Battle Royal

by Hugh Bicheno

  Understandably, given that their countries were at war, the December meeting at Lincluden Abbey was conducted in the strictest secrecy, between the two queens alone. They had much in common. Marguerite was still only 30 years old, Mary four years her junior, and their sons were respectively 10 and 8 years old. The Auchinleck Chronicle, the sole source for what was discussed, states they tentatively agreed a marriage alliance between the Prince of Wales and one of Mary’s daughters. We can deduce from subsequent events that they also discussed the cession of the fortress at Berwick if Mary helped the Lancastrians to defeat the Yorkists, but all we can be sure of is that Mary agreed to an immediate truce.

  While they were still at Lincluden, electrifying news arrived from south of the border – news that made it imperative for Marguerite and her son to join the army raised in his name as soon as possible. An agreement, presumably relating to the marriage, was signed by the two queens on 5 January, after which Mary arranged for Marguerite and Edward to be rushed across Scotland to the port of Leith. Here they boarded a royal ship provided by Mary and accompanied by an escort, and sailed south – for Yorkshire.

  *1 Greystoke did well out of it, but several years passed before Warwick forgave FitzHugh.

  *2 The inspiration for the ‘Red Wedding’ in George R. R. Martin’s A Storm of Swords.

  XXIII

  * * *

  Richard’s Humiliation

  Warwick acted as the king’s chief minister following Northampton and, using Henry as a rubber stamp, summoned Parliament to revoke the Acts of Attainder passed nine months previously. Salisbury was obsessively concerned with recovering and adding to his vast estate, and content to leave the politics to his son. Nor is there any evidence that Edward of March acted as his absent father’s deputy; to the contrary, both before and after York’s belated return from Ireland, Edward plainly acted as Warwick’s apprentice.

  Warwick petitioned the pope to appoint Coppini cardinal, and for permission to award him an English bishopric, but neither was forthcoming. Archbishop Bourchier remained benevolent and Viscount Bourchier replaced Wiltshire/Ormonde as Lord Treasurer. The office of Lord Chancellor, resigned by Bishop Wainflete three days before Northampton, went to Bishop George Neville of Exeter, and Bishop John Stillington of Bath and Wells replaced Bishop Laurence Booth of Durham as Lord Privy Seal.

  Any pretence that the king could command even his own household was swept away, a situation also facilitated by so many of the household having joined the queen. The only survivor was the neutral figure of Lord Beauchamp of Powick, who remained as steward because his expertise was irreplaceable. Warwick’s brother John became the king’s chamberlain and other Warwick appointees filled the lesser household offices. Warwick also made himself and his father joint chief stewards of the king’s duchy of Lancaster estates.

  Warwick recovered the governorship of the Channel Islands and had himself appointed Warden of the Cinque Ports. He got Parliament to renew his commission as Keeper of the Seas, now supported by the customs revenues of Sandwich and Southampton as well as all other ports. The Staplers were delighted to surrender their nominal right to the receipts from the two great wool ports in return for the resumption of uninterrupted trade. The City of London Corporation and the individual livery companies were likewise grateful, and lent Warwick large sums in the months ahead. He also collected £7,000 [£4.45 million] in a forced levy from all crown servants who wished to retain their offices.

  Warwick was a whirlwind on a tightrope, with every move designed to maintain the momentum won at Northampton, and he expended no political, still less financial capital to address the chronic problems that had brought successive kings’ governments into disrepute. The Commons were not required to vote any new taxation, which would have opened the door for a reiteration of demands for radical resumption to put royal finances on a sustainable basis.

  One unpostponable reckoning was the issue of legitimacy. Marguerite may have been the first to see that a puppet king could not long survive, but now the Yorkist lords ran into the contradiction at the heart of their rebellion. If, as they had repeatedly sworn by the most sacred oaths, they were the loyal liegemen of the anointed sovereign, then by what authority did they presume to dictate to him how he should rule? A present-day historian of the period offers a perfect summary of the issue:

  The real problem of Henry’s reign was that an authority which should have been whole and located in one man, was actually fragmented and dispersed: royal blood, personal lordship, executive power and the capacity to represent the public were scattered among a host of magnates, clerks and gentlemen of the household. The tragedy is that the efforts to restore this authority involved the great in conflicts among themselves, conflicts which were actually between the constituent parts of the monarchy. From these conflicts, unmodified by the saving power of genuine royal grace, there was no escape.*1

  Every argument the Yorkist lords had used to justify their defiance now backfired. As they had at all times acquitted the king of personal responsibility for the chronic ills besetting the nation, they found themselves promoted to the role of the ‘evil councillors’ who must, perforce, be to blame for everything. Added to which, the avidity with which the Nevilles awarded themselves lucrative offices made it clear they were just Suffolks writ large, and that their claim to uphold the greater good had always been a cynical pretence.

  York did not return to England from Ireland until 9 September 1460 when, his lordship of Denbigh still held against him, he stepped ashore at the Wirral, Stanley’s manor on the peninsula between the Mersey and Dee rivers. Like Grey of Ruthyn, Stanley had not yet received any significant reward for his treachery, and he made a further effort to curry favour from York by organizing a civic reception for him at Chester, the administrative capital of the Prince of Wales’s county palatinate of Cheshire. Blore Heath cast a long shadow.

  From the time of his arrival York assumed the full arms of England and omitted Henry VI’s regnal year in the dating of his correspondence. He had come to claim the throne, and Warwick’s later protestations that it had come as a complete surprise were false. The two men had probably agreed he must do so when they met in Dublin, and York delayed his arrival for a triumphal progress to London to be organized. In mid-September Warwick travelled to meet him in Shrewsbury, where they spent four days together before he returned to London. He did not, however, prepare the ground along the route later followed by York.

  If York hoped to replicate Warwick’s triumphal procession through Kent he was soon disappointed. He had gone to the well too many times. The loyalty he once commanded had been eroded by his failure to protect his supporters over the preceding decade, and only his retainers turned out to greet him at Ludlow. Although Cecily and, presumably, his younger children joined him at Hereford, Edward of March pointedly did not come to replace his younger brother Rutland at their father’s side.

  Whether or not York perceived it, there was a fundamental weakness at the heart of his relationship with the Nevilles. What would Warwick have gained if York became king? He stood only to lose if his rubber-stamp king was replaced by a man he could not control. York’s ambition was to establish strong, orderly government, whereas Warwick and his father had done very well indeed out of weakness at the centre. It did not require a crystal ball to see that the alliance the Nevilles had made with York would survive only as long as they faced a common enemy.

  Conversely York knew that the only alternative to claiming the throne was to become, once more, the Protector of a king he did not control and a government differing only in personnel from those against which he had rebelled. It is irrelevant whether he was coldly calculating or deluded by arrogance of ancestry and the urgings of his Irish and Marcher entourage, or to what degree he was encouraged – or not – by Warwick. What followed is best seen as a power play within the Yorkist alliance.

  When York entered London, his sword held before him point upward in royal style, he was not greeted by the po
pular enthusiasm Warwick could have organized had he wished to do so. Even though things were clearly not proceeding to plan, York still went ahead as though his acclamation as king was a foregone conclusion, which strongly suggests Warwick misled him about the reception he could expect from the handful of lords assembled in Westminster Hall.

  On 10 October York entered the Hall, walked to the throne and laid his hand on it. There was a deafening silence until Archbishop Bourchier spoke, to ask him if he sought an audience with the king. York blustered ‘I know of no person in this realm whom it does not behove to come to me and see my person rather than that I should go and visit him’, but his humiliation was as complete as it was, to him, unexpected. He had been hung out to dry.

  After the debacle a furious altercation took place in private between York and the Nevilles. Edward of March was present and did not support his father, but it was probably Salisbury who prevailed on the duke to accept the logic of ‘hang together or all hang separately’, and that they must make way for younger blood. Salisbury was 60 years old, but York was not yet 50 and it was a bitter pill to swallow, made worse by the galling knowledge that March’s young blood was not his. We can readily imagine his rage.

  A charade of parliamentary consultation ensued before Warwick proposed a compromise the bishops could accept. Very few secular lords had responded to the summons, and the Act of Accord agreed on 31 October was probably a deal worked out with Archbishop Bourchier. Even though York’s attempt to supplant Henry was ruled out for several reasons, not least the many oaths of allegiance he had sworn, it was judged expedient to accept the validity of his claim to a superior hereditary right, as the matrilineal descendant of Edward III’s second son. Henry was eleven years younger than York, so the most likely heir would be March, who carried none of his father’s baggage of sacred undertakings.

  Modelled on the 1420 Treaty of Troyes, the Act required the king to recognize York and his issue as his heirs. Pope Pius II recorded that it was the egregious Coppini who prevailed on Henry to accept it, arguing it was his Christian duty to do so in order to avoid further bloodshed. Fear for his own life may have influenced Henry less than is commonly supposed. Without even his confessor to advise him, he may have reasoned that no agreement reached under duress was binding, and that he should buy time for his beloved son to grow up and for York and the Nevilles to turn on each other, as they inevitably must.

  Sugaring the pill for York, the Act also appointed him Protector for life, with an annual salary of 10,000 marks [£4.24 million], of which 3,500 was for March and 1,500 for Rutland, to be drawn from disinherited Prince Edward’s lands in Wales, Cornwall and Chester. In point of legal fact the accord was never formally enacted – it was not even submitted to the Commons, which underlined that it was no more than a face-saving expedient. Underlining it further was that Warwick, not York, carried the king’s sword before him in the procession to St Paul’s to celebrate the Accord, while March carried his train.

  York’s claim and the Act of Accord caused widespread outrage. York and the Nevilles seriously underestimated the extent of the opposition they had aroused, and the only explanation for the carelessness that characterized the next act in the drama is if they were seriously misinformed about the situation developing in the North. All they had to work with were reports – which would have lost nothing in the telling – of raids, mainly against Salisbury’s estates, which seemed to follow the pattern of defiance last seen in 1454.

  As Protector York had to move quickly to suppress the disorder and Salisbury, as the person most directly affected, accompanied him. The crucial factor in the conduct of the ensuing campaign in the north was probably York’s state of mind. He behaved in a lackadaisical and rash manner; if depression is anger turned inward, he was probably deeply depressed. Also, his relations with Salisbury, brother and father of the woman and the man who had first intimately and now publicly humiliated him, may have been barely civil.

  The composition of their army suggests that York was not pleased to be leading an expedition whose main purpose was to re-establish Salisbury’s authority in Yorkshire. Apart from the duke, his son Rutland and Edward Bourchier, the youngest son of York’s brother-in-law Viscount Bourchier, the notables who marched north with him were members of Salisbury’s affinity, including his son-in-law William Bonville, Baron Harington.

  When they set out from London on 9 December they may have had a siege train, intending to recover Pontefract Castle, but at some point they abandoned the guns and decided to march instead to Sandal Castle, in York’s south Yorkshire manor of Wakefield. Why they went there rather than to his larger castle at Conisbrough, less than a day’s march to the south-east, is a mystery. Along the Great North Road they passed through or close to several of York’s boroughs in Hertfordshire and Lincolnshire, but he made no great effort to summon his affinity. Nor did he ensure that Sandal was adequately provisioned, so when they arrived on 24 December 1460 there was little in the way of Christmas cheer.

  Sandal was a compact fortification that could only accommodate a few hundred men within its walls. The adjacent village of Sandal Magna was also small, so the bulk of the Yorkist forces must have camped in the open, probably clustered around the entrance to the castle, overlooking the plain leading to the River Calder, with Wakefield on the other side across a narrow bridge. There was a 40-acre, wooded and fenced deer park close to the castle, but the earliest land use maps show no evidence of woods anywhere on the plain.

  York and Salisbury were unaware that there was a large Lancastrian force at Pontefract, where the West Country lords had met up with Northumberland, Clifford, Roos and Lord John Neville, acting for his demented brother the Earl of Westmorland. There also cannot have been outposts stationed in every direction to give early warning of an enemy approach. The omission of such an elementary precaution strongly suggests the weather was appalling. Bad visibility would also have discouraged the lookouts atop the castle keep.

  So, we have perhaps 5,000−6,000 men, cold, wet and ill fed, huddled around a castle where their leaders had brought them for no discernible purpose. Meanwhile, 9 miles away at Pontefract, at least twice and perhaps three times as many Lancastrians were gathered under leaders who knew exactly what they wanted to do. Somerset, Northumberland and Clifford could scarcely believe their luck to find two of the three men responsible for the deaths of their fathers on their doorstep, and were determined they should not get away.

  The hatred between the Nevilles of Raby and of Middleham ran deep, and Lord John Neville had also deeply offended York by obtaining a commission of array from him to raise troops and then joining the enemy camp. It may well have been he who proposed using himself as bait in a trap. By this time his men had teamed up with Clifford’s elite force of mounted archers and hobilars, known as the ‘Flower of Craven’ from the district around Skipton. It was probably they who scouted Wakefield and Sandal, and reported that the enemy was sending foraging parties north of the river.

  Clifford and Neville proposed to make a rapid advance north and south of the river to trap the enemy foragers and, if that failed, Neville would make a provocative display in front of the castle to lure the Yorkists out. The main Lancastrian force, having set out during the night, would march well to the south to approach from the direction of Walton, halting out of sight below the (possibly wooded) southern end of the ridge on which Sandal Castle stood. Once the Yorkists sortied they would charge around both sides of the ridge to cut off their retreat.

  On 30 December, whether because one of their foraging parties was cut up in full view of the castle, or in response to jeers and taunts from Neville’s men – or both – York led a mounted charge out of the castle and chased the coat-trailing enemy force. When the trap was sprung York and his men tried to fight their way back to safety, but were slaughtered. Some made a last stand on the riverbank, where centuries later excavations for Portobello House (see Map 18) found a great deal of battle debris. Seventeen-year-old Rutland ma
naged to flee across Wakefield Bridge, but not far beyond it he was killed after surrendering by Clifford.

  Shakespeare made the event one of the most dramatic scenes in Part III of Henry the Sixth. Despite the pleas of Rutland’s tutor to spare ‘this innocent child’, the fictional Clifford overflows with a hate that was probably not far from the historical truth:

  Had thy brethren here, their lives and thine

  Were not revenge sufficient for me;

  No, if I digg’d up thy forefathers’ graves

  And hung their rotten coffins up in chains,

  It could not slake mine ire, nor ease my heart.

  The sight of any of the house of York

  Is as a fury to torment my soul;

  And till I root out their accursed line

  And leave not one alive, I live in hell.

  York might have made a good king, or even a good ‘Hand of the King’ if Henry VI had emerged from catatonia with sufficient wit to continue the work of conciliation begun by Marguerite. As it was, the traditional mnemonic for the sequence of colours in a rainbow provides a sadly accurate epitaph: Richard of York gave battle in vain.

  Salisbury, his son Thomas, his Harington son-in-law and some of their retainers survived the battle and surrendered on terms. It is possible they never left the castle, which would indicate a last, fatal disagreement with York. They were taken to Pontefract, but their captors did not protect them from a mob that dragged them out and beheaded them. Salisbury’s death was dishonourable, but then so was his life: there was no shortage of people who passionately wanted him dead.