In such circumstances the influence of a good or bad resident territorial magnate undoubtedly had a great effect on the general state of law and order. A failure of belief in the king at the top as the ultimate, impartial and effective agent of justice, whether through his local agents or through his council, or approached personally, could lead to total collapse. The dangers inherent in these conditions which existed in England from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries are well illustrated by the conduct of justices of the peace in Bedfordshire in 1436, the type of quarrel between local magnates of more or less equal importance, competing for authority in one locality during Henry’s personal rule, which has been seen as the kind of situation which finally escalated into civil war. It was a quarrel between powerful commissioners of the peace who tried to use the commission against one another. Two members of the commission of the peace for Bedfordshire, naming another with them without his knowledge, had obtained a special legal commission and attempted, under its authority, to hold sessions outside the village church at Silsoe. The village belonged to Lord Grey of Ruthyn, another of the J.P.s for Bedfordshire. He duly appeared there when he learnt of this, suitably "accompanied by his retainers as befitted his station, to protect his tenants’ interests. He was supported by yet another J.P., John Enderby, also with an armed following, who proposed they should hold rival sessions and maintained that the special commission had been fraudulently obtained with the intention of injuring Grey’s tenants. It was further alleged by one of Grey’s party that the other local magnate, Lord Fanhope, was behind it all and Fanhope himself, yet another of the Bedford justices, also duly turned up to view the situation. Finding himself outnumbered there by the combined Grey-Enderby party, he sent back to his nearby manor of Ampthill for his armour and for more men. Under these conditions no party could hold sessions and the attempt was abandoned.39 This particular precarious balance in local politics in Bedfordshire was still unchanged two years later, as revealed by a second incident which has become known as ‘the Bedford riots’. Four of the same local gentry, still justices of the peace under the 1437 commission, attempted to hold sessions by themselves in the lawful place, the shire hall at Bedford. Again this was by authority of a limited special commission which they had obtained and again they were allegedly interrupted by Lord Fanhope, also still a justice of the peace, who proceeded to set up a rival court at the opposite end of the hall and to summon some, but not all, of the other justices present, to join him there. In this case each side reported the other to the king and council, under the provisions of Statute 13 Henry IV chapter 7, for causing a riot; first the four justices of the peace who had obtained the special commission of oyer and terminer and then Fanhope and his supporters in retaliation. Large numbers of men, forty-five on one side and one hundred on the other, were named and counter-named as being involved, and much larger unnamed bodies alleged to have been in support.
A long and inconclusive examination of the principals on both sides by the royal council followed. It emerged that neither side was entirely blameless, that a report against Fanhope, by those who had obtained the special commission of oyer and terminer in the first place, had probably been a fabrication and their original commission obtained for dishonest purposes. Both sides obtained Henry’s pardon as a result of this Star Chamber inquiry and in a Great Council meeting on 23 February 1439 Henry granted Fanhope’s request for an exemplification of the proceedings to be made under the great seal.40 Thus Lords Fanhope and Grey were repeatedly able to take the law into their own hands with impunity, only checked by the ability of others to do the same. Commissions of the peace were discredited and fraudulent powers obtained from Henry’s council, but it all ended with pardons all round and without punishments. The comparable Courtenay-Bonville dispute of 1441, already described, similarly ended inconclusively, and, as it turned out, was left to simmer before breaking out with renewed violence some ten years later.
A similar quarrel, but between lesser, gentry families, the Staffords of Grafton and the Harcourts of Stanton Harcourt, occurred when an old land dispute led to an affray and slaying in Coventry in May 1448. This was exacerbated by Sir Robert Harcourt’s ability, through his court connections, to get the king to stay proceedings begun against him for the murder of Richard Stafford. Richard’s father, Sir Humphrey Stafford, unable to get his son’s murder ‘by the course of your law duly punished’, was ultimately provoked into taking the law into his own hands. On 1 May 1450, with a force of some 200 Warwickshire tenants and supporters, he attempted to storm and burn out his enemies in their manor-house and church at Stanton Harcourt. The surviving parties to this dispute obtained pardons, without any punishment, later that year.41
Sir James Ramsay was the first to compile a catalogue of incidents of the domestic disorder in England in the 1440s, which he did not hesitate to describe as anarchic, and he first laid the blame squarely on the ‘simple’ king for these ‘premonitory symptoms of civil war’.42 In fact this is a mistaken explanation of the origins and causes of the civil wars or Wars of the Roses, which followed in the 1450s. The later outbreak of armed conflict on a national scale did certainly develop from a feud and rivalry between two of Henry’s greatest subjects, Richard duke of York and Edmund Beaufort, duke of Somerset, to which other families attached themselves, but this Yorkist-Beaufort enmity arose not out of English domestic history, but out of the conduct of the war in France. It grew out of the changing dispositions, vacillations and suspicions engendered by Henry’s policies there, not in England. It was a rivalry exacerbated during the years while Henry’s marriage remained childless, by fears on York’s part, after the death of Humphrey duke of Gloucester in 1447 made him heir presumptive, that he would be disinherited by allegations of treason, in favour of the Beauforts, in succession to the throne. Following the decline in Henry’s mental powers, the later, direct dynastic issue between York and Lancaster was grafted on to this original contest. However, it is certainly true that the same unhappy ability in Henry to generate and feed unrest and insecurity was evident in his actions at home, for almost all of Ramsay’s incidents of domestic disorder in the 1440s, since supplemented and developed by Professor Storey, contain the same disturbing element: the royal power in Henry’s hands appeared to be used and was alleged to be used, as an instrument of faction. Thus a dangerous new factor added to the already general tendency of disrespect for and manipulation of the law: the feeling that royal power was partisan and was being used as such in the administration of justice.
From the evidence of the Paston Letters it appears that in Norfolk the ‘princypall rewle and governaunce throwh all this schir’, which the duke who bore its name claimed in 145243 was his by right, under the king, had, during the 1440s, been usurped by king’s household men. Generally alleged to operate under the impregnable protection of the duke of Suffolk, the most prominent and hated perverters of the law, according to the Pastons, were Sir Thomas Tuddenham, John Heydon, John Ulveston and Thomas Daniel. Tuddenham, of Oxburgh, Norfolk, keeper of the king’s wardrobe from 1446, repeatedly M.P. for Norfolk and sometime sheriff, held the chief stewardship of the North Parts of the duchy of Lancaster jointly with Suffolk and was himself steward of the duchy in Norfolk, Suffolk and Cambridgeshire, jointly with Heydon, from 1443.44 He also ‘occupied and governed’ Suffolk’s honour of Richmond manor of Swaffham as steward and farmer.45 His associate, John Heydon of Baconsthorpe, Norfolk, sometime recorder of Norwich, J.P. and M.P. for Norfolk, engineered Lord Moleyns’s sack and seizure of their manor of Gresham, according to. the Pastons, while Sir John Fastolf complained in 1450 that Heydon had wronged him over the past thirteen years with continual distraints. While ‘the world was alwey set after his rule’, he said, legal action against Heydon had been pointless.46 John Ulveston of Debenham, Suffolk, employed by Henry as receiver of Eton College, a lawyer, M.P. for Yarmouth, J.P. in Suffolk, king’s escheator in Norfolk and Suffolk, was also the keeper of the writs and rolls of the Court of Common Plea
s so had special facilities for the misuse of legal instruments. Thomas Daniel, referred to by Margaret Paston as ‘my lord Daniel’,47 squire of the body, king’s remembrancer in the exchequer, was established at Roydon by Castle Rising, Norfolk, from 1447. He first entered the county by the king’s grant of Castle Rising according to Lord Scales, who complained about his interference with one of his tenants in 1450.48 Another protected lawbreaker and manipulator was Charles Nowell, Daniel’s bailiff of Bradeston, against whose misdeeds ten gentlemen of Norfolk jointly petitioned. He was the man who, with an armed band, set upon Paston and his men at the door of Norwich cathedral.49
According to Judge Yelverton only the fall of Suffolk and the discomfiture of the king’s household men in 1450 made possible the appointment of an impartial sheriff and undersheriff for Norfolk and Suffolk, as a start to getting proper remedies at law.50 Tenants of Swaffham in 1451, with some exaggeration, complained of sixteen years of Tuddenham’s misrule there,51 while twenty-four separate charges were prepared against Tuddenham and Heydon ready for a new and impartial commission of oyer and terminer, which it was hoped the duke of Norfolk would head in 1451. A separate list of twenty-two of their victims was compiled, headed by Yelverton, Fastolf and Paston.52 The activities of which these men were accused, by virtue of their many offices, included forcing juries to perjure themselves, issuing forged returns and inquisitions, retaining against the law, making unjust presentments and imprisonments, exacting obligations of money by threats and menaces, falsely outlawing men, manipulating the customs due on wool exports and overawing lawcourts. Tuddenham and Heydon mustered 400 knights, esquires and yeomen Successfully to influence a commission of oyer and terminer meeting at Walsingham, after their ally Judge Prisot had removed it there from Norwich.53 Fastolf claimed to have lost the manor of Dedham, Essex, through the false representations, and testimonies of these men, acting as the duke of Suffolk’s council.54 In 1448 he had lost his Norfolk manor of Titchwell, which he had bought dearly for £400 in 1431, to Sir Edward Hull and Thomas Wake, not by an unimpeachable judicial verdict, but through Heydon’s intervention in the legal process and Hull’s superior influence as Henry’s knight of the body and member of the tight circle of royal intimates.55 Over Lord Moleyns’s burning and sacking of Gresham the sheriff declared that it was the king’s wish that he empanel a jury to acquit him, and he dared not disregard it, even though Paston said such a writ could be bought for a noble.56
In all these incidents right was probably never entirely on one side, but the common theme running through them all was that in the 1440s the royal powers of justice in the localities could be manipulated with impunity by those who enjoyed Henry’s access and favour. The second set of impeachment charges laid against the duke of Suffolk in 1450, produced when his impeachment on higher matters of state appeared to be failing, made the same allegations. These concerned his ‘insatiable covertise’ in engrossing the king’s lands, revenues and offices to himself, which gave him the powers complained of, and made general references to the damage done to the efficiency of the king’s courts by his procuring excessive liberties, privileges and franchises for suitors, preventing the execution of writs, securing a pardon for Tailboys, and influencing the selection of sheriffs. Thus ‘they that would not be of his affinite in their contreys were oversette, every matere true or fals that he favoured was furthered and spedde, and true maters of such persones as had not his favour were hyndred and put abakke’, whereby justice miscarried, true men were hanged, thieves saved, and men lost their lands.57 Royal power had become the tool of faction. The misuse of royal power was commonly alleged even in cases where legal rights were duly upheld. In serious riots at Norwich in 1445, over jurisdiction disputed between the city and the cathedral priory, Henry’s council probably dispensed good law, if bad politics, by upholding the rights of the ecclesiastical authorities, suspending the city’s liberties and fining them heavily. But in 1450 the citizens of Norwich laid their consequent misfortunes at the door of Suffolk and his councillors who, they claimed, were responsible for the crown’s partiality against them.58
Undoubtedly assertions made in city records and the Paston Letters cannot always be taken at their face value, but the complaints of the Cade rebels in 1450, about conditions in Kent and Sussex during the 1440s, also bear remarkable similarities to the Norfolk scene. Here James Fiennes, Lord Say and Sele, Henry’s household chamberlain and treasurer of England, was principally blamed, together with his local associates, ‘the great extortioners Slegge, Crowmer, Isle and Robert Est’.59 As a result of the privileged, illegal activities of these men, the rebels claimed, gentlemen of Kent could have no security in goods or lands. Fiennes and William Isle represented Kent together in parliament in 1441–2, and Fiennes and Crowmer in 1446–7, when Slegge was member for Dover.60 Slegge was certainly closely associated with Fiennes in land dealings.61 William Crowmer, Fiennes’s son-in-law, son of a mayor of London and himself a king’s squire, was sheriff of Kent in 1444–5 and 1448–50, William Isle in 1446–7 and Stephen Slegge in 1448–9.62 They served on various commissions together, including the commissions of the peace. Robert Est, a lawyer and keeper of Maidstone gaol, was escheator in Kent in 1447 and had been coroner in 1445.63 As collectors of taxes, justices of the peace and oyer and terminer, sheriffs, escheators, coroners, constable of Dover castle, with its special jurisdiction, and Warden of the Cinque Ports, they undoubtedly administered the south-east during the ‘forties. The complaints of 1450 were an indictment of their power to distort the operation of justice. Men were summoned to courts without due notice and lost their cases by default, collectors serving writs of the exchequer extorted much more than they were authorized to collect, the offices of sheriff and undersheriff were bought and sold, influence at court secured them the lands and goods of innocent men, who were afterwards falsely condemned to forfeiture. The court of Dover extended its jurisdiction illegally over the whole county, while the barons of the Cinque Ports abused their exemptions from taxation at the cost of the rest of the county. These ‘great rulers of the shire’ themselves chose the knights of the shire for parliament who chose the dishonest collectors of taxes.
Again, there was doubtless some exaggeration in these charges, but an examination, published by Dr Roger Virgoe, of local presentments before commissioners of oyer and terminer, sitting from August to October 1450 at Rochester, Maidstone, Canterbury and Dartford confirms that conditions in Kent during the ‘forties presented a sorry condemnation of royal government and justice as administered by Say and his associates.64 Over three-quarters of the ninety presentments before these commissioners concerned events from 1445 and consisted of charges of corruption and extortion by the sheriffs and their under-sheriffs, bailiffs, gaol keepers and stewards, men who were principally the king’s officers or those of the archbishop of Canterbury, or Lord Say and Sele. Stephen Slegge of Wouldham and Robert Est of Maidstone were the two most frequently presented, for corrupt land deals, false outlawries, unlawful seizures of goods, forcible expulsions and extortions of fines by virtue of their offices.
Nine times between 1438 and 1448 Henry perambulated through the area of Kent from which Jack Cade’s rebellion drew its supporters in 1450. Each year, from 1446 to 1449 inclusive, he was in Norfolk and Suffolk where, according to the Paston Letters, and the records of the city of Norwich, members of the duke of Suffolk’s affinity corrupted and perverted the administration of royal justice to their own mercenary ends. But there is no record that during these years he ever took his judges with him on commissions of oyer and terminer, as became his constant practice from 1451 to 1453, or that he ever personally heard any complaints or did justice himself.
Indeed King Henry VI would certainly not have made a good Lord Chief Justice, the office which the chronicler John Hardyng later urged him to take personally into his own hands as a remedy for the general lawlessness of the late 1440s. Apart from mere weakness and inaction he had other undesirable personal traits, vindictivenes
s and a degree of credulity which jars with the popular, pious and enlightened image of the founder of Eton and King’s. These appeared in his over-reactions in certain judicial processes during the 1440s, which were set in motion by allegations of treason against his person. Two of these concerned the greatest in the land, the third, one of his ordinary subjects. Humphrey duke of Gloucester had returned in triumph from his Calais expedition in 1436 where he had put the traitorous duke of Burgundy to ignominious rout. He and his second duchess, the unfortunate Jacqueline of Hainault’s lady-in-waiting, Eleanor Cobham, then stood high in royal favour65 and Duke Humphrey’s views prevailed with the young king in the closing stages of the Gravelines peace conference of 1439.66 This harmony between the king and his uncle and heir presumptive was not destined to last for long. In 1440 Gloucester presumed to oppose his release of the duke of Orleans from captivity and the role proposed for Orleans in future peace negotiations with France. The duke put his adamant opposition to these royal policies on record by exemplification under the great seal, as an outspoken arraignment of the two cardinals Beaufort and Kemp, whom he professed to hold responsible. But Henry replied personally to him in a detailed, reasoned argument, claiming these decisions as his very own. His uncle had thus become a serious political nuisance and the Gloucesters the objects of the king’s displeasure. Consequently, when the duchess behaved foolishly and recklessly and laid herself open to a possible charge of treason, she received no mercy from Henry and in 1441 London witnessed the astonishing exemplary punishment of this first lady of the land, charged with imagining Henry’s death, seeking by means of witchcraft and sorcery to accomplish it, and thus to bring her husband, and herself, to the throne. To have submitted Duchess Eleanor to the fearful death reserved for heretics and traitors, and duly suffered by two of her accomplices, would, of course, have been unthinkable. Nevertheless, several days of humiliating public penance, walking through the principal streets of the capital in a fashion normally reserved for common prostitutes, were imposed upon her, followed by perpetual imprisonment in five successive royal strongholds under strict guard of officers deputed from the royal household.67
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