Queens Consort (58 page)

As Marguerite took her first steps into politics, she was becoming aware of a situation which had slowly dawned on the English magnates in the years before her marriage, and which may well have been hinted at in her coronation pageant. Quite simply, King Henry was never going to grow up. In the 1440s, the chroniclers John Hardyng and John Capgrave were already commenting on the King’s peculiar lack of energy and decisiveness, while records of ‘treasonable’ statements show that many people — even if they only said so when they were drunk — thought he was retarded. Modern historians have debated the implications of his alleged apathy, and there is some consensus that he did make his own wishes heard in both foreign affairs and domestic grants during the 1440s. A case can be made either for Henry pursuing a considered strategy of peace or for his apparent pacifism being merely the consequence of inertia. Either way, it was becoming increasingly evident that it was Suffolk who was governing, Suffolk who presented an appearance of authority to the world — an authority that the King himself conspicuously lacked.

Marguerite found herself in an unusual and isolated position. As the symbolism of her coronation had made clear, the primary duty of the queen was to produce an heir to the throne, but two years after her wedding she had not yet become pregnant. Whether Henry was a saint or merely a simpleton, he did not seem very interested in sex. His chaplain, John Blackman, recounts an incident at Christmastime when: ‘A certain great lord brought before him a dance or show of young ladies with bared bosoms who were to dance in that guise before the King, perhaps to prove him or to entice his youthful mind. But the King was not blind to it, not unaware of the devilish wile, and spurned the delusion, and very angrily averted his eyes, turned his back upon them and went out of his chamber, saying “Fie, fie, for shame.”’

Blackman’s description of Henry needs to be viewed with caution, as it was written under the auspices of Henry VII, who had an interest in demonstrating that his Lancastrian predecessor had saintly tendencies. Hagiography aside, if Henry’s piety was of fended by cavorting hussies, he was also suspicious of relations with his legal wife. His spiritual counsellor, the bishop of Salisbury, was accused by some of interfering in the royal marriage by advising the King not to go near his wife. Marguerite would have been highly conscious of the imperative to produce a child, and thus frustrated by any sexual neglect on her husband’s part. Henry’s pious
vagueness was not unaffectionate, but while there was no heir, her own position remained uncertain. Suffolk was in every way a contrast to her husband, a decisive, paternal figure, and moreover one of the few people to whom she had been close since her wedding. There were rumours that they were lovers, and though again these are unsubstantiated, Marguerite was careless in allowing their political alliance to be displayed so openly.

Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, the King’s uncle and the only living brother of Henry V, was a potential threat to both Marguerite and Suffolk. As heir presumptive, he stood to gain the crown if Marguerite remained childless and, as one of the strongest opponents of the 1444 peace settlement, he was angry and resentful of the Maine agreement, seeing it as a betrayal of his brother’s glorious legacy. On 10 February Henry and Marguerite opened Parliament in Bury St Edmunds, away from Gloucester’s centre of support in London and one of the focal points of Suffolk’s interest. When Gloucester arrived on 18 February, he was arrested by the Queen’s steward, Viscount Beaumont, and taken into custody to await trial. Five days later he was found dead in his lodgings. Suffolk had the body exposed to prove that Gloucester had not been injured, and possibly the Duke had died of a stroke, but rumours of hot spits and smothering with feather beds were more satisfactory to political gossips. Marguerite’s role in the Gloucester plot was soon perceived as the fruit of her relationship with Suffolk. She had ‘asked, then cajoled, then begged’
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Henry to have his uncle arrested, on Suffolk’s advice that he had been planning to seize Henry and herself, imprison them and take the crown for himself.

Gloucester was not the only one to be disgusted at the ‘sorry tale of dishonesty, underhand dealing, vacillation and mismanagement’ of French affairs
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Still favouring Suffolk’s policies (or complying with them), Henry made him a duke, but by 1449 Charles VII had grown weary of English promises and machinations. He took matters into his own hands by invading Normandy in July. By October, Rouen was lost, in April the following year the English suffered a devastating defeat at Formigny and by August the whole province had fallen. In spite of Marguerite’s vigorous opposition to attempts to impeach Suffolk, who was formally named in Parliament as the culprit of this national disgrace, in January 1450 he was imprisoned in the Tower to await trial in February, though Henry did rouse himself to intervene and persuade Suffolk’s accusers to accept a fiveyear banishment.

By now, the country was in uproar. In January, Adam Moleyns, bishop of Chichester, keeper of the Privy Seal and one of Suffolk’s two closest associates, was murdered by a mob at Portsmouth. The men of Kent had
taken up arms, and the terrified government banned the carrying of weapons in London and the south-east, an order as fearful as it was impractical. Suffolk was attacked as he left the Tower, but permitted a six-week respite before embarking on his exile on 30 April. On 2 May, his ships were surrounded and he was taken aboard the
Nicholas of the Tower
. A rusty sword proclaimed his last privilege as a peer and his headless body was delivered to Dover.

Officially, Suffolk’s death was treated as a crime, just as Humphrey of Gloucester’s had not been, and the unruly rabble of Kent was blamed. The Kentish response was the uprising that became known as Jack Cade’s rebellion. In June, the bishop of Salisbury, the last living member of the Suffolk ‘triumvirate’, was hauled from the Wiltshire church where he was saying Mass and killed. The rebels were in London in early July, brandishing their manifesto, the ‘Complaint of the Commons of Kent’, while Henry and Marguerite took refuge at Kenilworth. Two thousand pardons were issued to the rebels who massed at Blackheath, which gives a sense of the numbers involved, and though Jack Cade himself was put to death on 12 July and order restored, the first six months of 1450 had provided a horrifying example of how precarious Henry’s authority had become, and how easy it might be to overturn it.

On the Feast of the Epiphany 1451, the King and Queen were about to take their seats for dinner when the steward of the household regretfully informed them that there was none, as the court purveyors refused to deliver any more food on credit. The deplorable state of Henry VI’s finances was a consequence of the political and administrative incompetence that had brought about the crisis on the Continent and the frightening unrest in England. The truce negotiated on the King’s marriage ought to have permitted England to reassert its strong position in Normandy, but Henry’s poor leadership and the mangled diplomacy of long-term peace arrangements wasted this opportunity. A tax had been voted in for 1445—9 with a view to providing an extra 30,000 pounds a year to pay for defence, but taxpayers were infuriated to discover that this had dribbled away into the household accounts and were disinclined to pay more. Revenues fell as expenses increased and funds were divided incompetently between Normandy and the other French territories with the result that by 1449 the garrison of Calais, the King’s most powerful standing force, was owed 20,000 pounds in wages.

Marguerite was both directly and indirectly involved in this state of affairs. Suffolk had spent the incredible sum of £5,573 17s 5d during the period
he had spent in France organising her wedding and overseeing her return journey, the magnificence of which was designed to impress Henry’s dignity upon the French, but which he could ill afford. Further expenses were incurred by the preparation of Marguerite’s lodgings: there had been no queen in England for twenty years and the royal apartments at Westminster presented a rather sorry appearance. Henry engaged William Cleve, the clerk of works at Westminster, to build a new suite of rooms at Eltham, ‘honourable for the Queen’s lodging’,
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comprising a hall, scullery, saucery and serving area, so that Marguerite would have somewhere to entertain.

Marguerite had no dowry to offset such extravagance, and her management of her household suggests an almost defiant pride, a refusal to economise and thus to acknowledge her relatively impoverished status. In 1444, household expenses rose from 8,000 pounds to 27,000, and while a great proportion of this vast expenditure had nothing to do with Marguerite, it is notable that expenses for the Queen’s chamber in the year 1452 were 1,719 pounds in comparison with 919 for 1466 in the following reign. Marguerite was not the first queen to be plagued with debt, but it seemed at first that she was well provided for financially. Her dower settlement brought her 3,000 pounds in total from various resources of the duchy of Lancaster estates, 1,000 from the customs at Southampton, just over 1,000 from the duchy of Cornwall and a direct allowance of £1,657 17s IId from the royal exchequer. In addition, she could claim queens-gold and, after Gloucester was removed, she was given a further 500 marks from his duchy of Lancaster holdings. However, none of these resources was particularly reliable: in 1452—3, for example, Marguerite received only £53
IS
14d in queens-gold, and a large part of this was unpaid debt carried over from previous years. Of fifty-nine claims for that period, only sixteen were paid. She constantly battled to stabilise her income, attempting to trade her rights at the exchequer for the more solid security of land, and even venturing into trade with a licence to transport wool for sale tax-free. The customs payments from Southampton were tardy, and Marguerite was obliged to write sternly to John Somerton, one of the officials, to remind him of his duty: ‘We desire and pray you and also exhort and require you, that, of such money as is due to us, at Michaelmas term last past, of our dower, assigned to be paid of the customers of Southampton by your hands, you will do your pain and diligence that we may be contented and paid in all haste … and that you fail not hereof as we trust, and you think to stand in continuance of the favour of our good grace and to eschew our displeasure.’

Marguerite was justifiably active in pursuing her financial rights, but in
the process she inevitably acquired a reputation for both avarice and extravagance. However, this judgement should be considered against one of the achievements of that ‘extravagance’: the restoration of the royal court. One of the Queen’s wedding gifts was a French-made collection of romances presented to her by the Earl of Shrewsbury, John Talbot. The frontispiece features Henry and Marguerite crowned, with Talbot kneeling before them, the King’s chamberlain and counsellors grouped behind him and Marguerite’s ladies watching the presentation. Peeking from behind the chamber walls are enormous daisies, Marguerite’s emblem. After the frequent illnesses of Henry IV, the long absences of Henry V and the minority of Henry VI, the court had dwindled to little more than the King’s place of business, rather than the fascinating, cultured and romantic environment Talbot’s frontispiece imagines. As J.L. Laynesmith comments: ‘The combination of romances and treatises on chivalry and government within the book itself were … entirely appropriate as a wedding gift to a woman whose marriage signified her King’s entry into mature kingship and with that the re-establishment of the English court.’
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In August and September of 1450, the ‘new’ court received two men who would dominate the struggle for power around the King in the next few years. Edmund Beaufort, whose love affair with Catherine de Valois had caused such a scandal twenty years before, had now succeeded to the dukedom of Somerset and was the King’s closest living male relative. Like Somerset, Richard, Duke of York was descended from Edward III, and given the attainder on descendants of John of Gaunt’s mistress Katherine Swynford inheriting, his claim to the throne was arguably stronger than Somerset’s, despite the fact that he was descended from Edmund of Langley, the younger brother of Somerset’s grandfather Gaunt. With Suffolk disposed of, Somerset and York were set for a bitter rivalry as to which of them should control the King and, in the event that Marguerite remained childless, the succession. York was disgusted by the losses in France, for which he held Somerset responsible as lieutenant, a post he himself had coveted. There was a strong feeling, reflected in the November Parliament, that York, who had been absent as lieutenant of Ireland during the Normandy debacle, should now take up his rightful place as the nation’s premier aristocrat and its greatest magnate, but it was Somerset who was awarded the post of constable of England, and York’s attempts to advise Henry were ignored.

Events in France could only add to York’s rancour. By 30 June 1451, Bordeaux had surrendered to the French, Gascony was almost lost and the French armies were moving north to Calais. Henry was sufficiently
galvanised to declare that he would lead an expedition to recover his Aquitainian inheritance himself, but it came to nothing, and York was increasingly convinced that Somerset was poisoning the King against him and leading England towards chaos. York attempted to win supporters for reform in a series of open letters that were sent around the country, inveighing against the ‘envy, malice and untruth’ of the Duke of Somerset and setting out York’s manifesto against him: ‘To the intent that every man shall know my purpose … I, after long sufferance and delays, it not being my will or intent to displease my sovereign lord, but seeing that the said Duke ever prevails and rules about the King’s person and that by this means the land is likely to be destroyed, am fully determined to proceed in all haste against him with the help of my kinsmen and friends.’
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It was not quite a declaration of war, but York was risking a charge of treason. On 1 March 1451, his party met Henry and Somerset at Black-heath. Despite his wealth, the extent of his support and the popularity of his cause, York made a poor showing. The magnates, with the exception of Lord Cobham and the Earl of Devon, had come out for Henry. York made his case against Somerset, demanding that the Duke be arrested and tried for his mismanagement of the French war. Henry made some gesture of consent, but Somerset remained obstinately by his side, and in fact it was York who was escorted back to London like a prisoner and made to swear a humiliating public oath of allegiance at St Paul’s.