Henry VI

by Bertram Wolffe

  Bedford had returned to England for only the second time in ten years specifically to obtain adequate funds and support for his continuing role as regent in France. But it soon became clear that he was wanted in England. At the end of November the Speaker of the Commons appeared before the king and the lords to deliver a panegyric on Bedford for securing and consolidating the king’s French possessions, which they said could now more easily spare him, for his noble example in upholding the law, personally bringing criminals to justice, truly paying for his victuals and wisely advising the king. The purpose was to make him remain in England at the head of the government and, after consultation with Gloucester, the cardinal, the two archbishops and certain other lords unnamed, Henry ordered the chancellor to ask all the assembled lords whether they supported the Commons’ request. With their support he secured Bedford’s agreement.29 The next day in the Star Chamber the duke raised the question of his salary, recalling that he, or his brother, had in the past been paid as much as 8,000 marks per annum (£5,333 13s 4d). At this none of the other councillors ventured to speak. He then proposed, in view of the king’s great necessity, to take only £1,500 a year, with another £500 for each journey to or from France.30 On 18 December he laid before parliament his conditions for assuming his own new responsibilities, but only ‘as far as it may goodly be with the weal of his [the king’s] lands and lordships beyond the sea’, thus not abdicating what he still considered to be his primary charge, as laid upon him by his brother Henry V, but taking on additional responsibilities in England until the king could exercise the governance of the realm in his own person. Parliament now, in fact, gave him a new controlling interest over Henry’s government without any specific new title to formalize it: a new personal nomination of the continual council, a guarantee that none of the great officers of state, including those of the duchy of Lancaster, would be replaced without his approval, no parliament called without his assent and presence, and no bishop appointed without his assent.31 On 28 November Duke Humphrey faute de mieux also had to accept a mere £1,000 per annum for attendance at the council,32 and when the new councillors were nominated in Henry’s presence on 21 December the cardinal, the two archbishops and the bishops of Ely and Lincoln all agreed to give their services free in term time.33 The Commons finally granted one tenth and fifteenth, the standard form of direct taxation, to be levied in two instalments in 1434 and 1435 but, for the first time, with a deduction of £4,000 from the total sum because of poverty, distress and inability to bear the previous level of taxation prevalent throughout the country.34

  Cromwell’s appointment as treasurer had demonstrated that this was no time to expect massive financial assistance for the prosecution of the war in France. There was a financial crisis of the gravest magnitude in the aftermath of the enormously expensive coronation sortie of 1430–2. It was customary throughout the fifteenth century for the treasurer to ‘declare the state of the realm’ in general terms to parliament, but 1433 revealed for the first time that such general statements could be based on very detailed, comprehensive surveys of expenditure and revenue prepared by the treasurer’s staff in the exchequer. When Cromwell took over the treasurership on 11 August 1433, parliament had already been informed that even the normal expenses of government could not be covered to the sum of £35,000 or more. When parliament was suddenly prorogued on 13 August because of plague in London he had to be given emergency powers to restrain all assignments already made prior to 20 July, in order to secure an essential £2,000 for Henry’s personal expenses and the expenses of his household, until the reassembly of parliament on the quindene of Michaelmas. After reassembly (13 October), Cromwell was ready with further evidence of the seriousness of the financial situation. He now claimed that the earlier statement, alarming as it had been, had had little effect on the parliament. It seems that Cromwell feared that he would be blamed for the crippling lack of funds. Consequently on 18 October he laid before the Lords books and records of exchequer revenues and financial commitments. They had to undertake first to examine these, and then to instruct him how to provide for all the expenses of government, with a clear order of priorities for the limited resources available. A digest of these exchequer documents was also handed in to the Lords, sectionalized under the names of the various exchequer staff who had prepared it. This was subsequently read out to the Commons and sewn on to the roll of the parliament. Thus there survives for this year a survey of the resources and financial commitments of English government, unique in its detail and comprehensiveness, made only some three years before Henry assumed personal direction of affairs.35 The gross annual revenues of the crown amounted to £54,000, of which £31,000 came from indirect taxation, that is, from import and export duties, the customs, tonnage and poundage and wool subsidies levied at the ports. These provided £27,000 net, which was the major part of the current disposable income, because the remaining £23,000 of the gross sum, which alone might be called the permanent revenues of the crown, bore long-term charges, consisting mainly of fees and annuities, amounting to £14,000. Foreseeable expenses for the coming year amounted to £57,000 and there were debts outstanding of £165,000. At the end of his budget Cromwell clearly stated that there was no provision made for the defence of Henry’s French possessions. Neither was there any money even for the immediate expenses of the king himself and his household.

  These were the circumstances which caused the young king to spend the next four months in a monastery. It was the custom on the Feast of All Saints each year to decide where the king should spend Christmas. In the midst of this financial crisis, with no provision made for household expenses beyond the quindene of Michaelmas, and no parliamentary grants yet offered, the council now took the novel, emergency decision to send Henry and his household for a protracted stay, at no cost, from Christmas 1433 to St George’s Day 1434, to the monastery of Bury St Edmunds. Doubtless this was a financial decision. The abbot William Curteys, then at his manor of Elmswell some ten miles to the east of the town, received this unprecedented council order with astonishment. Nevertheless, mindful of the especial honour and obligation of entertaining this twice-crowned king of two realms, so he said, he immediately engaged eighty workmen for a month to put his dilapidated palace into order and prudently arranged to share both the honours and the expenses with the prior and convent. Even before the king’s arrival he had to feed an advance party of one hundred officials of various grades. A magnificent reception was required for the king himself, so at the abbot’s direction five hundred of his townsmen in red livery, led by their aldermen and burgesses in scarlet, rode out on Christmas Eve to meet the king and his mile-long train on Newmarket heath. Entering the precincts of the monastery by the south gate, Henry was assisted from his horse by his tutor Warwick, to be greeted by his confessor, William Alnwick, who was also the bishop of Norwich, and the abbot, in full pontificals, together with all the monks in the abbey’s best copes. Censed and sprinkled with holy water, he reverently kissed the cross which the abbot presented to him and processed to the high altar to the singing of the antiphon for the service of St Edmund: ‘Ave rex gentis Anglorum’. After praying at the saint’s shrine and thanking the abbot for his reception, the king and his nobles moved on to occupy his palace throughout the Christmas festivities, in all of which he participated in regal state until Epiphany. The abbot was careful to present suitable precious gifts not only to the king but also to his nobles according to rank. Probably among the Near Year gifts which Henry now received was the splendid dedicatory manuscript of John Lydgate’s Life of St Edmund which shows him kneeling in prayer before St Edmund’s shrine.36

  From 6 to 23 January Henry moved to the prior’s lodging, considered especially pleasant because of its proximity to the water and enclosed vineyard and, being easily accessible to the open country, allowing him to make frequent excursions hunting both fox and hare. Then it was the turn of the abbot’s manor house at Elmswell to accommodate him and his court, completely in the count
ry, where the sports of fishing and fowling could most easily be provided and provisions were especially plentiful. For Lent, 25 February to 11 April that year, he returned to the prior’s lodgings and then back to the abbot’s palace for the Easter festivities, until the time set for his departure for Windsor. When this approached, the duke of Gloucester and the various dignitaries of the court were solemnly admitted into the fraternity of the monastery and Henry himself, at his own request, in spite of his youth, was also solemnly enrolled in the fraternity by the abbot in a special ceremony in the chapter house. At the moment of departure, Gloucester prostrated himself before the king and requested him to express his final thanks to the abbot for his lavish presents and indefatigable hospitality. This the boy did, taking him by the hand, commending himself and his people to God and St Edmund and thanking the abbot joyfully and profusely.

  The circumstances and details of this prolonged monastic visit of 1433–4, as minutely described in the abbot’s register,37 if considered independently of posthumous assertions about Henry’s character, are hardly material for the view that he was, from birth, and by nature, more monk than monarch. It was in fact a state visit on a grand scale, very expensive for the abbot and community and, though possibly also made to seem desirable as part of the boy’s education, was occasioned by immediate financial necessity, not planned to accommodate his youthful wishes.

  Cromwell’s budget had contained a memorandum ‘To provide for the kingdom of France’ and highlighted the fact that there was no current provision at all from English revenues for the defence of Henry’s French possessions. Normandy and Maine were indeed normally expected to finance themselves. Only when special new expeditionary forces were sent out, such as Salisbury’s in 1428, the coronation expedition of 1431 or on the appointment of a new lieutenant there, did the English exchequer contribute to the cost of waging war and then only for the first six months after landing. With Bedford constrained to remain in England to rule the country, and. the king and court in a monastery, the problems of the French possessions, which had actually brought him back across the Channel in June 1433, were apparently ignored until April 1434. But the very purpose of Bedford’s visit had been to secure some permanent provision from England, and rumours of the raising of a great French army of attack, with repeated appeals for help from Normandy, persisted. A few days after the court’s departure from Bury, a great council assembled in the parliament chamber at Westminster on 26 April 1434, specifically summoned to deal with this problem. It was first confronted with ambitious plans put forward not by Bedford but by Duke Humphrey. Impatient at his elder brother’s unaccustomed presence and pre-eminence in England, he now proposed to usurp his vacant place in France.

  Bedford took this as a new personal attack upon his regency there and demanded the right to make a studied reply, which Gloucester then counter-challenged as a slight on his honour. Such an open and tedious quarrel, with both of them meticulously preparing their written cases, could only be settled in the king’s presence, as had been the previous quarrels between two of his three nearest princes of the blood in 1426 and 1432. It is natural to assume that Henry was advised here by the cardinal, for once not a party to the dispute, even though the record does not say so. The solution, ‘by advice of the council’, was to silence both of them, to have them both surrender their written evidences into Henry’s own hands for destruction, for him to declare that the honour of neither of his most loyal uncles had been besmirched, and to forbid any further argument.

  This scene in the great chamber of the bishop of Durham’s London palace on 8 May 1434,38 in the presence of the cardinal, the two archbishops and sixty-five other members of the great council, can hardly have strengthened the case for the continuance of conciliar government in the mind of the thirteen-year-old king. Moreover, the great council as a body considered that its honour and competence had also been put in doubt. Rumours were soon current that the two dukes had made offers, and submitted plans, which would solve the insoluble problems of France at no public cost and to the relief of many years’ taxation, which the council had irresponsibly laid aside. Gloucester, at least, had openly appealed to public opinion in support of his plan, which was apparently sufficiently detailed to be roughly costed: some £50,000, which the council declared was an utterly impossible sum to think of, when commissioners sent out into the counties to raise loans could not get any money, even on the security of the crown jewels. They therefore petitioned Henry that Gloucester should be formally challenged to request the summoning of a parliament and put his wholly admirable but financially impossible plan to it, in order to clear them of the imputations of negligence.39 After the king’s enforced reconciliation of the two royal dukes no more was heard of Gloucester’s plan.

  The council minutes for 14 and 15 June 1434 do, however, show that Bedford, on the other hand, did subsequently submit his plans in writing to Henry, embedded in a long justification of his whole regency since the death of Henry V, and these, in substance, were finally adopted. They involved the appropriation to war expenses of the only permanent item of royal revenue not covered by Cromwell’s budget, the major portion of the personal patrimony of the royal house, the part of the duchy of Lancaster which Henry V had enfeoffed for the fulfilment of his will. Some £5,000 gross and £2,500 net of duchy revenues had been included in Cromwell’s budget, though carefully excluded from his totals since he had no control over them. A further £4,000 per annum was being enjoyed by Queen Catherine. It was the remainder, currently producing about £6,000 per annum., still under control of the cardinal and Henry V’s other surviving feoffees, which Bedford now asked should be henceforth set aside to finance 200 lances and 600 bowmen for duty in France.40 He proposed to double this force by drawing upon the Calais garrison from which, if he were given the supreme command of it, he confidently predicted he could extract a mobile field force without weakening its defences.41 Finally he undertook to devote his own personal income from Normandy for two years from Michaelmas 1434 to the same cause. Had he lived, it is possible that these arrangements, which were approved in outline by the council,42 might have provided the basis for the permanent English field force which was so conspicuously lacking in France. But the trustees of the duchy imposed the condition that they should be provided with alternative income. While in fact, under pressure, they loaned some £114,000 towards the conduct of the war between the death of Henry V and their dissolution in 1441, all this had to be, and was, repaid.43 In the end, when Henry was given personal control, the duchy revenues went not to financing the war but to building Eton College.

  Bedford was eager to return to France, while at the same time maintaining his new pre-eminence in the English government and henceforth he proposed to travel to and fro as and when required.44 On 20 June 1434 in the Star Chamber he also extracted an oath from eleven members of the council, led by the cardinal, but not including Gloucester, that they would continue to observe the articles of the previous 18 December after his departure.45 In fact his return could only be managed by courtesy of his uncle, who now furnished a loan of 10,000 marks for the defence and safeguard of Henry’s realm of France and another 3,000 marks to provide Bedford’s escort of 100 lances and 300 bowmen when the council found they could not raise even that sum by any other means. The whole sum was secured for repayment on the tenth and fifteenth granted in 1433 and due for payment in 1434 and 1435. Moreover, Beaufort laid down further stringent conditions: a full account and payment of what was still owing for his expenses in attendance on Henry in France from 1430 to 1432; a declaration from the king’s own mouth that £6,000 which he had advanced to secure the return of his jewels in 1432 would be repaid on good assignment; the repayment of a further 5,000 marks from the tenth and fifteenth which he had loaned for war expenses while he, Bedford and Gloucester, had been together at Calais, and the surrender to him, in pledge, of 7,000 marks’ worth of crown jewels, plus personal guarantees from his fellow councillors for another 3,000 marks. Finall
y he requested and was given leave to go abroad at will, taking such valuables as he wished with him.46 Thus more than one-third of the 1433 lay taxation, demonstrably the only possible ultimate source of war finance, was mortgaged to Beaufort in advance of payment.

  Bedford returned for the last time to face the problems of Normandy early in July 1434.47 One other project was sanctioned before he left, destined for a very long time ahead to produce no results, but which was ultimately to have the most profound consequences for his nephew. With approval not only of the cardinal and Bedford but also of Duke Humphrey, who otherwise seems to have played no part whatsoever in Bedford’s final arrangements for the government of England and France to the end of the minority, the earl of Suffolk’s prisoner, Charles duke of Orleans,48 was to be allowed to attempt peace negotiations with his fellow princes of the blood in France. Orleans had already been bound on oath, in secrecy, to accept Henry as the only king of France.49 Under the strictest safeguards for his safe custody by land and sea and of collective conciliar responsibility for all his movements and negotiations (no one person being able to give any orders whatsoever in these respects), Suffolk was now instructed to convey to him the council’s permission to meet and negotiate with other French princes of the blood at Calais, with their English counterparts, Bedford, Gloucester and Beaufort, standing by.50

  Bedford was still only in his mid-forties when he died the following year. It is idle to speculate on what might have happened had he lived as long as his brother Gloucester, who was only a year his junior, but one cannot see him consenting to the surrender of his patrimony of Maine and Anjou. From the moment Henry V died, he had loyally tried to carry out his will in France, having successes both as a soldier and a diplomat. He made clear, however, that he was not going to allow his younger brother, Humphrey, to assume a power in England superior to his own. He may have been actuated by personal ambition in this, but he probably also showed sound judgement in view of some of Humphrey’s hasty and ill-considered acts. Faced with the impossibility of ruling himself in both England and France he threw the whole weight of his personal authority behind the council, maintaining its power against Gloucester and Beaufort, and also accepting that his own power should be restricted by the council’s articles. In this he showed considerable statesmanship. The council was probably the only way the country could be ruled efficiently through the minority and the king’s power kept undiminished for his ultimate assumption of power. For the thirteen years that he was the principal power in his nephew’s two kingdoms, he showed the qualities of kingship while never usurping his nephew’s position. He controlled the ambitions of others and had the respect of council and parliament. After his death there was no successor to his unique position, no one who could restrain the ambitious about the young king and no one who could guide the developing king towards the highest attributes of kingship.