The Hollow Crown: The Wars of the Roses and the Rise of the Tudors (9 page)

By 1436 the queen had fallen ill, with a lingering disease that progressively weakened her body and mind. By the end of the year she had moved into Bermondsey Abbey, a Benedictine monastery which regularly tended the sick and wounded, on the south bank of the river Thames, directly opposite the Tower of London.
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She lay there through a bitter winter, when a ‘great, hard,
biting frost … grieved the people wonder[fully] sore’, froze the chalk in the walls to dust and killed the herbs in the ground.
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The discomfort was too much. On New Year’s Day 1437, Catherine made her will, in which she complained of a ‘grievous malady, in the which I have been long, and yet am, troubled and vexed’, and named the king as her sole executor. Two days later she died, aged thirty-five.

Catherine de Valois was buried in the Lady Chapel at Westminster Abbey on 8 February, her coffin carried below a black velvet canopy hung all around with bells, and topped with a delicate wooden effigy painted as if it were alive (see plate section), which can still be seen today. But Owen Tudor did not have much time to grieve. He realised that the death of the queen dowager amounted to more than the sad loss of his wife. It placed him in immediate personal danger. He had broken a statute made in parliament, fathered a number of children who were half-blood relations to the king, and could now expect to be pursued. His enemies were not long in showing themselves. As soon as Catherine was laid to rest, the council, driven by the tireless Humphrey duke of Gloucester, went after Owen. Thus it was that the messengers sent from London had caught up with him in Warwickshire as he travelled towards Wales, and sent him down to Westminster, wearily, to face the music.

On arrival at Westminster, however, Owen Tudor chose not to present himself to the council. Instead he threw himself on the mercy of the abbey, where he claimed the right of sanctuary, ‘and there held him many days, eschewing to come out thereof’.
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After a while, the ministrations of friends persuaded Owen that by staying behind the walls of Westminster Abbey, he was only making his case worse. It was said that the young king had been stirred to anger, although the records of Owen’s arrest
and interrogation before the council give the strong impression that any real royal wrath was stage-managed by the duke of Gloucester, and that Henry VI had not interested himself very deeply, if at all, in the details of his stepfather’s flight.
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Nevertheless, after a fashion, Owen emerged from Westminster and was brought before the king. He ‘affirmed and declared his innocence and his troth, affirming that he had no thing done that should give the King occasion or matter of offense … against him’. It was a performance good enough to earn him release and passage back to Wales. But as soon as he arrived in his homelands, he was promptly rearrested for breaking the terms of his royal safe-conduct. This was rather a dubious charge, since he had not accepted safe-conduct in the first place. But it did not matter. Now Owen’s valuables were seized, taken into the treasury and given away to royal creditors, and Owen himself was shut up in the grim surroundings of the notorious Newgate prison in London, with only a chaplain and servant for company.

Although Newgate had been completely renovated in the 1420s and early 1430s, and had a code of rules supposedly to protect prisoners from the worst horrors of confinement, it was not a pleasant place to stay. Its inmates – both male and female – were held there for offences ranging from debt and heresy to thieving, fighting, treachery and murder. Many were waiting to be brought before a judge, and plenty of those were certain to swing on the hangman’s rope – or worse.
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Some prisoners there were clapped in irons, others were tortured, and extortion was commonplace by jailers who could make a handsome private profit by charging their prisoners for privileges and even basic comforts such as food, bedding and candles. There were a few decent rooms with lavatories and chimneys, and even access to a chapel and a flat roof above the main gate, where exercise could be taken, but other parts of the prison – dungeons known as the ‘less convenient chambers’ – were dark, cramped and diseased.

Fortunately, Newgate prison was corrupt enough to make escape a realistic possibility, and Owen Tudor determined to do precisely that. In January 1438 his chaplain helped him organise a bid for freedom. It was briefly successful: Owen fought his way out of the prison compound in a dash so violent that his jailer was ‘hurt foule’. But his flight was short-lived. He and his accomplices made it out of the prison, but were rearrested within days and promptly sent back. It was not until July that Owen’s friends, represented by none other than his late wife’s one-time sweetheart, Edmund Beaufort, secured his transfer to the more salubrious surroundings of Windsor Castle, where he was put under the watch of Walter Hungerford, the captain under whom he may have served in France nearly two decades previously. Eventually, in July 1439, Owen was deemed to have suffered enough for his temerity in disobeying parliament. He was given his freedom and pardoned. It had been a painful two years.

The Welsh bard Robin Ddu, writing some years later, composed a poem that lamented the fate of this adventurous but unlucky Tudor. ‘Neither a thief nor a robber, neither debtor nor traitor, he is the victim of unrighteous wrath,’ he wrote. ‘His only fault was to have won the affection of a princess of France.’
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Owen Tudor’s journey, however, was not quite over, for his marriage to Queen Catherine had produced more than just tall stories and trouble. As the Welshman emerged from his imprisonment, his two eldest sons, Edmund and Jasper, were taking the first steps of their own lives – which would, in time, prove just as remarkable as that of their enterprising father.

Katherine de la Pole, abbess of Barking, had every reason to be pleased with the religious house over which she ruled. The elegant, richly furnished buildings of the abbey, set around the large double-fronted church of St Mary and St Ethelburga, enclosed
one of the wealthiest and most prestigious nunneries in England, home to around thirty ladies in holy orders, served by a large staff of male servants and priests.
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Wealthy daughters and widows from the titled aristocracy and upper gentry came to Barking to retire from the world as inmates, where they followed the Benedictine Rule in a life of prayer, charity, high-born company and scholarship. Good connections had, over the years, brought Barking money, property, honour and fame: Katherine – who as abbess held the same privileged rank as a male baron – controlled thirteen manors and lands in several different counties, besides the hundreds of acres that surrounded Barking itself. A glance out of one of the western windows of the nuns’ dormitory (known as the dorter) revealed the scale of the abbey’s endowment: swathes of the flat, green woodland and countryside of the Thames estuary which stretched towards the broad horizon. In the distance, not more than a day’s ride away, was London, the hub of England’s wealth and power.

In the spring of 1437, Katherine welcomed two young visitors from the capital: two boys referred to in records by the tortuously quasi-Welsh names of ‘Edmond ap Meredith ap Tydier and Jasper ap Meredith ap Tydier’. They were the sons of the late queen and her shortly-to-be-imprisoned Welsh widower, Owen Tudor.
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Edmund was aged about seven, Jasper a year or so younger, and by any standards the little boys had endured a shocking and turbulent year. Katherine’s task was to offer them respite and shelter from the sudden chaos, a place to grow up away from the dangerous and unpredictable throng of London and the court. When Edmund and Jasper rode through the arch of the gatehouse and into Barking’s precincts, and first saw the soaring spires of the abbey church, the quiet gardens that lay within the cloisters and the little outbuildings that surrounded the abbey proper, they should have been reassured that they were coming to a place of peace and stability. It would be their home for the next five years.

Barking was used to taking in children. The abbesses often stood as godparents for Essex’s well-to-do families, whose privileged offspring had been placed in the abbey for the early stages of their education since the time of the Venerable Bede in the eighth century. But half-brothers of a king brought with them special requirements. Katherine was not expected to spare any expense in raising Edmund and Jasper. It cost the abbey the enormous sum of £13s 4d a week merely to feed the boys and their servants, quite apart from the further expense of their lodging, education, clothing and entertainment. Over the years that followed, the abbess would have to write on many occasions to the royal exchequer asking for large sums to recompense her for Edmund and Jasper’s upkeep.
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Although on occasion the exchequer was slow to pay her bills, there was no question of shirking the abbey’s responsibilities.

Rich, refined and intellectually advanced, Barking Abbey was a wonderful place to grow and learn. Latin and French as well as English were used by the nuns in an age where the vernacular was becoming the standard language of communication and discourse. The library contained volumes by Aristotle, Aesop, Virgil and Cicero, collections of saints’ lives, books of sermons, meditations on the life of Christ and even an English translation of the Bible, which the nuns were specially licensed to own. One Mary Chaucer had been a nun at Barking in the fourteenth century, and the abbey owned a copy of her relative Geoffrey Chaucer’s
Canterbury Tales.
The abbey church held the bones of its first abbess, St Ethelburga, as well as a particularly fine ornamental cross in the oratory, which drew large crowds of penitents and pilgrims on feast days. One famous ritual was the Easter play: a recreation of Christ’s harrowing of hell, in which nuns and their priests paraded through the church holding candles and singing antiphons, before symbolically releasing from damnation all the souls of the prophets and patriarchs.

There was, however, another reason for Edmund and Jasper to be domiciled there at such expense. This was Katherine herself. She was a tenacious, astute woman who was sufficiently impressive to have been elected to her post at only twenty-two or twenty-three. She was also the sister of William de la Pole, fourth earl of Suffolk, a member of the royal council, steward of the royal household, and an increasingly close companion of the young king. It is very probable that William recommended Barking to the king as the Tudor boys’ new home, for his advice counted heavily at court and in the council. Certainly, at the moment that Edmund and Jasper arrived in his sister’s care, Suffolk was beginning to establish his position as a central figure in the young Henry VI’s government. He was the man around whom almost every important political decision of the following decade was to turn.

And so, thanks to these generous connections, Owen Tudor’s sons remained peacefully at Barking for the next five years, even while their father fought to stay out of prison. It would be more than a decade before their closeness in blood to the king was formally recognised and they were elevated to positions of importance at court. In the meantime, it was their half-brother, Henry VI, whose emerging personality became the focus of English politics – with results more disastrous than anyone could ever have foreseen.

King Henry VI grew up beneath an almost crushing burden of expectation. Through no fault of his own, he was the first Plantagenet king finally to achieve what many had attempted: to be crowned king both of England and of France.
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His father had been one of the most famous men in the Christian world, a conquering hero smiled upon by God, whom English propagandists considered ‘able to stand among the Worthy Nine’ (i.e. the Nine Worthies of ancient history) and who even his enemies had been forced to admit was a paragon of wisdom, manliness and courage.
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The length of Henry’s minority had caused the old king’s reputation to soar to even greater heights. In 1436, the Venetian poet and scholar Tito Livio Frulovisi was commissioned to write Henry V’s posthumous biography, the
Vita Henrici Quinti
. Frulovisi’s patron was Humphrey duke of Gloucester, and one of Gloucester’s chief purposes in commissioning the Italian was to produce a work that would encourage the sixteen-year-old Henry VI to honour his father’s warrior spirit. ‘Imitate that divine king your father in all things,’ wrote Frulovisi, ‘seeking peace and quiet for your realm by using the same methods and martial valour as he used to subdue your common enemies.’
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This was a lot to ask of a teenager who had grown up without ever actually seeing his father – or indeed anyone else – rule England as a king.

Henry was an innocent-looking young man. In adulthood he stood five foot nine or ten. His face would remain round and boyish well into his mature life. A high brow and curved eyebrows sat above large, wide-spaced eyes, a long nose and a small, delicate mouth much like his mother’s. His most famous portrait,
produced in the sixteenth century but probably copied from a lost life-likeness, depicts him with smooth, plump cheeks and a weak chin, wearing a look of faint surprise.
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Henry seems to have been a solemn and sober youth. Certainly he was well educated, and could read and write in English and French with equal fluency. At his English coronation he was seen to gaze ‘sadly and wisely’ at the congregation before him, as if he were older than his years. Foreign observers found him to be a good-looking young man possessed of kingly dignity.
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By the late autumn of 1432, as he approached his eleventh birthday, he had come to terms with some aspects of his status as an anointed king: on 29 November, Richard Beauchamp, earl of Warwick, Henry’s personal tutor, who took responsibility for overseeing his upbringing and education, sat in a session of the royal council and informed them – as the minutes of the meeting attest – that the king was ‘grown in years, in stature and also in conceit and knowledge of his high and royal authority and estate, the which naturally causes him … more and more to grouch with chastisement and to loath it’.
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Warwick requested more powers to insure himself against the king using his royal prerogative to defy or punish his teacher whenever he felt disgruntled or indignant about his lessons.

Yet this was not Warwick’s only concern. In the same meeting, he asked the council to grant him powers to keep ‘ungoodly or unvirtuous men’ away from the royal presence, and similarly to banish anyone whom he deemed ‘suspect of misgovernance and not behoveful nor expedient to be about the king’. The council agreed, recognising an eleven-year-old boy who might easily be swayed by the wrong people unless a careful eye were kept on him. Here was the first inkling of a problem that would be magnified as his life went on: Henry would remain a highly impressionable and suggestible king, permanently childlike in his preference for allowing others to make decisions for him. He
could be extremely enthusiastic about certain matters – he was an avid reader of chronicles and histories, and given to religious pet projects, such as his attempt in 1442 to secure sainthood for the great Saxon king Alfred. Yet he remained blandly impassive about serious matters of public and national policy, lacking any real ability to drive government or take charge of the unavoidable business of foreign warfare. These were not the qualities of a mighty king.

The most vivid pen-portrait we have of Henry VI was written by his personal confessor, John Blacman, towards the end of Henry’s life.
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Understandably, given its author’s vocation, Blacman’s memoir makes great play of Henry’s simplicity, his religious fervour, and the general godliness of his life. In places the account is obviously distorted to play up the king’s saintliness, ignoring Henry’s taste for fine clothes, jewels and the trappings of royal pageantry and display, which began to develop from his teenage years. ‘It is well known that from his youth up he always wore round-toed shoes and boots like a farmer’s,’ wrote Blacman. ‘He also customarily wore a long gown with a rolled hood like a townsman, and a full coat reaching below his knees, with shoes, boots and foot-gear wholly black, rejecting expressly all curious fashion of clothing.’ This description seems to chime more with a desire on Blacman’s part to exaggerate the king’s piety – plenty of other accounts recall Henry dressed in rich and vivid splendour on state occasions.

All the same, much of the rest of Blacman’s account agrees with other descriptions and criticisms of Henry as he emerged from the shadow of childhood in the 1430s, from passing references in official records to scornful tracts condemning English foreign policy. The older he grew, the more his unusually limp and often downright vacant personality became apparent. He seems to have been gripped with a crippling sense of inertia in the face of his royal duties. He appeared absent and distracted
when engaged in conversation. He spoke simply and in short sentences, and seemed to prefer studying holy scripture to attending to government business. When he wore his crown on grand state occasions, he also wore a hair shirt. According to Blacman, the foulest curse that would pass his lips was ‘forsothe and forsothe’, and he told off those around him who used bad language, for ‘a swearer was his abomination’.
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He was at heart a gentle and malleable soul, timid and reluctant in the extreme to take any significant decisions, squeamish about human flesh, agonised by conflict and war, and virtually incapable of leading men, least of all into battle. He may have been chaste, generous, pious and kind, but these were not very useful qualities in a king who was expected to direct government, keep the peace between his greatest subjects and sail across the ocean at regular intervals to slaughter the French. By these crude measures of kingship, Henry VI would grow up to be a tragic failure.

During the mid-1430s, however, Henry’s adult personality was still a work in progress, and the men of his council could maintain reasonable hope that he would soon begin to feel for the levers of power. History, after all, was encouraging: Edward III had been seventeen in 1330 when he led an armed coup against his mother’s government; Richard II was fourteen when he faced down the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381; Henry’s own father had been sixteen when, as prince of Wales, he had led troops at the battle of Shrewsbury. But the vague hope became an urgent necessity in 1435, when Henry was fourteen, and England suffered two severe blows to her policy in France.

The first concerned the realm’s longstanding alliance with Burgundy. This was the diplomatic bedrock on which all the success of the past two decades had rested. It was the quarrel between the Burgundians and Armagnacs that had destabilised
France sufficiently for England to conquer her, and it was the Burgundian alliance that had allowed Henry V to broker the treaty of Troyes and claim the French crown. Burgundian soldiers had captured Joan of Arc and eventually handed her over to the English to be tried, and it was only through good relations with Burgundy that England could hope to continue as a credible occupying force in Normandy and other parts of France. Yet in 1435, at a peace council held in the buzzing Flemish merchant town of Arras, a place famous across Europe for its beautiful woven tapestries, the Anglo-Burgundian alliance dramatically unravelled.

The congress of Arras, held between July and September 1435, was supposed to be a chance to secure a truce between England and France, and to broker a marriage between Henry VI and a French princess. But Henry VI’s embassy, led by Cardinal Beaufort, was comprehensively outmanoeuvred by brilliant French diplomacy, designed to collapse the talks with maximum blame attached to the English. Various proposals were offered by Charles VII’s ambassadors, all of which appeared generous, but effectively demanded that Henry give up his claim to be the rightful king of both realms, return everything won since Agincourt, and hold Normandy only in feudal deference to the French crown. Beaufort did everything he could to negotiate more acceptable terms, but he was refused in such a way that the English were made to look unbending and arrogant. Eventually, on 6 September 1435 Beaufort stormed out of the talks, leaving Burgundy and France to negotiate directly with one another. His retainers were caught in a rainstorm on the way out of Arras and their vermilion cloaks, the word ‘honour’ sewn into their sleeves as a protest against the deceitful tactics to which they had been subjected, were drenched.
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But worse was to follow. On 14 September, a week and a day after the English delegation left the talks, John duke of Bedford,
whose health had been failing for some time, died in Rouen, broken by the strain of many years spent overseeing his nephew’s second kingdom. He was forty-six. Bedford left behind him a vast and magnificent household with a large collection of books, plate, tapestries and treasure.
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But no amount of riches could mitigate the loss of his personal influence. For nearly fifteen years he had been a living link between the spirit of Henry V’s conquests and the demands of the present. ‘Much moan [was made] amongst Englishmen that were [at] that time in Normandy; for as long as he lived, he was doutet [i.e. feared] and dread among the Frenchmen,’ wrote the author of the Brut Chronicle.
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In France Bedford had been a majestic regent and an inspiring general. When he had been summoned home to England, he had exercised his unique standing as an invaluable mediator, a great nobleman who stood above faction, commanding the obedience of all. He was the only figure able to hold the peace between his uncle Cardinal Beaufort and his brother Humphrey of Gloucester. His death robbed England of its most important figure of consensus, authority and stability – the nearest thing it had to a surrogate king.

Seven days later Philip the Good, duke of Burgundy, arrived at the abbey of St Vaast to sign a treaty by which the two warring factions in France’s civil war agreed to be reconciled. Burgundy would recognise Charles VII as the rightful king of France; in return Charles promised to take action against the men who had killed Philip’s father in 1419. In a matter of weeks England’s whole diplomatic position, carefully constructed over more than twenty years, had been swept away. Their greatest ally had switched sides. It was a blow from which English ambition could never recover.

In the eighteen months that followed Arras, the English position in France began to collapse. In the spring Paris was liberated by forces loyal to Charles VII and his new ally, the duke
of Burgundy. After the departure of the last Englishmen from the capital on 17 April 1436, the French began to address their attacks towards the duchy of Normandy, forcing the English into a war of defence and retrenchment. At home, meanwhile, there was a deliberate and desperate attempt to foist adult rule upon the fourteen-year-old Henry VI.

He was brought into his first council meeting on 1 October 1435, and orders began straight away to be made under his authority rather than by the command of the lords of the council alone. This fact was widely publicised: in letters sent to foreign councils and courts it was remarked quite deliberately that the king had begun to attend to his own affairs. In May 1436 the earl of Warwick was dismissed as the royal tutor, and no replacement appointed: a sign that Henry’s period of education was over and his induction to the full scope of kingly duties had begun. Two months later Henry started to sign petitions with his own hand, writing ‘R.H.’ and
‘nous avouns graunte’
below requests that he formally approved.
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The message to the outside world was clear: the minority had come to an end.

Or had it? Superficially Henry had begun to rule. Yet there was much about his kingship that was unsatisfactory. Council minutes began to include notes suggesting that the king was signing off requests which were not just ill-advised but actively damaging to the crown. ‘Remember to speak unto the King to beware how that he granteth pardons or else how that he doeth them to be amended for he doeth to himself therein great disavail,’ read one, from 11 February 1438, when Henry had granted a petition impoverishing himself to the tune of two thousand marks.
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The very next day another, near-identical note proposed that it should be explained to the king that his injudicious granting away of the constableship and stewardship of the castle of Chirk in north Wales had cost him another thousand marks. Tellingly, no attempt was made to take Henry back to Normandy to command
his own armies, or even to serve as a figurehead despite the peril resulting from Bedford’s death and Burgundy’s betrayal. Clearly, the boy was not made in his father’s mould.

The combination of Bedford’s death and the young king’s inability to step up to the task of vigorous rule left England with a kind of governmental vacuum. And into this vacuum, over the course of the 1430s, stepped William de la Pole, fourth earl of Suffolk.

Suffolk’s life until this point had been spent in a broadly conventional career of aristocratic soldiering. His father Michael had died of dysentery at the siege of Harfleur; his elder brother, also called Michael, had suffered a rare and unlucky death – for an Englishman – in being killed at the battle of Agincourt. William had therefore unexpectedly become the fourth earl of Suffolk at the age of nineteen. He spent the next decade and a half building up his military experience and establishing a record of total loyalty to the crown. He was a capable soldier, who fought with sufficient distinction in Brittany and Normandy to be named as a knight of the Garter in 1421; later he was awarded several important offices and grants of land in captured territory and served as an ambassador to the Low Countries in 1425.