Battle Royal

by Hugh Bicheno

  As the door swung back, it would have been the northerners on the far right of the Lancastrian line who were the last to realize that their army was collapsing. Some, trapped against the Cock Beck, gave Bloody Meadow its name. Others on this wing, cut off from the Great North Road, would have been the ones who left the pathetic trail of debris extending north past Renshaw Wood.

  Excavation of a mass grave under Towton Hall by the TBAS has added grim detail to what took place during the pursuit phase. It is a product of the hunting instinct provoked by a fleeing enemy and the explosive release of the pent-up rage required for hand-to-hand combat. The skeletons show evidence of frenzied hacking and stabbing, and the injuries to the skulls suggest the butchered men had thrown away their helmets as well as their arms to speed their flight. Not enough to outpace their over-adrenalized pursuers, however, as many of the injuries were inflicted by poleaxes, the preferred weapon of men-at-arms fighting on foot.

  Once the horses were brought up a more systematic pursuit ensued. There was no baggage train to distract their pursuers, so the men retreating along the Great North Road were harried through the night. No major fighting could take place in the darkness, but with riders snapping at their heels the pace of the retreat would have been unsustainable for many exhausted men, and their screams out of the murk would have caused the others to hurry even more. Cohesion would have been impossible to maintain, leading to mass panic and the final disaster following the collapse of the bridge over the Cock Beck near Tadcaster.

  Most of the lords, including the dying Northumberland, got away. Apart from Dacre, only Welles was killed on the field, while Rougemont Grey and (possibly) Beaumont were captured. Otherwise this was a battle in which, for once, the knights did not ride away, leaving the foot soldiers to be massacred. Trollope and some others were killed during the fighting, but a large number of gentry from all over England fell during the pursuit. Many of them were later attainted and their families ruined.

  Henry, Marguerite and Prince Edward fled to Scotland accompanied by Somerset, Exeter, Roos (who had remained with the royal family in York) and Ralph Percy, Northumberland’s remaining brother. Devon was captured in York, too ill to travel. He had to pay for Bonville and was executed on 3 April in Edward’s presence. So was Rougemont Grey, brother of the turncoat Grey of Ruthyn, for what particular offence is not recorded. Young Viscount Beaumont was spared, perhaps because Edward was ashamed at the manner in which his father had been killed at Northampton.

  Elsewhere, the flying Earl of Wiltshire’s luck finally ran out. Following defeat at Mortimer’s Cross he had made his way back to Pembroke, then took ship to join the northern army. He was not with it at Towton, however, and was trying to board a ship again when he was captured at Cockermouth. Edward saw him beheaded at Newcastle on 1 May.

  Captured along with Wiltshire were Marguerite’s clerks, Doctors John Morton and Ralph Mackerell. Morton was one of the men specifically excluded from pardon in the proclamation of 6 March, so it was his great good fortune to be brought before Edward a month after Towton, when his thirst for vengeance had been assuaged by the execution of Wiltshire. He ordered Morton and Mackerell imprisoned in the Tower while a commission investigated their treasons, from which they escaped to rejoin Marguerite in France a year later.

  While Edward was replacing the Yorkist heads on the Micklegate Bar with Lancastrians, Lords Montagu and Berners, captured at second St Albans, were found alive and well. Possibly because their lives had been saved by the city authorities, they interceded with Edward not to exact collective punishment, and a pattern was set for the generous treatment of all boroughs and individuals who submitted to his grace.

  On past and future form we may be sure that Warwick was not so magnanimous. The Trojan Horse Lord Greystoke, who had stayed clear of the final battle, now dropped his Lancastrian mask and advised Warwick which of the Neville tenants had been disloyal. If Lord FitzHugh did betray the Lancastrian cause at Towton, he gained nothing from it except immunity for having too willingly taken possession of Neville lands during the 1459−60 attainder.

  Edward rode on to Durham, where he made Bishop Lawrence Booth, previously Lord Privy Seal and Marguerite’s chancellor, his confessor. He even promised ‘good lordship’ to the Prior of Durham, who had lent the queen 400 marks [£170,000] and now had the chutzpah to ask the new king to reimburse him. Thirteen years later he was still trying to collect. Edward rode no further north than Newcastle, where he remained only to see Wiltshire executed, then rode back to Durham.

  He then embarked on a progress through Lancashire, Cheshire and Staffordshire. Continuing south-east, at Stony Stratford he received the submission of Lord Rivers, who came from his nearby manor of Grafton. Rivers and his son Anthony, Lord Scales, had been imprisoned in the Tower after Towton but were released in July, probably through the intercession of Jacquetta. Edward sent a letter to Bishop Neville, the Lord Chancellor, stating he had ‘of our grace especial pardoned and remitted and forgiven unto Richard Woodville, knight, Lord Rivers, all manner of offences and trespasses of him done against us’.

  Among those trespasses was breaking his parole, given to Warwick when he was released from captivity in Calais. Edward may have taken a liking to Rivers during his Calais captivity, as he certainly behaved with remarkable generosity towards a man who had come close to killing him at Towton – although this was not a demerit in knightly terms. Three years later he married Rivers’ and Jacquetta’s stunningly beautiful eldest daughter Elizabeth, and ushered in a whole new round of woe.

  From Stony Stratford Edward rode to Sheen, where he was immediately beset by the host of problems that Henry had never addressed, and which the last two years of war had greatly exacerbated. Parliament was summoned for 6 July and Edward’s formal coronation was scheduled to take place six days later. What seemed to be a perfect storm of combined threats from France and Scotland, detailed in the next chapter, caused him to postpone the summons until 4 November, and to bring forward the coronation to 28 June.

  Edward made his state entry into London on 26 June and was escorted to the Tower by the mayor, aldermen and 400 leading citizens. That evening and the next morning he created thirty-two new knights. They included Norfolk’s cousin John Howard, Norfolk’s 17-year-old heir John Mowbray and the late Duke of Buckingham’s son John, Lord Stafford. Others honoured were the Treasurer of Calais Walter Blount and Lord Stanley’s brother William. Edward also knighted his younger brothers, 11-year-old George and 8-year-old Richard, newly returned from the Burgundian court, where their mother had sent them after Wakefield.

  The following day, Sunday 28 June, was fully taken up by a magnificent ceremony in which Archbishops Bourchier of Canterbury and Booth of York anointed and crowned him, and by a sumptuous banquet. No expense was spared, but as the crown’s secular revenue stream had dried up completely, it was all with money borrowed against the security of a further tenth voted by the Canterbury Convocation. We may be sure the new king also received gifts in cash and kind from those anxious to win or keep his favour.

  On Monday, Edward created his brother George Duke of Clarence, and four months later he made Richard Duke of Gloucester. A month later Norfolk died, his heir still a minor. With the dukedom of York now merged with the crown, the heir to the dukedom of Buckingham also a minor, and Exeter and Somerset attainted, no adult dukes remained. Despite this, Edward did not make Warwick a duke, either now or later, on the face of it an outstandingly ungrateful act of omission. Perhaps he felt that Warwick’s behaviour at second St Albans and Ferrybridge had cancelled out his previous achievements – or maybe he just wanted to show Warwick who was the boss. Whatever his reasons, it was a slap in the face.

  On Tuesday 30 June he made Viscount Bourchier Earl of Essex, and Lord Fauconberg Earl of Kent. By summons to Parliament Edward created six new barons in their own names: William, Baron Hastings, William, Baron Herbert, Thomas, Baron Lumley, Robert, Baron Ogle, Humphrey, Baron Stafford of Southwick (previously
known as ‘of Hooke’) and John, Baron Wenlock, and confirmed Walter Devereux as Baron Ferrers of Chartley by marriage.

  All the new creations had distinguished themselves in the recent battles, most of them at Mortimer’s Cross. Edward’s intention was plain – he wished to refresh the nobility with men of proven courage and loyalty. Apart from Ogle, Lumley and Wenlock, they were unequivocally his men, not Warwick’s. Some were to become Edward’s closest councillors and even companions in debauchery.

  Acts of Attainder in late 1461 deprived Northumberland, Devon, Wiltshire, Pembroke, Clifford, Dacre of the North, Neville, Rougemont Grey and Welles, the majority killed on Palm Sunday or executed shortly afterwards. Of the living peers attainted, Somerset, Exeter and Roos were still in rebellion, but Beaumont was not, and was probably attainted because Hastings wanted his lands. Thirty-nine of the seventy-one attainted knights, squires, gentlemen, yeomen, clerks and two tradesmen had also been killed. Most attainders of the nobility were later reversed, but Edward had less compunction in permanently depriving commoners.

  Edward did not become personally involved in the suppression of continuing Lancastrian resistance. This showed a precocious understanding that kings should lend their presence only to great enterprises, and that a war of sieges and skirmishes offered no prospect of gain commensurate with the risk of death or disgrace. It was a surprisingly mature appreciation for a man who had only just, on 28 April, celebrated his twentieth birthday.*1

  *1 For a fuller account of the beginning and the rest of Edward IV’s reign see Blood Royal, the second volume of this two-part history of the Wars of the Roses.

  Coda

  * * *

  Checkmate

  Objectively Henry VI’s reign ended on Palm Sunday 1461, but he lived on for a further ten miserable years. It would have been infinitely better for the Lancastrian cause if he had been killed at the second battle of St Albans, leaving his son as king. After Marguerite recovered him she had to step back from the leading role she and her son had been playing. The dithering at St Albans during February 1461 seems more typical of Henry than of his consort, as does the fact that no progress was made to conclude a Scottish alliance on the foundations laid at Lincluden Abbey.

  Now, too late, Marguerite finally stopped trying to make her husband behave like a king, and resumed acting as though she were queen in her own right. Behind the scenes she had not ceased to do so: after St Albans she sent Morice Doulcereau to France to conduct clandestine negotiations with her uncle Charles VII through Pierre de Brézé, Grand Seneschal of Normandy and Charles’s foremost military commander. Brézé owed his eminence to Agnès Sorel, placed in the king’s bed by Isabelle of Lorraine. He was to prove a devoted friend to Isabelle’s daughter, whom he had known since childhood.

  Doulcereau was a Brézé retainer and had been with Henry VI at Northampton. Given that Brézé had played such a prominent role in the fall of Normandy, and had led the attack on Sandwich in 1457, the appearance of his personal emissary among the Lancastrian courtiers suggests he was there at Marguerite’s invitation. What passed between them before 1461 we do not know, but in February 1461 Doulcereau brought secret offers to Brézé which, had they become known in England, would have destroyed Marguerite’s credibility.

  In a letter to his king dated 24 February, Brézé warned Charles not to send letters to Marguerite ‘by any hands except Doulcereau’s, because, if his letters were captured and the queen’s intentions discovered, her friends would unite with her enemies, and kill her’. There is no reason to doubt that the secret offers Doulcereau brought were an outright gift of the Channel Islands to Brézé if he could conquer them, and to sell Calais to Charles in return for his financial support against the Yorkists.

  By a Dominican friar sent directly to Charles VII, she requested 80,000 crowns [£12.72 million], and that he should mobilize a fleet to wrest control of the Channel from Warwick. Another Dominican went to Rome to denounce Coppini. Charles agreed to Brézé recruiting an army and a fleet to seize the Channel Islands, but told Marguerite he was not in a position to send the money she needed, and that the matter of Calais must await a successful suppression of the Yorkist insurgency.

  Brézé sent his son-in-law to conquer the islands, Warwick’s through the right of his wife, Anne Beauchamp. John Nanfan, the warden who had welcomed Warwick and his party after their flight from Ludlow, was taken by surprise and surrendered Mont Orgueil Castle, a fortress on the eastern coast of Jersey. Although a simultaneous attack on Guernsey failed, Brézé proclaimed himself Lord of the Isles of Jersey, Guernsey, Alderney and Sark. In fact his rule did not even extend to the whole of Jersey; the Lord of St Ouen in the north-west of the island never bent the knee to him.

  Marguerite’s luck continued to be unfailingly bad. Whatever Charles VII might have done to help her after Towton became moot when he succumbed to the illness that had been crippling him for years. He became delirious, an abscess in his mouth prevented him from eating, and he died on 22 July. His son, who refused to be reconciled with him even on his deathbed, became Louis XI, and among his first acts was to strip Pierre de Brézé of his offices.

  Before that blow landed, Marguerite had been tending another iron in the fire. As soon as the royal party fled to Scotland after Towton, she renewed her friendship with Mary of Guelders. Henry was sent out to Linlithgow Palace, 18 miles west of Edinburgh, while Marguerite and her son were made welcome by Mary 50 miles away at Falkland Palace in Fife, with Bishop Kennedy also excluded from the proceedings. There, the two queens made a deal they may have discussed at Lincluden Abbey, but which could not have been concluded while Marguerite’s Marcher lords lived.

  Trusting to the truce previously agreed, Northumberland had drawn his retainers from the border and left Berwick with a skeleton garrison. Now that he was dead and his 12-year-old heir was in Yorkist custody, Ralph Percy, as the senior member of the family, consented to the hand-over of Berwick on 25 April. Nothing could better illustrate the depth of northern bitterness after Towton than that a Percy should have remained loyal to the Lancastrian dynasty despite the surrender of Northumberland’s border fortress.

  In addition, Marguerite’s remaining supporters not only agreed Scotland should have Carlisle, gateway to the western March as Berwick was to the eastern, but also to march with Scots troops to capture it. Along with Brézé’s assault on Jersey, this constituted the ‘perfect storm’ referred to in the last chapter, which caused Edward IV to postpone the summoning of Parliament and to bring forward the date of his coronation.

  Although the Scots border levies cannot have been happy to find themselves under the command of such as Dacre’s brother Humphrey and other English knights, they cheerfully laid waste the countryside around Carlisle. With remarkable stupidity (if, that is, they ever intended to mount a siege) they then burned the town, simplifying the castle garrison’s task while depriving themselves of shelter. The raiding force retreated back over the border at the approach of Montagu with a locally raised army.

  There, in a nutshell, was the conundrum posed by Marguerite’s Scottish alliance. The Marcher commons may have hated the Yorkists, but they hated the Scots even more. Regional identities were very strong, but an emerging national identity trumped them in any confrontation with foreigners. Although there were strong local dialects, almost all who lived within the kingdom of England spoke the same language, unlike France with its four major and several minor language groups.

  Yorkist propaganda insisted that Marguerite was not English, and that support for her was not only treason to the new king but also treason to England. Having spent her entire adult life in England without once returning to France, Marguerite was a thoroughly naturalized Englishwoman, and in many ways an exemplar of the profound English belief expressed in the clichéd phrase ‘I know my rights’. The Yorkist portrayal of Marguerite gained little traction until she was compelled to ally with England’s foreign foes. Even then, awareness of the great wrong done to her may have inc
lined many to forgiveness.

  She remained the guiding light to the small band of Lancastrians who continued to fight for her in a right-angle triangle of land north of Hadrian’s Wall and south of the border. At the western tip of the triangle, in Cumberland, Humphrey Dacre forted up in the family castle at Naworth. East of Naworth, the lord of the large but sparsely populated Harbottle and Redesdale estates in north-central Northumberland was none other than William Tailboys, whose ceaseless troublemaking in the 1440s and 1450s had done so much to undermine Henry VI’s authority. The main body of the triangle, however, consisted of Percy lands.

  The main focus of the war shifted to the royal castles of Bamburgh and Dunstanburgh, each on a headland jutting into the North Sea, and the great Percy castle at Alnwick. Alnwick was on the Great North Road, but the other two were in such remote locations that the only strategic threat they posed was as staging posts for seaborne invasion. They had harbours, plentiful water from wells dug deep into the rock on which they stand, and the walls of Dunstanburgh enclose one of the largest spaces of any castle ever built in England.

  Bamburgh had been the capital of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Bernicia and of the preceding British kingdom, and is only a few miles from the Holy Island, Lindisfarne, from which the north of England was evangelized at the invitation of Oswald, king and saint. Today we live detached from our history, and ‘folk tale’ is a term of derision. Not so in the fifteenth century, and Bamburgh’s talismanic quality may account in some measure for the tenacity with which it held out against the Yorkist tide.*1

  Alnwick, Bamburgh and Dunstanburgh all initially capitulated to Warwick in the summer of 1461 on the easiest of terms. Ralph Percy was left in command of all three, in the hope of reconciling the Percy affinity. He did not, however, regard an oath of loyalty extracted under duress as binding, and when a Lancastrian force under Tailboys marched south in October, he opened the gates. The castles now fulfilled their purpose by obliging the new regime to expend treasure and political credit, while buying time for Marguerite to raise an army.