Battle Royal

by Hugh Bicheno

  Marguerite’s greater strength lay with the bishops, several of whom owed their promotions to her influence. Firmly on her side were Archbishop William Booth of York, previously her chancellor, and her confessor Walter Lyhert at Norwich. Beckington at Bath and Wells, Percy at Carlisle, Boulers at Lichfield and Coventry, Chedworth at Lincoln and Dorchester, Kemp at London, the king’s confessor Stanberry at Hereford, and Wainflete at Winchester were all king’s, and by extension queen’s men. They controlled vast wealth, and Bishops Booth and Percy were also authorized to maintain armed forces.

  The Yorkists could count on only one bishop, Salisbury’s brother Robert Neville at Durham, although Salisbury obtained the election of his youngest son, 23-year-old George, to Exeter in November 1455. The Duke of Norfolk, the Earl of Worcester, Viscount Bourchier and Barons Clinton and Cobham supported them, but the rest of the secular peerage was at best lukewarm. The blatant insult to the king’s majesty at St Albans was impossible to overlook, and weak national government suited most lords very nicely. Their principal concern – devoutly shared by the bishops – was to avoid the tax increases that any attempt to recover England’s empire in France must require.

  The Yorkists’ first order of business on returning to London was to establish a justification for their actions. Parliament grudgingly accepted a patently false story about the Yorkists’ just petitions being kept from the king, with Somerset, his deposed nominee as Commons Speaker Thomas Thorpe and another low-ranking household member made the scapegoats. A popular gloss was applied by the posthumous rehabilitation of the Duke of Gloucester – and the promise to settle his debts, left unpaid after his assets were seized by the crown and distributed by Suffolk.

  The second priority was to allocate the offices made vacant by the death of Somerset, with the plums going to Warwick. He was appointed Lieutenant of Calais and was given three castles on the border of Monmouth and Abergavenny, consolidating his south Wales holdings. Viscount Bourchier replaced the fugitive Wiltshire as Lord Treasurer, and his youngest son Edward got Kidwelly Castle in Carmarthen. Lords Fauconberg and Berners, who had been with Henry at St Albans, were made joint Constables of Windsor Castle, where it was expected the king would reside. He chose not to, once again demonstrating that in small matters he could still do as he wished.

  Salisbury seized the opportunity to obtain a judgement in his favour over the Oxfordshire estate of the abeyant barony of Camoys, in the wardship of the crown since 1426. Also, the prosecution of the Percys for their attacks on Salisbury’s interests in 1453–4 went ahead and they were fined 9,000 marks [£3.8 million], which they could not pay. He also made sure that the payments due to him as Warden of the West March continued to be paid promptly, while the new Earl of Northumberland found it more difficult than ever to collect for the East March.

  By contrast with his Neville and Bourchier allies, York once again pointedly refrained from rewarding himself or his affinity. He replaced Somerset as Constable of England and of the largest royal castles in Wales, but these were necessary adjuncts for a protectorship. The reason for his forbearance is not hard to identify. The new crop of MPs were certain to insist on a radical resumption of crown revenue sources before they would vote new taxes, and York did not want to find himself obliged to seek exemptions for himself or his affinity. With the Lords sceptical of his motives and intentions, he needed the Commons on his side.

  This was admirably nuanced politics on York’s part; but it was incomprehensible to his peers and to his loyal followers. What was power for, if not to enrich yourself and your friends? To the despair of those who wish human nature were other than it is, people may respect but never love an austere ruler. It is the reason why politicians who make promises they know cannot be kept routinely defeat those who attempt to tell the truth about the allocation of limited resources. York’s lofty integrity was his Achilles heel – and Marguerite knew it.

  She was determined he should not be made Protector again, since to do so would acknowledge the king was incompetent even when not catatonic. Unfortunately for her, a tacit consensus was forming that Henry was ‘unworldly’. How else could he be absolved of personal responsibility for humiliating defeats abroad and borderline anarchy at home? Sovereignty could not, at this time, be detached from the person of the sovereign himself, and an unfit monarch posed a constitutional conundrum not finally resolved until Parliament judged Charles I guilty of treason and detached him from his head two centuries later.

  With the king not free to act, and York unable to act with the king’s authority, there was a power vacuum during the six months between St Albans and the appointment of York as Protector on 17 November 1455. Disorder surged, notably in the West Country, but it requires a deep faith in conspiracy theories to believe, as the queen and her party did, that any of it was engineered by York to bring about his appointment. That was indeed the outcome, but correlation was not causation in 1455 any more than it had been in 1450.

  Although he had been with the king at St Albans, York’s long-time supporter Devon judged the moment opportune to re-open the Courtenay–Bonville feud, to the point of open warfare. However, although this was the immediate cause of York’s appointment, Devon was a chronic loose cannon and had reasons of his own. Backing York in 1452 had cost him dearly, and over the following years Bonville had replaced him as the leading magnate in the West Country. Devon’s attempt to regain royal favour explains why he was on the losing side at St Albans. Now he had less than ever. The final straw came when Devon’s cousin, Philip Courtenay of Powderham Castle, married his son to Bonville’s daughter.

  In late October 1455, retainers led by Devon’s son murdered Nicholas Radford, Bonville’s senior councillor, and in early November Devon himself, at the head of 1,000 men, threw Bonville’s men out of the royal castle at Exeter. The castle had been traditionally held by the earls as hereditary sheriffs of Devon, but the king had appointed Bonville to punish Devon for backing York in 1452. Devon now marched south to besiege Powderham, while Bonville gathered forces at Shute, his stronghold. Devon marched back through Exeter to confront him, and on 15 December smashed Bonville’s army at Clyst Heath. He then vengefully sacked Shute, lost to Bonville by his marriage to Devon’s aunt.

  York himself owned land in Devon but, mindful of how he had been humiliated after resolving the last outbreak of Courtenay–​Bonville violence, he would do nothing unless specifically empowered to do so by Parliament and the king. The first protectorship did not provide a precedent, as it lapsed automatically when the king recovered his faculties. The king suffered some kind of relapse in late 1455, but York resisted appointment on the same terms as before. On 10 November, a Great Council of Lords appointed him the king’s lieutenant, but the Commons refused to conduct any other business until a Protector was formally appointed to resolve the situation in Devon. The only candidate was York.

  He was duly appointed on 17 November, having obtained the terms he wanted. These were that a Council should be nominated ‘to whose advice, council and assent I will obey and apply myself’, and that his appointment should last until Prince Edward came of age, or earlier if revoked by the king ‘with the assent of the lords spiritual and temporal in Parliament’. Of the eight lords elected to form the protectorate Council, the Archbishop of York and the Bishop of Norwich were out-and-out queen’s men, and the Bishops of Rochester and Ely were neutral. The others were the royalists Buckingham and Lord Stourton, balanced by Warwick and Viscount Bourchier. If York believed this would reassure the queen he did not mean to act against her interests, his hope was misplaced.

  One of York’s first actions as Protector was to quell the private war raging in the West Country. A letter signed by the king was sent ordering all involved to ‘obey [York] and keep his commandments as you would and ought to obey us as if we were there in our own person’. Bonville immediately appealed in person to the king, who told him to submit to York. Devon continued his siege of Powderham but was eventually arrested and broug
ht to London, where he spent some time with York before being brought before the protectorate Council. Devon and Bonville were imprisoned, not by the king or York, but by the Council, a constitutional novelty that in better times might have prospered.

  In a reversal of the situation during Henry’s period of catatonia, the queen now rejected compromise. York had backed the Commons’ demand for a radical resumption and, once the immediate issue for which he had been elected was resolved, she used the issue to rally the lords against him. The first – and much quoted – reference to Marguerite’s newly prominent political role was made with reference to her actions at this time. One of the Paston Letters, dated 8 February 1456, describes her as ‘a great and hard-working woman who spares no pains to pursue her interests with the purpose of increasing her power’.*1

  The Lords brought the king to Parliament to repudiate resumption and to receive York’s resignation as Lord Protector on 25 February 1456. York immediately left London, and we can readily imagine his thoughts. Resumption was unquestionably necessary to restore solvency to the royal finances, and there had never been any suggestion it might impinge on the endowments of either the queen or the Prince of Wales. The queen’s actions, therefore, must have been dictated by personal animosity, without regard for the national interest.

  York then got into man-think. Whence came Marguerite’s fury? It must be because Somerset had been her lover, and she was irrational with grief. It would not have occurred to him that a nubile young woman might have made a cold political calculation to forgo a short-term gain for a longer-term objective. The next, short hop of reasoning was perhaps coloured by York’s own matrimonial experience: his people begin to circulate rumours casting doubt on the paternity of the Prince of Wales.

  Taking away York’s formal title did not diminish the need for his services, because St Albans had cured Henry of any illusion that he could be a strong leader. In a decision we may be sure infuriated his wife, the king retained York as his chief councillor and sent him north to deal with a new threat from Scotland. The Battle of St Albans had persuaded King James II the time was ripe to renew the ‘auld alliance’ with France, and he wrote to Charles VII proposing concerted action to seize, respectively, Berwick and Calais. To muddy the waters, James also announced that York was the rightful king of England, before declaring war and sending raiding parties across the border. Marguerite would have believed York engineered the whole episode – but Henry did not.

  In the absence of support by Charles VII, James scuttled back across the border after York moved to his stronghold at Sandal Castle in Yorkshire and issued two stern warnings, the first in Henry’s name and the second in his own. Meanwhile the queen took the prince with her to Tutbury in Staffordshire, the westernmost of the triangle of castles at the heart of her Midlands dower, leaving Henry behind. It was an intimate power play and in late August, Henry left London to join her at Kenilworth Castle, outside Coventry, impregnable within its man-made lake, but which Marguerite ostentatiously equipped with additional artillery. A further twenty-six long guns (serpentines) would be brought from the Tower in 1457.

  Since York, Salisbury and Warwick were all busy about the king’s business at the time, it is worth pondering the motives behind Marguerite’s retreat to the Midlands. It is hard to escape the conclusion that she was dramatizing a non-existent threat – although she may have convinced herself it was real – to pressure Henry into taking a harder line with York. Her message could not have been clearer: only she could take care of her husband, and he should trust no one else.

  The inevitable result of the semi-permanent removal of the court to the queen’s Midlands was to indicate distrust of London, which, however deserved, in the end turned out to be a gross strategic error. That, perhaps, is more apparent in hindsight than it was at the time. Marguerite would have had in mind her uncle Charles VII’s ability, as dauphin, to rally support at Bourges after his father lost Paris. Unfortunately it was a false analogy. London was more central to the life of England than Paris was to France. It was by far the largest city, not only the political but also the commercial capital, and the hub of all the Roman roads that still provided the country’s principal highways.

  Marguerite completed her counter-coup at a Great Council summoned to Coventry on 16 October 1456. In the presence of York and Salisbury, the Bourchier Lords Chancellor and Treasurer were sacked and replaced by Bishop William Wainflete and John Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury. The late Archbishop Kemp’s man Lisieux was dying, and he had previously been replaced as Lord Privy Seal by Laurence Booth, the queen’s chancellor and younger brother of the Archbishop of York.

  Having control of the Privy Seal permitted Marguerite to appoint the officers of her son’s estate. John Morton, a previously obscure doctor of civil law, became the prince’s chancellor, while the ultra-loyalist Viscount Beaumont became his chief steward, as he already was the queen’s. Other offices were filled by members of Marguerite’s household.

  On 28 January 1457, a formal minority council was set up for Prince Edward, which a month later was given control of his patrimony: the principality of Wales, the duchy of Cornwall, the county palatinate of Chester and select parts of the duchy of Lancaster. Chester and the northern duchy estates were complementary to the queen’s Midlands dower, a factor that will help to explain some of her subsequent initiatives.

  The ecclesiastical members of the council were the queen’s former chancellor Archbishop Booth of York, the new Lord Chancellor Bishop Wainflete, the king’s confessor Bishop Stanberry of Hereford, Bishop Boulers of Coventry and Lichfield, and her chancellor Laurence Booth, the new Lord Privy Seal, who was made Bishop of Durham when Salisbury’s brother Robert died later in 1457. Three of the six lay members were the king’s new Lord Treasurer Shrewsbury, Beaumont again, and Lord Dudley who, like Boulers, had been a member of the king’s inner circle since he first assumed personal kingship.

  The other three were the Lancashire magnate Lord Thomas Stanley, Humphrey, Earl of Stafford, and, as Treasurer, James Butler, Earl of Wiltshire, whom the Yorkists would have killed at St Albans if they had managed to lay their hands on him. Stanley’s lordships and royal stewardships were also complementary to the prince’s Cheshire estates. The appointment of Stafford, Buckingham’s heir, was clearly intended as a gesture to smooth the duke’s feathers, ruffled by the dismissal of his Bourchier half-brothers, without bringing in the reluctant duke himself. Wiltshire’s appointment was equally clearly a defiantly rude gesture towards the Duke of York and, at this early stage, surprisingly provocative.

  Thus, less than two years after St Albans, Marguerite had totally outmanoeuvred York to set up a parallel government responsive to her will. Nobody questioned her right to act as regent for her son, which she turned into a de facto regency for the kingdom. She controlled the greater part of the unencumbered royal revenues, and all of Henry’s senior officials were now hers as well. The bureaucracy in London, as well as the unruly London mob, had been disempowered, and she was free to develop a compact affinity in areas where loyalty to the crown, and to her person, ran deep.

  What she lacked, and to her sorrow always would lack, was someone to fill the office much better described in the Game of Thrones saga by George R. R. Martin’s invented ‘Hand of the King’ than by ‘lieutenant’ or ‘constable’. Of the dukes, Buckingham was insufficiently partisan, Exeter too wild and the 20-year-old Somerset too young to be her champion. The Earls of Shrewsbury, Northumberland and Wiltshire were old enough at 39, 35 and 34 respectively, but they would have pursued their personal vendettas against York and the Nevilles without sufficient regard for the queen’s overall strategy.

  For all the mystique of divine right, the Yorkists had demonstrated at St Albans that power ultimately depended on brute force, intelligently applied. For all her political skill, Marguerite was disqualified by her sex from overtly leading the royalist faction because, until very recently, combat has always been an exclusively masculine activity. She
needed a loyal man of rank with brains as well as brawn – and she never found him.

  *1 The actual words are ‘a grete and strong labourid woman spareth noo peyne to sue hire things to an intent and a conclusion to hir power’.

  XV

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  Lord of Calais

  St Albans was the moment when the younger Richard Neville, known to history as Warwick ‘the Kingmaker’, first took centre stage. He was to remain there for the next sixteen years. His rise is bound up with Calais, the English outpost across the Channel surrounded by the Duke of Burgundy’s domains. While the military significance of the enclave is apparent, unless we fully appreciate its economic, strategic and diplomatic importance we cannot understand why Warwick once said he would give up all his lands in England if he could keep Calais.

  The Calais garrison was the English crown’s only standing army, and the outpost itself was virtually impregnable. It was protected to the east by the undrained marshes of the Aa River. The marshes to the south and west were drained, but where the drainage canals emptied into the sea, the Newenham bridge, guarded by Nieulay fort, provided the only road into the town.*1 Under the bridge were sluice gates that could be used to flood the approaches. The canals were a barrier to an attack through the counties of Ponthieu and Boulogne to the west, while a fort at Hammes and a castle at Guînes guarded the wooded hills to the south.