The Women of the Cousins’ War

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The Women of the Cousins’ War Page 11

by Philippa Gregory, David Baldwin


  York’s corpse was beheaded, and the head, crowned with paper, was spiked beside his son Edmund’s severed head, over the Micklegate Bar at York: a traitor’s end and a paper crown for a man who had been a king only on paper. York’s eldest son and heir, Edward Earl of March, learned of the death of his father as he was marching on the town of Shrewsbury, intending to prevent the Lancastrian forces led by the loyal Jasper Tudor from joining the queen. It must have been a very daunting moment for the eighteen-year-old. His father’s death made him Duke of York and the head of the family at war with the rightful king after a major defeat that surely must signal the end of the entire campaign. But Edward pressed on. With an army of about 3,000 he faced the Lancastrian force of about the same size led by the experienced soldiers Tudor father and son: Owen and Jasper. As the young York lord prepared for battle near Mortimer’s Cross on 2 February 1461 he saw something that his troops regarded as a miracle: a parhelion appeared in the sky above his army, a phenomenon caused by ice crystals sparkling in the atmosphere that created the illusion of three suns in the sky over Edward.

  A parhelion, the origin of the ‘sun in splendour’

  It was a deeply impressive sight to the superstitious armies of both sides. To Edward it was the blessing of God – the Father, Son and Holy Ghost – and he was quick-witted enough to reassure his army that it foretold their victory. Other commentators would see the three suns prefiguring the three sons of York who would fight side by side and found a new royal family: Edward and his brothers George and Richard. The sight of the three suns meant so much to Edward that he incorporated them into a personal badge: ‘the sun in splendour’.

  A contemporary stained-glass window showing the sun in splendour

  Edward held a strong position on the crossroads at the entrance to Worcester with the River Lugg at his back. The Lancastrian forces had to make a frontal attack and though they broke the Yorkist right they were thrown back from the centre of the line, commanded by Edward. The final charge of the Lancastrian forces broke and fled from the field. Edward captured Owen Tudor and executed him at Hereford, ending the life of a man who had risen very high: from service in the royal household to a secret marriage with the Dowager Queen of England, Catherine of Valois, to found the Tudor line. Jasper Tudor escaped the Yorkist pursuit, abandoned his nephew, the young Henry Tudor, at Pembroke Castle – where he became the ward of the new overlord of Wales, William Herbert – and took a ship from Tenby to exile overseas. He would be gone for nine years.

  Meanwhile, with contrasting fortunes, the victorious Lancastrian army, with Queen Margaret at their head, started to move south, pillaging and destroying firstly the lands of the Yorkist lords, and then of everyone else. It is hard for us now to imagine the terror felt by people living in the Midlands and the south as the northern hordes approached. Religious houses buried their treasure, and monks and nuns went into hiding; great landowners fortified their walls and took up their drawbridges; the poorer people braced themselves for rape, theft and destruction. The Scots recruits had been promised plunder instead of pay and they took everything they felt was owed to them. The prospect of the arrival of the queen and the northern men – widely regarded as savages – threw the south and the city of London into a state of utter terror.

  Jacquetta’s husband Richard Woodville was trying to lead this undisciplined marauding force; probably their son Anthony was serving, too. Richard Woodville persuaded his friend Sir Henry Lovelace to join the queen’s army and abandon his loyalty to York. Lovelace kept this new allegiance secret and marched with the Yorkist army for the time being. Also serving the queen was the Rivers’ son-in-law Sir John Grey, Elizabeth’s husband, who commanded the queen’s cavalry. Both Lord Rivers and his son-in-law may have found it almost impossible to impose discipline on their troops. Most of the army were northerners, disinclined to march very far south away from home; there was no pay to reward them, and they had been licensed to steal. Rivers, trained in France by the Duke of Bedford, who had urged that enemy lands be treated well – for fear of creating more enemies – must have found himself trying to limit the brutality at every halt.

  The Earl of Warwick was the only Yorkist commander available to resist the steady advance of the Lancastrians, and so, taking the king with him as a hostage, he marched out of London by the Great North Road and on 17 February 1461 met the queen’s forces at St Albans.

  Warwick must have remembered his previous triumph at St Albans, and positioned his archers – who had been so powerful before – in the town. But the queen’s prize captain Sir Andrew Trollope led an advance guard around the Yorkist barricades in a lightning night march, arrived unexpectedly, and drove the Yorkist archers out of the town. York regrouped and deployed cannon and a new style of handgun. But as snow fell the powder became damp and the weapons exploded in the hands of the gunners. The arrows of the Yorkist archers, fired against the wind, could not reach the advancing Lancastrian army; and when Lovelace, Richard Woodville’s recruit, abandoned his pretended allegiance to York and joined Lancaster, he left a disastrous gap in the line, which broke under a cavalry charge, probably led by Sir John Grey, Elizabeth Woodville’s husband. Grey, just twenty-nine years old, died in this battle, perhaps giving his life at this moment of triumph.

  The left wing of the Yorkist army fled from the field, and Warwick was forced to sound the retreat. Holding his surviving army together he marched away into the darkness, abandoning the king, who had been guarded throughout the battle by the Yorkist lords Lord Bonville and Sir Thomas Kyriell. They stayed with him, seated under an oak tree, and handed him over, unhurt, to the victorious Lancastrian lords to be reunited with his wife Queen Margaret and his son Prince Edward.

  The king knighted the prince, who then had the power to create other knights as a reward for their courage on the battlefield. Then the Yorkist lords Lord Bonville and Sir Thomas Kyriell, who had guarded the king’s safety, were brought before the royal party. According to some accounts the queen asked her young son what death the two lords should die and the seven-year-old boy chose that they should be beheaded: a shocking exchange even for violent times, a shocking precocity even for an age when men grew up young.

  The royal party, Jacquetta among them, stayed at the Abbey of St Albans, and the royal army pillaged for food and goods in the surrounding areas, to the horror of the people. Terror spread to London and the Lord Mayor’s carts, carrying supplies out from the city for the Lancastrian army, were seized by the mob to prevent them supporting the Lancastrians. They saw the royal army as their enemy, and prayed to be rescued by the armies of Edward the new Duke of York and his friend and ally the Earl of Warwick. Edward’s mother Cecily Neville, the widow of Richard Duke of York, living in London, who had surrendered to the royal army at Ludlow, sent her sons George and Richard overseas to the court of the Duke of Burgundy for their safety. She must have feared that the army of northern men, under the command of the queen, would be even worse than the royal army at Ludlow.

  The Lord Mayor chose Jacquetta, Anne Neville Duchess of Buckingham, the widowed Lady Scales and some clergymen to represent the city, asking the three noble – and popular – ladies to negotiate with the queen and get an assurance that the marauding northerners would not be allowed to loot the city.

  It was not an easy task for Jacquetta. The aldermen and councillors of London were prepared to admit the king and the queen but only on condition that they would guarantee the safety of the city. However, the merchants, tradesmen and citizens of London had heard terrifying stories of the rape and looting by the army of the north, ever since they crossed the Trent. It was generally known that Margaret allowed her soldiers to steal in lieu of their pay, and the people of London did not want an army of thieves and rapists inside the city walls. Worse, they did not trust the word of the queen that they would be safe.

  Jacquetta, the Duchess of Buckingham and Lady Scales negotiated with the citizens of London and then reported back to the queen at Barnet. When sh
e heard of the city’s reluctance, she sent the ladies back again to London to demand that the city proclaim Edward of York as a traitor, and open the gates to her. But even as Jacquetta tried to persuade the Londoners, the queen confirmed everyone’s worst fears by secretly dispatching two bands of soldiers, one up the river to Westminster, where they were driven away by the city militia, and the other to Aldgate, where they tried to force open the city gate.

  Infuriated by this double-dealing the Londoners barred the gates, and Jacquetta and the two ladies had to leave the city and report to the queen that London would not declare for her – even worse, that now it was raising money to support the Yorkist armies. Since Edward and Warwick were approaching, the queen took her army to Dunstable, nearly forty miles away, as the Yorkist army marched into London to a heroes’ welcome. The people proclaimed Edward as the rightful king, and a council of lords invited him to take the throne, and then presented him with the crown and sceptre in a hasty ceremony at Westminster Abbey. Edward took the crown and promised that he would have a formal coronation when Henry VI and the queen were either dead or in exile. The time for any sort of agreement or compromise was over. There were now two crowned kings in England. It was going to be a fight to the death.

  The queen abandoned her hopes of London and led her army back north. They regrouped at York, pursued by Edward and the Earl of Warwick. A detachment of the royal army, commanded by Jacquetta’s husband Richard Woodville with the young Duke of Somerset, held the crossing of the River Aire at Ferrybridge in Yorkshire, and Edward sent a vanguard force ahead to attack them and open his road to the king and queen, who were staying at York. Lord Clifford, for Lancaster, ambushed the Yorkist troops, before they even got to Lord Rivers’s troop, killing most of the Yorkists and wounding the Earl of Warwick. The Yorkists were halted, and then a message arrived from King Henry asking for a truce: it was Palm Sunday, the Sunday before Easter Day, 1461.

  Edward resisted the temptation to pause, broke the tradition of peace on a Sunday, and pushed on to Ferrybridge, fighting on foot himself and forcing Lord Rivers’s men back off the bridge. Rather than lose the bridge, Rivers and Somerset destroyed it. The Yorkist forces built a raft to get across, and the two armies fought for control of the raft. The Rivers troop won that skirmish; but then the Yorkists broke off from that battle, went further upstream and crossed the river at Castleford.

  Fighting halted for the night, and overnight it started snowing, unseasonal spring snow which made the prospect of a battle in the early-morning light even worse. The Lancastrian army had the advantage of higher ground above the village of Towton as the Yorkists came up from the south; on one side of the battleground was a steeply banked river – the Cock Beck – on the other was the River Wharfe. Both rivers were running fast and in flood with melt-water and spring rains. The Lancastrian archers were blinded by the snow blowing into their faces and the wind was against their volleys. Yorkist archers were far more accurate, even though shooting uphill, since they were shooting with the support of the wind, arrows scything into the Lancastrian ranks from an enemy that they could hardly see. The Lancastrians charged down the hill and the battle swayed one way and then another for three hours. Perhaps as many as 50,000 men were fighting, led by three-quarters of the peerage.

  Only the surprise late arrival of the men from the eastern counties, under the command of the Duke of Norfolk, fighting for York, broke the Lancastrian left flank and brought an end to the battle. The Lancastrian army fled as the Yorkist lords mounted up and pursued them down the river bank to the Cock Beck, where the bridge gave way under the weight of men struggling to flee, drowning them in waters which were already flowing red with blood.

  It was one of the most lethal battles in British history: almost every great northern family lost a son; the Lancastrian forces lost most of their best captains. It was said that all the fields from Tadcaster to Towton, a distance of more than two miles, were filled with the bodies of dead men. Amazingly, Jacquetta’s husband and her son Anthony survived. Once again they experienced the bitterness of defeat. But this time there was no marching away and regrouping. They had to surrender their swords to the young man that they would have to learn to call King Edward.

  The defeated Queen Margaret and the young prince fled from York, getting away just before the enemy arrived at the city gates, and headed north for Scotland and ten long years of exile, the king with them. Edward marched into the city and ordered the heads of his father and brother taken down from the spikes on the city walls. Jacquetta, her husband and her son probably left at once, back the way they had come, riding south, nearly 140 miles to their home at Grafton. They may have stayed there until the new King Edward was formally crowned on Sunday 28 June 1461. He issued full pardons to Lord Rivers and his son Anthony Woodville in July. Edward IV, as he now was known, would prove to be a pragmatic king and his pardon of the Rivers family was part of his policy of trying to befriend and reunite the divided nobility.

  Perhaps they all felt that life must go on. Anthony was nineteen and ready to marry. Jacquetta organised the marriage of her oldest son to Elizabeth de Scales, the daughter of the Lancastrian commander who had held the Tower of London during the Jack Cade rebellion, and again when the Yorkists invaded, breaking out only to be killed by Thames watermen. It may have been a marriage of affection as well as arrangement. The Woodvilles knew Lord Scales when he commanded the Tower against Jack Cade, and Anthony would have met his daughter Elizabeth. On the death of her father she inherited the title of Baroness Scales and, as her husband, Anthony took the title, and entered the Yorkist parliament as Lord Scales.

  Meanwhile, Jacquetta’s oldest daughter Elizabeth was struggling to stay in her dead husband’s home at Groby Hall. She was entitled to receive an income from three Grey family manors held in trust for her, but her mother-in-law, Lady Ferrers, had no intention of allowing her to live off them indefinitely. Such a drain on the estate could go on till Elizabeth’s death. Lady Ferrers disputed the purpose of the trust, and Elizabeth went home to her parents at Grafton while she applied to senior members of the family to argue the case for her and for her two young sons.

  In this new world the Rivers family no longer had the access to court, nor to the power that they used to exert. They could not make Lady Ferrers honour her word. Their king was an exile, sometimes in Scotland, sometimes hiding in the north-east of England, a hunted man; their queen and her son were in France with a few banished English lords, trying to persuade the rulers of Europe to support the defeated House of Lancaster. The Rivers themselves were newcomers to the Yorkist councils, regarded with some suspicion: they had no influence.

  But the Rivers had their pardon, and could rise again. In 1463 Sir Richard Lord Rivers and his son Anthony, now Lord Scales, were summoned to the king’s council to advise King Edward, and started the process of climbing into the monarch’s confidence and trust. All three men must have had to make an effort to forget the night in Calais when the young rebel had scolded Lord Rivers for rising through marriage, and the several times when they had been on opposite sides of the battlefield; but all three seem to have managed it.

  A year later, in early summer, that most seductive season in England, when the may is as white as snow in the hedges, and every bird is singing, King Edward, on his way north, recruiting men to fight against a Lancastrian army at Hexham, stopped at Grafton and was greeted by the Rivers’ widowed daughter Elizabeth, who appealed to him to support the claim for her dowry lands. The leading Yorkist lord, William Lord Hastings, made an agreement to share her inheritance if his influence won it for her, but – as it turned out – Elizabeth did not need his help. She did not even need her dower. The attraction between the outstandingly beautiful 27-year-old widow and the 22-year-old king must have been mutual and instant: they were married in secret within weeks of first meeting.

  Once again, the shadow of witchcraft falls over the reputation of Jacquetta and, from this moment, her daughter too. The marriage was
said to have taken place on 1 May, the greatest festival in the witch calendar, known as Beltane. For pagans and witches this date celebrates fertility and love at the start of summer, when the otherworld grows close. The wedding of the young king and Elizabeth Grey took place in secret and exhausted the young king, who was said to have returned to his camp and slept all day. Most ominously of all, later witnesses said that they found two lead images of a man and a woman, bound together with threads of gold, which they said had been used to charm the king and the widow into love with each other.

  Jacquetta may perhaps have made lead images. She may have recited spells. She would certainly have used herbs and believed in the power of invocation, blessings, curses and prayer. She had been raised in a world where such things were done, perhaps by many people, with the expectation of success. Certainly, she was the most senior witness at a phenomenally important secret wedding which was to have such explosive political implications for the king, his kingdom and his Council; and she may have kept it a secret from two of his councillors: her husband and her son. Without a doubt, having spent her life so close to the centre of power, she knew exactly what she was doing when she allowed her daughter to wed and bed the young man who had claimed the throne of England. Elizabeth may have been blinded by love; Jacquetta would have been well aware that the marriage would make a Rivers grandson the King of England. She may have tried magic, or she may have used the quiet skills of a covert politician, adept in the art of women’s power and seduction; but she and her daughter changed history that night in May 1464.

 

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