Battle Royal

by Hugh Bicheno

  There followed the first impeachment by the House of Commons since 1386, in which Tailboys was ‘named and famed for a common murderer, manslayer, rioter and continual breaker of [the king’s] peace’. He was held in the Tower of London for twelve months while the case against him was prepared. He spent the next five years in prison while a series of judgements were made against him, notably damages awarded to Cromwell in the amount of £2,000 [£1.27 million].

  Bonville’s long association with Suffolk paid off in July 1449, at the end of the first Parliament summoned that year, when he was created Baron Bonville of Chewton. In a defiant signal to Thomas Courtenay, Earl of Devon, Bonville chose a coat of arms modelled on the arms of the duchy of Cornwall. The same Parliament saw the royal favourite James Butler, son of the Earl of Ormonde, created Earl of Wiltshire. He and Bonville were to make common cause against Courtenay. These were, however, among the last significant acts of patronage by Suffolk.

  The impeachment of Tailboys started the rockslide that swept Suffolk from power, but the build-up of instability had been many years in the making. He was never as powerful as he seemed, evidence of which was his inability to maintain order even in East Anglia, his area of greatest influence. By far the richest contemporary source for our period are the Paston letters, a collection of over a thousand letters and papers to, from and relating to the Paston family of Norfolk between 1422 and 1509. They contain a detailed account of an outrageous breach of the peace committed against the family, which we may take as representative of the lawlessness prevailing in the county.

  It involved the manor of Gresham, 4 miles inland from the north Norfolk coast. In 1427 William Paston bought Gresham from Thomas Chaucer, father of Alice, Duchess of Suffolk. After William’s death in 1444 his son John enjoyed unchallenged possession of the manor until 1448, when it was forcibly seized by 17-year-old Robert, namesake eldest son of Baron Hungerford and, by right of his wife, Baron Moleyns. Although heir apparent to the wealthy barony of Hungerford, with the expectation of inheriting an even larger estate from his mother, sole heir of William, Baron Botreaux, he chafed at the relatively minor extent of his Moleyns estate.

  Moleyns’ teenaged hormones and aristocratic arrogance made him a willing listener to the malicious advice of John Heydon of Baconsthorpe, a lawyer who, in association with the Keeper of the King’s Wardrobe Thomas Tuddenham – both members in good standing of Suffolk’s affinity – exercised a predatory ascendancy at the expense of the local gentry. Heydon, no doubt seeking to promote lucrative litigation, persuaded Moleyns that John Paston’s title to the manor of Gresham could be challenged. Instead of suing, however, Moleyns simply took possession of the manor by force in February 1448.

  It being pointless to bring a legal action in a jurisdiction run by Heydon and Tuddenham, John Paston obtained the intercession of William Wainflete, Henry Beaufort’s successor as Bishop of Winchester and the king’s right-hand man in the projects dearest to him, the building of colleges at Eton and Cambridge. Moleyns’ solicitors made no serious attempt to defend the spurious title Heydon had created for their principal at a conference sponsored by Wainflete, and urged Paston to put his case to Moleyns directly. Paston tried to obtain an audience with him at several places, but was never received.

  Accordingly, in early October 1449 he simply reoccupied his property, which the absentee Moleyns had failed to guard adequately. Paston did not make the same mistake and remained in possession with armed retainers. It took time for news of his coup to reach Moleyns in Wiltshire, and for him to plan his response, but in late January 1450 upwards of a thousand armed men hired by Moleyns launched a full-scale assault while John Paston was in London on business.

  Margaret Paston held out with twelve servants, who put up stout resistance but were soon forced to surrender. Margaret was carried bodily from the mansion, which was then thoroughly ransacked and left in ruins. Paston estimated the damages at £200 [£127,200]. Before they left, Moleyns’ rent-a-mob told Margaret that if they had found John or his solicitor, they would have killed them.

  Paston sent a petition for redress to Parliament, and another to Wainflete, but 1450 was to be a year of unending crises for the regime and neither petition prospered. In subsequent years, Paston’s insistence on obtaining redress was thwarted by Moleyns’ seven-year captivity in France and the influence at court of the Duke of Norfolk, who made common aristocratic cause against Paston. In the end, all Paston could obtain was Moleyns’ tacit abandonment of a claim he should never have made. His spiteful vandalism remained unpunished.

  The swaggering behaviour of the knightly class has a flavour of the American Wild West about it. Then as later, men trained at arms and very little else, many with what today we coyly call anger management issues, were a very present danger. Still, we should beware of believing that anything like a complete breakdown of legal authority occurred. Trouble was concentrated in counties where there was no locally dominant lord, or where he was not normally resident. The biggest offender in this respect was Suffolk, permanently in attendance on the king, who perforce delegated the management of his local interests and affinities to crooks like Tuddenham and Heydon.

  The Harcourt–Stafford feud can be taken as representative of many local disputes that flourished in the absence of a dominant magnate or any realistic legal deterrent. Robert Harcourt of Stanton Harcourt in Oxfordshire enjoyed the ‘good lordship’ of Suffolk, while Humphrey Stafford of Grafton in Worcestershire was a distant kinsman of the Duke of Buckingham. In May 1448, the two knights, each with an entourage of armed retainers, encountered each other in Coventry. An exchange of insults between Harcourt and Stafford’s eldest son Richard led to a brawl in which Richard and two of Harcourt’s men were killed. Stafford himself was unhorsed and only narrowly escaped death.

  The next day Harcourt, who had initiated the violence by striking Richard with his sword, was charged with murder by the city coroner and detained. Suffolk abused the Privy Seal to order the local sheriff not to proceed against Harcourt, who was released. After Suffolk was impeached, Stafford with 200 men made an overnight march on Stanton Harcourt. Harcourt took refuge in the tower of the parish church and withstood a six-hour siege during which the tower was peppered with arrows, killing one of his men. After a failed attempt to burn him out, Stafford withdrew.

  In 1450, faced with the popular uprising known as Jack Cade’s Rebellion, the king quickly pardoned all involved in the Harcourt–Stafford affray. Less than two months later Humphrey Stafford and his brother were killed after leading a column of the king’s forces into an ambush set by Cade. Retribution for the killing of Richard Stafford was delayed until 1470, when Humphrey’s illegitimate son murdered Robert Harcourt.

  Cade’s Rebellion itself drew its strength from the chronic abuse of power by agents of James Fiennes, Lord Saye and Sele since 1447, the king’s bosom friend, Lord Treasurer and household chamberlain. Saye was represented in Kent by his son-in-law William Cromer, whose underlings duplicated the nefarious activities of Tuddenham and Heydon in Norfolk. Although there were no outrageous assaults comparable to Moleyns’ attack on the manor at Gresham, rapacious lawlessness prevailed across Kent and East Sussex.

  The king’s regular progresses through East Anglia and the south-east were not replicated in the West Country, the Welsh Marches and the North, which were a law unto themselves. However, even when he did visit a region he was not accompanied by judges to hold assizes (properly ‘commissions of oyer and terminer’), nor did he receive complaints or dispense justice himself. Henry’s neglect of his duty as first magistrate was to prove particularly damaging in areas like Kent, where his household members were most dominant.

  We should also consider the Ampthill dispute, out of historical sequence but a classic illustration of the continuing undercurrent of aristocratic lawlessness. According to a petition later presented to Parliament, in June 1452 Henry Holland, Duke of Exeter, with 300 men seized a Bedfordshire estate, including the manor and castle
of Ampthill, owned by Lord Cromwell. During his years as Lord Treasurer Cromwell had built up holdings that gave him an income only exceeded by the greater magnates. By contrast Exeter’s landed patrimony produced an income well below the amount expected of a duke, and he did not even inherit the whole of it until the death of his stepmother in 1457. He was consumed with envy.

  Exeter’s claim was entirely spurious, concocted with the suborned help of three servants of the previous owner of Ampthill, now dead, and by one of his executors. Possessed to an even greater degree of the aristocratic arrogance that motivated Moleyns’ seizure of Gresham, Exeter calculated he could spin out legal wrangling over Ampthill until the elderly and heirless Cromwell died, after which possession would be the proverbial nine-tenths of the law. Exeter was not clever enough to have conceived the scheme, and it was probably Tailboys who suggested manufacturing the claim as part of his feud with Cromwell.

  The supposition hardens into certainty when we consider the second prong of Exeter’s assault, which was to make a charge of treason against Cromwell, his allies the Bedfordshire and Marcher Lord Edmund Grey of Ruthyn, and John Fastolf, an East Anglian knight. The accusation was made by Robert Collinson, parson of Chelsfield in Kent, who swore that the leader of a post-Cade revolt in Kent, condemned for treason, had confessed, on the hurdle drawing him to be hanged and quartered, that Cromwell and the other two were traitors. Deathbed confessions carried a great deal of legal weight, as it was assumed nobody would wish to go into the afterlife with a lie on their lips.

  Cromwell was ordered to appear in the Lord Chancellor’s office and was suspended from the Council. However, in February 1453 Cromwell submitted a dossier that damned Collinson as a liar, a trickster and an epic whoremonger. Collinson’s charges were dismissed, but Exeter’s purpose had been achieved: a high-level panel of arbiters appointed by the king to decide the Ampthill dispute had been unable to proceed while a charge of treason was pending, and now events pushed it to the bottom of a pile of more urgent business.

  Exeter countered Cromwell’s suits with counter-suits and intimidated the sheriff of Bedfordshire, while juries could not be empanelled to hear the suits for fear of what Exeter might do to them. This moved the king to make one of his sporadic and typically ineffectual efforts to bring his nobles under control by briefly detaining Exeter at Windsor Castle, Cromwell at Wallingford Castle and Grey at Pevensey Castle.

  Cromwell, who died in 1456, is a deeply unsympathetic figure, only somewhat redeemed by the fact that Exeter was even more loathsome. He did, however, leave us an excellent summary of the legal anarchy that increasingly characterized the reign of King Henry VI:

  Where any of so great estate puts any man out of his lands and tenements and wrongs him of his goods, the aggrieved party suing for his remedy in that behalf by special assize or otherwise there will be no judge, learned counsel nor jury [that will] take upon them to sit, come or appear, nor sheriff to make any restitution or mediate or do anything appertaining to his office in such case at any special or general assize or other place where remedy by course of law should be had.

  *1 Their son became Baron Harington in 1458 following the death of his maternal grandfather. When all the male Bonvilles were killed his daughter Cecily became sole heir of both the Harington and Bonville estates.

  VI

  * * *

  Defeat and Humiliation

  Although appointed to the lieutenancy of Normandy for three years in December 1446, Edmund Beaufort did not move there until early 1448. His own men took over from York’s Anglo-Normans during 1447, but the province was essentially leaderless during a period of great uncertainty about the peace policy launched in 1444. Charles VII had agreed to extend the two-year truce agreed at Tours, but Henry failed to follow through with a journey to meet him in France in 1446. The main reason was financial – he had exhausted his credit to pay for Suffolk’s two embassies and could not afford the magnificence the occasion demanded.

  A greatly aggravating factor was Edmund’s insistence that he be compensated for the loss of his holdings in Maine before he would consent to handing over the county, as privately agreed by Henry in a letter to his ‘dear uncle of France’ dated 22 December 1445. The letter stressed entreaties by his ‘most dear and well-beloved companion the queen’, who had been assured by her father and Charles himself that the cession of Maine would lead to a lasting peace.

  Finally Edmund obtained a settlement of 10,000 livres tournois [nearly £1 million], to be paid annually by the already hard-pressed Norman exchequer. Only then did he move to Rouen, perhaps to ensure he received the agreed compensation. Although he was supposed to share it with the Anglo-Normans who would also be dispossessed, he did not. Consequently a deputation of English knights and squires obstructed the negotiations for the handover, to the point that in February–March 1448 they were besieged at Le Mans and even bombarded by a French army commanded by Pierre de Brézé. The knights handed over the town on 15 March after Charles VII agreed to compensate them himself, but of course they never saw a penny.

  Henry was so greatly relieved that on 31 March he recreated the dukedom of Somerset for Edmund. This was further salt in the wounds of the dispossessed Anglo-Normans, particularly those of Richard of York’s affinity, some of whom trickled back to England seeking his ‘good lordship’. The trickle became a flood in 1449–50, and was the reason York became such a determined enemy of Somerset; which, since Somerset enjoyed the unconditional support of the king, brought York into ultimately mortal conflict with the house of Lancaster.

  Somerset’s performance of his duties as Lieutenant of Normandy was abject. When all the arguments about the inevitability of the outcome are weighed, the outstanding fact is that he made no serious preparation to resist French aggression. He appears to have shared Henry’s wishful thinking, in the teeth of abundant evidence that Richemont’s military organization was well advanced and could only have one purpose. Even if there might have been some doubt previously, there can have been none after the siege of Le Mans.

  Possibly he thought the French would continue to nibble at the edges of Normandy through a process of armed negotiation. This would have granted him time to accumulate as much money as he could before returning to England, leaving his successor to deal with the consequences. The French did not oblige, and Somerset’s ruin would have been complete were it not for the king’s dogged loyalty to him, which may have been born in part of guilty knowledge that he should never have appointed Somerset to an office which required great personal wealth.

  Another, stronger reason was that the collapse of the truce was precipitated by a personal decision made by Henry. During the night of 23/24 March 1449, the Aragonese captain known as François de Surienne, a Garter knight for his services to the English crown, took the Breton border fortress of Fougères in a daring escalade. The purpose was to force the Duke of Brittany to release Gilles of Brittany, Henry VI’s childhood friend, imprisoned since June 1446. Henry knew Gilles had been arrested in the first instance by French soldiers acting on the orders of Charles VII. He regarded it as a breach of the truce, and the seizure of Fougères as therefore justified.

  Charles, however, saw it as the opportunity he had been waiting for to conclude an explicitly anti-English alliance with Brittany, denounce the truce, and to declare war on 31 July. A year and a fortnight later, to the exhilarated satisfaction – and no small surprise – of the French commanders (among them Marguerite’s father, René d’Anjou), the last of Henry V’s and the Duke of Bedford’s conquests were in French hands.

  Hardly any of the smaller fortified towns put up a fight. In most, the inhabitants opened their gates and welcomed the French armies or, as at Verneuil, helped them scale the walls. Most of the English garrisons that prevented this were persuaded to capitulate on generous terms. One such was Regnéville, a port on the coast of the Cotentin peninsula near Coutances, where the king’s stepfather Owen Tudor surrendered to the Bretons after six days. He was pe
rmitted to take ship to England with his men, their dependants and possessions.

  Obdurate garrisons were bypassed, to fall like ripe fruit in due course. The outstanding example was Fresnay-sur-Sarthe, a small town on the border of Maine. Fresnay held out from September 1449, when the Duke of Alençon recovered his long-lost county in a whirlwind campaign, until March 1450, when the last hope of relief was extinguished. Somerset must have expected many more such hold-outs to buy him time, but Fresnay was held by Anglo-Normans dispossessed in Maine, who judged they had nothing more to lose. Somerset’s own fief of Mortain welcomed the French invaders with open arms, as did Évreux, the chief town of Richard of York’s appanage.

  The English were vastly outnumbered. Not counting the Bretons, the four French armies numbered over 30,000 against 6,000–8,000 English in scattered garrisons. But the crowning humiliation was that they were defeated by equal numbers in the only pitched battle of the campaign. On 15 April 1450, about 4,500 men sent from England under Thomas Kyriell (the only knight banneret to respond to John Beaufort’s summons in 1443), joined by 1,500 drawn from the Cotentin peninsula garrisons, were routed at Formigny by two French armies totalling about 5,000. The French commanders were Richemont himself and the Duke of Bourbon, leader of the 1440 revolt against Charles VII.

  There is a common belief that Formigny was the first battle won by field artillery, but its role was only indirect. It was an encounter battle in which neither side had been well served by scouts. Taken by surprise and outnumbered, Bourbon did employ a couple of light cannon: but his aim was to keep the enemy out of longbow range. After the English archers rushed the guns he was in serious trouble and was on the verge of defeat when Richemont, marching towards the sound of the guns, appeared on Kyriell’s flank. So, although the guns brought about the timely convergence of the French armies, it was tactical agility, supposedly the decisive advantage enjoyed by the English, which won the day.