The Wars of the Roses - Alison Weir [144]
Meanwhile, on the 25th, Exeter had sailed from Sandwich with fifteen ships and 1500 men to intercept Warwick. People in Kent and Sussex were looking daily for the Yorkist invasion force; the corporation of Rye paid 6d. to one John Pampelon to sail to Camber to see if anyone there had news of Warwick’s coming. On 1 June, Exeter and his fleet lay off the coast of Cornwall. From here he could see Warwick’s ships in the distance as they returned to Calais from Ireland. Exeter had far more ships, but by now he was not sure of his men who, disgruntled at short rations and poor wages, were openly voicing Yorkist sympathies. Consequently the Duke put in at Dartmouth and dismissed most of them. This left him with hardly anyone to man his fleet, since the government had failed to provide him with any money for new recruits. The Channel was now Warwick’s.
After Warwick’s return there in June, Yorkist supporters gathered in Calais. Many of the garrison would rather have driven Somerset out of the Pale than invade England, but Warwick overruled them. The Merchants of the Staple loaned the Earl and his allies a total of £18,000, and by committing acts of piracy against foreign merchant shipping Warwick raised further funds for the invasion, as well as boosting his popularity with the Londoners. He and the other Yorkist lords also mounted an extensive propaganda campaign through their friends in England. In Ireland, Warwick and York had drawn up a manifesto outlining their grievances and their intentions, and this was widely distributed. In it they asserted that the King was still led by evil counsellors, and castigated oppression by lords both spiritual and temporal. Henry, they said, had put himself above the law and banished ‘all righteousness and justice’ from the realm. The manifesto alleged that the King had been persuaded by his advisers to incite the native Irish to rebel against York; York even claimed to have seen letters from Henry urging them to conquer Ireland. It further alleged that the King had, by proclamations, guaranteed to all the men of Cheshire and Lancashire who fought for him that they would be allowed to take what they liked ‘and make havoc’ in the south, thus fuelling the southern prejudice against northerners. Clement Paston wrote: ‘The people in the north rob and steal, and [have] been appointed to pillage all this country and give away men’s goods and livelihood, and that will ask a mischief in all the south.’ So successful was this particular piece of propaganda that proclamations were hastily issued in the names of the Queen and the Prince of Wales denying that the King had ever made such promises.
The Yorkist lords, says the chronicler ‘Gregory’, also ‘sent letters unto many places in England how they were advised to reform the hurts and mischiefs and griefs that reigned in this land; and that caused them much the more to be loved by the commons of Kent and of London; and the commons of Kent sent them word to receive them and go with them in that attempt, and the most part of the land had pity that they were attaint and proclaimed traitors’. In fact, the Yorkists were putting it about that the King had not freely consented to the attainders passed the previous November, and that therefore his subjects need not obey the royal commissions of array.
They also wrote an open letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury accusing Shrewsbury, Wiltshire, Beaumont and other lords of preventing them from gaining access to the King and procuring their attainders, and stating that they would again request an audience of Henry to declare the ‘mischiefs’ for which