Tower: An Epic History of the Tower of London (18 page)

Somerset’s death ended the struggle. What was significant about St Albans was not the numbers slain – around 100 – but the status of those killed. The victorious Yorkists deliberately slew the leaders of the court party, both in the heat of battle, and in cold blood afterwards. Besides Somerset himself, the head of the Percy clan, Henry the 2nd Duke of Northumberland, was killed; as was Thomas, Lord Clifford, a northern enemy of the Nevilles. After the slaughter, York, Salisbury and Warwick sought out their monarch and knelt in mock submission before him.

York’s coup had paid off, placing him and his allies again in pole positions. But the price exacted was high. The blood shed at St Albans opened a corrosive crack in England’s ruling elite. The taboo protecting an anointed king had been smashed, and those who had fallen in the battle had left sons and heirs to continue the blood feud. The trio of Yorkist lords now faced a quartet of young Lancastrians, a new generation of hot-blooded young men out for revenge on those who had slain their sires. Twenty-year-old Henry Beaufort, the new Earl of Somerset, had survived St Albans, despite being so severely wounded that he had been carried away in a cart. There was also a new Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland; and a new Lord Clifford, a brute-tempered nineteen-year-old whose determination to wreak revenge for his father’s death was so all consuming that it earned him the nicknames ‘Black-faced Clifford’ or, more simply, ‘the butcher’; and the equally savage-tempered Duke of Exeter.

Inspiring these young bloods, and as savage as any of them, was Queen Margaret herself. Burning to avenge the slaying of Somerset and the humiliations heaped on her husband, she toured the country with her baby son, shoring up Lancastrian support. Henry himself, by contrast, did his best to keep the peace, bringing the rival factions together in London in January 1458 for a peace conference. 25 March was proclaimed a ‘Loveday’ on which the murderous rivals would parade their new-found amity. In an extraordinary procession, King Henry led his queen and council through
the city to St Paul’s. Side by side they marched: Salisbury with Somerset; Warwick with Exeter; and – weirdest pairing of all – Queen Margaret squired by the Duke of York with every appearance of chivalrous consideration. It would last barely longer than the echoes of the Mass chanted in the old cathedral. The service was followed by a feast and joust at the Tower. Queen Margaret, seated high on her throne in the tournament stands, was the leading lady as the knights ceremoniously saluted her before thundering down the lists with a lethal intent that they would soon show for real on the battlefield.

Although most Londoners were firmly pro-Yorkist, the Lancastrian-dominated Royal Council used its control of the Tower to stockpile bows and arrows by the thousand at the Royal Armoury there as in the days before Agincourt. The difference was that this time the intended targets were to be fellow Englishmen. The next round in the escalating conflict went to the Lancastrians, who outmanoeuvred the Yorkists and drove their three leaders into exile. A Lancastrian-dominated parliament condemned York, Salisbury and Warwick as traitors and confiscated their estates.

But the Yorkists did not take their attainder lying down. In January 1460 Warwick, the Captain of Calais, raided Sandwich in Kent. The raiders towed away in triumph the fleet that the Lancastrians had been assembling for an attack on Calais. In June, Warwick masterminded another attack. This time, however, he meant to stay. The advance guard was commanded by his diminutive uncle and deputy, William Neville, Lord Fauconberg, Salisbury’s younger brother. Fauconberg seized Sandwich and held it as a bridgehead. On 26 June he was reinforced by Salisbury, Warwick and the young Edward, Earl of March, York’s eldest son, with 2,000 men. This was an invasion. Gathering men as they went, the Yorkists marched on London.

On 2 July they reached the capital. The city’s aldermen admitted them to the city. They paused for a couple of days to amass funds – London’s merchants lent them £1,000 – and recruit more men before moving north in search of King Henry who was in the Lancastrian East Midlands. Only one bastion in London held out against the Yorkists: the Tower. Warwick left his aged father, Salisbury, with 2,000 men to besiege the fortress, still held by the equally elderly governor, Thomas, Lord Scales, as it had been during Jack Cade’s rebellion.

Scales had taken several Lancastrian magnates – Lords Hungerford, de
Vesci, Lovell and de la Warre, and the Earl of Kendal – together with their ladies and households into the Tower with him for their own safety. There too was Anne, Duchess of Exeter, wife of the absent constable. Anne must have had mixed feelings about the siege since she was the eldest child of the Duke of York, while her unstable husband was a fanatical Lancastrian. Such were the cruel choices forced on divided families by civil war. But old Lord Scales had no doubts where
his
loyalties lay. From the Tower’s battlements he opened fire indiscriminately on the streets of Yorkist London with cannon from the Royal Armoury.

Among the weapons in Scales’s arsenal was a form of chemical warfare known as ‘Greek fire’ or ‘wildfire’, originally developed by the Byzantine empire. A medieval napalm, ‘wildfire’ was a terrifying cocktail of incendiary chemicals, probably including sulphur and naphtha, sprayed out of siphons. Wildfire burned all those it touched, and stuck to the skins of its unfortunate victims, flaring up even more fiercely if water was thrown over it. This was the first time that the Tower’s guns – let alone these horrific flame-throwers – had ever been turned on Londoners, and their fear and rage at Scales’s savagery were intense. The old governor was using the brutal methods of warfare he had learned in France, where the English had often used such tactics to terrorise hostile French civilians. It was not, however, what freeborn Londoners expected from their lords and masters and they would have their revenge.

Scales was confident that he could withstand Salisbury’s siege until King Henry returned to his capital after trouncing the Yorkist rebels. Salisbury answered Scales’s wildfire by placing a battery on the south bank of the Thames at Southwark, and began battering the Tower’s southern curtain walls with their balls, ‘crazing [cracking] the walls in divers places’. But as the echoes of the rival cannonades boomed out mournfully along the Thames, and Londoners sought shelter from the bombardment, the Lancastrian cause had come to grief on the banks of another river: the Nene at Northampton, where the defection of a treacherous Lancastrian nobleman, Lord Grey, and a sudden downpour which silenced the Lancastrian cannon, helped the Yorkists achieve victory. And vitally, the helpless King Henry, who had sat out the battle in his tent, fell into their hands.

Northampton sealed the fate of the Tower and its stalwart governor. Lord Scales had been holding out for a fortnight, and although he had plenty of weaponry in the Royal Armoury, the large number of Lancastrian
ladies he had taken into the fortress meant his food supplies were running low. Moreover, the loud lamentations of the women whenever Salisbury’s cannon balls crashed against the Tower’s walls was undermining the morale of the garrison. King Henry’s arrival in London as a prisoner of his Yorkist captors was the last straw for Scales. He surrendered on 19 July.

Although the terms of the Tower’s capitulation stipulated that the Lancastrian lords and ladies within would escape with their lives, lesser members of the garrison had no such guarantees. Warwick, vengeful in victory, sat in judgement at the Guildhall on members of the Duke of Exeter’s entourage from the Tower, whom he believed had conspired to assassinate him after the Loveday. They were hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn. Nor would Scales escape retribution for the wildfire that he had hosed so indiscriminately over London. The day after surrendering the Tower, he sailed upriver to seek sanctuary in Westminster Abbey. But he was recognised and cornered by Warwick’s watermen, who forced him out of his boat and butchered him on the south bank at Southwark. The old warrior’s corpse, stripped ‘naked as a worm’, was left on the steps of the Priory of St Mary Overy (now Southwark Cathedral). Warwick and the Earl of March attended the funeral and gave orders that such violence should cease.

Another temporary truce was called. Under an Act of Accord passed by Parliament, the Duke of York became heir apparent to succeed Henry. This act disinherited little Prince Edward, and there was no way that Queen Margaret would accept it. Indeed, that fierce and feisty woman had, since Northampton, been busy gathering troops in Scotland and the north. She was joined by Somerset, with another Lancastrian army from the south-west. Their combined forces of 20,000 men concentrated at York. The Duke of York could not ignore the threat. Hastily collecting cannon from the Tower, and leaving Warwick to hold London, he marched north with around 5,000 men. The duke was accompanied by the Earl of Salisbury and his second son, eighteen-year-old Edmund, Earl of Rutland. York sent his eldest son, Edward, Earl of March, to raise more men among his tenants in the Welsh Marches. It was a decision which signed his own death warrant – but saved the life of the future king.

Christmas 1460 found York, Salisbury and young Rutland at Sandal Castle, outside Wakefield in west Yorkshire, unaware that the Lancastrians, outnumbering him by some four to one, and led by his bitter enemy
Somerset, were fast approaching from Pontefract. Caught foraging for food and fuel in the open, the Yorkists were overwhelmed. The Lancastrians emerged from woodland hiding places, surrounding them on three sides ‘like fish in a net’. Between 1,000 and 2,000 men died in minutes. Among the casualties were York himself and his young son Edmund of Rutland, slaughtered by John ‘Black Faced’ Lord Clifford who told him, according to Shakespeare, ‘By God’s blood, your father slew mine [at St Albans] and so will I you, and all your kin.’

Clifford sent Rutland’s head to join his father’s, which, wearing a paper crown in mockery of his claim to the throne, was set up above Micklegate Bar, one of York’s ancient gateways. Here father and son were soon joined by the head of the old Earl of Salisbury who had been caught and executed at Pontefract the day after the battle. The young Lancastrian lords – Somerset, Northumberland, Exeter and Clifford – were avenged for their father’s deaths. But their glory would be brief.

The torch of the Yorkist cause had now also passed to younger hands. Warwick was in firm control of London, the Tower, and wretched King Henry. Young Edward of March, the new head of the House of York, six foot three inches of superb masculine charisma, was sweeping through the Welsh Marches gathering men. When he heard the grim news of Wakefield, Edward hardened his heart. Unlike his father, he would make the kingdom his own – and soon.

In his first victory, young Edward swiftly disposed of a Welsh Lancastrian force led by Jasper Tudor, Earl of Pembroke, King Henry’s half-brother, at a hamlet called Mortimer’s Cross near Hereford. Jasper escaped the field, but his aged father, Owen Tudor, founder of the future Tudor dynasty, was beheaded after the battle. He lamented that ‘the head that had once lain on Queen Katherine’s lap would now lie on the executioner’s stock’. Grotesquely, a local madwoman combed Owen’s hair clean of blood before surrounding his severed head with hundreds of candles (it was the feast of Candlemas).

On the morning of Mortimer’s Cross, a rare and alarming atmospheric phenomenon – a parhelion – had appeared in the sky as the Yorkists marched to battle. Ice crystals high in the atmosphere refracted sunlight, creating the illusion of three suns to appear, causing consternation among the superstitious soldiers. Edward quickly proclaimed that the three suns represented the Trinity, and was a mark of Heaven favouring their cause. He subsequently adopted the emblem of ‘the sunne in splendour’ along
with the Yorkist white rose as his personal badge. At Mortimer’s Cross the son of York first stepped on to the stage on which he would shine until his death two decades later.

Meanwhile, in Yorkshire, an equally indomitable warrior, Queen Margaret, had joined her victorious army after Wakefield, bringing Scottish soldiers with her. The vast host, 30–40,000 strong, marched south along Ermine Street towards London, plundering the estates of York and the Nevilles as they went. The
Croyland Chronicle
compared them to a horde of ravaging locusts. Their approach caused terror in London, where Warwick stripped the Tower armoury of the latest technology of war to use against the invaders – for that was how southerners regarded their northern countrymen, whose dialect was barely comprehensible to them.

Among the array of new military technology from the Tower that Warwick utilised was the fiercesome wildfire that the late Lord Scales had sprayed over London; ‘caltrops’, an ingenious starfish-shaped steel device fitted with four sharp spikes, one always pointing upwards, designed to deter mounted warriors; twenty-four-foot-long cord nets bristling with nails at every knot which, when spread on the ground, made an insurmountable obstacle for horsemen; huge spike-studded shields called ‘palises’ which had loopholes to fire through; and cannon firing giant iron-tipped arrows. Warwick’s army included Burgundian mercenaries with small cannon fired from the shoulder – an early form of bazooka – to take on the northerners. Londoners volunteered to defend their city, and Warwick soon left London with a host almost rivalling the Lancastrians in size.

Warwick’s new military gadgetry did him little good. He reached St Albans, only to be surprised and overwhelmed by the Lancastrians at dawn after a stealthy night march. After a hard day’s fighting, Warwick retreated – defeated, but not destroyed. The chief Lancastrian strategist, a mercenary knight named Sir Andrew Trollope, fell victim to the Tower’s new technology. He stepped on a caltrop spike, and despite being nailed to the spot, boasted later that he had killed fifteen men who passed him. Queen Margaret vented her customary cruelty on two captured Yorkists, Lord Bonville and Sir Thomas Kyriell; they had stayed behind to guard the captive King Henry, whom Warwick had neglected to take with him in his flight. The poor demented monarch had passed the battle sitting under a tree, singing and laughing in a world of his own. His ‘minders’ were now brought before Margaret and her son Prince Edward who, though
only seven, was showing every sign of having inherited his mother’s bloodthirsty temperament. ‘Fair son,’ said the queen sweetly. ‘By what manner of means shall these knights die?’ ‘Their heads shall be cut off,’ piped the little prince – and so the gruesome deed was done. Margaret and Edward were reunited with Henry in Lord Clifford’s tent, but the family reunion would be short lived.