by Simon Schama
All this was still not enough to make Henry IV feel secure. There were risings in support of the deposed king, and as long as Richard was alive he could expect them to continue. In all likelihood, ‘Sir Richard of Bordeaux’ was starved to death in Pontefract Castle, a truly horrible way to die but one that ensured there would be no compromising marks on his body. For the whole point of Henry’s elimination of his predecessor was that his body should be publicly displayed as a pre-emptive strike against hard-core Ricardian supporters. So the long, slow journey south from Pontefract Castle was orchestrated by Henry in a display of staggeringly disingenuous concern. In London the body was borne on a black bier with the arms of St Edward and St George on the side. But it was not, of course, destined for the mausoleum at Westminster. A requiem mass was said in St Paul’s and the body was taken to the Dominican abbey at King’s Langley in Buckinghamshire, where it remained for the rest of the disturbed and unstable reign of Henry IV.
Even more peculiarly, it was his son Henry V (who had served with Richard in Ireland, where he had been praised by the king) who had Richard’s body exhumed and re-interred in Westminster in the gilt-effigy grandeur Richard had already planned for himself before his deposition. Perhaps Henry V had inherited his father’s guilty conscience. Perhaps he hoped, in vain as it turned out, that somehow the wounds of the contending parties might finally scar over and heal.
And during his brief reign it looked, for a while, as if this might happen. With Shakespeare’s gorgeous rhetoric forever ringing in our ears, it’s impossible not to think of Henry V first and foremost as a warlord. But the lesson he took from the mistakes of his predecessors was that to survive and prosper, a king of England needed to be both messiah and manager. And in the managerial department, Henry was undoubtedly chief executive, knowing when to stamp on the inevitable quarrels of the magnates and when to stroke them into assent. To the Church he was the most assiduous and consistent patron since Henry III, and he possessed, in spadefuls, the critical psychological skill of making everyone in his immediate circle, beginning with his brothers, feel trusted and honoured. Unlike Richard, who seemed to conceive of the realm as an extension of his own persona, Henry evidently made the political community confident that the king’s business was also the country’s. So he managed without too much difficulty to extract from parliament taxes that were, in fact, far heavier than those that had triggered the Peasants’ Revolt! Of course, the stunning victory over a much larger French army at Agincourt, the annihilation of much of the French military nobility and the humiliation of their king did help. The streak of native pugilism that Shakespeare catches was not, in fact, missing from Henry’s campaign. The dispatches from France were written and publicized, for the first time, in English, and the London Company of Brewers noted that: ‘our most excellent King Henry hath procured the common idiom to be recommended by the exercise of writing and greater part of the Lords and Commons have begun to make their matters noted down in our mother tongue.’ When Henry came home after Agincourt, an immense ‘joyous entry’ was staged in the streets of London. Hosts of angels, prophets and apostles rained hosannas on the dark-haired, pale-faced, unnervingly sober king, the personification of the miles celestis (the anointed knight of heaven): a king perfectly capable of lecturing abbots on their proper Christian duties, a St George and a Galahad wrapped up in one unbeatable package.
Unbeatable, of course, except by King Death. For Henry’s premature death from dysentery in 1422 at the age of thirty-five was every bit as disastrous as all the histories now and then lamented. Of course, it is entirely possible that even had Henry V lived, he would eventually have run into the same troubles experienced in the disastrous reign of his son, Henry VI. There would have come a time when the French, smarting from a treaty imposed under duress, would have rejected the son of Henry V and Queen Katherine and would have gone to war, Joan of Arc or no Joan of Arc, to recover their lost provinces. The king – whoever he was – would then have been obliged to come to parliament for yet more subsidies and taxes, and without an unbroken string of victories would have met the inevitable resistance. That being said, it was plainly a poor prospect for the realm to have yet another child on the throne. And as Henry VI grew, it became evident that his child-like naïveté was not going to go away. So there came again all the old miseries – waves of the plague; a huge debt, partly incurred by the king’s irresponsibility; a peasant rebellion in 1450; and the conspiracies of magnate factions determined to capture the king for their own ends.
The chaos and anarchy of the period known as the Wars of the Roses was (as many of Shakespeare’s characters in the history plays argue) the poisoned fruit of Bolingbroke’s coup d’état. He had shown that a junior branch of the royal family could overthrow the legitimate king, and once the precedent had been set, the English aristocracy went at it with a will.
There are only two ways to feel about the Wars of the Roses. Either the endless chronicle of battles, of the entry and exit of kings, of hasty shipboard departures and even hastier coronations seems one of the great epics of English history, or the same story leaves the reader slightly numbed. If the latter, the temptation is to write off the entire sorry mess as the bloody bickering of overgrown schoolboys, each with their miniature armies or ‘affinities’, whacking each other senseless on the fields of Towton, Barnet and St Albans; a dance of death to a tune played by the Earl of Warwick, ‘the Kingmaker’. But there was something at stake in all the mayhem, beyond the bruisings of toughs and toffs, and that was the need to make the English monarchy credible again and to re-solder the chain of allegiance that had once stretched from Westminster to the justices of the shires and the jurors of the villages and that had been snapped by the fate of Richard II. The major players in the wars were, of course, only too acutely aware of this, wanting their survival to depend on something more than cheques made out to Warwick and the temporary possession of coercive force. But they divided into managers and messiahs rather than uniting them in the same personality like Henry V.
Edward IV was emphatically a manager, who believed he could finesse his authority through patronage, some of it conveyed to the Lancastrian family of his wife, Elizabeth Woodville. But there were also petty messiahs: Edward’s father, Richard, Duke of York, who seemed to believe he had been called by the Almighty to restore England’s dignity, and his youngest son, Richard of Gloucester, whom we have been conditioned to think of as either the incarnation of a godless villain or (by impassioned devotees) as a northern hero vilely defamed by Tudor propaganda.
In reality, Richard III was much more interesting but also much more sinister than either of those stereotypes allow, being not a godless but a godly fanatic, devoted to wiping out the unworthy, beginning with Edward IV’s in-laws, and his own inconvenient nephews, so that he might institute the reign of piety and justice in England: Henry V in a crazy-castle mirror. It was Richard who took improbable offence at what he thought was his brother Edward’s gross immorality – insisting that he was living in sin with Elizabeth Woodville – and who forced Edward’s mistress, Jane Shore, to parade through London as a common harlot. When Richard was killed at Bosworth Field, the country was saved not from a monster of corruption and depravity but from a puritan martinet.
The historians who began to busy their quills with apologias for Henry Tudor and his dynasty were at pains to represent the Wars of the Roses as one long nightmare, from which only the Tudors could release a grateful nation, a country torn from top to bottom, a pitiless field of carnage in which, as in Shakespeare’s histories, fathers were capable of killing their own children and vice versa. But in the middle of it, an intelligent French observer, Phillipe de Commynes, could claim in the 1470s (a decade in which the crown changed hands three times) that of all the countries he had known, England was ‘the one where public affairs were best conducted and regulated with the least violence to the people’. Commynes grasped an essential fact about the fifteenth century: that the battles affected only a
small part of the country. Remarkably for medieval warfare, there were almost no protracted sieges and few dreadful marches in which the helpless countryside was put to the torch. While the peerage of England slaughtered each other, the rest of the country got on with living.
Yet perhaps, as in so many instances in British history, we have over-corrected. For while the Black Death was still more of a terror for most people than the Earl of Warwick, the humiliation of the Crown and its impotence in the face of the over-mighty and the over-armed did filter down to conditions of local lawlessness. A petition of parliament to Richard III complaining of the perversion of government under Edward IV is not, of course, a disinterested document, but there was still something authentic about its lament that ‘this land was ruled by self-will and pleasure, fear and dread’. Great holes certainly had been torn in the fabric of authority, both by plague and by anarchy, and the spaces that opened up could be seen either as exciting opportunities or as frightening voids.
No family typified this high-risk, high-gain, knife-edge world of late medieval England better than the Pastons of northeast Norfolk whose letters – the earliest such surviving correspondence in English – have miraculously been preserved in brilliant vividness. They document the extraordinary change that could transform a single family against the backdrop of local anarchy, distant battles and the plague, which returned with a vengeance in the 1460s and 1470s. The founder of the Paston fortunes was Clement, mentioned in village records as a plain ‘husbandman’ – in other words, a peasant. But before he died in 1419 Clement had been able to profit from the labour shortage to make the kind of bargain with the lord of the manor that ensured his small prosperity. A power in the village, he might have served as ale-taster or constable, but his great achievement was in getting enough money to buy his son William a legal education and having the shrewdness to understand that it was through education as much as land that the family fortunes would be advanced.
William Paston did indeed become a lawyer, married into money and moved into Oxnead Hall, one of the grander houses in the county. In short order, he became the king’s man in his parish and indispensable to absentee landowners in the management of their local estates. His son, John, followed his father in the law and was now sophisticated enough to befriend Sir John Fastolf, alas, neither plump nor jolly but a wealthy veteran of Henry V’s wars and rich enough to leave a hoard of gold plate and jewels, including a ‘great diamond’ in a white rose, and lord of Caister Castle. Before long, John Paston was a trustee running Fastolf’s little East Anglian empire of manors in Suffolk as well as Norfolk. When he became Sir John Paston and inherited Caister, he had completed the family’s meteoric rise from peasant to knight of the shire in just three generations.
Nothing is ever quite this easy. As long as the Pastons were obscure nobodies, the bloody carnage of the Wars of the Roses was someone else’s problem, but as soon as they became rich and influential, they also became targets for the heavies, and no one was heavier than the Duke of Norfolk. One of the countless thugs of his ‘affinity’ who was running a small private army, the Lord Moleyn, drove John’s redoubtable wife, Margaret Mautby, out of Gresham Manor while her husband was away in 1449 – ‘myned down the walle of her chamber where she was and bare her out of the gates’. ‘Please it Your Highness,’ John wrote to Henry VI, ‘if this great insurrection, riot and wrongs and daily continuance thereof so heinously done against your crown’s dignity and peace . . . should not be duly punished it shall give great boldness to them and all other misdoers to make congregations and final destruction of your liege people and laws.’ In 1469 Norfolk himself, who had always coveted Caister, came to get it. Margaret wrote in anguish to her eldest son: ‘I greet you well, letting you know that your younger brother and his fellowship stand in great jeopardy at Caister.’ She was clearly desperate. But she was also very angry and, a few lines on, let her son, John, have the rough edge of her tongue: ‘Every man in this county marvels greatly that you suffer them to be . . . in so great jeopardy without help or other remedy, the greatest rebuke to you that ever came to any young gentleman.’ John the younger, it seemed, had other fish to fry since he was busy trying to find an even grander heiress at court, a woman ‘right nigh of queen’s blood’. In the meantime, however, Margaret had no alternative but to surrender the castle to the greedy Duke of Norfolk. It took a seven-year legal battle, including direct appeals to Edward IV, before the family was reinstated at Caister. And the vindication did John little good. In 1471, in the midst of a terrible plague epidemic, he wrote home fearfully asking for news: ‘This is the most universal death that I have ever witnessed in England. For by my troth I hear from pilgrims who travel through the country that no man who rides or goes in any country or borough town in England is free from the sickness.’ No more was he. Later that year he too died.
The Pastons survived all those setbacks to settle down as a well-to-do power in their corner of Norfolk. And that would have been true for countless other Englishmen and women like them. They were, above all, survivors. They somehow managed to survive the plague, dethronements, civil war and local outrages. They became accustomed to the nerve-wracking knowledge that affairs of high state were in constant commotion. But they also knew that the courts at Westminster (in whoever’s name) still dispensed justice in Common Pleas and King’s Bench, Chancery and Exchequer. Twice a year, when the assize came through, they could, if need be, still air their grievances. They could still expect marks of consideration, to serve time as justices and to send their sons as esquires, preferably to less embattled households; and when times were easier they might even be called to court to bathe in the affable smiles of Edward IV.
The first century of the plague had seen the country turned upside down. In the twilight years of Edward III it seemed that nothing could damage the greatness of the Plantagenet royal estate. But the world of the village went from impoverished claustrophobia to traumatized infection. A hundred years later, everything had been up-ended, courtesy of King Death. Although some historians have thought the fifteenth century a ‘slump’, characterized by depressed trade and shrinking agricultural incomes, the evidence of fine country houses, like the Wealden houses in Kent, built not for great magnates but for local gentry and yeomen, hardly seems to bear this out. Kings came and went, but the men of the village, the same kind of men who had marched on London in 1381 and who had burned the Savoy to the ground, were now on their way to becoming squires. They knew what the worst was – an outbreak of the plague that would carry off the babies and the children or a rampage by the knights from over the next hill. But they also knew that with equal measures of prudence and prayer they would get through it.
So a visitor to an English village around 1480 would see what we now expect to see in such a place but that had never been there before: a church handsomely rebuilt in the solid, economic elegance of the Perpendicular; for the first time an alehouse with a name, such as ‘the Swan’ or ‘the Frog’; and at the heart of the cluster of houses a grand and handsome dwelling for the biggest tenant farmer in the area. This was no longer just a glorified wattle-and-daub single-bay hut but a miniature manor house, with its own hall and servants to wait on the master and mistress, a buttery at the back, a cellar below and private retiring chambers.
Out of the fires of pestilence and bloodshed had come, then, that most unlikely example of survival: the English country gent.
CHAPTER 6
BURNING CONVICTIONS
YOU DON’T NOTICE the ghosts, not right away. At first sight Binham Priory looks much like any other East Anglian country church: limestone and limewash, plain and simple. But then you look again and sense something else lurking behind the innocent façade. The multistoried arcades and the round window high on the west wall seem much too grand for a parish church. And then you begin to see things that are no longer there: stained-glass windows, wall paintings, a great rood crucifix. The emptiness fills. The vaulted space becomes a forest of faith. An arde
nt, coloured, noisy world begins to press in, a world of monks and masses, of plainsong and pictures: the world of Catholic England.
For centuries this phrase didn’t sound strained. ‘Catholic England’ was just another way of saying Christian England. But then, in two generations, it stopped being a truism and started being treason. Images of the Virgin, the saints and the apostles, once glorified and cherished, were mocked and vandalized. At Binham the rood screen supporting the hanging crucifix was decorated with graceful pictures of the apostles. Come the Reformation, those images were expunged and covered up by texts from the English Bible. But time can work miracles. The lost souls sent wandering by the obliterators have returned, peeping through the letters of the Gospel like prisoners on the other side of a barred window, trapped, but not yet disposed of.
It’s no good reaching out for ghosts. If you were so inconsiderate as to try to touch them, the Binham apostles would flake away into nothing, just as the world in which they were at home resists restoration. But it is because the death of that world was so unexpected, so shocking and so improbable, and because the Reformation and the religious wars it triggered cut so deep a mark in our history that the surviving fragments need to be reassembled into a big picture. Only then might it be possible to answer one of the most poignant questions in the nation’s history: whatever happened to Catholic England?