by Ed West
Queen Margaret descended on London, with Edward in the Cotswolds, but she then made a dreadful mistake, stopping outside for fear of what her Scots army might do in London, the men having already ransacked Westminster and Southwark. So she withdrew north, and the Earl of March simply rode in from the west and was proclaimed King Edward IV, aged only 18.
This was in many ways a war of north v south. The Yorkists did have some support in the northern counties, and the Lancastrians in the south, but most of their soldiers came from different ends of the country, and this helps explain the savagery of the fighting. That the Yorkists won was down to the support of London, which was vastly richer than anywhere else in England, due to its role in the export of wool. In the nine months before Towton the city provided £13,000 for the Yorkist cause, enough to pay 26,000 archers for 20 days’ service.xxiv When in late 1460 the royal army headed south from Wakefield there was a genuine terror in the capital that the northerners would sack the city. Songs of the period recall the threats of northern men violating southern women and of ‘the lords of the North’ coming to ‘destroy the south country’.
Edward now brought an enormous army, 48,000 men, to Towton, facing at least 40,000 of the queen’s men. The Lancastrians were forced against the River Cock, in what became known as Bloody Meadow, and by the end of the day there were up to 28,000 dead, among them Andrew Trollope, leader of the Lancastrian forces. Another baron, Lord Clifford’s kinsman Lord Dacre, was killed when he went to take a drink and took off his helmet, and a sniper perched in a tree hit him in the neck with a crossbow bolt (Clifford had been killed a week earlier in a skirmish). The battle was followed by numerous executions, forensic evidence has suggested, with at least two dozen knights and countless more men put to death. Others were chased through the blizzard, and many on both sides were killed when pursuing Yorkists chased Lancastrians on to a bridge that collapsed, the heavily armoured men plunging to an icy death. It was said afterwards that a trail of blood marked the 23-mile road from Towton to York.
The new king then marched on York where he was greeted with the heads of his father and brother, which the people of the city had not had the wit to take down. They were buried, and in their place were put the heads of Devon, Wiltshire and various other Lancastrian aristocrats.
A sad trail of Lancastrians headed towards Scotland, and close to Banburgh, site of the old royal house of the north, Queen Margaret and her son were separated from the rest of the group. According to one (admittedly rather dubious) story a gang of robbers attacked and were ready to cut her throat when Margaret fell to her knees and pleaded: ‘I am the daughter and wife of a king, and was in past time recognized by yourselves as your queen. Wherefore if you now stain your hands with my blood, your cruelty will be held in abhorrence by all men in all ages.’
It turned out that Black Jack, as the man was called, was a former Lancastrian soldier and it was now his turn to get on his knees and swear to take her to safety, which he did, to the Scottish border at Kirkcudbright. In Scotland, Margaret would remain for the time being, so poor that she had to borrow a groat from an archer to make an offering on her saint’s day. Two more uprisings the following year were crushed, and led to the deaths of some of the last few remaining Lancastrians, among them Ralph Percy, Hotspur’s grandson, and the third Duke of Somerset, whose father had died at St Albans. He left a bastard son, who became the ancestor of the Dukes of Beaufort, but with him dead, the Lancastrian cause was too.
The Red Wedding
The former King Henry was finally captured in 1465 and left a prisoner in the Tower, where he was given five marks a week pocket money, as well as wine. More troubling for the new ruler was the thought of Margaret of Anjou abroad, and her son Edward of Westminster who would inevitably mount a challenge when he came of age. Her spies were everywhere, and several men thought to be passing on her messages were tortured and killed.
But for now the people of London were overjoyed to have a king worthy of that name. As well as being tall – he stood at 6’3” – Edward was handsome, fair-haired and blessed with charisma and natural affability. He had that knack of remembering the names of everyone under him, as well as something about them with which to make small talk. The king knew how to keep the growing merchant class happy, even taking leading merchants away for a day’s hunting, where they played sport in the morning and drank themselves senseless in the afternoon,
For the first time in living memory the Crown was not in financial meltdown, as Edward saved money by avoiding overseas conflict and managing stability at home. With the profit he was able to build Windsor Castle and lavish money on court. Sitting on the marble throne, he was attended by 400 men under the control of the Lord Chamberlain, while the Knights of the Body looked after his personal needs. Each day he would sit in the King’s Chamber, where in the morning 2,000 ate at the king’s expense with servants on hand with water and 13 minstrels playing. This was an era of outlandish fashions, with huge pointy shoes, ostentatious and disgusting rings and enormous belt buckles, which young men thought made them look dangerous and sexy. The king himself was a great lover of fashion. In the first year of his reign the keeper of the great wardrobe spent £4,784 on clothes and furs for the king’s person, at a time when the average annual wage of a labourer was £6. He even employed a peasant to jump on his bed after he had woken up to ensure it was wrinkle-free.
Edward also loved gold and had a toothpick made of it, the paranoid monarch having it garnished with diamond, pearls and ruby, as it was believed that if a poison went near the gemstone it became moist. He also brought jousting back into fashion, and in June 1467 he arranged for the greatest fighters in Christendom – Lord Scales, the Queen’s brother, and Anthony, ‘Bastard of Burgundy’ – to come to London to fight. It was meant to be a light-hearted affair, but after a day it was interrupted by the news that the Bastard’s father had died, and the plague was back in town. The sports fans left and spread it all over the country.
Fashion, fighting, food and fornication – Edward had ferocious appetites, but his lust for women would be his undoing.
After the bloodshed, he was wise enough to forgive Lancastrian lords who bent the knee, including Lord Rivers, who was given his lands back within a year, as was his eldest son Anthony, both even being allowed to join the king’s council. Rivers’ daughter Elizabeth had lost her husband Sir John Gray in the fighting, and she took it upon herself to ambush the king while he was out hunting to get his lands back. Elizabeth Woodville was a beautiful schemer with long blonde hair and blue eyes, and the king was enraptured, and by some accounts tried to take her by force, only for her to stick a knife to her own throat.xxv He backed down, and when his attempts to make her his mistress failed he did the unthinkable, by marrying her in secret.
As in Westeros, where Robb Stark married for love, this was a disaster. When Edward told the council that he was married there was at first laughter; no king had married a commoner for 400 years and that’s what Richard Woodville, now Earl Rivers, had been born. Then there was outrage. Marriage was for the purpose of alliance-making, and Edward’s decision to marry for love (or lust) was a serious mistake.
It infuriated Warwick in particular, as he had been in communication with the wily French king Louis XI, nicknamed ‘the Universal Spider’ for his network of spies, about a marriage alliance with France. Out of lust the king had thrown away a hugely advantageous chance of such an alliance. The Earl of Warwick’s aim was to thwart Margaret of Anjou’s attempts to have her own son Edward married to a French princess, and the king’s marriage was his prime diplomatic bargaining tool. Warwick had also toyed with the idea of Edward marrying the highly immoral (and sadly for the negotiations, dead) dowager queen of Scotland and later to the 12-year-old Lady Isabella of Castile; she instead married Ferdinand of Aragon, uniting Spain, an event that had huge ramifications, especially in the Americas.
Rivers and Warwick were also old enemies, having fallen out when Woodville had been in
charge of the Calais garrison and refused orders until they had been paid. Likewise Cecily Neville also strongly objected to her son’s disastrous choice, and with good reason. While Anthony Woodville, Rivers’s eldest son, was an intellectual who translated the first book printed by William Caxton in England, the Woodvilles as a family were over mighty and unpopular. Elizabeth Woodville was, in the words of one historian, ‘calculating, ambitious, devious, greedy, ruthless and arrogant’.xxvi She had 11 living siblings, who Edward felt obliged to help marry off; John Woodville, her 20-year-old brother, was paired with the 66-year-old Catherine Neville, the king’s aunt, a match known as ‘the diabolical marriage’. She already had three dead husbands and several children older than their new stepfather.
In one of the worst instances, the Duchess of Bedford, the Queen’s mother, took a liking to a tapestry in the house of wealthy London merchant Sir Thomas Cook. She demanded that Cook sell it for under its £800 value but he refused. The Woodvilles then accused him of working for the Lancastrians, and sent retainers to sack his houses in London and the country. Then Rivers had him tried with ‘misprision of treason’ for not disclosing a loan he had made to Margaret’s agent many years before; they gave him a fine of £8,000 and he was ruined.
Warwick, the king’s cousin and 14 years his senior, had been the effective second ruler of the kingdom. Such was his power over Edward that in 1464 a senior French lord told his master Louis XI: ‘They tell me they have two rulers in England – Monsieur de Warwick and another, whose name I have forgotten.’ But he now found himself sidelined by the queen’s brother, Anthony, while Edward also removed Warwick’s brother George Neville from his position as Archbishop of York. Warwick, away in Burgundy, was furious when he found out; it got to such a state in their relationship that the king ignored Warwick when he came to court with his French allies.
The kingmaker approached Edward’s brother George, Duke of Clarence, who was scheming away to get the crown himself. He proposed that his daughter Isobel would marry Clarence, but Edward blocked the idea.
By 1469 there was serious discontent and violence and crime had returned with a vengeance. The troubles started in the spring of 1469, with a rising in the north, led by two men, each called Robin, one of whom was clearly put up to it by Warwick. Warwick then effectively took over in a coup, and sent out his agents to capture the queen’s father and brother Sir John Woodville. He had them beheaded in Coventry (and so poor Catherine Neville found herself widowed for the fourth time). Warwick then had Rivers’ widow arrested on witchcraft charges, accusing her of using black arts to get her daughter married to the king. But she was found not guilty.
Warwick’s authority was at any rate falling to pieces. Humphrey Neville, from a different branch of the family, began a rebellion in the north, which Warwick crushed, having the leader brought back to London to be beheaded.
The king, meanwhile, recalled his lord high executioner, John Tiptoft, from Ireland. A refined and cultured Renaissance man, Tiptoft owned a rarefied collection of books and had made pilgrimages to Jerusalem, but he was also a sadist. In March the king sent the new Earl Rivers to capture Warwick’s ship in Southampton, and there arranged for Tiptoft to sit in judgment on the captive men; 20 were hanged, drawn and quartered. After they were dead the stunned crowd watched as they were beheaded and their naked torsos hung up by the legs. Sharpened stakes were then forced between their buttocks and their heads stuck onto the polls protruding out of the other end.
Edward’s position became untenable. Warwick and Margaret were reconciled and an alliance made in France, after Warwick was forced to repent his earlier slurs about her fidelity, while on his knees. As part of their alliance, Warwick would be named Regent and Governor of England, and the queen agreed to marry her son Edward of Westminster to Neville’s daughter Anne, but only once he had taken the field against his cousin. While Anne was ‘seemly, amiable and beauteous, right virtuous and full gracious’, Edward of Westminster had developed into a sadist at a very early age, the very epitome of the King Joffrey figure. The Milanese envoy in 1467 recalled that the 13-year-old, who had grown up in an atmosphere of extreme violence, ‘already talks of nothing but cutting off heads or making war, as if he had everything in his hands or was the god of battle’.
The two were married on July 25, 1470, in Normandy; but in fact Margaret had forbidden her son to consummate his wedding with Anne Neville so that when the time came he could marry a more suitable bride.
The Lancastrians landed in Devon. Edward was in the Midlands, and learned that Montagu, Warwick’s brother and another powerful landowner, had sided with the rebels. He was forced to flee to Burgundy with his brother Richard, Lord Hastings and Earl Rivers; they were so poor that Edward had to pay for the crossing by selling his fur-lined coat. Meanwhile his brother George had also joined the rebellion.
Queen Elizabeth and her children stayed in Westminster while Londoners closed the walls against the French mercenaries, but Warwick and Clarence rode in on October 6 and Henry was crowned again a week later. All the lords and knights present wore the badge of Warwick, now more powerful than ever. Meanwhile young John de Vere, whose father and brother had been executed by Tiptoft, presided over his trial after the hated executioner was captured up a tree near Huntingdon. Although Warwick planned to be conciliatory towards Yorkists, he would make an exemption for Tiptoft; in front of a braying, enormous London mob he went out in style, wearing his best clothes and telling the executioner to do it in three strokes.
Warwick declared that Edward IV was a bastard, and that his real father was a French archer, and therefore George would be heir presumptive after Edward of Westminster. On November 2, meanwhile, Elizabeth gave birth to a son, yet another Edward, in London, and Henry VI sent for a midwife and provided her with beef, a great kindness typical of the man, and in a grizzly twist the baby would share a fate with the gentle king – the boy’s uncle would murder them both.
However, Edward IV had by February 1471 raised up to 1,500 Englishmen and 300 Flemish mercenaries. He had also obtained ships from the Hanseatic League, the collection of mostly German city-states across the sea. Edward invaded in March, near the Humber, marched south with 4,000 men and met Sir William Stanley’s army of 2,000; the Stanleys, notoriously, never sided with anyone who might lose. (At Northampton in 1460 Lord Stanley had ignored the king’s summons, because he wished to see which way the wind blew.)
Then they came across Clarence’s 4,000 men near Banbury. Young Richard was sent to talk to the middle brother, and persuaded him to changed sides, adding his men to the king’s. Edward entered London unopposed on April 11 and there he met his son for the first time. Henry VI greeted him with the words: ‘Cousin Edward, I am right glad to see you. I hold my life in no danger from your hands.’
There followed the Battle of Barnet three days later on Easter Sunday, at a place called Dead Man’s Bottom. Edward turned up with 10,000 men, and poor King Henry once again a prisoner, and the rebels were slaughtered. In the thick fog Warwick’s affinity mistook the Lancastrian Earl of Oxford’s banner of an Enrayed Star for the Sun in Splendour, and fired at them.
When the battle was lost Warwick tried to escape but was recognised by his ostentatious and colourful blazoned surcoat; the king’s men cut him down. His brother Montagu was also killed and their bodies were displayed at St Paul’s Cathedral to prove to the common people that they were indeed dead.
King Edward intercepted the rebel forces in the west at Tewkesbury on May 4, a tired and desolately body of men who had walked 45 miles without rest and then had to set up defences. Even amid the battle, such were the hatreds that had overcome England that the Lancastrian fourth Duke of Somerset killed his own ally Lord Wenlock by smashing his brains out with a battleaxe. By the Avon, young Prince Edward of Westminster, wearing a coat with the arms of England, was also killed, one of 2,000 that day. It was said that after being captured, Westminster was interrogated by the king, who asked him why he had taken up
arms against him: ‘I came to recover my father's heritage. My father has been miserably oppressed, and the crown usurped.’ Edward slapped the young man, and his brothers Clarence and Gloucester drew their swords and struck him down. Somerset, whose father and brother had been killed in the conflict, was executed afterwards.
King Edward re-entered London once again on May 21, with Queen Margaret his prisoner, and that night Henry VI was murdered in the Tower on the king’s orders, although according to official reports he died of ‘displeasure and melancholy’ at his son’s death; possibly he was maced to death by Richard, Duke of Gloucester.xxvii With Henry’s son dead, the line was finished, and his presence could only fuel further rebellion.
Brother Clarence was forgiven, and allowed all his wife Isabel Neville’s lands after 1471, as well as Richard’s job of Great Chamberlain, and yet he remained enemies with his younger brother, a rivalry fuelled by jealousy over power. Gloucester had chosen to marry Anne Neville, Isabel’s sister and the widow of Edward of Westminster, but Clarence had kidnapped her to prevent a match that would enrich his brother and had her disguised as a maid at one of his castles. Gloucester managed to rescue her.
Meanwhile, Clarence seems to have lost his mind after his wife and child died in October 1476. He turned up in Somerset and accused a local widow, Ankarette Twynho, of being a witch and responsible for his wife’s death. She was charged with sorcery and of poisoning the Lady Isabel, to whom she was once lady-in-waiting, and was executed within an hour. A Warwickshire man called John Thirsby was also hanged for murdering the royal child and another knight, Sir Roger Tucotes, was accused but escaped to London to report the incident.