The War of the Roses (7 page)

Both these men had voluntarily abdicated in public in front of assemblies of leading (hand-picked) nobles, Edward at Kenilworth and Richard in the Tower, and this semi-public renunciation had been followed up by confirmation of the act by an incumbent Parliament.
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York lacked the presence of either a large body of acquiescent peers or the Commons, and thus could be accused of a coup–which could be reversed by armed force later if Margaret's army defeated him. He thus sought to allege that he had been rightful king all along; had he based his claim on the descent from Edward III's fourth son, Duke Edmund of York, the legal grounds would have been shakier as Richard II had never explicitly and publicly named Edmund as his heir. Edmund had been named regent–the normal role for the next adult male kin of the king–when Richard left for Ireland in 1399, but the then heir of Lionel's line, Edmund Mortimer, had been unavailable as he was underage.

The legal controversy was then put to Henry as king and supreme legal arbiter, and he stood by his own right to the throne. This meant that there would be no voluntary abdication, as in 1327 and 1399, and Henry would have to be deposed involuntarily. This had never been done since the rebel barons of 1216 had withdrawn their allegiance from King John for misrule, and transferred it not to his son but to his niece's French husband. Finally, on 31 October a compromise, proposed by the new Chancellor George Neville (Warwick's brother), left Henry the Crown for his lifetime under the political control and direction of affairs by York–a sort of permanent regency without the excuse of mental illness. There were potential legal precedents for this, in the direction of political affairs by committees of rebel lords who could not trust their adult sovereign to govern responsibly in 1264, 1310, and 1388. But none of these committees had ever been seen as permanent. The possibility arises that some people who joined the invading Henry of Bolingbroke in 1399 anticipated this solution to the problem of a vengeful and unstable Richard II, short of deposing him–if the later allegations of Henry promising not to depose Richard were accurate.

The grounds for deposing Henry by the ‘Great Council' on 3 March 1461 were set out in a petition to Parliament that autumn,
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which presumably followed the same lines as Bishop Neville's arguments to the public rally at St George's Fields on 1 March and the case made to the Council on the 3rd. Henry and his father and grandfather had been usurpers, as the correct claim to the Crown had lain with the line of Lionel, Duke of Clarence, not his younger brother John ‘of Gaunt'. York had been the rightful heir as senior descendant of Lionel, and Edward had inherited that claim. Moreover, Henry's reign had seen endless disorder, misrule, injustice, violence, rapine, and vicious living–which could be taken as a sign of God's disfavour as well as his unfitness to rule. He had violated the truce-agreement of October 1460 and was thus a perjurer
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–though he could hardly be blamed for the uncontrolled actions of his partisans at Wakefield; he had joined and headed their army in February 1461. This left unanswered the argument that if Henry and his ancestors had been usurpers, their royal actions could be illegal–which invalidated all royal laws and grants of lands and titles since 1399.

 

(ii) The existence of Edward, Prince of Wales: the crucial reason for armed conflict, or only an excuse?

The disinheritance of Edward, Prince of Wales, was necessary for York's claim and his long-term consolidation of power. Had the Prince not been born the removal of Henry would have given York the Crown–though the Duke of Exeter claimed an alternative right as the nearest descendant of Henry's great-grandfather John ‘of Gaunt', in the female line (and unlike the Beauforts fully legitimate). The enmity of the Queen meant that York could not rely on exerting power as a principal councillor during a minority for the Prince as Henry's successor, which would have been a problem had Henry continued in his catatonic state after 1454; hence York's securing a Parliamentary act in 1455 that only the King in Parliament (could remove him. (Of course, another Parliament, ‘fixed' by the Queen and the Beauforts, could cancel this.) The blatant disinheritance of the Prince of Wales for political reasons in October 1460 was unprecedented for England, apart possibly from the disinheritance of John's son Henry by those rebel barons who had invited Prince Louis of France to reign instead in 1216; and that could be excused by the argument that an adult king was necessary, plus the doubts about his parents' marriage. (John had divorced Isabella of Gloucester to marry Henry's mother, Isabella of Angouleme, in dubious circumstances.)

The Dauphin (Charles VII) had been disinherited in France in the Treaty of Troyes in 1420 on similar grounds of not being his father's son. The long time between Henry's marriage (1445) and the child's conception (early 1453), and the chances that the unworldly King was incapable of siring a child, made the idea that a desperate queen had resorted to a ‘stud' to produce an heir–and thus thwart York's claim to the throne–plausible. It was politically convenient but possible, although it is only speculation that it was news of the Queen's pregnancy had helped Henry's first mental collapse in 1453.
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Rumours of a move by York or his supporters to secure his long-term domination of politics after his return to power in 1453 by this means could have caused the irrevocable alienation of him and the Queen–as the King's closest companion, vital to control of influence and appointments–after the Prince's birth. But tension between the two was already apparent in 1452.

Logically, then, it is possible that if the King's increasing mental incapacity had been less apparent, rumours as to the Prince's parentage would not have arisen, or gained enough currency for them to alienate Margaret from their perceived Yorkist sources. Her first English court ‘patron' as a new arrival, Suffolk, had been killed in 1450 and it was vital to the development of private magnate feuds into bloodletting during the 1450s that she backed the Somerset/Exeter faction against York. This was apparent before the Prince's birth, with York's role as heir to the throne being linked to the rumours of 1450 that the Cade revolt had been carried out with his connivance to depose Henry. But the birth of a son added to her reasons to turn implacably against the Duke–particularly as the King's illness meant that York was able to exert full political control of the government for the first time in 1454–5 as the sick monarch's closest adult heir.

The right to an English regency (or headship of the governing Council) crucially lay with the monarch's male kinsfolk–Edward III's cousin Lancaster, not Queen Isabella, in 1327, Gaunt not Princess Joan in 1377 and Henry V's brothers in 1422. Had either Duke Humphrey or his elder brother Bedford produced a son they, not York, would have been the legal claimant to Royal guardianship, regency, and the succession and thus York would have seemed less of a threat. He could still have been leader of the anti-Suffolk faction and a potential military challenger to the King's power and favourites, as was the royal cousin and senior magnate Thomas of Lancaster to Edward II in 1310–22. Nor would the closest royal male relative automatically win control of political affairs on the removal of the King's ‘bad advisers' by magnate revolt–Henry of Lancaster had been prevented from assuming this role despite personal guardianship of Edward III in 1327. Roger Mortimer had won out over Henry of Lancaster in gaining political power then; York could still have been more powerful in political terms than a surviving son of Humphrey or Bedford on the defeat of the Suffolk/Beaufort faction.

The position of the Queen as ‘head' of the court faction, in opposition to the ‘reversionary' claimant, was more marked after 1455 when Edmund, Duke of Somerset and the senior magnate of the Suffolk/Beaufort faction, was killed; (as was the veteran head of the Percies, ‘Hotspur's heir); Somerset's heir Duke Henry was younger and even more inexperienced than the French Queen. The senior magnate of this faction was now the Duke of Exeter (Holland), who as a royal descendant and self-proclaimed potential heir to the throne could threaten Margaret's position and so was not trusted by her. His claim lay via male descent from Earl Edmund of Kent, son of Edward I's second marriage, and was thus more remote than that of the Dukes of Buckingham (who were descended from Edward III's youngest son Duke Thomas of Gloucester) but was not complicated by female descent.

By the confrontation between the royal army and York at Ludlow in 1459 Margaret was seen as the head of the ‘court' party, trailing the King along behind her as she led the army on York's headquarters, and in winter 1460–1 she was raising an army of northerners to attack the Yorkist leadership in London. Her role as the symbol and spokesperson of royal authority on behalf of her weak husband made her a crucial political player beyond the normal role of a Queen (usually a mediating figure, though not in the cases of Henry III's Eleanor of Provence and Edward II's Isabella). Instead of being a force for stability, Margaret was seen as fiercely partisan–with the threat to her son's succession at York's hands an obvious reason for her to be his implacable opponent. It should be said in her defence that the ‘Tigress of Anjou' as she was later nicknamed, the implacable foe of the York dynasty, did not become a partisan political player until the mid-1450s and was not necessarily only inactive as she was finding her feet in English politics earlier. Despite her links to Suffolk and the Beauforts it was only after the deaths of the senior male court leadership at St Albans in 1455–‘targeted' for elimination by their foes in front of her and Henry, in the manner of a blood-feud –that she rose to prominence as an implacable defender of their faction.

 

Was the escalation of the struggle in 1451–9 inevitable? And how and why did this confrontation differ from earlier power-struggles?

The first resort to military intimidation had been by York (1451–2), though he had been excluded from political influence and been virtually banished to Ireland and he had the fate of Duke Humphrey hanging over him; he was also the first to start killing his senior foes in battle (1455). His resort to violence in the face of his foes blocking his power and controlling the King was in line with the actions of Thomas of Lancaster in 1322, Mortimer and the Queen in 1326, the ‘Appellants' in 1387–8, and Henry of Bolingbroke in 1399–it was the continuation of the normal court struggles for power by other means when politics failed. What was new was the length of the dispute; the previous confrontations had quickly seen the excluded faction either defeated or victorious, and even in the more evenly-balanced political confrontation between Simon de Montfort and the ‘royalists' around Henry III the long-term control of power was resolved within a year (1264–5). York was mostly to blame for the escalation of the dispute into bloodshed, given that violence had been avoided in 1451–2 by both sides drawing back from military confrontation in contrast with what happened at St Albans in 1455. But York's forbearance in challenging the magnates around the King to battle in 1451–2 had not met a reciprocal restraint; arguably in 1455 he must have reckoned that he had no alternative but the permanent physical elimination of his foes (as resorted to by the victors in 1322, 1326, 1388, and 1399). De Montfort showed restraint in 1264, and ended up hacked to pieces on a battlefield.

The nature of magnate and court politics also argued for a resort to drastic measures by an ‘excluded' senior political figure. Given the nature of the political structure in the localities, most regions saw the evolution of ‘spheres of influence' over land-grants and local office by rival magnate families–in some cases, expressed in physical confrontations between them at times of weak central control such as the 1450s and 1460s. (The
Paston Letters
give a good example of this in Norfolk, where the Dukes of Norfolk, the Mowbray dynasty, opposed the ‘upstart' Pastons as heirs to Caister Castle.
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) The outbreaks in the Welsh Marches in the mid-1450s were more normal, given the militarization of the area and the fierce loyalties of the inhabitants to long-term dynastic lords rather than to the Crown–the English king was historically and culturally an ‘alien' foreign overlord to the Welsh tenantry anyway and most local Anglo-Norman barons had a hereditary claim on their loyalties.

Similar outbreaks of lawlessness and open armed feuds had occurred at times of other weak royal government, in the 1220s (when the original ‘Robin Hood' may have flourished?), the aftermath of the 1264–5 civil war, and the early and late 1320s. Ominously, it had commenced again in Henry VI's reign well before 1450. The political ‘point' here was that a strong king usually intervened to reverse this, as the new ruler Henry II did to illegal castles in 1155–7–or an heir did it for him, as Prince Edward did for Henry III in 1266–70. There was no such reassertion of non-partisan power by a vigorous king in the 1450s, although Henry VI and his court did visit Hereford in 1457 (with a suspiciously partisan commission of courtiers) after the Devereux/Herbert vs Tudor clashes.
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In an intensively competitive political world, loss of access to patronage and influence at court led to loss of confidence in a patron by his followers–he could not ‘deliver' security and grants of land and office. If this continued, he could easily face desertion by his supporters; self-assertion was thus vital for his own interests. Thus York had to back up his local supporters in conflict with rival magnates such as Exeter, and each act of challenge to a ‘pro-court' magnate backed by the King (or Queen) was easily interpreted as defiance and implicit rebellion. Many localities had their own feuding noble dynasts who each had a court patron and alignment in the 1450s, most notably the pro- Beaufort Percies and the pro-York Nevilles in the north. This conflict extended to their friends and relatives as proxies, like a mid–late twentieth century clash between two ‘Third World' powers threatening to drag in the latter's patrons, the USA and USSR. ‘Flare-ups' causing escalation were thus a risk, as seen by the proxy disputes involving Percy and Neville allies in the north. Any settlement of grudges between the rival provincial dynasties by a ‘truce', as endeavoured in 1456–8, would have required a mixture of compromise and goodwill by all sides to last; both would have had to refrain from provocation or from backing up their rival local allies too firmly. This goodwill and restraint was notably absent, and the Nevilles and Percies were already fighting as of August 1453 (before news of Henry's incapacity would have arrived in Yorkshire and reassured them that the paralyzed government would not react). If goodwill was absent, order would have to be enforced by the King or his nominee, a reaction notably absent in government in the turbulent 1440s and 1450s. This failure to punish local armed conflict duly encouraged others to take their grudges into their own hands, arm their tenants, and attack their enemies. The bloodshed at St Albans in 1455 was a cause for retaliatory acts at the first opportunity by the heirs of the aggrieved Beaufort, Percy, and Clifford families. Warwick then made matters worse by more killings at Northampton in July 1460–though had the Queen and Lord Clifford secured their foes at Ludlow in 1459 a ‘Lancastrian' massacre of the Yorkist leadership was possible before Warwick provided the Queen's faction with such an excuse. All this made another outbreak of struggles for power very likely, with the absence of a strong executive figure in London to adjudicate and force a conclusion to disputes an added reason for pessimism.