by Thomas Penn
Soon Warwick’s guns opened up, firing into the dark. Deafened, the Yorkists realized that they had pitched camp practically on top of the enemy lines and – unknown to them – ‘somewhat asidehand’, the armies overlapping at either end. These errors saved them. Assuming Edward’s forces to be further away and squarely in front, Warwick’s artillery miscalibrated, firing over the Yorkists’ heads. As Henry V had once done on the night before Agincourt, when his half-starved, disease-ridden troops had faced a powerful French army several times their size, Edward now commanded his men not to return fire: they should hold their nerve and make ‘no noise’. Throughout the night, as Warwick’s guns blasted blindly away, Edward’s troops sat grimly silent, huddled in their armour, and waited for daybreak.
As the darkness began to lift between four and five in the morning, it gave way to an intense whiteness. Thick fog smothered the battlefield, reducing visibility to a few feet. Edward had already decided on surprise. With banners raised and trumpets rasping, his men advanced.
The fog lent the fighting a more desperate edge than usual. Hand-gunners and archers fired at the invisible enemy at point-blank range. Barely able to see in front of them, the combatants’ fear and disorientation were total: the fighting, as one participant put it, was ‘the more cruel and mortal’. Intensifying the chaos was the armies’ skewed alignment. On the Yorkist left, where Hastings’ men faced the earl of Oxford’s much bigger force, the imbalance was driven home. Oxford’s advancing troops swung round and piled into Hastings’ exposed lines, which, after a fierce fight, buckled and broke. Their blood up, Oxford’s men chased Hastings’ fleeing troops back down the road towards London.
If the fog had helped Oxford, it had also concealed the destruction from the rest of Edward’s army. There was no wash of panic spreading through the Yorkist ranks. In the centre Edward’s troops, oblivious to the fate of Hastings’ men, fought viciously. At their heart, massive in his plate armour, was Edward himself. Surrounded by his disciplined household men, forming a tight plate-armoured phalanx round their war-leader, he fought in a crazed fury, beating a bloody path towards Warwick’s standards. Anything that stood in his way was battered down: ‘nothing might stand in the sight of him’.
Then, two things happened. On the Yorkist right flank, Richard faced the equal but opposite situation encountered by Oxford’s men. As his forces moved forward, all aggression, they curled round the Lancastrian left flank, squeezing and compressing the enemy lines into the path of Edward’s inexorable advance. On Edward’s now-vulnerable left, meanwhile, Oxford had failed to keep any discipline: his troops, pursuing Hastings’ men, ‘rifling’ the nearby town and the bodies of the dead, were effectively out of action. According to one account, they were worse than useless. When Oxford’s men belatedly regrouped and made it back to the battlefield, Warwick’s troops mistook their badges for Edward’s and attacked them: they turned and fled. With Oxford’s forces scattered, there was nothing to alleviate the crushing pressure of Edward’s advance.
Warwick, unusually for him, was in the thick of the fighting. Generally, he liked to marshal his troops on horseback, piling into the fighting if the momentum was with him, or escaping if things looked bad. While this was fairly common practice among noblemen, it nevertheless carried with it the whiff of faint-heartedness that had followed Warwick around over the years. This was probably why, as one story had it, his brother John Neville had insisted that Warwick dismount, send his horses away, and lead from the front, on foot. To the Lancastrians, however, the most reassuring presence was the resolute figure of John Neville himself. When, standing in Edward’s path, he was killed, his banner listing drunkenly then, suddenly, swept away, the Lancastrian ranks started to disintegrate.
Seeing his brother dead, Warwick grabbed a horse and, spurring away from trouble, rode straight into a nearby wood. There, he was run down by some of Edward’s troops and brutally killed; his body, according to one account, was ‘despoiled naked’. One story had it that Edward saw what was happening and ran towards his soldiers as they pulled Warwick off his horse, but arrived too late: to his ‘great regret’, he found Warwick dead. It seemed an unlikely tale. Edward was not in a sparing mood.
The death of Edward’s one-time mentor, the powerful nobleman who had made one king and remade another, the instinctive populist who had driven violent insurgencies against both monarchs to achieve his ambitions, the pirate whose unpredictable savagery had made him a bogeyman in Flanders as a ‘drinker of blood’, was met in Burgundy with unrestrained joy. Warwick’s ignominious end was given an epic force. At the moment of his killing, recounted a Dutch chronicler, farmers working fields outside The Hague looked up and saw armies ‘fighting across the great arch of the sky’ and ‘heard a sound like the roar of battle’.18
In London early on Easter morning, as bands of Hastings’ shattered troops arrived, rumour spread that Warwick had won; sporadic fighting broke out in the streets. At around ten o’clock, the tide of hearsay began to turn. A horseman galloped through Bishopsgate bearing one of Edward’s gauntlets, a token of victory for Queen Elizabeth. Soon, the victorious Yorkist forces were streaming through the gates. That afternoon, Edward himself arrived to the clangorous ringing of London’s church bells, his army marching through the city’s streets ‘in great triumph’. Another onlooker, a Hanse merchant named Gerhard von Wesel, saw things differently. Those who had left London the day before with ‘good horses and sound bodies’ had returned almost unrecognizable, bloody and disfigured. Von Wesel was particularly appalled by the preponderance of ‘bandaged faces without noses’, the result of close-quarter hacking and stabbing in the fog of Barnet.
At St Paul’s, to the singing of the Easter hymn Salve festa dies, celebrating God’s victory over hell, Edward offered up his battle standards, ripped and shredded by gun- and arrowfire. He then had Henry VI paraded through London, to the Tower. In a spitefully effective touch, the Lancastrian king was dressed in the same blue gown that he had been wearing since his ineffectual display of regality the previous Thursday.
On Easter Monday, around seven in the morning, the bodies of Warwick and John Neville were brought to St Paul’s and ‘openly showed’ on the floor in two open coffins, naked except for cloth covering their genitals. There, for the following days, they lay: incontrovertibly dead. Such was the power of Warwick’s name, and of his ‘subtlety and malicious moving’, that rumours of his survival might in themselves have been enough to have caused ‘new murmurs, insurrections and rebellions’. So one of Edward’s officials put it, in language that testified to Warwick’s magnetic hold over the people; ‘right many were towards him’, he concluded. In the following days, thousands upon thousands filed past the coffins, gazing at the two corpses, making the sign of the cross.19
Over the past months it had slowly dawned on Edward that he had never really managed to gain the hearts of the people. The previous autumn, barely anybody had answered his call to fight against Warwick and Clarence’s armies: ‘so little people’, remarked one commentator, ‘that he was not able to make a field against them.’ On his march south in recent weeks, meanwhile, ‘some folks’ joined him, but – as one of Edward’s servants put it, the bewildered royal ego all too evident – ‘not so many as he supposed would have come’. Not for the first time, Edward’s view of his own irresistible appeal was dented by contact with reality.20 If Warwick had always sought to exploit the explosive potential of populism, Edward had come to mistrust the people and their destabilizing power, their instinctive attraction to the ‘idols of the multitude’. During his Burgundian exile, he had done some thinking. From now on, his kingship would not seek to bend itself to accommodate the popular will: rather, the people would obey him, dread him – by force, if necessary.
One poem that did the rounds in the days following the battle made exactly this point. Urging people to reconcile themselves to Edward’s rule, the anonymous versifier pointed to his ‘just title’ and his undefeated record on the ba
ttlefield, remarking that he had never read of a more famous knight ‘since the time of Arthur’s days’. Anybody who didn’t love Edward, he added, was ‘mad’. In the poem, belief mingled with pragmatism. ‘He that loved division’ – the versifier couldn’t bring himself to mention Warwick’s name – ‘is gone.’ The not-so-subtle subtext was that Edward was now the only game in town. People had better put their ‘opinion’, their subversive political views, aside and ‘say Credo’ ‘I believe’: to sign up unequivocally to Edward’s rule. It was a message hammered home by the menacing refrain: ‘Convertimini, you commons, and dread your king.’21
In London, Sir John Paston wrote furtively to his mother back in Norfolk. Both he and his younger brother had fought at Barnet on the wrong side, as part of the earl of Oxford’s ill-disciplined force. His brother had been shot in the arm, but had been treated and was ‘in no peril of death’. The medical care, though, had been expensive and Sir John was now out of cash. He was also scared. Through his friendship with the slippery George Neville, who had managed to pull strings even from his place of incarceration in the Tower, Paston had managed to obtain letters of protection, and was reasonably sure that he would escape execution. Nevertheless, Paston told his mother, he had been threatened and ‘troubled’ by Edward’s men. There was in the city an overwhelming sense of fear and uncertainty – ‘the world, I assure you, is right queasy’ – and nobody knew what would happen next. It was crucial, he told his mother, that she not show his letter to anyone: ‘it must be secret’.22
The next day, news reached London that Margaret of Anjou and her son had finally landed at the Dorset port of Weymouth. They had arrived on the evening of Easter Sunday, just hours after Edward’s victory at Barnet. Linking up with the duke of Somerset and John Courtenay, they were heading southwest, raising troops as they went.23
Edward wasted no time. Standing down his injured men, he mustered fresh troops throughout the south and the midlands, and circulated a wanted list of Lancastrians, including the Beaufort brothers and Margaret’s chief political adviser Sir John Fortescue. Engineers overhauled his artillery, of which – bolstered by the guns he had captured at Barnet – he now had ‘great plenty’, loading them onto custom-made carriages. Ammunition was stockpiled: gunpowder, sulphur and saltpetre stuffed into leather bags; barrels of crossbow bolts; and chests packed tightly with bows, bowstrings, sheaves of arrows. Then, on Friday 19 April, as his scouts searched for the newly landed Lancastrian forces, the king and his brothers moved west up the Thames to Windsor Castle, his army’s assembly point. As troops mustered in the castle grounds, Edward, Clarence and Richard celebrated the feast of St George and planned their next move.24
Leaving London was a risk. Attacks were expected from Kent, a hotbed of popular support for Warwick’s cause; the Calais garrison, also loyal to Warwick, could be expected to march alongside an insurgent army. But the Lancastrian forces, and the galvanizing presence of Margaret of Anjou and her heir, could – if left to their own devices – be expected to garner huge popular backing. They had to be stopped before they could do so. Before he left, Edward tasked a force of men under the command of Anthony Woodville and the king’s reliable uncle Henry Bourchier, earl of Essex, with protecting his family and co-ordinating the city’s defences. Meanwhile, Yorkist scouts had found the Lancastrian army. Or so they thought.
Margaret, Edward’s agents told him, had gone west to recruit men in Devon and Somerset. From there, the king and his advisers reckoned, she had two options: to march east, towards London, by either the inland or coastal routes, or to head into the Lancastrian-supporting northwest. Either way, Edward had to get to Margaret as soon as possible, before she could link up with other pro-Lancastrian forces. If Margaret advanced east, this meant cutting her off before she reached Kent, where Warwick’s supporters would follow her banners; if she went north, Edward had to stop her crossing the Severn into Wales, where Jasper Tudor was raising his Welshmen. Margaret was hardly going to make it easy for him to work it out.
In the following days, as Edward set out from Windsor up the Thames valley, conflicting reports came in. Spotting a pack of Lancastrian foreriders at the Dorset town of Shaftesbury, Edward’s agents tracked them some twenty miles east to Salisbury. It was a feint, to convince Edward that the Lancastrians were heading towards London; so too was another detachment of riders that appeared shortly after at Bruton, in Somerset. Margaret’s main army, however, had been detected. It was heading northeast, towards Wells, where it had stopped.
Still protecting the approach roads to London, Edward advanced slowly, barely ten miles a day. Then, on Monday 29 April, he changed pace. Moving fast and decisively, his army marched thirty miles from Abingdon to Cirencester, on the southern edge of the Cotswolds. Margaret’s forces had reportedly made a move further northeast, towards Bath, from where they would ‘come on straight’ towards the Yorkist army.25
Now, Edward was on the prowl. The following day, his forces in battle array, he skirted the Cotswold escarpment slowly, ‘seeking upon them’. At Malmesbury, he heard that the Lancastrians had diverted to the sympathetic city of Bristol, where they had resupplied and been given cash, troops and artillery, and were now advancing towards the strategic high ground of Sodbury Hill, an Iron Age fort on Edward’s line of march. At midday on 2 May Edward reached Sodbury Hill. Everything was quiet. Scouring the surrounding river valley, his scouts found nothing. Margaret had given him the slip.
Over the previous days, as Edward had tried to narrow the Lancastrians’ angles of advance, it had become clear which way they were trying to go. Feinting towards Sodbury, they had sidestepped the Yorkist army, swerving north again towards the Severn crossings, where the river became fordable, and Wales. Margaret was aiming to join up with Jasper Tudor. As the Yorkist scouts rode further and further afield trying to pick up the Lancastrian trail, Edward pitched camp on Sodbury Hill and waited.
It was still dark when, at 3 a.m., a group of riders returned to the king with a definite sighting. The Lancastrians were marching through the night, following the course of the narrowing Severn estuary, to Gloucester, the first practicable crossing point. Edward had to overtake them before they crossed. The race was on.
There was no chance of his army catching the Lancastrians before they reached Gloucester, and so Edward, after a hurried consultation with his council, sent messengers racing ahead. They carried orders for the city’s governor Sir Richard Beauchamp, an appointee of Edward’s, to defend Gloucester against Margaret; Edward would, they assured Beauchamp, be there soon. Edward was in luck. When, at around 10 a.m., Margaret’s forces, weary from their night-long march, reached Gloucester, the gates were barred against them. Beauchamp ignored both the angry citizens, ‘greatly disposed’ towards the Lancastrian cause, and the increasingly desperate Lancastrian threats of violence unless he opened the gates. As both Beauchamp and Margaret knew, every minute that the standoff lasted brought Edward’s pursuing army closer. Facing the prospect of being trapped against the city walls, Margaret decided to march on to the next crossing point at the small abbey town of Tewkesbury.
It was a hot, cloudless day and Margaret’s army took the most direct route, the Severn a glinting, enticing presence on their left. It was a route entirely unfit for an army: not a road, but a lane, through a ‘foul country’. In suffocating heat, weighed down by armour and weapons, the Lancastrian footmen, horses and pack animals stumbled along over ‘stony ways’, through thickets and woods, ‘without any good refreshing’.
Before dawn that morning, Edward had set off in pursuit. He took a different way, up into the open ‘champaign country’ of the Cotswolds. As the day wore on, with no shade, his men were exposed to the blistering sun. Short of supplies, they were unable to find food or drink, nothing even for their horses ‘save one little brook’, its waters churned into mud by the horses and carts of his baggage train ploughing through it. Nevertheless, the Yorkists had one big advantage: where Margaret’s troops struggled to mak
e progress, they marched through open country. As Edward drove on his flagging men, ‘travailing’ them, his scouts kept ‘good espials’ on the Lancastrians, barely five or six miles away but in dramatically different terrain. Gradually the Yorkists began to gain ground. In late afternoon, after a forced march of thirty miles, they reached Cheltenham to the news that their enemies were at Tewkesbury, a few miles distant. There, they had stopped.
If the Yorkist troops were tired, the Lancastrians, having marched continuously for over thirty-six hours, were shattered and dehydrated; neither did they know exactly where Edward’s army was. The river crossing at Tewkesbury, about a mile south of the town at Lower Lode, was not straightforward. The Severn was tidal, its currents unpredictable, and impossible to ford at high water. Any attempt to do so would have left the Lancastrian foot-soldiers horribly exposed to Yorkist attack, as well as the risk of being drowned.
When Edward had received ‘certain knowledge’ that Margaret’s commanders had decided to dig in at Tewkesbury, he allowed his troops a brief pause, distributing what little food and drink remained, before continuing onwards. That night, the Yorkists camped some three miles outside the town.
Daybreak on Saturday 4 May saw Edward up and arming in his tent. Then, he inspected his men as they were formed up into their three divisions of around fifteen hundred troops each, armoured footmen interspersed with archers. As he did so, he and his commanders considered the task before them.
Edward’s troops were marginally outnumbered. He knew, too, that the Lancastrians, entrenched south of Tewkesbury Abbey in a ‘marvellous strong’ position, would be difficult to dislodge. Somerset and his fellow commanders had chosen their position well. In front of them, an entanglement of ‘evil lanes, deep dykes’ and ‘many hedges, trees and bushes’ made an advance ‘right hard’, while screening their own deployments from the Yorkists on their slightly higher ground. Edward and his commanders, though, had been well briefed by their scouts.