Henry VI

by Bertram Wolffe

  55 Benet’s Chronicle, 205, ‘iratus rex valde cum illis omnibus’; Giles’s Chronicle, 43, though the summons to Coventry is there dated after the Purification, possibly a mistake for the Nativity of the Virgin (8 September). Henry began his journey to Coventry from Windsor on 9 September, reaching Windsor on the return on 12 October.

  56 Recorded in exchequer records (Devon, Issues, 475, 478) because, as Fortescue wrote (Governance, 125), when the king rode out in his own person mightily accompanied no man was bound to serve him in such a case at his own expense. Ramsay, Lancaster and York, II, 152, noted that the second instance of payment in Devon, Issues, was misdated to 1452.

  57 ‘William Worcester’, in Stevenson, Wars, II, pt. ii, 770, 771.

  58 Benet’s Chronicle, 205; R.P., V, 248; P.R.O., K.B. 27/774 Rex, 27.

  59 Benet’s Chronicle, 205–6; Bale’s Chronicle, 139.

  60 Details in J. S. Roskell’s article, ‘Sir William Oldhall, Speaker in the Parliament of 1450–1’, Nottingham Medieval Studies, V (1961), 87–112, from the King’s Bench Coram Rege Roll, amplifying older accounts by C. E. Johnston in E.H.R., XXV (1910), 715–22, and A. J. Kempe, Historical Notes of the Collegiate Church of St. Martin-le-Grand (London 1825), 140–4; Devon, Issues, 476; R.P., V, 452–3.

  61 Paston Letters, Introduction, cxi.

  62 Ibid., cxii-cxiii; P.P.C., VI, 90–9, misdated to 1450.

  63 Bale’s Chronicle, 139.

  64 P.P.C., VI, 90–2.

  65 C.P.R., 1446–1452, 537, 577 (14 and 17 February).

  66 Devon, Issues, 476.

  67 P.P.C., VI, 116; Devon, Issues, 475–6; Bale’s Chronicle, 139.

  68 In the words of Giles’s Chronicle (p. 43): ‘campum auscepit ibidem suae fortunae eventus expectare’.

  69 Davies’s Chronicle, 70.

  70 Benet’s Chronicle, 206.

  71 Davies’s Chronicle, 70; B.L. Cotton Roll, ii, 23, printed by Gairdner in Paston Letters, Introduction, ccclxxxiv.

  72 Davies’s Chronicle, 70, Wheathampstead, Registrum, I, 162; R.P., V, 346.

  73 The most precise chronology is that of College of Arms Arundel MS, 19, printed by Kingsford, English Historical Literature, 297–8.

  74 Benet’s Chronicle, 207; B.E. Cotton Vespatian C. xiv, f. 40 printed in Paston Letters, Introduction, cxix-exxiii.

  75 Chronicle of London (ed. Kingsford), 163; Short English Chronicle (ed. Gairdner), 69; The Brut, 520.

  76 Giles’s Chronicle, 43; Short English Chronicle, 69; R.P., V, 346–7.

  77 This pardon, ‘the greatest pardon that ever came to England from the Conquest unto this time of my year being mayor of London’, was not preached in England until 1451, the year of Gregory’s mayoralty (Gregory’s Chronicle, 197).

  78 Wheathampstead, Registrum, I, 85–91; Storey, 216; Paston Letters, Introduction, cxxvi-cxxvii, from Pardon Roll c.67/40.

  79 ‘That year it was competent well and peaceable as for any rising among ourselves for every man was in charity, but somewhat the hearts of the people hung and sorrowed for that the duke of Gloucester was dead and some said that the duke of York had great wrong, but what wrong there was no man that durst say’ (Gregory’s Chronicle,

  80 C.P.R., 1446–1452, 512–13 (Kent); 513 (Surrey & Sussex, 9 February).

  81 P.R.O., E.28/82/5 (19 January 1452).

  82 Beaucourt, Charles VII, V, 34, 264, cited by Ramsay, Lancaster and York, II, 153.

  83 P.R.O., P.S.O.1/19/982; C.81/1546/54; C.P.R., 144–1452, 537; P.P.C., VI, 119–25.

  84 P.R.O., K.B.9/103/15; 3270/32; ‘per alium qui corone Anglie est hereditabilis’.

  85 ‘non habilis nee de potestate gubernare regnum predictum nee illud regnum de recte regere debuisset’.

  86 Indictments printed by Virgoe, op. cit., 256–65; Benet’s Chronicle, 207; B.L. Cotton Roll ii, 23, printed in Kingsford, English Historical Literature, 368.

  87 C.P.R., 1446–1452, 553–4.

  88 Ibid., 93–102 (exemplification made under the great seal at Cromwell’s request).

  89 See detailed itinerary below pp. 369–70.

  90 C.P.R., 1446–1452, 580–1.

  91 Exeter City Archives, Hooker Bk 51, fols 309 v-310, 317V. Bk 55 (Freeman’s Bk), f. 39; Receiver’s Rolls, 30–31 Hen. VI (dorse).

  92 J. Gairdner, Paston Letters, Introduction, exxxii-exxxiv; Ramsay, Lancaster and York, II, 151.

  93 P.R.O., E.101/410/9.

  94 P.R.O., K.B.9/103/2; 103/15; 270/34.

  95 MS Bodley, Rawlinson B.355, printed in Six Town Chronicles (ed. R. Flenley), 107.

  96 C.P.R., 1452–1461, 54 (commission of oyer and terminer dated 28 September 1452). For detailed itinerary see below, p. 370.

  97 P.R.O.,C.81/1371/31.

  98 Benet’s Chronicle, 208; ‘William Worcester’, in Stevenson, Wars, II, pt. ii, 770; C.C.R., VI, 122.

  99 Born on the translation of Edward the Confessor (13 October) but also, as Giles’s Chronicle, 44, puts it, ‘ut verisimile est, iuxta conputationem mensium, infra die Natale sancti Edwardi [5 January] erat a matre conceptus’.

  100 C.P.R., 1452–1461, 60.

  101 P.R.O., C.81/1371/33; Paston Letters, I, 229–30. The only commission of oyer and terminer issued specifically for Norfolk and headed by the duke was dated 4 September 1452 (C.P.R., 1452–1461, 54–5).

  102 Ibid., 82–3, 88, 91, 102, 103, 111; Benet’s Chronicle, 208; R.P., V, 265–6.

  103 Berry herald, 468; C.P.R., 1452–1461, 78, 108; Benet’s Chronicle, 209.

  104 D. Wilkins, Concilia, III, 560, proclamation dated at Croydon 1 October 1452 from Kemp’s Register, f. 234.

  105 Bale’s Chronicle, 139–40.

  106 See above, p. 217.

  107 R.P., V, 265–6, 329. For scandalum magnatum see Stat. 3 Ed. I, c.34; 2 Ric. II, c.5; 12 Ric. II, c.11.

  108 R.P., V, 228–30, 269; Wilkins, Concilia, III,563,564.

  109 See the seventeenth-century copy of proceedings of a 1449 council or parliament printed by A. R. Myers in B.J.R.L., XXII (1938), 402–4.

  110 R.P., V, 230–3 (reduced to 13,000 from the English Commons, 3,000 from the lords, 3,000 from Wales and Cheshire and 1,000 being remitted by the king’s grace out of gratitude: ‘for the great kindness that we have found in our said Commons in this our present parliament’) cf. C.P.R., 1452–1461, 406–10, November and December 1457 when the allocation was finally made.

  111 Ramsay, Lancaster and York, II, 161, repeated in effect by A. Steel, Receipt of the Exchequer, 273.

  112 Berry herald, 464.

  113 Benet’s Chronicle, 208–9; C.P.R., 1452–1461, 52; Steel, op. cit., 272.

  114 Henry had generously reduced the size of the grant, see above, p. 265, n.11.

  115 R.P., V, 233.

  116 K. B. McFarlane, ‘William Worcester: A Preliminary Survey’, in Studies Presented to Sir Hilary Jenkinson, ed. J. Conway Davies (Oxford 1957), 211–2.

  117 Boke of Noblesse, 5.

  Chapter 14

  MADNESS, 1453–1455

  The early summer of 1453 thus saw Henry as a stronger and more active king than he had ever been before in all his previous fifteen years of personal rule. Indeed, he seems suddenly to have become an altogether more virile person, even begetting an heir after seven years of fruitless marriage. The reason he gave for proroguing parliament at Reading on 2 July was that he wished to be free to undertake another of his successful judicial perambulations. He had spent twelve months countering the effects of York’s rebellion by exemplary punishment of his rank and file supporters in their localities. Quite separate and unrelated disturbances had now arisen in Yorkshire which appeared to require similar treatment.

  For fifty years or more the Percy and Nevill families had been rivals for offices and land in the north of England, especially for the two posts of greatest influence there which the crown could offer, the wardenships of the east and west marches towards Scotland. During Henry’s personal rule the balance of power there had been significantly tipped in favour of the Nevills. Ce
cily Nevill, sister of the effective head of the numerous Nevill clan, Richard Nevill, earl of Salisbury, was married to Richard duke of York, but the Nevills, who rose to exercise the predominant power in the north, did so chiefly through their Beaufort connections. They were the junior branch of the numerous Nevill family, children of the second marriage of their father Ralph Nevill of Raby, first earl of Westmorland, to Joan Beaufort, daughter of John of Gaunt1 and it was basically from possession of Joan Beaufort’s lands in Yorkshire and the court influence of their uncle, Cardinal Beaufort, that Richard Nevill, earl of Salisbury became one of the wealthiest peers of the realm, with estates worth some £3,000 per annum.2 He had acquired the title and estates of the earldom of Salisbury by his marriage to the heiress of the last Montague earl of Salisbury who died at Orleans in 1428. The York marriage of his sister was only one of five noble Nevill alliances and such relationships meant little among the frequently inter-related upper echelons of fifteenth-century English society, except insofar as they involved the acquisition and transfer of substantial estates. All the marriages of the male Nevills did so. Richard’s brothers William, George and Edward married the baronial heiresses of Fauconberg, Latimer and Abergavenny. The only other brother, Robert, was a priest, provided for with the palatine bishopric of Durham from 1438 to 1457. Salisbury’s eldest son Richard became the wealthiest of the clan when he acquired the title and estates of the Beauchamp earldom of Warwick by his marriage to Anne, heiress of Henry’s tutor Richard Beauchamp, earl of Warwick. By 1453 the Nevill-York marriage had had no political significance. Next after the Stafford duke of Buckingham Richard Nevill, earl of Salisbury, had been the most prominent supporter of Henry in the field against York at Dartford in 1452.

  The disturbances in Yorkshire which appeared to require Henry’s personal attention in July 1453 were caused by the landless younger sons of the Percy earl of Northumberland and the Nevill earl of Salisbury, Thomas Percy, Lord Egremont and Sir John Nevill, possibly resulting from rivalries generated in the conduct of the 1448–9 war with Scotland.3 Repeated summonses before the council to Egremont to answer for breaches of the king’s peace and peremptory letters to both of them on 26 June had been ignored.4 Efforts to get the particularly militant Egremont out of the way by persuading him to raise a force for Gascony on 7 July proved fruitless.5 The appointment on 16 July of a powerful commission of oyer and terminer for the North Riding, headed by Salisbury, Northumberland and Viscount Beaumont and including the three judges Ardern, Portington and Danvers, and some household men, thus similar in composition to the commissions which had accompanied Henry’s previous perambulations to punish York’s followers, suggests that his intended destination in the first half of July was the North. But this powerful commission was replaced on 27 July by one with more limited powers (to command appearances before the council only and to imprison those who refused to find security for their appearance), covering the whole four northern counties, but consisting only of Sir William Lucy and the same three judges. This stop-gap arrangement had become necessary because another magnate dispute had suddenly arisen potentially much more serious than the territorially remote squabbles of the younger sons of Percy and Nevill.

  On 21 July Henry presided over a council meeting at Sheen to settle pressing differences between Edmund Beaufort, duke of Somerset, and Richard Nevill, earl of Warwick, over the possession of the lordship of Glamorgan and Morgannok in South Wales. The conflict here had arisen because Henry had recently granted to Somerset the keeping of these lands, which had been held by Warwick since 1450. As a result Warwick was maintaining the two principal strongholds there, the castles and towns of Cardiff and Cowbridge, against Somerset by force of arms. The two of them were related by their marriages to half-sisters, daughters of the Beauchamp earl of Warwick.6 They had already been involved in rival family claims on the Beauchamp inheritance, but this dispute in South Wales was over Despencer lands and Somerset and his wife had no right by inheritance to these. Half these Despencer lands were held by Warwick’s wife Anne, the daughter of Isabel Despencer, Richard Beauchamp’s second wife. These lands were not in dispute. The other half were held by George Nevill, the grandson of Isabel Despencer by an earlier marriage.7 He was a minor, and Warwick had acquired his wardship in 1450, thus placing the whole Despencer inheritance under his control. It was probably assumed to be in the king’s hands again under the acts of resumption of 1450–1, and therefore available for granting to Somerset who received on 15 June 1453 the keeping of all the lands of George Nevill still in the king’s hands.8 This attempt by Somerset thus to dispossess Warwick and his wife was as deplorable as the king’s continued rash indifference to the probable consequences of his grants. The news that Warwick was holding the lordship against Somerset in a state of war was the alarming matter before Henry and his councillors, Somerset, but not Warwick, being present among them, at Sheen, on Saturday 21 July. The decision of the meeting was to send Warwick a peremptory order to disperse his armed followers and to hand the lordships over to John, Lord Dudley, until Henry, with his council, had decided what should be done. The execution of a note ‘item sembable to the duke of Somerset, mutatis mutandis’, himself taking part in the deliberations, would hardly be sufficient to make the king’s actions appear impartial in Warwick’s eyes.9 There is no evidence that he ever surrendered the lordship to Dudley or to anyone else.

  By 31 July Henry and the court were at the duchy of Lancaster manor of Kingston Lacy in Dorset, near Wimborne Minster,10 where Henry had stayed for five nights on his 1452 western progress. The most likely explanation is that Henry was making for the scene of trouble himself, following his previous convenient route to the west. Kingston Lacy lies beyond the royal hunting lodge at Clarendon by any route from London and it is possible that the king had journeyed even further west before something caused him to turn back. He was certainly at Clarendon by 5 August and is alleged to have been there about the festival of St Peter’s Chains (1 August), which is the date for the onset of his madness there as given by Benet’s Chronicle. There is no record of who accompanied him, except that one chronicler says Somerset took him there.11 The loss of his senses at Clarendon is thus not precisely dateable and the exact cause likewise remains a matter for conjecture. But he was able to receive the kiss of homage from Sir William Stourton at Clarendon on 7 August12 and the devastating news of the death of Talbot and the annihilation of his army at Castillon must have reached Henry during the first week in August. He had only used the ancient royal hunting lodge of Clarendon twice before, although, like Kingston Lacy, it was kept in repair in the custody of a member of the household. Its present isolation and remoteness, three miles east of Salisbury, buried and forgotten in a large modern game-park, makes it much less accessible now than it was in the fifteenth century, when the highway from Salisbury to Winchester, on the main route from the west country, passed through the ancient park. It is unlikely that he had travelled so far west and beyond Clarendon merely for the hunting there. He may well have joined this route to return to the capital when he received the news of Castillon. The shock of such a disaster, clearly indicating the utter loss of English Gascony and, by implication, his own further failure and the Tightness of York’s predictions, may well have caused the onset of psychotic illness, most likely depressive stupor, which deprived him of his wits for the next eighteen months.13

  The few chroniclers who give any dates and details were writing some years later and there are no strictly contemporary reports of his condition at Clarendon, where he remained until before Christmas 1453. Dates given for the onset vary from 7 July to 10 August. Giles’s Chronicle, which gives the impossibly early 7 July, is the source for the fact that a sudden shock or fright caused him to fall into this sickness which neither doctors nor medicines could cure and which deprived him of normal senses and intelligence adequate to direct affairs of state until about the feast of the Circumcision (1 January) 1455.14 There is no evidence of earlier physical ill-health or mental dis
ease in Henry himself, but there most probably was an inherited genetic component to his illness. On his mother’s side there had been the notorious mental derangement of his Valois grandfather, King Charles VI of France. His was a manic state of raging madness in a violent, choleric, fast-living person, but comparable with Henry’s in the sudden initial onset at the same time of year, while on a journey, and in the recurrence of attacks. In Charles’s case it occurred on a military expedition when he was riding, armed, and complaining of the heat, in pursuit of the would-be assassins of his constable, through the forest of Le Mans. The onset in Charles’s case was recorded in detail. He was startled by the sudden appearance of a well-meaning stranger, whom he mistook for an assassin, who seized his bridle to warn him of an ambush ahead.15 At the sound of clashing steel from a dropped lance he flew into a demented rage, allegedly killing four men before he was restrained. There was never any suggestion of violence in Henry’s condition but that does not exclude an inherited predisposition, as the actual symptoms displayed in his case would also be influenced by his own environmental background, personality and intelligence.

  No apparent specialization among the court physicians and surgeons, who were licenced by the council to treat Henry on 15 March 1454, sheds any further light on the nature of his illness. Neither does the whole gamut of draughts and confections, ointments, laxatives, head-purges, gargles, baths, poultices and bleedings which they were authorized to administer at their discretion.16 The first indication that Henry’s was not a once-for-all illness dates from 5 June 1455 when Gilbert Kemer, dean of Salisbury, formerly physician to his uncle Humphrey, was summoned from Salisbury to Windsor to attend the king ‘as we be occupied and laboured as ye know well with sickness and infirmities’.17 In view of the proximity of Clarendon to Salisbury and the wording of this summons, it may well be that this most eminent dietician had attended him there on the first occasion. The only genuine eye-witness account of his condition in the depth of his first attack is a report rendered to parliament on Lady Day 1454.18 A deputation from the lords spiritual and temporal had waited on Henry at Windsor the day before. They had arrived in time to watch the king dining and when he had finished his dinner their spokesman, the bishop of Chester, had attempted to carry out their instructions which, in essence, were to get him urgently to nominate a new chancellor and archbishop of Canterbury, vacancies caused by the death of Cardinal Kemp on 22 March. The bishop received absolutely no response in words or movement from Henry and they all then tried their utmost to move him by prayers, exhortations and unspecified actions as each thought fit, ending in a state of hopelessly unproductive, sorrowful embarrassment. The bishop of Winchester then relieved the tension by suggesting dinner for themselves. After they had dined they returned to find him as he had been before. They repeated their earlier charades with such variations as had since occurred to them, but still with no result. Finally they had him led into his bedchamber, between two of his attendants, and there tried a third time to elicit a response. They could get no answer, nor any indication that he might wish to see them at any future time, so, sorrowfully, they came away. The only other description of him at this time, by the garrulous and inventive Abbot Wheathampstead, is probably nothing but a gloss on their report and in any case tells us little more: he had no sense of time or memory, almost no control over his limbs, could not stand upright or walk or indeed move unaided from the place where he was seated.19 By March 1454 the stupor was thus even deeper than on an earlier occasion when he had at least raised and lowered his eyes to his infant son, who had been brought to him at Windsor, at Christmas 1453 or the New Year 1454.20 During this first illness, as would be expected, he required constant watching and attention day and night, duties falling on the grooms and pages of his chamber.21