by Thomas Penn
With Somerset’s forces drawn up on the Lancastrian right, Edward switched his own formation. His vanguard, commanded by his brother Richard – so successful at Barnet – was deployed not on the customary right wing but, facing Somerset, on the left. Hastings, meanwhile, was told to range right, opposing John Courtenay, earl of Devon. Confronting Edward in the centre was the Lancastrian heir Prince Edward who, eager for his first taste of battle, was surrounded by experienced men, among them the Warwick loyalist Lord Wenlock. As his own men manoeuvred into position, Edward noticed how beyond the Yorkist left wing, the rough terrain gave way to clear parkland, rising in a gentle incline towards a wood: precisely the kind of place that might conceal an ambush. He ordered two hundred handpicked spearmen to head for the wood and deal with any enemy forces they found. If there was nobody there, this mobile unit could operate as it saw fit.26 Then, instead of ordering his men to advance against the well-dug-in Lancastrians, Edward wheeled out his artillery, which, incorporating the guns captured at Barnet, was now massively superior to that of his opponents. He would blast them out.
Edward concentrated his fire on Somerset’s vanguard. In between punishing rounds of cannonfire, Yorkist archers advanced and loosed volleys of arrows. Somerset had to move. Skilfully, he manoeuvred his men along the skein of paths and hedges, skirting Richard’s forces, before erupting into the open parkland that sloped down towards the exposed flank of Edward’s own division, positioned behind that of his brother. Charging down the hill, over a ditch and through a hedge, the Lancastrians piled into Edward’s men. It was, nodded one Yorkist commentator respectfully, a ‘knightly and manly’ manoeuvre. For Somerset and Lancaster, though, it proved a disaster.
From the outset, Edward had been alive to the possibility of a surprise attack. His well-drilled troops absorbed the initial impact of Somerset’s onslaught. Whether because of the speed at which Somerset moved, or a breakdown in communication, or for some other unaccountable reason – pinned down by Yorkist gunfire, perhaps – the rest of the Lancastrian army failed to advance in support. Isolated on the Yorkist left, Somerset’s men now faced not just Edward’s forces but those of his brother Richard, whose vanguard turned in support. As at Barnet, the two brothers together counter-attacked ‘with great violence’, pushing Somerset’s men back up the hill and into a trap. Edward’s flying column of spearmen were concealed in the nearby wood. Seeing their chance – so perfect a conjunction of ‘time and space’, noted one Yorkist, that it might have been planned – they pounced.
Suddenly, Somerset’s men were running for their lives. Edward’s troops, though, showed iron discipline. Ignoring the easy target, they turned and, linking up with Hastings’ troops on the right wing, headed straight for the Lancastrian centre, which, overwhelmed and demoralized, collapsed.
Carnage followed. Many were killed as they fled across the exposed open country or were cornered in the lanes and hedges as they made for the town and the sanctuary of the nearby abbey. Great numbers of men, drawn towards the river that they had tried so desperately to cross, were caught in a mill-race in the nearby water meadows, which turned into a death-trap. Those who didn’t drown were slaughtered.
The Lancastrian cause was all but destroyed at Tewkesbury. Among the dead were John Courtenay, John, Lord Wenlock and, most significant of all, the sixteen-year-old Lancastrian heir, Prince Edward, caught fleeing towards the town by Clarence’s forces. At the moment of his killing, according to one account, his precocious belligerence deserted him as he begged Clarence for mercy. Clarence himself was at pains to stress that the young prince had died ‘in plain battle’.27 Whatever the case, to the Yorkists Edward of Lancaster was more use dead than alive.
As his troops looted and pillaged their way through Tewkesbury, Edward and his household men made their way to the abbey, where a ‘great number’ of Lancastrians had sought sanctuary. Moving through the abbey precincts in a haze of bloodlust, the heavily armed Yorkist troops murdered cowering Lancastrians where they found them; others, including the duke of Somerset and other ‘notable persons’, were dragged out of sanctuary. While the official Yorkist account took refuge in a technicality – the abbey had never been handed the status of sanctuary, went the argument, so the king could do what he liked – other commentators were less coy. So ‘polluted’ was the abbey, observed one, that the monks refused to hold services there until it was re-consecrated a month later by the bishop of Worcester. Neither was this a one-off. Edward’s troops systematically went round nearby parish churches and killed whoever they could find. There was nothing to suggest that the king had made any effort to stop them.28
Two days later, Somerset and the other Lancastrian leaders were charged with treason by Richard, reappointed constable of England for the occasion. The trial didn’t take long. Not only had the defendants borne arms against Edward, they were for the most part recidivists, having accepted pardons from him before rebelling again. They were ‘judged to death’, then led to a scaffold in the middle of Tewkesbury and beheaded – though, as the Yorkist account stressed, they were given honourable deaths, ‘without any other dismembering’, or ‘setting up’ of heads and body parts. Along with Edward of Lancaster, they were buried in the abbey, which inadvertently became a Lancastrian shrine.29
In the days after the battle, messengers rode furiously across the country to the Channel ports and into Flanders with news of Edward’s crushing victories. They carried with them eyewitness accounts of the campaign, written in real time by members of Edward’s own household and secretariat, already helpfully translated into French for immediate consumption and circulation at an ecstatic Burgundian court. One account told how, rifling through the luggage of the dead Lancastrian prince, Yorkist soldiers had come across a text of the secret treaty made between the Lancastrians and Louis XI the previous autumn, specifying how the Burgundian state was to be dismembered and divided between the victors. Copying out the treaty, one Burgundian scribe was struck by Lancastrian accusations that Edward IV planned to exterminate the house of Lancaster – something which, he scribbled delightedly on his copy, ‘was accomplished only a little later’. So many celebratory bonfires had been lit in Flanders, noted a Milanese ambassador sardonically, that ‘one would imagine the whole country to be on fire’. In France, Louis XI was rather less sanguine. He was, reported one ambassador, very upset.30
As Edward took stock, updates came in on the Kentish insurgency and, from the north, fresh reports of ‘commotions’, of ‘assemblies of people’ arming themselves in the name of Henry VI and Lancaster. While Edward felt that London, its defences marshalled by Anthony Woodville, could be relied upon to stand firm, the northern insurrection bothered him. Raising fresh troops as he went, Edward headed towards the midlands and the city of Coventry. On the way, news came that Margaret of Anjou, after almost exactly a decade manoeuvring and masterminding Lancastrian resistance to Yorkist rule, had been detained. With her were several of her close advisers, including Sir John Fortescue. Among her ladies was Warwick’s younger daughter Anne, doubtless in shock. In the past month’s bloodletting, she had lost her father, her uncle John Neville and her husband Edward of Lancaster. Approaching her fifteenth birthday, Anne was already a widow; her family, along with the house of Lancaster, broken.31
At Coventry Margaret, bereft of her only son, submitted to Edward: she was, so she assured him mechanically, ‘at his commandment’. She could hardly say otherwise. As news of the catastrophe at Tewkesbury percolated through the country, the northern rebellion evaporated, its cause newly uncertain. The one man who might have become a Lancastrian figurehead, Henry Percy, earl of Northumberland, distanced himself from the insurgents, announcing that he now stood ‘utterly’ with Edward and would put down any uprising to his ‘uttermost power’. He was as good as his word.32
It was just as well. The reports from London, where Queen Elizabeth and her children remained in the Tower, had turned increasingly urgent, ‘daily messages’ arriving from the Yorkist
commanders there. Many thousands of insurgents were swarming out of Kent towards the city, both by land and in boats up the Thames. Unlike the northerners, they had found a new leader. Their self-styled captain and leader of ‘Henry VI’s people in Kent’ was Warwick’s cousin Thomas, ‘the Bastard’ of Fauconberg.
London’s mayor John Stockton had finally recovered from his fictitious illness when, on 8 May, a messenger arrived from Fauconberg, demanding passage through the city on his way to fight Edward. Stockton, the messenger added, was to deliver his reply to the insurgents’ new base at Blackheath, the expanse of common heathland seven miles southeast of London, which was indelibly associated with popular revolt. To Stockton, as to most of London, it looked like Jack Cade all over again. Fortified by a letter from Edward with news of Tewkesbury, the mayor’s response was robust. Enclosing a copy of Edward’s dispatch, he reminded Fauconberg of the king’s two devastating victories and that Warwick – ‘who you suppose to be alive’ – was dead: the earl’s corpse recently on display at St Paul’s was proof positive. Fauconberg should immediately disband his illegal mob.33 Fauconberg ignored him. By the 12th his insurgents had reached Southwark. Edward was still a hundred miles away.
The rebel army that confronted London’s defenders looked ominously familiar: an assortment of Kentish smallholders, labourers and tradesmen nursing much the same mixture of socio-economic grievances and desire for good government that had fuelled insurgents’ violence over the past two decades and more. North of the Thames, rebels in Essex were also on the move. Many were dairy farmers, not so bothered by who was on the throne but incensed by the low prices they received for their produce in London markets. They marched on the city wielding ‘great clubs’, pitchforks and staves. This worrying situation was compounded by the volatile atmosphere in the city, with many ordinary Londoners minded to join Fauconberg rather than resist him. Some harboured a residual loyalty to Warwick; others to Henry VI and Lancaster; still others – the urban poor, menial servants, apprentices, who would have been ‘right glad of a common robbery’ – relishing the opportunity for looting and the chance to ‘put their hands in rich men’s coffers’ that such chaos inevitably brought.34
That Sunday, Fauconberg’s forces surged through Southwark, torching the southern end of London Bridge. The city’s resistance was fierce; the Bastard, forced to retreat, changed his plans. The next day, he set out for Kingston Bridge, ten miles upstream, aiming to cross the river and launch a fresh attack on the city through Westminster and its western suburbs. Halfway there, he realized it was a bad idea. With a detachment of Anthony Woodville’s men rowing fast to Kingston in barges, and knowing that Edward was approaching, he marched his men back to the place where they had started. There, aware that his window of opportunity was closing, Fauconberg threw everything he had at London.
The attacks came, it seemed to one citizen, ‘on all sides’. From the south bank, a ‘great number’ of guns, hauled off the Bastard’s ships, bombarded the city’s river front. While the city defenders returned fire with concentrated accuracy, forcing the insurgents to abandon their positions and scramble for cover, the artillery exchange, as Fauconberg had intended, absorbed most of their available firepower. Picking their way through the ruined southern defences of London Bridge, the rebels set light to the bridge’s teetering houses, trying to burn it down.35 Meanwhile, Fauconberg’s boats ferried some three thousand Kentishmen across to Blackwall and Ratcliffe, east of the city on the river’s north bank. Linking up with the Essex rebels, they made co-ordinated attacks on four of the city gates. At Bishopsgate and Aldgate, amid a relentless barrage of handgun- and arrowfire, they torched the adjoining houses, trying to set the gates themselves alight. As Aldgate ignited, the insurgents managed to force their way in; retreating, the city militia released the portcullis, which slammed down, crushing and killing some attackers. With defences at breaking point, the Yorkist defenders’ cool thinking told.
In the Tower, Anthony Woodville picked a force of four hundred troops, chosen from the garrison guarding the queen and her children. Emerging through a postern gate – a weak, tumbledown passage where City Wall met the Tower, unknown to the attackers – they crept round the city’s walls to Aldgate, where they piled into the insurgents. Sandwiched between Woodville’s men and the counter-attacking militias, the rebels fled. They streamed down Mile End Road, through Stratford, into Essex, or south to the river, through Stepney and Poplar, desperately trying to reach their moored boats and the safety of the river’s south bank. Many were killed in the shallows or drowned.
His troops routed, Fauconberg pulled the remnants of his army back to Blackheath. In the next days, as an advance contingent of fifteen hundred royal troops reached London, he slipped away. Abandoned, the rebels dispersed: relieved Londoners woke up the next morning to find them ‘vanished away’.36 A few days later, on 21 May, Edward, Clarence, Richard and the Yorkist army were welcomed into the city by a euphoric twenty-thousand-strong crowd.
At the heart of this new Yorkist unity, noted one poet, was the bond between the king and his brothers. This fraternal love, he continued, was the best possible evidence that the rightful order of things had been restored. Edward, Clarence and Richard had been split apart by a ‘subtle mean’, but nature had thankfully compelled them to reunite, forging a relationship that was stronger than ever: ‘the knot’, he concluded triumphantly, ‘was knit again’.
Of the three brothers, he singled out one for particular praise. The eighteen-year-old Richard, he felt, had a special quality. Still ‘young of age’ – within the phrase was a sense of astonishment that such a boyish frame was capable of such extreme violence – he had fought with a reckless bravery worthy of the great Trojan warrior Hector. It was a commonplace comparison, but a telling one. As the poet put it, ‘I suppose he’s the same as clerks of read’. Richard had become the kind of knight whose deeds, like those of Hector, literate people now read about in books: fitting praise indeed for a boy who yearned to emulate his chivalric heroes. ‘Fortune hath him chosen’, the poet reflected with a hint of wistful envy, ‘and forth with him will go.’37
Though the poet had reached instinctively for the example of Hector, it didn’t do to look too closely at the story. Like most heroes in the Greek myths, Hector dies a tragic death. In his last speech he rages against the gods for luring him to his destruction at the hands of Achilles, begging them not to let him die dishonourably but to go down in a blaze of glory, such that people would talk about him in time to come. Perhaps the poet knew all this, perhaps not. In any case, everyone used the example of Hector: it served nicely for Richard, ‘victorious in battle’.
It was Rogationtide and the city was, as customary, awash with junketing and processions, parishioners beating the bounds of their communities, driving away evil spirits and sickness with the parish cross, the ringing of handbells and Gospel readings, and beseeching God for his protection.38 On Ascension Eve, the last of the Rogation days, a procession emerged from the Tower and wove its way slowly through the city: a ‘great company’ of men from the Tower’s garrison who, remarked one observer, bore weapons in the way they might have done when leading a convicted man to a place of execution. The man they carried in their midst, in an open coffin, was however already dead.
There had been a brusquely businesslike quality to Henry VI’s killing; he was murdered, as one chronicler reported, on the day of Edward’s arrival in London, between 11 p.m. and midnight. Who had done it was an open question – there were a few coy insinuations about Richard’s presence at the Tower that evening – but, as everybody acknowledged, Edward had given the order. After all, for the best part of two months Henry had been in the close custody of two of Edward’s household esquires, Robert Ratcliffe and William Sayer, who oversaw a security team that at times expanded to as many as thirty-six men. While there might have been a hint of plausibility in the official Yorkist line that Henry had died out of ‘pure displeasure and melancholy’ at the news of his fam
ily’s destruction – possible given that the loss of Gascony had once plunged him into a fifteen-month spell of catatonia – nobody really believed it.39
Henry’s body was put on open display at St Paul’s so ‘that he might be known’, his coffin positioned against an ‘image’, a painting or statue, of the Virgin Mary. But there wasn’t the insistent urgency that had accompanied the showing of Warwick’s and John Neville’s corpses: few people filed past. Although the nature of Henry’s killing went unreported, his body continued to bleed from its wounds, first in St Paul’s and then again after it had been brought down through the steep lanes west of the cathedral to Blackfriars, where it spent the night.
The following morning, guarded by a detachment of Calais soldiers, Henry was loaded onto a barge and taken thirty miles upriver to the Benedictine abbey of Chertsey, where he was buried respectably, though not royally. Chertsey itself was chosen deliberately: the kind of place where the memory of a king could moulder gently away to nothingness in the depths of Surrey.40 That, at least, was what Edward hoped.
If Henry’s murder was cruel, it was also logical. Previously, with Henry’s son, a focus for Lancastrian loyalties, still alive, it would have been pointless to kill him. But following Edward of Lancaster’s death at Tewkesbury, there was no plausible heir to Lancaster left. As one Yorkist put it confidently, with the air of a job well done: ‘no one from that stock remained among the living who could now claim the crown’. Away in France, the Milanese ambassador Sforza de Bettini, driven to distraction in recent years by the impossibility of reporting on English affairs, received the news with a sigh of relief. Things had suddenly clarified, as there was only one king: Edward, the ‘dominator’ of England, who henceforth could rule ‘without the slightest obstacle’.41