De Re Militari | Book Reviews
David Clark
Barnet 1471: Death of a Kingmaker
Battleground Series, Barnsley: Pen & Sword Books, 2007.
Readers will discover no new information about the Battle of Barnet in this colorful book devoted to one of the significant clashes of the so-called “Wars of the Roses”. The battle, fought on Easter Sunday, 14 April 1471, was a key step for the victor, King Edward IV of England, in his effort to recover the throne from which he had been driven by his opponent in the field, Richard Neville, earl of Warwick, known to posterity as the ‘Kingmaker’. Warwick’s death at Barnet paved the way for Edward’s triumph over his major remaining rivals at Tewkesbury on 4 May 1471, and made Edward the only English king ever to lose his throne and regain it.
The book is lavishly illustrated, including no less than five imaginative renderings by artists of the death of Warwick. The exact circumstances of Warwick’s death are actually not known. It is curious that the author, obviously interested in Warwick, does not include in his bibliography Michael Hicks’ authoritative biography Warwick the Kingmaker (Oxford, 1998). All the same, the illustrations included in Clark’s book are one of its strengths.
Little is actually known about the course of the Battle of Barnet, although much creative guesswork has been directed at the subject. Clark discusses some historical interpretations in the final chapter of the book. The exact site of the battle is not known. No relics of a battle, such as bits of armor, weapons, or horse harness, have yet been discovered. There have also been no burials discovered that could relate to the battle. Clark devotes a chapter to directions for a tour of the battlefield, but his projected tour is necessarily provisional.
There are a few items in the text that require correcting. Richard II did not die in 1399 (p. 19), but in 1400. The legal process of an act of attainder is brought up on p. 22, but not defined until p. 68. There was no King’s Lynn in 1470 (p. 25) because the town was still Bishop’s Lynn. Richard, duke of Gloucester, did not accompany his brother Edward IV into exile in 1470 (p. 27), for the two men fled separately. Clark also assumes (p. 67) that Gloucester put the two sons of Edward IV to death, which is not a known fact.
Clark has written an attractive book that can serve to introduce the Battle of Barnet to a curious audience. More serious curiosity could be better served with Peter W. Hammond’s The Battles of Barnet and Tewkesbury (Gloucester, 1990) or Philip A. Haigh’s The Military Campaigns of the Wars of the Roses (Stroud, 1995).