If some elements of the funeral of Her late Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II, might seem arcane to the modern observer, it is worth reflecting on the extent to which they followed time-honoured tradition. This is all the more apparent by comparison of the ceremonial of September 2022 with the funeral of the first English King to be buried at Windsor, King Edward IV, in 1483.

In the mid-1470s Edward had decided to be buried not at Westminster, like most of the earlier Plantagenet Kings, or at Fotheringhay, the collegiate chapel to which in 1476 he would move the body of his father, Richard, duke of York, but in the splendid new chapel of St. George that he began to construct in the lower ward of Windsor castle in 1475. Yet, Edward died suddenly at the age of only 41, and neither his tomb, nor the chapel in which it was to be situated had been completed when he came to be buried. The King had arranged for a chantry chapel to be constructed at the east end of the chapel’s north aisle, overlooking the choir, and it is thought that a tomb carrying a magnificent golden effigy was to be placed at the upper level of this chantry. In the event, this arrangement was never completed, and both the King and his consort, queen Elizabeth Wydeville, were buried in a vault below the chapel floor, the spot marked by a plain stone tomb, the occupant’s status indicated by his heraldic achievements – his sword, surcoat and helmet – displayed above it.

Edward had returned to Westminster from Windsor in the final days of March 1483, and it was there that he suddenly fell ill. The ailment was serious enough for the King to add codicils to his will and to put his affairs in order in other ways. On Wednesday 9 April, he died. The new King, Edward V, had his own household based in Wales, and the King’s only surviving brother and nearest adult male relative, Richard, duke of Gloucester, was in the north: it is not clear whether attempts were made to recall them to Westminster when the seriousness of the monarch’s condition became apparent, but by convention the young Edward could in any event have played no part in the ceremonies surrounding his predecessor’s funeral.  

It thus fell to the King’s household and councillors to make arrangements for the monarch’s burial. This was a more strenuous task than might be supposed: England had not witnessed a full royal funeral since that of Henry V in 1422, some 60 years earlier. Following his death in the Tower of London in May 1471, Henry VI had been buried quietly at Chertsey abbey, and the funerals of two of Edward IV’s infant children in 1479 and 1482 had been small-scale affairs compared to the ceremonies that a reigning monarch’s demise called for.

In the first instance, however, interested parties had to be notified. By contrast with the altogether more suspicious Tudor monarchs, whose deaths were sometimes covered up for several days at a time, news that Edward was dead was circulated swiftly: just hours after the King’s demise, two peers, Lords Audley and Berkeley, were dispatched to the city of London to inform the mayor and aldermen. Meanwhile, at Westminster, the King was laid out so that his household and senior nobles and ecclesiastics might pay their last respects. By convention, the King’s body was covered only with a cloth from the navel to the knees, so that all might see that the body showed no evidence of violence. This public viewing lasted for about 12 hours, before the body was taken to be prepared for burial by being embalmed, wrapped in cloth, and finally encased in lead.

There then followed a period akin to the modern lying in state, as the body in its coffin was placed in the palace of Westminster’s St. Stephen’s chapel. It lay within a hearse, a term which at that time denoted an elaborate wooden construction laden with torches and candles and big enough for the principal mourners to enter and pray in with a degree of visual protection from lesser visitors. Here, the King’s body remained for a period of eight days during which daily masses and prayers were sung, while the members of the royal household, all clad in black, kept a permanent watch, and the chapel royal nightly sang the entire psalter.

On Wednesday, 17 April, the King began his final journey to Windsor. In the morning, Edward’s coffin was conveyed the short distance to Westminster abbey for the funeral service. It was carried by the knights and esquires of the household, and four of the senior knights carried over it a canopy. The coffin was accompanied by all available secular lords and senior ecclesiastics, the King’s eldest nephew, John, earl of Lincoln, taking the place of the chief mourner. While the mourners were soberly clad in black, with hoods obscuring their faces, the procession was a riot of colour, surrounding the monarch’s coffin with a forest of armorial and religious banners. In the abbey, the coffin was once more placed to rest in a hearse, and on a bier above the coffin was placed a funeral effigy, a likeness of the King, dressed in his surcoat and mantle, a crown placed on its head, and a sceptre and an orb in its hands.

At the time of Edward’s death, the archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Bourgchier, was too old to conduct the strenuous ceremonies, so it was the archbishop of York, Thomas Rotherham, chancellor of England, who took the lead in the funeral service. Once the service had ended, the coffin with its effigy was placed in a chariot covered in black velvet and drawn by six horses likewise draped in black. Accompanied by the noble and ecclesiastical mourners, the procession made its way to Charing Cross, and from there via Brentford to Syon abbey. Here, the coffin spent the night before setting out on the final leg of the journey on Thursday 18 April.

Then as now, the passing of a royal funeral cortege created much interest in the towns and villages it touched and local people and local clergy could be expected to form processions of their own and meet it. When passing a township, the knights and esquires of the household led the horses of the chariots to prevent them from bolting. Edward’s procession thus slowly made its way through Middlesex and Buckinghamshire until it reached Eton. Here, it was met by the members of the College of St. George who accompanied it across the bridge and up to the royal castle. The building work at St George’s was as yet incomplete, but the choir stalls were in place, and further black drapery probably hid how much was missing. Before the high altar a ‘mervelus well wrought herse’ had been constructed, its gilding and heraldry contrasting with the black of the surrounding building. In this, the coffin and effigy were now placed, and as the members of the college of St. George sang a further psalter for the dead King, a selection of lords, knights and royal household servants settled down to keep a further night’s watch for their dead master.

On the morning of Friday, 19 April, the final commendation of the body began with the offering of the King’s knightly achievements, his armorial surcoat, shield, sword and helmet at the high altar. At this point, there was a disturbance, as two of the lords present, Thomas, Lord Maltravers, son and heir of the earl of Arundel, and William, Viscount Berkeley, who should have received and held the King’s shield, disagreed over which of them should be allowed to stand and process in the position of honour on the right, and began to jostle for precedence. Once the other lords had put an end to this unseemly display, Sir William Parr rode in the King’s horse which, like the other items, was handed over to the canons of St. George’s.

By this stage, it was not merely the lords who were jostling. The chapel was crowded, and one of the observers noted that his view of the final stages of the ceremony was limited ‘by cause the prese of the people was soo great’. Eventually, the King’s coffin was lowered down to its permanent resting place, and the officers of the late King’s household threw their staves of office into the open grave. The reign of Edward IV was at an end.

While the king’s planned tomb and effigy were never made, an elevated tomb of touchstone was placed over the vault containing the King’s coffin (in which it would nine years later be joined by that of his queen), and shielded from the north aisle by a set of magnificent wrought-iron gates now moved to face the choir. Above the tomb were displayed for more than 150 years the King’s magnificent armorial achievements, until they were stolen by parliamentary soldiers in 1642.

Edward IV’s plan to establish a mausoleum for the Kings of England was nevertheless to bear fruit many centuries later. Although in the centuries that followed Edward’s death and the completion of the chapel it could only on occasion claim the body of a sovereign, George III returned there after death, and with the exception of Queen Victoria (laid to rest in a separate mausoleum constructed for her and her consort, Prince Albert, in the grounds of nearby Frogmore) all subsequent British monarchs bar Edward VIII (buried at Frogmore) lie in the chapel.

H.W.K.

Source: A.F. Sutton, and Livia Visser-Fuchs, with R.A. Griffiths, The Royal Funerals of the House of York at Windsor (London, 2005).

By modern convention, the death of a sovereign and the accession of their successor do not bring a parliament to an end. Rather, Parliament meets as soon as practicable after the event, and Members and peers take the oath of allegiance to the new monarch. This was not always so. In the case of the Parliaments of medieval England, the death or deposition of a King put an end to any Parliament summoned in his name. Thus, the proclamation of Edward IV as King on 4 March 1461 was deemed to have ended the Parliament summoned in Henry VI’s name in the previous autumn, and the same was true of the Readeption parliament of 1470-1. In both instances, many Members of the assemblies had in any event dispersed long before their formal or legal ending.

It was more unusual for a King to die while Parliament was in session, but this did happen when Henry IV died in March 1413. Writs had been issued on 1 December 1412 for a Parliament that was to meet at Westminster on 3 February 1413. Although the King suffered repeated bouts of illness and had to delegate much of the ceremonial surrounding the opening to the Chancellor, Archbishop Arundel, he did eventually appear in public and pledge a crusade. To this end, the Commons agreed a grant of taxation, and other business, including the framing of an ordinance concerning the manufacture of cloth, was also transacted.

Yet, the Parliament was never brought to a formal close, but rather was unceremoniously deemed to have come to an end with the King’s death on 20 March. None of the formalities normally associated with a dissolution, such as the issue of writs de expensis (ordering the payment of wages to the Members of the Commons) were observed, and in the absence of the royal assent none of the Parliament’s measures were regarded as acts. As a result, no Parliament roll was compiled, and the records of the assembly were discarded.

The new King, Henry V, lost little time in summoning a new Parliament, and in this assembly, which met at Westminster on 3 May the Commons complained bitterly of the expenditure that their predecessors had incurred during the time of the earlier, abortive, gathering. Henry V equivocated. He ordered that the records be searched for any precedents, but rather than promising to follow these, he merely agreed that on their basis he would do what seemed best to him.      

H.W.K.

Further reading:

C. Given-Wilson, Henry IV (New Haven and London, 2016), pp. 515-16.

‘A Draft of the Protestation of the Speaker’, in Parliamentary Texts of the Later Middle Ages ed. N. Pronay and J. Taylor (Oxford, 1980), pp. 197-201 (here ascribed to 1504, but in reality probably dating from the Parliament of Feb. 1413)

The History of Parliament joins the nation and the world in mourning Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, and in gratitude for her remarkable lifetime of service.

The story of the rise of the English Parliament is inextricably interwoven with the Crown’s acceptance in the 13th century that it should not in ordinary circumstances tax its subjects without the prior assent of the community of the realm. Hand in hand with this went an understanding that the King could only make such demands on its subjects on particular grounds. By the later Middle Ages it was accepted that taxation voted by Parliament should be applied to the defence of the realm, although it was understood that this included the King’s possessions on the European mainland.

Grants of taxation nevertheless remained controversial:

I pray God send you the Holy Ghost among you in the parliament house, and rather the devil, we say, than you should grant any more taxes!

John Paston wrote to his brother, Sir John, then a Member of Parliament, in March 1473 (Paston Letters and Papers ed. Davis, i. 361)

This was particularly the case when the war was going badly. In the aftermath of Henry V’s great victory at Agincourt in 1415 the Commons readily acquiesced to a string of taxes to fund fresh expeditions to France. Yet, just a few years later, as England’s French territory was lost piecemeal in the reign of Henry VI, the Commons increasingly pushed back. Wherever possible, they looked for taxes to be levied in the form of customs duties on imports and exports, or on any foreigners living in England. As for direct taxation, the Commons sent Henry VI’s finances into a tailspin by authorising repeated rounds of government borrowing, while delegating the task of agreeing the taxation by which these loans might be repaid to their successors in future Parliaments.

The memory of ever fresh taxes being poured into an apparent black hole as Henry VI’s French territory crumbled away was still fresh when Edward IV replaced him on the throne in March 1461, and the Commons in the Parliament that met at Westminster in November of the same year were no doubt relieved not to be asked for money in support of the new King’s ongoing fight against residual Lancastrian resistance to his rule. Just two years later, however, King Edward could point to the threat of a Scottish invasion in support of the restoration of Henry VI to request a grant of money from Parliament. In June 1463 the Commons agreed, on condition that the tax was to be used for the defence of the realm and for no other purpose. The bulk of the money was to be levied on the basis of a long-established assessment that determined how much every locality in England owed. A supplement, by contrast, was to be raised in the form of a special income tax on everybody who owned either lands returning annual revenues in excess of £1, or moveable goods worth more than £6 13s. 4d. More than half of the money was to be collected that same summer, and Parliament went into its summer recess on 17 June.

In the event, the projected Scottish campaign never took place, and the King instead used the money to pay the wages of the garrison of Calais, and to cover other routine expenditure. He clearly anticipated trouble, for when Parliament reassembled at York on 4 November, he sent the archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Bourgchier, to face the Lords and Commons, with instructions to prevent the assembly from any elaborate discussion by an immediate fresh prorogation until the following year.

The second half of the taxes granted earlier was to be collected about that same time, and the matter had clearly already been on the minds of the Commons, so they were ready for the King. Before the archbishop could send them packing, they found time to agree that their earlier grant of the income tax had been no grant at all, but merely an expression of intent. The chastened King had to agree to forego this special levy, as well as delaying the payment date of the remainder of the money from November to the following spring.   

Edward IV was not slow to learn his lesson. For the next four years, he did not approach Parliament for another grant of money, and when he eventually did so in May 1468, he took care to put the Commons in a good mood with plenty of blandishments and news of a royal wedding, that of the King’s sister Margaret to Charles the Bold, duke of Burgundy.

H.W.K.

Find more blogs from our Commons 1461-1504 project at the Commons in the Wars of the Roses page.

On Wednesday, 4 November 1461, Edward IV’s first Parliament opened at Westminster. It was an assembly designed to set a seal on the change of dynasty that had been foreshadowed in the accord reached in the previous Parliament a year earlier. As had previously been the case, and would be subsequently, there was a reluctance on the part of the King and the lords advising him to give Parliament too active a role in the making and unmaking of Kings. Edward’s accession in March 1461 had thus been affirmed by the acclamation of a specially convened assembly, even though Henry VI’s final Parliament had never been formally dissolved. Moreover, the new King claimed his right to seize the throne by virtue of Henry VI’s breach of the accord of 1460 in rejoining his consort and son after the battle of St. Albans in mid February.

Parliament had originally been summoned to meet in July, just weeks after the new King’s coronation. Yet, the need to root out residual Lancastrian resistance had seen Edward IV go on a progress through the southern parts of his kingdom to Bristol, where on 9 September he had personally overseen the execution of the rebel Sir Baldwin Fulford. He had then turned north and made his way to his childhood home at Ludlow castle, from where he had departed in dramatic circumstances two years earlier. Only at the very end of September did he gradually make his way back to the capital by way of Coventry, Warwick and Stony Stratford.

The King’s cousin, George Neville, bishop of Exeter, as chancellor of England, set the tone for the assembly with a sermon on Jeremiah 7.3: ‘Thus saith the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, “Amend your ways and your doings, and I will cause you to dwell in this place”.’ Once the formalities of the election and presentation of the Commons’ Speaker had been concluded, the Parliament settled down to its main, constitutional, business, probably beginning with a formal declaration of King Edward’s title. Then, the haggling started.

Part of the declaration of the new King’s title was a denial of the right to the Crown of the three Lancastrian monarchs, Henry IV, Henry V and Henry VI, and the consequent invalidation of their acts. So sweeping a measure obviously needed to be qualified, as did a wholesale resumption of all royal grants since 1399, and much of the time of Parliament was taken up by the consideration of individual claims for exemptions. Equally controversial proved the act of attainder which placed a number of supporters of the deposed dynasty outside the law, and handed their estates to the Crown. The discussions over this continued throughout the session, and only on 21 December did the Speaker deliver the final draft to the King.

Already, Edward IV showed an inclination to use Parliament as a clearing house for the settlement of property on his family, as he would do on a larger scale later in the reign. The settlement of dower fit for the mother of a King on the widowed Cecily, duchess of York aside, Parliament also sanctioned the transfer of Henry IV’s patrimony, the duchy of Lancaster, on Edward IV and his successors. In a similar vein, time was found to consider the petitions of a number of supporters of the new dynasty, including the Speaker, Sir James Strangways, a long-standing client of the King’s Neville kinsmen.

It may be a measure of the financial support that the merchants of the city of London had offered to the Yorkist cause that among the constitutional wrangling they gained time on the floor of Parliament to have a series of commercial measures considered, but in the event nothing was firmly decided before Parliament broke up for the Christmas festivities. The King himself was vocal in his assurances to the Lords and Commons that the pressing concerns which he knew moved them would be considered in a second session to be held in the following spring. Yet, by then the King had other fish to fry, and the assembly was dissolved after only a single day’s sitting.

If the Parliament of 1461 had been momentous in constitutional terms, it achieved little by way of other legislation and might well be given short shrift by historians, were it not for the survival of a copy of one of the earliest known journals of the House of Lords, the so-called ‘Fane Fragment’. Compiled by the clerk of the Parliaments, John Faukes, the fragment uniquely provides some details, however limited, of the Lords’ deliberations.

H W K

Further Reading:

The Fane Fragment of the 1461 Lords’ Journal ed. W.H. Dunham (New Haven, 1935).

Roger Virgoe, ‘A New Fragment of the Lords’ Journal of 1461’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, xxxii (1959), 83-87.

The Parliament Rolls of Medieval England ed. C. Given Wilson et al. (16 vols., Woodbridge, 2005), xiii. 2-82.

Lucy Brown, ‘Continuity and Change in the Parliamentary Justifications of the Fifteenth-Century Usurpations’, in The Fifteenth Century VII: Conflicts, Consequences and the Crown in the Late Middle Ages ed. L. Clark (Woodbridge, 2007), pp. 157-73.

Follow the work of our Commons 1461-1504 project at the Commons in the Wars of the Roses blog page.

When the late Duke of Edinburgh is laid to rest at Windsor on Saturday, 17 April 2021, he will become the latest in a long line of royalty buried in St. George’s chapel since its reconstruction by King Edward IV. When King Edward died in 1483 (on 9 April, like Prince Philip some 538 years later), the chapel remained unfinished. Nevertheless, the King was not the first member of his immediate family to be interred there. Already, two of the King’s children who had died in infancy had been buried at Windsor, Prince George in 1479 and Princess Mary in 1482.

The ceremonies surrounding the funeral of Edward IV extended, accompanied by the pageantry befitting a King, for ten days as the body was taken from Westminster to Windsor, and there eventually placed in its final resting place on 19 April. Edward had intended that his grave should be marked by a chantry chapel on the northern side of the choir of St. George’s, which was to include, probably at an upper level, a tomb complete with an effigy of the monarch. While the chantry was completed as planned, as a result of the political upheavals that followed the tomb chest and effigy were never put in their intended location. The King’s body itself was placed, as he had asked, in an underground vault covered by a black marble slab beneath Robert Tresilian’s splendid iron gates still in situ (albeit now moved to the sanctuary side of the arch).

Edward’s consort, Queen Elizabeth Wydeville, survived him by nine years, dying at Bermondsey Abbey on 8 June 1492. As the widow of a King she was entitled to the full trappings that her late husband had enjoyed, but her reduced circumstances and perhaps also her own pious preferences, dictated that her funeral should be a far more modest affair than Edward’s had been. In her will, Elizabeth had expressed the wish to be buried with her husband at Windsor, ‘without pompes entring or costlie expensis donne thereabought’.  

On the day after her death, the queen’s body was taken by boat up the Thames to Windsor, accompanied only by two clergymen (the prior of the Charterhouse at Sheen and her personal chaplain), a single distant cousin, and two female attendants. At Windsor it was carried through the little park to the castle, where it was received by only a single priest and a clerk, and buried immediately, at 11 o’clock at night, and with almost unseemly haste. More recently, it has been suggested that far from showing disrespect to the dead queen, the austere arrangements had been necessitated by Elizabeth’s death from an epidemic disease, which made it imperative that her body be disposed of with speed. 

Indeed, with the body safely out of the way in the same vault as Edward IV’s, the formal parts of the funeral service could proceed. On the following day (11 June), a hearse (a wooden structure designed to hold burning candles around a coffin or effigy) was constructed in the choir of St. George’s, and a day later (12 June) the principal mourners began to arrive. These included the dead queen’s three unmarried daughters, the Princesses Anne, Katherine and Bridget (her eldest daughter, Queen Elizabeth, Henry VII’s consort, was too heavily pregnant to attend), her daughter-in-law, Cecily, marchioness of Dorset, two nieces and a granddaughter. All of these ladies knelt around the hearse as a Dirige was sung.

On 13 June, a group of male relatives also arrived at Windsor. They were headed by Elizabeth Woodville’s eldest son, Thomas Grey, marquess of Dorset, and also included her son-in-law, John, Viscount Welles, and her nephew, Henry Bourgchier, earl of Essex, as well as Edmund de la Pole, the son of the recently deceased duke of Suffolk (Edward IV’s brother-in-law John de la Pole). On this day, a mass of requiem was celebrated and a further Dirige sung. The bishop of Rochester, Edmund Audley, presided, and two of the canons of Windsor read the lessons. In the masses that followed on 14 June, sung respectively by Canon John Vaughan and the dean of Windsor, William Morgan, the marquess of Dorset took the place of the chief mourner in place of the absent queen, but the ladies once more took the lead in the important ceremony of the offerings that followed the masses, the Princess Anne now taking the place of her sister the queen. As the body of the deceased had already been placed in its underground vault, an important part of the ceremony, the placing of lengths of cloth over the coffin had to be omitted, but some degree of colour and pageantry was added by the participation in the ceremonies on this day by the royal heralds, headed by Garter King of Arms, and the members of the college of St. George, the dean and canons, as well as the poor knights of the Garter, and members of the late queen’s household.

Nevertheless, to any knowledgeable observer the trimmed-back funeral arrangements contrasted sharply with the more elaborate ceremonial accorded to Edward IV and is children between 1479 and 1483, and to which Elizabeth Wydeville might also have been entitled in other circumstances.  

H.W.K.

Further reading:

A.F. Sutton and Livia Visser-Fuchs with R.A. Griffiths, The Royal Funerals of the House of York at Windsor (2005)

Euan C. Roger, ‘To Be Shut Up’: New Evidence for the Development of Quarantine Regulations in Early-Tudor England‘, Social History of Medicine, xxxiii (2020), 1077-96

Tim Tatton-Brown, ‘The Building of the New Chapel: the First Phase’, In St George’s Chapel, Windsor. History and Heritage ed. Nigel Saul and Tim Tatton-Brown (Wimborne Minster, 2010), 69-80..

The period between June 1469 and May 1471 witnessed a series of bewildering fluctuations in political fortunes and was, in the sound view of one modern commentator, ‘a period of political instability without parallel in English history since 1066’ (C.D. Ross, Edward IV, p. 126). The modern student of this confusing drama, of which the battle of Barnet was the penultimate act, might well sympathise with the exasperated remark of the Milanese ambassador at the French court. On 5 May 1471 he wrote to his master: ‘I wish [England and its people] were plunged deep in the sea … for I feel like one going to the torture when I write about them’.

The events that occasioned the unfortunate ambassador so much mental distress began in the summer of 1469 when Richard Neville, earl of Warwick’s alienation from Edward IV, the man he had done so much to make King, bore its first poisonous fruit. By means of orchestrated popular risings in the north, the earl compromised Edward’s authority and assumed control of government. His attempt to rule in Edward’s name, however, soon foundered, and in the following autumn Edward recovered power and, after a brief and hollow reconciliation, forced Warwick into exile in April 1470. Warwick responded by entering into an unlikely alliance with Queen Margaret, wife of the deposed Henry VI, and, in the autumn of 1470, catching Edward ill-prepared, his invasion led to the restoration of the hapless (and probably deranged) Henry. Edward found himself in exile in the Low Countries with the daunting task of recovering his throne.

As he planned for his return, Edward had one important advantage. The opponents ranged against him were an unnatural alliance of former enemies. Queen Margaret and Warwick had been brought together, in part at least, by the self-interested machinations of the French King, Louis XI; and the queen (and those Lancastrian lords who had remained loyal to her since 1461) had no reason to place trust in one of the main architects of her husband’s deposition. 

Thus, a notable feature of the campaign of the spring of 1471, was the failure of these new ‘allies’ to coordinate their resistance to Edward’s invasion. The Burgundian ambassador and chronicler, Philippe de Commynes, was quick to draw a moral from this: ‘how much ancient divisions survive, how much they are to be feared and how great are the losses they can cause’. Further, the division in the ranks of Edward’s opponents went beyond that between queen and earl. The earl had drawn the Edward’s brother, George, duke of Clarence into rebellion, marrying him to one of his two daughters and heiresses-presumptive, but their alliance was understandably fragile. Since the other daughter was married to the Lancastrian heir, the queen’s son, Edward, as part of the earl’s alliance with the queen, the duke had every reason to suppose he would become marginalised, or worse, under the new dispensation.

Yet, although the disunity of his opponents provided Edward with his opportunity, there were very considerable obstacles in the way of its realisation. He landed at Ravenspur on 14 March with only a relatively small force, perhaps as few as 1,200, and enjoyed little popular support. Indeed, he was only able to gain admittance to the city of York with the subterfuge that he had returned not to reclaim the Crown but only his dukedom of York. As the subsequent campaign showed, his victory depended on everything going right for him with no margin for miscalculation or misfortune.

At every turn his path was eased by the failure of enemies, actual or potential, to confront him. On his landing, the opposition of the dominant local lord, Henry Percy, earl of Northumberland, whose father had fallen in the Lancastrian ranks at the battle of Towton, might easily have derailed him, but the earl stood aside and Edward reaped the dividend of having restored him to the earldom a year before. Soon after, as he had advanced to Nottingham, a Lancastrian force of some 4,000 under John de Vere, earl of Oxford, a die-hard Lancastrian, was nearby at Newark, yet failed to give battle.

These failures allowed Edward to expand his forces unmolested as Yorkist loyalists rallied to him, most notably William, Lord Hastings, who brought some 3,000 men. Thus when he came into contact with Warwick’s main force, the earl withdrew within the walls of Coventry and refused to give battle in the expectation that he would soon be reinforced by Clarence coming from the west country. That help never came, as Clarence, in the crucial moment of the campaign, joined his brother. Edward then had his final piece of good fortune. Thwarted of battle outside Coventry, he continued south and won admittance to London, in part because the Lancastrian lords, principally, Edmund Beaufort, duke of Somerset, whom Warwick had hoped would defend the city, had marched west to meet Queen Margaret’s anticipated landing in Dorset.

Nonetheless, for all that had gone right for Edward in his march south, it is probable that he faced a numerically-superior force, perhaps by a margin of some 4,000, when he marched out of London to confront Warwick at Barnet. Further, for all the failure of his opponents to coordinate their activities, Queen Margaret’s landing was now imminently expected (indeed, she landed at Weymouth on the day of the battle), and he thus needed a decisive victory more than Warwick. This, together perhaps with a natural inclination, explains the aggressive tactics he adopted from the outset, attacking in the early morning in, as one well-informed chronicler has it, ‘suche a grete myste, that nether [side] might see othere perfitely’.

The same chronicler describes one incident as decisive. After the earl of Oxford, commanding one wing of Warwick’s army, had routed and pursued the opposing wing of Edward’s commanded by Lord Hastings, he returned to the field in the disorientating mist. In the confusion his troops were attacked by Warwick’s men who mistook their badge of ‘a sterre with stremys’ with Edward’s badge of the sun in splendour. Oxford took this as a sign that he had been betrayed and that Warwick had reverted to his Yorkist allegiance. He fled the field with his 800 men. This story is perhaps not to be taken too seriously. There is no evidence that the star with streams numbered among the de Vere badges, and the story conforms to the understandable convention of the chroniclers to explain victories in battle in the simple terms of a single incident. It does, however, illustrate the perception that, even on the field of battle, Edward’s opponents were fatally undermined by distrust and disunity. Indeed, the same chronicler emphasises this theme with an improbable account of the death of Warwick’s brother, John, Marquis Montagu: he was killed by one of Warwick’s own men who saw him donning Edward’s livery.

By whatever means the victory was won, it was complete. Warwick himself fell in the battle and his army was scattered. Edward now only had Queen Margaret to defeat, and the odds were now in his favour as he faced a final encounter, to be fought at Tewkesbury on 4 May.

S J P

Further reading

M.A, Hicks, Warwick the Kingmaker (Oxford, 1998)

H. Kleineke, ‘Gerhard von Wesel’s Newsletter from England, 17 April 1471’, The Ricardian, xvi (2006)

J. Ross, The Foremost Man of the Kingdom: John de Vere, Thirteenth Earl of Oxford (1442-1513) (Woodbridge, 2011)

Look out for our upcoming blog on the battle of Tewkesbury, on 4 May. Read about previous battles in the Wars of the Roses and their impact on Parliament via the Commons in the Wars of the Roses section of our blog.

Today marks the 560th anniversary of by far the largest battle of the Wars of the Roses. It was fought at Towton in the west riding of Yorkshire and ended in victory for the Yorkist Edward IV against the forces of his recently toppled Lancastrian rival, Henry VI. Contemporary chroniclers agree that the numbers involved and the death toll were both very large. It was undoubtedly a savage encounter, although possibly not quite as bloody as tradition would have it. While few details survive, it appears that the battle lasted for most of the day and that the outcome remained in doubt to near the end.

In spite of the Yorkist victory, Lancastrian resistance to the new King continued and fears of insurrection and invasion marked the months that followed. The strongest opposition to Edward was in the far north of England, although the autumn of 1461 also saw campaigning in Wales. Such a state of affairs had consequences for the timing of his first Parliament, the principal business of which was the assertion of his title to the throne and the punishment of his opponents. The original intention was for it to open at Westminster on 6 July 1461, but on 13 June that year it was postponed until the following 4 November, to allow the King more time to deal with the stronger than expected resistance to his accession.

As the example of East Anglia illustrates, however, news of the postponement took time to travel. Two days later, on 15 June, the Norfolk shire court met to return the county’s knights of the shire, and it was also on the strength of the original writ of summons that the borough of Bishop’s (now King’s) Lynn proceeded with an election on 30 June, at which Henry Thoresby and William Caus were chosen as the town’s MPs. It would likewise appear that the elections held in the Suffolk boroughs of Ipswich and Dunwich on 25 June and 1 July respectively on the basis of the May writ. Notwithstanding the postponement, the burgesses of Ipswich and Dunwich stuck with the representatives chosen on those dates, although this was not the case with the county of Norfolk and the borough of Lynn.

With regard to the county, the proceedings of 15 June were a rowdy and disputed affair which ended without an actual return being made. A subsequent election held on the following 10 August was a similarly controversial event, since the sheriff, Sir John Howard, refused to accept the electors’ choice of John Paston and John Berney. Although Howard was a confirmed Yorkist who had won his knighthood fighting for Edward IV at Towton, his opposition to Paston and Berney almost certainly reflected personal animosities rather than political divisions. As for Lynn, the authorities there decided, unlike their counterparts at Ipswich and Dunwich, to set aside the election held in response to the initial writ of summons, and the mayor, Walter Cony, and Henry Bermyngeham were returned in place of Thoresby and Caus at a fresh election on 2 September. This was not the end of the matter, however, since this result was superseded by yet another election on 9 October. On this occasion Bermyngeham and Simon Pygot were the burgesses elected, and it was they who subsequently rode to Westminster.

It may well be that the borough set aside the initial election of Thoresby and Caus for procedural reasons once they had learnt of the postponement, although it is likely that the changing personal circumstances of the candidates involved also played a part in these changes of personnel. Whatever the case, the very postponement of the Parliament in the first place reflects the uncertainties that abounded in the months following Towton, a battle that historians have frequently, but perhaps somewhat misleadingly, referred to as ‘decisive’.

C.E.M.

The present author’s biographies of the principal characters mentioned above, as well as his discussions of the constituencies they represented, have recently been published in the History of Parliament’s Commons 1422-61, ed. Linda Clark (Cambridge University Press, 2020).

Further reading:

• C.H. Williams, ‘A Norfolk Election, 1461’, English Historical Review, lx (1925), 79-86.

• Hannes Kleineke, ‘The East Anglian Parliamentary Elections of 1461’, in The Fifteenth Century X: Parliament, Personalities and Power – Papers Presented to Linda Clark, ed. H. Kleineke (Woodbridge, 2011), 167-187.

On 4 March 1461 a piece of political theatre was played out in Westminster Hall. At its heart was a tall strapping 18-year-old, Edward, since the death of his father at Wakefield little over two months earlier, duke of York. With him was a small band of nobles, and some carefully selected commoners. Before this select audience, and with their acclamation, Edward was ceremonially installed in the marble chair of the King’s bench and proclaimed King of England and France, and Lord of Ireland. The ceremony consciously mirrored what had been done 62 years earlier, when Henry IV had displaced Richard II. Then, too, any involvement by a formal Parliament had been carefully avoided. It is tempting to see in this an early example of the time-honoured concern of the English ruling classes that the wider community of the realm ought to be kept at arms-length from the making of kings, lest they might also take a fancy to unmaking them, a consideration that seems ironic in the face of the revolving-door monarchy of the 15^th century. The reality is perhaps more complex. If at a time of acute political crisis those making the decisions even had time to ponder the constitutional niceties of what was to be done, their concern may have been more that a divinely-ordained kingship should not arbitrarily be subjected to an institution that took its legitimacy from a royal summons.

Nevertheless, Parliament was accorded a place in the king-making of March 1461 at least in so far as the justification for the change of dynasty was based on the notion that by re-joining his wife and son at the battle of St. Albans on 17 February Henry VI had broken the accord sanctioned by the Lords and Commons in the previous autumn (which had settled the crown on Henry VI for his life, before it was to pass to his cousin, Richard, duke of York, and the latter’s descendants). Thereby, it was argued, Henry had immediately forfeited his throne, which should now pass to Edward of York as the senior representative of his line. The reality was, of course, rather more prosaic. Since taking Henry VI into their custody at the battle of Northampton in July 1460, the Yorkist lords had effectively ruled in his name. Having lost control of Henry’s person, they could no longer exercise power in his name, and a new King was thus needed.

In London, where the citizens were still reeling from the narrowly-avoided threat of having their city ransacked by Queen Margaret’s northerners, Edward’s accession was greeted with relief, and in some quarters even with enthusiasm. ‘Lette us walke in a newe wyne yerde, and lette us make us a gay garden in the monythe of Marche with thys fayre whyte ros and herbe, the Erle of Marche’, ran one verse current in the streets of London in the spring of 1461. Certainly, as winter gave way to the first shoots of spring, the arrival of a new King who looked the part must have held out hope that the bad times might finally be at an end.

Yet, not all of England could share in the Londoners’ enthusiasm. Spring had yet to arrive for large parts of the country: the battle of Towton which secured the throne for Edward IV was fought in driving snow and bitter cold. Until it was fought, the question of who would rule remained in the balance. Queen Margaret of Anjou’s northern army that had defeated the duke of York at Wakefield and the earl of Warwick at St. Albans on 30 December and 17 February remained intact, even if it had withdrawn into Yorkshire.

Nor did the Lancastrian army’s defeat necessarily improve matters. A winter of battles had left the countryside awash with the dregs of defeated forces seeking to make their way home, and living off the land as best they could. Nor were the victors necessarily much better: some years later, Humphrey, Lord Stafford, who had been in the Yorkist army at Towton, would voice his regrets for his behaviour on the journey home: where the commanders led, the common soldiers presumably followed. The combatants were soon joined by a new breed of vigilantes and bounty hunters. The ‘Parliament of Devils’ of 1459 had set a precedent with its attainder of the Yorkist leaders and it was clear that as soon as Edward IV summoned a Parliament, it would be the turn of the leaders of the Lancastrian party to suffer a similar fate. Until this could be done, the new rulers issued orders for the arrest of named individuals, and – more problematically – of all those deemed guilty of insurrection by panels of local commissioners. 

Under the guise of such orders – but often also without such authority – many sought to settle old scores by hunting down long-standing opponents and summarily executing them, or by extorting ransom payments from them. So, for example, Sir Robert de Vere, a younger brother of the earl of Oxford, chamberlain to Henry Holand, duke of Exeter, and a former MP for the county of Devon, fled to the south-west where he held lands in the right of his wife. He apparently reached Exeter before his pursuers caught up with him; within a few weeks however, it was reported that Sir Robert had been ‘slain in Cornwall’. On the very day of Towton, the Suffolk esquire John Mannok was compelled to seal bonds for the payment of a ransom to Charles Nowell, and for years thereafter the Neville retainer John Barowe was seeking to recover the money he had been forced to pay following his capture at Wakefield by a servant of Henry Percy, earl of Northumberland. 

Neither the spectacle of 4 March in Westminster Hall nor even the victory at Towton removed all doubts over who was the rightful King. Just a week later a group of townsmen in the market place of Bedford proclaimed Edward of York and the lords supporting him traitors; later that month, the London grocer Walter Walker was beheaded in Smithfield ‘for mysbehavyng and wordis spokyn agayn the kyng’, and it is a mark of how stable Edward IV’s rule had become by the end of June that a similar fate was not meted out to the notary John Clerk who, when invited by his neighbours to join them to see the King’s coronation procession, ‘Twutte and tourde for hym. I had as leef se the hunting of a dooke as him!’.

More generally, the new regime was keen visibly to assert its authority and in many places across England the new dawn of 1461 was blood red, as the heads and severed body parts of executed Lancastrian partisans came to adorn town gates and other prominent places. Here they would remain as a grim reminder of the civil war for years to come: at Exeter, the head of the former county sheriff and MP, Sir Baldwin Fulford, remained on a stake on the Guildhall for almost two years until the spring of 1463, when its removal and burial was permitted on the grounds that the ‘flesch thereof is now rotyn and dayli fallyth among youre peple of youre saide cete’.

H .W.K

Further Reading

H. Kleineke, Edward IV (Routledge, 2008).

H. Kleineke, ‘England 1461: predominantly provincial perspectives on the early months of the reign of Edward IV’, in The Fifteenth Century XVIII: Rulers, Regions and Retinues. Essays Presented to A.J. Pollard (Woodbridge, 2020), 81-92.

On 26 November 1470 a Parliament assembled at Westminster. This was in itself no remarkable event, even if there had been no such assembly for over two years. What was remarkable was that for the first time since the late summer of 1460 the writs for the Parliament had been issued in the name of Henry VI, who had been released from the Tower, declared restored to the throne, and installed in the bishop of London’s palace near St Paul’s just weeks earlier.

Following more than a year of popular unrest stirred up by the King Edward IV’s brother, George, duke of Clarence, and their cousin, Richard Neville, earl of Warwick, and a period of captivity at Warwick’s hands, in the summer of 1470 Edward IV had at last appeared to be secure on his throne. Warwick and Clarence had been driven into exile in France, and the King’s supporters seemed to be overcoming the insurgency in the north. Yet, when Warwick and Clarence returned at the head of a small invasion force assembled with French assistance, the King’s support melted away with alarming speed and at the end of September he himself had to take ship and seek refuge at the court of his brother in-law, Charles the Bold, duke of Burgundy.

Henry VI was declared King once more, and, as was by now becoming an established part of dynastic change. A Parliament was summoned to give formal sanction to the new constitutional arrangements. Yet, what the Parliament did, remains largely obscure today. While the record of the decisions of even the most contentious Parliaments of the Wars of the Roses were preserved, no Parliament roll for the assembly of 1470-1 seems to have been compiled.

The first and principal items of business can nevertheless be guessed at: on the precedent of 1461, Henry VI’s title to the throne, and the succession of his son, the Lancastrian Prince of Wales, would have been re-affirmed, and the decisions of 1460 and 1461 that called this into question disavowed. The same, or a separate act would have ensured that the acts of Parliaments and some other administrative decisions of Edward IV’s reign remained in force, even though his rule had been declared illegal: this, likewise had been done in 1461 with regard to the acts of the three Lancastrian Kings. Yet, the restored regime was highly insecure, and – in view of the presence in the new rulers’ ranks of Edward IV’s brother, George, duke of Clarence, and his cousin, the ‘Kingmaker’ earl of Warwick – had to tread carefully over any reprisals against the adherents of the house of York. By contrast with 1461, when a large number of Lancastrian loyalists had been attainted to treason, it is likely that in 1470 any act of attainder would have remained limited, perhaps restricted to Edward IV and the few men who had joined him in exile. Similarly, it is probable that any act of resumption cancelling Edward IV’s grants would have been moderated by the extensive issue of provisos exempting the recipient from the effects of the act. The receiver of the city of Exeter paid one of the city’s MPs, Richard Druell, 12d. for the cost of procuring just such an exemption even before Christmas 1470, and a petition for exemption by the abbess and convent of Syon also survives.

Perhaps the most awkward part of the constitutional retrenching concerned the position of the duke of Clarence. Although no explicit evidence survives, it may be reasonably suggested that the one concession made to him and Warwick by Queen Margaret was that in the event of the failure of Henry VI’s line, the crown should pass to him and his descendants. This represented a double insurance policy for the wily earl, whose grandchildren were thus all but guaranteed the throne by virtue of the respective marriages of his two daughters to Clarence and Henry VI’s son, Edward, prince of Wales. 

Before the Lords and Commons broke up for Christmas, there was one final item of business: as had been done repeatedly in his first reign, the King proclaimed a general pardon available to all comers, and in the four months that followed over 300 copies of the pardon were issued.

Parliament reassembled in the second half of January, and continued in session for other a month. By the end of February, however, the membership probably began to dwindle, as increasing numbers of Edwardian loyalists began to seek safety in ecclesiastical sanctuaries in the anticipation of fresh reprisals and arrests in the wake of Edward IV’s expected invasion.

Like Henry VI’s previous ‘final’ Parliament of 1460, the assembly may never have been formally dissolved, but simply dispersed in late March or early April, as the Yorkist monarch approached London. In 1478, and probably against the backdrop of the final disgrace of the duke of Clarence, its acts were formally declared null and void.

H.W.K.

Further Reading:

Rosemary Horrox, ‘1470: Introduction’ in The Parliament Rolls of Medieval England, ed. Chris Given Wilson et al. (16 vols., Woodbridge, 2005).

Hannes Kleineke and E.C. Roger, ‘Baldwin Hyde, Clerk of the Parliaments in the Readeption Parliament of 1470-1’, Parliamentary History, xxxiii (2014), 510-10.

Pardon Rolls of Edward IV and Henry VI, 1468-71 ed. H. Kleineke (List and Index Soc. ccclx, 2019).

Follow the research of our Commons 1461-1504 project via the Commons in the Wars of the Roses section of our blog.

The battle of Towton on 29 March 1461 has the reputation as the bloodiest ever fought on British soil. Contemporary chroniclers give extraordinary estimates of the number of deaths on that one day of prolonged fighting. Gregory’s Chronicle, for example, gives 35,000, and such high estimates are not confined to the chronicles. In the immediate aftermath of the battle, the heralds, who had the responsibility of reckoning the dead, gave a figure 28,000. A comparison with deaths on a single day of fighting in the age of mechanised warfare suggests that these figures reflect, not any objective reality, but the medieval mind’s rather careless understanding of large numbers. A rather less bloody picture emerges from an examination of the deaths among lords and former members of the Commons who are known to have participated in the battle.

The sources are, as ever, defective, but it can be said with reasonable confidence that 27 of some 50 lay peers fought there, 19 on the Lancastrian side and eight on the Yorkist (or nine, if one adopts the Lancastrian view of the King, namely that he was merely the attainted earl of March). Only five of the 27 died on the battlefield, all of them Lancastrian, most notably Henry Percy, earl of Northumberland, and Lionel, Lord Welles. It is harder to identify former members of the Commons who fought there, but the attainders of the Parliament of 1461 provide a starting point. Of the 18 former MPs attainted as present at Towton, only four died at the battle (and one of these, Ralph, Lord Dacre, MP for Cumberland in 1442 before inheriting his father’s peerage, was also one of the lords killed). Thus, of the 36 parliamentarians known to have fought for Lancaster, only eight fell on the field. A few other MPs can be added from other sources to this list of Lancastrian dead, like the Lincolnshire MP, Richard Waterton, a servant of Lord Welles, but the list is a short one, and there is no reason to suppose that the fatality rate among the unattainted Lancastrian MPs was any greater than that among the attainted (indeed, it may well have been lower).

The Yorkist side is much more difficult to reconstruct. All that can be said with certainty is that none of the Yorkists lords died in Towton campaign. Sir John Radcliffe, soi-disant Lord Fitzwalter, killed in a skirmish on the eve of the battle, is sometimes cited as one, but he was not a parliamentary peer. Other Yorkist casualties are hard to find. Of the 10 MPs from the Yorkist Parliament of 1460 who can be said with near-certainty to have fought there, two, the Worcestershire MP, John Stafford, notorious for the murder of Sir William Lucy at the battle of Northampton in 1460, and the Kent MP, Robert Horne, died at the battle, and another Thomas Gower, MP for Scarborough and closely connected with the Nevilles, may have done, but beyond this it is hard to go. Work for History of Parliament volumes for the 1422-61 period (soon to be published) has thrown up no other examples of MPs known to have been committed to the Yorkist cause who disappear from the records at the time of Towton. This implies that the list of Yorkist dead, namely Radcliffe, Stafford and Horne, recorded in a letter of 4 April 1461 is largely complete. In short, the death rate among the leading Yorkists was lower, and probably considerably so, than that among the leading Lancastrians, and that among the Lancastrians it was no more than about 20 per cent. 

One mundane source supports this general conclusion of a relatively low death rate, namely the writs routinely issued out of Chancery to enquire into the estates of deceased tenants-in-chief. One might expect these to provide a useful source for those who died at the battle, but they do not. Of the writs issued in the months after Towton in respect of likely combatants, nearly all relate either to those who died at earlier battles or to those, such as Welles and Radcliffe, known from other sources to have died on 29 March. All this suggests that the number of lords and MPs who died at Towton is not significantly underestimated in the surviving records and that the actual total may have been as few as about 20. Such a figure is hard to reconcile with an estimate of total deaths of more than one thousand times that figure.

This is not to deny that Towton was the greatest battle of the Wars of the Roses, only that, in terms of deaths among the leading protagonists, it was no more fatal than some much smaller engagements. The battle of Northampton, for example, which may have lasted only half an hour, witnessed the deaths of four Lancastrian lords, including two of the principal ones, the duke of Buckingham and the earl of Shrewsbury.  In this and other battles the leaders were systematically targeted in a way that might not have been possible in a much larger-scale battle like Towton.  None the less, the relatively few casualties among the leading protagonists there, particularly among those on the Yorkist side, raises the possibility that the battle did not see the carnage portrayed in contemporary chronicles. 

S.J.P.

Further reading:

C.F. Richmond, ‘The Nobility and the Wars of the Roses, 1459-61’, Nottingham Medieval Studies

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