The Gentry: Stories of the English. Adam Nicolson
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an exquisite care in dealing with men of Plumpton’s sort; an underlying brute reality; a dream of Arthurian perfection, already in its fading hours; the prospect of a final battle, a Camlann for real; reliance on the formal, feudal love of a king and dread of his kingdom disintegrating; recognition that ‘the weale of yourselfe’ relied on the bonds of loyalty which, in a kingdom now with two embattled kings, were already broken.
The letters mark the beginning of the crisis in William Plumpton’s life. He gathered the men of his household and those of Knaresborough forest and armed them. The young Lord Clifford, Elizabeth’s brother, and the Earl of Northumberland were doing the same across the whole of the north of England. Young William Plumpton joined his father, and the entire Lancastrian affinity marched south to meet the Yorkists. The huge armies, 40,000 on each side, met in the lanes, on the open fields and in the sharp stream valleys between the villages of Towton and Saxton just south-west of York. It was Palm Sunday, 29 March, and desperately cold. Heavy snow showers blustered between the armies all day. ‘This deadlie conflict’, according to Holinshed, ‘continued ten houres in doubtfull state of victorie, uncertainlie heaving and setting on both sides’.27 Heaving and setting: the seismic movements of a mass of armed men. The dead choked the streams, making dams and bridges in the water, and the river Wharfe ran red with their blood. Fighting men had to drag the bodies out of the way to clear a space so that others could be killed. About 28,000 men died, ‘all Englishmen and of one nation’,28 as Holinshed wrote mournfully, more than the number of British dead on the first day of the Somme, the bloodiest day in English history.
Archaeologists have excavated a mass grave on the edge of the battlefield. It was hastily dug, only eighteen inches deep, and held 43 bodies tightly packed into a space six feet by twenty. In the words of the archaeological report, they were the ‘casualties of an extremely violent encounter’.29 Most of the Towton dead had been hit over and over again, suffering ‘multiple injuries that are far in excess of those necessary to cause disability and death’. The cuts, chops, incisions and punctures all clustered around the men’s heads and faces.
Ears had been sliced away, eye sockets enlarged and noses deliberately cut off. Very few of the wounds were below the neck, on parts of the body protected by armour. The archaeologists thought that the wounds had probably been delivered when the victims were already on the ground, helpless, dead or dying ‘in a position that did not allow them to defend themselves’. It was savage and enraged mutilation. ‘Many were left in a state that would have made identification difficult.’30 Nor were these men – who as usual had been stripped of their armour after they were killed but before they were thrown in the grave – a crude peasant horde. Analysis of their skeletons has shown that they were stronger than the medieval norm, ‘appearing similar to modern professional athletes’.31 Many had clearly trained in lifting, thrusting and throwing. Several had old, healed wounds. Their upper bodies were developed symmetrically, the result of having been trained from childhood in the longbow, which requires strength in both the string-pulling and the bow-holding arms. The trace elements in their bones have also revealed that they had been fed on the best medieval diet: plenty of protein, much of it from fish. These were the best young men the country had. But there was nothing polite, graceful or chivalric about their dying. The Towton mass grave is a monument to brutality, terror and rage, a frenzy of killing and destruction, a dirty desecration of defenceless victims, among the elite warriors of late medieval England. It is a world in which Sir William Plumpton would have been entirely at home.
The Lancastrian cause was broken at Towton and Plumpton’s world collapsed with it. Each side knew this was a fight whose victors would not spare the defeated – ‘This battle was sore fought,’ the chronicler Edward Hall wrote, ‘for hope of life was set on side on every part’32 – and that alone explains the scale of destruction. Plumpton’s son William, aged twenty-four, was killed, lying anonymous among the thousands of Lancastrian dead, drowned or mutilated in his grave. The young Lord Clifford, his brother-in-law, aged twenty-six, a brutal warrior and murderer of prisoners, known as the Butcher, lay there with him, thrown like others into some anonymous body pit, stripped and unrecognized, after he had been killed by an arrow in the throat. The Earl of Northumberland, their feudal lord, mortally wounded, staggered off the field and made his way to York, where he died too. An affinity was destroyed that day, between sons and brothers, cousins and brothers-in-law, the whole spreading set of connections that made up a political-social-familial world. It was a community, as Gawain says in the Morte Darthur, which had ‘gone full colde at the harte-roote’.33 The Lancastrian peers were attainted, their heirs deprived of lands and titles. This was revolution by butchery, no less traumatic than the events of the 1640s and just as deep a cut into the body of England.
Sir William himself, who at fifty-seven was certainly too old to have been in the thick of battle, fled from Towton field, down the roads of the frozen north, escaping the frenzy of the Yorkist killing machine, and remained on the run for some weeks. But the levers of power were in other hands now. By the middle of May he was up before the new régime, being interrogated by a judge in York, who as a means of maintaining law and order demanded of him a bond guaranteeing his acceptable behaviour for £2,000, more than thirty years’ income from his manor at Plumpton, equivalent perhaps to £5 million today. The bond was set at a level Plumpton could not meet and by July he was a prisoner in the Tower of London, held there as an enemy of the Yorkist state. His decade of suffering had begun.34
All offices were taken from him. The Cliffords and Northumberlands, in whom he had invested every penny of his political capital, were dead meat. A world that had been running in Plumpton’s favour was now a bed of shards set against him and he had to wriggle for his life. He managed to get himself released from the Tower but was confined to London and prevented from returning to the north. Large pockets of Lancastrian resistance were still holding out against the Yorkists, even then being suppressed by Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, the ‘proud setter-up and puller-down of kings’,35 as Shakespeare called him. Warwick was at the height of his powers, in his mid-thirties, arrogant, ruthless, by far the richest member of the nobility England has ever seen, personally responsible for killing the old Lord Clifford in 1455 and so tied by blood-hatred to destruction of the Lancastrian cause. He mopped up all the rewards: Great Chamberlain of England, Master of the King’s Horse, Warden of the Cinque Ports and Constable of Dover Castle. Government of the whole of the north of the country was given to him and his brother. Those great estates which had belonged to his enemies were now handed over, including most of the Percy lands in Yorkshire and the Clifford lordship of Skipton. Yorkshire became Warwick’s fiefdom. A Frenchman joked about the country under Edward IV: ‘They have but two rulers: M de Warwick and another whose name I have forgotten.’36 Plumpton could have found no refuge in that unforgiving, Warwick-dominated world.
Deprived of his offices and their income, kept away from his own lands in the north, Plumpton found himself exposed to his enemies. Arms were stolen from his house at Plumpton, precious household goods and even a surplice from his chapel was taken. The monks of a monastery sieved his fishponds for bream, tench, roach, perch and ‘dentrices’. His timber trees and underwoods were cut down and taken away. Oxen were stolen from his lands at Spofforth and stones already cut for houses were carted off. In his manors up in the limestone dales of the Pennines, his hay was mown and stolen in the early summer, and rabbits and hares were taken from his warren at Grassington.
From his lodgings near Hounslow outside London, he was conducting secret negotiations with his co-Lancastrians in the north but was caught by Yorkist informers and denounced to the authorities. They had been watching him, the way he ‘had receyved, red, and understaud false, damnable, diffamatory, and slaunderous writing, traiterously by pen and other forged and ymagined against the honor and welfare of our said soveraigne, and the same sent to other suspicious persons to corage and comfort them by the same’.37 There had been comings and goings, agents had arrived at his house and Plumpton had ‘secretly cherished them, succored, forbored, and their secrets concealed’.38 Foolishly, he had not concealed his true feelings. ‘When any turble or enterprise was leke to fall hurt or scaythe to the Kings people, the said Sir William Plumpton, with oder suspected, rejoyced, and were glad in chere and countenance.’39
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