The Hollow Crown: The Wars of the Roses and the Rise of the Tudors

by Dan Jones

  Many towns and villages in the south-east of England remained dangerously volatile: several other individuals tried to raise Kent, Essex and Sussex into rebellion during the autumn, gangs of robbers roamed the countryside looting and killing, and London simmered constantly. Soldiers returning from Normandy swelled the urban population and veterans committed several offences against the heraldic arms of Lord Saye, including vandalising the stone that marked his burial place at the Greyfriars. In August the Tower was broken into and the armoury there was robbed of many of its weapons. The autumn saw disturbances in reaction to the routine election of a new mayor, while bill-posters railing against the government appeared all over the city and at one stage a disgruntled keeper of Newgate prison started a riot by setting all the inmates free.

  At every level, 1450 had been a year of strife, violence, chaos and terror, the product of a gradually building crisis in government that stemmed ultimately from the vacuity of the twenty-eight-year-old king. For years Henry’s semi-absent kingship had been managed by a succession of patches and muddles: first by a minority council that balanced the differing views of his uncles against the corporate will of the lords, then by the rule of Suffolk, whose command of government was constructed through his own connections in the council, the royal household and the countryside. Neither of these had proven to be a satisfactory solution and Suffolk’s rule had collapsed into murderous chaos and rebellion, of which Suffolk himself had been the first victim. Yet if they had succeeded in destroying a supposed governing clique, the protestors had done precisely nothing to address the root of all the country’s ills. Following Suffolk’s death and Cade’s rebellion, Henry’s personal incompetence remained as pressing a problem as ever. Another man would soon thrust himself actively into the centre of political life in an attempt to address it. In September, Richard duke of York returned from Ireland to make his own bid to rescue England from its dizzying decline.

  8 : Then Bring In the Duke of York

  A small fleet of ships sailed towards Beaumaris, a port town on the south-eastern tip of Anglesey that jostled in the shadow of a vast, turreted stone fortress. The castle, with its deep outer moat, defensive walls soaring more than thirty feet in the air, and twenty-two stout and round towers slitted all over with arrow-holes, had been the most expensive of Edward I’s large ring of Welsh fortresses. It was so huge, and its design so ambitious, that parts of the building, begun over 150 years earlier, had never been fully completed. What did stand was an ominous symbol of English royal power on the fringes of the king’s territories. Beaumaris was a formidable place to approach.

  It was early September 1450 and the ships had been expected for some days. They carried Richard duke of York, the king’s cousin and lieutenant in Ireland, and his men. York had left Dublin on 28 August, and the news of his coming had shaken Henry VI and his advisers. Instructions had been issued for the town to be on its guard. The captain of Beaumaris, Thomas Norris, was waiting along with several other local officers of the Crown. They had been told very firmly to delay York, and they sent a message to the duke at sea informing him (as he would later complain) ‘that I should not land there, nor have vitaile [i.e. food], nor refreshing for me and my fellowship … for man, horse nor other thing that might turn to my worschip or ease’.1 York was told that the commands issued directly from William Say, usher of Henry VI’s chamber, who was convinced that he came unbidden, as a ‘traitor’. He was refused permission to disembark; his ships were forced to stay at sea in search of another, friendlier, landing spot.2

  York’s ships finally landed near the mouth of the river Clwyd, some twenty-five miles along the coast of northern Wales. By 7 September the duke and his retinue had reached his own castle at Denbigh. From there they rode to Ludlow, and from Ludlow they crossed the midlands. As York travelled, he amassed followers: armed men from his extensive lands throughout Wales and England. On 23 September a writer in Stony Stratford, Northamptonshire, saw the duke appear in stately magnificence: ‘riding in red velvet, on a black horse and Irish hobby’. He would lodge that night in a tavern outside the town gates, called the Red Lion.3 He did not stay long: on 27 September he arrived in London, entering the city with three to five thousand men under his banner, marching through the streets and then out of the gates and down the short road from London to Westminster, where he was received in a short meeting by his beleaguered cousin, the king.

  The panic that York’s unscheduled return from Ireland struck into the heart of the royal administration was easy to understand. Jack Cade, whose rising had brought an entire summer of chaos to the realm, had called himself ‘John Mortimer’, deliberately implying that he was related to the duke. Cade’s articles of grievance warned that, unless there was reform, the commons of England would ‘first destroy the king’s friends and after himself and then bring in the duke of York to be king’.4 And plenty of other, pettier rebels had also invoked York’s name in opposition to the royal government.

  In 1449, when Henry VI had been travelling to Leicester for the session of parliament, he had also ridden through the town of Stony Stratford. A local writer recorded that as the king’s entourage passed through the streets one ‘John Harris, sometime a shipman dwelling in York’ approached the king waving a flail – a wooden agricultural tool, sometimes used as an improvised weapon, consisting of a long handle with a shorter pole attached to the end by a chain. Egged on by others in the town, Harris had beaten the ground in front of Henry with the flail, crying that he meant ‘to show that the Duke of York then in Ireland should in like manner fight with traitors at the Leicester parliament and so thrash them down as he had thrashed the clods of earth in that town’.5 For this impudence Harris was arrested, thrown in the dungeon at Northampton Castle and later hanged, drawn and quartered. But his point had been made: as the people of England rejected the regime around Henry, so they projected their dreams of national recovery onto the duke across the Irish Sea.

  There is no reason to believe that York had courted this. He was unquestionably the greatest English lord, a man of royal blood and huge landed power, which gave him much the same status as had once been possessed by John duke of Bedford and Humphrey duke of Gloucester. He was relatively untainted by the political failures of the previous three years: his time as lieutenant of France had preceded the dramatic loss of Normandy that took place on the duke of Somerset’s watch, and his time as lieutenant of Ireland had taken him away from the centre of politics at precisely the moment when Suffolk’s regime dissolved into blood and blame.

  But this is not to say that York was a rebel-in-waiting. He would always claim that his return from Ireland was an act of obedience: a move designed to assure the king of his loyalty against ‘diverse language … said of me to your most excellent estate which should sound to my dishonour and reproach’ – in other words, to demonstrate that whatever claims were being made of his ambition, he was a loyal subject. In bills drawn up and sent to the king, probably in the first weeks of his return from Ireland, he wrote that he had come to England in order to assure the king of his loyalty and to ‘declare me your true man and subject as my [duty] is’.6 Yet touring England and Wales in the company of thousands of armed retainers was a provocative way to demonstrate loyalty. Why, then, did he come?

  It is possible, but unlikely, that York left Ireland out of dynastic ambition. His ‘true blood’ had been noted by the Kentish rebels, but this was hardly a novel observation. The king was certainly childless and the matter of his heir apparent had not been formally addressed, but by the same token none of the noble promotions of the dukes of Somerset, Exeter or Buckingham constituted a direct threat to York’s lineage. In the case of Exeter, York’s superior blood-status was explicitly recognised in the first duke of Exeter’s articles of ennoblement. The first duke died in 1447, but his heir, the young Henry Holland, was even more closely tied to York’s family: he was married to York’s daughter Anne, and had been in York’s custody when he was a minor. As recently as 14
48 York and the duke of Somerset had been granted lands in joint trusteeship – a sign that there was no division (yet) perceived between those two men.7 Humphrey duke of Buckingham showed no signs of anything other than diligent loyalty to the Crown. In short, there was no dynastic crisis calling York home: despite the turbulence of the reign and the wild claims of Cade’s men, the king was not ill and showed no signs of imminent death, merely prolonged ineptitude.8

  In 1451 Thomas Young, MP for Bristol and one of York’s legal counsellors, would stand in parliament and suggest that for the security of the realm the king should name his heir apparent. Unsurprisingly Young nominated York and was duly arrested for his impertinence. If anything, such claims actively damaged York’s political standing. Whatever the rebels of Kent, the tavern-room gossips or upstart lawyers in the commons thought, York’s desire to force his claim to the crown, either immediately or in the near future, was precisely nil.

  What he saw for himself, rather, was a role as a sort of saviour of both crown and country. York and his wife Cecily had initially sailed to take up residence in Ireland on 22 June 1449. During the fourteen months that he had spent overseas, England had suffered the worst collapse of government, foreign policy and public order in a lifetime – arguably since the early thirteenth century. Normandy had been lost, parliament had revolted wholesale, the duke of Suffolk had been murdered, a violent and continuing popular rebellion had engulfed the entire south-east of England. And while it was true that York had played his part in the makings of the crisis – he was a prominent member of the nobility that had allowed, or at least acquiesced in, the rule of Suffolk and the royal household over a non-functioning king – he had also, by his fortunate removal from France and posting to Ireland, avoided any serious blame. Quite the opposite, in fact: all the news that reached him in Ireland would have given him the impression that his destiny and duty was now to rescue England from the chaos into which it had sunk. His royal blood gave him the prerogative. The thousands of men whom he could put at his disposal gave him the means. York had served as the king’s hand in France and now in Ireland; the logical next step was to offer his services for the same role within England itself.

  What the duke had perhaps not fully calculated, however, was the extent to which his desire to respond to calls for his return might be seen by some around the king not as a kindly offer but as a grave threat. First his ships were turned away from Beaumaris. Then, as York had ridden through north Wales, he had learned of rumours that a number of knights connected with the royal household intended to capture him, imprison him in Conwy Castle and ‘strike off the head’ of a number of his servants, including his chamberlain, the veteran soldier Sir William Oldhall. Finally, he had heard that certain unspecified judicial commissions had been issued to indict him for treason, and thereby to ‘undo me, mine issue and corrupt [my] blood’.9 He returned to England hoping to claim his position as the king’s reformer-in-chief but found on his arrival that this cast him in the role of the government’s most dangerous opponent.

  *

  York’s armed parade through London on 27 September put the febrile city in an even greater state of excitement than usual. Following his short meeting with Henry at Westminster, the duke lodged for a fortnight at the bishop of Salisbury’s house in London. From there he began to stake his claim to the central position in government for which he had come out of Ireland.

  Since his arrival in England, York had been exchanging bills and letters with the king. His first bill, sent shortly after landing in Wales, complained that he had been treated as a traitor and a criminal at Beaumaris. This was dealt with matter-of-factly in the reply from Henry, which explained patiently that since for ‘a long time the people hath given upon you much strange language … saying that you should be fetched home with many thousands’ to seize the crown, the coasts had been instructed to guard against such a thing. In other words, Henry suggested, his men had overreacted and ‘we declare, repute and admit you as our true faithful subject and as our well beloved cousin’.

  York remained affronted. At some point after their meeting in Westminster he sent Henry a second bill, ignoring the king’s calming words and pointing out that law and order appeared to be collapsing in England, and that ‘I your humble subject and liege man Richard Duke of York … offer … to execute your commandments’. He offered, in effect, to take over command of English government in its moment of crisis. This bill, unlike the first, seems to have been widely publicised among the people of London. It was somewhere between an open letter and a manifesto. 10 Once again, he was politely rebuffed. Rather than handing over government to York, Henry said he intended to ‘establish [a] sad and substantial council … in the which we have appointed you to be one’.11 This was plainly not the answer that York was looking for. He left London on 9 October, heading first for East Anglia, and then touring his estates in the midlands. Behind him, London stewed in a state of barely contained agitation. The streets were overrun with soldiers, who rioted during the mayoral elections on 29 October. There were frequent clashes between those who supported and those who opposed the duke of York: across the city the royal arms were torn down and replaced with those of York, restored and then torn down again. If England’s capital reflected the mood in the country at large, then peace lay a long way away.

  Among the chief impediments to York’s taking a central role in government was the fact that someone else had already taken that post. Edmund Beaufort, duke of Somerset, had come back from his catastrophic tenure in Normandy not to be censured or chastised, but rather to find himself appointed to more or less the position that York envisaged for himself.12 Within two weeks of his returning from France in August of 1450 he was attending council meetings. On 8 September he had been put in charge of stamping out the embers of revolt in Kent and the south-east and on 11 September he was appointed constable: the highest military post in England.

  Like York, Somerset was a kinsman of the king. Unlike York, he had close links to Queen Margaret, just as he had been close to Henry’s late mother, Catherine de Valois. As a nephew of Cardinal Beaufort he was a familiar and comforting figure to Henry, whereas York was more of an outsider. Somerset also benefited from having no significant landed estates to manage; he was able to devote his full attention to the business of government, taking on tasks that had previously fallen to Suffolk: those of concealing the vacuity of the king, allying the disparate interests of household, council and nobility, and somehow attempting to cope with the righteous anger of the commons. Assuming this task set Somerset on a direct collision course with York. Tension between the two men would dominate politics over the next five years.

  Parliament met at Westminster on 6 November 1450, and immediately the two dukes and their supporters collided. Chains had been erected in the streets of London in an attempt to limit the excesses of what the chancellor, Cardinal John Kemp, archbishop of York, described as ‘the people of riotous disposition’.13 It was hard to avoid the sense that the capital was on the point of eruption, and that the fate of England hinged on the next action taken by the duke of York.

  He arrived at Westminster on 23 November, one day before John Mowbray, duke of Norfolk, his chief ally since his return from Ireland. Both men, and indeed all the lords who attended the November parliament, brought with them large armed retinues. The author of one chronicle of the period describes seeing York come ‘riding [through] the city his sword born afore him’, a mark of great pomp and authority.14 There was an atmosphere of barely constrained violence. One important element in York’s adoption of the mantle of reform was to take a bitterly critical stance towards the ‘traitors’ who had allowed Normandy to be lost. No one was under any illusion: this meant Somerset. On 30 November a series of rancorous arguments broke out within the parliament chamber at Westminster Hall. Several MPs demanded that justice be done against those who had failed so miserably to protect the king’s possessions in France.

  During parliament’s session Som
erset was staying at the Blackfriars, a pleasant Dominican house within the western wall of the city just next to the Ludgate, at the point where the river Fleet spilled down into the Thames. On Tuesday 1 December, while the duke was eating, a large band of soldiers tried to break into the house in an attempt to arrest him. The danger to Somerset’s life was so acute that he was smuggled out of the house by the riverside quay and taken downriver on a boat, while the rioters remained at Blackfriars, ransacking and looting. Intriguingly, Somerset’s saviours were the mayor of London and another increasingly close Yorkist ally, Thomas Courtenay, earl of Devon, who was said to be acting on York’s direct instructions.

  Earlier that day, the same group of men had authorised the public execution of a rioter. As London’s streets seethed with protest and disaffection, York was attempting to play both reforming firebrand and lawgiver. Like the late Humphrey of Gloucester, whose memory he seemed increasingly to cherish and defend, York wished to use his popularity with the common people as a platform from which to disrupt the political process and state his own claim to pre-eminence. In fact, he was just being a nuisance.

  It was not York’s actions that eventually put the city into some sort of order, but a parade of all the lords of England united, riding through London on 3 December. As one chronicler put it, ‘… upon the Thursday the next day following the king with all the lords come through the City all in harness [i.e. wearing full armour] and the citizens standing upon every side of the street in harness, which was the gloriest sight that ever man in those days saw.’15

  London’s mood began to cool. York’s pandering to the populace had won him no favour whatever with the majority of the lords. He remained close to the duke of Norfolk, but when Christmas came, parliament recessed and the streets ceased to seethe, York found that his support was drifting away. He was appointed to a judicial commission in the new year to carry out justice on the Kent rebels, forcing a natural separation from the men who had cried his name the loudest.