by Ed West
York and his second son Edmund, Earl of Rutland, had spent Christmas at the castle of Sandal in Yorkshire, and when he arrived there he found a kinsman, Lord John Neville of Raby, from the other branch of the Neville family. (Not to be confused with Warwick’s brother, John Neville. To make matters confusing, this John Neville had recently married the widow of his nephew, another John Neville.) Lord John went to York to ask permission to raise troops in the area, to which he agreed; yet when later York saw fighting outside from inside the castle tower, he and his son were tricked into coming out to face a Lancastrian army. They soon learned that it was five thousand-strong, and included Somerset, Northumberland, Clifford, and Lord John Neville, who was indeed recruiting soldiers—for York’s enemies.
Perhaps he now knew it was the end; York was outnumbered five to one, and after an hour of fighting sent his son Rutland to flee while he held off the Lancastrians. Richard of York was soon cut down, and his long battle to win the throne was over.
Now in desperate flight the young Rutland had reached nearby Wakefield Bridge when he was cornered by Baron Clifford, whose father had been slain at St Albans. John Clifford had been born in Conisbrough castle in Yorkshire and had the blood of all the leading families of the north; his mother was a Dacre and his grandmothers a Percy and a Neville, making Clifford a great-grandson of both Hotspur and Ralph de Neville, just as Rutland was a grandson. Yet when he learned of his captive’s identity Clifford mercilessly killed him, York’s blood spilled in return for his father’s.1 Salisbury’s second son Thomas Neville also fell in the fighting and Salisbury himself was captured and beheaded the next day.
When the Queen arrived in York she saw the heads of York, Rutland, and Salisbury stuck over the gates of the city, and Clifford told her “Madam, your war is done, here is your king’s ransom.”2 There was “much joy, and great rejoicing” among the camp and Margaret now ordered that a paper crown be placed on her enemy’s head along with the sign “Let York overlook the town of York.” For the Queen, who had endured so much, “it must have been exhilarating to have hundreds of fierce warriors wearing the Prince of Wales’s livery kneel before them, with their enemies’ heads grimacing down of them.”3 And yet perhaps she would live to regret these deaths and the humiliation she inflicted, and her joy might one day turn to ashes.
For Cecily of York it was now an even more deadly situation. She had lost one son already, and her younger boys George and Richard were in grave danger, smuggled to the coast and sent across the sea to Burgundy. Her eldest, now Edward, Duke of York, was in the West Country celebrating Christmas when he was told the devastating news. Edward of March had been raised in Ludlow on the Welsh border and was seen by the marcher men as one of their own. He and his brother Edmund were very close in age and had grown up together along with local boys, but his childhood was short and as the country headed toward civil war he would have been in training from a young age.
Robb Stark is only supposed to be fifteen when he leads his army to victory; in reality, York’s son Edward of March was eighteen when he first commanded in battle, but he had been learning at his father’s side for far longer, and eighteen is by no means exceptionally young for military experience. Testosterone levels in fourteen-year-old boys can reach as much as 1,200 ng/dL, higher than most adult men, which range between 270 and 1,070. That is partly why males at fifteen commit more violent crime than those over twenty-five, and violence peaks at the ages of eighteen-nineteen. Boy soldiers as young as Robb are therefore not unusual, since they are at the age when men most enjoy fighting; their brains’ undeveloped frontal lobe also leads them to be more impulsive and unable to assess danger, and so brave but reckless.
Edward’s ancestor Henry II had led an army against his cousin Stephen while aged just fourteen during the Anarchy, while two thousand years ago Octavius, the future Roman Emperor Augustus, headed a force at eighteen, and the following year was given command over the whole imperial army. Rome’s most famous military hero, Scipio Africanus, fought from the age of sixteen and led an attack on the Carthaginians when he was just seventeen. King John’s nephew Arthur was fifteen when he was in charge of an army fighting his own grandmother in one of the strangest dynastic conflicts of the era. Poland’s King Wladyslaw III invaded Hungary at seventeen and just two years later, in 1444, led a force of twenty thousand Christians to take on the Turks. Faced with an army three times as large, the teenager led a cavalry charge against the Sultan Murad II which unfortunately ended up with his head being put on a pike.
Edward was very different to his father in appearance and temperament, which has added to speculation about his paternity, with his enemies accusing Cecily Neville of cuckolding her husband. Whereas York was short, dark-haired, and cold, even charmless, Edward was very tall, perhaps 6'4", blond, good-looking and affable; he was a charmer and seducer, and even persuaded some Lancastrians to change sides when it was a better strategy than killing them. Following his father’s death, the young warrior immediately faced his first challenge, as the now aging Owen Tudor brought eight thousand men east from Wales toward Worcester on the English side of the border. The two armies met at Mortimer’s Cross, close to the frontier, March and his mostly local troops aiming to stop Tudor, with his Breton and Irish mercenaries, from joining with the main Lancastrian host heading south toward London. The battle took place in the depths of winter, on February 3, 1461, where “on the morning there was seen three suns rising.” Edward’s men were at first “aghast” at this strange and unnatural vision, but the new Duke of York took it as a good omen, signifying the three surviving “sons” of York. Shakespeare records it:
Three glorious suns, each one a perfect sun;
Not separated with the racking clouds,
But sever’d in a pale clear-shining sky.
See, see! they join, embrace, and seem to kiss,
As if they vow’d some league inviolable:
Now are they but one lamp, one light, one sun.
In this the heaven figures some event. Henry VI, Part 3, Act 2, Scene 1
It was in fact a parhelion, or sun dog, a phenomenon which occurs during exceptionally cold weather when ice crystals refract the sun’s rays, giving the appearance of three suns in the sky. Afterward, March took the symbol of the “Sun in Splendour” as his personal banner.
March came close to joining his brother that day, but the battle turned with the arrival of William Hastings, a former sheriff whose father had served the House of York for many years. Hastings’s troops swung the fighting and afterwardthe Yorkists ran after their fleeing enemies, capturing the elderly Tudor and taking him to Hereford on Edward’s orders. Tudor had fought for many years in France and knew everything there was about warfare, and now expected a return to imprisonment until hostages could be exchanged. And yet the age of chivalry was gone, and it was only as the buttons around his neck were being undone that the old soldier realized his fate. This ladies’ man now lamented that the head that once lay on a queen’s lap was now to lie on a block. Afterward that same head was mounted in the market place of the town where a mad old crone placed a hundred candles around it, combing the corpse’s hair and washing off the blood.4
With her treaty in the northern kingdom, Margaret had raised an army to head south, bringing the terrifying prospect of a northern army bearing down on the south, and—even worse—a rabble of Scots with them too. Without the money to pay soldiers, she agreed that her troops could plunder once they had crossed the Trent into Yorkist territory in the east midlands. The northern army rumbled south along the king’s road while Warwick raised men in London. As her northern and Scot troops moved further into alien land, more of them slipped away with their plunder; these stragglers held up progress as well reducing the numbers of fighting men, and alienating villagers along the way. As well as the Scots, the army also contained Welsh and Irish troops and French mercenaries, all of whom would have been a terrifying prospect to the people of the realm.5
Warwick led
an army out of London with a group of leading nobles, including Norfolk; John de la Pole, married to his cousin Elizabeth; William FitzAlan, Earl of Arundel and Warwick’s brother-in-law, who had been a Lancastrian but had now switched; and Warwick’s brother John Neville and his uncle, Fauconberg. The two armies met on February 17, 1461, once again at St Albans, where Margaret had brought more than ten thousand and probably closer to fifteen thousand men; Warwick had as many as ten thousand, as well as the king as his prisoner. These armies were larger than any English city at the time other than London, and the amount of provisions they needed would have been awesome.
The killing went on until nightfall, and the Lancastrians were victorious. As prisoner, Henry had been treated well, but afterwards the mad king’s former captors Lord Bonville and Sir Thomas Kyriell were brought before the Queen and seven-year-old Prince Edward. He was asked: “Fair son, by what manner of means shall these knights die?”6
“Let their heads be taken off.” The boy got his wish.
Henry had guaranteed the safety of Bonville and Kyriel, but it was Margaret who ordered the executions, an unnecessary act of ruthlessness that showed either a cruel nature or simply the exhaustive stress of six years of conflict.
The Queen now descended on London, with Edward still in the Cotswolds. For the men of the south country the prospect of a northern army overrunning their lands was terrifying, not to mention what Scots or Frenchmen might do. A chronicler called the Prior of Croyland reported: “The duke [of York] being thus removed from this world, the northmen . . . swept onwards like a whirlwind from the north, and in the impulse of their fury attempted to overrun the whole of England . . . paupers and beggars flocked forth from those quarters in infinite numbers, just like so many mice rushing forth from their holes, and universally devoted themselves to spoil and rapine, without regard of place or person,” attacking monasteries and “covering the whole surface area of the earth just like so many locusts.”7
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.” Clement Patton, an East Anglian squire, told his brother John: “In this country [county] every man is willing to go with my lords here, and I hope God shall help them, for the people in the north rob and steal and are appointed to pillage all this country, and give away men’s goods and livelihoods in the south country, and that will ask a mischief.”4
Margaret’s army ransacked the outer suburbs of the capital but, fearful that they would lose her any support in London, she now led her troops away from the city and headed north. It was a strategic mistake, for on February 26 Richard of York’s son rolled in from the west, unopposed, and was proclaimed Edward IV.
THOSE ARE BRAVE MEN KNOCKING AT OUR DOOR. LET’S GO KILL THEM.
On March 3, 1461, bishops and lords assembled in Baynard’s Castle on the western edge of London where they agreed to Edward of March’s claim to the throne. Yet the Queen would not stay idle while her son was disinherited, and now followers of the great families were called up to fight for their lords, with the greatest battle ever fought on British soil about to unfold. The winters were still getting harsher as Europe went further into the Little Ice Age, and this climactic battle was fought amidst a snow blizzard just a week before Easter Sunday. Edward’s army may have had as many as forty-eight thousand men, the Queen perhaps even sixty thousand, and although these figures seem exaggerated, when the two sides met just off the Great North Road, at Towton in north Yorkshire, the front lines were as long as eight hundred yards apiece, packed thick with men.
Alongside March were a group of lords linked by blood; Warwick and his brothers-in-law Worcester, FitzHugh, Stanley, Arundel and Bonville, along with his uncle by marriage, Norfolk. Warwick’s bastard half-brother also joined him and was killed in the fighting. On the opposing side were most of the northern barons, including Percy, Clifford, Beaumont, and the Westmorland Nevilles, as well as Somerset.
Towton was turned into a gruesome pile of flesh, bones, and steel, and anywhere between nine thousand and twenty-eight thousand died over twenty-four hours of fighting in the snowfall. Some men were killed by small daggers driven into the eyes or brains, others by forty-inch broadswords. Many more were slain by arrow fire, and it was this that ground down the Lancastrian forces, who were shooting against the wind and whose arrows fell short.
The Lancastrian leadership was also decapitated. Edward had ordered men to go after his brother’s killer, Clifford, but thinking himself away from his pursuers, he went to drink a glass of wine, took off his neck-guard, and was killed instantly by a sniper hiding in a tree. Andrew Trollope, who had betrayed the Yorkists at Ludlow and killed several men at Barnet, was also slain, as was another major baron, Lord Clifford’s kinsman Randolph Dacre. Henry Percy, following his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather, also died in the fighting.
Before the battle, the Lancastrians had knocked down the only bridge to prevent their armies fleeing across the Cock Beck, a nearby stream. Now they were trapped and forced against the river on a spot that later became known as Bloody Meadow.8 Many jumped in the frozen water, and it was only when the river was dammed by a pile of dead men that anybody could escape over the corpses of their comrades, across this Bridge of Bodies as veterans later called it.
Recent archaeological work on the site has given historians a glimpse of the horror of that bitterly cold day as the Houses of York and Lancaster fought their climatic battle. Centuries later, in 1996, a pit was uncovered containing forty-three bodies, of which twenty-seven had multiple injuries, illustrating the ferocity and desperation of the fight: “One man received eight sharp-force traumas; one had nine sharp-force and two penetrative-force wounds; and another suffered ten sharp-force and three blunt-force traumas.” Twenty-seven of twenty-eight heads found in one corner of the field showed injuries from “swords, daggers, maces, war hammers, staff weapons, longbow arrows, and possibly crossbow bolts” and are “consistent with fleeing infantry cut down by horsemen.”9 Another grave had thirty-seven bodies, of which one had five slashes to the head, and another had survived a previous battle in which his face had been cut in two with a wound across his mouth and jaw.
Following the battle, numerous atrocities were committed against survivors, as well as the mutilation of bodies, reported by contemporary accounts and proven by recent digs, with “injuries that are far in excess of those necessary to cause disability and death.”10
The young King Edward was lucky to survive the day, his life saved by a Welsh knight, Sir David Ap Mathew, who was thereafter given permission to name the battle on the family crest as an honor, so that his posterity might always bask in the glory of his deed. Afterwards a trail of blood lined the twenty-three-mile road from Towton to York, and the victor marched on the city where he was greeted with the heads of his father and brother, now cut down and replaced by those of the defeated.
The boy had defeated his enemies, the House of Lancaster, those men who had cut his father’s head from his shoulders, and the unpopular queen and her violent young son were forced to flee. And so began the reign of Edward IV, and the end of the House of Lancaster. The new king stayed in the north until May 1 when he witnessed the Earl of Wiltshire’s beheading in Newcastle, one of several Lancastrian lords put to death, but soon the bloodlust ran out and he headed south for his coronation in June.
Across the sea Duke Philippe of Burgundy’s attitude toward the exiled children of the Duke of York changed. They had been kept far away from court in Utrecht but were now brought to Sluys and entertained at Duke Philippe’s home, and a banquet laid on. For the cunning and canny people across the sea—a stereotype of the Dutch that the English maintained for many years—the House of York were now their true friends.
Families who had sided with March now enjoyed the fruits of success. The Bourchier clan was rewarded, with its heir Henry becoming Earl of Essex. Sir John Wenlock, who had besieged the Tower of London for
Edward and helped his entry into London, was made Knight of the Garter. William Hastings became Lord Hastings, chamberlain of the household and gatekeeper to the king’s presence. Hastings, who would become Edward’s priapic accomplice in drinking and whoring, commissioned a coat of arms for himself, one which showed a tiger with a grinning face, most likely Hastings himself, and an enormous erect penis. After the drabness of Henry’s court, life would become interesting again under the young King Edward.
The king’s uncle Fauconberg became Earl of Kent and his cousin John Neville was made Lord Montague and also Earl of Northumberland, the hereditary Percy title, illustrating their total defeat. Warwick was not made duke, however, despite there being no adult dukes left—perhaps a snub, and a sign of troubles to come.
For the losers there was retribution, with twelve peers and one hundred knights and squires made outlaws, while Percy’s young son Henry was placed in the Tower and the family attained. Yet the young king was intelligent and understood that, as Tywin Lannister put it: “When your enemies defy you, you must serve them steel and fire. When they go to their knees, however, you must help them back to their feet. Elsewise no man will ever bend the knee to you.”11 Henry Stafford, the second son of the Duke of Buckingham, was pardoned despite fighting on the losing side. Henry Beaufort, the Duke of Somerset, was as ardent a Lancastrian as they came; he had fought and nearly died at the first battle of St Albans and watched his father slain by the Yorkists. Beaufort had seen action at Wakefield, the second St Albans and Towton, and when he was captured in 1462 he might well have expected the block. And yet Edward spared him, and indeed treated him like a friend. London mayor William Gregory wrote that Somerset “lodged with the king in his own bed many nights, and sometimes rode a-hunting behind the king, the king having about him not passing six horse[men] at the most and yet three were the duke’s men.”12 Six months after his capture in 1462 his lands were all returned, and the two men became close, enjoying wenching together.