by Thomas Penn
This assessment of noble hearts and minds revealed something else. Despite the list of presumed neutrals, it was clear that the allegiances of England’s lords were polarizing. Conspicuous by their absence were the names of eighteen irreconcilable Lancastrian lords, most of whom were now marching rapidly towards London with Margaret of Anjou. England’s political classes were headed for an overwhelming showdown. As Warwick put it to an English envoy to Rome, unless some sort of papal-brokered intervention could happen quickly – in favour of the Yorkist cause, naturally – England would tear itself apart. The violence, Warwick intimated, would be terrible, worse than anything for a thousand years.6
On 12 February, Warwick and his forces rode out of London to confront Margaret’s northmen. Receiving reports that the Lancastrians had diverted west, he moved slowly, barely more than a few miles a day. The last thing he needed was to be bypassed and to leave the city, with its reservoir of cash and supplies, exposed. On the 16th, four days into this game of cat-and-mouse, he halted at the Hertfordshire town of St Albans.
Warwick had every reason to be confident. Six years previously, in the same place, he had routed the Lancastrian army. His forces this time were several thousand strong, bolstered by the retinues of several Yorkist lords; they also included a detachment of crack Burgundian hand-gunners sent by Philip of Burgundy. He also had with him Henry VI, whose presence in his ranks gave him royal legitimacy. In fighting Warwick, Margaret’s troops would be bearing arms against their king, the very definition of treason.
Hearing that the Lancastrians were some nine miles away to the north, Warwick redeployed his forces in the customary three ‘battles’ or divisions in open ground, strung out along the Wheathampstead road down which he expected them to appear. His rear division, bristling with firepower, was dug in along the great Iron Age earthwork of Beech Bottom just to the north of the town. He was prepared. But as Shrove Tuesday dawned, as one observer put it, ‘all thing was sick and out of order’.7
Warwick’s intelligence had been terrible. His network of scouts had all failed to report back – except one, who had brought bad information. The previous day, the Lancastrians had surprised and massacred a Yorkist outpost of two hundred men in nearby Dunstable. Led by Somerset, fresh from his savage triumph at Wakefield, they then turned Warwick’s outflanking manoeuvre, so decisive six years before, back on himself. Somerset made his way round the outskirts of St Albans, headed at speed across the open heathland and attacked the entrenched Yorkist ordnance, which was expecting an attack from the other direction.
Assaulted ‘before they could level their guns’, Warwick’s new recruits from the Low Countries proved useless: as they tried desperately to deploy a mortar firing explosive shells, it erupted in their faces, the ‘fire turned back upon them’. Even so, the Yorkist rearguard – now, effectively, the vanguard – fought until the short winter day began to wane. In the fading light, as its remnants were pursued through the countryside, the rest of the Yorkist army, which had remained detached from the fighting, began to slip away. In the mayhem Warwick, along with the other Yorkist generals, escaped and went to ground. Although Yorkist sources – probably emanating from Warwick himself – later blamed the defeat on a deserting detachment of Kentishmen, it looked rather more like a comprehensive failure of leadership and organization.8
This time, it was the victorious Lancastrians who found Henry VI. The king had been left behind by the fleeing Yorkists, as useless as he had been during the first battle of St Albans, but in a rather better mood. He was discovered sitting under an oak tree, where, as the fighting progressed, he had passed the time laughing and singing to himself. That evening, he was reunited with his queen and son, now seven years old. After the boy’s status as heir to the house of Lancaster was ceremonially reaffirmed by his chancellor, John Morton, the little prince sat in his capacity as Constable of England, passing sentence ‘his own self’ on Yorkist prisoners, looking on as they were executed.9
The next day, Ash Wednesday, London awoke hungover after the carnival of Shrovetide. Citizens trooped to church, where priests marked their foreheads with dabs of wet ash murmuring ‘pulvis es et in pulverem reverteris’: ‘thou art dust and to dust thou shalt return’. Sometime that same morning, riders galloped into the city and, reining in their sweating horses, announced the news that twenty-five miles away at St Albans, the Yorkist army had been destroyed and Warwick had disappeared.
The city was shocked. Over the past weeks and months Warwick had talked an excellent game, and London had backed his leadership. Suddenly, it lay at Margaret of Anjou’s mercy. If the rumours were to be believed, she lacked the cash to pay her troops and, to compensate, had promised them they could instead ransack the city. As the reality of the situation sank in, the hangovers deepened. ‘Ash Wednesday’, wrote one Londoner, was a day on which ‘we lived in much dread’.10
The city gates were locked and barred; guards patrolled the walls. Shops were shuttered. Few ventured outside their neighbourhoods. Groups of civic militiamen passed watchfully through the deserted streets. London’s oligarchs, rarely in accord, were all agreed on one thing: a Lancastrian sacking had to be avoided at all costs.
They also thought that Margaret would be open to talks. Far from home, her supply lines were overextended and her apparently solid bastions of support no longer so reliable: the city of Coventry, its loyalties split, had refused Margaret aid on her way south, angering her so much that she had reportedly given her soldiers licence to ‘spoil and rob’ it on their way back through the midlands. Furious as she may have been at London’s support of the Yorkists, Margaret badly needed the capital’s goodwill, supplies and finances. Ordering her army to sit tight, she assured the city that rumours about her army’s viciousness were ‘untrue and feigned’, guaranteeing that ‘none of you shall be robbed, despoiled or wronged’. Perhaps, London’s leading citizens felt, they could negotiate the Lancastrians’ peaceful entrance – and, in doing so, play for time. Nobody knew for sure where Edward was but, people heard, he was in the Cotswolds, a few days’ march away. The corporation acted fast.11
An official deputation left for St Albans. Along with the various ‘clerks and curates’ sent to plead the city’s cause were three high-born noblewomen with exceptional Lancastrian credentials: the widows of the duke of Buckingham and Lord Scales, who had both been slaughtered the previous summer; and, the senior of the three, Jacquetta of St Pol, wife to the Lancastrian nobleman Richard Woodville, Lord Rivers. Elegant, aristocratic, from one of northern France’s most ancient noble families, Jacquetta had been close to Margaret since the queen’s arrival in England fifteen years before.12 The noblewomen proved convincing, returning with Lancastrian assurances that the army would keep its distance; in return, London was to send food and cash to the Lancastrian troops. Margaret also handed the deputation a list of wanted Yorkist associates, demanding that the city authorities admit a detachment of four hundred soldiers to hunt them down. The city’s oligarchs agreed to everything and – anticipating the response of ordinary Londoners – who had absorbed Warwick’s dire warnings of the northerners’ ferocity, proclaimed a general curfew.
Within an hour of the proclamation, the city was in uproar. Carlo Gigli, a Lucchese businessman who had settled in London, via Bruges, had seen a fair amount of rioting in his adoptive home over the years but, as he put it, ‘I was never more afraid’. Some panicked citizens daubed Somerset’s portcullis badge on their front doors in the hope of warding off his troops’ attentions; others seized weapons and, appointing captains, prepared to resist the Lancastrian advance force.13 At the port of London, hastily laden ships cast off and headed down the Thames towards the open sea, carrying Yorkist adherents for whom staying behind meant certain punishment.
On board one Antwerp-bound vessel were a number of men on Margaret’s wanted list, together with their treasure and moveable goods. Among them were high-profile London merchants such as the notorious, rich and unpopular draper Philip M
alpas, who clearly didn’t fancy his chances of explaining himself to the Lancastrian queen, though he had in fact financed both sides. He had already had his property looted once, by Jack Cade’s rebels a decade before, and was keen to avoid a repeat. On board the same ship were Thomas Vaughan, an administrator and ordnance specialist, as comfortable handling gunpowder as he was a high-level diplomatic mission, and a physician named William Hatteclyffe. After years at Cambridge and Padua, Europe’s finest medical university, Hatteclyffe had helped nurse Henry VI through his first bout of catatonia; Margaret, who clearly rated his skills and discreet urbanity, had appointed him her doctor. Both Vaughan and Hatteclyffe had been the queen’s trusted, confidential servants – until their defection to the house of York, when they were embraced with equal wholeheartedness by Richard of York and his wife, now widow, Cecily. It was probably Cecily who, in the face of Margaret of Anjou’s wrath, advised the pair to flee, entrusting them with the family gold that they now attempted to carry to safety.14 Another ship carried Cecily’s two younger sons, Edward’s brothers George and Richard.
As she came to terms with the loss of her husband and second son, Cecily had remained resolute in fighting the Yorkist corner. Even in adversity Cecily, who had been known to spend a baron’s yearly income in a single shopping spree, maintained a magnificent household in the family’s London home of Baynard’s Castle, whose turreted bulk, arranged round two great courtyards, rose sheer from the Thames on the city’s western edge. She also knew Margaret well. The two women had once been close, their friendship persisting deep into the faction-ridden 1450s. Cecily’s support of Margaret’s difficult pregnancy had been empathic, since by that point Cecily herself had borne twelve children, losing five. It was also shrewd, providing a crucial back-channel of influence as her husband became increasingly sidelined.15 But those days were long past and Margaret had since proved uncompromising. There was, Cecily clearly felt, no way that their friendship could be revived in the current frenzy of bloodletting.
Cecily’s instincts were sound. Her sons’ very existence was an obstacle to the dynastic pretensions of the house of Lancaster. Thanks to the parliamentary legislation of the previous autumn, both the eleven-year-old George, and Richard, three years his junior, were now prominent in the line of succession: indeed, should anything happen to their oldest brother Edward, George would be next in line to inherit the throne. After the disaster at Wakefield, Cecily had sent the boys into hiding to keep them out of ‘danger and peril’, in the unobtrusive household of a London widow named Alice Martyn. Now, even that had become unsafe. As London prepared to admit the Lancastrian troops, Cecily bundled her boys on board a ship that took them across the North Sea to the Low Countries and the court of Philip of Burgundy, who was happy enough to take them into his protection. Amid the panic Cecily herself stayed in the city, unswerving. Her overwhelming priority was to hold things together for her eldest son, Edward.16
On Sunday, 22 February, the promised cartloads of provisions rumbled through London’s streets for delivery to the waiting Lancastrians. But at Cripplegate, in the north of the city, the carts were stopped by armed citizens who barred the gates and distributed the food among themselves; the money destined for the soldiers’ wages also disappeared. When a Lancastrian advance guard tried to enter London from the east, through Aldgate, it was ambushed by city militiamen, who killed and wounded several troops; the rest fled. Around the same time, news spread through the streets, a rumour that gave an edge to the city’s resistance, and which forced Margaret’s weary, hungry army to give up the idea of entering London and to start the long retreat north. Edward was coming.17
After his victory at Mortimer’s Cross, Edward had regrouped in the Marches, recruiting fresh men, resupplying and rearming before marching across England. On 19 February, as news reached him of Warwick’s defeat at St Albans, he set off east through the Cotswolds; three days later, the two men met at Warwick’s town of Burford, in the rolling Oxfordshire hills.
Since the cousins had last seen each other, over three months previously, much had changed, and mostly for the worse. Despite his recent victory, Edward was jumpy: still swinging between a state of adrenalin-fuelled exhilaration and an acute sense of vulnerability and uncertainty. If Mortimer’s Cross had electrified him with a sense of his manifest royal destiny, the fact was that the house of York had endured two swift and catastrophic defeats, at Wakefield and now St Albans, and two shattering family losses: his father and his brother Edmund. Given the deafening silence that had greeted his father’s own attempt the previous autumn, the question was: could Edward convincingly claim the throne?
Warwick, as ever, had a plan. As he explained with his customary coolness, there had been nothing disastrous about his own fiasco at St Albans. Indeed, it had clarified matters wonderfully. There was, he suggested, no longer any need for the Yorkists’ carefully modulated expressions of loyalty and devotion to Henry VI, because at St Albans Henry – who, in Warwick’s mind, was morphing from an imbecile in need of Yorkist guidance to a double-dealing king with his own malign agency – had deserted them; in doing so, he had broken the binding parliamentary oath that he had made to the house of York the previous autumn. And, having broken his own oath, Henry had released Edward from his. The way was now clear for Edward to claim the crown of England – a crown that was his and his family’s ‘by right’. Besides which, the people loved him.18
Warwick had a clear idea of what made his younger cousin tick. In resolving the confused shades of grey into distinct black and white, the scenario he now unfolded was of a struggle that the extrovert Edward could fully understand: a war of good against evil for the highest of stakes, with Edward, England’s redeeming hero, at its centre. Just like the prophecies had said.
Edward was instantly energized. He wanted to be in the right; and he wanted to be adored. There was also, presumably, some satisfaction in the fact that Warwick was unequivocally prepared to back his claim to the throne, in a way that he had never backed that of Edward’s father.
The reality was that with Henry VI no longer in their grasp, this was more or less the only move that the Yorkists, their government deprived of the legitimacy conferred by their control of the king, could now make. Warwick was also reasserting his own credibility. London had been distinctly underwhelmed by his generalship at St Albans, but if he returned to liberate the city alongside a new, young and victorious heir to the throne, the story of his earlier inability to defend it from Margaret’s armies would look rather different. For his part, Edward didn’t let his own chivalric fantasies cloud the practicalities of the situation. As he told his cousin, he ‘had no money’. Most of his troops had come at their own cost – and a kingdom, as both men knew all too well, could hardly run on loyalty alone.
On Thursday, 26 February, almost a week after the curfew had been imposed, crowds crammed into London’s streets to welcome Edward, Warwick and their army into the city. It was a reception marked by stunned and disbelieving joy – not least because, as one chronicler put it, the Lancastrians could have taken London at any time they wanted in the preceding days. Yorkist supporters had been hard at work whipping up enthusiasm for the young pretender, a king in whose person England would be both saved and renewed. ‘Let us walk in a new vineyard’, went one saying, ‘and let us make a gay garden in the month of March with this fair white rose and herb, the earl of March.’19
Still, notwithstanding Warwick’s assurances and the Yorkists’ insistence that they were the true champions of the commons and the unifiers of the nobility, Edward’s claim to the throne was flimsy. Whatever his personal inadequacies, Henry VI was God’s anointed; Edward was merely a young nobleman, albeit an impressive one. Neither did he appear to have much in the way of noble backing. As one onlooker remarked, watching Edward’s troops marching into London, there were ‘few of note’ among his commanders. If Edward were to make good on his claim to be England’s rightful king, it was a transformation that would have to happe
n convincingly and – with Margaret’s armies already regrouping in the north – fast. Edward had neither time nor money for a coronation. Luckily for him, he had men around him who knew precisely what to do.
Warwick’s youngest brother, George Neville, bishop of Exeter, was a man to whom everything in life seemed to come easily. Intellectual, epicurean, he shared with Warwick a protean eloquence, equally at home addressing kings and charming diplomats as stirring up crowds with incendiary sermons. The previous summer, his precociousness and his brother’s influence had landed him the chancellorship of England at the age of twenty-nine. It was a post that Edward now unhesitatingly confirmed. Over the next days, George Neville would start to prove his worth.20
On Sunday, 1 March, between three and four thousand people gathered north of the city walls at St John’s Fields, a place synonymous with popular protest. The assembly consisted, more or less, of Edward’s troops – the Welsh accents were a giveaway – ‘mustered’, as one observer put it, with military precision. Choreographing the display of popular acclamation that followed was George Neville, who demanded of the crowd whether, having ‘wickedly forsworn’ his ‘true lords’ the Yorkists at St Albans, Henry VI was any longer a worthy king. After the obliging roar of ‘No’ had subsided on the air, he asked them if they wanted Edward as king, to which they shouted ‘with one voice, Yes Yes’.