Vaughan · 1469
Roger Vaughan dies at Edgecote
On the twenty-sixth of July 1469, in the open country at Edgecote Moor in Northamptonshire, six miles north of Banbury, the Yorkist army of King Edward IV under his Welsh marcher captains William Herbert (Earl of Pembroke) and Sir Roger Vaughan of Tretower met the rebel Lancastrian-Neville force of Robin of Redesdale (a captain of Warwick the Kingmaker, who was for these months in revolt against his cousin the king). The Welsh-speaking marcher army, about ten thousand strong, was caught in the early morning by a flank attack from the Earl of Warwick's lieutenant Sir Geoffrey Gate, broke after the death of Pembroke, and was destroyed in detail through the morning. About two thousand Welshmen, principally of the Herbert and Vaughan affinities, were killed on the field. Roger Vaughan of Tretower was killed in the press. William Herbert and his brother Sir Richard Herbert were taken alive and beheaded the next day at Northampton on Warwick's order. The Welsh-language elegy *Marwnad William Herbert* by Guto'r Glyn, written within the year, called Edgecote *the day Wales was widowed*. The political consequence was the temporary collapse of Edward IV's regime, the brief restoration of Henry VI, and the Lancastrian return of 1470–71. The military consequence in Wales itself was the elimination of the generation of Herbert and Vaughan landed leadership in a single morning.
It is twenty past nine on the morning of the twenty-sixth of July 1469, on the rising ground above the stream of the Welsh Lane at Edgecote Moor, in Northamptonshire, in heavy summer light. He is, by the best estimate of his birth-year, fifty-five years old. He is Sir Roger Vaughan of Tretower, of the Vaughan line of the Welsh marches, half-brother to William Herbert (whose Welsh-Norman name had been Wiliam ap Tomas before the Tudor anglicisation, and whose mother was Vaughan-Herbert's own mother Gwladus the Star). He is in plate armour over a surcoat of the Vaughan and Herbert quartered arms, with three hundred Welsh archers of the Tretower and Hergest tenancies behind him on the flank.
On the field below him, in the first deployment, are about ten thousand Welsh-speaking men of the Herbert-Vaughan marcher army, raised under Edward IV's commission for the campaign against the rebellion of Robin of Redesdale. Pembroke is in the centre. The army has marched up the previous evening from Banbury, expected to link with Lord Stafford of Devon's Yorkshire archers in the morning. Stafford, by Vaughan's report from a scout of an hour ago, is not yet in the field; he had quarrelled with Pembroke last night over quarters at Banbury and has gone south.
He thinks: Stafford has not come up. The army is on the field without the English archers. The Herbert-Vaughan archers are good but they are three hundred and not three thousand.
He thinks: the rebel host on the slope opposite is Robin's, perhaps eight thousand. If Robin's host is the only force we are facing, the Herbert-Vaughan line will hold.
He thinks, looking at the dust at the eastern horizon: Warwick's lieutenant Geoffrey Gate is in the field on our flank. Gate is at the slope on our left. Gate has the English archers Stafford was meant to have brought us. Gate has, by the dust, three or four thousand. The line cannot hold against both.
He thinks: William will not retreat. William has the King's commission and William will fight to the centre.
He thinks: I am his half-brother. I will be at his right. I will not see Tretower again.
Pembroke gave the order to advance at twenty to ten. The Welsh marcher line went up the slope at the standard pace. Gate's flanking archers came down off the western ridge into the Herbert-Vaughan left wing at ten past ten, and the line broke within the first hour. Sir Roger Vaughan of Tretower was killed in the press at about midday, by an unrecorded man-at-arms, by the Welsh-language elegy of Guto'r Glyn the next year, yn nyfnder ymladd, in the depth of the fight.
Pembroke and his brother Sir Richard Herbert were taken alive on the late afternoon, after the rout, by Warwick's officers. Warwick had them brought to Northampton. They were beheaded in the market square of Northampton on the morning of the twenty-seventh of July 1469. Pembroke's last act, by the tradition recorded in the Marwnad William Herbert of Guto'r Glyn, was to send a verbal message to his wife at Raglan that she should preserve their son William's marriage prospects to the king's niece. The marriage was carried through. The Herbert son did, eventually, marry Mary Woodville, niece of Edward IV, in 1466, before Edgecote, but the political mooring was broken by the morning at Edgecote.
The day, in the long view of the Welsh chroniclers and the bardic tradition, was the closing of the great Welsh-marcher house of the fifteenth century. The Vaughans of Tretower, the Vaughans of Hergest, the Herberts of Raglan, the Herberts of Pembroke, all lost senior generations of their leadership in a single morning. The Welsh political weight in the early Yorkist regime, which had been at its highest under Pembroke, was gone. The redress would not come until Bosworth, sixteen years later, when a different Welsh marcher captain (Rhys ap Thomas of Carew) brought a different Welsh army into England behind a different claimant (Henry Tudor of Pembroke). The grave-slab of Sir Roger Vaughan of Tretower is in the parish church of Bredwardine in Herefordshire, in the south transept, with the recumbent effigy in plate armour and the Vaughan arms cut on the breastplate. The slab has been there for five hundred and fifty-six years. Tretower Court, the Vaughan house 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 would have laid out the line of march on the night before Edgecote, is intact.