Henry VI

by Bertram Wolffe

  After a brief look at Henry as the founder of Eton and King’s Colleges it therefore remains to examine his conduct of war and diplomacy in order to give that full picture of his personal rule to 1450 without which no sound understanding of the events of the 1450s can possibly be attained.

  1 P.P.C., V, 88, 89.

  2 C.P.R., 1416–1422, 172; 1436–1441, 276, 311; The Governance of England, 134.

  3 P.R.O., E.28/64/30.

  4 P.R.O., E.28/65/19.

  5 P.P.C., V, 159–61, 166.

  6 P.R.O., E.28/68/22; C.P.R., 1436–1441, 532.

  7 P.P.C., V, 173–5, 203, 240.

  8 Richard Chandler, The Life of William Waynflete (London 1811), 299–305, 314–18, citing Pat.25 Henry VI pt. 2 m.29, 30, 36 and Foedera, XI, 172.

  9 This may indicate arrogance in the Great Chamberlain of England but can hardly prove that Suffolk had compelled Henry to change his mind as has been suggested.

  10 Correspondence of Bekynton, I, 155–9.

  11 P.P.C., V, 144–5.

  12 P.R.O., E.28/68/17.

  13 P.R.O., E.28/75/44.

  14 P.R.O., E.28/75/60, 61.

  15 Statute 18 Henry VI c.1.

  16 P.R.O., E.28/75/51.

  17 P.R.O., E.28/75/5.

  18 P.R.O., E.28/75/13.

  19 P.R.O., E.28/75/17.

  20 R.P., II, 141; V, 446; C.P.R., 1441–1446; Wolffe, The Royal Demesne, 102, 281.

  21 Mainly listed by K. B. McFarlane in the Cambridge Medieval History, VIII, 403.

  22 C.P.R., 1436–1441, 77, 248, 382, 402, 414, 423, 428, 470, 485, 493, 511, 529; 1441–1446, 76, 133, 140, 160, 161, 169, 187, 279, 296, 355, 401, 445; 1446–1452, 1, 45, 63, 87.

  23 Ibid., 1436–1441, 221, 237, 239–40, 285, 300, 349, 404, 431, 432, 454; 1441–1446, 2–3, 35, 226, 229, 258, 318, 344, 356, 452; 1446–1452, 33, 34, 46, 106, 107, 214, 256, 300, 332.

  24 P.P.C., VI, 316–20; S. B. Chrimes and A. L. Brown, Select Documents of English Constitutional History (London 1961), 277–9; B.L. Cotton Cleopatra F v 112b.

  25 P.R.O., C.81/1435/1789; Sir Henry Maxwell Lyte, Historical Notes on the use of the Great Seal (H.M.S.O., 1926), 122.

  26 C.P.R., 1441–1446, 312–13; Chrimes & Brown, op. cit., 279–80.

  27 P.R.O., C.81/1434, 1435.

  28 Files E.28/72, 73 as also noted by Baldwin, op. cit., 189.

  29 R.P., V, 200.

  30 R. L. Storey, The End of the House of Lancaster, 53.

  31 1 Samuel VIII, 20, cited in De Laudihus Legem Anglie of Sir John Fortescue (ed. S. B. Chrimes), 2.

  32 K. B. McFarlane, The Nobility of Later Medieval England, 118–19.

  33 See John Bellamy, Crime and Public Order in England in the Later Middle Ages (London 1973). 3–10.

  34 Alan Harding, The Law Courts of Medieval England (London 1973), chapter 3, and especially p. 91 with quotations and the detailed references there given.

  35 Margaret Hastings, The Court of Common Pleas in Fifteenth Century England (Ithaca, New York, 1947), especially chapter XV, ‘Delays and hindrances to Justice’.

  36 Ibid., 226–7, 259 60.

  37 Grants of the Reign of King Edward the Fifth, ed. J. G. Nichols (Camden Soc., 1854), xliii.

  38 See below pp. 124–5, 234–5.

  39 C.P.R., 1436–144,, 87; P.P.C., V, 35–8, 57–9.

  40 Select Cases before the King’s Council, ed. I. S. Leadam and J. F. Baldwin (Selden Soc., 1918), 104–7; C.P.R., 1436–1441, 246, 282, 578.

  41 Pasión Letters, I, 73–5; Storey, op. cit., 57–8.

  42 Lancaster and York, II, 49–53.

  43 Paston Letters, I, 230.

  44 R. Somerville, History of the Duchy of Lancaster, I, 420, 594.

  45 Paston Letters, I, 203.

  46 Ibid., I, 81–2, 116.

  47 Ibid., I, 70.

  48 Ibid., I, 117.

  49 Ibid., I, 231–4.

  50 Ibid., I, 165.

  51 Ibid., I, 203.

  52 Paston Letters, I, 188–93.

  53 Ibid., I, 210–12.

  54 Ibid., I, 359.

  55 P. S. Lewis, ‘Sir John Fastolf’s Lawsuit over Titchwell 1448–55’, The Historical Journal, I (1958), 1–20.

  56 Paston Letters, I, 207–8, 213–16.

  57 R.P., V, 177; Historical Manuscripts Commission, Third Report, Appendix, 280.

  58 Storey, op. cit., 217 25.

  59 John Stow’s Annales, 390.

  60 Returns of Names and Members of Parliament, I, 336.

  61 C.C.R., 1447–1454, 54, 56, 58.

  62 P.R.O., List and Indexes, IX, 68.

  63 C.C.R., 1441–1447, 321; C.F.R., XVIII, 83.

  64 Documents illustrative of Medieval Kentish Society, ed. F. R. H. Du Boulay, 220–43.

  65 Giles’s Chronicle, 30, Excerpta Historica, 148.

  66 See below p. 148.

  67 This trial is fully discussed and all sources of evidence reviewed by R. A. Griffiths, ‘The trial of Eleanor Cobham: an episode in the fall of Duke Humphrey of Gloucester’, B.J.R.L., LI (1968–9), 381–99. Dr Griffiths has also disproved the hitherto accepted belief that she finally died in prison on the Isle of Man in 1457: ‘Richard duke of York and the royal household in Wales, 1449–50’, The Welsh History Review, VIII (1976), 14–25.

  68 See A. R. Myers, ‘The Captivity of a Royal Witch’, B.J.R.L., XXIV (1940), 263–84; XXVI (1941–2), 82–100.

  69 R.P., V, 56.

  70 See below p. 161.

  71 For this and what follows see C. A. F. Meekings, ‘Thomas Kerver’s Case’, E.H.R., XC (1975), 331–45.

  72 The first by the lawyer William Tresham, king’s servant retained at £20 a year, later chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster, several times Speaker of the Commons, Sir Thomas Stanley, controller of the household, John Noreys of Bray, Berks., squire of the body and Thomas Browne, king’s squire, lawyer, later under-treasurer of England; the second by the two Chief Justices, the earl of Suffolk, king’s household steward, Sir Thomas Stanley and John Noreys again and Richard Restwold of Sonning, Berks., king’s squire and justice of the peace.

  73 Sources for the death of Gloucester, of which there is no good modern account, are: J. A. Giles’s Chronicle, 33–4, Gregory’s Chronicle, 187–8, The Brut, ed. F. T. Brie (E.E.T.S.), 512–13, Benet’s Chronicle, 192–3, J. S. Davies’s Chronicle, 62–3 and John Fox’s memoranda there printed, 116–18, Chronicle of London, ed. Kingsford, 157–8, J. Gairdner’s Three Fifteenth-Century Chronicles (A Short English Chronicle’), 65, Bale’s Chronicle, in Six Town Chronicles, ed. Flenley 121–2 and Rawlinson B 355, ibid., 104. Also Foedera, XI, 178 and E.H.R. XXIX (1914), 513 (Hatfield MS 281, ed. C. L. Kingsford), H. Ellis, Letters 2nd series, I, 108.

  74 ‘A Short English Chronicle’ in Three Fifteenth-Century Chronicles (ed. Gairdner), 65.

  75 Giles’s Chronicle.

  76 Registrum, I (R.S., 1872), 179.

  77 Lines in a poem entitled ‘On the mutability of worldly changes’ printed by C. L. Kingsford in English Historical Literature, 395–7.

  78 P.R.O., E.28/77/3: writs to Cardinal Kemp, the bishops of Norwich, Bath, Rochester and Lincoln, the dukes of Exeter and Buckingham, Lords Cromwell and Hungerford, Sir John Stourton, the marquises of Dorset and Suffolk.

  79 P.R.O., C.81/1370/41.

  80 The earliest allegation that he had been murdered was in the manifesto of the Cade rebels in June 1450: he had died as a result of the accusation of one false traitor whereas Suffolk, impeached by the Commons representing 24,000 of the king’s good subjects, might not be put to death by lawful means as he should have been (Three Fifteenth-Century Chronicles, 95, 97): cf. the petition for the attainder of the dead Suffolk submitted in the parliament which assembled on 6 November 1450 (R.P., V, 226).

  81 ‘Brief Notes’ (MS Lambeth 448) in Three Fifteenth-Century Chronicles, 149–50.

  82 R.P., V, 128 (Proverbs, XL, 20).

  83 R.P., V, 135.

  84 Ramsay, Lancaster and York, II, 75, 77, citing Foedera, XL, 155 an
d R.P., V. 132, 133, the earliest being a grant of Baynard’s Castle to King’s College, Cambridge that day.

  85 This includes the Brut continuation, Giles’s Chronicle, John Benet’s Chronicle, Bale’s Chronicle and Rawlinson B 355 ed. R. Flenley in Six Town Chronicles, Gregory’s Chronicle, Chronicles of London, ed. C. L. Kingsford, A Chronicle of London, ed. N. H. Nicolas, a Short English Chronicle and the Brief Latin Chronicle, both in Three Fifteenth-Century Chronicles, ed. James Gairdner and An English Chronicle, ed. J. S. Davies.

  86 C. L. Kingsford, English Historical Literature, 119.

  87 The Brut, 511–13.

  Chapter 8

  THE FOUNDER OF ETON AND KING’S

  The story of the two royal institutions of Eton College and King’s College, Cambridge, is obviously very germane to a biography of Henry VI. The terms of their foundation, and their history during the period while their founder exercised personal control over them, can tell us much about the nature and purposes of the man who chose to devote a major part of the resources of the English crown to their creation. They belong to the early stages of his personal rule and the earliest documents of Eton College reveal that, far from shrinking from affairs of state as he is represented in the tradition of early-Tudor hagiography, the young king regarded his assumption of the government of the realm in both his kingdoms in 1437 as cause for celebration and the expression of gratitude to his creator. That was why he founded Eton. It was his wish and intention to mark the attainment of his majority rule with a distinctive, commemofative act which would make a unique contribution to the record of monasteries and great churches built by his forbears,1 as a gift to God, that He might direct all his future actions as king.2 This was how he rationalized his foundation of Eton College in letters patent of 1440, and again in 1446, when he had to relieve the parishioners of Eton of the heavy burdens which he had unwittingly imposed upon them by appropriating their church and making it collegiate to further his great symbolic design.

  Execution of this intention to mark his attainment of power in this fashion was somewhat slow in appearing; his first specific step was to purchase the advowson of the parish church of Eton and two houses to the north of the churchyard in August 1440,3 followed by a declaration of intent to found a college of priests there on 12 September.4 The same day he enfeoffed twelve feoffees with all the possessions of alien priories in England, Wales and the Marches of Wales, with reversion of all grants hitherto made from them, in order to provide the initial means to endow his new college.5 Three of these same feoffees, together with the canonist William Lyndwood, keeper of the privy seal, were also nominated by William Alnwick, bishop of Lincoln, within whose diocese Eton lay, as his commissaries to convert the parochial church into a collegiate one, to receive the rector’s resignation and to install a provost in his place.6 Thomas Beckington, Henry’s secretary, was involved in the plan in four different capacities: as archdeacon of Buckingham, surrendering his archidiaconal jurisdiction over the church and parish to the new provost, as Henry’s feoffee, as his bishop’s commissary and as Henry’s secretary, conducting negotiations with his agents in Rome to secure the unprecedented papal privileges which the young king required for his new foundation. Perhaps it was he, rather than Archbishop Chichele, who first sowed the seed in the king’s mind.

  This first Eton foundation of 11 October 1440 was to consist of a provost, 10 priests, 4 clerks, 6 choristers, 25 poor scholars to learn grammar under a schoolmaster, who was also to be bound to teach any others who would come to him from anywhere in England free of charge, and 25 paupers and enfeebled men, whose purpose was to pray for Henry, for the souls of his parents, his forbears and all faithful departed, and for his own soul in due course. The college was licensed to acquire the considerable income of 1,000 marks (£666 13s 4d) per annum.7 He declared that he had selected this old parish church to raise it from poverty to distinction because it was so near to his birthplace and already dedicated to the incomparable festival of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, whom he especially delighted to honour.8

  At about the same time, on 14 September 1440, royal commissioners acquired for Henry land at Cambridge9 to found a college of a rector and twelve scholars, or more or less according to the resources available, on the site subsequently known as the Old Court of King’s College, to be licensed to acquire land and advowsons worth £200 per annum. This house was to be called the Royal College of Saint Nicholas, his birthday saint, to be devoted to the extirpation of the heresy then current in England, to the augmentation of the priesthood and the adornment of holy mother church. It was quite unconnected with Eton, except that both were to be endowed with alien priory lands, and it was not singled out, as in the case of Eton, to be the memorial of his assumption of the governance of the realm. Both these foundations had more in common with earlier fifteenth-century collegiate churches and university colleges than with those undoubted models for their subsequent refoundation, William Wykeham’s grand twin pioneering educational institutions of 1382, Winchester School and New College, Oxford.10 Building materials were being prepared for the Cambridge college from 14 February 1441 and Henry himself laid the foundation there on Passion Sunday, 2 April 1441. The source of this information also states that he had then already performed a similar ceremony for the new minster intended to replace the parish church at Eton, but there is no evidence of building operations there, either repairs, alterations or new construction, until 3 July 1441.11

  Henry’s initial plan for his Eton foundation thus did not envisage its development principally as an educational institution. His original prime concern was to obtain for the appropriated church from the pope the maximum possible spiritual privileges and immunities. To this end a second envoy, Richard Chester, was sent out to join his permanent proctor in Rome, Andrew Hulse, in October 1440, followed within a few months by a third, Richard Caunton. Between them they secured papal confirmation of the foundation and the same indulgences for a visit to Eton on the feast of the Assumption as for a visit to St Peter ad Vincula in Rome on the first day of August. A fourth envoy, Vincent Clement, succeeded in getting these extended in 1442 for Henry’s lifetime, to cover plenary remission of sins, and powers for the provost to hear confessions and give full absolution to the personnel of the college. But Henry was still not satisfied. The hapless Clement was constantly in fear that failure might blight his career by losing him the royal favour, as he laboured mightily for a further twelve months from May 1443 to obtain in perpetuity for Eton the power to grant these indulgences. Secretary Beckington urged upon him that the stream of instructions he sent to him were in great part framed and dictated by Henry himself. Henry daily asked him when would he have news of Master Vincent; when would his letters arrive? The clause in perpetuity, costing at least one thousand ducats, was finally obtained in a bull dated 11 May 1444.12 Such was Henry’s delight as 15 August, the feast of the Assumption, approached that year, that he felt moved to perform a specific act of gratitude for it. He spared the life of Thomas Carver, gentleman, of Reading, who on 3 August was condemned to a traitor’s death for derogatory remarks made about Henry’s kingship.13 It was the receipt of yet another papal bull in 1447, extending seven years’ and seven lents’ indulgences for a visit to the Eton shrines to cover further feast days, which occasioned his ultimate release. Gratitude for this final bull of 1447 also caused Henry to spare the lives of members of Duke Humphrey’s household who had been charged with conspiring to depose him.14 These indulgences were expected to spread the fame of the new foundation far and wide. In 1445, in anticipation of a great concourse of pilgrims, the college hired thirty beds for confessors and other servants, while an addition which Henry later made to the statutes required all fellows of the college to take an oath that if they were subsequently raised to the episcopate they would always return to Eton every year to assist at the feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin.15

  Henry later referred to the establishment of his two remodelled, and interdependen
t, royal colleges in their final forms as ‘the primer notable work purposed by me after that I … took unto myself the rule of my said Realms’.16 Yet the development of these two institutions had from the beginning mirrored frequent changes of purpose and ambition. There is in fact no evidence of such a dual determination in the initial foundations of 1440–1. The seeds of a plan to transform them both in pattern, and to link them into imitations of the twin Wykehamist foundations, were probably sown when he paid his first of many visits to the Winchester College from 5 to 7 August 1441.17 As late as 3 February 1441 he had granted some lands of the Ogbourne alien priory in frankalmoign to support five scholars at Oxford, provided they had been nurtured in grammar at Eton.18 Indeed, one historian of Eton College has asserted that the statutes of the initial foundation, which William Wainfleet swore to keep at his installation as provost of Eton on 21 December 1443, provided for scholars at Oxford, not Cambridge.19 This would indeed have been a more logical development as the King’s Hall at Cambridge, as endowed by Edward II, already existed to provide education for the children of the royal household chapel. The details of these earliest Eton statutes cannot now be known, since they are no longer extant,20 but it is clear that on 10 July 1443 the statutes for the first foundation of King’s College, which were still being compiled by William Alnwick, bishop of Lincoln, William Aiscough, bishop of Salisbury and William Lyndwood, the canonist and keeper of the privy seal, John Somerset and John Langton, were not completed when Henry relieved them of their duties and took the task into his own hands. This date is important as the first firm evidence of the radical change of plan,21 an intention confirmed by the conclusion of a quadripartite pact of perpetual alliance for mutual support in lawsuits between Winchester College, New College, Eton and King’s on 1 July 1444.22 The acquisition of a new site for King’s, six or seven times the size of the original and to the south of it, was begun on 26 August 1443,23 causing a clearance of buildings and closing of thoroughfares in the heart of Cambridge the like of which had not been seen since William the Conqueror cleared the site for his castle there.24 The earliest specific statement that King’s was now to be a foundation of 70 fellows and scholars, not 12, with an establishment of 10 secular priests, 6 clerks and 16 choristers for the chapel, dates from 1445.25 At Eton the acquisition of small properties adjacent to the original church and churchyard site had proceeded piecemeal, but likewise a major addition of over eleven acres was made on 9 August 1443,26 though the date of the enlarged Eton foundation of 70 scholars, with the addition of an usher to assist the schoolmaster, 10 extra priests, 6 more clerks, 10 more boy choristers and a reduction from 25 almsmen to 13 weak, old, single men, or disabled young paupers,27 is not exactly known.