Henry VI

by Bertram Wolffe

  During these five months there is no evidence that Henry did anything at all. Authority was uneasily shared between Warwick, who assumed the title of his lieutenant, and Clarence. Warwick established himself in the bishop’s palace with the king, taking the office of great chamberlain of England as well as his long-standing captaincy of Calais. Coroners, verderers, sheriffs, justices of the peace, judges, barons of the exchequer were now appointed or reappointed in Henry’s name. Summonses for a parliament were issued in his name on 15 October. This duly met on 26 November at Westminster, to hear a sermon from the chancellor on the appropriate text ‘Turn again to me O backsliding children’,43 and, after adjournment to St Paul’s, it sat until Christmas and then again in the New Year. Who attended is not known and what little is known about its proceedings comes only from the chroniclers, because the Yorkists later destroyed its records. Edward IV and his younger brother Richard duke of Gloucester were attainted and the attainders of his reign reversed. The making of a ten-year truce and a peace treaty with Louis XI was authorized.44 As seen from abroad this extraordinary regime appeared to have been instantly and well established, and Warwick, true to his compact with Louis, even began raising an army to fight with him against the duke of Burgundy in Flanders,45 where Louis had already begun hostilities. But Queen Margaret and the prince of Wales had still not sailed for England. Warwick received £2,000 and more from 18 December 1470 to proceed with an army of ships to France to fetch them.46 Late in February he went down to Dover to receive them, but still they did not come.47

  There was one man at Margaret’s court, Sir John Fortescue, formerly Lord Chief Justice of England and in exile with her since 1463, acting as tutor to Prince Edward, who tried to bend his mind squarely to the problems of the Lancastrian restoration of Henry VI. He communicated his advice, through the prince, to Warwick, in the belief that a permanent government in Henry’s name would now have to be provided for. How could a repetition of past disasters in this utterly unforeseen reversal of fortune be avoided? First Henry must reward no one, however deserving, until his resources had been surveyed and his means ascertained. Otherwise, from the start, he would again be living off his subjects and he, and whoever he took to advise him, would once again be the centre of intrigue and envy. Rewarding must be done not by Henry but by a new council of uncontroversial membership: twelve members, balanced by twelve ecclesiastics, together with a further four temporal lords and four spiritual lords, elected for a year at a time. The king should henceforth only act on advice given after mature debate in this council, not only over patronage but on all affairs of state. Thus a crucial mistake of the past, household and chamber men giving the king advice and controlling affairs, might be avoided. It was fundamentally for this reason, the alleged miscounselling of Henry, he believed, that so many people had lost their lives. The new council would be an adequately salaried body and would take no other rewards; the money for this must be found. Looking at the past it was obvious that under the old ways a single temporal lord had on occasion managed to acquire as much of the king’s livelihood as would have paid adequate wages for the whole council. Actual alienation of the king’s livelihood would now be allowable only by act of parliament. The rest of the advice was concerned mainly with the details of how the new council would manage the finances, with an especial concern that a controversial great new household should not be established immediately. Henry himself should be kept for at least a year in a sure place or places best for his health and pleasance, with a few people and only the absolute minimum number of his old household men about him.48

  All this was a sad admission, just short of spelling it out, that the fundamental problem would be the incapacity of Henry to rule, even if he could be roused from his comatose state after five years of captivity. It clearly demonstrates that a well-informed contemporary, who had participated in government during the 1440s, appreciated that the troubles of the 1450s, the first of the Wars of the Roses, had arisen from Henry’s inadequacies as king. But Fortescue could only offer a superficial, administrative solution to the fundamental, political problem of a king who had to rule but who, long before his illness, had shown himself to be inherently incapable of ruling well or even adequately. Georges Chastellain expressed the immediate political situation of 1470–1 graphically and directly: Warwick, as mayor of the palace, was ruling for ‘a stuffed wool sack lifted by its ears, a shadow on the wall, bandied about as in a game of blind-man’s buff … submissive and mute, like a crowned calf’.49

  Clarence accepted the lieutenancy of Ireland on 18 February 1471.50 His share in Warwick’s government is obscure, but he was almost certainly already suborned by his brother in exile, through the good offices of their sisters, the duchesses of Burgundy and Exeter.51 It was Louis XI’s declaration of war against the duke of Burgundy which, during the first week of January, decided Burgundy to finance Edward’s attempt to recover his kingdom.52 Edward sailed from Flushing on 11 March with some 1,200 men, a mixed force of English and Burgundian mercenaries, in Dutch and Hansa ships. The threat hanging over the so-called Lancastrian regime seems to have become apparent towards the end of March when Clarence, Pembroke and Warwick appointed themselves commissioners to raise Henry’s subjects against Edward. A similar commission was issued to the prince of Wales,53 who was still on board ship with his mother at Honfleur. They had embarked on 24 March, but contrary winds kept them in port until Easter Saturday 13 April.

  It is possible that by her six-month delay, unwilling or unable to bring herself to the point of risking everything on the final throw, Margaret herself ruined the Lancastrian cause. Had the prince and heir apparent, now seventeen, been sent over with Clarence and Warwick; had Henry, willing in 1460 to renounce his inheritance to the Yorkists, been now persuaded to abdicate in favour of his son; had all their available forces been concentrated together, then the House of Lancaster might, even at that late stage, have acquired a new, effective centre of loyalty and purpose. But Edward IV seized back the initiative. His restoration with the aid of a very few of his peers -Gloucester, Rivers, Hastings, Say and Sele – owed little to anyone’s efforts apart from his own. If his preliminary landing at Cromer had not been thwarted by the earl of Oxford, his final appearance at Ravenspur in Holderness might have been taken as a conscious imitation of Henry of Bolingbroke in 1399, especially as he kept up the pretence that he had come only to claim his duchy of York until he reached the Midlands, where William, Lord Hastings’s men flocked to his support. The Percy earl of Northumberland now amply repaid his restoration of the year before merely by ‘sitting still’.54 Warwick was surprised and bypassed in Coventry, where he was awaiting Clarence’s support. Clarence, as prearranged, brought his army, raised in Henry’s name, to his brother’s side.

  In London George Nevill, archbishop of York, paraded Henry on horseback through the streets of the capital from the bishop’s palace, in a vain attempt to inspire resistance and solidarity in the city, but he secretly sent to Edward to secure his grace and kept Henry out of sanctuary on Edward’s instructions.55 On Maundy Thursday, at dinner time, Edward entered the city in triumph, unopposed.56 There was no will or desire to resist him. He went directly to St Paul’s to offer and to secure the persons of King Henry and the archbishop from the bishop’s palace. When he came face to face with his feeble supplanter, Edward held out his hand to him, but Henry, who actually appeared glad to see him, came forward to embrace him saying ‘Cousin of York, you are very welcome. I hold my life to be in no danger in your hands.’ Edward told him not to worry about anything; he would fare well.57 We can only conclude that Henry was quite content to be Edward’s prisoner once more, perhaps looking forward to returning to his old quarters in the Tower. For the moment Edward kept him with him wherever he went, under close guard.58

  On the vigil of Easter, ‘paying more attention to urgent necessity than to absurd notions of propriety’,59 Edward set out to confront Warwick and Montagu at Chipping Barnet. Here, on Enfield Chase, to
the north of the town, in the misty first light of Easter Sunday, with the good luck that favours all successful generals, he slaughtered the Nevills in time for a triumphant re-entry into London that same afternoon. Henry, who had been taken to Barnet by Edward, was once again, and for good, put back in the Tower, together with his keeper, the treacherous archbishop.

  That day Margaret and the prince landed at Weymouth and moved north to Cerne Abbey, where on Easter Monday they had news of Barnet. Any plans to march on London were perforce abandoned. Feints were made to Shaftesbury and Salisbury, to convince the enemy that they were indeed moving east, but from Cerne they marched west, recruiting as they went, and mustered all the strength of the western counties they could gather at Exeter, under the earl of Devon and the self-styled duke of Somerset. The intention now was to proceed via the Severn valley to join with Jasper Tudor, and so on to Cheshire and to the duchy of Lancaster heart-lands. Edward, who had knowledge of their landing on Easter Tuesday, kept his nerve and patience, remustering his forces and holding the Feast of St George at Windsor. On the morning after, 24 April, he set out, furnished at last with reliable reports of their general movements. On 2 May, at Malmesbury, he heard that Bristol had received and refreshed them, but before they got to Gloucester, the town, castle and Severn crossing had been secured for Edward by his own servants under Sir Richard Beauchamp. Forced marches over the higher slopes of the Cotswolds brought Edward up with them at Tewkesbury on Saturday 4 May. His victory there, that day, was crowned by the death of Prince Edward, still on the field when struck down, but in flight towards the town according to the official Yorkist account, ‘The Arrivall’; deserted and crying in vain for succour to his brother-in-law, Clarence, according to the independent account in John Warkworth’s chronicle; deliberately assassinated by unnamed persons, along with the principal Lancastrian lords, according to the most reliable Crowland chronicler. This was truly the end of the House of Lancaster, though who can doubt that Henry, who had done so much to promote the Beauforts against York in his own days of power, would have rejoiced to see the ultimate triumph of his Tudor-Beaufort namesake when his Yorkist supplanters finally destroyed themselves by their internecine strife?

  His son’s murder at Tewkesbury undoubtedly sealed Henry’s own fate. He was done to death in the Tower a few hours before Edward IV reached London on the vigil of the Ascension, during the night or early morning of 21–22 May. The Crow land Chronicler, writing in 1486, called his unnamed slayer a tyrant and the victim a glorious martyr. The only circumstantial account, in Warkworth, written soon after July 1482, suggests that Richard duke of Gloucester was responsible for it as the principal man in the Tower at the time. A chronicle in the Cotton collection, Vitellius A xvi, written before 1496, records that it was then said that Richard of Gloucester did it but that there could be no certainty of this.60 His body was ‘chested’ and taken, heavily guarded, to lie with the face uncovered in St Paul’s, where it bled on the pavement, and then to Blackfriars for the funeral service, where it bled again. From here it was carried by barge up-river to the Benedictine abbey at Chertsey, to be buried there in the Lady Chapel and, it was hoped, forgotten. Twenty-eight yards of Holland linen were used to wrap the body and money expended on wax, spices and torches. Calais soldiers were hired to guard it, barges, masters and oarsmen to convey the cortege to Chertsey and the Dominicans, Franciscans, Carmelites, Augustinians and Friars of the Holy Cross were all paid to celebrate obsequies and masses.61 Neither the official ‘Arrivall’ account, that Henry died on Ascension day of pure displeasure and melancholy at the news of Tewkesbury, immediately after Edward IV’s departure again from London into Kent, nor the statement in a latin chronicle that he expired ‘feliciter’ on the vigil of the Ascension, can be believed.62 When his remains were exhumed in 1910 the best opinions then available confirmed the almost unanimous views of the contemporary chroniclers: the hair matted with blood on the skull showed that he had indeed died a violent death. That deed could only have been done on the orders of Edward IV himself. The Sforza ambassador in France reported as much to his master in Milan. Edward, he said, had decided to have the custody of King Henry no longer; with the prince of Wales, Warwick and all the powerful Lancastrian adherents dead he had had him secretly put to death and, rumour had it, Henry’s queen as well. He had chosen ‘to crush the seed’.63

  In fact only the Angevin Queen Margaret remained, now utterly bereft of her Lancastrian family and cause. Captured after the battle she was brought to London in a cart and took Henry’s place in the Tower.64 Later she was transferred to the more congenial wardship of her old friend, the dowager duchess of Suffolk, at Wallingford, until her cousin Louis XI pitied her and ransomed her from Edward after their treaty of Picquigny in 1475.65 She died on 20 August 1482, near Saumur in Anjou, and was buried in her father’s tomb in the cathedral of St Maurice in Angers.

  1 The Exchequer Rolls of Scotland, VII, xxxvi, xxxvii, 49, 60, 145, 211.

  2 R.P.,V, 478.

  3 Ibid., 486; ‘William Worcester’ in Stevenson, Wars, II, pt. ii, 791; Scofield, Edward IV, I, 458–9.

  4 Jacques Du Clercq, Mémoires, ed. M. Petitot (Paris 1820), 99–100.

  5 Commines, Memoires, ed. Lenglet-Du Fresnoy, II, 367–73; Jean de Waurin, Anciennes Chroniques d’Engleterre, ed. E. Dupont, III, 176–7.

  6 Basin, op. cit., II, 49–51; Commines, ed. Lenglet-Du Fresnoy, II, 373; G. Chastellain, Oeuvres, ed. Kervyn de Lettenhove (Brussels 1863–6), IV, 230–1.

  7 ‘’William Worcester’ in Stevenson, Wars, II, pt. ii, 780.

  8 Ibid., 781.

  9 Chastellain, op. cit., IV, 278–314, ‘ut ibi expectaret eventus mundi’ (’William Worcester’ in Stevenson, Wars, II, pt. ii, 781).

  10 Ramsay, Lancaster and York, II, 300–1 and references given there.

  11 MS Harley 545 f. 148, undated request for his extradition, printed by J. O. Halliwell, Letters of the Kings of England (London 1846), I, 125–6.

  12 Henry’s trading charter to Edinburgh dated there on 2 January 1464 cited in Exchequer Rolls of Scotland, VII, xxxvii; Kennedy’s despatch in Waurin-Dupont, III, 64–75.

  13 Printed in Waurin-Dupont, III, 178–81, and re-dated by Scofield, Edward IV, I, 316.

  14 Three Fifteenth-Century Chronicles, 178.

  15 Charles Ross, Edward IV, 60–1; details in Gregory’s Chronicle, 223–6; Three Fifteenth-Century Chronicles, 79, 179; ‘William Worcester’ in Stevenson, Wars, II, pt. ii, 781–2, and College of Arms MS L 9 printed by J. O. Halliwell in Warkworth’s Chronicle (Camden Soc, 1839), 36–9.

  16 Chronicles of London, ed. Kingsford, 178.

  17 Scofield, Edward IV, I, 380–1.

  18 Ibid., 381; Gregory’s Chronicle, 232; Thomas Basin, Histoire de Charles VII et Louis XI, II, 53, is the unreliable source of the story that he spent several years disguised as a monk, until betrayed by a monk.

  19 Foedera, XI, 575; C.P.R., 1461–1467, 536 (20 November 1466).

  20 R.P., V, 586; Foedera, XI, 548; P.R.O., E.404/73/1/124B. Thomas Talbot received the largest cash reward.

  21 The fullest account with notes of the various relicts of his stay still preserved in Ribblesdale houses in the eighteenth century is in Halliwell’s edition of Warkworih’s Chronicle, 5 and 40–3; Stow, Annales, 419; Three Fifteenth-Century Chronicles, 80; ‘William Worcester’ in Stevenson, Wars, II, pt. ii, 785; Waurin-Dupont, II, 284–6, although his interesting detailed account is wrongly dated.

  22 John Stone, Chronicle, ed. W. G. Searle (Cambridge Antiquarian Society, 1902), 93.

  23 Warkworth’s Chronicle, 5.

  24 Life of Henry VI, 19.

  25 P.R.O., E.404/73/1/124B; Devon, Issues, 489; Foedera, XI, 712.

  26 P.R.O., E.404/73/2/1, 74/2/37, 74/2/79; Devon, Issues, 492; P.R.O., E.404/75/15 (his expenses and debts after his death).

  27 P.R.O., E.404/73/2/26.

  28 Scofield, Edward IV, I, 383, citing Household Accounts and Issue Rolls.

  29 Warkworth’s Chronicle, 11
.

  30 Crowland Chronicle (Bohn translation), 463.

  31 Warkworth’s Chronicle, 11–12.

  32 Edward Hall, Chronicle, ed. H. Ellis, 285.

  33 R.P., V, 622–3; ‘William Worcester’ in Stevenson, Wars, II, pt. ii, 789.

  34 See above, pp. 333–4.

  35 The evidence is re-surveyed by Charles Ross, Edward IV, 114ff.

  36 Crowland Chronicle (Bohn translation), 457–8.

  37 As stated in Edward IV’s proclamations against them (Warkworth’s Chronicle, 53 notes), cf. Ross, op. cit., 133.

  38 Warkworth’s Chronicle, 46–51 (notes).

  39 For details see Ross, op. cit., 126ff.

  40 Stow, Annates, 422; London and the Kingdom, ed. Sharpe, III, 385–6.

  41 Waurin-Dupont, III, 43–4.

  42 Stow, Annates, 423; P.R.O., E.404/71/6/36 (city of London 18 December).

  43 Warkworth’s Chronicle, 12.

  44 Scofield, Edward IV, I, 563, citing Foedera, XI, 681–90.