The Hollow Crown: The Wars of the Roses and the Rise of the Tudors (10 page)

His final experience of fighting in France, however, had not been a happy one. He was in a position of high command when Orléans fell to Joan of Arc and her army in 1429. In the aftermath he had attempted to lead the retreat of a few hundred Englishmen along the banks of the river Loire. Five or six thousand Frenchmen, led by the duke of Alençon and Joan of Arc, were in fierce pursuit, and it had been all that Suffolk could do to direct his troops to shelter in the town of Jargeau, a small but reasonably well-defended settlement about eleven miles upstream from Orléans, with a town wall and fortifications around a bridge across the river. Once they reached the town, Suffolk commanded
his men and the inhabitants of Jargeau to barricade the walled part of the town for the inevitable siege. And sure enough, no sooner had the English settled in than the French ‘immediately surrounded them on all sides, and commenced to attack them very sharply and to assault them in many places’.
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Suffolk had twice attempted to negotiate a short truce and twice the French had rejected his overtures – first because he was deemed to have breached chivalric protocol by negotiating with a captain of low status, rather than with the duke of Alençon, and subsequently because Alençon claimed that the noise of the French assaults was such that he simply did not hear the messages being brought from the town. Given the size of the cannon that the French had deployed to smash down the walls of the bridge and town – including one absolutely massive gun called ‘Shepherdess’, after Joan of Arc – it is just possible that Alençon was telling the truth. In any case, the bombardment was brutal and effective. Although one enterprising Englishman had managed to hit Joan on the head with a rock thrown from the town walls, cracking her helmet in two and knocking her briefly to the ground, her galvanising presence had been enough to spur the French to victory. Jargeau fell in less than a day, Suffolk and his brother Sir John de la Pole were both captured, and another brother, Alexander de la Pole, was killed, along with more than one hundred other defenders. It was a dismal defeat, alleviated only slightly for Suffolk by the fact that he had managed to knight his captor – a lowly soldier rather than a nobleman – before formally surrendering, thereby avoiding the utter chivalric humiliation of having to give his lordly person up to a man of mean status.
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After Jargeau, Suffolk had been taken to Orléans and imprisoned for a number of months. He was finally released in 1430 – for a ransom he would later claim was an eye-watering £20,000, or about seven times his annual income during the wealthiest period of his life. Back in England he began building an extensive
and deep-rooted base of power that straddled court, countryside and council and eventually put him in control of the mainspring of royal authority.

Suffolk built up his influence through a combination of boldness, good fortune, excellent connections and old-fashioned stealth. His starting point was the lands associated with his earldom, which gave him a substantial power bloc in East Anglia: he was the dominant nobleman in Suffolk and Norfolk.
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A marriage to the distinguished, stunningly beautiful and extremely rich widow Alice Chaucer, dowager countess of Salisbury, brought more lands in Oxfordshire and Berkshire, close to the centre of royal government; it also introduced Suffolk into the spheres of national politics, since the Chaucers were close associates of Cardinal Beaufort and Catherine de Valois. These connections may well have lain behind Suffolk’s appointment to the royal council in 1431 – but here he was also undoubtedly helped by his easy relations with the other leading voice in the minority government, Humphrey duke of Gloucester. Rare was the man who could straddle the Beaufort–Gloucester split, but Suffolk showed from very early in his political career that he was a pragmatist who preferred working across factional divides to taking sides. He was not an exceptionally charismatic or commanding individual, but what he lacked in personality he amply made up for in diligence and the ability to render himself agreeable to mutually hostile colleagues.

Between 1431 and 1436 Suffolk gradually built up a reputation for assiduous royal service. He was one of the keenest attenders on the royal council, served alongside Cardinal Beaufort in the disastrous embassy at the congress of Arras, and even returned, briefly, to military service following Bedford’s death, attempting to pacify areas of Normandy. In this he joined up with the young and ambitious Richard duke of York, who led an army during the campaigning season of late summer and autumn
1436. Just as importantly, however, from 1433 Suffolk served as steward of the royal household. The steward enforced discipline and supervised all the day-to-day running of a domestic operation involving several hundred officers, servants and assistants. Out of necessity, he had regular, informal and largely unchecked personal contact with the king at all hours of the day. Therefore at the royal court it was an important position, one that Suffolk valued so much that he made sure to have it guaranteed by the council before he left to fight in France. By the second half of the 1430s he had thus established himself as both a stalwart of the administration and the central figure in the king’s household. Other personages, particularly Beaufort and Gloucester, still outranked him and had their own access to Henry; but gradually, through his diligent attendance at council meetings and his pre-eminence at court, Suffolk became, in effect, the main channel for official and unofficial approaches to the king. Throughout the 1430s, as Henry’s councillors attempted to nudge the young king into ruling in his own right, there was a to-and-fro of power between the household and the council chamber. Wherever the power went, Suffolk was there too.

This was not, it should be said, a purely self-interested power-grab on Suffolk’s behalf. Undoubtedly he was ambitious, and he would later brazenly accrue offices and lands for his own personal gain. But Suffolk was allowed to take on the role of royal puppeteer thanks to a general consensus among both his aristocratic colleagues and other important figures at court, driven by the realisation that someone would have to co-ordinate government behind the scenes until such time as the king summoned enough character and maturity to do it for himself. Nevertheless, Suffolk’s omnipresence allowed him to wield influence in a variety of ways and throughout every aspect of government policy and royal activity – which is why we can detect his hand beneath the decision in 1437 to send Edmund and Jasper Tudor to live
with his sister Katherine de la Pole at Barking Abbey. And as the years passed it would make him one of the most powerful men in England: Margaret Paston, doyenne of the famous letter-writing East Anglian dynasty, wrote that without Suffolk’s blessing, no one in England could defend their property or enjoy their life. Unless, as she put it, ‘ye have my Lord of Suffolk’s good lordship, while the world is as it is, ye can never live in peace’.
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However, as Suffolk amassed and exercised his considerable wealth and power, ruling quietly in the name of a wavering and inert king, he was inadvertently creating a dangerous political situation. For to operate kingship by stealth – even with the noblest intentions – was to play with fire. As the years passed, the dangers of manipulating the natural means of royal rule steadily increased. Soon enough, the problems of Suffolk’s ‘good lordship’ would be brutally exposed.

A nervous crowd stood waiting on Blackheath. It was Friday 28 May 1445 and the large grassy area of common land on the south bank of the Thames, just downriver from Southwark, swarmed with London’s most notable citizens: the mayor, the aldermen of London’s governing council, representatives of all the wealthy liveried companies of the city, all former London sheriffs and a group of minstrels. The city had been preparing for this day for the better part of a year and everyone of note was dressed identically, in custom-stitched gowns the colour of the bluest summer sky, trimmed with red hoods and embroidered with the crest of the wearer’s profession. The design of these fine robes had been a matter of intense civic debate, causing arguments that had raged for several weeks in the council chamber the previous August. It had taken considerable political energy to defeat the idea that the aldermen ought to be wearing saffron rather than blue. These were no petty squabbles. It was vital that the leading citizens of London represent the city at its most dazzling, for they had gathered to celebrate the arrival of a highly esteemed visitor.
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She was Margaret of Anjou, fifteen-year-old daughter of Duke René of Anjou, a famous but impoverished nobleman from central France. René held a number of splendid-sounding titles – he was, in theory, king of both Sicily and Jerusalem – but he was also a penniless and serially unlucky soldier, who had spent most of his daughter’s youth locked in his enemies’ jails or being beaten in wars on the Italian peninsula (a fact that had allowed the women of his family to wield a relatively large degree of political power and autonomy on his behalf ). Nevertheless, René was the brother
of the queen of France, which made Margaret the king’s niece. Her father may have been a relative pauper but the young girl was born of high blood, and her family was well connected, which was why Margaret had come to England to fulfil a political role of her own. She was the new bride and queen consort of King Henry VI.

Margaret’s marriage to Henry was Suffolk’s brainchild. The girl’s father was so poor that she came with a pitiful dowry – a measly twenty thousand francs and the hollow promise that one day the English king would inherit René’s claim to the crown of Majorca. But marrying Henry to the French king’s niece seemed to serve two greater purposes: it would bring England a diplomatic and military truce in the French wars and it would enable Henry and Margaret to rebuild the dwindling stock of the English royal family.

Since Bedford’s death in 1435, England’s French policy had been a mess. A famine caused by crop failures in England and Normandy between 1437 and 1440 had impoverished the realm on both sides of the Channel and the Crown was heavily indebted and in arrears with its payments to captains and troops. Parliaments now grumbled loudly when asked to approve new taxes for the never-ending war. At no point since his French coronation had any really serious effort been made to take Henry back to France at the head of an army. (Neither would the king ever be taken to Scotland or Ireland.) It was true that his rival Charles VII had also avoided taking command in the field, but Charles was at least a vigorous director of strategy. The same could not be said of his nephew. During the early 1440s Henry VI had thrown a great deal of his energy into supporting the foundation of Eton College, a grammar school dedicated to the Virgin Mary whose architectural plans he pored over and annotated with his own hand. At the same time he had sponsored the establishment of King’s College, Cambridge, a large, rich
place of higher education explicitly founded for ‘poor and indigent scholar clerks’. Few Plantagenet kings ever took as keen an interest in popular education as Henry VI. But few ever took less interest in warfare. Thus in England a series of confused, conflicting and counterproductive policies had been pursued under the leadership of various loud voices in government.

In 1440 Cardinal Beaufort had gambled away one of England’s most valuable diplomatic chips by permitting the release of the duke of Orléans, a prisoner taken at the battle of Agincourt in 1415, who had spent the ensuing twenty-five years writing romances in English castles, including the first recorded Valentine’s poem. (
‘Je suis déjà d’amour tanné / Ma très douce Valentinée
…’ – ‘I am already sick of love / My very sweet Valentine …’) Orléans’s release had enraged Humphrey duke of Gloucester, whose chief desire never wavered from all-out attack on France. Gloucester saw it as a disgrace to Henry V’s memory and made his feelings widely known, though he would soon be compelled to direct his attentions closer to home.

In 1441 a scandal blew up involving the duke’s second wife, Eleanor Cobham, the spirited young lady-in-waiting for whom he had abandoned his first wife, Jacqueline of Hainault, in 1428, when their childless marriage was annulled by the pope. The circumstances of the marriage were somewhat controversial, given Eleanor’s relatively lowly social status. But she proved to be a stately and intelligent woman who revelled at the head of the sumptuous Renaissance court that she and her husband held at their manor of Greenwich, where they hosted poets, musicians and playwrights.

The death of Bedford meant that Gloucester was heir presumptive; by extension Eleanor found herself potentially the next queen. The thought clearly thrilled and intrigued her, and she began consulting astrologers and necromancers to predict the date of the king’s death and thus, by extension, ‘King’ Humphrey’s
accession. But in this matter she had grievously overreached. The astrologers whom she consulted were men of considerable academic standing – for this was an age when the realms of science and superstition largely overlapped. But if her diviners were well schooled, they were also politically naïve. They predicted that, in the summer of 1441, Henry VI would sicken and die. Eleanor, or those around her, found it impossible to keep this a secret, and rumours of the king’s death began to swirl around the capital and the country.

The high standing of her husband was not enough to protect Eleanor. In July she was arrested, tried and, as one chronicler put it, ‘damned for a witch and an heretic, and put in perpetual prison’. Her associates were put to death, but Eleanor managed to escape the flames. She was sentenced to a very public and humiliating penance: ordered to walk barefoot, carrying a candle, about the streets of London on three occasions in November. She was forcibly divorced from the duke and sentenced to an indefinite jail term, which she served at ever more remote castles in Kent, Cheshire, the Isle of Man and finally, from 1449, Beaumaris on Anglesey.
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Gloucester was personally shaken by the loss of his wife and his public standing never recovered from the scandal: his credibility and the scope of his political influence were at a stroke smashed.

With Gloucester’s fall, Cardinal Beaufort’s influence grew. He had long been the largest financial creditor of the Crown and a consistently cautious voice on the royal council. But in 1442 the cardinal abandoned his own long-favoured policy of containment and reconciliation and turned heedless aggressor. He convinced the council and parliament to permit a military expedition to France led by his nephew John Beaufort, duke of Somerset. Its purpose was ostensibly to join up the two main blocs of English power in Normandy and Gascony by conquering further territory in the region around Maine. Somerset’s expedition, undertaken
in the late summer of 1443, was an aimless fiasco, which looked like a shallow attempt by the Beaufort family to endow themselves with booty seized and lands conquered in central France. It annoyed Richard duke of York, who succeeded Bedford as lieutenant of France only to find his authority undercut by Beaufort’s independent commission. And it wasted a vast amount of money. Somerset died shortly after his return, humiliated by his failure and very possibly driven to suicide. Cardinal Beaufort now joined his rival Gloucester in effective political retirement.

All this left England with an acute need for peace. Suffolk, now the chief force in English politics, was determined to meet the challenge. He departed for France early in 1444 with the aim of taking decisive action to bring a temporary halt to warfare. He came back with Margaret’s hand in marriage as the seal on an agreement with her uncle Charles VII for a two-year truce, a window in which to negotiate for a longer and more lasting peace.

Following the usual diplomatic protocol, Suffolk had personally stood in for Henry and married the fourteen-year-old Margaret by proxy. In the presence of the French king and queen and a vast array of French nobles, he had taken the girl’s hand and slipped on the marriage band in the cathedral at Tours on 24 May 1444. The first response of all who heard about the match was apparently one of joyous relief. At the French banquets that followed Margaret’s proxy marriage it was said that the common people ‘made joy and mirth, and song (all with high voyce) Nowell! Nowell! Nowell! and peace, peace, peace be to us! Amen!’
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The great English war captain John Talbot, earl of Shrewsbury, commissioned for the new queen the most magnificent book of hours, which still survives complete with a copy of the royal genealogy with which the duke of Bedford had bombarded Normandy during the 1420s, showing Henry VI as the rightful lineal heir to the crown of France.
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(See plate section.) On his return
to England, Suffolk was promoted from earl to the rank of marquess. (In 1448 he would be raised yet again, to become a duke.) The following year he crossed the Channel to collect the king’s bride and bring her back in triumph to her new kingdom. Among his companions on the trip was one Owen Meredith – most likely Owen Tudor, who was now around forty-five years old.

So it was that Margaret landed at Southampton on 9 April 1445, frail from a longstanding illness made worse by seasickness following a very stormy crossing of the Channel aboard the
Cock John.
While recovering her health she slowly made her way from the south coast towards the capital. Her journey took her through rural Hampshire, where her first appointment was at Titchfield Abbey, a modest house of Premonstratensian canons more famous for the austere and scholarly lives of its brethren than for the abundance of its hospitality. In this quiet, monkish setting Margaret finally married Henry in person. The king gave her a fine gold ring set with a ruby, remoulded from the sacred ring he had worn during his coronation as king of France.
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Then they made their way together towards London. And so it was that on 28 May 1445, when England’s new queen rode up to London she was not just greeted by the ranked welcome party of London’s azure-clad worthies; behind them the whole city had been decked out to celebrate her arrival.

London excelled at pageantry. Though the city was not looking quite its best – the wooden steeple of St Paul’s had been set alight during the winter by a direct lightning strike, and the city gates were in need of repair – it still had the power to dazzle and enthral. Streets had been tidied and houses secured to celebrate Margaret’s arrival. Gutters were cleared, roofs strengthened to support clambering spectators, and tavern signs made safe to prevent them from falling on partygoers’ heads. Thousands of pounds raised by a council grant and public subscription had been spent on a series of eight lavish pageants with spoken
English captions, each showing and hailing Margaret in a similar light: as the bringer of peace, the saviour of Henry’s two realms and a gift sent from heaven. The young queen travelled in a litter through the streets thronged with merrymakers, seeing tableaux that likened her variously to the dove that brought Noah his olive branch and to the virgin St Margaret, who tamed ‘the might of spirits malign’.
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She was lodged in the Tower of London until, two days after her formal entry into the city, she emerged dressed all in virginal white with a crown of gold and pearls, to be drawn in a carriage to Westminster and crowned. England greeted its new queen with three days of feasts and jousting. Soon, it was hoped, Margaret would use her connections to help bring a
long-awaited
and lasting peace.

At the time of Henry and Margaret’s marriage the future of the English royal line was a matter of uncertainty. True, there was little chance that Henry VI would emulate his father by dying anywhere near a foreign battlefield. But as the poet John Lydgate wrote, ‘experience showeth the world is variable’.
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Life was short and death could be sudden and unpredictable. The last formal provisions for the royal succession had been made in parliament by Henry IV in 1406, when it was agreed that the crown should fall first to Henry V and the heirs of his body, and subsequently to Henry V’s three brothers and their heirs: Thomas duke of Clarence, John duke of Bedford and Humphrey duke of Gloucester. By 1445 Clarence and Bedford had both died without issue and Gloucester, despite marrying twice, had only fathered two bastards, whose names, Antigone and Arthur, reflected his interests in classical literature and British mythology. He was fifty-five years old, his marriages had failed without providing him with a single legitimate heir, and his disgrace following the fall of Eleanor Cobham had severely compromised his status as heir apparent.
Henry VI was thus the only surviving grandchild of Henry IV, and he was near-certain to remain so. Who might follow him if he were unexpectedly to die was not wholly clear. This did not, in itself, put Henry’s hold on the crown in danger. But it promised plenty of uncertainty for the next generation. For outside Henry’s immediate family there was a tremendous profusion of men with some degree of royal blood in their veins. At least four families could claim descent from Henry VI’s great-great-grandfather, Edward III.

The first was represented by Richard duke of York. Born in 1411, York inherited royal blood from both his parents: by his mother he was descended from Edward III’s second son, Lionel; from his father he was the heir of Edward III’s fourth son, Edmund. (See House of York genealogical table.) His other ancestors included members of many of the greatest noble families in England’s recent history: Mortimer, Clare, Despenser, de Burgh and Holland.
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Throughout the early part of the fifteenth century, his father’s side of the family had been involved in rebellions in which they were trumpeted as the rightful kings of England. One great-uncle, Sir Edmund Mortimer, had joined Owain Glyndwr’s revolt against Henry IV, proclaiming another uncle – Edmund earl of March – to be the true heir to the crown. York’s father shared the belief and was found guilty in 1413 of plotting to depose Henry V and put March on the throne, a crime for which he was beheaded as a traitor.