Battle Royal

by Hugh Bicheno

  Supplies were scarce, money to pay the troops even more so, and there is no evidence to indicate the Lancastrians could have continued the march south to London even if they had wished to. Although Marguerite had written the capital off as a political dead loss since 1457, there is a near-unanimous consensus among historians that she committed a strategic blunder in not marching her army into London, there to await the arrival of the combined forces of Edward and Warwick. In effect, she stands accused of failing to put her head into a noose.

  She was certainly guilty of not committing that stupidity. Her army never moved from St Albans, where it blocked the fastest route – Roman Akeman Street – by which Edward could reach London from the west. He notably did not accept the challenge, which is only remarkable if we accept the view that a Lancastrian occupation of London would have been devastating to his cause. Clearly he did not think so, and his veteran Marcher councillors probably persuaded him to mark time in Oxfordshire, hoping Marguerite would march into London so they could cut off her retreat.

  Understandably, the mayor and aldermen of London did not share Edward’s relaxed view of the situation. Warwick’s propaganda had generated a healthy fear of the northern army, and the mayor sent a delegation to St Albans led by the two most senior ladies in the land after Marguerite: the dowager Duchesses of Bedford (Jacquetta, Lady Rivers) and Buckingham. Their Lancastrian loyalty was unquestionable, and their warning about the temper of the people of London would have confirmed there was no hope of conducting the king on a procession through the city.

  It is not clear whether the first Lancastrian emissaries were sent after the duchesses arrived at St Albans, or crossed paths with them. Either way, the Lancastrians brought only a request for supplies, which the mayor made haste to provide. A convoy of wagons set out from Cripplegate (today’s Barbican), but was set upon by a mob and looted. It would be unwise to read any political intent into the violent behaviour of the London underclass at a time of political instability. The mob is a wild beast, and any excuse to commit mayhem will do.

  What happened next, however, was definitely partisan. A party of Lancastrians carrying a warrant from the king declaring Edward a traitor was assaulted, resulting in a street battle with many casualties, after which the mayor announced a curfew ‘in order that the king and his forces might enter and behave peacefully’. This provoked a riot, at which point the authorities unleashed the city guard and the rioters were violently dispersed. Meanwhile, a second Lancastrian delegation skirmished with an advance party of Yorkists outside the city gates, now closed against them both.

  The king’s warrant, dated ‘at Westminster’, never achieved the form and the signet of law and so did not have to be officially recognized as valid by the London authorities. It was, instead, published as a proclamation on 26 February, the same day a demand for admittance arrived from Edward and Warwick, now close to London after taking the cross-country route from Chipping Norton through Oxford and High Wycombe. The mayor replied that the Yorkist lords might enter the city, but not their troops.

  On the same day the Lancastrian army departed St Albans, heading for York. Although they did not expect the Yorkists to be able to trump their possession of the king, in purely military terms it was essential to fall back on their area of greatest popular support. It was also a strategic retreat. Hoping to recreate the circumstances that gave them victory at Wakefield, their aim was to oblige the Yorkists to pursue them through a countryside emerging from winter, which could offer little in the way of supplies. It would have worked better if they could have conducted a scorched-earth campaign, but that was politically unthinkable.

  With the loss of the king’s person the Yorkist regime could make no claim to the obedience of royal officials and the general populace. With remarkable aplomb, Edward now styled himself ‘by the grace of God of England, France and Ireland the true and just heir’. He based his claim not on the unratified Act of Accord, but on his superior right of descent from Lionel of Clarence over the usurping House of Lancaster. The claim, seen as patently contrived when made by York after all his sacred oaths of fealty, had far greater credibility coming from his heir, who had made no such solemn undertakings.

  Edward and his captains took up residence at Baynard’s Castle, the York family’s grand Thames-side palace, but the Nevilles handled the stage-managing of his accession. On 1 March the Chancellor, Bishop George Neville, addressed a large crowd, composed mainly if not exclusively of Yorkist troops, outside London at St George’s Fields (today’s Bayswater), and set out Edward’s claim. Popular acclamation was an important prerequisite for claiming the throne, and the partisan crowd duly cheered when required.

  Next day the articles of Edward’s title were published and announced throughout London, and on the following day a hastily convened ‘Great Council’ consisting of Archbishop Bourchier, Bishops Beauchamp of Salisbury and Neville of Exeter, Norfolk, Warwick and the most prominent of Edward’s Marchers met at Baynard’s Castle and formally begged Edward to assume the throne. Henry IV had based his claim on conquest, and Henry VII was to do the same. Edward claimed the throne by hereditary right.

  On 4 March Edward rode the short distance to St Paul’s Cathedral to hear a Te Deum, then rode in a magnificent procession to the Palace of Westminster. In the Great Hall he swore to uphold the laws and customs of England, after which, duly robed, he took his seat on the king’s bench and personally proclaimed his title to the throne. After the sparse assembly acclaimed him, he formally ‘took possession of the realm of England’. He then walked to Westminster Abbey, where he sat on the throne and received St Edward’s sceptre, and again declared his title.

  The ceremonies served the purpose of absolving the assembled lords from their previous oaths of allegiance. This was particularly important to the bishops, who had previously found them an insuperable obstacle to York’s claim. A proper coronation would have to wait until Edward had made good his claim against Henry VI, now recast as a usurper after nearly forty years during which his right to reign had never been impugned.

  However contrived the formula to justify his usurpation, the young and virile Edward was a dream come true for those yearning for the glory days of Henry V, and from this time forward Warwick could only hope to be the first among equals, all illuminated by the rising sun of York. The abrupt reversal of roles could be finessed while they had a common cause, but in the end Warwick was sure to find it intolerable to be subordinate to his younger cousin and one-time apprentice.

  For the time being, however, they had to win the war they had begun together. With the loss of Bonville at St Albans, preceded by his heir, killed at Wakefield, they no longer had a local counterweight to Lancastrian sympathizers in the West Country. Also, despite Mortimer’s Cross, much of Wales remained loyal to the Prince of Wales and Jasper Tudor. There were also the Beaumont and Oxford affinities in East Anglia to be considered. All might erupt behind them when they marched north, and several important Yorkist lords remained behind to prevent this.

  On 6 March proclamations in Edward’s name were sent to the sheriffs of all the counties south of the River Trent, ordering them to prevent any support to pass over the river ‘towards our adversary’. Any follower of Henry VI who submitted within ten days was to have ‘grace and pardon of his life and goods’, except for those with an annual income of more than 100 marks [£42,000] – which was to say all peers and greater gentry – and twenty-two named individuals. Finally, a bounty of £100 [£63,600] was offered for each of the heads of eight individuals.

  The named men were not particularly prominent, but all had given personal offence to one or other of the Yorkist leaders. But then, the whole conflict was highly personal in nature. It is as well to recall how much it was a Neville family matter. Warwick was brother-in-law to Arundel, Worcester, FitzHugh, Stanley and Bonville, while the Dukes of Norfolk, Buckingham and York were or had been his uncles by marriage. Ranged against him, the entire Percy clan, the Nevilles of Brancepe
th, Clifford, Dacre of the North and Beaumont were all cousins of one degree or other.

  Nor should we forget the Beaufort connection. Somerset and his two brothers were the only descendants in the male line, but one great-aunt had been the matriarch of the Nevilles of Middleham and guardian of Richard of York, and another the mother of the Earl of Devon. Through the marriages of their father and uncle, and the subsequent marriages of their widows, they were related to Roos, Welles and to the Talbots and Lisles, all of them Warwick’s mortal enemies from the Beauchamp inheritance feud.

  There was no such complexity in the York family. Edward had only one aunt, married to Viscount Bourchier. Other than that, he was brother-in-law to Suffolk, now an ally, and to Exeter, who could not have been a more furious enemy. His desire to create a substantial extended family to rival Warwick’s was to define his subsequent reign.

  Although the Lancastrian army that retreated from St Albans to York was relatively small, Edward and Warwick knew it would swell rapidly once back in the North. They could not ignore the challenge, but once they, too, crossed the Trent, they knew the northerners would see them as an invading army and react accordingly. There was, therefore, a premium on acting as fast as possible.

  Warwick departed immediately after the coronation to raise troops in the Midlands. Less than a week later, on 11 March, the Van, mainly consisting of the mounted men who had ridden to London in late February, set off up the Great North Road under Fauconberg. Meanwhile, Norfolk summoned his own and allied East Anglian lords’ followers to rejoin him in London or on his way north.

  Edward also remained in London, to raise a further loan of £4,000 [£2.54 million] from the City, plus contributions from individual merchant houses. Money worked its usual magic and volunteers flocked to London from all over the Home Counties. They were equipped from the royal armouries, and an enormous wagon train assembled to supply the army on its way north.

  The contemporary poem ‘The Rose of Rouen’ is virtually the only source for who actually fought on the Yorkist side at the Battle of Towton, identified by their heraldic banners. Edward’s retainers fought under Lionel of Clarence’s Black Bull, Edmund of Langley’s Falcon and Fetterlock, and the White Lion of the Mortimer Earls of March. The Duke of Burgundy sent a contingent led by a representative of the French Dauphin Louis, under the dolphin banner of the Dauphiné. In addition to the banners of the nobles listed in the ‘Partisan Peers’ box, the poem describes the banners of Bristol, Canterbury, Coventry, Gloucester, Leicester, Northampton, Nottingham, Richmond, Salisbury, Windsor and Worcester.

  We have no way of knowing how the different contingents were distributed among the battles, but Edward led the Reserve, Fauconberg the Van, Warwick the Main and Norfolk the Rear. Fauconberg, with the majority of the mounted archers and hobilars, did not need to recruit. He raced ahead to clear the way along the Great North Road, springing Lancastrian ambushes as he went. Warwick went to draw on his own and other Yorkist lords’ extensive holdings in the Midlands. Edward and Norfolk set out along the Great North Road on 13 March, guarding the main wagon train and recruiting from their own and other Yorkist lords’ manors along the way.

  The core of the Reserve would have been the army recruited by Edward before and after Mortimer’s Cross, with the addition of an unknown number of Burgundians. Those who marched with Warwick to the Midlands would have been the Calais veterans, the Londoners and Kentish men who had stuck with him despite St Albans. Norfolk was in bad health – he died eight months later – but his own and associated affinities turned out in sufficient strength under his cousin, the Essex squire John Howard, to form a fourth battle.

  Sadly there are no records on the composition of the Lancastrian army or how it was organized. A reasonable assumption is that Somerset, ably advised by Trollope, was in overall command and would have led the tactical reserve under the banners of King Henry. Exeter must have been with him, as his ego would not have tolerated being under the Earls of Northumberland and Devon, who perforce commanded the other two battles.

  Devon fell ill and could not lead his battle to Towton, so the army fought broadly divided into two groups, with Northumberland and the northerners forming on the right, and Somerset, Exeter and the southerners on the left. As before, the mounted archers and hobilars under Clifford and Neville had a roving commission to keep the Yorkists under observation, and to attack any enemy scouting or foraging groups that ventured too far away from their army.

  Warwick’s battle joined Edward’s and Norfolk’s before Doncaster and they arrived together at Pontefract on 27 March. There were too many alternative crossings to make the Don a defensible line, but the next place where the Great North Road crossed a river, the Aire at Ferrybridge, a little over 2 miles from Pontefract Castle, was another matter altogether. The Romans never bridged it because the river meanders through a broad flood plain, and there was a serviceable alternative crossing where it ran wide and shallow at Castleford. The Normans replaced the ferry with a bridge in 1198, but it was not until the end of the fourteenth century that it was rebuilt with seven piers, a chapel, and a causeway over marshy ground to Brotherton, on a peninsula of firm ground north of the river, with flood plain on either side.

  It was an ideal chokepoint, yet Fauconberg found it undefended. The wooden upper works of the bridge had been demolished, but as long as the piers are still standing any bridge can be easily repaired. With no evidence that the Lancastrians intended to contest the crossing, Fauconberg must have assumed they intended to make their stand at the Wharfe, a bigger river and the last before York, 12 miles further north. He had no engineers or building materials, so rode on to establish whether the crossing at Castleford was passable. Finding it was, he sent squadrons of fore-riders across to reconnoitre north of the river.

  The Van, therefore, was astride the Aire at Castleford before the other battles arrived at Pontefract. Edward occupied the castle, while Warwick camped at Ferrybridge and sent workmen and materials to repair the bridge. The workmen set up their camp at the southern end of the bridge, guarded by a small force commanded by a Norfolk lord, John Radcliffe, de jure Baron FitzWalter, accompanied by Richard Jenny, one of Warwick’s illegitimate brothers. By the evening of Saturday 28 March the engineers had repaired the bridge and returned to camp for the night. They were not destined to enjoy their rest.

  XXVII

  * * *

  Knight’s Gambit

  Before the dawn of Palm Sunday, Clifford’s and Lord John Neville’s men crept along the causeway from Brotherton and silently disposed of any sleepy sentries there may have been at the southern end of the repaired bridge over the Aire. Once the rest of the raiders had crossed, they attacked the engineers’ camp. According to Hall’s Chronicle: ‘The Lord Fitzwalter hearing the noise, suddenly arose out of his bed and unarmoured, with a poleaxe in his hand, thinking that it had been an affray among his men, came down to appease the same, but before he could say a word, or knew what the matter was, he was slain, and with him the bastard of Salisbury, brother to the Earl of Warwick.’

  The survivors fled towards Warwick’s camp at Ferrybridge, pursued by Clifford’s men. Panic is particularly contagious in low-light conditions, and with arrows raining down on them from an unseen enemy, several thousand men milled around, some probably fighting each other. Gregory says that Warwick, who cannot have had time to don harness, was wounded in the leg by an arrow, but whether he was or not, he did not stay to steady his men. Hall again:

  He like a man desperate, mounted on his hackney and came blowing to King Edward saying, ‘Sir I pray God have mercy on their souls, which in the beginning of your enterprise hath lost their lives, and because I see no success of the world, I remit the vengeance and punishment to God our creator and redeemer’ and with that he alighted down and slew his horse with his sword, saying ‘Let him fly that will, for surely I will tarry with him that will tarry with me’ and he kissed the cross hilt of his sword.

  Although obviously embellish
ed – Hall was much given to putting words in his subjects’ mouths for dramatic emphasis – if any part of this account is true it reflects appallingly badly on Warwick, compounding his panic and desertion of his men with an histrionic act that would have made any fighting man’s lip curl.

  Having created chaos and inflicted a gratifying number of casualties, the raiders retreated once Warwick’s battle recovered from its initial disorder and began to fight back. They would have been too closely pursued to tarry on the bridge long enough to damage it again, but would have taken up positions on the other bank to cover the bridge, slowly falling back towards Brotherton and shooting at the Yorkists as they advanced along the causeway.

  Although most histories assume Clifford retreated on learning that Fauconberg’s men were approaching from Castleford, there is no reason to doubt the passage along the causeway to Brotherton was forced by Edward’s men-at-arms, led by hand-gunners and crossbowmen protected by their pavises. Clifford’s men would then have mounted up and ridden off along the Great North Road, well satisfied with as neat a delaying action as anyone could wish to have carried out.

  Several hundred crack archers would have done terrible execution among crowds of sleepy and unharnessed men spilling from their tents, and casualties must have been heavy. This would explain why Yorkist-inspired accounts gloss over the battle at Ferrybridge. Clifford would have sent messengers back to Somerset and Northumberland in York with an account that would have lost nothing in the telling, and they set their army in motion.