Warwick the Kingmaker (43 page)

If Warwick ever intended counter-attacking into the North, where he had succeeded to his father’s Neville estates and wardenry, he thought better of it. There was no need, as Margaret’s army advanced southwards. Coppini advised a defensive strategy.159 This was sensible, for the Lancastrians had not the access to taxation and loans of the Yorkists and could not remain in the field indefinitely, but a kingdom could not be won without fighting. The Yorkists in London determined instead on an offensive strategy and defensive tactics. They resolved on a pitched battle on ground of their choosing near St Albans. Norfolk led one column via Barnet and Warwick himself the other with ‘grete ordnance’ via his mother’s town of Ware. Small detachments were placed at Dunstable and in St Albans itself, but the main force was aligned to the east of St Albans astride the two roads down which the Lancastrians must approach from Luton. The chosen site was formidably entrenched. The chronicler Gregory speaks of pali-sades with loopholes, nets with nails, caltrops, and Burgundian handgunners besides the more conventional artillery. London lent the money for bows, arrows and bowstaves. The best of contemporary military science was on the Yorkist side. Perhaps it would make up for inadequacies in the troops themselves, which as in 1460 consisted of ‘grete multitude of commons’ from Kent, Essex and East Anglia with at best a leaven of seasoned professionals and aristocratic retainers; Warwick’s Midlanders and Welshmen were probably absent. The intention was that the Lancastrians should attack and be shot to pieces by the Yorkists, as in the English victories at Crécy, Poitiers and Agincourt and the triumph of the French cannons at Châtillon only seven years before. Historians have probably been correct in ascribing responsibility for these dispositions to Warwick as the most experienced of the Yorkist commanders and the most interested in military innovations.160

Perhaps Warwick’s tactics were misguided and inflexible, but the Lancastrians manoeuvred with speed and audacity. Once at Luton, they traversed rapidly westwards to Dunstable and thence by night to St Albans, where they arrived unexpectedly on 17 February and exposed the Yorkist right wing. Warwick had to change his alignment, abandoning his carefully prepared defensive position, and his army lost cohesion. The earl himself responded aggressively enough, leading his forces to St Albans, but finding them isolated, he first withdrew, failed to secure the king, and then fled. The chronicler Gregory reports on the ineffectiveness of the new-fangled mounted pikemen and handgunners, who were blinded by the smoke from their own weapons.161 The desertion of Lovelace’s Kentishmen may have added to the confusion, but was not as decisive as the Yorkists understandably claimed. It was surely Yorkist propaganda that attached weight to his revelation of the (lack of) Yorkist plans and that claimed that he had been suborned with money.162 Much of the Yorkist army melted away without fighting. Most of the leaders escaped, though Bonville and Kyriel, two of their new knights of the Garter, were taken and executed. Warwick’s own brother John was again captured, but was spared for fear of reprisals against Somerset’s brother Edmund.163 The king was the prize of the victors. And several peers present at the January parliament – among them Anthony Wydeville Lord Scales – now followed Henry into the Lancastrian army.

So complete was the Lancastrian victory that Norfolk, Warwick and Arundel made no attempt to hold London, which they wrote off as lost. They could not effectively resist the Lancastrian army. But Margaret wanted the City’s support as well as its compliance and hence temporized, seeking to reassure the author-ities of the peaceful and law-abiding intentions of her army. Her case, which was already undermined by regional animosity,164 had been weakened by her wasting of Yorkist property on her way southwards and by the sacking of St Albans in defiance of King Henry’s own order for peace. Coppini’s despatches attributed a cruelty to Margaret’s northerners that he had somehow overlooked in Warwick.165 The City corporation were conciliatory, organizing the despatch of a convoy of victuals, which was despoiled by their rather less accommodating populace.166 Margaret’s opportunity passed. Warwick, at least, did not see all as lost and joined up with York’s son Edward, now himself duke of York, fresh from his victory at Mortimer’s Cross on 3 February over Pembroke, Wiltshire and the Welsh Lancastrians. This was in Oxfordshire, either at Chipping Norton or at Warwick’s own town of Burford. Thence the two earls marched to London, where they were admitted on 27 February.167 The Lancastrians withdrew to the North.

The Lancastrian victory had removed the legal justification for the Yorkist regime. York had ruled in Henry VI’s name and supposedly with his authority. Now that Henry was in their hands, the Lancastrians had gained and the Yorkists had lost the right to act in his name. Queen Margaret could not accept Edward Duke of York as heir presumptive. Once again the Yorkists were traitors doomed to destruction. Perhaps they could have submitted and made their peace: if the Lancastrians were still willing to forgive; if the Yorkists would abandon their aspirations for power; and if either could trust the other’s intentions for the future. Perhaps Warwick had a real choice. The third preferred alternative was to increase the stakes, to convert Edward into King Edward, and thus to legitimize the deposition of Henry VI. It was a desperate and outrageous gamble. It was desperation that caused Warwick to promote Edward’s candidacy for the crown only five months after thwarting that of his father. It could convince only those willing to be convinced. Securing consent among Yorkist partisans was relatively easy; it was far less easy to make Edward’s title effective when most people still recognized King Henry and when Edward’s usurpation drove loyalists from passivity into outright opposition. Many more noblemen fought for Henry VI at the battles of Ferrybridge and Towton on 28–29 March 1461 than on any previous occasion and the Lancastrian army contained peers such as Scales who had attended parliament at Westminster in January.168

Edward IV’s accession was orchestrated with a skill completely lacking from his father’s botched usurpation of the previous year. Someone undertook considerable research into accessions and coronations – remember that there had been none for thirty years! It is unlikely to have been Warwick. Was it his brother George, Lord Chancellor and Bishop of Exeter? Certainly it was George who first broached Edward’s title in a sermon on Sunday 1 March. He detailed the offences of Henry VI and in particular how he had reneged on the
Accord
by joining the Lancastrians and how Edward’s superior title should now take effect. This was at St John’s Fields – to an audience several thousand strong of committed supporters – soldiers, retainers and Londoners – who could be trusted to acclaim him as king. The captains then visited Edward at Baynards Castle and asked him to take the crown. On 3 March a great council elected him as king. This was a politically committed assembly even less representative than the autumn parliament: apart from the Archbishop of Canterbury, Bishops Neville and Beauchamp, and only two great magnates in Norfolk and Warwick, mention is made only of the decidedly minor aristocrats, the titular Lord FitzWalter, Herbert and Devereux. Next morning, 4 March, Edward processed through the City to St Paul’s, where the
Te Deum
was sung and Bishop Neville preached another sermon setting out Edward’s title and refuting possible objections. His sermon ended with further popular acclamation. King Edward then removed to Westminster Hall and entered the court of chancery, where he took his oath in the presence of the Lords. After donning the cap of estate and rich robe, he moved into the court of King’s Bench elsewhere in the hall, sat on the throne in signification that he had taken possession of the realm, and declared his title himself. Acclamation followed and again he swore an oath, surely this time the coronation oath. Finally he proceeded to Westminster Abbey, where he made offerings at several altars, received St Edward’s sceptre, sat on a specially prepared throne, heard another
Te Deum
, received the homage of the lords, and again declared his title in person. Edward’s succession was thus consecrated by ceremonies of great solemnity that mimicked the election by parliament and the coronation that could not be undertaken in the time and presumably convinced his supporters of his legitimacy.169

The new king’s proclamation of 6 March built on the long-standing grievances of the Yorkist manifestos. It reiterated many of the old charges against Henry VI’s regime: the loss of France, of which he was true inheritor, the decay of trade and justice, the self-interest of rulers, and Henry’s own broken oath. He and his supporters were denounced as rebels, whose conduct towards the Church, property and women was compared to that of Saracens. Altogether twenty-two Lancastrians were excluded from pardon, none of them peers or northerners – clearly Edward wanted to win over the powerful if he could! – and none of the obvious enemies of Warwick himself except FitzHarry and Trollope.170

‘Warwick...has made a new king of the son of the Duke of York’, remarked Coppini.171 Such an interpretation sorely understates the contribution of Edward himself – not least because of the speeches that the nineteen-year-old monarch uttered in person. Nor should we ignore that it was the work of a small, partisan, and self-interested faction.172 The legitimacy that Edward’s accession bestowed on the regime assisted it to secure support. London advanced another £3,333.66 and possibly even £5,333.66 on 4–7 March.173 The new king’s brother-in-law John Duke of Suffolk was one of several magnates to join his cause and who enabled the Yorkists to raise their largest army, little smaller and ultimately superior to that of Henry VI. Recruitment began at once. Norfolk departed on 5 March for East Anglia and Warwick ‘with a grete puissance’ on the 7th for the Midlands. There he had to compete with the bastard of Exeter, representative of the Lancastrian court that had centred on Coventry and Kenilworth, and won. The bastard himself, who had participated in his father Salisbury’s death, was executed by Warwick at Coventry, whose corporation sent forty men with the earl to support Edward IV. Thence Warwick travelled via Lichfield to Doncaster where he joined the king.174 Fauconberg led the Yorkist vanguard from London on 11 March and King Edward himself followed on the 13th in a progress northwards via Newark and Nottingham that was deliberately slow to permit further recruitment. To the men of London and the Home Counties, Edward’s own Welsh borderers, and Norfolk’s East Anglians were added contingents summoned from many towns and the Midlanders recruited by Warwick himself. He rendezvoused with the new king at Doncaster about 27 March. Perhaps only Neville and other Yorkist supporters in Lancastrian-dominated territory were excluded.

Meanwhile Queen Margaret had mobilized the northerners, including certain Yorkist sympathizers on the wrong side of the territorial divide. She also commanded the West Country levies of Somerset, Exeter and Devon, which were presumably a select elite rather than at full strength, and probably attenu-ated by a winter’s service without pay, victuals and munitions. After St Albans it had been perhaps a crucial mistake to withdraw to Yorkshire and thus concede the Lancastrian heartlands to such as Warwick, both weakening her own forces and strengthening those of her adversaries.175 The greater size of her army was not in proportion to the much larger share of the peerage who supported her.

On 28 March the Yorkists forced a crossing of the Aire at Ferrybridge after beating off an attack by Clifford, who was killed; so was the Yorkist FitzWalter, whilst Warwick himself suffered a slight arrow wound in the leg. This was a prelude to the full-scale battle at Towton next day, when Edward attacked the Lancastrian army and destroyed it. Warwick was fully engaged. There are two stories, both probably apocryphal, about his role. In one, recorded by the French chronicler Du Clercq, the earl dispensed with his horse and vowed to fight to the death.176 Warwick’s vow appealed to post-medieval historians and romantic artists. Neither did he flee. As so often, Edward IV’s boldness more than compensated for his smaller numbers.

NOTES

1. E.g. Johnson,
York
, 213.

2. Ibid. 194.

3. The fullest list is in ibid. 199n.

4. Robbins,
Hist. Poems
, 219–21.

5. Waurin, 277; Johnson,
York
, 195.

6. Waurin, 277–8; Kingsford,
London Chrons.
171; E 403/824 m. 2.

7.
Gregory’s Chron.
, 205–6; Waurin, 278–9.

8. Scofield, i. 36–7.

9. Ibid. i. 37 & n; Whetehamstede, i. 343–4; cf. Radcliffe’s confession in
RP
v. 349.

10.
RP
v. 347–9.

11. A. J. Pollard, ‘The Crown and the County Palatine of Durham 1437–94’,
The North
of England in the Age of Richard III
(1996), 78–9; M. A. Hicks, ‘The Forfeiture of Barnard Castle to the Bishop of Durham in 1459’,
Northern History
xxxiii (1997), 223–31.

12.
RP
v. 344;
CFR 1452–61
, 268, 272.

13.
RP
v. 350 quoted by J. C. Wedgwood,
History of Parliament
(2 vols, 1936–8), i. 244n. The next two paras are based on Gilson, ‘Defence’, 512–25; Whetehamstede, i. 346–56; M. L. Kekewich, ‘The Attainder of the Yorkists in 1459: Two Contemporary Accounts’,
BIHR
lv (1982), 25–34; see also J. G. Bellamy,
The Law of Treason in England in the Later
Middle Ages
(1970), 201–4.

14. Whetehamstede, i. 346–56. I do not accept that Whetehamstede’s underlying tract commences before the debate in 1459 or that the Yorkist case in the
Somnium
was surly or inadequate, Kekewich, 27, 31.

15. Ibid. 33.

16.
Paston L & P
ii. 188;
RP
v. 346–50, 370; Whetehamstede, i. 356.