CHAPTER SIX

The Fatal Colours of Our Striving Houses

On October 13 Queen Margaret had given birth to a prince, named Edward, after which a great council was summoned; at some point it was decided that York should be invited, and on the 24th a letter was sent signed in the king’s name to his ‘right trusty and well-beloved cousin.’ York was told to put aside his differences with Somerset and to ‘come to the said Counsail peaceably and measurably accompanied.’

Inevitably, though, when York arrived at the council he got an ally to launch an attack on Somerset, once again accusing him of treason and demanding his imprisonment. A majority of lords this time agreed, and Somerset was arrested and sent to the Tower; since with the king in a catatonic state he had no protection. Then in January 1454, Margaret pushed herself forward as ruler, publishing ‘a bill of five articles’ in which she demanded ‘to have the whole rule of this land,’ the right to make appointments, and an income for her and her son. She also demanded the right to appoint ‘the chancellor, the treasurer, the privy seal, and all other officers of this land, with sheriffs and all other officers that the king should make’ together with power to ‘give all the bishoprics of this land, and all other benefices belonging to the king’s gift.’ The queen’s bill was rejected.

Margaret’s mother and grandmother had governed Anjou while her father was held captive on his various failed adventures, and she had grown up seeing women run things. But although she was competent, a powerful queen was likely to provoke resentment, and being foreign (and not just foreign, but French) didn’t help. So instead, on March 27, the Lords agreed to make York protector of the realm as well as chief councilor, although he insisted on a clause that stated he didn’t want the job, perhaps unique in employment history. Margaret’s son Edward was made Prince of Wales and Earl of Chester as a concession.

York appointed Salisbury chancellor, but he did try to be fair in his appointments, and went north to speak to and reason with the Nevilles and Percys. He also imprisoned his son-in-law Henry Holland, Duke of Exeter, in Pontefract Castle, for ‘a foolish rebellion’ in 1453 against a rival landowner. Holland, yet another great-grandson of John of Gaunt, was unpopular because of his cruelty and unpredictability. In a period in which there was some competition, Exeter was one of the least pleasant figures around, with a reputation for violence so bad that the torture rack at the Tower of London, where he was constable, was commonly known as ‘The Duke of Exeter’s Daughter.’ York also made himself captain of Calais, on top of lieutenant of Ireland. The queen received lands and offices, as did neutrals such as the Duke of Buckingham and the Lancastrian Tudors, half brothers of the king. However, York could not bury the hatchet with Somerset, who was still in the Tower.

Then on Christmas Day, 1454, Henry left his catatonic state, and five days later met his son for the first time, holding his hand and thanking God. He swore he could not remember having the child, whom he claimed must have been brought by the Holy Ghost, which made him a laughing stock all over Europe. However, although he was no longer catatonic, the king was never quite the same again.

On January 26, Henry had Somerset released from prison, with all charges dropped on March 4; York was formally stripped of his role on February 9 and also of his Calais position, which was given to Somerset; Salisbury was forced to resign the chancellorship and Warwick had to release the Duke of Exeter. And so the Yorks and the Nevilles went north to raise an army.

Battle of St. Albans

Somerset arranged for a great council to gather at Leicester, with York and his allies invited, but in mid-May the king’s men decided to meet instead at St. Alban’s and ordered York, Salisbury, and Warwick to come with no more than 200, 160, and 160 men respectively. The letters reached the three Richards in Royston, just outside of Cambridge, and York replied to Lord Chancellor Thomas Bourchier that ‘we intend not with God’s grace to proceed to any matter or thing, other than with God’s mercy shall be to his pleasure, the honour, prosperity, and wealth of our said sovereign lord, his said land and people’ and—York continuing in his rambling way—that having the council at Leicester ‘clearly implies a mistrust of certain person … therefore, we, his true and humble liegement, have come better companioned, in order to do whatever accords with our duty for the security of his said most noble person, wherein we will spare neither our bodies nor our goodes; and also to know who is suspected of such mistrust, so that we may proceed to the subjugation of those who are guilty of causing such mistrust.’45 Etc., etc.

The king was surrounded now by a broad group, including neutrals such as the Duke of Buckingham. Outside Ware, a few miles from St. Albans, they heard news that York was nearby with three thousand men, while the king had only two thousand with him. In a last desperate attempt to prevent the country imploding, the king removed Somerset as Constable of England and replaced him with Buckingham. It didn’t seem to satisfy York, who from his nearby encampment issued yet more demands.

At 10 a.m. on May 22, Warwick’s men began an assault on the town of St. Albans, where the king’s banner was raised, signifying that the Crown had declared war on a rebel. It was the first proper battle of the War of the Roses, but the fighting lasted just half an hour; such was the speed with which the Yorkists arrived that the king’s men barely had time to get their armor on.

In that short space of time, six thousand men fought with longbows, swords, maces, axes, and poleaxes through narrow streets and even in houses. Most of the battle involved bludgeoning, or the use of battle-axes, to knock men in armor over; once a man was down it was hard to get up, and his enemies would open his visor and put a dagger through his eyes. ‘Here you saw a man with his brains dashed out. Here another with his throat cut, the whole street full of corpses,’ the abbot of St. Albans, John Whethamstede, wrote, watching events.

During the battle, the fifty-five-year-old Salisbury killed the sixty-two-year-old Henry Percy, the Earl of Northumberland and son of Harry Hotspur; his son Henry, the third earl, would die at Towton six years later, four generations killed successively in battle, losing each time. Edmund Beaufort, the Duke of Somerset, had killed four opponents in hand-to-hand fighting outside an inn when he looked up and felt a sense of doom when he noticed it was called The Castle, recalling that a soothsayer had once warned him about castles; momentarily distracted, he was fatally stabbed. Next to him was his nineteen-year-old son Henry who was wounded and close to death; he survived and would vow to have his revenge on York and Warwick. Percy’s cousin Thomas, Lord Clifford, who had been in charge of the barricades, was the other high-profile Lancastrian casualty of the day, and on top of this were ‘other divers knights and squires sore hurt.’

One Lancastrian lord, James Butler, the Earl of Wiltshire, reacted in a way many of us would appreciate, taking off his armor and hiding it in a ditch, and then putting on a monk’s habit and slinking off. As one contemporary commented, he ‘fought mainly with the heels, for he was frightened of losing his beauty’; which having an axe in the head certainly would do.

Henry was put in a tanner’s cottage while this fighting played out. The king had spent the duration standing under the royal banner in the market place, a pathetic figure, so much so that even the royal standard bearer had run off. At one point an arrow landed in the king’s neck, and he called out: ‘Forsothe and forsothe, ye do foully to smite a king anointed so.’ For Henry’s standards that meant he was really angry.

The king’s men began to flee, leaving the monarch sitting on the ground, dazed and wounded. York and Warwick fell on their knees before Henry, calling for a surgeon to help him, and he was respectfully brought down to the local abbey, where survivors on both sides spent the night together, saying a Mass for the sixty dead.

York, having won the debate, was reappointed protector in November 1455 and made Warwick captain of Calais, also giving him some of Somerset’s land in Wales. By now Henry was planning his tomb at Westminster Abbey, not a sign of someone hugely optimistic about the future. However, York had to resign on February 25 after failing to secure an act of resumption that would take more land for the crown in order to raise revenue. And he wasn’t especially popular. Someone mounted five dog heads in Fleet St. in September 1456, each with a rhyme making fun of York, which rather summed up how many people felt about someone who had brought so much trouble to the kingdom. By the end of the year his allies were replaced in their offices by the queen’s.

In August 1456, Margaret and Henry entered Coventry with a display of great pageantry, greeted in verse by men dressed as Alexander the Great, St. John the Baptist, and Edward the Confessor, the eleventh-century king of England who was very holy if rather odd. The man playing St. Edward referred to the young prince as ‘my ghostly child, whom I love principally,’ while the actor dressed as Alexander greeted the king as ‘the noblest prince that is born, whom fortune hath fath,’ or favored, which was putting it kindly to say the least. There were also four men dressed as the four cardinal virtues—Righteousness, Temperance, Strength, and Prudence—who pledged their qualities to Margaret. It was now rumored Margaret wanted her husband to abdicate in favor of her son, of whom many ‘people spoke strangely,’ saying he was a changeling, or maybe a bastard.

Love Day

In early 1458, the king declared that York should suffer for his behavior with a fine of forty-five pounds a year, in order to pay for Masses to be said for the dead. This would be followed by a ‘Love Day’ on March 25, Lady Day,46 a well-meaning but rather ineffectual event fashioned by the more moderate men of the council.

Love Day was a typically useless political gesture to iron out impossible difficulties, favored by politicians down the ages. It was hoped to bring together Lancastrians such as Somerset, Northumberland, and Clifford, whose fathers had all been killed at St. Albans, and Yorkists Salisbury and Warwick, who would make reparations to them and agree to keep the peace for ten years. The leaders of each faction walked hand-in-hand to St. Paul’s Cathedral; Somerset beside Salisbury, behind them Warwick holding hands with the Duke of Exeter and at the back the king by himself.

They all celebrated a service of thanksgiving at the cathedral, the feeling of love only slightly diminished by the fact that the two sides had turned up with almost four thousand heavily armed men between them; York brought four hundred, Salisbury five hundred, and Warwick six hundred, all wearing red jackets with a ragged staff emblem, while the Percys had fifteen hundred men, Somerset and Exeter together eight hundred. The two groups of soldiers were separated by the walls of the city, while the mayor of London brought a force of five hundred just in case anyone was not feeling the love. Royal archers were placed along the Thames between Hounslow and London, sharpshooters who were ready to fire into the crowd at the first sign of trouble.

It did not make the slightest difference, for the younger Beauforts and Percys carried a ‘grudge and wrath’ against the Nevilles and York. Later in 1458, Warwick was involved in an accident in Westminster in which a kitchen worker almost stabbed him with a spit, which led to a fight between royal guards and Warwick’s men. Warwick claimed it was deliberate and escaped to Calais.

Queen Margaret tried to punish York through an Act of Attainder, which blamed him for all the kingdom’s troubles. However, despite the king’s revived sanity in 1458, York was not excluded. He still held his Irish position, he received new lands to compensate those that were lost, and his daughter Elizabeth was married to John de la Pole, the fifteen-year-old Duke of Suffolk. Salisbury, meanwhile, was made chief steward of the northern part of the duchy of Lancaster, a vital part of the defense against Scotland. But in the autumn of 1458, the queen removed more Neville supporters from office; Warwick was summoned from Calais in 1459, reluctantly as he feared for his safety, and while he was at court a brawl erupted between the household and his men.

In May 1459, the court went to Coventry again and then across the north and midlands, where Margaret had been building a power base through marriages and appointments, and men loyal to the crown were recruited. The queen handed out her son’s livery badge, featuring a swan wearing a crown as a collar, to be worn in battle.

A great council was called in June, but York and the Nevilles refused, and the queen openly denounced them; and so the court in Coventry sent the Hundred Years’ War veteran Lord Audley to arrest Salisbury. With this action, the kingdom exploded into violence. York had his wife and younger children evacuated from the North and brought to the relative safety of Ludlow near the Welsh border. Margaret, now in the North raising soldiers, wrote a letter in her seven-year-old son’s name to the city of London in which he declared himself ‘rightfully and lineally born by descent of the blood royal to inherit the pre-eminence of this realm.’ The country was clearly heading for civil war.