Battle Royal

by Hugh Bicheno

  Although modern research indicates that the Wars of the Roses impacted less than one would expect on the general population, Hobbes’ aphorism sounds like a pretty good description of what England had become by 1461. What we are looking at, therefore, is the coincidence of Edward’s emancipation from a father who did not love him with the final breakdown of the limited amount of order the Lancastrian regime had been able to provide.

  Henry, the anointed father of the nation, had utterly failed to enforce the law and so permit his people to prosper. Looming chaos made it imperative to anoint another, and suddenly to hand there was a victorious, noble, physically imposing and sexually potent candidate. In the absence of Sigmund Freud to explain how it was all a function of their libidos, many – not least Edward himself – saw it as proof that the forefinger of God had reached down to designate him.

  *1 Shakespeare puts these words in the mouth of the future Richard III. The real Richard was 8 years old at the time, and in Burgundy.

  XXV

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  The Bubble Reputation

  The paradox of Richard ‘the Kingmaker’ Neville’s epic life is that his brilliance as a politician was not matched by similar skill as a general. At St Albans in 1455 he was a subordinate, and Northampton, his one great victory, had been won by intrigue before the armies ever came into contact. Subsequently, he seems to have been guided by the maxim (devoutly practised by contemporary Italian condottieri, who were above all businessmen) that battle should be the last resort.

  This was the principle the French finally adopted to win the Hundred Years War; but it was completely at variance with the English way of war. The English were renowned for their ferocity and were not temperamentally suited to positional warfare, which may explain why castles played such a peripheral role in the conflict. It is hard to think of any other reason why siege artillery, so crucial in the fall of English Normandy, had to be deployed against only two English castles between 1455 and 1485.

  The strategic value of castles was that a few men could tie down a large force for months, dissipating the besieger’s resources and exposing his troops to attrition through camp diseases. An example of what might have been achieved was set by Lord Lovell’s castle at Thorpe Waterville in Northamptonshire, the only significant Lancastrian hold-out south of the River Trent in early 1461. Edward had to send John Wenlock with three bombards and commissions of array for five counties to deal with it, but he cannot have used the guns because the castle was undamaged when it was surrendered two months later. Just a few more like that and Edward would not have been able to march north with sufficient strength.

  Isolated Harlech, supplied by sea, held out for Lancaster from 1461 to 1468, and the only other castles held for any considerable time were also coastal. Inland, we simply do not know why Pontefract, ferociously Lancastrian at the time of Wakefield, was not held against the Yorkists only three months later. It was folly not to use castles to slow down opposing armies as they marched the length of the country, yet neither side appears to have believed it worth attempting. The only obvious explanation is that, apart from Calais, none had a permanent, professional garrison, which in turn reflected the English fixation on the quick campaign and climactic battle as the be-all and end-all of warfare.

  A climactic battle was what Marguerite’s army of allegedly ravening ‘Northmen’ marched south to seek in January 1461, supposedly wreaking havoc as it went. Contrary to Yorkist propaganda, there were no Scots or French contingents in Marguerite’s army: her supporters came from all over England. There is also no evidence whatever to support the over-the-top tales of Lancastrian atrocities recorded in the rolls of Edward IV’s first Parliament.*1

  Considering the treasonous support given to the Yorkists by the Canterbury Convocation, systematic looting of the wealthy abbeys and churches along the line of march might have been an understandable act of vengeance – but it would not have been queenly. Marguerite’s behaviour was governed by the need not to burn any bridges of allegiance over which today’s Yorkist supporters might cross back to her husband once she recovered him, or, if he were killed, to her son. Likewise, it made no sense to sack the previously Yorkist boroughs and manors through which her army passed because, following the 1459 attainders, they were legally crown estates.

  This is not to say that her army did not take what it needed in the way of food and other supplies against an uncertain promise of reimbursement, or that looting did not take place; but it was no chevauchée. Several edicts issued by Warwick at this time clearly point to the Lancastrians receiving significant voluntary support in Leicestershire, Lincolnshire and Cambridgeshire. A general order was issued to all sheriffs to raise the shires to repress ‘the malice of riotous people’, which may have been a precaution against a general breakdown of law and order, but could have been aimed at suppressing Lancastrian supporters.

  Warwick was acutely aware how thin popular support for the Yorkist cause was outside Kent and London. Having the church on his side was financially beneficial, but in strongly Lollard areas like Sussex, East Anglia and the South West it was probably harmful. Edward’s primary mission had been to shore up support for the regime in the South West as well as the Marches, assisted by the fact that the more determined Lancastrians had already marched north; but his assignment was only one of Warwick’s initiatives.

  Warwick’s most notable coup was to bring about Yorkist near-hegemony in traditionally fractured East Anglia. The cornerstone was to entice John Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk, out of political hibernation, and to reconcile him with 19-year-old John de la Pole, Earl of Suffolk, who had married York’s daughter Elizabeth in early 1458, but who only now became an active Yorkist. Added to the other Yorkist lords’ affinities in the region, this alliance persuaded the Lancastrian Earl of Oxford to keep his head down.

  For Sussex, Warwick persuaded William FitzAlan, Earl of Arundel, to come off the fence, joined by Richard Fiennes, Baron Dacre of the South. Warwick also convoked the Order of the Garter and had himself elected, along with three others: John Wenlock and Thomas Kyriell for services rendered, and William, Lord Bonville, mortal enemy of the Courtenay Earls of Devon, whose heir, Lord Harington, had died with York at Wakefield.

  The picture that emerges is not one of the Yorkist south united against the Lancastrian north, but of frantic coalition building by Warwick – which is what one would expect after a coup d’état. The peers who took sides after the coup were evenly divided, but all the Lancastrians fought at the climactic Battle of Towton except for Oxford, Pembroke cut off in Wales and Wiltshire who was in transit. In contrast many Yorkist peers did not, even though all had burned their bridges with Lancaster. Warwick probably judged it more important for them to stay in their shires to control the populace, a further indication that he was far from confident of having won southern hearts and minds.

  During the Lancastrians’ march south they were accurately informed about enemy numbers and movements, and the Yorkists were not. There is no way this could have happened if the Yorkists had enjoyed the southern support against the northern bogeymen that their propaganda sought to generate. For example, although Grantham and Stamford had been York’s boroughs, the affinities of Lords Beaumont, Roos, Welles and Willoughby made Lincolnshire, through which Marguerite’s army marched south from York, a strongly Lancastrian county. Furthermore, if the people had indeed fled before the Lancastrian advance, refugees would have kept Warwick fully informed about their movements.

  This quite evidently did not happen. Consequently, instead of marching north from London to meet Marguerite’s army head-on, Warwick reacted uncertainly and tentatively. He sent the Van under his younger brother John to St Albans with most of the guns. The Main, with Warwick himself, his 55-year-old uncle Lord Fauconberg and the king, marched through Waltham Cross to Ware. Thereabouts they rendezvoused with the Duke of Norfolk, whose East Anglian contingent constituted the third battle of an army 10,000−15,000 strong.*2

  At Ware, Warwi
ck learned that Marguerite’s army had left the Great North Road at Royston, turning west along the Icknield Way. Convinced she would turn south again between Baldock and Luton, he set out his battles accordingly. John Neville left most of his archers in St Albans and marched about a mile north-east to a massive Iron Age earthwork known as Beech Bottom Dyke, with a commanding view of the surrounding area. There, he set up an artillery fort seemingly modelled on the one that gave victory to the French at Castillon. Warwick’s battle was at Sandridge, a mile further to the north-east, and Norfolk’s another mile along the same road, covering roads from Hitchin and Welwyn/Baldock.

  It was not necessarily a bad idea to cover a wide front while keeping the three battles within supporting distance of each other – if adequate advance notice of an impending enemy attack could be obtained. Although a mile is no great distance, it takes time to create a column of march at one end and to deploy at the other. It appears Warwick was failed by his scouts, as they clearly did not maintain a close watch on the enemy. As a back-up he would have had outposts covering all the roads running south from the Icknield Way. No doubt he had them on the Baldock, Hitchin and Luton roads, and believed Watling Street was well covered by several hundred local levies at Dunstable.

  Fortuna notoriously favours the bold. Moving fast, the Lancastrian Van – probably Lords Clifford and Neville again, accompanied by Andrew Trollope, the most experienced officer in the Lancastrian army – surrounded and annihilated the Dunstable levies. Their unfortunate commander, a local butcher, survived but later hanged himself for shame. Watling Street was a well-defined thoroughfare and the Lancastrians then did something unheard of in medieval warfare: they marched by night to St Albans, arriving at dawn.

  Crossing the River Ver at St Michael’s Mill, they first attempted to rush the town by charging along Fishpool Street, but were stopped by an arrow storm as they tried to debouch into the marketplace. Dead and dying men and horses soon blocked the street and they fell back. However, another force raced along Folly and Catherine Lanes to cut off the defenders’ retreat. Attacked from two sides, the Yorkist archers were doomed. Some got away to warn a shocked John Neville, but Clifford’s ‘Flower of Craven’ would not have been far behind.

  The second battle of St Albans enjoys the distinction of having left us not one but two accounts written by men who were there. The first witness was, as before, the Abbot of St Albans, whose ornate Latin is sometimes enlightening. The second was the anonymous and regrettably laconic continuator of Gregory’s Chronicle, who may have served in Warwick’s army. His explanation for the operational surprise achieved by the Lancastrians is a priceless variant on the infantryman’s eternal grumble about the cavalry: ‘As for spearmen [lancers], they are good for riding before the footmen and to eat and drink up their victuals, and many more such pretty things they do, [but] hold me excused though I say the best, for in the footmen is all the trust.’

  Neville did not have time to reposition his artillery and could only turn his battle through almost 90 degrees to take up a new position on a broad stretch of flat ground known as Bernard’s Heath. He had with him a great novelty in English warfare: after Wakefield, Warwick had appealed for help to the Duke of Burgundy, who sent him a contingent of hand-gunners. Gregory’s Chronicle gives a detailed description of these professional soldiers:

  For the Burgundians had such instruments that would shoot both pellets of lead and arrows of an ell [45 inches] of length with 6 feathers, 3 in the middle and 3 at the other end, with a great mighty head of iron at the other end [he then asserts that these ‘instruments’ exploded in the gunners’ hands if loaded in haste]. Also they had nets of great cords of 4 fathoms of length and 4 foot broad… and at every second knot there was a nail standing upright such that no man could pass over it without the likelihood of hurt. Also they had pavises, like doors with a folding strut that they could set down where they wished, and loop-holes with shutting windows to shoot out of [and bristling with] three penny nails. When their shot was spent and done, they cast down the pavises in front of them [so that] no man could come at them over the pavises for the nails that stood upright, without mischief to himself.

  The weapons described are hook guns [Dutch hakebusse, hence ‘arquebus’], man-portable cannon with a brutal recoil, which had to be fired hooked over a solid support, in this case the traditional crossbowman’s propped pavise or heavy wooden shield. Gregory adds that the Burgundians also set out ground nets to tangle horses’ hooves, and scattered caltrops – four spikes welded together, such that one always stood upright.

  Neville expected his Burgundians to halt the Lancastrian attack, but they failed to do so. Gregory snorts that all this new-fangled defensive array had to be abandoned, and the matter was decided by ‘mauls of lead, bows, swords, glaives [pole arms topped with single-edged blades] and axes’. Reading between the lines, his message is clear – Neville tried to fight the battle according to the best practice developed on the European mainland, and was overcome by good old English speed and ferocity.

  The battle on Bernard’s Heath was over so quickly that Warwick, whilst marching to support his brother, encountered only the fleeing remnants of Neville’s command. At which point many of the levies in his own battle recalled an urgent appointment elsewhere, and he was left to fight a desperate rearguard action back through Sandridge. He was not able to make a stand until later on when he reached Norfolk’s intact battle on Nomansland Common.

  By this time, the epic Lancastrian attack had run out of momen-tum. They had been marching and fighting hard for twenty-four hours or more, and were exhausted. A strong counter-thrust would now have inflicted a severe reverse on them, but the Yorkists’ will was broken. Warwick later tried to blame the defeat on treachery by a Kentish captain called Lovelace, but it was glaringly evident to all that he had been comprehensively out-generalled and out-fought. Shakespeare called it ‘the bubble reputation’, and Warwick’s had burst.

  Either at Bernard’s Heath or during the retreat, Thomas Kyriell was killed and John Neville, Lord Berners (John Bourchier) and Lord Bonville were captured. The greatest prize, however, was the king. The most plausible explanation for how Henry was recovered safely is that his guards abandoned him in the chaos of the Yorkist retreat through Sandridge. Clifford’s outriders found him sitting alone under a tree, singing to keep his spirits up, and brought him back to their lord’s tent, where he was reunited with Marguerite and his son. According to Gregory:

  The night after the battle the king blessed his son the Prince, and Doctor Morton brought forth a book that was full of prayers, and there the book was opened and blessed that young child and made him knight… And the Prince made many knights. The first that he made was Andrew Trollope, for he was hurt and might not go for a caltrop in his foot; and he said ‘My lord, I have not deserved it for I slew but fifteen men, for I stood still in one place and they came unto me, but they abode still with me.’ And then came Whittingham, Tresham and many more others, and were made knights that same time.

  The precedence granted to Robert Whittingham is suggestive: he was from Salden in Buckinghamshire, only a few miles north-east of Dunstable, and may have been instrumental in sealing off the town so that none should get away to give warning. Thomas Tresham of Rushden in Northamptonshire was the son of the Speaker murdered by Grey of Ruthyn’s men in 1450, and had himself been the Speaker of the 1459 ‘Parliament of Devils’ at Coventry.

  There was also justice of another kind to be dispensed. The Earl of Devon demanded Bonville’s head, and Marguerite could not afford to deny him. Henry might have done so, but after agreeing to the Act of Accord his personal authority was nil. Marguerite made sure it was, instead, 7-year-old Prince Edward who pronounced sentence. Neville and Berners were spared because Warwick retained hostages, including Edmund, the second of the Beaufort brothers, captured trying to holding the Isle of Wight for his brother.

  Yorkist propaganda made much of the execution of Bonville, claiming Kyriell
was beheaded as well. It was alleged that he and Bonville had remained behind to guard the king, and Henry’s promise that they would be held harmless was overridden by Marguerite. One can forgive Shakespeare for typecasting Marguerite for reasons of dramatic licence, but there is no reason to believe she would have undermined her husband’s authority. The anecdote is of a piece with Yorkist accounts of Marguerite’s supposedly undisciplined, looting and pillaging army, which somehow became a tightly organized and fast-moving fighting force for long enough to win at St Albans and Bernard’s Heath, before reverting to rabbledom once more.

  Warwick’s army was scattered and his reputation for invincibility destroyed. The East Anglian lords’ levies having returned to their homes, he cannot have had more than 4,000 men under command when he marched west to meet Edward near Chipping Norton in Oxfordshire, 35 miles from Gloucester but 70 miles from the scene of his defeat. Edward by now commanded a Marcher army perhaps twice as large, and had money to pay his troops independently. Furthermore the men around him had seen Warwick humiliate York, and were coldly determined that history should not repeat itself with his son.

  *1 Bonita Cron took a well-researched war-hammer to that interpretation in the December 1999 issue of The Ricardian.

  *2 The Earl of Arundel, Earl of Suffolk and Viscount Bourchier took part in this campaign, probably joining forces with Norfolk. The recently turned Baron de la Warr also participated, after which he went home and stayed there.

  XXVI

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  Two Kings

  Marguerite’s purpose had been to recover the king, and with him the legal authority of the state. This had been achieved at relatively little cost. Only one Lancastrian of rank was killed at second St Albans: John Grey, heir to the barony of Ferrers of Groby and husband to Elizabeth Woodville, eldest daughter of Lord Rivers and Jacquetta. However, since setting out from Pontefract the Lancastrian army had marched 180 miles in mid-winter. The levies were at the end of their enlistment period and many of them had gone home before the battle, which Gregory affirmed was won by no more than 5,000 ‘household men and feed men’.