Battle of Tewkesbury, 1471: the day the House of Lancaster lost its heir

Three weeks after Barnet, the Wars of the Roses came to a field of lanes, hedges and ditches below Tewkesbury Abbey. When the day was over, the House of Lancaster had no heir, and Edward IV had no rival left in the field.²

Two landings, one day

Edward IV had been driven into exile in 1470 when the Earl of Warwick, the Kingmaker, changed sides and restored Henry VI. In March 1471 Edward landed in Yorkshire with a small force, won back his brother Clarence and London, and on 14 April destroyed Warwick at Barnet. On that same day Queen Margaret of Anjou and her son Edward, Prince of Wales, landed at Weymouth.³ › Rout of Ludford Bridge, 1459

The queen considered going back to France, but the Duke of Somerset and the Earl of Devon persuaded her to fight on, promising a powerful army from the West Country. Her plan was to march north, cross the Severn and join Jasper Tudor in Wales and the Lancastrians of the north.⁴

A race to the Severn

Edward guessed her intention. The Lancastrians twice fooled him with false promises of battle, first near Bath and then at Sodbury Hill, and slipped north through Bristol. Before dawn on 3 May Edward learned they were heading for the bridge at Gloucester. He sent a rider ahead to Sir Richard Beauchamp, the town's governor, and drove his army north along the drove road on the edge of the Cotswolds.⁵

When the Lancastrians reached Gloucester at about 10 a.m., the gates were shut against them. They could not risk a siege with Edward so close and marched on to the next crossing at Tewkesbury, arriving at about 4 p.m. after marching through the night. There the ford at Lower Lode was impassable, and the next bridges lay across the Avon through the town. It was, an eyewitness wrote, "right an-hot day": the Crowland Chronicle says both armies were so worn out by marching and thirst that they could go no further. Edward's men had covered about 35 miles that day, and camped three miles away.⁶

The field below the abbey

The Lancastrians drew up on a field called the Gastons, south of the town, behind "foul lanes and deep dykes, and many hedges". Somerset led the vanguard, the prince the center with the veteran Lord Wenlock at his side, and the Earl of Devon the rear. Edward took the center of the Yorkist army, his youngest brother Richard, Duke of Gloucester, the future Richard III, the vanguard, and Lord Hastings the rearguard. Noticing a wooded park on one flank, Edward placed 200 mounted spearmen near it with orders to watch for an ambush and, if none came, to act as they thought best.⁷

Somerset's gamble

Gloucester's men opened with arrows and guns, and the Lancastrians, who had fewer of both, suffered badly. The Yorkist chronicle known as the Arrivall says the king's shot gave them "right-a-sharp shower". Somerset would not stand and take it. Using lanes his men had found in the night, he led his battle out of the line, past the Yorkist vanguard, and fell on the flank of Edward's own division from a hillock.⁸

Edward, a tall and experienced fighter, met the attack head on and pushed Somerset's men back. The rest of the Lancastrian army did not move to help. Gloucester's vanguard turned to join in, and at that moment the 200 spearmen burst out of the park into Somerset's flank. His battle broke and fled; many were cut down in a field by the river later known as Bloody Meadow, and many drowned. Edward Hall's Tudor chronicle has Somerset ride back, call Wenlock a traitor for standing still and strike him dead, a story found in no earlier source.⁹

The death of the prince

The bombardment and the rout of the vanguard took the heart out of the rest of the Lancastrians. The center and rear broke, and the Earl of Devon and Somerset's brother John Beaufort were killed in the flight. So was the Prince of Wales, 17 years old and in his first battle. How he died is disputed. The Arrivall has him taken fleeing toward the town and slain in the field; John Warkworth adds that he cried out for mercy to his brother-in-law Clarence and was killed by foot soldiers; the later story that he was brought before Edward IV and executed after an exchange of words is almost certainly an invention.¹⁰

BritishBattles.com puts the Lancastrian dead at around 2,000 and the Yorkist losses at probably around 500. Somerset and other leaders took refuge in Tewkesbury Abbey. Accounts of what followed range from Edward entering with his sword drawn until a priest stopped him to a pardon later broken. On 6 May Somerset and the others were brought out, tried before Gloucester and the Duke of Norfolk, and beheaded in the market place.¹¹

The end of Lancaster

Queen Margaret was captured a few days later at Little Malvern Priory. Henry VI died in the Tower of London that same month, probably murdered, and with his only son dead the direct Lancastrian line was finished. Lancaster could no longer realistically challenge Edward IV. The Oxford Companion to British History counts Tewkesbury among the bloodiest battles of the Wars of the Roses, and the name Bloody Meadow still marks the field. By way of penance Edward paid to redecorate the abbey, in his own Yorkist colors and with his badge of the sun in splendor, which visitors can still see above the place where the prince is remembered.¹²