The Hollow Crown: The Wars of the Roses and the Rise of the Tudors (13 page)

The first utterances of public disaffection were probably in the taverns and townhouses, from the mouths of men like the unfortunate Thomas Kerver. But in November 1449, when a parliament met to address the dire distress of Normandy, the anger of England’s political classes was made absolutely plain. Parliament opened in Westminster, before moving to Blackfriars in London for a few weeks, on account of the ‘infected air’. Whatever plague hung in the air, it was not nearly so deadly as the wrath of England’s commons.

Parliament had ostensibly been called by the king to deal with ‘certain difficult and urgent business concerning the governance and [defence] of his realm of England’. But very swiftly the search began for someone to blame. The news of Rouen’s loss was fresh and raw. Every day brought new defeats, and there was a fear that once Normandy fell, Calais would be next. Since it
was impossible for parliament to turn on the king himself – direct criticism of the king was politically dangerous and implied serious constitutional crisis – his leading ministers would have to suffer for their evil counsel.

The first to face retribution was Adam Moleyns, the bishop of Chichester, keeper of the privy seal and a man whose hand touched virtually every aspect of royal business. For fifteen years Moleyns had served as a high-ranking ambassador and clerk (and subsequently a full member) of the privy council. Closely allied to Suffolk, he had been a key figure in the negotiations for the royal marriage, and a member of the diplomatic party that had formalised the cession of Maine. He had fallen out with Richard duke of York, publicly accusing him of corruption and incompetence during his French lieutenancy. Moleyns was a thoughtful and talented humanist scholar, but his career as a politician had ultimately been a failure and he was associated with almost every disastrous decision that had been made with regard to France. Having attended the first session of the parliament, he was granted royal leave to stand down from his secular duties and leave the country on a pilgrimage. He never made it out of England. He was in Portsmouth on 9 January 1450 when he was attacked and murdered by one Cuthbert Colville, a military captain who was waiting to embark to fight in France.

It was widely said that as he died, Moleyns cursed Suffolk as the author of all England’s misfortune. Whether this is true we will never know, but the rumour spread far and wide throughout England. The king’s chief minister would clearly be the next to face the anger of the realm.

Parliament broke for Christmas. As soon as it reconvened on 22 January, Suffolk tried to pre-empt the attack he knew to be coming. In the Painted Chamber at Westminster, richly decorated on every side with ancient murals of scenes from the Old Testament, he stood before the king and parliament and denounced
‘the odious and horrible language that runneth through your land, almost in every commons’ mouth, owning to my highest charge and most heaviest disclaundre [i.e. slander]’. The de la Pole family, he argued, had been conspicuously loyal, sacrificing almost everything in the name of the Crown: Suffolk’s father had died at Harfleur, ‘mine eldest brother after … at the battle of Agincourt’. Three more brothers had died in foreign service and he himself had paid £20,000 in ransom money after being captured at Jargeau in 1429. He had borne arms for thirty-four winters. He had been a knight of the Garter for thirty years. Since returning from war, he pleaded, he had ‘continually served about your most noble person [fifteen] year[s], in the which I have found as great grace and goodness, as ever liegeman found in his sovereign lord’.
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The impassioned appeal to Henry’s pity would save Suffolk’s life, but not for long.

How had it come to this? Since the 1430s, Suffolk had played a vital role in English government, managing relations between the royal household, the council and the nobility, and in general he had done so with the approval of those who understood just how disastrously ineffective and inert the king was. Yet in the winter of 1450, Suffolk was on his own. The nobility who might have been expected to rally to the defence of Normandy had conspicuously failed to do so. In fact, gradually since 1447, many of them had stopped attending council meetings and stayed away from court. Effectively, they had abandoned the government, leaving Suffolk and his diminishing group of allies looking increasingly like a domestic clique around the king, subverting his power for their own gain and ruining the country in the process.
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When he was deserted by his fellow peers, Suffolk’s method of rule – directing government minutely but disguising his hand – was brutally exposed. Since he, even more than Moleyns, had been at the heart of royal government for the years of greatest calamity, he would have to take the blame.

Suffolk’s plea of loyalty had no effect whatever on the commons. The lower house of parliament tended to be far less sympathetic to failures of noble government than the lords. Four days after the duke’s speech, they petitioned the king for Suffolk to be jailed on ‘a generalty’ – a non-specific charge by which he could be held until a detailed impeachment case could be put against him. There was something close to hysteria whipping around parliament. ‘From every party of England there is come among them a great rumour and fame, how that this realm of England should be sold to the king’s adversary of France,’ stated the petition, by way of justifying its demands: a ludicrous notion, but one that spoke of the extreme political tension in the air.

On 7 February 1450 Suffolk was formally impeached of ‘high, great, heinous and horrible treasons’. He was accused of inviting the French to invade England, stirring the king to release Charles duke of Orléans, giving away Maine and Le Mans, passing diplomatic and military secrets to the French, embezzling money through grants of office, tricking the king into granting him lands and titles, including the earldom of Pembroke, which he had held since 1443, giving money to the queen of France, and generally aiding and abetting Charles VII against the English Crown. Scurrilous gossip was written up into formal accusation, including the somewhat implausible suggestion that the night before the duke’s capture at the battle of Jargeau, ‘he lay in bed with a nun whom he took out of her holy orders and defiled’.
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A month later, on 9 March, the duke, having been given time to prepare his defence, knelt before the king and parliament and denied the charges one by one, ‘and said, saving the king’s high presence, they were false and untrue’.
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On 17 March, Henry VI summoned all the lords of parliament, including Suffolk, to his private chamber, ‘with a gable window over a cloister, within his palace of Westminster’.
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Kneeling before the assembled lords and king, Suffolk once more protested
his innocence, pointing out that it would have been quite impossible for him alone to have committed the long list of crimes of which he was accused. He waived his right to trial by his peers, and threw himself on the king’s judgement. Then Henry, through the chancellor, told the lords that he did not find Suffolk guilty of any counts of treason. Rather, he said, there were several lesser charges (known as misprisions) for which the duke could be held responsible. Rather than condemning Suffolk to a traitor’s death, he banished him from the kingdom for five years. The sentence was to begin on 1 May.

Despite the lack of a formal trial by peers, it is likely that this was a judgement that had been taken with the lords, whose desire to prevent one of their number from being humiliated by the commons outweighed their desire to see all blame for the realm’s ills conveniently fall on Suffolk’s shoulders. No record exists of this news being transmitted to the commons, but it is safe to speculate that it was met with something between astonishment and rage.

On 19 March, in the dead of night, the duke was removed from London and taken to his manor of East Thorp, in the county of Suffolk. The journey was supposed to be secret, but around two thousand angry Londoners nevertheless chased the party, jostling and abusing Suffolk’s servants all the way. By removing the target of popular disgruntlement, the lords had only served to increase the thirst for blood among their countrymen. A riot broke out in London two days later, in which the leader, a vintner’s servant called John Frammesley, was heard to shout, ‘By this town, by this town, for this array the king shall lose his crown.’
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Parliament was prorogued for Easter on 30 March. By now it was clear that the situation in and around London would be too dangerous for it to continue sitting after the break.

The final session on 29 April thus opened in Leicester, one hundred miles to the north of the capital. On the first day of the new session the king was presented with yet another petition: this time
calling upon him to issue an act of resumption, by which all lands originally belonging to the Crown or to the king’s private estate, the duchy of Lancaster, ‘in England, Wales, and in the marches therof, Ireland, Guînes, Calais, and in the marches thereof, the which ye have granted by your letters patent or otherwise, since the first day of your reign’ would be taken back, in an attempt to bolster the royal income. In other words, everything that had been given away by royal favour would now be taken back. It is quite likely that this had been demanded for some time, but demands were now all the louder and more persistent. The king had chosen to save his favourite. The government would therefore have to satisfy the calls for reform in some other radical way.

As the Leicester session of parliament debated the proposed act of resumption, Suffolk was on the east coast of England, in Ipswich, preparing to leave for his sentence of banishment. He and his servants set sail on 30 April in a small fleet of two ships and ‘a little spinner’ – a lighter craft, which we would now call a pinnace – heading for Calais, from where he could make his way to the duke of Burgundy’s lands. Before leaving, Suffolk swore on the sacrament that he was innocent of the charges put before him. Others, however, were not so sure.

The ships reached the straits of Dover the following day and the pinnace had gone ahead to make contact with the Calais garrison when, as one correspondent put it, they ‘met a ship called Nicholas of the Tower, with other ships waiting on them, and [from those in the pinnace] the master of the Nicholas had knowledge of the duke’s coming’. Suffolk’s ships were intercepted and the duke was persuaded or commanded to board the
Nicholas
, ‘and when he came, the master bade him, “Welcome Traitor”’. According to the same correspondent, Suffolk was held aboard for twenty-four hours, with the agreement of all its crew. The writer heard a rumour that the crew had set up their own tribunal to re-try the duke on the charges he had faced in parliament.
What is more certain is that after a period of time aboard the
Nicholas
Suffolk was removed to a smaller boat with a chaplain to shrive him, ‘and there was an axe and a stoke [i.e. a chopping block], and one of the lewdest of the ship’ – later named in court as a sailor from Bosham called Richard Lenard – ‘bade him lay down his head … and took a rusty sword, and smote off his head within half a dozen strokes’. Suffolk’s servants were put ashore, robbed but unharmed, to tell their tale. Two days later the duke’s body was found dumped on Dover beach, with his head standing next to it on a pole.
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The news of Suffolk’s death reached parliament in Leicester on 6 May. It was the final shock that forced the royal government to accept the act of resumption (albeit with an extensive list of exemptions, which somewhat blunted its practical effect). A sense of general crisis had by this time escaped the confines of parliament. Towards the end of May 1450 men began to gather in bands across south-west Kent. The county had been in a state of some alarm for around six weeks: the military collapse in Normandy had awakened fears that once Charles VII’s soldiers reached the coast, they would cross the Channel and attack or even invade England, in which case Kent would be one of the first places to suffer. Coastal raids were bloody and terrifying experiences. On 14 April the royal government had issued a commission of array: a command to raise the county militia in every Kentish hundred (the local unit of county administration), assessing each community for its readiness to protect the realm. Men were selected to serve in a potential defence force and provided with clothing, some equipment, money and armour. A night watch of the coast would have been organised. Perhaps most importantly, constables were appointed to take command of each hundred’s militia.
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This was a perfectly reasonable notion, given the gravity of the perceived threat from across the Channel. However, at the same time as the county was being put into a state of military readiness, Suffolk’s murder triggered a panicked rumour that the king intended to hold Kent communally responsible for the death of his favourite. It was said variously that a visiting court would carry out exemplary hangings of ordinary Kentish folk and that the whole county was going to be razed and turned into royal forest. The people of Kent were therefore armed, organised, angry, frightened and ready to go to war to defend the realm from its enemies.

Unfortunately, they did not see enemies only in the spectre of plundering Frenchmen aboard landing craft. Like the parliamentary commons, they began to see the true threat to the king’s realm as the clique around him: ministers and household men like the treasurer Lord Saye, the prominent councillor and royal confessor William Aiscough, bishop of Salisbury, the diplomat John, Lord Dudley and several others. On 6 June word reached these men, and the rest of parliament assembled at Leicester, that Kent had risen in rebellion, and armed bands were assembling around Ashford, in the south-east. It was said that they had elected as their leader and the ‘captain of Kent’ a man called Jack Cade, who was going by the suggestively aristocratic name of John Mortimer – a name he may have adopted to imply an affiliation to the duke of York’s family, who in past generations had been the instigators of rebellion and dynastic plot. (See above, p.
88
.) This was nothing more than fantasy, however: Cade had no contact or connection with York, who was then still in Ireland providing loyal service to the Crown.