At home the discontent over the national disgrace was profound. The people of course cast about to find a scapegoat, and after one or two changes finally fixed upon the blameless and unfortunate Henry the Sixth. Want of a strong central government was undoubtedly the disease from which England had suffered ever since the death of King Henry the Fifth, but for this the nation itself was principally responsible. It had chosen for its rulers the House of Lancaster because Henry of Bolingbroke had agreed to accept constitutional checks on the royal power before the country was ripe for self-government. It had thrown off the yoke of discipline which alone could enable it to tug the heavy load of English weal and English honour, and it paid the inevitable penalty. Numbers of republics have made the same mistake during the present century and have suffered or are suffering the same punishment. There is no surer sign of an undisciplined nation than civil war.
In the England of the fifteenth century the disease had been deeply aggravated by the interminable campaigns in France. All classes at home, from the highest to the lowest, were equally selfish and apathetic in respect of the national good: internal order was at an end, and riots and outrages which amounted to private war continued unceasingly and remained unrepressed. The system of indentures between king and subject for the supply of troops had been extended from subject to retainer and, as has been well said, the clause "for the King's service" could easily be dropped out of the contract.[37] The red cross of St. George never appears in the English battlefields; red rose and white were indeed the emblems of contending factions, but we hear far more of the badges of great families, the ragged staff, the cresset and the like, and of the liveries, which, though forbidden by statute to any but the king, were conspicuous all through the Civil War. The loss of France furnished but too much material to the hands of violence and strife. England was full of unemployed soldiers, who had been trained in the undisciplined school of French faction to treachery and plunder and all that is lowest and most inhuman in war. Hundreds of men who had held comfortable posts in French garrisons, and had turned them to purposes of brigandage, were cast adrift upon England, barbarised, brutalised, demoralised, to recoup themselves in their own country. After the peace of Brétigny the disbanded soldiery had made France their chamber and swept down thence upon Italy; the like men[38] were now to be let loose upon England, and France was to be well avenged of her old enemy. Worst of all, the leaders of factions, in the madness of their animosity, were not ashamed to import foreign troops and set them at each other's throats.
1460.
1461.
I shall not dwell upon this miserable and disastrous period, marking as it does the wreck of our ancient military greatness. Such few military points as present themselves in the scanty chronicles of this time must be noted, and no more. Of the principal figures one only is to be remarked. Warwick the "King-maker" must be passed over as rather a statesman than a soldier; Margaret of Anjou—the pestilent, indomitable woman—must be remembered only for her importation of mercenaries; Edward the Fourth, full of the military genius of the Plantagenets, alone is deserving of lengthier mention. There was not an action at which he was present wherein he did not make that presence felt. It was he who at Northampton turned his treacherous admission to the left of the Lancastrian position to instant and decisive account. It was he who in the following year, still only a boy of twenty, crushed Owen Tudor at Mortimer's Cross; it was he who held supreme command at that more terrible Marston Moor of the fifteenth century, the battle of Towton.
March 28.
This action has a peculiar interest as an example of English tactics and tenacity turned upon themselves. The Lancastrians, sixty thousand strong, were formed up on a plateau eight miles to the north of Ferrybridge, facing south-their right resting on a brook, called the Cock, their left on the Great North Road. It was a strong position, but too much cramped for their numbers, having a front of less than a mile in extent. They were probably drawn up according to the old fashion in three lines of great depth. The Yorkists numbered but five-and-thirty thousand, but they were expecting an additional thirteen thousand under the Duke of Norfolk, which, advancing from Ferrybridge, would come up on their own right and against the left flank of the enemy. Edward appears to have remedied his numerical inferiority after the pattern of his great ancestor at Creçy by forming his army in echelon of three lines, refusing his right. The foremost or left line of the echelon was commanded by Lord Falconbridge, the second by Warwick, and the third by Edward in person. The Yorkists advancing northward to the attack had just caught sight of the enemy on a height beyond a slight dip in the ground called Towton Dale, when there came on a blinding snowstorm, which so effectually veiled both armies that it was only by their shouts that they could know each other's position. Falconbridge with great readiness seized the moment to push forward his archers to the edge of the plateau, whence he bade them shoot flight-arrows, specially adapted to fly over a long range, into the Lancastrian columns. This done he quickly withdrew his men. The Lancastrians thereupon poured in a tremendous shower of fighting arrows, all of which fell short of their supposed mark, and maintained it till their sheaves were well-nigh exhausted. Then Falconbridge again advanced and began to shoot in earnest; his men had not only their own stock of shafts but also those discharged by the enemy. The rain of missiles was too much for the Lancastrians: they broke from their position on the height and poured down across the dip to drive the Yorkists from the slope above it. Then the action became general and the whole line was soon hotly engaged.
What followed for the next few hours in the driving snow no one has told us, or, it is probable, could ever have told us. All that is certain is that the Lancastrians, though occasionally they could force the Yorkists back for a space, could never gain any permanent advantage, a fact that points to extremely judicious handling of the refused division by Edward. From five in the morning until noon the combat raged with unabated fury, and the pile of the dead rose so high that the living could hardly come to close quarters. At length at noon the Duke of Norfolk's column, timely as Blücher's, appeared in the Great North Road on the left flank of the Lancastrians, and began to roll them back from their position and from the line of their retreat. Slowly and sullenly the Lancastrians gave way; there was probably little attempt to alter their disposition to meet the attack in their flank; but for three long hours more they fought, disputing every inch of ground, till at last they were forced back from it upon the swollen waters of the Cock. Then the rout and the slaughter became general; thousands were drowned in the brook; and the pursuit, wherein we again see the hand of Edward, was carried to the very gates of York. Thirty-five thousand Lancastrians and eight thousand Yorkists perished in the fight, an appalling slaughter for so miserable a cause. But this was a contest not merely of faction against faction, but of North against South; and the North never spoke disrespectfully of the South again. This perhaps was the principal result of what must be reckoned the most terrible battle ever fought by the English.
1471,
April 14.
The decisive battle of Barnet furnishes a still more brilliant instance of Edward's skill, and of his quickness to seize the vital point in a campaign. All turned upon his forcing his enemies to action before they could gather their full strength about them. Edward marched his men up to Warwick's position actually after dusk had fallen, a rare accomplishment in those days, and drew up his men as best he could in the dark. When day broke with dense fog he discovered that his army far out-flanked Warwick's left, and was as far out-flanked by Warwick's on his own left. The result seems to have been that the two armies edged continually round each other until their respective positions were reversed,[39] for some of Warwick's cavalry, coming back from the pursuit of Edward's left, found itself on its return not, as it supposed, in rear of Edward's army, but of its own. The cry of treason, always common in the Wars of the Roses, was quickly raised, and in the general confusion the battle was lost to Warwick. None the less the victory was due to Edward's promptness; and indeed the rapidity alike of his decisions and of his marches stamp him as a soldier of no ordinary talent, and as in many respects far in advance of his time.
1487.