Henry VI
Page 9
Warwick’s terms of reference were to train the boy in the moral virtues, literacy, languages, discipline and courtesy and other accomplishments which were meet for such a great prince, only the last two of these five requirements having been specified in Dame Alice’s brief of four years earlier. He was to hold before him mirrors and examples of times past; of virtuous kings who had come to good ends and their opposites who had come to bad, with corresponding results for their subjects. He had the assistance of at least one professional tutor, John Somerset, Henry’s physician who, in addition to his medical qualifications, had previously been master of a grammar school and was later rewarded for instructing Henry as well as for preserving his health. Warwick’s was now to be the principal charge both for Henry’s education and for his safety until he reached years of discretion, with power to control access to his charge, subject only to an over-riding responsibility to obtain the confirmation of the royal uncles for any exclusion he deemed necessary, and subject to the access normally enjoyed by the great officers of the household and others, duly appointed and admitted by the steward, according to the old and accustomed rule of the royal household. For any emergency of pestilence or other danger he was to have power to move his charge whenever and wherever he deemed best. At his discretion he could also chastize Henry for misbehaviour, refusal to learn, or other disobedience.61 The rule of women and the royal infancy were at an end.
1 In 1410 the young Charles of Orleans married the daughter of Bernard VII, count of Armagnac, and the Orleanist party soon became known as Armagnac.
2 Belonging to the abbey of Coulombs, diocese of Chartres, sent to the Sainte Chapelle afterwards and later to the abbey of St Magloire. A. Tuetey, Journal d’un bourgeois de Paris 1405–1449 (Société de l’Histoire de Paris, 1881), 376, n.2.
3 B.L., Add. MS 34764, quoted by C. L. Kingsford, English Historical Literature in the Fifteenth Century, 169.
4 Vita et Gesta Henrici V, ed. Thomas Hearne (Oxford 1727), 321–2.
5 Hall’s Chronicle, ed. Henry Ellis (London 1809), 108.
6 On 11 November in fulfilment of the treaty of Troyes, 1420.
7 S.R., II, 151.
8 Eton College archives contain the only known copy of this 1421 will and the ten codicils of 26 August 1422, a document to which no reference has hitherto appeared in print. It reveals the 1421 will to be a revision and extension of the original will of 24 July 1415 (Foedera, IX, 289–93), to which Henry had already added a long codicil of directions to his feoffees dated 21 July 1417 (J. Nichols, Royal Wills, 236–43, there wrongly described as a second will). Another codicil dated 9 June 1421, the day before the 1421 will was sealed, written ‘in haste with mine own hand, thus interlined and blotted as it is’, the existence, but not the contents, of which is known from R.P., IV, 299, was especially addressed to the feoffees of his fee simple lands and so did not concern the government of his heir or the kingdom. There is no reference to this codicil in the Eton document.
The Latin codicil on the child’s guardianship reads in the passage crucial for Duke Humphrey – ‘habeat tutelam et defensionem principales’ – exactly as he later affirmed it did. Tutela, a term of Roman civil law, signified the control of the heir’s estate during his minority, though not necessarily the personal care of the child: see J. S. Roskell, ‘The Office and Dignity of Protector of England’, E.H.R., LXVIII (1953), and references given there.
9 P.P.C., III, 247–8 (25 February 1427): William Alnwick, Doctor of Civil Law, papal notary and Henry V’s secretary and confessor who had probably drawn up the codicils, by then bishop of Norwich; Humphrey earl of Stafford and Sir Lewis Robessart, Henry V’s standard bearer, by then Lord Bourchier.
10 Henry V’s other brother, Thomas duke of Clarence, second son of Henry IV and heir presumptive at the time of the 1415 will, had been killed at the battle of Beaugé in 1421.
11 By Henry III in 1253 and by Edward I in 1272 before he left on crusade before his accession and anticipating his own and his father’s deaths. See J. S. Roskell, op. cit., 2, 7.
12 S. B. Chrimes, ‘The Pretensions of the Duke of Gloucester in 1422’, E.H.R., XLV (1930), where he prints Gloucester’s representations to the lords in the first parliament of the reign (P.R.O., C.49/53/12).
13 London and the Kingdom, ed. R. R. Sharpe (London 1895), III, 367–8, from City of London Letter Book I, fol. 43.
14 R.P., IV, 174–5.
15 P.P.C., III, 231–42.
16 See below pp. 44–5.
17 R.P., IV, 194. Parliament summoned 29 September, the new king’s peace proclaimed 1 October.
18 R.P., IV, 175–6.
19 Ibid., IV, 201. The council nominated in the 1423–4 parliament consisted of twenty-three members including the three officers.
20 P.P.C., VI, 343–7. The second occasion was the appointment of his uncle Henry Beaufort as chancellor at Hertford castle on 16 July 1424.
21 MS Harley 565 in A Chronicle of London, ed. N. H. Nicholas (London 1827), 111–12, for the journey; MS Cotton Julius B I for the Speaker’s oration in Chronicles of London, ed. C. L. Kingsford (Oxford 1905), 280–1.
22 By right of descent from Philippa, countess of March, daughter and sole heir of Lionel duke of Clarence, third son of Edward III, the Lancastrian kings being descended from John of Gaunt, Edward III’s fourth son.
23 R.P., IV, 202; Chronicles of London, ed. Kingsford 282–3, 341–2, the only account of this obscure incident.
24 For March as lieutenant of Ireland, see A. J. Otway-Ruthven, A History of Medieval Ireland (London 1968), 362–3.
25 Giles’s Chronicle, 6.
26 P.P.C., III, 169. York may have taken the Angevin name ‘Plantagenet’ about 1448: Gregory’s Chronicle, 189.
27 C.P.R., 1415–22, 443; Chronicles of London ed. Kingsford, 74.
28 R. L. Storey, ‘English Officers of State, 1399 1485’, B.I.H.R., XXXI (1958), 87–92.
29 C.P.R., 1415–22, 227, 234.
30 Ibid., 84, 455, 525, 531.
31 P.P.C., III, 143; C.P.R., 142–29, 323.
32 P.P.C., III, 170.
33 Sir John Fortescue, De Laudibus Legum Anglie, ed. and trans. S. B. Chrimes (Cambridge 1942), in, 193. This tract is generally accepted as written for Henry VI’s son Prince Edward in exile in France between 1468 and 1471.
34 P.P.C., III, 282, 292–3; Foedera, X, 387–8.
35 P.P.C., III, 284–6, C.P.R., 1436–41, 285; Foedera, X. 387–8.
36 P.R.O., E.404/42/306; E.404/44/334; Foedera, X, 387–8.
37 This is one of the very few references to any contact between the child and his youngest Beaufort great-uncle who was supposed to have taken personal charge of him under his father’s will. Exeter can have spent very little time with the boy as he returned to campaign in France in February 1423 and died on 31 December 1426. Likewise the two coadjutors who were never to be away from the infant Henry at the same time can have had little influence on his upbringing. Hungerford was given special dispensation by the council to accompany Exeter to France and Lord Fitzhugh died in January 1424.
38 P.P.C., III, 165: 2,000 marks p.a.
39 For the full story of the Hainault, Holland and Zeeland succession dispute and its outcome see Richard Vaughan, Philip the Good (London 1970), 31–49.
40 Romans, II, 10.
41 Chronicles of London, ed. Kingsford, 285.
42 P.P.C., III, 167 (26 February 1425).
43 Son of Philippa, daughter of John of Gaunt by her marriage to King John I of Portugal.
44 P.P.C., III, 183–4. According to one chronicler, other weapons being forbidden, men carried clubs, hence ‘The Parliament of Bats’ (Gregory’s Chronicle, 160).
45 Ecclesiastes, III, 2.
46 P.P.C., III, 185–6.
47 The earliest and fuller narrative account of the events of 1425–6 is in Chronicles of London, ed. Kingsford, 76–94. See also A London Chronicle, ed. Nicholas, 114; R.P., IV, 295–9; P.P.C., III, 181–9; ibid., VI, 347–9; Gregory’s Chro
nicle, 158–61; An English Chronicle, ed. J. S. Davies, 53–4; Giles’s Chronicle, 7–9.
48 K.B. McFarlane, ‘At the deathbed of Cardinal Beaufort’, in Studies in Medieval History Presented to F. M. Powicke, ed. R. W. Hunt and others (Oxford 1948), 405–28.
49 McFarlane, op. cit., 416–20.
50 Chronicles of London, ed. Kingsford, 94–5, 130–1 (38 names), Foedera, X, 356 (34 writs sent out).
51 P.P.C., III, 213–21, dated 24 November (another copy in R.P., V, 407).
52 Printed in Correspondence of Thomas Bekynton (R.S., 1872), i, 138–45, presumably Gloucester’s copy since Beckington was his secretary.
53 R.P., IV, 326–7.
54 Act found by Dr Griffiths in the archives of the borough of Leicester. See Law Quarterly Review, XCIII (1977), 248–58.
55 Annales S. Albani, I, 21; P.P.C., III, 294 (payment for French players and dancers coram rege).
56 P.P.C., III, 294–5; C.P.R., 1422–9, 531. Knights: William Philip, Ralph Rochefort, Walter Beauchamp, William Porter. Esquires: John St Loo, John Chetewynde, Thomas Boulde and William Fitzharry.
57 Master John Somerset, doctor in medicine at £40 a year, with the furred and lined livery accustomed for royal physicians (ibid., 460), possibly the ‘bastard of Somerset’ who received a legacy in Cardinal Beaufort’s will, son of his brother John earl of Somerset or of John duke of Somerset his nephew: K. B. McFarlane, ‘At the deathbed of Cardinal Beaufort’, in Studies in Medieval History Presented to F. M. Powicke, 425, n.4
58 In the autumn of 1426 he commissioned one of the most banal of Lydgate’s poems, ‘On the English Title to the Crown of France’, printed by Thomas Wright in Political Poems and Songs relating to English History (R.S., 1861), II, 131–40, from MS Harley 7333. fol. 31.
59 Cited by R. Pauli, Geschichte von England, V, 263 (Gotha 1858), from the Tower records.
60 ‘Tractatus de Regimine Principum ad Regem Henricum Sextum’, in Four English Political Tracts of the Later Middle Ages, ed. J.-P. Genet (Camden 4th Ser. 18, Royal Historical Society, 1977), 78.
61 P.P.C., III, 296–300 (French and English); Foedera, X, 399 (Latin from the Patent Roll). I am indebted to Dr Nicholas Orme for the references to Somerset as grammar master and tutor (see C.P.R., 1429–1436, 241; Emden, Biographical Register … Oxford, III, 1727).
Chapter 3
CORONATIONS
There was no English precedent to determine when a king who had succeeded to the throne in his cradle should be crowned. All previous royal minors, even the youngest – Henry III at the age of nine – had so far been considered old enough on accession to undergo the arduous ceremonies of recognition, oath-taking, anointing, crowning and homage, with all the processions, masses and feastings which constituted the medieval coronation. Indeed Henry III had had to undergo them twice, but it was not his extreme youth which had rendered the efficacy of the first time doubtful, only its partly improvised nature, held perforce at Gloucester where the bishop of Winchester, in the absence of the archbishop and St Edward’s regalia, had crowned him with a simple circlet of gold.1 In 1377 the rigours of the full Westminster ceremony at the age of ten had so exhausted Richard II that he had to be carried to his banquet in Westminster Hall.2
On St Leonard’s Day, Sunday 6 November 1429, Henry of Windsor, scarcely eight years old, was taken in procession to his abbey ceremony in the arms of his tutor the earl of Warwick, but he walked out unaided at the end to his coronation banquet between the bishops of Durham and Bath, with Warwick bearing his train, having cheerfully survived the full gruelling ceremony. It all began with ceremonial washing and creation of thirty-two knights of the Bath the previous evening; then the morning procession from the Tower to show himself to his people, followed by a solemn seating on the King’s Bench in Westminster Hall, a full abbey ceremony, and, finally, the customary gargantuan banquet with the dramatic appearance of the Dymmock champion to defend his right.3 The day was fine, the crowds huge, several people were crushed to death and a number of cut-purses were imprisoned and had their ears cut off.4 Observers noted especially the boy’s sad and wise demeanour as he surveyed the assembly from the coronation platform, his repeated long prostrations before the altar and the number of times he was ‘stripped of his gear’ and reclothed. St Edward’s crown proved ‘over heavy for him for he was of tender age’. The oath-taking seems to have gone unremarked, although the elaborate symbolism of all the regalia was noted, with the precise significance of each of the separate swords used specified for the first time.5 The most solemn moment was the anointing by the archbishop of Canterbury, Henry Chichele: ‘fyrste hys breste and hys ij tetys, and the myddys of hys backe, and hys hedde, all a-crosse hys ij schydlerys, hys ij elbowys, his pamys of his hondys; and thenne they layde a certayne softe thynge as cotton to all the placys a-noyntyde; and on hys hedde they putt on a whyte coyffe of sylke’. Left in situ for eight days, when the bishops washed the oil away ‘with whyte wyne i-warmyd leuke warme’, this especially solemn consecration must have made an even more lasting impression on the boy himself than on the careful chronicler, although in his grandfather’s case the same ritual appears to have been chiefly remembered because it produced an abundant growth of lice on the anointed royal head.6
Henry VI was in fact, like his grandfather, anointed from the golden eagle and ampulla, the receptacle of the holy Becket oil, ‘with which kings were accustomed to be consecrated’.7 The legend of the eagle containing a stone flask of oil, presented by the Virgin to the exiled Becket for the anointing of future English kings, first appeared in English history during the reign of Edward II. Fifteenth-century versions state that the vessel had disappeared before the crowning of Richard II, only to be rediscovered in time for the coronation of the usurping Henry IV. The political overtones added to the legend for the first Lancastrian crowning of 1399 are obvious, but its origins had lain in the desire to put the Westminster coronations of our fourteenth-century kings on a par with those of the Most Christian Kings of France. They alone hitherto, having the sacred oil of Clovis for their Rheims coronations, ‘did not have to buy their oil at the apothecary’s but had it brought direct from Heaven’.8
1429 saw further significant developments in this respect. Here, in Henry VI’s coronation, we have the first clear statement that the ancient English custom of anointing with two comparatively ordinary oils, the oil of the catechumens and chrism, both provided by the abbey sacrist, was abandoned. Henry was anointed solely with the miraculous Becket oil from the golden eagle ampulla. This was solemnly borne in procession with cross and candles from the palace to the high altar by a bishop in full pontificals, ‘and at its arrival the king to be crowned must reverently rise from his seat’. The new rubric appears in the up-to-date version of the coronation ordo recorded in a book of ceremonies compiled by the dean of the royal chapel, William Say, for presentation to the king of Portugal in the spring of 1449. Along with two other preliminary ceremonies new to the English ordo, it was undoubtedly copied from current French practice and designed to emphasize the highest theocratic nature of Henry’s kingship. The coronation ordo for 1429 had in fact been specifically modified in these respects to conform with the official French ordo, as written by command of Charles V in a volume in the royal library of the Louvre, which fell into Bedford’s hands in 1423. Thus in 1429 the English coronation service no longer actually began with the more popular or constitutional ceremony of recognition and acceptance, the traditional commencement of the English ceremony. This had significantly been completely omitted from the French coronation since the later thirteenth century.9
Henry’s Westminster coronation ceremonies were redesigned as befitted the enhanced sanctity and regality of the first king of two realms. The introduction of two extra preliminary ceremonies emphasizing the regality of the king, even before the recognition, together with the procession of the Becket oil from the palace to the abbey, on the pattern of the Rheims practice with the sacred Clovis oil from abbey to cathedral, w
ere meant to assimilate English practice to that appropriate for the Most Christian King of France, when Henry entered into his continental heritage. The young Henry’s approaching arrival in France had in fact been the very reason for fixing the date for the Westminster coronation. The same theme was continued in the concluding ceremonies of the banquet, eloquently expressed by the elaborate ‘subtleties’, or set-piece pastry confections, which accompanied each mammoth course. In the first the young king, in armour, was supported by St Edward and St Louis, similarly clad:
Loo here ben ij kyngys ryght profytabylle and ryght good,
Holy Synt Edwarde and Synt Lowys.
Also the branche borne of hyr blode.
The final presentation showed the Virgin, with the Christ Child on her lap, offering to the kneeling Henry, who was supported by St George and St Denis, not one crown but two:
Borne by dyscent and tytylle of ryght
Justely to reygne in Ingelonde and yn Fraunce.10
As the council had written to the citizens of Ghent on 18 October 1429, it had in fact been arranged that Henry should receive the holy anointing and take the crown of England in the accustomed place at Westminster on 6 November 1429, not for any English reasons of state, but specifically to facilitate and hasten his arrival in France, to take possession of his French kingdom.11 Thus the Westminster coronation was but the first half of a double ceremony for the hallowing of a king of two realms, who was as much the heir of St Louis as of St Edward, of St Denis as well as St George. Although the splendid Westminster ceremonies bore no obvious signs of hasty preparations, the style and date had in fact been determined by the exigencies of the political and military situation in Henry’s second kingdom. This was the reason why, as the crowds on the route to the abbey murmured, it was done much too early.12