Part 20

According to another school the real key to the problem is simply the question of the succession to the crown. If the wedlock of Henry VI. and Margaret of Anjou had been fruitful during the first few years after their marriage, no one would have raised the question of a change of dynasty. But when they remained childless for seven years, and strong suspicion arose that there was a project on foot to declare the Beauforts heirs to the throne, the claim of Richard of York, as the representative of the houses of Clarence and March, was raised by those who viewed the possible accession of the incapable and unpopular Somerset with terror and dislike. When once the claims of York had been displayed and stated by his imprudent partisan, Thomas Yonge, in the parliament of 1451, there was no possibility of hiding the fact that in the strict legitimate line of succession he had a better claim than the reigning king. He disavowed any pretensions to the crown for nine years; it was only in 1460 that he set forth his title with his own mouth. But his friends and followers were not so discreet; hence when a son was at last born to Henry and Margaret, in 1453, the succession question was already in the air and could no longer be ignored. If the claim of York was superior to that of Lancaster in the eyes of a considerable part of the nation, it was no longer possible to consider the problem solved by the birth of a direct heir to the actual occupant of the throne. Though Duke Richard behaved in the most correct fashion, acknowledged the infant Edward as prince of Wales, and made no attempt to assert dynastic claims during his two regencies in 1454 and 1455-1456, yet the queen and her partisans already looked upon him as a pretender to the throne. It is this fact which accounts for the growing bitterness of the Yorkist and Lancastrian parties during the last years of Henry VI. Margaret believed herself to be defending the rights of her son against a would-be usurper. Duke Richard, on the other hand, considered himself as wrongfully oppressed, and excluded from his legitimate position as a prince of the blood and a chief councillor of the crown. Nor can there be any doubt that the queen took every opportunity of showing her suspicion of him, and deliberately kept him and his friends from sharing in the administration of the realm. This might have been more tolerable if the Lancastrian party had shown any governing power; but both while Somerset was their leader, down to his death in the first battle of St Albans, and while in 1456-1459 Exeter, Wiltshire, Shrewsbury and Beaumont were the queen's trusted agents, the condition of England was deplorable. As a contemporary chronicler wrote, "the realm was out of all good governance--as it has been many days before: the king was simple, and led by covetous councillors, and owed more than he was worth. His debts increased daily, but payment was there none, for all the manors and possessions that pertained to the crown he had given away, so that he had almost nought to live on. For these misgovernances the hearts of the people were turned from them that had the land in rule, and their blessing was turned to cursing. The officers of the realm, and especially the earl of Wiltshire the treasurer, for to enrich himself plundered poor people and disinherited rightful heirs, and did many wrongs. The queen was defamed, that he that was called the prince was not the king's son, but a bastard gotten in adultery." When it is added that the Lancastrian party avoided holding a parliament for three years, because they dared not face it, and that the French were allowed to sack Fowey, Sandwich and other places because there was no English fleet in existence, it is not wonderful that many men thought that the cup of the iniquities of the house of Lancaster was full. In the military classes it was felt that the honour of the realm was lost; in mercantile circles it was thought that the continuance for a few years more of such government would make an end of English trade. Some excuse must be found for getting rid of the queen and her friends, and the doubtful legitimacy of the Lancastrian claim to the crown afforded such an excuse. Hence came the curious paradox, that the party which started as the advocates of the rights of parliament against the incapable ministers appointed by the crown, ended by challenging the right of parliament, exercised in 1399, to depose a legitimate king and substitute for him another member of the royal house. For Richard of York in 1460 and Edward IV. in 1461 put in their claim to the throne, not as the elect of the nation, but as the possessors of a divine hereditary right to the succession, there having been no true king of England since the death of Richard II. Hence Edward assumed the royal title in March 1461, was crowned in June, but called no parliament till November. When it met, it acknowledged him as king, but made no pretence of creating or electing him to be sovereign.

Motives of the contending parties.

But putting aside the constitutional aspects of the Wars of the Roses, it is necessary to point out that they had another aspect. From one point of view they were little more than a great faction fight between two alliances of over-powerful barons. Though the Lancastrians made much play with the watchword of loyalty to the crown, and though the Yorkists never forgot to speak of the need for strong and wise governance, and the welfare of the realm, yet personal and family enmities had in many cases more effect in determining their action than a zeal for King Henry's rights or for the prosperity of England. It is true that some classes were undoubtedly influenced in their choice of sides mainly by the general causes spoken of above; the citizens of London and the other great towns (for example) inclined to the Yorkist faction simply because they saw that under the Lancastrian rule the foreign trade of England was being ruined, and insufficient security was given for life and property. But the leading men among the baronage were undoubtedly swayed by ambition and resentment, by family ties and family feuds, far more than by enlightened statesmanship or zeal for the king or the commonweal. It would be going too far to seek the origin of the Yorkist party--as some have done--in the old enmity of the houses of March, Norfolk and Salisbury against Henry IV. But it is not so fantastic to ascribe its birth to the personal hatred that existed between Richard of York and Edmund of Somerset, to the old family grudge (going back to 1405) between the Percies and the Nevilles, to the marriage alliance that bound the houses of York and Neville together, and to other less well-remembered quarrels or blood-ties among the lesser baronage. As an example of how such motives worked, it may suffice to quote the case of those old enemies, the Bonvilles and Courtenays, in the west country. While Lord Bonville supported the queen, the house of Courtenay were staunch Yorkists, and the earl of Devon joined in the armed demonstration of Duke Richard in 1452. But when the earl changed his politics and fought on the Lancastrian side at St Albans in 1455, the baron at once became a strenuous adherent of the duke, adhered firmly to the white rose and died by the axe for its cause.

The baronial party. The Nevilles.

Richard of York, in short, was not merely the head of a constitutional opposition to misgovernment by the queen's friends, nor was he merely a legitimist claimant to the crown, he was also the head of a powerful baronial league, of which the most prominent members were his kinsmen, the Nevilles, Mowbrays and Bourchiers. The Nevilles alone, enriched with the ancient estates of the Beauchamps and Montagus, and with five of their name in the House of Lords, were a sufficient nucleus for a faction. They were headed by the two most capable politicians and soldiers then alive in England, the two Richards, father and son, who held the earldoms of Salisbury and Warwick, and were respectively brother-in-law and nephew to York. It must be remembered that a baron of 1450 was not strong merely by reason of the spears and bows of his household and his tenantry, like a baron of the 13th century. The pernicious practice of "livery and maintenance" was now at its zenith; all over England in times of stress the knighthood and gentry were wont to pledge themselves, by sealed bonds of indenture, to follow the magnate whom they thought best able to protect them. They mounted his badge, and joined his banner when strife broke out, in return for his championship of their private interests and his promise to "maintain" them against all their enemies. A soldier and statesman of the ability and ambition of Richard of Warwick counted hundreds of such adherents, scattered over twenty shires. The system had spread so far that the majority of the smaller tenants-in-chief, and even many of the lesser barons, were the sworn followers of an insignificant number of the greater lords. An alliance of half-a-dozen of these over-powerful subjects was a serious danger to the crown. For the king could no longer count on raising a national army against them; he could only call out the adherents of the lords of his own party. The factions were fairly balanced, for if the majority of the baronage were, on the whole, Lancastrian, the greatest houses stood by the cause of York.

Attitude of Richard of York.

Suppression of York's rebellion. Executions and confiscations.

The earl of Warwick defeats the Lancastrians at Northampton.

Richard of York declared heir to the throne.

Despite all this, there was still, when the wars began, a very strong feeling in favour of compromise and moderation. For this there can be no doubt that Richard of York was mainly responsible. When he was twice placed in power, during the two protectorates which followed Henry's two long fits of insanity in 1454 and 1455-1456, he carefully avoided any oppression of his enemies, though he naturally took care to put his own friends in office. Most of all did he show his sincere wish for peace by twice laying down the protectorate when the king was restored to sanity. He was undoubtedly goaded into his last rebellion of 1459 by the queen's undisguised preparations for attacking him. Yet because he struck first, without waiting for a definite _casus belli_, public opinion declared so much against him that half his followers refused to rally to his banner. The revulsion only came when the queen, victorious after the rout of Ludford, applied to the vanquished Yorkists those penalties of confiscation and attainder which Duke Richard had always refused to employ in his day of power. After the harsh doings at the parliament of Coventry (1459), and the commencement of political executions by the sending of Roger Neville and his fellows to the scaffold, the trend of public opinion veered round, and Margaret and her friends were rightly held responsible for the embittered nature of the strife. Hence came the marvellous success of the Yorkist counterstroke in June 1460, when the exiled Warwick, landing in Kent with a mere handful of men, was suddenly joined by the whole of the south of England and the citizens of London, and inflicted a crushing defeat on the Lancastrians at Northampton before he had been fifteen days on shore (July 10, 1460). The growing rancour of the struggle was marked by the fact that the Yorkists, after Northampton, showed themselves by no means so merciful and scrupulous as in their earlier days. Retaliatory executions began, though on a small scale, and when York reached London he at last began to talk of his rights to the crown, and to propose the deposition of Henry VI. Yet moderation was still so far prevalent in the ranks of his adherents that they refused to follow him to such lengths. Warwick and the other leading men of the party dictated a compromise, by which Henry was to reign for the term of his natural life, but Duke Richard was to be recognized as his heir and to succeed him on the throne. They had obviously borrowed the expedient from the terms of the treaty of Troyes. But the act of parliament which embodied it did not formally disinherit the reigning king's son, as the treaty of Troyes had done, but merely ignored his existence.

Battle of Wakefield. Richard slain.

Battle of St Albans.

It would have been well for England if this agreement had held, and the crown had passed peaceably to the house of York, after the comparatively short and bloodless struggle which had just ended. But Duke Richard had forgotten to reckon with the fierce and unscrupulous energy of Queen Margaret, when she was at bay in defence of her son's rights. Marching with a trifling force to expel her from the north, he was surprised and slain at Wakefield (Dec. 30, 1460). But it was not his death that was the main misfortune, but the fact that in the battle the Lancastrians gave no quarter to small or great, and that after it they put to death York's brother-in-law Salisbury and other prisoners. The heads of the duke and the earl were set up over the gates of York. This ferocity was repeated when Margaret and her northern host beat Warwick at the second battle of St Albans (Feb. 17, 1461), where they had the good fortune to recover possession of the person of King Henry. Lord Bonville and the other captives of rank were beheaded next morning.

Edward, earl of March, proclaimed as Edward IV.

After this it was but natural that the struggle became a mere record of massacres and executions. The Yorkists proclaimed Edward, Duke Richard's heir, king of England; they took no further heed of the claims of King Henry, declared their leader the true successor of Richard II., and stigmatized the whole period of the Lancastrian rule as a mere usurpation. They adopted a strict legitimist theory of the descent of the crown, and denied the right of parliament to deal with the succession. This was the first step in the direction of absolute monarchy which England had seen since the short months of King Richard's tyranny in 1397-1399. It was but the first of many encroachments of the new dynasty upon the liberties that had been enjoyed by the nation under the house of Lancaster.

Changed character of the war.

Battle of Towton.

Ruthless reprisals of the Yorkists.

Personal rule of Edward IV.

The revenge taken by the new king and his cousin Richard of Warwick for the slaughter at Wakefield and St Albans was prompt and dreadful. They were now well supported by the whole of southern England; for not only had the queen's ferocity shocked the nation, but the reckless plundering of her northern moss-troopers in the home counties had roused the peasantry and townsfolk to an interest in the struggle which they had never before displayed. Up to this moment the civil war had been conducted like a great faction fight; the barons and their liveried retainers had been wont to seek some convenient heath or hill and there to fight out their quarrel with the minimum of damage to the countryside. The deliberate harrying of the Midlands by Margaret's northern levies was a new departure, and one bitterly resented. The house of Lancaster could never for the future count on an adherent south of Trent or east of Chiltern. The Yorkist army that marched in pursuit of the raiders, and won the bloody field of Towton under Warwick's guidance, gave no quarter. Not only was the slaughter in that battle and the pursuit more cruel than anything that had been seen since the day of Evesham, but the executions that followed were ruthless. Ere Edward turned south he had beheaded two earls--Devon and Wiltshire--and forty-two knights, and had hanged many prisoners of lesser estate. The Yorkist parliament of November 1461 carried on the work by attainting 133 persons, ranging from Henry VI. and Queen Margaret down through the peerage and the knighthood to the clerks and household retainers of the late king. All the estates of the Lancastrian lords, living or dead, were confiscated, and their blood was declared corrupted. This brought into the king's hands such a mass of plunder as no one had handled since William the Conqueror. Edward IV. could not only reward his adherents with it, so as to create a whole new court noblesse, but had enough over to fill his exchequer for many years, and to enable him to dispense with parliamentary grants of money for an unexampled period. Between 1461 and 1465 he only asked for L37,000 from the nation--and won no small popularity thereby. For, in their joy at being quit of taxation, men forgot that they were losing the lever by which their fathers had been wont to move the crown to constitutional concessions.

Civil war in the north and west.

Battle of Hexham. Imprisonment of Henry VI.

After Towton peace prevailed south of the Tyne and east of the Severn, for it was only in Northumberland and in Wales that the survivors of the Lancastrian faction succeeded in keeping the war alive. King Edward, as indolent and pleasure-loving in times of ease as he was active and ruthless in times of stress and battle, set himself to enjoy life, handing over the suppression of the rebels to his ambitious and untiring cousin Richard of Warwick. The annals of the few contemporary chroniclers are so entirely devoted to the bickerings in the extreme north and west, that it is necessary to insist on the fact that from 1461 onwards the civil war was purely local, and nine-tenths of the realm enjoyed what passed for peace in the 15th century. The campaigns of 1462-63-64, though full of incident and bloodshed, were not of first-rate political importance. The cause of Lancaster had been lost at Towton, and all that Queen Margaret succeeded in accomplishing was to keep Northumberland in revolt, mainly by means of French and Scottish succours. Her last English partisans, attainted men who had lost their lands and lived with the shadow of the axe ever before them, fought bitterly enough. But the obstinate and hard-handed Warwick beat them down again and again, and the old Lancastrian party was almost exterminated when the last of its chiefs went to the block in the series of wholesale executions that followed the battle of Hexham (May 15, 1464). A year later Henry VI. himself fell into the hands of his enemies, as he lurked in Lancashire, and with his consignment to the Tower the dynastic question seemed finally solved in favour of the house of York.

Richard Neville, earl of Warwick.

The first ten years of the reign of Edward IV. fall into two parts, the dividing point being the avowal of the king's marriage to Elizabeth Woodville in November 1464. During the first of these periods Edward reigned but Warwick governed; he was not only the fighting man, but the statesman and diplomatist of the Yorkist party, and enjoyed a complete ascendancy over his young master, who long preferred thriftless ease to the toils of personal monarchy. Warwick represented the better side of the victorious cause; he was no mere factious king-maker, and his later nickname of "the last of the barons" by no means expresses his character or his position. He was strong, not so much by reason of his vast estates and his numerous retainers, as by reason of the confidence which the greater part of the nation placed in him. He never forgot that the Yorkist party had started as the advocates of sound and strong administration, and the mandatories of the popular will against the queen's incapable and corrupt ministers. "He ever had the goodwill of the people because he knew how to give them fair words, and always spoke not of himself but of the augmentation and good governance of the kingdom, for which he would spend his life; and thus he had the goodwill of England, so that in all the land he was the lord who was held in most esteem and faith and credence." As long as he remained supreme, parliaments were regularly held, and the house of York appeared to be keeping its bargain with the nation. His policy was sound; peace with France, the rehabilitation of the dwindling foreign trade of England, and the maintenance of law and justice by strong-handed governance were his main aims.

But Warwick was one of those ministers who love to do everything for themselves, and chafe at masters and colleagues who presume to check or to criticise their actions. He was surrounded and supported, moreover, by a group of brothers and cousins, to whom he gave most of his confidence, and most of the preferment that came to his hands. England has always chafed against a family oligarchy, however well it may do its work. The Yorkist magnates who did not belong to the clan of the Nevilles were not unnaturally jealous of that house, and Edward IV. himself gradually came to realize the ignominious position of a king who is managed and overruled by a strong-willed and arbitrary minister.

Edward IV. marries Elizabeth Woodville.

Breach between Warwick and the king.

His first sign of revolt was his secret marriage to Elizabeth Woodville, a lady of decidedly Lancastrian connexions, for her father and her first husband were both members of the defeated faction. Warwick was at the moment suing for the hand of Louis XI.'s sister-in-law in his master's name, and had to back out of his negotiations in a sudden and somewhat ridiculous fashion. His pride was hurt, but for two years more there was no open breach between him and his master, though their estrangement grew more and more marked when Edward continued to heap titles and estates on his wife's numerous relatives, and to conclude for them marriage alliances with all the great Yorkist families who were not of the Neville connexion. In this way he built up for himself a personal following within the Yorkist party; but the relative strength of this faction and of that which still looked upon Warwick as the true representative of the cause had yet to be tried. The king had in his favour the prestige of the royal name, and a popularity won by his easy-going affability and his liberal gifts. The earl had his established reputation for disinterested devotion to the welfare of the realm, and his brilliant record as a soldier and statesman. In districts as far apart as Kent and Yorkshire, his word counted for a good deal more than that of his sovereign.

Warwick organizes a rebellion.

Rising of "Robin of Redesdale."

Unhappily for England and for himself, Warwick's loyalty was not sufficient to restrain his ambition and his resentment. He felt the ingratitude of the king, whom he had made, so bitterly that he stooped ere long to intrigue and treason. Edward in 1467 openly broke with him by dismissing his brother George Neville from the chancellorship, by repudiating a treaty with France which the earl had just negotiated, and by concluding an alliance with Burgundy against which he had always protested. Warwick enlisted in his cause the king's younger brother George of Clarence, who desired to marry his daughter and heiress Isabella Neville, and with the aid of this unscrupulous but unstable young man began to organize rebellion. His first experiment in treason was the so-called "rising of Robin of Redesdale," which was ostensibly an armed protest by the gentry and commons of Yorkshire against the maladministration of the realm by the king's favourites--his wife's relatives, and the courtiers whom he had lately promoted to high rank and office. The rebellion was headed by well-known adherents of the earl, and the nickname of "Robin of Redesdale" seems to have covered the personality of his kinsman Sir John Conyers. When the rising was well started Warwick declared his sympathy with the aims of the insurgents, wedded his daughter to Clarence despite the king's prohibition of the match, and raised a force at Calais with which he landed in Kent.

Battle of Edgecott. Edward a prisoner.

Execution of the queen's relatives.