A History of England, Period I. Mediæval Monarchy

by J. Franck Bright

York again appears In arms.

First battle of St. Albans. May 22, 1455.

But the supremacy of York disappeared as suddenly as it had arisen. At the end of 1454, on Christmas Day, the King recovered his senses. Everything was immediately reversed. Somerset was taken from the Tower and declared innocent. York’s officers were displaced. True to the policy of his house, Henry restored the chancellorship to the Church by the appointment of Thomas Bouchier, Archbishop of Canterbury. But York had now determined upon an appeal to arms. Urged by fear of Somerset, and by dislike to the secondary position which the Prince’s birth had given him, and in company with the Nevilles, Lord Salisbury, and his son the Earl of Warwick, he advanced towards London, to forestall the action of the Parliament summoned to meet at Leicester, which he expected to be hostile to him. At the same time the royal troops were marching northward. The two forces consequently met. From Royston, York wrote a letter still declaring his loyalty, and stating his conditions. It was unanswered, and on the 21st of May the armies met at St. Albans. The King had with him the Dukes of Somerset and Buckingham, the Earls of Northumberland, Pembroke, Devonshire, Stafford, Dorset, Wiltshire, Clifford, and Sudely. The battle was fought in the town, and the victory, chiefly owing to Warwick, fell to the Duke of York. Somerset, Northumberland, and Clifford fell. Most of the other leaders were wounded, and the King himself was suffering from an arrow wound when York and the Nevilles came to him, knelt before him, begged his favour, and carried him with them in apparent harmony to London.

Character of the two parties.

On examining the chief names which occur as those of the leaders on either side in this the first battle of the Wars of the Roses, it will be seen that it was the Nevilles and Norfolk chiefly on whom York relied; his own relations, the Percies, and other gentlemen of the North, which constituted the strength of Henry’s party. There seem to have been three principles of division at work—family, geographical position, political views; and with regard to family, it would seem that the quarrel was one of very long standing, dating back as far as the reign of Richard II. It has been already pointed out that there was constantly some branch or other of the Plantagenet party in opposition to the reigning branch, which took for its cry reform of government and the good cause of England. In Richard II.’s reign Gloucester had represented this party. If we take the names of the Lords Appellant in the year 1387, we find them to be Gloucester and Derby, Plantagenets; Warwick, a Beauchamp; Nottingham, a Mowbray; and Arundel. Now, of these, the second, Derby, became afterwards King as Henry IV., and the opposition which he had at one time helped to direct was turned against himself and his family. The families of Mowbray and of Arundel had coalesced in the Duke of Norfolk. The heiress of the Beauchamps had married the Earl of Salisbury’s son Richard Neville, who with his wife had inherited the title of Warwick. The addition therefore to the party was that of the important family of the Nevilles, which had been consistently faithful to Henry IV. But this family had now become allied by marriage with the Duke of York himself (who had married Cecily Neville), with the Duke of Norfolk, and as we have seen with the family of Beauchamp. In addition to this, the fact that the rival house of the Percies had since the restoration of the son of Hotspur been firm supporters of the Lancastrian dynasty, would have been enough to put the Nevilles on the opposite side. The two families had ever been rivals for the chief influence in the North of England; and even now Lord Egremont, a Percy, was at open war with the Earl of Salisbury in the neighbourhood of York. Of the leaders appearing on the side of Henry, Northumberland was a Percy, and therefore enemy of the Nevilles; Somerset was a Beaufort, and of the Lancastrian house; Pembroke and Richmond were the King’s half-brothers; Clifford was one of the great lords of the North, and an opponent of the Nevilles; Wiltshire was James Butler of Ormond, of that family whose misgovernment York had been sent to cure. Of Buckingham and the Staffords, whose mother was a Plantagenet, it may be supposed that in the family quarrel they preferred the reigning house.

This seems to lead to the conclusion that in the main the war was a fight of faction, a tissue of hereditary family rivalries resting upon merely personal grounds. But beyond these there were geographical and political reasons which had their influence on the bulk of the nation. The demand for reform of government, the support given to the national prejudice in favour of continued war, and the opposition to the strong Church views of the Government, had rendered the party of York distinctly the popular one. The North of England was always more subject than the South to baronial influence. It was in the South therefore, in Kent, and in the trading cities, that the strength of the Yorkist party chiefly lay. To this of course must be added the very large estates held by York himself, as the heir of the Mortimers in the West; and the vast property of the various branches of the Nevilles. On the other hand, the Lancastrian party was that of the lower nobility, and of the Church, and found its strength in the baronial North. Politically, to speak broadly, it was the party of the Conservative gentry and the High Church, pitted against the party of reform of Church and State headed by a few great nobles; geographically, it was the North withstanding the attacks of the South.

York’s second brief Protectorate. 1456.

With the Nevilles he retires from Court.

Hollow reconciliation of parties. 1458.

One effect of the battle of St. Albans was, that the King again sank into lethargy. Again, for a brief space, was the power of York irresistible; he was appointed by the Lords to his old position of Protector. He was still careful not to speak of his claim to the crown, and accepted the Protectorate only as the gift of both Houses of Parliament. Again, however, the King suddenly recovered. In February, York was removed from his protectorate, and the Queen and Somerset were again ruling. The following year, a great meeting of the Council was held at Coventry, where York and his friends were again compelled to renew their fealty. But the loss of life at St. Albans had rendered the party feud much more violent, and York was induced to believe that the Queen had aims against his life. He and his friends at once separated; York to his western castle of Wigmore, Salisbury to Middleham in Yorkshire, Warwick to Calais, of which town he was the governor. Whatever influence the King had seems to have been directed to produce reconciliation. For this purpose he induced, in January, the rival chiefs to meet in London. The peace of the town was intrusted to the citizens, and a solemn reconciliation brought about, based upon money payments to be made by the Yorkists to the sufferers at St. Albans. Meanwhile, Warwick, a lawless and independent person, was living as a sort of authorized pirate at Calais. He attacked a fleet of ships, as he believed Spanish; they afterwards proved to be Hanseatic vessels. He was consequently summoned to Court to explain his conduct. There a quarrel arose between his servants and those of the King, and at once the ephemeral reconciliation was destroyed.