Battle Royal

by Hugh Bicheno

  Bringing Talbot into government was cunning. Although he was a party to the Beauchamp inheritance imbroglio he was a rival to Somerset in the matter of the barony of Bergavenny. Also, although he was brother-in-law to Wiltshire/Ormonde, whom York had just brushed aside as Lieutenant of Ireland, Talbot’s marriage to Ormonde’s sister had been an attempt to heal the feud between their respective fathers. It was very much in York’s interest to revive it by giving Talbot, who had inherited his father’s fierce temperament, an Irish bone to chew on.

  What York did not do was enrich himself, or show favour to his affinity. Unfortunately his allies Norfolk and Devon completely misread him, and took his appointment as a green light to settle scores with those who had encroached on their local supremacies under Suffolk and Somerset. These were very tricky issues and York appears to have handled them informally, presumably by appealing to Mowbray and Courtenay not to make his job more difficult.

  He was probably not too exercised by Courtenay’s renewed attack on Bonville, because the latter, as seneschal of lost Gascony, was waging a naval war against French shipping, which included seizing French cargoes carried by neutral ships. His actions were denounced as piracy by the Duke of Burgundy, who retaliated by putting an embargo on the Calais wool trade through his surrounding counties of Artois and Flanders.

  Burgundy’s embargo actually gave York some much-needed leverage in the Calais impasse, as it dawned on Rivers and Welles that their continued rejection of the Protector’s authority could get them included in the accusation levelled against Somerset, their patron, of a treasonous intent to sell Calais to Burgundy. The loss of Calais would have been devastating to York’s protectorship, but even if Somerset considered it a price worth paying, Rivers and Welles knew it would cost them their heads.

  One problem York did not have to deal with was hostility from the royal household. In recognition of the reduction of the king’s needs to doctors and carers, the money voted for his household was drastically reduced – but the reduction was matched by a corresponding increase in the votes for the households of the queen and the Prince of Wales. Marguerite, of course, controlled both, and was also the beneficiary of substantial transfers of assets, cleared of encumbrances by resumption, from the duchy of Lancaster to her son’s endowment. She could not be regent for the king, but nobody questioned her right to be regent for their son. While Henry remained catatonic it made her a major player in her own right.

  Perhaps most notably, York did not make any effort to proceed to the impeachment of Somerset, although he successfully resisted efforts to release him on bail. It is reasonable to assume he could have obtained the necessary articles from a Commons in which Somerset’s erstwhile supporters were anxious not to draw attention to themselves, so why did he not? One reason would have been to avoid being seen as vindictive, but another may have been because the queen asked him to let sleeping dogs lie.

  One of the most valuable primary sources for this period is contained in the commonplace book written in Latin by the priest John Benet. The duke, he wrote, ‘governed the entire kingdom of England well and honourably for a whole year [actually nine months], and miraculously pacified all rebels and malefactors, in accordance with his oath and without great severity’. Allowing for Benet’s Yorkist bias, this is still a fair summary. York had achieved as much as he could have realistically hoped, not least the mutually respectful modus vivendi he worked out with the queen.

  *1 The fifth item probably concerned her custody of the prince and matters to do with his upbringing.

  XII

  * * *

  Henry

  Henry VI emerged from catatonia at Christmas 1454 and within weeks destroyed the neutral royal centre painstakingly constructed by Marguerite and York. He had no memory of anything that had happened in the interim and so, disastrously, resumed personal kingship as though he had never relinquished it. Worse, he overcompensated for once more having abandoned his duties as a king and a man, and tried to act as he imagined his father would have done. On finding the queen had coped very well without him, he foolishly spurned what she had achieved and tried to turn back the clock.

  We may feel some residual sympathy for the wretched man because of his mental condition, but there can be none at all for the fecklessness of his conduct in the following months. He acted as though he were still riding high after humbling York, the bogeyman created by his panicked entourage in 1450, and was deceived by the rejoicing at his recovery into believing it reflected widespread dissatisfaction at the way the country had been governed in his absence. Perhaps so, but there was no less widespread awareness that York had been honest and even-handed, qualities the king’s personal kingship had always conspicuously lacked.

  Rescued from political eclipse by his recovery, Henry’s inner circle nurtured his delusion and urged him to make his priority the release of Somerset, their leader. He was duly freed on 26 January 1455 by the king’s warrant. In truth, he had been detained for too long without formal charges, and when the Great Council reassembled on 5 February it declared his continued detention violated the clause against arbitrary imprisonment in the Magna Carta. The bishops had been vocally uneasy about this for some time, and the Council might well have insisted he be formally impeached or released even if York had still been Protector.

  As soon as Somerset was back at Henry’s side his priority was to ensure his survival should the king lapse back into catatonia. A second York protectorate would finish him, so he had to destroy his rival as soon as possible. As a first step, on 4 March Somerset persuaded Henry to dismiss all criminal accusations against him, recasting the remainder as civil suits to be decided by an arbitration panel. The panel included the now rabidly anti-Yorkist Wiltshire/Ormonde, but its findings would be irrelevant because the king stated he believed the matters left pending were vexatious suits, without merit.

  On the same day York, who had resigned the protectorship as soon as the king’s recovery was confirmed, was dismissed as Captain of Calais and Somerset restored to the office. Three days later, on being ordered to release Exeter from Pontefract, Salisbury refused to do so and resigned as Lord Chancellor. Without seeking licence to do so, York and Salisbury withdrew to their estates in Yorkshire. Warwick, who resigned from the Council on 5 February, had already gone north, probably to Middleham. When he joined his father later, it was with a contingent led by Robert Ogle, whose family held several castles in Northumberland and had a history of bitter rivalry with the Percys.

  On 13 March, Henry ordered his new Chancellor, Archbishop Bourchier, to release Exeter from Pontefract, ludicrously stating that he had only been imprisoned because of ‘sinister information made upon him by certain persons not well disposed’. Two days later he dismissed Tiptoft as Lord Treasurer and appointed Wiltshire/Ormonde in his place. Egremont and his brother had defied the king before his catatonia, and so remained in Newgate, but this was scant consolation to the Nevilles. The king could not have made his ill will towards York and anyone associated with him any clearer.

  If Henry had appreciated the need for conciliation he would have given Somerset a blanket pardon and a golden handshake, and made Humphrey Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, his chief minister. It is worth examining why he did not. Fifty-three years old in 1455, Stafford was descended from Edward III’s youngest son, was married to Anne, one of Salisbury’s sisters, and was half-brother to the Bourchiers. With estates in twenty-two counties producing an annual income of about £5,000 [£3.18 million], roughly the same as York’s, he had a large affinity and could have played a much more prominent role in affairs of state than he did.

  Stafford had served with Henry V and was knighted by him in 1421. Despite marrying one of Cardinal Beaufort’s nieces, as a member of Henry’s minority Council from 1425 he was not a partisan in the cardinal’s rivalry with the Duke of Gloucester. Made a Garter knight in 1429, in 1431 he returned to France with the king and was involved in several military operations as governor of Paris, Constable o
f France and Lieutenant-General of Normandy. He was also made Count of Perche, worth 800 marks [£340,000] a year.

  It must have been galling to Stafford when York, nine years his junior and with negligible military experience, was appointed Lieutenant of Normandy in 1436. However, the appointment was made not only because York was a prince of the blood, but because he also had possession of his estates and could afford it, whereas Stafford’s mother controlled all except £1,250 [£795,000] of his landed income until her death in 1438. After Stafford came into the whole of his inheritance he was made Captain of Calais in 1441, and in 1444 he was made Duke of Buckingham.

  As we saw in Chapter 4, York had been stung in 1436–7, and he negotiated financial conditions permitting him to relinquish the lieutenancy when the money stopped coming. Although Stafford, too, had previously experienced difficulty in getting the money he was due from the exchequer, he did not take the same precaution. He loyally completed his ten-year Calais appointment, even though for the last few years he had to pay the garrison out of his own pocket. Having in the meantime lost the income from Perche, he was owed over £20,000 [£12.72 million] in 1451, and had managed to collect less than half of it by 1455.

  Not, one would have thought, an experience likely to make Stafford’s heart grow fonder of the feckless king. Yet he remained devoted to him, and his loyalty was rewarded. We have seen how, having connived as Constable of England in the disgraceful downfall of Gloucester, he received the duke’s magnificent palace of Penshurst in Kent. He was also made Constable of Dover and Warden of the Cinque Ports, which, together with his captaincy of Calais, should have made him the dominant lord in Kent. Cade’s revolt had revealed this was not the case, and may explain why he did not enjoy the king’s confidence.

  Stafford was loaded with offices but continued to have difficulty collecting the salaries supposed to accompany them. His eldest son married one of Somerset’s daughters, but the dowry was never paid, and it did little to increase his influence at court. His wife was made godmother to Prince Edward, but he seems to have held aloof from Marguerite’s attempt to construct a non-partisan centre. In sum, if we look for a reason why Henry did not even consider Buckingham as a compromise chief minister, it is that the duke was taken for granted but not taken seriously. The clever ones in his family were his Bourchier half-brothers.

  Following the absolution of Exeter in March 1455, events moved rapidly to a bloody climax and other magnates took sides. John Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk, inherited 150 properties across twenty-five counties, but outside East Anglia none formed a sufficient concentration for him to develop a significant local affinity. He also suffered from chronic bad health, the given reason why he did not attend the Council after Henry’s recovery. Forty years old in 1455, he was the son of Katherine, Salisbury’s eldest sister, and was married to Eleanor, full sister to Viscount Bourchier and the new Archbishop of Canterbury.

  Norfolk inclined to York because the king’s party included 46-year-old Viscount Beaumont, who held large estates of his own in Lincolnshire, Leicestershire, Norfolk and Suffolk, and had married Norfolk’s widowed mother. It galled the duke that, as a result of the marriage, Beaumont enjoyed the fruits of more than a third of Norfolk’s patrimony. Beaumont had been one of York’s councillors before 1450 and was not closely associated with Somerset, but he was a lifelong friend of the king, and head of his much-reduced household during 1454.

  The motives of 38-year-old William FitzAlan, Earl of Arundel, and 47-year-old John Vere, Earl of Oxford, are more obscure. Arundel was married to Salisbury’s eldest daughter, which inclined him to support his father-in-law, but he was a cautious player who went with whatever tide was flowing during the whole period of the Wars of the Roses. Oxford had been an ally of Norfolk against Suffolk and disliked Somerset, and in the early stages of the conflict followed the example of the prudent Arundel. Later, for reasons of his own, he made some fatally bad choices.

  Among the barons, in addition to Lord Cromwell, whose landed income was as great as an earl’s, two of the most powerful were Thomas, Baron Clifford, and Thomas, Baron Roos. Clifford’s lordships were adjacent to Neville strongholds in Cumberland, Westmorland and Yorkshire, and he had backed Egremont’s attacks on Neville manors in the north-west. Roos, with the oldest continuous title of nobility in England, held Helmsley in Yorkshire, Belvoir in Lincolnshire and other estates in Leicestershire. Eleanor née Beauchamp, his widowed mother, had married Somerset, and consequently Roos was involved in the Beauchamp inheritance imbroglio. Roos had supported the rebellion by Egremont and Exeter, and became one of the most tenacious enemies of the York–Neville alliance.

  The event that did most to crack the body politic irreparably was Salisbury’s and Warwick’s gamble that the king’s incapacity would be permanent. When this proved not to be the case a wiser king would have offered them a way back. Instead, by unconditionally embracing Somerset and all he stood for, Henry doomed him. Somerset continued to believe York was his principal enemy, but it was the Nevilles, whose power and fortune depended on royal favour, who most needed him dead.

  In mid-April the king summoned a Council to which York, Norfolk, Salisbury and Warwick were not invited. The small gathering voted to convoke an exceptional Council at the queen’s borough of Leicester on Whitsun (25 May), with the stated purpose of providing for the king’s safety. Messengers were sent far and wide to pack the Leicester Council with regime loyalists, something York and the Nevilles would have known about before they received their own summons.

  They could not construe it as anything other than an attempt by Somerset to repeat the charade engineered by Suffolk to bring down the Duke of Gloucester. Assuming, with some justification, that the deliberations of the exceptional Council were likely to place them in mortal danger, York and Warwick gathered their retinues and prepared to march south – to prevent Henry from reaching Leicester.

  The king, however, seems to have believed they would tamely submit. We can take this either as evidence of simple-mindedness, or else as a manifestation of the assertive, over-confident state of mind with which he had emerged from catatonia. Right up to the moment war arrows began to hammer into his entourage, Henry was convinced York and the Nevilles would not dare use violence against their ‘king anointed’. Somerset seems to have concurred, and as a result grossly overplayed his hand. The stage was now set for the first military encounter of the Wars of the Roses.

  We are better informed about the run-up to the first Battle of St Albans than for any other battle of the Wars of the Roses.*1 The evidence is partial and often contradictory, but the details are insignificant beside the astounding fact that the king’s entourage was unprepared for combat, even after the king raised his banner. To unfurl the royal standard was to declare that those against whom it was displayed were rebels and traitors. It was an action demanding immediate and unconditional submission – or war.

  How could such a dislocation of cause and probable effect have come about? Even if Henry, who knew nothing of war, did not fully appreciate its significance, the experienced warrior nobles around him would have fully understood what raising the standard meant. The only possible reason why most of them were not in full harness when the attack came was their shared belief that an outright assault on the king’s person was unthinkable.

  It was only the last of a series of miscalculations by Henry and his retinue. The first, the decision to relocate the exceptional – and handpicked – Council to the Lancastrian Midlands, arose because of concerns about Somerset’s unpopularity in London and a concomitant uncertainty that he could control the outcome of a normal election. The second was their assumption that the retainers summoned by York and the Nevilles were intended merely for a show of strength at Leicester. Only on the eve of departure from London, when the king received a letter from York at Royston in Hertfordshire, did they awake to the possibility the royal party might be intercepted before reaching Leicester.

  The Roman roads radiating out of Lo
ndon were still the main highways of the realm at this time, as was the pre-Roman Icknield Way, which linked Ermine and Watling Streets laterally. The high road from London to Leicester necessarily passed through St Albans, where the king wished to spend the night and to pray at the shrine of the martyr, towards whom he had a particular reverence. He may also have wished to pray for the soul of the Duke of Gloucester, victimized in his name, whose tomb was next to the shrine.

  Somerset had earlier summoned loyalists to come to Leicester with armed retinues, but now he sent messengers urgently requiring them in the king’s name ‘to be with us wheresoever we be in all haste possible’. The departure from London could not be delayed if the royal party was to arrive at Leicester by Whitsun, but the choice of the Watford over the more travelled Barnet road was probably made to get further away from the Great North Road, down which York and the Nevilles were presumed to be marching. A second letter from York and the Nevilles, sent from the Neville manor of Ware on 21 May, seemed to confirm it.

  It was a deception – by the time the letter arrived at Watford in the early morning of 22 May, York and the Nevilles were marching west through Hatfield towards St Albans. Somerset must have presumed as much, for he now argued strongly that the king should remain at Watford until reinforcements arrived. A large contingent led by the Earl of Shrewsbury was two days’ march away, while the Earl of Oxford, Lord Cromwell and Lord Stanley had also indicated they would join the king shortly. On the other side, the Duke of Norfolk was also closing in on St Albans in support of York. None of them arrived in time, and Shrewsbury was probably the only one who really tried.