Henry VI

by Bertram Wolffe

  Suffolk also now put in a written reply to the second lot of charges. This lost ‘book’, which must have contained a detailed justificatory curriculum vitae, produced in its turn a detailed riposte, possibly again prepared on behalf of the Commons, but showing a new personal tone of malice and scurrility which suggests it was an individual product.24 In its imperfect surviving state it begins with charges of his adultery with a nun, giving her name and identifying their illegitimate daughter. Taking its cue from the nature of Suffolk’s ‘book’, it then proceeded to belittle all his long record of military and diplomatic service. A number of otherwise unknown facts emerge from it. If it can be believed, then the English garrisons before the original truce of 1444 amounted to some 14,000 men; by the date of the first extension of it they were down to 8,000. Suffolk had actually admitted that his plenipotentiary powers, at Tours and in Lorraine, had been ample to cover the surrender of Anjou and Maine, but had absolutely denied that he ever consented even to discuss it, in spite of pressing attempts of the French to get him to do so. This final replication is also notable for its itemized demonstration of his ‘insatiable covetise’ at the king’s expense, to a figure of some 5,000 marks per annum in lands and offices, acquired by more than thirty patents, quite apart from his exploitation of ‘the best revenues of all this land’, the customs and subsidies, in the one specific instance cited amounting to a gain of another 5,000 marks through his wool factor, Simon Pygot of Lynn.

  Thus Suffolk was the scapegoat for Henry’s loss of his French lands. He also personified the abuse and prostitution of royal power in the localities to private ends which had become the hallmark of Henry’s personal rule. There can be no doubt that he had acquired the substance fitting for a great duke entirely through royal service. His enhanced status and very great rewards had even so not made him able to bear unscathed the responsibilities he had shouldered for his king. He had expressed premonitions of personal disaster in 1443 before he undertook the peace negotiations and, fundamentally, he must have known that only royal blood in his veins, if even that, could save a loyal servant of a king who was incompetently pursuing such unpopular policies. Perhaps the most significant sentence in this long, final, vitriolic attack was this: if he persisted in denying responsibility for what happened, then ‘let him tell the said defaults or misdeeds and lay them upon them that are guilty and tell what it is that passeth his power to amend’. This, of course, was utterly impossible, except by directly attacking the king himself, and Henry’s loyalty to him was all he had left to depend on.

  The next day Henry requested the lords through the mouth of the Lord Chief Justice to say what action they would advise. They deferred their answer until the following Monday, to give themselves time to consider, but what their answer would have been was never stated. Instead, on Tuesday 17 March, the king took the initiative. He summoned all his lords ‘then being in town’, forty-five of them including the chancellor, to his innermost chamber, identified in the record by its gavel window overlooking a cloister in Westminster palace. Here the duke of Suffolk was sent for and, kneeling, was asked, yet again, what answer he made to the Commons’ charges. Again he denied them utterly, adding finally and pointedly that it was impossible that such great things could be brought about by him alone. Again he did not claim his right to trial by his peers, but submitted himself wholly to the king’s will. The chancellor then read out Henry’s prepared decision. On the first eight capital charges he declared him neither cleared nor convicted; on the second bill of lesser charges, for ‘misprisions not criminal’, he pronounced him banished from all his realms for five years from 1 May, on the prior understanding that he would not show or allow any malice of any kind against any person of whatever rank, for what had been done to him. This was done entirely on Henry’s own will, not by way of legal judgement, nor by advice of the lords who thereupon, through the constable, Viscount Beaumont, requested that it should be so enacted on the parliament roll, to preserve intact their rights and their successors’ rights to trial by their peerage in like cases in the future.25 ‘William Worcester’ alleges that, while Suffolk was still in the custody of the household at Westminster, the frustrated Commons laboured to have him attainted of treason by bill,26 to force Henry’s hand. Such a bill in fact was presented, and rejected, in the next parliament, even though Suffolk was then dead.27

  In the passions roused by Henry’s refusal to allow the legal condemnation and destruction of this loyal servant whose innocence he alone could have proved, criticism of the king himself only found expression anonymously, or in the mouths of his humblest subjects. Henry released Suffolk from the palace under cover of darkness on the day he pronounced his sentence and he fled from the city, barely escaping from some 2,000 angry citizens, who managed only to seize one of his packhorses and rob some of his attendants.28 From this time probably dates the most extreme of the political lampoons, such as the ‘Warning to King Henry’, which warned about the probable consequences of a pardon for Suffolk. This placard demanded his condemnation as essential justice, and as the price of any parliamentary grant. The king was now advised to look to his own position if he stood by traitors.29 A London vintner’s servant, who was executed for planning a rising on 21 March, was alleged to have proclaimed that for letting Suffolk escape justice Henry would lose his crown.30

  Suffolk was the scapegoat for Henry’s own failures. The well-known letter of advice which the duke wrote to his son on the day he sailed into exile, whatever it may disclose of the writer’s character, is chiefly notable for the expressions of utter loyalty to Henry, and for the insistence that the same complete devotion should be shown to him by his heir.31 Suffolk then believed he was going into temporary exile in the territory of the duke of Burgundy. His actual fate on 2 May, beheaded on the gunwale of a small boat in Dover Roads by sailors from the ship Nicholas of the Tower, in open defiance of royal safe conduct and authority, was seen by its perpetrators as an act of justice upon both king and minister. Recent research has now made this quite clear. The many pardons issued to Kentish rebels in 1451 contained a proviso of exclusion for offences committed at sea to the king’s dishonour and when, finally, in June that year, two shipmen were brought to trial for Suffolk’s murder, they were also indicted for accusing the king himself of misgovernment and of harbouring traitors about his person. They were alleged to have declared, when they were shown the royal safe conduct on which the duke relied, that they recognized no such king; that the crown of the realm was the community of the realm and that they would now make another person from outside the kingdom king in his place.32 This in some measure echoes the final lines of the ‘Warning to King Henry’:

  O rex, si rex es, rege te, vel eris sine re rex;

  Nomen habes sine re, nisi te recte regas.33

  The Commons’ impeachment of Suffolk was only one half of a two-pronged parliamentary attack on the agents of Henry’s personal rule. The other plan was to enforce legislation to recover all the material benefits which Suffolk and his household colleagues had gained from their privileged positions in the royal service. To this end a bill was promoted to resume into the king’s hands all lands, offices, pensions and gifts made by Henry, or earlier in his name, since his accession. The only precedent for such an attempt to compel a king to annul royal acts went back to 1404, when parliament had similarly tried to make his grandfather Henry IV undo the costly arrangements by which he had rewarded the supporters of his usurpation. In that similar situation Henry IV’s resistance had been determined, clever and successful. In the spring of 1450 his much less able grandson had first to admit a partial defeat, which became total in the following parliament of 1450–1.

  The first two sessions of the parliament which impeached Suffolk, in the turbulent capital at Blackfriars and at Westminster between 6 November 1449 and 30 March 1450, had otherwise been singularly unproductive. Officially summoned to handle arduous affairs of the kingdom which could not be dealt with in any other way, which was circumlo
cution for the paramount need for substantial grants of taxation, the Commons stubbornly refused to grant anything at all. Apart from listening to the desperate appeal from Somerset for assistance for Normandy, they were treated to an exposition of the ‘state of the realm’, in other words a financial summary of the king’s resources, debts and obligations for the next twelve months, best calculated to impress his needs upon them.34 As with the previous assembly, the appalling financial situation thus revealed led them to demand not simply redress of grievances but retribution before supply. After Palm Sunday, 29 March 1450, at-the approach of Easter, the weary king, ‘for intimate reasons’ unspecified, took the first of what was to be many similar decisions to withdraw from London and retreat to the security and more favourable atmosphere of the Lancastrian Midlands, there to hold the next session of parliament at Leicester. John Paston received a letter from the parliament at Leicester, dated 6 May, informing him of Suffolk’s death, that Calais was threatened with attack, and that the king at Leicester had accepted a resumption ‘in some but not in all’.35 This resumption, coupled with the destruction of Suffolk, was the Commons’ panacea for all the nation’s grievances, for the loss of the French lands, the years of crippling taxation to no successful purpose, the evils of a royal household which lived off the land without paying for what it took, and for the scandal of royal servants who corrupted the administrative and judicial systems of the kingdom and contrived to enrich themselves while the king went bankrupt.

  The determination of this parliament to make Henry rescind his grants had been common knowledge inside and outside the assembly since its inception. The Kentish rebels rose in arms while it was still sitting at Leicester, claiming that those about the king were preventing its acceptance. This belief was not very wide of the mark, because it was only after Suffolk had been removed from the political scene, Normandy irretrievably lost, and Calais threatened, that any degree of resumption was accepted. When it was, no attempt was made to modify the original bill’s sweeping provisions, which suggests that the final decision to accept it was a sudden one, typical of Henry. Instead it was accepted wholesale, but with a clause reserving the king’s right to make exceptions appended to it. In this way it was hoped to get away with a gesture and only limited concessions.

  Fifteen modifying clauses and 186 separate clauses of exemption, the result of petitions, were subsequently added to the act. All these petitions were personally signed and authorized by Henry himself. Some of these were in fact harmless and necessary in order to avoid an utter and complete annulment of all acts of state made over the previous twenty-eight years. But the crucial exemptions were those made for the household men, which at first sight appear to be the least controversial, because in a number of cases they specifically stated that certain grants they had obtained would be surrendered. When their original petitions for exemption are consulted it becomes clear that some kind of conference or committee had in the first instance agreed in advance what they should keep and what they should be prepared to lose. As enrolled on the parliament roll their surrenders totalled some £700 per annum, but figures on a separate list of 101 household men raise this total to about £1,800 per annum and further reveal that they were actually retaining specific items of royal revenues totalling £3,750 per annum.36 Beyond this figure the greatest of the survivors, Cromwell, Say, Sudeley, Beauchamp and others, had blanket exemptions covering all their grants in the widest possible terms. Six months’ discussion of the measure had left plenty of time for individuals and corporate bodies to prepare for the possible event. Exemption certificates were reaching the exchequer by 13 August 1450 although it did not receive a copy of the act itself until 15 October 1450. Administrative action on the act was slow and ineffective. No writs went out to the shires ordering inquisitions into holders of crown lands and revenues until the spring of 1451.

  Nevertheless, the formal annulment by act of parliament of grants, antedated to take effect from 6 November 1449, the opening day of the parliament, was sufficient to create much uncertainty in the land market. Something of a scramble for new leases ensued. Some unfortunates who were absent, even the greatest, such as York in Ireland, Somerset in Normandy and of course the family of the dead Suffolk, lost heavily. In some cases Suffolk’s former colleagues benefited. Lord Beauchamp secured a twelve-year lease of his county and lordship of Pembroke. His Oxfordshire lands (Woodstock, Handborough, Wootton and Stonesfield) were taken over by Lord Sudeley. Some had postdated patents ready in case grants covered by the act should be resumed. Some household men lost rent-free grants or grants at nominal rates to colleagues who, with foreknowledge, stepped in smartly to secure them for themselves on less favourable but still remunerative terms.37 Such was the half-hearted, dilatory and deceptive act which, nevertheless, still constituted a parliamentary triumph. Along with it were passed a detailed reservation of specific items of the king’s endowed revenues for the expenses of his household and a graduated tax on incomes from land and offices. A further grant of the normal tenths and fifteenths, even in halves, such as had been reluctantly granted in 1447, was still out of the question, and Henry, in his extreme poverty, had to be content with this still novel, limited, income tax which in fact produced no more than £5,000 to repay loans over the next three years.38

  After 7 June news of the Kentish rising made the king’s return to London from Leicester imperative. In the ensuing confusion, the parliament was not so much dissolved as faded away. The Kentish rebels actually thought the king brought it back to London with him. They regarded themselves not as rebels, but as petitioners, seeking to back up the demands of parliament and they sent it a copy of their articles of complaint to Westminster. This rising, or petitioning, by the men of Kent, East Sussex, Surrey and Middlesex, known as Jack Cade’s rebellion, seems to have been initially organized in the Ashford area, in the religious gatherings on Whitsunday, 24 May 1450.39 The final spark to action there was the threat made to the whole county by the sheriff of Kent and Sussex in retaliation for the death of Suffolk. The duke’s headless body had been found on Dover sands and, according to the first article of the rebels’ complaint, William Crowmer, sheriff of Kent and Sussex, son-in-law of the treasurer, Lord Say, had taken custody of it and threatened that the king would now turn the whole county of Kent into a deer forest, in punishment. Such a threat was enough to coalesce all the grievances in this most politically conscious, responsive and best-informed area of England, lying as it did between the capital and disintegrating English Normandy, its coastal areas fully exposed to French raids, its trade and well-being most immediately susceptible to the severe economic crisis of 1449–50. Beginning in Ashford, a march on London rapidly gathered contingents by the way until they reached Blackheath, the obvious, final place of assembly outside London, on 11 and 12 June. Here they established a strong encampment, efficiently staked about to prevent its being over-run by cavalry. When the news reached Henry in Leicester he appointed two Kentish lords, the duke of Buckingham, of Penshurst, and Lord Rivers, of the Mote, by Maidstone, to head the vanguard of a battle force to accompany him back to London.40 Here he established himself at St John’s Hospital in Clerkenwell on Saturday 13 June. Nothing was done on Sunday, but on the Monday morning he sent out heralds to Blackheath to order the encamped host in his name to withdraw. These heralds returned with the message that those assembled on Blackheath declared they were not rebels, but petitioners, gathered for his right and his people’s rights. They would not withdraw without redress of their grievances.

  Their captain, at least from this 15 June, when a spokesman was required to address the king’s envoys, was a man who styled himself John Mortimer and John Amendall and claimed to be a cousin of the duke of York.41 In truth, according to the proclamations issued for his apprehension on 10 July, he was John Cade, a sanctuary man and outlaw, an Irishman and ex-soldier, who had taken service with the French.42 In contrast to their spokesman, those of his host who are identifiable were impeccably respectable, in
cluding as they did eighteen esquires, with several former sheriffs among them. Cade’s carver or sword-bearer was Robert Poynings of Maidstone, M.P. for Sussex in the next parliament, grandson of Lord Grey of Ruthyn and son-in-law of Judge Paston. Seventy-four of the rebels styled themselves gentlemen; there were the mayor of Queenborough and the bailiff of Sandwich among them; over 500 styled themselves yeomen and there were very many tradesmen and craftsmen present: farriers, saddlers, brewers, vintners, innkeepers, fullers, weavers, tailors, masons, tilers, coopers and butchers, sailors and many husbandmen. Inevitably there were many without any designation, but the most striking aspect of all is the way their 3,000 or more ultimate pardons43 were grouped together in their hundreds of origin, under constables. Fifty-three constables from thirty-one of the sixty-eight hundreds of Kent headed their named contingents, sometimes followed by the note ‘and all others of the said hundred’. In addition there were constables and their contingents from fourteen Sussex hundreds, three from Surrey, one from Middlesex and four from Surrey towns.

  It looks as though this was in fact a levy of the fencible men, mainly of Kent and East Sussex, raised for this mass petitioning of the king and parliament, and, they claimed, to defend the king and realm against the traitors about his person. This suspicion is strengthened almost to certainty by the fact that in their midst were at least five commissioners of array for Kent, who had been appointed with eight others on 14 April 1450, in the face of threatened French invasion, to array and muster all fencible men of the county, and to set up beacons.44 The two principal commissioners now numbered among the Kentish host were Sir John Cheyne of Eastchurch in Sheppey, justice of the peace, king’s sergeant-at-arms, M.P. for Kent in the previous parliament, and William Haute of Bishopsbourne, brother-in-law of Lord Rivers, justice of the peace and shire knight in the next parliament. The three other rebel commissioners of array were William Manston, John Fogge of Great Chart near Ashford, Hautc’s son-in-law, and William Hextal of Peckham, an associate of the Stafford duke of Buckingham, M.P. for Bletchingley, a Stafford borough, in the previous parliament, and for Kent in 1453–4. With the exception of the sparsely populated areas of the Isle of Thanet and Romney Marshes, all areas of Kent supplied contingents of fencible men to Blackheath: the areas bordering the main highway all the way from Dover, through Ashford, Canterbury, Sittingbourne, Maidstone and Wrotham to Southwark; the Weald and the whole of the Thames estuary from Deptford to beyond the Isle of Sheppey.