In the 15th Century, the killing of rival faction leaders were commonplace, especially throughout the Wars of the Roses. However, as Dr Simon Payling from our Commons 1461-1504 project investigates, one Lancastrian commander in particular garnered a reputation for brutality, going above the limits of accepted violence…

The Wars of the Roses, to state the obvious, were a series of battles, but they are equally meaningfully conceived as a series of political assassinations. From the deaths of the Lancastrian leaders – the earls of Somerset and Northumberland and Thomas, Lord Clifford – at the first battle of St. Albans in 1455 to that of Richard III at the battle of Bosworth 30 years later, mortality among military leaders in battle was so high as to demonstrate that leaders were routinely targeted. So effective a tactic generally went without critical contemporary comment, accepted, in the same way as executions after battle, as natural and justifiable expressions of the visceral divisions of the period.

One death, however, stands as an exception, that of the duke of York’s second son, Edmund, earl of Rutland, then seventeen years old, at the battle of Wakefield on 30 December 1460. The Tudor chronicler, Edward Hall (d.1547), in his The Vnion of the Two Noble and Illustre Famelies of Lancastre and Yorke, provides a vivid account of the young earl’s sad fate, an account later elaborated by Shakespeare in Henry VI, part three. As Edmund fled the field, in company with his chaplain, he was captured by John, Lord Clifford, one the commanders of the victorious Lancastrians. He kneeled, imploring mercy ‘both with holding vp his handes and making dolorous countinance, for his speache was gone for feare’. Clifford brutally replied, ‘By God’s blood, thy father slew myne (a reference to his father Thomas’s death in 1455), and so wil I do the and all thy kyn’. With these words, he stabbed the young earl through the heart, instructing the chaplain to take the terrible news to the boy’s mother and brother. In this act, the chronicler remarked, to the modern mind very reasonably, that Clifford was ‘accompted a tyraunt, and no gentelman’.

This circumstantial account has been treated with scepticism by historians. Its credibility is called into question by some obvious errors in Hall’s account of the battle, not least subtracting five years from Rutland’s age. Further, only one strictly contemporary chronicle, the Annales Rerum Anglicarum, assigns Clifford responsibility for Rutland’s death, and does so without condemnation or details. Yet Hall should not be so easily dismissed. He may have been able to draw on family tradition – he claims his ancestor, David Hall, fell on York’s side at the battle – and he is not the first known source to attribute an evil reputation to Clifford. John Leland, writing shortly before Hall, records that Clifford, ‘for killing of men’ at Wakefield was called ‘the boucher’. By inserting this remark immediately after recording the earl’s death, supposedly killed after a ‘poore woman’ had refused him sanctuary in her house (at a spot recorded by a memorial cross that survived in Leland’s time), he implies Clifford’s involvement.  

On this unsatisfactory basis the matter would rest save for one strictly contemporary source. A petition to the chancellor in about 1462 relating to a dispute between two Northamptonshire gentry is an unlikely place in which to find support for Hall’s much-doubted story, but its evidence damns Clifford. It records that, on 1 May 1461, Robert Tanfeld of Cransley sent his servants to abduct his rival, Robert Isham, from his house at nearby Pytchley. When Isham was brought to Cransley, Tanfeld issued an ominous threat: if Isham refused to release him from the surety of the peace he had been required to find, on Isham’s complaint, he ‘shulde be seruyd with a blocke and a axe aftir the lord Clifford lawez’. By this date Clifford was dead, killed at the battle of Towton in the previous March, but he was clearly survived by a reputation for the type of violence that went beyond the accepted limits of contemporary norms. The ironic reference to his ‘lawez’ leaves no doubt that that reputation related not to the killing of adversaries in battle (nor to the decapitation of the duke of York’s corpse attributed to him by Hall) but to the extra-judicial murder of captives. Added to the testimony of Leland and Hall, the circumstances of the battles in which he is known to have participated – Ludford Bridge, the second battle of St. Albans, Wakefield and Towton – leave little doubt that that reputation originated in events in the aftermath of the battle of Wakefield. Hall. therefore, whatever the validity of the circumstantial details he provides, was very probably correct to attribute to Clifford the killing of Rutland against the laws of war and chivalry.

SJP

Find more blogs detailing the parliamentary implications of battles during the Wars of the Roses here.