39 P.P.C., IV, 44.
40 Among the 54 assessors were Norman abbots and 10 theologians from the University of Paris. Ethel C. Williams, My Lord of Bedford, 199.
41 B.L., Cotton Julius B i printed in A Chronicle of London, ed. Sir N. H. Nicolas (London 1827), 170–1.
42 The sources for Henry’s solemn entry into Paris and his coronation there are: (1) the City of London Letter Book ‘K’ printed in calendar by R. R. Sharpe (London 1911) and in full by Jules Delpit, Collection générale des documents français qui se trouvent en Angleterre (Paris 1847), 239–44, who considered this account to have been compiled by the official master of ceremonies; (2) The Brut, 458–61 (probably derived from 1); (3) The Journal d’un Bourgeois de Paris (ed. A. Tuetey, Paris 1881), 274–9, well and conveniently translated by Janet Shirley as A Parisian Journal 1405–1449 (Oxford 1968), 268–73, from which quotations are taken; (4) Enguerrand de Monstrelet, Chronique, ed. L. Douët-d’Arcq (Société de l’histoire de France, Paris 1857–62), V, 1–7, in Johnes’s translation vol. I, 596–7.
43 B.L. Cotton, Domitian, A. xvii.
44 B.L. Add. MS 18850. Somerset’s latin autograph note of the occasion with his sign manual is on fol. 256 r. ‘prope imagine dicti domini mei ducis Bedfordie’ which is fol. 256, v, as, he states, Bedford subsequently asked him to record it. He describes himself as ‘Regis ad personam tuitor ad sanitatem vite pro consuasione consulens tunc presens et predicta cognoscens’.
45 Ethel C. Williams, My Lord of Bedford, 249–50.
46 Chronicle of London (ed. Nicolas), 119; Gregory’s Chronicle, 173.
47 Chronicle of London (ed. Kingsford), 97–116, which is John Lydgate’s verses ‘On the coming of the King out of France to London’, written to the order of the City. Another description is in Gregory’s Chronicle, 173–5. His state entry took place ‘towards the end of windy February’, on a Thursday when the Calends of March had begun. His first recorded act after his return seems to have been to preside over the surrender of the Great Seal by John Kemp on the afternoon of 25 February (P.P.C., VI, 349). The writ cited by Kingsford and Ramsay (Foedera, X, 500) as evidence that he ‘signed’ at Westminster on 16 February is in fact only a routine privy seal writ of that date authenticated as ‘teste rege’.
48 M.R. Powicke, op. cit., 378.
Chapter 4
ROYAL ADOLESCENCE
Fifteenth-century kings were expected to grow up fast. After the ceremony and pageantry of the coronation years there would be only six more, 1432–7, before Henry was invested with the full responsibilities of kingship. These were years of indecision and inaction by those who still governed in his name, even of helpless waiting for the young king’s assumption of power. The boy himself looked forward eagerly to that inevitable event and just before his thirteenth birthday in November 1434 his councillors had to warn him that he was not yet competent to assume control. It was the unlooked-for death of his uncle Bedford in 1435, still only in his mid-forties, which hastened the end of the minority, for in the last two years of his life, initially at the request of the Commons in parliament, Bedford was called upon to assume supreme direction of his nephew’s English as well as French affairs. The vacuum created by his death was thus complete and neither Gloucester nor Beaufort was ever regarded as an acceptable replacement. It was the immediate need to replace Bedford in his military post as Captain of Calais which provided the very first planned personal involvement in Henry’s affairs, leading through increasing participation to his full assumption of power in December 1437. There was no reason to expect that at sixteen years of age the son of Henry V would not be equal to the task.
The coronation, even of an eight-year-old king, could be no empty ceremony; apart from his own appreciation of his enhanced status, it entailed specific changes in the conduct of his affairs. With the existence of a crowned and anointed king the protectorate was at an end and Gloucester and Bedford were henceforth styled principal councillors only.1 But Henry’s absence from England for his French coronation meant that a deputy was required. On 23 December 1429 Duke Humphrey was nominated king’s lieutenant in the kingdom of England at a salary of 2,000 marks until Henry’s departure for France2 and 4,000 marks per annum thereafter. As king’s lieutenant in England from April 1430 to February 1432 Duke Humphrey had in fact acquired greater power than he had ever had as Protector. His new importance as the royal deputy was further enhanced by his prompt and personal suppression of a Lollard conspiracy which was discovered in May 1431. Centred on Abingdon, its handbills had been found, and arrests made, over an area as widespread as Coventry, Salisbury and London. The seditious writings were in substance a revival of the 1410 parliamentary petition for the confiscation of the temporalities of the church and, as such, directed only against the ecclesiastical establishment. Humphrey’s duties as king’s lieutenant certainly included the defence of the church, but the Lollard leader, William Perkins or Mandeville, called himself Jack Sharp of Wigmoreland, the Mortimer heartlands, just as Jack Cade was later to call himself Mortimer in 1450, and such a potentially political and anti-Lancastrian association must have seemed genuinely dangerous when kings and lords were absent abroad in strength.3 Apart from receiving specific reimbursement for his expenses in crushing the rising,4 as his terms of appointment merited, Gloucester had been voted a fifty per cent increase in salary and a continuing fee of 5,000 marks per annum, even after the king’s return. This had been proposed in the council and carried by John, Lord Scrope of Masham,5 supported by a newcomer to the council, William de la Pole, earl of Suffolk,6 and others, in spite of the opposition of Hungerford and Chancellor Kemp who maintained he should expect to revert to his former 2,000 marks on the king’s return. Gloucester intended to retain not only his higher salary but also his increased powers when the king returned to England.
Henry had been given his own signet seal and a secretary, William Hayton,7 with at least one clerk, William Crosby, to write for it, before he left for France. The signet in English history had hitherto been essentially an instrument of personal rule, but this could hardly have been expected of an eight-year-old boy and provision was made for both halves of the council to oversee any grants he might make with it.8 There is no evidence that he did make any grants,9 but the new signet office was certainly active. When Duke Humphrey, as Warden of the Cinque Ports, received his instructions to prepare for Henry’s re-entry into his English kingdom, the instrument was a letter under the signet, written in Abbeville on 18 January 1432.10 At a council meeting on 1 March 1432 Hayton was peremptorily dismissed. Henry’s signet was sealed up under the duke of Gloucester’s signet and given into the custody of the exchequer. The same council minute recorded the dismissal of four other principal officers of the royal household, which shows that the coronations and the French expedition had caused Duke Humphrey to fear a palace revolution centred on the possibility of Henry’s first personal exercise of authority. The dismissed household chamberlain, Ralph, Lord Cromwell, was replaced by Sir William Philip, the steward, Lord Tiptoft, by Sir Robert Babthorpe, Master Robert Gilbert, dean of the chapel, by Master Robert Praty and the almoner, John de la Bere, by Master Robert Felton. The new appointees were ordered to appear before Gloucester himself to receive their charges without delay.11 Four days earlier the treasurer, Sir Walter Hungerford, had been replaced by John, Lord Scrope of Masham.12 Archbishop Kemp had retired from the chancellorship on 25 February and been replaced by John Stafford, bishop of Bath and Wells.13 Lord Cromwell, at least, made a spirited protest against his dismissal, producing testimonies from Bedford and others who had been with Henry in France. He received no satisfaction beyond a declaration that Gloucester and the other lords of the council present on 1 March had been pleased so to decide.14
A new attack had already been launched on Gloucester’s most powerful opponent, Cardinal Beaufort, while he was still absent with the king in France, with a view to preventing his return. In the council on 6 November 1431 Gloucester produced historical evidenc
e that acceptance of a cardinalate by an English bishop had always meant resignation of his see and he extracted from the bishop of Worcester confirmation of his suspicions that Beaufort had in fact already purchased a papal dispensation to exempt his city and diocese from the jurisdiction of Canterbury. If Gloucester could get his way, Beaufort was now to be required to pay back all the revenues of Winchester, the richest of English sees and the fundamental source of his wealth, which he had received since 1426.15 On 28 November the duke succeeded in getting writs of praemunire and attachment prepared, with the joint objectives of crippling his uncle financially and preventing his return to English politics, but in view of Beaufort’s royal blood and his recent great services to the king he found that he could only get the consent of the council to holding the writs in suspension until Beaufort could return to England to be heard.16 In thus trying to manipulate the law to remove this greatest potential obstacle to his dominance of the young king, Gloucester was here his own worst enemy, because rumours of impending treason charges brought the cardinal back post-haste when, it seems, he had otherwise been bent on following up renewed possibilities of service in the papal cause and his own, which might well have kept him permanently out of England.
Subsequent events did not follow the earlier pattern of Beaufort’s 1426 humiliation. The new chancellor’s oration to parliament on 12 May 1432 on the text ‘Fear God, honour the king’, appropriate to the dignity of the now twice-crowned king there present, was followed next day by an oration from Gloucester, still, as he stressed, the king’s nearest male relative and chief councillor in Bedford’s absence. He declared that he was backed by a council which was of one mind in advising the king now and for the future, until he should come to years of puberty and discretion. This statement was communicated to the Commons when they presented their Speaker,17 but if it was intended as a challenge to overawe Beaufort it failed. Not only did the cardinal successfully demand public acceptance of his loyalty and innocence from Henry himself, but this was recorded under the great seal and Gloucester and all the other lords had to give their approval. Moreover, Beaufort also obtained a statutory guarantee, originating in the Commons House, both as cardinal and bishop of Winchester, that he would be subjected to no further harassment under provisors or praemunire. On 6 February 1432 Gloucester had had 6,000 marks’ worth of his uncle’s jewels and plate seized in the customs at Sandwich. These were now ordered to be restored to him and it can have been small consolation to the duke that their restoration was now made conditional on Beaufort’s making further substantial loans in the king’s services.18 It is noteworthy that Bedford’s services as mediator between his brother and uncle, as in 1425–6, were not required this time. In view of the young king’s enhanced status he may well have been no mere figurehead in this accommodation which was reached in his presence and declared for him among his lords in parliament in June 1432. The issue was certainly not to Gloucester’s liking, as he made clear when he raked up this 1432 bone of contention in his better known personal attack on his uncle eight years later.19
It is no surprise to find the earl of Warwick stating in late November 1432, on the approach of Henry’s eleventh birthday, that the boy had grown ‘in stature of his person’ in the four and a half years of his tutorship and ‘in conceit and knowledge of his high and royal authority’, and thanking God for it. But the occasion of these remarks was not mere praise. It was his tutor’s acknowledged inability any longer to administer correction and to control him which had forced him to appeal to the council for added powers. He consequently requested a clear, formal demonstration to Henry that his uncle Gloucester and all the council were still firmly behind him in his task. They were to explain to the king himself the need for new measures to support Warwick in doing his duty and also to move him not to bear any grudge against his tutor on that account. Warwick asked for and was given power to order his movements more strictly than before, to regulate all access to him, to remove unsuitable persons from his service and to be always present himself, or by deputy, at royal audiences. All this was necessary, he said, because unnamed persons in his absence had already stirred the boy from his learning and had told him things he ought not to hear. Subject to exceptions being made for princes of the blood, persons of the highest estate and the great officers of the household, all the new powers asked for were now granted to Warwick, but the principal councillor himself and the rest of the council were to be consulted before any changes were made among the knights and esquires of the body.20
1433 saw Henry’s council faced with insoluble problems which were to dog the footsteps of the young king and his advisers for the next twenty years. They could not conceive of any means of defending and consolidating the French inheritance which did not involve further aggressive conquest, yet it was impossible to raise finance from either kingdom adequate for this. A negotiated peace was not a viable alternative because the two rival French coronations at Rheims and Paris had created a fundamental block to peace by negotiation. As Berry herald put it, each party demanded, rightly or wrongly, to have the kingdom of France and each wished to be called the king of France. Since 1422 Bedford had striven militarily and diplomatically to assert his nephew’s claims to the uttermost. There was no going back on these. While it is possible that Henry V himself might have envisaged ultimate peace terms of his own which would have admitted of compromise over the title to the French crown, Bedford and the other councillors of the minority never could do so. Moves for peace earlier than March 1431 were not contemplated at all. Only then were steps taken to remove the specific ban on negotiations with ‘Charles the Dauphin’ without the assent of the three estates of both realms, which the treaty of Troyes had imposed. Even then it was papal intervention alone which compelled the formal consideration of peace, simply on Christian and moral grounds, although the grievous burden of the war was cited as a subsidiary reason for finally getting this ban removed in parliament.21 In fact peace negotiations thus only began when rival coronations were about to make peace by agreement impossible. Two years of negotiations under papal auspices revealed that even a meeting of principals or plenipotentiaries from both sides was unattainable. In April and May 1433 Bedford and Gloucester went to Calais for a whole month, and the dukes of Orleans and Bourbon, with other French prisoners, were moved to Dover for six weeks to be at hand to assist negotiations, but the promised French emissaries failed to appear.
The papal initiative had also brought another danger nearer, the alternative of a separate peace between Burgundy and Charles VII. Burgundy’s absence from Henry’s Paris coronation had been conspicuous. He was in fact already negotiating what ultimately turned out to be a separate peace, a course which the papacy pressed upon him as a duty should the English prove recalcitrant. Philip of Burgundy, for his part, feared that there were also secret Anglo-French negotiations in hand to his detriment, involving Henry’s marriage to one of Charles VII’s daughters. Consequently he sent an embassy to London under Hugh de Lannoy, designed to find out if there was any truth in such rumours. Lannoy was received in personal audience by Henry at his Guildford hunting lodge on 26 June 1433. According to his report the king, a fine looking, sturdy child, asked very pleasantly in French after the duke and conversed with the embassy for a while before summoning his lords who knelt around him while Burgundy’s letters were read. They remarked on the presence among his entourage of another ‘very gracious and clever child’, Gilles, younger son of the duke of Brittany,22 with whom they also spoke, evidence that Henry still had the allegiance of one other important ally, the duke of Brittany. Their audience, and subsequent consultations with the English lords, convinced them that Burgundy’s fears were quite unfounded. It was also through this embassy, as a result of their chance encounter at Calais on their return journey with one Jean de Saveuse, who had had direct access to Charles VII, that Philip of Burgundy was informed that, on Charles VII’s part, any peace with Henry VI depended absolutely on his willingness to relinquish his
claim to the French crown. Lannoy’s sealed despatch from Henry, when opened, revealed that Henry and his councillors had no intention at all of abandoning his crown and sovereignty of France.23 So Burgundy was now fully informed of the uncompromising stand of both Henry and Charles. It was also at this time that the first secret direct Orleans-Burgundian contacts were established. This was brought about by the accident that the earl of Suffolk had a Burgundian barber from Lille with access to his French prisoner, Charles of Orleans. This was to lead eventually to the release of the duke of Orleans and to an Orleans-Burgundian alliance.
The complete failure of the Calais negotiations was followed by urgent representations by the people of Normandy to Bedford for provision of effective defence. This was why he returned to England in 1433 to obtain it.24 Here, from 18 June 1433, he automatically took over the role of principal councillor.25 He had also been stung into action by rumours, which he claimed had been put about in England, that his carelessness and negligence were responsible for the declining fortunes of Henry’s French inheritance. Parliament had been summoned and, as soon as its opening formalities were completed, he rose on 13 July to demand that his attackers should identify themselves. A brief consultation of those about the king resulted in a formal declaration by the chancellor on behalf of Henry, his uncle Gloucester, and all the lords present, that no such allegations were known to them. Henry then personally thanked him profusely for his services and expressed his joy at having him once more in his presence. From this moment Bedford dominated the assembly. Ralph, Lord Cromwell, who now replaced Duke Humphrey’s nominee Lord Scrope as treasurer, must be considered his choice26 and, possibly also, the earl of Suffolk who replaced Robert Babthorpe, Gloucester’s man, as steward of the household.27 On 3 November Bedford led the Lords at the request of the Commons in taking an oath not to harbour or maintain criminals and later he administered a similar oath to all members of the Commons House, calling each member by name.28
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