The rebels travelled to the capital by road and by boat along the Thames, ‘surveying all the ways in and out of London, to discover what forces would be necessary and how they might enter to pillage that most wealthy of cities’. On 8 May, Fauconberg, from his base at
Sittingbourne, demanded that the Lord Mayor of London open the city gates to him, but the Londoners had already learned of the King’s victory at Tewkesbury and were not going to be bullied. When Edward IV heard of Fauconberg’s rising, he sent commissions of array out to many shires and within days ‘there came to him men to the number of 30,000’, according to Warkworth.
On the 13th, the Bastard appeared before London on the Surrey shore of the Thames and announced his intention of taking the city and freeing Henry VI from the Tower. But God, says Croyland, ‘gave stout hearts to the people of London that they might stand firm in the battle’. The Lord Mayor and aldermen refused him entry, saying they were holding the capital for King Edward. Fauconberg then marched his men to Kingston and crossed the Thames there, intending to lead an assault on Westminster, but when he received reports that the King’s army would soon be at his back, he retreated to Southwark, near to where his ships were moored. He then lined his guns up along the shore and fired upon the Tower, where Queen Elizabeth and her children were in residence and ‘all likely to stand in the greatest jeopardy that ever there was’. Elizabeth’s brother, Lord Rivers, was in command of the Tower, and ably defended the city against its attackers, ordering an intense bombardment of Fauconberg’s position by the cannon on the Tower walls and beating off the rebel assault.
The following day, Fauconberg made a futile attempt to fire London Bridge, but was driven back by cannonfire. Meanwhile, 3000 of his men had burst into the city through St Katherine’s Docks and were rampaging through the streets, firing guns and arrows indiscriminately, pillaging, and setting fire to Aldgate and Bishopsgate. At that point the Earl of Essex arrived to reinforce the city levies and sent them against the rebels, just as Rivers was sallying forth from the Tower with 4500 men. Fierce fighting ensued, and many of Fauconberg’s men were killed. Gradually the rebels were forced back to the banks of the Thames, and from there they were pursued to their ships, although not before they had impudently led away fifty of Butcher Gould’s oxen – destined to feed the Queen’s household – from their grazing place by the Tower.
On the 15th the rebels retreated quietly enough to Blackheath, where they regrouped. However, at news that the King was advancing at the head of 30,000 men, all their courage melted away, and they decided that they should disperse. The Duke of Gloucester, riding ahead of the King’s main force, received Fauconberg’s submission. Nothing now stood in the way of Edward’s triumphal return to London.
On Tuesday 21 May, the King was formally welcomed by the Lord Mayor and the city fathers at Islington and then, accompanied by a larger retinue than was usual, which included almost the entire peerage of England, he rode into the capital, says Croyland, ‘ordering his standards to be unfurled and borne before him. Many who saw this were surprised and amazed, for no enemy remained to be dealt with, but this prudent prince was familiar with the untrustworthy ways of the people of Kent and resolved not to lay down his arms until he had punished those rebellious men, which he did soon after.’ He also knighted those who had distinguished themselves in the defence of London.
Praise of the King ‘sounded through all lands’ and the Londoners were enthusiastic in their acclaim of his triumph, cheering exuberantly and crying out blessings upon him. He had emerged victorious after a brilliant campaign, during the course of which he had eliminated most of his enemies. His success had not only been due to his speed, tenacity and daring, but also to his outstanding abilities as a general and his deployment of men of calibre in positions of command.
But if there was triumph in London that day, there was also the manifestation of tragedy, for ahead of the King in the procession was borne a litter in which sat Margaret of Anjou, exposed to the derision and taunts of the crowds and tasting the bitter dregs of humiliation and grief. As she passed, bystanders flung mud and stones at her and yelled abuse.
Henry VI was still in the Tower, but Fauconberg, by rising in the name of Lancaster, had virtually signed his death warrant. With Prince Edward dead, Edward IV no doubt felt that there was every justification for removing the deposed King. While Henry lived, there would always be further military confrontations involving pointless loss of life and consumption of the Crown’s revenues, and with these demands on his purse and his energies, Edward IV could not hope to make progress with his programme of reconstruction. There was no point in allowing civil war to continue unchecked. Therefore Henry must die.
‘And in the same night that King Edward came to London,’ wrote Warkworth, whose account is contemporary, ‘King Henry, being in ward in prison in the Tower of London, was put to death, between eleven and twelve of the clock, being then at the Tower, the Duke of Gloucester.’ Tradition has it that Henry’s murderer came upon him as he knelt at prayer in a deep niche in the eastern wall of his chamber in the Wakefield Tower, a room in which the crown jewels were later displayed.
The official account of his death in the
Arrivall
states that Henry reacted to news of the death of his son, the capture of his wife and the bitter certainty that his cause was ’utterly despaired of with ‘so great despite, ire and indignation that, of pure displeasure and melancholy he died’. Few were deceived by this. The Milanese ambassador in Paris soon heard that King Edward had ’caused King Henry to be secretly assassinated in the Tower. He has, in short, chosen to crush the seed’. Commines had reason to believe that it was Gloucester who ‘killed poor King Henry with his own hand, or else caused him to be killed in his presence’, while Vergil states that by the time of Henry VII it was generally believed that ‘Gloucester killed him with a sword’. Whatever Richard of Gloucester’s involvement – and it seems probable, from Warkworth’s significant mention of him, that his purpose at the Tower that night was to see that the act of regicide was carried out – the order for the murder of Henry VI can only have come from King Edward. Gloucester would not have acted alone in such a matter.
For murder it most certainly was. Henry VI died of the effects of a severe blow to the head. In 1911, when his body was exhumed and examined, his skeleton was found to be in pieces, and the bones of the skull were ‘much broken’, according to the report in
Archaeologia
. Moreover, ‘to one of the pieces of skull there was still attached some of the hair, which was brown in colour, save in one place, where it was much darker and apparently matted with blood’.
Croyland was in no doubt as to the cause of death.
I shall pass over the discovery of the lifeless body of King Henry in the Tower of London. May God have mercy upon, and grant sufficient time for repentance to him, whoever he may be, who dared to lay sacriligeous hands on the Lord’s Anointed! Let the doer merit the title of tyrant, and the victim be called a glorious martyr.
On 22 May, says Warkworth, the late King’s corpse was laid in a coffin and carried through the streets of London to St Paul’s where it lay in state for several days. ‘And his face was open that every man might see him, and in his lying he bled on the pavement there; and afterwards at the Black Friars was brought, and there he bled new and fresh.’ The people murmured at this, and the Great Chronicle reports that ‘the common fame then went that the Duke of Gloucester was not all guiltless’ of Henry’s death.
The chroniclers do not record where Margaret of Anjou spent the
night of the 21st. However, on the following day she was certainly imprisoned in the Tower. Her reaction to the news of her husband’s death is not recorded either, but she did make a determined attempt to gain custody of his body, which was denied her. Before long, she received a letter from her grief-stricken father, King René: ‘My child, may God help thee with His counsels! For rarely is the aid of man tendered in such reverse of fortune.’ René himself had recently suffered a triple bereavement – his son, John of Calabria, his bastard daughter Blanche and his son-in-law Ferry de Vaudemont had all died within weeks of each other the previous year. ‘When you can spare a thought from your own sufferings,’ he wrote to Margaret, ‘think of mine. They are great, my daughter, yet would I console thee.’
Henry VI’s funeral service was conducted at the monastery of the Black Friars, after which his body was carried in a barge ‘suitably equipped with lamps fifteen miles up the Thames’ to Chertsey Abbey in Surrey where it was ‘honourably interred’ in the Lady Chapel.
‘There is many a great sore, many a perilous wound left unhealed,’ records the Parliament Roll of 1474, three years after the wars between Lancaster and York had ended. Croyland states that ‘this unhappy plague of division’ had spread ‘not only among princes and people, but even in every society, whether chapter, college or convent’. Many lords came out of the conflict facing financial ruin. ‘The slaughter of men was immense, for besides the dukes, earls, barons and distinguished warriors who were cruelly slain, multitudes almost innumerable of the common people died of their wounds. Such was the state of the kingdom.’
The Wars of the Roses did not in fact bring about the destruction of most of the mediaeval aristocracy, as this lament would seem to imply. Although thirty-eight peers perished, only seven noble families, not counting the royal houses, became extinct. And while the conflict undoubtedly led to the aggrandisement of some already ‘over-mighty’ subjects, other members of the aristocracy refused to become involved in it at all. Certainly the effect of the wars was to narrow the gap between the King and the magnates and gradually erode the royal authority, while the slaughter of so many lords and knights also signalled an end to the age of chivalry.
Tudor historians were fond of reminding their readers of the horrors of the Wars of the Roses, recounting how the realm had been plunged into a vicious civil war over a disputed crown that lasted more than thirty years. They spared no efforts to portray this as a
grim period of violence, political anarchy and social decay. Edward Hall posed the rhetorical question, ‘What misery, what murder, and what execrable plagues this famous region hath suffered by the division and dissension of the renowned Houses of Lancaster and York, my wit cannot comprehend nor my tongue declare. For what noble man, what gentleman of any ancient stock or progeny, whose lineage hath not been infected and plagued by this unnatural division?’ The Elizabethan antiquarian, John Stow, referred to the Wars of the Roses as ‘all that heaving in and hurling out’, while Shakespeare wrote a cycle of plays about them, saying famously:
England hath long been mad and scarred herself,
The brother blindly shed the brother’s blood,
The father rashly slaughtered his own son,
The son, compelled, been butcher to the sire:
All this divided York and Lancaster.
Croyland, writing in 1486, viewed the Wars of the Roses primarily as a dynastic struggle that had its origins in York’s assertion of his claim to the throne. This became the accepted Tudor view, and proves that the tradition had a very early source. Polydore Vergil, Henry VII’s official historian, traced the origins of the conflict to the usurpation of Henry IV, but this was too simplistic a view and did not take account of the political decline of the 1440s and 1450s. Vergil had no difficulty in believing that God had visited the sins of Henry IV upon his descendant, Henry VI, yet he did not explain how this was to be reconciled with the triumphant career of Henry V.
Tudor historians were adepts at rewriting history. The dynasty they served had brought peace, firm government and prosperity to England, but its monarchs were still usurpers. A striking contrast had to be drawn, therefore, between the peaceful England of Tudor times and the political anarchy it had suffered under the later Plantagenets, the implication being that if Henry VII had not become king in 1485, the civil wars would probably have dragged on for much longer. More importantly, the subjects of the Tudor kings had to be reminded of what might happen if the crown came into dispute again.
There is certainly no doubt that violence and lawlessness flourished during the Wars of the Roses. Soldiers brutalised in the French wars behaved with a ferocity which their commanding officers were powerless to control, while some magnates were little better than sadistic ruffians. Thousands of men died horribly in
battle, or were mercilessly butchered while trying to escape. Murder was often committed with impunity both on and off the battlefield.
Yet the wars were by no means continuous, as we have seen, nor did England experience many of the usual horrors of civil war, like those suffered in fifteenth-century France or seventeenth-century Britain. There were, at most, thirteen weeks of fighting in the thirty-two years covered by both of the Wars of the Roses, while the total amount of time spent campaigning amounted to approximately one year. The problems of keeping an army fed and watered meant that individual campaigns lasted for a matter of days or weeks, not months. Some of the battles were very short, and none lasted longer than a day. Most took place in open countryside and hardly affected life in the towns and villages. The conflict had very little effect upon the population at large, except on the rare occasions when a battle resulted in great loss of life that devastated a whole local community, as happened at Towton in 1461. This was why the behaviour of the Scots and men of the north on the Queen’s march south that year provoked such outrage. Relatively few civilians suffered attack or privation, and – with the exception of Stamford, St Albans and Ludlow – no town suffered a siege or a sacking. Nor did the castles, halls and manors of the aristocracy suffer greatly. Only the great defensive castles of the north became targets for military action.
The accounts of foreign visitors to England give the impression that the country appeared settled and prosperous in the second half of the fifteenth century, not torn by war. The architecture of the period reflects a trend of growing prosperity rather than a need to build defensively. Fortifications were no longer added as a matter of course to castles and manor houses, and moats and crenellations had become merely ornamental. Neither does the literature of the age reflect a preoccupation with the evils of civil war. This was because most of the population did not regard the Wars of the Roses as a civil war as such, but as a dispute between noble factions. Few English people really cared who sat on the throne, so long as he was able to govern effectively and maintain justice. The leaders of the political factions therefore used propaganda to sway public opinion, which was very fickle, and did their best to canvass the support of other magnates who, left to themselves, would have remained strictly neutral. In fact, the majority of peers, both spiritual and temporal, managed to avoid committing themselves wholeheartedly to either party, while some tended to wait and see which way a battle was going, and only went in to assist the winning side. Self-interest usually governed political loyalties.