There were twelve others whose names appear frequently as witnesses to the king’s acts of state. These were ten knights and esquires of Henry’s household,29 mainly gentlemen of his chamber, together with the privy seal clerk Thomas Kent, also clerk of the council from 1443, and the signet clerk, John Blakeney. Among these the two Beauchamps, both king’s carvers, entered the peerage, John as Lord Beauchamp of Powicke in 1447, and William as Lord St Amand in 1449. None of these twelve prominent members of Henry’s entourage, in spite of their obvious influence, ever received appointment to the council. Of the eleven still alive in 1450 only three of them escaped proscription and denigration in the crisis which then destroyed Suffolk, Fiennes, Moleyns and Aiscough.30
1 John Stafford as chancellor was frequently present with the king in his household. While still bishop of Bath and Wells he occasionally sealed documents with the great seal at his manor of Dogmersfield, as well as at Westminster, when he was not in the household; after he became archbishop of Canterbury, sometimes at Canterbury. The keeper of the privy seal, the seal and his clerks were even more frequently in the royal household; the secretary, the signet seal and its clerks were always there, although their movements from palace to palace did not always coincide to the exact day with the king’s movements as recorded in the household accounts. The treasurer’s movements cannot be so precisely ascertained, although he too was often present at court from 1437.
2 A duchy of Cornwall manor.
3 P.R.O., P.S.O. 1/17.
4 Duchy of Cornwall manor.
5 Duchy of Lancaster manor.
6 Duchy of Lancaster manor.
7 R.P., VI, 336.
8 Fortescuc on the Governance of England, ed. Charles Plummer (Oxford 1885), 352–3.
9 Printed by A. R. Myers, The Household of Edward IV (Manchester 1959), 66.
10 Governance, 151.
11 Robin Jeffs, ‘The Later Medieval Sheriff and the Royal Household, 1437–1547’ (unpublished Oxford D. Phil, thesis, 1960), 55–7.
12 i.e. 327 persons on the commissions at 13 November 1437 named 628 times; 440 persons on the commissions at 31 December 1449 named 740 times.
13 This figure represents those who were assessed at £20 per annum or above in the income tax returns of 1436 and a statute of 1439–40 laid down that Justices of the Peace must hold a landed income of not less than £20 per annum. Comparable income and status was required for election to parliament.
14 K. B. McFarlane, ‘Bastard Feudalism’, B.I.II.R., XX (1943–5), 165.
15 Carole Rawcliffe, The Staffords, earl of Stafford and dukes of Buckingham 1394–1512 (Cambridge 1978), 72–5.
16 T.B. Pugh, ‘The magnates, knights and gentry’, in Fifteenth-century England, ed. S. B. Chrimes and others (Manchester 1972), 107–8.
17 For details see B. P. Wolffe, The Royal Demesne in English History (London 1971), 248–89.
18 See below, pp. 215–6.
19 Governance, 350.
20 Ibid., 348.
21 Record Commission, 6 vols (London 1834–7).
22 P.P.C., V, 98.
23 Ibid., 218, 223–4, 225–8, 229, 232, 233, 234–7, 267, 279, 280–1, 284–90, 292–4.
24 R.P., V, 102–3.
25 P.P.C., VI, 50–4.
26 J. F. Baldwin, The King’s Council in England during the Middle Ages (Oxford 1913), 191.
27 P.R.O., E.28, files 75–8 passim.
28 P.R.O., C.81, files 1437–54 passim.
29 John Hampton, John Noreys, Thomas Scargill, Master John Somerset, Edmund Hungerford, John and William Beauchamp, John Saintlo, John Pennycook, John Trevelyan.
30 The two Beauchamps and Thomas Scargill. John Saintlo died in 1448. A list of twenty-nine people whose banishment from court was urged in a parliamentary petition of 1451 is printed in R.P., V, 216, and a largely identical list of thirty-two persons allegedly indicted at Rochester in August 1450 by C. L. Kingsford, Eng. Hist. Lit., 364–5 from B.L., Cotton Roll, ii, 23. For contemporary political lampoons see Political Poems and Songs, ed. Thomas Wright (R.S., 1861), ii, 222, 232, 234.
Chapter 7
PATRONAGE, FACTION AND INJUSTICE IN ENGLAND, 1437–1450
The royal entourage had great opportunities to exert influence on the king in their own and their adherents’ interests. The surviving evidence of Henry’s personal acts, done in this entourage which surrounded him from 1437, displays an open-handedness in the dispensation of patronage which might, at first, have been seen as largely inevitable in a good-natured boy of sixteen, set in the supreme seat of power after an upbringing uniquely sheltered and elevated right from birth. But it must soon have begun to disturb those great officers about him who were themselves bound by the responsibility of office to see certain principles followed. They certainly strove diplomatically to correct his weaknesses. As his lack of sound political sense became obvious, access to his person carried particularly heavy responsibilities. These were not fulfilled by all his entourage, or by all those whose rank alone was sufficient to give them the privileges of access when they wished to exercise it. Two very early instances are recorded of apparently mindless grants from which his council, sitting in the Star Chamber at Westminster, clearly hoped he would learn. On 11 February 1438 the council clerk, Henry Benet, noted that he was charged to speak to the king about the way pardons should be granted. He had given one to a collector of customs by which the crown had lost 2,000 marks. The next day he again made a note to draw Henry’s attention to a grant he had made of the office of constable and steward of Chirk castle, whereby he had lost another 1,000 marks.1 On 25 May he sold the lordship and castle outright to his great-uncle, the cardinal, who had no cause to acquire land for himself, but never missed a chance of using his ecclesiastical wealth to endow his Beaufort nephews. This sale was particularly unwise, especially as Henry’s father, by contrast, in 1418, had bought Chirk for the crown for cash. Henry’s Lord Chief Justice, Sir John Fortescue, was later to cite this sale as the most glaring instance of wanton alienation of crown lands he could think of.2
Three years later Henry’s lack of judgement and appreciation of the consequence of his actions gave cause for alarm. In the autumn of 1440 the council had been dealing with breaches of the peace by Thomas Courtenay, thirteenth earl of Devon, and by the king’s knight and steward of the duchy of Cornwall manors in Cornwall, Sir William Bonville of Shute. The earl had had to be forbidden to use his office of Justice of the Peace against Bonville and ordered, in October 1440, to make personal complaint to Henry if he had any grievance against Bonville.3 Bonville had appeared in person before the council and been bound over to keep the peace; Devon had been excused personal appearance there because of illness, but had been visited by the king’s household knight and councillor, Sir John Stourton, to take appropriate assurances from him.4 On 21 November 1441 Sir Philip Chetwynd was to be before the council about an assault made upon him and some Bristol merchants at Hungerford on their way to London by an unidentified armed band, who were thought to be the earl’s men who had mistaken them for Bonville’s supporters.5 It is quite impossible to believe that Henry was not made aware of the feud. Yet in the spring of 1441 he had granted the stewardship of the duchy of Cornwall, which Bonville had exercised in Cornwall since 1437, to his antagonist Devon. Within a week of the earl’s patent being sealed, the serious consequences of what he had done were brought home to him. At Sheen on 14 May 1441, in the presence of Suffolk, Treasurer Cromwell, Beaumont, the household chamberlain and Moleyns, he had to command the chancellor to send an immediate order to the earl, under the great seal, not to meddle with the office until a council meeting could be convened to ordain what should be done, in view of the ‘great trouble in the said county to great distress of our true subjects and disturbing of our peace’ likely to ensue from the consequent reopening of their quarrel.6 Much council time was subsequently taken up that year composing the differences of Devon and Bonville. In the end they appeared separately before Henry in his chamber and bound
themselves each to surrender their patent of office, to accept arbitration and to allow the stewardship to be held by ‘an indifferent man’ meantime. Bonville was constrained to accept the seneschalry of Gascony in the following year, but attempts to get Devon away to Normandy to rescue besieged Avranches, citing the example of how his father had responded to Henry V’s personal appeal when Cherbourg was threatened, met with no success.7 Thus the king had exacerbated rather than checked, controlled or solved the differences of his unruly subjects.
The picture thus gained of Henry of Windsor’s vacillation and uncertain judgement in his exercise of the powers of kingship is not what one would have expected from the son of Henry V, especially after the apparent promise of his minority. He was well enough served by his councillors, but nothing of importance was done or could be done without his approval and assent, and it is clear that his own personal wishes and decisions could brook no delay or circumvention. For example, Cardinal Beaufort died at Wolvesey on 11 April 1447 and that very same day Henry sent a signet letter from Windsor, ordering the prior and chapter at Winchester to elect Wrilliam Wainfleet as his great-uncle’s successor. This must have crossed a request for free election, sealed in the chapter house of St Swithun’s on 12 April and carried by a delegation to Windsor, because another peremptory order followed from Windsor 011 13 April ordering Wainfleet’s immediate election on Saturday 15 April, without waiting for back-dated letters under the great seal which would follow. The chancellor sealed letters patent committing the temporalities to Wainfleet at Canterbury which he back-dated to 11 April ‘per ipsum regem et de data predicta auctoritate parliamenti’, although no parliament was sitting, and in spite of the statute of 18 Henry VI forbidding this practice. The licence to elect under the great seal duly followed, dated at Canterbury 15 April. Writs went out from Westminster per ipsum regem, under the normal process, on 4 June, to the escheators, ordering the delivery of the temporalities. The papal letters of approval, stated in these writs to have been already received, must have been assumed, unless they had indeed been obtained meantime with most unusual promptitude.8
Henry also considered that he was perfectly free to change his mind if he wished to do so. In 1448, on the death of Robert Gilbert, bishop of London, he recommended Thomas Kemp, his chaplain and the archbishop’s nephew, for the vacant see. The papal letters of approval were duly sent. Some time before 19 May 1449 he wrote asking for the translation of Marmaduke Lumley, bishop of Carlisle and treasurer of England since 1446, to the see of London. Lumley was about to relinquish the treasurership to Lord Say and Sele, the king’s chamberlain, and it may have been belatedly desired to take advantage of the London vacancy to keep him close at hand. Suffolk also wrote to the pope, recommending Lumley, in support of the change of plan.9 But Pope Nicholas V refused to undo what he had already done, rejecting the joint efforts of king and minister when they claimed that Henry’s original letter had been surreptitious and that his proctor in Rome, William Gray, had been responsible for it. In a salutary homily to Henry, the pope defended the honour of Gray, sent Henry back a copy of his original letter to show how genuine it had been and called to mind some essential attributes of kingship: gravity in taking advice, constancy when he had accepted it. Such changes of mind or readiness to believe slander were deplorable in a king.10
An effective king had to be able to stand up to the unscrupulous pressure under which he made his grants and appointments. Henry’s failures in this respect can be further well illustrated by similar incidents involving the later squire of the body, Thomas Daniel. The same day in 1441 when his mistake over the duchy appointment was made clear to him, it also emerged that the chamberlain of Chester, John Troutbeck, had had to be ordered to return letters under the royal signet of arms and the duchy of Lancaster eagle signet, granting Daniel the manor of Frodsham rent free for life. Henry, it was now said, had been misinformed that this manor was only worth £20 per annum. The chamberlain had been instructed from Westminster to hold the grant in abeyance meantime, since Lord Cromwell, the treasurer, who was present at Sheen on 14 May, had realized that it was worth very much more and Daniel was therefore very properly restricted to a £20 per annum grant from it.11 A few years later the same avaricious Daniel secured from the pliant king a reversion of John Troutbeck’s own office of chamberlain of Chester held for life, immediately after his death or earlier, to have ‘quiet entry … if so be that the aforesaid John Troutbeck have offended or offend in any other wise than he should do in his said office’. John Trevelyan, yeoman of the crown, was his agent in the matter and carried the bill bearing Henry’s assent to Moleyns, newly made keeper of the privy seal, with a verbal message ‘that he should speed the bill in all haste’.12 Troutbeck had himself received the office from his father, to hold by himself or by sufficient deputy, on 16 June 1439, and might reasonably have expected to pass it on to his own son in due course. Daniel’s grant was dated 13 February 1445 and it is no surprise to find that on 29 March following, at Windsor, Troutbeck himself secured from Henry an exemplification of his letters patent of 1439, declaring his exemplary service in the office and safeguarding himself against any removal by virtue of other letters patent for the office obtained subsequently to that date. This Henry, impartially or indifferently, handed personally to Moleyns, also with a special order to expedite it: ‘et tradita mihi cum speciali iussu ad expediendum’.13 Such ambivalent actions can hardly have created confidence in his kingship.
The role of household squires and yeomen such as Daniel and Trevelyan in Henry’s appointments is further revealed in a covering letter written by John Hampton to Moleyns, as keeper of the privy seal, from Staines on 5 May 1445 to accompany a petition from Thomas Burghill for the office of collector and receiver of the king’s rents and dues at Calais, for which Hampton had just obtained Henry’s assent under his sign manual. The king’s secretary Richard Andrew was not at court, so he had been unable to get an immediate signet warrant to send to Moleyns, but he feared that Master John Langton, the treasurer of Calais, although he had promised ‘afore time that my said well beloved should have had it’, was at the same time suing for a man of his own to have the office. ‘Wherefore I beseech your good lordship as ever I shall desire that be unto your pleasure ye will speed my said well beloved afore any other in this matter. And almighty Jesus preserve your good estate. Written at Staines the V day of May in haste. Hampton by mine own hand.’14 While making sure that the chancellor received a warrant that he would execute without question, speed was of the essence because parliament in 1439, in order to close one abuse in the undignified scramble for grants which Henry’s majority had unloosed, had determined that the chancellor should henceforth not issue any letters patent bearing a date earlier than that of the delivery of the warrant into chancery.15
The ability of various household men to obtain all manner of grants great and small from Henry clearly soon became well known to suitors, informers, etc., who would share the proceeds of their grants with them in return for their promotion of them. For example, on 8 April 1445 Hampton obtained the royal assent by sign manual to a petition of his own and Thomas Hampton’s granting them all the king’s rights in ten pokes of wool which had been discovered at Titchfield by two local informers ‘in a barn of William Uvedale set upon the sea bank under straw in manner suspect there and hid for to be carried unto parts of beyond sea not customed nor coketted’.16 They commonly promoted bills for one another. A petition for John Say, yeoman of the crown, to have the office of keeper of the privy palace at Westminster and granted under the sign manual on 3 March 1445, is again endorsed as promoted by John Trevelyan, yeoman of the crown, ‘to my lord privy seal in the king’s behalf, praying and commanding him upon the said bill to do make letters under the privy seal unto my lord chancellor, etc.’17
The greatest could suffer from Henry’s unlimited and haphazard granting of favours. Humphrey duke of Gloucester had to petition on 10 March 1445 that he might in future be allowed to see all warr
ants under the privy seal before they were issued, if they concerned the royal forests and parks. Henry had committed to him the rule and governance of these, but so many warrants had been directed and executed there to the great damage of trees, underwood, vert and game, that he was left with responsibility, but no control.18 Richard duke of York, absent as Henry’s lieutenant in France and Normandy, wrote on 9 March 1445 to complain that in his absence Sir John Pauncefoot’s feoffees had disinherited him of his manor and lordship of Crickhowell, by granting the king a reversion of it and that Henry had ratified and approved the arrangement. He now petitioned for leave to sue for his title in the high court of parliament, which was granted.19 On the other hand there was one family whom absence from court or service abroad did not damage. Edmund Beaufort, marquis of Dorset on 4 October 1444 was given thirteen manors in Somerset and Dorset for himself and his heirs male which Henry V had decreed should be perpetually joined to the duchy of Cornwall. At the same time Henry similarly granted him the valuable earldom of Richmond lands, the manors of Bassingbourn and Babraham in Cambridgeshire, the whole grant being worth over £400 per annum. Possibly the cardinal was watching over his nephew’s interests at court. He had himself already acquired Chirk and Chirklands, the manors of Henstridge, Charlton Camville, Canford and Poole, in Somerset and Dorset, through Henry’s alienations, to bequeath to his Beaufort nephew.20
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