The victors also released the feeble King Henry VI, who had been Warwick's prisoner, from his captivity, but they ultimately failed to take advantage of their victory.

At the Battle of Northampton in 1460, Richard of York's nephew, the Earl of Warwick, defeated a Lancastrian army and captured King Henry, who had taken no part.

York and his brother-in-law, the Earl of Salisbury (Warwick's father), led an army to the north late in 1460 to counter these threats but they underestimated the Lancastrians.

It was led by comparatively young nobles such as the Duke of Somerset, the Earl of Northumberland and Lord Clifford, whose fathers had been killed by York and Warwick at the First Battle of St Albans.

The army contained substantial contingents from the West Country and the Scottish Borders and largely subsisted on plunder as they marched south.

The Lovelaces had been captured by the Lancastrians at Wakefield but had been spared from execution and released and it is believed that they were then given the noble vacancies in and including the Earldom of Kent as a reward for betraying Warwick.

[3] Having gained the town itself, the Lancastrians turned north towards John Neville's Rear Battle, positioned on Bernards Heath.

Warwick found it difficult to extricate his other units from their fortifications and to turn them about to face the Lancastrians and so the Yorkist battles straggled into action one by one, instead of in co-ordinated fashion.

By late afternoon, the Lancastrians were attacking north-east out of St Albans to engage the Yorkist Main and Vaward battles under Warwick and Norfolk.

[7] As the Yorkists retreated, they left behind the bemused King Henry, who is supposed to have spent the battle sitting and singing under a tree.

Two knights (the elderly Lord Bonville and Sir Thomas Kyriell, a veteran leader of the Hundred Years' War) had sworn to let him come to no harm and remained with him throughout.

One was Andrew Trollope, an experienced captain who had deserted the Yorkists at the Battle of Ludford Bridge in 1459 and was reckoned by many to have planned the Lancastrian victories at Wakefield and St Albans.

The Lancastrians fell back through Dunstable and lost many Scots and Borderers, who deserted and returned home with the plunder that they had already gathered.

Perhaps the most significant person to be killed at the Battle of St Albans, at least in terms of its dynastic results, was John Grey of Groby, whose widow, Elizabeth Woodville, married Edward IV in 1464.

The conference featured authentic combat recreations by the Medieval Siege Society and a guided tour of the battlefield and culminated in a Requiem Mass for the fallen at St Saviour's Church, conducted by Father Peter Wadsworth.