Henry VI

by Bertram Wolffe

  From 10 July 1460, until he returned to the queen’s custody at St Albans on 17 February 1461, Henry now performed acts of state at the will of the confederate earls.44 The Tower of London was starved out by 18 July; Somerset, in Guînes, surrendered to Warwick in August. The great seal was taken by Warwick’s younger brother George, bishop of Exeter, Viscount Bourchier was made treasurer and Margaret’s chancellor, Laurence Booth, was replaced as keeper of the privy seal by Robert Stillington, archdeacon of Wells. A parliament summoned to Westminster for 7 October proceeded to repeal all the acts of the Coventry Parliament as the work of seditious and covetous persons, bent on the destruction of Henry’s great, noble and faithful lords.45 So far the aftermath of St Albans in 1455 was exactly repeated.

  Over ten weeks elapsed, after the earls’ return to England, before York made his landing from Ireland, near Chester. Was this as originally planned, or did it represent the development of differences between them? York only appeared in London on the fourth day of the parliament, probably as the Commons were choosing their Speaker. He arrived with trumpets sounding and a naked sword borne before him. His surviving correspondence shows that, at least from 13 September, he had begun to date what he wrote by the year of grace, ignoring the regnal years of Henry VI.46 He also now displayed ‘the whole arms of England without any diversity’,47 whereas hitherto he had borne only the arms of his grandfather Edmund of Langley, late duke of York, fifth son of Edward III. In short, Richard ‘Plantagenet’48 had come to claim the throne. That this was no part of his original bargain with Warwick and Salisbury was soon evident. The abbot of St Albans described the consternation and dismay among the lords in the parliament chamber when he laid his hand upon the vacant throne to occupy it.49 The Burgundian chronicler Waurin, although he undoubtedly presented the history of England since St Albans as a panegyric on Warwick, was nevertheless particularly well informed about events in England at this time. He maintained that the earls were very much aware that their oaths of loyalty to Henry had greatly aided them in their progress towards Northampton. Consequently Warwick, with the approval of Salisbury and of York’s own heir, Edward earl of March, vainly remonstrated with York against his unexpected and unpopular move.50 This must be accepted, because Pope Pius II in his Commentaries, writing a few years before Waurin, also makes the same point.51: But York’s mind, hitherto known only to himself and his own council, was at last firmly made up, declared and not to be changed. There are conflicting accounts in the chronicles of York’s behaviour towards the king after his arrival. In Gregory’s chronicle and the English chronicle there is an account of violence towards Henry and forcible possession of his apartments in the palace. In Abbot Wheathampstead’s account, however, the only violence is the breaking of the seals to the king’s apartments when York took up residence there. They were unoccupied as the king was using the queen’s apartments. This seems the more credible account and is consistent with the rest of York’s behaviour at the palace of Westminster and with the respect still shown later to Henry. York was claiming the throne as his by right of inheritance and his behaviour was that of one who believed himself already the rightful king. According to Wheathampstead he did not even visit Henry when Archbishop Bourchier suggested it because ‘I know of no person in this realm whom it does not behove to come to me and see my person rather than that I should go and visit him’.

  On 16 October York’s legal counsel formally submitted his claim in the Upper House to the kingdoms of England and France and to the lordship of Ireland, by right of inheritance superior to Henry VI, as right heir of Edward III through his third son Lionel duke of Clarence. He demanded an immediate answer to it. Next day the assembled peers resolved to avoid the issue by laying the claim, through the chancellor, before the only authority superior to themselves, the hapless Henry himself, as a matter too high for any of his subjects. He requested them to find means to oppose it and they in turn countered by asking that he himself should use his own well-known bent for studying old writings to that end. For their part they then tried to pass the responsibility of providing an answer over to the king’s judges. They, in turn, declared that they would not be drawn into a matter which was too high for them, since it properly concerned only the princes of the blood and the peerage. The king’s sergeants and his attorney, subsequently summoned to give an opinion, naturally replied that what was too high for the judges was also too high for them. No initiative came from Henry.

  Hence the lords spiritual and temporal, continually pressed by York for an answer, were finally forced, after free and secret debate among themselves, to set out all the objections they could think of to York’s claim: all their previous oaths of loyalty, the parliamentary entail of the crown in the Lancastrian succession, the arms hitherto borne by York, those of Edmund of Langley, duke of York, who was only the fifth son of Edward III, the great number of legislative acts passed in the name of three successive Lancastrian kings, the assertion of Henry’s grandfather that Edmund Crouchback of Lancaster, not Edward I, had been the elder son of King Henry III, whose rightful heir he, Henry IV, therefore was, through his mother, Blanche of Lancaster.

  According to Abbot Wheathampstead York had previously been absolved from his oaths of fealty, homage and allegiance by the pope, so could brush such objections aside. This is unlikely, since the papacy had already denied earlier reports to this end,52 and his actual answer to this objection of the lords was that oaths taken against right and truth required no absolution. They were ipso facto invalid against his Divine Right ‘by title of inheritance … as it accordeth with God’s law’. Failure to act on his claim earlier could not prejudice this right: ‘though right for a time rest and be put to silence yet it rotteth not nor shall not perish’.

  Finally, on 25 October, in answer to York’s continued importuning, the peers of the realm took it upon themselves to propose a compromise to Henry through the mouth of George Nevill, the chancellor. He first bound them all to stand by him, however the king might take it. This was that Henry should continue king until death or voluntary abdication, but disinherit his heir in favour of York and his heirs. In fact Henry took it passively. He was in an isolated position, with no queen or trusted adviser to give him the will to oppose it. Two near-contemporary explanations for his acceptance arc extant: fear of death, ‘for a man that hathc by lytyllc wytte wyllc sone be a fcryd of dcthe’,53 and intervention by the papal legate. Pope Pius II did later claim credit for Henry’s acceptance of the compromise: ‘by the wisdom of the legate [Coppini] the dispute was settled’. It is quite feasible that such papal pressure was put upon him by the legate who favoured the Yorkists and that tipped his weak mind towards acceptance. Moreover, this solution did present a way round the thorny problem of York’s oaths in the eyes of the church, since it involved his swearing allegiance yet again to Henry.54 Important details of the settlement were that York and his sons all swore oaths to Henry, who bound himself, by indenture, to keep the agreement. York, as heir apparent, was given the protection of the law of treason and the titles and endowments of the heir to the throne (the principality of Wales, earldom of Chester and duchy of Cornwall, estimated to be worth 10,000 marks per annum) were all vested in him and his heirs. The statute of 1406 entailing the succession on Henry IV’s issue was repealed.55

  In spite of the face-saving all round there was in fact no royal dignity or power left to Henry at all. He had signed it all away. Following his acceptance of the lords’ arbitration, the very next enactment on the parliament roll ordered all royal officers throughout the land to give the same obedience to the new heir to the throne as was due to the king himself, subject to the penalties of treason for noncompliance, whenever he should take it upon himself to raise troops and ride against rebels and disturbers of the peace.56 The chroniclers now styled York protector and even regent of the kingdom57 for Henry’s lifetime, by authority of parliament. The analogy with Henry V’s dominant ruling position in France over his father-in-law, the mad Charles
VI, after the treaty of Troyes in 1420, was thus very close indeed.58

  The problem of ‘rebels’ was immediate. The queen, the prince, the dukes of Exeter and Somerset, the earls of Northumberland, Pembroke, Devon and Wiltshire, Lords Clifford, Roos and other lords, were in no way party to the acts of this parliament. Early in December parliament was prorogued so that the validity of this settlement, made on the authority of only a section of the peerage, might, so to speak, be put to the test of trial by battle. From Jasper Tudor’s castle of Denbigh, whither she had fled from Coventry after Northampton, Queen Margaret had gone by sea to Dumfries in Scotland. For ten or twelve days over the New Year she and the prince were closeted with the Queen Dowager of Scotland, Mary of Guelders, and the young King James III, in Lincluden abbey, arranging a treaty for Scottish military aid against York, probably involving a marriage of the prince with one of James Ill’s sisters and the cession of Berwick to Scotland.59 Twelve English lords assembled at York on 20 January 1461 before Queen Margaret and bound themselves to do all in their power to fulfil the terms of this humiliating treaty on behalf of King Henry.60 By this date, the queen’s party had already achieved a notable success. The forces of the dukes of Somerset and Exeter, the earl of Northumberland, Lords Roos, Nevill and Clifford, had overwhelmed York, Salisbury and York’s son Edmund earl of Rutland at Wakefield Bridge, by York’s castle of Sandal, on 30 December. It was alleged that they had been taken by surprise and treachery, against the law of arms, while their forces were dispersed in foraging parties, under protection of a truce. In any case the outcome had been that York and his son were slain in the melee and Salisbury was taken alive to Pontefract castle to be ransomed on the orders of Somerset, the official commander. This was duchy of Lancaster territory and ‘the commune peple of the cuntre, whyche loued hym nat, took hym owte of the castelle by violence and smote of his hed’. Salisbury, his life spared on the battlefield, had yet died for his desertion of the Lancastrian House. York’s head was fixed over the city gate of York, wearing a paper crown. He and his son lost their lives because of the now openly declared Plantagenet pretensions to the English throne.61

  Henry had played no part in all this, after he had signed away his son’s inheritance, but he was subsequently held to be legally responsible for these ‘murders’ as a dishonourable act, in violation of his solemn indenture with York and his family, which released them from the compact and gave legal justification for the usurpation of York’s son, Edward of Rouen. Both sides in the conflict, the queen and the Yorkists, were acting in Henry’s name. Edward of Rouen, now styled duke of York, was backed by an official royal commission to levy the king’s lieges in the West Midland counties against Henry’s ‘rebels’,62 He had succeeded in checking the concentration of Lancastrian forces there by defeating the earls of Pembroke and Wiltshire on 2 February at Mortimer’s Cross near Wigmore and driving them into the depths of Wales. Among those captured and quite needlessly executed on his orders was Henry’s step-father, Owen Tudor.

  Meanwhile the queen’s forces, composed of the lords in Yorkshire who had routed York and Salisbury at Wakefield, her new, in-disciplined Scottish allies and northern shire levies marched south. Their primary purpose was to recover Henry from the earls’ captivity. Their progress south of Trent to St Albans can be plotted by the record of places plundered on the way: Grantham, Stamford, Peterborough, Huntingdon, Melbourn and Royston. The dread felt at the approach of this whirlwind from the north, and the desperate measures of protection organized, are graphically described in the chronicle of Crow-land abbey whose demesnes escaped its ravages by a mere six-mile margin.63 The bishop of Ely hastily strengthened the water defences of the isle of Ely and Wisbech castle and garrisoned them with Burgundian cross bowmen against their advance.64 The defence of the capital was in the hands of Warwick with his forces acting nominally as the army of the kingdom. He took the king with him and kept him with him, even on the battlefield. This may have been desirable to show that Warwick’s was the legal army and the queen’s the rebels, or it may have been because the king was not an entirely docile puppet at that time and Warwick did not dare to leave him in London. Warwick chose to block the queen’s army’s approach by the eastern route by constructing an extended and well-fortified encampment for his army to the north-east of St Albans, with an outpost in Dunstable to the north-west and a rear party in the centre of the town. But strategic and tactical victory in the final encounter went to Margaret’s principal captain, Andrew Trollope, that professional Calais soldier whose earlier defection with his men from Warwick to the king had begun the disintegration of the forces opposed to Henry before Ludlow in 1459. Warwick found himself outflanked. Dunstable was first taken by surprise and from there an unforeseen night march made on St Albans. Here on 17 February the queen’s forces penetrated into the town, when Warwick’s scouts were reporting them as still nine miles away. Finally, an uphill attack from the town on Warwick’s left flank made it break under pressure while he was trying to withdraw and reorientate his whole encampment. The author of the most detailed account of the battle65 was scornful of Warwick’s Burgundian hand-gunners, mounted pikemen, elaborate cannon and defensive devices which did not work. These may well have hampered them in the vital hand-to-hand encounter which first broke Warwick’s left flank and then led to the collapse of his centre and right. Abbot Wheathamp-stead’s explanation was that, compared with the hardy northern men, too much sun had weakened the southerners’ blood and softened their resolution for confrontation with cold steel and lead hammers. Treachery was inevitably another contemporary explanation: the Kentish men in this vital position were commanded by one Lovelace, a leader whose life had been spared at Wakefield on condition that he should never again appear in arms. He chose to save his own skin at the vital position and moment of the encounter. Whatever the details of the final encounter, Andrew Trollope had won a resounding victory for his new employer, Queen Margaret. Nevertheless, she was unable to draw much advantage from it.

  Trollope’s former master, Warwick, successfully extricated himself in the confusion of withdrawal and escaped to meet with the still victorious earl of March in the Cotswolds, on his way towards London. Henry himself was left in the hands of his rescuers. He was subsequently accused of having acted dishonourably by his sudden desertion of Warwick and his supporters, or simply by his refusal to move with them on the battlefield. Instances of his proverbial ineffectiveness are immediately recorded. Bonville and Sir Thomas Kyriell, who had faithfully defended him and did not flee because they were promised their safety, were nevertheless summarily executed by command of Queen Margaret, who made the seven-year-old prince give the orders. When Henry took up his normal quarters in the abbey, the abbot requested him to issue a proclamation against plundering. This was done, but with no effect. Even the abbey suffered so badly that the abbot advised his brethren to disperse and himself retired to Wheathampstead.

  Possession of Henry’s person brought immediate military and political paralysis to the queen’s hitherto successful forces. Presumably his presence inhibited action without his approval and his indecisiveness now infected the direction of affairs. Havering and uncertainty now followed decisive military success. Victory had been achieved under Trollope’s command, in spite of the plundering hordes of worthless Scottish and northern levies, by the disciplined household and feed men of the queen’s and the Lancastrian lords’ retinues: footsoldiers, archers, clubmen and swordsmen, all marked by their own lords’ badges and the badge of the prince. But no advantage was now taken of the open road to London, even though counsels there were known to be divided between submission and resistance. In similar circumstances threat of assault and bombardment by the confederate earls from Calais in the previous year had proved sufficient to gain them possession of the political, administrative and financial centre of the kingdom. Now, as ‘William Worcester’ put it: ‘hoc fuit destructio regis Henrici et regine sue’, for if they had gone on to London all would have been at th
eir disposal. Advance seems to have halted at Barnet, where deputations for mercy were received from the city and their promised supplies of money and provision awaited. But a final agreement for the preliminary admission of divers lords with 400 men into the city, made when the northern levies on horseback were already plundering at Westminster and in the suburbs, was not fulfilled. Perhaps at bottom the queen was satisfied once more to have secured the king’s person and content to repeat, yet again, the earlier, established pattern of Lancastrian withdrawal with the king from the south in time of crisis. In any case the earls of March and Warwick now forestalled any Lancastrian moves for possession of the capital. After experience of the earls’ previous decisive action and their consequent collaboration with them in the previous summer, the city authorities were already predisposed, and financially committed, to their cause.