Henry VI

by Bertram Wolffe

  The office of Protector and Defender of the kingdom of England, now conferred on York by his peers on 27 March, was deliberately based on the precedent of the minority, since it resurrected Duke Humphrey’s title which had avoided the implications of tutor, lieutenant, governor or regent, all of which implied authority of government. It thus confined his duties to protecting and defending the kingdom from its enemies outward and inward, while making him first among equals in the council. He, for his part, required the fact that he had not sought the position and that the peers of the realm, the ultimate authority in the kingdom, had requested him to take it, to be enrolled on record. They, the lords spiritual and temporal in parliament assembled, required it to be recorded that they were compelled by circumstances to nominate and appoint him. The appointment was in formal terms during the king’s pleasure. It envisaged the possibility of a partial recovery, which might make it advisable for York to continue in office, to prevent the king’s recovery being retarded by the burdens of kingship. The only finality which could be foreseen at that moment was that if Edward prince of Wales wished to take it upon himself when he reached years of discretion, he should be free to do so. Separate letters patent reserved the prince’s rights here. Governmentally the duties of York’s additional position as chief of the king’s council, primus inter pares, were not spelled out in detail as they had been in 1422 but his limited rights, and those of the prince if he took the office upon himself, to royal patronage in offices and benefices were to be the same as Duke Humphrey had had47 and for the rest, royal patronage was to be exercised by the council. His salary was to be 2,000 marks per annum, with supplementary payment for necessary, unforeseen expenses. All the statutory rights and royal gifts so far granted to Queen Margaret were specifically reserved to her.48

  In the remaining days of the parliament it granted no further supply, but was used to give ultimate authority to a number of measures appropriate to current circumstances: the imprisoned Somerset was deprived of the captaincy of Calais and York’s appointment in his stead approved; the earl of Salisbury, York’s brother-in-law, was appointed as the first lay chancellor of the reign. Together with Shrewsbury, Worcester, Wiltshire and Lord Stourton he was also nominated to keep the seas for three years and tunnage and poundage officially appropriated to pay for this. Fresh financial appropriations on the existing revenues, at a much reduced scale of 10,000 marks, not to be exceeded, were made for the stricken royal household in response, it was said, to repeated remonstrances against the excesses of royal purveyors. Any magnates of the realm who declined to obey royal writs of summons before the council were made liable to forfeiture and loss of their peerages.49

  This last measure indicated that Richard duke of York would inevitably have to take up the exercise of royal authority over the disputes of his peers at the point where Henry had relinquished it once parliament was dissolved.50 He was on his way north by 16 May and established in York about the 19th,51 accompanied on his royal judicial progress by the earl of Warwick, Lords Cromwell, Greystock and Fitzhugh and the judges Richard Bingham, Ralph Pole, John Prisot and John Portington.52 This impressive armed oyer and terminer was designed for the exemplary punishment of the followers of Exeter, Egremont and Richard Percy. York’s own interest, the crown’s interests through the royal Protector in punishing flagrant breaches of the king’s peace, and the private interests of the Nevills and Lord Cromwell were for the moment conveniently and effectively identical. In addition to the indictment of over 700 Percy supporters, almost entirely Yorkshire-men, for the affray at Heworth on 24 August 1453, and for concomitant disturbances in York and elsewhere, the Protector and his fellow commissioners were also concerned with further more serious armed assemblies, principally at the Percy manors of Topcliffe on 17 October 1453 and Spofforth and York on 21 May 1454.

  The duke of Exeter and Lord Egremont, who were alleged to be in alliance with King James of Scotland, were, it seems, aiming to raise the whole north of England in rebellion against the Protector, if not against the helpless king. They assembled, with banners displayed, under Exeter, who was taking regal power upon himself claiming to be the rightful duke of Lancaster and handing out liveries in the Lancastrian colours ‘white and bloody’ with the words ‘take here the duke of Lancaster’s livery’. Consequently another two hundred or more named adherents, some from Cumberland and Lancashire, and from Exeter’s Bedfordshire estates, and many more unidentified, were indicted for this rebellion. It has recently been cogently argued from the evidence of these indictments made before York in June 1454, and the current records of the reactions of the council, that the Lancastrian Exeter saw himself as the alternative, rightful Protector to the Plantagenet York. In the absence of any other unquestionably legitimate male descendants of John of Gaunt, apart from his two royal great-grandsons (the prostrate Henry himself and King Alfonso of Portugal), Henry Holand, duke of Exeter, the third great-grandson of John of Gaunt through his younger daughter Elizabeth,53 saw himself as the rightful, supreme champion of the Lancastrian interest during Henry’s incapacity.54

  No direct confrontation between Exeter with his Percy allies and the Protector in fact ever took place. They and their supporters were condemned as traitors by York and his fellow commissioners. Exeter, who fled south, was taken from Westminster sanctuary by York on 23 July and lodged in Pontefract castle. The fugitive Egremont and Richard Percy were finally captured in an armed affray with Sir Thomas Nevill at Stamford Bridge, near York, early in November. They were first confined in the Nevill castle of Middleham, then handed over to the Protector, tried, condemned, and consigned to Newgate.55 Thus the Nevills triumphed over the Percies and York defeated his new, would-be Lancastrian rival for pre-eminence in the realm. He was back in the council at Westminster from the north by 8 July and then returned to York, where a further final session was held on 3 August. After this any further action against Northumberland and Percy associates could be safely respited until the next Yorkshire sessions due after Easter 1455.56

  On 23 July 1454 the council approved a severe reduction in the king’s stables. Thirty-one of the king’s horses were dispersed among the nobility and another 15 were given to the king’s almoner Henry Sever, leaving the now immobile household with 25 only and a stable staff reduced from 39 to 9.57 Measures were also pending severely to reduce the whole royal household establishment. On the other hand York was authorized to give the king’s livery collar to eighty gentlemen of his own choice.58 It could be argued that the reduction of the royal stables was intended only as a necessary and temporary measure. The drastic reduction of the household establishment announced on 13 November was, however, intended to be permanent and was justified not on the grounds of Henry’s illness but because, it was claimed, Henry had himself been about to make such a reduction on the eve of his collapse. This is most unlikely. A straight comparison with all those receiving fees and wages in 1452 shows reductions of about one-third, but this does not reveal the true nature of the exercise. Below stairs there was in fact no great change in numbers, but the knights, esquires and gentlemen of the household, numbering 301 on the 1452 roll, were now officially reduced to 24, while the yeomen of the crown and chamber were reduced from 72 to 31. A medical staff of eight: two master physicians, John Fauceby and William Hatclyff, three yeomen assistants and a sergeant surgeon, a yeoman and a groom, were retained to attend the sick king. Queen Margaret was allowed to retain a household of 120 persons, which was slightly more than she had in 1452, and an establishment of 39 was now provided for the infant prince.59 There can be no doubt that Henry, on his recovery, could quickly have restored the position, if such numbers were in fact immediately deprived of his livery. Ordinances on the size of the household and the reality did not necessarily correspond. The ordinance of 1445 had envisaged an establishment of only one-quarter of the then current number of household knights and esquires, but the accounts for 1447 show that the actual total by then stood at five times that number. Household men were t
he ubiquitous agents of personal influence and rule throughout the shires; there could never be enough of them from that point of view, and their numbers had been steadily increasing throughout the 1440s. The reductions now to be enforced brought their numbers down far below the establishment of 1445, and even lower than Henry V’s establishment on which these reforms of 1454 were supposedly based.60 The reference in this measure to the duty of the great council to effect this drastic reduction and relieve the country of the burden of supporting such a huge household before Henry recovered his health, after which they might be held to account for their stewardship if they did not do it, suggests that these household reforms were rushed through because recovery may indeed have been on the way by early November. Somerset’s fortunes since his imprisonment in the autumn of 1453 suggest the same. On 18 July York had been able to stall a move in the council to have him released on bail, by asking that the opinions of the judges first be obtained, and declaring that he himself could not agree to his release because the meeting was not so well attended (there were nineteen present) as the one which committed him had been.61 The record suggests that this ‘poorly attended’ great council had in fact been summoned to try Somerset. A few days later the duke of Norfolk was ordered to be prepared to present charges against Somerset to another great council on 28 October,62 but this trial never took place.

  By the autumn of 1454 the Protector had thus crushed rebellion and was in effective control of council and royal household. He had not, however, managed to deal decisively with the problem of his chosen enemy Somerset and, most galling for the man who had persistently accused his Beaufort rival of responsibility for the loss of the overseas possessions, had also failed utterly to establish his own authority in Calais and its marches. His own appointment as captain of Calais, giving him complete charge in place of Somerset, was formally exemplified under the great seal on 17 July, but Somerset’s lieutenants there, lords Rivers and Welles, still remained in control. Maintaining the Calais garrison was one of the heaviest single items for which the English exchequer was regularly responsible, since local revenues there accounted for under one-third of its peace-time cost and less than one-fifth in wartime.63 In the 1440s the wages of the garrison were continuously in arrears and captains of Calais normally ended their periods of command severely out of pocket, but Somerset, with Henry’s support, and contrary to York’s allegations, had been unusually successful in securing appropriations and guarantees from the wool customs and lay subsidies for the current wages of a well-equipped garrison, which he had built up almost to war strength by 1453. Now no money reached Calais from England after July 1453. In February 1454 parliament refused to grant £40,000 requested for the garrison and York only succeeded in making less substantial, alternative arrangements for loans from the Company of the Staple. But early in May, before he could get his envoy Viscount Bourchier there, bearing 6,000 marks in cash, the garrison mutinied and seized all the stocks of victuals and wool in the town belonging to the Company of the Staple, in order to sell them in lieu of their unpaid wages. The Protector, torn between the outraged Merchants of the Staple, who alone could supply the cash guarantees adequate to satisfy the garrison, and mutinous soldiers, who refused to admit his emissaries, was reduced to legalizing the garrison’s sales of wool in August. But he was still ordering Somerset formally to surrender his command on 4 November. Political and financial factors thus combined to impede York’s attempt to establish his control over Calais and when Henry recovered his senses Somerset’s captains, Rivers and Welles, were still in command.

  Henry’s loss of his faculties had rescued York from a political oblivion which might otherwise have been permanent. He had been given the unexpected chance of establishing an ascendancy in the state and, with a little further time, the outstanding problems of Calais would no doubt have been resolved in his favour. But Henry was reported fully restored to health in the first week of January 1455. Although the end of his Protectorate cannot be precisely dated, the decisions the king then took quickly dissolved all York’s authority. York last signed a council document on 30 December.64 The royal sign manual reappeared on an order for the removal of the duke of Exeter from Pontefract to Wallingford castle on 3 February 1455.65 The chancellor, Richard Nevill, earl of Salisbury, who was also constable of Pontefract castle, ignored it. Somerset was legally freed from the Tower on 4 February, although he may in fact already have been released on bail on 26 January, at which point York is alleged to have resigned from his protectorate. But another month passed before the political situation was made crystal clear. At Greenwich on 4 March Henry personally presided over a council meeting and repudiated all the charges of treason against Somerset, declaring him to be his trusted servant and loyal subject. He formally took the captaincy of Calais into his own hands and then returned it to Somerset. He bound York and Somerset, under bonds of 20,000 marks each, to keep the peace until 20 June, to allow for an arbitration of several lords over what he once more insisted on regarding as the purely personal disputes between them. On 7 March Salisbury was dismissed, or resigned, as chancellor, being replaced by the archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Bourchier, a resumption of the normal high ecclesiastical tradition of the office which, until Salisbury’s appointment during Henry’s madness, had been an unbroken one since 1412. On 13 March the new chancellor, under pain of forfeiture of 10,000 marks for non-compliance, was ordered to release the duke of Exeter from Pontefract, where he was now stated to be imprisoned due to ‘sinister information made upon him by certain persons not well disposed’.66 On 15 March the earl of Worcester was replaced as treasurer by the earl of Wiltshire, who had earlier vainly contended for York’s lieutenancy of Ireland. Contemporary comment on how these changes were received is almost entirely lacking, except that Salisbury was reported to have resigned the great seal rather than agree to the release of Exeter.67 Opinions vary as to when an alliance between York and the Nevills was finally cemented, but it was this alliance which now, within two months, enabled the demoted Protector to rise in successful armed rebellion to assassinate their respective enemies and rivals, Somerset and Northumberland, and to capture the king. Most likely it was these partisan decisions which Henry took immediately after his recovery, most notably the release of the duke of Exeter, which now gave Richard duke of York a substantial party in the state. In the 1440s the activities of Henry’s household had associated the king with local factions. Now, in the uncertainties of his resumption of power, he was again associating himself with faction, this time on a national scale. He was thus uniting against himself all the opponents of those he favoured. It was this which now gave Richard duke of York the broader support and following which had been so conspicuously lacking at the time of his Dartford humiliation in 1452.

  1 The senior branch of the Nevills, Ralph’s descendants by his first marriage to Margaret, daughter of Hugh earl of Stafford: Ralph, 2nd earl of Westmorland, John, Lord Nevill etc., played little part in the politics of Henry VI’s reign.

  2 Storey, The End of the House of Lancaster, 114.

  3 Ibid., 124ff.

  4 P.R.O., E.28/83/21.

  5 P.P.C, VI, 140–2; P.R.O., E.28/83/19A.

  6 Somerset was married to Eleanor, daughter of Richard Beauchamp, earl of Warwick (d. 1439), by his first wife Elizabeth Berkeley. Warwick was married to Anne, Beauchamp’s daughter by his second wife, Isabel Despencer.

  7 Isabel Despencer was previously married to the Beauchamp earl of Worcester. Their daughter Elisabeth (d. 1448) married Edward Nevill, Lord Abergavenny, and her heir was George Nevill.

  8 C.P.R., 1445–1452, 111, 162; ibid., 1452–1461, 34–5. The grant to Somerset was backdated to the date of the death of Anne Beauchamp (1449), only child of Henry duke of Warwick (d. 1445), Isabel Despencer’s son.

  9 P.R.O., E.28/83/41 (draft and final version of letters to Warwick and his countess finalized at Westminster 27 July). The other councillors present were the chancellor and treasurer, the prior of St John, dean o
f St Severin and Thomas Thorpe.

  10 PRO., E.404/69/215.

  11 Gregory’s Chronicle, 199.

  12 P.R.O., C.81/1371/41.

  13 The nature of his illness in the light of modern medical knowledge and opinion has already been discussed in print by R. L. Storey, The End of the House of Lancaster, 136n., 252n., by John Saltmarsh, King Henry VI and the Royal Foundations (Cambridge 1972), 11–12, and by Basil Clarke, Mental Disorder in Earlier Britain (Cardiff 1975), 176–206, but evidence relevant to Henry’s condition is in effect confined to the report of one single interview with representatives of the peerage on the eve of the Annunciation, Sunday 24 March 1454, at Windsor and the report of his behaviour during recovery on 30 December 1454 at Greenwich (see below, pp. 272–3). I am greatly indebted to Dr S. Bhanji, consultant psychiatrist at the Exe Vale Hospital, Digby, Exeter, and senior lecturer in adult mental illness in the University of Exeter, for his comments on Henry’s condition. There is insufficient information for a definite diagnosis. The differential diagnosis includes depressive stupor, schizophrenic stupor and some form of organic brain disease. His apparent good recovery from the first attack, with retention of his intellectual powers, rules out the latter and is similarly against a diagnosis of catatonic schizophrenia.