by Dan Jones
Yet at the critical moment, Kerver’s punishment was interrupted. He was not slaughtered with a blade, but simply cut down from the gallows, then handed over by the sheriff to another party who had been watching the execution. The men who received him then disappeared at speed, taking with them the prisoner, who was presumably bloodied, bruised, half-conscious and very, very frightened.
Thomas Kerver’s near-death experience had come about because the court of King’s Bench – one of the highest in the land – had found him guilty of treason: of having ‘falsely and traitorously … schemed, imagined, encompassed, wished and desired the death and destruction of the king and his realm of England and with all his power traitorously proposed to kill the king’. On the Monday and Tuesday after Easter in April 1444 he was said to have tried to recruit others to join in a plot against the royal life, asking them whether the country was ruled by a king or a boy, and scornfully suggesting that the king was not as great a man as the dauphin. He repeatedly condemned the financial embarrassment of the English Crown, stating that ‘it would have been worth more than a hundred thousand pounds to England if the king had died twenty years ago’. It had taken only a few months for Kerver to be arrested, imprisoned in the Tower of London, and found guilty by a jury.
Kerver’s rescue on the gallows had come as the result of a secret last-minute order from the royal council, who had decided to show clemency on behalf of the pious young king. This fact was not widely known – it was thought that Kerver’s reprieve at Maidenhead had only taken place so that, as one chronicler imagined, he could be ‘thence drawen to Tyborn gallow, and hanged … and then his head smitten off, and set on London Bridge’.2 In fact, Kerver was jailed at Wallingford Castle for a few years and then quietly released. The point, however, had been made. Treasonous words spoken against the king would not be tolerated.
Kerver’s case was exceptional for two reasons. His release had shown that Henry VI’s personal piety could be a tempering factor in criminal cases. But far more striking was the fact that the full weight of the law had been used against a fairly innocuous malefactor whose ostensible plans to kill the king as detailed in the legal records smack of nothing more than hot air. What was notable about the case was the intensity of the judicial response to words which in reality posed little or no threat.
Yet it is also possible for us to understand the feelings of the government that lay behind the prosecution. For during the 1440s, England was full of muttering and grumbling about the mounting problems faced by the realm both at home and abroad. An insecure regime could sense itself tottering. Occasionally it needed to lash out.
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There is nothing new about grumbling against authority. Even the greatest kings in history have known that somewhere in their kingdom a drunkard is probably railing against them. But England in the 1440s was especially rich in public disaffection, as it was beset by increasingly serious political problems. In 1448, a man from Canterbury was recorded complaining that Queen Margaret ‘was none able to be Queen of England’. The complainant boasted that if he were a peer of the realm he would strike the queen down ‘for because that she beareth no child, and because that we have no prince in this land’.3 In 1450 two farmers from Sussex, John and William Merfeld, were indicted before a court for saying that the king was a simpleton who would hold a staff with a bird on the end, playing with it like a clown, and that some other king ought to be found.4 Songs lamented the poverty and incompetence of the Crown and the royal government. The parliamentary commons, theoretically representing the people, complained in February 1449 that ‘murders, manslaughters, robberies and other thefts, within this … realm [are] dayly increasing and multiplying’.5 These were formulaic complaints, of the sort made by plenty of parliaments over the years, but in the early spring of 1449 there was some truth to the argument that law and order were beginning to falter.
There were two basic functions to kingship in the middle ages. The first was to uphold justice. The second was to fight wars. There was no sense in the 1440s that Henry VI was capable of doing either.6 Disorder had been increasing steadily in England for several years. Disputes between magnates went unresolved. One especially nasty feud had boiled up in the west country, where a private war had broken out between the Bonville and Courtenay families. The feud had been directly caused by Henry VI, who in 1437 had granted a prestigious and lucrative office – that of the stewardship of the duchy of Cornwall – to two men simultaneously. Latent rivalry between two of the most important families in the region spilled into roadside brawls and physical violence, which the king and his officers seemed worryingly unable to stem. Over the course of the 1440s, the dispute would escalate, resulting in murder, home invasion, the raising of private armies and sieges on property. And this was far from the only area in which such problems were brewing. Disorder was growing markedly across England, not least in the north, where rival magnates held and jealously guarded near-autonomous regional power, and in East Anglia, where the duke of Suffolk was finding his role as private lord and covert executor of royal government increasingly difficult to balance.
Problems were even more pronounced in France, where the English position following the cession of Maine had gone from uneasy to positively perilous. Richard duke of York’s commission as lieutenant had expired in 1445, and in 1447 he had been removed from the French wars and appointed to serve with broad and sweeping powers as lieutenant of Ireland, an area traditionally associated with the Mortimer side of his family. He took up his post in June 1449, and in the meantime he was replaced in France by Queen Catherine de Valois’s old courtier Edmund Beaufort, now the head of his family and honoured with the title of duke of Somerset.
This turned out to be a very unwise reorganisation of personnel. Despite receiving his commission in 1446, Somerset delayed crossing the Channel to take up his command until the spring of 1448, arriving just in time to see the truce collapse. Blatant breaches of the peace had been taking place on both sides for months, but none sufficient to provoke a return to all-out war. However, on 24 March 1449 English forces under the trusted Spanish mercenary François de Surienne attacked and captured the Breton town of Fougères, robbing its wealthy merchant citizens and sacking the townsfolk’s houses. The attack was presented as a spontaneous piece of violence by a renegade captain, but in reality it was planned and ordered in London, by none other than the duke of Suffolk. But the plan, intended as a cunning means by which to curry favour with a potentially dissident ally of Charles VII, backfired spectacularly when the duke of Brittany, whose authority had been offended by the raid on his territory, appealed to Charles VII for assistance.7 This was just the opportunity the French king had been waiting for, and in July he announced that he was no longer bound to keep the peace with England. He declared war on 31 July, launching a full and swift military invasion of Normandy. French forces swept through the duchy, dragging with them huge siege engines and a number of cannon. In many cases these were enough to convince English fortresses to surrender without a fight. Morale throughout the duchy quickly collapsed, a process hastened by the lack of swift support or reinforcement from England.
The Norman capital of Rouen fell on 29 October 1449. Somerset shamefully and unchivalrously saved his own skin by fleeing the city under a safe-conduct from Charles VII, for which he agreed to a monstrous ransom of fifty thousand ecus, to be paid within the year. Desperate to hold on to whatever they could of Normandy, the council scrambled two thousand additional troops to the duchy, funded by the treasurer, Lord Saye, who pawned the crown jewels to pay the bills. But it was too little, too late. Rouen’s fall was swiftly followed by the losses of Harfleur, Honfleur, Fresnoy and Caen. By the spring the English had been driven back almost to the sea. They had no choice but to stand and fight. On 14 April 1450 they met a joint French–Breton force in battle at Formigny, near Bayeux. Amid the boom of cannon fire, the English army was slaughtered and many of their best captains taken prisoner. Their control of Normandy was a
t an end. It was nothing short of a catastrophe.
Although accomplished quickly, the collapse of the English kingdom of France was still a human disaster. As town after town fell to besiegers, streams of inhabitants were forced to flee. Women trudged out into the countryside with as many of their belongings as they could carry, their children strapped to their bodies with scraps of linen. Garrisons were cleared of their male inhabitants: soldiers and landowners who had made their whole careers in the defence of Normandy were now abruptly forced out into hostile terrain. Some would stay on and find employment in the newly French territory or even serve in Charles’s armies; but many hundreds, probably thousands of others would join a flood of refugees making their way in pitiful fashion to England. Cheapside – the main thoroughfare through London – was daily occupied by miserable families wheeling their life’s possessions on carts in the street. It was, said one chronicler, ‘piteous to see’.8
Losing the war in Normandy was not just militarily humiliating: it triggered severe financial problems for the Crown. At the parliament of November 1449 it was said that the Crown was indebted to the dizzying tune of £372,000, against an annual income of just £5,000.9 Not all of this was due to the war. The running costs of the royal household alone were estimated at £24,000, meaning that, as it was somewhat tortuously expressed in parliament, ‘your expenses necessary to your houshold, without all other ordinary charges … exceedeth every year in expenses necessary over your livelihood’.10 Even with the income taxes granted by parliaments for war finance, individual loans, customs revenues, the special tax on wool and the practice of purveyance (by which the travelling royal household requisitioned supplies and goods without payment), the Crown still could not keep up with its obligations. During his relatively short time as lieutenant in France, Richard duke of York had accrued personal costs of £20,000 – five times the yearly return of all his extensive estates in England and Wales – for which he had great trouble in extracting repayment.11 A similar sum was owed in unpaid wages to the Calais garrison.
This seemed all the more perplexing given that, in theory, Henry VI ought to have had greater private resources than any of his ancestors in living memory, since he had the fewest living relatives to endow. All three of his uncles (Bedford, Clarence and Gloucester) were dead. So was his mother, and Henry IV’s widow, Joan of Navarre. Queen Margaret’s household had inflated the running costs, but she was far from the most profligate queen consort England had ever had (Edward III’s wife Philippa of Hainault had been the grande dame of reckless extravagance). Other than the queen there was no one left alive who absolutely required their own landed endowment from the Crown. The royal couple had produced no children, so the king still held the principality of Wales and the duchy of Cornwall in his own right. His duchy of Lancaster was by far the largest private estate in England. And yet Henry was broke.
It was not wildly unusual for the king to be insolvent or even technically bankrupt – throughout the middle ages the Crown was almost always in debt – although it must be said that Henry’s financial problems were unusually severe.12 The greater problem was one of perception: debt was generally tolerated in times of military success, domestic order and convincing royal leadership; at times of distress and disorder, it became a serious political problem. The common idea, which in many ways reflected reality, was that lands which should have supplied a stable income to the Crown, even if only to cover the costs of the royal household, were carved up for personal gain by the men who governed in the king’s name. ‘So poor a king was never seen,’ went the subversive popular song.13 Technically this was not entirely accurate, but the impression was what mattered.
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’.14 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.15 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’.16 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’.17
