Bosworth: The Birth of the Tudors (14 page)

Under the security of the new regime, Margaret felt able to return to her Lancastrian roots. When Margaret’s cousin, the exiled Edmund Beaufort, Duke of Somerset, returned to England from Burgundy in February, he met with Margaret, dining on a meal of fresh salmon, eel and tench. Somerset naturally assumed that Margaret would support the restored Lancastrian regime, yet Stafford remained uncertain which side to support. Events would leave him with little time to decide. Edward’s sudden return placed Stafford in an impossible dilemma. Should he back the king to whom he had previously pledged loyalty, or fall in with his wife’s family? With Edward’s landing and march to Coventry, the Duke of Somerset, uncertain himself whether to remain in the capital or to march west in the hope of meeting Margaret of Anjou’s forces upon arrival, once again visited the couple at Woking on 24 March, spending four days there with his retinue of forty men. He laid out his plans to head for Salisbury in order to recruit a larger army, but still Stafford refused to join the duke. The discussions continued after Somerset’s departure, with Stafford sending some of his men to Newbury for further talks, yet Stafford himself rode to London on 2 April, perhaps hoping to avoid any impending conflict.

Edward’s decision to leave Coventry and march into the capital, seizing Henry VI, would force Stafford’s hand. He had no option but to support Edward’s cause. Ten days later he joined the Yorkist army as it marched out of London towards Barnet where Warwick and his forces were approaching with speed. The pace of events had taken Stafford by surprise. Riding out of London, he was not even armed for battle; his servant had to follow later with gussets of mail that might hopefully protect his master in the impending conflict. As Stafford prepared for battle, he wrote a hastily drafted will, naming Margaret, ‘my most entire beloved wife’, as his executrix, and if he should fall in battle, asked for ‘my body to be buried where it shall best please God that I die’.

Warwick knew that the ultimate test of battle had arrived: unless
he could defeat Edward, his future within the Lancastrian dynasty would be over, regardless of whether Margaret of Anjou and Prince Edward arrived from France. He had waited too long in the Midlands, mistakenly believing that Clarence could be relied upon to provide vital support. Nevertheless, the earl still held the advantage in terms of the size of his army, supposedly numbering 30,000 to Edward’s 10,000 men.

After some initial skirmishes involving the advance patrols of both sides, the armies drew up half a mile north of Barnet on the evening of Saturday, 13 April. As darkness set in, and as both armies manoeuvred into position, blinded by nightfall, Warwick ordered his guns to bombard Edward’s camp. As the deafening sound of cannon fired across the skies, it was soon clear that Warwick had mistaken how close the Yorkist force was to his own side, with the guns overshooting their intended target, much to Edward’s relief. Quickly realising that his opponent had no idea of his position, he ordered his men not to return fire, while the entire army was placed under strict orders to remain in silence. The constant bombardment through the night from Warwick’s guns began to produce a large cloud of smoke that blended into the thickening mist, creating an impenetrable screen between both forces. Determined that the earl’s superior firepower should play no part in the battle, Edward decided to strike first.

Between four and five o’clock in the morning, in the half-light of dawn, a blast of trumpets signalled Edward’s advance into the mist. The two forces were so close that both sides fell almost immediately to ‘hand strokes’, even before the gunners and archers had time to fire their weapons. On Edward’s left, it quickly became clear that his troops were outnumbered by the Lancastrian right flank, commanded by the Earl of Oxford. After ‘sharp’ fighting, the Yorkist flank broke, with many taking to flight as Oxford’s forces pursued them, while other Lancastrians, ‘weighing that all had been won’, rode ‘in all haste’ to London to announce that Edward had ‘lost the field’. They were wrong.

Edward, unaware in the blinding fog that one flank of his army had collapsed, had continued fighting regardless, pushing Warwick’s other flank back, in what became a close-set slogging match between menat-arms on foot, led by Edward’s own physical prowess and fighting
skill. ‘With great violence’, one chronicler recorded, ‘he beat and bore down before him all that stood in his way, and turning first one way and then another he so beat and bore down that nothing might stand in the sight of him’. In the mist and confusion, in which men ‘might not profitably judge one thing from another’, the steel of their armour pressed so tightly that even movement became impossible, the battle became like a scrum, with each side locked against one another. Slowly, however, the alignment of both sides began to turn ninety degrees as the Yorkists gained the advantage.

Having scattered the Yorkist left flank, Oxford’s men returned to the battlefield, possibly to search for spoils among the dead (one chronicle recalled that they ‘returned and fell to rifeling’), only to discover that the battle had not ended. Oxford immediately regrouped his scattered force in the dense mist, unaware that the battle had swung round in a direction that would mean he would be charging into his own side. As the sound of Oxford’s charge grew near, Warwick’s men mistook Oxford’s livery badges of a star with streams that the earl’s men displayed on their coats for Edward’s badge of the Yorkist sun in splendour. Believing that a separate charge had been organised by the Yorkists, Warwick’s forces began to shoot and fight against Oxford’s men, ‘supposing they had been King Edward’s’.

By the time Oxford realised what was happening, it was too late. His forces had already fled, crying ‘Treason! Treason!’ Left to fight the battle alone, in the panic that ensued, Warwick’s troops were overwhelmed by the combined forces of Edward and his younger brother, Richard, Duke of Gloucester. Ignoring the earl’s plea to withstand a final charge, the Lancastrian soldiers, believing there was treason in their ranks, fled the field en masse. Soon Warwick had joined them, attempting to make his way to a nearby wood where he had tethered his horse in case he needed to escape. The opportunity never came. Edward had given orders that the earl should be taken alive, but even the king’s orders could not save him. Amid the carnage, Warwick was recognised by a group of Yorkist soldiers who, surrounding the earl, battered him to the ground and beat him to death.

The battle had lasted three hours. It was barely dawn, yet already a thousand Lancastrians had been killed, along with 500 Yorkists. The significance of the battle and its outcome could not have been greater;
the kingmaker was dead, with the rest of the Lancastrian noblemen put to flight, including the Earl of Oxford, who escaped northwards to Scotland.

For those remaining in the capital, waiting for the outcome of the battle, to discover whether their husbands or sons had survived or been killed, it was a nervous time. As soon as she discovered that Warwick and the Lancastrians had been defeated, on 17 April Margaret Beaufort made all possible speed from Woking to the capital. She did not know whether her husband was dead or alive; in her anxiety she sent a rider to the battlefield at Barnet to discover Stafford’s fate. In fact Stafford had been wounded, severely enough that he would play no part in any further military activities during the year.

Several hours after the battle, the bodies lying strewn across the field were loaded onto carts and taken away, including the corpses of Warwick and his brother Montagu, who were stripped and taken back to the capital to St Paul’s where they were placed on public display. But the war was not over yet. As the evening light of Easter Sunday grew dim, a fleet of ships drew anchor at Weymouth. Onto the shore stepped Margaret of Anjou and her son Prince Edward. ‘The world, I assure you’, Sir John Paston, who had fought on Oxford’s side at Barnet, wrote home, ‘is right queasy, as ye shall know within the month; the people here feareth it sore. God hath showed himself marvellously like him that made all, and can undo again when him list; and I can think that by all likelihood shall show himself as marvellous again, and that in short time.’

Hearing the news of Warwick’s defeat, Margaret of Anjou was ‘right heavy and sorry’. Yet she had every reason to remain optimistic; the Lancastrian cause was certainly not lost, and without Warwick, she would no longer be compromised by an agreement she had only entered into with hesitation. The Duke of Somerset, himself experienced in battle on the Continent having fought among Duke Charles of Burgundy’s army, soon joined her, and was appointed commander of her forces, which in addition to an army provided by the Earl of Devon, began to grow rapidly as the Lancastrians began to march northwards across the West Country. Meanwhile, Jasper Tudor had travelled westwards to South Wales, where he had begun to recruit a large Welsh army. The
intention would be to avoid battle until both armies were able to join up creating a formidable force.

As Margaret and Somerset made their way first to Exeter before heading northwards to Bristol and the Severn Valley, Edward prepared for a second round of battle, sending out orders to fifteen counties for soldiers. Marching from London, he celebrated St George’s Day at Windsor Castle and began his march westwards, knowing that he had to intercept Margaret and Somerset’s forces before they had the chance to join with Jasper Tudor’s. That meant ensuring that the Lancastrians did not cross the river Severn. Edward first moved cautiously, in case Margaret decided to change course and head for London, but his march soon picked up pace and by 29 April he had reached Cirencester, less than a day’s march from the Severn at Gloucester. The king could still not be sure, however, of the Lancastrians’ exact intentions; one moment it seemed they were heading towards Bath, luring Edward towards Malmesbury and away from the passage across the Severn, when in fact they journeyed in haste to Bristol, where they were welcomed and bolstered with a supply of arms, money and men. Then it appeared the Lancastrians were preparing to wage battle near Chipping Sodbury, but when Edward arrived there was no sight of any opposing army. In fact, Margaret and Somerset, sending advance patrols there, had deliberately sought to confuse Edward into believing that their direction had changed. Instead, having given the Yorkists the slip, they had headed west towards Gloucester with all possible speed. The race for the Severn was now on.

Outmanoeuvred, Edward had no chance of reaching the Lancastrian forces before they reached Gloucester. Instead he sent messages to its governor, ordering him to hold the town at all costs. The plan worked. When Somerset and Margaret arrived at Gloucester at ten o’clock on Friday, 3 May, they discovered that the town’s gates had been closed. Somerset threatened to storm its walls, but it was an idle threat. His troops had already marched thirty-six miles through the night, across ‘foul country, all in lanes and strong ways betwixt woods without any good refreshing’; they were exhausted, but were ordered to push on another twenty-four miles to Tewkesbury.

By now, both sides were running low on rations, and with neither food nor drink available, soldiers were forced to refresh themselves
from muddied puddles, churned up from the carts that passed through them, that one chronicler wrote were barely fit for horses to drink from. Edward shadowed the Lancastrian advance, marching across the high ground along the western edge of the Cotswolds, where there were better marching conditions than the woodlands of the Severn vale below. As the day passed with the dazzling hot sun beating down upon them, the Yorkists managed to make speed and by late afternoon, having covered over thirty miles in a single day, reached Cheltenham. There Edward discovered that the Lancastrians had advanced to Tewkesbury; after a brief rest to allow his troops to refresh themselves, his force continued their march into the night until they stopped to camp within three miles of the enemy, taking what little sleep they could among the preparations for the clash they would face the following morning. Edward knew that defeat was unthinkable if he wanted to prevent Margaret and Somerset crossing the Severn and joining forces with Jasper Tudor. Regardless of all his previous victories, this was the battle he had to win.

As dawn broke, it was clear that the Lancastrians had chosen a strong defensive position, encamped on high ground to the south of Tewkesbury; in front of them were ‘foul lanes and deep dykes, and many hedges with hills and valleys’, making it practically impossible for any attack upon them: it was ‘as evil a place to approach as could possibly have been devised’, one chronicler noted.

Edward was undeterred. On Saturday morning, 4 May, he drew up his forces in three divisions or ‘battles’. He placed his brother Richard, Duke of Gloucester, in charge of the vanguard on his left side, and Lord Hastings on his right while he himself remained with the main battle in the centre. Observing from his vantage point that there was a large wood to the left of the Lancastrian position, fearing that there might be Lancastrians lying there in wait ready to ambush his forces, he ordered that a squadron of 200 men-at-arms, mounted with spears, be placed near the wood. On the Lancastrian side, Somerset had chosen to command the right flank, placing the elderly veteran Lord Wenlock (who had fought in the first battle at St Albans nearly twenty years before) in charge of the centre of the army.

Edward made the first move, ordering his trumpeters to sound the advance. A soon as his archers and gunners were in range they opened
‘right-a-sharp’ fire. The Lancastrians attempted to return fire, but the ferocity of the Yorkist arrows which rained down upon them, together with the confined space of their defensive position, soon meant that Somerset found himself outgunned. Realising that his defensive line was in danger of being broken, he ordered that his men should attack Edward’s main battle, using the ditches, sunken lanes and wooded terrain skilfully to launch a downhill attack. Somerset, however, had underestimated the strength of the Yorkist vanguard, which having been freed from attacking the Lancastrian defences, returned to Edward’s aid. Somerset now found himself being attacked from both sides by Edward’s and Richard’s forces in fierce hand-to-hand combat. Somerset would have expected that his own central battle, led by Lord Wenlock, should have moved forward and engaged in the fighting, but for some reason, possibly due to the difficulty of crossing the rough terrain, Wenlock’s forces remained motionless on the ‘marvellous strong ground’.