Bosworth: The Birth of the Tudors Page 11
Having scattered the Yorkist left flank, Oxford’s men returned to the battlefield, possibly to search for spoils among the dead (one chronicle recalled that they ‘returned and fell to rifeling’), only to discover that the battle had not ended. Oxford immediately regrouped his scattered force in the dense mist, unaware that the battle had swung round in a direction that would mean he would be charging into his own side. As the sound of Oxford’s charge grew near, Warwick’s men mistook Oxford’s livery badges of a star with streams that the earl’s men displayed on their coats for Edward’s badge of the Yorkist sun in splendour. Believing that a separate charge had been organised by the Yorkists, Warwick’s forces began to shoot and fight against Oxford’s men, ‘supposing they had been King Edward’s’.
By the time Oxford realised what was happening, it was too late. His forces had already fled, crying ‘Treason! Treason!’ Left to fight the battle alone, in the panic that ensued, Warwick’s troops were overwhelmed by the combined forces of Edward and his younger brother, Richard, Duke of Gloucester. Ignoring the earl’s plea to withstand a final charge, the Lancastrian soldiers, believing there was treason in their ranks, fled the field en masse. Soon Warwick had joined them, attempting to make his way to a nearby wood where he had tethered his horse in case he needed to escape. The opportunity never came. Edward had given orders that the earl should be taken alive, but even the king’s orders could not save him. Amid the carnage, Warwick was recognised by a group of Yorkist soldiers who, surrounding the earl, battered him to the ground and beat him to death.
The battle had lasted three hours. It was barely dawn, yet already a thousand Lancastrians had been killed, along with 500 Yorkists. The significance of the battle and its outcome could not have been greater; the kingmaker was dead, with the rest of the Lancastrian noblemen put to flight, including the Earl of Oxford, who escaped northwards to Scotland.
For those remaining in the capital, waiting for the outcome of the battle, to discover whether their husbands or sons had survived or been killed, it was a nervous time. As soon as she discovered that Warwick and the Lancastrians had been defeated, on 17 April Margaret Beaufort made all possible speed from Woking to the capital. She did not know whether her husband was dead or alive; in her anxiety she sent a rider to the battlefield at Barnet to discover Stafford’s fate. In fact Stafford had been wounded, severely enough that he would play no part in any further military activities during the year.
Several hours after the battle, the bodies lying strewn across the field were loaded onto carts and taken away, including the corpses of Warwick and his brother Montagu, who were stripped and taken back to the capital to St Paul’s where they were placed on public display. But the war was not over yet. As the evening light of Easter Sunday grew dim, a fleet of ships drew anchor at Weymouth. Onto the shore stepped Margaret of Anjou and her son Prince Edward. ‘The world, I assure you’, Sir John Paston, who had fought on Oxford’s side at Barnet, wrote home, ‘is right queasy, as ye shall know within the month; the people here feareth it sore. God hath showed himself marvellously like him that made all, and can undo again when him list; and I can think that by all likelihood shall show himself as marvellous again, and that in short time.’
Hearing the news of Warwick’s defeat, Margaret of Anjou was ‘right heavy and sorry’. Yet she had every reason to remain optimistic; the Lancastrian cause was certainly not lost, and without Warwick, she would no longer be compromised by an agreement she had only entered into with hesitation. The Duke of Somerset, himself experienced in battle on the Continent having fought among Duke Charles of Burgundy’s army, soon joined her, and was appointed commander of her forces, which in addition to an army provided by the Earl of Devon, began to grow rapidly as the Lancastrians began to march northwards across the West Country. Meanwhile, Jasper Tudor had travelled westwards to South Wales, where he had begun to recruit a large Welsh army. The intention would be to avoid battle until both armies were able to join up creating a formidable force.
As Margaret and Somerset made their way first to Exeter before heading northwards to Bristol and the Severn Valley, Edward prepared for a second round of battle, sending out orders to fifteen counties for soldiers. Marching from London, he celebrated St George’s Day at Windsor Castle and began his march westwards, knowing that he had to intercept Margaret and Somerset’s forces before they had the chance to join with Jasper Tudor’s. That meant ensuring that the Lancastrians did not cross the river Severn. Edward first moved cautiously, in case Margaret decided to change course and head for London, but his march soon picked up pace and by 29 April he had reached Cirencester, less than a day’s march from the Severn at Gloucester. The king could still not be sure, however, of the Lancastrians’ exact intentions; one moment it seemed they were heading towards Bath, luring Edward towards Malmesbury and away from the passage across the Severn, when in fact they journeyed in haste to Bristol, where they were welcomed and bolstered with a supply of arms, money and men. Then it appeared the Lancastrians were preparing to wage battle near Chipping Sodbury, but when Edward arrived there was no sight of any opposing army. In fact, Margaret and Somerset, sending advance patrols there, had deliberately sought to confuse Edward into believing that their direction had changed. Instead, having given the Yorkists the slip, they had headed west towards Gloucester with all possible speed. The race for the Severn was now on.
Outmanoeuvred, Edward had no chance of reaching the Lancastrian forces before they reached Gloucester. Instead he sent messages to its governor, ordering him to hold the town at all costs. The plan worked. When Somerset and Margaret arrived at Gloucester at ten o’clock on Friday, 3 May, they discovered that the town’s gates had been closed. Somerset threatened to storm its walls, but it was an idle threat. His troops had already marched thirty-six miles through the night, across ‘foul country, all in lanes and strong ways betwixt woods without any good refreshing’; they were exhausted, but were ordered to push on another twenty-four miles to Tewkesbury.
By now, both sides were running low on rations, and with neither food nor drink available, soldiers were forced to refresh themselves from muddied puddles, churned up from the carts that passed through them, that one chronicler wrote were barely fit for horses to drink from. Edward shadowed the Lancastrian advance, marching across the high ground along the western edge of the Cotswolds, where there were better marching conditions than the woodlands of the Severn vale below. As the day passed with the dazzling hot sun beating down upon them, the Yorkists managed to make speed and by late afternoon, having covered over thirty miles in a single day, reached Cheltenham. There Edward discovered that the Lancastrians had advanced to Tewkesbury; after a brief rest to allow his troops to refresh themselves, his force continued their march into the night until they stopped to camp within three miles of the enemy, taking what little sleep they could among the preparations for the clash they would face the following morning. Edward knew that defeat was unthinkable if he wanted to prevent Margaret and Somerset crossing the Severn and joining forces with Jasper Tudor. Regardless of all his previous victories, this was the battle he had to win.
As dawn broke, it was clear that the Lancastrians had chosen a strong defensive position, encamped on high ground to the south of Tewkesbury; in front of them were ‘foul lanes and deep dykes, and many hedges with hills and valleys’, making it practically impossible for any attack upon them: it was ‘as evil a place to approach as could possibly have been devised’, one chronicler noted.
Edward was undeterred. On Saturday morning, 4 May, he drew up his forces in three divisions or ‘battles’. He placed his brother Richard, Duke of Gloucester, in charge of the vanguard on his left side, and Lord Hastings on his right while he himself remained with the main battle in the centre. Observing from his vantage point that there was a large wood to the left of the Lancastrian position, fearing that there might be Lancastrians lying there in wait ready to ambush his forces, he ordered that a squadron of 200 men-at-arms, mounted wi
th spears, be placed near the wood. On the Lancastrian side, Somerset had chosen to command the right flank, placing the elderly veteran Lord Wenlock (who had fought in the first battle at St Albans nearly twenty years before) in charge of the centre of the army.
Edward made the first move, ordering his trumpeters to sound the advance. A soon as his archers and gunners were in range they opened ‘right-a-sharp’ fire. The Lancastrians attempted to return fire, but the ferocity of the Yorkist arrows which rained down upon them, together with the confined space of their defensive position, soon meant that Somerset found himself outgunned. Realising that his defensive line was in danger of being broken, he ordered that his men should attack Edward’s main battle, using the ditches, sunken lanes and wooded terrain skilfully to launch a downhill attack. Somerset, however, had underestimated the strength of the Yorkist vanguard, which having been freed from attacking the Lancastrian defences, returned to Edward’s aid. Somerset now found himself being attacked from both sides by Edward’s and Richard’s forces in fierce hand-to-hand combat. Somerset would have expected that his own central battle, led by Lord Wenlock, should have moved forward and engaged in the fighting, but for some reason, possibly due to the difficulty of crossing the rough terrain, Wenlock’s forces remained motionless on the ‘marvellous strong ground’.
Outnumbered, Somerset’s force was slowly being driven back up the slope. It was at this point that Edward performed a masterstroke, ordering his 200 men-at-arms waiting hidden in the woods to launch a surprise attack into the side of Somerset’s beleaguered troops. The duke’s men scattered, ‘dismayed and abashed’; some fled along the lanes, some into the park and down to the meadow by the river running alongside the abbey, but most would suffer the same fate of being cut down and killed as they ran. Somerset, however, refused to give up, making his way back to the Lancastrian centre whose troops had stood motionless at Lord Wenlock’s order. Riding up to the aged nobleman, Somerset was in no mood for excuses; according to a later account, in a fury, he raged at Wenlock, and before he had a chance to respond, Somerset seized his battle axe and beat his brains out, though a more contemporary chronicle suggests that this dramatic confrontation never took place, with Wenlock being captured and executed after the battle.
As the division between the Lancastrian leaders had become horrifically apparent, Edward took the opportunity to engage with the diminished Lancastrian defensive line, now under the command of Prince Edward. Hacking away with battle axes and stabbing with swords, the hand-to-hand conflict did not last long. Already demoralised by their initial defeat, the front of the Lancastrian line gave way, leading to a mass flight towards the river Avon and the sanctuary of the abbey. Edward gave his soldiers permission to pursue the chase with ruthlessness, ordering that they should be killed and despoiled. The most significant victim was the seventeen-year-old Edward, Prince of Wales, who, having been recognised by his surcoat emblazoned with the royal arms, was hacked to death. The son of Sir William Cary, who had been in the service of the prince ‘at the field of Tewkesbury’, remembered how Edward had been ‘slain for his true faith and allegiance’ by ‘the servants of the said King Edward the iiiith’. By the time the fighting had ceased, the bodies of the Earl of Devon and Somerset’s brother, John Beaufort, also were among those littering the battlefield.
Meanwhile, Somerset and other Lancastrian leaders and men had fled into Tewkesbury Abbey, confident that the holy rights of sanctuary would protect them while they remained inside the building. At first, in the elation of victory, Edward offered a pardon to everyone inside the church. He soon decided to change his mind. In spite of the abbot’s protestations, Yorkist soldiers burst into the abbey brandishing weapons and dragged the fugitives out with such violence that enough blood was spilt on the stone floors that the abbey needed later to be reconsecrated. According to one chronicler, Edward himself was there, sword in hand, and had to be brought to his senses by a priest bearing the sacrament aloft.
In the aftermath of battle, vengeance would be swift. Under the direction of his brother Richard and the Duke of Norfolk, the trial of Somerset and around a dozen prominent Lancastrian knights was swiftly organised and with sentence summarily passed, they were sentenced to death. Dragged out into the town’s marketplace, they were quickly beheaded, though they were spared the indignity of being drawn and quartered, and were given honourable burials.
Margaret of Anjou had watched the battle unfold powerless from the tower of Tewkesbury Abbey. Somehow, realising that defeat was inevitable, perhaps watching the flight of her forces towards the abbey, she fled to a religious house near Malvern, where she was arrested three days later and taken to London.
Edward’s victory at Tewkesbury could have hardly been more comprehensive; after crushing a significant attack on London organised by ‘the Bastard of Fauconberg’, an illegitimate son of Warwick’s uncle, he marched into London in triumph on 21 May, ‘ordering his standards to be unfurled and borne before him’. That same night, Henry VI died in the Tower. The official account declared that the king had died of ‘pure displeasure and melancholy’ upon hearing of the fate of his cause. Few believed it. John Warkworth, in his chronicle written around 1480, wrote how Henry had been murdered ‘between eleven and twelve of the clock, being then at the Tower the Duke of Gloucester and many others’. The following evening, Henry’s body was taken to St Paul’s Cathedral, where his body lay in an open coffin, ‘that he might be known’. The next morning it was escorted up the river to Chertsey Abbey for burial. According to the Milanese ambassador, Edward had ‘chosen to crush the seed’ of the Lancastrian dynasty. With Henry and his heir both dead and buried, the king could not have contemplated a greater success.
That ‘great and strong laboured woman’, Margaret of Anjou, no longer a queen but a childless widow and broken woman, was taken to the Tower where she remained in custody for four years until she was ransomed to Louis XI and returned to France. There was little chance that she might become the focus for any disaffection; she lived out her final days first in a chateau near Angers then at Dampierre, near Samur, where she died on 25 August 1482.
The Lancastrian dynasty had effectively been erased from history. ‘In every part of England,’ one commentator wrote, ‘it appeared to every man that the said party was extinct and repressed for ever, without any hope of again quickening.’ With Warwick dead, Edward was the master of his own kingdom. For the first time his throne, together with the future of the house of York, looked secure. On 3 July Parliament assembled to swear its allegiance not only to their undisputed king, but also to his infant son Edward, Prince of Wales, as their successor. In the joy of victory and the celebration of success, it was perhaps easy to forget or even dismiss the fact that the Earl of Oxford had fled to Scotland, or that Jasper Tudor remained at large in Wales, in control of Pembroke Castle, and with him, his fourteen-year-old nephew Henry Tudor, whose claim to the throne, in the aftermath of the Lancastrian destruction, now seemed so remote as to be almost insignificant.
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Jasper Tudor had only just departed from Chepstow when the devastating news arrived that Margaret and Somerset had been ‘vanquished’ at Tewkesbury. He had marched from South Wales, in the hope of crossing into England to provide the additional troops he had been sent to raise, but had been unable to reach Margaret and her forces in time to prevent defeat. Realising that the scale of the defeat was so great that ‘matters were past all recovery’, he returned to Chepstow Castle, to consider what, if at all, the next possible course of action might be. Reflecting upon the disaster, he could have been forgiven for wondering what might have been if only Somerset had delayed battle until he had the chance to join him. According to the Tudor historian Polydore Vergil, he lamented ‘that headiness, which always is blind and improvident’ that had resulted in Somerset’s defeat.
Secluded behind the defensive walls at Chepstow, high upon the Welsh bank of the river Wye, Jasper continued to seek advice from his friends about his n
ext move. Together with Warwick’s death at Barnet, the outcome at Tewkesbury altered radically the position of his own family. Whether he knew yet of Henry VI’s death in the Tower, the death of Prince Edward had effectively destroyed the Lancastrian inheritance to the throne. Aside from the Duke of Exeter, one of the closest claimants to its lineage seemed to be his nephew Henry Tudor, currently residing in Pembroke Castle. With his mother Margaret forced to submit herself to Edward IV and make peace with the Yorkist regime once more, Jasper understood that the welfare of the boy lay in his hands alone.
Events left Jasper with little choice but to act decisively. Edward had sent Roger Vaughan of Tretower, described as ‘a very valiant man’, to arrest Jasper by trickery or some other secret means. Ten years previously, it had been Vaughan who had ordered the execution of Jasper’s father Owen Tudor, after the battle of Mortimer’s Cross; when Jasper ‘being advertised’ that Vaughan was approaching Chepstow, he was determined to have his revenge. Arresting Vaughan in the town before he had the chance to plan Jasper’s own capture, he swiftly had him beheaded. According to a later report, facing his death upon the block, Vaughan pleaded for Jasper’s mercy, but was met with the reply from Jasper that ‘he should have such Favour as he showed to Owen his Father’.
Jasper understood that to secure his nephew’s safety he would have to leave Chepstow immediately and travel to Pembroke Castle. He arrived only just in time, for Edward, hearing news of Vaughan’s death, was already in pursuit. The king now sent Morgan ap Thomas, the grandson of Gruffyd ap Nicholas, to besiege Jasper and his household at Pembroke. Thomas had been a strong friend of the earl’s, following his family’s traditional loyalties to the Lancastrians, but it is more than likely that his decision to turn against Jasper was a personal one: he was married to one of Sir Roger Vaughan’s daughters, and it seems that family loyalties on this occasion superseded previous alliances, especially considering the cold-blooded treatment his father-in-law had received at Jasper’s hands.