Two days I have with Edward when he comes home from the battle, two days when we move back to the royal apartments at the Tower, hastily cleaned and poor Henry’s things tossed to one side. Henry, the poor mad king, is returned to his old chambers with the bars on the windows, and kneels in prayer. Edward eats as if he has starved for weeks, wallows like Melusina in a deep long bath, takes me without grace, without tenderness, takes me as a soldier takes his doxy, and sleeps. He wakes only to announce to the London citizens that stories of Warwick’s survival are untrue: he saw the man’s body himself. He was killed while he was escaping from the battle, fleeing like a coward, and Edward orders that this body be shown in St. Paul’s Cathedral so that there can be no doubt that the man is dead. “But I’ll have no dishonoring of him,” he says.
“They put our father’s head on a spike on York gate,” George reminds him. “With a paper crown on his head. We should put Warwick’s head on a spike on London Bridge, and quarter his dead body and send it round the kingdom.”
“That’s a pretty plan you propose for your father-in-law,” I observe. “Will it not disturb your wife a little, as you dismember her father? Besides, I thought you had sworn to love and follow him?”
“Warwick can be buried with honor by his family at Bisham Abbey,” Edward rules. “We are not savages. We don’t make war on dead bodies.”
Two days and two nights we have together, but Edward watches for a messenger, and keeps his troop armed and ready, and then the messenger comes. Margaret of Anjou has landed at Weymouth, too late to support her ally but ready to fight her cause alone. At once we get reports of the rise of England. Lords and squires who would not turn out their men for Warwick feel it is their duty to support the queen when she comes armed for battle, and her husband Henry is held by us, her enemy. People start to say that this is the last battle, the one that will count: one last battle, which will mean everything. Warwick is dead; there are no intermediaries. It is the queen of Lancaster against King Edward, the royal House of Lancaster against the royal House of York, and every man in every village in the kingdom has to make a choice; and many choose her.
Edward commands his lords in every county to come to him fully armed with their proper number of men, demands that every town send him troops and money to pay them, exempts no one. “I have to go again,” he says at dawn. “Keep my son safe, whatever happens.”
“Keep yourself safe,” I reply. “Whatever happens.”
He nods, he takes my hand and puts my palm to his mouth, folds my fingers over the kiss. “You know that I love you,” he says. “You know I love you as much today as I did when you stood under the oak tree?”
I nod. I cannot speak. He sounds like a man saying farewell.
“Good,” he says briskly. “Remember, if it goes wrong, you are to take the children to Flanders? Remember the name of the little boatman at Tournai where you are to go and hide?”
“I remember,” I whisper. “But it won’t go wrong.”
“God willing,” he says, and with those last words he turns on his heel and goes out to face another battle.
The two armies race, the one against the other, Margaret’s army heading for Wales to gather reinforcements, Edward in pursuit, trying to cut her off. Margaret’s force, commanded by the Earl of Somerset, with her son, the vicious young prince, commanding his own troop, charges through the countryside going west to Wales, where Jasper Tudor will raise the Welsh for them and where the Cornishmen will meet them. Once they get into the mountains of Wales they will be unbeatable. Jasper Tudor and his nephew Henry Tudor can give them safe haven and ready armies. Nobody will be able to get them out of the fortresses of Wales, and they can amass forces at their leisure and march on England in strength.
With Margaret travels little Anne Neville, Warwick’s youngest daughter, the prince’s bride, reeling at the news of the death of her father, the betrayal of her brother-in-law George, Duke of Clarence, and abandoned by her mother, who has taken to a nunnery in her grief at the loss of her husband. They must be a desperate trio, everything staked on victory, and so much lost already.
Edward, chasing out from London, gathering troops as he goes, is desperate to catch them before they cross the great River Severn and disappear into the mountains of Wales. Almost certainly, it cannot be done. It is too far to go and too fast to march, and his troops, weary from the battle at Barnet, will never get there in time.
But Margaret’s first crossing point at Gloucester is barred to her. Edward’s command is that they should not be allowed across the river to Wales, and the fort of Gloucester holds for Edward and bars the ford. The river, one of the deepest and most powerful in England, is up, and flowing fast. I smile at the thought of the waters of England turning against the French queen.
Instead, Margaret’s army has to drive itself north and go on upriver to find another place where the army can get across, and now Edward’s army is only twenty miles behind them, trotting like hunting dogs, whipped on by Edward and his brother Richard. That night, the Lancastrians pitch their camp in an old ruined castle just outside Tewkesbury, sheltered from the weather by the tumbling walls, certain of crossing the river by the ford in the morning. They wait, with some confidence, for the exhausted army of York, marching straight from one battle to this next, and now run ragged by a forced march of thirty-six miles in the one day, across the breadth of the country. Edward may catch his enemy, but he may have drained the spirit of his own soldiers in the dash to the battle. He will get there, but with broken-winded soldiers, fit for nothing.
MAY 3, 1471
Queen Margaret and her hapless daughter-in-law, Anne Neville, commandeer a nearby house called Payne’s Place, and wait for the battle that they believe will make them queen and Princess of Wales. Anne Neville spends the night on her knees, praying for the soul of her father, whose body is exposed, for every citizen to see, on the steps before the altar at St. Paul’s in London. She prays for the grief of her mother who, landing in England, learned before her feet had dried that her husband was defeated, killed fleeing from a battle, and that she was a widow. The widowed duchess, Anne of Warwick, refused to go a step farther with the Lancaster army and shut herself up in Beaulieu Abbey, abandoning both her daughters to their opposed husbands: one married to the Lancaster prince and the other to the York duke. Little Anne prays for the fate of her sister Isabel, tied for life to the turncoat George, and now a York countess once more, whose husband will fight on the other side of the battle tomorrow. She prays as she always does that God will send the light of His reason to her young husband Prince Edward of Lancaster, who grows more perverse and vicious every day, and she prays for herself, that she may survive this battle and somehow come home again. She no longer knows quite what her home might be.
Edward’s army is commanded by the men he loves: the brothers he would gladly die beside, if it is God’s will that they should die that day. His fears ride with him; he knows what defeat is like now, and he will never forget it again. But he knows also that there is no avoiding this battle: he has to chase it with the fastest forced march that England has ever seen. He might well be afraid; but if he wants to be king he will have to fight, and fight better than he has ever done before. His brother Richard, Duke of Gloucester, orders the troop at the front of them all, leads with his fierce bright loyal courage. Edward takes the battle in the center, and William Hastings, who would lay down his life to block an ambush from reaching the king, defends at the rear. For Anthony Woodville, Edward has a special need.