It was at this point that fortune played straight into Edward’s hands. Before the battle had begun, he had spotted to the right-hand side of the field a wooded park. Thinking that it might give the Lancastrians the opportunity to spring an ambush, Edward sent a detachment of 200 spears (men-at-arms carrying lances) on horseback into the woods, where he ordered them to hide in formation, a quarter of a mile from the field, ‘giving them charge to have good eye upon that corner of the wood, in case that any need were, and to put them in devoir, and, if they saw none such as they thought most behoveful for time and space, to employ themselves in the best wise as they could’.92 When the spears found no evidence of an ambush in the woods, they had hidden themselves, waiting for the best moment to appear. Now they rushed headlong into battle, charging at Somerset’s vanguard from the side. Turning to see the spears charging at them, Somerset’s men were astonished. Already struggling against the king’s forces, they were, one chronicler observed, ‘greatly dismayed and abashed, and so took them to flight into the park, and into the meadow that was near, and into lanes, and dykes, where they best hoped to escape the danger’.93 The very means by which the Lancastrians had hoped to entrap their Yorkist opponents now proved to be their own prison. Unable to escape, pinned in by the narrow lanes and dykes, ‘many were distressed, taken, and slain’.
Soon Somerset’s forces realised they were becoming overwhelmed. When Somerset recognised that his troops were ‘overlaid with the multitude of his enemies’, he ordered his men to draw back to their standards, ‘that being close together, they might more easily resist’. His soldiers’ courage was ‘somewhat refreshed’ and they began to fight more fiercely than before. Yet without any fresh soldiers to replace the rising number of wounded and dead, it was a losing battle. They were ‘overmatched of the multitude, and in the end vanquished’. Soon the Lancastrians were in full flight: as they fled towards the town, many were hacked down, including the earl of Devon, Somerset’s brother, John Beaufort, and John, Lord Wenlock, earning the fields near the abbey the sobriquet of the ‘bloody furlong’ within thirty years of the battle.94 For now, a fortunate few, including Somerset himself, managed to make it inside the doors of Tewkesbury Abbey, hoping to find sanctuary behind its holy walls. The great hope of the Lancastrian dynasty, the young Edward, Prince of Wales, was not so fortunate.
The official version of events, the Arrivall of Edward IV, states merely that ‘in the winning of the field such as abode hand-strokes were slain incontinent; Edward, called Prince, was taken, fleeing to the town wards, and slain, in the field’.95 Yet rumours of the young prince’s cold-blooded and brutal dispatch in the aftermath of the battle would continue to circulate. Warkworth believed that Prince Edward had been slain in the field, only after he had ‘cried for succour to his brother-in-law the Duke of Clarence’.96 The Crowland chronicler stated that ‘upon this occasion, there were slain on the Queen’s side, either on the field or after the battle, by the avenging hands of certain persons, Prince Edward’.97 Twenty-five years later, the Great Chronicle described how the Yorkist forces had captured both Queen Margaret and Prince Edward alive. The prince was brought into Edward’s presence, where ‘the king had questioned a few words of the cause of his so landing within his realm’. When the prince ‘gave unto the king an answer contrary [to] his pleasure’, the Chronicle reported that ‘the King smote him on the face with the back of his gauntlet, after which stroke so by him received, the king’s servants rid him out of life forthwith’.98 The Tudor historian Polydore Vergil elaborated the story further, describing how when brought to the king, who demanded to know how ‘he durst be so bold as to enter and make war in his realm’, the prince insouciantly replied, ‘that he came to recover his ancient inheritance’. Edward fell silent, ‘only thrusting the young man from him with his hand, whom forthwith, those that were present were George duke of Clarence, Richard duke of Gloucester, and William lord Hastings, cruelly murdered’.99
The further the sources are removed from the event itself, the wilder the accusations of murder and foul play surrounding Prince Edward’s death become. According to the Tudor chronicler Edward Hall, Prince Edward was himself hauled before Edward IV, having been captured by Sir Richard Croft, the king’s tutor, who was knighted at Tewkesbury. When the prince replied discourteously to the king, Edward struck him across the face with his gauntlet before the young man was murdered in the king’s presence by Clarence, Gloucester, Thomas Grey, marquess of Dorset, and William, Lord Hastings.100 Much contained within these later tales can be dismissed as interpolation, especially as every contemporary source, including a letter from Clarence on 6 May, noted how the prince and other Lancastrians ‘were slain in plain battle’.101 One illuminated French manuscript, however, circulating shortly after the battle and certainly within a year of the event, suggests that there may be more than a grain of truth to the later accusations. The scene depicted shows that the battle has finished; King Edward with three other men in armour is standing at the head of a company of knights on horseback. The king’s arm is raised, about to strike at a man standing before him. The man is held captive by two others. As to the identity of the prisoner, the illuminator had made this clear by the royal coat of arms hanging on the shield. There is no hint of the identity of the prince’s captors, while his fate is held in the suspense of the frozen image of the illumination. But it is clear that, from the image alone, the prince’s fate was already sealed.102
Prince Edward’s death was not the only controversy that Edward and the Yorkists would later face. After the battle, Edward went to the abbey, where, according to the official Yorkist account, he planned to ‘give unto Almighty God laud and thanks for the victory, that, of his mercy, he had that day granted and given him; where he was received with procession, and so conveyed through the church, and the choir, to the high altar, with great devotion praising God, and yielding unto him convenient laud’. The account continues by saying that Edward, as a merciful king, gave to his enemies on the field ‘all his free pardon’, adding somewhat cautiously that this had ‘not at any time been granted, any franchise to that place for any offenders against their prince having recourse thither’; if Edward so wished, it would have ‘been lawful to the King to have commanded them to have been drawn out of the church, and had done them to be executed as his traitors, if so had been his pleasure’.103
The reality suggested in other contemporary accounts of what happened in the aftermath of the battle is somewhat different. Edward and his men forcibly entered the abbey, determined to chase Somerset and his men out of their sanctuary. As Edward ‘came with his sword into the church’, the king was only stopped in his tracks by a priest carrying the sacrament ‘in his hands’, who ‘required him by the virtue of the sacrament that he should pardon all those’ who had sought sanctuary in the church, including the earl of Somserset and a dozen other knights. Edward eventually agreed, and ‘upon trust of the King’s pardon given’ the men were left alone in the abbey.104
Further evidence of affray or violence breaking out in the abbey itself can be found in the Chronicle of Tewkesbury Abbey, which describes how Edward and his men entered the abbey wielding arms; before the fighting could be broken up, several Lancastrians were attacked and killed, forcing the abbey to be reconsecrated on 30 May by the bishop of Worcester; a nearby church at Didbrook was also reconsecrated by the bishop the following year, after it too had been ‘notoriously polluted by violence and shedding of blood’.105
If Edward agreed to issue a royal pardon to all those who had fled into the church, he soon changed his mind. Two days later, on Monday, 6 May, the remaining Lancastrians in the abbey were dragged out as captives, where they were brought to trial before Richard as Constable of England and the duke of Norfolk as marshal. Accused of having ‘provoked the great rebellion that so long had endured in the land against the King, and contrary to the weal of the realm’, they were judged guilty: as diehard Lancastrians, the men had already shown themselves irrecon
cilable to the Yorkist dynasty, having been pardoned by the king before, only to rebel once more. The sentence of execution was carried out instantly, ‘in the midst of the town, upon a scaffold therefore made’, upon which Somerset and his companions were ‘beheaded, each one, and without any other dismembering, or setting up, licensed to be buried’.106 This time, Edward would not give his enemies any opportunity to avenge their defeat.
In the capital, there was still further resistance to overcome, in the form of an armed raid mounted upon London by the Bastard of Fauconberg, one of Warwick’s cousins, who had arrived in Kent from Calais. Managing to persuade hundreds of Kentishmen to march with him, incited by the prospect of plundering wealthy Londoners, the rabble arrived outside the city armed with ‘heavy and great clubs and long pitchforks and ashen staves’.107 Fauconberg had also moored his Calais fleet at Southwark, where the ships’ cannons opened fire on the Tower. The following day, he attacked London Bridge, yet the retinues of Earl Rivers were able to mount a counter-attack, driving the rebels to Stepney, where many of Fauconberg’s followers were slaughtered. Still unwilling to surrender, Fauconberg withdrew to Blackheath, where he received news that the king was hastening back to London with a large army. As his own forces began to disperse in panic, Fauconberg had no other option but to withdraw, taking a ship to Sandwich, where he waited in the hope of being pardoned.
Edward and his forces arrived in the capital on 21 May in triumph. His victory was complete. The following morning, news began to leak out that Henry VI had died in the Tower the previous night. On 22 May, Henry’s body was brought from the Tower to St Paul’s Cathedral in a procession. As the procession made its way through the city, past Cheapside, one city chronicle noted how there were ‘about the bier more glaives and staves than torches’; ‘the corpse of King Henry VI was brought through Cornhill from the Tower with a great company of men of that place bearing weapons as if they would have led him to some place of execution’.108
Ten years after he had first won the throne, Edward had been forced to demonstrate the same determination and zeal to win back his kingdom. His victory was all the sweeter for the fact that the Lancastrian dynasty had finally been destroyed and lay in tatters, without an heir. Not only were Henry VI and his son, Edward, dead, and Margaret of Anjou a broken woman, but he had faced down the man who had made him king, and won. For the first time, Edward was his own man.
3
‘NOT ALTOGETHER BROTHERLY EYES’
The events of 1468 to 1471 had seen a major realignment in the royal brothers’ fortunes: while Clarence had plotted his elder brother’s downfall, Richard had distinguished himself as a loyal servant to the crown. Clarence also had to face a new uncomfortable truth: that he was no longer the next in line to the throne. Returning to the capital, Edward had been reunited with Queen Elizabeth in Westminster Abbey’s sanctuary. There he had held his newborn son, the prince and heir to his throne, in his arms. After four daughters, the sight of his first male child came ‘to his heart’s singular comfort and gladness, and to all them that him truly loved’, and the child was quickly named Edward, after his father: ‘the sight of his baby released part of his woe’, Edward’s sister Margaret later observed.1
Richard’s guardian through childhood, the earl of Warwick, had been ruthless in destroying his political rivals, and had demonstrated the power of his vast northern estates that brought with them a northern affinity of men, nothing less than a private army, with which he had come close to overturning the Yorkist succession. Richard had learnt first hand how the threat of military power and violence could beat a path to success. He had witnessed, both in his time spent at Middleham or Sheriff Hutton in Warwick’s household and during the enthronement banquet of Archbishop George Neville in September 1465, the allure of the Neville authority. Now, with the deaths of both Warwick and his brother the marquess of Montagu, the Neville ascendancy in the north had been irretrievably broken.
Richard’s bravery on the field had been singled out for praise in a poem written to celebrate the return of the Yorkist army to London following the battle:
The duke of Gloucester, that noble prince
Young of age, and victorious in battle
To the honour of Hector that he might comens
Grace him followeth, fortune and good speed
I suppose he is the same that clerkis of red
Fortune hath him chosen, and forth with him will go
Her husband to be, the will of God is so.2
Edward, recognising Richard’s service and devoted loyalty to his campaign to reclaim the throne, accepted that his younger brother would need to be fully rewarded. It seemed that Edward was willing to consider Richard’s desire to step into Warwick’s shoes. On 18 May, Richard was appointed Great Chamberlain, ‘in the same manner as Richard, late Earl of Warwick, receiving such fees as the said Earl had at the receipt of the Exchequer, with all other profits’, while on 29 June Richard was granted Warwick’s former lordships of Middleham, Sheriff Hutton and Penrith.3
During the summer, Richard was tasked with mopping up any remaining vestiges of rebellion. The same day that Henry’s body was carried from the Tower, Edward sent Richard to Kent, leading the vanguard of the king’s army to apprehend Fauconberg at Sandwich. Negotiations seem to have already opened, and after some deliberation Edward chose to grant Fauconberg his pardon. It was left to his brother to travel to the Kentish coast in his role as Admiral, while Edward himself had by now reached Canterbury. Four days later, a warrant was issued under the king’s privy seal for safe conduct to be granted to Fauconberg to travel to the north, where he was to journey in attendance upon Richard as warden of Carlisle and the West March.4
Suddenly, however, something went very wrong. The Vitellius Chronicle records how, by the end of the year, Fauconberg ‘was taken at Southampton and beheaded; and his head sent to London, and set upon the bridge’.5 Polydore Vergil, writing later, also described the events after Fauconberg’s surrender: ‘sometime afterwards, having incautiously gone to the port of Southampton, he was captured and forfeited his head’.6 On 28 September, the news was confirmed, as Sir John Paston noted coolly in his memoranda: ‘Item, Thomas Fauconberg his head was yesterday set upon London Bridge, looking into Kent ward.’7
What had occurred during a matter of weeks that could cause such a rapid change in fortune? Jean de Waurin, writing before 1474, wrote that Fauconberg had been sent with Richard ‘for his good surety’ to ‘a place called Merlan’ (probably Middleham Castle).8 The purpose of Richard’s journey northwards was to restore Edward’s authority in the north: as a Neville restored to the king’s favour, by his presence Fauconberg would have been a valuable means to achieve this. According to Waurin, Fauconberg ‘came and went with Gloucester’s other servants without being constrained or harmed’, suggesting that he was not in custody, but rather the terms of the safe conduct were being observed. But by late summer Fauconberg had returned to the south coast, where he had taken to the sea. Here he was arrested ‘for a new offence’; Waurin believed that he had taken to his ship ‘to harm King Edward again’. Waurin maintained that his offence had been ‘discovered’ by Richard, who ordered his execution.9 Sir John Paston was uncertain as to whether Fauconberg deserved his fate: ‘some men say he would have deserved it, and some say nay’.
According to Warkworth’s chronicle, it was ‘by the Duke of Gloucester in Yorkshire, the said Bastard was beheaded’.10 Fauconberg’s death was not Richard’s own private enterprise; in his role as Constable, overseeing cases of treason, he was obeying Edward’s wishes. It was a role he took very seriously indeed. On 4 July 1471, Richard issued a letter to the bishop of Bath and Wells ordering that Thomas Dagsell, Thomas Bylsby and John Blamehall, having been found guilty of treason, were to be arraigned by the sheriff and brought to London, ‘to the town of Southwark to be dragged and after hanged’.11
Regardless of Richard’s role in the execution, Fauconberg’s death must have been ordered by t
he king; it was Edward’s own royal warrant which ordered that thirty shillings be paid to one Henry Cappe ‘in payment for his expenses in carrying the head of Bastard Fauconberg’. The head was taken to London Bridge, where it was ‘pitched upon a stake or pole where it stood long after’.12
Richard should have been pleased with his grants from the king. His new wealth and the ties of service and loyalty that stemmed from possession of Warwick’s Neville lands in the north, together with the duchy of Lancaster and wardenship of the West March appointments, ensured that the duke’s future would be a promising one. Yet looking around, Richard still had cause to feel embittered. Not only did his new livelihood hang on the thread of a royal grant, with all the risks that it might one day be rescinded; it seemed that his loyalty and devotion had counted for little, especially when compared to Edward’s generosity to his brother, George, duke of Clarence, whose past treachery had been the cause of so much strife. Since Clarence’s reconciliation, as a reward for his defection, he had been immediately granted all the Warwick inheritance that his wife Isabel had been entitled to inherit, while Clarence was also restored to his former estates. It was, given Clarence’s past behaviour, an act of remarkable generosity, ensuring that the duke enjoyed a landed income of around £7,000. Edward himself would later claim that he ‘gave him so large portion of possessions, that no memory is of, or seldom hath been, that any King of England heretofore within his realm gave so largely to any of his brothers’.13
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