The Hollow Crown: The Wars of the Roses and the Rise of the Tudors (27 page)

In the end, these were not questions that the court of Henry VI had very long to ponder. New Year passed with Edward IV still in exile in Bruges: but he had been busy. He was discreetly supplied with ships and money by Charles the Bold and the merchants of the Low Countries, and with his brother-in-law Anthony Woodville (now the second Earl Rivers) Edward began fitting out an invasion fleet to reclaim his kingdom. Edward, Rivers, Lord Hastings, Richard duke of Gloucester and their company set sail from Vlissingen on the island of Walcheren on Monday 11 March 1471, armed with thirty-six ships and twelve hundred men. (Edward sailed aboard a Burgundian warship called the
Antony
.) This small flotilla picked its way across a sea bristling with enemy craft, heading for a landing in East Anglia. Storms,
however, blew the fleet north, and they eventually landed near the mouth of the river Humber at Ravenspur. This was enemy territory in every sense, for Warwick’s men patrolled the countryside, watching jealously for any sign of an invasion. By coincidence, it was the very same point at which Henry Bolingbroke had arrived in 1399, when he had come to claim his lands, and subsequently the crown, from Richard II. It was an auspicious scene for the return of a king.

‘It is a difficult matter to go out by the door and then want to enter by the windows,’ Sforza de Bettini of Florence, the Milanese ambassador to Louis XI, wrote from the French court to his master Duke Galeazzo Maria Sforza on 9 April, the Tuesday before Easter 1471. Having monitored reports from across the Channel, he held out very little hope for Edward’s mission to rescue his kingdom. Wild rumours spinning out of England suggested that the earl of Warwick had the upper hand: Bettini had heard that ‘the greater part of those who were with [Edward were] slain and the rest put to flight’. Queen Margaret and Prince Edward were waiting impatiently in port at Normandy for a wind to carry them across the sea and reclaim their kingdom in triumph.
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It appeared that Edward IV’s mission to rescue his realm had been strangled before it had even begun.

But Bettini was misinformed. Edward was far from routed. In fact, on the very day that the Milanese ambassador wrote his letter, he was marching south on London, with men rallying to his side.

Edward’s arrival in Ravenspur had not quite thrown England into great bouts of celebration, but neither had he been immediately chased away, in part because he rode through the countryside claiming (much as Bolingbroke had before him) that he came not to take back the crown, but ‘only to claim to be Duke of
York’.
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He wore the ostrich feather badge of the prince of Wales rather than the crown, and professed to all who would listen that he was returning as a loyal subject. This was enough to gain him entry successively to the northern towns of York, Tadcaster, Wakefield and Doncaster, before he moved down into the midlands and entered Nottingham and then Leicester. At every stop he was joined by supporters; a few at first but gradually more, until ‘his number was increased’ with ‘bands of men, well arrayed and habled [i.e. armoured] for war’.
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On 29 March he advanced on Coventry, where the earl of Warwick was holed up with his allies John de Vere, earl of Oxford, Henry Holland, duke of Exeter and Lord Beaumont. Warwick, preferring to avoid a fight until reinforced by Montague and Clarence, retreated inside the walls of the city, barred the gates and refused to come out. Momentum now lay with Edward, and it was at this point that he dropped the obvious pretence of claiming his duchy, and announced his determination to defeat the adherents of ‘Henry the Usurper’.
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From Coventry Edward struck out west, before turning in the direction of Oxford and London. As he went, news of his return fanned out around him. It did not take long to reach the realm’s other great rebel, George duke of Clarence, who was in the west country when Edward landed. Clarence now frantically tried to raise troops, in order to rally to the earl of Warwick. But a coward and a turncoat such as he did not have the moral steadfastness to attack his brother ascendant. (Clarence had also been lobbied by two of his sisters, Margaret duchess of Burgundy and Anne duchess of Exeter, who had counselled him to make peace.) He met Edward near Banbury on Wednesday 3 April. In the company of Rivers, Hastings and Gloucester, he threw himself at Edward’s feet. Edward ‘lifted him up and kissed him many times’, assured him that they were at peace and took him back to Coventry, in a second attempt to coax Warwick out of his bolthole. Again Warwick would not emerge, even though he was by now
accompanied by his brother John Neville, Marquess Montague. Edward decided not to waste any more time seeking battle. On Friday 5 April he set out for London.

So on Tuesday 9 April London’s common council, who had much better information than distant diplomats, were aware that, far from having been crushed, ‘Edward late king of England was hastening towards the city with a powerful army’.
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Warwick was also writing to the city, demanding that the council keep it for King Henry. The stress was such that the mayor, John Stockton, had taken to his bed and would not be dragged out of it. But in the mayor’s absence, the rest of the city council resolved not to resist Edward. They had plenty of good reasons. Not only were Queen Elizabeth, her daughters and her newborn son as well as scores of other Yorkists still holed up in sanctuary at Westminster, close to the city walls, but the merchants of London had also loaned Edward a great deal of money, which, according to the Burgundian chronicler Philippe de Commines, ‘obliged all the tradesmen who were his creditors to appear for him’. Commines, who was like all good chroniclers an insatiable gossip, added that ‘the ladies of quality and rich citizens’ wives, with whom [Edward] had formerly intrigued, forced their husbands and relations to declare themselves on his side’.
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Edward entered London on Maundy Thursday. He found that the Tower had already been secured by his friends. Supporters of the earl of Warwick, identifiable by badges of the bear and ragged staff worn on their coats, were making themselves scarce. Edmund Beaufort, duke of Somerset had left London for the coast, to await Queen Margaret’s arrival. Warwick’s brother, the treacherous George Neville, archbishop of York, had been left in possession of the ‘other’ king, but his attempt to rally the populace by parading Henry VI through the streets during Edward’s approach was met with ridicule. Henry appeared as the pathetic, downtrodden old man he was: his shoulders draped not in the
latest Burgundian finery but in a dreary old blue gown. In fact, the pious Henry was dressing according to the solemnity of the religious calendar – for Maundy Thursday, the day before Good Friday, was a day of mourning. Yet it looked to one London chronicler as if ‘he had no more to change with’.
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Nor was the rest of the parade impressive. Lord Zouch, commissioned to carry the sword of state, appeared old and impotent. The crowd accompanying the king was small. And their symbol of defiance – a pole borne above the parade with two foxes’ tails tied to it – appeared lame and unkingly. It was ‘more like a play than the showing of a prince’, recorded the chronicler. It was in this context that the strapping, energetic Edward entered the city to ‘the universal acclamation of the citizens’, who now awaited his command.
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Edward went first to St Paul’s, to give thanks, before riding directly for the bishop of London’s palace in Lambeth, to take possession of Henry VI. Dim and vacant, the shabby figure greeted Edward with an embrace and the words, ‘My cousin of York, you are very welcome. I know in your hands my life will not be in danger.’
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Edward assured him that all would be well and sent him back to the Tower of London, with the archbishop of York for company. Then he set out for Westminster Abbey, where he gave thanks once again, this time before the shrine of St Edward: the source of all that was mysterious and holy about English kingship. Finally he made the short trip from the abbey church to the abbot’s apartments, where Queen Elizabeth was waiting for him. She had received personal letters announcing her husband’s return, but nothing would be a substitute for the man in person. Since the beginning of Warwick’s rebellion Elizabeth had lost her father and her brother. She had been in hiding at the abbey for six months, during which time the official record would state that she had endured ‘right great trouble, sorrow and heaviness, which she sustained with all manner of patience that belonged to any creature’. The queen presented Edward
with his tiny namesake, ‘to the Kings greatest joy, a fair son, a prince’.
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Joyfully reunited, they spent the night back in the city, at Edward’s mother’s lodgings in Baynard’s Castle. The following day was Good Friday, and Edward spent the morning with his brothers and allies, plotting ‘for the adventures that were likely for to come’.
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‘On Holy Saturday in Easter week,’ wrote a chronicler of the time, Edward ‘quitted the city with his army, and, passing slowly on, reached the town of Barnet, a place ten miles distant from the city; and there pitched his camp, on the eve of the day of our Lord’s resurrection.’
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There were two kings in the army, for Edward had brought Henry VI with him. It was hardly likely that Henry would have escaped, or even conceived of escaping from the Tower of London. But his presence in Edward’s lines was vital, for marching in the other direction, directly towards them on the road from St Albans, came the earl of Warwick. He had finally left Coventry, ‘calling himself lieutenant of England and so constituted by the pretensed authority of King Henry’.
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Henry’s physical presence on the other side rendered this claim manifestly false.

The two armies made first contact as the light was fading on Saturday afternoon, when Warwick’s scouts were intercepted and chased by Edward’s men. With the sun setting, there was no hope of a fight that day, but the two sides were virtually within sight of one another. Both camped on the open ground north of Barnet. The damp, cold night air flashed and boomed with fire sprayed from the muzzles of Warwick’s cannon, aimed badly in the darkness and flinging shot safely over the heads of the kings’ men.

Dawn broke around four o’clock on Easter Sunday. A great mist hung over the ground, clouding the short distance between the two armies and obscuring ‘the sight of either other’. But
almost all present – not least the veterans of the battle of Towton – had fought in worse. No sooner had the sun’s thin light come up than Edward ‘committed his cause and quarrel to Almighty God’, raised his banners, ordered his trumpeters to blow and charged his men forward against the blaze of the enemy artillery.
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The reckoning had begun.

The royal army was commanded by Edward, with Lord Hastings on the left flank and Richard duke of Gloucester leading the right. Opposite them were Oxford, Montague and Exeter, with the earl of Warwick commanding from the rear. The two armies were misaligned, so that Gloucester’s men heavily outnumbered Exeter’s at the eastern end of the battlefield, while Hastings was hobbled in his fight against Oxford on the west. Hastings in particular took terrible losses, his division routed and chased back in the direction of London, carrying the false but terrifying news that Warwick had triumphed, capturing Edward and killing Clarence and Gloucester.

It was not so. Both sides’ guns were nullified by the thick fog, and the battle raged hand to hand, ‘cruel and mortal’. Edward fought in the centre of it all, his vision obscured so badly that he, like the rest of his men, could ‘see but a little from him’. Nevertheless, he ‘manly, vigorously and valiantly assailed’ his enemies and ‘with great violence, beat and bore down afore him all that stood in his way … first on that one hand, and then on that other hand … so that nothing might stand in the sight of him’.
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While Edward was accustomed to fighting on foot, Warwick was said by one chronicler to prefer to run with his men into battle before mounting on horseback, ‘and if he found victory inclined to his side, he charged boldly among them; if otherwise he took care of himself in time and provided for his escape’.
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At Barnet, however, he was harangued by his brother Montague, who insisted that he should demonstrate the Neville family’s courage by fighting on foot and sending his horses away. It was
to be his undoing. After several hours of fighting the battle lines had wheeled ninety degrees, and the positions of the two armies grew very confused. The earl of Oxford, returning from his pursuit of Hastings’s men, arrived back on the misty battlefield and attacked what he thought were Edward’s rear lines. In fact he was encountering Montague’s men. In the mist and the press of battle, the Neville retinue apparently mistook the Oxford badge – a star – for Edward’s sun, and immediately turned their guns on their own allies.
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The cry of ‘Treason’ went up around the Lancastrian–Neville army and its order collapsed. In the confusion Warwick turned to scramble from the field and save himself. But on foot he was fatally hampered. By the time he had found a horse and set off in the direction of St Albans, there were Yorkist men in pursuit. Warwick was driven into a little wood at a fork in the road, where he was taken prisoner and killed before he could be brought up to Edward IV. Behind him on the battlefield Warwick left his brother John, Marquess Montague to be ‘slain … in plain battle, and many other knights, squires, noblemen, and other’.
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It was all over by eight o’clock on Easter morning. The battlefield was strewn with ten thousand spent arrows.
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The earl of Oxford fled the field and escaped to Scotland. Exeter was left for dead on the battlefield, but was eventually discovered by a servant, dragged from the field towards London and spirited into the sanctuary at Westminster. Later he was taken out of sanctuary and imprisoned in the Tower, where he remained for four years.