Wars of the Roses: Bloodline: Book 3 (The Wars of the Roses) (33 page)

‘It seems there is no loyalty left in England now,’ he said bitterly. ‘Follow the coast to Honfleur and then the river into Paris. I believe I have one or two friends there who might aid us in our hour of need.’

He started as Isabel gave a wail, a sound of such pain that was as much the moan of a wounded animal as anything he had heard before. Warwick crossed to her and saw how she had opened her blouse to see the tiny babe within. It was unmoving, the wrinkled skin faintly blue. Isabel had felt the coldness grow against her skin and now she tried to feed her breast into a mouth that was still. She put her head back and shrieked out her grief until George of Clarence pressed her into his shoulder and held both the mother and his dead daughter, tears wracking him in great heaves.

Warwick could smell the city of Paris as he waited in the corridor. Unlike the Palace of Westminster, built along the river from London so that it would benefit from sweeter breezes, the Louvre was right at the heart of the French capital. The result was that it was practically unusable in summer months, when poisonous miasmas rose from the overcrowded streets and the entire French court packed up and moved to the country. There was still a sense of chaos in the hundreds of rooms he had passed, as staff polished and swept, opening windows to let light and air flood back into shuttered cloisters.

He sat on a bench in a small alcove, resting his head against a statue much older than Christ, of some Greek with a tightly curled beard. His daughter had withdrawn into herself, hardly speaking even to her husband Clarence. The two of them had been inconsolable as they buried the tiny child in a French field, a niece of an English king. The grave had been marked and Warwick had sworn to bring the box back to England when they were free to do so, for a proper tomb and service. It was all he had been able to offer.

A door opened, interrupting his thoughts so that he sat straight and then stood as King Louis came out, looking for him. Warwick knelt as the French king wiped his hands with a cloth. The king’s fingers were dark with ink and he eyed them dubiously as he took Warwick’s arm.

‘Richard, I have heard of your tragedies. I left my work with these new presses, these printing machines that replace a dozen monks with just three men and a contraption! I am so sorry, both for you and your son-in-law, for your daughter. Did she name the child?’

‘Anne,’ Warwick said, in a whisper.

‘It is a terrible thing. I have experienced it in too many ways, too often to bear. The dead children who cannot even go to heaven without baptism! It is a cruelty, too much. And your King Edward! To allow such accusations to stand against his earl and his own brother! It is incredible. I offer you my hospitality with my sympathy, of course, anything you require.’

‘Thank you, Your Majesty. That means a great deal to me. I have funds and some small property …’

‘
Pfui!
I will sign a thousand livres to you for your expenses. You and your companions are my guests, friends to this house. There are entire floors unused in this palace, my lord. There are worse places to grieve than Paris, I think. It is up to you, of course. I merely offer and advise.’

Warwick was genuinely touched and bowed once again to show his pleasure at such generous treatment. The king bowed back, solemnly.

‘I hope you will take up residence in this place, Richard. You would not be alone.’ The king paused, pressing his finger across both of his lips. ‘I should tell you, perhaps. You were a gentleman before, when I was so crude as to presume on your good manners. It was wrong of me to force you into the presence of one who might have made you uncomfortable.’

‘Queen Margaret, Your Majesty?’ Warwick asked, following the stream of words with a little difficulty.

‘Of course, Margaret, with that brigand she calls Derry Brewer, who claims to speak no French at all, but listens most acutely to what is said in front of him.’

‘I don’t follow, Your Majesty,’ Warwick said.

King Louis faced him squarely.

‘Milady Margaret of Anjou is once again my guest, Richard. I would not want you to be uncomfortable, though she spoke well of you after you met here before. Her son accompanies her also. Perhaps you will find it in you to tell the boy another tale or two about his father.’ The king stared at Warwick’s eyes as if he could see through to the man behind them. ‘If it is not possible, I understand. You have suffered as much as any man. Betrayed by your king, a granddaughter dying at sea before your eyes. Would the child have lived if you had not been forced to run? Of course, of course. It is too cruel.’

King Louis wiped at his eyes, though Warwick had not seen a trace of tears there.

‘You know, Richard, there are some who never truly accepted Edward of York as king. A king must lead, of course, but not just on the battlefield, do you see? It is his role to encourage his lords, to create a rising tide that lifts all the ships, not just his own. Perhaps I should arrange another fine lunch for you to tell Margaret and her son all that has happened. Would that be agreeable, my lord? It would please me. King Henry is still alive in the Tower, yes? Still well?’

‘He is the same,’ Warwick replied. He felt a surge of anger at the manipulation, then shrugged it away. He had been cast out of England, left to rot like Margaret of Anjou before him. What if there was a way back?

‘Ah, I am pleased,’ King Louis said. ‘His wife tells me
that he has no will of his own, poor man. Such tragedy. Yet you have met his son. Quite the Tartar! If you agree to see the lad again, I think you will be amazed at how he has grown in just a few years. He has a more royal bearing, if you follow me. If you agree, Richard?’

Warwick bowed a third time. Margaret was responsible for the execution of his father. He had imagined her death a thousand times, though less so in later years, when she had been so far from his thoughts. He nodded, finding that the embers had grown cool and he could put aside an old anger at last. Now that he had discovered a new one.

He had felt despair as he buried the body of his granddaughter. The French king’s words brought a lamp into that deep and inner darkness, giving him hope.

‘Of course I will meet Queen Margaret and her son,’ Warwick said. ‘It would be a great honour.’

Louis was peering closely at him, and whatever he saw brought a gleam to the king’s eye.

‘Who could bear a life without challenge, without perils, Richard? Not I! I sense it in you also. While we are all young, why should we not live? Like birds of prey, without regret or too much fear of what lies ahead. I tell you I would rather reach and fall than sit and dream. Is it not the same for you?’

Warwick smiled, feeling his black depression begin to ease, affected by the man’s sense of delight in the world.

‘It is, Your Majesty,’ he said.

After the battle at Sandal Castle in December 1460, known now as the battle of Wakefield, four heads were taken to be spiked on the walls of the city of York. The Duke of York was one, wearing a paper crown to show his empty ambition. The second was Earl Salisbury, father to Warwick. The third head belonged to York’s son, the seventeen-year-old Edmund, Earl of Rutland. Finally, with terrible symmetry, the fourth head belonged to Salisbury’s son, Sir Thomas Neville. Sir Thomas was also seventeen and, for plot reasons, I chose not to place yet another young Neville man in the same battle. The danger of this period is always that there are too many cousins, daughters, sons and uncles to keep a main line of plot moving. Some, who play no major part, must fall away. It is interesting to note, however, how many of the lords at Towton had
very
personal reasons to seek vengeance.

Salisbury’s two main titles passed to his sons: Salisbury to Warwick and Montagu to John Neville. John Neville
became Earl Northumberland for some time, but was later forced to return that title to the Percy heir by Edward IV. The Montagu title was bumped up to a Marquess to compensate John Neville, though I suspect nothing ever really could. The rank of marquess, somewhere between an earl and a duke, is a rare creation, little known in England – with notable and famous exceptions such as the Marquess of Queensberry, who codified boxing, and the modern Marquess of Bath, who owns the stately home of Longleat, Cheddar Gorge and around ten thousand acres.

John Neville was indeed captured by Queen Margaret’s forces for a time, but was still a prisoner in York until Edward entered the city after Towton, so did not fight in that battle.

In regard to the extraordinary event of 1461, when London refused entry to the queen, the king and the Prince of Wales, the key to it does appear to be the fear of northerners. It is true that Margaret’s army had been allowed to steal and butcher and burn their way down the country – without pay, the leash was off. At that time, northerners spoke a thick dialect that would have been almost unrecognizable to London ears. (Abbot Whethamstede described it as sounding like dogs barking.) Londoners would have feared the Scots in Margaret’s army even more – true ‘savages’ from what was then an unimaginably distant and unknown country. The sense of a foreign invader is difficult to comprehend today, but having Scots in her army did Margaret no favours in public perception.

Sir Henry Lovelace did in fact play a part in the run-up to the second battle of St Albans. Warwick created the most
ornate defences, all facing north, only to have the queen’s army swing west to Dunstable and then strike Warwick’s army in the rear left square, working their way to the centre force. Although Derry Brewer is a fictional character, once again, someone like him must have existed to have gathered this sort of useful information. Lovelace may have been promised an earldom for passing on the details. It is true that he was one of Warwick’s close retinue. I changed his name to Sir Arthur Lovelace as I had another Henry in Earl Percy, one more in Henry Beaufort, the Duke of Somerset – and, of course, King Henry himself. With all the Richards and quite a few Edwards, it does seem at times as if the noblemen of medieval England chose their names from just half a dozen, in a hat.

After the second battle of St Albans in 1461, that disastrous rout, the Yorkist side had lost their control of King Henry – and with it, a large part of their authority and how they were perceived. They needed another king and Edward Plantagenet was in the right frame of mind to reach for a crown. As daring military decisions of history go, it would be the turning point in the York fortunes. It took slightly more careful managing than I have described, led by Bishop George Neville, who became a vital player for his show of support from the Church. It was Bishop Neville who declaimed Edward’s rights to rule in London on 1 March. Excited captains ran across the city, carrying the news that Edward of York was to be king. A slightly more formal ‘Great Council’ met at Baynard’s Castle on the bank of the Thames on 3 March. The entire process was put together in an incredibly short time and owes its success to sheer audacity – and London’s rejection of the
house of Lancaster. The city had chosen sides when they refused to let King Henry enter. They had no choice at all but to back York.

On 4 March 1461, Edward made his coronation oath in Westminster Hall. From that moment, supporters and vital funds flooded in. London bankers lent him £4,048 to go with a previous £4,666 13s 4d. Individual loans were also made, from private individuals and religious houses in the city. Soldiers expected to be paid, fed and equipped.

On 6 March, Edward sent proclamations to the sheriffs of thirty-three English counties, as well as major cities such as Bristol and Coventry. Lords and commons came to fight for Edward Plantagenet at the same time as even greater numbers and twenty-eight lords were joining King Henry and Lancaster in the north. As nothing else, this explains why Edward declared himself king. From that day on, he assumed the power and authority of the Crown over feudal lords and their followers.

The speed at which such large armies gathered is impressive by modern terms. By the much slower medieval standard, this was a vast and
furious
rush to battle. It would have taken Edward’s army eight or nine days to march one hundred and eighty miles to Towton. The first skirmish was on 27/28 March at Ferrybridge, involving Edward, Fauconberg and Warwick – and the death of Clifford as he tried to reach the safety of the main force and was run down and killed by an arrow in the throat.

On 29 March 1461 – Palm Sunday – in a driving snowstorm, the battle lines of Towton came together. What followed is certainly the bloodiest battle on English soil. Historical estimates run as high as twenty-eight thousand
dead, as reported by George Neville, bishop and chancellor, in a letter written nine days after the battle. That is around eight thousand higher than the first day of the Somme in 1916. It is worth noting that in the First World War, modern weapons existed, such as the mounted machine gun. At Towton, every man who died was cut by arrow, or sword, or mace, or billhook, or axe. The river ran red for three days afterwards.

Reports of the numbers fighting vary enormously, from the most likely estimates of sixty thousand to hundreds of thousands. The death toll was around one per cent of a population of just three million. In impact on the society, then, it would be the equivalent of a battle with six to seven
hundred thousand
dead today. In all the extraordinary tapestry of English and, later, British history, Towton stands out.

The name of Towton comes from the village nearby. The old road to London ran through it and it was better known than Saxton, though the battle was fought about halfway between them, in a place now known as ‘Bloody Meadow’. I recommend a visit. It is a bleak place. The steep flanks of Cock Beck are daunting enough on their own. In snow, for men in armour, they would have been an impossible obstacle for Lancastrians trying to retreat. Towton has become the established name of that terrible slaughter, though in the past it was known as York Field, Sherburn-in-Elmet (a town to the south), Cockbridge and Palm Sunday Field.

Note on weapons: billhooks, pollaxes and swords. The word ‘broadsword’ was not used at all in the fifteenth century. It came in much later to distinguish medieval swords from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century duelling swords.
With individually crafted weapons such a key part of a knight’s kit, there were almost as many descriptive names as blades.

One medieval weapon in common use was the falchion, a single-edged cutlass very much like a modern machete, in that it was wide-bladed and top-heavy. Untrained working men called by Writs or Commissions of Array would do better with good, solid weapons of this sort.

The billhook and the pollaxe (or poleaxe) are similar in many respects, though the main blade of a billhook usually had a single point to pierce armour and the pollaxe used a crescent axe blade, and often a hammer on the opposite side. Both weapons often bore bayonet-style spikes and they are similar in the sense that they were three to five pounds of sharp steel bound to an axe-handle or longer pike-handle. Nicely weighted, they would have been devastating in the hands of untrained farmers and townsmen – men who were very familiar, however, with chopping tools. The billhook was used more in England than the pollaxe, though both found their way into the hands of the armies at Towton. Some of the crushed and broken skulls found in burial pits in that area can only have come from multiple, enraged blows – six or ten delivered with a pollaxe, say, to a body long dead. The level of savagery is comparable to a frenzied stabbing. Violent killing is clearly difficult to stop, once begun.

I hope I have described the main events of Towton accurately. Lord Fauconberg’s contact with the Lancaster lines is an example of how a good commander needs to respond to factors like changing weather and terrain. Under Fauconberg’s orders, archers loosed thousands of shafts and then immediately fell back out of range. In heavy snow,
with visibility down to almost nothing, the Lancaster lines replied blind, wasting precious shafts. Fauconberg’s men gleefully collected those shafts – and sent them back. The Lancastrian lines suffered brutal losses in that one action – certainly thousands. They were stung into attack and the two armies crashed together.

Fauconberg used both wind and poor visibility to annihilate enemy positions, even before the main forces came together. His name is almost unknown compared with his nephew Warwick, but it is not too much of a stretch to say that Fauconberg was probably the better tactician. He lived just a few years after Towton, though I kept him alive a little longer into Part Two, for Warwick to consult, and also because I liked him.

As is so often the case with turning points of history, luck and the weather played a vital part. In the case of Towton, fortune favoured Edward of York. Norfolk’s right wing getting lost and falling behind turned out to be the key factor in breaking Lancastrian spirit. Norfolk never claimed to have planned the action, so we must assume it was as it seemed – a complete disaster, turning into a late arrival that was every bit as decisive as Blücher turning up at Waterloo. Eight or nine thousand fresh soldiers appearing on a flank would have been crushing to the fighting spirit of those who thought they were holding well. In the snow and the dark, it broke the forces of Lancaster – and the routed men drowned or were slaughtered as they tried to escape, crushed and beaten.

Historical fiction is often a struggle between the desire to tell the main story and the desire to reveal extraordinary
side stories – at least in my experience. It is very common for me to learn of some scene which I simply cannot fit into the story arc. A novel must not bog down. My Part Two begins in 1464 and, in doing so, omits the attempt by Margaret in 1462 to take back the kingdom. It could easily be a book on its own. In exchange for mortgages on Calais, Margaret brokered with the French king for forty-three ships and eight hundred soldiers to support troops still loyal in England. She picked up King Henry from Scotland, made an armed landing and retook castles like Alnwick in Northumberland. Moving swiftly, Margaret took her fleet back to sea – where it was wrecked in a sudden storm. Margaret’s ship limped into Berwick and she escaped once again to France. Her father, René of Anjou, allowed her to live on a small estate in the Duchy of Bar, and she remained there with some two hundred supporters in poverty: the pitiful remainder of the Lancaster court. Margaret never lost hope, despite the sort of setback that would have broken many.

After betrayal, Henry was eventually captured in 1465 and taken to the Tower of London by Warwick. There is no record of him writing letters or poetry or anything at all. I suspect Henry was a broken figure by that time, an empty vessel. Five members of Edward IV’s household were paid well to wait on King Henry and others were brought in as needed. A priest, William Kymberley, celebrated Mass with him every day of his confinement. Henry’s solace, as always, lay in faith and prayer.

There is also no record of ill-treatment. A later text suggested the king endured torture, as part of an attempt to have Henry recognized as a saint. There is no proof either way, but records do exist of new clothes being fitted as
well as wine sent from the royal cellars. At a later stage, there is a suggestion that Henry had become unkempt, possibly filthy, but it is most likely that he was by that point seriously mentally ill and unable or unwilling to look after himself. How that affects the judgement of Margaret in leaving him behind is a matter for discussion. It has turned some against her in the intervening centuries. It is only my own opinion, but I do not judge her too harshly for not loving a man who brought her so much pain and was never truly a husband to her.

Elizabeth Woodville came to court in 1465, with five brothers, two sons and seven unwed sisters. Older than Edward, of no great house, a widow with sons, it is true that Edward married her in secret and admitted as much to Warwick only while he was in the process of negotiating for a French bride.

Like the Nevilles before her, Elizabeth Woodville set about seeding her family into every noble house in England, so creating and shoring up support in the most powerful families of the realm. The marriage of John Woodville (nineteen) to the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk (sixty-five) was obviously an attempt to gain the title, part of the seven great marriages arranged by Elizabeth Woodville in the two years after being crowned queen consort. The Duke of Norfolk who had fought at Towton had died in 1461. He did in fact have a son, who was alive at the point of the ‘Diabolical Marriage’. That duke died suddenly, however, leaving only one daughter, so the title fell into disuse. If John Woodville had survived the Wars of the Roses, he could well have ended up as the duke and been free to marry again.