THE KINGS IN THE NORTH
During the Age of Heroes the Boltons used to flay the Starks and wear their skins as cloaks.
—JAIME LANNISTER
The Percy-Neville feud burned slowly at first. As late as 1453 the two families were still working together against the Scots and dealing with administration in the north. But a changing balance of power is always dangerous, in families as with countries, and outside of the county of Northumberland the Nevilles had now gained the upper hand. The expansion of the Salisbury branch of the Neville family had also provoked increasing opposition from the other northern houses, among them the Clifford and Dacre families in Cumberland; Lord Dacre was also married to one of the daughters of Ralph Neville’s first marriage who were embittered by their loss of their rightful inheritance.
The Percys had traditionally held prestigious positions, such as the Warden of the East, which have their corresponding equivalents in Westeros, where Ned Stark is Warden of the North, a role that entails protecting the realm from the Wildlings; Eastwatch in Westeros also corresponds to the East March in England.1 Yet the Nevilles had since acquired the better paid position of Warden of the West, defending the Cumberland stretch of the border, much to their rivals’ anger.
In Martin’s world, the various houses trace their descent back to different groups of people who arrived in Westeros; most were originally Andals, although the Targareans and Baratheons were once Valyrian, and the Starks hail from the First Men (although presumably most are a mixture). In reality, all of the noble families in England were of Norman descent through the male line, since the Normans had effectively decapitated English society, killing thousands at Hastings and disinheriting the others, so that there were just two significant native landowners by the time of the Conqueror’s death. The one exception were the Nevilles, who could trace their lineage back to the old kingdom of the North.
Ralph Neville came from a long line of de Nevilles, mostly called Robert or Geoffrey, but Ralph’s paternal great-great-great-great-great-grandfather Sir Robert Fitz Meldred Raby had adopted the name after marrying an Isabella de Neville. Fitz Meldred was of Anglo-Saxon origin, his father’s father being the far less French-sounding Dolfin, lord of Fitzuchred. Although born after the conquest, three of Dolfin’s grandparents were Saxons, unusual for someone of such high status after 1066; his paternal grandfather was Gospatric, Earl of Northumbria, and his grandmother Etheldreda, granddaughter of Edmund II, the last fully Saxon king of England. And way, way back into the mists of time, Gospatric’s paternal ancestor was King Osberht of Northumbria, killed in battle in 867 fighting the Vikings. This marked the end of the old kingdom of the North, and when Northumbria was conquered from the Vikings two generations later it would be the “South Angles” in charge, the former kings reduced to earls.
Fitz Meldred, through his mother, was also descended from Uchtred the Bold, Earl of Northumbria, whose family seat was Bamburgh, the northern kingdom’s capital and the site of a fortress and castle ever since. He was killed in 1016 in the war against the Norsemen.* Like the Starks, the Nevilles were descended from the old kings of the North, and like them could imagine their forefathers sitting on the same land under the same stars many centuries before. A Neville could look upon the land in Durham and Yorkshire and know the line of his forefathers went back to an age of kings, and as DNA analysis of the British population confirms that the Saxons took natives wives, so his family would go all the way to the first men of the island.
After Ralph Neville’s death in 1425, his sons fell out over the inheritance of his estates, and from 1430 to 1443, increasing hostility between the children of his first and second marriages. The eldest from the former, John, had died prematurely and the inheritance taken up by his son Ralph, who became second Earl of Westmorland. He and his brothers and cousins were bitterly opposed to their half-Beaufort cousins, their anger growing even worse when Richard Neville, the Earl of Salisbury came into his wife’s inheritance, too, making him vastly wealthier than his half-nephews.
Salisbury and Alice Montagu had twelve children, the eldest of whom, another Richard, had been made immeasurably wealthy when, aged six, he was betrothed to another rich heiress, Anne Beauchamp, Countess of Warwick. Her father, the Earl of Warwick, was a fantastically rich and cultured man who had also burned Joan of Arc; Anne’s mother Isabella le Despenser was descended from Edward II’s infamous crony. At twenty-one, Warwick had already inherited lands larger in size than his father’s, though poorer, and luckily for him a lot of wealthy female relatives died in a short space of time, including his aunt Cecily in 1450 and his wife’s half-sister in 1448. But Warwick also had five younger brothers make it to adulthood, surplus males who added to the land- and status-hunger among the aristocracy.
The Percy clan were married into both branches of the Nevilles, with Henry Percy, the second Earl of Northumberland, wed to one of Salisbury’s sisters and his sister Elizabeth married to Westmorland. Despite this, Percy found himself drawn into the conflict.
Henry Percy had six sons, at least two of whom were uncontrollably violent and possibly unstable. His second son Thomas was the worst, a notorious thug who was “quarrelsome, violent and contemptuous of all authority” and with “all the worst characteristics of a Percy for which his grandfather Hotspur was still a byword.”2 In King’s Landing, Ned Stark is forced to listen to the pleas of the Riverlands folk after their homes and tenants are attacked by the monstrous Gregor Clegane, and in real life ordinary people often found themselves at the mercy of thugs with titles. In 1447, the twenty-five-year-old Thomas Percy and friends ended up in jail in Yorkshire after going on a rampage, but it was just the start of a litany of disorder. On another occasion Percy ordered his men to beat up the Sheriff of Cumberland because he was a Salisbury follower.
In 1449, Suffolk gave Thomas Percy the title of Baron Egremont partly in the hope that it would encourage him toward more civilized behavior, although it only had the opposite effect. Suffolk also wished to rebalance northern politics in favor of the Percys, but little could prevent the clan rivalry spiralling out of control.
Richard Percy, the earl’s third son, was also a hooligan; he and a gang had once broken into a church in nearby Craven and seized a local bailiff while a priest said Mass and would have killed him were it not for the holy man’s intervention. Another brother, William Percy, was made bishop of Carlisle in 1452, aged just twenty-four, but only used his position to help his siblings stir up trouble with the Nevilles.
Despite his bloodline, Egremont preferred to spend his time in the seedier taverns and inns of his native county, enjoying the company of the “artisans, tradesmen and the unemployed” whom he recruited as his own private gang.3 Over the winter of 1452-3 he moved onto York, which was enduring hard times and had become a breeding ground for various resentments. The city was in between Neville territory centered on Sheriff Hutton and Sowerby, with Percy land to the west and north in Topcliffe, and thus was a natural flashpoint.
So, when in January 1453 three deputy sheriffs arrested Oliver Stockdale, a Percy tenant in the city, 120 locals came out to stop the arrests by asserting they could not do that in Percy land where the king’s writ did not run. In Westminster, the Neville Earl of Salisbury informed the king of Egremont’s worsening behavior; Thomas Percy was summoned to fight in France instead, but refused to come south. Instead Warwick’s brother John Neville was sent to look for him, and a “cat and mouse game” followed, leaving a trail of vandalism and broken limbs across the region.4 Neville, the third of Salisbury’s sons, had from an early age experienced war and diplomacy, and grew to become an efficient and reliable commander, especially adept at flushing out rebels. Aged just eighteen, he was among a handful of men given the task of overseeing border defences, but he had little prospect of an inheritance while his brothers lived.
With escalating violence between the two men and their followers, the royal council in London ordered Neville to stop; three days later he threatened to hang tenants if they didn’t tell him where Egremont was and the king sent orders to both men ordering them to cease the violence. Egremont had now formed an alliance with the even more unpleasant Duke of Exeter, a sadist rather than a simple thug, and the two men planned for Exeter to claim the duchy of Lancaster and challenge York’s protectorate. In order to calm the waters, Richard of York went north in May 1453 where he had to retreat after learning of a plot to assassinate him.
In August, the Percy-Neville conflict broke out into open fighting, the spark being the inheritance of Wressle Castle in Yorkshire. Wressle had been in the hands of the Percys since the early fourteenth century and the wider area had once been their heartland before they moved further north. But after their failed rebellion against Henry IV, the estate had been confiscated and passed to the Duke of Bedford and had since been held by the crown and loaned out to favorites. The loss still hurt to a family in fear of decline.
On August 24, 1453, there came the marriage at Wressle of Salisbury’s second son Sir Thomas Neville and Maud Stanhope, which would result in the castle passing to the Nevilles; it ended up as a battleground. There are records of 710 Percy men turning up, among them a wide range of social classes, including Oliver Stockdale, who like all the Percy tenants repaid their loyalty when called upon. Although this “Battle of Heworth” was described as the first skirmish of the War of the Roses, no one died—but that would change soon.
Two weeks later, John Neville and his gang smashed up a Percy house at Catton in Yorkshire, breaking doors and windows and writing threatening messages on the wall. The following day Richard Percy and forty-one “drunken rioters,” twenty-nine of whom had been at the wedding battle, broke into the house of a vicar in Neville territory and stole all the wine, before beating up the local deputy sheriff and bailiffs. As often with civil conflicts, the eruption of out-and-out violence was often preceeded by lower level thuggery, a sign of growing disorder.
The two families slowly shifted sides in the wider dynastic dispute. The Percys had been bitter enemies of the House of Lancaster, but from 1453 the Nevilles began to align themselves with York, partly because of their marriage alliance but also Warwick’s increasing hostility to his cousin Somerset. The two men were in dispute over the inheritance of their wives, half-sisters, who owned large tracts of land in south Wales. Northumberland, instead, moved toward the house that had killed his father and grandfather.
Queen Margaret gave birth to a prince at Westminster on October 13, 1453, named Edward, and afterward a great council was summoned; at some point it was decided that York should be invited, and on October 24, a letter was sent signed in the king’s name to his “right trusty and well-beloved cousin” and the messenger was told to advise him to put aside his differences with Somerset. However, when the baby was presented to the king at Windsor, he showed no signs of recognition. Somerset stood as godfather, and there was muttering—like Cersei, Margaret was rumoured to have fathered a bastard behind her unsuspecting husband’s back, a boy who grew into a monster and whom powerful enemies wished to disinherit.
With the king in a catatonic state, in January 1454 Margaret issued “a bill of five articles” in which she demanded “to have the whole rule of this land,” to appoint officials and to have an income for her and Edward. Margaret, like the other women in her family, had experience ruling in the absence of men, but a powerful queen was always dangerous. MPs rejected her proposal.
The king could not be coaxed out of his slump, even when Archbishop of Canterbury Cardinal John Kemp died on March 22, 1454, after which twelve leading lords and bishops rode to Windsor to tell Henry. Three times Reginald Peacock, the scholalry Bishop of Chichester, tried to addresss him, but they could get no answer; two days later it was agreed that York should be appointed protector.
When Richard of York arrived in London, he persuaded Norfolk, now an ally, to launch an attack on Somerset at the council, once again accusing him of treason and demanding his imprisonment—a majority of lords this time agreed. John Mowbray, the third Duke of Norfolk, descended from the same Mowbray of Richard II’s time. His father, like York, had had his wardship sold to Ralph Neville, who married him off to his daughter Katherine, making the current duke yet another scion of the prodigious Earl of Westmorland. Mowbray had 150 properties across twenty-five counties, but it was mostly concentrated in East Anglia, and only there could he gather an affinity.
Mowbray was in fierce competition with local rivals in the flatlands by the North Sea, which saw increasing use of force in property disputes. Mowbray’s main competitor was Suffolk, but even after his downfall he found himself frustrated by rivals, mainly Viscount Beaumont—who was also his stepfather and in charge of one-third of Mowbray’s patrimony. Originally loyal to the crown, Norfolk grew closer to York as the conflict escalated, largely because Beaumont sided with the queen.
The larger families had to decide whose side they were on. Humphrey Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, had a huge affinity and estates in twenty-two counties in 1455, producing five thousand pounds in revenue, around the same as York. He had fought with Henry V and been knighted, and later he served with York, who was nine years his junior and had no military experience yet had been appointed Lieutenant of Normandy nonetheless. He had married yet another of Ralph Neville’s daughters and had so far remained neutral.
William FitzAlan, Earl of Arundel, was married to Salisbury’s eldest daughter but he was cautious; so too was John Vere, Earl of Oxford, who was allied with Norfolk against Suffolk and disliked Somerset but remained neutral for now. There was Thomas, Lord de Ros, who had the oldest continuous title of nobility in the whole country, based in Helmsley in Yorkshire; his mother had married Somerset and they were locked into an almost interminable conflict over inheritance, but he remained loyal to the crown.
The council was now full of Yorkists: Warwick, Salisbury, and Lincolnshire baron Ralph Cromwell, while Exeter, Somerset, Northumberland, and Clifford had been excluded. As protector, York made himself Captain of Calais, on top of Lieutenant of Ireland, and he also appointed Richard Neville as chancellor, but despite such partisanship his rule was just, and he had also brought some semblance of peace to the vendetta in the North. He had also imprisoned his own son-in-law Henry Holland, Duke of Exeter, in Pontefract Castle, for his involvement in a local feud, against his oath as a lord. Queen Margaret, Buckingham, and the Tudor brothers all received lands or offices, while York’s ally Warwick got nothing. His great enemy Somerset remained in the Tower, however.
York, in many ways an honest and honorable man, lacked the necessarily guile to rule the land; he failed to understand that many leading men were not like him and expected bribery and rewards. He seemed to possess an acute sense of what was right and just rather than expedient. In contrast, Somerset, who had wormed his way into the king’s inner circle, was better at manipulation; he was also a spymaster, and in January 1454, even while imprisoned in the Tower, he still employed friars and seamen to act as his spies and “enter the house of each lord in the land.”5
In May 1454, Salisbury and York ordered Northumberland as well as his brothers Thomas and Ralph to come to London to explain their actions. No Nevilles were asked, despite some of their depredations, and the Percys refused. Instead Egremont went to York where they held the mayor hostage; so, Richard of York went north and forced his submission.
York also succeeded in ending the violence between the Courtenays and Bonvilles, which had begun in October 1445. The feud had deteriorated to such an extent that one of the Courtenays, Sir Thomas, had arrived at the house of a Bonville affiliate, an MP called Nicholas Radford, and knocked him to the ground, after which one of his cronies cut the man’s throat. But with York’s firm hand the Realm saw some peace.
Then on Christmas Day, 1454, Henry left his catatonic state. Five days later he met his son, held his hand, and thanked God for this blessing; yet, he said, he could not remember the child ever being born, who must have been brought by the Holy Ghost. After eight years of a childless marriage this only further added fuel to rumor and speculation about the child’s real father. York, who stood next in line, was certain the boy was really Somerset’s bastard, or at least he had instructed his liegemen to say so.
The mad king released Somerset, and, on February 9, York was formally stripped of his role as protector and of his Calais position, which was given to Somerset. Salisbury was forced to abdicate the chancellorship and his son Warwick made to release Henry Holland—and so the Yorks and the Nevilles went north to raise an army.
Somerset arranged for a great council to meet in Leicester in the midlands, in which York and his allies were invited. But Salisbury had already recruited an army of five thousand from his family seat in Middleham in Yorkshire. In mid-May the king’s men chose to meet instead at St Albans and ordered York, Salisbury, and Warwick to come with no more than five hundred men in total. They did not.
In Westeros, Jaime can raise thirty thousand men against Robb, and Tywin brings an equal number; Robb Stark can gather around twenty thousand. Standing armies are expensive, and only a few lords could raise anything like that many troops; outside Ware, a few miles from St Albans and just north of London, the king’s force heard news that York was nearby with three thousand men, half raised as he marched south from Yorkshire, while the king had only two thousand.
Despite attempts to compromise by replacing Somerset as Constable of England with the more neutral Buckingham, the two groups were camped outside St Albans where York issued more demands on May 21. Then at ten o’clock the following morning Warwick launched an assault on the town where the king and his entourage were based.
Fighting in built up areas gives advantage to defenders, something the English learned in France, but such was the speed and surprise of the attack that many Lancastrians had not had time to put their armor on, and the battle lasted barely half an hour. During that time several thousand men fought with longbows, swords, maces, axes, and pole-axes through side streets and even houses, bludgeoning each other or swinging axes. Many would have brandished giant broadswords with two hands, and the muscles of regular soldiers were incredibly well-developed before the advent of modern warfare. A pole-axe, up to six feet in length, would also be used and could go through armor and rip bones and flesh. After a short space of time the men would have been exhausted.
The Earl of Northumberland, Hotspur’s son, was struck down by Salisbury; Lord Clifford, Percy’s cousin, was also slain. Somerset had killed four men in close combat outside an inn before, looking up, he noticed the sign outside—the Castle—and recalled the prophecy he was once told. Momentarilly distracted, he was stabbed and then dragged away and hacked to death. His son Henry, just nineteen, was seriously wounded and not expected to make it.
While this fighting played out the Mad King Henry sat by the royal banner in the market place, and at one point an arrow landed in his neck, and he cried out in pain—but the rebels could not kill the king, too much of a taboo even when all the other rules were being broken, for as it is said in the Old Testament: “The Lord forbid that I should stretch forth mine hand against the Lord’s anointed.”6
With most of the leading Lancastrians cut down, the king’s men fled, leaving Henry sitting on the ground, dazed and wounded. The battle won, Warwick and York approached and called for a surgeon and afterwards the king was taken to the nearby abbey, where a Mass was said for the sixty men who had died that day. Among the fallen were the most powerful barons in the country, and their sons would do everything to get their revenge.
*Uchtred is also the name of the Northumbrian protagonist in Bernard Cornwell’s Last Kingdom series, who is supposed to come from the same family.