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
Richard of York declared heir to the throne.
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.
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
Battle of Wakefield. Richard slain.
Battle of
St Albans.
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.
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., Edward, earl of March, proclaimed as Edward IV. 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.
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
Changed character
of the war.
Battle of Towton.
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
Ruthless reprisals of the Yorkists.
Personal rule of Edward IV.
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 £37,000 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.
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 Civil war in the north and west. 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 Battle of Hexham. Im-prisonment of Henry VI. 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.
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 Richard Neville, earl of Warwick. 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
