The Hollow Crown: The Wars of the Roses and the Rise of the Tudors (16 page)

The praise was uncommonly high: ‘By their most noble character they are of a most refined nature,’ the petition read; they were also lauded for ‘their other natural gifts, endowments, excellent and heroic virtues, and other merits of a laudable life’. Notwithstanding the fact that, being half Welsh and half French, neither had a drop of English blood in their veins, they and their heirs were confirmed in their right to hold property and titles. The Tudor boys, having left almost no mark on the historical record since their education in Barking Abbey during the late 1430s and early 1440s, were suddenly promoted into the front rank of the aristocracy, their noble blood and royal relations trumpeted. In a highly unsubtle dig at York, lands seized from the now ruined Sir William Oldhall were granted out as part of Jasper earl of Pembroke’s new landed estate.

At almost exactly the same time came more good news. In the early spring of 1453 Queen Margaret, who had for so long been the object of public derision for her failure to produce an heir, became pregnant. Notwithstanding the difficulties of childbirth
and the infant mortality rate of the time, there was a real prospect that a direct heir to the crown would soon provide England with a new focus – and that any questions of noble precedence would finally wither away. The queen was delighted, and on discovering her pregnancy immediately set out for Walsingham in Norfolk to give thanks at the famous shrine to the Virgin Mary. Henry VI rewarded the servant who brought him the news with a jewel known as a ‘demy ceynt’. All England stirred in happiness: even York’s wife Cecily – whose relations with the queen were more cordial than those between her husband and the king – was moved to write to Margaret, remarking that her unborn child was ‘the most precious, most joyful, and most comfortable earthly treasure that might come unto this land and to the people thereof’. Finally, after so much misery, so much strife, it appeared that God was smiling on the reign of King Henry VI.

Then, on 17 July 1453, in a field near Castillon, a town on the banks of the Dordogne just twenty-six miles east of Bordeaux, an English army under Talbot was annihilated by the cannon and cavalry of a French force commanded by Jean Bureau. Talbot, the brilliant veteran of half a century of warfare who was known as the ‘English Achilles’ and the ‘Terror of the French’, died alongside thousands of his men, charging headlong into a hail of artillery fire. The English were routed and within three months Bordeaux would once again fall under French control. It would prove to be the final, unequivocal defeat in a war that had been waged since 1337, and was greeted in England as the calamity it was. No one reacted more terribly to the news than Henry VI. In August, as the court was touring the west country, Henry fell into a form of stupor – the crippling, vacant, catatonic insanity of a waking coma under whose grotesque spell he would remain for fifteen months. At a stroke, England was once again kingless. And soon madness would engulf not just the king, but his kingdom, too.

Henry’s illness came upon him while he was staying at his hunting lodge in Clarendon, near Salisbury. It struck suddenly and overwhelmingly, and although for several weeks the king’s condition remained a secret, when he failed to recover it became impossible to conceal the fact that he was profoundly and shockingly unwell. The men around him had no specific name for his ailment; they could only describe its symptoms. ‘The king … suddenly was taken and smitten with a frenzy and his wit and reason withdrawn,’ wrote one. To another he was merely ‘sick’. He became completely helpless, removed both from his wits and the world around him to the point of total vacuity. He recognised no one. He could not speak or respond in any way to questions. He could neither feed nor clean himself, since he had no control of his arms or legs and could not even keep his head up. He had no sense of time. No physician could stir him. No medicine could stimulate him.
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His grandfather Charles VI of France had also suffered numerous bouts of insanity, but, whereas Charles’s madness had led him to scream in pain, smear himself in his own waste and run deranged through the royal palaces, Henry was simply mute and inert: a kingly nothing.

Even when sane, Henry had been a fairly weak and impotent force in government. Now that he was so obviously indisposed, however, Somerset and the rest of his counsellors were presented with a dire problem. When the king was healthy, they possessed an animated if ineffectual puppet through whom government could legitimately be carried out by a small group working as his chosen ministers. But with the king devoid of reason and will,
their mandate to rule in his name disappeared. The king had all the will and capacity of a newborn baby, which meant that a situation similar to Henry’s long minority in the 1420s was once again upon the realm. There was a royal person who could be said to reign, but he had no ability whatever to rule. Just as in the 1420s, a communal response was required.

Although the turbulence in England and the dire situation in the meagre rump of English France demanded constant attention, a political reaction to Henry’s illness was nevertheless delayed as long as possible, probably with the dual aim of hoping, rather vainly, that he would recover and waiting for the queen’s pregnancy to reach its term. The second of these came to pass, on 13 October 1453 – the feast day of Edward the Confessor, one of the holiest and most venerated saints in England, with special importance to the royal family. In a chamber at Westminster, Margaret of Anjou was delivered of her first child, a boy. The child was called Edward, a princely name that not only spoke to the auspicious day of his birth but recalled times of greater glory: the days of the baby’s great-great-great-grandfather Edward III. ‘Wherefore the bells rang in every church and Te Deum [was … ] sung,’ wrote one observer.
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The duke of Somerset stood godfather at Prince Edward’s baptism.
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If the birth was cause for great joy, it was also clear that the torpor of the boy’s father could no longer be ignored. It was important to construct a working government, and it was vital that this government should be genuinely inclusive. The king’s mental collapse had coincided with, and may indeed have contributed to, a huge escalation of violence, particularly in the north of England. Long-simmering hostility between the Neville and Percy families, who were rivals for power in Yorkshire, Cumbria and Northumberland, had descended into more or less open warfare. On 24 August 1454 Thomas Percy, Lord Egremont and an army of retainers numbering perhaps a thousand ambushed a wedding
party celebrating the marriage of Sir Thomas Neville and Maude Stanhope. The immediate cause was a disputed inheritance: the beautiful manor and castle of Wressle, which had once belonged to the Percys, would come into the hands of the Nevilles by way of Sir Thomas’s marriage to the Stanhope heir. But this was one small battle in a much bigger struggle: the Percys sensed, with some justification, that the Nevilles were gradually displacing them as the most powerful family of the north. This, in turn, was a pressing problem for central government. The north of England appeared to be on the brink of civil war, as all pleas and instructions to cease hostilities issued by Somerset’s government had been ignored. Since the feud involved the two most powerful families in the region, there was no authority save the king’s that was able to put a stop to massive and disastrous bloodshed.

As soon as Prince Edward was born, a great council of all the senior lords and churchmen in the realm was summoned to meet as soon as possible. At first, the intention was to exclude York from its membership, but on 24 October a letter was sent, addressed ‘By the king’ to his ‘right trusty and well-beloved cousin’, summoning the duke from his estates to attend the gathering in London. It is not clear who drafted the letter, since it is signed in Henry’s name. However, the messenger who took the letter was told to advise York to put aside ‘the variance betwixt’ him and Somerset, and to ‘come to the said Counsail peaceably and measurably accompanied’, with the aim of securing ‘rest and union betwixt the lords of this land’.
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York arrived at Westminster on 12 November, but he did not come in a conciliatory mood. His first action was to have his sometime ally the duke of Norfolk launch a vehement attack on Somerset before the council, once again accusing him of treason in losing France. Norfolk demanded Somerset’s imprisonment and in the confusion and crisis of the moment, browbeaten by his aggressive demands, a majority of the lords assembled
consented. The duke was arrested and sent to the Tower to await trial. A few days later the lords once again gathered in council at the Star Chamber, and were individually ‘sworn on a book’ that they would keep their ‘troth and allegiance … to the king’.
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After several years of failure, York was now finally at the centre of affairs.

He did not occupy his position unchallenged. In January 1454 the queen, having recovered from the birth of Prince Edward, made her own bid for power. Margaret had long been close to Somerset and to the royal household through which so much of government had proceeded, and it seems that her intention was to fight York’s dominance by any means she could. The dumbstruck King Henry had shown no signs of recognising his son – when Margaret and Humphrey duke of Buckingham took the baby to see his father at Windsor Castle, ‘all their labour was in vain, for they departed thence without any answer or countenance saving only that once he looked on the Prince and cast down his [eyes again] without any more’. Nevertheless it was clear that, in possession of the baby, Margaret had the opportunity to build a different, rival power base to York’s. In the new year she published ‘a bill of five articles’ in which she demanded ‘to have the whole rule of this land’, as well as the right to appoint all the great officers of state, sheriffs and bishops, and ‘sufficient [livelihood] assigned her for the King and the Prince and herself’.
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Margaret’s efforts were bold, but they were not unprecedented. Although female rule was uncommon in the fifteenth century, it was not completely unknown. England’s own history held examples: Queen Isabella had ruled as regent for Edward III between 1327 and 1330, and before her Eleanor of Aquitaine had been granted extensive powers of governance during the reigns of her husband Henry II and her son Richard the Lionheart. Perhaps more pertinently, Margaret had in her early life seen her mother and grandmother taking command of government
in Anjou and Naples while Duke René languished in captivity.
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However, in the crisis of 1453–4, the last desire of the English lords (or, for that matter, the parliamentary commons) was to experiment with a new model of female rule. Margaret’s bill was cordially rejected. As a mollifying measure on 15 March 1454, the five-month-old Edward was created prince of Wales and earl of Chester. This was as far as accommodation with the queen went.

A week later Margaret’s close ally, Cardinal Kemp, archbishop of Canterbury and chancellor of England, died. In desperation the lords sent another delegation to the king, to see if they could coax from him some indication of whom he wished his new archbishop to be. Once again, they reported to the parliament, which took a keen interest in the king’s condition, that they could get ‘no answer nor sign’. The lords left ‘with sorrowful hearts’.
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The crisis of authority had worsened. On 27 March the lords in parliament agreed to elect Richard duke of York as protector of the realm and chief councillor. His rise was complete.

There were many who held grave reservations about York’s suitability for the role of protector. Their fears were not realised. Although he appointed as the new chancellor Richard Neville, earl of Salisbury – patriarch of the Neville family whose feuding with the Percys was tearing apart the north – York’s government attempted in general to be tough, even-handed and non-partisan. He went in person to the north to make a serious attempt to arbitrate between the Nevilles and the Percys. In the course of this he imprisoned his own son-in-law, the violent and feckless Henry Holland, duke of Exeter, in Pontefract Castle, as punishment for involving himself in the northern war and thereby directly disobeying the oath sworn by all the lords to keep and respect ‘royal’ authority during the king’s illness.

York appointed himself captain of Calais and resumed his lieutenancy of Ireland, but these were actions natural and conducive
to strong leadership rather than representative of his seizing the spoils of office. Other grants, which were modestly made, were given out on non-partisan lines: the queen, the duke of Buckingham, and Jasper and Edmund Tudor all received lands or offices during York’s protectorship, whereas men supposedly closer to him – such as Salisbury’s eldest son the earl of Warwick (also called Richard Neville) – received nothing.
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Yet there was one glaring area in which York’s policy of peace and conciliation failed: he could not normalise relations with Edmund Beaufort, duke of Somerset. Throughout 1454, Somerset remained locked away in the Tower. He kept keenly abreast of news from the outside world through a network of undercover agents: ‘spies going in every Lord’s house of this land: some gone as [friars], some as shipmen … and some in other wise; which report unto him all that they can see …’
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To have killed Somerset would have been a destructively divisive act. In prison, therefore, he was able to study the situation and bide his time, hoping, as the popular image had it, that Fortune’s wheel would shortly give another turn.

On Christmas Day 1454, more than a year after he had been stricken, Henry VI woke up. His senses flooded back as quickly as they had first rushed out of him. Two days after Christmas he was ordering his almoner to deliver gifts of thanks to the shrine at Canterbury, and on Monday 30 December Queen Margaret took the fourteen-month-old prince to see his father. Henry ‘asked what the prince’s name was, and the Queen told him Edward; and then he held up his hands and thanked God thereof’. He had no memory of anything that had been said or done during his stupor. But he seemed extremely happy to have recovered. When his ministers found that he could once more speak to them ‘as well as he ever did’, they ‘wept for joy’.
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The same could not be said for York. Henry’s recovery did not simply end the protectorate: it led directly to the reversal of most of the means York had pursued over the course of the last year. By 26 January 1455 Somerset had been released from prison and by 4 March the charges of treason against him were dropped. York was formally stripped of the protectorate on 9 February. In a sign of the absolute repudiation of York’s primary case against Somerset – that he was treasonably negligent in his dealings with the French – York was stripped of his captaincy of Calais and it was awarded once more to Somerset. York’s ally Richard earl of Salisbury was forced to resign the chancellorship. In mid-March Salisbury’s son, the earl of Warwick, was ordered to release Henry Holland, the scheming and belligerent duke of Exeter, from his entirely deserved place in prison at Pontefract.

As Somerset and his allies raced back into their old positions in government and at the side of the king, York and the Nevilles were forced to abandon court. Despite the protector’s genuinely purposeful actions in trying to maintain government during the royal madness, he now found himself stripped of his posts, authority and dignity as though he had been a usurper. The only possible conclusion York could draw was that with Somerset beside the king, he would forever be treated as an enemy of the crown: denied his proper place in the realm as if he were nothing but a scoundrel and a rebel. York had been bound by the king and a council of the lords to keep his peace with Somerset until June, on pain of a fine of twenty thousand marks. But peace was no longer an option. With the Nevilles, York now went north to follow the only course of action that was left to him: he began to raise an army.

York and the Nevilles – led by the earls of Salisbury and Warwick, father and son – were now thrown together in a friendship of common cause. Between them, they controlled much of northern England, and since the Nevilles existed in a state of war-readiness owing to their struggles with the house of Percy,
it did not prove difficult for the allies to raise their retainers to form a small army during the spring of 1455. They had, by their own later admission, ‘great might of men in diverse countries, much harness [i.e. armour] and great habiliments of war’.
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It is important to note that for York the purpose of raising an armed force was to remove Somerset and the ‘traitors’ around the king; this to his mind was a very different matter from rebellion – and certainly
dynastic
rebellion – against Henry VI himself. It is questionable, however, how many of the men who served beneath him would have appreciated the subtle difference. All the same, they were raised with efficient haste in April and May, and the news of York and the Nevilles’ mobilisation, although perhaps not its scale, soon reached the court and council at Westminster.