The Hollow Crown: The Wars of the Roses and the Rise of the Tudors
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In March 1470 another rebellion broke out. This time it was Lincolnshire that rose up, initially due to a bitter private feud between the local peer Lord Welles and Willoughby and Sir Thomas Burgh, a bodyguard and close servant of the king. In response, Edward raised an army and marched north to put an end to the violence. The sight of the king marching at the head of an army sent rumours whirling around the north, as speculation mounted that bloody revenge was on its way for the events of 1469. As Lord Welles and his son Sir Robert parlayed these fears into all-out insurrection, a desperate Warwick decided to raise an army of his own and throw in with the rebels once more. Once again, the unscrupulous Clarence decided to join him – despite having assured the king of his allegiance – and the pair aimed at what a government-sponsored account of the rising later described as ‘the likely utter and final destruction of [the king’s] royal person, and the subversion of all the land’.3
After most crises Edward’s instinct was usually towards calmness and reconciliation rather than murderous revenge. But this time he had been provoked too much. He responded with furious aggression. He captured Lord Welles and sent a message to his son that the old man would be killed unless he submitted. This drew Sir Robert out to fight before he had a chance to combine armies with Warwick. At Stamford on 12 March 1470, a royal army routed the Lincolnshire rebels in such humiliating fashion that the insurgents ran from the battlefield, throwing their clothes away as they hastened to escape. The field was thereafter known as Losecote Field.
According to the partisan account later published of the battle, the rebels at Losecote Field ran at the king’s men shouting, ‘A Clarence! A Warwick!’ Some of them were said to be wearing Clarence’s livery, and when Sir Robert Welles was cut down in the chase, his helmet was found to contain ‘many marvellous bills, containing matters of the great sedition’ – in other words, implicating Warwick and Clarence in yet another round of skulduggery. 4 This time, the king’s miserable relatives could expect no leniency. They refused summons to the royal presence, fled south from Lancashire to Devon, took ship at Dartmouth and escaped across the Channel, heading once more for Calais. But even here they were denied entry when Warwick’s deputy captain Lord Wenlock declined to open the gates. The two men eventually landed in Normandy, in the territory of the French king. Their isolation appeared to be complete. And indeed it might have been, but for one of the most audacious and unscrupulous alliances in all of English history.
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Margaret of Anjou and her son Prince Edward had been living in French exile for nearly ten years. The prince had been raised in his grandfather René of Anjou’s castle of Kœur, in Lorraine, near the banks of the river Meuse. In the spring of 1470 the boy was sixteen years old and quite as unlike his father as it was possible to be. Indeed, those who saw him suggested that he was made in the same mould as his other grandfather, Henry V. In February 1467 the Milanese ambassador Giovanni Pietro Panicharolla commented in a letter to the duchess and duke of Milan that the prince, then only thirteen, ‘already talks of nothing but of cutting off heads or making war, as if he had everything in his hands or was the god of battle or the peaceful occupant of that throne’.5 He loved to ride, fight and joust with his friends and companions. His mother had never given up the idea that this splendid young tyro could some day return to claim his father’s crown.
Margaret’s determination to overthrow the Yorkists knew almost no limit. Since being ejected from England she had appealed for assistance to countless allies in France, as well as to the rulers of Scotland and Portugal. Now, in 1470, she prepared herself to make common ground with the unlikeliest partner of all, the man who had done more than anyone else alive to damage her: Richard earl of Warwick. The old enemies met in Angers on 22 June, in a meeting brokered by Louis XI, and thrashed out a deal. Prince Edward would marry Anne Neville, Warwick’s youngest daughter, and Warwick would then return to England in opposition to Edward IV, doing everything in his power to overthrow the Yorkists and return Henry VI to the throne.
Warwick, Clarence, Jasper Tudor and the earl of Oxford set sail from La Hougue in Normandy on 9 September. The young Prince Edward was left behind with his mother, presumably to his indignant frustration. After four days at sea they landed on the Devonshire coast, announced their allegiance to King Henry VI, called on all men to join them in their mission of restoration and set out on a march to Coventry to confront Edward IV.
Edward was at this time in the north. He had been kept well abreast of developments over the sea, writing to his subjects in the south-east to tell them that ‘we be credibly ascertained that our ancient enemies of France and our outward rebels and traitors be drawn together in accord, and intend … utterly to destroy us and our true subjects’. He instructed them to be ready for invasion at any moment. ‘As soon as ye may understand that thay land,’ he wrote, ‘put you in uttermost devoir [i.e. your highest duty] … to resist the malice of our said enemies and traitors.’6 Violent uprisings had racked the north throughout the summer, and Edward had been torn between the need to defend a vast coastline and the pressing demand to restore order in the north country only recently restored to the management of the Percy family. When news of Warwick’s landing reached him he set out for London, to defend his crown and capital.
As the rebels marched they gathered numerous powerful defectors, all with reasons to bear a grudge against the king. The earl of Shrewsbury and Lord Stanley brought substantial numbers of armed retainers, and they were followed, most damagingly of all, by Warwick’s brother Marquess Montague. This was far from a critical mass of the English nobility, but the uncertainty of military campaigning seems to have convinced Edward that ‘he was not strong enough to give battle’, particularly if his opponents were to include the formidable Montague.7 Rather than stand and fight for his crown with an inadequate army, Edward ‘withdrew from a contest so doubtful in its results’.8 To give battle immediately for his kingdom might have seemed like a natural course of action. But to do so also risked capture or death.
Edward boarded a ship at King’s Lynn and set sail for Flanders, leaving his kingdom in the hands of his enemies. He left in such haste that he did not even stop to collect his pregnant wife: Queen Elizabeth was forced to take sanctuary with her three daughters behind the walls of Westminster Abbey. Lodged in the abbot’s apartments, she would give birth there to her first son, yet another Prince Edward, on 2 November 1470. ‘From this circumstance was derived some hope and consolation for such persons as remained faithful in their allegiance to Edward,’ wrote one chronicler. But to the ascendant Nevilles and Lancastrians, ‘the birth of this infant [was] a thing of very little consequence’.
As Elizabeth Woodville laboured in the sanctuary apartments at Westminster, the so-called ‘readeption’ of Henry VI was well underway. The old king was brought out of the Tower of London on Saturday 6 October 1470. His supporters made no delay in formally returning him to his throne, for the most auspicious day in the English royal calendar was fast approaching: the feast day of the Translation of St Edward the Confessor, whose stunning shrine was the centrepiece of all the tombs of the Plantagenet kings inside Westminster Abbey. A week after Henry’s release, ‘after walking in solemn procession, [he] had the crown publicly placed on his head’.9
Henry was now forty-eight years old and jail had not been kind to him. He had, wrote his confessor John Blacman, ‘patiently endured hunger, thirst, mockings, derisions, abuse and many other hardships’.10 The chronicler Warkworth sniffed that he seemed ‘not worshipfully arrayed as a prince and not so cleanly kept’. Nevertheless, many in England seemed able temporarily to convince themselves that since Henry VI had not been the author of the ills done during his reign, he was fit to be restored to the throne. The chronicler Warkworth put this down to Edward’s failure to restore England to ‘prosperities and peace’. So much hope had been invested in him at the beginning of his reign, wrote the chronicler, ‘but it came not; but one battle after another, and much tro
uble and great loss of goods among the common people’.
Yet if there was any genuine hope placed in Henry’s return to the throne then this, too, would be sorely disappointed. The restoration of Queen Margaret was hardly an event likely to bring reconciliation and understanding to the realm, all the less so if her son had inherited his mother’s implacable temperament. It was virtually impossible to see how Lancastrian loyalists like the Cliffords, Courtenays, Somersets and Tudors might be rewarded, or even restored to their former estates and dignities, when the chief beneficiaries of the Yorkist victory had been Warwick and Clarence, the same men who had helped bring Henry VI out blinking from the Tower and placed the crown back on his head. And then there was the problem of Clarence himself: the faithless rebel had caused so much of the trouble that had descended on England through his selfish desire to inch closer to his brother’s throne. With two rival Prince Edwards now alive – the one a bellicose young Lancastrian, the other Edward IV’s tiny son and heir – Clarence was now further from the crown than ever. How, then, could his lasting support be bought? And how would Warwick enjoy a political role that would surely never reach the near-mastery that he had achieved in the 1460s?
In the end, these were not questions that the court of Henry VI had very long to ponder. New Year passed with Edward IV still in exile in Bruges: but he had been busy. He was discreetly supplied with ships and money by Charles the Bold and the merchants of the Low Countries, and with his brother-in-law Anthony Woodville (now the second Earl Rivers) Edward began fitting out an invasion fleet to reclaim his kingdom. Edward, Rivers, Lord Hastings, Richard duke of Gloucester and their company set sail from Vlissingen on the island of Walcheren on Monday 11 March 1471, armed with thirty-six ships and twelve hundred men. (Edward sailed aboard a Burgundian warship called the Antony.) This small flotilla picked its way across a sea bristling with enemy craft, heading for a landing in East Anglia. Storms, however, blew the fleet north, and they eventually landed near the mouth of the river Humber at Ravenspur. This was enemy territory in every sense, for Warwick’s men patrolled the countryside, watching jealously for any sign of an invasion. By coincidence, it was the very same point at which Henry Bolingbroke had arrived in 1399, when he had come to claim his lands, and subsequently the crown, from Richard II. It was an auspicious scene for the return of a king.
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‘It is a difficult matter to go out by the door and then want to enter by the windows,’ Sforza de Bettini of Florence, the Milanese ambassador to Louis XI, wrote from the French court to his master Duke Galeazzo Maria Sforza on 9 April, the Tuesday before Easter 1471. Having monitored reports from across the Channel, he held out very little hope for Edward’s mission to rescue his kingdom. Wild rumours spinning out of England suggested that the earl of Warwick had the upper hand: Bettini had heard that ‘the greater part of those who were with [Edward were] slain and the rest put to flight’. Queen Margaret and Prince Edward were waiting impatiently in port at Normandy for a wind to carry them across the sea and reclaim their kingdom in triumph. 11 It appeared that Edward IV’s mission to rescue his realm had been strangled before it had even begun.
But Bettini was misinformed. Edward was far from routed. In fact, on the very day that the Milanese ambassador wrote his letter, he was marching south on London, with men rallying to his side.
Edward’s arrival in Ravenspur had not quite thrown England into great bouts of celebration, but neither had he been immediately chased away, in part because he rode through the countryside claiming (much as Bolingbroke had before him) that he came not to take back the crown, but ‘only to claim to be Duke of York’.12 He wore the ostrich feather badge of the prince of Wales rather than the crown, and professed to all who would listen that he was returning as a loyal subject. This was enough to gain him entry successively to the northern towns of York, Tadcaster, Wakefield and Doncaster, before he moved down into the midlands and entered Nottingham and then Leicester. At every stop he was joined by supporters; a few at first but gradually more, until ‘his number was increased’ with ‘bands of men, well arrayed and habled [i.e. armoured] for war’.13 On 29 March he advanced on Coventry, where the earl of Warwick was holed up with his allies John de Vere, earl of Oxford, Henry Holland, duke of Exeter and Lord Beaumont. Warwick, preferring to avoid a fight until reinforced by Montague and Clarence, retreated inside the walls of the city, barred the gates and refused to come out. Momentum now lay with Edward, and it was at this point that he dropped the obvious pretence of claiming his duchy, and announced his determination to defeat the adherents of ‘Henry the Usurper’.14
From Coventry Edward struck out west, before turning in the direction of Oxford and London. As he went, news of his return fanned out around him. It did not take long to reach the realm’s other great rebel, George duke of Clarence, who was in the west country when Edward landed. Clarence now frantically tried to raise troops, in order to rally to the earl of Warwick. But a coward and a turncoat such as he did not have the moral steadfastness to attack his brother ascendant. (Clarence had also been lobbied by two of his sisters, Margaret duchess of Burgundy and Anne duchess of Exeter, who had counselled him to make peace.) He met Edward near Banbury on Wednesday 3 April. In the company of Rivers, Hastings and Gloucester, he threw himself at Edward’s feet. Edward ‘lifted him up and kissed him many times’, assured him that they were at peace and took him back to Coventry, in a second attempt to coax Warwick out of his bolthole. Again Warwick would not emerge, even though he was by now accompanied by his brother John Neville, Marquess Montague. Edward decided not to waste any more time seeking battle. On Friday 5 April he set out for London.
So on Tuesday 9 April London’s common council, who had much better information than distant diplomats, were aware that, far from having been crushed, ‘Edward late king of England was hastening towards the city with a powerful army’.15 Warwick was also writing to the city, demanding that the council keep it for King Henry. The stress was such that the mayor, John Stockton, had taken to his bed and would not be dragged out of it. But in the mayor’s absence, the rest of the city council resolved not to resist Edward. They had plenty of good reasons. Not only were Queen Elizabeth, her daughters and her newborn son as well as scores of other Yorkists still holed up in sanctuary at Westminster, close to the city walls, but the merchants of London had also loaned Edward a great deal of money, which, according to the Burgundian chronicler Philippe de Commines, ‘obliged all the tradesmen who were his creditors to appear for him’. Commines, who was like all good chroniclers an insatiable gossip, added that ‘the ladies of quality and rich citizens’ wives, with whom [Edward] had formerly intrigued, forced their husbands and relations to declare themselves on his side’.16
Edward entered London on Maundy Thursday. He found that the Tower had already been secured by his friends. Supporters of the earl of Warwick, identifiable by badges of the bear and ragged staff worn on their coats, were making themselves scarce. Edmund Beaufort, duke of Somerset had left London for the coast, to await Queen Margaret’s arrival. Warwick’s brother, the treacherous George Neville, archbishop of York, had been left in possession of the ‘other’ king, but his attempt to rally the populace by parading Henry VI through the streets during Edward’s approach was met with ridicule. Henry appeared as the pathetic, downtrodden old man he was: his shoulders draped not in the latest Burgundian finery but in a dreary old blue gown. In fact, the pious Henry was dressing according to the solemnity of the religious calendar – for Maundy Thursday, the day before Good Friday, was a day of mourning. Yet it looked to one London chronicler as if ‘he had no more to change with’.17 Nor was the rest of the parade impressive. Lord Zouch, commissioned to carry the sword of state, appeared old and impotent. The crowd accompanying the king was small. And their symbol of defiance – a pole borne above the parade with two foxes’ tails tied to it – appeared lame and unkingly. It was ‘more like a play than the showing of a prince’, recorded the chronicler. It was in this contex
t that the strapping, energetic Edward entered the city to ‘the universal acclamation of the citizens’, who now awaited his command.18
Edward went first to St Paul’s, to give thanks, before riding directly for the bishop of London’s palace in Lambeth, to take possession of Henry VI. Dim and vacant, the shabby figure greeted Edward with an embrace and the words, ‘My cousin of York, you are very welcome. I know in your hands my life will not be in danger.’19 Edward assured him that all would be well and sent him back to the Tower of London, with the archbishop of York for company. Then he set out for Westminster Abbey, where he gave thanks once again, this time before the shrine of St Edward: the source of all that was mysterious and holy about English kingship. Finally he made the short trip from the abbey church to the abbot’s apartments, where Queen Elizabeth was waiting for him. She had received personal letters announcing her husband’s return, but nothing would be a substitute for the man in person. Since the beginning of Warwick’s rebellion Elizabeth had lost her father and her brother. She had been in hiding at the abbey for six months, during which time the official record would state that she had endured ‘right great trouble, sorrow and heaviness, which she sustained with all manner of patience that belonged to any creature’. The queen presented Edward with his tiny namesake, ‘to the Kings greatest joy, a fair son, a prince’.20 Joyfully reunited, they spent the night back in the city, at Edward’s mother’s lodgings in Baynard’s Castle. The following day was Good Friday, and Edward spent the morning with his brothers and allies, plotting ‘for the adventures that were likely for to come’.21