On 10 July 1460 the Battle of Northampton was fought. This was a major battle in the Wars of the Roses and saw the Yorkist army reverse their previous misfortune. Simon Payling from our Commons 1461-1504 project discusses this dramatic battle.
The ‘Wars of the Roses’ were notable for their striking reversals of fortune, but perhaps none was so extreme as that which occurred between the rout of the Yorkist lords at Ludford Bridge in October 1459 and their victory at the battle of Northampton in July 1460. At first sight, their cause had seemed irretrievably lost after their humiliating flight from Ludford Bridge and the forfeiture of their estates enacted in the Coventry Parliament of the following month. Yet nine months later they had captured the King, killed several leading Lancastrian lords, and resumed control of government. As a Yorkist poet reflected, very soon after the battle, ‘and som tyme, by enspeciall grace, Sorow is turned into gladnesse’.
There were many factors in this dramatic reversal of fortune. If one were to emphasise the failings on the Lancastrian side, chief among them would be their unsuccessful efforts to dislodge the Yorkist lords from their strongholds in Ireland and Calais and the loss of political support occasioned by the extreme measures they took against the Yorkists in the Coventry Parliament. It should, however, be stressed that the consequences of these failings were magnified by the skilfulness and speed of the Yorkist campaign that began when the Neville earls and York’s son, the earl of March (the future Edward IV) landed at Sandwich on 26 June 1460. This ensured that, when the two armies – the Lancastrians marching from Coventry, the Yorkists from London – confronted each other, only two weeks later, on the banks of the River Nene near Northampton, the Lancastrian army was outnumbered. There had been no time for it to be joined by forces from the north under Henry Percy, earl of Northumberland, and John, Lord Clifford, militant and powerful exponents of the Lancastrian cause. None the less, it had certain compensatory advantages on the field. Although smaller, it was largely drawn from baronial retinues, and thus better-trained than its Yorkist opponents, who, although afforced by professional troops from the Calais garrison, largely consisted of mass recruits. More importantly, it was drawn up in a powerful defensive position, with its rear defended by the river, its front by high ramparts and with major reserves of artillery to repel attack. Indeed, according to the chronicle of John Wheathampstead, abbot of St. Albans, who provides one of the best contemporary accounts of the battle, these advantages gave its commander, Humphrey Stafford, duke of Buckingham, the confidence to repudiate Yorkist attempts to negotiate.
Their calculations, however, were undone by an act of treachery. On the face of it, Edmund (b.1416), Lord Grey of Ruthin, was an unlikely traitor to the Lancastrian cause. Through his maternal grandmother, Elizabeth, a sister of Henry IV, he was the King’s second cousin, and his ties to the ruling house had been strengthened by his marriage to a sister of the earl of Northumberland. Further his brother, Thomas, had been promoted to the peerage in 1450, and he himself had become a member of the royal council in the late 1450s. He was clearly a trusted figure in the Lancastrian ranks, for he was given a position of command, perhaps in place of his brother-in-law, on the field of Northampton. Yet he had reason to fear what a Lancastrian victory might mean for his personal fortunes. Just before the death of Ralph, Lord Cromwell, in 1456, he had agreed to purchase from him, for the staggering sum of 6,500 marks, the great castle and lordship of Ampthill in Bedfordshire, a few miles from his main residence at Wrest. The difficulty was that Cromwell’s claim to this extensive property had been, violently and without justification, claimed by Grey’s cousin, Henry Holland, duke of Exeter. Grey had supported Cromwell in that dispute and now had grounds for concern that, should the Yorkists be defeated, the duke, who stood higher in Lancastrian counsels than he did, would have government support in winning the lordship from him. No contemporary chronicler suggests that this was the reason why Grey changed sides at Northampton, but the Tudor antiquary, John Leland (d.1552), no doubt reflecting a contemporary rumour, noted the potential connexion.
Whatever prompted Grey, his treachery was a significant factor in the Yorkist victory. Most of the chronicle accounts, one of which claims the fight lasted only half an hour, are specific on this point. Wheathampstead gives the most circumstantial account: ‘as the attacking squadrons came to the ditch before the royalist rampart … Lord Grey with his men met them and, seizing them by the hand, hauled them into the embattled field’. The Welsh historian, Howell Thomas Evans (d.1950), did not hold back in his condemnation of Grey’s action: in the ‘sordid annals of even these sterile wars there is no deed of shame so foul’. Its consequences were certainly immense. It may be that the outnumbered Lancastrians would have lost the battle in any event, but they would have not done so in such a sudden fashion. Since, due to Grey’s ‘deed of shame’, the Yorkists were able to overwhelm their defensive position, they were able to kill whom they would, and they took full advantage. Buckingham, according to one account, ‘stondyng stylle at hys tente’, fell on the field, as did his three leading captains, John Talbot, earl of Shrewsbury, John, Viscount Beaumont, and Grey’s brother-in-law, Thomas Percy, Lord Egremond. The Yorkists were also able to capture the King, who, although in himself a mere cipher, was an important prize. Historical counterfactuals are generally more indulgent than informative, but it is interesting to reflect on what would have happened had the Lancastrians retained the King. On 30 July the Yorkists, with the King in their possession, summoned the Parliament in which the duke of York, newly returned from Ireland, was to make his claim to the throne. One wonders what would have been the status of this assembly had the King not been present to attend its opening, and whether it would have had the political and legal authority to pass the Act of Accord by which the Lancastrian line was disinherited.
It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the Lancastrians lost a battle they did not need to fight. Their purpose in so quickly coming to battle was to prevent the Yorkists forces uniting on the duke of York’s arrival, imminently expected, from Ireland. Yet it does not need the benefit of hindsight to conclude that it would have been better to draw the Yorkists north. The potential success of such a tactic was to be exemplified at the end of the year, when the duke of York and the Neville earl of Salisbury met their deaths at the battle of Wakefield. Had Northampton not been fought, Buckingham and Shrewsbury, both of whom left mere boys as their heirs, would have survived, and the events of 1461, for that reason among others, may have had a different result.
SP
Further reading
R.I. Jack, ‘A Quincentenary; the Battle of Northampton, July 10th 1460’, Northamptonshire Past and Present, vol. 3 (1960), pp. 21-25
The History of Parliament 