A modern note is struck as we drive out of the town past the racecourse, and find to our pleasure that the splendid road is "treated" with some preparation that makes it absolutely dustless. This is the road by which the Stewart Kings approached York with so much show and colour, and by which their supporters marched away, defeated, but with honours of war. Like them, we are going to Tadcaster. The middle of the bridge that spans the Wharfe at Tadcaster is the boundary between the West Riding and the Ainsty, or County of York City; and this is why it was the spot where the sheriffs welcomed the Kings of England when they came to York. It was not on this actual bridge, however, that Charles was met by the citizens; for this one was made from the ruins of the castle early in the eighteenth century. Both castle and bridge, it would seem, were useless by the time they had passed from hand to hand in the Civil War. Tadcaster was an important place then, an outpost of York; even as its predecessor, Calcaria, had been an outpost to Eboracum.
A couple of miles beyond Tadcaster we pass through the village of Towton. It was near here, in the fields that lie between the main road and the river Cock, that the White Rose overcame the Red after ten hours of "deadly battle and bloody conflict." It was on the night before the actual battle that Lord Clifford and his company "were attrapped or they were ware," and Clifford, having taken off his gorget for some reason, was killed by an arrow "stricken into the throat." "This end had he," says the chronicler, "which slew the young Earl of Rutland kneeling upon his knees." If we leave the high-road for a few minutes, turning to the right beyond Towton, we shall be crossing the actual battlefield, the ground that was such a horrible medley of snow and blood on that Palm Sunday when "both the hosts approached in a plain field," the ground in which the Yorkists stuck the spent arrows of the Lancastrians, "which sore annoyed the legs of the owners when the battle joined." The falling snow, too, "somewhat blemished and minished" their sight, and the end of it was that King Henry's men turned and fled towards Tadcaster. We cannot see "the little broke called Cocke" from this spot, but there on the right is the depression in the fields through which it runs. So many men were "drent and drowned" that day in the Cock that their comrades, it is said, crossed the stream on their dead bodies, and even the river Wharfe was red with blood. From this scene of slaughter, which "did sore debilitate and much weaken the puysance of this realme," Edward IV. rode into York as its master.
At Saxton we turn to the left and rejoin the high-road to Pontefract, and after some miles of good going but cheerless scenery we cross the Aire at Ferrybridge. It was this crossing of the Aire at Ferrybridge that caused the death of Clifford the Butcher on the eve of Towton; for he, "being in lusty youth and of frank courage," attempted to prevent Edward of York from passing the river, and so was himself cut off from the Lancastrian army. He did actually secure the bridge. Lord Fitzwalter was keeping the passage for Edward "with a great number of tall personages," but Clifford and his light-horse stole up to this spot early in the morning "or his enemies were ware, gat the bridge, and slew the keepers of the same." This was the beginning of the carnage of Towton. Lord Fitzwalter, hearing the racket, rose from his bed and hurried, poleaxe in hand, to join in the fray, but "before he knew what the matter meant" he was killed. A few hours later Clifford, too, was dead.
For the last few minutes we have been travelling on the road that holds, perhaps, for road-lovers, more glamour in its name than any other—the Great North Road. We have no time to think of the romance of it, of the millions who have trodden its dust, of the gay-hearted vagabonds or anxious kings who have passed this way, for we turn from it too soon and take the road to Pontefract.
I do not know if it was on this identical road between Ferrybridge and Pontefract that Edward IV. and Warwick rode out to the field of Towton; it was in any case on a very different surface. The town of Pontefract itself is strangely unimposing for a place of such great renown; the houses are unpicturesque, the surrounding country dull. Yet Camden says it is sweetly situated, and is remarkable for producing liquorice. There are other things for which Pontefract has been remarkable in its day; but as we mount the slope into the long, straggling town there is little to show that it has ever been concerned with affairs of more vital importance than liquorice. There is, it is true, a fine church greatly ruined on our right, which has the air of having lived through a good deal. It was battered to pieces in the course of three sieges, and the transept only has been rebuilt. The strange Perpendicular tower, of which the lower part is square and the upper octagonal, seems oddly enough to have suffered less than the body of the building, for it has been very little restored. This church of All Saints was connected with a religious house whose brethren served the castle chapel; but it was not the abbey that Camden "industriously omits" from his description of Pontefract, because even in his day there was hardly a sign of it left. In his day the walls of this forlorn nave were still unbroken, and rising high above it on the hill were all the towers of the castle, a splendid cluster, with the great Norman wall encircling them, and the Round Tower of Ilbert de Lacy tallest of all. Of this "high and stately, famous and princely impregnable castle and citadel," as it was called only a few years before the Civil War, there is deplorably little for us to see. Hardly one stone was left upon another by General Lambert. The débris were heaped over the foundations, soil was spread over all, and the sinister fortress whose walls had echoed the sighs of royal prisoners and the last groan of a king, the "guilty closure" that was drenched with blood and tears, was devoted to the rearing of silkworms and other such innocent uses. During the last century, however, a good deal was excavated, and we may without great difficulty find out the scene of much that has happened here.
NORMAN DOORWAY IN PONTEFRACT CASTLE.
"Oh, Pomfret! Pomfret! O thou bloody prison,
Fatal and ominous to noble peers!"