Richard III (6 page)

Chapter Four

THE WHEEL OF FORTUNE

The ‘re-adeption’ or ‘second reign’ of poor Henry VI now began. He was released from imprisonment in the Tower of London, where he had spent five years. Still ‘not so cleanly kept as should seem such a Prince’, he was moved to the adjoining palace to receive the homage of the Earl of Warwick, who, having unmade him a King, now made him a King again. Then, hastily smartened up and put into a blue velvet robe, he was paraded through the streets to St Paul’s to give thanks – the Earl carried his train in the cathedral, a scene not without irony. Eventually Henry was installed in his Palace of Westminster as though there had never been a Yorkist interregnum. There were a limited number of reprisals; the impaler Tiptoft was beheaded and several particularly hard-line Yorkist lords were imprisoned. Queen Elizabeth Woodville found sanctuary in Westminster Abbey, where after a few weeks she gave birth to her first son by her second marriage, the future Edward V.

The Yorkist cause appeared lost. Edward and Richard’s little flotilla, after escaping from pirates only with difficulty, managed to land on the coast of Holland near Alkmaar. Commynes, who actually spoke to men who had seen them, says, ‘There never was such a beggarly
company.’ Edward had no money and gave his ship’s master ‘a robe lined with fine marten’s fur, promising to reward him better in the future’. Luckily the Governor of Holland, Louis de Gruthuyse, was well disposed and paid for them to go to The Hague. Even so, Duke Charles (who by now had succeeded Philip the Good) was most unhappy at having these embarrassing refugees in his territory. He ‘would rather the King had been dead’.

But Warwick’s regime was extremely vulnerable. It had few rewards to offer its supporters, as it could not afford to antagonize too many people by a general redistribution of estates and offices, while Lancastrian exiles and moderate Yorkists found it hard to trust one another. Dependence on Louis XI was a serious handicap, since the English detested the idea of any alliance with France. Nevertheless, Louis forced Warwick to join him against Burgundy and to declare war on Duke Charles in February 1471. A nobleman first and foremost, and one of those who despised merchants, Warwick simply could not see that this meant the loss of England’s chief markets in the Low Countries. It was a mistake which Edward would never have made.

As so often the French King had been too clever by half. The Duke of Burgundy now had no option but to support the Yorkists – the new Anglo-French alliance was too dangerous for him to do anything else.
¹
Edward and his brother were summoned to the Burgundian court where Charles gave them a large sum of money ‘to assist his return’. It amounted to 50,000 Burgundian florins, roughly £8,000 in English gold of the period. He also hired three or four large ships for him, together with fourteen well-armed Hanseatic vessels. Presumably Richard now became extremely busy organizing the expedition. However, we know that he was at Lille in February 1471, with his sister Margaret. It is possible that here he met William Caxton, an English merchant and the future father of English printing, who had recently joined the Duchess’s household.

Edward hoped to sail on 2 March, but it was still winter and the North Sea was stormy, a terrifying prospect for the little boats of the period. By 11 March the weather abated and the King’s expedition sailed out from Flushing. He made land in Norfolk the following morning, but, after a scouting party had been attacked, sailed on to
Ravenspur in Yorkshire, a small and long since vanished port at the very mouth of the River Humber, where he disembarked on 14 March in the teeth of a storm. Richard’s ships went aground some four miles away. Luckily he and his 300 troops managed to rejoin his brother the next day. Their army was tiny, 2,000 men in all, though among them were Flemish hand-gunners. Besides Edward and Gloucester, the only prominent Yorkist commanders were Lords Hastings and Rivers.

They were in a desperate situation. If England disliked some of Warwick’s measures, it was tired of fighting and of changing Kings. Even Yorkist landowners were frightened that Edward’s army was too small. Hostility was evident everywhere. Undaunted, Edward remembered how Bolingbroke had behaved seventy years before when he came to overthrow Richard II and announced that he merely wanted his Duchy back. Edward proclaimed that he only sought his rightful inheritance, the Dukedom of York, and made his men wear Lancastrian badges. At York the city fathers, led by the Recorder Thomas Conyers and a citizen called Martin de la Mere, refused to admit him, but he managed to enter with a dozen or so companions, all sporting the ostrich plumes of the Lancastrian Prince of Wales, and strolled ostentatiously about the streets. Next day the rest of his little army was let in. They found it harder to leave than to enter – the Recorder and de la Mere tried to force Edward to take an oath in the Minster that he had not come to claim the throne. But the zealous burgesses were kept in talk until the expedition had got outside the walls.

Edward and Gloucester then began their progress south. Yorkists rallied to them in increasingly large numbers. By a brilliantly calculated series of marches and counter-marches they eluded Warwick’s troops and a fortnight after his landing Edward felt sufficiently confident to proclaim himself King again. On 4 April Clarence, having deserted his father-in-law with 4,000 men, was reunited to his brothers at Banbury in an emotional meeting.

Having lured the Lancastrians out of London, Edward was able to enter the capital triumphantly on 11 April, Maundy Thursday. As Commynes points out, ‘There were more than 2,000 of his supporters there, hidden in the sanctuaries, including three or four hundred knights and esquires who were very important to him’, while his
enormous debts ‘made his merchant creditors support him’ and ‘several noblewomen and wives of rich burgesses with whom he had been closely and secretly acquainted won their husbands and kinsmen over to his cause’. He was reunited not only to his wife but to his new son and heir. Commynes comments grimly, ‘Had they shut the gates against him his fate would have been sealed, because the Earl of Warwick was only a day’s march behind him.’ Henry VI was taken back to the Tower.

Yorkists from all over England now hastened to London. King Edward found himself with an adequate army and an excellent artillery train, ready to fight Warwick, news of whose advance arrived on Holy Saturday – it was learnt that he was marching on London down the road from St Albans and would come through Barnet. The King sent his advance guard to intercept them under Richard. Scouts found the Lancastrians just outside Barnet, but it was dark before Edward came up. He was only too willing to give battle to the Earl, before Margaret arrived from France with reinforcements.

Warwick’s army bivouacked north of Barnet village, in the positions they would fight the following day. The Earl himself commanded the reserve and an unusually large number of cannon, while his brother, the Marquess Montagu, had the centre and straddled the road. The left was entrusted to the Earl of Oxford behind hedges to the west, and the right to the Duke of Exeter on a slope eastward, protected to some extent by a marshy bottom below as well as by a thick hedge. Edward’s troops encamped much nearer the enemy than either side realized, due not only to the pitch dark but to an unnaturally thick fog – which locals believed to have been conjured up by the ghost of a wizard, Friar Bungay. Throughout the night Warwick’s guns fired ceaselessly, but because of the darkness ‘it so fortuned that they always overshot the King’s host and hurted them nothing’.

Commynes reports that everyone, commanders included, dismounted and fought on foot in the ensuing battle. The archers and hand-gunmen were unarmoured, which enabled them to get out of the way more quickly. The ‘hand-to-hand’ infantry were the billmen, who used an English version of the half-pike, the ‘brown bill’, whose head still trims country lanes even today; they were protected by light
‘sallets’, helmets rather like steel sou’westers, and ‘jacks’ – metal-studded leather coats down to the knees and several layers thick. The gentry generally wore full armour, which, contrary to modern belief, was surprisingly light; huge elbow pieces, to catch and snap an enemy’s weapon were common, together with sallets and chin guards. It had been developed to such a degree that no sword could penetrate it, so the favourite tool of men of rank when dismounted was the two-handed poleaxe, with a five-foot metal-plated handle and a blade designed to crush and rip open armour like a modern tin opener – Richard is known to have carried an axe at Barnet, probably one of this sort. (On horseback a shorter weapon was preferred.) Despite bows, hand-guns and cannon, both sides knew that once they got to grips the outcome would be decided by a dreadful slogging match in the mud, everyone hacking, hammering, stabbing, till it was over – one way or the other.

Commynes comments sardonically that Warwick was normally an excessively cautious warrior who invariably remounted his horse after his men had engaged the enemy so that he could make a quick escape if things turned out badly. There was never any mercy for defeated leaders in the Wars of the Roses. However, on this occasion his pugnacious brother, the Marquess Montagu, persuaded him to remain on foot – no doubt to boost his troops’ morale.
²
The nervous Earl knew that he outnumbered Edward’s army of 10,000 by at least half as much again.

The Yorkists began to move at about four o’clock on Easter Sunday morning, after a miserably dank night spent on the wet ground. Richard is said, on questionable authority, to have commanded – in name at least – their right wing which faced Exeter, Lord Hastings their left opposite Oxford and King Edward the centre.
³
Because of the murk they were wrongly aligned, and outflanking was to play a considerable part. In the dark, trudging clumsily through the marshy ground, Richard’s men found themselves far to the right of Exeter’s hedge and once they were up the slope were able to charge into his flank – soon it was a desperate mêlée and two of the young Duke’s squires were cut down.
⁴
(According to a Hanseatic merchant, writing on 17 April, Richard was slightly wounded.)
⁵
On the other wing the Earl of Oxford similarly outflanked the Yorkist left and Hastings’s
men broke and ran, hotly pursued by the Lancastrians. In the centre, however, there was a sustained and murderous conflict, each side battering grimly away at the other and refusing to give ground. In consequence, the entire battle pivoted until the Lancastrians faced east and the Yorkists west, instead of north and south. Warwick used his reserve to strengthen Exeter, who then managed to stiffen the Lancastrian left wing and hold off Gloucester’s onslaught. Edward, who ‘fought as much or more than anyone on either side’, according to Commynes, was in the thick of the combat in the centre and because of the dense fog could not see what was happening. Meanwhile, Hastings’s panic-stricken survivors were fleeing down the road towards London, shouting that ‘the King was distressed and his field lost’.

Now was the time for Oxford, who had re-formed his troops, to attack Edward from behind and win certain victory. His men marched purposefully up the road in their livery of a star with streamers. They did not realize that the line of battle had swung round and mistook Montagu’s centre for the King’s troops. In the fog and dim watery light of early morning Montagu’s men confused the star with streamers for the Yorkist sun in splendour and shot a lethal arrow volley at their comrades. Oxford and his soldiers at once thought that the battle had been lost and ran for their lives, shouting, ‘Treason!’

The confusion infected Montagu’s centre, which collapsed. The Lancastrian right followed suit. The Marquess was killed. Warwick mounted his horse and rode off, but the ‘Proud setter-up and puller-down of Kings’ was caught and slain in Wrotham Park as he was trying to reach the safety of Barnet Wood. Edward is said to have given orders to save his life, yet it seems unlikely; Commynes states that both men of noble birth and commoners were killed because the King did not give his usual order to ‘spare the commons and slay the gentles’ since he was furious with ordinary Englishmen for supporting the Earl. Not a man to be blinded by sentiment, he had the corpses of Warwick and Montagu displayed outside St Paul’s for several days. Exeter was so badly wounded that the Yorkists thought he was dead and, stripping the unconscious Duke, left him naked on the battlefield – later he somehow reached the sanctuary at Westminster. Only Oxford got away, to fight another day.

Edward IV had shown Gloucester how to outmarch, outmanoeuvre and outfight the most formidable-seeming opponent. Warwick was above all defeated by the sheer speed of the King’s tactics. We cannot even guess how Richard felt about the bloody end of the close kinsman with whom he had spent his early teens.

The Yorkists had undoubtedly won a great and glorious victory. But the Lancastrians were far from beaten. On the very same day that Barnet was fought, Queen Margaret and her son landed in Dorset at Weymouth. Adverse winds had delayed her in Normandy for the past three weeks – if it had not been for the weather, she would have joined Warwick in time to make him invincible. Horrified by the news of his defeat and death, she almost sailed back to France. However, the Duke of Somerset persuaded her that the Yorkists had lost many men and that most of England was still Lancastrian.

Somerset’s assessment seemed justified as she rode to Exeter and then, by way of Taunton and Wells, to Bath; large numbers of West Country landowners, from Cornwall to Wiltshire and led by the Earl of Devon, rallied to her banner. It was known that the gentry of Wales, of Cheshire and of the northern Midlands were even more devotedly Lancastrian. If only she could reach the loyal heartland she would win.