by Thomas Penn
A delegation of representative ‘captains’ – the significance of the term, with its resonances of popular leadership, was lost on no one – then headed through the city to Baynard’s Castle, where Edward, reunited with his mother Cecily, was now in residence. Surrounded by his councillors, Edward gravely received the news that the people, in truth represented by a few detachments of his army, ‘had chosen him king’.
Over the following days, this acting-out of Edward’s right to the throne continued, with his title proclaimed throughout London’s streets and ratified by a ‘great council’ which, even padded out by the hasty ennoblement of some of his key supporters, looked less like a representative gathering of the ‘natural governors’ of the kingdom than the partisan group it was. After listing nine names, one chronicler ran out of steam: ‘and many more’, he ended, lamely.21
Early on Wednesday, 4 March, a large crowd, primed by a rousing sermon from George Neville, pressed into Westminster Hall to witness England’s new king take possession of his realm.22 A head taller than most, imposing in his royal robes and cap of estate, Edward processed through the crowd to the King’s Bench, the great marble seat of royal justice, where he sat, the lawgiver facing his people. Swearing his coronation oath, to rule justly and maintain the rule of law, Edward announced that, from that moment onward, he would begin to reign.
It had been a rickety set of ceremonies, with manufactured popular assent, rubber-stamping by a small cabal of nobles masquerading as a great council, and an enthronement in place of a coronation. The master of ceremonies, George Neville, thought things had turned out rather well. Shortly after, he wrote with an air of satisfied certainty to the papal envoy Francesco Coppini that Edward had practically been compelled ‘by force’ to take the crown. Though Neville was overstating the case, on that morning in Westminster Hall, with the Lords and Commons hailing him king, Edward had nevertheless undergone that profound, imperceptible transformation that elevated him above the ranks of the lords from which he had emerged. What was more, there was a sense that the eighteen-year-old Edward IV showed rather more signs of delivering on his oaths to bring peace and justice to a conflict-ridden country than Henry VI had ever done.23
Edward now had to move quickly. Entrenched in the north, with Henry in her possession, Margaret of Anjou was happy to play a waiting game: to sit tight, repel Yorkist attacks and cause havoc until Edward’s newfound popularity began to wear off. It was up to Edward to go and find her, and to validate his right to the crown in what was the supreme expression of God’s will – battle.
As the ceremonies unfolded, the new king and his councillors were working feverishly, mobilizing troops, stockpiling supplies and raising funds. Edward seemed to have an unusual ability to make people feel good about parting with their money. The city contributed another hefty corporate loan of over £4,000: four times the sum it had extended to Warwick before St Albans. Others – institutions and individuals – also expressed their allegiance in cash. Edward insisted on receiving the contributions in person, ‘with our own hands’, giving his creditors the opportunity to bask in the glow of his vigorous charm. He also demonstrated a new seriousness towards creditors. Although loans were funnelled into the coffers of his household for immediate disbursement, Edward gave assurances that they would be properly recorded in the Exchequer and a sense that – one day – lenders would receive their rewards. It was rather different from the practices of the house of Lancaster, where credit seemed simply to disappear into a bottomless pit.24
Other Londoners showed their loyalty in different ways. John Orwell, a goldsmith, was hard at work engraving Edward’s seals, the symbols of the regime’s authority, which allowed government to function and for Edward to raise troops on his own account. He made a new great seal, handed to the chancellor, George Neville; a privy seal, whose office acted as a formal clearing-house for the business done by the king and his officers; and a golden signet ring, with which the king’s secretariat authenticated Edward’s personal decisions. Meanwhile a grocer, John Nicholl, supplied the new king with a large consignment of gunpowder.25
Edward issued his first proclamations, loaded with denunciations of the northern lords, ‘moved and steered by the spirit of the devil’, and their ‘ungodly’ king Henry, whose acts of violence were condemned as ‘treasons and rebellions’ against England’s rightful king, Edward IV. By contrast, Edward, modest and God-fearing, was a paragon of moral virtue who would rule on behalf of the whole country, a statement underscored by his offer of a pardon to any follower of Henry VI who submitted to him within ten days and – balancing conciliation with rigour – the offer of £100 to anybody who killed any of the Lancastrians on a list circulating with the proclamation. Anyone disobeying his injunctions to public order, Edward assured his new subjects, would be met with the full coercive force of his sovereign laws.26
After presiding over an exemplary beheading in Smithfield – it wasn’t clear whether the executed man, a grocer named Walter Walker, had been tried for any offence, but the point was made – and announcing to the city’s elites that his mother Cecily would deputize for him in his absence, ‘our new king Edward’ rode out of London through Bishopsgate ‘with great triumph’ at the head of his army of Welshmen and Kentishmen and headed north, collecting more cash loans as he went.27 Away in their own regions, armed with royal commissions of array fixed with the heavy wax cake of Edward’s new great seal, were the Yorkist general John Mowbray, duke of Norfolk, recruiting his willing East Anglian men, and Warwick himself, distributing his badges throughout his midlands estates. As Edward progressed, his army was swelled by supporters ordered to assemble with as many armed men as they could bring, ‘in all haste possible’, at pre-arranged muster stations along the line of march. Edward was all too mindful of his father’s recent, disastrous journey. As well as a baggage train stretching several miles behind him, a fleet shadowed his progress up the east coast, resupplying his troops at regular intervals. Ahead of his growing army, the Lancastrians, instead of confronting him, melted away.28
As he crossed the Trent river, the traditional dividing line between north and south, Edward was heading deep into what had become enemy territory. At the south Yorkshire town of Doncaster, he linked up with Warwick and his forces. With the duke of Norfolk’s East Anglians not yet arrived, he pressed on through his family’s ravaged estates towards Pontefract Castle, scene of the killing of his father and brother the previous December. He found the castle abandoned, the Lancastrians having retreated across the nearby Aire river, now in spate, a natural barrier to the Yorkist line of march. After an advance Yorkist force, trying to secure a crossing to the east at Ferrybridge, was ambushed, Edward decided to move forward himself.
Although Easter week was approaching, it still felt like winter. On the morning of 28 March, as the Yorkist army advanced towards Ferrybridge, snow and sleet were in the air. Around the bridge, half-destroyed by Lancastrian sappers, arrowfire gave way to vicious, hand-to-hand fighting on the riverbanks and in the shallows. Then, as the weather set in, a detachment under Warwick’s uncle Lord Fauconberg forded the fast-moving river a few miles upstream at Castleford and surprised the Lancastrians. When their commander, Lord Clifford, was shot in the throat, they broke and fled towards the main Lancastrian army, drawn up outside the nearby village of Towton.29
That night, after crossing the Aire, Edward’s army bivouacked in the freezing open fields, acutely aware of the presence of the enemy forces a few miles to the north. Both sides had mustered huge numbers of troops, but the Lancastrian army, commanded by the duke of Somerset, was considerably bigger. Confronting Edward’s twenty thousand were perhaps thirty thousand men, mostly northerners, as well as the majority of England’s lords – or, as one commentator put it, ‘the substance of the noble blood of this land’. Warwick had been overly bullish in his assessment of crucial loyalties. Five of the lords on his ‘neutrals’ list were now fighting for Lancaster, among them Richard Woodville, Lord Rivers
and his twenty-one-year-old son Anthony.
Warwick’s sense of an imminent reckoning, after the paralysing uncertainty of recent years, had been correct – unsurprisingly, given how much he had done to bring it about. Most of England’s noblemen and their retinues were now ranged against each other across a few bleak miles of north Yorkshire. But Warwick himself was not there. Shot in the leg during the crossing at Ferrybridge, he had been forced to stay in the rear nursing his wound and, doubtless, cursing his bad luck.30
The following morning, Palm Sunday, the weather worsened, and the armies faced each other in driving sleet and snow. The Lancastrians, a large dark mass discernible through the blizzard, were drawn up on higher ground, their flanks protected on the left by boggy terrain and, on their right, by a sheer slope down to the river below. Through the whiteness could be glimpsed the brightly painted standards of Lancaster, among them Margaret’s banner, which bore a verse from Psalm 43: ‘Judica me, Deus, discerne causam meum de gente non sancta’, ‘Judge me, O lord, and favour my cause from that of unholy people’.31 But with Margaret and Henry both sheltering behind the walls at York, twelve miles away, there was only one royal claimant present on the battlefield.
When the Yorkist battle lines had deployed early that morning, Edward addressed his commanders. They had all wanted to make him their king, he shouted above the wind, and here he was: heir to a crown that had been usurped by Lancaster long ago. So help me reclaim my right, he cried. The yell went up: they would follow him until death. Edward, surrounded by his phalanx of heavily armoured household men, took up position beside his standards: his father’s falcon-and-fetterlock, the black bull of his Clarence ancestors and the white lion of Mortimer, and, newest of all, his rose-en-soleil, a sunburst’s rays streaming from a white rose.
The Yorkist archers, several thousand strong, marched forward and, having made the sign of the cross on the ground and kissed it, prepared to fire. As they did so, their commander Fauconberg had a hunch. If the Lancastrians’ position, numbers and nobility were all to their advantage, one thing was not: the blizzard, which was blowing straight into their faces. Fauconberg ordered his archers to shoot an opening volley then, as the dense cloud of the arrowstorm hissed through the air, ‘made them stand still’, listening for the tell-tale screams in the enemy ranks.32 As their arrows hit the Lancastrian vanguard, it began to return fire rapidly: fire which fell well short, thudding into the ground in front of the Yorkist ranks. Blinded by the snowstorm, shooting into the wind, the Lancastrian archers were neutered. Somerset had only one option: to advance. As the Lancastrian footmen moved slowly and relentlessly forward, the Yorkist archers loosed off their last arrows before running for the safety of their own ranks. Then the two sides engaged.33
In the treacherous conditions, the close fighting took on an even greater intensity than usual. For hours the tightly packed troops, the weather further hampering the view through their visor slits, fought viciously, stabbing and slashing, maces and flails crushing armour and bone, stumbling over the bodies of the injured and dying.34 The Yorkist lines were held in place by the massive steel-armoured figure of Edward, fighting like a madman at the heart of his phalanx of household men. Though both armies comprised thousands of hastily enlisted commoners – ‘naked’, poorly equipped recruits who wore their commitment and discipline as scantily as their armour – it was this core of drilled, disciplined, loyal fighters who counted most. Nevertheless, as the day wore on, the weight of superior Lancastrian numbers began to tell, the Yorkist lines wavering under pressure.
Then, for the Yorkists, relief arrived. The duke of Norfolk’s long-awaited East Anglian recruits finally materialized, fresh troops surging into the Lancastrian ranks. For a while, the Lancastrians withstood the pressure. Then, they buckled. Suddenly, men in their thousands were turning and running in panic, flinging off weapons, shields, helmets, anything that would weigh them down. Somerset and his commanders wheeled their horses about, spurring up the York road, away from the battlefield. Those on foot had no such recourse. Later, Edward reminisced that he had urged his troops to spare the common soldiers and kill the lords. He lied. His men killed everybody.35
The Lancastrians scattered over the open ground. Rode down by Yorkist horsemen, they fell, heads and faces sliced open by blades, smashed in by maces and hammers, poleaxe spikes driven into their skulls. The steep snow-covered slopes down to the nearby beck, which had previously protected the Lancastrian right flank, turned into a slippery death-trap; corpses piled up in the river, forming bridges of flesh over which survivors tried to scramble. On the York road, men were slaughtered as they bottlenecked around a partly destroyed bridge over the River Wharfe; more were drowned as they desperately tried to cross. The river’s waters ran with blood.36
Darkness brought an end to the carnage. The following day, the blizzard had blown itself out. Edward rode slowly towards York through a landscape carpeted with bodies: corpses, it was said, littered an area six miles by three. Blood and gore mixed with snowmelt, trickling into furrows and ditches. Looters moved about the field, relieving the dead of money and clothes, severing rings from swollen and stiffening hands, ransacking tents and baggage carts; heralds counted the bodies and gravediggers began their work. Many of the Lancastrian dead were to be denied rest in the afterlife. Before burial, noses and ears were sliced off and faces gouged at, to prevent their identification at the Resurrection; then corpses were packed tightly in pits. In a final indignity, they were laid with heads facing west. When they awoke and sat up on the Day of Resurrection, their scarred, sightless eyes would be looking away from the sun and the risen Christ.37
As Edward was received into York with ‘great solemnity and processions’, the Yorkist reprisals began. The Lancastrian earl of Devon and forty-two knights captured during the battle were declared guilty of treason and beheaded. Five days later, on Easter Saturday, riders reached London around mid-morning, carrying a letter from Edward to his mother. A clutch of eager courtiers, waiting at Baynard’s Castle for news, gathered round the dispatch, its seal broken, its message exultantly declaimed: ‘it was seen and read by me’, confirmed the jubilant Norfolk esquire William Paston. Heralds had counted twenty thousand Lancastrian dead, and eight thousand Yorkists. Heading the list of dead Lancastrian noblemen was Northumberland, hunted down by the Neville brothers in the latest act of vengeance between the two great northeastern families. But the people Edward most wanted had given him the slip. Riding north, Henry VI, Margaret and their son, together with Somerset, had evaded their Yorkist pursuers and, reaching Newcastle, then Berwick, disappeared over the Scottish border.38 Over the following weeks, as Edward headed into the northeast, mopping up pockets of resistance and dispensing summary justice, more fleeing Lancastrians joined the fugitive royal family in Scotland. There they were given political asylum by Mary of Guelders, ruling on behalf of her young son James III.39
Later that spring, Edward turned south again. He stopped off for a few days in early May, just after his nineteenth birthday, at the earl of Warwick’s castle of Middleham, deep in the dales of north Yorkshire. With him were a number of Lancastrian prisoners, men who, in their different ways, were of far more value alive than dead to a precarious new regime. Among them were skilled and experienced administrators like John Morton, arrested at the port of Cockermouth as he tried to escape by boat; an ageing clerk in Margaret of Anjou’s secretariat named George Ashby; and other Lancastrian nobles and gentry who, rapidly evaluating their options, decided that their cause was now hopeless. Foremost among them were the Woodvilles, Lord Rivers and his son Anthony, who had ridden as far north as Bamburgh on the Northumbrian coast before second thoughts prompted them to throw themselves on Edward’s mercy. Along with the others, they were taken to London and locked in the Tower.40
To those who had backed Edward, his success at Towton had proved God’s clear endorsement of his royal credentials. Edward was, wrote the abbot of St Albans John Whethamstede, reaching for typically over
blown classical analogies, an all-conquering warrior, Hector and Achilles rolled into one. As a Yorkist versifier put it, he was the rose that ‘stands alone’: the country’s ‘chief flower’, who had come to save ‘all England’ – and had triumphed. In the same breath, though, the poet revealed that it was a victory, not for all England, but for the south. Now the property-owning southerner could live, without fear of northerners, ‘in his own place/ His wife, and also his fair daughter, and all the goods that he has.’ In enumerating Edward’s support at Towton – Calais and London, Edward’s main financial backers, were first on the list – the poet also inadvertently showed how geographically limited, how patchy it was.41 Which was why, as Whethamstede noted, as well as being a dread dispenser of justice, Edward was going out of his way to embody another quality expected in kings: mercy. Fresh from his astonishing triumphs as war-leader, he now embraced the role of peacemaker.
Conciliation made sense, for a variety of reasons. The loyalties of many had been fluid, their commitment to either York or Lancaster the result of a tangle of family connections and interests, as well as a decision taken hastily in the face of unpredictable, fast-moving events. At Towton, as one appalled commentator noted, the fabric of English society had been torn apart. Families had found themselves pitted against each other, ‘the son against the father, the brother against brother, the nephew against nephew’. Now, perhaps, those ties of blood and kinship could help to heal England; the sprawling extended families that knitted together England’s political classes could enable Lancastrians to integrate with the new regime, if given the chance to do so. But genuine rehabilitation depended on people being convinced by their new king.