Crown & Country: A History of England Through the Monarchy

by Starkey, David

  IV

  Prince Henry might not have been born to be king. But no heir to the throne had served a more distinguished apprenticeship. He was created prince of Wales immediately after his father’s accession, and, though he was only in his early teens, he quickly became his right-hand man and the pillar of the Lancastrian cause. He fought bravely against Hotspur at the battle of Shrewsbury and he led the English to victory in the ensuing hard-fought campaign against the Welsh. But mere military glory was not enough for Prince Henry. He wanted the reality of power as well. His father was disfigured, diseased and hopelessly tainted by his usurpation. Henry, in contrast, was the great white hope for his father’s enemies as well as for his friends.

  Henry V’s first task was to unite the fractured realm his father had bequeathed him. He was firm in laying down the law and seeing it obeyed, and he stabilized the coinage. On several occasions he travelled through the country to foster loyalty to the crown. Above all he rooted out faction. As the son of a usurper, Henry knew from personal experience the importance of letting bygones be bygones. So Henry pardoned his father’s enemies and Richard’s supporters. He even restored the Percys.

  By and large the policy paid off and Henry’s former bitter enemies became his loyal lieutenants. Only one thing remained. Henry’s smartest move was to make his peace with the unquiet ghost of Richard II. Henry IV had accorded Richard the dignity of a public funeral but he had refused to bury him in Westminster Abbey. The result was that Richard’s memory continued to plague his successor. Miracles took place at his modest tomb; his name was constantly invoked to justify rebellion and many refused to believe he was dead at all. So when Henry V became king he moved to tackle the problem with his characteristic decisiveness. In December 1413, only eight months after his own coronation, Richard’s body was brought to the Abbey in a magnificent procession and reburied among his fellow kings, in the tomb that Richard had commissioned for himself. The stain of 1399 was wiped out and Henry was able to benefit from the usurpation without incurring the stigma or the bad conscience of his father.

  Having settled domestic politics, Henry was able to turn his attention to the project that would dominate his reign: the war of conquest with France.

  The reign of the peace-loving Richard II had shown that the English war monarchy of the Edwards was ungovernable in peace. Better that the English nobles should fight the French than each other – or the king. But Henry’s claim to France was also, for this intensely religious man, an article of faith.

  For Henry, the war was essentially about justice for his ancestral claims. Through his ancestor, Henry II, he had a claim to the whole of the Angevin empire, to Normandy, Anjou and Aquitaine, while from his other ancestress, Isabella of France, queen of Edward II, he claimed the throne of France itself. Only let these claims be conceded, Henry announced, and there would be no war.

  From the French point of view this was an outrageous demand and they refused. Denied his legitimate claim, Henry decided his conscience was clear: the French had refused peace with justice so the god of battles must decide. Henry also presented his case effectively in England; won support for his policies and brought the might of the nation behind the campaign. Most importantly, he was a systematic planner and his French expedition, like all his great projects, was carefully prepared in advance.

  Henry set sail for France on 11 August 1415. His first campaign is the stuff of legend. ‘For Harry, England and Saint George’. This was the battle-cry that Shakespeare gave the English soldiers on the field at Agincourt. Here Henry showed himself everything that an English king should be: resolute, heroic and a born leader of men. The English soldiers were in retreat, exhausted and far outnumbered by the French – by three to one – but fired up by loyalty to their king and country, they won an astounding victory.

  It seemed proof positive that Henry V was God’s chosen king. It was also proof that his war policy would work. Within two years he was back. This time his aim was conquest. The English army swept through Normandy, systematically besieging and capturing the greatest cities: Caen, Falaise and Rouen. But the key to France was Paris.

  By 1420, Paris was in his grasp. But, rather than risk reuniting the French by attacking the capital, Henry, who was a subtle politician as well as a dashing general, decided to exploit the profound divisions within the French court. He made apparently enormous concessions: he would no longer claim western France as heir of Henry II. The present king of France could even keep his titles.

  The ploy worked. By a treaty signed at Troyes on 21 May 1420, Henry seemed to have won the prize that had eluded even Edward III and the Black Prince. He was recognized as the legitimate heir to the then king of France, Charles VI, and, a few days later, in Troyes Cathedral, he married Charles’s daughter Catherine. Henry, in other words, was seeking to apply in France the same model of traditional kingship which had served him so well in England. He would rule France not as a conqueror but as a legitimate king, and he would rule it in the French way according to French customs.

  England had not known such victories. The status of the monarchy soared, as this piece of doggerel expresses:

  And he is king excellent

  And unto none other obedient

  That liveth here in earth – by right

  But only unto God almight[y]*

  Within his own, Emperor

  And also king and conqueror.

  King, conqueror, emperor: these exalted titles were given living expression when Henry wore a closed arched crown. This style of crown signified imperial status. As an emperor Henry had no superior on earth, not even the pope.

  On 1 December 1420 Henry entered Paris in triumph as heir and regent of France. He was warmly received and the French parlement ratified the Treaty of Troyes. It wasn’t so simple, however. Many French nobles had understandable reservations about acknowledging an Englishman as king of France. Henry renewed hostilities to force the French resistance to accept the Treaty of Troyes. It was a hard slog of campaigning in northern France alleviated only by the knowledge that his wife Catherine had given birth to a son and heir.

  But suddenly, at the age of thirty-five and in the middle of yet another campaign, Henry caught dysentery and died.

  In only nine years Henry V had reunited England and taken France. And he had done it all as a consciously English king: speaking and writing English even for official documents. For the first time since the Conquest, England was a nation-state once more.

  Henry was laid to rest in Westminster Abbey in a magnificent funerary chapel. The king’s image was covered in silver gilt while among the rich sculptures were two coronation scenes representing Henry’s two kingdoms of England and France. And in both he is shown with the imperial crown. But what really impresses is the sheer scale of the chapel and its magnificent location, directly at the east end of the Abbey. Here, everything seems to say, is the apogee of the medieval English monarchy and the monument to the perfect medieval king. The institution could scarcely go any higher. Could it even survive at its present high-water mark? Everything would depend on Henry’s son, the nine-month-old infant, who in his cradle was heir of England and France.

  V

  With Henry’s death on 31 August 1422 his son became king of England as Henry VI. If this were not enough, two months later his French grandfather also died and he was named king of France. Once again England had an infant king. But this time there was no serious rival nor any suggestion that an adult, perhaps an uncle, should be preferred in his place. This was a remarkable state of affairs, given that the dynasty had come to the throne through an act of usurpation less than a quarter of a century before. But the triumphs of Henry V blotted out the shame of his father, Henry IV, and extended a protecting hand over his son.

  In these benign circumstances, the polished machinery of English government adapted easily. Acting in the name of the ‘community of the realm’, the nobility made arrangements for the rule of the cradle king. They divided the government
of England and France between the king’s two uncles, each of whom was assisted by a council.

  Then, in 1429, the nine-year-old boy was crowned king of England at Westminster Abbey. The form of the coronation was unique and, reflecting his position as king of two realms, much of the French coronation ritual was incorporated into the English service. The boy surveyed the pomp and splendour ‘saddely and wysely’ as the crown was placed on his head. This brought a formal end to the regency. But it did not mean that others ceased to rule in Henry’s name.

  In France, meanwhile, important victories were won. And, despite the rallying of the French by Joan of Arc, the situation seemed sufficiently stable in 1430 for Henry’s council to decide that the time had come for the ten-year-old Henry VI to take possession of his second kingdom. In April 1430, the young king, accompanied by the nobility, senior bishops and a large army, went to Rouen. There the court remained for a year. A month into the sojourn Joan of Arc was captured. But it was too risky and too expensive to escort Henry to Reims, the traditional place where French kings were crowned. Instead, in December 1431, Henry was taken to Paris, where he was crowned Henri II in Notre-Dame. The event was not a success. The English and French clergy quarrelled and the Parisians rioted. Within a month Henry was bustled back to Calais and thence to England. It was to be his first and last visit to France.

  Whether France remained English would depend on the kind of king Henry VI turned out to be. And no effort was spared to turn him into another edition of his great father. For the first four years of his life he was brought up, as Henry V had wished, with his mother. But in 1427–8 Queen Catherine had an affair with a dashing young nobleman, Edmund Beaufort, later duke of Somerset. And a year or two later she married an attractive Welsh squire of her household, Owen Tudor, by whom she had four children.

  Thereafter, his mother saw little of Henry. Instead, responsibility for his upbringing was given to Richard Beauchamp, earl of Warwick, who was appointed Henry’s governor, tutor and master. Warwick seemed ideally qualified for the role. He was one of Henry V’s closest companions, and was brave, cultured and pious. And he tried hard to inculcate Henry with the same qualities. Two little suits of armour and a long-bladed sword were bought for the boy.

  At first, all seemed to go well and Henry was described as a promising boy, unusually tall and advanced for his age. But there were worrying signs. He was indecisive. He was generous to a fault and he loved pardoning people. But of the sterner virtues that were indispensable to fifteenth-century kingship there was not a trace.

  What had gone wrong? Maybe the veterans of Agincourt had tried too hard. The legacy of his French grandfather, the feeble Charles VI, who had died insane, cannot have helped. Not did his warring uncles, each with his diametrically opposed vision of how the war with France should be fought or whether it should be fought at all. Each sought to dominate the boy and capture him for his own point of view. In so doing, they appear to have stunted his mind and paralysed his will. As for Henry III and Richard II before him, a royal minority proved to be a personal, as well as a national, disaster.

  In short, Henry never became his own man. Indeed, by fifteenth-century standards he never became a man at all since his passion was not war but religion.

  How a king wishes to be remembered takes us to the heart of his king-ship. And Henry’s chosen monument was not a battlefield or a great castle; instead it was the chapel at Eton College. As he said to a group of scholars there: ‘be you good boys, gentle and teachable, and servants of the Lord’. It was a good recommendation for earnest schoolboys; it was a poor model of kingship in the fifteenth century. Nowadays we think of Eton as the most famous school in the world. But the school as such was more or less incidental to Henry’s purpose. Instead he was interested in the size and scale of the chapel. He wanted it to become one of the biggest, richest and holiest churches in England. As long as Lincoln Cathedral, as wide as York Minster, his very own Westminster Abbey. But, thanks to constant changes of plan, which led him to demolish parts already built and start again, only a fragment of the vast scheme was finished at the time of his fall from power. It is an apt symbol of a reign that began with high hopes and a magnificent inheritance and ended in failure and disaster.

  But not merely was Henry unwarlike. Once he took government into his own hands, he pursued an active peace policy. He detested war. It was cruel. It was costly. And above all it destroyed Christian unity. Henry was the only king since the Conquest never to have commanded an army. He was even prepared to surrender parts of his father’s conquests. This was to incur the wrath of the English nobles, who had done so well out of the war.

  The most dramatic signal of Henry’s intentions came in 1444, when, at the age of twenty-two, he married a French princess, Margaret of Anjou.

  Margaret was the symbol of the controversial peace policy with France. Moreover, after she came to England and married her impressionable husband, she became its most effective partisan as well. This played into the hands of its opponents. The English always distrusted politically active queens, especially when they were foreign. And especially when, like Margaret, they looked suspiciously like a French secret agent at the heart of the English court.

  Soon the worst fears of the English nobility came true. By the time Henry was thirty he had lost everything his father had won. Only Calais remained in English hands. Thanks to Henry, a hundred years of war with France had yielded nothing and the prestige of the English crown was destroyed at home and abroad.

  But most lethal for the monarchy was the fact that the war, like most unsuccessful wars, was marked by vicious quarrels between the English generals. Most dangerous was the feud between Richard, duke of York, and Edmund, duke of Somerset. Both were members of the royal house, and York arguably had a better claim to the throne than Henry himself. Both his parents were descended from Edward III’s sons – his paternal grandfather was Edmund, duke of York, and his maternal great-great-grandfather was Lionel, duke of Clarence. And he was by far the richest noble in the land with a string of estates and a large following. As such he resembled another great landowner of royal blood who fancied he held the balance of power in England: John of Gaunt.

  York was an energetic soldier. He had commanded the armies in France and served as English viceroy in Ireland. In all this, he contrasted strongly with the timid Henry VI. York’s bitter rival and the king’s new favourite, the duke of Somerset, was a man of a similar stamp. He, too, was royal and Lancastrian after a fashion, as he descended from John of Gaunt – but via Gaunt’s liaison with his long-term mistress and eventual third wife, Catherine Swinford. And he had been a much-decorated soldier as a young man. But, in 1449–50, having succeeded York as commander in France, Somerset surrendered first Rouen and then Caen and all Normandy to the French with scarcely a blow struck. Gascony, English for 300 years, followed. At best it was staggering incompetence. York thought it was treason and never forgave Somerset. Their quarrel now dominated English politics and led to civil war.

  But it was the popular and parliamentary outrage at the catastrophe in France that brought the two dukes back to England. As news of the loss of Normandy reached London, the House of Commons turned on Henry’s government. Ministers were accused of treason abroad and misgovernment at home. They had lost France, bankrupted the king and perverted justice. And what Parliament began popular violence completed as several leading councillors were done to death by mobs. Worse was to follow. In the summer Kent rose in revolt and the rebels, led by Jack Cade, entered London. Henry fled, leaving Queen Margaret to negotiate a settlement of sorts.

  Both Somerset and York now took their chance. Cade had called on Henry ‘to take about his noble person his true blood of the royal realm, that is to say, the high and mighty prince the Duke of York’. And, on cue, York had returned from Ireland, proclaiming his loyalty to Henry on the one hand but, on the other, presenting himself as the great white hope of good government against the corrupt court clique – and Somerse
t in particular. Somerset, for his part, had already returned from France. His aim was to defend his reputation. He hardly needed to have bothered as Henry, with a confidence that is scarcely credible bearing in mind Somerset’s performance in Normandy, immediately turned to him as the military strongman of his tottering regime.

  The dukes’ roles were now defined. Somerset became Henry’s chief minister while York set himself up as the leader of an increasingly disloyal opposition. Their relationship was further poisoned by the problem of the succession. Henry’s marriage was still childless. In these circumstances, York had an excellent claim to succeed Henry and Somerset a more doubtful one – though it was greatly strengthened by his ‘Lancastrian’ blood and Henry’s favour.

  The next few years were an extraordinary switchback. In the autumn of 1450, events seemed to be running strongly in York’s favour. He was received enthusiastically by Parliament and Somerset was sent to the Tower. But York had ‘gone too far without going far enough’. His professed loyalty to Henry meant that he could not force his services on the king – and Henry would not accept them any other way.

  The tables were now turned. Somerset was released and resumed his old place in government. Two years later, York, despairing of making headway any other way, took up arms. He justified his rebellion by claiming, in time-honoured fashion, that it was not directed against Henry himself but against his evil councillors in the court, especially Somerset. But, receiving little popular or noble support, he was forced into a humiliating surrender and submission. Then, in 1453, Queen Margaret, still barren after eight years of marriage, ‘miraculously’ became pregnant. York seemed destined for oblivion.

  But, once again, events somersaulted. The English suffered a final, shattering defeat in Gascony and Henry VI, probably in reaction to the news, had a mental breakdown. His stupor was so severe that for months he had to be spoon-fed.