Henry VI

by Bertram Wolffe

  The scandal had broken about a month after the date allegedly predicted for the king’s death had safely passed, at the end of June 1441, with the arrest of her accomplices in the black arts, the fashionable astrologer and necromancer and member of Humphrey’s household, Master Roger Bolingbroke; the rector of St Stephen’s Walbrook, a canon of the king’s own palace chapel of St Stephen’s Westminster, Master Thomas Southwell; Eleanor’s secretary and chaplain who was also secretary to the duke, John Home; and the ‘witch of Eye’, or Ebury, by Westminster, Margery Jourdemain. Bolingbroke had allegedly presided over ceremonies designed to foretell the date of the young king’s death for the foolish gratification of the wife of the heir presumptive, and a resulting prediction of an early demise had spread among the London populace, Bolingbroke himself informing an esquire of the household and sergeant of the king’s tents, John Solers. Margery Jourdemain, a well-known sorceress, had also been consulted by Eleanor to provide potions to make her pregnant by the duke and provide him with a legitimate heir.

  Such charges of treasonable witchcraft against royal ladies in England were not in themselves an entirely new thing. Henry IV’s Queen, Joan of Navarre, had been so charged some twenty years before, but, in contrast to Eleanor’s fate, Joan’s rank had prevented her from being brought to trial, and an honourable, if not luxurious, brief imprisonment had been followed by her return to court, where she had been quite prominent during Henry VI’s infancy.68 Henry now showed no such leniency to Eleanor. Gloucester’s inability to protect his wife and the ruin of his influence over his nephew were now made manifest. Her examinations before an ecclesiastical tribunal, consisting of the two cardinals, the archbishop of Canterbury and three bishops, were completed by 25 July. They secured admission of certain of the charges. After extensive inquiries by a joint civic and conciliar committee into the alleged plot against the king’s life and the trials and deaths of her accomplices, who turned evidence against her, she performed her public penance in mid-November, was solemnly divorced from her husband and finally proceeded to her lifelong incarceration which Henry announced on 19 January 1442. Moved from Leeds castle, where Queen Joan had served her brief imprisonment, to Chester, in the charge of Sir Thomas Stanley, controller of the household and Lord of the Isle of Man, and kept under the strictest guards, her subsequent peregrinations were prompted by Henry’s periodic fears that attempts might be made to free her. In 1443 he was roused to anger by a Greenwich woman who reviled him to his face for his treatment of the duchess. She was pressed to death for the offence, and Eleanor was moved to Kenilworth under the charge of Lord Sudeley, the household chamberlain and constable of the castle there. Shipped off in 1446 to the distant Isle of Man, fears of a possible French or Scottish raid there brought her back to Beaumaris in 1449, where she ended her days in 1452 in the care of Sir William Beauchamp, the king’s carver and constable of the castle. Charges were made against members of Duke Humphrey’s household in 1447, not only that they intended to make the duke king, but that it was planned to rescue Eleanor and make her queen. Her presence at Beaumaris, when Richard duke of York landed there in early September 1450, on his unbidden return from Ireland, may well have been a factor in prompting the decision to send household men to oppose him. Feared as a possible source of future discontent, even as a threat to Henry’s throne, the hapless Eleanor was also a martyr to the rights of women. Her final sentence for treason had been decreed by Henry without any trial by a duly constituted, secular court of law. This caused much apprehension, on a wider if less exalted issue, so much so that the next parliament in 1442, in a petition introduced into the Commons House, appealed to Magna Carta on behalf of such defenceless women in general and ensured that in future, but not retrospectively, peeresses in their own right, or as wives of their husbands, were guaranteed the same trial by their peerage, for charges of felony and treason, as was enjoyed by their husbands.69

  Another over-reaction to an alleged personal attack occurred in 1444 when careless talk brought a charge of treason upon the head of the abbot of Reading’s bailiff, Thomas Carver. He had ventured to contrast the unmartial Henry unfavourably with the valiant French dauphin, then leading his father’s armies in Gascony; all they had in common, he said, was their age.70 The Truce of Tours was then in the making. Six years or more had passed since the king had attained his official majority, and continued English losses in Gascony and central France had culminated in the failure of a major expedition in 1443, led not by the king but by the duke of Somerset. Throughout the shires, down at least to the level of such lesser gentry where few can have been without neighbours or friends who had served in France, there was much disappointment and bitterness. Now at this small verbal sign of discontent, a massive judicial exercise was mounted to secure an exemplary sentence and to strike terror into eastern Berkshire, an area prominent in the king’s habitual perambulations. It was a ‘sledgehammer to crack a nut’.71 Carver’s words resulted in successive special commissions of inquiry, leading in turn to two separate trials, the first in King’s Bench, which rightly failed to secure a conviction on such unsubstantial grounds, the second under an oyer and terminer commission, with sharpened charges, which finally produced the required result: conviction for imagining Henry’s death and for seeking to accomplish it by the incitement of others! The special commissions were carefully staffed by household men,72 three of the juries of inquisition employed had as their foreman William Staverton, a yeoman of the chamber. The victim was not only removed from the Tower in July to confinement in Wallingford castle, under the charge of its constable, Suffolk, the household steward, but immediately returned there after being cut down from the gallows, under escort of John Say, a trusted yeoman of the chamber. His exemplary punishment across twenty miles of Berkshire, the last three of these dragged either on a hurdle or at a horse’s tail, was abruptly terminated only at the very moment of death by an eagle signet writ, signed by Henry in his lodge in the park at Windsor on 4 August 1444. This extraordinary writ ordered the pardon to be kept secret so that the punishment could shine forth as a deterrent ‘even to those nearest to the king in blood’.

  The most sinister event of all in the 1440s was the public degradation and death of the man who was indeed the nearest in blood to the king, the duke of Gloucester himself, at Bury St Edmunds in February 1447.73 One chronicler described it as treason against the victim, rather than against the king.74 According to another source Henry had previously forbidden his uncle his presence from about 1445 or 1446, and had fortified himself with armed guards against him.75 This might be regarded simply as a projection back in time of the actual situation early in 1447, except that Abbot Wheathampstead, when describing later persistent attempts to clear the duke’s name, which Henry persistently refused to accept, also asserted that the king himself became convinced that his uncle and heir presumptive was himself secretly and assiduously labouring to encompass his death and to usurp the throne.76 Henry first conceived these suspicions through a bishop who revealed to him something he had heard in the confessional.77

  On 25 September 1446 summonses to a council meeting for 11 October were sent out from the royal court, then at Marlow, to twelve councillors. It was to assemble to discuss business for a new parliament, although the last one was but five months dispersed, and especially to plan Henry’s intended ‘personal convention with our uncle of France’. Gloucester and York were notable omissions from the list of summonses.78 When Henry was returning to Windsor, late in January 1447, from a progress which had taken him as far as Southampton, he wrote from Alresford to the chancellor about the coming parliament. Its venue had already been fixed for Cambridge and then changed to Winchester because of a pestilence there. But now all those concerned were to be speedily informed that ‘we now be fully deliberated and advised that our said parliament shall be holden at our town of St Edmunds Bury’.79 Three years later it was already believed that the principal intended business of this parliament, the destruction of Gloucester, had
been finally fixed on by Henry to take place at Bury on the advice of Suffolk, in country where he was most powerful.80 Henry had decided upon his uncle’s destruction. One chronicler, who accurately lists the places of Henry’s nights’ lodgings at Cambridge, Newmarket and Royston on the way, noted the unusually large guard which now surrounded him day and night, for fear of his uncle. Duke Humphrey was in fact coming innocently to the parliament as bidden, intending, it was said, to plead with his nephew on behalf of the incarcerated Eleanor.81

  The parliament which assembled there in Henry’s presence in the abbey refectory on Friday 10 February first heard the chancellor preach a pertinent sermon on the theme of good and bad councillors to the text: ‘To the counsellors of peace is joy.’82 No business ultimately appeared on its roll concerning the Gloucesters, except an act to debar the duchess, ‘for her great misgovernance’, from receiving any dower or jointure from the dead Humphrey’s lands.83 The suspicion must be strong that these lands were previously bespoke, judging by the indecent haste with which they began to be granted to the queen, the king’s foundations and members of the royal household on 23 February, the very day of the duke’s death.84 The chroniclers also noted the unusual guard of armed men kept about the town ‘secretly commanded to watch for safety of the king’s person’, and lords riding thither ‘with great power as they should have ridden to war’. Gloucester arrived on Saturday 18 February, with a household retinue of some eighty men, no great size for his rank, as he had been ordered to do. He was met by Sir John Stourton and Sir Thomas Stanley, the treasurer and controller of the royal household, and ordered straight to his lodgings, without being given access to the king. After dinner, at Henry’s command, he was placed under arrest there by the Constable of England, Viscount Beaumont, the duke of Buckingham, the marquis of Dorset, the earl of Salisbury and Lord Sudeley, and put in the charge of Thomas Calbrose, sergeant-at-arms, and two yeomen of the chamber, Bartholomew Halley and Thomas Pulford. Later that day a progressive arrest of some fifty members of his entourage began, which continued until Shrove Tuesday 21 February. They were despatched to widely scattered places, some to the Tower, some to Winchester, some to Nottingham, some to Northampton. On 23 February the duke died, and his body, which exhibited no signs of violence, was exposed for viewing by the whole parliament next day. The earliest accounts make no mention of foul play. It was said, and it was most likely true, that he died of sheer depression and despair at being prevented from appearing there to identify his accusers and to answer the charges of treason preferred against him. Again, no record of these charges remains, though it is alleged that Henry especially feared him because Humphrey would have done his utmost to prevent Henry’s surrender of Maine and Anjou, at that time so crucial to the furtherance of his peace policy.

  It is understandable that such an arrest should have prostrated the prince who is remembered as the good Duke Humphrey. Even though he was given this title by posterity principally as the opponent of the unsuccessful policies of Henry and his agents, this appellation does suggest qualities hoped for and revered in a prince of the blood, which were so conspicuously lacking in his nephew the king. He had the adventurous spirit and courage of his Lancastrian forbears and, had he not been overshadowed and constrained by Bedford and Beaufort, he might have matured into a respected elder statesman. His fundamental loyalty to his nephew cannot be doubted and now that it is known that Humphrey really was designated regent of England by Henry V in his will one has more sympathy for and understanding of his resentment and frustration at his failure to be accepted in that position. As the only surviving prince of the Lancastrian blood royal after 1435 he alone was sufficiently powerful and courageous openly to oppose the haphazard, ignominious peace policies of Henry and his queen from 1445. It was for this, not treason, that he was unworthily attacked at Bury St Edmunds. In view of the way his duchess Eleanor was being punished for her foolishness it is not surprising that he should have despaired at his arrest. It was a mortal blow that his years of loyalty and service were rewarded by such a despicable attack on his honour.

  Of the members of Gloucester’s household, his bastard son Arthur, Sir Roger Chamberlain, Richard Middleton esquire, Thomas Herbert esquire, Richard Neadham, a London mercer in Gloucester’s service, and four others unnamed, were finally indicted before the marquis of Suffolk and others at Dartford on 8 July 1447, charged with conspiring at Greenwich, and assembling there on 11 February, in strength, to march to Bury, to kill the king and to make Gloucester and Eleanor king and queen, maintaining that they had the support of a great part of the people of England. Sentenced for high treason on 12 July and taken to the Marshalsea, the King’s Bench prison in Southwark, they were drawn from St George’s Fields on 14 July, over London Bridge to Tyburn, tied to hurdles and clad in velvet doublets, the bastard Arthur with a gold cross held between his manacles, all loudly protesting their innocence of treason. This was an unpleasant and unpopular sight for the London populace and disturbing for a French peace delegation, who also witnessed it. Hanged, cut down alive, stripped for quartering and beheading, and the knife put to their throats, they were spared by the last minute appearance of Suffolk bearing Henry’s pardon, granted not on the merits of the case but in honour of the pope’s Eton indulgences at the approaching Feast of the Assumption. In it was included the same warning, as in Thomas Carver’s case, to those even nearest in blood to the king, not to presume on Henry’s mercy for any comparable behaviour.

  Such was the nature of the domestic history of England in the 1440s, with the crown reduced to the level of faction in the hands of an ineffective king who often appeared unable to comprehend the likely consequences of his actions. Henry was a dangerous compound of forcefulness and weakness, unable to establish a firm, purposeful grip on the government of the realm, but willing and able to destroy his uncle and heir presumptive who opposed his misguided policies, on spurious charges of planning to usurp the throne. Some modern historians have discerned in the uncontrolled feuding of the 1440s the seed-bed of the civil wars which sprang up in the following decade. However, near-contemporary narrative accounts of these years which are fairly plentiful, while full of the misfortunes of the Gloucesters, make no mention of the unregulated disputes of the nobility and gentry which are alleged to have escalated into civil war.85 The greatest single interest for all of them was the conduct of the war in France and the fate of Henry’s other kingdom; the truce, the king’s marriage, the intermittent peace negotiations and controversies over English-held Anjou and Maine, leading to military defeats and national disaster. It therefore comes as no surprise to discover that the earliest attempt to dcducc cause and effect for the troubles of the next dccade from the depressing events of the 1440s looked not to conditions within the kingdom of England but to the affairs of Henry’s French kingdom. This is an exposition in the continuation of the Brut chronicle to 1461, written up in its final form between 1464 and 1470,86 which Caxton selected for his 1480 edition of the chronicles of England. Adopted by Shakespeare through the medium of the Tudor chroniclers, Hall and Hollinshed, it thus provided the inspiration for the crucial final scene of his Henry VI Part 1 and the opening scene of Henry VI Part 2 which together set the stage for Shakespeare’s ensuing immortal version of the Wars of the Roses. This unknown continuator of the Brut deduced that Henry never prospered from 1445; fortune then turned against him in Normandy, France, Gascony and England, because he broke a marriage contract already concluded with the sister of the powerful and wealthy count of Armagnac in favour of a marriage with Margaret, the daughter of the impoverished duke of Anjou, surrendering to the French the English-held counties of Anjou and Maine, which opened the door for the conquest of Normandy. All this was done for no quid pro quo whatsoever, except his dowerless bride. Moreover, Henry squandered a whole fifteenth and tenth simply on the cost of bringing this penniless queen over to England. Great princes ought to keep their promises and by their policies augment and conserve the resources of the realm,
not deplete them. Consequent troubles within the kingdom of England itself began to show from the moment when the noble duke of Gloucester was destroyed at Bury St Edmunds in 1447, because he would have prevented the delivery of Anjou and Maine to the French king. The commons of the realm began to murmur and finally rebelled against such folly and injustice, the loss of Normandy and Gascony ensued, the lords of the realm were split over the issue, the king was deposed and his queen and her son forced to flee to Scotland and then to France, to take refuge back in the family lands from which she had first emerged in 1445 to trouble England.87 This ancient, reasoned exposition of the downfall of the House of Lancaster, which looked for and found cause and effect in the conduct of war and diplomacy rather than in domestic feudings and disorders, serious as these may have been, in spite of its obvious crudities and inaccuracies, first showed real insight into the relationship between Henry’s personal rule from 1437 to 1450 and the events of the next decade.