April 4th 1471: A last try for Peace

The White Boar, Sun in Splendour, Black Bull

Badges of the brothers Richard, Edward and George

(The Street Banners of Tewkesbury)

Whilst Edward was greeting his wayward brother and accepting him and his 4,000 troops back into the Yorkist fold, reinforcements were also arriving in Coventry. At last the Marquis Montague, the Duke of Exeter and the Earl of Oxford ‘with many others of great number’ arrived at the city, greatly swelling Warwick’s army.

The Duke of Clarence was a strange choice for Edward to send to Warwick to try to reach terms, but he appeared at Coventry as Edward’s emissary. Maybe Clarence saw himself as a peacemaker, but his arrival as a Yorkist, having betrayed him and robbed him of a large part of his hoped-for army would not have lowered Warwick’s anxieties. Not surprisingly, despite the good terms offered there was no agreement.

The ’Arrivall’ went into a lot of detail about the reasons for the offer and Warwick’s reasons for rejecting it.

Clarence, it says, was trying to avoid a ‘cruel and mortal’ war and to demonstrate the love he had for his father in law. The reasons Warwick rejected the offer which had ‘diverse good conditions which would have been profitable for the Earl’ were speculated to be that he did not think that any pardon would last, given what he’d done; that he’d made solemn sworn promises to Queen Margaret that he could not, With honour, break; that he already had a plan for failure which involved escaping to Calais or, maybe the real reason, that the Earl of Oxford  ‘being disposed in extreme malice against the king, would not suffer him to accept any manner of appointment, were it reasonable or unreasonable, but caused him to refuse all manner of appointments; which as many men deme was the very cause of none accepting of the King’s [grace]; wherefore all such treaty brake and took none effect’.