The Hollow Crown: The Wars of the Roses and the Rise of the Tudors (12 page)

When Gloucester arrived at Bury shortly before 11 a.m. on Saturday 18 February his fears were confirmed. He was prevented from going to meet his nephew the king and was advised ‘that he should take the next way to his lodging’ at St Saviour’s Hospital, the abbey infirmary, just outside the north gate of the city.
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The journey took him through the town’s horse market and down a small street known as the Dead Lane. It was a prophetic path to tread. After Gloucester had eaten dinner a delegation of peers arrived to arrest him on the authority of the royal council. His head servants were also arrested, and the more menial ones were ordered to disperse. The most senior judges in England – the chief justices of the courts of King’s Bench and Common Pleas – had been instructed to suspend their business and come to parliament. It seemed that a trial, one likely to be concluded with the duke’s final disgrace, was inevitable.

But fate intervened. On Thursday 23 February at around 3 p.m., some five days after he was arrested, Gloucester was dead.
‘How he died or in what manner the certainty is unknown, but only to God,’ wrote one chronicler. ‘Some said he died for sorrow, some said he was murdered between two feather-beds; and some said he was thrust into the bowel with an hot burning spit.’
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In fact, he had probably suffered a stroke, for he lay three days in a coma before finally expiring.

Gloucester was buried in St Albans. Before he was laid in his tomb, his body was displayed openly in an effort to dispel any talk of foul play. In the weeks that followed the end of the Bury parliament, several members of the duke’s household were tried and found guilty of plotting to kill the king and rescue Eleanor Cobham from prison. They were pardoned on the gallows – suggesting that the charges against them were either invented or had been exaggerated for effect, and that the whole campaign against Gloucester was one designed to discredit him and silence any criticisms of Suffolk’s peace with France. These grotesque and unsubtle tactics would backfire. Over the years, as the situation in France deteriorated, a legend of Humphrey the ‘good duke’ arose. This was quite a distortion: in life Gloucester had been quarrelsome, factious, somewhat conceited, impossibly aggressive and at times the single greatest danger to the stability of the realm. His most lasting achievements were in the realm of scholarship, where his patronage of Italian Renaissance artists and scholars was at the forefront of English secular learning, and his library numbered among the finest in the country. But his reputation would swiftly outstrip reality. The ‘good duke’ would be contrasted ever more fiercely and contemptuously with hostile portrayals of Suffolk and King Henry himself. This hostility would soon erupt in the most fearsome demonstration of popular anger seen in England for nearly seventy years.

On Wednesday 5 August 1444, in the town of Reading a horse set out slowly through the crowded streets, pulling behind it a cart containing a prisoner. In procession behind came the sheriff of Berkshire and others, following closely as the prison cart bumped and trundled slowly towards Reading’s western outskirts, before turning around and traversing the town slowly in the opposite direction. The prisoner was one Thomas Kerver, a moderately wealthy local gentleman, until recently the bailiff of the abbot of Reading. He was being paraded around the town in which he had lived his life in a ritual of social humiliation. This would be his very last tour of Reading, for he was shortly scheduled to meet his death at the county gallows near Maidenhead.
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Kerver’s cart left town by the London road, heading east towards open country. A few miles down the road it stopped. Kerver was brought down from the cart and attached to a far less comfortable device – either a wooden hurdle or a rope tied to a horse’s tail. Then for several miles he was dragged painfully along the ground, each stone, rut and pothole in the road scraping against his body and head. In this bloodying fashion he was hauled around another public circuit, this time through Maidenhead and the riverside village of Bray, until eventually his journey reached its end, alongside the gallows where the court of King’s Bench had decreed that he was to die. Hauled up from behind the horse, Kerver had a noose placed around his neck and was then strung up to dangle. He did not die – hanging was an experience designed to torture a criminal by choking him, rather than killing him outright by snapping his spine. Everyone who
looked on would have known what to expect next: the hangman’s knife cutting through Kerver’s stomach to pull out his entrails; the same knife hacking off his genitals which would then be burned in front of him. The body finally being cut down, beheaded and chopped into rough lumps. This was the ritual of hanging, drawing and quartering, the most fearsome punishment in English law.

Yet at the critical moment, Kerver’s punishment was interrupted. He was not slaughtered with a blade, but simply cut down from the gallows, then handed over by the sheriff to another party who had been watching the execution. The men who received him then disappeared at speed, taking with them the prisoner, who was presumably bloodied, bruised, half-conscious and very, very frightened.

Thomas Kerver’s near-death experience had come about because the court of King’s Bench – one of the highest in the land – had found him guilty of treason: of having ‘falsely and traitorously … schemed, imagined, encompassed, wished and desired the death and destruction of the king and his realm of England and with all his power traitorously proposed to kill the king’. On the Monday and Tuesday after Easter in April 1444 he was said to have tried to recruit others to join in a plot against the royal life, asking them whether the country was ruled by a king or a boy, and scornfully suggesting that the king was not as great a man as the dauphin. He repeatedly condemned the financial embarrassment of the English Crown, stating that ‘it would have been worth more than a hundred thousand pounds to England if the king had died twenty years ago’. It had taken only a few months for Kerver to be arrested, imprisoned in the Tower of London, and found guilty by a jury.

Kerver’s rescue on the gallows had come as the result of a secret last-minute order from the royal council, who had decided to show clemency on behalf of the pious young king. This fact was not widely known – it was thought that Kerver’s reprieve at
Maidenhead had only taken place so that, as one chronicler imagined, he could be ‘thence drawen to Tyborn gallow, and hanged … and then his head smitten off, and set on London Bridge’.
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In fact, Kerver was jailed at Wallingford Castle for a few years and then quietly released. The point, however, had been made. Treasonous words spoken against the king would not be tolerated.

Kerver’s case was exceptional for two reasons. His release had shown that Henry VI’s personal piety could be a tempering factor in criminal cases. But far more striking was the fact that the full weight of the law had been used against a fairly innocuous malefactor whose ostensible plans to kill the king as detailed in the legal records smack of nothing more than hot air. What was notable about the case was the intensity of the judicial response to words which in reality posed little or no threat.

Yet it is also possible for us to understand the feelings of the government that lay behind the prosecution. For during the 1440s, England was full of muttering and grumbling about the mounting problems faced by the realm both at home and abroad. An insecure regime could sense itself tottering. Occasionally it needed to lash out.

There is nothing new about grumbling against authority. Even the greatest kings in history have known that somewhere in their kingdom a drunkard is probably railing against them. But England in the 1440s was especially rich in public disaffection, as it was beset by increasingly serious political problems. In 1448, a man from Canterbury was recorded complaining that Queen Margaret ‘was none able to be Queen of England’. The complainant boasted that if he were a peer of the realm he would strike the queen down ‘for because that she beareth no child, and because that we have no prince in this land’.
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In 1450 two farmers from Sussex, John and William Merfeld, were indicted before
a court for saying that the king was a simpleton who would hold a staff with a bird on the end, playing with it like a clown, and that some other king ought to be found.
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Songs lamented the poverty and incompetence of the Crown and the royal government. The parliamentary commons, theoretically representing the people, complained in February 1449 that ‘murders, manslaughters, robberies and other thefts, within this … realm [are] dayly increasing and multiplying’.
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These were formulaic complaints, of the sort made by plenty of parliaments over the years, but in the early spring of 1449 there was some truth to the argument that law and order were beginning to falter.

There were two basic functions to kingship in the middle ages. The first was to uphold justice. The second was to fight wars. There was no sense in the 1440s that Henry VI was capable of doing either.
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Disorder had been increasing steadily in England for several years. Disputes between magnates went unresolved. One especially nasty feud had boiled up in the west country, where a private war had broken out between the Bonville and Courtenay families. The feud had been directly caused by Henry VI, who in 1437 had granted a prestigious and lucrative office – that of the stewardship of the duchy of Cornwall – to two men simultaneously. Latent rivalry between two of the most important families in the region spilled into roadside brawls and physical violence, which the king and his officers seemed worryingly unable to stem. Over the course of the 1440s, the dispute would escalate, resulting in murder, home invasion, the raising of private armies and sieges on property. And this was far from the only area in which such problems were brewing. Disorder was growing markedly across England, not least in the north, where rival magnates held and jealously guarded near-autonomous regional power, and in East Anglia, where the duke of Suffolk was finding his role as private lord and covert executor of royal government increasingly difficult to balance.

Problems were even more pronounced in France, where the English position following the cession of Maine had gone from uneasy to positively perilous. Richard duke of York’s commission as lieutenant had expired in 1445, and in 1447 he had been removed from the French wars and appointed to serve with broad and sweeping powers as lieutenant of Ireland, an area traditionally associated with the Mortimer side of his family. He took up his post in June 1449, and in the meantime he was replaced in France by Queen Catherine de Valois’s old courtier Edmund Beaufort, now the head of his family and honoured with the title of duke of Somerset.

This turned out to be a very unwise reorganisation of personnel. Despite receiving his commission in 1446, Somerset delayed crossing the Channel to take up his command until the spring of 1448, arriving just in time to see the truce collapse. Blatant breaches of the peace had been taking place on both sides for months, but none sufficient to provoke a return to all-out war. However, on 24 March 1449 English forces under the trusted Spanish mercenary François de Surienne attacked and captured the Breton town of Fougères, robbing its wealthy merchant citizens and sacking the townsfolk’s houses. The attack was presented as a spontaneous piece of violence by a renegade captain, but in reality it was planned and ordered in London, by none other than the duke of Suffolk. But the plan, intended as a cunning means by which to curry favour with a potentially dissident ally of Charles VII, backfired spectacularly when the duke of Brittany, whose authority had been offended by the raid on his territory, appealed to Charles VII for assistance.
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This was just the opportunity the French king had been waiting for, and in July he announced that he was no longer bound to keep the peace with England. He declared war on 31 July, launching a full and swift military invasion of Normandy. French forces swept through the duchy, dragging with them huge siege engines and a number of
cannon. In many cases these were enough to convince English fortresses to surrender without a fight. Morale throughout the duchy quickly collapsed, a process hastened by the lack of swift support or reinforcement from England.

The Norman capital of Rouen fell on 29 October 1449. Somerset shamefully and unchivalrously saved his own skin by fleeing the city under a safe-conduct from Charles VII, for which he agreed to a monstrous ransom of fifty thousand ecus, to be paid within the year. Desperate to hold on to whatever they could of Normandy, the council scrambled two thousand additional troops to the duchy, funded by the treasurer, Lord Saye, who pawned the crown jewels to pay the bills. But it was too little, too late. Rouen’s fall was swiftly followed by the losses of Harfleur, Honfleur, Fresnoy and Caen. By the spring the English had been driven back almost to the sea. They had no choice but to stand and fight. On 14 April 1450 they met a joint French–Breton force in battle at Formigny, near Bayeux. Amid the boom of cannon fire, the English army was slaughtered and many of their best captains taken prisoner. Their control of Normandy was at an end. It was nothing short of a catastrophe.

Although accomplished quickly, the collapse of the English kingdom of France was still a human disaster. As town after town fell to besiegers, streams of inhabitants were forced to flee. Women trudged out into the countryside with as many of their belongings as they could carry, their children strapped to their bodies with scraps of linen. Garrisons were cleared of their male inhabitants: soldiers and landowners who had made their whole careers in the defence of Normandy were now abruptly forced out into hostile terrain. Some would stay on and find employment in the newly French territory or even serve in Charles’s armies; but many hundreds, probably thousands of others would join a flood of refugees making their way in pitiful fashion to England. Cheapside – the main thoroughfare through London – was daily
occupied by miserable families wheeling their life’s possessions on carts in the street. It was, said one chronicler, ‘piteous to see’.
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Losing the war in Normandy was not just militarily humiliating: it triggered severe financial problems for the Crown. At the parliament of November 1449 it was said that the Crown was indebted to the dizzying tune of £372,000, against an annual income of just £5,000.
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Not all of this was due to the war. The running costs of the royal household alone were estimated at £24,000, meaning that, as it was somewhat tortuously expressed in parliament, ‘your expenses necessary to your houshold, without all other ordinary charges … exceedeth every year in expenses necessary over your livelihood’.
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Even with the income taxes granted by parliaments for war finance, individual loans, customs revenues, the special tax on wool and the practice of purveyance (by which the travelling royal household requisitioned supplies and goods without payment), the Crown still could not keep up with its obligations. During his relatively short time as lieutenant in France, Richard duke of York had accrued personal costs of £20,000 – five times the yearly return of all his extensive estates in England and Wales – for which he had great trouble in extracting repayment.
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A similar sum was owed in unpaid wages to the Calais garrison.

This seemed all the more perplexing given that, in theory, Henry VI ought to have had greater private resources than any of his ancestors in living memory, since he had the fewest living relatives to endow. All three of his uncles (Bedford, Clarence and Gloucester) were dead. So was his mother, and Henry IV’s widow, Joan of Navarre. Queen Margaret’s household had inflated the running costs, but she was far from the most profligate queen consort England had ever had (Edward III’s wife Philippa of Hainault had been the
grande dame
of reckless extravagance). Other than the queen there was no one left alive who absolutely required their own landed endowment from the Crown. The
royal couple had produced no children, so the king still held the principality of Wales and the duchy of Cornwall in his own right. His duchy of Lancaster was by far the largest private estate in England. And yet Henry was broke.

It was not wildly unusual for the king to be insolvent or even technically bankrupt – throughout the middle ages the Crown was almost always in debt – although it must be said that Henry’s financial problems were unusually severe.
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The greater problem was one of perception: debt was generally tolerated in times of military success, domestic order and convincing royal leadership; at times of distress and disorder, it became a serious political problem. The common idea, which in many ways reflected reality, was that lands which should have supplied a stable income to the Crown, even if only to cover the costs of the royal household, were carved up for personal gain by the men who governed in the king’s name. ‘So poor a king was never seen,’ went the subversive popular song.
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Technically this was not entirely accurate, but the impression was what mattered.