Who won the Battle of Barnet?
King Edward IV and the Yorkists won. At dawn on Easter Sunday, 14 April 1471, Edward attacked the Lancastrian army of Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, the Kingmaker, in thick fog just north of Barnet. After about three hours of confused fighting Warwick's army broke, and Warwick and his brother Montagu were killed.1
In April 1471 two men who had made a king together fought for the crown of England a few miles from London. Edward IV, back from exile, had taken the city and the captive Henry VI. Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, the man later called the Kingmaker, came down the road from the Midlands to stop him. They met at dawn on Easter Sunday, in a fog so thick that neither army could see the other, and the battle that followed was decided as much by confusion as by courage. This is the story of why they fought, how each side read the campaign, how Warwick's own men turned on their allies in the mist, and why the field where the Kingmaker died is still being searched for. It belongs to our history of the Wars of the Roses and of Britain at war.2
Why was the Battle of Barnet fought?
Warwick had been the young Edward IV's greatest ally. He helped him take the throne from the Lancastrian Henry VI in 1461 and fought beside him at Towton. But the King grew independent: he married Elizabeth Woodville in secret in 1464, while Warwick was pursuing a French match for him, and promoted her relatives. By 1469 the two were enemies.3
Warwick drew Edward's brother George, Duke of Clarence, to his side, and in 1470 the pair fled to France after a failed rising. There Warwick made peace with his old enemy, Henry VI's queen, Margaret of Anjou. He landed in England in September 1470, drove Edward into exile and restored Henry VI to the throne.4
Edward came back within six months. With ships and troops from his brother-in-law, Duke Charles of Burgundy, he sailed from the Low Countries and landed at Ravenspur in Holderness on 14 March 1471 with a small force: some 1,500 Englishmen by the Crowland chronicler's count, perhaps as few as 1,200 in Simon Payling's estimate, and between 1,000 and 2,400, including Burgundian troops, by the reckoning of the Barnet Battlefield Project. He marched south gathering men, and in early April Clarence brought his own levies over to his brother.5
What was Warwick trying to do?
Warwick's plan was to gather an overwhelming army before he fought. When Edward offered battle outside Coventry at the end of March, the Earl stayed behind the walls to wait for his allies: his brother John Neville, Marquess Montagu, from the north, the Earl of Oxford from East Anglia, and Clarence, whose desertion he did not yet know of. Oman thought the Earl was counting on reinforcements from three directions; Payling stresses that he expected Clarence above all.6
Even after Clarence changed sides, Warwick refused the terms his son-in-law offered on Edward's behalf. The Yorkist author of the Arrivall could only guess why, and offered four reasons: that the Earl despaired of any lasting peace with the King after all he had done, that he would not break the oaths he had sworn to the French King, Queen Margaret and her son, that he had secured an escape by sea to Calais, or that men such as Oxford, in extreme malice against Edward, would not let him accept any terms at all.7
Time also seemed to be on Warwick's side. Queen Margaret and her son Edward, Prince of Wales, were waiting on the Norman coast with more troops, held back by contrary winds. Commynes, the Burgundian courtier who later wrote memoirs of these years, believed that if the Earl had waited for the forces that landed with them, they would in all probability have won. He also gave Warwick's reason for not waiting: the Earl feared the Duke of Somerset, whose father and brother he had put to death, and hated the Queen.8
Warwick had also hoped that Edmund Beaufort, Duke of Somerset, would hold London for Henry VI, but Somerset had marched west to meet the Queen's expected landing, Payling notes. The Crowland chronicler adds that the Earl meant to surprise Edward in London over Easter, when the King would be at his prayers rather than in arms.9
His army was a coalition of former enemies. Old Lancastrians such as Henry Holland, Duke of Exeter, stood beside Nevilles who had fought for York for most of a decade, and Historic England calls it an uneasy alliance of former Yorkists and Lancastrians. Oman thought the suspicion of treachery must have been present in every breast. That mistrust was to matter at Barnet.10
How did Edward IV get to Barnet?
Edward reached London first. On Maundy Thursday, 11 April, the city let him in, and he took Henry VI and Warwick's brother, Archbishop George Neville, into custody. In the sanctuary at Westminster his queen, Elizabeth, had given birth to their first son while he was in exile.11
Warwick, marching south by way of St Albans, halted on Saturday 13 April just north of Barnet and drew up his army “undre an hedge-syde,” as the Arrivall puts it, in a position that blocked the main road north from London. That afternoon Edward marched out of the city to meet him and took Henry VI with him. His scouts drove Warwick's scouts out of Barnet, and in the dark the King looked for a place to camp beyond the town.12
Edward could not see where his enemies stood, and he deployed his army much nearer to them than he supposed, and not squarely opposite them but somewhat to one side. He ordered complete silence and, the Battlefields Trust adds, no fires. Warwick, who had many more guns, fired them almost all night to harass the King's host, but because the Yorkists lay so close, every shot passed over their heads. Edward let his own guns stay silent so that their flashes would not betray his position.13
How big were the armies at Barnet?
Nobody knows. The Yorkist Arrivall says the King had no more than 9,000 men and that the rebels counted themselves at 30,000, and Warkworth's chronicle gives Warwick 20,000. Ramsay, writing in the 1890s, dismissed estimates running from 7,000 to 30,000 a side as not worth noticing.14
Modern estimates are smaller but still give Warwick the advantage. The Battlefields Trust gives Edward between 10,000 and 12,000 men and Warwick about 15,000; London Museum gives 9,000 to 12,000 against 15,000 to 20,000. Payling judges that Edward probably faced a larger army, perhaps by some 4,000 men, and needed a quick, decisive victory more than Warwick did, because Queen Margaret was about to land.15
Both armies had guns, and Edward's included a company of Flemish handgunners, put at 300 to 500 by the historian P. W. Hammond. Foard's team notes that Barnet and the second battle of St Albans are the only battlefields of the wars where an army is known to have included a substantial number of handgunners. Commynes notes that both sides fought on foot.16
How was the Battle of Barnet fought?
Between four and five in the morning of Easter Sunday, 14 April, Edward raised his banners, sounded his trumpets and attacked, first with arrows and guns and then hand to hand, by the account of the Arrivall. A heavy mist covered the ground and let neither side see the other except at close range. The Arrivall gives the fighting about three hours; the Battlefields Trust allows four.17
Because of the night deployment, the two lines did not meet squarely. At the west end Warwick's line overlapped Edward's, and there the Earl of Oxford's men broke the Yorkist wing, commanded by Lord Hastings in the reconstruction of Oman and Ramsay, and chased it back through Barnet. Some fugitives ran all the way to London with news that the King had lost. At the east end the reverse happened: Edward's right, under his younger brother Richard, Duke of Gloucester, overlapped and pressed back Warwick's left.18
The fog hid the rout from the rest of the field, so no panic spread along Edward's line. In the center the King fought in person with the men around him; the Arrivall says he beat down all who stood in his way, and Commynes, writing from Burgundian reports, agreed that Edward fought as much as any man on either side.19
Oxford's men, returning from their pursuit, came out of the fog at the rear or flank of their own army, and Warwick's men took them for Yorkists and attacked them. Warkworth's chronicle explains why: Oxford's men wore their lord's badge, a star with rays, which in the mist looked like Edward's badge, a sun with rays. Crying “treason!”, Oxford and his men, some 800 by Warkworth's count, fled the field. Not every historian accepts the detail of the badges: Payling finds no evidence that the star with streams was a de Vere badge, and notes that chroniclers liked to explain a battle by a single incident, though the attack on Oxford's men by their own side is not in doubt.20
How did Warwick the Kingmaker die?
The cry of treason ran along Warwick's line and broke it. Montagu was killed: Warkworth reports that he had secretly come to terms with Edward and put on the King's livery, and that one of Warwick's own men saw it and killed him. Payling calls that an improbable account, which says more about the distrust inside Warwick's army than about Montagu.21
Warwick had chosen to fight on foot that day. Commynes says it was not his custom: he usually led his men to the charge and then mounted, but this time his brother Montagu persuaded him to send the horses away. Britannica reads it as a way to avert any suspicion that he would desert his men.22
When he saw his brother dead and Oxford gone, Warkworth says, Warwick leapt on a horse and fled to a wood by the field where there was no way out. One of Edward's men caught him there, killed him and stripped the body. Britannica and London Museum agree that he was killed as he fled.23
How many died at the Battle of Barnet?
Nobody counted reliably. Sir John Paston, who fought on Warwick's side and whose brother John was hit by an arrow below the right elbow, wrote to their mother four days later that more than a thousand men of both parties had been killed. Warkworth gave 4,000 dead on both sides.24
Gerhard von Wesel, a German merchant in London, put the dead at about 1,500, and Commynes gave 1,500 on the King's side alone. London Museum settles on around 1,000, and possibly as many as 3,000.25
On the Lancastrian side Warwick and Montagu fell with many others. Exeter was left for dead on the field but survived and later reached sanctuary at Westminster. Edward's side lost Humphrey Bourchier, Lord Cromwell, Lord Say and another Humphrey Bourchier, the son and heir of Lord Berners.26
Commynes claimed that Edward, blaming the commons for favoring Warwick, had resolved to stop ordering his men to spare the common soldiers, and at Barnet spared none of them. Scofield accepted that the battle fell chiefly on the rank and file.27
What happened after the Battle of Barnet?
Edward rested his men at Barnet and rode back to London the same day, arriving after midday to give thanks at St Paul's. Next morning the bodies of Warwick and Montagu were brought to the cathedral and laid out uncovered, for two days by Scofield's account, so that no one could later claim the Kingmaker was still alive.28
Henry VI, who had been kept with the Yorkist army during the fighting, went back to the Tower, and Oxford escaped the field. On the same Easter Day Queen Margaret and her son landed at Weymouth, and on Easter Monday they heard that the battle was lost and Warwick dead.29
They fought on. On 4 May Edward destroyed their army at Tewkesbury. Henry VI died in captivity soon after; London Museum dates his death to 21 May, the day Edward returned to London. Edward then ruled until his own death in 1483.30
Who won the Battle of Barnet, and why did it matter?
Edward IV won, and by killing Warwick he removed the one man who could still make and unmake kings. Historic England notes that Warwick's death broke the power of the Neville family and set the stage for Tewkesbury. Glenn Foard and his colleagues call Warwick arguably the most influential individual of the whole period of the wars, and his death arguably second only to Richard III's at Bosworth.31
Historians have long given Edward the credit. Oman thought his decision to camp so close that Warwick could not slip away without battle was a stroke of military genius, though he believed fortune, rather than skill, had defeated the Earl in the rest of the campaign. Ramsay wrote that Edward fully justified his confidence in his military superiority over Warwick, whose talents were political rather than military.32
Barnet was also an early command for the future Richard III. Leading the Yorkist right, Gloucester gained experience that Foard's team suggests may have shaped his own choices about artillery and ground at Bosworth fourteen years later.33
How do we know what happened at Barnet?
Barnet is better recorded than most battles of the wars, but there is no full eyewitness account. The Historie of the Arrivall of Edward IV was written by a servant of the King who said he saw much of the campaign himself; it is the official Yorkist account, and a short French version, illustrated with a painting of the battle, survives in Ghent. The chronicle attributed to John Warkworth gives a separate, shorter account.34
Two letters were written in the days after the battle. Gerhard von Wesel, a German merchant in London, wrote home on 17 April, and Historic England lists his newsletter among the key sources. Sir John Paston wrote from the losing side, and a letter that the Paston editors attribute to the fugitive Earl of Oxford asks his wife for money and horses and promises that he will yet bring his purpose about.35
Commynes, the Burgundian diplomat, looked at Barnet from the Continent and made at least one clear mistake: he wrote that Clarence changed sides on the battlefield itself, when in fact he had joined Edward before the stand-off at Coventry. Shakespeare later staged the battle in Henry VI, Part 3, where Edward brings in the wounded Warwick and leaves him to die, the scene engraved at the top of this page.36
Where was the Battle of Barnet fought?
The battle was fought just north of the town now called Chipping Barnet, on the road to St Albans, in what was then open heath and common. Paston placed the field half a mile from Barnet. Victorian writers such as Frederick Charles Cass, rector of Monken Hadley, put it on Hadley Green, the old Gladsmore Heath, and Historic England's registered battlefield covers this area, now partly a golf course.37
The exact site has never been proved. An obelisk raised in 1740 by Sir Jeremy Sambrooke, now called the Hadley Highstone, claims to mark the spot, but it stands at a road junction and Foard's team doubts that it records a genuine tradition. Between 2015 and 2018 the Barnet Battlefield Project, led by Glenn Foard of the University of Huddersfield, searched the fields around Wrotham Park and Kitts End, north of the obelisk, with metal detectors and test pits.38
It did not find the battlefield. Earlier chance finds from the area, a handful of lead round shot that may or may not date from 1471, a Burgundian jetton and coins of the period, cannot fix the fighting either. The team concluded that the terrain of Kicks End Common, north of the Highstone, fits the accounts best; as early as 1728 the county historian Salmon, quoted by Cass, reported that local people placed the battle on a green spot near Kicks End. Brian Warren has argued instead for a line along the hedged bank of Enfield Chase, and Bruce Watson reports that a hermitage chapel once thought to mark the mass graves showed no trace of burials. The search goes on.39
