The Wars of the Roses - Alison Weir [245]
While the battle was raging, men had come running into the capital crying that the King and his brothers had been routed by Warwick and slaughtered. No one knew if this was true or not until the King’s messenger came riding at speed into the city and galloped through the streets, triumphantly waving one of Edward’s gauntlets as a sure token of his victory before taking it to the Queen. That afternoon the King himself entered London, accompanied by Clarence and Gloucester and attended by a great retinue of magnates. He was welcomed, says the Arrivall, ‘with much joy and gladness’. By evening Henry VI was again a prisoner in the Tower, where four days later he was joined by the perfidious Archbishop Neville. The Archbishop, however, had the King’s ‘promise of safety’.
The bodies of Warwick and Montague were brought back to London by ten o’clock on Easter Monday morning and displayed naked, except for loincloths, in a single open coffin at St Paul’s Cathedral, where they remained for three days, ‘so that the people should not be abused by feigned and seditious tales’ claiming that Warwick yet lived, which were even now being circulated by his adherents. The bodies were then taken to the Augustinian abbey at Bisham in Berkshire, which had been founded in the fourteenth century by William de Montacute, Earl of Salisbury, as a sepulchre for his descendants. Here, next to four of the earls of Salisbury, Warwick and Montague were buried. Their graves have long since disappeared. Bisham Abbey was dissolved during the Reformation and its site is now occupied by a modern leisure centre.
Despite the rejoicing in London, however, Edward IV knew that the struggle was not yet over, and that he must recruit more men, for there yet remained to be dealt with the threat posed by Queen Margaret and Prince Edward of Lancaster in the West.
26
To Tewkesbury and the Tower
Anne, Countess of Warwick, had been travelling towards Dorset, hoping to meet up with Queen Margaret and her troops. On the way, however, she received reports of the Battle of Barnet, and then came the grievous news of her husband’s death. Fearing that King Edward’s vengeance would fall upon her, the Countess fled through the New Forest and sought sanctuary in the Cistercian abbey at Beaulieu. Here she would remain for more than a year, until Gloucester, who had prevailed upon the King to declare her legally dead and settle upon him half her lands, took her to live with him – as a prisoner, according to John Rous – in his household at Middleham,
On Easter Monday, Queen Margaret and her company rode to the Benedictine abbey at Cerne in Dorset, where they would stay for the next ten days. Abbot Roger Beyminster extended a warm welcome to the Queen and lodged her in the abbey guest house, the remains of which may still be seen today. Soon, Margaret was joined by Pembroke, Devon and the Beaufort brothers, Somerset and his younger brother, Sir John, who broke the news of Warwick’s defeat and death at Barnet. The shock caused her to collapse in a faint. Edward Hall records that when she recovered her senses and could speak she ‘reviled the calamitous times in which she lived and reproached herself for all her painful labours, now turned to her own misery, and declared she desired rather to die than live longer in this state of infelicity’. Her chief concern now was the Prince’s safety, and she ‘passionately implored’ the lords to do all in their power to ensure it. In her opinion, no good could come of a further armed confrontation with King Edward, and therefore it would be best if she and the Prince returned to France, ‘there to tarry until it pleased God to send