Henry VI
Page 18
A full survey of the bounty lavished on members of Henry’s household, over and above the normal fees and wages of their offices, between 1437 and 1450, would entail consideration of grants to eight members of the nobility, fourteen king’s knights and forty-five king’s esquires, not to mention gentlemen ushers of the chamber, king’s sergeants, clerks, etc. However, its extent and variety can be suggested by what three of them at different levels in the household hierarchy received: the earl of Suffolk, established as head of the household from 1433, James Fiennes, who rose from esquire of the body in 1438 to be household chamberlain, treasurer of England and Lord Say and Sele by 1449, and John Hampton who became an esquire of the body in 1438 and remained so to the end of the reign.
William de la Pole, earl of Suffolk, the household steward, surpassed all his predecessors and competitors in the acquisition of major offices, with all the powers and patronage they each entailed, as well as vast acres of crown lands which Henry granted to him for life, or to him and his heirs in perpetuity. By 1446 he was steward of the Chiltern Hundreds, constable of Wallingford castle, steward of the honours of Wallingford and St Valery, chief justice of Chester, Flint and North Wales, chief steward of the North Parts of the duchy of Lancaster and steward and surveyor of all mines in England and Wales. In 1447 he acquired the Chamberlainship of England, and the wardenship of the New Forest. In 1448 he became Captain of Calais. His share of the crown lands included the manors of Woodstock, Handborough, Wootton and Stonesfield, with the hundred of Wootton in Oxfordshire, the manor of Swaffham in Norfolk, and East Worldham, Nutley, Benesworth and part of Woolmer forest in Hampshire. All these grants were for life, rent free; the Welsh castles and lordships of Pembroke, Cilgerran, Emlyn Is-Cych and Dyffryn Breuan he received in perpetuity. Raised to marquis in 1444 and duke in 1448, he secured the additional earldom of Pembroke, along with the Welsh lands, on the death of Humphrey duke of Gloucester in 1447. The wardships he acquired were the greatest in the land, including the heiresses of Warwick and Somerset.21
An equally impressive though lesser patrimony fell into the lap of his household colleague James Fiennes of Knole, by Sevenoaks in Kent. As an esquire of the body his grants at first, understandably, came in smaller parcels than Suffolk’s. In 1437 he was given £40 a year from the manor of Headington and Bullingdon hundred, Oxfordshire and the alien priory manor of Monkecourt in Kent, with exemption from clerical taxation for it. In 1440 he added the manor of Capel to his Kentish possessions, followed by the manor of Huntingfield with land in Chelsfield in 1441. When Henry wanted Monkecourt for King’s College, Cambridge, Fiennes exchanged it with him for the manor of Witley in Surrey. In 1444 he was given the manors of Solihull and Sheldon in Warwickshire. His offices included spells as sheriff of Kent, Surrey and Sussex, the chamberlainship of the exchequer, constableship of Rochester castle, bailiff of Otford and Uckfield Stonham and of Loxfield hundred in Kent and Surrey, while the temporalities of the archbishopric of Canterbury were in Henry’s hands, and steward of the duke of Warwick’s lands in Kent and Sussex during minority. From 1447 he was the king’s household chamberlain, constable of Dover castle and Warden of the Cinque Ports. To all these were added pensions at the exchequer, on the issues of the county of Kent, and on the customs in the port of London, and a string of royal forfeitures and wardships. He also received apartments in Westminster palace, the Tower, Eltham and Sheen. Only after ten years in the household did he become a member of the council, in 1447.22
John Hampton of Stourton, Staffordshire, was already an established usher of the chamber in 1437, enjoying the additional offices of constable of Chester and water bailiff of Plymouth, master of the ordnance, life sheriff of Merioneth and steward of Morfe and Shirlet. Promoted to squire of the body in 1438, he had acquired additional pensions amounting to £122 a year out of the revenues of Coventry, Worcester, Bridgnorth and London by 1440. Henry also gave him £9 a year of the issues of the forest of Kinver and £7 3s 4d of the issues of the manor of Rowley Regis, Staffordshire; £8 a year, with Bewes Hampton, of the issues of Wrockwardine, Shropshire, the offices of master of the horse, constable of Colchester castle and captaincy of Hammes castle in the marches of Picardy. He was also master of the queen’s horses from 1445. He specialized in picking up wardships, forfeitures and reversions. In 1439 he had the keeping of the manor of Aston Botterell, Shropshire and marriage of the heir, the reversion of the keeping of Kempton park and lodge, and two tuns of Gascon wine a year for life. 1444 and 1445 were good years when he acquired an additional £4 3s 8d pension which fell in, payable from the issues of Bridgnorth, a ship, the Katherine, forfeited for exporting uncustomed wool, various consignments of wool discovered being exported uncustomed, and a surety of £40 forfeited by the citizens of Coventry for breaking the peace. In 1446 he picked up the keeping of an idiot, in 1447 forfeitures incurred by a Genoese merchant and by the citizens of Cambridge, and the reversion of the manor of Newport and Birchhanger in Sussex.23
It is hard to believe that in the 1440s Henry weighed the consequences of granting any petition which reached him, or refused it, and this must have been the situation which the council in the Star Chamber, at some date which cannot be precisely determined, tried to remedy in a discreet and diplomatic memorandum. He duly approved it with his sign manual. It is now pasted, without date, in the Cotton collection printed by Nicolas, immediately after a document dated 4 March 1444.24 It amounted to a plan to constitute an advisory body of receivers and triers for royal petitions, something like those long since automatically appointed at the beginning of every parliament to process petitions received in parliament. It was proposed that henceforth the sponsor of any petition to the king, whether a member of the council or any other with access to the king’s person, should have to subscribe his name to it. Then certain persons, nominated by Henry, would first receive them all. If they were matters affecting justice and the common law they would then be sent to the council, if matters of grace, taken to Henry. But first a clear summary of the contents of each would be written on the back for his easy comprehension, so that he might the better decide whether to grant or refuse it, in whole or part, or to remit it to the council for their advice. What he granted, where and when, and in whose presence, especially noting which lords, if any, were there at the time, should then be subscribed on it. The king would then sign it immediately and command his chamberlain either to sign it also or to take it to the secretary. To prevent the dangerous practice of granting the same thing to two persons in the future, everything which the king granted should be minuted: ‘provided always that the king hath not granted the things asked to any other person afor this time’.
There was in future to be only one channel by which these petitions, once they had been made into warrants by the king’s approval, should reach the chancellor for execution under the great seal: first to the signet office, then to the privy seal office, then to the chancellor. The diplomatic but revealing reason given for this was that ‘such things as passeth the hands of many persons shall the more readily and sadly pass and any hurt that should else more grow to the king or to prejudice of any other person the more to be eschewed’. It was recommended that the signet office, Henry’s most intimate writing office, should henceforth keep all originals and copies of their consequent warrants to the privy seal, clearly something not previously done. In this connection it must be mentioned that on 16 October 1444 Henry duly assigned the highest chamber in the tower next to the Lancaster Tower in Windsor castle to his secretary and the signet office clerks as their first permanent, static base for storing their records.25
The crux of this document was the role envisaged for the keeper of the privy seal: he would scrutinize the grants before allowing them to pass and, at his discretion, refer them to the council, who would refer them back to the king if they thought this advisable. The deferential tone of the memorandum submitted ‘only by way of advertisement … for they in no wise think nor have will to do … any thing but that the king
’s good grace do at all times as it shall please him and use his power and will as it pertaineth to his royal estate’, shows how powerless the council really were in this situation. Indeed, such explicit conciliar supervision of royal acts was incompatible with the exercise of real kingship. To sweeten the pill, the document concluded with a special new oath of loyalty and impartiality, to be taken by the new ‘receivers and triers’, and other recommendations to ensure the integrity and impartiality of royal councillors.
Since the document bears the royal sign manual, Henry must actually have approved it. But a privy seal writ was soon issued from his lodge in Windsor park, on 7 November 1444, for letters patent under the great seal to be made reaffirming the validity of all direct warrants to the chancellor made since the tenth year of his reign (1431–2) until that date, whether under his sign manual, his signets, or endorsed by his chamberlain or the clerk of the council. He thus appears soon to have changed his mind, although it is possible that this privy seal writ was merely to ensure that the new measure of conciliar control he was now accepting should not affect the validity of his past acts.26 The real test of the effectiveness of the council’s laudable plans to supervise the ineffective king ought to be whether or not the records of the privy seal and signet reveal any consequent changes. The answer is that the files of direct warrants under the sign manual and signets covering 144427 are the smallest of any before the period of Henry’s madness, while the corresponding files of council and privy seal warrants to the chancellor do seem to provide some evidence of restriction to conciliar supervision.28 But the files for these and subsequent years in both series also demonstrate that these changes, if made, were but partly and temporarily applied, and direct warrants under the sign manual subscribed by the three signet clerks Robert Osbern, John Blakeney and Robert Repynghale, which should have been eliminated by the proposed council reform, substantially increased in volume again from 1445 until the autumn of 1453.
The favoured circle who had access to Henry’s person between 1437 and 1450 and received grants of lands, offices and privileges stretching throughout the land, were not only the channels of royal authority at the centre, but also in the localities. Some of the most favoured, like James Fiennes, Lord Say and Sele, in Kent and Sussex, received their bounty in lands, offices and privileges mainly, but never entirely, in one territorial area. For example, John Viscount Beaumont received his grants mainly in Lincolnshire, Ralph Lord Cromwell in Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire, Lincolnshire and Yorkshire, John Lord Beauchamp of Powicke in Gloucestershire and the Marches of Wales, John Lord Stourton and Sir Edmund Hungerford in Wiltshire, Sir Thomas Stanley in North Wales, Cheshire and Lancashire. This also applied to some of the lesser fry. The squire of the body, John Trevelyan, received most of his extensive rewards in his home county of Cornwall. Others, however, who were equally favoured, such as Ralph Butler Lord Sudeley, William Beauchamp Lord St Amand and John Somerset, the king’s physician, received as many, if not more, grants scattered haphazardly throughout the kingdom. The conclusion must be that it was the local interest, preference and early knowledge of what became available, on the part of the recipients, which produced these territorial groupings and not any conscious policy on Henry’s part. In theory Henry’s ability to dispose of so much valuable patronage in lands, offices and privileges throughout the kingdom, and the concentration of them in the hands of members of his household, should have given him an invincible royal affinity, with roots in every shire of England. In fact it only served to generate the same jealousies and resentments in the localities as in government at the centre. From the later 1440s evidence begins to accumulate of the royal power and influence being regarded as support for territorial factions. In 1449 the Commons in parliament complained that the king’s duty to keep the peace, dispense justice and maintain the law of the land was no longer being fulfilled as it had been, and consequently ‘murders, manslaughters, rapes, robberies, riots, affrays and other inconveniences greater than before, now late have grown within this your realm’.29 These were the words of the preamble to a petition for the punishment of the king’s squire, William Tailboys, of South Kyme in Lincolnshire, who had set upon Lord Cromwell with an armed band at the entrance to the Star Chamber, a glaring instance of a local feud being carried into the very precincts of the palace of Westminster. Tailboys enjoyed the protection of Suffolk and Viscount Beaumont, and had been allegedly saved from the execution of judicial writs against him by Suffolk’s intervention.30 According to contemporary complaints it was the king’s favour, operating through members of Henry’s household in their localities and through their privileged agents and servants, which was now bringing the machinery of royal justice into growing disrepute.
One of the two fundamental duties of a medieval king was to judge his people. The other was to fight their battles.31 Henry VI did neither. The two duties were not mutually exclusive or incompatible, since the previous reign had been outstanding in both respects. In spite of Henry V’s almost continuous absence on the conquest of France, while he was abroad his mere shadow, it was said, maintained a healthy respect for law and order in England. He was a tireless correspondent, issuing orders and directives in English, in his own hand, to his servants back home; his tremendous energy enabled him to poke his finger into all manner of his subjects’ concerns. He was never the tool of any faction. Evidence survives of his personally punishing a prominent Oxford esquire, Reginald Malyns, in July 1419, for bribing a jury with money, food and drink. Dangerous quarrels between three powerful baronial families were peacefully settled in his council between 1415 and 1420.32 Likewise the duke of Bedford, during Henry VI’s minority, in 1433, was praised for upholding the law and for bringing criminals to justice. Some rulers did it, some did not; how it was done is difficult to determine, but undoubtedly mere charisma, as well as energetic, strategic personal intervention was important. Between 1437 and 1450 throughout the shires of England the personal influence of the king in the field of justice, law and order was at best a negative one. In so far as he allowed the royal power to be associated with faction, it was positively harmful.
Lawlessness and disorder are almost impossible to quantify for any epoch, but specialized studies of almost any specific, limited period of English history in the later middle ages, from the later thirteenth to the early sixteenth centuries, tend to come up with evidence of outstanding lawlessness.33 The pattern of later-medieval law and order, and the undoubted elements of endemic disorder in it, was probably set at the end of the thirteenth century with the collapse of law enforcement from the centre by the general eyres, due to the impossible burdens then placed upon them and to their local unpopularity. The multiplication of more specialized, real property assizes never filled the gap and the ensuing enforced delegation of royal authority to the local gentry, first as keepers of the peace and, later, as justices of the peace, with statutory powers to imprison and punish, ensured, in the long run, that the commission of the peace would become more an instrument of local politics than an effective grass-roots agency of the common law and royal authority in England. Likewise the later-medieval sheriff, the king’s only server of writs and empaneller of juries, was emasculated as an effective, impartial agent of central government by a diminishing financial role, by his being deprived of control of the crown lands within the area of his shrievalty and by parliament’s insistence on his annual appointment and prohibition of reappointment within three years. Even in the 1330s, one of the few periods intensively studied in this respect, English society was already looking back to a mythical golden age of effective law enforcement and had allegedly ‘largely ceased to place its trust in royal justice’, seeking security in ‘local bands and private associations’.34
Another consideration which partially explains an endemic lawlessness in later-medieval England, not peculiar to the personal rule of Henry VI, was that, by contrast with modern society, public opinion was not naturally inclined to respect and obey the law. The author of the onl
y detailed, large-scale study of the workings of an English court of law during this period has demonstrated that the fifteenth-century land-hungry gentry and their superiors, as well as the prosperous mercantile classes, demanded from the law courts not abstract or perfect justice but assistance in furthering their own private objectives.35 The correspondence and complaints of the Paston, Plumpton and Cely families, stretching backwards and forwards beyond this reign, like the petitions and depositions which form the judicial records themselves, must always be evaluated in the light of their one-sided self-interest. An action at law was a skilled and unscrupulous contest to outwit your opponent by any possible means to hand. No prudent man, however skilled in that exercise, relied on the letter of the law alone to protect or further his interests. The particular advice given to the next-generation John Paston in 1461 can be taken as generally followed: ‘Make you so strong in lordship and in law that ye reck not much whether the [law] be good or bad.’36
In the maintenance of law and order in the localities, the authority of the local lords was undoubtedly of vital importance. The commissions of the peace for the thirty-six counties of England in the mid-fifteenth century were always headed by those temporal lords who had estates within the county and by the bishop of the diocese, where similarly appropriate. The power of the nobility, where they lived and exercised it, could be the most important element making for peace and quiet. In a famous ‘king’s speech’, prepared for the opening of parliament in 1483, the royal chancellor, Bishop Russell, declared that ‘the politic rule of every region, well ordained, standeth in the nobles’.37 This maxim was equally applicable to the reign of Henry VI, because the parts of his kingdom where public order was most disturbed were not those where the great lords were constantly resident, but, for example, South Wales and the Marches, where the lords were absentee landlords and where the conduct of affairs was left to their local officials, mainly selected from the Welsh squirearchy. Likewise disturbances and local discontents which were revealed in 1450 in Kent, Sussex, East Anglia and Wiltshire also had this element in common. They arose where the lords of the area were absent because constantly employed at the centre in the king’s service: in Kent and Sussex the treasurer, Lord Say, and the chancellor, the archbishop of Canterbury; in East Anglia, the duke of Suffolk, and in Wiltshire, where the courtier Bishop Aiscough, Lord Stourton and Sir Edmund Hungerford held sway. The brutal murder of Henry’s confessor, the bishop of Salisbury, by his tenants at Edington began the disturbances there. He was making for the safety of Sherborne castle on 29 June 1450 on what was probably only his first or second visit to his diocese during his twelve-year episcopate. The complaints of abuse and corruption of the processes of the law which appeared in 1450 were mainly against the lesser gentry, lawyers and officials who were operating under the ‘good lordship’ of the absentee great.38 Grievances against the king’s ministers were most keenly felt in localities where they delegated their local responsibilities to concentrate on their position in the king’s entourage.