Goodwin - Fatal colours : the battle of Towton, 1461 ; [Englands most brutal battle]

FATAL COLOURS

THE BATTLE OF TOWTON

1461

George Goodwin

For Frances, Cecily and Arthur

CONTENTS

David Starkey

This is a book about a battle. But it is also a book about kingship or rather, as the King in question was Henry VI, its very present absence.

To be short the prince is the life, the head and the authority of all things that be done in the realm of England. And to no prince is done more honour and reverence than to the King and Queen of England;no man speaketh to the prince nor serveth at table but in adoration and kneeling; all persons of the realm be bareheaded before him; insomuch as in the chamber of presence where the cloth of estate is set, no man dare walk, yea though the prince be not there, no man dare tarry there but bareheaded.

Sir Thomas Smith wrote these words of his own sovereign, that most kingly of queens, Elizabeth I. But they apply equally to all her predecessors, including that least kingly of kings, Henry VI. His court, contrary to what most historians have supposed, was magnificent. The rituals of his chapel royal were held up for emulation in Portugal. His badge was worn with pride in Italy. And at home, for almost forty years, he was treated with all the solemn, quasi-religious respect and ceremony that Smith describes.

Now contemporaries were not fools and most of them were as well able to gauge Henry VIs inadequacies as we are. But they were able to discount them because of a difference between their thought patterns and ours. Nowadays we distinguish between the office (abstract) and the incumbent (person). They thought instead of two different royal persons or kings: there was the actual King (the rex nunc or King for the time being, as the records of the Exchequer, the principal department of finance, put it with wonderful coolness) and there was the permanent King. The latter never died, as the heralds cry at a royal death made clear: the King is dead;long live the King! And he embodied the essence of kingship. But he was absorbed in whoever was rex nunc .

Moreover, this other King was not only eternal, he was also ubiquitous. The actual King, like other human beings, could only be in one place at a time. He was at Westminster. Or Woodstock. Or Windsor. Or even God forbid in prison. But his alter ego had no such limitations. He could, at one and the same time, be in every law court and every county. His person travelled with his seal and his most potent symbol as Smith makes clear was an empty throne.

In short, this King was a royal god. And, like God himself, he was self-created. For these emanations of royal power were the creation of a long line of earlier kings. They went back to the Conquest and beyond. And the best of what they built survived. The French have a word for it: acquis . That is, a power which is accumulated and added to and hardly ever diminished. Such was the nature of English government.

Oldest, most important and the foundation of everything else was the unity of England. This was the achievement of the Anglo-Saxon kings of Wessex: Aethelstan, the great Alfreds grandson, who was the first king to rule over all England, and Edgar, whose imperial consecration at Bath some fifty years later in 973 set a precedent of magnificence and liturgical coherence whose effects were still felt six centuries later in the two coronations of Henry VI.

This hard-won unity was built on natural advantages. England was comparatively small;as the larger part of an island it had clear natural frontiers and its stock was relatively homogenous. But royal initiative was more important still. The key was the characteristic unit of local government: the shire (in Anglo-Saxon) or county (in French). These were established first in Wessex and then spread, with the power of Wessex, over the whole country. The shire had a double face: it was both an area of royal administration, headed by a powerful royal official, the ealdorman , and a unit of local self-government. But what it was not was just as important. The ealdorman , who became known as the earl under the Danish occupation of Canute, might be the predominant landowner in the shire. But he did not own it outright. This meant that the shires did not become semi-independent territorial principalities, as in France or, still more, in Germany.

There were still important regional differences of course: between North and South and the Celtic west and the rest. These differences emerge very clearly in the composition of the rival armies at Towton: the Lancastrian troops came largely from the North; the Yorkist, from the South and Wales. Moreover, Yorkist propaganda went out of its way to play on the fear of the Northern men as the other. It painted them as violent predators, intent on destroying the peace and prosperity of the South. And it worked. It led, it is argued, to the extraordinary savagery of the battle, in which the defeated and defenceless Northerners were treated as an alien horde and slaughtered in droves. And it left a legacy, in the problem of the North, which is still with us today.

But, for all the differences and demonization, North and South did not go their own ways. Instead, Towton, too, was a back-handed compliment to the unity of England, in which the parts struggled, not for separation, but for control of the whole kingdom.

The unity, as well as the wealth, of Anglo-Saxon England had made it very appealing to would-be conquerors; it also made it vulnerable to conquest. This is shown most strikingly in the aftermath of William, Duke of Normandys victory at Hastings. At that point, England was not conquered. But the death of King Harold II in the battle had decapitated royal government. Thereafter, without royal leadership, Anglo-Saxon resistance collapsed and delivered England to William with scarcely a fight.

Thanks to the brevity of the struggle, England was also delivered as a going concern. William was determined to keep it that way and to keep it different from Normandy. His Norman followers were, of course, rewarded with vast estates confiscated from the dispossessed Anglo-Saxon aristocracy. But he made sure that the estates were widely scattered to avoid the sort of regional satrapies which bedevilled French and Norman politics.

His sons and successors went much further and in the course of the twelfth century built a royal administration of unusual reach and ambition. It had two main departments. The Exchequer was the ministry of finance. Twice a year, the sheriffs, the new royal administrators of each county, were summoned to Westminster to have their accounts audited at the Exchequer board or table. The table was covered with the chequered cloth that gave it its name and turned it into a giant calculating machine. The machine and hence the Exchequer itself was accurate to the last penny and fractions of a penny, and it was inescapable.

The other principal department was the Chancery or secretariat. This issued royal instructions known as writs. They were written on slips of parchment and authenticated by a wax impression of the Kings massive, double-sided seal. One side showed him mounted and armed as warrior-defender of his people; the other crowned and enthroned as their judge. And it was royal justice which was the particular concern of the Conquerors great-grandson, Henry II. He created both a machinery of royal justice and a system of law, known as Common Law, which brought the Kings justice to all his subjects, whoever and wherever they were. It was a two-way traffic. Judges on tour took the Kings law to the localities; writs, bearing the Kings image, summoned his subjects to his law courts in Westminster.

Anglo-Saxon England was an usually unified state;the bureaucratic and legal reforms of the Anglo-Norman kings also turned it into one of the most densely and effectively administered as well. But kings did not have it all their own way. Starting with the Conqueror himself at his fateful coronation on Christmas Day 1066, each king was first acclaimed by the people in token of their consent to his rule. Next he swore to respect the laws of Edward the Confessor, the last king of Anglo-Saxon England. Then, and only then, was he anointed, crowned and invested with the rest of the regalia.

Next page