Despite Salisbury’s victory, York and his allies were now confronted by a large royal army bearing down upon them. They retreated from Worcester to Ludlow, where they established an armed camp. Yet it was clear enough that York was uneasy about confronting the king in open battle where he could be accused of high treason. A contingent of Warwick’s forces from Calais then deserted and, knowing themselves to be vulnerable, York and the Nevilles fled under cover of darkness; York returned to his old fiefdom, Ireland, while Warwick and Salisbury sailed to Calais. Their lands were seized by the king and they were declared to be traitors. Their cause seemed to have ended ingloriously.
The coastal defences of the country were now strengthened, with the possibility of an attack both from Calais and from Dublin; meanwhile, in the spring of 1460, Warwick sailed to Ireland in order to consult York on the next move. It came in the form of invasion. In the early summer of 1460 Warwick and Salisbury landed at Kent and began a march to the friendly territory of London. The leaders of the capital welcomed them and even offered them money. The Nevilles said that they had come to ‘rescue’ the king from his evil councillors; they professed nothing but goodwill towards Henry himself; they were not rebels, but reformers of the body politic; they wished to lighten taxation and to reduce the king’s debts; they pledged to reform the workings of the law and to lift the manifold oppressions of the king’s courtiers. It was the standard rhetoric of the period, but it was received warmly by the citizens and by the people of south-eastern England. It seems likely, however, that York and Warwick had brooded on the possibility of killing the king together with his wife and son. It should be remembered that these were all vicious and ruthless men.
Warwick remained in the city for only three days before marching north in search of the king’s army. He found it outside Northampton and, before sending his forces into battle, he ordered them to hunt down and kill the king’s entourage; the senior nobility and the knights were not to be spared. The fighting lasted less than an hour, and the victory went to Warwick after the slaughter of the king’s closest companions. Henry himself was taken into custody and once more escorted to London, where he was king only in name. ‘I follow after the lords,’ he is described as saying in a poem of the time. ‘I never know why.’ He was a puppet monarch. Nevertheless the queen and her son, the young Prince Edward, were still at large.
York returned from Ireland ten weeks after the battle, and bore about him all the appurtenances of royalty. He no longer dated his letters according to the years of Henry’s reign, as was the custom, and he bore the arms of England on his banners. He arrived as the parliament in Westminster, summoned by Warwick, was beginning its proceedings; his trumpets sounded as he made his entrance, and a drawn sword was carried before him. He then made his way towards the vacant throne and put his hand upon it as if to claim possession; this unexpected and unlawful act was greeted with surprise and dismay by the lords assembled. It looked as if York had miscalculated his popularity, and underestimated their residual loyalty to their rightful king.
He demanded to be installed as the monarch. When asked to make a courteous visit to Henry he replied that ‘I know of no person in the realm whom it does not behove to come to me and see my person rather than that I should go and visit him.’ The king himself was too frightened to encounter York. The lords demurred at York’s demand, and passed the question to the judges; the judges in turn refused to meddle in such ‘high matters’ and passed the problem back to the lords. The question was ‘above the law and past their learning’. In any case no man wished to perjure his oath of loyalty to the anointed sovereign. In his incapacity Henry had become the emblem of his age; the senior members of the realm were struck by indecision. Emptiness ruled at the heart of government.
Eventually the lords, in English fashion, proposed a compromise. Henry would retain the crown but, on his death or at the time of his willing abdication, York and his heirs should succeed him. Since York was ten years older than Henry, the lords were playing a game of wait and see. When the king accepted this proposal he was effectively disinheriting his son, and stripping him of his rightful inheritance. But he was in no position, and perhaps in no condition, to remonstrate on the matter. The feelings of Queen Margaret on the issue of succession are hardly in doubt; but for the moment she was on the run. She retreated with her son to Wales, but then fled to Scotland; she left her forces under the command of the earl of Pembroke, Jasper Tudor, half-brother to the king. So the Tudors properly enter English history. Jasper Tudor was the fruit of an unlikely marriage when Katherine of Valois, the widow of Henry V, became the wife of a junior courtier by the name of Owen Tudor. The older Tudor had joined his son on behalf of the queen. No one, however, could possibly have imagined the ultimate success of his family line.
By the end of 1460 the queen reappeared in the north of England, having persuaded the great lords of that region to support her against the Londoners and the south-easterners. She mustered some 10,000 armed retainers, as York and Salisbury marched north to meet them. Battle was joined outside Wakefield, in the course of which both York and Salisbury were despatched; it was for the Lancastrians some recompense for the slaughter at St Albans and Northampton. The head of York was wreathed in a paper crown, and placed on the southern gate of the city of York known as Micklegate Bar. It bore a sign saying ‘Let York overlook the town of York.’
So it seemed thatMargaret of Anjou had won, with the benefits flowing to her son as well as to a weak and feeble king; but Henry himself remained in London, in the control and at the mercy of Warwick. That magnate had not marched north with his allies, but had remained behind to protect what was now a Yorkist administration at Westminster. According to the agreement reached by the lords between the king and York, the heir to the throne had now become York’s son, Edward of March. Two young Edwards, Prince Edward at the age of seven and Edward of March at the age of eighteen, were now pitted against one another.
Edward of March had in fact already taken to the field in defence of the Yorkist inheritance. He marched at the head of his army, with the aim of preventing the Welsh forces led by Jasper Tudor from aligning with the main body of Lancastrian troops in the north. At the beginning of February 1461 he encountered the Tudors in Herefordshire, at a place known as Mortimer’s Cross. Before battle was joined the unusual appearance of a parhelion or sun dog became visible in the air, where by means of small ice crystals a second sun seems to appear beside the first. The soldiers on the earth knew nothing of ice crystals, of course, but the manifestation of two suns suggested some great change in the direction of the world. Two sons were, after all, in conflict. And there were about to be two kings of England.
The victory was won by Edward of March; Jasper Tudor fled, but his father was not so fortunate. Owen Tudor was taken to the block where he was heard to murmur that ‘the head shall lie on the stock that was wont to lie on the lap of Queen Katherine’, the widow of Henry V whom he had married. His head was carried from the scaffold and placed on the market cross of the local town. It was here that a madwoman combed his hair and washed the blood from his face.
Margaret was already marching towards London, emboldened by the death of York; the Tudors were unable to join her, of course, but still she moved steadily to the south. All the while she allowed her troops to pillage and plunder the lands of her Yorkist enemies through which they passed. Warwick mustered his army in London to prevent her from entering the capital, where most of his power and resources lay; he took the king with him, as a form of insurance. He must also have hoped that Margaret would not attack an army that effectively held her husband hostage.