by Hugh Bicheno
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Marguerite and Henry
Henry VI’s situation in 1457 mirrored York’s, on a larger scale. Decades of fiscal irresponsibility had shrivelled his possibilities of exercising patronage, although he remained the fount of the judicial powers that might be exercised to buttress the ‘good lordship’ of his loyalists. However, if York’s inability to protect his own followers had diminished his authority, it paled beside the towering fact that the murder of the king’s most eminent supporters at St Albans remained unpunished. Few had respect for Henry as a man, or any faith he would keep his word, or honour the tallies littering the country.
Henry’s struggle to employ his inadequate resources and negligible personal authority to palliate the confrontational determination of his queen is, I believe, the reason why, in the words of York’s biographer, ‘the tone of English political life in 1457 is… peculiarly elusive’.*1 Henry believed, beyond reason, that it was still possible to negotiate a peaceful settlement of the blood feuds born at St Albans. Consequently York was not entirely excluded from favour, with financial compensation promised for the loss of the Welsh castles, and the award of one or two profitable privileges that cost the crown nothing.
In March, York’s appointment as Lieutenant of Ireland was renewed, six months before it was strictly necessary, along with a payment on account of £446 [£283,656]. This must have been in the form of a tally, as by this time the court was subsisting almost entirely on credit. There may have been an element of wishful thinking involved, with Henry entertaining the hope that York could be persuaded to exercise his kingly pretensions in Ireland, as Warwick’s restless ambition was now focused on Calais. Ireland, however, offered no comparable attractions.
The truth, squarely faced by Marguerite but intolerable to her husband, was that nothing he did could fill the void of authority created by his compound personal deficiencies. For a man so profoundly convinced that God’s will was paramount, he must have believed his troubles were akin to the biblical trials of Job by Satan. Deprived of everything he previously enjoyed, Job utters one of the most famous biblical aphorisms: ‘The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord’. Thus also Henry, desperately hoping that if he, too, steadfastly maintained his faith in the face of adversity, he would be rewarded.
During 1457–8, therefore, the king resisted pressure from Marguerite to take a harder line with York. Henry spent most of 1457 in the queen’s Midlands domain, yet he was clearly not under her control, even though this was widely perceived to be the case. No doubt there were tense scenes in the royal apartments at Kenilworth, but Marguerite knew better than anyone that once her husband was set on a course of action, the peculiar workings of his mind were impervious to argument. She would also have been haunted by the ever-present fear that, if pushed too hard, he might withdraw once more into catatonia.
The emergence of the royalist faction during this period was characterized by the fundamental contradiction between a quietist king and an activist queen. It was precisely analogous to driving with the brakes and accelerator applied simultaneously. The only question was whether the brakes would burn out before the motor exploded – but neither outcome could avoid a wreck.
To take the brakes first, the product of Henry’s prayers and consultation with his confessor, the Carmelite monk John Stanberry, Bishop of Hereford, was the ‘Loveday’ of 24 March 1458. The good faith of Stanberry, whose diocese covered much of the ancestral Mortimer lands that were York’s Marcher stronghold, was at this time still respected on both sides of the factional divide, and probably no one else could have brought the rival nobles together. York and the Nevilles would not have trusted Henry’s unsupported word that they were not simply being lured into an ambush.
Henry summoned a Great Council of the entire peerage to meet in Westminster on 27 January, to discuss a wide range of governance issues, leading up to a settlement of the vendettas born at St Albans. York and Salisbury arrived separately to stay at their London palaces, but as they rode out together to the opening session of the Council, surrounded by over 1,000 guards, they encountered a hostile demonstration by a larger number of retainers wearing the livery of Somerset, Exeter, Clifford and Egremont. The two groups were kept apart by a special force of 5,000 armed men that the king had prudently commissioned the Lord Mayor to recruit and equip.
Other nobles, including Warwick (who arrived from Calais with 600 men), were late in coming and Henry withdrew to Chertsey, 25 miles south-west of Westminster, for a week. After Warwick arrived, the king returned to Westminster to declare the main purpose of the Council was ‘to set apart such variances as been betwixt divers lords of this our realm’. Discussion of the core issue, St Albans, was again postponed until the arrival of Northumberland. On 26 February the king withdrew even further, to the queen’s castle at Berkhamsted. There, he granted an audience to the aggrieved lords, and another to Northumberland when he arrived.
The details of the deal eventually agreed are revealing. York was to pay Somerset 5,000 marks [£2.12 million], Salisbury was to forgo the fines of 9,000 marks awarded to him against the Percys for their breaches of the peace and Warwick was to pay Clifford 1,000 marks. The only reciprocal undertaking was that Egremont’s conviction and his escape from Newgate were set aside in return for posting a 4,000 mark bond to keep the peace. The payment York agreed was far from onerous – it was made with royal tallies owed for his lieutenancy, and he was granted a licence to export wool on his own account to a customs value of 10,000 marks, of which about half would be profit.
No doubt similar arrangements were made with regard to the Nevilles’ indemnities. Simply put, they were bribed to accept a semblance of culpability for the St Albans killings. Contrition was to be shown with an annuity of £45 [£28,620] to pay for a permanent chantry for the souls of those killed at St Albans, in the abbey church where they were buried. A single payment of £45 was made before these arrangements were overtaken by events.
The terms were published on 24 March, the day the proceedings were crowned by a procession from Westminster to St Paul’s in which Warwick walked hand in hand with Exeter (presumably in representation of the Percys and Clifford), Salisbury with Somerset, and York with the queen. In an age that attached great importance to symbolism, the king had arranged a pageant unequivocally reserving the role of arbiter to himself alone, casting the queen, who should have walked by his side, in the role of one of the plaintiffs.
During the remaining months of 1458 Henry resumed his peregrinations. Immediately after the ‘Loveday’ he spent three weeks at St Albans abbey, to which he returned for a month in September–October, and again for ten days in March 1459. There can be little doubt he went there to pray that the spirits of his uncle of Gloucester, dishonoured by his authority, and of the men who died for his mistakes in May 1455, should rest in peace and cease troubling his realm. Shakespeare was no historian, but his three-part Henry the Sixth portrays the tragic fate of a man born to a role no amount of prayer could make him competent to play:
O God! methinks it were a happy life,
To be no better than a homely swain.
The ‘Loveday’ did not, indeed could not, answer what Humpty Dumpty rightly posited as the only question of importance: ‘which is to be master – that’s all’. One gets tired reading the ceaseless invocations of God to witness their loyalty to the king from men who were evidently disloyal, and constrained from seizing power only because they were deeply distrusted by almost all their peers. Most histories have portrayed the following eighteen months as a period in which the queen forced the issue, yet the issue – and the force – were entirely of the Yorkists’ making. With regard to Marguerite, the French saying ‘this animal is very wicked: if you attack it, it defends itself’ springs to mind.
There was a limited amount Marguerite could do when shackled to a supine king, but she had proved adept at shaping the political environment to strengthen her husband’s hands, should t
hey cease to be clasped in prayer. Amid a sea of uncertain loyalties, the seldom savoury but usually sound maxim ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’ compelled her to work with men hated by York, among them the egregious Wiltshire and the infamous Thomas Tuddenham and William Tailboys. They used the same techniques to raise money for the cash-strapped court they had employed during Suffolk’s ascendancy.
The giving of royal consent to noble marriages and the granting of wardships were areas in which the queen’s influence was undisputed, and she made full use of it. In September 1456, she arranged the marriage between the namesake heir of Thomas Courtenay, Earl of Devon, and Marie of Anjou, illegitimate but dearly loved daughter of her brother Charles, Count of Maine. Devon, whose alliance with York had brought him little but grief, was ripe for plucking because the Nevilles favoured Bonville, his mortal enemy. He died on his way to the ‘Loveday’ Council, and his son became one of the queen’s unconditional supporters.
Although Margaret Beaufort, Edmund Tudor’s teenaged widow, negotiated her own marriage to Buckingham’s younger son Henry, it required royal approval and the price was the queen’s wardship of the infant Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond. Margaret was a considerable heiress in her own right, but the Richmond estates were a strategic royal asset and needed stronger wardship than Henry Stafford could provide. Marguerite entrusted it jointly to Henry’s uncle Jasper, Earl of Pembroke, and to John Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, Lord Treasurer and the senior lay member of the Prince of Wales’s council.
The desire to drive a wedge between York and the Nevilles, which had led to Warwick becoming the virtual lord of Calais and Lord High Admiral in all but name, seems to have lain behind Marguerite’s consent to the marriage in April 1457 of her 15-year-old ward Isabel Ingoldisthorpe to John Neville, Salisbury’s second son. Isabel had eight manors in East Anglia from her recently deceased father, and was also co-heir of her childless uncle by marriage John Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester, previously and briefly married to Cecily Neville, dowager Countess of Warwick. The expected benefit to John Neville from this marriage can be measured by his agreement to pay the queen £1,000 [£636,000] in ten instalments.
One of the more intriguing matrimonial alliances made at this time was arranged between York and Alice de la Pole née Chaucer, widow of the murdered Duke of Suffolk. She remained, as she had been before she married Suffolk, an acquisitive landowner in her own right, with estates in twenty-two counties. Although the dukedom had been revoked, her only son John was still an earl, and Alice remained a member of the Order of the Garter, a lady-in-waiting to Marguerite, and castellan of her castle at Wallingford. Fifteen year-old John de la Pole was the most eligible bachelor in the kingdom, and his marriage in early 1458 to York’s 13-year-old daughter Elizabeth was a highly significant political event.*2
The most noteworthy matrimonial initiative of this time came in late 1458, with a proposal for multiple marriages with the French and Burgundian royal houses for the Prince of Wales, York’s eldest son Edward, and Somerset. It did not proceed beyond a preliminary embassy by John Wenlock, lately Speaker of the House of Commons. Although he had extensive diplomatic experience, he was not of sufficient stature to lead such a high-level mission and King Charles VII sent his own herald to London to assess the seriousness of the proposal.
His findings were startling: after meeting with Warwick in Calais, Wenlock had totally subverted the peace-making purpose of the mission by stirring up trouble between Burgundy and France, and by falsely reporting to his own government that a French attack was imminent. Application of the ‘who benefits?’ test suggests Warwick saw that the embassy, if successful, would undermine his own status as the indispensable man in the confrontation with France. Wenlock’s emergence as a committed Yorkist in 1459 strongly suggests Warwick bribed him to make sure the embassy failed.
The Wenlock mission marked the abandonment of the queen’s gamble that Warwick might be tempted to break with York, to pursue power and glory on his own account. Marguerite was now faced with a monster of her own creation, and the possibility cannot be dismissed that she authorized an attempt on Warwick’s life in November 1458. The attack took place at Westminster after Warwick responded to a personal summons from the king under the Privy Seal. Along with his father and York, Warwick had ignored a previous, more general summons to a Council in which, among other matters, his predation of neutral shipping in the Channel and the failure of Wenlock’s mission were to be discussed.
The details of the episode were, of course, disputed. According to the court, Warwick got caught up in a fracas between his retainers and the Westminster kitchen staff. He agreed that the incident took place in the kitchen, but said it was a carefully prepared ambush in which the would-be assassin, posing as a cook, lunged at him with a roasting spit. There are two good reasons to believe Warwick’s version was correct. The first is that several of his retainers were killed and he only got away thanks to the intervention of other lords. The second and conclusive reason is the presence at the scene of the royalist thug Thomas Tuddenham, who was later rewarded by promotion to treasurer of the household.
Warwick escaped by boat down the Thames, and never returned in peace. The Lancastrian version of what followed is that he, Salisbury and York had previously agreed a plan whereby Warwick would make a sudden advance from Calais to capture Kenilworth, to support a charge of conspiracy to kill the royal family and to seize the throne. The conspiracy had to have been hatched before the attempt on Warwick’s life, because if not the fuse for war was lit in the Westminster kitchens.
Further dominoes fell steadily in 1459. As the household had done in 1450, so now the queen orchestrated a campaign of disinformation designed to convince Henry that York and his allies intended his downfall. There is no evidence of any such conspiracies, the least believable of which implicated Alice, Countess of Salisbury. Possibly aware of how he had been manipulated nine years earlier, Henry refused to be panicked into precipitate action.
The queen, meanwhile, put the young lions on standby and prepared to recruit her own army in the name of her son in Cheshire, by issuing the knights and squires of the shire the swan livery badge of Henry V’s Bohun mother. He had adopted it when he was Prince of Wales, and it was talismanic to English chivalry.
Finally, even appeaser-in-chief Buckingham was convinced. He accused York, the Nevilles, the Bourchiers, the Bishops of Ely and Exeter and several others of conspiracy at a Great Council summoned to Coventry in June 1459. Two Acts, unfortunately lost, were passed, but the king refused to sanction the recommended punishments. In a staged melodrama, Buckingham and the loyalist lords knelt before him and begged:
Seeing the great jeopardy for your most noble person, and also [seeing] the Lords so often charged, and disturbing so often the great part of your Realm, that it should not please you to show grace hereafter to the said Duke of York, nor none other, if they attempt to do the contrary to your Royal estate, or disturbing your Realm and the Lords thereof, but to be punished as they deserve, and have deserved, for the good of You, Sovereign Lord, and for the good of all your Lords and people.
Henry indicated his assent, and with it all the offences supposedly wiped clean by the ‘Loveday’ were back on the table. Salisbury and York began to gather forces respectively at Middleham and Ludlow, and Warwick prepared an expedition. The Yorkists issued repeated professions of loyalty, and assurances that they were acting in self-defence. For Henry, this must have been all-too reminiscent of the events leading up to St Albans, and the king could only conclude that another coup d’état was in preparation.
Were the Yorkists, as they declared, simply acting in order to pre-empt further false accusations leading to their condemnation and attainder? The assumption that such measures were likely to be taken was an entirely reasonable one. By this stage the only thing that could restore the political standing and financial credit of the Lancastrian dynasty was a massive acquisition of lands and wealth. The lands of the duchy of York and the earldo
ms of Salisbury and Warwick would have fitted the bill nicely.
Faced with a similar situation, Richard II doomed himself by dispossessing Henry VI’s grandfather Henry Bolingbroke, but the precedent was ignored. One of the constants of history is how effortlessly people persuade themselves that, however disastrous a particular course of action was when first attempted, they will achieve a favourable outcome by doing exactly the same thing again.
The Nevilles agreed to join York at Ludlow for two reasons. The first was that York was a royal duke, and still a figure around whom those discontented with the king’s government could be expected to rally. The second, however, was that his standing in the Welsh Marches had been successfully undermined by the 1452 and 1457 assizes, and his Marcher affinity was understandably reluctant to sign up for what might prove another Dartford. The arrival of strong contingents from the North and from Calais would provide concrete evidence that, this time, York was not isolated.
This time, however, what we may now regard as the Lancastrian faction was alert and prepared, and Henry gave evidence of an unwonted purposefulness. Whatever methods of persuasion Marguerite used to urge her husband to take decisive action – on past form some encouragement in the bedchamber would have been involved – he now dressed for war, and for a month led his army in the field, not merely as a show of force but with the clear determination to bring his enemies to battle.
*1 From P. A. Johnson, Duke Richard of York 1411−1460.
*2 John de la Pole had previously been married to 7-year-old Margaret Beaufort in 1450. Henry VI declared the marriage annulled in 1453 when he bestowed her wardship on Edmund Tudor, who married her himself.
Entr’acte
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The English Way of War
Our story now moves from a mainly political to a preponderantly military sphere, and a brief digression now will save much explanation later. It is relatively easy for the modern reader to relate to the dynamics of ambition, pride and the bonds of kinship and affinity we have been reviewing. Medieval warfare is another matter.