Battle of Mortimer's Cross, 1461: three suns and a new king

The chronicler who told the story in London set down two scenes. In one, as the young Earl of March mustered his men in a marsh outside Hereford, three suns were seen shining over him. In the other, an old Welshman in a red velvet doublet waited for a pardon until the collar was ripped from his neck, then said that the head which used to lie in Queen Katherine's lap would now lie on the block, and took his death meekly. Between those two scenes lies the battle of Mortimer's Cross, one of the least documented and most consequential of the Wars of the Roses. The battle is one chapter in the military history of Wales.²

Background: why Edward of March fought in February 1461

In 1460 Richard, Duke of York, was recognized as heir to Henry VI, cutting out the king's son, and Queen Margaret refused to accept it. Gathering their forces in the north, the Lancastrians surprised and killed York at Wakefield at the end of December. His claim passed to his eldest son, Edward, Earl of March, who was then in the Welsh March raising men.³

The Mortimer lands on the border were Edward's inheritance, and Britannica notes that he gathered his army in Wales. One chronicle quoted by the Battlefields Trust says that, hearing of his father's death while at Shrewsbury, he asked the town for help to avenge it. Against him a Lancastrian army was marching east out of south Wales towards England.⁴

Armies and commanders

The Lancastrians. Their leader was Jasper Tudor, Earl of Pembroke, whom Britannica calls the leader of the Lancastrians in Wales; the year before he had taken the Duke of York's stronghold of Denbigh. With him came James Butler, Earl of Wiltshire, and Jasper's father, Owen Tudor. The Battlefields Trust notes that the army included Irish, French and Breton mercenaries as well as Welsh troops.⁵

Owen Tudor was a Welsh squire who had entered the household of Henry V and, after the king's death, secretly married his widow, Catherine of Valois, probably in 1429. Their sons Edmund and Jasper were thus half-brothers of Henry VI; Edmund was the father of the future Henry VII. In old age Owen was a loyal Lancastrian, rewarded in 1460 with rights in the lordship of Denbigh.⁶

The Yorkists. Edward's army is assumed to have been a local force of the Marches, though a Paston letter mentions East Anglian men hired to go to Mortimer's Cross. The contemporary accounts claim 15,000 Yorkists against 8,000 Lancastrians; the Battlefields Trust calls these serious overestimates and cites the historian Geoffrey Hodges, who, counting named followers, suggests about 3,500 Lancastrians and perhaps as few as 2,500 Yorkists.⁷

What were the three suns at Mortimer's Cross?

On the morning of the battle the Yorkists saw a parhelion. The Battlefields Trust explains it as a reflection effect in ice crystals in the cold air, which made it look as if three suns stood in the sky, one on either side of the real sun. It was, supposedly, taken as a good omen, a sign of the Trinity looking down on the Yorkist cause. Gregory's Chronicle says only that "men say" three suns were seen shining over Edward as he mustered his men.⁸

The story grew in the telling. According to the Tudor chronicler Edward Hall, this was why Edward later took the sun as one of his badges, the sun in splendor. A later description of Herefordshire, quoted by the Battlefields Trust, has the three suns appear in the firmament and then join together into one.⁹

The battle

Of the fighting almost nothing is known. The Battlefields Trust calls Mortimer's Cross one of the most poorly documented battles of the war: the sources fix it only at or near Mortimer's Cross, or near Wigmore, and give no detail of the action. The ground was the flat floor of the Lugg valley, bounded by the river, the Pinsley Brook, the marsh of Shobdon and the hills to the west, an area of little more than a square mile.¹⁰

Two sites are argued. The standard modern interpretation, set out by Hodges, puts the armies just south of Mortimer's Cross, where the Roman road from Hereford enters the narrow gap of the Lugg; a reading of the road system from Ogilby's map of 1675 favors a site about a mile to the southeast, by Kingsland, where finds and a reputed burial mound were reported in the 19th century. Either way, the Trust writes, the action probably opened with an arrowstorm and soon came to close combat, and what is certain is that the Lancastrian army broke and fled.¹¹

Who won the Battle of Mortimer's Cross?

Jasper Tudor and the Earl of Wiltshire escaped; Jasper made his way to Ireland and later Scotland. Gregory's Chronicle says Edward took and slew knights, squires and others to the number of 3,000; the English Chronicle speaks of 4,000 Welshmen killed. The Battlefields Trust regards both as the usual exaggeration of medieval chronicles.¹²

Owen Tudor was captured and brought to Hereford. He was beheaded in the market place, Gregory's Chronicle says, and his head set on the highest step of the market cross, where a madwoman combed his hair, washed the blood from his face and set more than a hundred burning candles around him. Sir John Throckmorton and other Lancastrian prisoners died with him. He was buried in the church of the Grey Friars at Hereford.¹³

Aftermath: from earl to king

Mortimer's Cross did not end the war. On 17 February the Lancastrians beat the Earl of Warwick at the Second Battle of St Albans. But Edward joined Warwick on the march, reached London before Queen Margaret on 26 February and was proclaimed king at Westminster on 4 March. He then pursued the Lancastrians north and won the bloodiest battle of the war at Towton, and was crowned on 28 June 1461.¹⁴

Jasper Tudor would come back. In 1468 he landed in north Wales to relieve Harlech Castle, which still held out for Henry VI, and was defeated by William Herbert. He escaped to Brittany with his young nephew Henry, Earl of Richmond, raised him there, and in August 1485 landed with him in south Wales. At Bosworth, Owen Tudor's grandson took the crown from the House of York.¹⁵ › Battle of Bosworth Field, 1485

Why the Battle of Mortimer's Cross mattered

For the Battlefields Trust the battle was important if relatively small. It reversed, for a while, the disaster of Wakefield, and it was Edward's first success as a field commander, the first of a series of crushing victories that destroyed the Lancastrian cause for more than a decade. It is also a battle of Welshmen on both sides: an army raised in Wales by Jasper Tudor against an earl whose power lay in the March.¹⁶

In 1799 a monument was raised by subscription at Kingsland. Its inscription, recorded by Historic England, calls it an obstinate, bloody and decisive battle and claims four thousand dead, many Welsh persons of the first distinction taken prisoner among them Owen Tudor, and the battle that fixed Edward IV on the throne. The figures belong to the 18th century, not to the evidence.¹⁷

Where is the Mortimer's Cross battlefield today?

The pedestal stands on the A4110 at Kingsland, beside the Monument Inn, and is listed at Grade II. The Battlefields Trust notes that the valley has changed: hedged fields have replaced open field and meadow, and the old road from London to Aberystwyth has gone. There is no interpretation on the battlefield; the mill by the bridge at Mortimer's Cross has had a small room about the battle, and Croft Castle, home of the Yorkist Sir Richard Croft, is nearby.¹⁸