The Wars of the Roses - Alison Weir [248]
At four o’clock in the afternoon of 3 May, Margaret’s great army tramped into Tewkesbury; here they could cross the Severn and pass into Wales. However, having marched for a night and a day, they were ‘right weary, for by that time they had travelled thirty-six long miles in a foul country, all in lanes and stony ways, betwixt woods, without any good refreshing’. Some of the Queen’s soldiers, overcome by heat and exhaustion, had collapsed on the march and been left to fend for themselves. Margaret herself was too exhausted to go any further, and it was decided that everyone should rest for the night and take the field on the morrow. The Queen, the Princess of Wales, the Countess of Devon, Katherine Vaux and other ladies-in-waiting all retired for the night to nearby Glupshill Manor, a house built in 1430 in the shadow of Glupshill Castle, an old Norman motte-and-bailey fortress whose mound may still be seen today.
King Edward had arrived in Cheltenham late that afternoon, to be informed that the Lancastrians were making for Tewkesbury. He ordered his men to rest for a while and ‘a little comforted himself and his people with such meat and drink as he had carried with him’. Then, in the early evening, he pressed on to Tredington, three miles from Tewkesbury, where he set up camp for the night. Like the Lancastrians, his men were so ‘footsore and thirsty’ that they could have marched no further.
At dawn the next day the Lancastrian army began preparing for the battle that would surely take place very soon. Somerset, as commander-in-chief, drew up his men in battle array in a strong position on a hill rising out of a field at the southern end of Tewkesbury, with the town and abbey at their backs, although his captains and the Queen expressed concern that ‘afore them, and on every hand of them, were foul lanes and deep dykes, and many hedges with hills and valleys, a right evil place to approach’, which is still today known as Margaret’s Camp.
Later that morning, the King’s army caught up with the Lancastrians at Tewkesbury, crossing the Swillgate Brook and passing Stonehouse Farm, then taking up battle stations 4–600 yards south of the enemy.
Meanwhile, the Queen and the Prince of Wales had mounted their horses and were riding through the Lancastrian ranks, speaking words of encouragement to their soldiers and promising them fame, glory and great rewards if they fought well. The Queen then left the field and returned to Glupshill Manor, leaving Somerset in command. The Prince, seeing active service for the first time, was to lead the centre, under the tutelage of Wenlock, a seasoned soldier but hardly a wise choice for he had twice changed sides in recent years. Somerset chose to lead the right wing, and gave Devon command of the left. On the Yorkist side, the King commanded the centre, Gloucester the left wing and Hastings the right. Thomas Grey, Marquess of Dorset, Elizabeth Wydville’s son by her first husband, was to lead the rearguard.
The Lancastrian army numbered around 5–6000 men, the Yorkists around 3500–5000. The King, however, had more noble support than Somerset, and consequently more professional troops with better arms and equipment; nor had his men suffered loss of morale through being hunted down over a number of days.
Somerset’s plan was that Wenlock should attack the Yorkists from the front while he bore down on them from the right side, but it was the King who opened hostilities, leading his army with some difficulty up the hill where the Lancastrians were positioned, and then ordering Gloucester to commence the assault. The Duke led his men across what the Arrivall describes as an ‘evil place’ thick with ‘so many hedges and trees that it was right hard to approach them near and come to hands’. For an hour, his soldiers, armed with the cannon captured after Barnet and traditional English longbows, inflicted many casualties, loosing upon the enemy ‘right a-sharp shower’ of arrows, so that it appeared