By Ben Oldham (bo286@cantab.ac.uk)
Christmas is not usually a time for warfare, but in the Wars of the Roses, despite the sanctity of the festive season, the opportunity to cut the head off a rival branch was not one to be missed.
In December 1460, Richard, duke of York kept Christmas at Sandal Castle: a Yorkist bolthole hemmed in by a Lancastrian sea. In such menacing conditions, and with very limited supplies, York’s final Christmas was a pitiful one. All he could do to pass the long winter nights was to contemplate: how did it come to this?
York knew better than most the dizzying speed at which Fortune’s wheel could turn. Only a matter of months beforehand, he had been at his political high-water mark: entering into his second protectorate on behalf of the inane King Henry VI, York had also just been designated as his heir to the throne1. Now he was a political prisoner in his own castle. It was not a situation a man of York’s temperament could long withstand.
Whether out of self-confidence, desperation, or just sheer boredom, on 30 December, York sallied out of Sandal to face his problem head on. Worse mistakes have been made on Christmases since – but not many.
The Battle of Wakefield that followed was, in reality, less a battle than a manhunt. York and his second son Edmund, earl of Rutland, were spotted, hunted down, and executed, whilst their supporters made it little further before they met the same, brutal end2. Now the Lancastrians were in the ascendancy, but it would not be long until Fortune’s wheel turned again.
- J. Watts, Henry VI and the Politics of Kingship (1996). ↩︎
- D. Jones, The Hollow Crown (2014). See also the dramatization in Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part III, Act I, Scenes III and IV. ↩︎
Illustration: James William Edmund Doyle, “Edward IV”, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fauconbridge%27s_tactics_at_Towton.jpg
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