Foundation (History of England Vol 1) (57 page)

York and his followers retired to their estates after the recovery of the king from mental incapacity and the return of Somerset to power, but in the spring of 1455 they were summoned to attend a great council at Leicester. York feared that this would be the occasion for his arrest or arraignment, and so he forestalled events by gathering his supporters and marching down towards London. He was joined by the representatives of one of the great families of northern England; York’s brother-in-law was Richard Neville, the earl of Salisbury, and the earl’s son was another Richard Neville, the earl of Warwick. Their inveterate enemies in the north, the family of the Percys, had taken the side of Somerset. So local enmities exacerbated the general conflict. Salisbury and Warwick, who came to be known as ‘Warwick the king-maker’, proclaimed that they had taken up arms to remove ‘our enemies of approved experience, such as abide and keep themselves under the wing of your Majesty Royal’.

They had at all costs to maintain the fiction that they were not marching against the king but against the king’s councillors; otherwise they would have incurred the charge of high treason. Nevertheless York’s army now faced the king’s army in open battle at St Albans. There had been some attempt at preliminary negotiations, but York feared that Henry was wholly in Somerset’s control and was therefore not to be trusted. So his forces entered the town at ten o’clock in the morning on 22 May 1455, and began a series of rapid raids in its main street and public spaces. They were looking for their enemies. Somerset and Henry Percy, the earl of Northumberland, had been marked for slaughter. They were tracked down and killed on the spot in a notable if not unique act of savagery. The king himself was wounded in the neck, as he sat beneath his banner in the market square, but he was not seriously injured. Sixty men were killed in the fighting, which lasted for only a couple of hours.

Once their victory was assured, York and the Nevilles submitted to the king. It was reported that they ‘besought him of his Highness to take them as his true liegemen, saying that they never intended to hurt his person’. Henry then ‘took them to grace, and
so desired them to cease their people, and that there should no more harm be done’. York then escorted the king back to London, if escort is the appropriate word for an armed entourage, and four days later presented Henry with his crown in St Paul’s Cathedral. It might legitimately have been asked who was in charge. A friend wrote to John Paston, on that day, ‘as for what rule we shall have, yet I know never’. The king’s forces had been defied, and the king himself wounded; the order of the world had been turned upside down, and the governance of the realm placed in utmost peril. Yet who could have known or guessed that the combat of St Albans was the prelude to an internecine war that would continue for thirty years, provoke seven or eight major battles on English soil, and lead to the killing of some eighty nobles of royal blood? It has all the ingredients of a revenge tragedy. ‘By God’s blood,’ one Lancastrian noble screamed at the son of York on a later battlefield, ‘your father killed mine, and so will I do to you and to all your kin!’ We might be back in the days of the Anglo-Saxons, as if the years between had been a dream.

Within a short time after the battle the king had fallen prey to some malady, the nature of which remains unknown. It is easy to conjecture that he had relapsed into the same state of confusion as before, perhaps traumatized by his defeat, but he does not seem to have withdrawn completely from the world. He even managed to open the parliament in the summer of 1455. After a delay of some months York resumed the protectorate but the king, or his wife working in his name, let it be known to his councillors that he wished to be kept informed ‘in all matters as touching his honour, worship and safety’. The royal family were now more wary and defensive; they feared that York aspired to being king in all but name.

York’s most significant task was to defend the southern coast against French incursions and the northern frontier against the Scots; he was also obliged to protect the last remaining English settlement at Calais. So he named his ally, Warwick, as captain of that town. For all these preparations he needed money to be granted by the parliament house. That proved a complicated and arduous task, made infinitely more difficult when in February 1456 the king was brought by the lords to Westminster in order to
abrogate the proceedings and effectively to overrule the protector. At that point York, resentful and weary, resigned or was made to resign from his post.

The king was now nominally in command, but the real power lay with his wife. Margaret of Anjou was according to a contemporary ‘a great and strong laboured [strong-minded] woman’ who arranged everything ‘to an intent and conclusion to her power’. She was certainly more masterful than her husband. Her essential purpose was now to safeguard the interests of her infant son and to make sure that he succeeded his ailing father. In this respect, York was still the principal enemy made all the more dangerous by the death of Somerset.

She moved the king and court to the middle of her landed estates around Coventry, with the castle of Kenilworth as her stronghold, thereby setting up a base of power as an alternative to York who remained in London. The citizens had taken up his cause, and the queen did not feel safe among them. The councils of the realm were literally divided, and the course of affairs seemed likely to drift. One contemporary observed that ‘the great princes of the land [pre-eminently York and Warwick] were not called to Council but set apart’.

For the next three or four years there is little mention of the king; he spent much of his time travelling through the midlands, staying at various favoured abbeys or priories. It is said that above all else he enjoyed sleeping. No speeches by the king are reported. He was ‘simple’; he upheld no household, and he prosecuted no war. Little or no attempt was made at governance, apart from the routine business of finance and patronage. Even in these spheres, however, the queen’s wishes and decisions were paramount. The Lancastrian court, and the Yorkist lords, watched each other eagerly and suspiciously; the air was filled with threat.

The court returned to Westminster, in the winter of 1457, accompanied by a force of 13,000 archers; it was widely believed that the king and queen had returned in order to overcome York and to overawe the city. Political life had always been a form of gang warfare, in a scramble for lands and riches. Now it showed its true face. The streets of the city were filled with supporters of the
Lancastrians and the Yorkists; the younger relatives of the Lancastrians who had been killed at St Albans had come for vengeance.

Another source of unrest arose in that winter. In the summer of the year a French fleet had landed at Sandwich and devastated the town, a signal example both of the failure of English policy and of English weakness. The merchants of London, in particular, were horrified and outraged at the threat to maritime trade. In such an environment no one could feel safe.

Confronted with the possibility of civil war breaking out in the capital between the supporters of both sides, the principal figures reached a form of compromise in which the relatives of the dead were offered financial compensation for their loss. Money, in England, is always the best policy. This agreement was followed by what was known as a ‘love day’, in which sworn enemies literally joined hands and proceeded to a solemn service in St Paul’s Cathedral. But the love did not last. The royal court showed no favour to York or to the Nevilles, and in the spring of 1459 Henry ordered his loyal nobles to gather at Leicester with ‘as many persons defensibly arrayed as they might according to their degree’. The king was, in other words, calling for the armed retainers of the lords to be put at his disposal. A great council was held in June at Coventry, to which York and his supporters were not invited. At this assembly the renegade lords were denounced for their disloyalty.

York and Warwick now gathered their forces, and marched towards Worcester where they held their own council. Richard Neville, earl of Salisbury, was intent upon joining them with 5,000 men. The queen’s army intercepted him, however, on the road from Newcastle-under-Lyme; Salisbury beat off the attack, killing the queen’s commander and scattering what must now be called the enemy. The battle, lasting for more than four hours, claimed the lives of 2,000 men; the battlefield itself became known as ‘Deadmen’s Den’. So it had come to this. The English were fighting and killing the English, the men of Yorkshire against the men of Shropshire, the men of Wiltshire against the men of Cheshire.

Despite Salisbury’s victory, York and his allies were now
confronted by a large royal army bearing down upon them. They retreated from Worcester to Ludlow, where they established an armed camp. Yet it was clear enough that York was uneasy about confronting the king in open battle where he could be accused of high treason. A contingent of Warwick’s forces from Calais then deserted and, knowing themselves to be vulnerable, York and the Nevilles fled under cover of darkness; York returned to his old fiefdom, Ireland, while Warwick and Salisbury sailed to Calais. Their lands were seized by the king and they were declared to be traitors. Their cause seemed to have ended ingloriously.

The coastal defences of the country were now strengthened, with the possibility of an attack both from Calais and from Dublin; meanwhile, in the spring of 1460, Warwick sailed to Ireland in order to consult York on the next move. It came in the form of invasion. In the early summer of 1460 Warwick and Salisbury landed at Kent and began a march to the friendly territory of London. The leaders of the capital welcomed them and even offered them money. The Nevilles said that they had come to ‘rescue’ the king from his evil councillors; they professed nothing but goodwill towards Henry himself; they were not rebels, but reformers of the body politic; they wished to lighten taxation and to reduce the king’s debts; they pledged to reform the workings of the law and to lift the manifold oppressions of the king’s courtiers. It was the standard rhetoric of the period, but it was received warmly by the citizens and by the people of south-eastern England. It seems likely, however, that York and Warwick had brooded on the possibility of killing the king together with his wife and son. It should be remembered that these were all vicious and ruthless men.

Warwick remained in the city for only three days before marching north in search of the king’s army. He found it outside Northampton and, before sending his forces into battle, he ordered them to hunt down and kill the king’s entourage; the senior nobility and the knights were not to be spared. The fighting lasted less than an hour, and the victory went to Warwick after the slaughter of the king’s closest companions. Henry himself was taken into custody and once more escorted to London, where he was king only in name. ‘I follow after the lords,’ he is described as saying in a poem of the time. ‘I never know why.’ He was a puppet monarch.
Nevertheless the queen and her son, the young Prince Edward, were still at large.

York returned from Ireland ten weeks after the battle, and bore about him all the appurtenances of royalty. He no longer dated his letters according to the years of Henry’s reign, as was the custom, and he bore the arms of England on his banners. He arrived as the parliament in Westminster, summoned by Warwick, was beginning its proceedings; his trumpets sounded as he made his entrance, and a drawn sword was carried before him. He then made his way towards the vacant throne and put his hand upon it as if to claim possession; this unexpected and unlawful act was greeted with surprise and dismay by the lords assembled. It looked as if York had miscalculated his popularity, and underestimated their residual loyalty to their rightful king.

He demanded to be installed as the monarch. When asked to make a courteous visit to Henry he replied that ‘I know of no person in the realm whom it does not behove to come to me and see my person rather than that I should go and visit him.’ The king himself was too frightened to encounter York. The lords demurred at York’s demand, and passed the question to the judges; the judges in turn refused to meddle in such ‘high matters’ and passed the problem back to the lords. The question was ‘above the law and past their learning’. In any case no man wished to perjure his oath of loyalty to the anointed sovereign. In his incapacity Henry had become the emblem of his age; the senior members of the realm were struck by indecision. Emptiness ruled at the heart of government.

Eventually the lords, in English fashion, proposed a compromise. Henry would retain the crown but, on his death or at the time of his willing abdication, York and his heirs should succeed him. Since York was ten years older than Henry, the lords were playing a game of wait and see. When the king accepted this proposal he was effectively disinheriting his son, and stripping him of his rightful inheritance. But he was in no position, and perhaps in no condition, to remonstrate on the matter. The feelings of Queen Margaret on the issue of succession are hardly in doubt; but for the moment she was on the run. She retreated with her son to Wales, but then fled to Scotland; she left her forces under the command
of the earl of Pembroke, Jasper Tudor, half-brother to the king. So the Tudors properly enter English history. Jasper Tudor was the fruit of an unlikely marriage when Katherine of Valois, the widow of Henry V, became the wife of a junior courtier by the name of Owen Tudor. The older Tudor had joined his son on behalf of the queen. No one, however, could possibly have imagined the ultimate success of his family line.

By the end of 1460 the queen reappeared in the north of England, having persuaded the great lords of that region to support her against the Londoners and the south-easterners. She mustered some 10,000 armed retainers, as York and Salisbury marched north to meet them. Battle was joined outside Wakefield, in the course of which both York and Salisbury were despatched; it was for the Lancastrians some recompense for the slaughter at St Albans and Northampton. The head of York was wreathed in a paper crown, and placed on the southern gate of the city of York known as Micklegate Bar. It bore a sign saying ‘Let York overlook the town of York.’