She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth (52 page)

By this act of attainder, York and his allies were destroyed in law; yet the unpalatable fact was that they were not there to be destroyed in person. Nor, now, did they have anything left to lose by challenging the very existence of the regime over which Margaret presided. The centrifugal force of spiralling conflict was now so intense that nothing could be taken for granted, other than the certainty that England’s future would be decided on a battlefield – and the terrifying truth was that, on a battlefield, anything could happen.

That grim knowledge was etched on the faces of three generations of the duke of York’s family – his sixty-year-old brother-in-law Salisbury, his thirty-one-year-old nephew Warwick and his own son Edward of March, who had just turned eighteen – as the three earls set sail to return to the south coast of England in June 1460, their ships full of soldiers recruited once again from the Calais garrison. This time, however, the earls found themselves welcomed as champions, not resisted as traitors. Margaret had built herself a power base in the midlands and the north-west; the heavy cost of that militarisation, it now transpired, was a haemorrhaging of support for her cause in the south-east. The people of Kent, Surrey and Sussex, and the citizens of London – who, though nervous at the approach of an army, opened the gates of the capital to the Yorkist lords on 2 July – no longer
trusted a government led by the queen from her citadel at Coventry. Instead, they were prepared to give a sympathetic hearing, and practical support, to Yorkist declarations that the crown had been hijacked and royal justice perverted for partisan ends.

That the city of London should endorse this view of a regime led by the queen in the name of the king and prince was a startling rejection both of Margaret’s claim to exercise power on her husband’s behalf, and of her confrontational strategy. But there would be no reconsideration of tactics or goals; only an unyielding resolve to defend the crown against treasonable resistance. When Warwick and March left London to move north at the head of an army on 5 July, therefore, Margaret’s forces marched south from Coventry to meet them. And once again, the limitations of her position and of the composite authority she wielded were obvious and inescapable. She and her six-year-old son remained behind Coventry’s city walls, safe, but helpless to inspire or lead her troops, who were commanded instead by her loyal supporters the duke of Buckingham, the earl of Shrewsbury and Viscount Beaumont, while the king rode alongside them, a docile mascot rather than a royal general.

At Ludford Bridge York’s soldiers had refused to take up arms against their sovereign. But now, just nine months later, when the two armies met outside Northampton on 10 July, Henry’s insubstantial presence proved inconsequential rather than talismanic. The king sat meekly in his tent, sheltering from the pouring rain that turned the field into a treacherous bog into which his army’s artillery sank, immobilised and useless in the enveloping mud. Warwick and March seized the advantage, and their soldiers overran the field in little more than an hour. They had ordered their troops to safeguard the king and spare the rank and file, so far as was possible, while concentrating their assault on the lords who commanded the enemy lines. It was a shrewdly judged tactic for an army claiming to fight for the common good, and its success was startling. By sundown, the bloodied, mud-spattered corpses of Buckingham, Shrewsbury and Beaumont had been removed
for burial, other casualties were few, and King Henry was riding biddably beside his cousin of March and the earl of Warwick on the road south to the Yorkist-held capital.

Pope Pius II was later moved by this passive compliance to describe Henry as ‘more timorous than a woman, utterly devoid of wit or spirit’. The essence of this papal observation was acute enough, but its expression much less well considered. With Henry installed under Yorkist guard in the bishop of London’s palace, and Yorkist nominees newly appointed to the great offices of state, it was apparent more than ever that the cause of this puppet-king now depended on his wife – and there was nothing timorous, witless or spiritless about Margaret.

The situation she now faced demanded physical endurance and a more resolute will than ever. Northampton had been a catastrophe: her husband was lost to her, her chief noble lieutenants slaughtered, and her base at Coventry under threat as the duke of York made preparations to sail from Dublin to Chester at the head of another army. But a reliably steadfast ally, her husband’s half-brother Jasper Tudor, earl of Pembroke – one of the two sons of Queen Catherine’s second marriage – remained in control of south and west Wales; the earl of Northumberland was mustering men to defend the north of England against the Yorkists; and the energetic young duke of Somerset was preparing to return from France, where he had taken refuge after a bold but unsuccessful attempt to seize Calais from Warwick’s control, in order to raise the south-western counties for the queen. All was not lost, if she could co-ordinate a rapid counterstrike.

Bundling her son onto horseback to ride pillion with a trusted bodyguard, and taking the saddle with a servant of her own, Margaret headed west from Coventry with a small escort. Her guards were not heavily armed enough to prevent the loss of valuable baggage to thieves along the way, but some time in September the dishevelled and exhausted party arrived at the gates of Harlech Castle, a massive fortress overlooking the sea from a clifftop on the north Welsh coast. They were there still, safe behind its
formidable walls, when news came that was worse than anything Margaret had yet faced.

On 10 October, the duke of York had ridden into London. Ringing trumpets announced his arrival before his company came into sight. All dressed in livery of white and blue marked with his device of a fetterlock, the duke’s men made an imposing spectacle as they escorted their lord through the streets of the capital and out of Ludgate towards the palace of Westminster. But it was not this show of force that had stopped the breath of those who watched them pass; instead, it was the extraordinary message that could be read in the trappings of the procession. The duke’s great sword was carried upright before his horse, just as the king was traditionally attended when he rode among his people. Banners fluttering in the autumn air displayed the arms of Lionel of Clarence, the second son of Edward III from whom York could claim a senior line of royal inheritance to that of Henry himself. And, most unmistakably of all, the royal standard itself now flew above York’s head.

After ten years of escalating conflict, ten years in which it had become appallingly clear that there could be no lasting security for York – or peace for England – while Margaret championed the cause of her husband and son against him, the duke had at last come to the frightening conclusion from which he had shrunk for so long. Henry VI, that amiable innocent whose very harmlessness had had such devastating effects, would have to be removed. Amid the echoing magnificence of the great hall at Westminster, where the lords had gathered for a meeting of parliament, York strode to the dais and placed his hand on the marble throne, turning to the assembled peers to await their shout of acclamation.

It did not come. The faces of the nobles before him showed confusion, consternation and horror. Desperate though they were to find a way out of the war, a crown on York’s head promised only more darkness and bloodshed. After ten years of conflict in which he had taken such a prominent part, the duke himself was too tarnished a figure to offer any credible hope of reconciliation
or renewal in government. And, even after everything that had happened, Henry’s kingship was not divisive enough to vindicate York’s actions. He was not a tyrant like Edward II and Richard II, the kings who had previously been pushed from their thrones because of the threat they posed to the interests of the subjects they had sworn to protect; instead, he was an empty vessel, to whose unassuming mildness still clung a faint aura of the sanctity of his anointing, and of the divine sanction that his father’s great victories had conferred on his dynasty.

In shock and alarm, the lords retreated into urgent conclave. Three weeks of tense negotiation followed, in which the earl of March, York’s eighteen-year-old son, acted as go-between, riding sombrely between his father at Westminster Palace and the lords in session at the Black Friars, a monastery built into the south-west corner of the city walls. Those who were looking for guidance from God were scarcely reassured when the ornamental crown that hung in the room at Westminster Abbey where the parliamentary commons sat in debate crashed suddenly to the floor. By 31 October, however, a settlement had at last been agreed, which was promulgated with oaths, solemn ceremonial and public proclamations. By its terms King Henry VI would keep his throne; but when he died he would be succeeded, not by his son Edward, but by his cousin of York.

This settlement – a diplomatic homage to the treaty by which Henry’s father had, long ago, been named heir to his defeated enemy, the French king Charles VI – served its immediate purpose. It was a compromise which gave due acknowledgement to York’s claims, while allowing his regime to retain the support of the wider political community by functioning in King Henry’s name. Like that earlier treaty, however, its failure was an in escapable part of its very formulation. Acknowledgement of York’s claims meant the disinheritance of Henry’s son – and that meant, in practice, it was no settlement at all.

For Margaret it was proof of what she had believed ever since York had first ridden in arms to St Albans five long years earlier:
that this conflict could be resolved only by the total destruction of her enemies. Her husband, as usual, was a pawn in the hands of whoever currently had him in their keeping, and he participated with meek submissiveness in the ceremonies by which the accord was sealed. The difficulty with which the settlement presented Margaret therefore lay not simply in its direct attack on her son’s position, but also in its assault on what remained of the composite authority she had struggled so hard to construct. Henry’s increasingly fragile but still extant claim to legitimacy was now appropriated, along with his person, by the Yorkist regime, leaving the queen and prince cut adrift from the crown that had anchored Margaret’s claim to rule.

It was no accident that rumours about the irregularity of the prince’s birth now re-emerged with renewed force. For Yorkist partisans, these whispers served the happy double purpose of justifying York’s claim to be Henry’s heir and undermining the queen’s public standing through insinuations – damning to a woman as they would never be to a man – about her private conduct. Margaret responded with a forceful restatement of her son’s rights: a letter to the city of London written in the seven-year-old prince’s name – a habit of ventriloquism to which she had had to become accustomed during the fifteen years of her married life – declared him to be ‘rightfully and lineally born by descent of the blood royal to inherit the pre-eminence of this realm’. She also attempted to reclaim her husband’s authority by emphasising Henry’s plight as a prisoner in need of rescue, whose acquiescence in the naming of York as his heir was the result of coercion, not genuine concession.

But she knew, too, that her case depended on the point of a sword, not legal argument. At the end of November she set sail from Harlech, heading north across iron-grey water to Scotland, to appeal for help against her enemies in England. Scottish kings were always eager to make trouble for their southern neighbours, in whatever form the opportunity presented itself. But the king of Scots in November 1460 was eight years old, his father, James II, having been killed three months earlier when his own cannon
blew up while he was trying to wrest Roxburgh Castle from its English occupants. In the matter of royal minorities, as in so much else, the Scots followed the lead of their French allies, and it was therefore the newly widowed queen mother, Mary of Guelders, who was appointed regent on behalf of her young son. If Margaret envied the clarity of the Scottish queen regent’s position, she strove not to show it as she petitioned for men and money while their two boys played.

In England meanwhile, her loyal lords, led by Jasper Tudor in the west and the earl of Northumberland in the north, were massing the military forces already at their disposal. York knew that he urgently needed to counter this threat before Margaret had the chance to secure reinforcements from beyond England’s borders. Despite the difficulty of moving armies across country in winter when the weather was harsh and provisions scarce, the duke therefore set his own forces in motion. The earl of Warwick remained in the capital; Edward of March led his troops westward to Wales; York himself marched north, in the company of his old ally Salisbury. What they did not know as they set out on icily rutted roads, their breath hanging in great clouds around them, was that against all the odds the duke of Somerset had succeeded in forging a path from the south-west – where York had believed he was about to launch an assault on Bristol – to rendezvous with Northumberland in the north. And when the duke emerged from his castle at Sandal near the town of Wakefield in Yorkshire on 30 December to encounter his enemy, it was to face the horrifying realisation that he was both outmanoeuvred and massively outnumbered.

The result was a rout. When the fighting was over, the corpses that lay piled on the cold earth included the duke of York himself, united in death with his teenage son Edmund, earl of Rutland. Salisbury too lost a son, Thomas, but he had no time to grieve for his lost boy or for York, his brother-in-law and brother in arms; instead, he was taken in chains to Pontefract, where he was killed the following day. Then their four heads were taken to York and set on spikes on the city gates as a terrible warning of the fate of
traitors, the duke’s mockingly festooned with a paper crown, his pretensions of majesty now as hollow as the sockets of his sightless eyes.

The news, when it reached Margaret more than a hundred miles north in Scotland, was overwhelming. Her greatest enemy was dead. She was no longer a fugitive and a supplicant, driven into exile to beg for help from a fellow queen. Instead, her army held the north of England, and the kingdom lay open to their advance. As soon as she and her son rejoined Somerset and Northumberland and the troops they commanded in early January 1461, they began the long march south, pressing hard for the capital. But still the final victory remained to be won – and the journey itself began to reveal the full complexity of the task ahead of them.