by Hugh Bicheno
Meanwhile the Rear would have redeployed behind the ridge to join the reserves commanded by Dudley on the royalist left wing. Once Audley’s attack had engaged the attention of Salisbury’s right wing, Dudley was to advance across the brook and take the fort by frontal assault. The principal drawback to the plan was that it slighted the Lancastrian advantage in archery, but it is hard to see how they could have used their numerical advantage to better effect. It was a good plan and should have worked – but nothing in battle is certain.
Audley’s attack was repulsed and he was killed in hand-to-hand combat by a man thirty-five years his junior, 26-year-old Roger Kynaston of Hordley in Shropshire, who thereafter quartered the Tuchet arms with his own. As noted previously, the Kynastons and Eytons were York’s confederates in Shropshire, and Roger was the constable of his castle at Denbigh. He and Roger Eyton had probably joined Salisbury only recently, to guide him along the back roads around Shrewsbury, the Talbot clan’s stronghold in the Welsh Marches.
The ancient cross marking where Audley fell is well within 50 yards of where I believe Salisbury deployed his archers, so the charge was first slowed by an arrow storm and then driven back by Kynaston and other knights and men-at-arms. This would have created a shambles in the brook bed, as the Main struggled to advance through a hail of arrows from the archers who advanced with the men-at-arms, and from the unengaged centre of Salisbury’s line, which would have swung forward like a door to hit them in the flank.
The overthrow of Audley’s attack happened so swiftly that Dudley’s advance, which was supposed to be a coordinated, knockout punch, went in too late. He could not be seen to hold back while the Main was slaughtered, but with the attention of the men and guns in the wagon fort no longer engaged by Audley, Dudley’s chances of success were greatly diminished. Also, the success of his attack required Salisbury to have committed his reserves already. If he did, they were not required to defeat the first attack, and so were free to ride around the fort to hit the second in the flank.
Dudley’s men would already have been unsettled by artillery fire, a novelty to most of them, which began to hit them well outside archery range. They would also have seen their comrades of the Main thrown back. Finally, the Lancastrians again suffered the misfortune of losing their commander early. Once Dudley fell, badly wounded, the Cheshire knights and esquires fled, leaving their foot soldiers to be harried mercilessly back towards Market Drayton. The field next to today’s bridge over the Tern, against which they were trapped, was once known as ‘Deadman’s Den’.
The first battle in a war generally sets the tone for what follows: you do not get a second chance to make a first impression. By any abstract calculation of numbers, strategic planning and operational advantage, the Lancastrians should have annihilated Salisbury’s army at Blore Heath on 23 September 1459, and snuffed out the Yorkist revolt. Instead, the flower of the queen’s army was shattered, and with it her hopes of being able to control events.
Casualty figures for medieval battles are notoriously unreliable, even when the victorious army took the time to bury the dead. In this case Salisbury had no time to devote to such niceties, and even abandoned his own wounded and his guns. Perhaps 1,000 of Salisbury’s men, a fifth of his army, would have fallen, consistent with a battle fought at point-blank range by many skilled archers on both sides, followed by a brutal hand-to-hand struggle. The Lancastrians would have lost more than twice as many, the imbalance coming, as always, from the massacre of fleeing men.
There is a believable anecdote that Salisbury left a ‘stay behind’ party, possibly including the Augustinian friar mentioned in Gregory’s Chronicle, to fire the captured royalist guns on the far side of Blore Hill at intervals during the night, in order to discourage an advance by the Lancastrians from Eccleshall. Pausing only long enough to loot the royalist baggage train in Market Drayton, he marched the remnant of his army, severely depleted by casualties and desertion, across the Tern bridge to camp at a place still called Salisbury’s Hill.
Among the wounded Salisbury left behind were his sons John and Thomas, and the Lancashire knight Thomas Harrington. They were captured 25 miles north of Market Drayton, presumably on their way to the Harrington manor of Brierley in western Yorkshire. Their captor was the 17-year-old namesake son of John Done of the nearby manor of Utkinton in Cheshire, who had been killed along with his eldest son Richard at Blore Heath.
The three men were held at Chester Castle but released not long afterwards, allegedly in the face of a threat of force by local sympathizers, but almost certainly by order of Stanley. When they were captured they were carrying a note from him to Salisbury, congratulating the earl on his victory and offering further assistance. It would have been difficult to sweep the matter under the carpet if the captives had been brought before magistrates and interrogated.
Although it was an astonishing feat of arms, Blore Heath was a pyrrhic victory. Salisbury had to abandon his equipment and brought relatively few men to Ludlow; but in addition the Yorkist line that they were only in rebellion against the ‘evil councillors’ around the king lost all credibility once they had destroyed the queen’s personal army. The offence was judged so heinous that the terms subsequently offered to the Yorkists specifically excluded Salisbury and his subordinate commanders at Blore Heath from all possibility of grace.
As things turned out, however, the greater effect of the battle was that the talismanic swan livery was discredited and the county palatinate of Cheshire never again responded in such numbers when summoned in the name of the prince. Had Audley won, Marguerite would have ensured he became one of the king’s principal military councillors, offsetting and perhaps supplanting the temporizing Buckingham. That weapon had now been dashed from her hand, and her ability to influence military decisions greatly diminished.
XIX
* * *
Lancaster Resurgent
The Lancastrian narrative, set out in the pre-amble to the Acts of Attainder that followed, was that the Yorkists had plotted to march on Kenilworth to capture or kill the king. In fact York remained at Ludlow and, as we have seen, Salisbury’s route was designed to skirt the Midlands. Warwick’s line of march from London to Ludlow did, however, pass through Marguerite’s fortress triangle. His force of 300 Calais veterans (half the number he brought to the ‘Loveday’), swelled by Kentish men who joined them on the march from Dover, had a near miss with a Lancastrian force led by Somerset at Coleshill, 13 miles north of Kenilworth.
On the face of it this would seem to support the Lancastrian accusation – but in fact the fastest route from London to Ludlow followed Watling Street (Map 3), which arches through northern Warwickshire, well to the north of Kenilworth. However, to continue on Watling Street much beyond High Cross would have lengthened his journey considerably, as well as bringing him dangerously close to Lancastrian Shrewsbury. Assuming he cut the corner, his line of march would indeed have passed through Coleshill. That said, Warwick knew it was a highly provocative route, and took it to distract the Lancastrian armies from closing in on his father.
Somerset may have been leading troops from the South West to join the queen, making the near encounter accidental. Another possibility is that he had already joined Marguerite and, when they learned of Warwick’s movements, Somerset led a column south to keep him under observation. A perceived threat from the south might also explain why the army at Eccleshall did not advance to join the attack on Salisbury at Blore Heath. Such a stratagem would have required a military sophistication Warwick did not possess, and its author would probably have been the veteran Andrew Trollope, commander of the Calais contingent.
On arrival at Ludlow, Warwick found that with the exception of the younger Thomas Vaughan of Bredwardine, already accused of treason in the alleged conspiracy involving Countess Alice, the Herberts and Vaughans had not answered York’s summons. Despite the queen’s efforts to divide and rule, this was not an act of disloyalty to York. They had valid reasons to stay at hom
e in the face of the threat from Jasper Tudor in Pembroke, and from Buckingham’s retainers in Brecon and Newport. The same consideration kept Warwick from summoning his own retainers from Glamorgan and Abergavenny.
Viscount Bourchier was absent, but his brother John, Baron Berners, and his son Edward were there. They were joined by the ever-faithful John, Baron Clinton, and the younger Walter Devereux, de jure Baron Ferrers of Chartley; also by Edmund, Baron Grey of Ruthyn, and Henry, de jure Baron Grey of Powys, who was married to the late Lord Audley’s daughter.*1 Grey had joint possession of Powys Castle with his cousin John Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester, who went on pilgrimage to the Holy Land early in 1458 and did not return until late 1461. Also present were two previous Speakers of the Commons: John Wenlock, who may have come with Warwick, and York’s much-persecuted chamberlain William Oldhall.
With the king were the Dukes of Buckingham, Somerset and Exeter, the Earls of Shrewsbury, Wiltshire, Northumberland, Devon, Oxford and Arundel, Viscount Beaumont and the northern Barons Clifford, Dacre of the North, Egremont, Greystoke and FitzHugh (another Salisbury son-in-law), plus Grey of Ruthyn’s brother Grey of Rougemont, Rivers, Roos, Scales, Sudeley and John Tuchet, the new Lord Audley. Greystoke and FitzHugh were supposedly defectors from the Neville affinity, but with the exception of Arundel the rest were committed Lancastrians and the Yorkists should have expected them to turn out against them.
Clearly they did not, or else grossly underestimated the numbers their enemies would bring to the field. Vastly outnumbered, the Yorkists had brought about the conditions for their own defeat and attainder, the very situation they had mobilized to pre-empt. Any chance of another coup d’état was gone, and if they fought, they could expect no mercy from the heirs of the men they had killed at St Albans. It is not clear why they did not immediately disband their followers and go into exile, which they must have known was their only realistic option from the moment they came together at Ludlow.
Instead, they embarked on a peculiar peregrination, marching along the River Teme to Worcester, where they met Richard Beauchamp, Bishop of Salisbury, who brought the king’s offer of a conditional pardon for all except Salisbury if they disbanded and made submission within six days. The bishop was accompanied by Garter King of Arms, acting as the royal herald, to emphasize that the alternative was war.
York and the Nevilles swore a solemn oath of loyalty to the king in the cathedral, but they rejected his terms. They replied that the reopening of past, pardoned offences at the Coventry Council in June had shown the worth of the king’s grace. In addition, the unpunished and excused assassination attempt on Warwick in the Westminster kitchen had demonstrated the will of the king’s councillors to destroy and dispossess them. It was all quite plausible, and it was couched in language that presaged its future use as a manifesto.
When the king advanced towards Worcester the Yorkists retreated down the Severn valley to Tewkesbury, presumably hoping the royal coalition would fall apart through lack of leadership and money. Henry was now in warrior mode, however, and his march from Worcester towards Malvern, threatening their line of retreat to Ludlow, left them in no doubt that he was seeking battle. The Yorkists made a forced march to Ledbury, after which they probably followed the line of a Roman road that once ran from Cirencester to Ludlow.
Passing behind the retreating Yorkists, the king marched to Leominster, where he would have lodged at the Benedictine abbey that owned the borough. It was prime campaigning season, with barns and grain stores full from the recent harvest, and religious establishments probably provided the supplies to maintain an exceptionally large army in the field. Once in the Yorkist heartland, however, they would have been released to forage at will, not quite a destructive chevauchée, but painful for York’s tenants nonetheless.
When the Yorkists reached the bridge over the River Teme at Ludford, about 600 yards from Ludlow Castle, they could retreat no further. The river was in flood and they dug a wet ditch and rampart around the bridgehead, with artillery mounted in wagons around the perimeter. The Yorkists’ collapse is traditionally ascribed to the defection of Trollope and the Calais contingent, supposedly induced by Somerset’s appeal to their old loyalty to his father, but by this time desertion was the only rational choice. What followed was described with contempt in the preamble to the Act of Attainder:
[During the night of 12 October] Almighty God smote the hearts of the Duke and Earls from the most presumptuous pride to the most shameful fall of cowardice that could be thought, so that about midnight they stole away out of the field under colour that they would have refreshed them a while in the town of Ludlow [and], leaving their Standards and Banners in their battle directly opposite [the king’s] field, fled out of the town unarmed with few persons into Wales.
York also abandoned Duchess Cecily, his younger sons George and Richard, and his youngest daughter Margaret, found standing forlornly at the market cross when the king entered Ludlow. On the face of it a pragmatic decision to spare them the dangers of accompanying (and slowing) York’s flight, it was not an action any wife or child was ever likely to forgive. They were placed in the custody of Cecily’s older sibling Anne, Duchess of Buckingham, the wife of a man who now detested York, and who could not resist gloating over their father’s over-indulged favourite.
According to Gregory’s Chronicle the royal army sacked Ludlow – if true, probably a breakdown of discipline provoked by lack of pay. Still, it was the traditional reward for soldiers when they captured an enemy town, and the crowning achievement of the queen’s long campaign to demonstrate that York’s ‘good lordship’ was worse than valueless:
The misrule of the king’s gallants at Ludlow, when they had drunken enough of wine that was in taverns and other places, they full ungodly smote out the heads of the pipes and hogsheads of wine, that men went wetshod in wine, and then they robbed the town and bare away bedding, cloth and other stuff, and defouled [sic] many women.
There was further evidence of logistical failure and indiscipline when the royal army continued to loot on its way back to Worcester, even though York and the Nevilles had no estates along the Teme valley. This was probably the work of levies discharged at Ludlow, but the result was that the political outcome of the ‘rout of Ludford’ was more ambiguous than the phrase implies. In the competition for hearts and minds it was a serious error for the king’s forces to be seen to have treated any part of his kingdom like conquered enemy territory. It showed him to be either spiteful, or else too weak to control his men.
The pros and cons of what followed are set out in arguably the most illuminating single document to survive from this period. It was discovered bound with other unrelated papers and listed, presumably from a lost title page, as Somnium Vigilantis (the reference is to the Latin aphorism spes est vigilantis somnium – ‘hope is the dream of the vigilant’). Written in Latin, English and French and clearly intended for the eyes of the highest in the land, it is a lawyerly brief, awkwardly crammed into the literary form of a dream about a debate in the presence of the king between advocates of pardon and attainder for the Yorkist lords. At the end a French-speaking arbitrator (a proxy for Marguerite?) calls for exemplary punishment.
The case for the defence is that mercy is a cardinal virtue in a king, and the Yorkists should also be pardoned because the consequences of attainder would be more harmful. They took up arms for the good of the kingdom, and meant no harm to the king. Those who had died were regrettable collateral damage. At a time when foreign enemies threatened, their power should be harnessed to defend the kingdom. Finally, and going to the heart of Henry’s dilemma, they commanded support in the country and ‘if they be not received into mercy while they are inclined to accept it, it is to be doubted that at another time they will ask for any’.
The rebuttal is comprehensive: mercy shown to notorious and recidivist offenders would undermine the rule of law; the prospect of reconciliation with such wicked men was a chimera; they posed a greater threat than foreig
n enemies; any support they enjoyed was won by lies; and they were motivated by insatiable ambition, not by any concern for the general welfare. So far so reasonable, but the concluding indictment restated the patently false accusation that had undone whatever chance the ‘Loveday’ ever had of bringing about a peaceful settlement:
Furthermore, was it no harm to kill that merciful and most gracious king that now is? And although the blessed grace of God saved him at that time and suffers him as yet to be alive, they nevertheless did their utmost to undo him, and proceeded as far as they might within the limits of concealing their pernicious intent.
The ‘arbitrator’ fully supports the case for the prosecution and also sets out the political argument in favour of attainder. It would strike weapons from the hands of the king’s enemies and – properly administered – strengthen his own. By handsomely rewarding his supporters from the proceeds of attainder, their interests and lives would become bound to the survival of his regime. To strengthen the bonds further, all who spoke out against the king’s supporters should be put to death as though they had impugned the king himself.
The author of Somnium Vigilantis was probably Lawrence Booth, Bishop of Durham and Lord Privy Seal, the queen’s chancellor and a member of the Prince of Wales’s council. To the modern eye, the realpolitik of the ‘arbitrator’ is simply common sense. Perceptions were radically different in the Middle Ages, however, and more so in the case of Henry VI. He was still haunted by the injustice committed in his name against his uncle Gloucester, and perhaps more aware of how he had been manipulated in 1450 than historians have been willing to consider.