The Brothers York

by Thomas Penn

  Almost three years had passed since the bloodshed at St Albans. Yet the arbitration was based on an inbuilt assumption of Yorkist guilt and Lancastrian innocence, the Yorkists bound to future obedience. Moreover, in treating the problem as a series of private quarrels, the settlement ignored the wider issue of great public concern that had cast a long shadow over the country: of how to hold government together when the king was clearly incapable of ruling. Despite desperate attempts to bring together the two warring sides, no solution had been found, and this weakness ran through the loveday like a stress fracture. Rather than an incontestable display of impartial royal authority, it was a settlement made by a king squarely in the control of Queen Margaret and her attendant noblemen; obedience to the king, the aggrieved Yorkists felt, meant bending the knee to the faction who controlled him. Rather than addressing the ‘roots of rancour’, the accord was a fudge. As one commentator put it, ‘it endured not long’.31

  The signs of fresh Yorkist self-assertion were soon evident. From his base in Calais, the earl of Warwick started to establish closer relations with the ruler of the surrounding lands, Philip duke of Burgundy, whose dominions encompassed the Low Countries, northern Europe’s industrial and financial powerhouse.32 If such unilateral diplomacy irritated Queen Margaret, who was close to Burgundy’s antagonistic neighbour and overlord, the French king Charles VII, so too did Warwick’s other initiative. That summer, he addressed the piracy that plagued the eastern reaches of the Channel – by joining in. From May to September, his ships attacked and overwhelmed fleets irrespective of nationality, provoking international incidents with England’s key trading partners, from Genoa to the powerful Hanseatic League of Baltic states, and – inevitably – with France. If the government could not defend England and its interests, it seemed the Yorkists would do so. Warwick’s privateering made his reputation – a ‘famous knight’, people said – and made him and the Calais garrison, their wages perpetually in arrears, a tidy and morale-boosting profit into the bargain.33

  Meanwhile, there were growing whispers about Margaret herself: the corruption of her household, her plans to depose her husband and install her son – who, people speculated, was not even the king’s – in his place. The source of these venomous rumours, Margaret suspected, was Warwick who, even more than York, was rapidly becoming the regime’s biggest headache. That autumn, years of sporadic harassment against the Yorkist lords came to a head. In the latest of a string of assassination attempts, a pack of household servants, knives drawn, tried to corner Warwick as he left a council meeting in Westminster Palace. His men pressed around him, hustling him out across the Palace Yard and onto his waiting barge on the Thames. He left for Calais immediately. Once there, he sat tight.34

  In June 1459, at a meeting of the great council in Coventry, everything finally reached crisis point. With the leading Yorkists and a number of their supporters absent – uninvited, or failing to turn up – Margaret accused them of treason. The council accepted the charges. News of the meeting soon reached York and Salisbury, hunkered down on their estates in the Welsh Marches and Yorkshire, and Warwick, away in Calais. As they had done four years previously prior to St Albans, the Yorkist lords sought a meeting with Henry VI to clarify their position. And, just as before, they brought their combined ‘fellowship’ of armed retinues – for their own security, naturally.35

  Late in September, they managed to rendezvous at Worcester. While Warwick, crossing the Channel with the Calais garrison, dodged a Lancastrian ambush, his father Salisbury almost ran straight into one. As he marched across Blore Heath in Staffordshire his scouts, scouring the countryside, glimpsed banners badly concealed behind a ‘great hedge’. Abruptly taking up a defensive position, the earl watched as the waiting Lancastrian army emerged, at some ten thousand men it was twice as large as his own. Pretending to retreat, the experienced Salisbury suckered the Lancastrians into charging across the steep-banked brook that separated the two forces, then mowed them down in a hail of arrowfire.

  In Worcester Cathedral, the three lords signed a letter to the king, protesting their loyalty and asking for dialogue. It was met with a counter-offer of a royal pardon – excluding Salisbury, whose fighting against royal forces at Blore Heath automatically triggered charges of treason – provided the lords submitted to Henry VI in person, within six days. They refused.

  Pursued by the royal army, the Yorkists reached Ludlow on 10 October. As they put it in a defiant letter to Henry VI, those around the king had, ‘out of extreme malice’ and in order to get their hands on ‘our lands, offices and goods’, done everything to try and proclaim them traitors. They had done everything to try and avoid confrontation. At this point, though, it seemed inevitable.36

  On the afternoon of 12 October, below Ludlow, the bridge of the River Teme at their backs and the natural defence of the river curling around their left flank, the Yorkist forces drew up in battle order, embedded behind a deep ditch and a barricade of stakes and wagon-mounted guns. Alongside York were his two oldest sons, Edward earl of March, now seventeen, and the sixteen-year-old Edmund earl of Rutland. They watched as Henry VI’s massive army, marching in battle formation under its heavy canvas standards, came to a halt a few hundred yards away from their lines. They saw a herald step forward from the Lancastrian ranks, his voice carrying on the air, stating that the king was prepared to give royal pardons to anybody who now joined him.

  Enticed by the offer, men soon began to slip away from the Yorkist lines and through the evening, the trickle of deserters became a flood. Hopelessly outnumbered, the Yorkist lords realized there was only one thing for it. Around midnight, they announced that they were going back across the bridge into Ludlow ‘to refresh themselves awhile’. Reasoning that Henry’s offer of a pardon was hardly likely to apply to them, they fled under cover of darkness, abandoning not only their remaining troops but also York’s wife Cecily and their younger children, cooped up in Ludlow Castle.37

  The fleeing lords split up. Richard and his second son Edmund, with a small group of retainers, made their way west through Wales, destroying bridges in their wake; reaching the coast, they commandeered a ship and sailed for York’s old stronghold of Dublin. Edward earl of March, with Warwick and Salisbury, headed southwest to Devon, where they were given a boat and supplies by a sympathetic local knight named John Dinham. They sailed up the English Channel, hugging the French coast, to Calais. There, they were greeted by the reassuring, diminutive figure of Warwick’s uncle, William ‘little’ Lord Fauconberg, a veteran of the French wars who had held the town and its garrison for Warwick in his absence. Back in England the Yorkist cause was being ripped apart.38

  In the aftermath of Ludford Bridge, Lancastrian troops rampaged through Ludlow, drinking the local taverns dry, pillaging and raping. Among those detained were Cecily duchess of York and her two youngest boys: George, nearly eleven years old, and the seven-year-old Richard. Cecily, so one partisan commentator alleged, was badly treated and ‘spoiled’.39

  In Coventry that December, Parliament assembled in the chapter house of St Mary’s Priory, in front of an enthroned Henry VI. The royal case against the absent Yorkists was uncompromising: they were guilty of treason, their titles and lands permanently forfeit, their noble titles erased, their heirs forbidden ever from inheriting.

  Orchestrating proceedings were sharp legal and political minds among Henry’s councillors, persuasive men committed to the Lancastrian regime. Prominent among them were Sir John Fortescue, a Lincoln’s Inn-educated Devonian who had become Henry’s chief justice, and another west-countryman whose forensic brilliance and political acuity had led to his appointment as chancellor to the little Edward of Lancaster, Henry and Margaret’s son and heir. In his late thirties, John Morton had already come a long way. He would go much further.

  During the parliament a piece of Lancastrian propaganda circulated, aiming to harden any wavering consciences. The Somnium Vigilantis, ‘Dream of the Vigilant’, depicted a courtroom w
here, in front of a king and his lords, two men were locked in debate. One was a boorish Yorkist lout claiming to represent the ‘common weal’; the other a royal orator who, after listening patiently, dissected and refuted his arguments. The Yorkists, the orator retorted, had it the wrong way round. The true ‘common good’ lay not in taking up the cause of the people – who were in any case irrational, fickle and stupid – but in loyalty to the king, whose supreme authority enabled the rule of law and the functioning of society. Anybody who failed in such loyalty was acting for their ‘singular will’, in their own self-interest. And anybody, the orator stressed, who claimed for themselves some kind of supreme authority as ‘protector of the commonwealth’ could not do so ‘without lying’. The Yorkists wanted to subvert royal authority. Their very existence presented a threat to the security of the king and the ‘universal quiet’ of the country as a whole. The time for mercy was over.

  In Parliament, Henry reminded people of his ‘prerogative to show such mercy and grace as shall please his highness’. But it was little more than window dressing. The Yorkist lords were found guilty of treason, their fate enacted in statute. Richard of York, the Nevilles and their heirs were now legally dead – or, as the royal orator in the Somnium sneered, ‘lords of time past’.40

  Matters had acquired a new and terrible clarity. In the ‘parliament of devils’, as the Yorkists termed it bitterly, all hope of reconciliation between the warring parties had effectively been destroyed. Cast out into the political wilderness with no route back, they now had no option but to fight against the regime that had put them there. From now on, they would do so not as reformers of that regime, but as its alternative.

  That winter, besieging Lancastrian troops ringed the borders of the Calais Pale, trying to get a stranglehold on the Yorkist lords. The earl of Warwick, unruffled, had taken things in hand, securing the town and port with practised efficiency, and smoothing the anxieties of Calais’ merchants. Hit hard in recent years, the wool trade was further menaced by war and crippled by the trade embargo that Queen Margaret, suspicious of the merchants’ Yorkist tendencies, had slapped on Calais. Warwick did his best to keep trade routes open. But under constant, wearing attack, the Calais garrison’s morale began to slump, and deserters trickled away. Something spectacular was needed.

  Hours before dawn on Tuesday, 19 January 1460, a seaborne detachment of seven hundred Yorkists landed quietly at Sandwich. Overwhelming the Lancastrian defences, they bundled the commander, Richard Woodville, Lord Rivers, and his son Sir Anthony Woodville, onto a ship and took them back across the Dover Strait. The government’s point man in the region, Rivers had been assembling a navy to deal with the Yorkist lords in their enclave across the Channel. Warwick had got in a pre-emptive strike.

  Awaiting the captive Lancastrians in Calais harbour, weapons and armour glinting in the light of 160 blazing torches, was a detachment of the garrison and the three Yorkist lords: Salisbury, Warwick and Edward earl of March. Edward was emerging from his absent father’s shadow. In his older cousin Warwick he found much to emulate: a man cool under fire but with a nose for the disruptive. As persuasive in front of a crowd as he was negotiating loans with merchants or diplomatic settlements with foreign princes, Warwick was becoming as notorious for his savagery – capturing Lancastrian ships, he had singled out and summarily executed the crewmen who had previously been in his service – as for his freebooting in the Channel’s eastern approaches. That winter, there was in the relationship between Warwick, now thirty-one, and York’s energetic, charismatic eldest son, something of a partnership – or at least, that was how Edward later remembered the ‘tender zeal, love and affection that he bore to our person and our security’. It was a mentoring role that Warwick played with accomplished skill.41

  In the raid on Sandwich, Warwick had shown at a stroke what the English people, angry and humiliated at the loss of their ‘power of the sea’ under Henry VI’s hopeless government, were missing. Realizing this, on Sunday 1 March the king put in one of his rare and aimless appearances in the capital. By this time, with the Yorkist position in Calais increasingly secure, Warwick had left to head west with a small fleet of ships to Ireland, to rendezvous with Richard of York.

  Landing at Waterford on 17 March, St Patrick’s Day, Warwick spent the following weeks with York, the pair chewing over their course of action. The plan that Warwick brought back to Edward in Calais that spring was not recorded – or, perhaps, was quite deliberately kept secret. Whatever the case, it made a strong impression on Richard’s heir: it was, Edward would later recall, ‘our greatest joy and consolation earthly’.42 It would not be long before the Yorkist plans, guided by Warwick’s unerring instincts, started to reveal themselves.

  Short, busy and eloquent, the papal envoy Francesco Coppini viewed his mission to England as the chance to put his claim for the red cardinal’s hat he craved. The previous year Pope Pius II, seeking to belie his reputation as an accomplished writer of erotica, had announced a crusade against the Ottoman Turks who threatened Europe’s south-eastern border and its trading interests throughout the Mediterranean. It was an ambitious aim. Not only were Christendom’s cash-strapped princes reluctant to let the pope collect crusading revenues from their churches, but they showed rather more interest in fighting each other than the Turks – England being a case in point. Arriving in the country in 1459 to knock heads together, Coppini had at first met with an ‘agreeable’ reception but, as the months passed, the wining, dining and fine promises came to nothing. Increasingly desperate, he left England for Calais at the invitation of the earl of Warwick; there, the pair had a full and frank conversation.43

  Outlining to Coppini their plans for regime change, Warwick stated that the Yorkist lords would govern the kingdom themselves. Henry VI, ‘a dolt and a fool’, would be kept on as a figurehead with only the ‘bare name of sovereign’. Warwick went further. He told Coppini that Richard of York should by rights be ‘reigning’ – or, to put it another way, York, with his superior blood claim, was the true king of England.

  Dynastic change was a cataclysmic solution to the country’s political morass. But it also promised a clean break, a fresh start. Over almost ten years, as York had struggled unsuccessfully to assert himself and his populist cause and to reform the system from within, he had constantly stressed his loyalty to Henry VI, the anointed king of England. And here lay the problem. Henry may have been hopeless, but he was also blameless. Back in 1399, Henry’s grandfather, Henry Bolingbroke, had confronted Richard II with his many crimes and had forced him to abdicate. Henry VI, though, had done nothing wrong. Indeed, he had barely done anything at all, but while his inaction had provoked a constitutional crisis, it was hardly a crime. There were no grounds for removing him from the throne. If, however, there turned out to have been a genealogical error – that Richard of York, by virtue of his finer lineage, was actually England’s rightful king and that the house of Lancaster had been reigning for sixty years by mistake – that was another matter entirely.

  The problem was that dynastic change was hardly a solution destined to attract the widespread backing the Yorkists so desperately needed; rather, it was more inclined to make potential supporters run the other way. Deposing a crowned king was incomprehensible to most. Besides which, Lancastrian rule was well over two generations old: by 1460, it was all England’s people had ever known. Unsurprisingly, in his talks with Coppini Warwick played down the idea of revolution. Rather, he stressed the Yorkists’ reforming programme and their allegiance to Henry VI, and pledged to send a fleet to participate in the pope’s crusade – just as soon as the Yorkists had, with papal help, restored peace and order in England.

  By mid-June, Warwick had constructed an international coalition of support for the Yorkist cause, foremost among which was the legitimating spiritual might of the Curia. Calais, meanwhile, supplied finance and the military heft of its permanent garrison. With this establishment backing in the bag, the Yorkist lords were, as ever, a
ssiduous in their cultivation of the ‘true hearts of the people’.44

  Late that spring, various anonymous manifestos, seeming to bubble up from a deep wellspring of popular sentiment and speaking in their various ways of Lancastrian betrayal, were circulating through Kent: copied, passed from hand to hand, read out in taverns and marketplaces, pinned up on gates and doors. Echoing through them were the usual complaints. England was ruled by venal, base-born councillors; Henry VI himself was incapable; his marriage and his son were both ‘false’. Rightful king he may have been, the implication went, but his wife and son were illegitimate and could not possibly be included in any political settlement. The Yorkists, on the other hand, were the true-blooded representatives of the people. As one manifesto spelled out, redemption was at hand in the shape of both Richard of York and his son and heir, Edward earl of March. A boy of ‘blood royal’, conceived ‘in wedlock’ – unlike the rumoured bastardy of his Lancastrian namesake, Henry VI’s heir – Edward would ‘save England’ and lead it into a bright new future: ‘his fame the earth shall spread’.

  Whatever the manifestos implied, and whatever the Yorkist lords said in private, their official pronouncements remained the bland expressions of loyalty that they had always been. Henry, they stated, remained ‘our most sovereign and Christian king’. All Warwick and Edward wanted was to ‘amend defaults’ to the benefit of all England, with Richard of York at the head of a reforming council. Through all the conciliatory language, however, ran an uncompromising tone. Whoever stood in their way, the Yorkists promised, ‘we shall mark him’.45

  On 26 June 1460 the Yorkist lords, with Coppini in tow, crossed the Channel to Sandwich. Their arrival, smoothed by fair winds and weather, was ‘gracious’, more like a state arrival than an invasion. With the Kentish commons at their backs, and a swelling number of local big men disillusioned with the regime – at Canterbury, the city’s commanders, Sir John Fogge and Sir John Scott, ordered to defend the city against the Yorkists, opened the gates to them instead – they advanced on London.46