The Hollow Crown: The Wars of the Roses and the Rise of the Tudors

by Dan Jones

  Henry was not impressed by the prospect of the trip. Although the start of the journey was smooth, and the infant king was well attended by his nurses and nannies, the travelling did not much agree with him. After the first day on the road the royal party spent the night at Staines. Then, on the morning of Sunday 13 November, as Henry was carried towards his mother, seated in her coach and ready to travel onwards to Westminster via Kingston, he threw a royal tantrum. ‘He cried and shremed [i.e. shrieked and thrashed about and wept] and would not be carried further,’ wrote one London chronicler, ‘wherefore he was borne again into his inn, and there bode the Sunday all day.’6 Only twenty-four hours later, after a day of mollification in his lodgings, would the toddler consent to be taken on towards parliament. Finally, on 18 November he arrived, was presented to the realm on his mother’s lap and listened, presumably with no interest whatsoever, to the Speaker, the lawyer and MP John Russell, expressing the thanks of all concerned for their great ‘comfort and gladness to see your high and royal person to sit and occupy your own rightful see and place in your parliament’.7

  If all this seemed rather a strained and strange political dance, it nevertheless had profound importance to the men who performed it. Kingship was a sacred and essential office, and in the 1420s every effort was made to draw the young Henry into its symbolic rituals. Day-to-day government was carried out by a council with clear rules and a fixed membership. Seventeen councillors were initially appointed, articles of conduct for their meetings were agreed and a quorum of four was deemed necessary to make decisions binding. The council kept detailed minutes, including the names of those who had made decisions, and it limited itself to carrying out only the essential functions of kingship. It sold offices and titles only for the financial benefit of the Crown, rather than for private political patronage. It held absolute and secret control over the royal finances. It was as close to a disinterested political body as could be conceived.

  Yet the king was still brought into play whenever it was possible. In the first month of Henry’s reign, a solemn ceremony had been held at Windsor to mark the transfer of the great seal of England – the essential tool in royal government – out of the hands of the old king’s chancellor, Thomas Langley, bishop of Durham. The baby was surrounded in his chamber by the greatest nobles and bishops of the land, who watched carefully as the ‘chancellor delivered to King Henry the late king’s great seal of gold in a purse of white leather sealed with the said chancellor’s seal, and the king delivered the same by [the duke of Gloucester]’ s hands to the keeping of [the keeper of the chancery rolls], who took it with him to London …’8 The next day the seal was taken to parliament and solemnly handed over to a clerk of the royal treasury for safekeeping.

  It was pure theatre, but the fabric of English government was materially sustained when the king’s soft and tiny fingers passed over the fine white leather of the seal’s purse. The same ceremony was repeated nearly two years later at Hertford Castle, when the king was again called upon to hand the seal over to his great-uncle Henry Beaufort, bishop of Winchester, who had been appointed chancellor in his turn.9 When the king was five years old, the lords of his council recorded in their minutes an astonishingly clear summary of their position: ‘How be it that the king as now be of tender age nevertheless the same authority resteth and is at this day in his person that shall be in him at any time hereafter.’10

  This attempt to affect personal kingship was, at times, comical in its confection. Official letters survive, written in the very first years of Henry VI’s reign, which were framed not as instructions from older men ruling on the behalf of a baby, but with the pretence that the baby himself was a fully functioning adult dictating his royal despatches in person. One such, written to the duke of Bedford in France, on 15 May 1423, when the king was still a couple of weeks short of eighteen months old, began, ‘Right trusty and most beloved uncle we greet you well with all our heart and signify unto you as for your consolation that at the time of the writing of this thanked by God we were in perfect health of person trusting to our Lord it as we desire in semblable wise ye so be …’11 Five years later, the king was described in parliament as showing signs of readiness to rule: ‘The king, blessed be our lord, is … far gone and grown in person, in wit and understanding, and like with the grace of God to occupy his own royal power within [a] few years.’12 He was six years old.

  In fact, conciliar government continued throughout the 1420s. In areas where an adult king would traditionally have intervened in person, such as arbitrating disputes between the great nobles in the shires, a system of mutual oath-taking served to keep the peace. It was not always straightforward, but order was generally maintained. Only in 1425 did a personal feud threaten to destabilise the administration completely, when a dispute flared up between two of the most powerful and potentially dangerous men in England: the frustrated protector, Humphrey duke of Gloucester, and the king’s rich and influential great-uncle, Henry Beaufort, bishop of Winchester.

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  On 29 October 1425, the city of London boiled with excitement. A new mayor, John Coventry, had been elected and was taking office, but as he sat down to his official feast, he received an urgent message summoning him with all the most important men in the city to a meeting with the duke of Gloucester. When he arrived in the duke’s presence, he was instructed to secure London as swiftly as possible for the night ahead. He was told that a large armed force was gathering under the leadership of Beaufort on the south side of London Bridge, in the suburb of Southwark. Archers, men-at-arms and a whole array of other men loyal to the bishop were said to be preparing to invade London the next day, determined to do harm to anyone loyal to Gloucester, and to cause mayhem in the city. A long, sleepless night lay ahead. The citizens were told to keep watch, and to ready themselves for a fight.

  The background to the quarrel was complex. Gloucester and Beaufort were both capable and experienced men, with vital roles in the minority government. In the absence of the duke of Bedford, they bore, between them, a large responsibility for keeping the peace, but their views on foreign policy and domestic issues frequently clashed, producing mutual suspicion and hostility.

  Gloucester’s outsized personality was well known, but Beaufort was also an imposing figure. The second son of Henry VI’s great-grandfather, John of Gaunt, and his third wife, Katherine Swynford, he had been made a cardinal and legate by Pope Martin V in 1417. The cardinal’s personal power and wealth came from his diocese of Winchester, the richest in England, and his public standing came from a long life of service. At fifty, he had held high office in England for more than twenty years, often helping to prop up Crown finances by means of vast and generous loans. In 1425 he was the chancellor of England and probably the leading advocate of the conciliar system of government. It was likely that Beaufort, naturally conservative, had helped co-ordinate opposition among the lords of the council to Gloucester’s regency. All this meant that the two men were, as one chronicler laconically put it, ‘not good friends’.13

  By 1425 their animosity and mutual suspicion was intense. The principal fault lay with Gloucester who, the previous summer, had led a popular but extremely unwise military expedition to the Low Countries, in pursuit of his wife’s claim to the county of Hainault. Unfortunately, the man who now held Gloucester’s wife’s possessions was her first husband, John of Brabant, who was supported by the duke of Burgundy, a key ally of the English in their war with Armagnac France, and a man whom Beaufort had spent a great deal of time and effort courting. That Burgundy was greatly upset and antagonised by Gloucester’s heedless aggression was bad enough. To make things worse, the campaign was a total failure. It also stirred up violent anti-Flemish feeling in London, which bubbled over into xenophobic riots and disturbances in the streets. Beaufort, as chancellor, was left to try and calm the capital. He appointed a new keeper of the Tower of London, one Richard Woodville, as a precautionary peacekeeping measure, but this was interpreted as an attem
pt to intimidate the citizens by putting the fortress that loomed over the city in the hands of a government stooge, and had the effect of arousing still more popular ire. By 1425, Cardinal Beaufort had become the chief public enemy in the capital, perceived to be a friend of foreigners and enemy of native Londoners.

  Thus it was that on the evening of 29 October, tensions exploded. Beaufort had come to believe that it was his cousin’s intention to travel from London to Eltham to take personal command of the young king, a symbolic appropriation of the source of power that would have amounted to a full coup d’état. It is unlikely that Gloucester really meant to kidnap the king, but Beaufort was not prepared to gamble on the duke’s trustworthiness. He had thus garrisoned Southwark, and, when day broke over a wakeful city, the citizens rushed to the riverbank to see that that the south side of London Bridge had been barricaded, with huge chains drawn across it and heavily armed men standing guard at windows, ‘as it had been in the land of war, as though they would have fought against the king’s people and breaking of the peace’. On the north side of the bridge, Gloucester and London’s new mayor had closed the city gates. It was a stand-off whose most likely conclusion appeared to be a deadly confrontation on the bridge itself. There was panic throughout the city. ‘All the shops in London were shut in one hour,’ wrote one breathless chronicler.14

  Yet battle was never joined. There was enough passion on both sides of the Thames to have foamed the eddies beneath London Bridge’s narrow arches with blood, but England luckily had cooler heads than those of the two disgruntled uncles of the king. Chief among them were Henry Chichele, archbishop of Canterbury, and Pedro, prince of Portugal and duke of Coimbra, a much-travelled cousin of King Henry, who was then staying in England as an honoured guest of the court.15 They led frantic negotiations throughout the day on 30 October, their messengers riding eight times between the opposing camps until eventually a truce was brokered.

  Bad blood lingered on both sides. The next day, Beaufort wrote an indignant letter to his nephew, John duke of Bedford, begging him to return from France and take command of the troubled regime. ‘As ye desire the welfare of the king our sovereign lord and of his Realms of England and of France, and your owne wele [i.e. well-being] and ours also, hasten you hither,’ he wrote, ‘for by my troth [ if ] ye tarry, we shall put this land in adventure with a field [i.e. a battle]. Such a brother ye have here. God make him a good man.’16 Bedford returned in January and spent a year restoring calm.

  This was a significant act: in a sense his return to mediate between his sparring kinsmen had the duke playing surrogate king. But it worked. Cardinal Beaufort resigned as chancellor, his attentions soon diverted by instructions from the pope to lead a military crusade against the Hussites, a reforming sect of heretics in Bohemia. Yet Beaufort’s climbdown did not mean that Gloucester was allowed to feel he had emerged victorious: under Bedford’s instruction the regulations that had established the careful conciliar government of 1422–4 were re-enacted, and in January 1427 two separate meetings were held in the Star Chamber at Westminster and Gloucester’s inn in London, where Bedford and Gloucester both swore to the assembled lords of the council on the Holy Gospels that they would support a conciliar form of government. Both agreed they would be ‘advised, demesned [i.e. dealt with] and ruled by the lordes of the council and obey unto the King and to them as for the King’. Gloucester evidently gave his oath in bad faith, for less than one year later he would again demand an expansion of his powers over domestic government, huffily threatening to boycott all future parliaments unless he was granted what he desired. Yet once again, he would be unequivocally slapped down, told in parliament to satisfy himself with the powers that the realm had deemed sufficient for him and asked forcefully to confirm ‘that you desire no greater power’. In the face of every serious crisis of authority, a general commitment to preserving and defending royal government triumphed.

  Nevertheless, no matter how diligently the principles of conciliar rule were observed, royal government without the king could only ever be temporary, and each challenge to the existing order inevitably tested the ability of all around the council table to preserve their constitutional pact. The crisis of 1425–7 illustrated precisely why there was such eagerness to see in the child-king the ability ‘to occupy his own royal power within [a] few years’. Recalling Bedford from France had been a desperate measure that would not prove practical or desirable to repeat. In short, as the 1420s progressed it became very clear that Henry would have to grow up – or be forced to grow up – as rapidly as could be managed. Yet it would not be domestic affairs that prompted Henry’s most significant advancement. Rather, it was events across the Channel that impelled England’s surrogate rulers to thrust the first real vestiges of kingship upon a seven-year-old boy.

  3 : Born to Be King

  On 17 August 1424, eight thousand men stood ranked together on the plain outside the fortified town of Verneuil, in eastern Normandy, and braced themselves for the charge. Opposite them bristled a massive army, loyal to the dauphin – or, as he would have it, Charles VII of France. Charles himself was not present, but his distant cousin Jean, count of Aumale, a twenty-eight-year-old prince of the French blood who had been fighting the English since his teenage years, commanded between fourteen and sixteen thousand troops, all heavily armed and prepared to fight to the death. Above Aumale’s army blew flags and pennons representing men of various origins: Frenchmen stood shoulder to shoulder with six and a half thousand Scottish men-at-arms and archers and a contingent of Spaniards, all of whom were flanked, most menacingly, by two divisions of cavalry from Lombardy, a region of northern Italy famous for producing the finest armour and the most terrifying and stoutly protected mounted warriors in Europe. The juddering approach of these powerful and heavily shielded horses, together with the bright glint of the lances and breastplates of their riders, was enough to strike mortal fear into the hearts of any man who saw them. There may have been as many as two thousand of these galloping agents of death in the French army. The wide, unprotected plains of Verneuil were the perfect territory for them. It was a fearsome sight.1

  The eight thousand men who prepared to confront these fearsome horsemen and the thousands of infantry they accompanied were an army of Englishmen and Normans under the command of John duke of Bedford. The regent of France led his army wearing a surcoat decorated with both the white cross of France and the red of England – a potent sign of the dual monarchy he represented. Over the top he wore the blue velvet robes of the Order of the Garter. Beside him in the field stood Thomas Montacute, earl of Salisbury, a grizzled veteran who, at thirty-six, was one of the most famous soldiers in Europe. They formed an impressive pair of leaders, but for all their personal honour and experience, they could not ignore the facts of the battlefield, which seemed overwhelmingly to favour the enemy.

  Bedford and Salisbury’s men were arrayed to anticipate the danger that the cavalry, in particular, would pose. An armoured horse and rider charging at full speed could just as well knock a soldier to the ground and crush him as gore him with the thrust of a lance. The force of hundreds of cavalry arriving at the same time could scatter an army into terrified chaos before the hand-to-hand fighting even began. So just as at the battle of Agincourt, the English archers protected their lines by hammering sharp wooden stakes into the ground, as vicious obstacles to check the cavalry charge. The large body of English and Norman men-at-arms – dismounted knights who fought in armour with swords, axes and daggers – were grouped together in one huge division. Horses and baggage wagons were tied together behind them to create further defensive barricades. The rest was entrusted to God.

  The battle began, as expected, with a charge of the Lombard cavalry, who hurtled towards Bedford and Salisbury’s centre. They collided with such force that they drove straight through the middle of the English line, splitting the entire army in two, emerging at the rear and proceeding to attack a lightly armoured reserve force who had been kept b
ack to guard the baggage train. The reservists leapt on their horses and fled from the battlefield in fear. The Lombards gave murderous pursuit. Behind them, the French and Scottish men-at-arms waded towards the now broken line of English foot-soldiers and the chaotic one-to-one crowded fighting known as the mêlée began.

  ‘The battle was a bloody one; no one could tell who was winning,’ wrote a Parisian diarist, who was not an eyewitness at Verneuil, but managed to capture in one phrase the reality of so many medieval battles.2 As soon as the cavalry charge had passed, the duke of Bedford is said to have exhorted his troops to fight not for ‘winning or keeping worldly goods, but only to win worship in the right of England’.3 Thereafter he showed them the way, fighting manfully with a poleaxe, while Salisbury displayed the martial skill and bravery that had made him a hero of the French wars. It was a desperate fight, waged with violent intensity on both sides. At one point the English standard – the flag that marked the central position of the army – fell to the ground. Traditionally this was a sign that an army was defeated, but a Norman knight threw himself into the French lines and managed single-handedly to retrieve it.

  The day was eventually won by this sort of courage: Bedford’s men simply ground their way to victory in hand-to-hand combat rather than by following any orders of tactical military brilliance. Noble-blooded men-at-arms fought alongside peasant-born archers, all devoted to the same cause. They managed to slaughter enough of the French and Scots to ensure that when the Lombards returned to the field following their rout of the English reserve, they found the battle already over, and English horsemen now thundering about a broken enemy, despatching anyone within reach as they tried to flee.