Calais, repeating the usual charges of oppression and misgovernment, accusing Wiltshire, Shrewsbury, and Beaumont of plotting the death of York and the surrender of Calais, and threatening war if the Coventry attainders were not reversed (ib. p. 88). In the last week in June Dynham and Fauconberg seized Sandwich. Osbert Mundeford [q. v.], who was lying there with a force intended for the relief of Somerset, was sent over to Calais, and beheaded on 25 June—another victim of Warwick's vengeance for the desertions at Ludford (ib. p. 86; Three Fifteenth-Century Chronicles, p. 73; Worcester, p. 772; Gregory, p. 207). Next day Warwick crossed to Sandwich with March and Salisbury, and forces estimated at from fifteen hundred to two thousand men. They were accompanied by a papal legate, Francesco dei Coppini, bishop of Terni, who, sent by Pius II to mediate between the two parties in England, had been completely won over by Warwick (Worcester, p. 772; Whethamstede, i. 371; State Papers, Venetian, i. 357–8). Joined by Archbishop Bourchier and the men of Kent, under Lord Cobham, Warwick reached Southwark, where his brother, George Neville [q. v.], bishop of Exeter, met them, with forces twenty thousand strong according to one estimate, forty thousand according to others. London was so friendly to them that Lords Hungerford and Scales, who held it for the king, shut themselves up in the Tower, and the Yorkist earls on 2 July entered the city. At nine next morning they attended the session of convocation at St. Paul's, and Warwick explained that they were come to declare their innocence to the king or die on the field, after which they all solemnly swore on the cross of St. Thomas of Canterbury that they meant nothing inconsistent with the allegiance they owed to King Henry (Worcester, p. 772; Chron. ed. Davies, p. 95). Leaving his father to besiege the Tower, Warwick a few days later advanced northwards, with March, to meet the king, who had set forth from Coventry towards London on hearing of his landing. With Warwick, besides the archbishop and the legate, were his brother, the Bishop of Exeter, and three other bishops, seven lay peers, of whom two, Fauconberg and Abergavenny, were his uncles, and a third, Lord Scrope of Bolton, his cousin, and ‘much people out of Kent, Sussex, and Essex,’ greatly overestimated, no doubt, at sixty thousand men (Whethamstede, i. 372; Chron. ed. Davies, p. 96). On the morning of Thursday, 10 July, he came upon the king's army entrenched in the meadows immediately south of Northampton, with the Nen at their back (ib.; Whethamstede, pp. 373–4). The Duke of Buckingham, not unreasonably, declined the proffered mediation of the prelates in Warwick's train, or to admit Warwick himself to the king's presence; and at two in the afternoon the earl gave the signal for the attack, dividing the command with March and Fauconberg. The immediate desertion of Henry by Lord Grey de Ruthin decided the battle, and all was over in half an hour. Warwick and March had issued orders that no quarter should be given to the leaders. Buckingham, the Earl of Shrewsbury, and Lords Beaumont and Egremont were all slain (Chron. ed. Davies, p. 97). Warwick brought the unfortunate king to London (16 July) in time to receive the surrender of the Tower on Wednesday, 18 July, and on the following Wednesday some seven of the followers of his rival, the Duke of Exeter, constable of the Tower, were arraigned at the Guildhall in his presence and executed (Three Fifteenth-Century Chronicles, p. 75; Worcester, p. 773).
Placing the great seal, resigned by Bishop Waynflete before the battle, in the hands of his young brother, the Bishop of Exeter, and procuring the confirmation of his captaincy of Calais, with appointment as governor of the Channel Islands, Warwick crossed to Calais about 15 Aug. with a royal order calling upon Somerset to surrender Guisnes to him. He soon came to terms with the duke, and entered into possession (ib. p. 774; Fœdera, ix. 458–9).
In September he made pilgrimage to Our Lady of Walsingham in Norfolk (Wavrin, v. 309), afterwards met the Duke of York at Shrewsbury, and thence preceded him to London (ib. p. 310). In October the House of Lords, although now generally supporting York, successfully resisted York's proposal to ascend the throne. Wavrin ascribes this conduct to the influence of Warwick, who, he says, had quarrelled with the duke on the subject. Warwick's interposition is not mentioned by any English authority, and Wavrin cannot be implicitly trusted. But Warwick was bound, if not by his recent oath, yet by his engagements to the legate Coppini, and may very well have thought that he would lose some of the power he now wielded in the name of the helpless Henry if the throne were occupied by a real king. The recent Yorkist triumph had been the work of himself and his family without York's assistance, and Warwick's popularity had perhaps a little dimmed his uncle's (cf. Paston Letters, i. 522). The compromise which made York heir-presumptive was completed on 31 Oct., and in the thanksgiving procession to St.
