The Wars of the Roses - Alison Weir [165]
There then followed a more macabre ceremony. Bonville and Kyriell were brought before the King, Queen, and Prince to be sentenced. In view of Henry’s promise of mercy they expected to be dealt with leniently, for they had behaved honourably towards him throughout. But the Queen, intervening before her husband could say anything, turned to the Prince and said, ‘Fair son, what death shall these two knights die?’ There was a shocked hush as the child answered, ‘Let them have their heads taken off.’ Bonville, appalled, retorted, ‘May God destroy those who taught thee this manner of speech!’
The executions of Bonville and Kyriell aroused fury among the Yorkists. Both men had been acting under orders, guarding the King, and had taken no part in the fighting. Bonville, however, had recently gone over to the Yorkists and was regarded by the Queen as a traitor, which was enough to secure his fate. The bloodshed did not end there, for several other Yorkist prisoners were brutally put to death on the Queen’s orders.
The King and Queen and their retinues now went into St Albans Abbey to give thanks for the victory. At the porch they were received by the abbot and his monks with triumphal hymns, and processed inside for the service. Afterwards Henry and Margaret were shown to their rooms in the abbey’s guest house, where they would lodge for the next few days.
News of Warwick’s defeat reached London on Ash Wednesday, 18 February. From that day, ‘we lived in mickle dread’, wrote a Yorkist living in the capital, while Bishop Beauchamp told the Venetian ambassador that there was ‘general dread’ in the city at the news. One wealthy citizen, Philip Malpas, whose house had been sacked by Cade’s rebels eleven years earlier, was so frightened that he fled abroad to Antwerp. As the wave of fear swept London, streets emptied as merchants shut up and locked their shops and people barricaded themselves inside their houses. Since Warwick had abandoned them, the Lord Mayor arranged for the city militia to patrol the walls, himself accompanying them. London had for years now been sympathetic to the Yorkist cause, and the reported behaviour of the Lancastrian army disposed the citizens even more in its favour. Already in the south-east there was a conviction that the Wars of the Roses had come to represent a conflict between north and south, and that the Lancastrian victory meant that the prosperous south now lay under a dire threat from the north.
On the 19th it was reported in London that Edward of York was in the Cotswolds. Warwick had ridden there at full speed and met up with him either at Burford or Chipping Norton. After he had greeted the Earl, Edward apologised ‘that he was so poor, for he had no money, but the substance of his men came at their own cost’. Many, however, were more concerned about protecting their homes and families from the Queen’s army than being paid to do so, and Warwick told Edward to be of good cheer, for the commons of England were on his side. The two men then formulated a plan to race for London and have Edward proclaimed king before the Lancastrians got there, both now realising that in this lay their only hope of victory.
Meanwhile, even as the King and Queen were being entertained by the Abbot of St Albans, Margaret’s victorious northerners were enthusiastically pillaging and plundering the abbey and town and the countryside round about, creating a trail of destruction. Abbot Whethamstead persuaded Henry to issue a proclamation forbidding such behaviour, but no one took any notice of it, ‘for they were all at liberty, and licensed, as they asserted, by the Queen and northern lords to plunder and seize anything they could find anywhere on this side of the Trent, by way of remuneration and recompense for their services’. In vain the Queen tried to stop them, promising pardon to all