The storms had slackened enough to allow Edward to leave Vlissingen, but they soon returned. Driven towards the East Anglian coast by gale-force winds, his fleet was quickly in trouble. A ship full of warhorses foundered and all the animals were lost – though, on the plus side, the foul weather kept hostile ships in port. On 12 March 1471, barely a day after leaving Vlissingen, he dropped anchor off the north Norfolk port of Cromer and sent a reconnaissance party ashore to check out the lie of the land. It soon returned. The news was bad. Anticipating Edward’s landing, Warwick had rounded up the leading men of the region whom he suspected of Yorkist sympathies, chief among them the duke of Norfolk, taken them to London and locked them up. In their place, watching and waiting, were the forces of the Lancastrian John de Vere, earl of Oxford. Changing his plans, Edward headed north, back into the storms: that night, his fleet was scattered. Two days later, Edward’s ship the Antony limped alone into Ravenspur, on the Holderness coast of north Yorkshire, the same port where, back in 1399, Henry of Bolingbroke had returned from exile to claim the throne as the first Lancastrian king, Henry IV.1
Taking Hastings and a small bodyguard, Edward disembarked and found shelter in a ‘poor village’ a couple of miles inland. Overnight, the winds slackened. The following morning the rest of his men came ashore; not long after, contingents from the other ships, many driven onto the north bank of the Humber Estuary, began to appear. They had been astonishingly lucky: not a single vessel had been lost. Soon, the whole force was assembled, including Richard with his three hundred men and Anthony Woodville, who had landed some thirteen miles away at a small fishing village called Paull.
As Edward knew, the local population was ‘evil disposed’ towards him. Though the carnage of Towton was now a decade ago, it lingered in the memory and everybody knew somebody who had died there: mostly on the Lancastrian side, fighting for Henry Percy, earl of Northumberland. Since then, the Nevilles had imposed themselves on the region, and Warwick’s agents had been through the area in recent weeks, whipping up anti-Yorkist hostility. Riding warily inland, Edward’s scouts reported back that armed groups – totalling, they guessed, some six thousand men – lay in wait along the road to York, some forty miles away; the nearest town, Hull, had also been ordered to resist him. At which point, Edward swallowed his regal pride and changed his story. He had returned, he proclaimed, not to regain the throne but simply to claim his patrimony as duke of York.
It wasn’t a new tactic. Henry of Bolingbroke had used it when launching his bid for the throne seventy-two years previously. Such a move allowed potential supporters to rally to Edward without committing treason; by the same token, it gave those who had been ordered to resist him every excuse to stand off. Although Edward’s two thousand troops numbered substantially fewer than the local forces, they were heavily armed, well drilled and came with a formidable reputation, while the cash and promises of future reward that Edward threw around helped potential combatants to make up their minds.
Anybody seeking control of the northeast needed York, the powerful, prosperous city at its heart. Edward made his way directly there. As he approached, York’s authorities repeatedly told him support was out of the question. Hiding his growing anxieties – if his plans were to succeed, the city’s backing was crucial – Edward convinced a civic deputation to admit him and a small group of his advisers for talks. Once inside the walls, he put on a consummate show of deceit: sporting an ostrich feather, Edward of Lancaster’s badge; repeatedly and publicly proclaiming the names of King Henry and his son; and – to show York’s mayor and aldermen he meant what he said – swearing on the gospels to be faithful to Henry VI and the house of Lancaster. As one chronicler grumbled, Edward was prepared to swear to anything, ‘forgetting all religion and honesty’, to get what he wanted.2
The lies worked. York’s gates were opened to Edward’s army. The following day, refreshed and resupplied, they started on the long journey south, through his father’s former recruiting grounds of Sandal and Wakefield, from where Edward hoped to attract more recruits to his cause – which, ostensibly, remained his claim to the dukedom of York.
The roads along which they moved were quiet, the lack of opposition marked. One factor above all others stood out: Henry Percy, earl of Northumberland. Despite his residual Lancastrian allegiance, Percy had weighed his loyalties in the balance and found there was no contest. If he disliked the idea of York, he hated Warwick and the Nevilles. Edward’s restoration of the young nobleman to his birthright, to John Neville’s disadvantage, now seemed a masterstroke. From the moment he landed, Edward was flourishing Northumberland’s letters, the wax seal of Percy enough to make even the most antagonistic local pause for thought. Percy didn’t turn out for Edward – an impossibility, given the regional loathing for York – but then, he didn’t need to. He just ‘sat still’. By letting Edward pass onwards, he sent out a signal to ‘every man in all those north parts’ to do the same. Simply removing his men from the equation was, remarked one of Edward’s men with respect, a ‘notable service’, ‘politiquely done’. At Pontefract, where John Neville himself was lying in wait, Percy’s inactivity had particular repercussions. Unable to raise sufficient troops to oppose Edward, Neville hunkered down inside the castle and waited as he went by.
While support was slow to rally to Edward – at Wakefield, there was a disappointing trickle of recruits – the lack of resistance had a further effect. The longer Edward continued without being challenged, the more people assumed that it was safe to join him. There were positive signs at Doncaster, where he was joined by a handful of royal officials. These were followed at Nottingham by significant backing in the form of the north-western knights Sir James Harrington – Edward and Richard’s support for his family against their regional Stanley rivals had proved key – and Sir William Parr from Westmorland (his loyalty to Edward overriding his connection to the earl of Warwick), bringing with them six hundred troops. Newly confident, Edward ordered his scouts to push further and further afield and, at Nottingham, they returned with news. Reaching Newark, some twenty miles northeast, they had found the town jammed with four thousand men: a Lancastrian army commanded by the earl of Oxford, the duke of Exeter and various other nobles. Unhesitating, Edward advanced. Since his landing, the speed and audacity of his decision-making, coupled with his brazen duplicity over his real ambitions, had caught potential enemies in two minds. As they hesitated, Edward moved forward.
At Newark, news of his coming panicked the Lancastrians into fleeing under cover of darkness, at two in the morning. When Edward heard that they were gone, their forces ‘disperpled’, scattered, he didn’t bother entering Newark, but returned to Nottingham. Greater challenges were close at hand.3
Edward was still making his way towards York when, on 16 March, rumours of his landing reached Clarence at the Somerset city of Wells. The same day, Clarence wrote to his Derbyshire follower Henry Vernon. Back in 1467, Clarence and Warwick had backed Vernon in his blood feud against the Grey family. Now, as Vernon’s lord, Clarence was calling in a favour. He wanted Vernon ‘secretly’ to plant ‘sure and trusty men’ in the northeast, keeping tabs on the behaviour of the earl of Northumberland – Clarence knew the importance of his role – and on two other northern lords with elastic loyalties, the earl of Shrewsbury and Thomas, Lord Stanley. Agents should work in pairs, he directed, one in place at all times while the other was ‘coming to us’, relaying information. Vernon was also to send spies to report on Edward, and – if he had indeed landed – to monitor his progress closely. Finally, Clarence ordered Vernon to raise as many armed men as he could, ready to mobilize on an hour’s notice.
In his dispatch Clarence gave away almost nothing about his own plans or his own allegiances. A reader might have assumed that he was simply watching, waiting to see which way the wind blew, but for one detail: when writing of his brother, he referred to him by the initials ‘K. E.’, King Edward.
There was something inevitable about Clarence re-entering the Yorkist fold. His place in the Lancastrian settlement, precarious from the outset, had looked ever more unsteady as time went on: at that moment, away in France, Margaret of Anjou was planning the latest legal assault on his estates in favour of herself and her son and heir. Whatever Clarence’s grievance with Edward, the family would always welcome him back: of that, Yorkist agents had stressed, he could be sure. He was also reassured by news from the north of Northumberland’s sitting still and, following his uncharacteristic spasm of commitment to Warwick the previous autumn, of Stanley’s return to his default mode of inaction.4 Clarence wrote to Warwick, now marshalling his own forces at Coventry, to tell the earl to hold off attacking Edward until he arrived. Then, raising his men, Clarence headed off into the midlands to find his brothers.
Clarence’s message might have jogged a memory in Warwick of the previous March, when he and the duke had sent duplicitous messages to Edward not to advance against the Lincolnshire rebels until they got there. As Warwick now probably guessed, the boot was on the other foot.
At Leicester, Edward received his biggest military boost to date: three thousand men, recruited by Hastings from his east midlands estates. With his now habitual directness, and mindful of the other Lancastrian forces in the region, he headed straight for Coventry, aiming to isolate Warwick. Cagey as ever, the earl retreated inside the city walls and stayed there, deaf to Edward’s offers of fighting or negotiating. Leaving him to it, Edward marched on. He hadn’t gone ten miles when, at the city of Warwick, news came that Clarence was approaching from Banbury with four thousand men. The news was good. Clarence was coming ‘to aid and assist’ Edward ‘against all his enemies’.
On the afternoon of 3 April, Edward rode south out of Warwick. Three miles outside the city he halted in open country, his men drawn up in battle order, royal banners displayed. In the distance, Clarence’s army could be seen: a ‘great fellowship’ moving towards Edward. Within about half a mile, it stopped.
With a few men, among them Richard, Anthony Woodville and Hastings, Edward rode out towards Clarence’s lines. At the same time, a knot of riders detached themselves from the distant army. Soon, they were close enough for Edward’s men to see the liveries Clarence’s men wore on their jackets: the duke’s gorget badge and, over it – an indication of superior allegiance – the white rose of York.5 As the two groups faced each other, Edward and Clarence slowly advanced their horses, then stopped and dismounted.
Clarence fell to his knees, grovelling. Edward lifted his brother up, hugging him, smothering him in kisses, forgiving him everything. Then Clarence turned to Richard, the pair greeting each other warmly. As trumpets sounded, Edward and Clarence saluted each other’s men to roars of ‘Long Live King Edward’. For the first time since making landfall three weeks previously, Edward revealed his true aim: to regain the throne. The two armies then came together, the afternoon dissolving in smiles and embraces.
The reconciliation could hardly have gone better. As one onlooker put it, Edward, Clarence and Richard had been reunited with ‘perfect accord’. There had been such ‘kind and loving language’ between them, such ‘heartily loving cheer and countenance’ that the bond between the three brothers was now, clearly, indissoluble: they were ‘knit together for ever hereafter’.6
As they discussed their next steps, Clarence turned conciliator, pleading with his brother to let him try and broker peace with Warwick. Edward agreed, and sent messengers to the earl. Suspicious of Edward’s intentions, and under pressure from his own Lancastrian allies to reject any Yorkist approaches, Warwick sat tight and refused to negotiate. In any case, time was on the earl’s side. Lancastrian reinforcements were flooding into Coventry daily, while Edward’s troops were having trouble finding food in a region already stripped bare by Warwick’s men. The longer Edward waited, the stronger Warwick would get. After talking things through with his brothers, Edward struck camp. Detailing a force of spearmen and archers, ‘behind-riders’, to watch his back should Warwick come after him, he set out for London.7
Reaching Daventry, the Yorkists observed Palm Sunday, ten years to the day since the bloody victory at Towton. At the local parish church, Edward walked ‘with great devotion’ behind the sacrament-bearing priests, followed by townspeople clutching their ‘palms’ of yew and willow. Then, as the choir sang the customary anthem ‘Ave Rex Noster’, ‘Hail our King, Redeemer of the World’, the painted veil that had covered the church’s crucifix through Lent was lifted; Edward knelt, fervently venerating the revealed cross.8 As he did so, on an adjacent pillar a wooden box enclosing one of the church’s statues gave ‘with a great crack’. Through the slight opening could be glimpsed a little alabaster image of St Anne, a saint whose intercession Edward had especially sought during his exile. Mother of the Virgin Mary and grandmother of Jesus, Anne was divine validation of descent through the female line, on which the Yorkist royal claim depended. The boards seemed to close up again, then – all ‘without any man’s hand, or touching’ – burst open, the image fully revealed to the entire congregation.
Coming as it did on Palm Sunday, the day Christ came in triumph to Jerusalem to save his people, the implications of this ‘fair miracle’ seemed undeniable: a ‘good prognostication’, pronounced one of Edward’s men. St Anne’s backing was manifest in two ways: the non-appearance of Warwick, following Edward with his usual caution; and the news that, away in northern France, storms continued to delay Margaret of Anjou and her son’s voyage to England.9
Early that Holy Week, there was panic in London. Two letters were read out to the city council. One was from Edward, ordering the authorities to take Henry VI into custody; the other from Warwick, telling them to hold the city against Edward at all costs. The council dithered. Hearing the news the city’s mayor John Stockton, who some six weeks previously had decided that discretion was the better part of decision-making and had ‘feigned himself sick for fear of ministering of his office’, remained in bed.10
Now leading Warwick’s administration, George Neville tried to muster the city defences against Edward. Londoners’ response was lukewarm. In a mirror-image of 1461, a stream of Lancastrian supporters, laden with whatever goods they could carry, headed down to London’s port and sailed for France; among them was Sir Thomas Cook, whose political rehabilitation had been brief. As Edward and his army approached, the two senior Lancastrian commanders in the city, Edmund Beaufort, duke of Somerset and John Courtenay, heir to the earldom of Devon – both in any case inclined to do the opposite of what Warwick commanded – gave London up as a bad job and left for the south coast, to await Margaret of Anjou. ‘Omnes fugierunt’, noted one chronicler simply. ‘They all fled.’11
In a last-ditch attempt to boost Londoners’ morale, George Neville ordered Henry VI to be put on a horse and led through the city’s streets. Where, ten years previously, Edward’s hastily constructed inauguration ceremonies had convinced most Londoners, this limp procession backfired spectacularly. His hand held all the way by Neville – perhaps in reassurance, perhaps to stop him falling out of his saddle – Henry was dressed in a shabby long blue gown, ‘as if’, remarked one observer, ‘he had no more clothes to change with’, adding that the whole thing was more ‘like a play than the showing of a prince to win men’s hearts’.12 Nobody seemed less convinced than Neville himself. With the fore-riders of Edward’s army reported to be in the village of Stoke Newington, barely five miles to the city’s north, Neville deposited Henry back in his lodgings and promptly ‘shifted for himself’, writing to Edward to ask for his pardon. Yorkist prisoners in the Tower overpowered their Lancastrian guards.
Towards noon on 11 April, civic officials ordered the city militia to stand down ‘and go home to dinner’. A couple of hours later, Londoners watched as Edward and his ‘fair band’ of men rode unopposed through Shoreditch into the city. Offering up thanks to God at St Paul’s, Edward walked into the bishop of London’s palace, where George Neville prostrated himself and then, pouring out a stream of excuses, produced Henry VI.
Ignoring Edward’s extended hand, the frail king embraced him: ‘My cousin of York’, he said, ‘you are very welcome. I know that my life, in your hands, will not be in danger.’ Edward replied that Henry didn’t have to worry about anything. He would be taken care of.
With Henry secure in his lodgings, and the self-exculpatory George Neville and a group of Lancastrian bishops led away to the Tower, Edward took the royal barge upriver to Westminster. There, following a re-coronation ceremony in the Abbey – Edward’s immediate priority was to reaffirm his royal right – he was reunited with his family: Elizabeth, his daughters and, ‘to his greatest joy’, the infant prince that had been born during his exile.13
As one London versifier put it, Edward’s troubles ‘turned to bliss’. Here was the devoted family man, surrounded by his queen and children, cradling his ‘young prince’ in his arms. Emphasizing Elizabeth’s exhausted relief, the poet recalled her ‘anguish’ during the extreme uncertainty of the past six months. She had shown great strength in adversity, trying to get on with life as far as possible in Edward’s absence, but ‘when she remembered the king’, found it impossible to control her emotions. ‘Glorious God’, the poet declaimed feelingly, ‘what pain had she?’14
Bringing Elizabeth and his daughters out of sanctuary, Edward had them rowed downriver to Baynard’s Castle, where they were welcomed by his mother Cecily, Clarence and Richard. Their reunion, though, was brief. The family observed the deep solemnity of Good Friday, creeping barefoot in the chapel towards the bare altar and the cross, which they kissed fervently. Outside, mounted scouts clattered into the courtyard with reports that the earl of Warwick was now coming south fast. His advance suited Edward, who knew he needed to fight Warwick before the main Lancastrian force under Margaret of Anjou materialized.15
Edward chewed over the situation with ‘the great lords of his blood’, his brothers foremost among them. What confronted them was daunting. The combined forces of Warwick, his brother John Neville and the earl of Oxford were reportedly ‘far above’ Edward’s army; in firepower, too, they far outgunned the Yorkists. On Easter Saturday, 13 April, Edward sent Elizabeth, his children and his mother to the safety of the Tower. Then, he rode out of the city to St John’s Fields, where ten years previously his Welshmen had acclaimed him king, and where his troops were now mustering.
The scene perhaps stirred memories of the battles Edward had fought as an eighteen-year-old, of Mortimer’s Cross and the carnage of Towton. Since then, he had done little fighting. Either it had been done by his commanders, or the enemy had disintegrated, or he had fled. Edward’s Burgundian exile and his rapid march through England had sharpened him, the instinct and muscle memory still there. Once again, he would have to fight his own subjects to assert his right to the kingdom. Around four in the afternoon Edward led his nine-thousand-strong army up St John Street and, through Islington, north.16 With him, this time, were his brothers. And if Edward hadn’t fought in anger for ten years, Clarence and Richard had never fought at all.
Both had been too young to experience the bloodletting of the early 1460s; Edgecote, meanwhile, was all over before Clarence could get there. Their education, though, had prepared them for this moment: hours upon hours of physical and military training, of practising combat with swords and lances; of learning the right way to tumble from horses and regain their feet in full plate armour; of how to fight in teams and to keep discipline. All this, drilled into them repetitively, was reinforced in the schoolroom by the standard texts of military theory, leavened by the inspiring tales of chivalric heroes from myth-history. It was a culture that Richard had inhaled since his youth: devoted to his training, he pored over manuals and romances alike. Now, his servants armed him in earnest for the first time. They moved around him, building up layers of padding and armour; tying his flexible steel sabatons over his shoes and, moving upwards, fitting the polished plate sections like a glove round his body; then, finally, attaching his visored helmet and buckling his dagger and short sword at his waist.17 All commitment, Richard was ready. He had long wanted this: tant le desierée.
Edward continued to be impressed by his youngest brother, whose hunger belied his stiff, slight frame, and who pushed uncomplainingly through the dull back pain that had started to bother him. While the king kept Clarence close to him, just in case, he handed Richard command of his vanguard.
Six miles out of London, at Hornsey Park, the clashes began, Edward’s ‘scourers’ attacking a pack of Warwick’s scouts. As they fought against the setting sun, Warwick’s men were chased up the escarpment that rose from the Middlesex plain, into the town of Barnet. In the half-dark Edward’s men returned, breathless. Galloping through Barnet, they had run straight into Warwick’s main army north of the town, half-concealed behind a great hedge. As night fell Edward had to decide, quickly, whether to stick or twist. Typically, he gambled. Not wanting to get trapped in the town, and aware of Warwick’s powerful ordnance, he ordered his men to advance.
By now it was ‘right dark’, a thick layer of cloud obscuring any moon- or starlight. Creeping forward, muffling the clink of armour and horse harness as best they could, Edward’s men started to deploy. With a hazy sense of the enemy’s position in front of them, they drew up in the customary three ‘battles’: the left, under Hastings’ command; Richard’s forces on the right; and Edward and Clarence in the centre. Then, with no fires lit that might give away their position, they ‘kept them still’.
Soon Warwick’s guns opened up, firing into the dark. Deafened, the Yorkists realized that they had pitched camp practically on top of the enemy lines and – unknown to them – ‘somewhat asidehand’, the armies overlapping at either end. These errors saved them. Assuming Edward’s forces to be further away and squarely in front, Warwick’s artillery miscalibrated, firing over the Yorkists’ heads. As Henry V had once done on the night before Agincourt, when his half-starved, disease-ridden troops had faced a powerful French army several times their size, Edward now commanded his men not to return fire: they should hold their nerve and make ‘no noise’. Throughout the night, as Warwick’s guns blasted blindly away, Edward’s troops sat grimly silent, huddled in their armour, and waited for daybreak.
As the darkness began to lift between four and five in the morning, it gave way to an intense whiteness. Thick fog smothered the battlefield, reducing visibility to a few feet. Edward had already decided on surprise. With banners raised and trumpets rasping, his men advanced.
The fog lent the fighting a more desperate edge than usual. Hand-gunners and archers fired at the invisible enemy at point-blank range. Barely able to see in front of them, the combatants’ fear and disorientation were total: the fighting, as one participant put it, was ‘the more cruel and mortal’. Intensifying the chaos was the armies’ skewed alignment. On the Yorkist left, where Hastings’ men faced the earl of Oxford’s much bigger force, the imbalance was driven home. Oxford’s advancing troops swung round and piled into Hastings’ exposed lines, which, after a fierce fight, buckled and broke. Their blood up, Oxford’s men chased Hastings’ fleeing troops back down the road towards London.
If the fog had helped Oxford, it had also concealed the destruction from the rest of Edward’s army. There was no wash of panic spreading through the Yorkist ranks. In the centre Edward’s troops, oblivious to the fate of Hastings’ men, fought viciously. At their heart, massive in his plate armour, was Edward himself. Surrounded by his disciplined household men, forming a tight plate-armoured phalanx round their war-leader, he fought in a crazed fury, beating a bloody path towards Warwick’s standards. Anything that stood in his way was battered down: ‘nothing might stand in the sight of him’.
Then, two things happened. On the Yorkist right flank, Richard faced the equal but opposite situation encountered by Oxford’s men. As his forces moved forward, all aggression, they curled round the Lancastrian left flank, squeezing and compressing the enemy lines into the path of Edward’s inexorable advance. On Edward’s now-vulnerable left, meanwhile, Oxford had failed to keep any discipline: his troops, pursuing Hastings’ men, ‘rifling’ the nearby town and the bodies of the dead, were effectively out of action. According to one account, they were worse than useless. When Oxford’s men belatedly regrouped and made it back to the battlefield, Warwick’s troops mistook their badges for Edward’s and attacked them: they turned and fled. With Oxford’s forces scattered, there was nothing to alleviate the crushing pressure of Edward’s advance.
Warwick, unusually for him, was in the thick of the fighting. Generally, he liked to marshal his troops on horseback, piling into the fighting if the momentum was with him, or escaping if things looked bad. While this was fairly common practice among noblemen, it nevertheless carried with it the whiff of faint-heartedness that had followed Warwick around over the years. This was probably why, as one story had it, his brother John Neville had insisted that Warwick dismount, send his horses away, and lead from the front, on foot. To the Lancastrians, however, the most reassuring presence was the resolute figure of John Neville himself. When, standing in Edward’s path, he was killed, his banner listing drunkenly then, suddenly, swept away, the Lancastrian ranks started to disintegrate.
Seeing his brother dead, Warwick grabbed a horse and, spurring away from trouble, rode straight into a nearby wood. There, he was run down by some of Edward’s troops and brutally killed; his body, according to one account, was ‘despoiled naked’. One story had it that Edward saw what was happening and ran towards his soldiers as they pulled Warwick off his horse, but arrived too late: to his ‘great regret’, he found Warwick dead. It seemed an unlikely tale. Edward was not in a sparing mood.
The death of Edward’s one-time mentor, the powerful nobleman who had made one king and remade another, the instinctive populist who had driven violent insurgencies against both monarchs to achieve his ambitions, the pirate whose unpredictable savagery had made him a bogeyman in Flanders as a ‘drinker of blood’, was met in Burgundy with unrestrained joy. Warwick’s ignominious end was given an epic force. At the moment of his killing, recounted a Dutch chronicler, farmers working fields outside The Hague looked up and saw armies ‘fighting across the great arch of the sky’ and ‘heard a sound like the roar of battle’.18
In London early on Easter morning, as bands of Hastings’ shattered troops arrived, rumour spread that Warwick had won; sporadic fighting broke out in the streets. At around ten o’clock, the tide of hearsay began to turn. A horseman galloped through Bishopsgate bearing one of Edward’s gauntlets, a token of victory for Queen Elizabeth. Soon, the victorious Yorkist forces were streaming through the gates. That afternoon, Edward himself arrived to the clangorous ringing of London’s church bells, his army marching through the city’s streets ‘in great triumph’. Another onlooker, a Hanse merchant named Gerhard von Wesel, saw things differently. Those who had left London the day before with ‘good horses and sound bodies’ had returned almost unrecognizable, bloody and disfigured. Von Wesel was particularly appalled by the preponderance of ‘bandaged faces without noses’, the result of close-quarter hacking and stabbing in the fog of Barnet.
At St Paul’s, to the singing of the Easter hymn Salve festa dies, celebrating God’s victory over hell, Edward offered up his battle standards, ripped and shredded by gun- and arrowfire. He then had Henry VI paraded through London, to the Tower. In a spitefully effective touch, the Lancastrian king was dressed in the same blue gown that he had been wearing since his ineffectual display of regality the previous Thursday.
On Easter Monday, around seven in the morning, the bodies of Warwick and John Neville were brought to St Paul’s and ‘openly showed’ on the floor in two open coffins, naked except for cloth covering their genitals. There, for the following days, they lay: incontrovertibly dead. Such was the power of Warwick’s name, and of his ‘subtlety and malicious moving’, that rumours of his survival might in themselves have been enough to have caused ‘new murmurs, insurrections and rebellions’. So one of Edward’s officials put it, in language that testified to Warwick’s magnetic hold over the people; ‘right many were towards him’, he concluded. In the following days, thousands upon thousands filed past the coffins, gazing at the two corpses, making the sign of the cross.19
Over the past months it had slowly dawned on Edward that he had never really managed to gain the hearts of the people. The previous autumn, barely anybody had answered his call to fight against Warwick and Clarence’s armies: ‘so little people’, remarked one commentator, ‘that he was not able to make a field against them.’ On his march south in recent weeks, meanwhile, ‘some folks’ joined him, but – as one of Edward’s servants put it, the bewildered royal ego all too evident – ‘not so many as he supposed would have come’. Not for the first time, Edward’s view of his own irresistible appeal was dented by contact with reality.20 If Warwick had always sought to exploit the explosive potential of populism, Edward had come to mistrust the people and their destabilizing power, their instinctive attraction to the ‘idols of the multitude’. During his Burgundian exile, he had done some thinking. From now on, his kingship would not seek to bend itself to accommodate the popular will: rather, the people would obey him, dread him – by force, if necessary.
One poem that did the rounds in the days following the battle made exactly this point. Urging people to reconcile themselves to Edward’s rule, the anonymous versifier pointed to his ‘just title’ and his undefeated record on the battlefield, remarking that he had never read of a more famous knight ‘since the time of Arthur’s days’. Anybody who didn’t love Edward, he added, was ‘mad’. In the poem, belief mingled with pragmatism. ‘He that loved division’ – the versifier couldn’t bring himself to mention Warwick’s name – ‘is gone.’ The not-so-subtle subtext was that Edward was now the only game in town. People had better put their ‘opinion’, their subversive political views, aside and ‘say Credo’ ‘I believe’: to sign up unequivocally to Edward’s rule. It was a message hammered home by the menacing refrain: ‘Convertimini, you commons, and dread your king.’21
In London, Sir John Paston wrote furtively to his mother back in Norfolk. Both he and his younger brother had fought at Barnet on the wrong side, as part of the earl of Oxford’s ill-disciplined force. His brother had been shot in the arm, but had been treated and was ‘in no peril of death’. The medical care, though, had been expensive and Sir John was now out of cash. He was also scared. Through his friendship with the slippery George Neville, who had managed to pull strings even from his place of incarceration in the Tower, Paston had managed to obtain letters of protection, and was reasonably sure that he would escape execution. Nevertheless, Paston told his mother, he had been threatened and ‘troubled’ by Edward’s men. There was in the city an overwhelming sense of fear and uncertainty – ‘the world, I assure you, is right queasy’ – and nobody knew what would happen next. It was crucial, he told his mother, that she not show his letter to anyone: ‘it must be secret’.22
The next day, news reached London that Margaret of Anjou and her son had finally landed at the Dorset port of Weymouth. They had arrived on the evening of Easter Sunday, just hours after Edward’s victory at Barnet. Linking up with the duke of Somerset and John Courtenay, they were heading southwest, raising troops as they went.23
Edward wasted no time. Standing down his injured men, he mustered fresh troops throughout the south and the midlands, and circulated a wanted list of Lancastrians, including the Beaufort brothers and Margaret’s chief political adviser Sir John Fortescue. Engineers overhauled his artillery, of which – bolstered by the guns he had captured at Barnet – he now had ‘great plenty’, loading them onto custom-made carriages. Ammunition was stockpiled: gunpowder, sulphur and saltpetre stuffed into leather bags; barrels of crossbow bolts; and chests packed tightly with bows, bowstrings, sheaves of arrows. Then, on Friday 19 April, as his scouts searched for the newly landed Lancastrian forces, the king and his brothers moved west up the Thames to Windsor Castle, his army’s assembly point. As troops mustered in the castle grounds, Edward, Clarence and Richard celebrated the feast of St George and planned their next move.24
Leaving London was a risk. Attacks were expected from Kent, a hotbed of popular support for Warwick’s cause; the Calais garrison, also loyal to Warwick, could be expected to march alongside an insurgent army. But the Lancastrian forces, and the galvanizing presence of Margaret of Anjou and her heir, could – if left to their own devices – be expected to garner huge popular backing. They had to be stopped before they could do so. Before he left, Edward tasked a force of men under the command of Anthony Woodville and the king’s reliable uncle Henry Bourchier, earl of Essex, with protecting his family and co-ordinating the city’s defences. Meanwhile, Yorkist scouts had found the Lancastrian army. Or so they thought.
Margaret, Edward’s agents told him, had gone west to recruit men in Devon and Somerset. From there, the king and his advisers reckoned, she had two options: to march east, towards London, by either the inland or coastal routes, or to head into the Lancastrian-supporting northwest. Either way, Edward had to get to Margaret as soon as possible, before she could link up with other pro-Lancastrian forces. If Margaret advanced east, this meant cutting her off before she reached Kent, where Warwick’s supporters would follow her banners; if she went north, Edward had to stop her crossing the Severn into Wales, where Jasper Tudor was raising his Welshmen. Margaret was hardly going to make it easy for him to work it out.
In the following days, as Edward set out from Windsor up the Thames valley, conflicting reports came in. Spotting a pack of Lancastrian foreriders at the Dorset town of Shaftesbury, Edward’s agents tracked them some twenty miles east to Salisbury. It was a feint, to convince Edward that the Lancastrians were heading towards London; so too was another detachment of riders that appeared shortly after at Bruton, in Somerset. Margaret’s main army, however, had been detected. It was heading northeast, towards Wells, where it had stopped.
Still protecting the approach roads to London, Edward advanced slowly, barely ten miles a day. Then, on Monday 29 April, he changed pace. Moving fast and decisively, his army marched thirty miles from Abingdon to Cirencester, on the southern edge of the Cotswolds. Margaret’s forces had reportedly made a move further northeast, towards Bath, from where they would ‘come on straight’ towards the Yorkist army.25
Now, Edward was on the prowl. The following day, his forces in battle array, he skirted the Cotswold escarpment slowly, ‘seeking upon them’. At Malmesbury, he heard that the Lancastrians had diverted to the sympathetic city of Bristol, where they had resupplied and been given cash, troops and artillery, and were now advancing towards the strategic high ground of Sodbury Hill, an Iron Age fort on Edward’s line of march. At midday on 2 May Edward reached Sodbury Hill. Everything was quiet. Scouring the surrounding river valley, his scouts found nothing. Margaret had given him the slip.
Over the previous days, as Edward had tried to narrow the Lancastrians’ angles of advance, it had become clear which way they were trying to go. Feinting towards Sodbury, they had sidestepped the Yorkist army, swerving north again towards the Severn crossings, where the river became fordable, and Wales. Margaret was aiming to join up with Jasper Tudor. As the Yorkist scouts rode further and further afield trying to pick up the Lancastrian trail, Edward pitched camp on Sodbury Hill and waited.
It was still dark when, at 3 a.m., a group of riders returned to the king with a definite sighting. The Lancastrians were marching through the night, following the course of the narrowing Severn estuary, to Gloucester, the first practicable crossing point. Edward had to overtake them before they crossed. The race was on.
There was no chance of his army catching the Lancastrians before they reached Gloucester, and so Edward, after a hurried consultation with his council, sent messengers racing ahead. They carried orders for the city’s governor Sir Richard Beauchamp, an appointee of Edward’s, to defend Gloucester against Margaret; Edward would, they assured Beauchamp, be there soon. Edward was in luck. When, at around 10 a.m., Margaret’s forces, weary from their night-long march, reached Gloucester, the gates were barred against them. Beauchamp ignored both the angry citizens, ‘greatly disposed’ towards the Lancastrian cause, and the increasingly desperate Lancastrian threats of violence unless he opened the gates. As both Beauchamp and Margaret knew, every minute that the standoff lasted brought Edward’s pursuing army closer. Facing the prospect of being trapped against the city walls, Margaret decided to march on to the next crossing point at the small abbey town of Tewkesbury.
It was a hot, cloudless day and Margaret’s army took the most direct route, the Severn a glinting, enticing presence on their left. It was a route entirely unfit for an army: not a road, but a lane, through a ‘foul country’. In suffocating heat, weighed down by armour and weapons, the Lancastrian footmen, horses and pack animals stumbled along over ‘stony ways’, through thickets and woods, ‘without any good refreshing’.
Before dawn that morning, Edward had set off in pursuit. He took a different way, up into the open ‘champaign country’ of the Cotswolds. As the day wore on, with no shade, his men were exposed to the blistering sun. Short of supplies, they were unable to find food or drink, nothing even for their horses ‘save one little brook’, its waters churned into mud by the horses and carts of his baggage train ploughing through it. Nevertheless, the Yorkists had one big advantage: where Margaret’s troops struggled to make progress, they marched through open country. As Edward drove on his flagging men, ‘travailing’ them, his scouts kept ‘good espials’ on the Lancastrians, barely five or six miles away but in dramatically different terrain. Gradually the Yorkists began to gain ground. In late afternoon, after a forced march of thirty miles, they reached Cheltenham to the news that their enemies were at Tewkesbury, a few miles distant. There, they had stopped.
If the Yorkist troops were tired, the Lancastrians, having marched continuously for over thirty-six hours, were shattered and dehydrated; neither did they know exactly where Edward’s army was. The river crossing at Tewkesbury, about a mile south of the town at Lower Lode, was not straightforward. The Severn was tidal, its currents unpredictable, and impossible to ford at high water. Any attempt to do so would have left the Lancastrian foot-soldiers horribly exposed to Yorkist attack, as well as the risk of being drowned.
When Edward had received ‘certain knowledge’ that Margaret’s commanders had decided to dig in at Tewkesbury, he allowed his troops a brief pause, distributing what little food and drink remained, before continuing onwards. That night, the Yorkists camped some three miles outside the town.
Daybreak on Saturday 4 May saw Edward up and arming in his tent. Then, he inspected his men as they were formed up into their three divisions of around fifteen hundred troops each, armoured footmen interspersed with archers. As he did so, he and his commanders considered the task before them.
Edward’s troops were marginally outnumbered. He knew, too, that the Lancastrians, entrenched south of Tewkesbury Abbey in a ‘marvellous strong’ position, would be difficult to dislodge. Somerset and his fellow commanders had chosen their position well. In front of them, an entanglement of ‘evil lanes, deep dykes’ and ‘many hedges, trees and bushes’ made an advance ‘right hard’, while screening their own deployments from the Yorkists on their slightly higher ground. Edward and his commanders, though, had been well briefed by their scouts.
With Somerset’s forces drawn up on the Lancastrian right, Edward switched his own formation. His vanguard, commanded by his brother Richard – so successful at Barnet – was deployed not on the customary right wing but, facing Somerset, on the left. Hastings, meanwhile, was told to range right, opposing John Courtenay, earl of Devon. Confronting Edward in the centre was the Lancastrian heir Prince Edward who, eager for his first taste of battle, was surrounded by experienced men, among them the Warwick loyalist Lord Wenlock. As his own men manoeuvred into position, Edward noticed how beyond the Yorkist left wing, the rough terrain gave way to clear parkland, rising in a gentle incline towards a wood: precisely the kind of place that might conceal an ambush. He ordered two hundred handpicked spearmen to head for the wood and deal with any enemy forces they found. If there was nobody there, this mobile unit could operate as it saw fit.26 Then, instead of ordering his men to advance against the well-dug-in Lancastrians, Edward wheeled out his artillery, which, incorporating the guns captured at Barnet, was now massively superior to that of his opponents. He would blast them out.
Edward concentrated his fire on Somerset’s vanguard. In between punishing rounds of cannonfire, Yorkist archers advanced and loosed volleys of arrows. Somerset had to move. Skilfully, he manoeuvred his men along the skein of paths and hedges, skirting Richard’s forces, before erupting into the open parkland that sloped down towards the exposed flank of Edward’s own division, positioned behind that of his brother. Charging down the hill, over a ditch and through a hedge, the Lancastrians piled into Edward’s men. It was, nodded one Yorkist commentator respectfully, a ‘knightly and manly’ manoeuvre. For Somerset and Lancaster, though, it proved a disaster.
From the outset, Edward had been alive to the possibility of a surprise attack. His well-drilled troops absorbed the initial impact of Somerset’s onslaught. Whether because of the speed at which Somerset moved, or a breakdown in communication, or for some other unaccountable reason – pinned down by Yorkist gunfire, perhaps – the rest of the Lancastrian army failed to advance in support. Isolated on the Yorkist left, Somerset’s men now faced not just Edward’s forces but those of his brother Richard, whose vanguard turned in support. As at Barnet, the two brothers together counter-attacked ‘with great violence’, pushing Somerset’s men back up the hill and into a trap. Edward’s flying column of spearmen were concealed in the nearby wood. Seeing their chance – so perfect a conjunction of ‘time and space’, noted one Yorkist, that it might have been planned – they pounced.
Suddenly, Somerset’s men were running for their lives. Edward’s troops, though, showed iron discipline. Ignoring the easy target, they turned and, linking up with Hastings’ troops on the right wing, headed straight for the Lancastrian centre, which, overwhelmed and demoralized, collapsed.
Carnage followed. Many were killed as they fled across the exposed open country or were cornered in the lanes and hedges as they made for the town and the sanctuary of the nearby abbey. Great numbers of men, drawn towards the river that they had tried so desperately to cross, were caught in a mill-race in the nearby water meadows, which turned into a death-trap. Those who didn’t drown were slaughtered.
The Lancastrian cause was all but destroyed at Tewkesbury. Among the dead were John Courtenay, John, Lord Wenlock and, most significant of all, the sixteen-year-old Lancastrian heir, Prince Edward, caught fleeing towards the town by Clarence’s forces. At the moment of his killing, according to one account, his precocious belligerence deserted him as he begged Clarence for mercy. Clarence himself was at pains to stress that the young prince had died ‘in plain battle’.27 Whatever the case, to the Yorkists Edward of Lancaster was more use dead than alive.
As his troops looted and pillaged their way through Tewkesbury, Edward and his household men made their way to the abbey, where a ‘great number’ of Lancastrians had sought sanctuary. Moving through the abbey precincts in a haze of bloodlust, the heavily armed Yorkist troops murdered cowering Lancastrians where they found them; others, including the duke of Somerset and other ‘notable persons’, were dragged out of sanctuary. While the official Yorkist account took refuge in a technicality – the abbey had never been handed the status of sanctuary, went the argument, so the king could do what he liked – other commentators were less coy. So ‘polluted’ was the abbey, observed one, that the monks refused to hold services there until it was re-consecrated a month later by the bishop of Worcester. Neither was this a one-off. Edward’s troops systematically went round nearby parish churches and killed whoever they could find. There was nothing to suggest that the king had made any effort to stop them.28
Two days later, Somerset and the other Lancastrian leaders were charged with treason by Richard, reappointed constable of England for the occasion. The trial didn’t take long. Not only had the defendants borne arms against Edward, they were for the most part recidivists, having accepted pardons from him before rebelling again. They were ‘judged to death’, then led to a scaffold in the middle of Tewkesbury and beheaded – though, as the Yorkist account stressed, they were given honourable deaths, ‘without any other dismembering’, or ‘setting up’ of heads and body parts. Along with Edward of Lancaster, they were buried in the abbey, which inadvertently became a Lancastrian shrine.29
In the days after the battle, messengers rode furiously across the country to the Channel ports and into Flanders with news of Edward’s crushing victories. They carried with them eyewitness accounts of the campaign, written in real time by members of Edward’s own household and secretariat, already helpfully translated into French for immediate consumption and circulation at an ecstatic Burgundian court. One account told how, rifling through the luggage of the dead Lancastrian prince, Yorkist soldiers had come across a text of the secret treaty made between the Lancastrians and Louis XI the previous autumn, specifying how the Burgundian state was to be dismembered and divided between the victors. Copying out the treaty, one Burgundian scribe was struck by Lancastrian accusations that Edward IV planned to exterminate the house of Lancaster – something which, he scribbled delightedly on his copy, ‘was accomplished only a little later’. So many celebratory bonfires had been lit in Flanders, noted a Milanese ambassador sardonically, that ‘one would imagine the whole country to be on fire’. In France, Louis XI was rather less sanguine. He was, reported one ambassador, very upset.30
As Edward took stock, updates came in on the Kentish insurgency and, from the north, fresh reports of ‘commotions’, of ‘assemblies of people’ arming themselves in the name of Henry VI and Lancaster. While Edward felt that London, its defences marshalled by Anthony Woodville, could be relied upon to stand firm, the northern insurrection bothered him. Raising fresh troops as he went, Edward headed towards the midlands and the city of Coventry. On the way, news came that Margaret of Anjou, after almost exactly a decade manoeuvring and masterminding Lancastrian resistance to Yorkist rule, had been detained. With her were several of her close advisers, including Sir John Fortescue. Among her ladies was Warwick’s younger daughter Anne, doubtless in shock. In the past month’s bloodletting, she had lost her father, her uncle John Neville and her husband Edward of Lancaster. Approaching her fifteenth birthday, Anne was already a widow; her family, along with the house of Lancaster, broken.31
At Coventry Margaret, bereft of her only son, submitted to Edward: she was, so she assured him mechanically, ‘at his commandment’. She could hardly say otherwise. As news of the catastrophe at Tewkesbury percolated through the country, the northern rebellion evaporated, its cause newly uncertain. The one man who might have become a Lancastrian figurehead, Henry Percy, earl of Northumberland, distanced himself from the insurgents, announcing that he now stood ‘utterly’ with Edward and would put down any uprising to his ‘uttermost power’. He was as good as his word.32
It was just as well. The reports from London, where Queen Elizabeth and her children remained in the Tower, had turned increasingly urgent, ‘daily messages’ arriving from the Yorkist commanders there. Many thousands of insurgents were swarming out of Kent towards the city, both by land and in boats up the Thames. Unlike the northerners, they had found a new leader. Their self-styled captain and leader of ‘Henry VI’s people in Kent’ was Warwick’s cousin Thomas, ‘the Bastard’ of Fauconberg.
London’s mayor John Stockton had finally recovered from his fictitious illness when, on 8 May, a messenger arrived from Fauconberg, demanding passage through the city on his way to fight Edward. Stockton, the messenger added, was to deliver his reply to the insurgents’ new base at Blackheath, the expanse of common heathland seven miles southeast of London, which was indelibly associated with popular revolt. To Stockton, as to most of London, it looked like Jack Cade all over again. Fortified by a letter from Edward with news of Tewkesbury, the mayor’s response was robust. Enclosing a copy of Edward’s dispatch, he reminded Fauconberg of the king’s two devastating victories and that Warwick – ‘who you suppose to be alive’ – was dead: the earl’s corpse recently on display at St Paul’s was proof positive. Fauconberg should immediately disband his illegal mob.33 Fauconberg ignored him. By the 12th his insurgents had reached Southwark. Edward was still a hundred miles away.
The rebel army that confronted London’s defenders looked ominously familiar: an assortment of Kentish smallholders, labourers and tradesmen nursing much the same mixture of socio-economic grievances and desire for good government that had fuelled insurgents’ violence over the past two decades and more. North of the Thames, rebels in Essex were also on the move. Many were dairy farmers, not so bothered by who was on the throne but incensed by the low prices they received for their produce in London markets. They marched on the city wielding ‘great clubs’, pitchforks and staves. This worrying situation was compounded by the volatile atmosphere in the city, with many ordinary Londoners minded to join Fauconberg rather than resist him. Some harboured a residual loyalty to Warwick; others to Henry VI and Lancaster; still others – the urban poor, menial servants, apprentices, who would have been ‘right glad of a common robbery’ – relishing the opportunity for looting and the chance to ‘put their hands in rich men’s coffers’ that such chaos inevitably brought.34
That Sunday, Fauconberg’s forces surged through Southwark, torching the southern end of London Bridge. The city’s resistance was fierce; the Bastard, forced to retreat, changed his plans. The next day, he set out for Kingston Bridge, ten miles upstream, aiming to cross the river and launch a fresh attack on the city through Westminster and its western suburbs. Halfway there, he realized it was a bad idea. With a detachment of Anthony Woodville’s men rowing fast to Kingston in barges, and knowing that Edward was approaching, he marched his men back to the place where they had started. There, aware that his window of opportunity was closing, Fauconberg threw everything he had at London.
The attacks came, it seemed to one citizen, ‘on all sides’. From the south bank, a ‘great number’ of guns, hauled off the Bastard’s ships, bombarded the city’s river front. While the city defenders returned fire with concentrated accuracy, forcing the insurgents to abandon their positions and scramble for cover, the artillery exchange, as Fauconberg had intended, absorbed most of their available firepower. Picking their way through the ruined southern defences of London Bridge, the rebels set light to the bridge’s teetering houses, trying to burn it down.35 Meanwhile, Fauconberg’s boats ferried some three thousand Kentishmen across to Blackwall and Ratcliffe, east of the city on the river’s north bank. Linking up with the Essex rebels, they made co-ordinated attacks on four of the city gates. At Bishopsgate and Aldgate, amid a relentless barrage of handgun- and arrowfire, they torched the adjoining houses, trying to set the gates themselves alight. As Aldgate ignited, the insurgents managed to force their way in; retreating, the city militia released the portcullis, which slammed down, crushing and killing some attackers. With defences at breaking point, the Yorkist defenders’ cool thinking told.
In the Tower, Anthony Woodville picked a force of four hundred troops, chosen from the garrison guarding the queen and her children. Emerging through a postern gate – a weak, tumbledown passage where City Wall met the Tower, unknown to the attackers – they crept round the city’s walls to Aldgate, where they piled into the insurgents. Sandwiched between Woodville’s men and the counter-attacking militias, the rebels fled. They streamed down Mile End Road, through Stratford, into Essex, or south to the river, through Stepney and Poplar, desperately trying to reach their moored boats and the safety of the river’s south bank. Many were killed in the shallows or drowned.
His troops routed, Fauconberg pulled the remnants of his army back to Blackheath. In the next days, as an advance contingent of fifteen hundred royal troops reached London, he slipped away. Abandoned, the rebels dispersed: relieved Londoners woke up the next morning to find them ‘vanished away’.36 A few days later, on 21 May, Edward, Clarence, Richard and the Yorkist army were welcomed into the city by a euphoric twenty-thousand-strong crowd.
At the heart of this new Yorkist unity, noted one poet, was the bond between the king and his brothers. This fraternal love, he continued, was the best possible evidence that the rightful order of things had been restored. Edward, Clarence and Richard had been split apart by a ‘subtle mean’, but nature had thankfully compelled them to reunite, forging a relationship that was stronger than ever: ‘the knot’, he concluded triumphantly, ‘was knit again’.
Of the three brothers, he singled out one for particular praise. The eighteen-year-old Richard, he felt, had a special quality. Still ‘young of age’ – within the phrase was a sense of astonishment that such a boyish frame was capable of such extreme violence – he had fought with a reckless bravery worthy of the great Trojan warrior Hector. It was a commonplace comparison, but a telling one. As the poet put it, ‘I suppose he’s the same as clerks of read’. Richard had become the kind of knight whose deeds, like those of Hector, literate people now read about in books: fitting praise indeed for a boy who yearned to emulate his chivalric heroes. ‘Fortune hath him chosen’, the poet reflected with a hint of wistful envy, ‘and forth with him will go.’37
Though the poet had reached instinctively for the example of Hector, it didn’t do to look too closely at the story. Like most heroes in the Greek myths, Hector dies a tragic death. In his last speech he rages against the gods for luring him to his destruction at the hands of Achilles, begging them not to let him die dishonourably but to go down in a blaze of glory, such that people would talk about him in time to come. Perhaps the poet knew all this, perhaps not. In any case, everyone used the example of Hector: it served nicely for Richard, ‘victorious in battle’.
It was Rogationtide and the city was, as customary, awash with junketing and processions, parishioners beating the bounds of their communities, driving away evil spirits and sickness with the parish cross, the ringing of handbells and Gospel readings, and beseeching God for his protection.38 On Ascension Eve, the last of the Rogation days, a procession emerged from the Tower and wove its way slowly through the city: a ‘great company’ of men from the Tower’s garrison who, remarked one observer, bore weapons in the way they might have done when leading a convicted man to a place of execution. The man they carried in their midst, in an open coffin, was however already dead.
There had been a brusquely businesslike quality to Henry VI’s killing; he was murdered, as one chronicler reported, on the day of Edward’s arrival in London, between 11 p.m. and midnight. Who had done it was an open question – there were a few coy insinuations about Richard’s presence at the Tower that evening – but, as everybody acknowledged, Edward had given the order. After all, for the best part of two months Henry had been in the close custody of two of Edward’s household esquires, Robert Ratcliffe and William Sayer, who oversaw a security team that at times expanded to as many as thirty-six men. While there might have been a hint of plausibility in the official Yorkist line that Henry had died out of ‘pure displeasure and melancholy’ at the news of his family’s destruction – possible given that the loss of Gascony had once plunged him into a fifteen-month spell of catatonia – nobody really believed it.39
Henry’s body was put on open display at St Paul’s so ‘that he might be known’, his coffin positioned against an ‘image’, a painting or statue, of the Virgin Mary. But there wasn’t the insistent urgency that had accompanied the showing of Warwick’s and John Neville’s corpses: few people filed past. Although the nature of Henry’s killing went unreported, his body continued to bleed from its wounds, first in St Paul’s and then again after it had been brought down through the steep lanes west of the cathedral to Blackfriars, where it spent the night.
The following morning, guarded by a detachment of Calais soldiers, Henry was loaded onto a barge and taken thirty miles upriver to the Benedictine abbey of Chertsey, where he was buried respectably, though not royally. Chertsey itself was chosen deliberately: the kind of place where the memory of a king could moulder gently away to nothingness in the depths of Surrey.40 That, at least, was what Edward hoped.
If Henry’s murder was cruel, it was also logical. Previously, with Henry’s son, a focus for Lancastrian loyalties, still alive, it would have been pointless to kill him. But following Edward of Lancaster’s death at Tewkesbury, there was no plausible heir to Lancaster left. As one Yorkist put it confidently, with the air of a job well done: ‘no one from that stock remained among the living who could now claim the crown’. Away in France, the Milanese ambassador Sforza de Bettini, driven to distraction in recent years by the impossibility of reporting on English affairs, received the news with a sigh of relief. Things had suddenly clarified, as there was only one king: Edward, the ‘dominator’ of England, who henceforth could rule ‘without the slightest obstacle’.41
As Henry’s corpse was being rowed to its resting place, in London the executions of captured rebels were just starting. Sending a force into Essex to mop up the rebels there, Edward and Richard rode into Kent. Fauconberg himself had gone to sea with ships he had stolen from Edward. Wanting the ships back, Edward offered him a pardon, which he accepted. On 26 May, he came ashore at Sandwich, where Richard received his fresh oath of loyalty on the king’s behalf. Fauconberg aside, Edward was in no mood to be gracious. At Canterbury, royal agents compiled a list of 186 wanted men, most of whom had had the good sense to make themselves scarce before the king arrived. When Edward reached the city the mayor, Nicholas Faunt, detained as an associate of Fauconberg, was summarily hanged, drawn and quartered.
There was something calculated about Edward’s vengeance. That summer, following his brief foray into Kent, royal commissioners prowled through the county, sniffing out treachery in what one commentator called a ‘season of punishment’. The process was novel enough to attract comment. Those who were wealthy enough were ‘hanged by the purse’: given the chance to buy pardons with exorbitant cash ‘gifts’, and to enter into bonds for their future good behaviour; the poor were simply ‘hanged by the necks’. Another chronicler painted a desperate picture of an indigent rebel scrabbling around to pay the seven shillings necessary to escape capital punishment: selling his clothes, borrowing money on exorbitant terms, then labouring to pay off the debt. From Kent, he said, Edward got ‘much good and little love’.42 For the first time in ten years, England now had only one king, Edward IV. If his rebellious subjects wished to be received into his grace, they could pay for it.