Signs and portents of civil unrest, according to the native chroniclers, darkened the air of the mid-fifteenth century. A rain of blood fell in different regions, and the holy waters of healing wells overflowed. A huge cock was observed in the waters off Weymouth, ‘coming out of the sea, having a great crest upon his head and a great red beard and legs half a yard [45 centimetres] long’. Many people heard a strange voice rising in the air, between Leicester and Banbury, calling out ‘Bows! Bows!’ A woman in the county of Huntingdon ‘felt the embryo in her womb weeping as it were, and uttering a kind of sobbing noise’ as if it dreaded being born into a time of calamity.
The houses of York and Lancaster were in fact two sides of the same ruling family. The house of Lancaster was descended from the fourth son of Edward III, John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster; the house of York was descended from the fifth son of the same king, Edmund, duke of York, whose youngest son had married the great-granddaughter of the third son. They are sometimes described as the third and fourth sons respectively, but this omits one male child who lived for six months. Their closeness, however, bred only enmity and ferocity. Blue blood was often bad blood. It was like a fight breaking out among a small assembly; slowly it spreads, bringing in more and more people. But there is still a vast crowd standing outside the arena of combat, watching silently and incuriously or going about their familiar business.
York and his followers retired to their estates after the recovery of the king from mental incapacity and the return of Somerset to power, but in the spring of 1455 they were summoned to attend a great council at Leicester. York feared that this would be the occasion for his arrest or arraignment, and so he forestalled events by gathering his supporters and marching down towards London. He was joined by the representatives of one of the great families of northern England; York’s brother-in-law was Richard Neville, the earl of Salisbury, and the earl’s son was another Richard Neville, the earl of Warwick. Their inveterate enemies in the north, the family of the Percys, had taken the side of Somerset. So local enmities exacerbated the general conflict. Salisbury and Warwick, who came to be known as ‘Warwick the kingmaker’, proclaimed that they had taken up arms to remove ‘our enemies of approved experience, such as abide and keep themselves under the wing of your Majesty Royal’.
They had at all costs to maintain the fiction that they were not marching against the king but against the king’s councillors; otherwise they would have incurred the charge of high treason. Nevertheless York’s army now faced the king’s army in open battle at St Albans. There had been some attempt at preliminary negotiations, but York feared that Henry was wholly in Somerset’s control and was therefore not to be trusted. So his forces entered the town at ten o’clock in the morning on 22 May 1455, and began a series of rapid raids in its main street and public spaces. They were looking for their enemies. Somerset and Henry Percy, the earl of Northumberland, had been marked for slaughter. They were tracked down and killed on the spot in a notable if not unique act of savagery. The king himself was wounded in the neck, as he sat beneath his banner in the market square, but he was not seriously injured. Sixty men were killed in the fighting, which lasted for only a couple of hours.
Once their victory was assured, York and the Nevilles submitted to the king. It was reported that they ‘besought him of his Highness to take them as his true liegemen, saying that they never intended to hurt his person’. Henry then ‘took them to grace, and so desired them to cease their people, and that there should no more harm be done’. York then escorted the king back to London, if escort is the appropriate word for an armed entourage, and four days later presented Henry with his crown in St Paul’s Cathedral. It might legitimately have been asked who was in charge. A friend wrote to John Paston, on that day, ‘as for what rule we shall have, yet I know never’. The king’s forces had been defied, and the king himself wounded; the order of the world had been turned upside down, and the governance of the realm placed in utmost peril. Yet who could have known or guessed that the combat of St Albans was the prelude to an internecine war that would continue for thirty years, provoke seven or eight major battles on English soil, and lead to the killing of some eighty nobles of royal blood? It has all the ingredients of a revenge tragedy. ‘By God’s blood,’ one Lancastrian noble screamed at the son of York on a later battlefield, ‘your father killed mine, and so will I do to you and to all your kin!’ We might be back in the days of the Anglo-Saxons, as if the years between had been a dream.
