BARNET
The Easter morning dawned dim and gray; a dense fog had rolled up from
the valley, and the two hosts could see no more of each other than on
the previous night. Only the dull sound of unseen multitudes told each
that the other was still before them in position.
Of the two armies each, so far as we can judge, must have numbered
some twenty-five thousand men. It is impossible in the conflict of
evidence to say which was the stronger, but there cannot have been any
great difference in force.[20] Each had drawn itself up in the normal
order of a medieval army, with a central main-battle, the van and rear
ranged to its right and left, and a small reserve held back behind the
centre. Both sides, too, had dismounted nearly every man, according to
the universal practice of the English in the fifteenth century. Even
Warwick himself,--whose wont it had been to lead his first line to the
charge, and then to mount and place himself at the head of the reserve,
ready to deliver the final blow,--on this one occasion sent his horse
to the rear and fought on foot all day. He wished to show his men that
this was no common battle, but that he was risking life as well as
lands and name and power in their company.
In the Earl's army Montagu and Oxford, with their men from the North
and East, held the right wing; Somerset with his West-Country archery
and billmen formed the centre; Warwick himself with his own Midland
retainers had the left wing; with him was his old enemy Exeter,--his
unwilling partner in the famous procession of 1457, his adversary
at sea in the spring of 1460. Here and all down the line the old
Lancastrians and the partisans of Warwick were intermixed; the Cresset
of the Hollands stood hard by the Ragged Staff; the Dun Bull of Montagu
and the Radiant Star of the De Veres were side by side. We cannot doubt
that many a look was cast askance at new friends who had so long been
old foes, and that the suspicion of possible treachery must have been
present in every breast.
Edward's army was drawn up in a similar order. Richard of Gloucester
commanded the right wing; he was but eighteen, but his brother had
already learnt to trust much to his zeal and energy. The King himself
headed Clarence's men in the centre; he was determined to keep his
shifty brother at his side, lest he might repent at the eleventh hour
of his treachery to his father-in-law. Hastings led the rear-battle on
the left.
The armies were too close to each other to allow of manoeuvring; the
men rose from the muddy ground on which they had lain all night, and
dressed their line where they stood. But the night had led King Edward
astray; he had drawn up his host so as to overlap the Earl's extreme
left, while he opposed nothing to his extreme right. Gloucester in the
one army and Montagu and Oxford in the other had each the power of
outflanking and turning the wing opposed to them. The first glimpse of
sunlight would have revealed these facts to both armies had the day
been fair; but in the dense fog neither party had perceived as yet its
advantage or its danger. It was not till the lines met that they made
out each other's strength and position.
Between four and five o'clock, in the first gray of the dawning, the
two hosts felt their way towards each other; each side could at last
descry the long line of bills and bows opposed to it, stretching
right and left till it was lost in the mist. For a time the archers
and the bombards of the two parties played their part; then the two
lines rolled closer, and met from end to end all along Gladsmore
Heath. The first shock was more favourable to Warwick than to the
King. At the east end of the line, indeed, the Earl himself was
outflanked by Gloucester, forced to throw back his wing, and compelled
to yield ground towards his centre. But at the other end of the line
the Yorkists suffered a far worse disaster; Montagu and Oxford not
only turned Hastings' flank, but rolled up his line, broke it, and
chased it right over the heath, and down toward Barnet town. Many of
the routed troops fled as far as London ere they stopped, spreading
everywhere the news that the King was slain and the cause of York
undone. But the defeat of Edward's left wing had not all the effect
that might have been expected. Owing to the fog it was unnoticed by the
victorious right, and even by the centre, where the King and Clarence
were now hard at work with Somerset, and gaining rather than losing
ground. No panic spread down the line "for no man was in anything
discouraged, because, saving a few that stood nearest to them, no man
wist of the rout: also the other party by the same flight and chase
were never the greatlier encouraged." Moreover, the victorious troops
threw away their chance; instead of turning to aid his hard-pressed
comrades, Oxford pursued recklessly, cutting down the flying enemy for
a mile, even into the streets of Barnet. Consequently he and his men
lost themselves in the fog; many were scattered; the rest collected
themselves slowly, and felt their way back towards the field, guiding
themselves by the din that sounded down from the hill-side. Montagu
appears not to have gone so far in pursuit; he must have retained part
of his wing with him, and would seem to have used it to strengthen his
brother's hard-pressed troops on the left.
But meanwhile King Edward himself was gaining ground in the centre; his
own column, as the Yorkist chronicler delights to record, "beat and
bare down all that stood in his way, and then turned to range, first on
that hand and then on the other hand, and in length so beat and bare
them down that nothing might stand in the sight of him and of the
well-assured fellowship that attended truly upon him." Somerset, in
short, was giving way; in a short time the Lancastrian centre would be
broken.
At this moment, an hour after the fight had begun, Oxford and his
victorious followers came once more upon the scene. Lost in the fog,
they appeared, not where they might have been expected, on Edward's
rear, but upon the left rear of their own centre. They must have made a
vast detour in the darkness.
Now came the fatal moment of the day. Oxford's men, whose banners and
armour bore the Radiant Star of the De Veres, were mistaken by their
comrades for a flanking column of Yorkists. In the mist their badge had
been taken for the Sun with Rays, which was King Edward's cognisance.
When they came close to their friends they received a sharp volley of
arrows, and were attacked by Warwick's last reserves. This mistake
had the most cruel results. The old and the new Lancastrians had not
been without suspicions of each other. Assailed by his own friends,
Oxford thought that some one--like Grey de Ruthyn at Northampton--had
betrayed the cause. Raising the cry of treason, he and all his men fled
northward from the field.[21]
The fatal cry ran down the labouring lines of Warwick's army and
wrecked the whole array. The old Lancastrians made up their minds that
Warwick--or at least his brother the Marquis, King Edward's ancient
favourite--must have followed the example of the perjured Clarence.
Many turned their arms against the Nevilles,[22] and the unfortunate
Montagu was slain by his own allies in the midst of the battle. Many
more fled without striking another blow; among these was Somerset, who
had up to this moment fought manfully against King Edward in the centre.
Warwick's wing still held its ground, but at last the Earl saw that
all was lost. His brother was slain; Exeter had been struck down at
his side; Somerset and Oxford were in flight. He began to draw back
toward the line of thickets and hedges which had lain behind his army.
But there the fate met him that had befallen so many of his enemies,
at St. Albans and Northampton, at Towton and Hexham. His heavy armour
made rapid flight impossible; and in the edge of Wrotham Wood he was
surrounded by the pursuing enemy, wounded, beaten down, and slain.
The plunderers stripped the fallen; but King Edward's first desire was
to know if the Earl was dead. The field was carefully searched, and the
corpses of Warwick and Montagu were soon found. Both were carried to
London, where they were laid on the pavement of St. Paul's, stripped to
the breast, and exposed three days to the public gaze, "to the intent
that the people should not be abused by feigned tales, else the rumour
should have been sowed about that the Earl was yet alive."
After lying three days on the stones, the bodies were given over to
George Neville the Archbishop, who had them both borne to Bisham, and
buried in the abbey, hard by the tombs of their father Salisbury and
their ancestors the Earls of the house of Montacute. All alike were
swept away, together with the roof that covered them, by the Vandalism
of the Edwardian reformers, and not a trace remains of the sepulchre of
the two unquiet brothers.
Thus ended Richard Neville in the forty-fourth year of his age,
slain by the sword in the sixteenth year since he had first taken it
up at the Battle of St. Albans. Fortune, who had so often been his
friend, had at last deserted him; for no reasonable prevision could
have foreseen the series of chances which ended in the disaster of
Barnet. Montagu's irresolution and Clarence's treachery were not the
only things that had worked against him. If the winds had not been
adverse, Queen Margaret, who had been lying on the Norman coast since
the first week in March, would have been in London long before Edward
arrived, and could have secured the city with the three thousand men
under Wenlock, Langstrother, and John Beaufort whom her fleet carried.
But for five weeks the wind blew from the north and made the voyage
impossible; on Good Friday only did it turn and allow the Queen to
sail. It chanced that the first ship, which came to land in Portsmouth
harbour the very morning of Barnet, carried among others the Countess
of Warwick; at the same moment that she was setting her foot on shore
her husband was striking his last blows on Gladsmore Heath. Nor was
it only from France that aid was coming; there were reinforcements
gathering in the North, and the Kentishmen were only waiting for
a leader. Within a few days after Warwick's death the Bastard of
Fauconbridge had mustered seventeen thousand men at Canterbury in King
Henry's name. If Warwick could have avoided fighting, he might have
doubled his army in a week, and offered the Yorkists battle under far
more favourable conditions. The wrecks of the party were strong enough
to face the enemy on almost equal terms at Tewkesbury, even when their
head was gone. The stroke of military genius which made King Edward
compel the Earl to fight, by placing his army so close that no retreat
was possible from the position of Barnet, was the proximate cause of
Warwick's ruin; but in all the rest of the campaign it was fortune
rather than skill which fought against the Earl. His adversary played
his dangerous game with courage and success; but if only ordinary luck
had ruled, Edward must have failed; the odds against him were too many.
But fortune interposed and Warwick fell. For England's sake perhaps it
was well that it should be so. If he had succeeded, and Edward had been
driven once more from the land, we may be sure that the Wars of the
Roses would have dragged on for many another year; the house of York
had too many heirs and too many followers to allow of its dispossession
without a long time of further trouble. The cause of Lancaster, on the
other hand, was bound up in a single life; when Prince Edward fell
in the Bloody Meadow, as he fled from the field of Tewkesbury, the
struggle was ended perforce, for no one survived to claim his rights.
Henry of Richmond, whom an unexpected chance ultimately placed on the
throne, was neither in law nor in fact the real heir of the house of
Lancaster. On the other hand, Warwick's success would have led, so far
as we can judge, first to a continuance of civil war, then, if he had
ultimately been successful in rooting out the Yorkists, to a protracted
political struggle between the house of Neville and the old Lancastrian
party headed by the Beauforts and probably aided by the Queen; for it
is doubtful how far the marriage of Prince Edward and Anne Neville
would ever have served to reconcile two such enemies as the Earl and
Margaret of Anjou. If Warwick had held his own, and his abilities and
his popularity combined to make it likely, his victory would have meant
the domination of a family group--a form of government which no nation
has endured for long. At the best, the history of the last thirty years
of the fifteenth century in England would have been a tale resembling
that of the days when the house of Douglas struggled with the crown of
Scotland, or the Guises with the rulers of France.
Yet for Warwick as a ruler there would have been much to be said. To a
king of the type of Henry the Sixth the Earl would have made a perfect
minister and vicegerent, if only he could have been placed in the
position without a preliminary course of bloodshed and civil war. The
misfortune for England was that his lot was cast not with Henry the
Sixth, but with strong-willed, hot-headed, selfish Edward the Fourth.
The two prominent features in Warwick's character which made him a
leader of men, were not those which might have been expected in a man
born and reared in his position. The first was an inordinate love of
the activity of business; the second was a courtesy and affability
which made him the friend of all men save the one class he could not
brook--the "made lords," the parvenu nobility which Edward the Fourth
delighted to foster.
Of these characteristics it is impossible to exaggerate the strength
of the first. Warwick's ambition took the shape of a devouring love
of work of all kinds. Prominent though he was as a soldier, his
activity in war was only one side of his passionate desire to manage
well and thoroughly everything that came to his hand. He never could
cease for a moment to be busy; from the first moment when he entered
into official harness in 1455 down to the day of his death, he seems
hardly to have rested for a moment. The energy of his soul took him
into every employment--general, admiral, governor, judge, councillor,
ambassador, as the exigencies of the moment demanded; he was always
moving, always busy, and never at leisure. When the details of his life
are studied, the most striking point is to find how seldom he was at
home, how constantly away at public service. His castles and manors
saw comparatively little of him. It was not at Warwick or Amesbury,
at Caerphilly or Middleham that he was habitually to be found, but
in London, or Calais, or York, or on the Scotch Border. It was not
that he neglected his vassals and retainers--the loyalty with which
they rallied to him on every occasion is sufficient evidence to the
contrary--but he preferred to be a great minister and official, not
merely a great baron and feudal chief.
In this sense, then, it is most deceptive to call Warwick the Last
of the Barons. Vast though his strength might be as the greatest
landholder in England, it was as a statesman and administrator that he
left his mark on the age. He should be thought of as the forerunner
of Wolsey rather than as the successor of Robert of Belesme, or the
Bohuns and Bigods. That the world remembers him as a turbulent noble
is a misfortune. Such a view is only drawn from a hasty survey of the
last three or four years of his life, when under desperate provocation
he was driven to use for personal ends the vast feudal power that lay
ready to his hand. If he had died in 1468, he would be remembered
in history as an able soldier and statesman, who with singular
perseverance and consistency devoted his life to consolidating England
under the house of York.
After his restless activity, Warwick's most prominent characteristic
was his geniality. No statesman was ever so consistently popular
with the mass of the nation, through all the alternations of good
and evil fortune. This popularity the Earl owed to his unswerving
courtesy and affability; "he ever had the good voice of the people,
because he gave them fair words, showing himself easy and familiar,"
says the chronicler. Wherever he was well known he was well liked.
His own Yorkshire and Midland vassals, who knew him as their feudal
lord, the seamen who had served under him as admiral, the Kentishmen
who saw so much of him while he was captain of Calais, were all his
unswerving followers down to the day of his death. The Earl's boundless
generosity, the open house which he kept for all who had any claim on
him, the zeal with which he pushed the fortunes of his dependents, will
only partially explain his popularity. As much must be ascribed to his
genial personality as to the trouble which he took to court the people.
His whole career was possible because the majority of the nation not
only trusted and respected but honestly liked him. This it was which
explains the "king-making" of his later years. Men grew so accustomed
to follow his lead that they would even acquiesce when he transferred
his allegiance from King Edward to King Henry. It was not because he
was the greatest landholder of England that he was able to dispose of
the crown at his good will; but because, after fifteen years of public
life, he had so commended himself to the majority of the nation that
they were ready to follow his guidance even when he broke with all his
earlier associations.
But Warwick was something more than active, genial, and popular;
nothing less than first-rate abilities would have sufficed to carry him
through his career. On the whole, it was as a statesman that he was
most fitted to shine. His power of managing men was extraordinary; even
King Louis of France, the hardest and most unemotional of men, seems
to have been amenable to his influence. He was as successful with men
in the mass as with individuals; he could sway a parliament or an army
with equal ease to his will. How far he surpassed the majority of his
contemporaries in political prescience is shown by the fact that, in
spite of Yorkist traditions, he saw clearly that England must give up
her ancient claims on France, and continually worked to reconcile the
two countries.
In war Warwick was a commander of ability; good for all ordinary
emergencies where courage and a cool head would carry him through, but
not attaining the heights of military genius displayed by his pupil
Edward. His battles were fought in the old English style of Edward
the Third and Henry the Fifth, by lines of archery flanked by clumps
of billmen and dismounted knights. He is found employing both cannon
and hand-gun men, but made no decisive or novel use of either, except
in the case of his siege-artillery in the campaign of 1464. Nor did
he employ cavalry to any great extent; his men dismounted to fight
like their grandfathers at Agincourt, although the power of horsemen
had again revindicated itself on the Continent. The Earl was a cool
and capable commander; he was not one of the hot-headed feudal chiefs
who strove to lead every charge. It was his wont to conduct his first
line to the attack and then to retire and take command of the reserve,
with which he delivered his final attack in person. This caution led
some contemporary critics, especially Burgundians who contrasted his
conduct with the headlong valour of Charles the Rash, to throw doubts
on his personal courage. The sneer was ridiculous. The man who was
first into the High Street at St. Albans, who fought through the ten
hours of Towton, and won a name by his victories at sea in an age when
sea-fights were carried on by desperate hand-to-hand attempts to board,
might afford to laugh at any such criticism. If he fell at Barnet
"somewhat flying," as the Yorkist chronicler declares, he was surely
right in endeavouring to save himself for another field; he knew that
one lost battle would not wreck his cause, while his own life was the
sole pledge of the union between the Lancastrian party and the majority
of the nation.
Brave, courteous, liberal, active, and able, a generous lord to his
followers, an untiring servant to the commonweal, Warwick had all
that was needed to attract the homage of his contemporaries: they
called him, as the Kentish ballad-monger sang, "a very noble knight,
the flower of manhood." But it is only fair to record that he bore
in his character the fatal marks of the two sins which distinguished
the English nobles of his time. Occasionally he was reckless in
bloodshedding. Once in his life he descended to the use of a long and
deliberate course of treason and treachery.
In the first-named sin Warwick had less to reproach himself with than
most of his contemporaries. He never authorised a massacre, or broke
open a sanctuary, or entrapped men by false pretences in order to put
them to death. In battle, too, he always bid his men to spare the
Commons. Moreover, some of his crimes of bloodshed are easily to be
palliated: Mundeford and the other captains whom he beheaded at Calais
had broken their oath of loyalty to him; the Bastard of Exeter, whom he
executed at York, had been the prime agent in the murder of his father.
The only wholly unpardonable act of the Earl was his slaying of the
Woodvilles and Herberts in 1469. They had been his bitter enemies, it
is true; but to avenge political rivalries with the axe, without any
legal form of trial, was unworthy of the high reputation which Warwick
had up to that moment enjoyed. It increases rather than lessens the sum
of his guilt to say that he did not publicly order their death, but
allowed them to be executed by rebels whom he had roused and might as
easily have quieted.
But far worse, in a moral aspect, than the slaying of the Woodvilles
and Herberts, was the course of treachery and deceit that had preceded
it. That the Earl had been wantonly insulted by his thankless master in
a way that would have driven even one of milder mood to desperation,
we have stated elsewhere. An ideally loyal man might have borne the
King's ingratitude in silent dignity, and foresworn the Court for ever:
a hot-headed man might have burst out at once into open rebellion; but
Warwick did neither. When his first gust of wrath had passed, he set
himself to seek revenge by secret treachery. He returned to the Court,
was superficially reconciled to his enemies, and bore himself as if
he had forgotten his wrongs. Yet all the while he was organising an
armed rising to sweep the Woodvilles and Herberts away, and to coerce
the King into subjection to his will. The plan was as unwise as it
was unworthy. Although Warwick's treason was for the moment entirely
successful, it made any confidence between himself and his master
impossible for the future. At the earliest opportunity Edward revenged
himself on Warwick with the same weapons that had been used against
himself, and drove the Earl into exile.
There is nothing in Warwick's subsequent reconciliation with the
Lancastrians which need call up our moral indignation. It was the line
of conduct which forced him into that connection that was evil, not the
connection itself. There is no need to reproach him for changing his
allegiance; no other course was possible to him in the circumstances.
The King had cast him off, not he the King. When he transferred his
loyalty to the house of Lancaster, he never swerved again. All the
offers which Edward made to him after his return in 1471 were treated
with contempt. Warwick was not the man to sell himself to the highest
bidder.
If then Warwick was once in his life driven into treachery and
bloodthirsty revenge, we must set against his crime his fifteen long
years of honest and consistent service to the cause he had made his
own, and remember how dire was the provocation which drove him to
betray it. Counting his evil deeds of 1469-70 at their worst, he will
still compare not unfavourably with any other of the leading Englishmen
of his time. Even in that demoralised age his sturdy figure stands out
in not unattractive colours. Born in a happier generation, his industry
and perseverance, his courage and courtesy, his liberal hand and
generous heart, might have made him not only the idol of his followers,
but the bulwark of the commonwealth. Cast into the godless times of the
Wars of the Roses, he was doomed to spend in the cause of a faction the
abilities that were meant to benefit a whole nation; the selfishness,
the cruelty, the political immorality of the age, left their mark on
his character; his long and honourable career was at last stained by
treason, and his roll of successes terminated by a crushing defeat.
Even after his death his misfortune has not ended. Popular history has
given him a scanty record merely as the Kingmaker or the Last of the
Barons, as a selfish intriguer or a turbulent feudal chief; and for
four hundred and ten years he has lacked even the doubtful honour of a
biography.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 20: The Yorkist author of the _Arrival of King Edward_ says
that his patron had only nine thousand men. But we can account for many
more. Edward landed with two thousand; at least six hundred joined at
Nottingham, at least three thousand at Leicester; Clarence brought
seven thousand, Essex and the other Bourchiers seven thousand more.
This makes nineteen thousand six hundred, and many more must have
joined in small parties. On the other side Warwick had at Coventry six
thousand men; Oxford met him with four thousand, Montagu with three
thousand, Somerset with seven thousand, and he too must have drawn in
many small, unrecorded reinforcements. The Yorkists called his army
thirty thousand strong--probably overstating it by a few thousands.
Their own must have been much the same.]
[Footnote 21: Compare this with an incident at Waterloo. Ziethen's
Prussian corps, coming upon the field to the left rear of the English
line, took the brigade of the Prince of Saxe-Weimar for French owing to
a similarity in uniform, attacked them, and slew many ere the mistake
was discovered.]
[Footnote 22: There seems no valid reason for accepting Warkworth's
theory that Montagu was actually deserting to King Edward. But there is
every sign that the Lancastrians imagined that he was doing so. If he
had wished to betray his brother, he could have done it much better at
an earlier hour in the battle.]
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By Professor E. Dowden.
SPENSER.
By Dean Church.
STERNE.
By H.D. Traill.
SWIFT.
By Sir Leslie Stephen, K.C.B.
THACKERAY.
By Anthony Trollope.
WORDSWORTH.
By F.W.H. Myers.
MACMILLAN AND CO., Ltd., LONDON.
Twelve English Statesmen.
Edited by Viscount MORLEY.
_Crown 8vo. 2s. 6d. each._
WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. By Edward A. Freeman, D.C.L., LL.D.
_TIMES._--"Gives with great picturesqueness ... the dramatic incidents
of a memorable career far removed from our times and our manner of
thinking."
HENRY II. By Mrs. J.R. Green.
_TIMES._--"It is delightfully real and readable, and in spite of
severe compression has the charm of a mediæval romance."
EDWARD I. By Prof. T.F. Tout, M.A. History, The Owens College,
Manchester.
_SPEAKER._--"A truer or more life-like picture of the king, the
conqueror, the overlord, the duke, has never yet been drawn."
HENRY VII. By Dr. James Gairdner, C.B.
_ATHENÆUM._--"The best account of Henry VII. that has yet appeared."
CARDINAL WOLSEY. By Bishop Creighton, D.D.
_SATURDAY REVIEW._--"Is exactly what one of a series of short
biographies of English Statesmen ought to be."
ELIZABETH. By E.S. Beesly, M.A.
_MANCHESTER GUARDIAN._--"It may be recommended as the best and
briefest and most trustworthy of the many books that in this
generation have dealt with the life and deeds of that 'bright
Occidental Star, Queen Elizabeth of happy memory.'"
OLIVER CROMWELL. By Frederic Harrison.
_TIMES._--"Gives a wonderfully vivid picture of events."
WILLIAM III. By H.D. Traill.
_SPECTATOR._--"Mr. Traill has done his work well in the limited space
at his command. The narrative portion is clear and vivacious, and his
criticisms, although sometimes trenchant, are substantially just."
WALPOLE. By Viscount Morley.
_ST. JAMES'S GAZETTE._--"It deserves to be read, not only as the
work of one of the most prominent politicians of the day, but for
its intrinsic merits. It is a clever, thoughtful, and interesting
biography."
PITT. By Lord Rosebery.
_TIMES._--"Brilliant and fascinating.... The style is terse,
masculine, nervous, articulate, and clear; the grasp of circumstance
and character is firm, penetrating, luminous, and unprejudiced; the
judgment is broad, generous, humane, and scrupulously candid.... It
is not only a luminous estimate of Pitt's character and policy; it
is also a brilliant gallery of portraits. The portrait of Fox, for
example, is a masterpiece."
PEEL. By J.R. Thursfield, M.A.
_DAILY NEWS._--"A model of what such a book should be. We can give it
no higher praise than to say that it is worthy to rank with Mr. John
Morley's _Walpole_ in the same series."
CHATHAM. By Frederic Harrison.
_ST. JAMES'S GAZETTE._--"It comes near the model of what such a book
should be."
MACMILLAN AND CO., LTD., LONDON.