A Brief History of Britain 1066-1485

by Vincent, Nicholas

  At St Albans in 1455, Somerset was killed. There followed a brief hiatus, with York’s protectorate undermined by the Queen and by resistance to any resumption of royal patronage distributed over the past twenty years. Inconclusive encounters at the battles of Blore Heath and Ludlow in 1459, led to York’s flight to Ireland, from where, like Harold Godwinson in the 1050s, he planned his return to power. At the Battle of Northampton in 1460, the King was once again taken prisoner by York’s ally, Warwick, and by the Earl of March, York’s eldest son. York himself returned from Ireland to be proclaimed protector and this time to be recognized as heir to the throne should Henry die. Still there was a reluctance to seize the throne itself, let alone to kill off Henry VI, in part perhaps because of compassion for Henry’s prolonged childhood, minority and present incapacity, in part out of a more hard-headed reluctance to undermine, once again, the very basis of public or royal authority. Theologians, from the twelfth century onwards, had sanctioned the killing of tyrants. They had said nothing about killing the feckless or the childlike. Six months after Northampton, on 30 December at Wakefield, near Sandal in Yorkshire, Richard of York himself rode out to death on the battlefield. His head was displayed on the walls of the city of York dressed in a paper crown: a macabre use for the new medium of print.

  Wakefield did not end the Yorkist rebellion. At the second Battle of St Albans in February 1461, a Yorkist defeat, Henry VI was released from captivity, only to be forced to flee into exile in Scotland after 29 March when the Earl of March, Richard of York’s son, entered London, having defeated the western Lancastrian army at Mortimer’s Cross, and thence proceeded to Towton (outside York) where yet another Yorkist victory was inflicted on the Lancastrians.

  Edward IV and Henry VI

  March himself had meanwhile been proclaimed King in London, taking the title King Edward IV. In each of these battles, lives were lost and much blood was spilled. Entire dynasties were obliterated: the Poles, the Beauforts, ultimately the Lancastrian dynasty itself. Towton was fought in a raging snowstorm, on Palm Sunday. A hundred and fifty years earlier, fighting on Palm Sunday had been so deplored that its punishment was a contributory factor in Edward I’s conquest of Wales. Amidst the horrors of the 1460s, however, it went almost unremarked.

  The death toll at Towton was exceptionally high, including the Earl of Northumberland and lords Clifford, Randolph, Dacre, Neville and Wells amongst the Lancastrian dead. After Mortimer’s Cross, Owen Tudor, Henry VI’s stepfather, was taken to Hereford and beheaded, a mad woman combing his hair and placing a hundred candles around his severed head at the market cross. Both Edward of Lancaster, Henry VI’s vengeful little son, aged a mere eight at the second Battle of St Albans, and Edward, Earl of March, the future Edward IV, only eighteen at the time of his victory at Towton, were blooded in these encounters, in effect as a lost generation of boy soldiers whose lives were now consecrated to war. This was tribal warfare, akin to the convulsions of African chieftainship, albeit fought under silk standards in the latest and most fashionable of plate armour. England had been riven by civil wars in the past, most notably during the 1140s under King Stephen. Stephen’s reign, however, had witnessed only one pitched battle, at Lincoln in 1141, and virtually nothing by way of judicial execution of the aristocracy. After 1460, battles came thicker and faster than they had ever done before.

  After Towton and for the first time in English history, there were now two rival kings, Edward IV and Henry VI, both anointed in Westminster, both claiming to be right successor to their royal ancestors. The irony is that one of these claimants, Henry VI, a direct descendant of King Edward I, was forced to seek refuge with the King of Scots, whilst the other, Edward IV, found himself threatened not so much by the rather feeble attempts at a Lancastrian come back, at the battles of Hedgeley Moor and Hexham in 1464, as by his own closest allies and indeed by his own brother. Although Henry VI was eventually taken prisoner by the Yorkists, betrayed in July 1465 in Ribblesdale in Lancashire and thence conveyed as a prisoner to the Tower of London, there followed a second act to the drama.

  George, Duke of Clarence, Edward IV’s younger brother, rebelled with the assistance of the earl of Warwick, Richard Neville, making bizarre and common cause with Margaret of Anjou, Henry VI’s queen. By the late 1460s, the continued operation of Queen Margaret’s court in Scotland and later in France, and rumours of secret contacts between the Queen and the English aristocracy, led to a rash of arrests in which former Lancastrians were tried and executed. Warwick and Clarence declared their rebellion in 1469, with Clarence marrying Warwick’s daughter at Calais on 11 July. They then launched an invasion of Kent defeating Edward IV’s forces at the Battle of Edgcote on 26 July. Deserted by his men, Edward IV himself was taken captive and sent as a prisoner to Warwick Castle. For a few weeks, with two crowned kings now prisoners of state, Warwick and Clarence attempted to rule, in theory as representatives of Edward IV, in practice as usurpers even of the Yorkist claim. But Edward IV himself secured his release and by the end of October was once again in possession of London.

  A pretence was maintained that peace would be restored. In reality, Warwick and Clarence had spilled too much blood to be left unpunished. Sensing their coming fate, they mounted a rebellion in Lincolnshire. Defeated at a battle fought near Empingham, they then fled to France from where they launched yet another invasion in September 1470, backed by Queen Margaret and by Henry VI’s half-brother, Jaspar Tudor. It was now Edward IV’s turn to flee into exile in Flanders. Henry VI was released from his imprisonment in the Tower and crowned for a second time on 3 October 1470. His second reign, described by contemporaries as his ‘readeption’, lasted barely six months. By April 1471, Edward IV was once again at the gates of London, having landed at Ravenspur in Yorkshire, at more or less precisely the same spot from which Henry Bolingbroke, the founder of the Lancastrian dynasty, had in 1399 launched his bid to depose King Richard II.

  Death of Henry VI

  Henry VI was now processed through the city of London, dressed shabbily in a long blue gown, greeted with only lukewarm enthusiasm by his subjects. He was then forced to accompany King Edward to confront the Lancastrian army at the Battle of Barnet, fought on Easter Sunday in thick fog.

  Here Warwick ‘the Kingmaker’ was killed. Henry was promptly returned to the Tower. After yet another Yorkist victory, at Tewkesbury on 4 May, the last of the Beaufort dukes of Somerset was captured and executed. Queen Margaret was captured and Edward of Lancaster, her eighteen-year-old son, killed. Henry VI was himself put to death within only a few hours of Edward IV’s return from Tewkesbury to London, the official explanation being that he had died of ‘pure displeasure and melancholy’. Edward IV, the anointed of God, had at last realized the necessity of killing his fellow anointed. Had his father, the Duke of York, been a little more ruthless in this respect, in the immediate aftermath of the first Battle of St Albans in 1455, or had Edward IV grasped this particular nettle after Henry VI’s capture in 1465, the entire sorry story of the Wars of the Roses might never have been. As it was, the survival of both Henry VI and his eldest son, Edward of Lancaster, had served as a rallying cry to rebellion. With their deaths, the killing should in theory have ceased. For a while it seemed to have done so.

  ‘Saint’ Henry

  Henry VI’s body was conveyed for burial at Chertsey Abbey in Surrey, where it almost immediately began to attract claims of miraculous healing. In death, ‘Saint’ Henry proved a far more effective protector of his people than he had ever been in life. Indeed, to judge by the number of pilgrim badges collected by visitors to his shrine, the cult of Henry VI, the least royal of English kings, soon came to rival that of Thomas Becket, the most anti-royal of English saints.

  King Edward IV

  Edward IV, having secured the throne, now sought to enjoy the fruits of his usurpation. In this he was hindered first and foremost by the disloyalty of his own family, and in particular of his younger brother George, Duke of Clarence, rewarded
in Edward’s first reign with a vast estate and provision for a household of 399 staff, grander even than that of the royal household, yet lured into rebellion against his brother by the prospect of marriage to a daughter of Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick.

  In 1471, Clarence had in theory made his peace with the King, but his treason was never truly forgiven. As early as 1472, a dispute with the youngest of his three brothers, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, over the partition of the Neville estates, in which Richard was almost certainly the aggressor but in which Edward IV backed Richard against Clarence, swiftly degenerated into an open rift amidst accusations of abuse of power by all concerned. By 1477, not only had Clarence been implicated in the kidnapping and judicial murder of a maidservant, and accused of poisoning his wife, who had in fact died from the effects of childbirth, but also in charges of imagining the King’s death by necromancy brought against Clarence’s retainer, Thomas Burdet. Convicted for his involvement in these and other affairs, after a show trial that would have done credit to the henchmen of Josef Stalin, Clarence was executed in the Tower of London, apparently by drowning in a barrel of sweet Greek (or malmsey) wine. With fine hypocrisy, Edward IV paid for lavish funeral celebrations and a tomb at Tewkesbury Abbey. Where it had taken the Lancastrian dynasty nearly fifty years to collapse into rancour and self-interest, the house of York almost immediately fell to fighting within itself. These were men and women who simply did not behave as kings and queens were expected to behave.

  Elizabeth Woodville

  The King, Edward IV, although a competent enough politician and capable of generosity to his supporters, had already caused scandal as early as 1464 by secretly marrying Elizabeth Woodville, the widow of a Lancastrian knight who had died fighting for Henry VI at the second Battle of St Albans. By her first husband Elizabeth already had two sons, besides an entire quiver of brothers and sisters for whom Edward was persuaded to secure prestigious marriages. The Woodvilles, former servants of John, Duke of Bedford, were not the sort of people that kings were expected to marry. Worse still, the rumour circulated that Edward IV had already been contracted to marry another heiress at the time of his marriage to Elizabeth, so that even the legitimacy of the King’s Woodville sons, including the future Edward V, born in 1470, was called into question.

  Amidst such lawlessness, there was little further need for outlaws. The outlaws of the greenwood, indeed, either faded away or were subsumed within the contending affinities of the greater figures at court. Robin Hood himself went to war, in the person of Sir John Conyers who, calling himself ‘Robin of Redesdale’ or ‘Robin Mend-All’, played a significant role in harassing the northern Yorkists in 1469. Other figures from English myth were brought into commission, none more potent than King Arthur, adopted by Edward IV as his special protector, with Edward himself claiming to be the ‘second Arthur’ who would unite the kingdoms of Britain, fulfilling a prophecy made by the Angelic Voice to Cadwallader, last King of the Britons, at the end of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain, itself first written down by Geoffrey of Monmouth during the earlier civil war of King Stephen’s reign.

  Sir Thomas Malory

  It was as a hapless participant in the wars of the 1460s and 70s, bringing defeat with him to every party to which he changed sides, that the Warwickshire gentleman and outlaw, Sir Thomas Malory, began to assemble his own stock of Arthurian lore. Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, in some ways the greatest of the medieval Arthurian cycles, was written between 1468 and 1470 whilst Malory languished in far from chivalric captivity as a prisoner of Edward IV in the Tower of London. It was published fifteen years later by William Caxton, on his printing press at the sign of the Red Pale in Westminster, becoming, together with Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales published by Caxton in 1476, the very first English bestseller, its success all the more ironic given that the warfare of the 1470s was so very far from the polite and honour-ridden combat described in Malory’s fantasies. Misappropriated from the Welsh, and clothed in fifteenth-century armour, Arthur became a hero for the modern age: doomed, drawn both to piety and to mass murder, an appropriately violent and confused national figurehead for violent and confusing times.

  The Yorkists

  Even here, and for all its illegitimacy and air of corruption, the Yorkist regime might have survived, not least had Edward IV made good his promises to reopen the war with France. As was remarked in Parliament, briefly revived as a forum to vote taxation to the crown, foreign adventures were the ideal way of re-establishing domestic harmony, channelling the more warlike impulses of the aristocracy into hostility towards a common foe. In just this way, Henry V’s anti-French crusades after Agincourt had brought the royal family and the aristocracy to coalesce around a common military goal. Edward IV himself had been born at Rouen, in the final stages of the late Anglo-French war, the last king in English history to have been born on French rather than on English soil. In 1475, he set out to reopen the Hundred Years War, but it was a war that was promptly cancelled as a result of negotiations between Edward and the French king, Louis XI. Chivalry and heroism were exchanged for an annual pension of £10,000 from the French court.

  Money was now seen as Edward’s chief goal, not honour or peace. Alchemy, the transformation of base metal into gold, and the restoration through alchemical harmony of a vanished golden age were perhaps already obsessions of a court itself given over to the worship of worldly goods. Like Merlin in the stories of King Arthur, the talented George Ripley, the King’s principal alchemist, played an alarming role both as defender of the regime and as an interpreter of Arthurian history on the King’s behalf. Even such Yorkist symbols as the white rose, the sun in splendour or the three crowns, had distinctive and widely recognized alchemical resonances. Whether this amounted to very much in practice, and whether Edward IV was truly a great patron of arcane science, the air of mystery which such writings conveyed certainly added to the intrigues of a court already suspected of licentiousness, moral and financial corruption and of trafficking with powers that were best left undisturbed.

  Edward’s Death and Richard of Gloucester

  The atmosphere of Edward IV’s court was of crucial significance in determining events after Edward’s sudden death in 1483, at the age of forty. The cause of his death remains uncertain, but gluttony may well have been a contributing factor. For at least the past ten years, Edward had been running to fat. As with the obesity of William I in the 1080s, corpulence could be interpreted as the wages of sin: the outward mark of the criminal usurper. Through his management of men rather than institutions, through his sheer capacity to survive the outrageous fortunes of the 1460s, and through his careful husbanding of the crown’s finances, Edward appeared to have restored at least some stability to English kingship. Government still functioned, both in the provinces and at the centre, albeit increasingly without any active role for Parliament, with authority mediated instead through local power-brokers and the favouring of one magnate faction against another. In the Midlands, Lord Hastings had been promoted to replace the Duke of Clarence as the King’s chief enforcer. John de Vere, earl of Oxford, was deliberately ruined in order that his estates might be used to reward John Howard, himself settled into the shoes of the late Duke of Norfolk. The King had intervened in the local warfare fought out between the Stanley and the Harrington families in Lancashire. Above all, Edward IV had relied upon his younger brother, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, granted a large share of the estate that had formerly belonged to Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, and a power base entirely his own in south Wales and the north of England.Throughout the 1460s, and in the face of the rebellions by Clarence and Warwick, Richard of Gloucester had remained loyal to Edward IV. In 1471, aged barely eighteen, he had taken a decisive lead in suppressing rebellion in Kent, executing the rebels’ leader, in theory pardoned his crimes. When the citizens of York disputed the wisdom of admitting Edward IV to their city, Richard suggested killing them all and being done with it. Already, Richard displ
ayed a very practical approach to murder. Thereafter, through the disgrace of the Veres and of his brother, Clarence, he had established an unassailable position for himself as the King’s most trusted confident and as one of the richest men in England. He was also one of the best regarded. His probity, his loyalty, his espousal of morality and his patronage of puritan spirituality, his collection of books and his patronage of pious literature, all marked him out as a good man amidst a court of sinners. With an uncle such as Richard, it was supposed, the young sons of Edward IV would be shepherded to the throne in just the same way that John of Gaunt, in the end, had shepherded his nephew Richard II, or John, Duke of Bedford, uncle of Henry VI, had upheld the cause of his own royal ward. Richard, in accordance with historical precedent, was groomed to become the very best of royal uncles. He turned out to be the very worst.

  Edward IV died at Windsor on 9 April 1483. His twelve-year-old son, Edward V, was then at Ludlow on the Welsh border. The coronation was set for 4 May. In the company of his mother’s brother, Lord Rivers, the boy was brought southwards, the party diverting to Stony Stratford in Buckinghamshire in order to meet up with Edward’s loving uncle, Richard. There, entirely contrary to what anyone had expected, Richard arrested Lord Rivers and other members of the Woodville affinity. The Woodvilles themselves were unpopular, regarded as upstarts glutted on the spoils of power. Richard had little difficulty in manipulating public opinion, and the affinity of the King’s household, against them. By 10 June, he was writing to the city of York for assistance against Elizabeth Woodville, the former Queen, and her associates, claiming that they intended his murder.