Bosworth: The Birth of the Tudors Read online

  On 26 June 1460 the Earl of Warwick, together with York’s eldest son, Edward, Earl of March and Richard Neville, Earl of Salisbury, landed at Sandwich in Kent with a force of 2,000 men, joining Salisbury’s brother, William Neville, Lord Fauconberg, who had led an advance raiding party to defeat an attempt by the king’s party to muster troops, ‘like bees to the hive’. They were warmly welcomed, and their army swelled along the road from the coast to Canterbury as large numbers of Kentishmen rushed to join their standard. Before nightfall they had arrived at Canterbury, where the town threw open its gates. That evening the Yorkists knelt in prayer at Thomas Becket’s tomb, before heading towards the capital. After the city authorities decided to admit them, the earls entered London in triumph on 2 July where they were welcomed by the mayor and the archbishop of Canterbury.

  The Yorkists had no intention of remaining in London. Their aim was to confront the king, whose forces were gathering near Northampton. The Yorkist invasion had thrown the Lancastrian party into confusion; if an invasion were to have taken place, they had expected it would have come from Ireland, through Wales. Thrown into panic, Henry had refused to take refuge but instead, leaving his wife and son at Coventry, made his way slowly towards London. As news reached his troops that the Yorkists were advancing out of the capital, the king established his camp outside Northampton.

  The Yorkist army arrived at Northampton on the evening of 9 July. Compared to Ludlow, when only six peers were prepared to lend their support, now seventeen members of the nobility joined their cause, bringing with them a superior force of arms and men. The Lancastrians were outnumbered, but their commander, the Duke of Buckingham, was steadfast in his refusal to negotiate. Battle was inevitable. The Yorkists drew their forces into three divisions, with orders to spare the king and the commons, but to slay any lords and knights. As the weather worsened and a heavy downpour began, the battle was decided after half an hour. Buckingham himself was killed defending the royal tent. He had resolved that he would always fight to the death; before the battle began, he had made his final will and testament. Included in its provision was 400 marks’ worth of land for his son Henry Stafford and Margaret Beaufort. The king was discovered in his tent, and must have found it confusing that, after Warwick and March had declared their unreserved loyalty to him, he was to be led back to London a prisoner.

  News of the king’s capture left Margaret of Anjou still residing at Coventry with little option but to flee, seeking Jasper Tudor’s protection at Harlech Castle. Jasper’s influence in Wales could hardly be tolerated by the Yorkists: on 9 August 1460 Jasper was ordered to hand over Denbigh Castle. Jasper refused to obey ‘royal’ orders that he knew came not from his king. Instead, he would do everything in his power to frustrate and undermine his Yorkist enemies. Jasper Tudor’s defiance was not the only problem that the new Yorkist regime faced. Margaret of Anjou had decided to flee to Scotland, where she enlisted the support of the Scottish King James III. In London, Warwick moved quickly to establish York’s supporters in key positions of power while Parliament was summoned to meet in October, its principal aim to cancel the Acts of Attainder that had been passed in the previous year.

  But still the Yorkist figurehead, the Duke of York himself, was absent, having remained in Ireland throughout the invasion. Now with the king finally within his control and the queen forced into exile, York planned his return, this time not as Protector but as a potential king.

  York landed at Chester on 9 September. Making slow progress south, it was obvious that the duke’s intentions had changed dramatically. His banners were emblazoned with the royal arms, trumpeters announced his arrival at each town along the route, his drawn sword was carried upright before him, a privilege granted only to kings. When he arrived at the capital three days after Parliament had assembled, the fanfare that greeted him was reserved for a monarch, as York made his way to Westminster. In a scene nothing short of remarkable, he entered the palace through the king’s traditional entrance and approached the empty throne. In front of the assembled lords, he held out his hand, ‘in this very act like a man about to take possession of his right’. There his hand hovered, in silence. York turned round, looking ‘eagerly’ for applause from the nobility nearby. But none came. In the awkwardness of the moment, ‘at length’ York withdrew his hand, once again turning to those standing ‘quietly’ around the royal canopy.

  The embarrassing silence was broken by the Archbishop of Canterbury who suggested that the duke should speak first with the king. York retorted angrily: ‘I do not recall that I know anyone within the kingdom whom it would not befit to come sooner to me and see me rather than I should go and visit him.’

  York had badly miscalculated the support he would receive for his claim to the throne. He had defied Henry on five separate occasions over the past decade; it was clear that the nobility remained deeply distrustful of the man whose ambitions had destabilised a kingdom, throwing it into turmoil. But York was relentless. A week later, he formally submitted his claim, based upon his superior descent from Lionel of Clarence through his Mortimer relatives. The judges were not prepared to pass a verdict, which they claimed was ‘above the law and past their learning’. With stalemate likely to ensue, the Lords decided upon what they considered the best compromise, passing an act on 24 October formally recognising York as Henry’s heir.

  If the nobility believed their compromise would placate the kingdom, they underestimated the resolve and determination of Margaret of Anjou to protect her son’s rights of inheritance. As soon as the news reached her of the plans to disinherit Prince Edward, she began planning for invasion, able to count upon her loyal Lancastrian supporters including Jasper Tudor and Somerset, together with the Earls of Northumberland, Wiltshire and Devon who one chronicler estimated would be able to raise a force of 15,000 men. The impending threat could hardly be ignored, and on 9 December a Yorkist force some 6,000 strong commanded by York himself left London, reaching Sandal Castle near Wakefield on 21 December where they spent Christmas. Any festivities were cancelled when it became clear that within the castle there was a severe lack of provisions to feed York’s army. Dependent upon foraging missions into the surrounding hostile countryside, York realised that he could not hold out for long within the confines of the castle’s walls.

  On 30 December a force led by Somerset appeared outside Sandal. On the freezing cold day, as the winter afternoon began to darken, York took the decision to lead his men outside of the security of the castle, the duke himself charging down the hill at his opposing forces, where outnumbered and outflanked, he found himself ‘environed on every side, like a fish in a net, or a deer in a buckstall’. York was dragged from his horse and killed, while his son, Edmund, Earl of Rutland was killed by Lord Clifford as he attempted to escape. The battlefield lay thick with the bodies of York’s men; many others who were wounded died later in the bitter cold. The Earl of Salisbury was taken prisoner, and despite his attempts to bribe his gaolers, according to one chronicler, ‘the common people of the country, which loved him not, took him out of the castle by violence and smote off his head’.

  York’s decision to leave Sandal Castle is shrouded in mystery. Later chronicles suggested that the duke had been the victim of treachery, deceived by the ‘false colour’ of his own side. Whatever the exact reason, the retribution and vengeance inflicted upon the dead bodies of the fallen was unprecedented. John Whethamstede, the abbot of St Albans, wrote how York’s corpse was propped up on ‘a little anthill’ and a crown, ‘a vile garland made of reeds’, was placed on his head. Somerset and his men then approached the dead man, and bending their knees, mockingly cried, ‘Hail King, without rule. Hail King, without ancestry. Hail leader and prince, with almost no subjects or possessions.’ York’s body was then decapitated, and his head was taken together with those of the Earls of Rutland and Salisbury to York, where they were placed upon spikes above Micklegate Bar. To add further insult, a paper crown was placed upon the duke’s head, a re
minder to all those who passed beneath the stone gate how fortune’s wheel had turned so fast for the man who would be king.

  The battle of Wakefield, as it became known, was an unmitigated disaster for the Yorkists. Not only had they lost their leader, but the road to London was now left open for Margaret and the Lancastrian army, which now swelled to 20,000 men as it made its way towards the capital, sparking a sense of general panic throughout the realm as men feared vengeance from this ‘whirlwind of the north’ which one abbot described as ‘a plague of locusts covering the whole surface of the earth’.

  When Edward, Earl of March, discovered the news of the death of both his father and his brother, he had been preparing his forces at Ludlow. His immediate instinct was to march towards London, intent on avenging York’s death, yet his journey was curtailed with news that the Earl of Wiltshire had landed in south-west Wales with a force of French, Breton and Irish mercenaries. Wiltshire had joined forces with Jasper Tudor, bringing with him a large number of Welsh troops, as well as his own father, Owen Tudor. Together they had begun to march upon Hereford. The news caused Edward to change his mind and turn north. He succeeded in intercepting this new Lancastrian threat not far from his castle at Wigmore, on the rising ground near the river Lugg, known as Mortimer’s Cross, between Ludlow and Leominster. With his father’s cruel death and the humiliating treatment of his corpse still fresh in his mind, as well as the execution of his brother, Edmund, Earl of Rutland, Edward was determined to wreak vengeance upon the Lancastrian army.

  It was Candlemas Day, 2 February 1461, when the two armies met in the freezing cold at Mortimer’s Cross. Just before the battle, Edward looked up at the sky, where to his amazement, in the east not one, but three suns appeared, ‘in the firmament shining clear’. This strange phenomenon was most likely caused by the optical illusion known as a perihelion, which appears in winter skies when light is refracted through ice crystals in the atmosphere, causing the apparition of multiple suns to form in the frosted air. Not knowing what was happening, the Yorkist troops were terrified at what they considered an ominous portent, until Edward himself knelt down on his knees and thanked God, taking the spectacle as a sign of divine favour, claiming that the three suns ‘betoken the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost’. From that moment, Edward took the sign of ‘the sun in splendour’ as one of the images for his badges, the golden sun of York.

  Edward took to the field, where his Lancastrian opponents, caught out unprotected by a storm of arrows unleashed upon them as they advanced across the frozen ground, found their line beginning to collapse and within half an hour were soon routed, fleeing for their lives. Some 4,000 Lancastrians were killed, most of them Welshmen in Jasper Tudor’s service. More soldiers were killed at Mortimer’s Cross than the three previous battles combined. It was a sign of the unrestrained bloodshed that was about to be unleashed upon England.

  Jasper Tudor and the Earl of Wiltshire had managed to successfully flee the battlefield. Others were not so fortunate. Owen Tudor, now a man in his fifties, was taken prisoner and removed to Hereford. Along with several other Lancastrian lords he was sentenced to die, yet it seems that Tudor still believed that as the king’s stepfather, he would receive a pardon at the final moment. But the moment never came. It was not until Owen was led out to the block in the marketplace at Hereford and caught sight of his executioner wielding an axe, that he realised his fate. As the collar of his red velvet doublet was ripped off to expose his neck, in a mixture of defiance and amazement, he told the crowds, ‘That head shall lie on the stock that was wont to lie on Queen Catherine’s lap’. According to one chronicler, he then ‘put his heart and mind wholly unto God, and full meekly took his death’. His head was set upon the highest part of the market cross, where a ‘mad woman’ took it upon herself to comb his hair and wash away the blood from his face, setting around his decapitated head more than a hundred burning candles.

  Father for father, brother for brother; the pattern of the civil war was becoming gruesomely familiar, as each family sought to avenge the deaths of their own. For Edward, Owen’s execution was some comfort for his father’s own brutal end. As the wars drew on and families were torn apart fighting, fathers and sons hacked down on the field of battle, soon many more would be drawn into the blood feud of revenge and reprisal. As Jasper Tudor fled towards the sanctuary of Pembroke Castle a defeated man, he reflected on how both his brother Edmund and his father Owen had died at the hands of his Yorkist enemies. Only he remained to defend not only the Lancastrian cause, but his own house of Tudor, its hopes embodied in the small four-year-old child, his nephew Henry, whom he returned to at Pembroke. Jasper resolved that revenge would be his. In a remarkable letter that survives, written by the earl to his kinsman Roger Puleston three weeks after the battle, he fumed of ‘the great dishonour and rebuke that we and you now late have by traitors March, Herbert … with their affinities … in putting my father your kinsman to the death, and their traitorously demeaning’. He now intended ‘with the might of our Lord, and assistance of you and other our kinsmen and friends’ to avenge his father’s execution ‘within short time’. There Jasper ended his brief letter to Puleston, ‘trusting verily that you will be well willed and put to your hands unto the same, and of your disposition with your good advice there in we pray you to ascertain us in all haste possible, as our especial trust is in you’.

  Little did Jasper Tudor realise then, that vengeance would take nearly quarter of a century.

  Edward was still basking in his victory at Ludlow when news reached him that Margaret of Anjou and the Lancastrian forces had inflicted a massive defeat upon the Yorkist force led by the Earl of Warwick at St Albans on 17 February. In the confusion of the battle, it is difficult to comprehend why Warwick should have been defeated so comprehensively. The fact that not a single Yorkist lord was killed during the fighting suggests that Warwick’s army never really engaged with their enemy. To make matters worse, the earl had failed to keep possession of his most valuable asset – the person of the king himself. Henry VI was discovered by Margaret’s troops, sitting under an oak tree where he had watched the battle, laughing and singing.

  With her husband back in her possession, all that was needed to complete Margaret’s triumphant victory was to march into London to take charge of the country. But she did not. Instead she turned back, ordering her army to travel to Dunstable. Margaret’s decision not to enter the capital was to prove disastrous. As soon as Edward had heard the news of what had happened at St Albans, he had immediately marched eastwards with his troops, where on 22 February he met with the humbled Earl of Warwick in the Cotswolds. Together they rode to London where, four days later they entered the capital where they were ‘joyously received’ as grateful Londoners threw open the gates.

  Edward’s entrance into London created fresh dynastic problems for the Yorkists. They held the capital, and with it the financial power and departments of state to control the country. Yet without possession of the king, they could no longer claim to act, as they previously had done, on the authority of Henry VI. Their solution would mark a complete break in the accepted order, ushering in a new phase to the civil wars. The Yorkists would create their own king; on 4 March, the eighteen-year-old Edward, Earl of March was proclaimed Edward IV in Westminster Hall, wearing a purple robe and holding St Edward the Confessor’s sceptre in his hand. A formal coronation, however, would have to wait: Edward was determined that he must first defeat Henry in battle, the only true sign of divine favour for his new kingship.

  As soon as he had entered the capital, Edward was already preparing for one final military confrontation, and ‘acting faithfully in the Lord, girded himself with the sword of battle’. There was no small number of people willing to fight for their new king; an Italian visitor to London wrote how there was ‘a great multitude who say they want to be with him to conquer or die’. The chance for God’s judgement upon Edward’s kingship came three weeks later when, on Palm Sunday, 29 March 1
461, the Battle of Towton was fought in a bitter snowstorm.

  Margaret of Anjou and her Lancastrian force had retreated towards York, where they had begun to regroup, sending for reinforcements from Wales and Scotland. Soon a titanic force estimated at 30,000 soldiers had gravitated to her standard. The Lancastrians also retained the support of the majority of the nobility, having the backing of nineteen peers compared to Edward’s eight. Sensing the danger and eager to seal complete victory, Edward and his forces had arrived in Pontefract by 27 March, ready for a final showdown. Between them, the two armies numbered over 50,000 men, the largest show of force ever witnessed in England. When battle came, it was the weather which was to be a decisive factor in the Yorkist victory as the Lancastrians found the wind against them, and consequently found themselves trapped, blinded by the driving snow as arrows hailed down upon them.