A Bowman at Towton Pt 3
Created | Updated Mar 9, 2006
Author's Note: This is the final part of a story which began in earlier editions of the Post. You can read the first part here and the second here.
John Hand fought at Towton in 1461. Some twenty years later, he tries to dissuade his son from joining the Yorkist forces in the last phase of the Wars of the Roses. John Hand's reminiscences are italicised. The words of his son, the principal narrator, are in upright type.
The story continues on the evening before the battle. Hand was earlier picked out by a recruiting captain, Brotherton, and was assigned to the company of Lord Fauconberge, one of the key allies of Edward of York. The Battle of Ferrybridge has just taken place, and Hand is lauded for the killing of the Lancastrian commander, Clifford.
...I think that my father felt his first qualms about killing in that little dell, even as the victors slapped him on the back and draped Clifford's blood-soaked singlet about his shoulders. He didn't tell me that he felt that way, but there was no triumph in his recounting of this, his most glorious moment.
Be that as it may, Edward's forces had received a mighty boost and Fitzwalter had been deeply avenged. No more than a handful of Clifford's men had escaped the valley and Fauconberge's casualties were very light. To cheer the Yorkists further, Edward's great army had crossed the Aire and was soon marching in from the south.
There were only two problems. The first was that there was still no sign of Norfolk. The second was that an immense Lancastrian army was visible at the head of the slope, not a mile to the north. With light already failing, it was clear that neither side would contemplate an engagement today. The show of power by Somerset, though, was a chilling masterstroke.
This time, it was left to my father to recover what arrows he could and it was almost dark as he came to the little village of Saxton, between Dintingdale and the Tadcaster road. There were torches in the churchyard. The hand on his arm made him start, and he saw that it was Fauconberge. The man who emerged from the chapel at that same moment bore a crown and white
silks streamed beneath his gleaming pauldrons.
I do not know if my father spoke with Edward, since he did not describe this episode in any more detail than I have done. I know that he never saw his King again, except at distance in the thick of the fray. He told me, too, that Fauconberge mentioned him to Edward as the bowman who struck down Clifford, but I do not know if it happened in the churchyard or at some
other time.
He took up the story in detail once more with Edward gone, but with Fauconberge still present. The great Lord evidently confided in John Hand to a high degree, and told him first of the parley that had already taken place between the two Houses. It had been agreed that they would meet on the field between their present positions at daybreak. It had also been agreed that there would be no quarter given or asked by either side.
I plucked up the courage to speak plainly with Lord Fauconberge that night. 'It's a terrible thing,' I said, 'that Englishmen should fight one another with no quarter given.'
'Ah, but there's a practical reason for it,' Fauconberge replied. 'Everyone who survives the battle will recognise the same rightful King. There will be no dispute any longer, and this ruinous war will be ended.'
'King Edward,' said I.
'You'd better hope so,' continued the nobleman. 'Otherwise you will lie on Towton Field forever.'
I didn't say anything to that. After a period of silence, Fauconberge changed the subject. 'Let's walk to the edge of the village,' he said. 'I must show you something.'
He pointed into the trees down by Cock Beck and I could see in the dim light that some had been felled across the stream. 'The Beck is swollen,' said Fauconberge. 'I ordered that those trees be cut so that it can be crossed here by men running over them. I do not think that the stream can be easily forded for a long way to the north of here, at least not by men who will be fit to fight afterwards. That means that the whole western fringe of our battlefield, our left and their right, will be an ice-cold death trap.'
I could not see what he was getting at to begin with, but then he explained further.
'You know my fish-hook standard?' he asked.
I nodded. It was the Neville family's crest, used by all of them except the mighty Warwick, who fought under the sign of the bear and ragged staff.
'If you see that standard raised, it will be your signal to stand off the field and take two dozen men over this crossing. You pick the men and tell them the plan at first light. Once you're across, you'll all return to a point adjacent to the field on the other side of the water. The other bow-captains will see the standard too and take from it their instruction to fire half their remaining arrows into the top of the bank across the beck, so that your men can recover them. There is a point ideal for this, a clearing in the trees to the west where the beck makes a sharp bow. Within the bow, and because of the thaw, a water-logged flood plain has appeared. We're going to do our best to drive Lancaster into it.'
'And my task, then?' I asked, although I could see it already.
'To shoot down every Lancastrian who tries to scale the far bank,' Fauconberge said simply. I must have looked sceptical, because he added, 'You’re good at it,' rubbing the back of his neck unnecessarily.
I decided to change the subject. 'How do you know all this about the field?' I ventured.
'Good scouts,' he said, with a hint of surprise that I should ask such a foolish question. 'I know a great deal more, too.'
Every minute that I ever spent in that great Lord's company convinced me more of his brilliance and ruthlessness. He watched the wind like a bowman, and now he pronounced that it would stay in the north all night but swing right round to the south in the first hour of daylight. With it would come snow, he said. I cannot tell how he could know such a thing, but he foretold that it would do so, and it would turn out that he was right in every detail.
'If all this comes to pass,' he said, 'I shall want you with me on the right flank of the field. Do you still have any of those ridiculous fence-posts you call arrows? Bring them all.'
Then he put his arm round my shoulder and drew me close. 'We should sleep,' he said. 'There's a dreadful day to follow and we'll need all our strength. Twenty thousand of our brethren are huddled on the frozen soil out there. We're the lucky ones, with roofs above us.'
I spent that night among sacks and blankets in the nave of Saxton chapel, where an hour before my King had prayed.
At dawn on 29 March, the wind still blew from the north. My father chose his party and explained the plan to them. He told me that he didn't really expect it to come to fruition. He couldn't imagine why the Lancastrians would attempt to flee westwards, instead of back north towards their stronghold at York.
The deployment of the armies was formal, since Towton was a staged battle, intended by both sides to produce a decisive outcome. Both York and Lancaster set out three divisions, with bowmen at the flanks and men-at-arms in the middle of the field. The men-at-arms on the Yorkist side, where John Hand could count them, were six files deep on a front half a mile wide. A little reckoning suggests that Fauconberge's twenty-thousand would not be far wrong for Edward's army alone, and according to lore, Lancaster numbered half as many again.
The middle divisions were commanded by Edward and Somerset. The Yorkists' left was lead by Warwick, opposite Percy of Northumberland for Lancaster. On Edward's right was Fauconberge, with my father among those under him. Who it was that faced them I do not know. It should have been Clifford, but he was dead.
The two armies stood about a quarter of a mile apart. Away on the opposite side of the field, my father saw the gap in the trees, just as Fauconberge's scouts had described it. He looked back south along the Tadcaster road, too, but there was still no sign of Norfolk.
It was a quarter till ten o'clock when my father noticed that the serried banners of both armies hung limp. Then they picked up and streamed out towards the Lancastrian line, and it began to snow.
Within minutes, there was a blizzard and the two sides could no longer see each other. It was then that Fauconberge called his bowmen forward to a position perhaps three hundred yards out from the Lancastrian line. At least two thousand men loosed their first arrow in unison, at the sounding of a horn. I thought I heard a few arrows strike the ground ahead of us, but any return of fire was slight.
Fauconberge rode up out of the swirling whiteness, right before our line. He pointed his sword straight at me, and then swung it round to point behind him, in the direction of the Lancastrian left division.
'Do you remember the hedge at Conisborough, Mr Hand? I want you to show me that trick again, right over there. I want you to loose every one of your black arrows in even time. And all the rest of you, draw as full as you can and fire up at Hand's elevation. Copy it down the files. While this blizzard hides us, we must break their line.'
The horn blared again, and the volley was the most perfect I ever saw fired. I set another arrow and fired again and again. This time the Lancastrian bowmen answered, and a forest of arrows seemed to spring from the ground fifty yards short of us at the limit of visibility.
I do not know what havoc we caused with the wind in our favour, because we could not see anything. I heard afterwards that the Lancastrians used up a large proportion of their arrows answering our fire, and certainly their onslaught dried up after a few minutes. Several of our men went forward and gathered up a great many arrows for our own use, firing a measure of them
back into the Lancastrian ranks as they did so.
After about half an hour of this travesty of battle and with the snows at last beginning to relent, our harvesters fell back at a run. Fauconberge's goading had done its work. The Lancastrian right was advancing.
The Lancastrian charge was disorderly. Somerset and the centre joined it late, as though forced to keep up to avoid a broken line, and Percy followed later still. As a result, the charge was repulsed and the action soon moved to the press in the centre, where there was terrible carnage on both sides. My father and the other bowmen stood deep, picking off the enemy when they could get a clear shot, but by sheer weight of numbers the Lancastrians began to push the Yorkists back. Edward lead numerous sorties to rally his men and was easily distinguishable by his great stature and his newly-adopted device of the white rose. Almost magically, he was never so much as scratched.
By the middle of the afternoon, men were clambering over the dead to get at one other and the Yorkist line seemed to be on the point of buckling. Then, in the nick of time, a call went up that banners were coming along the road from the south, and Edward's men were reinvigorated.
Norfolk's army marched under the white lion standard, but John Mowbray, the Duke himself, lay decrepit and ill in a Pontefract hospital. Whoever commanded the division in his stead did so with great presence of mind, because he did not join the rear of the Yorkist ranks. Instead, he lead his men further up the road until they could take a position square on to the
Lancastrian left. He set his men-at-arms in a north-south line and began a steady advance. His bowmen, meanwhile, moved on behind the Lancastrian line and began to fire into their rear.
At about four o'clock, the left of the Lancastrian line broke and the whole battle formation wheeled around, with Edward pressing from the southeast and Norfolk from the northeast. The Lancastrian army was gradually backed down the westward slope and onto the floodplain of Cock Beck, just as Fauconberge had planned. Seeing what was now happening, my father looked to his commander's position. As he did so, the fish-hook standard rose up.
We crossed the beck within ten minutes of the standard being raised, and I do not think a single one of my chosen party was missing. Finding a decent path on the other side, we came back at a run, screened by trees. We hung back at the edge of the wood, because arrows were pouring into the sward ahead of us in a torrent.
The blood-lust was still in me, although I was dazed and sickened by the things I had seen that day, and so I had kept back one black arrow. The first Lancastrian to gain the slope would meet with it.
The hail of arrows ceased and I walked out towards the top of the bank. Although I realized long afterwards that I could hear the screaming clearly enough, the horrors of the last few hours had deafened me to their meaning. I was totally unprepared for the scene below.
The bend in the stream was a great half-circle, two hundred yards across, and the meadow within it was red and strewn with all manner of wreckage. The stream itself had disappeared under a mound of bodies, ten feet deep in places. The mound was twitching and seething. At its margins, hundreds of desperate souls clutched and scrambled and the fire poured into them in a
shocking black storm.
It was then that one man came up the bank. He was running fast, but he was bristling with arrow-shafts like a hedgehog. I do not know how he still lived, let alone moved like that. I do not know how I moved either, but my instinct took over.
The great black dart tore half his face away and he somersaulted backward with the blood spraying out of him in a horrible skyward arc. He bounced down the bank and was left sprawling atop the terrible mound in the stream-bottom.
I felt sick. I felt weak. I felt nothing at all. The other men stood beside me, their mouths open with no words to come out.
'You finish this,' I whispered to the nearest of them, and I walked away. I walked back down the path and staggered across the stream, over the felled tree. I walked up into Saxton village, and glanced at the churchyard where darkness was closing in once more. I knew I could not go in there and so I kept walking east, to where I had seen a barn the night before. I don't
remember anything more about the day of the battle.
He had stopped looking at me long before this point in the story. Now, as the shadows lengthened around the water-trough outside our house, he stopped talking as well.
'Thank you, father,' I said helplessly, and I put my head on his shoulder. We both wept a little.
After a few minutes like this, I stood up and told him that I had made my choice. He told me that I mustn't, not yet, because the tale was not finished. I couldn't imagine what more there was to say, and so I insisted that I would never again talk of going to the wars. Nor would I entertain the thought that I was less of a man for not doing so.
My father didn't say anything. He seemed drained and suddenly old. I fetched the bow from the doorway and held it out to him.
He shrugged. 'When I am gone after your mother, you must place it in the grave,' he whispered. There was another silence and I searched for the words to break it.
'Did you name me William after Lord Fauconberge?' I asked.
He sighed, and I couldn't tell whether he nodded or not.
'Let me finish the story,' he said.
Dawn broke eventually, and the detail of the barn-roof high above emerged from blackness. I lay on the straw, lightheaded and aching. I could feel the presence of a hundred comrades, and yet they made no sound. Even those who endured grave wounds made no sound. At last we had all learned that weariness and horror numbs the victor too.
It was the morning after Palm Sunday, in the Year of Our Lord fourteen-hundred and sixty-one. It was the first day that Edward of York would would spend as England's undisputed King. Beyond the grey outline of the door, there were torches on the Tadcaster road. The snow had given way to cold rain.
The opposite wall of the barn, the northwest-ward one, had no window, and it was just as well. On that side, the fields sloped away to Cock Beck.
Brotherton soon came there. He was subdued and his arm was in a sling. He told me that Fauconberge would see me. I thought at first that I was to be arraigned for my desertion, but then Brotherton mentioned what the others from the far bank had said. They had reported that only one man reached the crest of the bank before complete darkness fell, and that it was Hand who shot him down.
I knew then that Fauconberge would honour me. Out of this misery, I was destined to secure wealth and privilege, perhaps even land and title for my son. So I searched in the satchel, and took out the little sword that Fauconberge had bade me carry, and I cut the bowstring. Then I walked away.
John Hand turned to face me, and his eyes were both dark and bright. A few hours before, I had been entranced by the power and glory that shower upon a battle's victor. Now I knew that I might have had those things by birthright, if my own father had chosen to defy his conscience.
'Will you change your choice, now that you might have been a nobleman?' he asked. But now there was the hint of a smile on his face, and I knew that I would never change, because he had shown me nobility of a truer kind.
