Henry VI

by Bertram Wolffe

  The final acceptance of this act destroyed the validity of Henry’s grants and leases. Consequently in June and July there was a scramble for new ones. Again, in the last three months of the year, when the returns which sheriffs and escheators had to make under the act were coming in, the number of new leases rose again. At least eighty-five new leases were taken out in 1451. Little if anything had yet been done to implement the earlier act, but the two acts were now operated jointly and as a result at least twenty-four units of permanently alienated lands and properties were recovered and let out again to farm for terms of years at the current rate of extent, several cases of recovered alienated lands were kept in hand, and at least forty-four instances of life grants recovered were changed to leases for terms of years. Many leases for terms of years were shortened after recovery and the farms raised. For the first time within living memory, and possibly for much longer, an element of financial competition now entered into royal leasing. The act stipulated that he who offered most should get the lease unless the previous holder would match his offer.37

  Henry had at last made a real concession to public opinion as expressed by the Commons in parliament. There appears to have been no political discrimination against new would-be lessees of the resumed lands. In many cases the existing holders, including the household men, got them back on the new and less favourable terms. Jointly held and syndicate leases, taken out by men unknown on the political scene, began to appear, confirming that financial considerations began to operate in the re-leasing. In addition the act annulled a host of annuities, liberties and privileges. The greatest, including both York and Somerset, suffered, as well as many household men. Many grantees quickly got their grants regranted and backdated, but, significantly, many did not. The financial records of government over these years reveal that prior to this resumption cash payments made by farmers of royal lands into the exchequer and assignments made on them were negligible. As a result of these resumptions farms and rents from the resumed lands became, for the time being, sound assignments for the payment of the king’s debts, for defending the borders, for repaying loans and current expenses.38 In May 1450 a sum of £5,661 os 11d per annum had been ordered to be levied from lands and customs revenues for the expenses of the royal household. Twelve selected units of land laid under contribution there could only have contributed £40 at that time. By the summer of 1451 the whole £1,500 charged on these twelve units could be met.39 Again the receipts which the treasurer of the household acknowledged direct from the exchequer in the 1440s averaged less than £3,000 per annum. In the regnal year 1450–1 this figure rose to over £10,500.40 Thus the parliamentary resumption had restored a considerable measure of control over the endowed revenues of the crown to the exchequer of which the agents of Henry’s personal rule since 14.37 had hitherto deprived it. The unpaid expenses of the royal household, which had become such a public scandal, could now be made a primary charge on this newly-freed income. So it continued for a time.

  The Commons had resubmitted their petition for a resumption because they rightly said their previous one had ‘not been effectually had’ and asked for ‘good and effectual conclusion’ to it. At last they had got it. Henry now allowed the arrangements he had made for the use of the crown lands over the previous ten years or so to be almost entirely undone. York, Somerset, the other great lords and the knights and esquires of the household surrendered grants in fee and for life in a manner without precedent. The flow of alienations, life grants and extravagant annuities after 1451 was reduced to a trickle. It is true that the queen benefited hugely, and Henry thereby also found the means adequately to endow his two half-brothers, Edmund and Jasper Tudor, newly created earls of Richmond and Pembroke, with the most important of the resumed lands. The hereditary patrimony of the prince of Wales, duke of Cornwall and earl of Chester was also largely freed of encumbrances for the heir to the throne, when he should appear. But these were all quite legitimate and accepted charges for the crown lands. The actual and potential financial yield of the king’s hereditary patrimony should not be exaggerated. Taxation in its different forms provided by far the major part of the revenues of later-medieval English kings. Nevertheless, Henry could hardly have made any other move more calculated to restore and enhance the standing of his government, once the effects were seen.

  With parliament dissolved, it was the turn of Surrey, Sussex, Hampshire and Wiltshire, from 22 June to 27 July 1451, to experience a personal, punitive judicial perambulation on which Henry’s entourage was almost identical with that of January into Kent, though strengthened judicially by the presence of the Lord Chief Justice.41 A second royal visitation of Kent on the same lines followed between 30 July and 20 August.42 The records of the cases heard on all three of these personal visitations reveal the punishment of further lesser risings after the pattern of Cade’s, notably one led by Henry Hasildene in Sussex and Kent and another by William Beerbrewer in Wiltshire. It is improbable that Henry presided over them all himself, but on each of these perambulations there is evidence that at Lewes, Salisbury and Canterbury he did personally sit in judgement with his judges.43

  Thus by mid-summer 1451 Henry’s combination of belated concession to public opinion and unusually firm personal action in the shires had restored an appreciable measure of strength to his government at home. Throughout these months Richard duke of York, now identified with would-be reformers and tainted with suspicion of aspiring to the throne, was conspicuous only by his renewed absence from the king’s presence and his complete lack of involvement in affairs of state. Henry’s personal attitude towards his suspected would-be supplanter was succinctly expressed by one of the better chroniclers: ‘When need demands, or necessity compels, we will invoke your aid.’44 This aid was in fact never sought. Although York was still in London over Christmas 1450,45 it was probably on the further prorogation of parliament in the New Year that he departed once more into virtual exile at Ludlow. He had offered his services as the king’s principal adviser; he had revealed a smouldering, vindictive hostility to Somerset, who had taken Suffolk’s place in Henry’s service; he was certainly not prepared to run in joint harness with the Beaufort duke. Thus he was once again untouched by the continuing momentum of disaster abroad and from the New Year of 1451 was in a position, from the sidelines once more, to make vociferous and alarming complaints against Henry’s government in general and Somerset in particular.

  When the surrender of Cherbourg on 12 August 1450 completed the conquest of Normandy, Charles VII apportioned garrisons for its defence and turned his full attention to the reduction of English Gascony, sending the surplus of his forces by sea from Normandy to the marches of Guienne. Henry at last made plans to counter this new, singleminded threat to his most ancient French possessions, but their failure to reach maturity was to be as miserable a tale of halfhearted incapacity as any of his previous mishandlings of the affairs of his French kingdom. Richard Wydeville, Lord Rivers, was appointed seneschal of Gascony and commissioned on 30 August 1450 to be ready to sail from Plymouth to Bordeaux with 4,000 men by 21 September. Eighty-six ships great and small, from as far away as Lynn and Calais, were commandeered and gradually assembled in Plymouth and adjacent south-western ports. But it appears that loans were only being raised to pay the soldiers in late February and March 1451 on the security of an as yet unpaid tenth, granted by the clergy of the Canterbury province in November 1449. By early February the still unpaid ships’ captains and crews were threatening to disperse and efforts had to be made locally to detain them by force and to summon defaulters before the council. They finally received assignments of over £3,000 on the London customs early in June. The final date of assembly of the force had been repeatedly postponed until 1 March and musters, first attempted for 26 March, were then successively postponed to 30 May. Unpaid mariners and soldiers were disturbing the county of Cornwall in June, when Henry compelled the Genoese merchants to loan him £8,000 by seizing their alum cargoes to that value.46 How much o
f this forced loan, if any, went to pay for Rivers’s expedition is not known, but Henry was also concurrently pledging and selling jewels and plate for their wages. As late as 8 July 1451 Thomas Gill was appointed the king’s special courier to travel with Rivers and return, immediately after landing, with a report on the disposition of the country, but the ill-fated expedition, thus assembling and waiting for nearly twelve months, on which £13,000 was spent to no purpose, never left port. By July Gascony was almost completely lost to the French and fear of a French attack on Calais had now become uppermost in the minds of the king and his advisers.

  Charles VII had made a significant start to the conquest of English Gascony in the autumn of 1450, notably with the capture of Bergerac and Bazas and a humiliating decimation of a field force at Blanquefort, only some five miles from Bordeaux. Nothing had been retrieved there when the French opened their spring campaign in May 1451 for a systematic reduction of all strongholds, with several armies operating at once, in a fashion reminiscent of the rapid Normandy conquest. The successive capture of Montguyon, of Blaye and Bourg, together dominating the navigation of the Gironde, and of Castillon, was followed by the simultaneous investment of Fronsac, the main English-manned stronghold on the Dordogne, Libourne, Dax and Rions. Ominously these two latter towns in the south were invested by the counts of Armagnac and Foix and the Sire d’Albret, indicating the full involvement of the great lords of the Midi in the French conquest from this point. The whole future of the English duchy, the ancient inheritance of Eleanor of Aquitaine, with the exception of the port of Bayonne in the remote south, which still confidently waited for English aid, was at length made to depend on a formal journée, reminiscent of the trial of strength arranged at Tartas in 1442, to be held before Fronsac on the eve of St John the Baptist (24 June). On that day, as at Tartas, the French held the field in strength and no English forces appeared. Fronsac, the key and entry to the English duchy, perforce then surrendered. Bordeaux admitted the enemy forces under Charles VII’s lieutenant-general, Dunois, on 30 June. Bayonne was finally entered after siege on 21 August. A few days later the barons of the Bordelais and the three estates of Bordeaux, Dax and Bayonne went to Taillebourg to do homage to the French king.47 Henry had now lost the whole of the ancient English duchy of Gascony.

  There is no evidence to determine exactly when Henry decided against sending the Rivers expedition to Gascony. Even before the fall of Bayonne he had turned his attention to the needs of Calais. Londoners paid a tax for the relief of Calais on 17 July 1451, alleged to be sufficient to provide 1,000 men.48 Henry was selling a great gold spice plate for the maintenance of the Calais garrison on 22 July and reinforcements were being introduced there from 10 August. Henry again showed his supreme faith in Edmund duke of Somerset by appointing him Captain of Calais on 21 September.49 By the end of the year Rivers himself arrived in Calais with 60 lances and 530 archers.50 The irresolute switch from Bordeaux to Calais was reminiscent of the elder Somerset’s vacillation between Gascony and Normandy in 1443. In any case the problems of Gascony and Calais were now overshadowed by the urgent need for a considerable armed force at home.

  In September 1451 Richard duke of York, now based on his castle of Ludlow in the Welsh marches, supported by Robert Hungerford, Lord Moleyns and Sir William Herbert, intervened, on his own initiative, to settle a dispute in the county of Somerset. This had led to armed confrontation there between the duke of Somerset’s brother-in-law, Thomas Courtenay, earl of Devon, supported by Edward Brook, Lord Cobham on one side, and William, Lord Bonville of Chewton and Shute, who was allied with James Butler, earl of Wiltshire on the other. In spite of recent careful investigation of the dispute51 its origins remain sadly obscure, but it may well have first arisen as a family quarrel between Courtenay and Bonville who were quite closely related,52 along the lines of their disagreement often years previously. York headed the commission of the peace for the county of Somerset. It is unlikely that York’s intervention had anything to do with personal enmity towards the Butlers in Ireland at this stage, because he had left Wiltshire’s father, the Butler earl of Ormond, as his deputy there is August 1450, when he made his return to England.53 Devon had marched from Tiverton across the county of Somerset, with a substantial force, to bring Wiltshire to battle at Lackham near Bath, on his way spurning the peacemaking efforts of Bishop Beckington, another Somerset justice of the peace, and of the dean of Wells. He had turned back to besiege Bonville in Taunton castle when he found his first quarry, Wiltshire, had flown from Lackham in dutiful answer to a summons to the king at Coventry. It was during this investment of Taunton that York and his assistants appeared on the scene and intervened between Courtenay and Bonville, a course he could only have taken in an official capacity as the principal member of the commission of the peace for that county. His prestige, and the superior might of his 2,000-strong force, quickly brought the earl and Bonville to terms.54

  Henry, however, was not prepared to accept that York’s intervention had been made disinterestedly in the cause of law and order in the west. This was possibly the last point in the relations between the king and York when a peaceful settlement could have been secured. Since his return from Ireland in August 1450 York had acted entirely consistently as an upholder of good government. He was associated with the demand for reform, but when the king at last took action through judicial progresses and the acts of resumption to meet these demands, York returned to his castle of Ludlow. His personal assistance had been spurned but the tenor of his advice followed, so he had no cause for complaint. The following year this intervention in the Courtenay-Bonville dispute could be entirely justified as his duty as the senior member of the justices for that county. York’s power could not be ignored by the king. If it was to be contained, his services had to be accepted at their face value. Henry now chose to continue to show his distrust of York thus forcing him into open opposition. Lumping him with the other principals concerned in the dispute, he summoned all of them indiscriminately to answer for a flagrant breach of the peace.55 On 9 September he set out for the Midlands to hold a countil meeting at Coventry, which was becoming his normal refuge in difficult situations, in the heart of Lancastrian territory. He was powerfully supported by his nobility, notably by York’s brother-in-law Richard earl of Salisbury, and by Humphrey Stafford, duke of Buckingham, both of whom were later paid handsomely for contributing to the strong force about his person.56 This journey was in a sense yet another personal oyer and terminer, this time directly to judge noble peacebreakers and, according to one chronicler, to impose the arbitration of certain lords in his presence upon the variances of York and Somerset, which he proposed to treat as a mere personal matter between them.57 Wiltshire, Bonville and Moleyns all suffered a month’s confinement in Berkhamsted and Wallingford castles for their parts in the disturbances. Cobham was ultimately detained for two years or more.58 Once again, York’s proffered services had been rejected. York and Devon, temporarily thrown together, simply declined to respond to Henry’s frequent summonses.

  The activities of Sir William Oldhall, York’s right-hand man, during this period suggest that support for York was being expressed in word and deed. Oldhall had taken sanctuary in the royal chapel of St Martin-le-Grand in London. From subsequent indictments in Easter Term 1452 it appeared that he had been made liable for detention by an accusation made by a king’s esquire, Walter Burgh, the member for Downton in the last parliament, that he had stolen Somerset’s goods at Blackfriars on 1 December 1450. Further charges claimed he was responsible for raising the great shout against traitors in Westminster Hall while the law-courts were in session there, for assembling traitors there himself again on 20 July 1451, and for planning a rebellion in mid-September 1451 to seize the Great Seal and deprive Henry of his crown. Still later indictments alleged that he had instigated an assembly at York’s castle of Fotheringhay on 11 November 1451 to encompass Henry’s death, and to depose him in favour of York. The earls of Shrewsbury and Wiltshire and
Lords Moleyns and Lisle were sent with 400 men to extract him from sanctuary for confinement in Westminster palace on 28 January 1452,59 presumably for questioning and safer custody, as a suspected rallying point for York’s supporters in London, since his indictment for high treason in the Reading parliament of 1453 accused him of helping to prepare his master’s armed rising of February 1452. Dean Cowdray of St Martin’s, absent when the seizure was made, was nevertheless able to insist on his orderly reinstatement there, which duly took place under the supervision of the duke of Somerset two days later, but a guard of Henry’s yeomen of the household was left posted round the sanctuary.60

  From Ludlow on 9 January 1452 York at length issued an open manifesto of loyalty to his sovereign to counter the king’s reported great displeasure. In it he called upon Henry’s intimate adviser, whom he had earlier protected from the public wrath, the bishop of Hereford and former abbot of Gloucester, Reginald Boulers, and his own former deputy in Normandy, John Talbot, earl of Shrewsbury, to act as his intermediaries with the king and publicly to witness his oath of loyalty on the sacraments if Henry would not send two or three lords to him at Ludlow for this purpose.61 Ominously he claimed that Henry’s unjustified mistrust of him was entirely due to sinister information fed to him by his ‘enemies, adversaries and evil-willers’. By 3 February he had tired of waiting and decided to use force. He sent written appeals to numerous towns for support in an armed demonstration to remove the duke of Somerset from Henry’s presence as a danger to the safety of the realm. He referred back to the advice which he had pressed upon Henry in October 1450 which the king had ignored, with consequent further disasters. Again he alleged that efforts were being made to have him arraigned for treason, his blood corrupted, and he and his heirs disinherited.62