Battle Royal

by Hugh Bicheno

  Of the named ‘evil councillors’ only Wiltshire had escaped the net. Following the failure of the Duke of Exeter to intercept Warwick on his return voyage from Ireland to Calais, Wiltshire had been entrusted with raising a fleet to guard the Irish Sea and to rouse the Butler affinity against York’s authority in Ireland, meeting with success in neither endeavour. Not long after Northampton he sailed to Brittany on instructions from Marguerite to ask the new Duke Frañsez II to back the Lancastrian cause. The death of Arzhur III, his immediate predecessor, was a heavy blow to Marguerite as he was none other than the Count de Richemont, erstwhile Constable of France and a loyal supporter of the House of Anjou.

  Two weeks after Northampton the Lancastrian lords holding the Tower of London capitulated. Although their leader, Lord Scales, was granted a safe conduct, it was not respected by the watermen supposed to row him to safety. They murdered him and dumped his body in the grounds of a riverbank priory. He was 63 years old, a distinguished Normandy veteran who had led an army for York in the later stages of the Hundred Years War, and godfather to Edward of March.

  Warwick and March attended his funeral and deeply regretted the murder; but they also executed – for treason – six of the Duke of Exeter’s retainers who had fought their way into the Tower. They had acted in the service of their legitimate sovereign, which clearly could not be treason, but the Yorkist lords needed to throw the mob a bone. They could only hope to channel popular fury – they could no more control it than a surfer controls a wave.

  The other lords who had held the Tower with Scales were more fortunate. Henry Bromflete, Baron Vescy, had not previously participated, and after this wisely retired from the conflict. Richard West, Baron de la Warr, temporarily defected to the Yorkist cause. John, Baron Lovell, held multiple titles of nobility and had landholdings in the Midlands an earl might envy. He continued to fight for Lancaster. Robert, Baron Hungerford, had only recently returned from French captivity after payment of a ruinous ransom. He was released to go on a pilgrimage.

  Northampton also destroyed any hope Somerset retained of capturing Calais. Warwick returned and on 8 August met Somerset to agree terms of capitulation for Guînes and Hammes. As the alternative was that Somerset might sell them to France, the terms were generous. Somerset, Roos, Trollope and their men were paid to march unhindered to France with their equipment, and Rivers and his son were released to join them.*4 They were welcomed by Charles VII, who gave them more money and lent them ships and an escort to take them back to England. Somerset had sworn not to bear arms against Warwick in the future, but saw no reason to keep his word to an oath-breaker.

  Following the battle Marguerite and her son fled from Kenilworth with what remained of the royal plate and jewellery, and a small escort. According to William Gregory she was robbed near Malpas in Cheshire by a member of her entourage whom she had raised from nothing to the status of gentleman, and completed the journey to Harlech Castle riding pillion behind a young squire. The people of north Wales received their prince and his mother warmly, but she could not remain once the Yorkist lords learned where she was:

  And from there she moved in secret to Lord Jasper, Lord and Earl of Pembroke, for she dared abide in no place openly. The cause was that counterfeit tokens were sent to her as though they had come from [her husband]… but she gave them no credence; for at the king’s departing from Coventry toward the field of Northampton, he kissed her and blessed the prince, and commanded that she should not come to him until he sent her a special token that no man knew but the king and she. For the [Yorkist] lords greatly wished to bring her to London, as they knew full well that all the workings that were done were her doing, for she was much more clever than the king…

  Some spirit remained in the defeated and captive king, it seems. Despite his many failings, one cannot withhold sympathy for him, miserably aware his life hung by a thread and humiliatingly paraded through London in a cynical mockery of a triumphal procession. Most devastating of all would have been to discover that not only his bishops but even the pope had turned against him. The following passage in the Commentaries, although its words are attributed to Warwick by Pius II, reflects the pontiff’s own opinion and crusading hopes:

  Our king is a dolt and a fool who is ruled instead of ruling. The royal power is in the hands of his wife and those who defile the King’s chamber… Many feel as I do, among them the Duke of York, who would now be on the throne if there were any regard for justice… If God gives us victory, we shall drive our foes from the King’s side and ourselves govern the Kingdom. The King will retain only the bare name of sovereign… before long, when the Kingdom is again at peace, we will equip a fleet in defence of religion.

  If Pius believed the already bankrupt English crown would be able to contribute to his crusade after a further round of civil war, he had parted company with reality. It is a sobering thought that the papacy’s decisive intervention in the internal affairs of the kingdom was based on a delusion as profound as any of poor Henry’s wishful thinking.

  *1 Mortimer’s Cross, as we shall see, is the zero.

  *2 My reconstruction draws heavily on Northampton Council’s online Site of the Battle of Northampton 1460: Conservation Management Plan, and on ‘War in Writing’ in Medieval Warfare (June 2015) by battle of Northampton guru Mike Ingram.

  *3 His reward for this well-designed act of cold-blooded treachery was the definitive award of Ampthill and, eventually, the earldom of Kent.

  *4 Jacquetta would have been sent back to England soon after capture.

  XXII

  * * *

  Marguerite and Son

  After Northampton Marguerite’s situation was desperate. Her husband was now a prisoner and, although this freed her to take personal command of the defence of her son’s right, it permitted her enemies to issue orders in the king’s name. Financially, the loss of London and the South East, and the defection of the Canterbury Convocation, were body blows. Strategically, the battle had nullified the power base she had built up since 1455: her Midlands domain around the fortress-triangle of Kenilworth, Tutbury and Leicester was lost, as were her castles at Wallingford and Berkhamsted.

  Any chance of limiting Stanley’s influence in Cheshire had gone with the death of Shrewsbury and the ensuing defection of the previously dog-loyal Dudley. Her attempt to undermine York’s influence in the Marches was also undone, but in Wales itself loyalists held a crescent from recently taken Denbigh Castle around the coast to Carmarthen. Grey of Powys held Montgomery for her, and Buckingham’s affinity was still strong in Brecknock, but the only really safe area was Jasper Tudor’s isolated Pembroke.

  Possession of the Welsh coast would have been more useful if there had been any hope of supplanting York in Ireland, but that was a pipe dream. Wiltshire had neglected his earldom of Ormonde, and leadership of the Anglo-Irish was now exercised by the firmly Yorkist Earl of Kildare. Money might persuade the Gaelic lords to provide troops, but they were mainly concerned with fighting among themselves. The ports on the Pembroke peninsula were, nonetheless, among the few geostrategic assets remaining to the Lancastrian cause.

  With the return of Somerset to Corfe the situation in the West Country was more promising. Henry Beaufort was a vigorous and now militarily experienced 24-year-old, and loyal to the House of Lancaster in a way his father had never been. Marguerite also had the unqualified support of 28-year-old Thomas Courtenay, who was married to her niece and had succeeded his namesake father as Earl of Devon two years previously. A Yorkist triumph would see his efforts to drive Bonville out of Devon reversed. Lastly, she could count on Alexander Hody, a major landowner around Yorkist Bridgwater in north-central Somerset and, for what he was worth, the Duke of Exeter, who had lands in Somerset and Dorset.

  Wales and the West Country aside, the principal hope of the Lancastrian cause now lay in the North. With Stanberry imprisoned, apart from her confessor Walter Lyhert at Norwich and Thomas Bird at St Asaph, she could no longer count on the su
pport of any of the bishops in the archdiocese of Canterbury. In contrast, with the Booth brothers at York and Durham, and William Percy at Carlisle, the archdiocese of York was solidly hers. While far poorer than Canterbury, in the absence of any other major source of revenue it can be assumed the church in the North subsidized the Lancastrian cause in 1460−1.

  Added to which Yorkist influence in the North had been curtailed to the benefit of the Percys and their allies. However, the degree to which Neville influence had been supplanted in the region should not be overestimated. Before he set out from Middleham Castle in 1459, Salisbury appears to have secretly agreed that Ralph, Baron Greystoke, would act as his Trojan Horse within the Lancastrian ranks should the rebellion not prosper. It is probable that Salisbury had also made a similar arrangement with his son-in-law Lord FitzHugh, but it seems FitzHugh’s head may have been turned when he benefited so greatly from Salisbury’s attainder.*1

  With the king now the hostage of their enemies, Northumberland and the other northern lords needed no urging from Marguerite to cast off the restraint he had imposed on them, and they raided Yorkist manors across the North. The raids were not destructive and were more akin to peremptory tax collections. Although the Parliament summoned by Warwick had repealed the 1459 attainders, the letter of the law was now irrelevant in the North.

  What Marguerite could and did do, using dispatch boats out of Tenby, was to coordinate the mobilization of her own West Country followers and officials. She begged Somerset, Devon and Hody to gather their followers and march north to meet her at the port of Hull, on the River Humber in the East Riding of Yorkshire. To ‘all those servants that loved her or wished to keep and enjoy her office’, she wrote, ‘all excuses ceasing and other occupations left, you shape yourselves to be with us [at Hull] in all haste possible, for certain causes that move us, which shall be declared to you at your coming’. This they did, marching up the Fosse Way past Bath, through Cirencester and past Coventry to join the northern lords.

  The Lancastrians quickly agreed they would all wear the Prince of Wales’s livery, and one of the very few surviving Lancastrian proclamations from this time took the form of a letter from Prince Edward to the inhabitants of London. It was written after York dropped the pretence of being a loyal subject and tried to claim the throne for himself (see following chapter). In it the prince denounced ‘that horrible and falsely forsworn traitor calling himself duke of York, mortal enemy unto my lord, to my lady and to us, [who] has blinded my lord’s subjects and, to [the end of] obtaining his subtly contrived treason, by untrue means often times provoked them to commotions, stirrings and unlawful assembly against his royal estate’.

  Aware that Warwick’s propaganda machine was already cranking up atavistic fear of ‘the Northmen’ among the southern English, Marguerite herself wrote a rebuttal addressed to the council of the City of London, in which she announced her intention to rescue her husband:

  We will have you know for certain that at such time as we and our son shall be disposed to see my lord, as our duty is and so binds us to do, that none of you shall be robbed, despoiled or wronged by any person that at that time we or our son shall be accompanied with, or any other sent in our or his name, praying to you in most hearty and desirous wise that you will diligently extend all earthly means to the security of my lord’s royal person in the meantime.

  The designation of Hull as the rendezvous point suggests Marguerite had already received a favourable response to a request for a meeting with Mary of Guelders, queen mother and regent for 8-year-old King James III of Scotland. If the aim was only to join the northern lords, she could have sailed to Cumberland, bypassing Stanley in Lancashire, even though that would have put her on the wrong side of the Pennines in mid-winter. The choice of Hull indicates Marguerite already knew she would sail to south-eastern Scotland, then cross to the North Sea and take another ship down the coast.

  It was politically impossible for Marguerite to accept open support from her uncle Charles VII of France. With Yorkist propaganda branding her a French whore, her Valois parentage was something she needed to downplay in the competition for hearts and minds. As for the allegations of infidelity, such evidence as we have supports the view that it was not believed. She continued to enjoy considerable popular sympathy as the wife of the man all regarded as the legitimate king, and the mother of a no less legitimate Prince of Wales. Sympathy would evaporate, however, if she made any overt alliance with England’s foreign enemies.

  Wiltshire/Ormonde had her authority to treat with the Duke of Brittany and to recruit foreign mercenaries, but that was at suitably arm’s length and, anyway, she had nothing to offer Brittany in exchange for more substantial support. She did, however, have something to offer Scotland, but could entrust no one else with the task. Having first obtained a private letter from her uncle Charles VII supporting her mission, and leaving Jasper Tudor to await the arrival of Wiltshire and whatever forces he had gathered, she sailed with her son from Tenby to Kirkcudbright, then travelled to Lincluden Abbey, near Dumfries.

  The Scottish backstory is in many respects a mirror image of events in England. It will be recalled that the first (of six successive) King James fell in love with and married Joan Beaufort when he was a hostage in England. James was murdered in February 1437 by assassins sent by the Earl of Athol, his uncle and nearest adult relative. Joan was wounded but escaped with her 6-year-old son to the protection of Alexander Livingston, warden of Stirling Castle. The coup d’état failed and Athol and his co-conspirators were executed.

  The chronic threat came from the over-mighty Black Douglas dynasty. The 5th Earl of Douglas acted as regent until he died in 1439, but a year later his 16-year-old heir and his next eldest son were invited to the infamous ‘Black Dinner’ by James II and murdered by his Lord Chancellor, whom the king promptly ennobled.*2 Twelve years later James II himself murdered the 8th earl at Stirling Castle. James Douglas, the 9th earl, was attainted for rebellion and for conspiring with the English in 1455. After his brothers were killed in battle by the Red Douglas Earl of Angus, James Douglas took refuge in England. Angus was awarded the Douglas title and core domain, but James II prudently retained the wider Black Douglas estates.

  Also in 1455, as we have seen, James II proposed a joint war against England to Charles VII of France to take advantage of the Yorkist rebellion, and tried to stir the pot by falsely alleging that York had been in treasonous correspondence with him. Charles refused the invitation but James followed up the defeat of the Black Douglases by leading a raid into England. He withdrew when York was made Protector and marched north, only to launch a six-day chevauchée into Northumberland the following year, after York’s protectorship was ended. James agreed to a one-year truce in July 1457 mainly because he needed to assert royal authority in the Highlands and to initiate far-ranging institutional reforms.

  Although the 2nd Duke of Somerset, his maternal uncle, had been killed at St Albans, sentiment played no part in James II’s calculations. War with England was one of the few policies capable of uniting his unruly nobles, and in conjunction with his reforms rallied the common people behind him. He was also a pioneer in the use of siege artillery, the bane of the castle-based feudal order, and had used it to complete the destruction of the Black Douglases and their allies.

  In July 1460, following the Battle of Northampton, James set out to remove the irritant of Roxburgh, an English stronghold on the north bank of the upper River Tweed, which was regarded by the Scots as their natural frontier. The Anglo-Scottish border shown on the maps in this book is today’s; in the fifteenth century it was more like a wide ribbon of no man’s land running on either side of a line from Berwick to Carlisle, populated by infamous border ‘reivers’ and studded with fortified houses and Pele towers.

  Roxburgh town fell quickly, but James had to bring up his guns to reduce the castle. In early August, while supervising the bombardment, he was killed by a fragment when one of the guns exploded. He was only 29 y
ears old, and the timing of his death could not have been more fortunate for the Lancastrians.

  Marguerite sailed to Scotland in December 1460 to win peace on the border so her supporters could concentrate against the Yorkists. Like Marguerite with Henry, Mary of Guelders had been 15 years old when she was betrothed to James II in 1449. Unlike Marguerite, however, she came with a magnificent dowry of 60,000 crowns [£9.54 million] provided by her cousin Duke Philippe of Burgundy, in whose household she had grown up. The Scots regarded her as such a splendid asset that the palace of Holyrood House was built to receive her, and her dowry underpinned her husband’s consolidation of royal power.

  Mary was well regarded by all strata of Scots society, especially after producing the required heir in 1452. When she learned of her husband’s death she took her son, now King James III, to Roxburgh, arriving five days later to direct the successful conclusion of the siege and the demolition of the hated castle. Having thus established her credentials as a leader, she had no difficulty in assuming the role of regent to the infant king and quickly appointed her own men as keepers of the most strategically located royal fortresses.

  The only significant opposition she had to deal with for the remaining three years of her life came from her principal minister, Bishop James Kennedy of St Andrews. Superficially their differences concerned the correct manner to exploit the situation south of the border, with Mary to some extent swayed by the Yorkist sympathy of her surrogate father the Duke of Burgundy, and Kennedy fiercely advocating the ‘auld alliance’ with France. The real problem was that Kennedy was another episcopal misogynist who tried to smear Mary with the usual allegations of promiscuity, for no better reason than his own psychology and the Church’s hostility towards women it judged insufficiently submissive.