Great Tales from English History, Book 2 (5 page)

Joan’s voices had told her to dress as a soldier of God, and her appearance in a specially made suit of armour created a stirring
image around which her legend could flourish. As her authority grew, she demanded that France’s soldiers
should give up swearing, go to church and refrain from looting or harassing the civilians through whose towns and villages
they passed.

Volunteers stepped forward in their hundreds, inspired by the idea of joining an army with a saint at its head, while the
demoralised English, once so confident that God was on their side, also began to believe the legend. When Joan was captured
by Burgundian forces in May 1430, both the Burgundians and the English‘were much more excited than if they had captured five
hundred fighting men’, wrote the French chronicler de Monstrelet.‘They had never been so afraid of any captain or commander
in war.’

The English promptly set up a church tribunal where Joan was condemned as a witch — her habit of wearing men’s clothes was
taken as particular proof of her damnation. If the Dauphin had exerted himself he might have negotiated her ransom, as was
normal with high-profile prisoners-of-war. But he did nothing to help save the girl who had saved
him.
On 30 May 1431 Joan of Arc was led out into the marketplace in Rouen by English soldiers, tied to a stake and burned to death.
She was nineteen years old.

’We are all ruined,’ said one English witness,‘for a good and holy person was burned.’

Over the centuries England has chosen to remember the Hundred Years War for its great victories like Crecy and Agincourt:
but, thanks to Joan of Arc, the bloody 116-year enterprise actually ended, for the English, in miserable defeat. According
to one account, a white dove was seen in the sky at the moment of the Maid’s death, and the French took this to symbolise
God’s blessing. They felt inspired to campaign
with even more righteous certainty, and by 1453 all that survived of England’s once great French empire was the walled port
of Calais.

Joan of Arc’s scarcely credible adventure remains eternally compelling. The simplicity and purity of her faith have inspired
writers and dramatists over the centuries — particularly in times when it has become fashionable not to believe in God.

T
HE LONG LISTS OF LATIN WORDS IN GEOFFREY
of Lynn’s
Promptorium Parvulorum
would offer tedious reading for modern fans of Harry Potter, but his‘Prompter for Little Ones’ has a good claim to being England’s
first child-friendly book.

Geoffrey was a friar from the Norfolk town known today as King’s Lynn, and his‘Prompter’ reads like the work of a kindly schoolmaster.
It was a dictionary which set out the words that a good medieval pupil might be expected to know — many of them to do with
religion. But defying the solemn tone, Geoffrey also listed the names of toys, games and children’s playground pastimes. We
read of rag dolls,
four different types of spinning top, a child’s bell; of games of shuttlecock, tennis and leapfrog, three running and chasing
games, and games to be played on a swing or seesaw (which Geoffrey calls a‘totter’, or‘merry totter’).

All this gives us a rare glimpse into childhood in the Middle Ages. Medieval books were for grown-ups — most chronicles tell
us of war and arguments over religion. But Geoffrey of Lynn takes us into the world of children, and shows us something of
their preoccupations and imaginings.

In recent times this picture has been made real for us thanks to the chirps and bleepings of the modern metal detector. The
Thames Mud Larks, named after the Victorian children who used to scavenge flotsam from the banks of the river, are a group
of enthusiasts who scour the mudflats of the Thames at low tide. During London’s construction boom of the 1980s they were
also to be seen raking over the city’s building sites, and what they came up with was an extraordinary treasure trove — large
numbers of ancient toys.

One Mud Lark, Tony Pilson, retrieved hundreds of tiny pewter playthings dating back as early as
AD
1250 — miniature jugs, pans, other kitchen and cooking utensils and even bird-cages. He and his fellow-searchers turned up
just about everything you would need to equip a doll’s house — along with small metal soldiers that included a knight in armour.
Mounted on horseback, the little figure had been cast from a mould, so he must originally have been produced in bulk.

When we look at portraits of children in the Middle Ages, they usually stare out at us with formal and stern expressions.
But in the pages of Geoffrey’s‘Prompter for Little
Ones’ and in the modern discoveries of the Mud Larks, we find evidence of so much infant fun and laughter. And since all these
toys were made by adults, and must, for the most part, have been purchased and given as presents by parents and other fond
relations, we can presume that medieval grown-ups recognised and cherished the magic world of childhood.

H
ENRY VI WAS THE YOUNGEST EVER KING
of England, succeeding his warrior father Henry V at the age of just nine months. When the little boy attended his first
opening of Parliament, aged only three, it was hardly surprising that he‘shrieked and cried and sprang’, as one report described.

The problem was that in the course of his fifty troubled years, this king never really grew up. Henry VI went from first to
second childhood, according to one modern historian,‘without the usual interval’.

This is unfair. Henry was a kindly and pious man who financed the building of two gems of English architecture —
the soaring Perpendicular chapel of Eton College across the Thames from Windsor, and the chapel of King’s College, Cambridge.
He also ran a court of some magnificence, to which his naivety brought a charming touch. The‘Royal Book’ of court etiquette
describes Henry and his French wife Margaret of Anjou waking up early one New Year’s morning to receive their presents — then
staying in bed to enjoy them.

But Henry showed a disastrous lack of interest in the kingly pursuits of chivalry and war. Faced with the need to command
the English army in Normandy at the age of eighteen, three years after he had taken over personal control of government from
his father’s old councillors, his response was to send a cousin in his place. Henry felt he had quite enough to do supervising
the foundation of Eton College. It was not surprising he developed a reputation for nambypambiness. Riding one day through
the Cripplegate in London’s city walls, he was shocked to see a decaying section of a human body impaled on a stake above
the archway — and was horrified when informed it was the severed quarter of a man who had been‘false to the King’s majesty’.‘Take
it away!’ he cried.‘I will not have any Christian man so cruelly handled for my sake!’

Unfortunately for Henry, respect for human rights simply did not feature in the job description of a medieval king. Toughness
was required. In the absence of a police force or army, a ruler depended on his network of nobles to ensure law and order,
and if people lost confidence in the power of the Crown, it was to their local lord that they looked. They wore their lord’s
livery and badge — and it was these rival
badges that would later give the conflicts of this period its famous name.

A memorable scene in Shakespeare’s play
Henry VI, Part 1
depicts the nobility of England in a garden selecting roses, red or white, to signify their loyalty to the House of York or
the House of Lancaster. It did not happen — Shakespeare invented the episode.’The Wars of the Roses’, the romantic title we
use today for the succession of battles and dynastic changes that took place in England between 1453 and 1487, was also a
later invention, coined by the nineteenth-century romantic novelist Sir Walter Scott. The Yorkists may have sported a rose
on occasion, but there is no evidence that the Lancastrians ever did — at the Battle of Barnet in 1471, they started fighting
each other because they did not recognise their own liveries. To judge from the profusion of badges and banners that were
actually borne into battle during these years, men were fighting the wars of the swans, dogs, boars, bears, lions, stars,
suns and daisies.

The struggle for power, money and land, however, certainly revolved around York and Lancaster, the two rival houses that developed
from the numerous descendants of King Edward III (you can see the complications in the family tree on p.x). The Lancastrians
traced their loyalties back to John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, while the Yorkists rallied round the descendants of Gaunt’s
younger brother Edmund, Duke of York. Shakespeare dated the trouble from the moment that Gaunt’s son Henry Bolingbroke deposed
his cousin Richard II. But York and Lancaster would have stuck together under a firm and decisive king — and if Henry V had
lived longer he would certainly have passed on
a stronger throne. Even the bumbling Henry VI might have avoided trouble if, after years of diminishing mental competence,
he had not finally gone mad.

According to one account, in August 1453 the King had‘a sudden fright’ that sent him into a sort of coma, a sad echo of his
grandfather, Charles VI — the French king who had howled like a wolf and imagined he was made of glass. After sixteen months
Henry staged a recovery, but his breakdown had been the trigger for civil disorder, and in the confused sequence of intrigue
and conflict that followed he was a helpless cipher. In February 1461 he was reported to have spent the second Battle of St
Albans laughing and singing manically to himself, with no apparent awareness of the mayhem in full swing around him. It was
hardly a surprise when, later that year, he was deposed, to be replaced by the handsome, strapping young Yorkist candidate,
Edward IV (
see p. 42
).

In this change of regime the key figure was the mightiest of England’s over-mighty subjects — Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick,
who fought under the badge of the Bear and Ragged Staff. With no claim to the throne, but controlling vast estates with the
ability to raise armies, the earl has gone down in history as’Warwick the Kingmaker’.‘They have two rulers,’ remarked a French
observer of the English in these years,’Warwick, and another whose name I have forgotten.’

When Warwick and Edward IV fell out in the late 1460s, the Kingmaker turned against his protege, chasing him from the country.
To replace him, Warwick brought back the deposed Henry VI who had spent the last six years in the Tower: the restored monarch
was paraded around London
in the spring of 1471. But the confused and shambling king had to be shepherded down Cheapside, his feet tied on to his horse.
Never much of a parade-ground figure, he now made a sorry sight, dressed in a decidedly old and drab blue velvet gown that
could not fail to prompt scorn —‘as though he had no more to change with’. This moth-eaten display, reported the chronicler
John Warkworth, was‘more like a play than a showing of a prince to win men’s hearts’.

It was the Kingmaker’s last throw — and a losing one. Warwick was unable to beat off the challenge of Edward IV, now returned,
who soon defeated and killed the earl in battle, regaining the crown for himself.

As for poor Henry, his fate was sealed. Two weeks later he was found dead in the Tower, and history has pointed the finger
at his second-time supplanter, Edward. Henry probably
was
murdered — but there is a sad plausibility to the official explanation that the twice-reigning King, who inherited two kingdoms
and lost them both, passed away out of‘pure displeasure and melancholy’.