Fatal Colours: Synopsis
The day of the Battle of Towton and its immediate aftermath was the day that the greatest proportion of living Englishmen died in one day and in one place. It was fought in appalling conditions of sleet and snow, as the colossal armies of two kings of England – Henry VI of Lancaster and Edward IV of York – slashed and stabbed at each other for 10 hours before The Lancastrian lines finally shuddered and broke. There then followed one of the darkest episodes in English history as the northern Lancastrians – with their routes of escape from the battlefield blocked - were hunted down and massacred by the Yorkists, men largely from the South and Wales. Thus, men from south of the Trent treated those from the north as sub-human and alien, as a vendetta amongst the nobility at last embraced an entire nation.
Towton marked a turning point in English history: the end of a frantic period of seven battles in eighteen months, that took in extraordinary changes of fortune, in the first of what has become known as the Wars of the Roses.
It finally swept away the inviolate sacred position of a medieval king anointed by God: indeed, it was the culmination of a period of forty years, where England first lost its greatest ruler – Henry V – to sudden disease and death and, then slowly at first, the vast empire in France that Henry had done so much to create. For his successor was unique in a very different way: a baby king, the youngest ever sovereign of England and of France, who crowned as a child, remained childlike, before descending into adult madness and a catatonic trance that held him for 17 months.
The loss of the king’s authority created a vacuum that his greatest nobles sought to fill. The loss of France unleashed an extraordinary tide of noble recrimination and of disciplined and then undisciplined protest, including a 3-day sack of London itself. Two blocks of power formed – each based around one of the two great magnates of the day, the Dukes of Somerset and York, who were supported by extraordinarily vibrant and vengeful people, including respectively, a great warrior Queen in Margaret of Anjou and a brutal populist Earl in Richard Neville, known to history as Warwick the Kingmaker.
Finally, fuelled by a Papal Legate with the power and inclination to excommunicate an entire army, the blood feud between the two sides descended into all-out civil war. The appalling conclusion came at Towton.
