Battle Royal

by Hugh Bicheno

  Both genetically and through training by experts, therefore, Marguerite had the potential to be a dynamic queen consort, and grew up witnessing how strong women could make something of weak men. Lamentably for her and for England, while her husband Henry VI was even more ineffectual than her father he was also less pliable, and circumstances completely beyond her control doomed her attempt to emulate her grandmother.

  Properly handled, a marriage alliance with the House of Valois-Anjou had much to offer the English crown. Charles VII had no eligible daughter, and his queen’s niece was as good a French match as Henry VI could hope for. That said, England’s best chance of imposing a negotiated settlement evaporated in 1440, when it failed to exploit the opportunity presented by a rebellion against Richemont’s centralizing policies by the Duke of Bourbon and the deposed Grand Chamberlain Trémoille, who enticed the Duke of Brittany and Charles VII’s teenaged heir apparent Louis to join them in a rebellion known as the ‘Praguerie’ (by analogy with a revolt that had recently occurred in Bohemia).

  Henry’s first choice had been to marry a daughter of Count Jean IV of Armagnac, one of the few remaining French magnates not of royal blood. This would have strengthened England’s position in south-west France, off-setting the deep commitment to Charles VII of the Lord of Albret, whose lands lay within and adjacent to English Guyenne. Charles VII put an end to the count’s dalliance with the English by invading Armagnac, imprisoning him and installing royal officials to administer La Marche, Rodez and Armagnac-Comminges (see Map 5).

  So it was that when Suffolk was sent to treat for the hand of Marguerite in 1444, his negotiating position was weak and he insisted on the explicit backing of the Council and Parliament. At the time it was recognized that his contacts among the magnates of France made him uniquely qualified for the task; later they were viewed in a more sinister light. Suffolk’s embassy met Charles VII and Richemont at Tours, the capital of Touraine, with René d’Anjou in attendance. At the end of May a two-year truce was agreed and a betrothal ceremony, with Suffolk as proxy for the king, was performed.

  Suffolk also made a number of informal proposals authorized by Henry, including a temporary suspension of the English claim to the French throne in return for an extension of the truce, and the possibility that lands seized by the English in Maine and Anjou might be returned to René. These proposals were, rightly, interpreted by the French as evidence of Henry’s lack of the will to prosecute the war, and Richemont used the truce to accelerate the establishment of the first standing army in French history.

  Suffolk, by then a marquess, returned to collect the new queen the following November with a large retinue including 28-year-old Jacquetta, newly delivered of her second son, and her husband Richard Woodville. In 1443, Jacquetta’s younger sister had married Marguerite’s uncle Charles, the dispossessed Count of Maine, so she was able to greet the young queen as a kinswoman. As foreigners married into the English ruling family they had much in common and became good friends.

  A key member of Suffolk’s retinue was his duchess, 40-year-old Alice de la Pole, granddaughter of the poet Geoffrey Chaucer. Marguerite would form a daughterly bond with Alice who, like Jacquetta, would become one of her ladies-in-waiting. The Chaucer connection reveals how Suffolk became part of the Beaufort affinity. Geoffrey Chaucer was married to the sister of John of Gaunt’s mistress and later wife Katherine Swynford, mother of the Beaufort clan.*1 Alice’s father Thomas, elected Speaker of the House of Commons five times between 1407 and his death in 1434, was a key intermediary between Henry IV and his son, and as a result was Henry V’s most trusted official. After the king’s death, Thomas worked closely with Bishop Beaufort to deny Gloucester the regency.

  Alice was Thomas’s sole heir, having previously inherited a large estate from her short-lived first husband, whom she married when she was 11 years old, and an even larger one from her second, Thomas Montagu, Earl of Salisbury, whom she married when still a teenager. He was killed in 1429 at the siege of Orléans, after which Suffolk, Salisbury’s second-in-command, was defeated and captured by Jeanne d’Arc herself. He was released a year later after payment of a £20,000 [£12.7 million] ransom and promising to do all he could to obtain the release of the Count of Angoulême, a hostage since 1412, and his older brother the Duke of Orléans, captured at Agincourt in 1415.

  Impoverished Suffolk became betrothed to now very wealthy Alice immediately after his release. Although she sensibly insisted on a ‘what’s mine is mine and what’s yours is mine also’ prenuptial settlement, theirs was a genuine love-match, strongly suggesting there may have been a previous relationship. Suffolk became lord of the Woodville estate at Grafton as Alice’s husband, not in his own right, so it is reasonable to assume she and Jacquetta knew each other before they formed part of the young queen’s retinue.

  The bridal party made a progress through occupied Normandy, during which Marguerite was greeted as queen of France. At Rouen, pleading illness but possibly ashamed of the poverty of her wardrobe, she did not take part in a procession and pageant organized by the Duke of York, the king’s lieutenant in France. Although Jacquetta was of senior rank as dowager duchess of Bedford, she stood aside to let Alice represent the queen.

  The most commonly reproduced likeness of Marguerite is from a magnificently illustrated book given to her at Rouen by John Talbot, by now Earl of Shrewsbury and Marshal of France. Although the depictions of Talbot himself and of his superior Richard of York (among the spectators) would have been taken from life by the Rouen miniaturists, the illustration shows Talbot presenting the book to Marguerite as crowned queen, holding hands with a depiction of Henry VI that bears no resemblance to any other portrait of him.

  Sadly, the charming portrait of Marguerite bears no relation to her appearance, either. The loose hair represents virginity, and by convention all English queens were portrayed as fair-haired. She was described as dark-haired, and as ‘handsome’ rather than beautiful. The only reliable likeness of Marguerite is her profile on a medallion made for René d’Anjou by the sculptor Pietro da Milano in 1464, after she had fled England.

  After her arrival at Southampton on 9 April, genuinely ill after a rough crossing, Marguerite was visited by the king in disguise, a convention of courtly love she was too distracted to recognize. Henry ordered she should be bedecked and adorned as befitted a queen, and on 22 April they were married at Titchfield Abbey in Hampshire by his confessor, Bishop William Ayscough of Salisbury. Pageants and tableaux celebrating peace marked her entry into London on 28 May, and she was crowned in Westminster Abbey two days later.

  Three days of feasts and tournaments followed. Not only was 15-year-old Marguerite herself rapturously received, but Suffolk was unanimously commended by the Lords, led by the Duke of Gloucester, and by the Commons. He was later to be made the scapegoat for the failure of English policy in France, but in mid-1445 he was applauded for accomplishing the king’s commission, and for acting in accordance with the consensus of the political nation.

  Tragically for Marguerite and fatally for Suffolk, her marriage was the keystone of a peace policy based on wishful thinking. It was not politically possible for Henry VI to surrender his dynasty’s claim to the throne of France (not formally renounced by the British crown until 1801), or to pay homage to Charles VII for Normandy and Guyenne. With the strategic balance tipping more in his favour every year, however, Charles was not going to accept anything less.

  If not often active allies of France, Burgundy and Brittany were no longer making common cause with England, and French royal authority was stronger than ever after the 1440 rebellion was crushed. Previously dependent on revenues from the ravaged royal domain and exceptional grants from the Estates General, in 1438 Charles helped himself to the substantial proportion of Church revenues previously paid to Rome.

  The following year the Estates General voted to make permanent the taille, a previously exceptional tax on land, specifically to pay for a standing army.*2 Charles’s ap
pointment in 1436 of the talented merchant Jacques Coeur as Master of the Royal Mint had brought rip-roaring inflation under control, and in 1438 he made him Steward of the Royal Expenditure. Improving fiscal order helped to sustain a boom in production and commerce sparked by the inflation, taxes from which further enhanced the royal exchequer.

  The final factor dooming the English empire in France was demographics. Although reduced by pandemics from a peak of 17 million a century earlier, at 10 million France still had a population four times as large as England and Wales in the mid-fifteenth century. However, the estimated ‘French’ population includes Brittany, Burgundy, English Guyenne and the vast areas occupied by the Anglo-Burgundian alliance in northern and north-eastern France. Until the Burgundians changed sides in 1435 the demographic imbalance was not great, but Duke Philippe’s desertion of his former allies tipped the scales decisively in France’s favour.

  The most fought-over areas, in particular Normandy, Maine, Alençon and the Île-de-France, suffered population declines of 70−75 per cent against an average of 40 per cent for the rest of the country. Unlike stable and prosperous Guyenne, the northern areas conquered after Agincourt became so devastated by marauding armies and endemic banditry that the cost of holding them outstripped the surpluses that could be extracted from them.

  For all the certainty of England’s impending defeat, the manner in which they were bundled out of Normandy within five years of the royal marriage, followed by the loss of neglected Guyenne, was a national humiliation. Suffolk and Edmund Beaufort were to be made the scapegoats, because to blame the king would have been high treason. In their innermost thoughts, however, all knew that the manner in which England lost its continental empire was primarily attributable to Henry VI’s incompetence.

  The failure of her marriage to bring peace and the consequent loss of Normandy and Guyenne therefore did not affect Marguerite’s popularity, which soared against a backdrop of the collapse both of English rule in France and her husband’s fragile morale. Her response was the first occasion on which she would step in to fill the void of authority left by her husband. Thereafter she played an increasingly activist role, as one would expect of a woman born of Duchess Isabelle of Lorraine and prepared for life by Princess Yolande de Aragón.

  *1 If to Chaucer’s robust appreciation of female sexuality we add the evidence of John of Gaunt’s infatuation, it is reasonable to assume that the Swynford sisters were also passionate princesses.

  *2 As John Fortescue observed in his near-contemporary On the Laws and Governance of England, or the Difference between an Absolute and a Limited Monarchy, the taille and the standing army defined the French monarchy.

  IV

  * * *

  House of York

  The arms of Richard, third Duke of York, proved predictive of his life. The first and fourth quarters proclaimed him the great-grandson of Edward III, the second quarter was his grandmother’s arms of Castille and León, and the third quartered the arms of the Mortimer earls of March and the Burgh earls of Ulster. The most potent element, however, was the central inescutcheon of the arms of England.

  As the only son of two direct descendants of Edward III, the burden of ancestry lay heavily on him. His father Richard of Conisbrough, Earl of Cambridge, was the grandson of Edward III’s fourth son Edmund, Duke of York. His mother Anne Mortimer, who died bearing him, was the great-granddaughter of Lionel, Duke of Clarence, Edward’s second son. As Henry IV’s father John of Gaunt was only the third son of Edward III, the Mortimer claim to the throne was stronger than the Lancastrian.

  In 1415, when his namesake son was three years old, Cambridge was involved in a plot to put his brother-in-law Edmund Mortimer, 5th Earl of March, on the throne. Alas, he had failed to consult Edmund, who informed Henry V of the plot as soon as he learned of it and was a member of the court that condemned Cambridge to death. Even so, Henry V pointedly pardoned Edmund for his entirely unwitting role in the plot, to leave him in no doubt about the thinness of the ice under his feet.

  The complicated backstory to the 1415 conspiracy began with the 1st Earl of March, Roger Mortimer, who was executed and attainted in 1330 after seizing power and murdering Edward II. After the title and Mortimer lands were restored to the 2nd earl in 1354, in 1368 the 3rd Earl of March married Philippa, only child of Lionel, Duke of Clarence, through whom he became Earl of Ulster. As the next in line to the throne after the Black Prince’s son, the future Richard II, March was a leader of the nobles opposed to John of Gaunt’s influence over Edward III during his final, senile years.

  The 4th Earl of March was heir presumptive to Richard II until he was killed in an Irish ambush in 1398. Richard went to Ireland the following year to avenge his death, and on his return found he had lost his kingdom to Henry Bolingbroke, John of Gaunt’s eldest son. In 1402, the 4th earl’s brother was captured by Owain Glyn Dŵr and, after Henry IV refused to ransom him and looted his estate, joined the Glyn Dŵr-Percy rebellion, proclaiming his nephew Edmund, the 5th earl, to be the true king of England.

  To thicken the plot further, Constance of York and Edward, Duke of York, the daughter and eldest son of Edmund of Langley, Edward III’s fourth son, were involved in a plot to spring March from custody in Windsor Castle. Henry IV imprisoned York for four months; but he kept Edmund Mortimer in custody for the remaining years of his reign. There were good reasons for distrust of the Mortimers to be practically written into the DNA of the Lancastrian dynasty.

  Edward of York was not involved in the later plot that led to the execution of Richard of Conisbrough, his younger brother, and shortly afterwards died heroically at Agincourt. Having saved his neck by denouncing Richard’s plot, Edmund Mortimer was released from custody and restored to his inheritance by Henry V, under whose supervision he served in France. Although subsequently a member of the regency Council, he was never fully trusted by the Lancastrians and was sent to Ireland, where he died of the plague in 1425.

  Henry V had not attainted Richard of Conisbrough, so his namesake son inherited the earldom of Cambridge, although his young stepmother, Maud née Clifford, occupied Conisbrough Castle and several other manors until her death in 1446. When the childless Edward, Duke of York, was killed, however, the king hesitated before granting the boy succession to his uncle’s duchy, with entailed holdings in Hertfordshire, Lincolnshire, Northamptonshire, Yorkshire, Wiltshire and Gloucestershire.*1 Having done so, Henry V kept him in custody for the rest of his reign, ominously guarded by Robert Waterton, one of the men responsible for the murder of Richard II.

  In 1423 the minority Council sold Richard of York’s wardship for 3,000 marks [£1.27 million] to Ralph Neville, Earl of Westmorland (of whom much more later), who had become the greater of the northern Marcher lords after being instrumental in the defeat of the Percy rebellions. That the Council should have entrusted him with a boy whose very existence called the legitimacy of the Lancastrian dynasty into question was almost certainly because Joan, Ralph’s formidable second wife, was Bishop Henry Beaufort’s sister.

  In 1424 Ralph bestowed the magnificent gift of betrothal to 13-year-old York on the youngest of his sixteen surviving children, 9-year-old Cecily, who was over-indulged all her life and whose imperiousness led to her being known as ‘Proud Cis’. Not long afterwards York inherited the earldoms of March and Ulster from his childless maternal uncle Edmund Mortimer, and became the largest landowner in England after the king.

  Joan Beaufort inherited York’s wardship when Ralph Neville died in October 1425. Until then, York and Cecily grew up together at Raby, one of the finest castles in England. The title, the Durham castles of Raby and Brancepeth, and little else passed to the 19-year-old heir of Ralph’s eldest son from his first marriage, who had died in France in 1420. The vastly greater part of Ralph’s estate was left to Joan and her children.

  She moved with the younger children and Richard of York to London. York had been presented at court earlier, but from this time he was able to observe a
t first hand the power struggle between Bishop Beaufort and Gloucester. When Bedford returned to part the warring princes in 1426, he took the time to knight York and other young lords who travelled back to France with him. In 1429 York sailed back to England to take up residence in the royal household and, in May, he and Cecily were married. Later in 1429 they were present at the coronation of 7-year-old Henry VI in Westminster Abbey, and then formed part of the cortege that accompanied him to Rouen and then to Paris, where he was crowned king of France in December 1431.

  Twenty-year-old York finally came into his inheritance in May 1432. The 5th Earl of March had left the Mortimer estate heavily encumbered, but the deaths of the dowager Duchess of York in 1431 and of the dowager Countess of March in 1432 gave York the cash flow to settle with his debtors, among them Cardinal Beaufort, who behaved benevolently towards his nephew by marriage. With the Beauforts disqualified, York was next in line to the throne after the king’s aging and childless uncles, and the cardinal was keen to win him.

  York’s estates in England and Wales plus annuities were worth about £4,600 [£2.92 million] per annum. He also had estates in Normandy, and although revenues from them and his Irish earldom of Ulster and the lordships of Connacht and Trim were meagre, his total annual income was well in excess of £5,000. The administrative centre for his holdings in Wales, the Middle March and the West Country was at Ludlow Castle in Shropshire, for Yorkshire at Sandal Castle, and for his eastern holdings at Fotheringhay Castle in Northamptonshire.

  To put this in perspective, crown rents from its own lands in England and France, plus church subsidies, feudal and other dues (including payments in lieu of military service), and customs receipts from the export of wool, were about £70,000 [£44.52 million] per annum during 1438−53, the period of Henry VI’s personal kingship prior to the loss of English France. The loss of Guyenne, in particular, was a severe blow and reduced annual crown revenues to about £44,000 up to 1461, when the first round of the Wars of the Roses came to a climax.*2