Foundation (History of England Vol 1) (61 page)

He could do nothing with either of them. The earl was in practice the ruler of the country, but he lacked legitimacy and moral authority. He could hardly rule on the king’s behalf if he kept the king confined to a castle. Edward’s council seems grudgingly to have accepted Warwick’s direction, but the hiatus in national affairs provoked outbreaks of local violence and rebellion. Once more the great families of the realm could attack one another with impunity. Only one remedy offered itself. The king had to be released from custody and allowed to resume his sovereignty. So Edward IV returned to be met by a contrite earl, archbishop and younger brother who pleaded that they had acted only in the interests of the realm. Edward and his supporters then processed towards London, where they were met by the mayor and aldermen in their scarlet regalia. ‘The king himself’, John Paston wrote, ‘has good language of the Lords of Clarence, of Warwick, and of my Lords of York and Oxford, saying they be his best friends.’ But he added that ‘his household men have other language’. His household, in other words, were inclined towards revenge.

Yet the king realized that the stability of the realm had to be regained at all costs. According to the chronicler Polydore Vergil ‘he regarded nothing more than to win again the friendship of such noblemen as were now alienated from him . . .’. He invited Clarence and Warwick to join the sessions of a great council that was called to arrange ‘peace and entire oblivion of all grievances upon both sides’. He also allowed his four-year-old daughter, Elizabeth, to be betrothed to Warwick’s nephew. Warwick had of course only recently murdered the young girl’s maternal grandfather and uncle. The politics of power are always realistic.

Nevertheless the earl had been dealt a grievous blow; it had been proved that he could not wield authority without the presence of the king. In the spring of 1470 he was once again implicated in armed rebellion. The revolt came from Lincolnshire where certain families, afraid of the king’s justice or offended by the king’s
depredations, rose up with the intention of giving the crown to Clarence. When Edward took the field against them they cried out ‘A Clarence! A Clarence!’ and ‘A Warwick! A Warwick!’ It was all the evidence the king required. His army defeated the Lincolnshire men with ease, and the site of the battle became known as ‘Lose Coat Field’ for the number of clothes bearing the livery of Warwick or of Clarence that the soldiers discarded in their flight. After his overwhelming victory, his two opponents fled to the safety of the court of Louis XI in France. Some of their collaborators were not so fortunate. One of Warwick’s ships was seized at Southampton, where the gentlemen and yeomen on board were beheaded. A sharp stake was then driven through their posteriors, and their heads were impaled on top.

Warwick and Clarence were now joined by Margaret of Anjou. She, too, had left her familial lands and arrived at the court of the French king. Louis had three birds in his hand, but Margaret and Warwick had been fierce enemies for a long time. The king now entered into protracted negotiations in order to reconcile her to the man who had been ‘the greatest causer of the fall of Henry, of her, and of her son’. He spent every day in long discussions with her until eventually she deferred to him. Margaret now agreed to conspire with her once inveterate enemies and to overthrow Edward IV. Her husband, still in the Tower, would regain the throne; her son Edward, prince of Wales, would marry another of Warwick’s daughters and thus become brother-in-law to Clarence. The families of York and Lancaster would therefore be finally united. The young couple were betrothed in Angers Cathedral.

Warwick and his new ally now began preparations for the great invasion of England. Edward kept his eyes upon the coasts but, in the summer of 1470, he was distracted by news of further rebellions in the north inspired by Warwick’s cause; he was obliged to march to York and Ripon. He could not be sure where Warwick’s fleet might land – anywhere from Wales to Northumberland – and he took a calculated risk in going northward. While he lingered in York, having successfully overcome the incipient rebellion, the news came in the middle of September that Warwick and Clarence had landed at Exmouth in Devon from where at once they began their
march towards him. The king was in hostile country in any case, and it became increasingly clear that Warwick was acquiring supporters as he moved forward.

The public records of Coventry reveal that Clarence and Warwick ‘drew to them much people’ and that ‘they were thirty thousand’ by the time they reached the city. Edward had left York for Nottingham, but he was still in desperate circumstances. He had ‘sent for lords and all other men’, but to his dismay ‘there came so little people to him that he was not able to make a field against them’. In the words of the public record Edward ‘went to Lynn’. In fact he made a rapid retreat to what is now King’s Lynn where he took ship and sailed towards the Low Countries. He had few men, and little money; such was his penury that he had to pay for his transport with the furred gown he was wearing.

Eventually he landed in Holland, where the governor of the province was known to him; he was in Burgundian territory, and the duke of Burgundy was an ally. The duke, having married Margaret of York two years before, was also the king’s brother-in-law. So Edward was, for the time being, safe from his enemies. Elizabeth Woodville and her mother had already taken sanctuary in Westminster Abbey. The sanctuary stood at the bottom of the churchyard to the west of the abbey. It was described as ‘a gloomy building, of sufficient strength to withstand a siege’. It was here that the queen was delivered of a son.

Warwick returned to London in order to confirm his supremacy. Margaret and her son remained in France, waiting for Henry VI to be given back his throne. So the once abandoned king was led from the Tower after an imprisonment of five years; he was wearing a long gown of blue velvet, but he was ‘not so cleanly kept as should be such a prince’. In his captivity he sometimes quoted words from the seventh psalm to the effect that ‘My help cometh of God, who preserveth them that are true of heart’. Now God had worked an unlooked-for wonder. Truly He moved in mysterious ways. At the opening of Henry’s parliament the archbishop of York preached upon the text ‘Turn, O backsliding children’.

But if Henry was once more king in name, Warwick was the puppet master. Henry was according to a contemporary chronicler no more than ‘a crowned calf, a shadow on the wall’. Warwick
now had to balance a variety of interests in order to preserve his rule; he had to satisfy his Lancastrian supporters as well as the Yorkists who had favoured Edward IV. He also had to manage the ambitions of Clarence, who might have wished the crown for himself. These various tensions and divisions did not augur for good rule. The noblemen of England had in any case become increasingly disenchanted with the protagonists on both sides, and were inclined merely to give their support to the strongest at any given moment. ‘Trust not much upon promises of lords nowadays,’ Margaret Paston told her son, ‘that you should be the surer of the favour of such men. A man’s death is little set by nowadays. Therefore beware of simulation, for they will speak right fair to you that would you fared right evil.’

Soon enough another reversal of fortune complicated a story already filled with strange turns and accidents. In the early spring of 1471 the duke of Burgundy agreed to finance an invasion of England by Edward, and on 14 March the exiled monarch landed at Ravenspur on the coast of Yorkshire; his reception was not at first encouraging. ‘There came right few of the country [Yorkshire] to him,’ according to a contemporary history, ‘or almost none.’ The men of Holderness turned him away, and he was only permitted to enter York on the declaration that he had come to claim his father’s dukedom rather than the English crown.

Nevertheless he kept on moving towards London. He marched towards Doncaster and, learning that Warwick was gathering his forces in Coventry, turned towards that city. The duke of Clarence now deserted the earl in favour of his brother; with Henry VI back on the throne, and with Margaret of Anjou poised to return to England with her son, he may have realized that his chance of gaining the crown was now remote. He was also suspected by his erstwhile enemies; he was held, as a contemporary wrote, ‘in great suspicion, despite, disdain and hatred with all the lords . . . that were adherents and full partakers with Henry’. But his actions may have had no logic to them at all; he was young, impressionable and impulsive with little control over his tongue or over his actions. He was a shuttlecock flying in all directions.

Edward, leaving Warwick embattled in Coventry, decided to move swiftly upon the capital and to announce himself once more
to be king. The archbishop of York, brother of Warwick, tried to rally support by parading Henry VI through London; the king was still wearing the blue velvet gown in which he had been dressed when he left the Tower. Edward entered the city and urgently sought an interview with the old king. ‘My cousin of York,’ Henry told him, ‘you are very welcome. I know that in your hands my life will not be in danger.’ In this he proved to be mistaken. The unhappy monarch was once more consigned to the cold walls of the Tower, while Edward was united with his wife and his newborn son fresh out of sanctuary. Very little time could be spent in celebration, however, and on the following morning the king ‘took advice of the great lords of his blood, and other of his council, for the adventures that were likely to come’. The adventures reached a climax on 14 April at Barnet, a small town north of London, where the Yorkists won the victory with a confused set of skirmishes in thick fog; in the subsequent rout Warwick himself was killed. The ‘king-maker’ was slain by the forces of the king.

The earl of Warwick is not a happy figure. Lands and wealth had been heaped upon him by an over-generous monarch, and as a result he became fractious and over-mighty; he proclaimed himself to be the representative of the rights of England, and yet he was merely the tool of faction and of family; he aspired to glory, but in victory he was cruel and vindictive; he was a politician without any grasp of political strategy, and a statesman who had a habit of opposing the national interest at every juncture. His vanity, and his ambition, destroyed him. In these respects, he was not so different from his eminent contemporaries.

Margaret of Anjou and her seventeen-year-old son, Prince Edward, had sailed from France without knowing of Edward’s victory over Warwick. The news greeted her soon after her landing at Weymouth, in Dorset, with her followers. It was too late to flee; she could only fight. She made her way north towards Bristol, picking up supporting forces on the way, but Edward’s army was approaching from the east. At this moment John Paston wrote to his mother, Margaret, that ‘the world, I assure you, is right queasy’. On 4 May 1471, in a meadow just to the south of Tewkesbury in Gloucestershire, the Lancastrians were overtaken by the Yorkists; in
the subsequent mêlée Prince Edward was killed and Margaret was taken prisoner.

Edward IV returned in triumph to London less than three weeks later. On that same day, Henry VI was killed in the Tower of London. It was said that he had expired from melancholy, but the truth is no doubt more prosaic. He had been murdered on the orders of the victorious king, who wished to hold no hostages to fortune. It was claimed later that his assassin was Edward’s youngest brother, the duke of Gloucester, but this inference may entirely be due to Gloucester’s later fame as the inglorious Richard III. It seems appropriate, at any rate, that he should now enter this history of England as a man of shadows.

In any event the Lancastrian royal family, descended directly from Henry IV, was now extinguished. Henry’s body was taken from the Tower to St Paul’s Cathedral, where he was laid out ‘open vysagid’ so that all might recognize him. Margaret of Anjou was incarcerated in the Tower, where she remained for four years before being ransomed by Louis XI; she spent the rest of her days, impoverished, in France. Her life had been lived in a storm that had claimed her husband and her son.

A vignette of Henry VI may be included here. On one occasion, in the 1450s, he visited Westminster Abbey in order to mark out the site of his tomb. He ordered a stonemason to scratch with a crowbar the position and dimensions of the vault that he wished to be built in the floor of the abbey. He did not require a monumental tomb; he wanted to rest beneath the quiet stone. As he conferred with the abbot, he leaned on the shoulder of his chamberlain; the king was then only in his thirties, but he was already tired with the demands of the world. There has rarely been a wise king in England, let alone a good one. But it is still possible to concede a certain amount of sympathy to a man who seems to have been wholly unsuitable for the duties of kingship.

It is often said that the opposing sides in the Wars of the Roses were engaged in an act of mutual destruction, and that the noble families of England were noticeably thinned as a result of the fighting. In fact the pressure of time and circumstance always worked against the survival of any noble house, and it has been
calculated that in any period of twenty-five years a quarter of the nobility left no sons to inherit their titles and so lapsed into inconsequence. There must always be a steady flow of ‘new blood’ to keep the governance of the land in good health. The Wars of the Roses did not interrupt what was essentially a continuing process.

In a larger sense, too, the world went on its own way despite the immediate disturbance of the wars. The fact of conflict of course weakened the body politic, and loosened the ties between the realm and the nobility, but there is no evidence of general desolation or dislocation. Few towns or cities were affected by the disturbances, and only those in the immediate vicinity of the battles would have suffered from the factional struggle. The vast resources of the Church were not touched, and in general the clergy remained as distant observers of the conflict. The law courts at Westminster were still in session and the judges rode on circuit throughout the country. The French chronicler and historian Philippe de Commynes remarked at the time that ‘there are no buildings destroyed or demolished by war, but the calamities and misfortunes of the war fell only upon the soldiers, and especially on the nobility’.