King did I call thee? No, thou art not king;
Not fit to govern and rule multitudes,
Which dar'st not, no, nor canst not rule a traitor . . .
Give place: by heaven, thou shalt rule no more
O'er him whom heaven created for thy ruler.
A few moments later Salisbury and his son Warwick inform the King that they too must break their oath of allegiance and will henceforth look to York as their legitimate sovereign. The Duke of Buckingham and Lord Clifford remain loyal. The lines are drawn. War is now inevitable.
All this is, of course, a travesty of the truth. When he saw Somerset at Blackheath and realized that the King had broken his promise, Richard of York kept his head. To have behaved as Shakespeare describes, insulting both King and Queen ('O blood-bespotted Neapolitan!') and claiming the crown when surrounded by Henry's men, would have been suicidal. Instead, he wisely hid his resentment as best he could, returning with the King to London and swearing his oath in St Paul's. There followed Henry's mysterious illness and Richard's appointment as Protector, both events omitted altogether in the play. It was, as we know, only after Henry recovered and Somerset returned to power that the Duke of York reluctantly gave the call to arms, protesting to the last his own personal loyalty to his King.
Another curious feature of the scene is the introduction of York's children - or, more accurately, of the eldest and the youngest of his four sons, the future Edward IV and Richard III. In March 1452, the time of the meeting at Blackheath, young Edward was a month short of his tenth birthday - hardly a suitable age to stand surety for his father. As for Richard, he did not yet exist at all; he was to be born only on 2 October of that same year. Edward speaks but a single line; Richard, on the other hand, is already presented as a prematurely venomous youth, 'As crooked,' as Clifford unkindly points out, 'in thy manners as thy shape': the first reference in the canon of plays to Richard's deformity, to which Shakespeare gives so much prominence as his story continues.
The last two scenes cover the battle of St Albans. Clifford reappears at once. He is known to have played an important part in the engagement, fighting valiantly to keep the Yorkist forces out of the town; Shakespeare's account of his death at the hands of York himself is, however, based exclusively on a hint in Hall, who quotes Clifford's son as saying to York's second son, Edmund, the young Earl of Rutland: 'By God's blode, thy father slew mine, and so wil I do the and all thy kyn'. In the play, young Clifford is rather more articulate; the sight of his dead father inspires a long and savage speech before he sadly carries off the body. Poetic justice would dictate that York should also have dispatched his enemy Somerset, but Shakespeare rather surprisingly gives that task to young Prince Richard - who, at the time of the battle, was not quite three years old.
So, lie thou there;
For underneath an alehouse' paltry sign
The Castle in St Albans, Somerset
Hath made the wizard famous in his death.
The spirit called up for the Duchess of Gloucester in Act I, when asked about the fate of Somerset, had said, 'Let him shun castles'; that prophecy was now fulfilled.
Encouraged by the young Clifford, King Henry and Queen Margaret take flight - another fantasy of Shakespeare's, since in fact they spent the night at St Albans and returned to London only the following day. Meanwhile York, Prince Richard, Warwick, Salisbury and their followers congratulate themselves on their victory. Much emphasis is laid - as it was in V.i, when he withdrew his allegiance to King Henry - on Salisbury's advanced age:
And like rich hangings in a homely house,
So was his will in his old feeble body.
It comes as a mildly unpleasant shock to discover that at the time of the Battle poor Salisbury was just fifty-five.
The Wars of the Roses
[1455-1475]
KING EDWARD.
Once more we sit in England's royal throne,
Repurchas'd with the blood of enemies.
What valiant foemen, like to autumn's corn,
Have we mow'd down in tops of all their pride!
Three Dukes of Somerset, threefold renown'd
For hardy and undoubted champions;
Two Cliffords, as the father and the son;
And two Northumberlands - two braver men
Ne'er spurr'd their coursers at the trumpet's sound;
With them, the two brave bears, Warwick and Montague,
That in their chains fettered the kingly lion
And made the forest tremble when they roar'd.
Thus have we swept suspicion from our seat
And made our footstool of security.
KING HENRY VI PART III
The opening scene of The Third Part of King Henry VI, beginning as it does with a post-mortem on the battle of St Albans by the Yorkist leaders and ending with the Duke of York's claim to the throne and what is tantamount to a declaration of war by Queen Margaret, covers a historical period of five and a half years. Those years were marked by two brief but extremely bloody battles, at Blore Heath and Northampton, both ending in victory for the house of York; by various grand but ultimately unsuccessful gestures of conciliation; by a minor war in the West Country; by a Lancastrian attack on Calais and a Yorkist raid on Sandwich; by the increasingly rapid slide of the entire country into anarchy and civil war; and finally by the correspondingly growing authority and ambition of the Queen. Margaret of Anjou was, according to a contemporary, 'a great and intensely active woman, for she spares no pains to pursue her business towards an end and conclusion favourable to her power'. The loss of her most faithful ally the Duke of Suffolk seems only to have strengthened her resolve: realizing that nothing could be expected from her hopeless husband, she was gradually carving out an individual power base for herself and gathering the reins of government into her own ruthless but capable hands.
The other bright star clearly in the ascendant was that of the Earl of Warwick. He remained, during those five and a half years, the unswervingly loyal right-hand man of the Duke of York; but his sheer panache had earned him a reputation which far outshone that of his uncle. He had commanded the army at Northampton, when Richard had been once again away in Ireland; he seemed, moreover, to be equally at home on land and sea. What other Governor of Calais, refused by the Exchequer in London sufficient funds to pay his own garrison, would have built up a fleet often ships of his own and begun a new career as an outstandingly successful pirate, capturing six Spanish ships in the Channel and even daring to attack the great Hanseatic Bay Fleet on its annual journey between the Atlantic coast of France and the League towns of North Germany and the Baltic?
Not until October 1460 was the partnership of Warwick and Richard of York put under serious strain. In the previous month Richard had returned from Ireland, landing near Chester; and as he made his way south, gathering supporters as he went, he made it clear that this, his fourth march on the capital, was very different from its predecessors. Previously he had always emphasized his loyalty to the King; this time he had come openly to claim the crown. When he reached Abingdon, we are told, 'he sent for trumpeters and clarioners to escort him to London, and there he gave them banners with the royal arms of England without any diversity and commanded his sword to be borne upright before him.' Arriving on 10 October with 500 men at the Palace of Westminster, 'he went straight through the great hall until he came to the chamber where the king, with the commons, was accustomed to hold his parliament. There he strode up to the throne and put his hand on its cushion just as though he were a man about to take possession of what was rightfully his. He kept it there for a while, then, withdrawing it, he turned to the people and, standing quietly under the canopy of state, waited expectantly for their applause.'
There was none. Warwick in particular was furious. But York had crossed his Rubicon. Laying before the House of Lords his formal claim to the throne, based as it was upon his direct descent from Henry III, he now demanded that Parliament should pass judgement on hi
s case. The Lords, much embarrassed but probably encouraged by Warwick, pointed out that they themselves, as well as the Duke, had taken repeated oaths of allegiance to King Henry VI. York retorted that Henry owed his crown only to his grandfather, who was a usurper; it followed that none of the last three monarchs had any legal right to the throne. Finally he accepted a compromise, which was embodied in what was known as the Act of Accord of 24 October 1460: Henry was to retain his position during his lifetime, but would be succeeded on his death by York and York's heirs in perpetuity. (The Duke was at this time forty-nine, ten years older than the King; but Henry's precarious health suggested that the succession would occur sooner rather than later.)
The King, predictably enough, accepted the arrangement without a murmur; his wife, on the other hand, had no intention of standing by while her young son was disinherited. Taking ship to Scotland, she sought allies at the court of the eight-year-old James III - who had succeeded his father some three months before — simultaneously summoning her adherents from all parts of the country to a general meeting in the north. The outraged Lancastrians rallied to her standard. Jasper Tudor, Earl of Pembroke, set out with his men from Wales; the Duke of Somerset and the Earl of Devon marched up from the south-west; in the north, the Earl of Northumberland with Lords Clifford and Roos set to work raising forces of their own. Finally on 9 December, York and Salisbury, together with their respective sons Edmund Earl of Rutland and Sir Thomas Nevill, led the Yorkist army against them. Near Worksop they were attacked by Somerset and lost a number of men; but the remainder reached York's own castle of Sandal, just outside Wakefield, on the 21st. There they spent Christmas, while the Lancastrians closed in; and from there on 30 December, realizing that the only alternative was a siege which he was ill-equipped to withstand, Richard of York led his men out to meet his enemies.
It was a disastrous decision: the Yorkists were heavily outnumbered. Richard himself was killed; his severed head - adorned, the Nevill chronicler reports, with a paper crown - was impaled on a pike and raised above the walls of York. Among the countless other casualties were his son, the seventeen-year-old Earl of Rutland - dispatched by Clifford in cold blood on the bridge at Wakefield-and Sir Thomas Nevill, whose father the Earl of Salisbury was captured, only to be executed at Pontefract on the following day. On receipt of the news Queen Margaret hurried south from Scotland, met her victorious captains at York and joined them in mid-January on their triumphal march to the capital - the rough northern soldiers wreaking, we are told, unspeakable havoc in the towns and villages through which they passed.
Reports of the battle of Wakefield soon reached Wales, where Richard's eldest son Edward, Earl of March, had been enjoying his first independent command. Now himself Duke of York, he at once set out with his locally engaged forces for London, but on hearing of the approach of Pembroke and the Earl of Wiltshire - who had recently landed in south Wales with an army of Frenchmen, Irishmen and Bretons - turned to intercept them and, in the first days of February 1461, defeated them soundly at Mortimer's Cross in Herefordshire. Pembroke's father, Owen Tudor - stepfather to the King, since he had married Queen Katherine after the death of Henry V — was executed at Hereford, in the market square; Pembroke himself, however, managed to escape, as did Wiltshire; and it was probably the knowledge that these two dangerous men were still at liberty that caused Edward to remain after all in the west.
The Yorkist army in the capital was thus in the hands of the Earl of Warwick, who had remained behind to supervise the government and keep a watchful eye on King Henry in the Tower. Setting out in mid-February with the King himself, the Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk, the Earl of Arundel and his own brother John Nevill, Marquis of Montagu, he marched his considerable force - it included a formidable contingent of hand-gunners sent by Philip of Burgundy — to St Albans, scene of his and York's victory nearly six years before. That victory, however, was not repeated. The details of the second Battle are as usual unclear, but much of the blame lay with Warwick himself. His reconnaissance, first of all, was hopelessly inadequate: Queen Margaret and her army arrived before he was ready for them, and by a different road. And his generalship, when the battle began, proved very little better. On being driven back from the market place by a hail of Yorkist arrows, the Lancastrians wheeled round to Barnet Heath a few miles to the north-east, where they came upon Warwick's vanguard — still in a state of hopeless disarray - and after a desperate struggle put them to flight. The remainder of the divided army, unsupported and outnumbered, took to its heels, as did its commander. King Henry, left alone, bewildered and frightened — here at least history seems to have repeated itself - was eventually picked up by his wife and son, who carried him off to the now familiar abbey.
After so humiliating a defeat, the Yorkists could not have prevented the King and Queen entering the capital, their jubilant army behind them. But Margaret had advanced no further than Barnet when she called her army to a halt. Why she did so we shall never know; perhaps she intended only a temporary delay while she negotiated with the city authorities. At all events the hesitation proved her undoing. Suddenly the people of London - among whom the stories of the northerners' barbarity, assiduously spread by Warwick, had lost nothing in the telling - rose up in violent opposition to the Lancastrians; Margaret, seriously alarmed, retreated to Dunstable. Young Edward of York, having made a rendezvous with Warwick at Burford in Oxfordshire, saw his chance: hurrying with his vast following of Welshmen to London, he entered the capital in triumph on 26 February and claimed the crown. Six days later on 3 March it was agreed by the Council, meeting at Baynard's Castle, that he was indeed the rightful ruler, Henry and Margaret having clearly acted in breach of the recent parliamentary settlement; and on the following day, seated on the royal throne in Westminster Hall and to the loud acclamation of all present, Edward declared himself King before moving across to the abbey to pray at the shrine of his namesake the Confessor. Finally, on 5 March, the royal proclamations were issued in his name: Edward IV, King of England.
Edward was King; but, significantly, he - or perhaps the bishops - had baulked at the idea of a formal coronation. The ceremony would surely have strengthened his hand; one is left with an uncomfortable feeling that he himself was not yet fully confident of his position. Besides, as he well knew, the war was by no means over. Queen Margaret, disappointed but undefeated, had withdrawn once again to her loyal fastness in the north, where she could still command the allegiance of well over half the country's nobility; there could be no peace in the land while she remained under arms, with Henry - ineffectual as he might be - at her side. After his proclamation Edward remained only ten more days in London before taking the road again, marching slowly northward via Cambridge to allow time for the hastily gathered contingents from East Anglia and the Midlands to rally to his standard. As he headed towards York the numbers of his army steadily increased; by the time he reached Pontefract he probably had as many as 50,000 men under his command.
But Margaret had also been raising forces. Her own army was every bit as formidable; and the Battle of Towton, which was fought in bitterly cold weather on Saturday and Palm Sunday, 28 and 29 March 1461, proved to be on a dramatically different scale from any previous engagement. The first day saw a furious encounter as the Yorkist troops attempted to cross the river Aire at Ferrybridge, between Pontefract and York. The Lancastrians resisted with all their strength but were finally obliged to fall back. Warwick was wounded by an arrow in the leg, while the icy water claimed many victims on both sides. Shivering with cold — many of them were also soaked to the skin - and with practically no food to sustain them, Edward's men spent an agonizing night in the open, their leaders wondering how long the army would manage to hold together in such nightmare conditions; but Margaret's soldiers too were suffering, and by morning both sides were eager to come to grips as soon as possible.
It was Edward who attacked first. The He of the land was against him, the Queen's army having occupied the highe
r ground on the road between Ferrybridge and Tadcaster. On the other hand the appalling weather was in his favour: it was blowing a blizzard but the wind was at his back, driving the snow straight into the eyes of Margaret's archers, slowing their arrows while speeding those of the Yorkists. The Lancastrians had no choice but to charge - perhaps 20,000 of them under Somerset, Lord Rivers and Sir Andrew Trollope, flinging themselves forward down the slope until it seemed that Edward's army must take flight or perish; yet somehow it stood its ground, and the next six hours saw one of the bloodiest and most ruthless battles ever fought on English soil. Edward himself remained in the thick of the fray, fighting on foot with immense courage, wielding in turn sword, axe and mace, encouraging and inspiring all those around him. Seeing his magnificent figure - he was six foot three inches tall, and his helmet probably added at least another six inches — Yorkists and Lancastrians alike could hardly fail to contrast him with the feeble, feckless Henry, cowering behind his wife in the rear.
Shakespeare's Kings Page 31