by Licence, Amy
The autumn days passed but the king did not improve. His absence was beginning to be noticed and those citizens and courtiers who believed in the real power of witchcraft feared he was the victim of some form of enchantment. Henry’s condition was dangerously suggestive of daemonic possession or the influence of maleficium, the Latin term for ‘mischief,’ or magic of evil intent. These were very real and active threats in the fifteenth century; it was believed that spells, chants and magic rituals could injure and even kill, as could the presence of evil spirits. In 1484, the Pope would issue a ‘witch-bull’ outlining the activities of witches and a manual of witch-hunting, Malleus Maleficarum, the Hammer of Witches, appeared in print. It was a subject that was given considerable credence and importance in late medieval logic. Only twelve years had passed since Eleanor, Duchess of Gloucester, wife of the heir to the throne, had been convicted of treasonable necromancy and paraded through the streets of London. She had finally died, in the summer of 1452, after spending the remainder of her life in captivity, the news no doubt stirring memories of her activities for the inhabitants of the capital. Priests may have been summoned to Westminster to pray for the king to overcome any evil spirits holding his soul and sanity in their grip. Making their devotions in the Abbey, they may well have brought holy relics, the consecrated host and phials of blessed water, across the short distance to the king’s bedchamber, or even conducted their ceremonies there.
Once the spiritual remedies had failed, the physical alternatives encompassed a range of painful possibilities. It was not unknown for patients to undergo the highly dangerous process of trepanning, when a hole was drilled into the skull to release humours or demons, as described in some contemporary medical tracts and images.3 Doctors might also use cautery; the application of heat in the same way that wounds were cauterized, in order to divert inflammation away from another part of the body, such as the brain. They also recognised the likelihood that his condition was genetic. Henry’s madness of 1453 may well have been inherited from his maternal grandfather, the French King Charles VI, who suffered from intermittent periods of mental illness, claiming different identities, being unresponsive and believing himself to be made of glass. As a result, France had become embroiled in political turmoil and power struggles; now the same fate threatened to befall England. In a deeply superstitious age, where the king’s health was held to be a mirror of the health of the nation, strong leadership was required to maintain peace and this illness was a potential disaster. It was imperative that his madness should be cured.
Writing in the sixteenth century, physician Andrew Boorde’s advice on the treatment of ‘them the whiche be madde and out of theyr wytte’ clarifies the dangerous overlap of medical understanding with superstition. He identified three different kinds of madness – lunatics, frantics and possessed ‘daemonics’ – but the regime to which they were all subjected sounds sufficient, to the modern mind, to ensure the total loss of any remaining sanity. Primarily, such individuals were considered a danger to others and should be kept in ‘savegarde … in some close howse or chamber where there is lyttell light’. The room must not have painted walls or hangings, nor pictures ‘for such thynges maketh them full of fantasyes’. Citing the case of a murderous maniac named Mychell, who killed his wife in a fit, Boorde advocates that the lunatic must be ‘allowed no knife or shears or girdle’ and be guarded over by a keeper ‘whom he fears’. No words must be spoken to him, except for ‘reprehension or gentyll reformacyon’. He must be shaved once a month, drink no strong liquor and eat a little warm meat and ‘moderate suppings’ three times a day.4 These instructions had unique implications when the sufferer was of royal blood. As an anointed king, Henry VI’s status as the ruler and protector of his people was undermined, for his lunacy transformed him into a potentially malignant force, with the resulting ramifications for his country. Frailty of any kind could potentially prove the downfall of a ruler; as Shakespeare’s Claudius states about his step-son Hamlet, ‘madness in great ones must not unwatched go’. If Henry had previously been considered a weak, easily led king, he never fully recovered from this redefinition, even after his madness abated.
Henry VI had inherited the throne in 1422, when he was only nine months old. His warmongering father was a hard act to follow, even if his son had been a grown man on accession. Revered as a hero in his own lifetime for his victory at Agincourt and the conquering of vast swathes of French territories, Henry V had contracted dysentery and died suddenly at the age of thirty-five, fulfilling his own brother’s prophecy that he was ‘too famous to live long’. The baby’s inheritance was a dubious one. Having been engaged in expensive wars for over the eponymous Hundred Years, the country had amassed a wealth of foreign properties which the boy felt obliged, by the memory of his father, to maintain. The young Henry VI was crowned in England 1429 and then, as King of France, at Notre Dame in 1431, following the burning of Joan of Arc. His two uncles, John, Duke of Lancaster, and Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, whom Henry V had appointed Regent and Lord Protector and who oversaw his upbringing, had died in 1435 and 1447 respectively. After that, keeping a foothold in the many English territories abroad was to prove difficult. And it was a difficulty the young man did not seek. By nature he was gentle and unworldly, unable or unwilling to make decisions and easily manipulated; he had no inclination for the martial arts or desire to prolong a state of war. One condition of his marriage to Margaret of Anjou in April 1445 had been his agreement to relinquish the provinces of Maine and Anjou to France, a clause that was initially kept secret and was as controversial as expected when it became public knowledge in 1446. By 1451, the English-held territories in Normandy, Bordeaux and Gascony had been lost through the incompetence of Edmund Beaufort, the Duke of Somerset, as Commander of the French Campaign. In 1453, the final blow came when English forces were routed at Castillon, marking the traditional end of the Hundred Years’ War. It may be that this loss precipitated Henry’s collapse. The royal finances were also in disarray with huge debts being owed to the Court’s suppliers. On one infamous occasion, the royal family sat down to dine, only to be told there was nothing to eat! The royal routine continued, ‘but payment there was none’, causing additional, unpopular taxes to be levied.5 An anonymous chronicler of the 1460s described the king as ‘simple and led by covetous council and owed more than he was worth’. Many attributed this mismanagement, as well as much of the bad decision-making of the 1450s, to the king’s unpopular favourites. Now that John, Duke of Lancaster, and Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, were out of the way, a number of ambitious English noblemen saw their opportunity to pull the strings of government. Many of them clustered around the real power behind the throne, Henry’s young wife, Margaret of Anjou.
The young queen found herself in an awkward position at the onset of Henry’s illness in 1453. As a couple, they were temperamentally very different. According to their contemporary, Henry’s adviser and Carthusian monk John Blakman, the king was pure, truthful and devout; he rejected the immodest fashions of the day and frivolous pastimes in favour of reading the scriptures and worship. Famously, he was scandalised at the sight of naked bathers and desired them to be clothed, disliking the fashion that allowed the female neck to be exposed. His views on sex were equally prudish and his confessor continually advised him not to have ‘his sport’ with the queen. Margaret, however, was young, intelligent, energetic and beautiful; at the time of her marriage, when she was fifteen, she was ‘already a woman, passionate and proud and strong-willed’.6 She conceived after almost eight years of marriage and the inevitable rumours implicated the unpopular Duke of Somerset as the potential father. As Henry lay incapacitated, he may have heard the screams of his wife, coming from her apartments in the Palace, when she went into labour that October. The child proved to be a boy. After his birth, Edward of Westminster was shown to the king for his blessing on New Year’s Day 1454, but Henry said nothing. He merely looked at him and cast his eyes down again, supposedly refusing t
o acknowledge the child, although this may have been more to do with his inability to communicate. When he did finally recover, the following Christmas, he expressed surprise at the existence of the infant, whom he said must have been conceived by the Holy Ghost. Others at court favoured a different explanation.
Somerset had already replaced Margaret’s previous ally, William de la Pole, Earl of Suffolk, who had met an untimely death on board a ship on his way to exile in 1450. These favourites were felt to have an undue influence over a young man who was unsuited for kingship and was content to let others fill his regal shoes. Now that Henry VI had fallen ill, Margaret and her faction were in a position to assume almost complete power over the invalid and, by extension, her son. It appeared that the same conditions that had caused chaos in France were about to disrupt England’s already fragile monarchy. Factional rule, bankruptcy and national humiliation over French losses led to public calls for reform and retaliation against those considered culpable. Civil conflict was looming; in 1450, Jack Cade had headed a rebellion against the ‘false council’ of Henry’s advisers but his death had not silenced the widespread complaints of the day. Chaos seemed to lurk just over the horizon. Boorde’s suggestion that a madman required a ‘feared keeper’ was a difficult one, too: who would be prepared to rule the king in his incapacity and what would happen to them in the event of Henry’s return to health? Several prominent candidates emerged at the Westminster Court, including the Duke of Somerset, whose own claim to the throne was not inconsiderable. However, there was another duke, whose inheritance placed him even closer in blood to the king, who was not prepared to stand by and watch his rivals dominate. The challenge that he mounted to them in the 1450s stemmed partly from bitter personal rivalry but was also for the wider ‘common weal’, which he saw as being adversely affected by the current status quo.
Ambitious and driven, Richard, Duke of York, was head of the Plantagenet family. The rivalries of the fifteenth century stemmed, in part, from Edward III fathering so many children and now the order in which three of those sons had been born was of crucial importance. First had been Edward, the Black Prince, whose early death meant his son Richard II had become king in 1377, next in line was Lionel of Antwerp, Duke of Clarence, and finally, John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster. In 1399, Richard II had been deposed and murdered by the Lancastrian line of descent through Gaunt, which had placed his son, Henry Bolingbroke, on the throne as Henry IV. In turn, he was succeeded by his son Henry V and grandson Henry VI. However, as the great-great-grandson of the second Plantagenet sibling, Lionel of Antwerp, Richard of York should have taken precedence over the claim of this younger branch of the family. It also placed him before Somerset, another cousin as a result of the descent from John of Gaunt he shared with the king. York considered he had been passed over unfairly because his claim was carried through the female line, rather than the all-male exclusivity of the Lancastrians, which was thought superior. Additionally, his family had suffered disgrace when he was a child. His father’s title and lands had been attainted after his involvement in a plot against Henry V but when the boy’s uncle died at Agincourt, the four-year-old was allowed to inherit the Dukedom of York. Before Queen Margaret gave birth in October 1453, York was the heir to the throne and had previously attempted to assert his rights for the ‘common weal’: he was rumoured to have been responsible for Suffolk’s death in 1450 and later marched on London, intent on dislodging the other unpopular favourites. The rivalry between York and Somerset had become increasingly personal when Beaufort had replaced his cousin as Lieutenant of France in 1448, after which the majority of the remaining English possessions there had been lost. York blamed Somerset for this and attempted to oust him from power but his rival had tricked him into being captured, forcing him to promise not to take up arms again. York’s subsequent appointment as Lieutenant of Ireland had briefly removed him from the scene but now he was the leading duke of the land and the man to fill Henry VI’s shoes.
Despite their common ancestry, the contrasts between the duke and the king could not have been more profound. York was ambitious, organised and soldierly yet he was more than his royal cousin’s equal in terms of wealth, being the second-greatest landowner in England after him. His annual income was almost £6,000, twenty times that of Somerset, although by 1450, the crown owed him something in the region of £40,000. Queen Margaret loathed him and deliberately excluded him from consultations over Henry’s future but when the extent of the king’s illness became apparent, Parliament recognised York’s claim and he was appointed Lord Protector. One of his first acts was to impeach Somerset and have him imprisoned in the Tower, in spite of the queen’s protests. Finally, with his enemy out of the way, the capable York had the reins of government in his hands and national disaster could be averted. He was also in a position to reward his supporters, none of whom had been more loyal than his nephew-in-law, Richard Neville, who came to be known as Warwick the Kingmaker. Neville’s father, Salisbury, was the brother of York’s wife Cecily. It was through this connection that the Neville family, including their two daughters, Isabel and Anne, would play a central role in English politics in the coming decades.
It was Cecily Neville who provided the initial connection between Richard of York and Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick. A granddaughter of John of Gaunt, she was known as the beautiful ‘rose of Raby’, after the castle where she was born, and ‘proud Cis’. At fourteen, she had married the duke and went on to bear him thirteen children, of whom six survived to adulthood. Cecily and her brother Salisbury had themselves come from a large family. One of the youngest of an impressive twenty-three children, she was only thirteen years older than her nephew, the Earl of Warwick. He, in turn, was betrothed to the wealthy heiress Anne de Beauchamp in 1434, when they were children of six and nine, and married two years later at Abergavenny, perhaps in the castle chapel or else in the church of Benedictine Priory. Such early marriages were not uncommon among the biggest landowning families of the day, although the pair were young by even that standard and would not be expected to live together as man and wife for many years to come. At first, there was no question of rebellion or of siding with York against the king. The young man’s career advanced quickly at his cousin Henry VI’s Lancastrian court; in 1445, he was knighted at the Coronation of Margaret of Anjou and later is likely to have seen military service with his father, the Earl of Salisbury, in the Scottish wars of 1448–49. On the death of the previous heir, he was permitted to inherit the Warwick title through his wife, although the claim was subject to dispute over the coming years. One of those questioning his right was the unpopular Duke of Somerset, who had married Anne de Beauchamp’s elder half-sister and laid claim to the lands Warwick inherited in the 1440s. Thus York and Warwick already had a common enemy in Edmund Beaufort.
On a personal level, Warwick appeared charming, charismatic and capable. The Tudor chronicler Edward Hall sang the praises of ‘a man of marvellous qualities … witty and gentle demeanour … among all sorts of people he obtained great love, much favour and more credence, which he increased by his abundant liberality and generous housekeeping’, bringing him ‘favour among the common people’.7 By the time of the king’s illness, Richard and Anne were already the parents of a daughter, Isabel, born on 5 September 1451. Considering that their marriage was probably consummated in the mid-1440s, when Richard reached his mid-teens, the birth of one female child could scarcely be considered prolific and the family legacy was entailed in such a way that only a male child could claim it in its entirety; otherwise the various lands, wealth and titles would be split. As yet, the much-desired son had not materialised to inherit the entire package but the couple were still hopeful. In the summer of 1453, when Margaret’s favourite, Somerset, looked poised to take charge, Warwick joined forces with Richard of York and supported his appointment as Lord Protector. From this point onwards, the lives of these two men and their offspring would be closely linked. York’s success brought Warwick increase
d power, yet it also made him more enemies.
Even though the birth of Queen Margaret’s son in October 1453 was a cause for national celebration, York was not content. Edward of Westminster had supplanted him as heir to the throne and he had been relieved of his regency in February 1455, after Henry’s recovery appeared to be lasting. It was not easy being relegated from his position of power, when he considered he had done a better job than Henry or Somerset. During his tenure, he had also won many nobles over to his side as a preferable ruler to the king or the queen’s favourites and introduced the strong leadership and relative stability that impressed the citizens of London. The contemporary ‘Davies’ chronicler claimed the common people loathed Somerset ‘and loved the Duke of York because he loved the Commons’.8 The unpopular minister had been imprisoned in the Tower but was now released and it appeared that things would return to the way they were before, if not worse, while others asserted that baby Edward of Westminster was actually Somerset’s son. Henry was finally able to acknowledge the boy but the possibility of a Beaufort-dominated minority in the event of his relapse or death could push York out completely. While the duke was keen to regain some of his former influence, the queen was equally desperate to oust him and when Margaret and Somerset called a meeting of the Great Council at Leicester, to deal with the king’s enemies, York and Warwick found themselves excluded. One informal explanation was given – that the queen feared the duke and earl would arrive bearing arms – but the clear implication was that they were the problem and the meeting had been called to discuss how best they could be disabled. This proved sufficient to provoke York to action. Gathering his allies, he raised an army of almost 2,000 and marched towards London, intent on destroying the hold of the court party on the king. A manifesto of their intentions was sent to Henry, who was still in the capital, but it was intercepted and destroyed by Somerset who raised troops of his own and began to march north.