As the Earl of Salisbury started to advance south from Yorkshire, the royal army moved quickly forwards to Nottingham to deny him the castle and he was forced to march south-west to join York at Ludlow. The Queen’s army (many of them Cheshire levies, as last used as a royalist ‘private army’ by Richard II) intercepted Salisbury at Blore Heath on 23 September, but was routed; the royal army then pursued him to Ludlow.54 Henry was again paraded at the head of the royal army in the advance on York’s Marcher base –and proved a major psychological weapon as the court propagandists played up the treason of fighting against the King and his standard. York’s men had had no such scruples in 1455, but this time Andrew Trollope, commander of the Calais troops, declared that he had not known he was being brought along by Warwick to fight the King in person and deserted after the ‘showdown’ at Ludford (across the River Teme bridge from Ludlow). Apparently outnumbered, York and his older sons, Edward and Edmund, Salisbury, and Warwick (all of whom could face execution for treason) fled Ludlow overnight across the Teme bridge–with the royal commanders too incompetent to guard all the bridges and trap them. The crucial role in the confrontation, for the final time, was played by Henry in person.55 He was clearly unable or unwilling to assert himself as mediator again after the ‘Love-Day’–and thus became more of a partisan figure to the danger of his throne.
Henry’s role in 1459 was that of a talisman of his Queen and her allies, used to show that resistance to their army was treason. But was his incapacity sufficient to justify removing him as king? The first rumour of this eventuality after the 1450 crisis surprisingly emanated from the court camp pre-1459, with the Queen the alleged instigator–no doubt aiming to make herself regent for Prince Edward.56 It may have been a ‘security measure’ to counter-act any York-led seizure of her husband. The growing anarchy and private wars of powerful nobles showed up the King’s ineffectiveness, but this did not lead to widespread desertion. For the moment the Queen was able to assert her faction’s power after her military victory, and at the quickly summoned Parliament at Coventry, York, his elder two sons, Salisbury and his son Warwick, Salisbury’s wife (as heiress of the Earldom of Warwick), and their principal adherents were attainted and all their lands seized.57 Pardon was possible if the accused submitted, but the sweeping and legally dubious nature of the conviction aroused support for them and was as counter-productive as York’s killing of the court leadership at St Albans had been. Worse, the means used implied that Parliament could be used for legal pillaging of any court critic in future, an implicit threat to the entire social elite’s safe possession of their property. Such a sweeping ‘purge’ of ‘traitor’ nobles had only been seen before by the restored regime of Henry III in 1265 (later wisely modified) and by Richard II in 1397–9.
This politically unwise triumphalism therefore can be seen as a factor in the failure of the majority of the peerage or landed gentry to rally to the King and Queen as York’s heir, Edward, Earl of March, and Warwick led an expedition back from their refuge at Calais to Sandwich on 26 June 1460. A papal legate joined them, and so did Archbishop Bourchier–and Sandwich, pillaged by the Queen’s countrymen the previous year, was hardly likely to hold out on her behalf.58 The expedition entered London unopposed on 2 July, with only the Tower holding out, and marched on to encounter the King’s army near Northampton on 10 July. Crucially, the warlike Queen was not with her husband and heavy rain accompanied Warwick’s assault on the royal army, which crumpled in half an hour.59 From now on the King was a prisoner in the hands of York’s faction, and his removal from the throne with his supposed consent became one way to counter the control his wife and her party had over him. But support for his right to remain king was strong enough to make his threatened deposition in autumn 1460 by York’s clique unpopular with a majority of the lords–and the well-informed French observer Jean de Wauvrin believed that non-partisan peers had been reassured by Warwick’s group swearing not to depose him as they invaded.60 Had this oath tipped the balance against any serious rallying to the royal army in July 1460? The resistance to Henry’s deposition cannot be blamed on opportunist aristocrats fearful of the rule of a strong king who would halt abuses of power, as the ‘Yorkists’ could argue. In any case, to the fifteenth-century ‘mind-set’ the importance of keeping sacred oaths of allegiance outweighed such practical considerations as the King’s competence. At the time, the Queen and her army in the north were still a major factor, with their advance on London expected. The infant Prince of Wales was with them, so deposing Henry would not neutralize the Lancastrian dynasty. Ludlow had been sacked for assisting a ‘rebel’ after its fall to the royal army in autumn 1459–would it be London’s turn next if the King was deposed and his wife returned? Fear of the possible revenge to be expected on Lancastrian deserters by Queen Margaret meant that self-preservation should induce those nobles supporting her dynasty’s displacement to grant York, their champion, what he wanted and prevent their enemies securing a compliant King again. The scale of ‘courtier’ reprisals against the York faction in 1459 seems to have altered the balance of support by uncommitted nobles, though not to the extent of enthusiasm for Henry’s immediate deposition. York’s bold legal claim to depose Henry, made to the House of Lords on 16 October 1460, was promptly passed on to Henry himself as a weighty matter that only the King could decide; and as Henry refused to abdicate the question was passed to the senior judges who also equivocated and preferred to leave it to the decision of the ‘blood royal’. It was also pointed out that York claimed the throne now as direct heir of Edward III’s second son, Lionel, Duke of Clarence (senior to Henry VI’s ancestor John ‘of Gaunt’) but until this he had displayed the arms of, i.e. relied on the claim of, Edward’s fourth son Edmund, Duke of York.61 He was thus changing the rules of the game to suit his current position.
Eventually, the King agreed to a compromise put by Warwick’s brother Bishop George Neville–he would remain king until his voluntary abdication or death, but his son would be disinherited. This gave York the role of heir apparent and its estates (the Principality of Wales, Duchy of Cornwall, and Earldom of Chester) plus legal immunity from prosecution, as stripped from Prince Edward. Quite apart from the excuse of apparent rumours of the late Duke of Somerset being the boy’s real father, nobody had taken any oaths of allegiance to the Prince yet and disinheriting him removed the threat of Margaret seizing power if Henry died leaving an under-age successor. The initiative may have come from the papal legate Copponi, as Pope Pius later claimed credit for the idea–and the support of the Pope for its legality would persuade the cornered King to give in.62 If abdicating a position given him by God was a sin, the Pope could absolve him.
Despite his failure to gain the throne, York had secured the succession, legal immunity, and vast estates to reward his family and friends–always a major inducement for a medieval semi-royal magnate. He had also secured the support of many peers–although with the Queen’s party so vengeful they had little alternative to agreeing. The bloodthirsty Warwick had killed the Duke of Buckingham, Lord Beaumont, and other leading court peers in the clash at Northampton,63 clearly aiming to wipe out the opposition leadership as York had done in 1455 and thus inviting later reprisals. As of 1455–9 the perceived ‘aggressor’ in the inter-royal feuds had been seen as York, who had attacked the court’s army at St Albans in 1455, killed senior nobles of the rival faction in cold blood, and taken the King captive. In 1459 the Queen had been the moving spirit in the ‘coup’ that ended the uneasy political truce, leading the royal army on York’s headquarters at Ludlow and demanding his surrender. The Yorkist reply to their forced exile, as to the threat of arrest in 1455, had been unnecessarily violent and personal.
Who was responsible for the escalation of the crisis in 1459–60? It must be remembered that we can see events with hindsight and thus know that years of instability were to follow, but as of 1459 political actors’ attention was focused on York’s recent armed insurrections. The Queen’s army’s att
ack on Ludlow in 1459 was partly pre-emptive, to prevent York and Salisbury from another attack on the court as in 1452 and 1455. Technically, by levying war on the King they had committed treason and their lands could be forfeited as was done at the Coventry Parliament after their flight. Any action of armed defiance of the King and the royal army was taken as treason rather than self-defence, and so the Coventry Parliament had a legal excuse to deprive York and Salisbury of their vast landed estates so as to cripple their political-military power. But this was politically counter-productive, quite apart from the inevitable reaction to the planned enrichment of the victorious pro-court nobles (led by the Percies). As with the confiscation of Roger Mortimer’s lands in 1325 and Henry of Bolingbroke’s lands in 1399, this only led to invasion by the aggrieved party at the first opportunity. Luckily, York was able to defy the government and secure his ancestral lands and troops in Ireland, where he had been a popular governor in the late 1440s. The Dublin Parliament ignored all orders to remove him, and he could invade England (belatedly) in 1460. He also secured the major military force at Calais, from which his son Edward and cousin Warwick (captain of Calais) invaded the south-east in July 1460. The new court nominee to govern Calais, the late Duke of Somerset’s son and successor Duke Henry, was kept at bay and captured by Warwick, and the latter’s navy gained control of the Channel and a link to Ireland to co-ordinate the invasion. In June 1460 Warwick and York’s son Edward, Earl of March, landed at Sandwich to be joined by Archbishop Bourchier.
(iii) Deposition–1460–1
As seen by the new government and its allies in autumn 1460, it was essential to avoid the Queen’s party regaining the legitimacy automatically awarded by physical control of the King. From 1451–2 onwards she had become seen as an irreconcilable foe, starting with her building up armed support in the north Midlands in 1456 and then the dismissals of pro-York ministers. Margaret had driven York and his family into exile in 1459 in revenge for the ‘usurpation’ of power in 1455 and the killings of her allies at the battle of St Albans; what would she do if she regained power this time? Making York king (not just regent) as he requested was the only way to keep the vengeful Queen out of power permanently, but a significant number of nobles resisted this. By the time of the ‘Yorkist’ faction’s seizure of power that summer, Henry’s illness and an apparent unworldliness may have saved him from the fate of the equally politically ‘incompetent’ and resisted Edward II and Richard II. Luckily for him, his son was still at liberty to serve as a figurehead if York had murdered him. (As soon as the boy was killed, in May 1471, York’s son announced Henry’s allegedly fortuitous demise.) Apart from a sense of honour for a sick man apparently ‘touched by God’, on this occasion–unlike in 1327 and 1399–there was a powerful, unscrupulous, and masculine queen to blame for the King’s misdemeanours and grievances against the late regime could be deflected onto her. The legend of the ‘Tigress of Anjou’ was born, and was to be much enhanced by her party’s bloody revenge on York and his family in December 1460 and her pillaging northern army’s march on London thereafter. As with Richard II and III and Henry V, the popular conception of her was to be ‘fixed’ by Shakespeare–who had used somewhat ‘sensationalized’ sixteenth-century chronicles such as Hall’s history of York and Lancaster.64
The drama of York’s killing in December 1460 added to the notion of the political conflict over patronage and the succession as a ‘blood-feud’, with elements of treachery that the Yorkists could play up. Fighting during the Church’s Christmas festivities was unusual, and implicitly not chivalrous. York had gone to his south Yorkshire residence, Sandal Castle, to raise troops against the gathering court/Percy army based at nearby Pontefract, but had not taken the offensive; instead, the enemy advanced by surprise to blockade him and cut off his supplies. A sortie into Wakefield to gather supplies was then ambushed in dubious circumstances and the Yorkist leadership ‘targeted’ for killing. In fact, contrary to Shakespeare’s story, Margaret was not present at the battle or the executions, though she exulted in them afterwards; the surprise attack on York’s force–possibly at a time of truce–was led by the Dukes of Exeter (who had a distant claim to the throne himself) and Somerset, the Earl of Northumberland, and Lord Clifford. The last three, sons of the principal lords killed at St Albans in 1455, had old scores to settle. Nor was York’s 17-year-old son Edmund of Rutland a youthful non-combatant, whose killing was seen as unprecedentedly shocking;65 he was old enough to fight and be killed by contemporary reckoning. (Henry V had played a leading role at the battle of Shrewsbury in 1403 aged 16.) But the killings left York’s heir Edward at large in the Welsh Marches, where he had been raising troops, and the local court force under the Earl of Wiltshire and Jasper Tudor (Henry VI’s half-brother) was unable to complete the Queen’s victory by killing Edward. Instead, the latter took the offensive and destroyed the ‘Lancastrians’ at Mortimer’s Cross on 2 or 3 February before marching on London to link up with the Earl of Warwick.66 After the battle he executed the King’s stepfather, Owen Tudor, whose grandson Henry VII was to kill his brother Richard in 1485; the blood-feud escalated.
Henry’s eventual deposition by Edward (3 March 1461) was not carried out with the confirmation of most of the political ‘nation’ as had been the agreement of October 1460. There was no formal meeting of the Lords, though the unsettled state of the war-torn country and the need for speedy action after Edward’s arrival in London on 26 February made that impossible anyway. The only major magnates involved in the ‘Great Council’ at Baynard’s Castle, the York residence in the city, that backed Edward were Warwick and the (Mowbray) Duke of Norfolk; the churchmen were led by the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of Exeter. The latter, Warwick’s brother George Neville, was also Lord Chancellor, in which capacity he had set out Edward’s genealogical claim and the misrule by Henry to a public meeting at St George’s Fields on 1 March.67 The seizure of power was unrecognized in the northern counties occupied by the Queen’s forces.
The accession of Edward IV was at least partly due to recent actions by Queen Margaret. Following Wakefield, the Queen advanced into the Midlands with her feared northerners, as recorded by the panicking Croyland chronicler, and took the usually competent Warwick by surprise at St Albans on 17 February. This time Trollope’s Calais troops won the day for the Queen’s party; Abbot Wheathampstead reckoned that the soft southerners in Warwick’s army were terrified of the Percy/Scottish levies’ élan and bloodthirstiness.68 Henry himself, rescued from the Yorkists by the Queen’s faction at St Albans, passed from being a prisoner of Warwick to being a virtually powerless talisman of his wife’s army. As York’s son Edward destroyed the court army in the Marches at Mortimer’s Cross and advanced to join up with Warwick the Queen retreated, possibly nervous of the damage to her reputation if London was sacked. Negotiations at Barnet to admit a token force of court lords and troops were unsuccessful. A deputation of leading figures pleading for her to leave the city unoccupied may have played a part, but in any case London was less important than defeating Edward’s army.69 (In similar circumstances a decade later in March 1471, Edward took care to secure London even with his enemies rapidly closing in.) The responsibility for her failure to press on to London is unclear, but the decision lost her the south as she retreated to her strongholds in Yorkshire. Warwick, who had retreated to the Cotswolds, was left unmolested to join up with the advancing Edward’s Marcher army somewhere around Burford in mid-February and then regain London.
The removal of Henry VI–and his son–to the north in March 1461 left a legal vacuum in government in London. Edward could not carry out the government in Henry’s name (as his father had been forced to do after the Lords’ rejection of his own claim to immediate usurpation in October 1460) as he did not have physical possession of him. The decision of Edward and his backers, led by Warwick, to depose Henry in his absence in March 1461 was partly a reply to the recent killing of York, his second son the Earl of Rutland, and his brother-
in-law Salisbury (Warwick’s father) at or after the battle of Wakefield. Placing the victims’ heads on Micklegate Bar in York afterwards further embittered matters between the York-Neville faction and their enemies, though technically traitors’ heads were legally liable to public display (as seen at London Bridge for centuries.) If the killings and posthumous humiliations of December 1460 were the act of a psychopath, it was Clifford not Margaret, contrary to later legend. York had already started the practice of killing captured foes in cold blood at St Albans in 1455; this was merely the expected retaliation. Had he been captured at Ludlow in October 1459, judicial murder would have been probable. But the blood-feud between the York dynasty and the Beauforts intensified with these killings, and served to justify Edward deposing Henry once he had destroyed the Lancastrian army in the Welsh Marches at Mortimer’s Cross (February 1461) and raced to London ahead of the Queen’s forces. Technically, the court party’s breach of the truce at Wakefield could be presented as a reason for Edward to abandon his allegiance to his ‘faithless’ King and Queen; the settlement of October 1460 had involved York paying allegiance to Henry but Edward had not done so.
The War of the Roses Page 5