The Wars of the Roses - Alison Weir [230]
On 1 October news of King Edward’s flight from Yorkshire was cried in London. Queen Elizabeth was eight months pregnant and, feeling that it was no longer safe for her to remain in the Tower, that night, with her children and her mother, sought sanctuary in Westminster Abbey. When she arrived, ‘in great penury and forsaken of all friends’, Abbot Thomas Milling received her kindly and, rather than lodging her with the common rabble in the cruciform bulk of the sanctuary building, placed at her disposal the three best rooms in his own house within the abbey precincts.
No sooner had the Queen arrived than she received word that Warwick’s advance company had entered London unopposed. Elizabeth at once sent the abbot to the Lord Mayor and aldermen, asking them to take command of the Tower of London and secure the city against the men of Kent and the rest of Warwick’s approaching army. The mayor, however, knew that it would be folly to resist such a large force, and that he and his fellows would be better advised to come to terms with Warwick, then entreat him to spare the city from the more violent members of his affinity.
Warwick sent his representative, Sir Geoffrey Gate, ahead into London to receive its submission and liberate Henry VI. Gate was unpopular with the citizens because he had incited the Kentishmen to riot, and there was much murmuring against him. Nevertheless, on the 3rd the Constable of the Tower surrendered the fortress to Gate and the Lord Mayor, which placed Gate in control of the person of Henry VI. Acting on Warwick’s instructions, Gate sent the Bishop of Winchester to liberate the King. Henry emerged ‘as a man amazed, utterly dulled with troubles and adversities’. According to Warkworth he ‘was not worshipfully arrayed as a prince, and not so cleanly kept as should seem such a prince’. Gate arranged for him to be moved to the royal apartments in the Tower and lodged in the sumptuous rooms prepared for Queen Elizabeth’s confinement.
On the 5th Archbishop Neville marched into London at the head of a strong force and took control of the Tower. The next day, Warwick and Clarence, accompanied by Shrewsbury, Stanley and the main body of their army, rode in triumphal procession into the City and made straight for the Tower, where they knelt before Henry VI and greeted him as their ‘lawful king’. Their arrival prompted many Yorkist knights and squires, as well as some members of the Council, to seek refuge in various sanctuaries, just as a similar number of Lancastrian and Neville sympathisers were emerging from them. One was Thomas Howard, treasurer of Edward IV’s household, who, after an abortive attempt to flee abroad to join his master, took sanctuary at Colchester.
Warwick ordered that the King be ‘new arrayed’ in a robe of blue velvet, then he and the lords escorted him in procession into London, passing along Cheapside to the Bishop of London’s palace by St Paul’s Cathedral, where he was to lodge temporarily. Here, they sat him on a throne and placed the crown on his head. Warwick paid Henry ‘great reverence’, says Warkworth, ‘and so he was restored to the crown again, whereof all his good lovers were full glad’. But it was noted that the restored King sat on his throne as limp and helpless