Henry VI
Page 16
Ordered magnificence was expected of a medieval king’s household. When the Commons in parliament were petitioning Henry VII in 1485 to order an act of resumption, the proceeds from it were to go first to meet the regular expenses of his household which they considered amounted to some £14,000 per annum, and they referred back to the household of his uncle, King Henry VI, as a precedent for an ‘Honourable Household … kept and borne Worshipfully and Honourably, as it accordeth to the Honour of your Estate and your said Realm, by the which your Adversaries and Enemies shall fall into the dread wherin heretofore they have been’.7 But a royal household could easily become a burden on the realm, and a centre of faction, both in affairs of state and in the local government of the shires, because of the privileged positions in the realm which its personnel could so easily acquire. Such indeed rapidly became this ‘worshipful and great household’ of Henry VI, which Sir John Fortescue, looking back some twenty-five years later, thought Henry should forbear to re-establish for the first year of his Readeption in 1470 to prevent a repetition of the way his affairs had been conducted in the pre-Yorkist period.8 Its personnel required very careful selection and control and strict rules for their conduct had to be established. Whether the royal household functioned as a blessing rather than as a burden on the realm depended essentially on the ability of the king to control and direct its activities.
1 England and Wales
An establishment drawn up for Henry’s household in 1445 made provision for a total of 53 knights and esquires of the hall and chamber and 36 chamber valets or yeomen. But an extra provision in this 1445 ordinance allowed for a surplus of king’s esquires and officers beyond the appointed number, who were only to come to court at the five principal feasts of the year, at parliaments, great councils, levees for receiving strangers and on other occasions when specially summoned by the steward and the ‘sovereigns’.9 The treasurers’ and controllers’ accounts in fact reveal that in the following year numbers far in excess of these – 254 knights and esquires and 223 yeomen – were wearing the king’s livery. By 1451 these figures had risen to 301 knights and esquires and 228 yeomen. The earliest figures after Henry attained his majority are for 1439: 128 knights and esquires and 172 yeomen. The equivalent figures for the first year of his father’s reign had been 75 knights and esquires and 181 yeomen. Thus the number of Henry’s household retainers, above stairs, of rank of esquire and higher, more than doubled during fifteen years of personal rule and, together with the yeomen of the household, reached a grand total of a little short of 550 by 1451. The comparable totals of chaplains and clerks of the chapel, which stood at 26 in 1413, and 28 in 1439, had risen to 37 by 1448–9, as against an establishment of 20 in the ordinances of 1445 and 1454.
Henry’s mobile household establishment thus became the largest single institution in the realm, at least twice the size, above stairs, of a parliament in session. Its influence and tentacles stretched throughout the kingdom, since most of those household men who wore his livery were also domiciled somewhere in the shires and held local offices there, and elsewhere, in person, or by deputy. According to Sir John Fortescue, the king had more than a thousand offices at his disposal, without including those in the duchy of Cornwall, the principality of Wales and the earldom of Chester.10 The majority of these now went to household men and their nominees. It has been calculated that 63 household men held the key office of sheriff on one or more occasions between 1437 and 1461. In 1448 alone fourteen of the thirty-six counties of England had household men as sheriffs.11 Administratively the sheriff and his undersheriff were the king’s local men-of-all-work, serving writs, empanelling juries, collecting debts, holding elections to parliament, etc., and raising the fencible men of the county for the king’s service. Increasing numbers of household men now appear among the Justices of the Peace. In 1437, 327 persons served on the commissions of the peace in the English shires. By 1449 this number had risen to 440.12 Whereas in 1437 members of the household, 27 in all, made up only one-twelfth of the total, by 1449 this figure had risen to 76, so that one in six of the J.P.s in the shires were now receiving the royal livery.
Within an overall total of 51 peers of the realm and rather more than 2,100 armigerous gentry in England in 1436,13 the upper strata of society who considered themselves able to sit on commissions of peace or in parliament, this rapidly expanding household of Henry’s majority thus grew to be the greatest political affinity, or faction, in the kingdom. It is generally supposed that it had been the landed wealth and retainer power of John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster and king of Castile, the most over-mighty subject in English history, which had enabled his son, Henry of Bolingbroke, Henry VI’s grandfather, to seize the throne of England in 1399 and found the Lancastrian dynasty. At the height of his power, John of Gaunt had retained seven bannerets and 195 knights and esquires.14 But this was less than two-thirds of the size which his great-grandson’s establishment had reached by 1451. By comparison, in 1448 the best documented affinity of any fifteenth-century magnate, the affinity of Henry VI’s most wealthy subject Humphrey Stafford, duke of Buckingham, who had lands in twenty-two counties, consisted often knights and twenty-six esquires.15
It has further been suggested that the Lancastrian party built up by John of Gaunt was carefully enhanced and maintained by his son and grandson, Henry IV and Henry V, as an invincible political connection, but that it disintegrated in the nerveless hands of Henry VI.16 In fact it was the size and expense of Henry VI’s very substantial affinity and the privileged positions which its members abused, which caused growing resentment, jealousy and division among his subjects and lowered royal power and authority to the level of faction. It is true that the revenues of the duchy of Lancaster no longer formed the basis for it. But this was not due to a personal change of design on Henry’s part or to weakness or neglect. In his use of the duchy Henry VI in fact followed a pattern mainly determined by his father. In 1419 rather less than £13,500 of duchy revenues had been at Henry V’s disposal, above the unavoidable sums spent on internal administration, in fees, wages, etc. A little more than £5,000 per annum had certainly then been spent on annuities, which allegedly still secured a duchy of Lancaster affinity. But Henry V had tied up £6,000 per annum of these revenues for the performance of his will, an arrangement which lasted until 1443, and he endowed his queen with another £4,000 per annum. Humphrey duke of Gloucester took over £2,500 per annum as Protector and principal councillor of the realm. The budget which Treasurer Cromwell presented to parliament in 1433 revealed that less than £2,500 per annum was then at the crown’s disposal. This sum was clearly increased substantially with the death of Queen Catherine in 1437 and from 1439 to 1458, under various arrangements made in parliament, the net revenues of the duchy were actually paid towards the expenses of the king’s household. Nevertheless from 1445 these were again diminished because his new queen, Margaret of Anjou, began to absorb some £4,000 per annum and Henry, following his father’s precedent and regarding the duchy essentially as his personal estate, chose to set aside another like sum to build and endow his colleges at Eton and Cambridge.
Henry’s affinity was in fact built up on the basis of the crown lands and permanent revenues of the crown, which came into his hands in unusual profusion. With no heir to the throne, the lands of the duchy of Cornwall, the principality of Wales and the earldom of Chester were at his disposal from the beginning. The deaths of his three uncles, Clarence (1421), Bedford (1435) and Gloucester (1447), without legitimate issue, together with both the queens dowager, Joan and Catherine, in 1437, left him in a most unusual position, with absolutely no royal family to provide for, except his own queen from 1445. The revenues of this profusion of crown lands thus made available went not to the national exchequer but mainly to his household affinity who enjoyed their resources in the main in addition to their normal fees and wages of office. Between 1437 and 1450 Henry made at least 192 choice grants of royal lands and properties for terms of years, lives, or in
fee, over and above grants of offices, to 169 persons. These grantees included 9 great lords, some of whom were household members, 74 others wearing his livery, who were more or less permanent residents in the household, another 15 who can only be described as ‘country’ members and 22 with positions in the royal service who had easy access to the household.17 These extraordinary material grants of royal favour were topped up with a uniquely lavish distribution of honours.18 All this came under very heavy criticism in parliament and elsewhere from 1449, as unprecedented dilapidation of the financial resources of the monarchy and the creation of privileged factions within the administrative and judicial system.
Henry’s rule from 1437 to 1450 was thus undoubtedly centred on his household. With government directed from a peripatetic household, members of the council which operated from one static centre at Westminster were now at a distinct disadvantage unless they also happened to be household officers, because they were dependent upon the king’s personal summons before they could meet in his presence. Many years later in 1470, after Henry had lost his throne and briefly recovered it, the exiled Sir John Fortescue, who had been his Chief Justice of the King’s Bench from 1442, warned Henry, through the medium of his pupil Prince Edward, how dangerous it was to allow himself to be counselled by men of his chamber, or of his household generally, men not qualified and with no right to advise him.19 He was writing from his own experience in Henry’s council during the 1440s. This was also the sound, unheeded advice given to him by the author of his ‘Mirror of Princes’. For a king to be thus ruled by ‘private Counselloures’, Fortescue wrote, was the surest means to civil strife.20 This was also the contemporary charge levied against Henry’s so-called favourites in the crisis of 1450 because they, according to their detractors, had constituted the government of the country during the king’s majority rule. The degree of privilege and private profit they had gained from the king’s service was then taken to fix upon them responsibility for abuses of the law and corruption of government at home, as well as for the policies followed in France which led to the loss of Normandy, to Henry’s financial bankruptcy and to grave damage to the material interests and pride of the crown and his subjects.
The main evidence of how the kingdom of England was governed, and through whom it was done at this time, comes from documents published by Sir Harris Nicolas under the title Proceedings and Ordinances of the Privy Council in England.21 This collection lumps together, quite indiscriminately under this one misleading classification, all the records of three quite distinct kinds of governmental meetings: the council in Star Chamber, the council meeting with the king in his various palaces and the king signifying his will in the presence of a few advisers and servants who were not necessarily councillors at all. In the latter case an attendance of at least two was normally recorded, but there were cases where Adam Moleyns, who was both clerk of the council and the privy seal clerk attendant on the king from May 1438, was alone in the king’s presence when he granted petitions and issued warrants. By careful attention to the nature of each of the separate documents which are all thus indiscriminately classified by Nicolas as council proceedings, and by reading the endorsements on the hundreds of similar unprinted documents for the period of Henry’s personal rule still existing in the Public Record Office, it is possible to show who actually were the regular companions of Henry’s working days and who exercised power under or over him.
Henry thus made appointments, grants, etc., in the presence of a certain entourage which was only partly identical with the membership of his council. Such records as survive indicate that matters of general policy were still discussed, often indecisively, in his council, either when it was summoned to his presence, or without him, in the Star Chamber. But on all these matters final decisions, wise or unwise, were now his alone. An intermittent written dialogue between king and council can be studied with ease up to 22 July 1446 when the record of it fails, and throughout that period the pattern remained the same. For example, on 18 November 1437 a long council debate on the question whether to restore the forfeited franchises of the city of Norwich and whether to prohibit the export of wool and cloth was concluded: ‘this to be had to the king’. The clerk’s jottings were necessary to enable him to rehearse the conciliar discussion to Henry for his approval or otherwise. Equally necessary was his record of what was done when he was in the king’s presence and not with the council; he reported back, for example, that on 13 May 1438, in the king’s secret chamber at Kennington, with Gloucester, the chancellor, Suffolk and the Privy Seal present, Henry granted three bills and had rehearsed to him what had been discussed in the council the day before.22 One of the most detailed accounts of decisions taken in a matter of the greatest weight, the launching of a large-scale expeditionary force against France in 1442 and 1443, shows how the council was merely the executant of the decisions taken over its commander, its size, its destination, places of assembly, date of departure, etc. Every matter was referred to the king for final decision after full and, it must be said, inconclusive discussions in council, some of them in his presence. The most vital decision, the selection of commander, was certainly taken by Henry himself and another equally vital one, its destination, by Henry and the commander together.23
When the record fails in July 1446, the council were still executing the king’s decisions. He had recently personally decided to meet his uncle Charles VII of France and the lords spiritual and temporal in parliament, not to be saddled with the responsibility for it, had put on record that it was his personal decision.24 The council were now perforce settling the location, between Mantes and Melun; they were executing his orders to move Eleanor Cobham, the disgraced and divorced wife of the heir presumptive, Duke Humphrey, to stricter and remoter confinement in the Isle of Man; determining wages for various ambassadors according to precedent; conveying to the duke of York a temporizing answer from Henry as to his future as lieutenant in Normandy; and, finally, deputing the treasurer to ascertain the king’s final wishes on the numbers of his escort, the place of assembly and the date of departure for his visit to France.25 Typically of Henry, that meeting never actually took place.
Most of the mere executive work of government was still undoubtedly carried out through the council, sitting without the king. The historian of the king’s council thought that it was only from 1446, when the council minutes fail, that the most vital processes of government were withdrawn into the innermost recesses of the household26 and a simultaneous decline in the volume of documents, issuing under the privy seal, by authority of king and council, may seem to bear this out.27 But routine meetings of the council never ceased and surviving isolated summonses to council meetings indicate that matters were still discussed there, after 1446 as before. Moreover, the numbers of instruments minuted with presences around the king by a privy seal clerk, on occasions other than council meetings, also show a simultaneous decline. On the other hand, comparable direct warrants under the sign manual, subscribed by the signet clerks Robert Osbern, John Blakeney and Robert Repynghale, who were not accustomed to note presences, continued much as before 1446, if anything increasing in number.28 The conclusion must be therefore that the ravages of time are responsible for the imbalance in the record, that 1446 was no turning-point, and that the practice since 1437, which had established that some members of Henry’s household were the more important and favoured of his advisers, prevailed throughout the period of his personal rule, not just after 1446.
If we described as the king’s ministers those persons whose names appear as the most frequent witnesses to his acts of state, both inside and outside council meetings and ignore for this purpose those present ex officio, equally at council meetings or in the household, as chancellor, treasurer, keeper of the privy seal, secretary, or household chamberlain, then already from 1437 the most important was the earl, later marquis and duke, of Suffolk, steward of the household, who was to succeed Humphrey duke of Gloucester as Great Chamberlain of England in 1447. Most
assiduous in attendance with him were William Aiscough, Henry’s confessor, bishop of Salisbury from 1438 and a councillor from 1441; England’s first viscount, John, Lord Beaumont, who married the daughter of Lord Bardolf, the household chamberlain, received Bedford’s former viscounty of Beaumont in France, became a councillor from 1443 and Constable of England from 1445; Master Adam Moleyns, privy seal clerk in attendance and clerk of the council from May 1438, a councillor in his own right and keeper of the privy seal from early 1444, dean of Salisbury and bishop of Chichester from 1445; James Fiennes, esquire and knight of the body from 1438 to 1447 when he became household chamberlain, and then treasurer of England in 1449, a peer of the realm as Lord Say and Sele and a councillor from 1447; John Sutton, Lord Dudley, a councillor from 1443, and, from about 1445, Reginald Boulers, abbot of Gloucester, made bishop of Hereford in 1450, and also a councillor from 1445. These seven, who were most constantly in the king’s presence when he carried out the duties of kingship, can be considered as the ministers of his personal rule. It is a striking fact that four of them actually lost their lives in 1450 for their alleged responsibilities, and Beaumont alone among them escaped attack in the political proscriptions and lampoons of that year.