The Brothers York

by Thomas Penn

  The first impulse of the city’s mayor and aldermen was to bar the gates. But the mood of resistance was weakened by political divisions among the civic elites and eroded still further by the mood of ordinary Londoners, who had chuckled admiringly over Warwick’s anti-establishment exploits and were, by and large, belligerently pro-Yorkist. The pressure told. On 2 July, impressed by the size of the Yorkist lords’ support, and after receiving assurances of their loyalty to Henry VI, London’s authorities opened the gates. The Lancastrian garrison still occupying the Tower, the great royal fortress on the city’s eastern edge, was told to stay put – and to stay out of trouble.47 After raising loans from city businessmen, Warwick and Edward then led their forces out of London and rode north.

  Days later, advancing up the Great North Road in torrential summer rain, the Yorkists approached Northampton. They were confronted by a formidable sight. South of the town, the River Nene at their backs, dug in behind earthworks and ditches fortified by massive amounts of artillery, Henry’s army was waiting for them.

  Playing their spiritual trump card, Warwick and Edward dispatched a cluster of clergymen, headed by the pliable Coppini and Thomas Bourchier, archbishop of Canterbury, to talk with Henry VI. Their efforts fell on stony ground. The Lancastrian commander Humphrey Stafford, duke of Buckingham, a veteran of St Albans, sent a blunt message back to the Yorkist commanders. If they tried to approach the king, they would die.48

  In the early afternoon of 10 July, as the deluge continued, the Yorkist army advanced through meadows turning rapidly to mud. With the saturated Lancastrian artillery out of action, the commander of Henry’s vanguard, Lord Grey of Ruthin – to whom, before the battle, Warwick had given a nod and a wink regarding the security of his precariously held family estates under a future Yorkist administration – decided that, rather than preventing the Yorkists reaching the Lancastrian fortifications, he would be better off helping them over.

  It was all done in half an hour. As the Lancastrian lines collapsed, Warwick and Edward, shouting to their troops to spare the commons and kill the nobles, hunted down the Lancastrian commanders. Buckingham was slaughtered making a last stand outside the king’s tent. Inside it, the scene from St Albans was re-enacted: the Yorkist lords falling to their knees at the feet of their witless king, his agitation quickly turned to ‘great recomfort’ by their protestations of loyalty.49

  Back in London, the Lancastrian defenders in the Tower traded fire with the Yorkist besiegers. There was collateral damage, men, women and children injured and killed in the surrounding streets. When news arrived of the Yorkist victory at Northampton, the Lancastrians tried to escape. Their commander, Lord Scales, was murdered by the boatman who was supposedly rowing him across the Thames to safety, his naked corpse dumped in the Southwark churchyard of St Mary Overy. On 16 July, as the remaining defenders surrendered, Warwick and Edward re-entered London with Henry VI, a relieved city offering ‘great laud and thanking’ to God.

  With Henry securely installed at the bishop of London’s palace on the north side of St Paul’s, the Yorkist reprisals started. Members of the Tower garrison were tried by a panel headed by Warwick: seven, found guilty of treason, were hanged, drawn and quartered. The legality of Warwick’s actions, for which he had received no royal sanction, was highly dubious – after all, the Lancastrians had been fighting in the king’s name. But, as one commentator remarked meaningfully, ‘necessity knows no law’.50

  That summer, Lancastrians were removed from key positions in the king’s household and government, their property and assets seized. Yorkists were installed in their place. If the dispatches of dazzled European diplomats were to be believed, Warwick was at the heart of everything, his energy inexhaustible. Almost singlehandedly, one Milanese observer recounted, he had brought an end to war in England and, in control of government, was doing ‘marvellous things’ as he awaited York’s return from Ireland. Amid the superlatives, the Milanese reported another piece of speculation: ‘It is thought they will make a son of the duke of York king.’51

  Like most foreign envoys struggling to make sense of England’s fast-changing political landscape, the letter-writer was probably fed most of his information by Warwick. Not long before, Warwick had told the papal legate Coppini that it was his belief that by rights Richard of York should be on the throne.52 Yet if the Milanese was to be believed, the thinking now emanating from Warwick’s camp was that Henry VI should be replaced, not by York but by his son and heir Edward earl of March. It was perhaps an indication of the way Warwick and Edward had grown together in the past months of exile and battle; an indication, too, of the promise that the earl saw in his young protégé.

  Approaching his full adult height of six feet four inches, Edward was the physical antithesis of his short, dark father. His good looks were striking, wide cheekbones throwing into relief a roman nose and cupid’s-bow mouth. His demeanour was intensified by an effortless expansiveness, though something in his eyes – narrow, hard – offset all this beauty, almost as if he was perfectly conscious of the effect he created and how to use it.53 In Yorkist propaganda, Edward was the embodiment of England’s future, untainted by the years of destructive factional deadlock. Besides which, as one Yorkist poem on the recent battle of Northampton noted, Edward and Warwick seemed to understand each other instinctively. Warwick, in an allusion to the earl’s bear-and-ragged-staff badge, was the savage bear, Edward his ‘bearward’, the only man capable of controlling this fearsome instrument of his will. Edward, the poet remarked, had a disposition for ‘solace’, for enjoying himself: while he relaxed, Warwick did the dirty work. Or, looked at another way, the young bearward’s authority gave Warwick the freedom to act as he liked.

  The Yorkists now needed to make their seizure of power legitimate, and to repeal the damning acts of attainder passed against them the previous winter. Summoning parliament, Edward and Warwick settled down to wait for the return from Dublin of Richard of York – who was, after all, ‘the master of this game’.54

  Edward, meanwhile, took the opportunity to catch up with his three sisters and two younger brothers: George, now rising eleven, and Richard, almost eight years old. In his father’s absence Edward was the head of the family, and his attentiveness towards his younger siblings was noted: he ‘cometh every day to see them’. And, like all great noblemen – or noblemen who aspired to be thought of as great – he kept a magnificent household. Magnificence invariably involved an inexhaustible supply of alcohol: of the £39 9s 11d-worth of credit he ran up with one merchant on necessaries ‘for the use of our household’, £33 went on five tuns, 252-gallon barrels, of red wine.55

  On 9 September 1460, Richard of York came ashore on the heavily wooded Wirral peninsula. There, he joined forces with Sir William Stanley and made his way south, recruiting men as he went. On his return from Ireland a decade previously, he had made vocal protestations of loyalty to Henry VI. This time, such declarations were conspicuous by their absence. As men committed their service to York, the indentures they signed omitted the king’s regnal year; missing too was the customary, overriding, pledge of loyalty to the crown. Signatories were simply to ‘promise and bind themselves’ to Richard and his son and heir Edward earl of March.56 As York rode through the Welsh Marches, his retainers wearing his falcon-and-fetterlock badge, his sword carried before him and banners displaying the full royal arms of England, people turned out in force to acclaim him.

  A month later, on Friday 10 October, York rode into Westminster Palace Yard, accompanied by eight hundred armed men on horseback. His arrival announced by the blaring of trumpets, he strode through Westminster Hall and into the Painted Chamber, where Parliament was in session. Making for the king’s throne, empty under its cloth of estate, York laid a hand on it ‘like a man taking possession’ and stated flatly that he had come to ‘challenge his right’: to claim the crown of England. He was met, not with a ringing acclamation, but with a sea of faces frozen with shock.

  The first
to break the silence was Archbishop Thomas Bourchier, who asked mildly if York wanted to see the king. York’s retort was inflammatory: ‘I can think of nobody in the kingdom who should not come to see me, rather than I him.’57

  Only weeks before, as York journeyed south, Warwick had met him at Shrewsbury and the pair had reviewed the possible courses of action open to them. One, which they had discussed months before in Ireland, was the possibility of York laying claim to the throne. Whether they had argued about it, whether Warwick had advised against it and York had ignored him, or whether Warwick, assessing the mood in London, had got cold feet at the last minute, the reality was that York’s claim would never have worked. All the Yorkists’ carefully cultivated support had been achieved by portraying themselves as loyal reformers of Henry VI’s regime. Parliament was not prepared for anything else – and neither was it prepared to depose an anointed, crowned king of England. At a stroke, York’s precipitate claim had validated all the Lancastrian accusations of Yorkist treachery and ambition. That Friday morning, nobody seemed more horrified than Warwick himself.58

  As York sulked in the king’s apartments – kicking the doors in, he had turfed a bewildered Henry out – the lords, chief among them Warwick and Edward, reconvened around the curve of the Thames at Blackfriars in an atmosphere of studied avoidance. Not wanting to find against York’s claim, they passed the buck to the judges, the government’s senior legal advisers. Declaring the issue beyond their competence, the judges passed it back. A week later, as York threatened to proceed with his own coronation come what may, the lords reconvened at Westminster and proposed a radical compromise.59

  Henry VI would remain king for life. On his death, the crown would pass not to his young son and heir Edward of Lancaster, who was debarred from the succession, but to Richard of York and his sons. It was an astonishing settlement. Nevertheless, for not quite the last time, York had found himself blindsided. Given that, at forty-nine, he was a full decade older than the Lancastrian king, there was every chance he would die first. Not even York’s closest supporters, it seemed, wanted him as king. He reacted with savage petulance, riding torchlit through Westminster Palace as though he owned it, repeating insistently that the crown was his ‘by very right’. There was talk that he didn’t intend to wait for Henry to die of natural causes. But if even York’s closest allies had been unconvinced about the prospect of him as king, there were others who hated it.60

  North of the Trent, news of Richard of York’s ‘untrue pretensed claim’ was greeted with fury by Queen Margaret and her supporters, chief among them the powerful northern lord Henry Percy, earl of Northumberland. Since the summer, Percy’s men had been raiding the Yorkshire estates of York and the Nevilles, the earl’s bitter rivals; now, they went on the rampage, wrecking property, slaughtering and driving off livestock, killing anybody who resisted and leaving a trail of destruction in their wake. Meanwhile, Lancastrian forces were massing across the country, their mobilization co-ordinated ‘full privily’ by Margaret from her base in the port town of Hull. It was said that Margaret had raised fifteen thousand troops in a matter of weeks – figures so excessive that in London, anybody who mentioned them was accused of spreading Lancastrian propaganda.61 Nevertheless, the disorder in Yorkshire was real enough. Early that December, Richard of York, his second son Edmund earl of Rutland, and Warwick’s father the earl of Salisbury marched north to reassert control over their devastated estates.

  The weather late that autumn had been terrible. Harvests had failed; the roads were flooded and impassable. As York rode north, he found food and billeting harder to come by than usual; supply lines were difficult to maintain. Then, as his scouts rode into the Nottinghamshire town of Worksop, they were ambushed and killed. Unnervingly, the attackers wore the distinctive portcullis badge of the young Lancastrian nobleman Henry Beaufort, duke of Somerset, whom York had believed to be two hundred miles away in Dorset. Just before Christmas Richard finally arrived at his castle of Sandal, a couple of miles south of the market town of Wakefield. He did so to bad news. Somerset and Northumberland were at Pontefract Castle, barely ten miles east, and their army had already stripped the region bare of supplies.

  Probably it came as a relief to Richard when Somerset agreed a seasonal truce, which would hold until after Epiphany, the sixth day of January.62 But, that Christmas, York’s foraging parties were attacked by Somerset’s troops and the truce was broken. Acutely aware of the greater Lancastrian numbers, York’s commanders urged him to sit tight within the castle walls and wait for the arrival of Edward and his Marcher men, now believed to be on the move. Richard, itching for combat, ‘would not be counselled’.

  As he led his men out of Sandal Castle and down into the fields below, his miscalculation soon became clear. The Lancastrian army waiting for him, partly concealed in nearby woods, was vast. At its heart were the retinues of no fewer than nine lords, some of whom, armed with Richard’s royal commissions of array, had recruited forces in his name before defecting to Lancaster. With disciplined fury, Somerset allowed York to move onto the level terrain between Sandal and Wakefield until he was, as one report had it, ‘surrounded on every side, like fish in a net’.63

  Some two thousand Yorkists were slaughtered. York himself was hunted down and butchered; his son Edmund, trying desperately to flee the fighting, was ridden down at the bridge into Wakefield. Salisbury was captured and led back to Pontefract Castle, where a group of locals who ‘loved him not’ frogmarched the earl outside the castle walls, then hacked off his head: an extra-judicial score-settling on Somerset’s part, so one chronicler felt, masquerading as rough popular justice. Stuck on spiked poles, the heads of the dead Yorkists were paraded the thirty miles to the city of York. For Richard’s head, Somerset had added a special, malevolent touch: a paper crown.64

  Weeks later, on that brilliant, bitter day in the Welsh Marches, as Edward led his men into battle, he carried with him the devastating news from Wakefield, still raw. If it gave his fighting an added rage, so too did the knowledge that he had come into his inheritance. Head of the house of York, Edward was also heir to the throne of England.

  2

  The Rose Stands Alone

  In the early weeks of 1461, Londoners tried to digest the news of the massacre at Wakefield. There were reports of Margaret of Anjou’s Lancastrian army now marching inexorably south, and rumours of the threatening storm: an all-consuming ‘plague of locusts’, wrote one trembling chronicler; worse than Attila the Hun, surmised another, apprehensively.1 It was true, there had been some destruction. As they made their way through the east midlands, the Lancastrians had pillaged the Yorkist towns of Grantham and Stamford, though talk of a belt of devastation some thirty miles wide, and of the ransacking of churches and abbeys, seemed exaggerated.

  In London the earl of Warwick, pulling the strings of Henry VI’s puppet government, was expertly fanning the fears of southern England into a white heat. As sermons were preached at Paul’s Cross, the open-air pulpit in the cathedral’s churchyard, and ballads and verses circulated, the struggle between the two rival claims to the crown was coloured by another, more atavistic narrative. ‘All the lords of the north’, went one verse, ‘wrought by one assent/ To destroy the south country’. This vision of a divided country suited Warwick down to the ground: in Norfolk, one report stated, anxieties about northern robbing and pillaging were so intense that ‘every man’ was ‘well willing’ to follow the Yorkist lords.2

  Warwick strode through the chaos with reassuring authority – ‘like another Caesar’, noted one impressed Italian diplomat – mobilizing troops, securing more loans from a terrified London, and raising spiritual, financial and military support from the house of York’s international backers, among them the compliant papal legate Francesco Coppini and, in Flanders, Philip duke of Burgundy. ‘All will end well’, he told them breezily. But, as Warwick waited for news from Edward in the Welsh Marches, and as his messengers fanned out across England’s southern coun
ties with urgent orders for troops to mobilize and join him in ‘all possible haste’, he knew it wasn’t quite as straightforward as that.3

  In an emergency session of Parliament, Warwick and his advisers had tried to get a grip on the constantly shifting loyalties of England’s nobility. Attempting to map the results of their lobbying – the bargaining and appeals to loyalty that took place in quiet corridors or private rooms, the terse exchanges and delicate, evasive replies or, perhaps, a glance and barely perceptible incline of the head – somebody had scribbled down names on a scrap of paper, in two speculative lists. One was a core group of twenty-one nobles believed to be committed to the Yorkist cause; the other, sixteen names above which had been written the word ‘newtri’: neutrals. As the lists were worked over again, their author, his initial certainty clouding, covered them in jottings, crossings-out and duplications, switching names between columns as he tried to work out precisely whether certain nobles meant what they said. After all, as familiar allegiances and connections had been abraded by anxiety, wariness and opportunism, people had said one thing and done another, swapped sides on the battlefield, done nothing at all – or even, as in the case of the great north-western nobleman Thomas, Lord Stanley, whose name had been optimistically jotted down among the Yorkist lords, all of these things at once.4

  Then there was the question of precisely what these lords were supposed to be supporting. Ostensibly, the Yorkist cause remained that of a reformed government under the sovereign authority of Henry VI, and indeed, in these hastily drawn-up lists, the idea of an alternative Yorkist monarchy had been played down. While the list of neutrals had been clearly labelled, the list of Yorkists had been left untitled. What was more, the name of Edward – head of the house of York and now, by act of Parliament, heir to the crown – appeared not first in the list, but fifth; nor was he called by his new style of duke of York. While the error might have stemmed from long familiarity with his title of earl of March, it was odd, given how thoroughly the list had been gone over in other respects, that it hadn’t been corrected.5 Perhaps, in order to attract neutrals worried that in backing the Yorkists they might be betraying a reigning king, Warwick had decided to play down Edward’s claim. Or it simply showed quite how fast events were moving.