Henry VI

by Bertram Wolffe

  The infant’s youngest uncle soon made clear his natural resentment that Henry V’s plans for him should be thus set aside. Politics of the minority in England became dominated by rivalry in government between Humphrey and his Beaufort uncle, Henry bishop of Winchester. This suggests that the powerful Beaufort was probably the most influential promoter of the conciliar rule in England which followed and which deprived Humphrey of the power Henry V had intended him to have. No obvious precedent existed for coping with the problems of the accession of an infant in his cradle. Richard II had been nearly ten-and-a-half at his accession in 1377. There had then been no admission that a minority existed at all and the royal authority had been exercised in his name for a few years by a series of councils, nominated by the lords spiritual and temporal meeting in great council or parliament. Edward III was over fourteen at his accession in 1327. He had merely been given a council of lords to advise him. But the accession of the previous youngest of English royal minors, and therefore the most likely precedent to be followed, Henry III in 1216, had been marked by the formal appointment of William Marshall as regent of the king and kingdom. Duke Humphrey knew this well enough and made the most of it, but to no avail.

  The details of the collective conciliar supremacy which governed England from 1422 were in fact only recorded for posterity some five years later as the final outcome of Duke Humphrey’s persistent attempts to overturn it, at a point when he did succeed in bringing Henry Beaufort’s own secular career as chancellor and principal councillor to an abrupt end, but still failed to further his own. At that point the collective council, first with Bedford’s temporary presence and backing, and later by itself in his absence, proved strong enough to uphold as permanent the arrangements made for the government of England within a few weeks of Henry V’s death. On 28 January 1427 Beaufort’s successor as chancellor, John Kemp, archbishop of York, declared in the Star Chamber on behalf of all his conciliar colleagues, in the presence of the duke of Bedford, that the royal authority, so long as the infant king could not exercise it in person, could not be vested in any other individual. It could only be exercised collectively in the lords spiritual and temporal assembled in parliament or great council, or by the continual council when neither of these two bodies was assembled. It was their responsibility to preserve it intact until it could be handed over to an adult king. Should providence decree that, in the event, that king should not turn out to be the infant Henry then, even so, whosoever it should be (Bedford or Gloucester being envisaged as the only alternative possibilities) would only blame them if meantime they had made it possible for any individual to usurp the royal rights in any way. This view the chancellor declared was based on advice and exhortations they had received from Bedford since his return to England in 1425. The fact that he there and then took a voluntary oath on the gospels to uphold this conciliar supremacy and solidarity confirms that this was indeed so.

  According to the conciliar record Duke Humphrey, who was not present, similarly bound himself the next day when visited at his inn by a council deputation. But not before he had observed: ‘let my brother govern as his lust whiles he is in this land for after his going over into France I will govern as me seemeth good’, and that he would answer for his actions to no man but the king himself when he came of age.15 In final pursuit of thwarted ambition he chose publicly to challenge the position at the opening of the next parliament, but even without Bedford and Beaufort the lords spiritual and temporal assembled in parliament proved strong enough to maintain this conciliar supremacy.16

  Thus from September 1422 government by a council had replaced government by a king in England, with prospects of unprecedented endurance before it. From the beginning all acts of state were performed by this council which at first consisted of all those lords spiritual and temporal who happened to be within reach of Westminster when the news of Henry V’s death first reached them, about 10 September;17 then by a council of seventeen, nominated by the lords spiritual and temporal at the request of the Commons in the first parliament of the reign, which met at Westminster on 9 November 1422. Their names were announced to the Commons and five articles for the conduct of council meetings submitted for their approval. The Commons added a sixth which was accepted. Of the seventeen nominated councillors, excluding the three great officers (the chancellor, the treasurer and the keeper of the privy seal), a minimum of four would constitute a quorum, but Bedford or Gloucester must be present before any matter which in normal times would have been dealt with by the king and council together could be determined. The council collectively would appoint to all royal offices and benefices except to a limited range of parkerships, foresterships and prebends allowed to the Protector, chancellor and treasurer; a collective and secret conciliar control of the royal revenues would be absolute, and personal responsibility for their actions would be recorded by the clerk of the council who every day would write the names of those council members present when anything was enacted.18 This process of recording names and responsibility and drawing up articles of conduct, further to strengthen their collective responsibility, was renewed in the 1423–4 parliament.19 Long afterwards, when the grown king lost his wits and succumbed to debilitating illness, this remarkable precedent of orderly and effective conciliar rule was recalled and resurrected.

  These decisions were of considerable personal significance for the royal infant in whose name this conciliar rule was instituted. No regent had been appointed; the person and the office of the king had been declared inseparable and there could be no substitute for him. Thus even while still in his cradle the most solemn acts of state had to be performed in his presence; he had to be made available to his loyal subjects; the quarrels of the great had to be resolved before him. At the hour of vespers on 28 September 1422 the great seal of gold was ceremoniously surrendered in his bedchamber at Windsor by his father’s chancellor, the bishop of Durham, and handed by Duke Humphrey to the keeper of the rolls of chancery for temporary safe-keeping. At two-and-a-half years old Henry was consideredable to transfer the great seal with his own hands.20 Even before he was two he was on the move for reasons of state. In the winter of 1423, in spite of the season, his presence was required at the second parliament of the reign and on Saturday 13 November 1423 he left Windsor in his mother’s care to fulfil the desire of the Commons, in the words of their Speaker, to see ‘your high and royal person to sit and occupy your own rightful seat and place in your parliament to whom our recourse of right must be to have every wrong reformed’. The fact that this unaccustomed journey was remembered in detail for posterity was probably due to the scare occasioned by the sudden illness which it brought on. After the first night at Staines, when carried out to his mother’s conveyance to resume his journey, he ‘shrieked and cried and sprang and would not be carried further’. Mercifully a quiet day at Staines restored him and the next morning he was ‘glad and merry cheered’. His day of rest at Staines was a Sunday and this was taken by the chronicler, writing twenty years after, to demonstrate the child’s God-given piety. This interpretation is of interest in showing that by 1443 Henry’s scrupulous regard for Sundays and Feast Days had been remarked. During his personal rule the court never moved on Sundays. However, his leisurely progress after the alarms at Staines suggest a more childish reason for the delay. After a further prudent night’s stay at Kingston, and Tuesday spent at Kennington, he rode in state through the city on the Wednesday in his mother’s arms ‘with a glad semblance and merry cheer’. On Thursday 18 November he was brought to the parliament to be seen and to hear the Speaker’s loyal address, returning to Westminster and then via Waltham to Hertford castle for Christmas.21

  This first enforced public appearance at such a tender age was most likely connected with a treason scare of that year because this parliament went on to enact a new form of treason; attempted escape from prison by a person under suspicion of treason should be taken as proof of guilt. There was such a person in custody with the fatal name of Mortime
r, one Sir John, imprisoned in the Tower by Henry V, who duly attempted to escape and was drawn and hanged on 26 February 1424. At this most critical time for the Lancastrian House no hint of the rival Mortimer claim to the throne,22 however faint, could be ignored. The informer employed for the trial, a servant of the lieutenant of the Tower, alleged that the accused intended to kill both Gloucester and Beaufort, ‘play with his [Beaufort’s] money’ and make a king of the earl of March, even though March was ‘but a dawe’ (a fool).23 Edmund Mortimer, earl of March and Ulster, whose father, Roger, according to later Yorkist tradition, had actually been recognized as King Richard II’s heir presumptive, had inevitably been the focus of intrigue since the Lancastrian usurpation of 1399 to which Henry owed his throne. In 1423 March had been nominated as the first lieutenant in Ireland of the new reign. He had initially been allowed to appoint a deputy, but in 1424 he was ordered to his post in person.24 It may be that, not for the first time, he was the innocent victim of the intrigues of others. But the only recorded explanation for the council’s sudden change of mind is that Duke Humphrey was alarmed by the size of the retinue which March brought to the parliament and by the lavish hospitality he dispensed during it from his lodgings at the bishop of Salisbury’s inn. Packed off to Ireland out of harm’s way he conveniently died of the plague within six months.25 His lands and claims then devolved on his sister’s son, Richard ‘Plantagenet’, the young duke of York. The keeping of the land during York’s minority was bestowed on Duke Humphrey.26

  The story of the government of the realm during Henry VPs minority and how the collective council and the royal uncles faithfully maintained his rights against the attainment of his majority can be told in some detail. By contrast, information about the domestic life of the royal infant is extremely scanty and can only be gleaned incidentally from financial records. His mother Queen Catherine left him at Windsor in Elizabeth Ryman’s care at six months old, to rejoin her husband in France, taking with her a military escort drawn from that part of the royal household which Henry V had left behind him.27 At his death this became the royal household of the new reign. Sir Robert Babthorp continued in office as steward, but the absence of the treasurer of the household, who also acted as paymaster of the army in France, meant that he had to be temporarily duplicated at home by a commission of the ‘clerks of the expenses of the household‘28 for the financial reorganization of the new reign. The first parliament made provision for household expenses at 10,000 marks a year, but the council considered that a child’s household could manage on 3,000 marks for the moment and the other 7,000 marks was appropriated for pressing military needs until July 1424.29 The infant’s mainly female entourage were reappointed under the authority of the new reign. Apart from Elizabeth Ryman he had a principal nurse, Joan Asteley, paid £20 a year, who had her salary doubled in January 1424, a day nurse, Matilda Fosbroke, at half that rate, subsequently raised to £20, Agnes Jakeman, his chamberwoman, and Margaret Brotherman, his laundress, both at £5, with a later doubling of wages. Another personal attendant, Margaret Brekenam, was not mentioned in the records until she persuaded the council in 1427 to double her salary of £5 because it was insufficient to maintain her honestly in her station. There was a sixth lady, Rose Chetewynd, also at £10, who was commended for her good service about his person in his tender age in 1429.30 The queen returned to England with her husband’s corpse about the beginning of November 1422 and joined her infant son at Windsor after the funeral on 7 November in Westminster Abbey. She remained in charge of him until he was seven years old.

  On 23 April 1424 the council decided that he should have a governess. Lady Alice Butler was appointed to train him in courtesy, discipline and other things necessary for a royal person. She had licence to administer reasonable chastisement from time to time as the case might require and a salary of £40 a year during pleasure. Her selection appears to have been justified, because at Leicester two years later her remuneration was increased by 40 marks and given to her for life. She was finally rewarded with an extra 10 marks a year immediately after Henry officially came of age.31 He was not educated in solitude. In 1425 the council ordered all heirs of the crown’s tenants-in-chief, of the rank of baron or above, who were in royal wardship during minority, to be brought up at court, with at least one master provided for each of them at the royal expense.32 If Sir John Fortescue’s recollections are to be trusted, when he was schooling Henry’s son some forty years later, these noble young orphans were particularly fortunate to be reared in this ‘supreme academy for the nobles of the realm and a school of vigour, polity and manners by which the realm is honoured and will flourish’.33 But Henry’s younger companions in the household were not all to be orphans and infants. The seventeen-year-old duke of York was removed from the care of Henry’s Beaufort great-aunt, the widowed Countess of Westmoreland, in April 1428 to reside continuously in the household, and at least three other noble youths who were knighted by Henry at Leicester in 1426 were resident in the court, they and their attendants wearing the king’s livery. They were Thomas, Lord Roos, some five years older than the king; James Butler, son and heir of the earl of Ormond, who was no more than eight years old in 1428; and the nineteen-year-old John de Vere, earl of Oxford, who in February 1428 lost his gold collar of the royal livery worth 20 marks when Henry personally removed it from his neck to honour with it a Polish knight then visiting the court.34 They were to prove three of his most loyal, life-long servants. Dame Butler, who had at least one lady, Griselda Belknap, wearing a silver gilt collar of the king’s livery, in her service, had status comparable to a chief officer of the household, authorizing expenditure in the chamber as one of those who ‘bore rule about the king’s person’, together with the household chamberlain Lord Bourchier.35

  It is possible to gather a few personal details of the lifestyle of the infant Henry from two accounts kept by John Merston, his chamber treasurer.36 From the expenses paid for one can reconstruct his regular pattern of movement with his attending female entourage, movement not just of essentials but even of the king’s portable organs. He lived mainly at Windsor, Eltham and Hertford but he also stayed at the royal hunting lodge at Woodstock, at Kennington and at the Lancastrian castle of Kenilworth. Christmas and New Year expenditure gives some impression of the entertainment available for him. Throughout Christmas at Eltham in 1426 he was entertained by Jack Travaill’s London players and also by four boys, protégés of the duke of Exeter,37 performing interludes. The next year the John Travaill players were again at Eltham, this time with another company, called the Jews of Abingdon. The time for present giving was New Year’s Day and the royal child received gifts from his mother, uncles and others. For example, in 1428 Sir John Erpingham presented him with coral beads and a gold brooch which had once belonged to King Edward. Henry also made gifts. In 1428, on the advice of Dame Alice, he gave his mother the gold ring set with a ruby which had been his gift from his uncle Bedford in 1426. Purchases made for Henry’s personal use in 1426 show that even a five-year-old king was expected to dress impressively. These included a gold chain with pendants of unicorn and serpentine and a gold collar of esses and broomscods, supplied by the London goldsmith John Patyng. The accounts also show that Henry made a Maundy distribution at this early age, bestowing two shillings and nine pence each to thirty-three poor men.

  It is impossible to determine when the young Henry first became aware of the animosity and rivalry between his uncle Humphrey and his great-uncle Henry Beaufort which became the principal domestic issue of his minority. Later generations, viewing this first development of domestic faction in the reign in the light of the civil war which dominated its final years, have sometimes discerned two unbroken threads of aim and interest in two parties running right through the minority and through the ensuing period of Henry’s personal rule, linking and identifying Humphrey duke of Gloucester with Richard duke of York and the later Yorkist cause, and the Beaufort cardinal with the later interests of his two Beaufort n
ephews, successive dukes of Somerset, who ultimately became the preferred men of Henry’s choice in the execution of policies opposed by Humphrey duke of Gloucester and by Richard duke of York. In this view a developing conflict of policies between parties, the alternatives of war and peace, and an ultimate dynastic conflict of York and Lancaster arose from, or, rather, were grafted on to this initial personal rivalry for power between these two great Lancastrian princes of the blood royal, Gloucester and Beaufort. This simple, comprehensive explanation of forty years of English political history has powerful attractions, but detailed study of the politics of the successive stages of the reign will expose the contradictions undoubtedly inherent in it and suggest essential modifications.