On Palm Sunday, 29 March 1461, the army of the newly proclaimed King Edward IV defeated the army of Henry VI between Towton and Saxton in Yorkshire, in falling snow. Many Lancastrians were cut down or drowned as they fled, and letters reported 28,000 dead. On 29 March 1973 the United States disestablished its Military Assistance Command, Vietnam.
Full story · ~12 min readBattle of Towton 1461: England's Bloodiest Battle?On Palm Sunday 1461 Edward IV broke Henry VI's army in a snowstorm near Tadcaster.Read the full story ›
Two kings
In October 1460 Henry VI accepted the Act of Accord, which made Richard, Duke of York, and his heirs the heirs to the throne; Queen Margaret would not accept that her son was disinherited. York was killed after the battle of Wakefield at the end of December 1460. In early February 1461 his eldest son Edward defeated a Lancastrian army at Mortimer's Cross, but later that month the Yorkists under the Earl of Warwick were beaten at St Albans and King Henry was back in Lancastrian hands. Edward and Warwick still entered London, and on 4 March Edward took the throne as Edward IV.1
Edward marched north in mid-March. On 28 March, the eve of Palm Sunday, the Yorkists fought for the crossing of the River Aire at Ferrybridge; Lord Fitzwalter was killed and Warwick was wounded in the leg by an arrow, but the crossing was won. Lord Clifford, who had led the Lancastrians there, was among the dead of the next two days.2 › Battle of Towton, 1461
Battle in the snow
The main armies met on Palm Sunday, 29 March 1461, between the villages of Towton and Saxton in Yorkshire. Snow fell: Hearne's Fragment says that "all the season it snowed", and the Croyland chronicler writes of snow covering the ground. The fighting lasted many hours; Bishop George Nevill wrote that it began at sunrise and went on "until the tenth hour of the night".3
The best-known story of the battle comes from Edward Hall's chronicle, printed in 1548: the wind drove the snow into the faces of King Henry's men and spoiled their archery, and the historian Sir James Ramsay accepted it in 1892. Two writers of the time, the chronicler Jehan de Waurin and Bishop Richard Beauchamp, give Edward himself a large part in the victory, and so does Ramsay. Waurin writes that the killing was so savage that "the father did not spare the son, nor the son the father". Hearne's Fragment has the Duke of Norfolk arrive with fresh troops to help Edward, while Hall says Norfolk was sick; Ramsay noted the conflict.4
The rout and the dead
When the Lancastrians broke, many drowned in the river on the way to Tadcaster, and the slaughter went on along the road toward York. Orders had been given to take no prisoners; even so some forty-two knights were captured, only to be put to death afterwards.5
Nobody knows how many died. Letters written in early April 1461 reported that the heralds had counted 28,000 dead. The chroniclers give higher totals still. Modern writers distrust all these figures: the Battlefields Trust calls the chronicle claims improbable, and Ramsay would not even estimate the number of men engaged.6
In 1996 building work at Towton Hall uncovered a mass grave of men killed in the battle, which archaeologists then excavated. The counts of the dead in it differ: Mark Rose's review of the excavation report gives at least 39 individuals, Tim Sutherland about 50.7
Victory and flight
Edward entered York the day after the battle. Henry, Margaret and their son escaped, and fled into Scotland. The victory secured the throne for the Yorkists for the time being, but the Lancastrian cause was far from finished. How the House of York lost the crown is told in our article on the Battle of Bosworth Field, and other great fights of the age in our guide to the most famous medieval battles.8
Also on 29 March: the end of MACV, 1973
The Paris peace agreement, signed in January 1973, required all American troops to leave South Vietnam within sixty days. On 29 March 1973 the United States disestablished the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV). The only American military personnel left in the country were a small Defense Attaché Office contingent and the Marine embassy guard, which both the Army's and the Marine Corps' histories give as 143 strong. How South Vietnam fell is told in our article on the fall of Saigon.9
