Warwick the Kingmaker (42 page)

7.4 FROM ABYSS TO VICTORY

York’s claim to the throne was an error of judgement and a crucial turning point. It cost him his life, plunged the country into civil war, and shed an ocean of blood. Was it York’s error alone or was Warwick also at fault? Surely York’s conduct since his landing anticipated what was to follow? Moreover, so Johnson has argued, Warwick’s visit to York at Shrewsbury enabled the two to finalize arrangements which may even have been planned when they were in Ireland. York’s actions were interpreted in this way, at least in retrospect, Jones has shown.140 None of these arguments are conclusive. The other Yorkists are hardly likely to have known of York’s revised dating formulae and new-style indentures and may not have recognized the implications. His stately progress had precedents in earlier years when he did
not
claim the crown. Was he trying to avoid the other Yorkist lords? Even the use of the royal arms, like the stress on his ‘yssew royale’ in the new manifesto and the
Verses on the Yorkist Lords
, could have been the necessary preliminary to claiming the protectorate ahead of other royal princes; in both cases they were accompanied by protestations of loyalty. Waurin claims that Warwick knew nothing of York’s claim in advance. Both he and Pope Pius II reported the earl’s objections. Most significant is the absence of any stage-management for York’s claim. The Lords were not prepared for his usurpation. There was no acclamation: not even by the Nevilles. There was no pressure from the Commons as in 1455. The king had not been prepared – no abdication had been arranged, as in 1399 – and he was allowed and even invited to object. If the Yorkist peers had known and approved of York’s choice, Henry would not have opened parliament in person. Such matters need not have been left to chance. The victory at Northampton had caused Duke Richard to change his views. Now was the time to sweep away his pathetic cousin, with whom he no longer had any patience, and to take his right. Wrongly he expected his allies to think likewise.

Yet there is an interpretation that squares the circle and removes the apparent contradictions. All the Yorkist professions of loyalty were directed at the king, none to the prince. Already in July it was rumoured ‘that they will make a son of the Duke of York king and that they will pass over the king’s son, as they are beginning to say that he is not the king’s son’.141 Prince Edward could be set aside. To establish his rights as heir presumptive of King Henry over the Holland, Beaufort and Stafford lines, York needed to establish his Mortimer claim. Up until his entry to the Lords all his reported actions contributed to this. What Warwick and his fellow Yorkists wanted was the duke’s recognition as heir to the throne and his appointment as protector during Henry’s life: the eventual
Accord
in fact. Commons and Lords could support that, but not the king’s deposition.

Whilst to contemporary thinking Henry’s madness could have been regarded as a malady of the body politic as Gross has shown,142 this was not stated in Yorkist propaganda and conflicted with the saintly image described above. For York to present himself to parliament as ‘principall physician’ with the prescription to extirpate ‘the rote and botome of this long festered cankar’ was to demonstrate that he was out of touch.143 Lacking support even from his own side, York was obliged to withdraw and complex negotiations were needed to attain the objective that his fellow Yorkists had always sought and that earlier had seemed assured.

Hence York was forced into a humiliating retreat. He had revealed the ambitions for the throne that some already suspected, exposed himself to charges of disloyalty and perjury, and appeared an obstacle to concord and compromise even to those at parliament. It was not York who was credited with the
Accord
. Those Lords who consented were all to some degree Yorkist sympathizers; else they would not have been present. Only Rutland concurred with York’s claim to the crown. Some Lords backed a Yorkist government; a few had fought at Northampton; and others, probably, were prepared to acquiesce. Several who attended the chapter of the Garter or otherwise co-operated with the new regime were later to oppose it. We do not know how many lay peers attended the parliamentary session and agreed to the
Accord
; probably not many.144 The
Accord
itself was never actually enacted into law by parliament: could the Commons not be prevailed upon to consent? York’s Third Protectorate, like his Second in 1455, was established by a minority of sympathetic Lords who nevertheless needed intimidating with overwhelming force.

As on earlier occasions, in 1454 and 1456, those opposed to the Yorkists failed to appear. Among the absentees were the sons of Buckingham, Shrewsbury and Beaumont, who could reasonably have wanted revenge for their fathers’ deaths. Also missing were the queen and prince, the dukes of Exeter and Somerset, the five earls of Northumberland, Westmorland, Pembroke, Wiltshire and Devon, one viscount, and many barons. The Yorkist regime may have ruled the South and Midlands, but it did not control the West Country, Wales or the North. Its opponents were prepared for violence – according to Waurin, Northumberland had tried to ambush Warwick in August145 – but there was no civil war as yet. Parliamentary elections were held all over the kingdom and those elected duly attended parliament. Despite the blood that had been shed at and since Northampton, the Yorkists could reasonably hope that as on previous occasions parliamentary authority would prevail and political opponents would accept the new protectorate.

York’s attempted usurpation had changed all that. The title that the Lords at Westminster accepted as irrefutable was unacceptable to the queen, to her son, and to other members of the royal family, some with their own claims, such as Exeter, Somerset, the king’s half-brother Pembroke, or Sir Henry Stafford, new husband of Margaret Beaufort. Whatever the face-saving formulae, York could no longer be credited with the loyalty that he had earlier asserted. His claim to be acting with the king’s consent was thrown into doubt: was Henry a free agent? The parliamentary unanimity that might have given the moral ascendancy was missing. York had alienated people loyal to Henry VI and had inflamed his own enemies. For them, far from being a compromise, the
Accord
was a declaration of war.

The duke’s action offered propagandist opportunities to the Lancastrians, who did not hesitate to write to the corporation of London and no doubt other towns to exploit them. It made more credible the claims of Queen Margaret and her son that Duke Richard had
long
secretly (and treasonably) imagined the destruction of the king, that his assertions that he had never intended harm to the king when rebelling were false, that he had killed divers lords of malice not for the public good, and that he had lately sought the crown contrary not only to his allegiance but also to ‘divers solempne othes of his owne offre made uncompelled or constraigned’. They were able to thank the corporation for thwarting York’s intended usurpation. And Prince Edward declared his intent ‘to then-larging of my lord’ (of releasing the king) ‘at such tyme aswe shalbe disposed’. If not acted on immediately, these letters were nevertheless read to the City corporation to which they were addressed and were recorded in the City journal.146 They were not dismissed out of hand. However, as we shall see, the Lancastrians failed to make the most of their propaganda opportunity, were quickly driven on the defensive, and were unable to win many of their potential sympathizers still in the South to their cause.

Of course there were those who applauded the new regime. Among them apparently was the aged chronicler John Hardyng, whose verses on York as potential ruler and references to his ‘regalitie’ can belong only to this time. He looked forward to

Howe ye shall rule your subiectes, while ye lyve,

In lawe, and peace, and all tranquyllite

Whiche ben the floures of all regalyite.

Apart from aliens, York needed to watch against divisions at home.147 York was indeed determined to enforce his authority in the provinces, but did not appreciate that its opponents were now as ruthless and merciless as the Yorkists were themselves. He expected his opponents to respect the authority of king, protector and parliament, to melt away and submit as Exeter’s men had done in 1454 and the Yorkists themselves did at Ludford the previous year. He did not anticipate that their opponents were now engaging in proper strategic planning and colluding with foreign powers, nor did he expect them really to sacrifice national interests to those of the house of Lancaster. The Yorkists expected them to avoid bloodshed at all costs, as on previous occasions, and they expected them to honour their words. Hence they failed to mobilize their forces fully and indeed divided them. Warwick, Norfolk, Arundel and the Bourchiers were left behind with the king and government, when on 9 December 1460 March was despatched to establish control of Wales and York and Salisbury proceeded northwards to sort out the queen, the Percies and other northerners, and to relieve their own beleaguered tenants and retainers. On 16 December Warwick’s retainer Sir Geoffrey Gate was despatched to the Isle of Wight, where he quickly overcame Somerset’s brother Edmund Beaufort and his sixty-one men. The Earl of March was to be as similarly successful in Wales.148

Yet the greatest threat was in the North, where Queen Margaret had assembled almost all branches of the Lancastrian royal family and where she enjoyed the support of almost the whole regional nobility. Somerset, Exeter and Devon had joined her. She could draw on the justifiable hostility towards the junior house of Neville fomented by the Percy–Neville feud, by the partisan anti-Percy verdicts of the resulting judicial commissions, and by the deaths of the second Earl of Northumberland, Lord Clifford, and Lord Egremont at St Albans and Northampton. She also sought to make common cause against a common enemy with the Scots. If Salisbury himself was missing from the Lancastrian councils and army, his allies FitzHugh and Greystoke were not able to absent themselves, and the Earl of Westmorland and Lord Neville were representatives of the senior line.149 Salisbury’s forfeiture in 1459 had allowed local rivals to recover, to assert control over his own estates, and to neutralize the famous Neville connection. Late in 1460 the North was Lancastrian.

Though York’s duchy took its name from a northern county and though Salisbury and Warwick were themselves northerners by birth and inclination, it is indicative of how opportunist was Yorkist propaganda that the Yorkists now blackened the northern character of Margaret’s regime. The ‘same fals traitour’, complained Prince Edward, ‘hathe nowe late sowen amongis you and many othir of my lordis trewe liegemen...that we shuld entende to make assembles of grete nombre of straungeres that wolde purpose to dispoile and robbe you and thayme of yor goodes and uttirly to distruye you and thayme for evur mo’. Queen and prince denied the slander in letters read to the City aldermen on 2 December.150 Long before the Lancastrians came southwards, the Yorkists were concerned to whip up fear and regional animosity against them in the South, evidently to reinforce the commitment towards themselves of southerners and Londoners against their factional and dynastic rivals. We have no direct evidence that such slanders were circulating in the North. Instead of exploiting to the full the propaganda initiative that York’s failed usurpation offered, queen and prince were obliged to defend themselves against these charges in their letters, and found their freedom of action inhibited next year when they did indeed proceed southwards.

York and Salisbury took with them only a small force since, as prominent northern magnates, they had many local followers to count upon. They were unable to make contact. Instead they found themselves isolated at York’s small castle of Sandal near Wakefield by much more numerous foes. Allegedly Sir Andrew Trollope used ragged staves to make his forces appear as supporters of Warwick. When rashly counter-attacking, York and Salisbury were easily defeated on 31 December. York himself, his son Rutland, Warwick’s father Salisbury, brother Thomas, brother-in-law William Lord Harrington, the Neville knights Parre, Radford and Harrington, and Harrow, captain of the Londoners, were among those killed or executed. It was now the Lancastrians’ opportunity for revenge. Salisbury had initially been spared, but was lynched by the commons at Pontefract: ‘the commune peple of the cuntre loued him nat’. However popular the Nevilles were in the South, they had as committed opponents as supporters in the North.151

The death of so many kinsmen was certainly a severe blow to the Yorkist leadership and encouraged further opposition, such as that of Thomas Daniel at Castle Rising (Norf.), but the Yorkists were unwilling to concede defeat. York’s son Edward Earl of March succeeded not only to his father’s duchy, but also to his protectorate and his status as heir to Henry VI. Henceforth he styled himself as ‘verrey heir’. Theoretically, for he was far away in Wales. Initially it was more important that in London Warwick was ‘like another Caesar’.152 He may have had private doubts, as he told Antonio de la Torre153 – he seems to have found it easier to confide in foreigners – but he took command and acted defiantly and resolutely. He wrote at once to the pope, dauphin, dukes of Burgundy and Milan assuring them that the defeat would soon be reversed.154 On 5 January he and other lords secured a further 2,000 marks (£1,333.66) in loan from the City. On the 8th the mercers’ company agreed to lend Henry VI a further 500 marks (£333.66) for the benefit of king and commonwealth and specifically ‘to the hasty spede of Erle of Warwik vnto the North Contre with his puissance’.155 On 13 January Philip the Good replied. A troop of Burgundian handgunners was despatched under the command of Seigneur de la Barde.156 Warwick again induced Coppini to intervene: he wrote indirectly to Queen Margaret offering his mediation in negotiations and asserting his authority – had the Lancastrians questioned that he was a true legate? – though he was not to live up to renewed promises to Warwick to give papal support to his cause in battle.157 Parliament met again and adjourned without any legislation. The earl is reported to have regarded Somerset’s involvement with the Lancastrians as a breach of the promise that he had made to him at Newnham Bridge.158 He expected others to adhere more strictly to their promises than he did himself.