Henry VI

by Bertram Wolffe

  2 English Normandy and Maine

  The earl of Suffolk, steward and head of the king’s household, was understandably nervous at being singled out by his king’s adversary to lead this new Tours peace mission. He prudently made his doubts public before the king, Gloucester, and most of the other lords of the council in Henry’s privy chamber at Westminster on I February 1444.15 He pointedly recalled the opprobrium which had fallen on the heads of earlier peace negotiators, much mightier than himself, saying also that there was already talk in London of his unsuitability for the task because of his former captivity in France, his close association with Orleans as his keeper during his captivity in England, and the French indication that he would be persona grata to them. Henry nevertheless ordered the chancellor formally to declare that it was his own high commandment, and the desire of all the lords present, that Suffolk should undertake the task and he would not have him discharged of it. No protest by Gloucester is recorded on this occasion. Suffolk then requested that if the embassy had to consist of men of ‘easy degree’ like himself, and be few in number, his few chosen colleagues should be shrewd and able. This was granted: he was in fact to be accompanied by a household team, Master Adam Moleyns, doctor of laws, dean of Salisbury, made keeper of the privy seal on 11 February, Robert Roos the king’s carver, Master Richard Andrew, doctor of laws, the king’s secretary, and John Wenlock, the king’s squire. From Rouen they were to be joined by the chancellor of Normandy, Thomas Hoo, a former retainer of Suffolk’s. The purpose of Henry’s new embassy, succinctly stated, was ‘to satisfy our mind’s whole and singular desire for a good peace and the marriage of our person’.16 It is thus inconceivable that the Angevin marriage was not fixed and personally accepted by Henry himself before the embassy left. As the result of previous overtures for his marriage had shown, no one else could select his bride. A joint delegation from Aragon and Navarre, offering a choice of Spanish princesses in 1430, had been plainly told that the lords of the blood royal and the council could not undertake the grave responsibility of choosing a wife for Henry. Other possibilities, of a Habsburg marriage raised when the Garter was sent to Albert of Austria on the eve of his election to the empire in 1438, and Portuguese proposals in the early 1440s, had all come to nothing for the same reasons.17 He had also clearly shown, in advance of the embassy for the Armagnac match, that his own personal wishes and decision would be paramount in selecting his consort. Marriages of kings, like treaties with foreign princes, were matters for kings alone.

  Suffolk’s departure was imminent on 14 February 1444.18 Charles VII arranged to have him met from Calais, but he announced his landing at Harfleur round about 15 March to Orleans and Pierre de Brézé, intending to proceed via Rouen to Le Mans. Charles VII had installed himself in the castle of Montils-les-Tours and summoned there all the princes of the blood, including Burgundy, who alone did not come. Arrangements for the conference to be held at Vendôme, protected by local truces, fell through because Charles succumbed to a serious illness19 and the English embassy, with its French escort headed by Orleans and his bastard brother, consequently went on to Blois and finally down river to Tours on 26 April.

  Here, on the sixth day of the conference, at his first meeting with Charles VII, Suffolk presented a letter under Henry’s signet and sign manual of greeting and hope for a successful outcome of negotiations with his ‘dear uncle of France’. Now, for the first time, Charles was no longer styled his adversary. The negotiations were interspersed with appropriate festivities: the marriage of Charles of Anjou to Isabella of Luxembourg; an archery contest between the king’s Scots guard and English archers and, on 1 May, the dauphine at the head of three hundred gallants riding out to bring in the May. Some formal negotiations were certainly held for the conclusion of a perpetual peace, but they came to nothing. The French offered Gascony, Quercy, Périgord, Calais and Guînes, to be held in homage to Charles VII. The English wanted the lands which they had claimed before their claim to the French throne had been advanced, that is Gascony and Normandy in full sovereignty, for which, most significantly, Henry was now prepared to abandon his claim to the French throne. This vital English change of position and bargaining counter, so cavalierly revealed at Tours to no purpose, is known from the later negotiations conducted in London with the great French embassy of July 1445, when Suffolk and the new archbishop of Rheims, Jacques Jouvenel des Ursins, summarized these preliminary parleyings of Tours. The French clearly had not been prepared to make any concessions at all at Tours and had not allowed for any progress whatsoever to a final peace treaty there.20

  The French were, however, very ready to make progress with the marriage negotiations. The marriage treaty with King René was concluded on 22 May 1444.21 Margaret renounced all claims to any of her father’s possessions, a renunciation which Henry was to confirm after consummation of the marriage. Her dower was to consist merely of her mother’s empty claims to the kingdom of Majorca and 20,000 francs. René undertook to send an embassy to England to fix the date of the marriage and the place where she should be handed over to Henry. On 24 May in the church of St Martin, in the presence of her aunt and mother, the queens of France and Sicily, and all the princes of the French blood royal, Charles VII in person, doffing his hat, handed the young princess to the papal legate for betrothal to Suffolk, who was standing proxy for his king, while the people shouted ‘Noel’. Festivities at the abbey of Saint-Julien then continued into the small hours. The whole congress terminated with the signing of a mere twenty-one-month truce on 28 May. This was the second, attainable purpose for which Charles had designated a suitable commission on 20 May consisting of Charles duke of Orleans, Louis count of Vendôme, Suffolk’s French equivalent as Grand Master of the royal household, Pierre de Brézé, lord of Varenne and Bertrand de Beauvau lord of Précigny and a servant of René of Anjou. They did have powers to negotiate truces particular or general with a view to arriving at a permanent peace, but the ultimate formal goal of a final peace settlement in fact remained as remote as ever.

  Charles VII had good reasons to be very satisfied with this outcome. The concessions had all been one-sided. He had acquired the prospect of an attractive and able personal agent as the consort of his nephew of England22 and he had a truce of limited duration, the extension of which would be the subject of further bargaining. On this point Henry had fundamentally shifted his position since Gravelines in 1439, when the basic English fear had been that Charles VII would use a short truce for an insidious conquest of Normandy. Thirdly, Charles now knew that Henry’s title to the French throne was negotiable. But, fourthly, and in fact in the long run the most significant of his triumphs over his English nephew at Tours, both the English and the French versions of the truce terms, which were mutually ratified in Paris and Rouen to run from sunrise on 1 July 1444 to sunrise on 1 April 1446, included the duke of Brittany, not among the allies and subjects of the king of England, but in due order among the allies and subjects of Charles VII, after the dauphin, Orleans and Burgundy and before Bourbon, Alençon and Charles of Anjou, count of Maine.23 It is hard to realize that Henry VI and his negotiators at that time attached no special significance to this formal acknowledgement of the loss of the vital Breton alliance.

  John V duke of Brittany, of the House of Montfort, who died in 1442, had repeatedly been caught in the vice of the English and French claims to the French throne and had attempted to keep his duchy free from the ravages of war by accommodating whichever side was the stronger at the moment. Charles VII always had the possibility of bringing pressure to bear upon him through the family of Clisson-Penthiève, representatives of a rival Blois claim to the duchy, as well as through his power to confiscate certain lands which the duke held of the French crown outside the bounds of the duchy. Thus he had rendered homage to Charles VII in 1425, although he had been a firm supporter of the treaty of Troyes. Successful English attacks on Brittany, and the absence of aid from Charles VII, had brought him back into an English alliance in 142
7, with a declaration of perpetual homage to the infant Henry VI and a reaffirmation of his adherence to the treaty of Troyes. In a most solemn declaration of homage to Henry he then undertook to perform it in person when Henry should come to France, as his predecessors had been accustomed to do to the kings of France. He furthermore insisted on subscription to this declaration of homage by the Breton estates, his chancellor, bishops, lords, cathedral chapters, a number of towns and his near relatives, including the later Duke Francis himself, then count of Montfort, his eldest son and successor. There is no record of this homage ever being personally rendered while Henry was in France. Subsequent successes of French arms forced the duke into yet another treaty of amity with Charles VII in 1431, but, together with the Dauphin Louis, King René of Anjou, the dukes of Bourbon and Alençon and the count of Armagnac, he was involved in the Praguerie of 1440. Finally the duke signed a new treaty of peace with Henry on 11 July 144024 which, among other more important general matters, mentioned St Malo as being given to his younger son Gilles, Henry’s ‘dear cousin’, to be kept to ensure free intercourse between the two principals, a port from which all ships of the adversary Charles VII, and even Breton ships hostile to Henry VI, should be excluded. At the time of his death the duke was attempting to mediate between the two sides.

  The young Henry had become personally attached to the House of Montfort. An important aspect of John V’s relations with England had been his decision to send his youngest and favourite son Gilles, then eight years old, to be brought up with the young Henry VI under the tutorship of Richard Beauchamp, earl of Warwick. They were cousins through their mothers Jeanne and Catherine, daughters of Charles VI of France, and no more than two years separated them in age. Lavishly provided for by his father, the young Gilles also received a maintenance allowance of 250 marks from the English exchequer. The two boys became greatly attached to one another and it was with much reluctance that the English council agreed to Gilles’s return to his father in August 1434, heaping praises upon him for the pleasure and satisfaction which the young king had found in his company.25 Gilles’s special captaincy of St Malo was a memorial to his own, and his father’s, particularly close English affiliations.

  Such was the background to the reappearance of Gilles at Henry VI’s court in June 144326 at the head of a Breton embassy. The vasion of his territory, on which Henry gave him immediate satisfaction who had only recently succeeded his father on 28 August 1442, had sent his younger brother to ask for the restoration of the earldom of Richmond, which had been held by the Montfort family for two centuries from 1136, and again during the reign of Richard II. Gilles was authorized personally to enter Henry’s service and to offer Duke Francis’s own services as mediator in the renewed peace negotiations with the king of France. Henry’s ready acceptance of the personal allegiance and service of Gilles of Brittany in the autumn of 1443 was to have far-reaching, long-term consequences, at least as significant as his grasping at the Angevin marriage, and his decision to make a unilateral surrender of the county of Maine to his new father-in-law. Its special importance arose from Henry’s careless acceptance of the loss of the allegiance of Duke Francis at Tours in May 1444 and the consequent separate English and French allegiances of the two Montfort brothers.

  Gilles’s service to Henry VI, proffered and accepted in 1443, was to be open-ended, at the king’s discretion, in peace and war. His brother the duke also asked to be included by Henry, on honourable terms, in any peace treaty he made with Charles VII. But in October or November 1443 Gilles was reporting that Charles VII had requested the presence of his brother the duke in his entourage, along with his princes of the blood, to meet Henry VI’s ambassadors, Suffolk and the others, a request he said the duke would not answer until Henry had declared his wishes in the matter. At this time the duke also made his complaint against the elder Somerset’s alleged invasion of his territory, on which Henry gave him immediate satisfaction and at the same time confirmed the fact of the approaching peace conference. With regard to the duke’s claim to the earldom of Richmond an evasive reply was made. It was said that diligent search of the records revealed only its continuous history in the hands of the House of Lancaster ever since its conferment on John of Gaunt in 1342. This was untrue. The Montforts had held it for much of Richard II’s reign and, perhaps more to the point in 1443, Henry had alienated most of the lands of the earldom to Richard Nevill, earl of Salisbury. Gilles formally entered Henry’s service with an annual pension of 1,000 marks on 12 December 1443, with the king taking great interest in it and personally settling the details: a gift of two service books from the effects of the cardinal of Luxembourg for his chapel, a cup of gold worth 100 marks with £100 in it and advance payment of his first quarter’s pension.27 On 28 August Charles VII, fully appreciating the danger that Gilles’s embassy might result in a new strengthened alliance between Henry and Duke Francis, had already confiscated Gilles’s French lands of Chantocé and Ingrandes on the Loire which he had inherited from his father, for treason with the English.28

  It has been claimed that Somerset’s idiotic blunder over La Guerche threw Duke Francis into the arms of Charles VII at Tours, or alternatively that Somerset, in spite of being immediately disowned by Henry, had in fact only been following his instructions to demonstrate the English power to the young duke of Brittany when he was wavering in his allegiance.29 But contemporary evidence states that La Guerche, like Pouancé, was held for the duke of Alençon, Charles VII’s commander-in-chief in the area, and suggests that its capture was the result merely of a local military decision taken on the spot. The fact was that Henry VI and those who had his ear, in their eagerness to come to terms with Charles VII, utterly failed to realize until too late the great potential importance of the Breton allegiance. It was Charles VII, not Henry, who managed to ensure that Duke Francis appeared at Tours as his ally, if not yet as his vassal. Henry was left only with the troublesome allegiance of his brother Gilles. Shortly after the Tours negotiations Gilles abducted and married an eight-year-old Breton heiress, Françoise de Dinan, and, with her patrimony of Châteaubriant, La Hardouinaie, Montrafilant and Le Guildo, became at a stroke one of the greatest landowners in Brittany. Established in the fine stronghold of Le Guildo on the Arguenon estuary to the west of Dinard, he remained a firm adherent of the English interest and entitled to Henry’s support, a potential menace to his brother’s new French allegiance and thus also to Charles VII’s intended reassertion of Valois sovereignty over Brittany.30

  An English embassy to collect Henry’s bride left England on 13 November 1444 and the marriage ceremony was performed at Nancy by Charles VII’s councillor, Louis d’Haraucourt, bishop of Toul, early in March 1445. Suffolk, now raised to the marquisate, once more stood proxy for his king. The mounting of such a major expedition could hardly have been done in shorter time. The services of some 70 ships were required to transport the substantial household of Suffolk and his lady, together with Beatrice Lady Talbot and a suite of 5 barons and baronesses, 17 knights, 65 esquires and 215 yeomen, the escort deemed appropriate for the new queen. It cost the English exchequer, over six months, £5,573 17s 5d, that is £434 5d more than had been made available for John Brecknock, the receiver general of the duchy of Cornwall, and John Everdon, clerk of accounts in Henry’s household, who were deputed to manage the finances.31

  No further negotiations were conducted by Suffolk on this his second assignment beyond completing the necessary financial arrangements for the truce. These were an agreement about division of appatis or ‘protection’ moneys, which the coming of the truce would entail, the means of support which the garrison troops of both sides levied in time of war from the various local communities within their range of influence. From the date of the truce all these would be taken under control of higher authority by both sides within their designated areas of jurisdiction. It had emerged that the French would lose thereby, since at the date of the truce appatis levied by the French in the disputed frontier regi
ons considerably exceeded those levied there by the English. To compensate for the discrepancy, Suffolk at Nancy agreed to pay Charles VII 4,500 livres tournois and a further 1,078 livres tournois each quarter to the garrison of Bellême, sums which were subsequently charged on the revenues of Normandy until the renewal of the war.32 It was by later agreeing to forgo these Norman contributions that Charles VII could claim to have provided compensation for those dispossesed in Le Mans, at ten years’ purchase, when Henry finally handed it over.33 Apart from one other agreement made by Suffolk on his return journey at Rouen on 3 April 1445 regarding compensation for violations of the truce and the payment of income due to churches and individuals who had lands and rents under control of the other side,34 there is no evidence whatsoever of any further negotiations. The contemporary charge of Thomas Gascoigne, who tells the story three times over, that Suffolk at Nancy was compelled to promise to hand over Maine without conditions, or return to England empty-handed without Henry’s bride, is entirely without foundation.35 Suffolk’s report to parliament on 2 June 1445 did state that he had had conversations with French ambassadors arranging for an embassy to England to discuss peace terms with Henry, but he had not presumed to discuss any details of a settlement. He also claimed that a truce meant no loss of vigilance in the English lands and that he had advised the duke of York to strengthen and provision the frontier towns of Normandy and Maine as ‘a great means to the better conclusion of peace’.36 The ending of York’s lieutenancy in September 1445 meant that this was never done.

  The undoubted delay of some two to three months after Suffolk’s arrival in Nancy, the capital of Lorraine, was in fact clearly explained by the military activities of Charles VII, who had taken immediate and full advantage of the new freedom of action presented by the truce of Tours to concentrate his resources and energies on problems in the eastern confines of his kingdom where Henry VI’s new father-in-law was also closely involved as duke of Lorraine and Bar by right of his wife. The ‘Bourgeois of Paris’ regarded this as an irresponsible abandonment of the kingdom by Charles and the dauphin to make a war in Lorraine and Germany, leaving the English free to strengthen and provision their castles,37 but in fact they had taken the English troops under Mathew Gough with them! The problems and dangers of English soldiery unemployed because of the truce were for the moment shelved by allowing English men-at-arms led by Mathew Gough to enlist under the dauphin to fight in Germany. After five months subduing the country between Strasbourg and Basle, the dauphin was recalled to the court at Nancy from where his father and René of Anjou were conducting a siege of Metz, a city tenacious of its independence of the duke of Lorraine and of Valois France. Only on 28 February 1445 was a treaty of peace signed with the stubborn city and Charles, at last, free to welcome Suffolk and attend to the marriage of Margaret.38