The Last Plantagenets (46 page)

On Christmas Day, King Henry showed the first real signs of returning sanity. Two days later he sent substantial offerings to Canterbury and Westminster, a clear indication that the royal mind was awakening and beginning to function along normal lines. The queen waited for further confirmation and then on December 30 she took the infant Edward to Windsor. This time she did not stand on ceremony but, holding the prince in her arms, hurried to the cabinet of the king.

Henry was sitting up as usual, but this time there was a difference. There was a light in his eyes which turned quickly to recognition. The queen placed their son in his arms.

The king was still very weak and showing signs of having wakened
from a long dream. But he seemed to recognize the child without difficulty.

“What name has he been given?” he asked.

“Edward,” replied the queen.

The thin, grave face of the king responded with a smile. “Good,” he whispered. “That is good.”

Soon after, he was able to converse coherently and he told Margaret, to quote from the
Paston Letters
, that “he never knew him till this time, nor wist what was said to him, nor wist where he had been whilst sick till now.”

Further evidence of the clearing of his mind was provided during the day. He asked the names of his son’s godfathers and commented on the death of Cardinal Beaufort, “one of the wisest lords in this land,” and he was able to sing matins and join in evensong later in the day. Several days later Bishop Waynflete came to Windsor and spoke with the reviving monarch at some length, emerging from the chamber at the finish weeping for joy.

Henry was so much better, in fact, and Margaret so impatient, that he was taken soon thereafter to London. Here he was led before the lords in session to declare the dissolution of the House. Margaret wanted to be free of parliamentary interference in the course of action she had decided to follow. The face of fortune had been turned from the royal pair for a long time, but now it turned to them with a smile. The queen acted with characteristic decision in taking advantage of the change. Her innocent blue eyes emitted sparks of triumph and determination and she did not propose to wait for parliamentary sanction. It is highly unlikely that she disturbed the still inactive mind of the king for advice before she began to wield the broom of change with vigorous hand. Richard of York was dismissed from the protectorate and was even excluded from the council. Archbishop Bourchier, who had been holding the post of chancellor, was wafted through the door of his temporal office. Every Yorkist official, major or minor, was sent away.

The Duke of Somerset was released from the Tower and put in York’s place. Waynflete replaced Bourchier as chancellor. All Westminster was filled with Lancastrian supporters.

Richard was not disposed to accept these summary proceedings. He called his supporters together, particularly the members of the powerful Neville family, and it was decided to dispute the issue by force of arms. An army of 3000 men was assembled in the northern counties and along the borders of Wales, and a march on London was begun.

At Ware, a Hertfordshire town about twenty-five miles from London,
the advancing Yorkists paused and Richard sent a letter to the king, protesting his loyalty. They were so close to the capital that there would have been small opportunity for the slowly recovering monarch to do much about this avowal. But, as it developed, Somerset intercepted the letter. The same day the royal army, consisting of 2000 men, marched out to meet the rebel forces. They came together at St. Albans, where a sharp battle was fought on May 22.

A very large broom in the hands of a very small queen had precipitated the start of the Wars of the Roses.

The first battle of the long drawn-out civil war was a rather muddled affair which showed little evidence of strategic planning on either side. The Yorkists came down the Great North Road in considerable haste, for they realized that sentiment in London favored them. The royalists, appreciating this also, wanted to meet the rebel forces as far away from the city as possible. They struck out at a tangent for Watford, intending to follow Watling Street to Leicester. This left the road to London wide open. But when they reached Royston, the Yorkists learned what King Henry had done. They decided to offer battle and swung westward through Ware and Hatfield to St. Albans, arriving there a few hours after the army of the king.

St. Albans straggled along the southern and western end of a high ridge. St. Peter’s Street ran through the center of town, past Castle Inn and the abbey. Paralleling this on the east was the town ditch surmounted by a palisade, which the Lancastrians had already taken over when the Yorkists arrived. The Yorkist attack had to be launched, therefore, along the two main roads running into town from the east, Shropshire Lane and Sopwell Lane. When they came to the ditch they found the palisade swarming with the soldiers of the king. This brought them to a dead stop.

It happened, however, that the Lancastrian leaders had massed their troops behind the palisades opposite the two main roads and had left a long space between unoccupied. This mistake was responsible for the birth of a legend, the belief held thereafter and presented in many histories, that the young Earl of Warwick was a great general. He had the good fortune to be leading his column up between the two main roads and found no opposition in his path. He took advantage of this by sending his men in to cross the ditch and climb the undefended palisades. There were private gardens on the other side, through which the eager troops plunged, coming to a brick wall which they had to batter down
before reaching St. Peter’s Street. The young earl proudly led them out into the center of town, brandishing his sword and shouting, “A Warwick! A Warwick!”

There was no trace of the enemy in that part, so Warwick divided his forces and had them wheel right and left to catch the king’s troops in the rear.

This decided the issue. The Lancastrians had been outnumbered to begin with and the Yorkists had been recruited from men with long experience in the French wars, archers for the most part. The defending army was packed so closely into two pockets that they could not do anything. Under cover of a continuous flight of arrows, Warwick’s men took them in the flanks and proceeded to demolish them.

This battle demonstrated the absurd pass to which chivalry had reduced the art of war. Armor had become so cumbersome and heavy that the knights had to dismount and fight on foot. The result was a complete lack of mobility in tactical operations. The brave knights had to remain where they were and wait for the enemy to attack. If the enemy also fought by the code, it would sometimes happen that the two armies would line up face to face and proceed to fight it out with sword and mace and dagger. But if one side maneuvered about to attack from the most advantageous direction, the stationary knights were badly at a loss, being unable to change their base. When the issue had been decided, the knights on the losing side could not reach the horse lines to mount and be off. All they could do was to turn at bay and face death or capture (which was often the same thing) at the hands of the victorious foe.

The heavy losses sustained by the nobility in the battles of the Wars of the Roses were due to being thus shackled by the code. The archers and foot soldiers, wearing nothing heavier than leather jerkins, could get away from the field and scatter for safety, but the knights were anchored in muddy fields.

King Henry had been in a bellicose mood the night before the battle. “By the faith I owe St. Edward,” he had cried, “I shall destroy them, every mother’s son! They shall be hanged and drawn and quartered!” But when the battle began, he felt in a different mood. He was not a coward but he dreaded bloodshed and would have no part in it himself. In full armor he occupied a tent under the royal standard, which had been unfurled on St. Peter’s Street. When the right half of Warwick’s column came down the road, driving all opposition before it, the royal
tent was surrounded after being riddled with arrows. The king was found sitting on the ground beside the Duke of Buckingham, both of them wounded. The king had been hit in the neck by an arrow, the duke in the face. The royal guards had taken to their heels.

“Forsooth and forsooth,” said Henry quietly.

When Richard of York arrived, his face flushed and triumphant, the king issued a brusque order. “Stop this slaughter of my subjects!”

Henry’s wound was attended to, it being slight, and he was led down St. Peter’s Street to the nearest house, which belonged to a tanner. Here he remained until he could be removed safely to the abbey for the night. On the way, they saw on the steps of the Castle Inn the body of the Duke of Somerset, who had fallen early in the battle.

Henry was not treated as a prisoner. Richard of York and the Earl of Warwick knelt before him and asked to be forgiven. The king nodded gravely and said that he bore them no ill will. When sufficiently recovered from his wound, he rode to London with the victors and entered the city in great state.

Queen Margaret, who had remained behind at Coventry with the infant prince, took him with her to the royal palace at Greenwich. With indomitable will, she began to issue calls for assistance to all in England and abroad who were favorable to the cause of the Red Rose. It was at this time that her ill wishers began to call her
Captain Marguerite
.

T
HE war between the Lancastrians and the Yorkists could possibly have been brought to a quick conclusion after the victory of the White Rose at St. Albans, as Henry IV had done after the capture of Richard. If Richard of York had overcome his scruples about removing his cousin and had declared his own claim to the throne, he would have found little organized resistance at this point. He held Henry as his prisoner, and there had been heavy mortality at St. Albans in the ranks of the nobility who sported the Red Rose. The determined queen, flying for safety from Coventry with her young son, was in no position to act promptly in raising more battalions. London was loud in support of Richard, and in Parliament the Lancastrian element was not in a position to fight for a captive king.

Parliament met on July 9 and, as York made no determined move, the loyalty of all the lords assembled was pledged to the king. Henry suffered another attack later and York was made protector when the House met again in November.

By this time, things had settled down. The armed contingents had been disbanded; the rival roses were no longer worn on the streets. It developed that Henry’s attack was of a much less serious character. At any rate he retained sufficient sanity to be consulted on state decisions. In February of the next year, the king emerged with suddenness from his seclusion and declared himself fit to assume all his duties again. He was willing to continue Richard of York as his chief councilor, but on that point a small feminine foot came down with unmistakable vehemence. No, declared Queen Margaret, there would be no more of that. Henry was king and would rule as a king; and the Yorkist element must be removed. Henry gave in and dismissed his cousin of York from office.

And so it went. The fortunes of war swayed back and forth. Bloody battles were fought. Sometimes the White Rose was in the ascendant, more frequently at first the Red. The king continued to suffer from attacks of his mental malady and the queen remained adamant in her attitude, refusing to agree to any concessions.

The story of the long drawn-out struggle, if told at full length, would prove both repetitious and monotonous. The chief interest in the period lies in the cast of unusual characters who played the leading parts: Henry himself, a man of true devotion but limited mental capacity and with little steel in his composition, who would gladly have played a part of passive resistance in this cycle of violence, a medieval Gandhi; Richard of York, a second John of Gaunt in that his scruples sometimes out-weighed his ambition, but who had courage and capacity; the Earl of Warwick, showy, brilliant, lucky (at the start), who emerged as the ablest man of the day and won in history the name of the Kingmaker, a bold, aggressive leader but lacking in many of the higher qualities; Margaret, the beautiful and brilliant queen, who had more fighting spirit in her than any of the men concerned but was utterly lacking in such qualities as fairness, moderation, and foresight; the two sons of Richard of York who were both to rule England later as Edward IV and Richard III.