The Brothers York

by Thomas Penn

  The lies worked. York’s gates were opened to Edward’s army. The following day, refreshed and resupplied, they started on the long journey south, through his father’s former recruiting grounds of Sandal and Wakefield, from where Edward hoped to attract more recruits to his cause – which, ostensibly, remained his claim to the dukedom of York.

  The roads along which they moved were quiet, the lack of opposition marked. One factor above all others stood out: Henry Percy, earl of Northumberland. Despite his residual Lancastrian allegiance, Percy had weighed his loyalties in the balance and found there was no contest. If he disliked the idea of York, he hated Warwick and the Nevilles. Edward’s restoration of the young nobleman to his birthright, to John Neville’s disadvantage, now seemed a masterstroke. From the moment he landed, Edward was flourishing Northumberland’s letters, the wax seal of Percy enough to make even the most antagonistic local pause for thought. Percy didn’t turn out for Edward – an impossibility, given the regional loathing for York – but then, he didn’t need to. He just ‘sat still’. By letting Edward pass onwards, he sent out a signal to ‘every man in all those north parts’ to do the same. Simply removing his men from the equation was, remarked one of Edward’s men with respect, a ‘notable service’, ‘politiquely done’. At Pontefract, where John Neville himself was lying in wait, Percy’s inactivity had particular repercussions. Unable to raise sufficient troops to oppose Edward, Neville hunkered down inside the castle and waited as he went by.

  While support was slow to rally to Edward – at Wakefield, there was a disappointing trickle of recruits – the lack of resistance had a further effect. The longer Edward continued without being challenged, the more people assumed that it was safe to join him. There were positive signs at Doncaster, where he was joined by a handful of royal officials. These were followed at Nottingham by significant backing in the form of the north-western knights Sir James Harrington – Edward and Richard’s support for his family against their regional Stanley rivals had proved key – and Sir William Parr from Westmorland (his loyalty to Edward overriding his connection to the earl of Warwick), bringing with them six hundred troops. Newly confident, Edward ordered his scouts to push further and further afield and, at Nottingham, they returned with news. Reaching Newark, some twenty miles northeast, they had found the town jammed with four thousand men: a Lancastrian army commanded by the earl of Oxford, the duke of Exeter and various other nobles. Unhesitating, Edward advanced. Since his landing, the speed and audacity of his decision-making, coupled with his brazen duplicity over his real ambitions, had caught potential enemies in two minds. As they hesitated, Edward moved forward.

  At Newark, news of his coming panicked the Lancastrians into fleeing under cover of darkness, at two in the morning. When Edward heard that they were gone, their forces ‘disperpled’, scattered, he didn’t bother entering Newark, but returned to Nottingham. Greater challenges were close at hand.3

  Edward was still making his way towards York when, on 16 March, rumours of his landing reached Clarence at the Somerset city of Wells. The same day, Clarence wrote to his Derbyshire follower Henry Vernon. Back in 1467, Clarence and Warwick had backed Vernon in his blood feud against the Grey family. Now, as Vernon’s lord, Clarence was calling in a favour. He wanted Vernon ‘secretly’ to plant ‘sure and trusty men’ in the northeast, keeping tabs on the behaviour of the earl of Northumberland – Clarence knew the importance of his role – and on two other northern lords with elastic loyalties, the earl of Shrewsbury and Thomas, Lord Stanley. Agents should work in pairs, he directed, one in place at all times while the other was ‘coming to us’, relaying information. Vernon was also to send spies to report on Edward, and – if he had indeed landed – to monitor his progress closely. Finally, Clarence ordered Vernon to raise as many armed men as he could, ready to mobilize on an hour’s notice.

  In his dispatch Clarence gave away almost nothing about his own plans or his own allegiances. A reader might have assumed that he was simply watching, waiting to see which way the wind blew, but for one detail: when writing of his brother, he referred to him by the initials ‘K. E.’, King Edward.

  There was something inevitable about Clarence re-entering the Yorkist fold. His place in the Lancastrian settlement, precarious from the outset, had looked ever more unsteady as time went on: at that moment, away in France, Margaret of Anjou was planning the latest legal assault on his estates in favour of herself and her son and heir. Whatever Clarence’s grievance with Edward, the family would always welcome him back: of that, Yorkist agents had stressed, he could be sure. He was also reassured by news from the north of Northumberland’s sitting still and, following his uncharacteristic spasm of commitment to Warwick the previous autumn, of Stanley’s return to his default mode of inaction.4 Clarence wrote to Warwick, now marshalling his own forces at Coventry, to tell the earl to hold off attacking Edward until he arrived. Then, raising his men, Clarence headed off into the midlands to find his brothers.

  Clarence’s message might have jogged a memory in Warwick of the previous March, when he and the duke had sent duplicitous messages to Edward not to advance against the Lincolnshire rebels until they got there. As Warwick now probably guessed, the boot was on the other foot.

  At Leicester, Edward received his biggest military boost to date: three thousand men, recruited by Hastings from his east midlands estates. With his now habitual directness, and mindful of the other Lancastrian forces in the region, he headed straight for Coventry, aiming to isolate Warwick. Cagey as ever, the earl retreated inside the city walls and stayed there, deaf to Edward’s offers of fighting or negotiating. Leaving him to it, Edward marched on. He hadn’t gone ten miles when, at the city of Warwick, news came that Clarence was approaching from Banbury with four thousand men. The news was good. Clarence was coming ‘to aid and assist’ Edward ‘against all his enemies’.

  On the afternoon of 3 April, Edward rode south out of Warwick. Three miles outside the city he halted in open country, his men drawn up in battle order, royal banners displayed. In the distance, Clarence’s army could be seen: a ‘great fellowship’ moving towards Edward. Within about half a mile, it stopped.

  With a few men, among them Richard, Anthony Woodville and Hastings, Edward rode out towards Clarence’s lines. At the same time, a knot of riders detached themselves from the distant army. Soon, they were close enough for Edward’s men to see the liveries Clarence’s men wore on their jackets: the duke’s gorget badge and, over it – an indication of superior allegiance – the white rose of York.5 As the two groups faced each other, Edward and Clarence slowly advanced their horses, then stopped and dismounted.

  Clarence fell to his knees, grovelling. Edward lifted his brother up, hugging him, smothering him in kisses, forgiving him everything. Then Clarence turned to Richard, the pair greeting each other warmly. As trumpets sounded, Edward and Clarence saluted each other’s men to roars of ‘Long Live King Edward’. For the first time since making landfall three weeks previously, Edward revealed his true aim: to regain the throne. The two armies then came together, the afternoon dissolving in smiles and embraces.

  The reconciliation could hardly have gone better. As one onlooker put it, Edward, Clarence and Richard had been reunited with ‘perfect accord’. There had been such ‘kind and loving language’ between them, such ‘heartily loving cheer and countenance’ that the bond between the three brothers was now, clearly, indissoluble: they were ‘knit together for ever hereafter’.6

  As they discussed their next steps, Clarence turned conciliator, pleading with his brother to let him try and broker peace with Warwick. Edward agreed, and sent messengers to the earl. Suspicious of Edward’s intentions, and under pressure from his own Lancastrian allies to reject any Yorkist approaches, Warwick sat tight and refused to negotiate. In any case, time was on the earl’s side. Lancastrian reinforcements were flooding into Coventry daily, while Edward’s troops were having trouble finding food in a region already stripped bare by Warwi
ck’s men. The longer Edward waited, the stronger Warwick would get. After talking things through with his brothers, Edward struck camp. Detailing a force of spearmen and archers, ‘behind-riders’, to watch his back should Warwick come after him, he set out for London.7

  Reaching Daventry, the Yorkists observed Palm Sunday, ten years to the day since the bloody victory at Towton. At the local parish church, Edward walked ‘with great devotion’ behind the sacrament-bearing priests, followed by townspeople clutching their ‘palms’ of yew and willow. Then, as the choir sang the customary anthem ‘Ave Rex Noster’, ‘Hail our King, Redeemer of the World’, the painted veil that had covered the church’s crucifix through Lent was lifted; Edward knelt, fervently venerating the revealed cross.8 As he did so, on an adjacent pillar a wooden box enclosing one of the church’s statues gave ‘with a great crack’. Through the slight opening could be glimpsed a little alabaster image of St Anne, a saint whose intercession Edward had especially sought during his exile. Mother of the Virgin Mary and grandmother of Jesus, Anne was divine validation of descent through the female line, on which the Yorkist royal claim depended. The boards seemed to close up again, then – all ‘without any man’s hand, or touching’ – burst open, the image fully revealed to the entire congregation.

  Coming as it did on Palm Sunday, the day Christ came in triumph to Jerusalem to save his people, the implications of this ‘fair miracle’ seemed undeniable: a ‘good prognostication’, pronounced one of Edward’s men. St Anne’s backing was manifest in two ways: the non-appearance of Warwick, following Edward with his usual caution; and the news that, away in northern France, storms continued to delay Margaret of Anjou and her son’s voyage to England.9

  Early that Holy Week, there was panic in London. Two letters were read out to the city council. One was from Edward, ordering the authorities to take Henry VI into custody; the other from Warwick, telling them to hold the city against Edward at all costs. The council dithered. Hearing the news the city’s mayor John Stockton, who some six weeks previously had decided that discretion was the better part of decision-making and had ‘feigned himself sick for fear of ministering of his office’, remained in bed.10

  Now leading Warwick’s administration, George Neville tried to muster the city defences against Edward. Londoners’ response was lukewarm. In a mirror-image of 1461, a stream of Lancastrian supporters, laden with whatever goods they could carry, headed down to London’s port and sailed for France; among them was Sir Thomas Cook, whose political rehabilitation had been brief. As Edward and his army approached, the two senior Lancastrian commanders in the city, Edmund Beaufort, duke of Somerset and John Courtenay, heir to the earldom of Devon – both in any case inclined to do the opposite of what Warwick commanded – gave London up as a bad job and left for the south coast, to await Margaret of Anjou. ‘Omnes fugierunt’, noted one chronicler simply. ‘They all fled.’11

  In a last-ditch attempt to boost Londoners’ morale, George Neville ordered Henry VI to be put on a horse and led through the city’s streets. Where, ten years previously, Edward’s hastily constructed inauguration ceremonies had convinced most Londoners, this limp procession backfired spectacularly. His hand held all the way by Neville – perhaps in reassurance, perhaps to stop him falling out of his saddle – Henry was dressed in a shabby long blue gown, ‘as if’, remarked one observer, ‘he had no more clothes to change with’, adding that the whole thing was more ‘like a play than the showing of a prince to win men’s hearts’.12 Nobody seemed less convinced than Neville himself. With the fore-riders of Edward’s army reported to be in the village of Stoke Newington, barely five miles to the city’s north, Neville deposited Henry back in his lodgings and promptly ‘shifted for himself’, writing to Edward to ask for his pardon. Yorkist prisoners in the Tower overpowered their Lancastrian guards.

  Towards noon on 11 April, civic officials ordered the city militia to stand down ‘and go home to dinner’. A couple of hours later, Londoners watched as Edward and his ‘fair band’ of men rode unopposed through Shoreditch into the city. Offering up thanks to God at St Paul’s, Edward walked into the bishop of London’s palace, where George Neville prostrated himself and then, pouring out a stream of excuses, produced Henry VI.

  Ignoring Edward’s extended hand, the frail king embraced him: ‘My cousin of York’, he said, ‘you are very welcome. I know that my life, in your hands, will not be in danger.’ Edward replied that Henry didn’t have to worry about anything. He would be taken care of.

  With Henry secure in his lodgings, and the self-exculpatory George Neville and a group of Lancastrian bishops led away to the Tower, Edward took the royal barge upriver to Westminster. There, following a re-coronation ceremony in the Abbey – Edward’s immediate priority was to reaffirm his royal right – he was reunited with his family: Elizabeth, his daughters and, ‘to his greatest joy’, the infant prince that had been born during his exile.13

  As one London versifier put it, Edward’s troubles ‘turned to bliss’. Here was the devoted family man, surrounded by his queen and children, cradling his ‘young prince’ in his arms. Emphasizing Elizabeth’s exhausted relief, the poet recalled her ‘anguish’ during the extreme uncertainty of the past six months. She had shown great strength in adversity, trying to get on with life as far as possible in Edward’s absence, but ‘when she remembered the king’, found it impossible to control her emotions. ‘Glorious God’, the poet declaimed feelingly, ‘what pain had she?’14

  Bringing Elizabeth and his daughters out of sanctuary, Edward had them rowed downriver to Baynard’s Castle, where they were welcomed by his mother Cecily, Clarence and Richard. Their reunion, though, was brief. The family observed the deep solemnity of Good Friday, creeping barefoot in the chapel towards the bare altar and the cross, which they kissed fervently. Outside, mounted scouts clattered into the courtyard with reports that the earl of Warwick was now coming south fast. His advance suited Edward, who knew he needed to fight Warwick before the main Lancastrian force under Margaret of Anjou materialized.15

  Edward chewed over the situation with ‘the great lords of his blood’, his brothers foremost among them. What confronted them was daunting. The combined forces of Warwick, his brother John Neville and the earl of Oxford were reportedly ‘far above’ Edward’s army; in firepower, too, they far outgunned the Yorkists. On Easter Saturday, 13 April, Edward sent Elizabeth, his children and his mother to the safety of the Tower. Then, he rode out of the city to St John’s Fields, where ten years previously his Welshmen had acclaimed him king, and where his troops were now mustering.

  The scene perhaps stirred memories of the battles Edward had fought as an eighteen-year-old, of Mortimer’s Cross and the carnage of Towton. Since then, he had done little fighting. Either it had been done by his commanders, or the enemy had disintegrated, or he had fled. Edward’s Burgundian exile and his rapid march through England had sharpened him, the instinct and muscle memory still there. Once again, he would have to fight his own subjects to assert his right to the kingdom. Around four in the afternoon Edward led his nine-thousand-strong army up St John Street and, through Islington, north.16 With him, this time, were his brothers. And if Edward hadn’t fought in anger for ten years, Clarence and Richard had never fought at all.

  Both had been too young to experience the bloodletting of the early 1460s; Edgecote, meanwhile, was all over before Clarence could get there. Their education, though, had prepared them for this moment: hours upon hours of physical and military training, of practising combat with swords and lances; of learning the right way to tumble from horses and regain their feet in full plate armour; of how to fight in teams and to keep discipline. All this, drilled into them repetitively, was reinforced in the schoolroom by the standard texts of military theory, leavened by the inspiring tales of chivalric heroes from myth-history. It was a culture that Richard had inhaled since his youth: devoted to his training, he pored over manuals and romances alike. Now, his servants armed him in earnest for th
e first time. They moved around him, building up layers of padding and armour; tying his flexible steel sabatons over his shoes and, moving upwards, fitting the polished plate sections like a glove round his body; then, finally, attaching his visored helmet and buckling his dagger and short sword at his waist.17 All commitment, Richard was ready. He had long wanted this: tant le desierée.

  Edward continued to be impressed by his youngest brother, whose hunger belied his stiff, slight frame, and who pushed uncomplainingly through the dull back pain that had started to bother him. While the king kept Clarence close to him, just in case, he handed Richard command of his vanguard.

  Six miles out of London, at Hornsey Park, the clashes began, Edward’s ‘scourers’ attacking a pack of Warwick’s scouts. As they fought against the setting sun, Warwick’s men were chased up the escarpment that rose from the Middlesex plain, into the town of Barnet. In the half-dark Edward’s men returned, breathless. Galloping through Barnet, they had run straight into Warwick’s main army north of the town, half-concealed behind a great hedge. As night fell Edward had to decide, quickly, whether to stick or twist. Typically, he gambled. Not wanting to get trapped in the town, and aware of Warwick’s powerful ordnance, he ordered his men to advance.

  By now it was ‘right dark’, a thick layer of cloud obscuring any moon- or starlight. Creeping forward, muffling the clink of armour and horse harness as best they could, Edward’s men started to deploy. With a hazy sense of the enemy’s position in front of them, they drew up in the customary three ‘battles’: the left, under Hastings’ command; Richard’s forces on the right; and Edward and Clarence in the centre. Then, with no fires lit that might give away their position, they ‘kept them still’.