The Story of Britain: From the Romans to the Present (31 page)

Warwick and Salisbury had played key roles at the Battle of St Albans. Warwick was rewarded by being made captain of Calais, a position he kept despite the return of Henry VI to his senses in 1456, which meant the end of York’s protectorship. York remained a member of the King’s Council, which soon descended into feuding, and all over England the governmental structure began to collapse, and with it the rule of law. Fighting for booty in France had created an appetite among the nobility that did not die with the loss of Normandy and Gascony.

It became the habit for great lords to support retinues of soldiers dressed in their badges, a custom known as livery and maintenance. It would have been a common if unwelcome sight to see such bands of forty men or more–who pledged themselves like so many others to ride with their lord and ‘take his part against all other persons within the realm of England’, as one oath had it–galloping across the landscape in pursuit of vengeance. In many areas the local law courts stopped functioning, since these private armies simply overturned judgements in the local court that they disagreed with. As the local administration fell apart, the nobility indulged in raids against one another and in small wars. In a period of anarchy the strong man wins, at least temporarily. As captain of Calais, Warwick became a popular hero for using his personal wealth to attack the French.

In 1459 war between the Yorkists and Lancastrians broke out again. This time it was begun by the energetic queen deciding to make a pre-emptive strike against the Yorkists, whom she had been steadily trying to drive out of the King’s Council. Out of the blue she and her troops attacked the Earl of Salisbury but were defeated at the Battle of Blore Heath in Staffordshire. The action now moved to the Welsh marches and the heart of Mortimer country where Warwick was gathered with the Duke of York and his father the Earl of Salisbury preparatory to a fresh attack. Henry VI now showed unexpected decisiveness and, marching at the head of his troops, forced the unprepared conspirators to escape abroad–York to his estates in Ireland and the Nevilles to Calais. Queen Margaret then had Parliament declare all the Yorkist leaders attainted. That meant that they were sentenced to death and all of their property forfeited to the crown.

This aggressive action only upped the stakes for the Yorkists–now it was all or nothing. The following year, 1460, when Warwick and Salisbury returned at the head of an army containing the Duke of York’s eldest son, the future Edward IV, their aim was to make his father king instead of protector. At the Battle of Northampton, Warwick the Kingmaker captured Henry VI, who was wandering incoherently about the battlefield and their victory seemed complete. The queen was forced to escape north to Scotland.

York lost no time in crossing over from Ireland to demand the crown before Parliament, but the Lords refused him. Instead he again had to be contented with the title of protector, though he was now styled heir to the throne and made Prince of Wales. Whatever his titles, York was the real ruler of the country; Henry VI lived quietly in the Tower of London. But at the end of the year the protector was forced to hurry north to put down a revolt by Lancastrian Yorkshire magnates. At the Battle of Wakefield in December 1460 the Yorkists were severely defeated, and some of the most important Yorkist nobles lost their lives–including the duke himself. Warwick’s father Salisbury was publicly executed at the Lancastrian stronghold of Pontefract and York’s second son, the Earl of Rutland, was killed. York’s head was cut off after death, crowned with a paper coronet and stuck on the city of York’s walls as a dreadful warning.

Meanwhile Queen Margaret was making her way down from Scotland accompanied by Scottish soldiers to join up with the northern Lancastrian army which was now heading for London. The Scots had driven a hard bargain–in return for their aid Berwick was to be given back to Scotland. At St Albans in Hertfordshire on the road to London, the queen encountered Warwick who had marched north to stop her from reaching the capital. There she won a great victory and recaptured her husband.

As a foreigner Queen Margaret had not understood the national feeling about Berwick and the historic enmity between the Scots and the English. As the Scots travelled down through England they behaved like an invading army, which in many ways they were. Their looting and burning of English property in the end proved the French queen’s undoing, as the south began to turn against her. Londoners prevented the food carts bearing provisions for the queen’s army from reaching her, and Margaret herself hesitated to march straight into London for fear of the reception she would get.

The nineteen-year-old Edward, the former Earl of March–he had inherited his maternal uncle Edmund Mortimer’s title and, since his father’s death, Duke of York–seized the moment. Summoning an immense gathering of his retainers from the Mortimer estates in Wales and the Welsh marches, he advanced eastwards. Having defeated a Lancastrian army at the Battle of Mortimer’s Cross in Herefordshire in February 1461 he met up with Warwick and his army and reached London before Queen Margaret. At Westminster Hall a month later he was acclaimed king. He became Edward IV.

Although Edward IV had been acclaimed king, the Lancastrians had not abandoned hope and they continued to fight. Edward was an astute general and saw that their huge army had to be routed immediately or it would remain a threat. At Towton near Tadcaster in Yorkshire he caught up with the Lancastrian forces. In what was becoming a north–south divide the Battle of Towton was fought on Palm Sunday, March 1461, in a blinding snowstorm, the private armies of northern border lords such as the Cliffords and the Percys clashing with retainers from Edward IV’s Mortimer estates in Wales and Warwick’s soldiers from the midlands. The Lancastrians were comprehensively defeated. Six of their most important magnates were killed, leaving the cause almost leaderless, while some 37,000 of their followers were killed. Their blood stained the snowdrifts red. Many of their bodies fell into a ravine running alongside the battlefield and were never recovered.

It was not in Queen Margaret’s nature to give up, however. She retreated to Scotland with the bewildered Henry VI and from there encouraged rebellions in northern England. In 1464 Edward, at last provoked into engaging with what remained of the Lancastrian forces, put an end to the insurrections at the Battle of Hexham. In its aftermath Henry VI, who had been part of the raiding party, became a fugitive and was captured wandering in the Pennines. He was then brought to the Tower of London. The Scots had by now abandoned him, and they made a peace treaty with Edward IV, who began to put the country in order and restore the government. But by the end of the decade a new threat to the Yorkist regime had arisen. This time it came in the somewhat surprising shape of the Earl of Warwick. The Yorkists’ former chief adviser had been crucial to their achieving the throne and his influence throughout his own immense estates scattered all round England was a significant factor in ensuring the smooth transition to the Yorkist regime. Warwick had swiftly moved his relations into positions of influence at court, one of his brothers being made Archbishop of York and the other assuming the old earldom of the attainted Percys. His own reward was to be recognized as an international statesman. It had become his conviction that an alliance with France as opposed to the traditional links with Burgundy would now be more useful to England.

Warwick’s vanity was flattered by the cunning new King of France Louis XI, Charles VII’s son. Louis was determined to limit the power of the dangerous rival perched on his eastern borders, so an alliance with England made perfect sense. He suggested that Edward should marry Bona of Savoy, his wife’s sister. But by now Edward IV was older and anxious to be less dependent on the over-controlling Warwick and the Nevilles. He had his own political ideas. The rupture between him and his advisers began when Warwick’s French marriage plan forced the king to reveal that he was in fact already married to the exquisite Elizabeth Woodville, the daughter of Lord Rivers and widow of Sir John Grey, a Lancastrian supporter. She had triumphed where other court beauties had failed. The fair and handsome Edward IV was a young giant who stood six feet three in his stockinged feet, a man of great personal charm and a well-known pursuer of the ladies.

Queen Elizabeth, despite her delicate appearance, was no ingenue but an experienced woman of the world, older than the king and the mother of two children by her first husband. The revelation of the secret marriage became the signal for the wholesale filling of positions at court with her grasping relatives, and Warwick and his brother the Archbishop of York were soon excluded from the king’s counsels. Moreover Edward deliberately pursued a foreign policy which was the opposite of Warwick’s. He renewed the Anglo-Burgundian alliance by marrying his sister Margaret of York to Charles the Rash, Duke of Burgundy.

For so proud a magnate as Warwick to be publicly humiliated in this way was intolerable. He therefore determined to use the private armies of his vast territories to revolt against the king. His scheming mind soon fixed on a new vehicle for his vigorous ambition in the king’s younger brother, the impressionable and greedy George, Duke of Clarence. Like everyone Clarence disliked the Woodvilles, and was soon lured into marrying Warwick’s elder daughter Isabella, who stood to inherit the Kingmaker’s great estates. Thwarted by Edward IV, the Kingmaker now proposed to make Clarence king and his own daughter queen.

In 1469 a series of rebellions began on the Warwick and Neville properties in the midlands. At the Battle of Edgecote Edward IV himself was temporarily taken prisoner by Warwick, though bad feeling among the Lords forced the Kingmaker to release him. A year later Warwick orchestrated another rising, but this time it was absolutely routed by Edward. Clarence and Warwick were forced to flee abroad to the court of the French king Louis XI.

There the restless Warwick’s plans took a different form under the influence of the equally crafty Louis XI, who was determined to hit at Burgundy by reinstating the Lancastrian dynasty. Since France was also home to the exiled Queen Margaret and her son Edward, Prince of Wales, Louis managed to effect an amazing reconciliation between the bitterest of enemies–the Lancastrian queen and the former Yorkist Warwick. Once again, Warwick’s vanity drew him into a new plot to lead an invasion of England to restore Henry VI to the throne. In return his second daughter Anne Neville was to marry Queen Margaret’s son, the Prince of Wales. Anne now became the focus of Warwick’s hopes of seeing his flesh and blood on the throne.

In the autumn of 1470, with troops paid for by the French, Warwick and Clarence landed in England. While Edward IV was in the north, they released a puzzled Henry VI from the Tower of London and proclaimed him king. Then with the French army they drove Edward IV into exile at his brother-in-law’s court in Burgundy. The speed with which Warwick’s expedition had reached London meant Edward had no time to rally his defences.

Henry VI’s restoration lasted for six months between October 1470 and May 1471, but it was really the restoration to power of Warwick the Kingmaker and his Neville relations. Henry VI’s whirligig of fortune, which might have upset the equilibrium of a more stolid personality, was far too much for him and he became almost imbecilic. One chronicler unkindly reported that he was ‘as mute as a crowned calf’. But the Kingmaker’s day was drawing to a close. In March 1471 Edward of York landed at Ravenspur on the Humber river, just like that earlier pretender Henry IV, and steadily fought his way to London.

The civil wars had been going on intermittently for over fifteen years. By and large its battles scarcely affected the ordinary citizen, despite their killing perhaps a third of the nobility. Although Edward did not achieve the nationwide enthusiasm which had been crucial for Henry IV’s revolution, support for the Yorkist cause had always tended to be concentrated in the south and east, in Kent and Sussex, and on the Welsh marches. Edward IV had extremely warm relations with the merchants of London owing to his keen interest in money. When the city opened its gates to him, Henry VI went back to the Tower and Edward was acclaimed king once more. By his side was Clarence, who had finally realized that his best hope lay with his brother now that Warwick was promoting the cause of Lancaster.

On Easter Sunday, 14 April 1471, the decisive Battle of Barnet was fought in what is now north London. Edward defeated Warwick and the Lancastrian army in no uncertain terms and Warwick himself died on the battlefield. As at the Battle of Towton, freak weather conditions prevailed, with such low-lying mist that it was almost impossible for the soldiers to see.

Although Edward IV’s main enemy had been disposed of, there remained the threat of the Prince of Wales and Margaret of Anjou, who had just landed in the west. Had Queen Margaret arrived a little earlier she might have done better for her son, but since the Yorkists had triumphed so conclusively at the Battle of Barnet the country rallied behind Edward. On 4 May Edward IV caught up with the queen and her son, and fought them at the Battle of Tewkesbury. A final, brutal slaughter marked the end of the hopes of the Lancastrians and the triumph of the white rose. Queen Margaret was imprisoned, but the Prince of Wales was murdered in cold blood–as were all the Lancastrian nobles, even though they had surrendered. As for Henry VI, Edward IV at last came to the conclusion that the threat he posed to his dynasty made him too dangerous to live. On the day that Edward returned to London from Tewkesbury it was officially proclaimed that Henry had died in the Tower ‘of pure displeasure and melancholy’.

For the rest of his reign, Edward IV ruled as a strong monarch. Law and order returned. He summoned Parliament as little as possible to avoid enhancing the power of the nobility, but so many of their scions had died in the wars that there was no real opposition. The king was very popular with the commercial classes for refusing to tolerate the nobles’ habit of private war, even though to escape Parliamentary demands he returned to a form of the Maltolt now known as a benevolence, a forced loan paid mainly by the merchants. His close links with their community were cemented by his longstanding relationship with Jane Shore, the wife of a London merchant.

Now that London was no longer the scene of warfare it benefited from the growing volume of international trade and from cheap and mobile labour, for villeinage had at last withered away. It also helped that the seas round England were safer since Edward IV had stamped out piracy. Instead of fighting suicidal wars among themselves the European kingdoms had begun to turn their energies outwards, exploring the unknown. By 1460 the Portuguese king and grandson of John of Gaunt, Henry the Navigator, had discovered the north-west coast of Africa. In 1481 Bristol merchants sailing west into the Atlantic hit on what they called the isles of Brasil, which may have been Newfoundland. And only a decade later Christopher Columbus became the first European to set foot on the unknown continent later called America.

Edward IV supported the printer Caxton, enabling him to set up his press in the shadow of Westminster Abbey in 1476. This revolutionary development meant that what people read was no longer controlled by the Church. There now circulated in England the uncensored literature of the ancient Greeks and Romans, which had been frowned on since the days of the Church Fathers as well as romances and histories. It was the beginning of what is known as the Renaissance or rebirth of western culture. Spread by scholars like the Dutchman Desiderius Erasmus and John Colet, the Dean of St Paul’s and founder of its School for Boys, the humanist movement took hold in England. The study of man unmediated by religion marked the end of the middle ages and saw the beginning of the modern world.

In the turbulent north, to suppress the Lancastrians and keep out the Scots Edward relied on his brother Richard of Gloucester, who as well as being a talented commander–as he had shown at the Battle of Tewkesbury–was also a very good administrator. The Yorkist king soon felt secure enough to invade France in order to punish Louis XI for his part in Warwick’s uprising, but the Anglo-Burgundian alliance was damaged almost at once when the king’s brother-in-law Charles the Rash failed to send enough troops to ensure success. Burgundy’s existence as an independent country was in any case near its end. In 1477 Charles the Rash was killed at the Battle of Nancy against the Swiss. It was the signal for Louis to invade Burgundy and make it part of France, as it has been ever since.

In 1483 Edward IV suddenly died of a stroke. He was only forty, still golden haired but with a tendency to plumpness. His death was generally put down to a life of self-indulgence which had started to verge on debauchery. In his last years he had moved against his troublesome brother Clarence by means of a bill of attainder. Clarence had learned little from his adventures. He had already aroused the enmity of his brother Richard of Gloucester, who had recently married Clarence’s sister-in-law Anne Neville after the murder of her husband, the Prince of Wales. Despite Gloucester’s expectations Clarence had attempted to make sure that the immense Warwick possessions were inherited by himself alone. Eventually, in 1478, it was given out that Clarence had drowned in a vat of Malmsey wine. He was most likely murdered.

On the death of Edward IV the crown passed to his thirteen-year-old son, who became Edward V. He and his brother, the eleven-year-old Duke of York, are known to history as the ill-fated Princes in the Tower.