by Thomas Penn
An anxious government expected violence. That November, as Westminster’s streets and lanes crawled with royal troops, a restive Parliament took up York’s demands. As Somerset’s apartments at Blackfriars were looted – York’s supporters, it was said, urged on an enraged crowd – Somerset himself was hustled to the safety of the Tower and locked up. But in the face of the Commons’ attempts to push through wide-ranging reforms, the regime closed ranks, swamping proposed legislation in amendments and obfuscation. While England’s establishment might have accepted the odd policy gesture, sweeping and destabilizing change was not what they had in mind. Besides which, there was something about Richard – the sense of high-minded public morality, perhaps, in which he cloaked his personal ambitions – that made them bristle. Their suspicions over York’s ultimate aims only intensified when Thomas Younge, an MP in the duke’s pay, tried to push a bill through Parliament formally recognizing York as the king’s heir presumptive. It didn’t succeed. The government closed ranks and, as the popular protests ran out of steam, wrestled back the initiative. Henry VI released Somerset from the Tower.12
In the months that followed, York found himself out in the cold. At the king’s shoulder, a vengeful Somerset enforced royal authority, made a tentative stab at financial reform, and went after York’s key followers. Early in 1452 York made another, more desperate, bid to prise Somerset away from the king. Issuing manifestos and raising men, he was confronted at the Kentish town of Dartford by the combined armies of the lords, then brought to London and forced to make a humiliatingly public pledge of allegiance to Henry in St Paul’s Cathedral before being set at liberty. York’s release was apparently hastened by the fleeting news that, at barely ten years old, his son and heir Edward earl of March was marching to his aid with a ‘great posse’ of ten thousand Welshmen. In fact, Edward had not moved from Ludlow in the Marches where, at seven years old – the age when noble children left the female world of the nursery and started their formal education – he had been set up with his own household and council, along with his brother Edmund, just a year younger.13
For York, there now seemed little way back into favour. His predicament was exacerbated by his growing family, a further cause for alarm in a Lancastrian regime without an heir. On 2 October 1452, at his family’s Northamptonshire home of Fotheringhay, his fourth son was born, named Richard after his father. York himself was not with Cecily at the birth; rather, the picture of a newly dutiful subject, he was slogging round the legal circuit, handing down the king’s justice at the Oxfordshire town of Thame.
The following January, he carefully sent the customary New Year’s gifts to the royal family which, finally, was also in the process of expanding. Early in 1453, Margaret of Anjou announced that she was pregnant, to general surprise. That spring, Cecily wrote to Queen Margaret; expressing joy at Margaret’s pregnancy, she then described her husband’s ‘infinite sorrow’ and ‘unrest of heart’ at being ‘estranged’ from the king. She begged Margaret to talk with Henry about York’s possible restoration to favour.14 His prospects, though, looked more remote than ever. Summer came, and little changed.
Then, on Tuesday, 17 July 1453, in southwest France, thirty miles east of Bordeaux at the town of Castillon, English forces were annihilated by an advancing French army. The English kings had held Gascony for almost three hundred years, and suddenly it was gone. With the exception of the prized enclave of Calais, England was solely an island nation – and a vulnerable one at that. It was all too much for Henry VI.
That August the king suffered a ‘sudden and unexpected fright’ and fell into a catatonic stupor, unresponsive to all external stimuli. Throughout history, English kings had had their physical and mental weaknesses, but never before had a monarch, as it was now said, been so bereft of ‘natural sense or intelligence’ that he was unable to rule.15
With the king’s mental crisis came renewed insecurity. Noblemen throughout England, wary of what was to come, recruited armed men, distributing their badges and liveries and handing out cash payments. In the north, the mutual and long-standing hatred between the two great regional families of Neville and Percy threatened open war. Unity among England’s lords was vital to maintaining order and some semblance of effective government. As the greatest of those lords, Richard of York seized his opportunity.16
Dusting off his reforming agenda, in the winter of 1453 he seized control of the royal council, had Somerset locked in the Tower, and prepared to make his pre-eminence permanent. Alongside him in London – no rumour now but a solid presence – was the twelve-year-old Edward earl of March and two noblemen whose support had transformed York’s prospects: his brother-in-law Richard earl of Salisbury, head of the powerful Neville family, and Salisbury’s oldest son, the twenty-five-year-old Richard Neville, earl of Warwick. An exceptionally wealthy man of ruthless political instincts, Warwick had clashed violently with Somerset over some Welsh estates that formed part of his vast inheritance. He didn’t like Somerset. Backing York made sense.
With Neville support, Richard of York acquired a new potency as the leader of a power bloc. Still, that January, as Parliament gathered to decide how England should be ruled, he faced a formidable new opponent: Henry’s queen and Somerset’s ally, Margaret of Anjou. Margaret had given birth to a baby boy. Now, as queen and mother to the Lancastrian heir, she issued a manifesto of her own, demanding ‘the whole rule of the land’, a parliamentary mandate to wield power on behalf of her insensate husband and their young son.17
But while there were French precedents for a regency of the kind Margaret sought, England – as political theorists never ceased to point out – was not France. In England, when the king was for whatever reason unable to rule in person, the tried-and-tested model of government was the one that had been used during the minority of Henry VI himself: a unified council of lords, acting collectively on behalf of the king and country, headed by a ‘chief councillor and protector’. The obvious candidate was Richard of York.
Behind the closed doors of the council chamber, the atmosphere was palpably hesitant. The council’s most urgent task was to balance the differing interests and demands of its two most vocal factions – one led by York, one clustering around Somerset and Queen Margaret – and to make sure their mutual hostility was kept in check. Handing a great nobleman the powers of a protector was always a dangerous move, especially so given the existence of an adult king and a queen who had made her antipathy to York all too clear. So, while York’s appointment was made, it was done reluctantly and hedged about with conditions to limit his power. When York and his allies came to form a governing council, many noblemen, unwilling to appear partisan, were suddenly reluctant to get involved. Some remembered pressing business elsewhere; others reported sudden and incapacitating illness. There was no getting away from the fact that few were enthusiastic about the solution, and about York himself – but, given the state of emergency that now gripped England, he was the least-worst option.18
Throughout 1454, York worked hard to get a grip on the twin problems of national security and internal disorder. His supporters felt he governed England ‘nobly and in the best way’; his detractors saw government by a faction for a faction, a stitching-up of vested interests. As he tackled what was by now open conflict in the north between the Neville and Percy clans – favouring, naturally, his Neville partners in government – York kept his two eldest sons in Ludlow up to date with news. In Easter Week, Edward and Edmund wrote thanking him for his latest dispatch. Amid demands for some ‘fine bonnets’ to go with the green gowns their father had sent them, and complaints about bullying by a pair of older boys being brought up in their household, they offered their heartfelt hopes and prayers that York would prevail against ‘the malice of your evilwillers’.19
Yet by the end of the year, York’s official role was redundant. After sixteen vacant months, Henry VI woke from his trance on Christmas Day, apparently fully recovered. York and the Nevilles were stripped of their authorit
y. In their place Somerset, released from his incarceration, took up where he had left off at the head of government, the political clocks reset to the time before the king’s illness. As an Italian merchant writing from London remarked, matter-of-factly, Somerset ‘ruled as usual’. Quite what part the supposedly functioning Henry played was unclear: not much, was the merchant’s implication.20
In mid-April 1455 Somerset’s restored government summoned a great council, a meeting of all England’s nobility, to Leicester; its purpose, ostensibly, was to make arrangements for the ‘surety of the king’s person’. To York and his allies, the agenda looked more like a menacing settling of scores. Heading first into Yorkshire to gather troops, they returned south at speed, stressing in a letter how – for the avoidance of ‘doubts and ambiguities’ – the three thousand armed men at their backs were a purely defensive measure, insurance against Somerset’s aggression. Making their leisurely preparations for the journey to Leicester, the king and his advisers were caught out.
Up to this point, the simmering hostility between the two factions had just about been contained. Now, with no political resolution forthcoming, conflict seemed inevitable. Scrambling to mobilize troops, Somerset and his allies, the king in their midst, advanced cautiously out of London. York was marching through Hertfordshire when his outriders spotted the royal army near the abbey town of St Albans. He changed direction to meet it.21
Early on the morning of 22 May, the king’s forces moved into St Albans and secured the town, barricading and fortifying its approach roads. A stream of heralds and envoys shuttled between the two sides. The king himself – his authority desperately needed to calm an explosive situation – was nowhere to be seen. In fact, York and his allies got the impression that Henry wasn’t being shown their letters at all. In response to a peremptory order to disperse, the Yorkists were blunt. They would ‘redress the mischief that now reigneth’, or they would die trying.22
The two armies that now faced each other across the heavily defended streets and lanes of St Albans bore the signs of their recent and hasty recruitment. Groups of armed men wore badges and colours indicating their allegiance, ‘so that every man might know his own fellowship by his livery’.23 At about 10 a.m. Yorkist archers, deployed to the northeast of St Albans, started to advance cautiously along the narrow, barricaded lanes into the town. Encountering resistance, they were forced back. It was at this point that Richard Neville, earl of Warwick, made an audacious move. Skirting the town’s perimeter, he led his troops across an undefended part of the city ditch and, scrambling through gardens, closes, houses and inns, attacked the densely packed royal forces at the southern end of the marketplace, a cacophony of blaring trumpets and war cries adding to the confusion. As the royal ranks disintegrated, the Yorkists hunted down their enemies. Henry Percy, earl of Northumberland, the Nevilles’ great rival in the northeast, was killed as he tried to make his way to a nearby inn where Somerset was holed up. Deciding to take his chances, Somerset tried to hack his way out before being butchered himself with axe blows. Henry VI was found sheltering in a nearby tanner’s, bewildered, his neck bleeding from an arrow wound.
With the king in their hands, and their opponents either dead or captured, York and the Nevilles followed up their victory with a display of conspicuous loyalty to the monarch they now controlled. Back in London, Henry’s authority was dramatized in a ceremonial crown-wearing at St Paul’s, York himself placing the crown on the king’s head.24 That summer of 1455, the loose ends were swept up. In Westminster, the streets thick with Yorkist troops, a compliant Parliament extended sweeping pardons to York and his backers for their actions at St Albans – which, seen in another light, had been tantamount to treason, an attack on the king – and placed their loyalty on parliamentary record. With blame for the conflict dumped emphatically at the door of the dead Somerset, the issue of St Albans was firmly closed: ‘nothing done there never after this time to be spoken of’.25
As York and the Nevilles resumed control of government, Henry was reportedly ‘sick again’. He seemed to inhabit a sort of mental twilight: compos mentis for stretches but listless, the business of ruling apparently well beyond his capacities. York was once more made protector.26
This time, his ambitions were more fully evident. The central plank of his planned fiscal reforms was a far-reaching parliamentary act of resumption. This was the process by which the king clawed back, or ‘resumed’, royal grants of land and office from their recipients, thereby providing him with an income-generating property portfolio: lands which, judiciously managed by his disinterested councillors, would allow him to fund the royal household without making excessive financial demands of his resentful subjects. A move constantly advocated by political theorists, it was far more difficult in practice than on paper. Great landowners were alarmed by a move that threatened their own fortunes and interests. Their consternation was given a further edge by a new Yorkist genealogy doing the rounds in which the superior descent of the family’s Mortimer forebears was conspicuously reinstated, underscoring York’s royal bloodline.27
Establishment anxieties over the act of resumption gave York’s opponents a new window of opportunity. In the months following St Albans, Queen Margaret who was ‘strong laboured’, constantly lobbied, by the alarmed elites became the focus of resistance to both York’s reforms and his efforts to consolidate his power and authority. In February 1456 Henry VI was brought into Parliament and, surrounded by ‘almost all the lords’, set about obstructing the act of resumption. Isolated, York resigned his protectorate on the spot.28
With Henry VI manipulated by both sides, England’s political community looked on appalled. York and Margaret were apparently irreconcilable, the reciprocal loathing of their two factions infused with spilt blood. Opposing York and the Nevilles, and clustering round the queen, were the sons of those who had been slaughtered at St Albans. Chief among these was the new duke of Somerset, Henry Beaufort, who had seen his father killed and, an aggressive and charismatic twenty-year-old, had scores to settle.
During the months that followed, both sides settled into a phoney war. In mid-1456 Margaret of Anjou and her toddler son left a volatile London for her powerbase, the great duchy of Lancaster estates in the midlands, where she was joined soon after by her feeble husband and increasing numbers of England’s nobles. York stayed in his Yorkshire heartlands, watching for her next move. As their proxies fought a vicious turf war in southwest Wales, the Yorkist Sir William Herbert detained the king’s half-brother Edmund Tudor, earl of Richmond, who then died soon after his release, leaving his thirteen-year-old wife, Lady Margaret Beaufort, six months pregnant and frantic with worry.29
Margaret of Anjou’s influence, meanwhile, was growing. When she attended a great council meeting in Coventry in the spring of 1457, one observer noted, surprised, how the civic authorities attended on her ‘like as they before time did before the king’. But she was also high-handed and dismissive and, as she built a new regime in the midlands, existing governmental structures began to collapse. Sensing anarchy at the regime’s heart, England’s traditional enemies – the Scots and the French – probed the country’s flimsy defences. No community felt more anxious, more disillusioned about the lack of national security than England’s financial elites, who had extended credit hand over fist to the regime. London’s oligarchs, shaken by a succession of riots in the capital, were concerned about the ‘great navies’ of France that menaced England’s export trade; so too were the wool merchants of Calais, whose wealth underwrote the security of this precious English enclave on the north-eastern French coast.
The Yorkists subtly recalibrated. Now, their message of populism and unity was shot through with another kind of appeal. Where Margaret had been deaf to the concerns of big business, the Yorkists lent a sympathetic ear, providing quiet assurances on security and on trade. Nobody was more receptive, more smoothly reassuring, than the man whose appointment as captain of Calais York had managed to push throu
gh during his second protectorate, and who now remained in charge of the garrison there – Richard Neville, earl of Warwick. The Calais merchants threw their support behind him.30
Early on the morning of 28 August 1457, national anxieties were catalysed. A French fleet materialized off the Kentish port of Sandwich and disgorged a large raiding force, which overwhelmed the town’s defences and went on the rampage, killing, burning and looting. Even to a region inured to French raids, the sack of Sandwich was shocking. The French ‘went again unpunished’, noted one commentator through gritted teeth. The regime appeared unable to protect its merchants, its own people, England itself.
This was a turning point. In March 1458, amid renewed calls for unity and for the two feuding factions to come together and ‘be friends to each other and obedient to the king’, London played host to a loveday, a negotiated arbitration that, so it was hoped, would ‘eradicate the roots of rancour’ and achieve a final peace. As the lords arrived in the capital with their private armies, thousands strong, the authorities tried desperately to prevent an armed standoff in the city’s streets. The two groups were kept apart: walls and gates under heavy guard, curfews imposed, squads of urban militiamen on patrol.
Yet the talks, held at Westminster Palace in the wavering presence of the king, progressed with relatively little incident, and after a week, on the morning of Friday the 25th, church bells rang across the city. Crowds crammed into the cavernous interior of St Paul’s to give thanks and to watch the reconciliation being acted out. The date was no accident; it was Lady Day, the Feast of the Annunciation of the Virgin Mary, and the first day of the new year, pregnant with associations of renewal and rebirth after the winter darkness. Behind a crowned Henry VI came Richard and Margaret of Anjou, hands clasped and ‘lovely countenance’ between them – even if, to those who looked closely, the smiles were fixed, the ‘great familiarity’ forced. In the margin alongside his account of events, one chronicler wrote tersely, ‘Concordia ficta’: ‘False friendship’.