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

by Dan Jones

  In the new year, Somerset, released from his protective custody in the Tower, resumed control of government, this time with some success. He took the king into the shires to suppress another uprising, this time led by one Stephen Christmas. This was followed by further exemplary punishment of rebels. In an attempt to bring more landed revenue back under Crown control Somerset allowed a new act of resumption to pass parliament and began to try to raise money to defend Gascony, the next portion of English France that Charles VII was determined to conquer. He even managed to deal, after a fashion, with a long-running private war between the warring Courtenay and Bonville families, whose murderous feuding continued to cause chaos in the west country.16 York, meanwhile, appeared ever more to resemble a rabble-rouser rather than the agent of order and peace. His client and counsellor Thomas Young’s parliamentary petition of May 1451 demanding that York be recognised as heir presumptive caused parliament to be more or less instantly dissolved and for York to be wholly excluded from any role in government. The duke’s great play to rescue the crown by inserting himself at its right hand had, it seemed, come to nothing. He spent the rest of the year on his estates, brooding.

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  The collegiate church of St Martin-le-Grand in the north-west quarter of the city of London, abutting the Greyfriars on one side and the Goldsmiths’ Hall on the other, had a long history of independence. Anyone who entered the college claiming the right of sanctuary could – if their request was granted – be hidden inside the precincts, shielded by the charters of privilege which had long ago been granted to its inhabitants. For this reason, the college had for years been a favourite hideaway for criminals, ne’er-do-wells and escaped prisoners to run to for protection from the vengeance of the law.17

  Among its community in January 1452 was Sir William Old-hall, chamberlain to the duke of York, and a prominent politician who had served as the Speaker of the November 1450 parliament. Oldhall had taken to St Martin-le-Grand before dawn on 23 November 1451, prompted, as the dean of the college would later write, ‘by fear of heavy imprisonment, and greatly alarmed for his life’.18 He was accused, most immediately, of having taken part in the looting of Somerset’s possessions from the house of the Blackfriars in 1450, but there were also wild allegations circulating that he had been plotting on York’s behalf to stage a coup in which the king was to be kidnapped. That such a plan was really afoot seems highly improbable, but Oldhall’s fear for his life was very real.

  So too was Somerset’s desire to punish him. During the night of 18 January Walter de Burgh – the man who had accused Old-hall of looting Somerset’s goods – was attacked in the street by three strangers and left for dead. In response, Somerset sent a high-ranking delegation to St Martin’s. The earls of Salisbury, Wiltshire and Worcester, along with two barons, one of London’s sheriffs and a posse of servants, broke into the college shortly before midnight. They were, in the dean’s pious words, ‘armed with grievous force, not having the fear of God before their eyes’, and they proceeded to smash ‘all the doors and chests’ they could see, looking for Oldhall’s hideout. Eventually they found him, concealed in the nave of the church. Oldhall was dragged out, loaded onto a horse and bundled off to the palace of Westminster to be interrogated.

  Breaches of sanctuary were serious matters. They were both illegal and offensive to God. And indeed, Oldhall’s removal caused such outrage and protest at St Martin-le-Grand that within forty-eight hours he had been returned and placed back under holy protection, where he would remain for more than three years. It was a miserable period in his life. But more significantly, Oldhall’s removal from sanctuary marked an escalation in the feud between the duke of York and the government, represented as it was by Edmund duke of Somerset.

  York’s position was impossible to sustain. He was too great a lord to be alienated from the government of a king whose inane rule demanded co-operation between the greatest men in the realm. In any event, alienation was one thing; directly attacking York’s closest servants was another. It was too much to be ignored. Evidently furious with Somerset for the insult to his honour, York sent letters to most of the towns in southern England demanding that they join an orderly march on London to remove Somerset from power in the name of restoring good government to the realm. York made a great play of the fact that Charles VII’s forces had all but overrun English possessions in Gascony and occupied the key city of Bordeaux: he reminded England’s townsfolk of the ‘derogation, loss of merchandise, lesion of honour, and villany’ that had taken place in France already, and insisted that the vital trading port and last foothold of Calais was about to fall too. York insisted that he was ‘the King’s true liegeman and servant (and ever shall be to my life’s end)’. He complained bitterly of the ‘envy, malice, and untruth of the said Duke of Somerset’, who, he said, ‘laboreth continually about the King’s highness for my undoing, and to corrupt my blood, and to disinherit me and my heirs, and such persons as be about me’.

  York wished to raise his quarrel above the personal: he stressed the importance of the common weal, or the good of the country at large, and placed his personal enmity with Somerset in the context of a battle for the basic survival of England. ‘Seeing that the said Duke ever prevaileth and ruleth about the King’s person, and that by this means the land is likely to be destroyed, [ I ] am fully concluded to proceed in all haste against him with the help of my kinsmen and friends; in such wise that it shall prove to promote ease, peace, tranquillity, and safeguard of all this land,’ he wrote.19 Then, as his letters circulated, York ordered the tenants of his broadly scattered estates to take up arms and march once again with him to London.

  As York marched south at the end of February, Somerset brought the king and an armed retinue out to meet him. While York had his personal retainers and two significant allies in the earl of Devon and Lord Cobham, the king was joined by a large number of bishops and at least sixteen other lords, including the three other most senior dukes in the land: Exeter, Buckingham and Norfolk, York’s erstwhile ally. It was a show of near-total unity from the lords.

  The royal force camped at Blackheath, and York eventually brought his several thousand men to rest about eight miles to the east, at Dartford. They were equipped with cannon in the field, and seven ships loaded down with baggage and materiel in the Thames. Negotiations took place on 1 and 2 March. York presented a long list of grievances, ‘for the great welfare and the common avail and interest of your majesty royal and of this your noble realm’. Most were levelled against Somerset, who was blamed for the loss of Normandy, for inciting the breaking of the French truce at Fougères, for failing to defend English garrisons, for plotting to sell Calais to the duke of Burgundy and for embezzling money received at the abandonment of Maine.20

  York’s grievances were insufficient to impress the king, or – more pertinently – the rest of the lords who had gathered around him determined to maintain England’s fragile peace. Far from being handed control of government and Somerset’s head, York was taken to London, effectively a prisoner. Word quickly circulated that the king had tricked him into submission at Dartford, by pretending that he would agree to his articles of reform and to have Somerset imprisoned on condition that York break up his army, only to go back on his word.21 If true, this was a remarkable and unworthy piece of humbug on the part of the king and his counsellors.

  Trickery or no, a fortnight after the encounter at Dartford, the duke was humiliated in public. At a ceremony in St Paul’s Cathedral, he was forced to swear a long oath of allegiance to the crown. He announced himself to be a ‘humble subject and liegeman’ to Henry VI, and promised to bear him ‘faith and truth as to my sovereign lord, and shall do all the days unto my life’s end … I shall never hereafter take upon me to gather any routs, or make any assembly of your people, without your commandment or licence, or in my lawful defence.’ As York spoke he laid his hand first upon the holy gospels, and then on the altar cross; finally he was administered the sacrament to
confirm that ‘with the grace of our Lord I never shall, anything attempt by way of fear or otherwise against your royal majesty and obeisance that I owe thereto’.22

  Beyond London, England remained perilously unstable: scattered risings continued to break out in Suffolk, Kent, Warwickshire, Lincolnshire, Norfolk and elsewhere, revealing the fundamental difficulty of ordering political society at the highest level in the absence of a powerful and forthright king. Separate armed disputes continued between the greater families in Derbyshire, Gloucestershire and East Anglia, while the west country continued to convulse thanks to the dispute between the Courtenays and the Bonvilles. In Warwickshire the arrival of a new lord, Richard Neville, earl of Warwick, resulted in several serious disturbances, while in Yorkshire, a very serious clash was brewing between Neville’s extended family and the traditionally dominant Percys: a dispute that would descend by the mid-1450s into something akin to a northern civil war. The dissolution of stable relations between the magnates of England gradually undermined their collective ability to stand together as they did at Dartford in March of 1452. In the short term, however, the faith of the political community lay with Edmund duke of Somerset rather than Richard duke of York. For the second time in eighteen months, York’s efforts to impose himself on the crown in the name of the common good had come to nothing.

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  York’s defeat handed Somerset an unquestionable mandate and he began to exert himself in government. Out of nowhere, Henry VI suddenly seemed to become a vigorous and energetic king. Law and order remained a problem, but in other areas the government began to make progress. The earl of Shrewsbury was sent to Kent to continue attempts to stem the stream of rebellions in the county. Judicial proceedings were launched against those who had supported York in his abortive Dartford rising, including a thorough destruction of Sir William Oldhall, whose life in sanctuary at St Martin-le-Grand was made daily more miserable by legal action that stripped him of most of his property and loaded him with the shameful status of an outlaw. York’s position as lieutenant of Ireland was given to James Butler, the young earl of Ormond and Wiltshire, who had been close to York in 1451 but now moved decisively towards Somerset’s circle. In a further mark of confidence, the court toured the marches of Wales and the east of England – areas where York held large tracts of land – dispensing justice and bringing the king into the view of his people.

  There was even limited success across the Channel. Early in 1452 the government had begun to suggest, apparently in all seriousness, that the king might lead a military campaign to rescue what remained of England’s possessions in Gascony. This did not come to fruition, but in October 1452 news arrived that an advance force sent under John Talbot, the formidable earl of Shrewsbury, had won several splendid victories. Bordeaux had been recaptured with ease from the French and much of the area around the city rallied back to the English flag. This was the best news to have arrived from France in many months, and when parliament met at Reading in March 1453 it responded generously, voting a subsidy in the form of a fifteenth and tenth (a fixed tax on property), as well as a tax payable on wool exports which was to be paid every year for the rest of the king’s life.

  The parliament also received a petition concerning two young men who had grown up in relative quiet amid all the turbulence and danger of the 1450s: Edmund and Jasper Tudor. In November 1452, as a way to bolster the ranks of the immediate royal family, the Tudor boys, now in or approaching their early twenties, had been elevated jointly to the peerage. Edmund was made earl of Richmond, while Jasper was created earl of Pembroke. The parliament of 1453 was successfully moved to declare them legitimate half-brothers of the king. The Latin petition began by praising the ‘famous memory’ of Queen Catherine de Valois, and then calling on parliament ‘to esteem highly and to honour with all zeal, as much as our insignificance allows, all the fruit which her royal womb produced’, in this case, ‘the illustrious and magnificent princes, the lords Edmund de Hadham and Jasper de Hatfield, natural and legitimate sons of the same most serene lady the queen’.

  The praise was uncommonly high: ‘By their most noble character they are of a most refined nature,’ the petition read; they were also lauded for ‘their other natural gifts, endowments, excellent and heroic virtues, and other merits of a laudable life’. Notwithstanding the fact that, being half Welsh and half French, neither had a drop of English blood in their veins, they and their heirs were confirmed in their right to hold property and titles. The Tudor boys, having left almost no mark on the historical record since their education in Barking Abbey during the late 1430s and early 1440s, were suddenly promoted into the front rank of the aristocracy, their noble blood and royal relations trumpeted. In a highly unsubtle dig at York, lands seized from the now ruined Sir William Oldhall were granted out as part of Jasper earl of Pembroke’s new landed estate.

  At almost exactly the same time came more good news. In the early spring of 1453 Queen Margaret, who had for so long been the object of public derision for her failure to produce an heir, became pregnant. Notwithstanding the difficulties of childbirth and the infant mortality rate of the time, there was a real prospect that a direct heir to the crown would soon provide England with a new focus – and that any questions of noble precedence would finally wither away. The queen was delighted, and on discovering her pregnancy immediately set out for Walsingham in Norfolk to give thanks at the famous shrine to the Virgin Mary. Henry VI rewarded the servant who brought him the news with a jewel known as a ‘demy ceynt’. All England stirred in happiness: even York’s wife Cecily – whose relations with the queen were more cordial than those between her husband and the king – was moved to write to Margaret, remarking that her unborn child was ‘the most precious, most joyful, and most comfortable earthly treasure that might come unto this land and to the people thereof’. Finally, after so much misery, so much strife, it appeared that God was smiling on the reign of King Henry VI.

  Then, on 17 July 1453, in a field near Castillon, a town on the banks of the Dordogne just twenty-six miles east of Bordeaux, an English army under Talbot was annihilated by the cannon and cavalry of a French force commanded by Jean Bureau. Talbot, the brilliant veteran of half a century of warfare who was known as the ‘English Achilles’ and the ‘Terror of the French’, died alongside thousands of his men, charging headlong into a hail of artillery fire. The English were routed and within three months Bordeaux would once again fall under French control. It would prove to be the final, unequivocal defeat in a war that had been waged since 1337, and was greeted in England as the calamity it was. No one reacted more terribly to the news than Henry VI. In August, as the court was touring the west country, Henry fell into a form of stupor – the crippling, vacant, catatonic insanity of a waking coma under whose grotesque spell he would remain for fifteen months. At a stroke, England was once again kingless. And soon madness would engulf not just the king, but his kingdom, too.

  9 : Smitten with a Frenzy

  Henry’s illness came upon him while he was staying at his hunting lodge in Clarendon, near Salisbury. It struck suddenly and overwhelmingly, and although for several weeks the king’s condition remained a secret, when he failed to recover it became impossible to conceal the fact that he was profoundly and shockingly unwell. The men around him had no specific name for his ailment; they could only describe its symptoms. ‘The king … suddenly was taken and smitten with a frenzy and his wit and reason withdrawn,’ wrote one. To another he was merely ‘sick’. He became completely helpless, removed both from his wits and the world around him to the point of total vacuity. He recognised no one. He could not speak or respond in any way to questions. He could neither feed nor clean himself, since he had no control of his arms or legs and could not even keep his head up. He had no sense of time. No physician could stir him. No medicine could stimulate him.1 His grandfather Charles VI of France had also suffered numerous bouts of insanity, but, whereas Charles’s madness had led him to scream in pain, smear himself
in his own waste and run deranged through the royal palaces, Henry was simply mute and inert: a kingly nothing.

  Even when sane, Henry had been a fairly weak and impotent force in government. Now that he was so obviously indisposed, however, Somerset and the rest of his counsellors were presented with a dire problem. When the king was healthy, they possessed an animated if ineffectual puppet through whom government could legitimately be carried out by a small group working as his chosen ministers. But with the king devoid of reason and will, their mandate to rule in his name disappeared. The king had all the will and capacity of a newborn baby, which meant that a situation similar to Henry’s long minority in the 1420s was once again upon the realm. There was a royal person who could be said to reign, but he had no ability whatever to rule. Just as in the 1420s, a communal response was required.

  Although the turbulence in England and the dire situation in the meagre rump of English France demanded constant attention, a political reaction to Henry’s illness was nevertheless delayed as long as possible, probably with the dual aim of hoping, rather vainly, that he would recover and waiting for the queen’s pregnancy to reach its term. The second of these came to pass, on 13 October 1453 – the feast day of Edward the Confessor, one of the holiest and most venerated saints in England, with special importance to the royal family. In a chamber at Westminster, Margaret of Anjou was delivered of her first child, a boy. The child was called Edward, a princely name that not only spoke to the auspicious day of his birth but recalled times of greater glory: the days of the baby’s great-great-great-grandfather Edward III. ‘Wherefore the bells rang in every church and Te Deum [was … ] sung,’ wrote one observer.2 The duke of Somerset stood godfather at Prince Edward’s baptism.3