Red Rose, White Rose (41 page)

Before dinner on the day after our arrival, family members and guests gathered in the grand first floor chamber off the great hall. Talk centered on the summons Richard, Hal and Dick had each received to a meeting of the Great Council at Leicester in May.

‘I am not going,’ declared Dick, waving his letter of summons high. ‘To Leicester? In the Lancaster heartland? With no retinue? They jest! This is a one-way invitation to the Tower.’

‘Somerset is certainly pulling no punches,’ agreed his father in a slightly more moderate tone. ‘No doubt he wants pay-back for the months he spent there last year.’

‘It smacks of Duke Humphrey’s summons to the St Edmund’s Bury parliament,’ said Richard grimly. ‘He was ordered to attend the king and bring no retainers and look what happened to him.’

‘What did happen to him, my lord?’

It was Edward who spoke; he was on the cusp of his thirteenth birthday and about to become a squire, albeit only in the service of his governor Sir Richard Croft. Of course, being Edward, he was desperate to serve someone of more exalted rank, such as his cousin Dick, but Richard had told him he must wait.

‘Poor Gloucester was arrested and died soon afterwards,’ Richard explained. ‘He was fifty-seven and it was said that he had an apoplexy but few believe it was not murder. He took on a corrupt court party and came off worst. Edmund Beaufort was one of them – before he became Duke of Somerset and the equally corrupt Suffolk was the royal favourite at that time. Your cousin Dick is right. This summons is definitely a trap.’

Richard had still received none of the money owed to him by the crown and to add insult to injury Somerset, in the king’s name, had released Harry of Exeter from the Tower declaring him to be there due to the malice of ill-wishers. Richard saw this as a personal insult and bitterly resented seeing the red rose and the wheatear flying together again.

Meanwhile Dick of Warwick was on the warpath because Somerset had reinstated his claim to Glamorgan and besieged Cardiff castle. ‘I will need to send relief to South Wales before I can bring a force to your aid,’ he said. ‘What action do you have in mind, my lord of York?’

Richard flung one arm around Hal’s shoulder, which my brother bore patiently but awkwardly. They were not bosom friends however much Richard liked to pretend they were. ‘Your father suggests we should prevent this meeting of the Great Council happening at all and I am inclined to agree with him. If it does not happen we do not need to go and therefore we cannot be accused of treason for refusing.’

Warwick raised an eyebrow. ‘Hmm. That is a crafty plan, my lord father. How do you propose we bring it about?’

‘Will there be fighting, Uncle?’ Edward asked, making thrusts with an imaginary sword.

Hal smiled at his bloodthirsty young nephew and eased himself from under Richard’s arm. ‘Well, young March, I think we might aim at the barber treatment – trim Somerset’s beard a little but not draw any blood. We are not aiming for a fight.’

‘And I think your father will consider you too young take part, Lord Edward,’ remarked Sir Richard Croft, crushingly.

‘And his mother most certainly will,’ I declared firmly from my seat near the hearth where I sat with Elizabeth and Meg beside me. As they were eleven and almost ten respectively now, I thought it time they experienced the world of adults, however boring they claimed to find it.

I watched Edward’s temper flare but was glad to see him swallow his ire, make a graceful bow of compliance to his governor and retreat to stand behind his father. Edward was learning tact as well as tactics. Edmund on the other hand was always quiet on these occasions, watching and listening. One of the small triumphs Richard had achieved as Protector had been successfully to argue that his second son should be made Earl of Rutland, in recompense for the lands and titles he had lost when France had overrun Normandy. I hoped this would do much to reduce Edmund’s sense of inferiority.

Richard expanded on the proposed strategy. ‘If we are to stop the council from sitting we have to prevent the king from going to Leicester. When he takes the road north he always spends the first night at St Albans Abbey. We will block his progress there but we will not make an attack and King Henry will not order one because it is not in his nature. Therefore it will be a stand-off, giving an opportunity for negotiation. That is what we need – a chance to take our case directly to the king without having to deal with his weasely side-kick. But hear this, if I could make Somerset disappear in a puff of smoke I would, believe me.’

Later that evening, after the meal was concluded, the trestles were cleared and when wine had loosened tongues I passed close to where Dick of Warwick was discussing these tactics with one of his companion knights. I did not like what I heard.

‘York has tried that strategy before – bringing a large force to confront the king and relying on him to negotiate. It did not work last time and it will not do so now. Personally I vow that if Somerset is in the royal party when we confront them at St Albans I will not waste time in talking. There will be a fight and Somerset will not survive.’

St Albans Town, 22nd May 1455

Cuthbert

A
t dawn a thick mist formed over the fields where our troops were stationed behind the outer row of houses and gardens on the east side of St Albans. The town had no walls and the makeshift barricades erected against us did not look as if they would offer much resistance. Our three-thousand-strong force had been deployed in three divisions and because of my tactical skill with the longbow I had been seconded to the Earl of Warwick’s retinue to captain his crack cohort of archers. We were drawn up behind the foot-soldiers who were detailed to storm the barricades while we shot over their heads to break down the defenders on the other side with showers of arrows. I could not fault Dick of Warwick’s strategy or his instructions to his knights to inflict as little injury as possible on the common soldiers and concentrate on taking out the men of rank. He did not declare it publicly but all the captains knew that while York claimed only to want certain people to be stopped from abusing their positions of power beside the king, Warwick had only one aim in this confrontation – to come face to face, sword in hand, with the Duke of Somerset, the man who had robbed him of his wife’s legitimate inheritance, as he saw it.

Although it meant that the archers would be shooting blind, the shrouding mist would undoubtedly assist the infantry’s attack, hiding them from the defenders until the last minute and Warwick, fretfully pacing the ground between Richard’s forces and his own, was anxious to get started in order to take advantage of this. First, however, we had to wait for the inevitable last-minute diplomatic efforts to prevent bloodshed. Richard had insisted on sending his herald to assure the king of his loyalty and obedience to the crown but also of his intention one way or another to remove from the king’s presence the traitors by whom he was surrounded. When the herald returned with the royal reply that the only traitor the king could see around him was the Duke of York, Dick punched the air with delight, clapped his father and uncle on their armoured shoulders and declared, ‘Then we fight! God give us the day!’ and marched off to mount his horse.

As predicted, the barricades barely delayed our assault on the town. Once my archers had let loose their fusillades of arrows our infantry charged at the haphazard heaps of upturned carts and domestic furniture, hauling them aside and then, screaming defiance, battering and hacking their way through the defenders in the gardens beyond. Some of our more enterprising men had the idea of stopping to release pigs and chickens from their pens and coops which then ran amok and caused further havoc, before breaking through the houses to the street beyond, leaving a trail of destruction but few injured citizens, most of whom seemed to have retreated to their upper floors behind locked doors. I led the archers after the infantry. Bows slung and daggers in hand, we avoided entering the street and prowled along the row of back gardens seeking a suitable vantage point from which to bring our fire-power to bear on the real foe – the high-ranking barons and knights of the king’s party. The royal forces we had encountered so far were evidently recruited from the surrounding countryside and seemed timid and badly equipped, armed mostly with scythes and billhooks and protected with ancient padded gambesons, relics from the previous century. When they turned and ran we let them go. They were not our prey on that day.

Where the houses were intersected by a crossroads, we came to a building that was one story higher than the others. The extensive stables and outhouses behind it were deserted and the rest of us took cover while two of my sturdier sergeants put their shoulders to a rear door. After several heaves they succeeded in bursting through, allowing us all to pour into the chamber beyond, a large room supported by wooden pillars, which occupied most of the ground floor. It was deserted and almost devoid of furniture but the strong smell of ale and the presence of several large barrels at one end revealed its normal function as the taproom of an inn; the furniture must have found its way onto the barricades. There was a gallery of rooms above reached by a staircase at one corner and I led the way up, hoping to find the attic floor and a way out onto the roof. If there were people cowering in the first floor bedchambers we did not disturb them as we climbed further. From a landing window, I caught sight of the painted sign that swung from the front of the building. It told us that we were occupying a hostelry called The Castle Inn.

Within ten minutes I had thirty archers deployed on the roof which overlooked a key street leading up through the marketplace and into the main square of the town, an area milling with men-at-arms wearing red rose badges and fully armoured knights with shields bearing easily-recognized crests of the Lancastrian affinity. Over their heads I could just make out the top of the market cross and flying above it the unmistakable lions and lilies on the royal standard. Somewhere under that standard must be the king himself. I made a furtive sign of the cross. Never before had I taken up arms against England’s anointed king and I felt as if I was breaking one of God’s commandments. I glanced quickly at the men around me and wondered if the same thought had occurred to them but if they were aware that they were about to commit treason I could discern no sign of it.

By now the sun was well risen and had dispelled the mist; its beaming brilliance reflected off the polished armour of Warwick and his household knights who were massed on horseback at the far end of the street. At the entrance to the marketplace a Lancastrian mounted troop lined up and began a charge, starting at a slow trot and building up speed as they thundered between the closely shuttered houses and workshops. Their horses’ iron-shod feet churned up the hard-packed dirt of the thoroughfare, forming a choking cloud of dust and when they passed beneath us we could hear the riders spluttering and coughing inside their helmets. Wisely Warwick kept his arm raised, holding his troop steady at the street’s end where they could still breathe clean air, waiting for the enemy to come to them, maces, swords and shields raised against their dust-blinded attackers. Meanwhile my archers sent a shower of deadly missiles raining down on the Lancastrians, hardly able to miss their targets at such close quarters. Injured horses reared up and fell, throwing their riders and impeding those who came behind them who were forced to a halt directly beneath our deadly shower. Those with sense turned and galloped back up the street, their backs briefly making perfect targets for our armour-piercing arrows until Warwick’s mounted men moved up to pursue them and I gave the order to stop firing.

Several unseated Lancastrian knights gathered swiftly around one of their number and forced their way into the shelter of the inn through the street door beneath us. The prominent member of the group displayed a ducal coronet around the band of his helmet and a portcullis on his surcote. I beckoned one of the nearest archers over to me and whispered under the earflap of his leather coif. ‘Do not go out the way we came in but seek a way down through an upper window and over the outhouse roofs. Find the Earl of Warwick and tell him the Duke of Somerset is at the Castle Inn. Say I sent you. Go!’

The lad was a nimble youngster selected for his climbing skill and I watched him scramble easily over the ridge of the roof and disappear before turning to issue more orders to the rest of my men. ‘Those of you with the longest range find a position from which to fire into the main square. You will not be able to see your target but fire around the area of the market cross and you should cause some consternation at least. Stop if you see any of our badges entering the square.’

As these orders were obeyed, I made my way along the parapet and back through a gable door into the roof-space. The last man up had replaced the hatch that led down into the upper floors and I eased it back slowly, fearful of attracting attention but I need not have worried. Loud voices carried up from below and the gist of the conversation was not hard to decipher. The Duke of Somerset wanted another mount.

‘Fetch me Blanchard from the horse-lines!’ he shouted to one of his companions. ‘A horse is worse than useless in these narrow streets but that devil Warwick is mounted so I must be. And try and catch the bay! He was not badly wounded, just frightened. I cannot afford to lose a good horse. And hurry, man, hurry! I need to get back out there.’

I grinned to myself. Clearly Somerset was an angry man and angry men did not fight well. Warwick needed to get here quickly to seize that advantage. I crept back out onto the roof, hoping Somerset would draw all attention to himself so that his supporting knights would not think to wonder where the arrows that felled their precious horses had come from. If they did they would be up the stairs in moments and we would be cornered on the tiles. It would be a tricky platform to fight on.

Luckily it was not long before we heard a loud hammering from below and the squire calling out in a fearful tone. ‘Your grace’s horse is here but you must be quick. Warwick’s knights are not far away.’