Edward IV and Henry VI
March himself had meanwhile been proclaimed King in London, taking the title King Edward IV. In each of these battles, lives were lost and much blood was spilled. Entire dynasties were obliterated: the Poles, the Beauforts, ultimately the Lancastrian dynasty itself. Towton was fought in a raging snowstorm, on Palm Sunday. A hundred and fifty years earlier, fighting on Palm Sunday had been so deplored that its punishment was a contributory factor in Edward I’s conquest of Wales. Amidst the horrors of the 1460s, however, it went almost unremarked.
The death toll at Towton was exceptionally high, including the Earl of Northumberland and lords Clifford, Randolph, Dacre, Neville and Wells amongst the Lancastrian dead. After Mortimer’s Cross, Owen Tudor, Henry VI’s stepfather, was taken to Hereford and beheaded, a mad woman combing his hair and placing a hundred candles around his severed head at the market cross. Both Edward of Lancaster, Henry VI’s vengeful little son, aged a mere eight at the second Battle of St Albans, and Edward, Earl of March, the future Edward IV, only eighteen at the time of his victory at Towton, were blooded in these encounters, in effect as a lost generation of boy soldiers whose lives were now consecrated to war. This was tribal warfare, akin to the convulsions of African chieftainship, albeit fought under silk standards in the latest and most fashionable of plate armour. England had been riven by civil wars in the past, most notably during the 1140s under King Stephen. Stephen’s reign, however, had witnessed only one pitched battle, at Lincoln in 1141, and virtually nothing by way of judicial execution of the aristocracy. After 1460, battles came thicker and faster than they had ever done before.
After Towton and for the first time in English history, there were now two rival kings, Edward IV and Henry VI, both anointed in Westminster, both claiming to be right successor to their royal ancestors. The irony is that one of these claimants, Henry VI, a direct descendant of King Edward I, was forced to seek refuge with the King of Scots, whilst the other, Edward IV, found himself threatened not so much by the rather feeble attempts at a Lancastrian come back, at the battles of Hedgeley Moor and Hexham in 1464, as by his own closest allies and indeed by his own brother. Although Henry VI was eventually taken prisoner by the Yorkists, betrayed in July 1465 in Ribblesdale in Lancashire and thence conveyed as a prisoner to the Tower of London, there followed a second act to the drama.
George, Duke of Clarence, Edward IV’s younger brother, rebelled with the assistance of the earl of Warwick, Richard Neville, making bizarre and common cause with Margaret of Anjou, Henry VI’s queen. By the late 1460s, the continued operation of Queen Margaret’s court in Scotland and later in France, and rumours of secret contacts between the Queen and the English aristocracy, led to a rash of arrests in which former Lancastrians were tried and executed. Warwick and Clarence declared their rebellion in 1469, with Clarence marrying Warwick’s daughter at Calais on 11 July. They then launched an invasion of Kent defeating Edward IV’s forces at the Battle of Edgcote on 26 July. Deserted by his men, Edward IV himself was taken captive and sent as a prisoner to Warwick Castle. For a few weeks, with two crowned kings now prisoners of state, Warwick and Clarence attempted to rule, in theory as representatives of Edward IV, in practice as usurpers even of the Yorkist claim. But Edward IV himself secured his release and by the end of October was once again in possession of London.
A pretence was maintained that peace would be restored. In reality, Warwick and Clarence had spilled too much blood to be left unpunished. Sensing their coming fate, they mounted a rebellion in Lincolnshire. Defeated at a battle fought near Empingham, they then fled to France from where they launched yet another invasion in September 1470, backed by Queen Margaret and by Henry VI’s half-brother, Jaspar Tudor. It was now Edward IV’s turn to flee into exile in Flanders. Henry VI was released from his imprisonment in the Tower and crowned for a second time on 3 October 1470. His second reign, described by contemporaries as his ‘readeption’, lasted barely six months. By April 1471, Edward IV was once again at the gates of London, having landed at Ravenspur in Yorkshire, at more or less precisely the same spot from which Henry Bolingbroke, the founder of the Lancastrian dynasty, had in 1399 launched his bid to depose King Richard II.