by Dan Jones
He was not, however, anything more than that. In the early 1440s, while he was serving in France, there were no suggestions whatever that he harboured designs on the crown. He was ambitious, to be sure, and conscious of his status. His wife, Cecily, produced a great brood of children: their first daughter, Anne, was born in 1439, a short-lived son named Henry arrived in 1441, and eleven more children followed over the course of the next ten years. The eldest of the surviving sons, Edward and Edmund, were shown exceptional royal favour. By 1445 Edward – then no more than three years old – had been created earl of March and Edmund, a year younger still, had been made earl of Rutland. The main purpose of elevating York’s infant sons to the peerage seems to have been to marry one of them to a French princess. But if these were extraordinary honours, there was little sign that the young duke dreamed of creating a rival royal dynasty. His family’s own history amply demonstrated that the exercise of naked ambition was a certain way to lose one’s head. At the time of the king’s marriage to Margaret of Anjou, York was generally committed, like his peers, to maintaining the form of rule by which England muddled along, with Suffolk leading government quietly from the household, with the tacit backing of those magnates who wanted to keep an underwhelming king from losing control of his twin realms.12
All the same, so long as the king remained childless, some thought had to be given to the status of those like York, who were near to him in blood. During the 1440s three other families profited from their descent from Edward III, and around the time of the king’s marriage all of them were elevated in status, giving the sense, albeit rather a confused one, of an extended royal family.
The Beauforts, kinsmen of Cardinal Beaufort, were the most prominent members of this greater royal family. Their descent, like the king’s, came through John of Gaunt and the house of Lancaster. Gaunt’s third wife, Katherine Swynford, had borne him three sons. They were considered illegitimate – not unreasonably, since they had been born while Gaunt was married to someone else – and although in later years Gaunt and Katherine had been married, and the children’s taint of bastardy removed by an act of parliament, it had been made very clear – again by parliamentary law – that they were debarred from ever inheriting the crown.
In the 1440s, Cardinal Beaufort was the only surviving son of Gaunt and Katherine Swynford, but the family continued through the cardinal’s nephews. In 1443, John earl of Somerset was raised to the rank of duke, and given specific precedence over the duke of Norfolk, the head of one of the oldest and most prominent families in England. As we have seen, this grand elevation did John Beaufort very little good, for he died in unhappy circumstances following his woeful 1443 expedition to France. The family’s involvement in politics passed to John’s younger brother Edmund Beaufort, who took over the Somerset title in 1448 and fathered a clutch of children of his own. Finally, there was Joan Beaufort, who had been married to James I of Scotland and enjoyed an exciting career in the north, where she served for a brief time as regent, while her son, James II of Scotland, was a minor.
The Beauforts were thus closely connected to the crown, even if technically they were barred from any future succession. So were others. The Holland family traced their own royal ancestry through Henry IV’s sister Elizabeth. In January 1444 the most senior Holland, John earl of Huntingdon, was promoted to duke of Exeter, with precedence over all other dukes except for York – another elevation specifically credited to his closeness in blood to the king. John Holland died in August 1447, and his son Henry Holland eventually succeeded to his duchy.
Then there were the Staffords, another family with direct links to the Plantagenet dynasty. The Staffords were descended from Thomas of Woodstock: Edward III’s youngest son and the bitterest enemy of the deposed King Richard II. In 1444 Humphrey Stafford, the most senior member of the family, was made duke of Buckingham, and three years later he was, like York, Somerset and Exeter, given a special precedence: specifically, he was to rank above all other dukes who would be created in the future, unless they were of the king’s blood.13
Thus, around the time of the king’s marriage, a loose sort of succession plan had been made – or at the very least there was a hierarchy of aristocracy, in which York, Somerset, Exeter and Buckingham all knew their rank. With a new queen there was now the promise of further expansion of the dynasty. Was a new generation finally stepping forward to take command of England’s destiny?
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The personal relationship between Henry VI and Queen Margaret seems to have been close and even tender. The king’s confessor, John Blacman, wrote in his memoir that ‘when he espoused the most noble lady, Lady Margaret … he kept his marriage vow wholly and sincerely … never dealing unchastely with any woman’. (This chastity was in large part temperamental, since Blacman also records that the king was mortified by the sight of nudity and ‘was wont utterly to avoid the unguarded sight of naked persons’. When one Christmas ‘a certain great lord brought before him a dance or show of young ladies with bared bosoms … the king … very angrily averted his eyes, turned his back on them and went out to his chamber’. He was also apparently shocked by the sight of naked men when he visited a warm spa in Bath.)14
There was chivalry and even real romance. When Margaret arrived in England, Henry kept up his family’s tradition of greeting his new wife incognito, dressed as a squire, and only later revealing his identity. After their marriage the couple spent much of their time together in the royal palaces dotted near the banks of the Thames: Windsor, Sheen, Eltham and Greenwich. Henry bought his wife jewellery and numerous horses in which she particularly delighted. He allowed her to found Queen’s College in Cambridge in 1448 to mirror his own foundation of King’s seven years earlier.15 In a warrant for payment to one London jeweller, Henry describes Margaret as ‘our most dear and most entirely beloved wife the queen’.16 A touching vignette is preserved describing the royal couple during the New Year festivities not long into their marriage, receiving gifts as they lay in bed together, staying there all morning and apparently enjoying one another’s company. Yet if they shared a happy bed, it was not a fruitful one. Eight years would pass between their marriage and the birth of their first child.
This was a problem in its own right. More serious, however, was the complete failure of Margaret’s arrival in England to bring about the glorious peace that the marriage had seemed to promise. In July 1445 a magnificent diplomatic delegation – including Margaret’s father, René of Anjou – arrived from France to meet with the English in London. It was the greatest peace council of its sort to have taken place in thirty years. There were high hopes – not least from the king, who seems genuinely to have had a desire for peace with the French and whose appearance before the ambassadors at the beginning of the talks was marked by warmth and friendliness. Henry greeted the French diplomats personally, and although royally dressed in red cloth of gold, he raised his hat to them, patted them on the back and appeared to be quite overcome with brotherly love and rejoicing.
Henry’s ministers, led by Suffolk, hoped that improved relations with France would lead to a settlement in which they could keep the conquered lands in complete sovereignty. But the French had no intention of agreeing to such terms. They stipulated that for a final peace to be made, the English would be allowed to hold on to their historical lands in and around Gascony, along with Calais and Guînes, but everything else should be surrendered, and English claims to the French crown dropped. Henry and his advisers could not countenance such terms. After a promising beginning an impasse was reached and a mere seven-month extension to the truce was agreed. Plans were made for Henry and Margaret to travel to France in 1446 to continue talks face-to-face with Margaret’s uncle, Charles VII.
They never went. Instead, in the autumn of 1445 another French delegation arrived in London, followed by a flurry of letters between Charles, Henry and Margaret. In October the French proposed new conditions: there would be no final peace, but in return for a twenty-year t
ruce the English were asked to surrender possession of the county of Maine to Margaret’s father, René. It is possible that this had been the French plan ever since the first negotiations for Margaret’s marriage, and it may have been suggested to or even verbally agreed by Suffolk at Tours in 1444 or Henry in July 1445. But it was just before Christmas 1445 that the deal was actually done. On 22 December Henry wrote to Charles VII, saying that since ‘it appeared to you that [ceding Maine] was one of the best and aptest means to arrive at the blessing of a peace between us and you … favouring also our most dear and well-beloved companion the queen, who has requested us to do this many times … we signify and promise in good faith and on our kingly word to give and deliver … Maine by the last day of April next coming …’ This may have been a necessary move towards peace, but the consequences for England, and for the young queen’s reputation, would be disastrous. 17
By agreeing to surrender Maine and its capital Le Mans, Henry had placed his government in a difficult position. The terms were basically humiliating – the surrender of hard-won territory for mere promises and talk from the French. The deal was bound to upset both the duke of York, whose authority in France was once more undermined, and Edmund Beaufort, the future duke of Somerset, who stood to lose a great deal of land and his title of count of Maine. Worst of all, surrendering Maine gave the French a fresh military route to attack the English both in Normandy and in Gascony. And it confirmed the general sentiment that the English war effort was one of retreat and slow humiliation.
Attempts were made to keep the deal secret. Henry’s proposed personal embassy to France now appeared to be a dangerous liability at which any number of further calamitous concessions might be made, and Suffolk stalled desperately through 1446 and 1447 to delay sending the king for a follow-up mission and giving back the promised land. But it was pointless. Charles VII was a shrewd negotiator and an accomplished king. The English, who were attempting through Suffolk to govern around the king, were diplomatically outflanked.
There was huge disaffection, bordering on mutiny, among the English soldiers who garrisoned Maine and Le Mans. They dragged their heels at every order to co-operate. As a result, Maine and Le Mans were not physically surrendered until the spring of 1448, but returned they were: the start of the final collapse of England’s position in the Hundred Years War, whose preservation had been Henry V’s most important legacy, had begun. Chroniclers with the benefit of hindsight would much later write that Henry’s wedding ‘was a dear marriage for the realm of England’.18
Marginalised since his wife’s disgrace in 1441, Humphrey duke of Gloucester had become a meek bystander, openly mocked by Suffolk in front of the French ambassadors. As a mark of his dwindling relevance he was not included in the peace negotiations of 1445. And yet, as news began to filter out that the cession of Maine was the price to be paid for a long-term truce, Gloucester’s insistent hostility to the French seemed finally vindicated. It did not require much imagination on the part of those who had made the deal to see that when the news became fully public, Gloucester might be thrust back into the heart of politics. It was possible that a new faction, opposed to Suffolk’s concessions, might be drawn together around the ageing Humphrey. If the king (and therefore Suffolk and probably the queen) really were to leave England to negotiate further terms with Charles VII, then Gloucester would have a very good claim on exercising the powers of regency in his absence. Late in 1446 a decision was taken by Suffolk and his closest allies to silence the duke before he had a chance to embarrass them.
In February 1447 a parliament was summoned to meet in the unusual location of Bury St Edmunds, a ‘safe’ venue in the heart of Suffolk’s territory. According to the records of the parliament, the weather was ‘fervent cold … and biting’.19 Gloucester had been summoned to appear before the parliament. Clearly he was suspicious, for he came to Bury ten days after it had opened, with a huge retinue of armed Welshmen. It is possible that he came in the hope of bargaining for the release of his former wife Eleanor from her jail cell on the Isle of Man. But it was obvious that he was in considerable danger. Rumours had been put about of a plot to kill the king, rumours which were quite probably fabricated in order to place Gloucester under suspicion and facilitate an attempt to destroy him on charges of treason. Contemporary chroniclers were in very little doubt: the parliament, said one, ‘was made only for to slay the noble duke of Gloucester’, and the prime mover in the conspiracy was Suffolk.20
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.21 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.’22 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.
7 : Away, Traitors, Away!
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.1
Kerver’s cart left town by the London road, heading east towards open country. A few miles down the road it stopped. Kerv
er 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.
