The Wars of the Roses - Alison Weir [162]
We collected together our precious vestments and other treasures, besides all our charters and muniments, and hid them in the most secret places within the walls. And every day the convent held processions and poured forth prayers and tears. All the gates of the monastery and town were guarded, day and night.
However, the Queen’s soldiers mercifully passed them by at a distance of six miles. ‘Blessed be God, who did not give us for a prey unto their teeth,’ wrote the chronicler.
Croyland had heard that the royal army had now been reinforced by ‘an infinite number of paupers and beggars, who had emerged like mice from their holes’ eager for booty, and whose advance encompassed a line thirty miles wide. He tells how they committed many unspeakable crimes, ‘murdering anyone, including clergy, who resisted, and robbing the rest, even digging up valuables whose whereabouts they discovered by threats of death’.
As the Queen’s army advanced through the east Midlands, the men of the south and East Anglia were hurrying to arms. Clement Paston wrote: ‘My lords that be here have as much as they may do to keep down all this country, for they would be up on the men in the north, for it is the weal of all the south.’ Sir John Wenlock was busy arraying the levies of Hertfordshire and five other shires north of London. Reports of atrocities had caused many towns to switch sides, including Coventry, which had hitherto been chiefly Lancastrian in sympathy. Meanwhile, bands of Welsh soldiers, escaping after Mortimer’s Cross, were hastening to join the Queen.
Warwick, who could be indecisive in a crisis, had dallied in London when he should have been busy raising an army in the Midlands to counteract the threat posed by the advancing forces of the Queen. Instead, he waited until she had reached Hertfordshire before he began recruiting in London, Kent and the eastern and southern counties. On 12 February, the Council commissioned Edward of York, still making his way to the capital, to array the lieges of the west to march with him against the King’s enemies.
On that same day, King Henry, accompanied by the Duke of Norfolk, rode out of London to Barnet, followed hours later by Warwick, who left the city for Ware with a great army and ordnance. Four days later the Queen’s host came to Luton. Warwick had laid an ambush south of the town, with nets concealing spikes and caltraps, the latter being two rods of iron twisted together with cruelly sharp points which were strewn along the road to impede the passage of cavalry. However, a former Yorkist, Sir Henry Lovelace, espied them, and sent a message of warning to Margaret, who ordered her army to swing west and take the road to Dunstable instead of that to St Albans. At this time, some of her unruly troops were ravaging the countryside between Hitchin and Buntingford.
A detachment of Warwick’s army under the command of a local butcher was waiting for the Queen at Dunstable, but fared badly in the ensuing skirmish, losing 200 men before being driven out of the town. The butcher, overcome with shame at his defeat, promptly committed suicide, and ‘Gregory’ is scathing in his denouncement of the man’s inefficiency and cowardice. The royal army then proceeded down Watling Street towards St Albans.
On the 17th, King Henry rode into St Albans to rendezvous with Warwick, who was now awaiting the arrival of the Queen’s advance guard. The Earl had a large army, the size of which is nowhere given precisely, and was supported by Norfolk, Suffolk’s heir John de la Pole, and Arundel, none of whom could match him in military expertise and experience, and by the more reliable Lords Fauconberg, Bourchier and Bonville. He had divided his men into three groups, placing the weakest group, containing a large number of archers, in the town, and the other two outside it on the Harpenden and Sandridge roads, the latter being positioned on Nomansland Common. A sunken lane called Beech Bottom ran between these two wings and