She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth (56 page)

The point on which she would not concede was the security of her son. He was crucial to this enterprise, the physical embodiment of the Lancastrian claim and the Lancastrian future, but Margaret had not kept him safe all these years to surrender him into Warwick’s dubious clutches. Still, Louis’s web, drawn about her in the silken surroundings of Amboise, was irresistible. Without Warwick, the Lancastrian future was nothing but a chimera. And so on 22 July in the great château of Angers beside the river Loire, the queen and the earl came face to face. When Warwick knelt before her to pledge his renewed allegiance, Margaret’s revulsion was such that she kept him on his knees for more than fifteen minutes. But the deal was done. Her son, the prince of Wales, was to marry Anne, the younger of Warwick’s two daughters. Warwick was to take ship immediately for England to restore King Henry to his throne. Only then, once the country was secure, would the queen and prince follow; and the prince would then rule as regent on his father’s behalf, with his father-in-law Warwick at his right hand in this new Lancastrian government.

With autumn approaching, and Louis keen to set his plan in motion and see the back of his English visitors, there was no time to lose. Warwick landed in the west country on 13 September, declaring that he had come with the authority of ‘the most noble princess Margaret, queen of England’ and that of her son the prince, to rescue ‘our most dread sovereign lord, King Henry the Sixth’ from the hands of ‘his great rebel and enemy, Edward, late earl of March, usurper, oppressor and destroyer of our said sovereign lord and of the noble blood of all the realm of England and of the good, true commons of the same’. The man who had done more than anyone else to put this ‘usurper’ on the throne could hardly have taken a more breathtakingly brazen stand, but Warwick did not hesitate. While the earl marched north, Margaret and her son and his new young wife remained at Amboise to wait for the good news.

It was startlingly quick to come. Edward was a perceptive politician and a commanding leader, but he could not free his hands from the the coils in which he now laboured. Six months earlier he had decided to restore the earldom of Northumberland to the Percy family, believing that only the Percys had the depth of support in the far north of England to secure the region against Warwick’s now hostile influence. But in doing so he had to take the earldom away from Warwick’s brother, Lord Montagu, whose reward it had been for his role in suppressing Lancastrian resistance in the early 1460s, and whose impeccable loyalty had not faltered even over the previous twelve months when it meant taking up arms against his own brother. Now, however, despite Edward’s best efforts to compensate him, Montagu was bitterly disillusioned. How much, the king discovered only when Montagu’s advancing troops were within ten miles of his encampment at Doncaster. Shaken messengers delivered the devastating news that Montagu had declared for Edward’s enemies, and intended not to help but to capture him.

The king’s forces were scattered and unprepared, caught between the armies of Warwick and Montagu, and Edward knew
that this time he would not have long to live if he were captured. He decided to run, making at speed for the Norfolk coast – narrowly escaping the treacherous tides of the Wash as he did so – and from there found ships to take him to the Netherlands to seek asylum and support in the territories of the duke of Burgundy. Amid riots in London, Queen Elizabeth, who was heavily pregnant, fled into sanctuary at Westminster Abbey with her three small daughters. As Warwick and his army approached the capital, another of the earl’s brothers, the archbishop of York, seized control of the Tower and conveyed the dishevelled figure of Henry VI from his prison quarters to the lavish apartments the queen had so frantically vacated. And on 13 October, Warwick himself carried Henry’s train when the crown was ceremonially restored to the bemused king in the magnificent surroundings of St Paul’s.

When the news reached Paris, Louis ordered three days of celebration and thanksgiving at which Margaret and her son – now once again accorded the full estate and majesty of a queen and prince – were guests of honour. The speed of Edward’s fall had been greater than Margaret could possibly have hoped, and yet she did not hasten to the coast to take ship for England. The queen herself was in no hurry. After all the reverses, all the bloodshed of the last fifteen years, she would not let her son’s feet touch English soil until his security was assured.

And security, in England, was still hard to come by. For all the sumptuous ceremony on the streets of London and Paris, the suddenly restored Lancastrian regime was more patchwork and motley than ever. It rested on paper-thin foundations: returning Lancastrian exiles had to swallow their distaste and distrust to follow the lead of a Yorkist renegade, and Warwick found himself unable to restore their titles and estates without depriving those – himself included – who had benefited from their forfeitures. The position of the duke of Clarence, the other conspicuous Yorkist cuckoo in this supposedly Lancastrian nest, was becoming particularly invidious. Thwarted and purposeless now that Warwick’s conversion to the Lancastrian cause had removed all hope that he might
wear the crown himself, he was said to be ‘held in great suspicion, despite, disdain and hatred with all the lords, noblemen, and other, that were adherents and full partakers with Henry’. Henry himself was more confused than ever; the absent prince was still an unknown quantity, his unenviable position as Warwick’s new protégé scarcely reassuring for his kingdom’s future; and no one yet knew how Margaret’s forceful will might sit within a government that was already acutely unstable.

King Louis, meanwhile, was equally reluctant to despatch the queen and prince into Warwick’s care until his own conditions were met – in his case, the fulfilment of Warwick’s promise that England would join France in war against Burgundy. It took some time, given how full the earl’s hands already were, and the difficulties, political and practical, of imposing the pressures and costs of fighting overseas on a deeply troubled country. But at last, in February 1471, Warwick put his seal to a treaty with France and ordered the Calais garrison to move onto the offensive against Burgundy. Margaret and her son were already at the Norman port of Honfleur, and began to make preparations for their final journey to their recaptured kingdom. Still they were delayed. Every time they put to sea, headwinds drove them back to harbour; and it was not until Easter Sunday, 14 April, that the weary royal party stepped ashore at Weymouth in Dorset, where horses were waiting to take them fifteen miles north to rest at the Benedictine abbey at Cerne.

There their world fell apart. The same moment that had convinced them to take ship for England – Warwick’s declaration of war on Burgundy – had precipitated a chain of events that had undone everything they thought they knew when they left the coast of Normandy. Back in September, Duke Charles of Burgundy had not given an effusive welcome to the bedraggled figure of the fugitive King Edward on his arrival in Holland. Thanks to the treaty the two men had sealed in happier days, Edward was the duke’s brother-in-law, but the duke had no wish to be drawn into all-out war on his behalf, and sent conciliatory messages to the new regime in England through the duke of Exeter, a Lancastrian
loyalist whom he had welcomed to his court after finding him begging in the street as a poverty-stricken exile. But this studied neutrality was no longer an option once Warwick had rebuffed his advances and announced England’s support for Louis’s war. In February 1471 Edward suddenly found that he had Burgundian money and ships at his disposal, and on 11 March, after the same agonising wait for favourable winds that was confining Margaret to the harbour at Honfleur, he set sail for England.

His position – at the head of a small band of fewer than a thousand soldiers driven by storms and by Warwick’s defences to land not in Norfolk, as he had hoped, but at Ravenspur in Yorkshire – was intensely dangerous. ‘It is a difficult matter to go out by the door and then wish to enter by the windows,’ came the laconic comment of the Milanese ambassador at Beauvais. ‘They think he will leave his skin there.’ But the fragility of Warwick’s regime was equally apparent. The two greatest northern lords, Warwick’s brother Montagu and Henry Percy, Montagu’s rival for the earldom of Northumberland, made no move to intercept Edward as he marched south into the midlands. At Coventry, the duke of Clarence threw himself on his brother’s mercy, hoping to save his own skin and salvage his political future from the bonfire of his hopes that his alliance with Warwick had now become. The panic-stricken inhabitants of London, terrified by these bewildering reverses, offered no resistance when Edward rode through their city gates on 11 April, to reclaim his crown and meet for the first time his baby son, the new heir to the Yorkist throne who had been born in the abbey sanctuary at Westminster five months earlier.

Two days later, Edward’s men were once again on the march, moving ten miles north to Barnet to confront the Lancastrian forces commanded by his cousin of Warwick. A decade earlier, it had been Margaret’s unexpected retreat from Barnet that had allowed Edward and Warwick, giddy with euphoria, to sweep into the capital together and unopposed to claim the crown for the Yorkist cause. Now all those old certainties were gone. Next morning, in the early hours of Easter Sunday – just as Margaret’s
shipmaster was setting his course for the approach to Weymouth harbour – Edward gave the order to attack. The two armies fell on one another in the semi-darkness, shrouded by fog as dense as the confusion of enmities and loyalties at play on the field. Four hours later, fifteen hundred men lay slaughtered. Among them were Lord Montagu, his struggle with his conscience laid bare in the Yorkist badge found on his corpse under his Lancastrian armour, and beside him his brother Warwick, the self-appointed arbiter of England’s destiny finally brought to earth by a dagger thrust through his open visor.

Margaret, who had made the safety of her son the touchstone of her political strategy for a decade and a half, had brought him to England on the very day, almost at the very hour, when ten months of intricate preparation to secure his future collapsed into dust. She would not weep for Warwick, but she could not contemplate the ruin of their plans without exhaustion and fear. But all was not lost. Her son was still unharmed; their forces were massing in the south-west; and there might yet be great advantage, once Edward was defeated, in the opportunity to rule without Warwick’s oppressive and demanding presence. The queen, the prince and their military lieutenant, yet another faithful duke of Somerset – Edmund Beaufort, younger brother of the Somerset who had died at Hexham – pressed on northward towards the Severn estuary, intending to cross into Wales to rendezvous with forces under the command of Jasper Tudor. King Edward, meanwhile, mustered fresh troops of his own and set out to intercept them, proclaiming as he went that death would be the penalty for anyone offering help to ‘Margaret, calling her queen, which is a Frenchwoman born’ or her son.

Confusion and panic reigned. ‘The world is right queasy,’ wrote Sir John Paston with impressive understatement, having escaped with his life from Warwick’s defeated army at Barnet. Sforza de’ Bettini, contemplating from his ambassadorial post in France the difficulty of procuring reliable information to send to his master in Milan, was more forthright. ‘I wish the country and the people
were plunged deep in the sea because of their lack of stability,’ he said feelingly, ‘for I feel like one going to the torture when I write about them, and no one ever hears twice alike about English affairs.’ An Italian resident in Bruges had more patience with the unfolding drama: ‘King Edward has set out with his power to look for the queen and prince, who had landed and gone to the parts of Wales,’ he told his father. ‘We have heard nothing since, although we are greedy for news. There are many who consider the queen’s prospects favourable, chiefly because of the death of Warwick, because it is reckoned she ought to have many lords in her favour who intended to resist her because they were enemies of Warwick.’ The truth, whichever way one looked at it, was that everything now depended on this pell-mell chase across country.

The queen and her army pressed on as hard as they could, but Edward had sent messages ahead to warn the keeper of Gloucester Castle to bar the gates against them. Unable to gain access that way to the bridge across the Severn, they had no choice but to push on to the next crossing-place, a ford at Tewkesbury. Edward’s forces, meanwhile, were bearing down on them, a forced march of thirty-six miles on 3 May bringing them within three miles of Margaret’s troops. Early the next morning, it became clear that the queen and prince could not reach their reinforcements in Wales without first confronting their enemy. Yet again, Margaret was left to hurry to the safety of a nearby monastery while her army mustered in battle array. For the first time, however, her beloved son’s fate was out of her hands. The seventeen-year-old prince commanded the centre of the Lancastrian army; at last he could put to use the years of military training at Koeur. Today, he would either win his father’s crown, or lose his life.

The end, when it came, was quick. First Edward’s soldiers broke the Lancastrian vanguard under the duke of Somerset, who turned and fled to Tewkesbury’s great abbey, though sanctuary, in the end, could not save him. And then, amid the carnage of that rout, Edward himself led an assault on the prince’s position. Margaret’s son died where he fell. The whereabouts of the queen
herself were not discovered for three more days, but she did not try to run. She had nowhere to go, and no one left to fight for. She was brought to Edward at Coventry, once her citadel, now a place of humiliation and grief. And when the victorious king made his triumphant entry into London, with trumpets sounding and his loyal lords about him, there was a chariot at the back of the procession in which the queen sat, straight-backed and blank-faced, staring at nothing.

The day after their arrival in the capital, the body of Henry VI was brought out of the Tower. The Londoners were told that their former king had died of ‘pure displeasure and melancholy’ at news of his son’s death and the destruction of his cause, but few doubted that his life had been ended on King Edward’s orders. There was no advantage, now, in keeping alive a Lancastrian puppet when the whole Lancastrian line could be extinguished. For one night, his corpse was displayed to public view on a bier at St Paul’s, its face uncovered, to forestall seditious rumours of his survival. The next day, it was placed on a barge and rowed twenty miles upriver for burial at the ancient abbey of Chertsey. ‘And so no one from that stock remained among the living who could claim the crown,’ one contemporary solemnly noted.