Henry VI

by Bertram Wolffe

  The best of the French chroniclers says mildly that the English much blamed Somerset for thus exploiting and wasting their grand army to no purpose. He had indeed dissipated the strength of a fine and costly force; he had effected no relief to Gascony; he had completely failed to bring a French field force to battle and he had achieved nothing, at great cost, in his other declared role as a shield and defence of Normandy. Such was Henry VI’s one and only effort to make ‘cruel and mortal war’. The supreme fault surely lay not in the personal shortcomings, however apparent, of the hapless Lancastrian prince of the half-blood who was allowed to formulate and execute his own plan of campaign without consideration of its overall consequences, but in Henry’s vacillating direction of the affairs of his French inheritance. If a scheme of this nature for further conquest was to be attempted – a renewal of his illustrious father’s campaigns – then it was Henry’s prime duty, not Somerset’s, to lead it in person in the field. Most seriously of all for the future, the elevation of the elder Beaufort brother at the expense and neglect of Richard duke of York sowed the seeds of a deadly enmity between him and the House of Beaufort which was to lead ultimately to civil war.

  1 Richard Vaughan, Philip the Good (London 1970), 100 1, and references there to the work of Dr Thielemans.

  2 M. R. Thielemans, Bourgogne et Angleterre, 111–63; C. T. Allmand, ‘The Anglo-French Negotiations of 1439’, B.I.H.R., XL (1967), 1–33; Richard Vaughan, op. cit., 107–9.

  3 P.P.C., V, 345–62.

  4 Foedera, X, 732–3, from French Roll 17 Hen. VI. m.6; P.P.C., V, 361.

  5 Documents relating to the conference, mainly from the French side, are printed by C. T. Allmand in Camden Miscellany XXIV (Royal Historical Society, 1972), 79–149.

  6 Printed in P.P.C., V, 334–407.

  7 Stevenson, Wars, II, 446.

  8 Thielemans, op. cit., 66, though the earlier offer had been better in that reasonable ransom was to be paid for Orleans and the impossibility of demanding homage from Henry VI in person after his crowning recognized. His heir was to do the homage and have the title of duke of Normandy.

  9 P.P.C., V, 388–95.

  10 Ibid., 391.

  11 According to what Beaufort told the English embassy, Charles VII had informed Orleans and the duchess meantime that he could not agree to the mode of peace proposed by them without the advice and assent of his lords of the blood and his council which the dauphin could not attend before 25 September in Paris, therefore he required postponement of any further meeting; P.P.C., V, 396.

  12 Stevenson, Wars, II, 446.

  13 Jacques Garillot, Les Etats généraux de 1439 (Nancy 1947), 17, quoting the conflicting evidence: Berry herald, 404, and a royal letter to the inhabitants of Lunel printed in Beaucourt, Charles VII, iii, 528–9. The chronicle of Berry herald is printed by Denys Godefroy in Histoire de Charles VII Roy de France par Jean Chartier, Souschantier de S. Denys, Jaques le Bouvier, dit Berry, Roy d’Armes, Mattieu de Coucy et autres autheurs du temps (Paris 1661), 369–480.

  14 Chronique de Mathieu D’Escouchy, ed. G. du Fresne de Beaucourt (Paris 1864), iii (Pièces justificatives), 58, 61, 62.

  15 Monstrelet, vi, 27–49.

  16 Joycelyne C. Dickinson, The Congress of Arras, 1435 (Oxford 1955), 151–4.

  17 For the rest of this paragraph see E. M. Burney, ‘The English Rule in Normandy, 1435–1450’ (unpublished Oxford B.Litt. thesis, 1958, in the Bodleian Library), 147–54.

  18 Stevenson, Wars, II, 603–7.

  19 Correspondence of Bekynton, I, 289–95, undated, though placed by the editor under 1435.

  20 Stevenson, Wars, I, 192–3, 21 July 1441, wrongly dated 1447 (Beaucourt, iii, 23, quoting the original).

  21 E. M. Burney, op. cit., 127, quoting Hall’s chronicle, 18r, citing an unidentified Norman chronicle.

  22 P.P.C., V, 7: ‘almost expired’, 7 April 1437.

  23 Ibid., 142–3; Stevenson, Wars, II 585–6.

  24 He was still owed at least 1,150 marks from his last lieutenancy (Stevenson, Wars, II, lxxi-lxxii) and Warwick for his long-standing service in France was some £10,000 out of pocket in 1438 (ibid., lxix-lx).

  25 See A. H. Burne, The Agincourt War (London 1956), 293–302, for this campaign.

  26 Jacob, The Fifteenth Century (Oxford 1961), 467–8.

  27 Stevenson, Wars, II, 549–50, 551–2, 27 March 1439; M. G. A. Vale, English Gascony 1399–1453 (O.U.P., 1970), 246, quoting P.R.O., Gascon Rolls C.61/129 m.21 and m.16. Acting by 11 August 1439, C.61/129 m.7. Returned to England by 21 December 1440, C.61/130 m.10.

  28 Beaucourt, op. cit., III, 14–6.

  29 Ibid., 233; A. Vallet de Viriville, Histoire de Charles VII (Paris 1862–5), II, 437.

  30 Beaucourt, op. cit., III, 233.

  31 Chronique de Mathieu d’Escouchy, III (Preuves), 45.

  32 Foedera, X, 765–6.

  33 Vale, op. cit., 115–16, quoting C.61/130 m.10.

  34 P.P.C., V, 161, 21 November 1441, but they thought it should be held by an Englishman.

  35 The date on which he left London with an English escort which returned home on 2 April 1442 (Stevenson, Wars, II, 460–2).

  36 Foedera, X, 764–7, dated at Kennington 2 June and enrolled on the patent roll 18 Henry VI pt. 3 m. 17, a whole membrane to itself.

  37 B.L. MS Cotton Vitellius A xvi fol. 102 printed by Kingsford, Chronicles of London, states that the articles of the release were presented to the parliament which met on 14 January 1440.

  38 Stevenson, Wars, II, 440–51.

  39 Paston Letters, I, 40.

  40 Stevenson, Wars, II, 451–60.

  41 Indenture for release, Foedera, X, 776–82 (Orleans’s half), 782–86 (Henry’s half), Westminster 2 July 1440.

  42 Charles VII’s confirmation, ibid., 798–800, St Omer, 6 August 1440.

  43 Beaucourt, op. cit., IV, 159–64.

  44 Correspondence of Bekynton, II, 177–248, from MS Ashmole 789 fol. 174, also printed in trans, by Sir Nicholas Harris Nicolas in 1828 as A Journal by one of the suite of Thomas Beckington; Beaucourt, op. cit., III, 240–52.

  45 Ibid., III, 30–1, 252–5. See also for a recent investigation of the Armagnac affair Samuel E. Dicks, ‘Henry VI and the Daughters of Armagnac: a Problem in Medieval Diplomacy’, Emporia State Research Studies, XV (Kansas 1967), 5–12.

  46 Correspondence of Bekynton, II, 201, 216–17.

  47 Vale, op. cit., 124, quoting C.P.R., 1441–1446, 154 and E.403/747.

  48 P.P.C., V, 261.

  49 Berry herald, 423.

  50 P.P.C., V, 253, 30 March 1443.

  51 Ibid., 260 (5 April 1443).

  52 The men of Bordeaux were informed of this in a letter dated from Windsor 21 September 1442.

  53 P.P.C., 223–4, 225–7.

  54 Ibid., 229, 2 March.

  55 Ibid., 234.

  56 Ibid., 234–5.

  57 Ibid., 241.

  58 Raised to marquis of Dorset, 24 June 1443.

  59 P.R.O., Chancery Miscellanea, C.47/26/28 (Articles for the earl of Somerset with the king’s answers, dated under the privy seal at Eltham, 30 March 1443); P.P.C., V, 251–6, 263.

  60 Treaty of Harcourt, 20 December 1438, in J. Du Mont, Corps universel diplomatique du droit des gens (8 vols, Amsterdam and The Hague, 1726–31), t. III, pte. I, 60, and also in Frédéric Leonard, Recueil des Traitez. (Paris 1693), t. I, 457; cf. P.P.C., V, 15. For appalls see below p. 180.

  61 P.R.O., C.47/26/28.

  62 P.P.C., IV, 281.

  63 Ibid., 259–63.

  64 T. Basin, Histoire des règnes de Charles VII et de Louis XI, ed. J. Quicherat (Paris 1855), I, 149–52.

  65 P.P.C., V, 299–300.

  66 Ibid., 303–4, 409–14.

  67 Ramsay, op. cit., II, 55, quoting Issues, Easter 21 Henry VI m. 14 (sailed by 15 August).

  68 Burney, op. cit., 206–9, quoting P.P.C., V, 257, and Arch. Nat. K.68/19, accounts of his debts to the crown as granted to Margaret of Anjou in 1446.

  69
Berry herald, 424. Stevenson, Wars, II, 347–9.

  70 Berry herald, 423.

  71 P.P.C., V, 288–9 (presence: the Chancellor, the bishop of St Davids, Adam Moleyns, the duke of Somerset himself, the earls of Stafford, Northumberland and Suffolk).

  72 Monstrelet, Chronique, vi, 66–7; Waurin, Recueil des chroniques, ed. W. & E. L. C. P. Hardy (R.S., 1884), iv (1431–47), 375–6.

  73 Berry herald, 424.

  74 Pierre Hyacinthe Morice, Mémoires pour servir de preuves à l’histoire de Bretagne (Paris 1742–6), ii, cols 1329–31, 1342–3; Foedera, X, 788; Stevenson, Wars, II, 304–5.

  75 P.P.C., VI, 11–13, 17–18, 22–3.

  76 Morice, Preuves, II, cols 1238–50.

  77 Kingsford, Chronicles of London, 145. Since it is here mentioned in close proximity to the taking of Saint Aignan-sur-Roe this is unlikely to have been La Guierche, some fourteen kilometres north of Le Mans as identified by Beaucourt, op. cit., III, 16, quoting Berry’s reference to it, 400.

  78 See map in Philippe Contamine, Guerre, état et société au fin du Moyen Age (Paris 1972), 264.

  Chapter 10

  MARRIAGE AND TRUCE, 1443–1445

  Somerset’s grandiose campaign, launched so belatedly in August 1443, had been planned because of the apparently total failure of peace through negotiation on which Henry had pinned his hopes in 1440, when he had released his prisoner, the premier Valois prince of the blood royal, Charles duke of Orleans. After 1439 Charles VII took no part in peace negotiations which continued between England and Burgundy only and led finally to a separate perpetual truce between them, signed by the duchess Isabel and Richard duke of York at Dijon on 23 April 1443.1 The French king’s antipathy towards Henry’s former ally, the duke of Burgundy, and his desire to injure his interests persisted.2 He firmly vetoed a marriage arranged by treaty on 4 February 1443 between Margaret of Anjou, the daughter of his queen’s brother, René duke of Anjou, and Charles count of Nevers, Burgundy’s nephew, even though papal dispensation had already been obtained for it.3 This intervention to prevent Margaret of Anjou’s marriage into the House of Burgundy may have been prompted only by a desire to prevent an alliance of Angevin and Burgundian interests, but within a very few months she was designated for the role of Henry’s consort and queen of England.

  A new peace initiative had originated from the French side towards direct Anglo-French negotiations by September 1442. In that month Henry appointed a peace embassy which, he stated, he did as a result of recent letters received both from Charles VII and from Charles duke of Orleans.4 They had been reconciled at Limoges in May 1442 and Orleans became the king’s pensioner, a check to the coalition of confederate princes from which it never recovered.5 Detailed plans for these new peace negotiations with Henry were most probably formulated at a meeting in Poitiers at Whitsun 1443 when Charles VII dined with the dauphin, Charles of Orleans, the brothers René and Charles count of Maine, and the papal nuncio, the bishop of Brescia, who was under recent explicit orders to work for an Anglo-French peace.6 Henry had at first appointed an embassy under Richard duke of York, made up from the Anglo-Norman establishment, as a result of the new French initiative, and debated with his council what instructions they should be given.7 The duke of Brittany promptly offered his services as a mediator, but when negotiations did begin, they were actually to be conducted on the English side by a completely new team from England. The leader of it, William de la Pole, earl of Suffolk, Orleans’s former custodian, was the man asked for by Charles VII himself.

  More than once in later years Charles maintained that in 1443 he had been poised to throw the English out of Normandy and had had no need to re-open peace negotiations,8 but it is very doubtful whether he was so confident militarily at that stage, especially as the peace initiative then came from him. The offer of an Angevin bride for Henry, linked to the conclusion of a short truce, was in fact a cleverly calculated act of policy on Charles’s part. Thomas Basin was surely wrong on several counts when he stated that the resultant English embassy to Tours in 1444 laboured for an alliance with one of Charles’s numerous daughters, and then only accepted Margaret as second best.9 In the first place, even if Charles had been amenable to accepting his nephew Henry as his son-in-law, there was no choice available among his own offspring. Of his twelve children, born to his queen Marie of Anjou by 1444, eight were girls. Three boys and two girls were already dead. The eldest daughter, Radegonde, a sickly girl of eighteen, was long since betrothed to Sigismund duke of Austria and died in 1445. Catherine, already married to Burgundy’s heir, died in 1446. Yolande, nine years old, had been betrothed to Amadeus prince of Piedmont since infancy and was being brought up at the court of Savoy. There remained one of two twins born in 1438, destined to survive only to the age of eight; Madeleine, only born on 1 December 1443, and finally Jeanne, the third daughter and fifth child, still unmarried and not betrothed, the one and only marriageable daughter of them all, born about 1430 and roughly of an age with Margaret of Anjou (born 23 or 25 March 1429).10

  There is no evidence that either side, French or English, at this time proposed a marriage between Henry and his first cousin Jeanne, or that the English ever made an issue of the obvious disparagement to Henry in Charles’s offer of the French queen’s dowerless niece, Margaret of Anjou. Mere consanguinity, especially in view of the madness of their grandfather, the poor health and survival rate of her brothers and sisters and possibly the unjustifiably poor reputation of the capabilities of Charles VII himself in England, may have made a marriage with Jeanne appear not worth having. But this is unlikely, because Richard duke of York soon afterwards was ambitious enough to seek Jeanne as a bride for his heir Edward of Rouen, through the good offices of Suffolk and Margaret of Anjou. Charles VII then offered only the infant Madeleine for a second English marriage, useless to York, who wanted a bride of an age to produce an heir. It is hardly surprising that Charles VII was not willing to offer Jeanne to Henry, considering the trouble which had come to his house from the previous two English marriages of French princesses close in line of succession.11 His antipathy towards an English marriage some ten years before at Arras can hardly have been forgotten. But the basic fact was that only Margaret of Anjou was on offer because he saw the possibility of an Angevin marriage as a potent means of furthering his interests against England.

  From the English point of view Margaret was at least healthy breeding stock; the House of Anjou was demonstrably fecund. Also the queen’s brother René duke of Anjou was titular king of Jerusalem and Sicily, as well as duke of Bar and Lorraine by right of his wife, and count of Provence, which could be taken to lessen the degree of disparagement. There were two surviving daughters of Anjou, but the elder was already betrothed to Ferry of Lorraine, son of Antoine de Vaudemont, a political alliance destined to strengthen René’s hold over his wife’s patrimony of Lorraine. Margaret’s father René, like Charles VII, was now prepared to sacrifice his second daughter towards a profitable accommodation with the nephew of England.12 The Angevins themselves had the prospect of doing very well out of this match, in return for their compliance in their king’s act of high policy: no less than the peaceful recovery, with the help of their sovereign, of the English-held county of Maine, the most recent and strongly held English conquest and strategically, the key to Normandy, as well as English abandonment of their efforts against Anjou. Maine was the patrimony of the French king’s companion and favourite, René’s younger brother, Charles of Maine. Charles VII made the Anjou marriage essential to the conclusion of even a short truce. But Henry and his council had already decided in October 1442 that a short truce would not be acceptable, in default of that final peace settlement which had been made impossible by the impasse over the title to the Regnum Francie and the question of sovereignty over the English-held lands. The quid pro quo of such substantial concessions by Henry and the English was never specified, beyond the understanding that his Valois uncle would be made amenable to a peace settlement thereby. In
this vital matter Henry, who had never known his father, but had been reared by his Valois mother, began to show himself more of a Valois than a Plantagenet or Lancastrian.

  Charles VII’s purposes in peace negotiation with his nephew of England are revealed by the terms of the powers of attorney by which René of Anjou made Charles’s ambassadors to London in October 1445 his own plenipotentiaries, superior to his personal representatives: the marriage was executed by the good pleasure and will of Charles under the hope that for the affinity and love between Henry and René which should reasonably ensue from it, the differences outstanding in the achievement of final peace between Charles and Henry could be more swiftly settled. Furthermore, by the above means, ‘the county of Maine or what our dear son holds of it, will be made over to us as we have requested’. In return for this, René had permission from Charles VII to make an alliance for life and a twenty-year truce with his new son-in-law.13 The unilateral surrender of English Maine from son-in-law to father-in-law was thus boldly requested at an early stage by the Angevins and, by 17 October 1445 at the latest, they had formally made Charles VII their agent in this. The French were later to maintain that Adam Moleyns, secondin-charge of the Tours embassy and treaty, had instructions from Henry to implement this surrender when he was again in France, even as early as September 1445. It was also later asserted more than once that Henry gave an oral undertaking to surrender it by 1 October 1445 to the great French embassy to London in July that year.14 This surrender of Maine was to become the most bitter charge laid against the duke of Suffolk when final disaster in Normandy overwhelmed Henry’s government. Suffolk always strenuously protested his innocence and certainly no promises appear to have been given at Tours in May 1444. Nevertheless, Charles VII and the Angevins undoubtedly had it very much in mind from the beginning of these new negotiations.