Free Blood Sisters by Sarah Gristwood Page B

welcomed into the city, where Edward went to his mother’s house of Baynard’s Castle.
    This time there was no talk of loyalty to King Henry – or of wishing only to rid him of his evil counsellors. On 1 March the Bishop of Exeter, Warwick’s brother, asked the eager Londoners whether they felt that Henry deserved to rule, ‘whereunto’, as the Great Chronicle of London reported, ‘the people cried hugely and said Nay. And after it was asked of them whether they would have the Earl of March [Edward] for their king and they cried with one voice, Yea, Yea.’
    Cecily Neville’s eldest son, the ‘fair white rose’ of York, was still only eighteen but when, three days later, he was acclaimed and enthroned, his huge stature and glowing golden looks made him seem every inch the king. The youthful Edward with his royal bloodline was not only the favourite candidate backed by Warwick and the Neville party, but had recently proved his mettle with his victory at Mortimer’s Cross.
    But the Yorkists had not yet completely won. London was not England. On 13 March, with Warwick already engaged recruiting men in the Midlands, King Edward marched his army north where Henry and Marguerite still commanded the loyalty of a majority of the nobility. Prospero di Camulio erroneously heard that Marguerite had given her husband poison, after persuading him to abdicate in favour of their son: ‘However these are rumours in which I do not repose much confidence.’ And very soon, after the dreadful battle of Towton, di Camulio was writing less cautiously.
    Fought outside York in wintry weather, on an icy Palm Sunday, Towton is still probably the bloodiest battle ever fought on English soil. No detailed description survives, and the numbers of those involved, as estimated by contemporary reporters and later historians, vary wildly. But what is agreed is that this was a ten-hour endurance test in which men slogged each other to exhaustion; one in which King Edward told his men to give no quarter; and the opposing Lancastrians, with the wind against them, suffered snow and arrows blowing together into their faces.
    Before the battle even began both sides were already tired and frozen after a bitter night spent in the biting wind. None the less, the fighting went on until ten o’clock at night, long after it was dark. By dusk the Lancastrian forces had been driven backwards to a deep gully of the river Cock, and many who were not hacked down were drowned as they tried to cross. It was, says the Great Chronicle of London , ‘a sore and long and unkindly fight – for there was the son against the father, the brother against brother’. Crowland talks of more than thirty-eight thousand dead; and though that is probably an exaggeration, ‘many a lady’, said Gregory’s Chronicle , lost her beloved that day.
    For others, of course, the news was good. Cecily had word of the victory early, on 3 April, as William Paston wrote: ‘Please you to know such tidings as my Lady of York hath by a letter of credence under the sign manual of our sovereign lord king Edward, which letter came unto our said lady this same day … at xi clock and was seen and read by me.’ The Bishop of Elphin, as he subsequently told the Papal Legate, sets the glad tidings later: 40 ‘On Easter Monday, at the vesper hour [sunset], I was in the house of the Duchess of York. Immediately after vespers the Lord Treasurer came to her with an authentic letter … On hearing the news the Duchess [returned] to the chapel with two chaplains and myself and there we said “Te Deum” after which I told her that the time was come for writing to your Lordship, of which she approved… .’
    Now it was Marguerite, her husband and her son who were to flee, leaving York, where they waited for news, with only what they could carry. As Prospero di Camulio wrote: ‘Any one who reflects at all upon the wretchedness of that queen and the ruins of those killed and considers the ferocity of