Roger Vaughan dies at Edgecote

A house in the marches is not built in one generation, and it is not unmade in one either, except on the rare morning when a single field swallows two generations at once. Then a country wakes widowed, and the bards, who keep the long account, write the date down before the gravediggers have finished.

THE HALF-BROTHERS OF GWLADUS THE STAR

Sir Roger Vaughan of Tretower was the son of Gwladus ferch Dafydd Gam, called Gwladus the Star, and through her the half-brother of William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke. The two names had risen together out of the Welsh march in the middle of the fifteenth century: Raglan and Tretower, Hergest and Pembroke, archers and stone, the new Yorkist captains of a country that had been, within living memory, Owain Glyndŵr's. Edward IV had given them Wales in all but name. He had given Pembroke the earldom, the wardship of the boy Henry Tudor at Raglan, the commission to hold the south against any Lancastrian return. Roger Vaughan had stood at his half-brother's right hand at Mortimer's Cross in 1461, and by tradition it was Vaughan who took the captured Owen Tudor to the block at Hereford after the battle. He was now, by the best estimate of his birth-year, fifty-five. He had a wife at Tretower, a hall at the foot of the Black Mountains, three hundred archers off the Tretower and Hergest tenancies, and the King's commission in his half-brother's hand.

THE ROAD UP FROM BANBURY

They had marched up out of Banbury the evening before, in the heavy summer light of late July, expecting Lord Stafford of Devon and his West Country archers to come up on their right by morning. Stafford did not come. He had quarrelled with Pembroke at Banbury over quarters, over a woman by one account, and had taken his archers south in the night. The Herbert-Vaughan host, about ten thousand Welsh-speaking men in surcoats of the quartered arms, lay on the rising ground above the Welsh Lane at Edgecote Moor, six miles north of Banbury, without the English bowmen who were meant to stiffen the line. The rebel host on the opposite slope was Robin of Redesdale's, a captain of Warwick the Kingmaker. Warwick himself was somewhere east with the main body, in open revolt against his cousin the king he had made.

Twenty past nine in the morning. Vaughan in plate over the Vaughan and Herbert quartered surcoat, on the slope above the stream, watching the dust along the eastern horizon thicken into men. A scout came up from the left wing with his horse blown. Geoffrey Gate, Warwick's lieutenant, was on the western ridge with three thousand archers, perhaps four. The English archers Stafford was meant to have brought them were on the other side of the field, in another man's livery, coming down off the slope toward the Herbert-Vaughan left wing.

A SECOND ON THE SLOPE

A man who has marched at his brother's right hand for twenty years does not, on the morning of the twenty-sixth of July 1469, calculate his way out of the field. He counts what is in front of him. Three hundred archers of Tretower and Hergest, good archers, his own tenants' sons, but three hundred and not three thousand. Robin's host on the slope opposite, perhaps eight thousand, Welsh enough in habit that the line might be held against it alone. Gate coming down on the left with the bowmen Stafford had taken away in the night. The arithmetic is not difficult. The line cannot hold against both. He looks across at the centre, where the Herbert standard is already moving, and understands that William will not retreat: William has the King's commission, William is Earl of Pembroke by Edward's grant, William will fight to the centre because the centre is the only ground a marcher earl is permitted to lose on. The half-brother on the right wing makes the only calculation left to him, which is not a calculation at all but a settling. He will be at William's right. He will not see Tretower again. The wife at the foot of the Black Mountains, the hall, the slab in the parish church at Bredwardine that has not yet been cut: these are now arranged, by his on this slope at this hour, into the shape they will keep.

Pembroke gave the order to advance at twenty to ten. The Welsh line went up the slope at the standard pace, the archers loosing from behind the men-at-arms. At ten past ten Gate's bowmen came down off the western ridge into the left wing, and the left wing folded inward toward the centre. By eleven the Herbert-Vaughan host was being killed in detail along the line of the Welsh Lane. About two thousand Welshmen died on the field through the morning, principally of the Herbert and Vaughan affinities. Sir Roger Vaughan of Tretower was killed in the press at about midday, by an unrecorded man-at-arms, yn nyfnder ymladd, in the depth of the fight, as Guto'r Glyn would set it down within the year.

THE MARKET SQUARE AT NORTHAMPTON

Pembroke and his brother Sir Richard Herbert were taken alive in the late afternoon, after the rout, by Warwick's officers. Warwick had them brought under guard to Northampton overnight. On the morning of the twenty-seventh of July, in the market square, both were beheaded by Warwick's order, without trial, without the King's writ. Edward IV was at this hour effectively a prisoner at Olney. The regime that had given Wales to the Herberts and Vaughans was, for the space of a season, gone. Henry VI would be brought out of the Tower the following autumn and set back on the throne for six months. The Lancastrian return of 1470-71 ran through the hole that opened at Edgecote.

THE DAY WALES WAS WIDOWED

Guto'r Glyn, the household bard of Raglan, wrote the elegy within the year. Marwnad William Herbert called Edgecote the day Wales was widowed, y dydd y gweddwyd Cymru, and the phrase has held. He named the dead by their houses: Raglan, Tretower, Hergest, Pembroke. He set the slope and the archers and the half-brothers down in the cynghanedd of a tradition that had been keeping the long account of the marcher houses since before the surnames had settled. He did not pity them. He counted them.

THE REDRESS AT BOSWORTH

The redress did not come for sixteen years. In 1485 a different Welsh marcher captain, Rhys ap Thomas of Carew, brought a different Welsh army across the marches into England behind a different claimant, Henry Tudor, who had been the boy in wardship at Raglan in 1469 and who was now the last credible Lancastrian. The field was Bosworth. The Welsh political weight that had been broken at Edgecote in a single morning was, on that field, reassembled around a Pembroke claimant of another name, and the dynasty that came out of it was the one the Vaughans of Tretower had, through Gwladus the Star, been kin to all along. The grave-slab of Sir Roger Vaughan of Tretower lies in the south transept of the parish church of Bredwardine in Herefordshire, the recumbent effigy in plate armour, the Vaughan arms cut on the breastplate. It has been there for five hundred and fifty-six years. Tretower Court, at the foot of the Black Mountains, is in the care of Cadw and is open to the public; the Great Hall, where Roger Vaughan laid out the line of march on the night before he rode east to Banbury, is intact, the roof timbers still smoke-stained from the fires of a household that did not know, that evening, that it had already been counted.