Henry VI
Page 6
7 John W. McKenna, ‘Piety and Propaganda: the cult of Henry VI’, in Chaucer and Middle English Studies in honour of Rossell Hope Robbins, ed. Beryl Rowlands (London 1974). 78.
8 Henry the Sixth, 10; Royal Wills, ed. J. Nichols (London 1780), 338–9; H. C. Maxwell Lyte, A History of Eton College (4th ed., London 1911), 29.
9 As the modern editor M. R. James is careful to point out (Henry the Sixth, 48), this incident is told as related by Tunstall, not, as usually claimed, by the author himself, Henry’s claimed ‘confessor’. He merely adds that he remembered a similar incident at Windsor.
10 The portrait on the jacket of this book is a colour photograph of the original in the Würtembergische Landesbibliothek, Stuttgart, Cod.hist.40,141, printed as The Diary of Jörg von Ehingen, ed. Malcolm Letts (O.U.P., 1929), which contains a black and white photograph at p. 50. Jakob von Hefner-Alteneck’s Trachten des christlichen Mittelalters (Mannheim 1840), II, plate 81 is a colour drawing. The other portraits are of Ladislas of Hungary, Charles VII of France, Henry IV of Castile, Alfonso V of Portugal, James III of Cyprus, René of Anjou, John II of Navarre and Aragon and James II (of the red face) of Scotland.
11 Roy Strong, Tudor and Jacobean Portraits (H.M.S.O., 1969), I, 147. This is the earliest of the Tudor portraits, considered, on costume and portrait formula evolved by Roger van der Weyden, to be a copy of an ad vivum likeness of about 1450.
12 Coventry Leet Book, or mayor’s register 1420–1455, ed. M. D. Harris (E.E.T.S., 1907–13), 264.
13 Registrum Abbatiae Johannis Whetamstede, etc., I (R.S., 1872), 323–5.
14 Liber Regis Capelle, 61, 63 (see below, p. 12, n. 16).
15 See below p. 283.
16 Liber Regis Capelle, a Manuscript in the Biblioteca Publica, Evora, ed. Walter Ullmann (Henry Bradshaw Society, 1961).
17 B. L., Cotton MS Cleopatra A xiii, printed by Jean-Philippe Genet in Four English Political Tracts of the Later Middle Ages (Camden Society, 1977).
18 Liber de Illustribus Henricis, ed. F. C. Hingeston (R.S., 1858), also in translation as The Book of the Illustrious Henries (London 1858). Capgrave expresses the hope that London will spew out her foulness and welcome Henry back.
19 An early quotation from the Libel of English Policy: see The Libelle of Englyshe Polycye: A Poem on the Use of Sea-Power, 1436, ed. G. Warner (Oxford 1926), 3, 61.
20 See below pp. 128–9.
21 Chiefly discovered by Professor Robin Storey and Dr Roger Virgoe to whose works I am indebted in the first instance for most of the following references.
22 P.R.O., K.B.9/260/85 (indictment of 11 January 1447).
23 P.R.O., K.B.9/256/12, allegedly in June and November 1447 respectively (indictments of 23 November 1447).
24 P.R.O., K.B.9/262/1 (indictment of 21 November 1449), allegedly in October 1449.
25 P.R.O., K.B.9/262/78; 122/28 (printed by R. F. Hunnisett, ‘Treason by Words’, Sussex Notes and Queries, XIV [Lewes 1954–7], 116–20).
26 Cf. an instance of this in 1440 cited by Hunnisett op. cit., 118, where a Chichester man was indicted for saying the king was no king nor should be and that should be known in a short time.
27 P.R.O., K.B.9/270/34.
28 P.R.O., K.B.9/273/103.
29 Registrum, I, 247–68.
30 Ibid., 415: ‘Matris non patris, fuit ortus filius excors:
Martern non coluit, nimis a patre degeneravit….
Hic fuit in verbis Rex mitis, Rex pietatis,
Attamen in factis nimiae vir simplicitatis.’
(The juxtaposition of excors and simplicitatis in this context makes the intended meaning of simplicitas unmistakable here.)
31 The Chronicle of John Hardyng together with the Continuation of Richard Grafton (ed. Henry Ellis, 1812), 394. The earlier version (B.L. Lansdowne 204) was partially printed by C. L. Kingsford in E.H.R., XXVII (1912), 462–82, 740–53.
32 An English Chronicle, ed. J. S. Davies (Camden Society, 1856), 79, 88–9.
33 In Ingulph’s Chronicle of the Abbey of Croyland with the Continuations, ed. and trans. H. T. Riley (Bohn, London, 1854), 420, 424.
34 Calendar of State Papers Milan (H.M.S.O., 1910), I, 61–2.
35 Constance Head, Archivum Historiae Pontificae, VIII (1970), 145, 152, citing the Commentaries of Pius II on the Memorable Events of his Times, trans. Florence Alden Gragg and ed. Leona C. Gabel (Smith College Studies in History, vols XXII, XXV, XXX, XXXV, XLIII, Northampton, Mass., 1937–57, reprinted New York, 1959), III, 268, 269–70, IX, 578.
36 Cited by Miss Head, op. cit., 161, quoting Commentaries, III, 271.
Part II
THE MINORITY
Chapter 2
AN INFANT KING
A fifteenth-century English king both reigned and ruled. For his subjects, great and small, his was the supreme authority on earth. He had to be seen by his people, be accessible to his people and, in the ultimate event, personally decide their disputes and determine their requests for favour. He was their personal champion in peace and war. On the personality of the king depended the tone and quality of the life of the nation.
Undoubtedly the king of England had at his disposal to assist him in his task an apparatus of government which was impressive by any fifteenth-century standards. At its head was a council of his choice to advise and to execute his decisions. A representative parliament to tax and legislate had existed for more than a century and a half by 1422. Two great self-sufficient offices, the chancery under the chancellor or keeper of the great seal, and the exchequer under the treasurer of England, directed the administrative and financial systems. In addition the king had the services of his extensive royal household, the offices of his lesser seals, the privy and signet seals, his law courts and judges, his network of administrative and legal officers in the shires, sheriffs, escheators, coroners, customs officials, justices of the peace. Without all these he could not rule and in that sense his powers were limited. Yet all enduring peace, good law, justice and order within the kingdom, its prosperity and its defence against its external enemies, depended on his personal direction of affairs and on his subjects’ conviction that the king was personally directing everything in their best interests, that he knew what was going on and that he cared about it. The exacting office of a successful fifteenth-century English king demanded real mental ability and shrewdness in camp and in council, a tough physique, a commanding presence and a royal integrity which could inspire loyal, efficient service.
In the year 1422 the kingdom of England could look back over nine years of glorious rule by King Henry V, a paragon of medieval kingship, who had successfully recreated the martial, imperial ethos of his greatest predecessors on the English throne, Henry II, Edward I and Edward III. In his short reign he had quickly taken a firm grip on his English kingdom, marshalled all its resources for war, defeated the French at Agincourt and recovered Normandy for the English crown. He had married the French king’s daughter and established himself as regent and heir to a second kingdom. Had he lived two months longer he would have been crowned king of France on the death of his father-in-law, the mad Charles VI.
It has been suggested that unrest and uncertainties in his English kingdom led Henry V to re-assert Edward Ill’s claim to the French crown, that his purpose was to provide an outlet in foreign conquest for energies which might otherwise feed the divisions still confronting his usurping dynasty at home. The ease with which he dealt with a plot to assassinate him in 1415 makes this doubtful. On that occasion the very man who was cast for the position of king, Edmund Mortimer, earl of March, divulged the conspirators’ activities to Henry in advance. Neither does such a notion fit Henry V’s character, with his burning ambition and his belief in the rightness of his cause. In any case, whatever doubts may have remained about the stability of the new Lancastrian dynasty at his accession in 1413, he had certainly given it the stamp of successful kingship and permanency by 1422. The major significance of the French adventure for his successor lay in the fact t
hat Henry V, in claiming the French crown and then dying, undefeated and unspotted by failure, with the necessary conquest of the French kingdom half achieved, left behind him a glorious legend, but a task impossible to fulfil.
Henry’s French adventure had been assisted from the start by the internal divisions of French politics, the struggle for power at the French court of the mad king Charles VI, between the great princes of the royal blood, Orleans and Burgundy. His further stroke of good luck came at a moment in the final stages of his conquest of Normandy, when these two rival parties were about to reunite in face of the invader. Duke John the Fearless of Burgundy was assassinated on the bridge at Montereau on 26 August 1419 while in conference with the dauphin Charles, a belated revenge for an earlier murder of Louis duke of Orleans at Burgundy’s instigation in 1407. The personal responsibility of the young dauphin for the murder remains a matter for conjecture, but in consequence the new young duke of Burgundy, Philip the Good, bound himself in solemn alliance with the invader Henry V, acknowledging him as rightful king of France. His ally Queen Isabeau repudiated her son the dauphin as illegitimate. It was thus the renewal and extension of this internecine feud in the French royal house which enabled Henry V to enlarge his conquest and authority beyond Normandy to cover half France, to marry Catherine of France and to die regent and heir to Charles VI, leaving his infant son to inherit two kingdoms. But the unresolved problem was the continued existence of a second kingdom of France, dauphinist-Orleanist, or Armagnac France,1 south of the Loire, which acknowledged the dauphin as Charles VII, by the grace of God, King of France, on the death of Charles VI, in defiance of the allegations of his illegitimacy. This problem of the English claim to the French throne, dependent for its realization on the continued alliance of Burgundy and the further conquest of half the vast kingdom of France, was the damnosa hereditas of Henry V to his infant son Henry of Windsor.
With so much dependent on the aims and personality of the king it was only to be expected that the accession of a nine-month-old baby to the English throne should be taken to portend not only the end of his father’s grandly designed dual monarchy but also the inevitable collapse of government, law and order and a decline into corruption and chaos at home. One might expect the oft-quoted saying on minorities would be true in its entirety: ‘Woe to thee O land when thy king is a child and thy princes eat in the morning.’ In fact this infant’s princes, his royal uncles and their peers, the Lancastrian lords spiritual and temporal assembled in council or parliament, confounded the preacher. In some respects a period of marking time inevitably followed the nine years of continuous action under Henry V, for only an adult king could initiate new policies. But government did not collapse at Henry V’s sudden and unexpected death. Those who found themselves saddled with the responsibility of carrying it on, his brothers, uncles and councillors, strove, not without success, for some fifteen years to continue what they believed had been his policies and to hand on an unimpaired and expanded inheritance to his son. Contests for power and precedence potentially harmful to the cohesion of the body politic inevitably arose in the absence of the strong, effective kingship which alone could permanently limit and control them, but crises were surmounted. The long minority of Henry VI revealed the inherent political maturity of fifteenth-century England. Such was the prestige of English kingship and the fundamental loyalty and ability of the Lancastrian royal family that it was to prove easier for the kingdom to flourish under a minor than under a weak and ineffective adult king who failed to harness its powerful energies, or misdirected them.
Henry of Windsor, only child of King Henry V and Queen Catherine of Valois, was born in Windsor castle on St Nicholas day, 6 December 1421, an event well prepared for and joyfully welcomed. It was assisted by the presence of that precious relic, Our Lord’s foreskin, known as the silver jewel, renowned for its help to women in labour, specially brought over in good time from France.2 All the bells of London were rung that day and the mayor commanded Te Deums to be sung in the churches.3 In France Henry V and the English army besieging Meaux received the news joyfully.4 The tale that he had wished to avoid a birth at Windsor as a bad omen, foreshadowing the shortness of his own successful reign and the length of his son’s days and misfortunes, only began as a piece of Tudor hindsight.5 Before the child was nine months old the death of his father at Bois de Vincennes in the small hours of 31 August made him king of England. By the death of his French grandfather Charles VI on 21 October 1422 he became the first and last king of the two realms, proclaimed king of France over his grandfather’s open grave.6
Henry V had probably known, or at the least must have had grounds for hope, that his queen was pregnant when he left England for the last time. The unusually generous gift of the manor of Old Shoreham for life, made at Canterbury when he was organizing his departure, to Elizabeth Ryman, one of the queen’s ladies, whom he later commanded to take care of the child from its birth, suggests that this was so. An act of parliament in 1406 had entailed the kingdom of England on the heirs of his body like any other piece of landed estate, so that by the law of the land a child of either sex would have succeeded to the throne in the event of his early death, in preference to his adult brothers.7 Since he thoroughly revised his will at Dover on 10 June 1421, before sailing to France for the campaign which proved to be his last, it is surprising that he did not see fit to address his mind to the problems which an infant succession would create. Indeed historians have hitherto always assumed that he did so. This 1421 will, which was placed in the care of William Alnwick, keeper of the privy seal, was lost some time before 1445 when the council tried in vain to find it, and its contents thus remained unknown until 1978 when reorganization of the archives at Eton College led to the fascinating rediscovery of a copy of it, along with later codicils added to it, the contents of which have also hitherto been uncertain. This Eton College document now reveals that it was not until Henry V was mortally ill from dysentry and knew he was near to death that he formulated his wishes for the care of his English inheritance and his infant son, in one of two codicils drawn up on 26 August 1422 at the castle of Bois de Vincennes. He intended that Humphrey duke of Gloucester, his youngest brother, then in his early thirties and guardian, warden or keeper of England during his absence, should be the child’s principal guardian and protector. His Beaufort uncle Thomas duke of Exeter was to have the governance of the child’s person, with the choice of appointment of all his personal servants. Thomas Beaufort was the youngest of the three illegitimate sons of Henry V’s grandfather John of Gaunt by his mistress Catherine Swynford, who had subsequently been legitimized by King Richard II. Henry IV had specifically excluded them from the succession to the throne. The eldest of these three sons, John Beaufort, earl of Somerset, had died in 1410; the middle one, Henry Beaufort, now bishop of Winchester, was given no part to play in these arrangements except as an executor of the will. Henry V nominated two Garter knights, his household steward Sir Walter Hungerford and his chamberlain Henry, Lord Fitzhugh, to assist the duke of Exeter in the child’s household and laid down that one or the other of them was to be always with him.8
Neither the will of 10 June 1421 nor the written codicils of 26 August 1422 contained any directions for the pressing problems of the government of the French dominions or for the future conduct of the war. But testimony was later made to the council of the minority by Hungerford and three other survivors of the death-bed scene9 confirming the role which Henry V intended his other brother, John duke of Bedford, who was a year older than Humphrey, to play in this respect.10 This revealed that the dying king had orally instructed Bedford to ‘draw him down into Normandy and keep that country as well as the remnant of his conquest on the best wise that God would give him grace, with the revenues and profits thereof and do therewith as he would with his own’. To Bedford’s questioning he had replied that his authority there was to last until his son came of age. Henry V’s dying wishes thus became Bedford’s prime, sacred duty towards hi
s nephew, even though as the eldest brother he might have expected to become regent in England during the minority. Gloucester had been the one who had initially left England with the king on campaign in June 1421 while Bedford remained behind to govern England. Their roles had been reversed only in April 1422 when Bedford brought out reinforcements and Humphrey returned home to take his place there. Thus circumstances of the moment to a large extent dictated the respective roles which the child’s two uncles were to play in the management of his affairs. Henry V seems to have held them both in equal high esteem.
There were English precedents for such a disposal of the governance of the realm and of the heir, by will, during a minority,11 but the will of Henry V did not prevail for long. According to Duke Humphrey the lords spiritual and temporal back in England, either in great council or parliament, at first agreed to the terms of the codicil and prayed him to undertake the high office which Henry V had assigned to him, but before long objections were raised to the implications of the term of civil law, tutela which the writer of the codicil had used. The lords could not accept that the younger brother should be given the power of regent in England which this term would imply. Theirs proved to be the final decision as regards the rule of the kingdom of England, fortified with the assent of the Commons assembled in parliament. Duke Humphrey only received the title of protector and defender and principal councillor of the king which deliberately avoided all imputations of supreme authority of governance which tutor, lieutenant, governor or regent would have carried. In vain he justifiably claimed that this did not give him his due under his brother’s will and aptly cited the case of William Marshall, made Rector Regis et Regni Angliae for Henry III, even though he ‘was not so nigh to the king as my lord is to our liege lord’.12 He did not claim to Rector Regis, but only of the kingdom, for clearly the will had directed otherwise as regards custody of the child’s person. Probably the most important single factor which led to this provision of the dead king’s will being set aside was that Bedford, the elder uncle, who found himself regent not only for Normandy and English France but also for Valois France after his nephew’s French accession when the duke of Burgundy declined to act there, refused to see his younger brother accepted as regent in England, even though he could not possibly act there himself as well. He made this known publicly in a letter to the mayor and corporation of London, firmly reserving his own claims as next in line to the crown and declaring his belief that his dead brother had in no way intended to prejudice his rights in this matter.13 Thus the disappointed Gloucester received a summons to the first parliament of the new reign as duke of Gloucester only and a mere commission to open it on his nephew’s behalf. His full title, warranted by ‘the king by the advice and assent of the lords spiritual and temporal in parliament and the assent of the Commons’ on 5 December 1422, was ‘Protector and Defender of the kingdom of England and the English church and principal councillor of the lord King’, and that only when Bedford was out of the country.14