by Charles Ross
The failure of the government’s supporters in the north to attack Edward whilst still weak saw him through the first critical days, and now his own friends began to come into the open. As he pushed south, his forces grew. At Doncaster he was joined by a small band under William Dudley, later dean of his chapel; at Nottingham Sir William Parr and Sir James Harrington came in with 600 men from Lancashire and the north-west; and at Leicester his force was swelled by 3,000 men of Lord Hastings’s midland connection, led by Sir William Stanley and Sir William Norris. But the enemy was also gathering his forces. When Edward arrived at Nottingham, news reached him that the duke of Exeter, the earl of Oxford, and William, formerly Viscount Beaumont, were in Newark with a great fellowship. When Edward boldly turned east to Newark, he found they had fled south during the night to rendezvous with Warwick. The earl himself was in Warwickshire raising men. Other Lancastrians gave him little support. Edmund Beaufort, duke of Somerset, and John Courtenay, the heir of Devon, came up to London, but then, early in April, they, left for the south coast to await the landing of their true leaders, Queen Margaret and Prince Edward.
The duke of Clarence was in the West Country when news first reached him that Edward had landed. Though probably now disposed to defect if opportunity offered, he was also anxious not to back a losing cause, and began cautiously to test the wind. On 16 March he wrote to his Derbyshire supporter, Henry Vernon, asking for news not only of Edward’s doings but also of the activities of Northumberland, Shrewsbury and Stanley. The latter two soon proved themselves fair-weather friends of Warwick. Shrewsbury’s connections were with Clarence rather than the earl, and he made no move on his own initiative. The shifty Stanley – whose family motto ‘Sans Changer’ has a splendid historical irony – was busily engaged in his private feud with the Harringtons, and was now besieging their castle of Hornby in Lancashire with some official backing; and he too had not moved to help Warwick. This lack of action by men whose aid he hoped for may help to explain the earl’s cautious behaviour during the later days of March 1471, and he is also said to have been deceived by messages from Clarence exhorting him not to risk a battle with Edward before the duke arrived.1
Yet Edward’s position was dangerous enough. As he lay at Nottingham, Montagu, now in action at last, was moving south behind him; ahead lay Warwick; and on his flank the forces of Exeter and Oxford. Had his opponents moved with decision, he might have been trapped between these enemy forces, probably much larger than his own. But again he made the bold move and kept the initiative. He marched straight on Coventry, where Warwick withdrew within the walls, and refused repeated challenges to come out and give battle, and even the promise of a pardon for himself and his followers. Meanwhile, the Yorkist forces beat off an attack by Exeter and Oxford.2 Warwick’s timidity gave Clarence his chance to defect. On 2 April, Edward, who by then was at Warwick, heard that Clarence was coming up from Burford, and on the next day he and Gloucester rode out to meet him on the Banbury road. The three brothers were reconciled, and there was ‘right kind and loving language betwixt them’. Strengthened now by Clarence’s contingents, Edward again challenged Warwick to leave Coventry and give fight. Again Warwick refused. Nor would he discuss terms of surrender, although Clarence was despatched as mediator to offer ‘a good accord’.3
Once more Edward faced a critical decision. He could not besiege Coventry, and food supplies in the area were running short. Risky as it was to leave enemy forces intact in his rear, he decided to strike for London. Control of the capital would have great advantages, as the author of the Arrivall appreciated. He would gain
the assistance of his true lords, lovers, and servants, which were there, in those parts, in great number; knowing also that his principal adversary, Henry, with many his partakers, were at London, there usurping and using the authority royal, which barred and letted the king of many aids and assistances, which he should and might have had, in divers parts, if he might once show himself of power to break their authority.
On 5 April he began his march. The news of his approach threw the mayor and council of London into a state of deep uncertainty, especially since they had just heard that Queen Margaret and her company were daily expected to land in England. Messages from Edward were matched by others from Warwick. The mayor, John Stockton, prudently took to his bed and refused to exercise his authority. The only Lancastrians of note in the city, Archbishop Nevill and the aged Lord Sudeley, a veteran of Henry V’s French campaigns, tried to rally support by parading King Henry through the streets. Dressed in ‘a long blue gown of velvet as though he had no more to change with’, he had to be held ‘by the hand all that way’ by Archbishop Nevill. The poverty of his attire and the meagreness of his retinue was ‘more like a play than the showing of a prince to win men’s hearts’, and did his cause more harm than good.1 Moreover, there were influential Yorkists in the city, including the archbishop of Canterbury and the earl of Essex. Their presence, according to Commynes, was one of the reasons why the ruling oligarchy inclined to favour Edward, the others being their hope of recovering the large loans made to him in earlier years, and the influence of many of their ladies, who had enjoyed Edward’s friendship and favours. In any case they were anxious to prevent the destruction of property. The Common Council prudently resolved that2
as Edward late king of England was hastening towards the city with a powerful army, and as the inhabitants were not sufficiently versed in the use of arms to withstand so large a force, no attempt should be made to resist him.
By way of Daventry and Dunstable Edward had reached St Albans on 10 April, and the next day he entered London in triumph, his army led by a ‘black and smoky sort of Flemish gunners to the number of 500’.3 After offering at St Paul’s, he made his way to the bishop’s palace to secure the person of Henry VI. The two kings shook hands, and Henry, now far gone in simplicity, is reported to have said: ‘My cousin of York, you are very welcome. I know that in your hands my life will not be in danger.’4 The archbishop of York and several other Lancastrian bishops were placed, along with Henry VI, in the Tower. Edward now went on to Westminster, and, after a brief crown-wearing ceremony, was reunited with his queen in the abbey’s sanctuary, where she had spent the entire period of his exile. There, for the first time, he could see the son and heir she had borne him on 2 November.5
The next day – Good Friday, 12 April – Yorkist supporters began to flow into the city, among them John, Lord Howard, Humphrey Bourchier, Lord Cromwell, and Hastings’s brother, Sir Ralph. The same day news reached London that Warwick, with Montagu, Exeter, Oxford and Beaumont, was approaching the city with a powerful force, and had already reached St Albans. Perhaps, as the Arrivall suggests, he hoped to take Edward unprepared during the Easter celebrations. If so, he was to be disappointed, for Edward reacted at once. The next day, taking Henry VI with him, he marched out of London on the Great North Road towards Barnet. With him were Gloucester and Clarence, Hastings, Rivers and some five or six other lords, and an army of about 9,000 men.1 Towards evening, as he neared Barnet, his scouts reported that Warwick’s army was drawn up along a ridge of high ground about half a mile north of the town, astride the main road to St Albans. Not wishing to be caught in the town, Edward ordered his men forward in spite of the gathering darkness, and they quietly took up position on an east-west line facing the enemy. This rather unusual night-manæuvre had two consequences. Because the king’s army could not see its opponents clearly in the dark, the lines overlapped, each army’s right extending beyond the enemy’s left. For the same reason, Edward’s troops were much closer to the enemy lines than they supposed. During the night Warwick tried to distress the Yorkists by harassing fire from his guns, but, because the lines were so close, the cannon overshot the royalists and achieved nothing. Edward sensibly ordered his troops to maintain silence and not to return the fire, in order to conceal their positions from the enemy gunners.2
Easter Sunday morning dawned thick with mist. Even before it was f
ully light, ‘betwixt four and five of the clock’, Edward decided to attack at once on foot:
he committed his cause and quarrel to Almighty God, advanced banners, did blow up trumpets, and set upon them, first with shot, and, then and soon, they joined and came to hand-strokes.
But in the mist the fact that the armies were not directly aligned front to front began to tell. On the Lancastrian right, ‘the west end’, the earl of Oxford’s troops rolled up the Yorkist left, which gradually broke and fled, pursued by Oxford’s men. Some of the refugees poured south through Barnet and even got as far as London, announcing that all was lost for Edward, and this news was despatched to the Continent before it could be corrected. Some of Oxford’s men began to pillage in the streets of Barnet, but eventually their captains regrouped some 900 of them and marched them back towards the battlefield. Because of the continuing mist the other divisions of the armies knew little of all this and fought on fiercely in a hand-to-hand mêlée. In the centre of his own battle, Edward used his great height and strength to perform prodigies of valour. But the disintegration of the Yorkist left and the pressure of Edward’s overlapping right wing on Warwick’s left caused the battle lines to swivel until they lay almost parallel with the Barnet-St Albans road. This caused Oxford’s returning men to make contact with their own troops instead of the enemy. They wore the De Vere livery badge of a star with streams, easily confused with the Yorkist rising sun (‘the sun with streams’). Mistaking them in the mist for Yorkists, Warwick’s men opened fire on Oxford’s troops, who broke and fled with cries of treason, which demoralized their fellows. Meanwhile, Montagu had been slain, and, seeing that the Yorkists were gaining the upper hand, Warwick decided on flight, and took to his horse. But as he galloped off towards Barnet wood, he fell into the hands of some of Edward’s men, and was killed and ‘spoiled naked’ before Edward, hurrying up, could save his life.
So ‘the perfect victory’ went to Edward. After a hard-fought battle lasting three or more hours, there were substantial casualties on both sides. The Yorkists lost Lords Say and Cromwell, Sir Humphrey Bourchier and Sir William Blount, Lord Mountjoy’s heir. On Warwick’s side, only the earl and his brother were killed amongst the leaders. Exeter was seriously wounded and left for dead on the field, but afterwards recovered, and spent the next four years a prisoner in the Tower. Oxford, his two brothers, and Viscount Beaumont escaped to Scotland. On his return to London the king had the bodies of Warwick and Montagu displayed in St Paul’s so that people should not be deluded by ‘fained seditious tales’ that they were still alive, but with his usual generosity he spared them the customary indignities of quartering and impalement on some bridge or town-gate, and sent off the corpses for decent burial in the family vault at Bisham Abbey.1
Edward was given little leisure to relish his victory or to savour the delights of his return to his capital. On 16 April news arrived that Queen Margaret had landed at Weymouth two days before, the evening of the fatal day at Barnet. With her son and his new wife and the countess of Warwick, Margaret had arrived at Dieppe in January 1471. Thereafter her arrival in England was constantly expected but, for a variety of reasons, constantly delayed. Eventually her party had boarded its ships at Honfleur on 24 March, but was driven back again and again by contrary winds until finally they made a safe crossing, leaving France on 13 April. Hearing the news of her husband’s death, the countess of Warwick took sanctuary at Beaulieu Abbey. Queen Margaret was joined at Cerne Abbey on 15 April by Duke Edmund of Somerset and John Courtenay. They assured her that, in spite of the defeat at Barnet, all was not lost, and their cause might indeed be stronger. The whole company then departed for Exeter.1
There she and her friends had immediate success in raising a considerable force. Beaufort and Courtenay influence helped her to rally ‘the whole might’ of Devon and Cornwall, ‘districts presumably primitive and ignorant’, as Sir James Ramsay quaintly described them. There was support, too, in Somerset, Dorset and Wiltshire, where her followers had been hard at work preparing the ground.2 There is some evidence also of disturbances in her favour elsewhere in England, especially in the north.3 With a growing army, the queen and the Lancastrian lords moved up in the later days of April through Taunton and Wells to Bath.
The king responded to this new challenge with the same vigour and decision which marks all his actions in this critical year. It was essential to crush Margaret before support for her spread into new local risings. Edward at once set about raising fresh troops. Between 18 and 26 April commissions of array were sent to fifteen counties, and requests for men to various towns. Orders were given for the assembly of the royal artillery train. Spies were sent westwards to report on the enemy’s movements. If the Lancastrians seemed likely to march on London by way of the southern counties, Edward planned to march out and meet them as far from the capital as he could, to prevent their drawing strength from these regions as they advanced. On the other hand, they might make for the Welsh border regions and effect a junction with Jasper Tudor and his Welsh supporters, and thence they could make for Cheshire and Lancashire, with their strong traditional ties with the prince of Wales and the descendants of John of Gaunt. If this were their plan, it was important to head them off from the Severn crossings, at either Gloucester or Tewkesbury or Worcester. The king rightly interpreted information from his agents that Lancastrian troop movements south-east into Somerset towards Yeovil were a feint, and concluded that the main force was marching for the Severn.1
On 24 April the king set out from Windsor, and his forces reached Cirencester on the 29th. News that Margaret was about to attack him proved false and he pushed on to Malmesbury in Wiltshire. Here he learned that the queen had succeeded in obtaining men, money and artillery from the citizens of Bristol, and, being ‘greatly refreshed and relieved thereby’, was again advancing upon him, and that her vanguard lay at Sodbury, on the road between Bristol and Malmesbury. On 1 May Edward took up position on Sodbury Hill, only to discover that Margaret’s force was already pushing hard towards the Severn, and had reached Berkeley, twenty-four miles north of Bristol. After a few hours’ rest, her men set out again and marched on through the night a further fourteen miles to Gloucester. This news reached the king in the early hours of the morning of 3 May.
He set off at once in pursuit. His army took the ancient road running along the high western scarp of the Cotswold ridge, and had better marching conditions through this ‘champain country’ than the Lancastrians in the ‘foul country’ of the Severn Vale below. But the day was very hot, and, high up on the sheepruns of the wold, his men suffered from hunger and thirst. The enemy had troubles of their own. Edward had sent messages ahead to Sir Richard Beauchamp, governor of the castle and town of Gloucester, to hold the gates closed against them, and, encouraged by the proximity of Edward with his ‘mighty puissance’, Gloucester kept them out and barred the Severn bridge to them. They had no choice but to push on to the next crossing, the ford at Tewkesbury, where they finally arrived in the evening, weary after a twenty-four-mile march from Berkeley, and took up position in the ruins of the ancient castle destroyed during the wars of Stephen and Matilda’s reign about half a mile south of the town, and close to the ford. Later that day the king’s troops came down from the wold at Cheltenham, marched on to Tewkesbury, and made camp some three miles from the enemy, after a mighty march of thirty-six miles.
The next day, Saturday, 4 May, Edward advanced to the attack.1 The Lancastrian position was strong. From the high ground of their camp they looked down over a confused stretch of wooded ground: in ‘front of their field were so evil lanes and deep dykes, so many hedges, trees and bushes, that it was right hard to approach them near, and come to hand’, as the Arrivall observed. Through this area the royal army moved forward in the customary three ‘battles’, with young Gloucester commanding the van, Edward the centre, and Hastings the rear. Before moving off, the king had taken the precaution of posting a ‘plomp’ of 200 spears at the corner of Tewkesbur
y Park to the left of his own line of advance to prevent any ambush prepared amongst the trees. These men had instructions to engage in battle at their discretion, if the wood proved to be clear of enemy troops. The battle began with an exchange of fire, from the king’s guns, and from Gloucester’s archers, who gave the enemy ‘right-a-sharp shower’ of arrows. Had the Lancastrians maintained their defensive positions, the result of the battle might have been different. But, whether because his men were sorely harassed by the Yorkist fire, or because he hoped to strike the Yorkists before they could fully deploy in battle positions, Somerset, commanding the Lancastrian vanguard, now ordered his forces to move down the hill under cover of the trees and lanes. This manæuvre brought his men into contact with the flank of the king’s battle, but they were themselves ‘somewhat aside-hand’ Gloucester’s division. Fierce hand-to-hand fighting now broke out. Pressed by the superior weight of the two royal divisions, Somerset’s soldiers were gradually driven back up the hill. Now the ‘plomp’ of 200 spears saw their chance to engage, and charged the flank of Somerset’s hard-pressed forces. These now broke and fled. Many were cut down as they tried to escape into the park or the meadows beside the river. Edward immediately pressed his advantage and fell upon the Lancastrian centre commanded by Edward, prince of Wales, which was routed in its turn. Soon this entire division was in full flight, north towards the town. There was heavy slaughter among the fugitives, the most prominent casualty being Prince Edward himself.1 Finally, the Lancastrian left was overpowered, and John Courtenay, earl of Devon, Somerset’s brother, John Beaufort, and John, Lord Wenlock, were slain on the field.