The Last Knight Errant: Sir Edward Woodville & the Age of Chivalry (27 page)

The King had moved his court north to the huge castle of Kenilworth in Warwickshire where he started to plan and muster support. Towns were instructed to lay in food and drink which would be bought at a ‘reasonable price’ for the army. A proclamation was issued enforcing public order and military discipline, i.e. no robbing churches, no ravishing women, no stealing meat, no illegal lodging and so forth.

There were detailed orders for the cavalry: at the first blast of the trumpet the trooper must saddle his horse, at the second put the bridle on, at the third mount up and await orders; there was to be no unauthorized shouting or horn blowing. Vagabonds and ‘common women’ were not permitted to follow the King’s host.16

The cavalry was to be divided into two wings, the leading or right wing to be commanded by ‘the Queen’s uncle, Sir Edward Woodville Lord Scales’. This wing was to be formed immediately. The only surviving instructions for any kind of organization in these proclamations are for the cavalry, Edward’s area of command.

The order of battle was predictable: the Earl of Oxford ‘besought the king to have the conduct of the Forward, which the king granted’,17 with Jasper, Duke of Bedford, commanding the mainguard. The left or rearguard would be made up of Stanley troops under Lord Strange, the heir to Lord Stanley who had been King Richard’s hostage at Bosworth.

Troopers for the first cavalry wing were drawn from the young gallants at court and the surrounding counties. Kenilworth was a good recruiting centre in the heart of England and easy for Edward, as Grafton, where he would know many of the locals, was only a day’s ride away. As soon as he had recruited his wing, he took them north to Yorkshire where the invading army was expected. Information on Lincoln’s plan was excellent, ‘for the King was in his bosome and knew every hour what the Earl did’. The Reverend Urswick was clearly a good intelligence gatherer.

Edward found the invaders outside Doncaster and launched a harassing action. He had limited numbers, perhaps 500 men (see note 18), so there can have been no question of a pitched battle. He was to delay them to enable the King to gather his forces. It was an ideal opportunity to use the cavalry tactics he had learned in Spain, where the lightly armed Moorish horsemen had dashed in to attack the army on the march and the Spanish
genitors
had shown their worth. Here the enemy was very short of cavalry, so it was easy to harass their wretched infantry.

Edward’s prickers (light horsemen or skirmishers) galloped at a marching column of foot soldiers and while they may have caught an occasional straggler, more importantly, they disrupted the line of march. When they swooped, the infantry were forced to stop marching, regroup to form a defensive hedgehog and prepare to receive cavalry. The prickers then irritated the captains by riding away and not fighting. They ambushed supplies and foraging parties; they were always watching, waiting for a weakness.

The action lasted for the three days it took the enemy to march from Doncaster to Sherwood Forest, just north of Nottingham. There Edward and his cavalry broke off their harassment and joined the royal army which had arrived just south of Nottingham. In those three days the enemy had only managed to cover some 35 miles, 12 miles each day, which was slow for a small medieval army in a hurry, particularly one that had been averaging 25 miles each day when they had marched from Barrow to Doncaster – 150 miles in just six days. But that rate of march was before Edward had started work.

Molinet, with his Burgundian sympathies, implies that the invaders had the best of these encounters but the facts do not support this. Rather they show how effective Edward was in holding up the invaders by reducing their average daily rate of march by half. The King had needed extra time and Edward provided it.

There had been a supportive response to the King’s call to muster. Lord Strange had 5,000–6,000 men; Northumberland had 4,000 and other noblemen with their followers, in all making up to around 12,000 men. The rebels numbered only 8,000–9,000, having failed to recruit in England (they were still substantially larger than the Tudor army of two years earlier). Martin Schwarz believed he had been let down by Lincoln and Lovell who had promised to raise substantial support that had not materialized. King Richard had exhausted the goodwill for the house of York and there was no appetite for further civil war. The captain of the mercenaries could do nothing other than fulfil the terms of his contract and grumble. He and his men had taken their pay.

King Henry should have been set for an easy victory, but for some reason morale appears to have been low and the troops unsettled. It seemed to them that the King kept disappearing and this gave rise to rumours that he had run away. There were some desertions but the English captains held the army together and the King was back in place to do the traditional dawn-of-battle business on 16 June.

He knighted suitable young men, attended early church and made a prebattle speech, or so Bernard André writes: ‘Most trusty Lords and most valiant comrades-in-arms who have experienced with me such great dangers on land and sea, behold again we are assailed against our will in another battle.’ He laid the blame squarely on ‘the perfidious’ and ungrateful Earl of Lincoln and the ‘silly and shameless’ Duchess of Burgundy who were ‘unjustly and spitefully in contention’ with him. ‘As God is my witness I have laboured unceasingly for the safety and peace of the realm and it is the Devil himself who has thwarted my efforts. Nevertheless just heredity will be stronger than their iniquity.’ Here he conveniently forgot his own suspect lineage but he ended the speech robustly, ordering his men to have faith: ‘God himself, who made us victors in the previous battle will allow us now to triumph over our enemies.’ The final exhortation was to attack fearlessly, ‘for God is our helper’.

The royal army was up at the crack of dawn and started its march up the Fosse Way. Molinet reports that Edward, ‘Le Seigneur d’Escales’, was ‘at the left wing of the vanguard in command (
en chief
) with two thousand horse’.18 In reality he was on the right wing, according to the herald’s report, and probably with nearer 500 horse, which, on the advance, would have provided a reconnaissance screen well ahead of the marching men. At around six o’clock in the morning his scurriers found Lincoln’s army drawn up on a ridge across the Fosse Way just south of Newark.

The vanguard under Oxford arrived at nine o’clock and shook themselves out from line of march into battle order, i.e. ranks facing the length of the enemy front. The mainguard arrived and started to take up a position to the left, but they could do no more than watch as the rebel army was arranged in a tight knot, offering a front that was too small for anything but the vanguard to confront. Lincoln and Martin Schwarz had decided that this knot formation was best suited to their mixture of experienced, well-armed German mercenaries and wild, ill-equipped Irish. But they had not considered its weakness when their opponents had longbows.

The invaders and the vanguard stood and faced each other in silence while the rest of the royal army sorted itself out. The vanguard then advanced with measured tread to the beat of the drums. Schwarz’s crossbow men fired a volley at the vanguard, which halted and loosed a flight of arrows. The tight enemy formation presented a perfect target for the archers who were beyond the range of the short Irish bows and arquebuses,19 while the crossbows were slow to crank back and load. The bowmen in the vanguard stood and shot flight after flight of arrows at the enemy who could do nothing.20

The invaders’ casualties were terrible, particularly amongst the Irish who had no armour, so that many of them were ‘shot through with arrows like hedgehogs’. While they were strong on courage, they were weak on discipline and could not take such punishment without reacting. The Irish ranks suddenly erupted and charged down the hill at their tormentors, catching Lincoln and Schwarz totally unprepared – their battle plan included no headlong heroic charge. But on seeing most of their army streaming down the hill towards the enemy, all they could do was to sound the general advance.

The Germans charged after the Irish, down the hill into Oxford’s vanguard that reeled under the impact, but then steadied and held its ground. There was fierce hand-to-hand fighting. The Germans fought solidly but the poor ‘half naked’ Irish, though they ‘fought hard and stuck to it valiantly’, were no match for armoured professionals and were slain like ‘dull and brute beastes’.

It could not last for long. The invaders wavered and withdrew back up the hill. Again the archers took their opportunity and sent terrifying flights of arrows into their enemy. Oxford sounded his advance and led the vanguard forward and up the hill. Edward and his cavalry were on the right and they charged the enemy’s exposed left flank. The vanguard reached the hill top where there was hard fighting. After an hour or so, the invading army was no more, with only a few small groups of die-hards left on the hill while most of the men had been pushed back, over the hill and down into a ravine still called the ‘Red Gutter’. There was terrible slaughter.

Half the invasion force was dead – between 4,000 and 5,000. One estimate puts the King’s losses at around 3,000, another puts it at only a few hundred. The latter seems more likely. The Earl of Lincoln21 and Martin Schwarz were killed in the battle and the Irish Warwick was caught. In the afternoon great trenches were dug for the corpses, and cavalry rode out to round up fugitives. The English and Irish rebels were hanged and the mercenaries discharged, i.e. sent home. (Molinet reported that only 200 rebels survived but, again, that is probably an exaggeration.) Letters were dispatched telling people, ‘how Almighty God had sent the king victory of his enemies and rebels, without the death of any noble or gentleman’. The German mercenaries had fought their best but the odds had been against them:

These, in the day when heaven was falling,

The hour when earth’s foundations fled,

Followed their mercenary calling,

And took their wages and are dead.22

At the post-mortem King Henry and his Council considered the young prisoner. They agreed his name was Lambert Simnel23 and decided to put him to work turning the spit in the royal kitchens. Through industry he was eventually to rise to the post of royal pastry cook. It was a shrewd move as it showed clemency, but was spiced with a heavy helping of contempt. The policy was to ridicule the opposition.

Piel Island, where Simnel landed and was declared king, was given its own ‘king’, one who rules even now. He is also the local publican, the landlord of the Ship Inn, and by tradition he can create a ‘knight of Piel’, and so King Henry’s ridicule still runs.

Two years later the absurdity of a commoner aping royalty was still the narrative when some Irish peers came for an audience. The King reminisced happily, ‘My masters of Ireland you will crown apes at last.’ 24

However, the uprising had frightened the King, so the fate of the wretched young Warwick in the Tower was sealed. He was executed ten years later once he was old enough. After all, it was only evil men like King Richard who killed children.

After his victory King Henry toured the north and then marched back towards London. At Leicester he was met by French envoys who congratulated him effusively on his success and, having flattered him, moved smoothly on to ask for his understanding for their king who had ‘a similar problem’. In reality, this meant France was going to attack Brittany and wanted a clear run. This was the start of what the French later christened
La Guerre Folle
or ‘The Mad War’.

The envoys had come to remind Henry of his debt to France and to dissuade him from aiding Brittany, England’s traditional ally. Her dukes paid fealty to the Kings of France, but it was nominal, as they stood ‘erect and armed’ when they pledged and ‘recognized no creator or sovereign save God Almighty’. Duke Francis of Brittany was not a strong man but he had a tough chief minister, the hawkish Pierre Landois, who was ‘intelligent, industrious and astute’ but also ‘arrogant, avaricious, violent, suspicious and vindictive’ and, even worse, ‘his humble origin made him odious to all classes’.

This meant that the nobles loathed him and were joined in opposition to anything he did. The Marshal de Rieux led the group that took a dove-like line on France because Landois was a Francophobe. However, the real problem for Brittany was the deterioration in the Duke’s mental health (inherited through the maternal line from his grandfather, Charles VI of France) and the need for an advantageous marriage for the heir apparent, his eight-year-old daughter Anne.

In France government was in the hands of Anne de Beaujeu, King Louis’s daughter and elder sister to the young King. She was 24 years old and noted as handsome, although she looks rather forbidding in her portrait. Anne was proving a very capable regent, with her father’s grasp of
realpolitik
and – unfortunately for Brittany – she had decided France would have the duchy. The
Rosier des Guerres
(‘Rosebush of Wars’) written in 1481–82 for the instruction of King Charles when he was Dauphin, under the direction of King Louis, states ‘the noble kings of France have always aimed and worked to expand and enlarge their kingdom’. Anything other than the total subjection of Brittany would be unacceptable.

The French Minister for War put the analysts to work and produced a reasoned exposition of the French claim, along with an appreciation of how best it could be achieved.2 They knew the duchy’s annual revenues were around 1 million livres (£110,000) even after defence costs; there were about 12,000 men who were capable of carrying arms and some 600 ocean-going vessels.