Henry VI

by Bertram Wolffe

  45 Coventry Leet Book, 362 (22 February); A. R. Myers, ‘The Outbreak of War between England and Burgundy in February 1471’, B.I.H.R., XXXIII (i960), 114–15.

  46 P.R.O., E.404/71/6/35.

  47 Chronicle of London, ed. Kingsford, 183.

  48 Identified and printed by Charles Plummer, Fortescue on the Governance of England, 348–53.

  49 Chastellain, op. cit., V, 490, quoted by Ramsay, Lancaster and York, II, 363.

  50 Foedera, XI, 693, backdated to 29 September.

  51 Crowland Chronicle (Bohn translation), 464.

  52 Foedera, XI, 705–7 (25, 27 March).

  53 Ramsay, Lancaster and York, II, 363, citing Comines-Lenglet, I, 162, II, 197; Waurin-Dupont, III, 55; T. Basin, op. cit., II, 252.

  54 The Arrival of Edward IV, ed. J. Bruce (Camden Soc., 1838), 6. This official account of his restoration, sent out after the event, gives the basic facts. A French version is printed in Waurin-Dupont, III, 96–145.

  55 Warkworih’s Chronicle, 26.

  56 Chronicles of London, ed. Kingsford, 184; Warworth’s Chronicle, 15.

  57 As reported to Margaret of York, duchess of Burgundy, by an Englishman who left London on Easter Monday 1471; Waurin-Dupont, III, 210–14.

  58 Ibid., III, 124.

  59 Crowland Chronicle (Bohn translation), 464.

  60 Chronicles of London, ed. Kingsford, 185; English Historical Literature, 101.

  61 Devon, Issues, 495–6.

  62 Three Fifteenth-Century Chronicles, 184.

  63 Calendar of State Papers Milan, I, 157, dispatch in cypher dated at la Fére, 17 June 1471.

  64 Chronicles of London, ed. Kingsford, 184; P.R.O., E.404/75/15 (2 June 1471), payments for the ‘debts’ of Henry and the current expenses of Margaret.

  65 B.L. MS Cotton, Vespatian, F. iii, f 65, agreement between Louis XI and Edward IV for the delivery of Margaret of Anjou, 2 October 1475. J. J. Bagley, Margaret of Anjou (London 1948), 233ff., gives the details.

  Part VI

  APOTHEOSIS

  APOTHEOSIS

  The ‘variable and divers fortune of king Henry the Sixt’1 is not yet entirely told, for well within ten years of his death the ‘sillie weake King’2 had become the popular saint, embarked on by a burgeoning career of miracle working which, for the next fifty years, at least equalled, if it did not exceed, that of St Thomas of Canterbury. Long years of passive endurance and the violence done to the Lord’s anointed at the end provided fertile ground for an image of innocent martyrdom. Although no Chaucer appeared to immortalize him, forbidden pilgrimages of gratitude for his ghostly interventions to the hitherto unremarked but easily accessible Thames-side abbey of Chertsey presaged a more than nationwide devotion.3 Two further usurpations, within three years of his supplanter’s death, each gave boosts to the popular cult and the ensuing official campaign for the canonization of the now saintly royal martyr should have been crowned with success, in due course, within a few years of what proved to be its final mention, in 1528.4 But in the event Henry’s heavenly kingdom, like his earthly inheritance, slipped through his fingers.

  The earliest surviving evidence of the cult comes from York minster where his former secretary Dean Richard Andrew had erected a screen bearing images of all past kings of the realm, from the Conqueror to Henry. His statue on this screen was already being venerated there in 1473.5 Archbishop Booth condemned this veneration as contempt of the church and disparagement of King Edward in 1479.6 Edward himself enlisted the aid of the London livery companies to stop the ‘great usage … in going of Pilgrimage to King Henry’ in the following year.7 There is some evidence that the abbot of Chertsey himself, in the face of royal displeasure, quite understandably did his official best to discourage the pilgrims.8

  By contrast Richard III took a different line. On 12 August 1484, no doubt from the same motives as had prompted Henry V to move the body of Richard II, whom his father had deposed and murdered, from Langley to Westminster, and to rescind the prohibitions of offerings at the shrine of Archbishop Scrope whom his father had executed, King Richard III gave Henry of Windsor’s corpse an honourable ‘translation’ back to his birthplace. Here he was buried opposite his supplanter, in the second bay of the south choir aisle of St George’s Chapel (the first perhaps being reserved for Richard himself). The charge made by Henry VII, in his supplication for papal approval of a further remove to Westminster abbey, that the Windsor burial carried out by Richard III was intended to be more obscure and inaccessible even than Chertsey, can hardly be sustained. An exhumation carried out at Windsor on 4 November 19109 revealed that in 1484 the remains of the earth burial at Chertsey had been reverently enclosed within a wooden casket, inside a small chest of sheet lead and then re-interred inside a full-sized, wooden, iron-bound coffin. This discovery thus confirmed, in part, John Rous’s contemporary description of the event; not that the body was found in great part uncorrupted, but that the corpse was honourably treated and reburied with great solemnity to the south of the high altar at Windsor.10 Nearby stood the chapel of Master John Shorn, another late-fifteenth-century cure worker, now the Lincoln chapel, as well as the canons of Windsor’s greatest treasure, a piece of the True Cross. This point in the ambulatory was the culmination of pilgrimages which Henry’s ‘translation’ now enormously enhanced. All that remains today of the contemporary scene is the elaborate wrought-iron money box with its four separate locks and Henry’s initial, probably made in 1484 by John Tresilian, the king’s smith, to receive the offerings of pilgrims at the tomb.

  Henry was a popular, invocatory saint to whom, usually joined with the Virgin, the faithful made their supplications, bending a coin or measuring the length of the body of the beneficiary and vowing a wax candle of equivalent length to be offered at the tomb on the subsequent pilgrimage in thanksgiving for the favour received. Further votive offerings, as portrayed in a woodcut of about 1490 which shows the royal saint in gigantic proportions, surrounded by his kneeling suppliants, were also left at the tomb; wax models symbolic of the cure or rescue, such as parts of the body, a whole naked boy, a horse or a ship, or real objects discarded, such as crutches, chains or garments.11 Prayers, promptly answered at the site of the calamity, were the essence of his miracles. Subsequent cures at the tomb itself, or following the pilgrimage, were rare.

  That the widespread devotion to Holy King Henry extended even beyond his kingdom of England is testified by the distribution of leaden pilgrim tokens purchased at the Windsor shrine.12 Among his miracles appears the case of the infant Miles Freebridge, of Aldermanbury, London, who choked on a round silver token bearing the image of St Thomas of Canterbury, of the type which had been sold at Canterbury for the previous three centuries. Prayers to Henry, not Thomas, dislodged it from his gullet and revived him. The canons of Windsor were now producing their own Holy King Henry badges. Five distinct known types have been dug up: two depicting the king standing crowned in robes of state with orb and sceptre, either embossed on a round medallion or on a lozenge-shaped badge, one a standing cut-out of the king with his antelope, one of the king peering over a towered rampart and another of the king in a ship, a design based on the gold noble. Also within England, apart from his effigies in York, Durham and Ripon minsters, he came to be represented on screens or in stained glass in numerous parish churches. Prayers and hymns addressed to him abound in late-fifteenth and early-sixteenth-century manuscripts and printed Books of Hours.13

  As Eton boys wrote in their grammatical exercises, ‘King Henry doth many divers miracles. Divus Henricus non una miraculorum specie inclarescit.’14 He was indeed no narrow specialist. His collected miracles have the appearance and range of a fifteenth-century coroner’s roll as regards his exploits for his fellow men, except that the victims recovered: rescues from death by drowning, from crushings to death under cartwheels, from hangings, woundings, fatal falls, lightning strikes, fires and assaults. Ruptures cured included one caused by a kick in a football match, an execrable, worthless and
dangerous game, in the Tudor compiler’s opinion. Madness, blindness, deafness, sweating sickness, plague, epilepsy, lameness, battle wounds, even heresies, were all cured or healed; shipwrecks were averted, childbirth made easy and deformed infants made normal by his intervention. But he was not above curing horses, cows or pigs and would find lost animals, or even a mislaid purse. He was pre-eminent in all he touched, for not only did he outshine St Thomas, but he stole the thunder of his successors. Prayers and vows alone to Henry were sufficient to cure scrofula, the king’s evil, and the wise parents of a nine-year-old sufferer were recorded (after 1485, notably) as having rejected the ministrations of the live Richard III in favour of the more immediately accessible and effective offices of the dead Henry.

  The canons of Windsor duly recorded the original, vernacular testimonies of the recipients of Henry’s bounty themselves, and of their witnesses and supporters, who on occasion numbered as many as forty at a time, accompanying them on their pilgrimage. All that now survives is a latin edition of 172 miracles,15 some given in detail, some only in epitome, but culled from what must have been at least 445 cases in the original vernacular accounts, as taken down at Windsor between 1484 and 1500. This latin edition seems to have been compiled for use by papal commissioners, since 77 of the case histories were subsequently marked as investigated and 23 of these declared proved to the satisfaction of investigators. Peak years of pilgrimage before 1500 were 1484, 1485 and 1486, with a resurgence in 1490 and 1491 and again in 1499, but there is evidence that devotion to ‘Holy King Henry’ continued long after. Henry VIII is recorded offering at his altar on 10 June 1529.16 In 1543 a Windsor choirman, Robert Testwood, could not refrain from admonishing idolatrous Devon and Cornishmen, with their candles and wax images, who were offering to Good King Henry of Windsor, as they called him, vainly spending their goods on such a long journey simply to revere his relics, to kiss a spur, and to have an old hat put on their heads.17

  Henry VII promoted his uncle’s canonization with three successive popes, Innocent VIII, at some date before 1492, Alexander VI, who appointed the archbishop of Canterbury and the bishop of Durham to inquire into Henry’s life and miracles, before and after death, on 4 October 1494, and Julius II, who appointed a further commission, consisting of the archbishop of Canterbury and the bishops of Winchester, Durham and London, on 20 May 1504. In response to a request from this latter commission Julius gave them extra powers to appoint deputies, to travel about to take the testimonies of aged and infirm witnesses, on 3 May 1507.18 But the matter was still sub judice in 1528 when a report from the archbishop of Canterbury and the bishop of Winchester, presumably under yet another commission of inquiry, was still awaited in Rome.19 The break with Rome put an end to it.

  The temptation is strong to see here a series of inquiries languishing over half a century and failing because of the weakness of the case. Francis Bacon, while partly blaming the length and inconclusiveness of the process on Henry VII’s reluctance to pay for it, also says shortly, but without foundation, that the pope had to make a distinction between saints and fools if the honour was not to be cheapened.20 Archbishop Morton’s Register in fact provides contemporary evidence that there was no undue delay in Rome or elsewhere. The normal rate of progress towards canonization, allowing for unavoidable delays caused by deaths of popes and ecclesiastical commissioners, was certainly followed in this case. Current papal directives, entered in the Register about 1494 for the guidance of those involved in a process of canonization, stressed that the pope had to be petitioned not once but many times, and always in the most compelling terms; that he would never act precipitately; that the reputation of sanctity had to grow and grow until the pope felt compelled to issue a commission of local inquiry into the authenticity and extent of the belief. This, duly considered, and accepted at Rome, was followed by a further local commission to ascertain the facts of the candidate’s life and miracles. All this had to precede further final, exhaustive inquiries at Rome into all the evidence submitted.21 If, as seems to have been the case, the only support for a saintly life which could then be produced was the jejune Blacman collection which attempted to describe an uninvolved, holy innocent, with its blatant manufacture of one solitary, incongruous, lifetime miracle (Henry, with his army in the field, feeding his whole host with a superfluity of bread from a small quantity of wheat, while his enemies went hungry), then this at least must certainly have presented serious difficulties to honest contemporary ecclesiastical opinion. Morton’s instructions specified both a glorious life, with miracles performed while still on earth, as well as posthumous miracles. Neither the one nor the other was sufficient alone. Arguments that Henry was ‘A Very Small King’ and that a saint should achieve his sanctity in harmony, and not at variance, with his secular vocation, are valid ones.22 They must have carried weight then as now.

  The posthumous miracles also, while in a different category from the Blacman tract, are still at the mercy of the sceptic. A natural explanation can be offered for them all: the patient would have recovered anyway; the illness or injury looked much worse than it was; death was wrongly presumed; the therapeutic value simply of prayer alone, and of being prayed for, could be very high.23 There is no record of the comparable occasions on which Henry’s intervention must have been sought without success. But the fact remains that the great army of the faithful populace involved in these posthumous manifestations of Henry’s sanctity believed that what they experienced, saw, heard and reported was true. Maintained over a sufficiently long period, and duly recorded by the legal processes of the church, this would in due course have been deemed sufficient, and may even yet be so. Thus divine judgement would be declared decisive over human reason.24 But in a canonized Henry VI there could be no exemplar of kingship.25 Decisions he took, and the courses of action he initiated and approved, on earth, had produced less good than evil.

  From 1496, when Edward IV’s new chapel of St George at Windsor was ready to become the chapel of the Order of the Garter, Henry VII was free to pursue plans for the eventual, official translation of his sainted uncle’s relics. He pulled down almost entirely the old chapel of St Edward and St George, the home of Edward Ill’s Order, on the site of the present Albert Memorial Chapel, and began to build there a new Lady Chapel to house seven chantry priests, his own tomb, and a shrine over the relics of Holy King Henry. Special indulgences for pilgrims to this new chapel of the Virgin at Windsor were obtained, with papal permission to transfer to it the endowments of Luffield priory in Buckinghamshire.26 Among the miracles is a case of mariners carrying dressed stone from Caen for building Henry VII’s new church at Windsor, who escaped the hot pursuit of pirates by continuously calling on the name of Good King Henry.

  But contention arose to prevent these plans. The abbots and convents of Chertsey and Westminster now both asserted prior claims to the relics, Chertsey on the grounds that Richard III had removed them from Chertsey without authority and against their will, Westminster on the more compelling grounds that Henry VI himself, when he was their parishioner, had chosen his resting-place there and that it was the traditional burial place of the kings of England. The matter was heard out by the king’s council both in the Star Chamber and, finally, at Greenwich on 5 March 1498. Eleven ancient eye-witnesses – John Ashby, former clerk to the signet, priests, servants, scriveners and craftsmen of the abbey, commissioned to make the tomb – all claimed that Henry had himself selected a spot in St Edward’s chapel at Westminster as his burial place. The evidence is not entirely above suspicion. The date was very uncertain, generally given as forty years or more earlier. The most specific of the witnesses, a scrivener of seventy, who plumped for the autumn of 1458, claimed he then saw Henry take the chamberlain’s staff from the hands of Ralph, Lord Cromwell and with it mark out the length and breadth of the tomb.27 Cromwell had in fact died on 4 January 1456. However, the sheer volume of their circumstantial evidence convinced the king and council that the Westminster convent had indeed succeed
ed in revealing Henry’s own intentions for his final resting place. Henry VII therefore ceased his building at Windsor and petitioned the pope for permission to move the relics to Westminster, which was finally granted in 1504.28 On 24 January 1503 Abbot John Islip had laid the first stone of the magnificent new Westminster Lady Chapel which, it was hoped, would receive the relics of the new royal saint and, in due course, those of Henry VII himself.29 Understandably, in the circumstances, the king bound the abbot and convent of Westminster to contribute £500 to the cost of it.30 But at Henry VII’s death in 1509 the process of canonization was still not concluded. Henry VIII, who himself intended to be buried in his father’s Lady Chapel at Windsor, which Cardinal Wolsey had meantime appropriated and finished to contain his own mausoleum, clearly did not press sufficiently hard for the rapid completion of his great-uncle’s cause. The relics of Holy King Henry still rest today to the right of the high altar in St George’s Chapel at Windsor, where Richard III had reburied them. Henry VIII’s will not only marked the end of the contest of Lancaster and York but also of all sixteenth-century hopes of canonization for Henry of Windsor. He left impartial instructions that the tombs and altars of both his great-uncle Henry VI and his grandfather Edward IV should be made more princely at his charge where they were.31

  Here, o’er the martyr-king the marble weeps,

  And, fast beside him once-fear’d Edward sleeps;

  The grave unites: where e’en the great find rest,

  And blended lie th’oppressor and th’opprest!

  (Alexander Pope, Pastorals, Windsor Forest).

  1 Polydore Vergil’s English History, ed. Henry Ellis (Camden Soc, 1844), 112.

  2 This was King James I’s description of him. He found comparisons made with himself particularly irritating: cited by R. Zaller, The Parliament of 1621 (Berkeley 1970,69.