The Red Rose and the White

The Wars of the Roses, 1453-1487

John Sadler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317905172
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

If Richard III had not charged to his death at Bosworth, how different might the history of Britain have been?

Beginning in 1453 and ending in 1487, The Red Rose and the White provides a gripping overview of the bitter dynastic struggle for supremacy that raged between the houses of York and Lancaster for thirty years, culminating in the dramatic events on Bosworth Field in 1485.

As well as offering a comprehensive account of the campaigns, battles and sieges of the conflict, the book also assesses the commanders and men involved and considers the weapons and tactics employed. Photographs, maps and portraits of the principal characters help to bring the period to life, whilst the fast-paced narrative conveys a sense of what it was actually like to fight in battles such as Towton or Tewkesbury the effect of the arrow storm and the grim realities of hand-to-hand combat with edged and bladed weapons.

Skilfully weaving in political and social events to place the conflict in its context, The Red Rose and the White is a fascinating exploration of the turbulent period that would change the course of British history forever.

Chapter 1

The Art of War in the Fifteenth Century

Arguably the first clash in the series of dynastic conflicts later to be described as the Wars of the Roses occurred in 1453 when the Percies prepared an ambush for the Neville affinity attending the wedding of Sir Thomas Neville.¹ First blood was not properly shed until the First Battle of St Albans in May 1455 and much of that was gentle; in civil war, traitors carry no promise of ransom.

King Edward told me that in all the battles which he had won, as soon as he had gained victory, he mounted his horse and shouted to his men that they must spare the common soldiers and kill the lords of which none or few escaped.²

In the long bloody Battle of Towton, the Lancastrians, as their army disintegrated, suffered very badly. John, Lord Clifford, ‘the Butcher’ had been killed in the skirmish at Dintingdale the day before; Northumberland, Lord Dacre of Gilsland and Sir Andrew Trollope, fell on the field. With the rotting skulls of their own families grinning down from Micklegate Bar it is no wonder that the Yorkists were unmoved by notions of chivalry.³

Raising Armies

In order to provide a reliable supply of trained fighting men, Edward III had developed the contract system, whereby the monarch, as commander-in-chief, entered into formal engagements and indentured contracts in writing with experienced captains, who were then bound to provide an agreed number of men at established rates for a given period. The protracted and wide-ranging campaigns in France made the reputations of famous captains, such as Robert Knollys and John Chandos. Frequently it was the magnates who acted as main contractors, sub-contracting knights, men at arms and archers in turn.⁴ To what extent the end of the French wars and the dashing of final hopes, with the consequential glut of unemployed men at arms, fuelled the rise of magnatial thuggery, remains questionable. It is certain, however, that a swelling reservoir of trained manpower offered recruits to gentry affinities. The provision of indentures and annuities was, it appears, also employed by lords to bind their retainers. Humphrey Stafford, 1st Duke of Buckingham, killed at Northampton in 1460, had 10 knights and 27 esquires in his service. One of the former, Sir Edward Grey, was granted a life annuity of £40 in 1440. Those further down the social scale might receive annual emoluments of £10–£20.⁵

In addition to his professional retainers the lord could call out his tenantry, many of whom might also have military experience. To these he might add, if numbers were sought, a following of masterless men happy to have the protection of a great man’s livery. A surviving indenture, dating from 1452, and entered into by the Earl of Salisbury and his tenant Walter Strickland, knight of Westmorland, lists the complement which Sir Walter was to muster: billmen – ‘horsed and harnessed’, 74; mounted bowmen to the number of 69; dismounted billmen 76; with 71 foot archers – an impressive total of 290.⁶ Archers, in most companies were still the predominant arm, outnumbering bills by anything between 3 to 1 and 10 to 1.

When Sir John Paston was preparing to sail for Calais, he begged that his brother recruit 4 archers: ‘Likely men and fair conditioned and good archers and they shall have four marks by year and my livery’.⁷ In short, these were to be permanent retainers, paid an annual wage. A particularly skilled archer belonging to a lord’s household might command equal remuneration to a knight. In 1475 Edward IV was raising an army to intimidate France, and the great magnates each contributed to his muster as follows:

• Duke of Clarence: 10 knights, 1,000 archers
• Duke of Gloucester: 10 knights, 1,000 archers
• Duke of Norfolk: 2 knights, 300 archers
• Duke of Suffolk: 2 knights, 300 archers
• Duke of Buckingham: 4 knights, 400 archers.⁸

The king still had the capacity to issue what were termed ‘Commissions of Array’, which empowered his officers to call up local militias who, in theory at least, were to be the best armed and accoutred men from each village in the county. This system, though time honoured, was much open to abuse. The antics of Falstaff provide a comic parody.⁹ Contemporary letters from the Stonor correspondence, relating to the Oxfordshire half hundred of Ewelme, comprising some 17 villages in the county, show that the catchment yielded 85 recruits, 17 of whom were archers. The village of Ewelme itself provided 6:

Richard Slyhurst, a harness and able to do the King service with his bow, Thomas Staunton [the constable] John Hume, whole harness and both able to do the King service with a bill. John Tanner, a harness and able to do the King service with a bill. John Pallying, a harness and not able to wear it, Roger Smith, no harness, an able man and a good archer.

Those without any armour are described as ‘able with a staff’.¹⁰

Surviving muster rolls from the period also provide an insight into the local levy. One held at Bridport in Dorset on the 4 September 1457, before the King’s officers, reveals that a man was expected to possess a sallet, jack, sword, buckler and dagger. Of those on parade that day around two thirds carried bows and had arrows. Other weapons on show included poleaxes, glaives, bills, spears and axes, staves and harness.¹¹ Dominic Mancini has left us a vivid, eyewitness account of the appearance of the troops that Gloucester and Buckingham brought into London in 1483 to provide encouragement for any citizen who might be tempted to think of resisting the usurpation:

There is hardly any without a helmet, and none without bows and arrows; their bows and arrows are thicker and longer than those used by other nations, just as their bodies are stronger than other peoples, for they seem to have hands and arms of iron. The range of their bows is no less than that of our arbalests; there hangs by the side of each a sword no less long than ours, but heavy and thick as well. The sword is always accompanied by an iron shield . . . they do not wear any metal armour on their breast or any other part of their body, except for the better sort who have breastplates and suits of armour. Indeed the common soldiery have more comfortable tunics that reach down below the loins and are stuffed with tow or some other soft material. They say the softer the tunics the better do they withstand the blows of arrows and swords, and besides that in summer they are lighter and in winter more serviceable than iron.¹²

Attitudes to War

Civil wars do not promote chivalric conduct, vendettas tend to mar fair play, and the decline in knightly values was much bemoaned by contemporary chroniclers, though vestiges persisted. In his work ‘Le Jouvencel’ the chronicler Jean le Beuil, writing around 1466, gives an insight into the mind of the fifteenth-century gentleman:

What a joyous thing is war, for many fine deeds are seen in its course, and many good lessons learnt from it . . . You love your comrade so much in war. When you see that your quarrel is just and your blood is fighting well, tears rise in your eyes. A great sweet feeling of loyalty and pity fills your heart on seeing your friend so valiantly expose his body to execute and accomplish the command of our Creator. And then you prepare to go and live or die with him, and for love not abandon him. And out of that there arise such a delectation, that he who has not tasted it is not fit to say what a delight is. Do you think that a man who does that fears death? Not at all; for he feels strengthened, he is so elated, that he does not know where he is. Truly, he is afraid of nothing.¹³

Fine sentiments indeed, but the list of slaughters which accompanied battles or which mired the wrack of defeat does not bear this out. The thirst for revenge, fear, greed and sheer expediency were all powerful realities. Salisbury was handed to the mob, or so it appears, after Wakefield and, in the same battle, his nephew Rutland was murderously slain by Clifford. Battles, such as Hexham and Tewkesbury, were immediately followed by a savage round of executions. At Shrewsbury in 1403 the English had discovered what it was like to be on the receiving end of the missile storm. During the Wars of the Roses both sides employed the longbow, and many battles opened with an archery duel; as a consequence, casualties would be high, and it was usually the side which fared worst in the opening exchanges that first advanced to contact. The armourer’s art may have developed to a point where good quality harness could deflect a clothyard shaft, but the commons, relying on jacks, were less protected. At Stoke in 1487 the Earl of Lincoln’s Irish, ill-harnessed kerns were shot down in droves.¹⁴

Improved armour did not render a knight invulnerable. When Lord Clifford unwisely removed his bevor to gulp water in the extended skirmish at Dintingdale he was pierced through the throat. A similar fate befell Lord Dacre. It has been estimated, again with reference to Palmsunday Field that, if each archer loosed four dozen arrows, then over a million shafts with a gross weight of 40 tons fell across the field.¹⁵ In all probability archers, like billmen, remained posted with their own companies, rather than being formed into a separate arm. Most likely, at the start of the fight, all would advance a few paces from the line to shoot, and then retake their places for the melee which was bound to follow. As a contemporary chronicler observed: ‘After the third or fourth, or at the very most the sixth draw of the bow, men knew which side would win.’¹⁶

Strategy

Strategy tended to be based purely upon the offensive. Conversely, tactics often assumed the defensive. Command was most frequently exercised by the magnates themselves: York at St Albans and Wakefield, Warwick at Second St Albans and Barnet, Henry Beaufort 3rd Duke Somerset at Wakefield, Second St Albans, Towton and Hexham. Divisional commanders would often be family or high-ranking members of the commander-in-chief’s affinity. Thus Richard of Gloucester commanding a wing of his brother’s forces at Barnet and Tewkesbury; Oxford and Exeter leading divisions of Warwick’s army at Barnet. Commanders might and did rely upon the advice of seasoned professionals such as Sir Andrew Trollope. Though many of the older generation of protagonists, such as York, 2nd Duke of Somerset, Buckingham and Fauconberg, had seen service in the French wars, their sons and successors, for the most part, had not.

Campaigns were of short duration, avoiding the need to keep forces victualled and in the field through the harshness of winter. Commanders tended to seek a decisive encounter, rarely was the offer of battle refused (Warwick at Coventry in 1471 is an obvious if rare exception). When one side faced hopeless odds, the temptation was simply to flee the realm – as did the Yorkist leaders after Ludford Bridge, Warwick and Clarence after Empingham and Edward IV in 1470. As Professor Hicks points out, in each case the exiles made a successful return bid. To force the issue, then, was the preferred course. Once strong forces were in the field, attempts at mediation invariably foundered. If a ruling monarch was unable to prevent his enemies from effecting a lodgement, then it was essential to move quickly to destroy his forces before he could recruit sufficient contingents: thus Richard III hastens to confront Henry Tudor. Major field engagements therefore dominate the course of the conflicts; long sieges (Harlech being an exception here, and the sieges of the Northumbrian Castles 1461–3), are rare; territory is not held or ceded, manoeuvre to contact is far more the norm. Where a magnate raised the flag of rebellion he would seek to confront the reigning monarch in the field before the forces owing loyalty to the Crown might be fully mustered. Thus Warwick hastens to bring the army of Henry VI to a decisive moment at Northampton before the northern Lancastrians could add their strength to the muster.

Grand Tactics

Subtlety is lacking. In the majority of campaigns the two sides simply square up: Somerset’s flanking manoeuvre before Second St Albans evidences a rare degree of strategic and tactical innovation. To stake all on the outcome of a single battle is a high-risk strategy. Once forces are committed on the field, the commander has little prospect of decisively influencing events. The soundest of tactics can be undone by the fog of war – Edmund Beaufort at Tewkesbury, and a want of intelligence as to the numbers arrayed against could lead to disaster. York’s end at Wakefield being a salutary lesson.

Knights and men-at-arms dismounted to fight on foot, horses were sent to the rear, to be mounted only when the enemy was in rout;¹⁷ pursuit of the beaten foe was rigorous and merciless, the slaughter indiscriminate. A wealthy captive in the French wars could be the making of a yeoman’s fortune but a lord whose lands stood to b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Publisher’s Acknowledgements
• List of Illustrations
• List of Maps
• Abbreviations
• Timeline
• Dramatis Personae
• Maps
• Being Introductory
• Chapter 1. The Art of War in the Fifteenth Century
• Chapter 2. The Nature of Kingship and the House of Lancaster
• Chapter 3. The Path to Conflict 1453–1455
• Chapter 4. First Blood – First St Albans 22 May 1455
• Chapter 5. Blore Heath 23 September 1459 and the Rout of Ludford Bridge 12/13 October 1459
• Chapter 6. Northampton 10 July 1460 and Wakefield 30 December 1460
• Chapter 7. Mortimer’s Cross 2 February 1461; Second St Albans 17 February 1461
• Chapter 8. ‘Palmsunday Field’ – Towton 29 March 1461
• Chapter 9. War in the North 1461–1463
• Chapter 10. Hedgeley Moor 25 April 1464 and Hexham 14 May 1464
• Chapter 11. The Overmighty Subject – Warwick the Kingmaker 1464–1469; the Battles of Edgecote (26 July 1469) and Empingham (12 March 1470)
• Chapter 12. The Road to Barnet 14 April 1471
• Chapter 13. Tewkesbury 4 May 1471
• Chapter 14. ‘This Sunne of York’: the Yorkist Age 1471–1483
• Chapter 15. ‘Under the Hog’ – Richard III and Bosworth 22 August 1485
• Chapter 16. Stoke Field 16 June 1487
• Postscript: The Military Legacy
• Glossary
• Appendices
• Bibliography
• Index