by Hugh Bicheno
The new French guns did, however, bring about the rapid capitulation of major fortresses that in former times had confidently withstood prolonged sieges. In 1414–15 the port of Harfleur held out against Henry V’s primitive bombards for over a year. It fell in three weeks in 1450. Massive Château Gaillard, built on an immensely strong position overlooking the Seine, resisted Henry V for a year in 1419. In 1449 it was battered into submission in less than two months, and was never rebuilt.
Accordingly, when in 1452 York accused Somerset of treachery for capitulating at Rouen after a siege lasting barely a week, and seven months later at Caen after twenty days, he could not argue that further resistance would have affected the final outcome. By convention a fortress commander would hold out while there was hope his own side might send an army to lift the siege, and there was no dishonour in seeking terms when there was no such prospect. It was Somerset’s haste and the terms he negotiated that York judged contemptible.
Somerset had thoroughly alienated the people of Rouen, probably because he needed to wring every penny out of his lieutenancy. Even though the Norman capital had much the largest garrison, commanded by none other than Somerset’s fearsome brother-in-law John Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, in October 1449 they abandoned the city to a popular uprising and pulled back to the enormous castle. The main French armies were elsewhere and their heavy guns were at Château Gaillard, so even the minimum precondition of an effective siege had not been met when Somerset capitulated.
Along with the castle, he surrendered the fortified towns of the Pays de Caux and the port of Honfleur on the southern bank of the Seine estuary, which would have isolated Harfleur, on the north bank. In addition, he agreed to pay a ransom of 50,000 Norman saluts d’or [£7,314,000] for himself and his family to travel to Caen. As a guarantee he left Talbot and four other officers as hostages.
Intriguingly, Talbot bore Somerset no ill will; indeed he and his sons were to support him against York in the following years. A hypothesis to fit these facts is that by becoming a hostage for Somerset’s debt Talbot avoided being held to ransom in his own right. What is generally judged to have been an exceptionally shameful act turns out, on closer examination, to have been probably an act of clever collusion between the two peers.
The captain of Honfleur refused to obey Somerset’s order and held out until after Harfleur surrendered, capitulating on 18 January 1450. Talbot remained a hostage until July, when Andrew Trollope, one of his retainers and captain of Falaise, one of the last Norman towns still in English hands, made his release a condition of capitulation. Talbot swore never to bear arms against France again, and was to abide by the letter of his oath. He was unarmed when killed three years later during the last battle of the Hundred Years War.
The Earl of Oxford’s son Robert Vere, commanding the Caen garrison, was able to prevent a revolt by the inhabitants. Besieged during June 1450 by an army led by Charles VII himself, he conducted an active defence of the city that may have included a bribe to Scots members of Charles’s bodyguard to kill him. This, at least, was the charge levelled against them in 1453. One of the illustrations in the 1487 Vigiles du roi Charles VII shows an English sortie against the French bombards (the modern guns had not yet arrived), which finally put a stone shot through the window of the room where Somerset’s duchess and children were sheltered.
Somerset immediately agreed terms of capitulation including an astronomical ransom of 300,000 écus d’or [£43,884,000], with 18 hostages as surety, to permit Somerset, his family and the garrison to evacuate by sea. The ransom was totally unrealistic – it would have wiped out both the Norman and English exchequers – and the hostages were later released for the derisory sums they raised themselves. Understandably uncertain of the loyalty of his troops or of the reception awaiting him in England, Somerset sailed separately to Calais.
With the Normandy debacle well under way, the Parliament summoned to vote emergency funds in November 1449 was in a vengeful mood. Driven by Lord Cromwell, the Tailboys impeachment segued into a full-scale parliamentary attack on Suffolk. The first notable rat to desert the sinking ship was Adam Moleyns, Bishop of Chichester, who in early December resigned the office of Lord Privy Seal, pleading ill health and a belated desire to attend to his neglected diocese, which he had visited only to be invested in 1446.
A month later, he was in Portsmouth delivering wages to the troops assembling for Kyriell’s expedition when a group of Normandy veterans seized him and announced he must die for his role in handing over Maine. He tried to save himself by accusing Suffolk of embezzling the money intended for the defence of Normandy, but was slaughtered regardless. The murder of a bishop was a deeply shocking act in itself; but for the royal household the more worrying aspect was that the killers were men who had served under York, who may have been avenging Moleyns’ attempt to blame him for the parlous state of Normandy’s defences.
Suffolk issued a statement denying Moleyns’ accusation at the opening of the new session of Parliament on 23 January 1450, but it backfired. The Commons cited his own words as proof ‘there was an heavy noise of infamy upon him’, which required he should be brought to trial. Suffolk’s response was worded in a way to imply that the murdered bishop was indeed to blame for the surrender of Maine. This was demeaning: everybody knew the king was personally responsible, but it was treasonable to say so. The feeling was that Suffolk, having profited so greatly from being the king’s chief minister, should now manfully accept his role as chief scapegoat.
On 7 February, the Speaker read out a very long indictment accusing Suffolk of a fantastical plot with the French king to depose Henry VI and to replace him with Suffolk’s son John, whom he had betrothed to his ward Margaret Beaufort to give him a claim to the throne. This and other wild accusations about dealings with the French were simply embellishments to the core charges, which concerned the alienation of crown lands and rights to himself and his affinity. The result, said the indictment, was that there was not enough left to support the king’s government, requiring the Commons to make good the deficit with taxation.
Suffolk was consigned to the Tower to await trial. When he was brought out on 9 March, he did the only thing he could and cast himself on the king’s mercy. On 17 March the king summoned the lords to his inner chamber. In their presence, Suffolk knelt before him to assert his innocence, and once again threw himself on his mercy. Henry made no judgement on the charges against him, but banished him for five years from 1 May. The intention, clearly, was to recall him when the heat had died down.
Suffolk departed for his home in Ipswich, heavily guarded against a London mob intent on lynching him in revenge for what they believed was his murder of ‘Good Duke Humphrey’ in February 1447. When he got home he put his affairs in order and wrote a loving valedictory letter to his young son. The second paragraph, couched as advice, gives us an insight into how Suffolk himself had won the unreserved confidence of the king (my italics):
Next [to God], above all earthly things, be a true liegeman in heart, in will, in thought, in deed, unto the King, our elder, most high, and dread Sovereign Lord, to whom both ye and I be so much bound; charging you, as father can and may, rather to die than to be the contrary, or to know anything that were against the welfare and prosperity of his most royal person, but that so far as your body and life may stretch, ye live and die to defend it and to let His Highness have knowledge thereof, in all the haste ye can.
Suffolk sailed from Ipswich on 30 April, bound for Calais. His two ships were intercepted by a flotilla led by the ‘great ship’ Nicholas of the Tower, flying the royal colours, which summoned him. He had himself rowed across without hesitation, perhaps believing the king had changed his mind, only to be seized, ‘tried’ for treason by the crew and his head hacked off with a cutlass. His torso was cast ashore at Dover.
Although Henry and Marguerite were devastated by the news, the circumstances of Suffolk’s death were not investigated. It was clearly not an act of piracy –
there must have been collusion with the master of Suffolk’s ship for the interception to take place at all, and no pirate operated a ‘great ship’. One is inescapably drawn to the conclusion that the murder was the work of young Henry Holland, Duke of Exeter. As Lord Admiral, Exeter’s father had enjoyed a unique naval affinity, which made him, in practice, pirate-in-chief. The shamelessly corrupt Court of Admiralty was an extremely lucrative operation that provided his principal source of income, and continued to do so for his successors well into the seventeenth century.
When the older Exeter died, Suffolk added the Court of Admiralty to his own bag of offices. As we saw in Chapter 5, without the income from the court the younger Exeter was decidedly poor. Not only did this give him reason to hate Suffolk, but he would also still have had contacts within the seafaring community made while his father was alive. The remaining members of the royal household would not have dared suggest to the king that a prince of his blood would be capable of such a thing, and the office of Lord Admiral now reverted to the psychopathic young man.*1
The household’s suspicion that Exeter had assassinated Suffolk would have been subsumed into a growing panic about what they believed was a greater threat. Their fear, which soon infected the king himself, was that the murders of Moleyns and Suffolk were the product of a conspiracy with Richard of York at its heart. Suffolk’s downfall had been initiated by Lord Cromwell, one of York’s councillors, and Exeter was York’s son-in-law. To their fearful minds it looked a lot like two plus two adding up to a deeply ominous four.
After the leader of the London riot against the release of Suffolk suffered the gruesome fate reserved for traitors, his quarters were sent to Coventry and Winchester, where there had been disturbances of the peace, and to Newbury and Stamford, where there had not. They were, however, boroughs owned by York. Further panicked by a lightning strike that severely damaged his favourite palace at Eltham, and by an outbreak of the plague, the king fled to Leicester. On his way there, another man earned a traitor’s death by lashing the ground in front of Henry’s horse, calling for York to do the same to the king’s government.
There is not the slightest evidence that York had anything to do with any of the shocks suffered by the court at this time. Barring the lightning strike, they were the result of a long period of misgovernment. This was not, however, an explanation the king and his household were prepared to contemplate. Much better to blame an external agency of infinite cunning and resource – the essential ingredient of every conspiracy theory throughout history.
*1 As Constable of the Tower he took such pleasure in torturing people that the rack became known as ‘the Duke of Exeter’s daughter’.
VII
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Henry and Richard
Suffolk’s assassination on 2 May 1450 was the cat-alyst for a cascade of events that ripped apart the cocoon around the king. William Cromer, sheriff of Kent and Sussex and son-in-law of Lord Saye and Sele, took custody of Suffolk’s body and threatened retaliation against the people of Kent. Summoned by commissioners of array on their own authority, and led by their local constables, in June several thousand minor Kentish gentry, yeomen and labourers assembled at Ashford and marched on London, joined by a smaller contingent from east Sussex.
The host, at this point without a conspicuous leader, camped at Blackheath, where the main roads from Kent converged south of the Thames. When ordered to disperse by the king’s heralds on 15 June, they said they were not rebels but petitioners, and would remain until their grievances were heard. However, the spokesman they elected was a bold ex-soldier, possibly of Irish origin, called Jack Cade – who had chosen to call himself Mortimer ‘for to have the more favour of the people’.
The name was a red alert. By blood, the Mortimer claim to the throne was better than the ruling dynasty’s, and Richard of York was the heir to the claim. Lest there should be any doubt why Cade chose the name, the first item in the ‘The Complaint of the Poor Commons of Kent’ denounced those said to be spreading rumours that York wished to seize the throne. Their purpose, the petition declared, was to make the king ‘hate and destroy his real friends and to cherish the false traitors that call themselves his friends’.
This appears to be an accurate appreciation. The king’s household were now a leaderless rabble, and rather than accept their responsibility for the widespread unrest it suited them to blame York, now out of the way in Ireland and unable to defend himself. The Kentish petition went on to denounce the abuses committed by the agents of the absentee lords of Kent, with particular venom directed at Lord Saye. It demanded that the king banish Suffolk’s ‘false progeny and affinity’ and replace them with York, the Dukes of Buckingham and Norfolk, and ‘all true earls and barons of this land’.
It is not for this but for the immortal dialogue with Dick, a confederate, put in their mouths by Shakespeare, that the spirit of Jack Cade lives on among the English-speaking peoples:
Dick: The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.
Cade: Nay, that I mean to do.
While still at Leicester the king summoned Buckingham, who had been awarded Gloucester’s palace at Penshurst, near Tonbridge in Kent, and Jacquetta’s husband Richard Woodville, created Baron Rivers in 1448, with lands around Maidstone on the road from Ashford to London. They were commissioned to raise troops from their estates and meet the king in London, where he returned on 8 June. Joined by troops from royalist Cheshire under Lord Stanley, and the personal retinues of Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, the Neville Earls of Salisbury and Warwick, and the veteran Thomas, Baron Scales, the king rejected the petition and led his army across the river to confront the Blackheath encampment.
The massed petitioners melted away that night – and then Henry overplayed his hand. He sent punitive columns into Kent under Percy, Woodville, Scales and Buckingham’s kinsmen, the brothers Humphrey (he of the recent attack on Stanton Harcourt) and William Stafford. The Staffords’ column was ambushed by Cade and the two brothers killed in woods near Sevenoaks. Henry then compounded his error by ordering Buckingham’s and Woodville’s Kentish men to avenge the defeat. Instead they mutinied and declared solidarity with Cade.
From browbeating arrogance to abject panic was for Henry but a short step, and he fled to Westminster via Marguerite’s (previously Gloucester’s) palace at Greenwich. All would have contrasted his behaviour with the regal courage of young Richard II in 1381, when he rode out of London with only an escort to face down the so-called Peasants’ Revolt. Henry also ordered Lord Saye and William Cromer detained in the Tower, and issued a proclamation echoing the petition’s denunciation of unspecified traitors.
Once given into, fear is uncontrollable and this was the moment when Marguerite first stepped up to provide the courage her husband lacked. Despite the entreaties of the mayor and aldermen of London, Henry could not be persuaded to stay and she guided his further flight to the comforting security of her castles at Berkhamsted in south Hertfordshire and Kenilworth outside Coventry, the latter at the heart of her substantial Midlands dower. She, however, heroically remained at Greenwich, no more than a mile from Blackheath.
Henry tried to save Saye, but Exeter, the Constable of the Tower, refused to release him because the king had earlier ordered a formal trial for his friend. Cade returned to Blackheath on 23 June wearing the armour of one of the slain Staffords. Now that the fear of reprisals seemed to have been confirmed, his following – stripped of the respectable element – was far more radical. Another large gathering of petitioners emerged from Essex and on 2 July the two groups converged on the city. Cade occupied Southwark, next to London Bridge, whose ropes he cut so it could not be drawn against him, while the Essex men advanced north of the river to Mile End, opposite Aldgate.
Named by the rebels as one of the ‘false traitors’, Bishop William Ayscough of Salisbury, who had officiated at the king’s wedding and was his revered confessor, fled London in mid-June for his castle at Sherborne in Dorset, wi
th a caravan bearing his personal wealth. He got only as far as the monastery at Edington, in Wiltshire. On 29 June a mob dragged him out of the church where he was celebrating Mass, stripped him of his finery and hacked him to death. They then looted his caravan of goods and cash worth about £4,000 [£2.5 million] and sacked the monastery, while others despoiled his palace at Salisbury.
Other senior churchmen found themselves under attack around this time. Only their armed retainers saved the Bishops of Bath and Wells, Coventry and Norwich, and the Abbots of Gloucester and Hyde, from sharing Ayscough’s fate. Intriguingly, the king’s close friends Reginald Boulers, Abbot of Gloucester and soon to be Bishop of Hereford, and John Sutton, Baron Dudley, fled for sanctuary to Richard of York’s castle at Ludlow.
It is telling that – with the exception of Hyde (today in Greater Manchester) – all these attacks took place in areas where Lollardy remained strong. Lollardy was also strong in Sussex and Essex, but not so in Kent or Surrey, the counties that provided the majority of Cade’s followers. Their anger was triggered less by the wealth and corruption of the church than by the thuggish behaviour of royal officials and their agents, and was exacerbated by the influx into these counties of destitute soldiers evacuated from Normandy.
The events we have been reviewing merely caused the cup of unrest to overflow – it had been filled by an economic contraction that began in the late 1430s and ran on until the 1480s. The north and Wales were hit by several harvest failures and the decimation of livestock, which sharply reduced income from rents. The south was adversely affected by a slow collapse of trade across northern Europe, mainly as a result of war. English cloth exports fell by over a third at the end of the 1440s, with the West Country particularly hard hit. The incomes of those who murdered Ayscough and looted Church property in Wiltshire had quite recently fallen precipitously, escalating chronic resentment of ecclesiastical tithes and excessive wealth to a peak of murderous hatred.