by Hugh Bicheno
After London shut its gates to him at the king’s command, York took his force, which included artillery, south of the river and established a fortified camp at Dartford in Kent. He may have expected the Kentish men to rally to his standard, but if so he was disappointed. Only Devon and Cobham were with him. Ranged against them were the Dukes of Buckingham, Norfolk, Exeter and Somerset, the Earls of Salisbury, Warwick and Shrewsbury, the viscounts Bourchier and Lisle, the Bishops of Winchester and Ely, and a dozen barons including the veteran Scales and the new creations Bonville and Stourton.
The ensuing negotiations were designed to grant York and his confederates a face-saving formula to escape a charge of treason. They were permitted to submit their accusations against Somerset – which were dismissed by an arbitration panel packed with the king’s men − a royal pardon for their followers was agreed, and then York had to kneel before the king in St Paul’s cathedral on 10 March and swear a humiliating oath of allegiance (my italics):
I, Richard Duke of York confess and acknowledge that I am and ought to be a humble subject and liegeman to you, my sovereign lord, King Henry VI, and ought therefore to bear you faith and truth as my sovereign lord... [and when summoned] to come in humble and obeisant manner. I shall never hereafter make any assembly of your people without your command or licence, or in my lawful defence. In the interpretation and declaration of my lawful defence, I shall report at all times to your highness...
York undertook to confine himself to his own estates and departed for Ludlow on the 24th. He was compelled to depart for Fotheringhay when the king came to Ludlow to conduct assizes after a judicial progress through Devon, accompanied by Bonville and Moleyns, to punish the Earl of Devon’s followers. At Ludlow tenants who had followed York were indicted and found guilty of treason before being told of the pardon negotiated at Dartford. It was a demeaning trick to play on men who had no choice but to obey their lord’s summons, and done to demonstrate York’s powerlessness.
York had to move again when Henry, accompanied by a retinue of lords including York’s erstwhile ally Norfolk, made a judicial progress through Hertfordshire, Cambridgeshire, Huntingdonshire, Northamptonshire and Lincolnshire. These areas had provided the bulk of York’s army at Dartford and the assizes at his boroughs of Grantham, Newbury and Stamford were harsher than at Ludlow. At least one man suffered a traitor’s death and his quarters were displayed in Yorkist towns.
Sadly for Marguerite, her husband’s new-found self-confidence did not lead to a fresh start, but instead to a stubborn repetition of the mistakes of the past. He had learned nothing from the debacle in 1450 and the survivors of Suffolk’s regime were permitted to resume the old pattern of abuses. Objectively, Somerset had fulfilled his function and should have been let go after Dartford. Unfortunately Henry was unwilling, perhaps indeed psychologically unable, to deal with the stress of being a hands-on king and, once again, fell into the damaging error of over-investing in his chief minister. By delegating too much of his power to Somerset, Henry risked confirming to the world the correctness of York’s opinion of him.
The king awarded Somerset several benefits York had lost to resumption, including the lease of the Isle of Wight. York also lost offices he previously held, with the lieutenancy of Ireland going to his enemy Wiltshire, who had become Earl of Ormonde on the death of his father in August 1452. York’s office of Justice of the Forests south of the Trent went to Somerset in July 1453, the grant gloatingly stating it was for good service ‘on both sides of the sea’ to rub in the king’s opinion that he had done no wrong in Normandy.
At the same time the government did address some of the grievances that had shaken the country in 1450. An executive council was set up to manage the royal finances and to handle routine matters of administration, and the Commons became more amenable once the king was seen to be putting his house in order. They may also have been abashed that, after they refused to vote the money for Rivers’ expedition, Guyenne and Gascony had fallen easily to the armies of Charles VII in mid-1451.
The people of the conquered province had been governed by distant English kings for 300 years and resented their new overlords, who did not even speak the same language.*3 They sent emissaries to London and, with Parliament now willing to vote the necessary funds, an expeditionary force of 3,000 men was rapidly assembled by inspiring 66-year-old John Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, and sailed for Guyenne in October 1452.
Timing his assault to coincide with a rebellion by the citizens of Bordeaux, Talbot quickly seized the city, after which other towns and castles along the Garonne and Dordogne valleys fell like dominoes. Further funding was voted for 3,000 reinforcements led by his son Viscount Lisle, accompanied by Lord Moleyns, to face the inevitable French counter-offensive in 1453.
Given her husband’s over-investment in Somerset, it was probably Marguerite’s initiative to dilute the new favourite’s status by promoting two more princes of the blood. In late 1452 the king’s bastard half-brothers, previously commoners, were vaulted to earldoms. The elder, 21-year-old Edmund Tudor, was created Earl of Richmond, and his one-year-younger brother Jasper was created Earl of Pembroke. An Act of Parliament lifted the stigma of illegitimacy from them the following year.
Pembroke was no great prize, but the honour of Richmond was a wealthy endowment where the benefit of the king’s many manors had been granted for decades – with the promise of hereditary right – to Salisbury. Once again Henry was guilty of awarding the same patronage twice, with the added aggravation that Edmund Tudor was also declared the premier earl over the head of Warwick, to whom the king had awarded the status only a year earlier.
For a family as dependent on royal favour as the Nevilles, who must have been expecting reward for their robust support of the king against York, the promotion of the obscure – and Welsh – Tudors at their expense was a very unpleasant surprise. In conjunction with royal support for Somerset’s machinations with regard to the Beauchamp inheritance, however, it took on a far more sinister complexion.
Once confirmed in office Somerset wasted no time in attacking the rulings made in the Beauchamp inheritance case while he and Shrewsbury had been extricating themselves from Normandy. In typical Henrician fashion, two royal grants made to Warwick in 1450 were reversed in favour of Somerset in 1451. The first was the wardship of the minor George Neville, heir to the barony of Bergavenny; both awards were disgraceful, as they usurped the natural right of the boy’s father. The second was the office of Chamberlain of the Exchequer, awarded to Warwick before Christmas and given to Somerset a few months later.
Somerset and Shrewsbury also obtained a grotesque ruling on behalf of their wives that they were entitled to equal shares with their half-sister Anne, Warwick’s wife, of the dower lands of her – not their – mother. If Somerset thought he could simply take possession of over half the dower lands as well as the whole of the Bergavenny estate, he was mistaken. Warwick, in possession of both, let him know the only way he could get any of it was by force. Ordered to submit and surrender Cardiff and Cowbridge castles to the king’s friend Lord Dudley, Warwick refused him entry and increased their garrisons.
Taken together, the estates of Warwick and Salisbury put them on a par with the Dukes of York, Norfolk and Buckingham. Having made an embittered enemy of York it was breathtakingly foolish of Henry to alienate the Nevilles as well. One would be inclined to believe it was a case of the Somerset tail wagging the royal dog, were it not for the promotion from nowhere of the Tudor brothers, which was clearly not in Somerset’s interest. Marguerite simply did not appreciate that it would be perceived by the Nevilles as further evidence of a concerted royal plot to undermine them.
*1 Starting early in 1451, the queen began to pay him an annuity of £100 [£63,600] from her own exchequer.
*2 See Appendix D: The Beauchamp Inheritance.
*3 The Occitan languages of southern France have completely different roots from metropolitan French.
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Mitre and Crown
The elements of statesmanship that leavened the febrile squabble between the houses of Lancaster and York were largely the work of Cardinal Archbishop John Kemp, who became Lord Chancellor in 1450 and was promoted from York to Canterbury in 1452. John Stafford, his predecessor in both offices, had been Chancellor since 1432, but had been excessively accommodating to the Suffolk regime, even granting Lord Saye and the infamous William Cromer stewardship of all the estates of the Canterbury archbishopric.
Kemp was unsullied by association with the fallen regime and was also a notably able administrator. The pope had made him a cardinal-priest as early as 1439, and he had previously been Lord Chancellor in 1426–32. He was the obvious candidate to deal with the crisis of 1450, as he also was to succeed Stafford at Canterbury two years later, when Rome made him a cardinal-bishop. His only price was the appointment in 1450 to the bishopric of London of his (genuine) nephew Thomas, which had been opposed by Suffolk.
As we have seen, it was Kemp in combination with Marguerite who defused Cade’s Rebellion, and it was certainly he and not Somerset who introduced fiscal restraint and more rational administration through the new executive council, and won back the support of the Commons. It was Kemp who devised the face-saving formula that averted bloodshed at Dartford, and he was also instrumental in obtaining the taxes from the Commons and the clerical subsidy which had made possible Talbot’s initially successful expedition to Guyenne.
In sum, it was practically entirely thanks to Kemp that the regime won back a considerable degree of popular acceptance. When Parliament assembled at Reading in March 1453 it voted the king, for life, customs dues, increased wool subsidies and a poll tax on aliens (later revoked), along with the customary tax on the value of moveable goods (a fifteenth for rural and a tenth for urban areas). The last time the Commons had shown this much honour to their monarch was to Henry V after Agincourt. They even voted an additional three fifteenths and tenths to raise a force of 20,000 archers, an invitation for Henry to lead an army for the reconquest of the lost empire in France.
The emergence of Kemp as the regime’s saviour is perhaps the most unreported aspect of the crisis, and the reason is not hard to identify. Even today journalists report the easy stuff – the public doings of politicians – and hardly ever mention the senior permanent officials without whom the inadequacy of their political ‘masters’ would become apparent. Although historians may eventually be able to draw on the minutes of today’s confidential discussions, there were no such records in earlier times.
The Church’s moral and social power was in decline, but churchmen were valued as civil servants for a number of interrelated reasons. As the clergy were, in theory, celibate, there was less chance they would advance their families’ interests at the expense of the state. The priesthood was also a career open to talent, and provided a pool of literate and numerate individuals from which the monarchy and the aristocracy preferentially drew their clerks and accountants. They were the ‘technocrats’ of the Middle Ages.
Senior churchmen also represented a powerful constituency and were no less self-serving than today’s permanent officials. Since the 1430s the archdioceses of Canterbury and York, under constant pressure to finance secular government, had merged their convocations (assemblies). While most frequently summoned in response to royal requests for subsidies, ecclesiastical matters had also become subject to the approval of the convocation. The Archbishop of Canterbury, whose own see was relatively poor, was in a position vis-à-vis his bishops and lesser clergy somewhat akin to the king and his Lords and Commons.
Bishops played an active part in secular political life through membership of the House of Lords, and traditionally occupied two of the three most senior non-ceremonial offices of state. The first was the Lord Chancellor, Keeper of the Great Seal and Chief Royal Chaplain. He was not only the king’s senior adviser in matters spiritual but also the senior legal officer, without whom the business of government could not be conducted. The second was the Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal, the king’s personal signet, which travelled with him while the Great Seal remained in Chancery, the Lord Chancellor’s London office. Almost all non-judicial documents requiring the Great Seal were first warranted by the Privy Seal.
Beyond these office-holders we know little of the role of the clergy in government. Some questions are easier to answer than others. The relatively tiny diocese of Ely was prized out of proportion to its size in part because, like Durham, the Isle of Ely was a county palatine – one ruled by a magnate with special authority elsewhere possessed only by the sovereign. Its principal attraction, however, was that although it was only the fifth most richly endowed see, it had much the lowest outgoings. The handsome surplus could be spent to buy influence.*1
Bishops also enjoyed the rights by which a later age defined constitutional monarchy: to be consulted, to encourage, and to warn. Perhaps above all, the Church provided institutional memory and continuity. If to these attributes we add that about a third of the land in England was held by the Church, whose members were immune from civil or even criminal prosecution by the secular authorities, the wonder is not that a figure like Kemp should emerge in a crisis, but rather that it was not a more common occurrence.
Although most people compartmentalized religion apart from their worldly pursuits, everyone took it seriously. This had practical consequences. Throughout the Middle Ages, rebellion against the monarch was justified as an action taken against ‘evil councillors’ because the rebels had sworn allegiance to the king himself. When York finally articulated his claim to the throne he stressed the prior Lancastrian violation of divine order in a bid to absolve himself of the sacramental oaths he had sworn to Henry VI. Nobody was convinced.
Kemp would have disapproved of the king’s provocative assizes in the Yorkist heartlands and his support for Somerset’s perversion of legal process in his attack on the Beauchamp settlement. They indicate that after Dartford Henry was no longer paying as much attention as previously to his Chancellor’s political advice. Kemp did not tell the king what he wanted to hear, and could not prevail against a household of sycophants led by Somerset, a man even more rapacious and considerably less politically astute than Suffolk had been.
Then came a totally unforeseeable event, which threw everything into the melting pot and brought Kemp to the forefront again. On or about 7 August 1453, at his hunting lodge at Clarendon, east of Salisbury in Wiltshire, Henry VI went into a frenzy, followed by a deeply catatonic state from which he could not be aroused. The breakdown is commonly ascribed to his learning that Talbot and his son Lisle had been killed and their army destroyed at the Battle of Castillon on 13 July. Six weeks earlier, the news of the fall of Constantinople to Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II must also have been a terrible shock.
Henry may have been building up to a psychotic episode for some time. It would be in keeping with a diagnosis of schizophrenia that the harbinger of his catatonic withdrawal from reality was his acute sense of persecution in 1450, followed by his surrender of personal autonomy. Possibly Marguerite, alarmed by the purposeless agitation that characterizes the disease, suggested Henry should unwind at Clarendon, far from London, as he had in 1450 when she whisked him off to Bishop’s Waltham.
Henry’s collapse brought Kemp back into play. Although genuinely concerned to protect the dynasty, he had his own agenda. The king was effectively the supreme governor of the Church in England long before Henry VIII expropriated the monasteries and, like all European princes, regarded it as a dependable cash cow. After being ruthlessly milked by Henry V, the bishops had become accustomed to far greater indulgence under Henry VI. Consequently the bishops were even more anxious than most lay lords that cold-eyed York should not become the king’s chief minister, still less replace the king himself.
Over the coming months Kemp did all he could to buy time for Henry to recover. Although of supreme dynastic significance, the birth on 13 October 1453 of baby Edwar
d, the long-awaited heir apparent, did not address the immediate problem of governance. Marguerite chose Kemp and Somerset as the baby’s godfathers (his godmother was Anne, Duchess of Buckingham and older sister of Cecily, Duchess of York), but Kemp could not put himself forward as Protector, and Somerset lacked the prestige to do so.
Despite the fact that her uncle had just extinguished English hopes of recovering their empire in France, motherhood exalted Marguerite’s status and popularity – already high following her heroism in 1450 – to an extraordinary degree. Cecily, Duchess of York, captured the public mood in her letter of congratulations when she learned the queen was pregnant. It was, she wrote, ‘the most precious, most joyful, and most comforting earthly treasure that might come into this land and to the people thereof’.
Politically, however, there was to be a serious downside to the queen’s confinement (from which men were strictly excluded). For a month before the birth and for forty days after it Marguerite was out of the loop at a crucial time, when the severity of her husband’s incapacity could no longer be concealed and Parliament was becoming alarmed about the power vacuum it created.
What Marguerite and Kemp needed, and did not get, was domestic tranquillity. The Lord Chancellor could not provide executive leadership. Somerset could only act with the authority of the king’s warrant and could not forge one because the Privy Seal was under the control of Thomas Lisieux, Dean of St Paul’s and a Kemp protégé. The accepted role for the queen, as for any noble lady, was to intercede with her husband to prevent or repair injustice, and to reward faithful service rather than to punish transgressions. Unfortunately, even before Henry’s catatonia, transgressions were what had to be dealt with.