The morrow (May 4, 1471) was to be the darkest in all the chequered career of Margaret of Anjou and England. Sweet Pentecost though it was, the spirit of comfort belied, failed the fated Queen once more. With early dawn fell aslant the springtide sunbeams a rain of feathered hail. Battle was joined, each man at his post—save one, the perjured Lord Wenlock. His command, in the centre of Queen Margaret’s forces, lacked its leader, and Somerset rode off to find him. At a low brothel he discovered the miscreant drinking with and fondling loose wenches. “Traitor!” cried the Duke; “die, thou scoundrel!” And he clove his head in two. This defection caused irretrievable disaster; still, the Prince of Wales did prodigies of valour, and so did many more; but he was felled from his horse, and the “Hope of England” was lead captive to victorious Edward’s tent. Received with every mark of discourtesy, the heart of the chivalrous young Prince must have quailed as he stood before the arch-enemy of his house, but he had very little time for reflection.
“How durst thou, changeling, presumptuously enter my dominions with banners displayed against me?” demanded Edward.
“To recover my father’s crown, the heritage of my ancestors,” bravely replied the Prince.
“Speakest thou thus to me, thou upstart! See, I smite thee on thy bastard mouth!” roughly exclaimed the conqueror, and with that he demeaned himself and the crown he fought for by cowardly and savagely striking with his mailed fist the unsuspecting and unarmed Prince. This treacherous blow was the signal to the titled scoundrels standing by for a murderous attack upon the Prince of Wales. He fell crying fearlessly: “A Henry! A Henry!” pierced by many daggers. It was a dark deed and dastardly; its stain no course of years will ever cleanse, and Edward IV. is for all time “Bloody Edward.”
Queen Margaret, seeing the hopelessness of the conflict, and fearing the worst had happened to the Prince,—for he never came to cheer her,—took the Princess and fled to a convent hard by the battlefield, and there lay concealed. Edward, yielding to the base instincts of a cruel nature, very soon got news of Margaret’s hiding-place, and with a demoniacal scowl, “Ah, ah!” he cried out, “we’ve settled the cub; now for the she-wolf!”
The Queen was dragged from her hiding-place, and borne to Edward’s quarters, where, like the brute he was, he reviled and insulted her.
“Slay me, thou bloodthirsty wretch, if thou wilt! I care not for death at thy desecrating hands! May God strike thee, as He will!” she exclaimed.
Margaret was sent to the Tower, but not to her husband; they were kept apart, and the Princess of Wales was delivered over to the care of her uncle, the Archbishop of York. But even so Edward’s malice was not exhausted. The Queen was conducted without honour, or even decency, in the suite of Edward on his return to the capital. At Coventry,—of all places for further outrage, a place so greatly agreeable to Henry and herself,—ill-fated Margaret was subjected to personal insults from her vanquisher. In reply she reviled him, and thrust him with abhorrence from her. In revenge he ordered her to be fastened upon a common sumpter horse, and he ordered a placard to be placed on her breast, “This is Queen Margaret, good lieges,” and her hands were tied behind her back. Thus was the most valiant, most unselfish, and most loyal Queen that England ever had led to grace the mock triumph of a royal murderer. She was thrust into the foulest dungeon of the grim Tower, and there remained, bereft of food, of service, and wellnigh of reason, too, for seven dreary, weary months.
The day after her incarceration King Henry’s dead body was discovered in his cell. Gloucester, it was said, had killed him; but Edward was, if not the actual murderer, privy to the deed. Queen Margaret, hearing in her dark, foul den the heavy tramp of men-at-arms, scrambled up to the bars of her little window, and beheld,—what probably Edward meant she should,—the corpse of her slaughtered husband borne past for burial. No ceremony of any kind accompanied that mournful passing. At St. Paul’s, Henry’s body was exposed in a chapel of the crypt, and then it found merciful sepulture in the God’s-acre at Chertsey Abbey.
That her beloved son,—her one and only hope,—was dead as well, heart-broken Margaret gathered amid ribald blasphemies of the intoxicated soldiery as she was borne to London in that “Triumph.” Now was she bereft indeed, and nothing seemed so desirable as death; indeed, she resigned herself, and prepared herself for execution at any moment, at any savage hint of her consort’s supplanter on England’s throne—accursed Edward! It was, however, not to be supposed that King Louis of France or King René of Sicily-Anjou should silently condone the unhalting cruelty of a bloodthirsty monarch, especially when the person and the honour of a French Princess were at stake.