Henry VI

by Bertram Wolffe

  In theory Margaret and her allies had achieved as much in the capture of Henry at St Albans as the confederate earls had done in similar circumstances at Northampton. But the political circumstances of 17 February 1461 were no longer those of 10 July 1460. An alternative course of self-preservation and political mastery was available, much more likely to be a permanent solution than any attempt to recapture Henry’s person. York’s claim to the throne had been fatal to himself, but not to his heir. There was now a legally respectable case for Edward of Rouen to claim the throne de jure, in contrast to Henry’s now admitted de facto, prescriptive title. This was a welcome salve for any uneasy consciences in that Henry could be deemed to have broken his oaths to the Plantagenets through Wakefield and St Albans, thus absolving them from their allegiance. These were to be the arguments enacted in the parliamentary legislation of 1461 tojustify the ensuing Yorkist usurpation and must have fortified its perpetrators and justified their novel actions in their predicament after 17 February 1461. The exact date of Margaret’s withdrawal to the north, at the end of her desultory negotiations for admission to London, is not known66 so cannot be directly related to the peaceful entry of the future Edward IV there on Thursday 26 February.67 Intentions to make Edward of Rouen king were tested out at an assembly of Yorkist supporters, reinforced by the London populace and numbering some three to four thousand persons, in St John’s Fields on the Sunday afternoon. George Nevill, bishop of Exeter, was their orator and the acclaim of the assembly was secured. Next day Edward’s title was proclaimed. The recorded personnel of a council meeting which approved it at the Yorkist town seat of Baynard’s Castle on Tuesday 3 March reveals who were the authors of the move. They were the duke of Norfolk, the earl of Warwick, the archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Bourchier, the Beauchamp bishop of Salisbury, the chancellor, George Nevill, bishop of Exeter, Lord Fitzwalter, Sir William Herbert, soon to be Lord Herbert and later earl of Pembroke, and Sir Walter Devereux, soon to be Lord Ferrers of Chartley. In spite of the unspecified addition et multis aliis to these names, their numbers were obviously small. Their action nevertheless turned out to be decisive. Edward was inside the capital with a disciplined, effective, armed force, and sufficient goodwill and popular support had been raised for their purpose. He was able to appear at St Paul’s on the Wednesday morning and process to Westminster, where the populace could see him enter into his ‘right’. Received in chancery by the Yorkist lords, he donned royal robes and a cap of estate and publicly took some form of oath before them. Then, ceremonially seating himself on the marble chair or King’s Bench, in that part of Westminster hall occupied by the Law Courts, he was acclaimed by those present. Next he proceeded over the road to the Abbey to take formal possession of the vital coronation regalia, which the monks had in their charge, including the most important item of all, St Edward’s sceptre. With this in his hand he was then enthroned in the coronation chair, while a Te Deum was sung and those peers present did him homage.

  Such was the cleverly stage-managed process, in imitation of the early stages of a coronation, by which a handful of Yorkist lords inaugurated their new king. Had Margaret advanced on London the opportunity for this charade would have been denied them. Her forces had won the battle of St Albans, but her victory had proved of no advantage to her. On the contrary, in the changed circumstances following the compact of October 1460 between Henry and the Yorkists, Henry was no longer the undoubted king and thus automatically able to establish the right of the side holding him. There was, however, still an undefeated Lancastrian army in the field and the new king would have to survive a successful trial by battle against them before he could proceed to his actual coronation. Some ten days were sufficient to muster a field force in pursuit of the Lancastrians, who elected to make no stand south of Trent. The city fathers, who had previously committed their money, if not their hearts, to the confederate earls in July 1460 now once again opened their purses in the Yorkist cause. By 7 April they had loaned Edward £12,000.68 The various sections of Edward’s army, his own, Norfolk’s, Warwick’s and Fauconberg’s, finally came together for joint action at Pontefract. In the ensuing battle at Towton, some twelve miles south-west of York, three-quarters of the surviving peerage of England were engaged, most of them on the Lancastrian side. Historians now think there were possibly even 50,000 combatants in all.69 The scale of the slaughter was in any case unprecedented. Edward IV required the permanent elimination not only of his principal opponents, but of the substance of the Lancastrian cause. This was to a large degree achieved at Towton on Palm Sunday 29 March, where the Yorkist footsoldiers, aided by a driving snowstorm which blinded their opponents, finally won the day. The earl of Northumberland and Lords Clifford, Nevill, Welles, Mauley and Dacre, Andrew Trollope and Sir Henry Stafford, headed some 9,000 Lancastrian slain,70 the earls of Devon and Wiltshire were taken at York and Newcastle and beheaded. Henry, Margaret and the prince, who awaited the result in York, fled the kingdom into Scotland, where Exeter and Somerset, Lords Roos and Moleyns, Chief Justice Fortescue and other faithful, subsequently joined their exile. On their way, on 25 April, to fulfil Margaret’s compact and to crown Henry’s shame, Berwick was handed over to the Scots.71

  The Yorkist lords had rescued the kingdom from the consequences of Henry VI’s ‘inanity’,72 I that most apt description of his predominant mental state, at least since 1455, if not of all his policies since his assumption of power in 1437. This alone had rendered the event of Edward IV’s usurpation possible and desirable. The shortcomings and offences of Henry VI now at last had pride of place in all the pronouncements of the Yorkist lords, although their immediate aim had been self-preservation. The intermittent fighting commonly called the Wars of the Roses had originated from the gross misgovernment and mismanagement of the nation’s affairs at home and abroad by Henry VI, in which the aristocratic enmities and struggles for power were generated and fostered. These had been quite absent in the reign of his predecessor Henry V. They appeared long before Henry VI went mad. He was both an incompetent and a partisan king. He generated faction. It says much for the conservatism and restraint of the fifteenth-century English aristocracy that it took ten years from 1450 before any of them ventured to propose the removal of the king himself. Kingship was the most fundamental bond of society in fifteenth-century England and ten years of sterile armed confrontations and battles were endured before the vital issue was finally faced up to. It was impossible to end any incompetent government because the king was the government. In 1461 Henry VI was at last deposed, primarily because of his own failings and not for the claims, ambitions or rights of his supplanter.

  1 Beaucourt, op. cit., VI, 52, 55, 137, citing MS fr. 18441 (depositions in the trial of the duke of Alençon).

  2 P.R.O., C.81/1469/26; Stevenson, Wars, I, 358–77.

  3 Deposition of Jean Doncareau, Brézé’s secretary, and his envoy to Henry’s court, B.N. MS fr. 15537, printed by P. Bernus, ‘Le rôle politique de Pierre de Brézé, 1451–1461’. Bibliotheque de I’Ecole des Charles LXIX (1908), 303–47.

  4 Ramsay, Lancaster and York, II, 210–11; Storey, op. cit., 185, although as Storey notes, nothing was said in York’s parliamentary attainder about his having established private relations with foreign powers.

  5 R.P., V, 349; C.P.R.,,433–1461, 585-

  6 Mémoires de Philippe de Commines, ed. D. Godefroy and Lenglet de Fresnoy (Paris 1747), II, 310–11; Beaucourt, op. cit., VI, 144–5.

  7 Loc. cit.

  8 Basin, op. cit., IV, 358–60.

  9 Stevenson, Wars, I, 367–9.

  l0 C.C.R., 1454–1461, 318, 350. What he called a parliament, really the law courts in session in Westminster Hall, had just been interrupted by the duke of Exeter, which dates his visit to early 1459.

  11 Six Town Chronicles, 113; The Brut, 526; Davies’s Chronicle, 78; Kingsford’s London Chronicle, 169, cf. Registrum Johannis Whethamstede, I, 340.

  12 P.R.O., E.404/71/3/43.

  13 Registrum, I,
336–7.

  14 Coventry Leet Book, I, 301; Letters of Queen Margaret of Anjou, ed. C. Munro (Camden Society, 1863), 100–1, 131, 137, 141.

  15 Ibid., 98–9, 119, 128, 132, 142, 147, 160, 164; A. R. Myers, English Historical Documents, IV, 280–1.

  16 Davies’s Chronicle, 88.

  17 The Brut, 526, 527.

  18 Davies’s Chronicle, 79–80,92: ‘fals heryres fostred as knowethe experyence’; Benet’s Chronicle, 216.

  19 Davies’s Chronicle, 79–80; Benel’s Chronicle, 224; Gregory’s Chronicle, 204.

  20 Ibid., 209.

  21 Registrum, I, 337–8.

  22 P.R.O., E.28/88/49.

  23 Paston Letters, I, 438.

  24 Benel’s Chronicle, 223.

  25 R.P., V, 348.

  26 From Nottingham he summoned his household chamberlain Thomas Lord Stanley to his presence in vain (R.P., V, 369). Stanley, whose brother William was with Salisbury, sympathized with Salisbury and wished him well.

  27 Davies’s Chronicle, 80–3.

  28 Including Lord Grey of Powys, Walter Devereux Esq., Sir Henry Radford (R.P., V, 349); Walter Hopton, Roger Kynnarston, Fulk Stafford, William Hastings, William Bowes [ibid., 368).

  29 A. J. Otway-Ruthven, A History of Medieval Ireland, 386–8.

  30 Ramsay, Lancaster and York, II, 221–2, for references.

  31 Printed in Davies’s English Chronicle, 86–94.

  32 R.P., V. 367 (petition of the old sheriffs for pardon for illegally holding the elections as instructed by the writs).

  33 Ibid., V, 349, 15 others: John, Lord Clinton, William Oldhall, Thomas Vaughan, Thomas and John Nevill, John Wenlock, James Pykering, John Conyers, Thomas Parre, John and Edward Bourchier, Thomas Colt, John Clay, Roger Eyton and Robert Bold.

  34 Ibid., 366.

  35 C.P.R., 1452–1461, 526–614 passim; Foedera, XL, 446–8.

  36 The ‘Somnium Vigilantis’, ed. J. P. Gilson, E.H.R., XXVI (1911), 512–25.

  37 Paston Letters, I, 535–6.

  38 A Short English Chronicle, ed. Gairdner, 74; Bale’s Chronicle, 152.

  39 Ibid., 150 and editor’s note.

  40 Ramsay, Lancaster and York, 227–9 and reference given there.

  41 Davies’s English Chronicle, 97.

  42 Gregory’s Chronicle, 207.

  43 Registrum, 1,374; Davies’s English Chronicle, 97; ‘William Worcester’ in Stevenson’s Wars, II, pt. ii, 773, cf. Gregory’s Chronicle, 207 who mentions treachery but is unspecific.

  44 ‘Kept them in his majesty royal at pleasure of the lords’ (Bale’s Chronicle, 151).

  45 R.P., V, 374.

  46 K. B. McFarlane, ‘The Wars of the Roses’, Proceedings of the British Academy, L (1965), 93, n. 2.

  47 Gregory’s Chronicle, 208.

  48 This was the ancient sobriquet of Geoffrey count of Anjou, father of Henry II, which it is assumed York took to mark his royal descent as superior to the Lancastrian line, although kings of England had never used it. He may have originally adopted it about 1448 in protest at Henry’s renunciation of Anjou and Maine (see above, p. 35, n. 26). It must have been particularly offensive to Margaret of Anjou.

  49 Registrant, 376–80.

  50 Chroniques, ed. W. & E. L. C. P. Hardy (R.S. 1891), V, 312–18.

  51 Constance Head, ‘Pius II and the Wars of the Roses’, Archivum Historic Pontificiae, VIII (1970), 160.

  52 Papal Letters 1447–1455 (H.M.S.O., 1915), 152–3.

  53 Gregory’s Chronicle, 208.

  54 Constance Head, op. cit., 161, citing Pius ITs Commentaries, 111, 271.

  55 R.P., V, 375–82.

  56 Ibid., 382–3.

  57 The Brut, 530; Davies’s Chronicle, 106; ‘William Worcester’ in Stevenson, Wars, II, pt. ii, 774; Chronicle of London, ed. Kingsford, 172.

  58 S. B. Chrimes, Lancastrians, Yorkists and Henry VII (London 1964), 74.

  59 Treaty of Lincluden, 5 January 1461: The Auchinlech Chronicle and Short Chronicle of the Reign of James the Second King of Scots, ed. Thomas Thomson (Edinburgh 1819), 21; Exchequer Rolls of Scotland, ed. G. Burnett (H.M.S.O., 1884), VII, 8, 39, 157.

  60 Exeter, Somerset, William Percy, bishop of Carlisle, Northumberland, Westmorland, Devon, John Hales, bishop of Coventry, John Lord Nevill, Henry Lord FitzHugh, Thomas Lord Roos, Thomas Seymour and Ralph Lord Dacre of Gillesland: T. Basin, Histoire des règnes de Charles VII et de Louis XI, IV, 357–8, where the editor, J. Quicherat, prints the copy of their undertaking, sent to Charles VII of France.

  61 Bale’s Chronicle, 152; Three Fifteenth-Century Chronicles, 154, 171–2; Davies’s Chronicle, 106–7, from which the quotation is taken; ‘William Worcester’ in Stevenson, Wars, II, pt. ii, 775; Registrum Johannis Whetehamstede, I, 381–3; John Benet’s Chronicle, 228, all tell substantially the same story. The alternative explanation that the outcome was due to York’s military rashness comes from the First Crowland Continuation (Bohn translation), 421. The countess of Salisbury, who later named nine obscure men as her husband’s murderers, claimed that Percy retainers under Sir Ralph Percy were accessories: Storey, The End of the House of Lancaster, 194, citing K.B.27/804, m.67.

  62 C.P.R., 1452–1461, 659 (commission under the great seal by authority of the council enrolled 12 February 1461).

  63 Crowland Chronicle (Bohn translation), 421–3.

  64 Three Fifteenth-Century Chronicles, 76, 155, 172.

  65 Gregory’s Chronicle, 211–15. See also ‘William Worcester’ in Stevenson, Wars, II, pt. ii, 776–7; Regislrum Johannis Whetehamstede, I, 388–401; Davies’s Chronicle, 107–8; Chronicle of London (ed. Kingsford), 173; Three Fifteenth-Century Chronicles, 76, 155, 172.

  66 For details of the panic measures in London taken by great and small in fear of Margaret’s advance see Cora L. Scofield, The Life and Reign of Edward IV, I, 147–8.

  67 The preferred date in a welter of conflicting dates: see C. A. J. Armstrong, ‘The Inauguration ceremonies of the Yorkist Kings’, T.R.H.S., 4th ser, XXX (1948), for this and what follows.

  68 P.R.O., Exchequer of Receipt, Receipt Rolls, E.401/877; Warrants for Issues, E.404/72/1, m.22.

  69 J. R. Lander, The Wars of the Roses (London 1965), 21; Charles Ross, Edward IV (London 1974), 36–7; but see Ramsay, Lancaster and York, II, 278, where he suggests that from measurements of the most likely site of the battle only 5,000 combatants could be accommodated in the Lancastrian lines.

  70 ‘William Worcester’ in Stevenson, Wars, II, pt. ii, 778.

  71 R.P., V, 478.

  72 K. B. McFarlane, Proceedings of the British Academy, L (1965), 97.

  Chapter 17

  THE LAST TEN YEARS

  When Henry crossed the border to Scotland in April 1461, ten years of exile, concealment in his own realm, captivity and a final, brief, nominal restoration to the throne, in which he personally played no part, still lay ahead before his murder in the Tower on the night of 21–22 May 1471. Previously deposed kings of England, whose mere survival was dangerous to their supplanters, had not survived their depositions by as many months. By her treaty of Lincluden and her final stand near enough to the border to make flight to safety possible, Queen Margaret had secured for him several years of freedom to rally the still powerful Lancastrian cause. His grandfather had won the kingdom from exile; Henry’s successor was to recover it from exile. Starting out from exile, with initial resources no greater than Henry’s were at this time, his nephew, Henry Tudor, was likewise to secure a kingdom for himself in 1485. But no such efforts came from Henry during his four years of freedom in Scotland and northern England. From 1465 he was in the hands of his supplanters, safe only because the Lancastrian heir was still at large. Prince Edward’s death at Tewkesbury sealed his father’s fate. Henry was done to death immediately his survival ceased to be of use to his enemies.

  On his arrival in Scotland, Henry was housed first in Linlithgow palace by command of the Queen Mother, Mary of Guelders, and later with the Dominican friars in Edinburgh.1 The young prin
ce was made welcome by the Queen Mother at Falkland. Action in the cause which was nominally Henry’s was inevitably desultory and fragmented for lack of overall, effective leadership and direction. Henry was accused in a parliamentary attainder of rearing war at Ryton and Brancepeth on 26 June 1461,2 but whether these were Scottish incursions into England, or risings of the Westmorland Nevills, there is no evidence that Henry himself was actually back in his own kingdom there at that time. The earl of Oxford, his eldest son Aubrey, Henry’s former keeper of the wardrobe, Sir Thomas Tuddenham, and others were brought to the block for communication with Queen Margaret and planning a landing in Essex in February 1462. In Wales Harlech castle held out until 1468, but attempts were not made to relieve it until that year, when Jasper Tudor, earl of Pembroke, in three ships with fifty men, provided by Louis XI, set out from Honfleur. Although the place was too tightly invested by Lord Herbert’s men to be relieved, the carl was still able to march inland, with his tiny force swelled by local support, and to take Denbigh before he was routed.3 In Northumberland the three adjacent castles of Alnwick, Dunstan-borough and Bamborough were not finally subdued by the Yorkists until June 1464.

  The strong fortresses of Northumberland, with their ready access by sea, were the obvious springboard for recovery of the kingdom. But something more than Scottish help was deemed necessary and in July 1461 Queen Margaret sent Somerset and Moleyns to the dying Charles VII to appeal for French aid. They returned with only empty promises from the new king, the wily Louis XI,4 so the only indefatigable champion of the Lancastrian cause, Margaret herself, landed in Brittany on Good Friday 1462, bent on success in the same mission. She was armed with valuable plenary powers from Henry to mortgage Calais in return for effective assistance. At Touraine, on these terms, she won over her cousin to give limited but practical support against Edward, ‘late earl of March’.5 Her old advocate, Pierre de Brézé, ex-seneschal of Normandy and Poitou, was given command, with 43 ships and 800 soldiers, whose wages he had to pay himself. With this force Margaret returned to Scotland, picked up Henry, Somerset and a few Scottish reinforcements and landed near Bamborough on 25 October. Alnwick, which had meantime been taken by the Yorkists, was recaptured, and all three garrisons then reinforced. But nothing more could be attempted. Setting out with Henry and de Brézé and some half of the original French force to return to Scotland, Margaret’s fleet was wrecked in a storm. The French soldiers were captured on Holy Island and Margaret, Henry and de Brézé reached comparative safety in Berwick with little more than their lives.6 In January 1463 an attempt by land to relieve the besieged castle of Alnwick, led by the earl of Angus and de Brézé, achieved nothing.7 French help, for the price of Calais, had proved no more effective in restoring Henry to his throne than Scottish help for the price of Berwick.