Henry VI

by Bertram Wolffe

  30 See above p. 139 n. 20.

  31 Saltmarsh, 378 note 32, where he provides a cogent explanation of why the reference in the register of Abbot Curteys of Bury St Edmunds to the event refers to this dale and to the first chapel.

  32 Saltmarsh, 388.

  33 Verses from King’s College Muniments Box M.9. f. 16a cited by Saltmarsh, 378, and printed by Willis and Clark, Arch. Hist., I, 465; R.P., V, 164 a.

  34 Saltmarsh, 389, deduced from the evidence of the kind of stone used only during Henry’s reign, detailed by Willis & Clark, Arch. Hist., I, 486–9.

  35 Saltmarsh, 379.

  36 The duchy of Lancaster great seal (72mm) and signet of the eagle, the great seal of England, the signet of arms and a unique seal (80mm) appointed for the use of Henry’s feoffees of those duchy lands now appropriated to the two foundations.

  37 Maxwell Lyte, op. cit., 45.

  38 Eton College Records, Vol. 39/81, ‘the kynges owne avyse’, printed in Arch. Hist., I, 366–7.

  39 Maxwell Lyte, op. cit., 48–9.

  40 Diagram of this enhancing of different levels for the various buildings in Willis & Clark, Arch. Hist., I, 364.

  41 Ibid., 401–2.

  42 Winchester College Muniments 22123 (bursar’s account roll for 1448–9) and information from Mr Peter Gwyn, archivist of the College, to whom I am indebted for the references and full transcript of the entry first printed by T. F. Kirby, Annals of Winchester College (London and Winchester 1892), 193.

  43 Arch. Hist., I, 409, 428–9.

  44 Maxwell Lyte, Eton College, 74–5, Arch. Hist., I, 388, 393–5.

  45 Ibid., 405

  46 For details of the work force see Douglas Knoop and G. P. Jones, ‘The Building of Eton College 1442–1460’, Transactions of the Quatuor Coronati Lodge, XLVI (1933), 70–114.

  47 Maxwell Lyte, Eton College, 20, 59.

  48 Arch. Hist., I, 395, 430, 433, 439, 440, but contrast Leach in V.C.H. Bucks., II, 155, where he states that there are doubts whether the present Long Chamber and headmaster’s and usher’s chambers and the old Lower School beneath it were in the school yard before the sixteenth century.

  49 Anc. Laws, 621–3.

  50 Ibid., 167–9.

  51 On 12 July 1455, no doubt appreciating his own incapacity, though ostensibly because of pressing affairs of slate, he resigned his hitherto personal oversight of the statutes of his two foundations to William Wainfleet and John Chedworth, bishop of Lincoln, for the rest of his life: Anc. Laws, 623–4, wrongly dated 1445.

  Chapter 9

  WAR AND PEACE: THE PROBLEMS OF NORMANDY AND GASCONY, 1437–1443

  When Henry entered fully and without opposition into his peaceful and secure English inheritance in 1437 the problems facing his French inheritance were many, and its future uncertain. His unclc Bedford and the councils of the minority had perforce kept all alternatives for future action there open to him: war or peace, resolute defence of English Normandy, Calais and Gascony, or sustained military effort to complete the conquest; insistence on his title to the French throne and arms, or their relinquishment in return for some quid pro quo, perhaps the English-held lands in France in complete sovereignty, or even in homage to his uncle Charles VII. Undoubtedly Henry’s own attitude to the problems of the English occupation and claims in France would henceforth be of paramount importance. Sad to say, the lack of consistent purpose, random changes of plan and undue susceptibility to influence by persons with wills stronger than his own, already revealed in his kingly acts at home and in the history of the royal foundations, were equally apparent in the affairs of his second kingdom. An account of these years shows that contradictory policies were pursued at the same time. Peacc negotiations were continued, while preparations were made for war, Normandy and Gascony were considered separately, and yet were expected to act complementarily. The overall picture has to be built up gradually because it is crucial to an understanding of Henry and his reign. In foreign policy there is more evidence of Henry’s personal involvement than in England and more positive indication of his thinking. His failures here were to have fundamental repercussions on his rule in England.

  Moves for a new, comprehensive peace conference first arose at Gravelines in 1438, where attempts were being made to re-establish normal Anglo-Burgundian commercial relations. The duke of Burgundy initiated them, prompted by a deepening realization of how little he had gained, and how much he stood to lose, from his unilateral agreement with Charles VII at Arras in 1435. His chief agent was his third duchess, Isabel of Portugal, the grand-daughter of John of Gaunt, who, unlike her husband, proved acceptable to the English because of her Lancastrian blood. The English, of course, did not know that along with Burgundy’s chancellor Nicholas Rolin and other influential Burgundian councillors she was already Charles VII’s pensioner. He had successfully bribed her in 1435 at the Arras congress to act in the French interest.1 Her English feelers for peace moves were made through her uncle Cardinal Henry Beaufort. Together these two succeeded in assembling a tripartite conference at Gravelines in June 1439 to which Henry gladly undertook to send a powerful delegation.2 Its leader, Archbishop Kemp, received their official instructions from his own hands at Kennington on 21 May 1439. These were noteworthy chiefly for their rigid maintenance of his claim to the French throne and arms and for the almost complete absence of possible concessions, except for an expressed willingness to ransom the duke of Orleans for 100,000 marks.3 But four days later Henry gave different, secret directions to his Beaufort great-uncle, making him his plenipotentiary with complete discretion to negotiate and conclude a binding agreement within the terms of his word-of-mouth instructions. Beaufort alone was told ‘all the king’s mind and intent as regards the crown’.4 It may be that these secret instructions of 25 May 1439 were the very first step towards implementing the policy of peace by concession and compromise, leading to the truce and marriage of 1444–5 which came so disastrously to grief in 1450.

  The conference warily assembled near Gravelines in an elaborate, isolated, temporary town of wooden and canvas pavillions, erected on the next best thing to neutral territory, an open site in the Calais march by the Gravelines road, at the Anglo-Burgundian frontier. Negotiations alternated with lavish displays of mutual hospitality, dominated by the duchess and the cardinal. Together with the duke of Orleans, who had been brought as far as Calais on parole by the English to assist in the attainment of peace, they were accepted as mediators between the French and English delegations.5 The full extent of Beaufort’s reserve powers was never disclosed, though they were real enough, because he was able on his own authority to purge the English instructions of some features which were most obnoxious to the French, for example, changing the insulting form of address for their king, ‘Charles of Valois’, to ‘our adversary of France’. On 18 July, in a bid to break complete deadlock, the cardinal and the duchess took the actual negotiations into their own hands. According to what emerged in a final draft, and from what Beaufort subsequently told Henry’s secretary Beckington, who was present throughout and subsequently wrote an account of the proceedings,6 they agreed orally to the following proposals: a truce for thirty, twenty or fifteen years, on the basis of the territorial status quo in Normandy with its appurtenances and appendances, Calais and its marches, and Gascony, during which time Henry would cease to use the title of King of France. He might resume it at any time and renew the war, after giving a year’s notice of his intentions. Permanent peace could be made at any point within the period of truce if Henry decided to make renunciation of the crown and to do homage for the lands he held. Charles VII should make no demand for homage from Henry meantime and the duke of Orleans should be released without ransom.

  The task of agreeing and formulating these original oral proposals in writing proved formidable enough. The official English embassy understandably shied away from a first draft which, among other unacceptable points, left the precise extent of the lands to be held by Henry in homage to the decision of
the French king and demanded prior renunciation of all the English conquests and of the claim to the French throne. For a long time Beaufort and the duchess simply could not agree in writing what they had orally understood, or misunderstood, from each other, even though the duchess was reduced to tears in the attempt (or tried to use tears as a weapon, Beckington was not sure which). On 29 July both sides finally agreed to an adjournment until 11 September, for the reference back to King Henry and to Charles VII of a final draft produced by the duchess with the assistance of the captive duke of Orleans. In spite of his plenipotentiary powers and secret instructions, this was not a package for which Beaufort was willing to accept full responsibility. Henry’s assent had therefore to be publicly and formally given. Kemp was sent back to England to try it out on the young king.

  According to Humphrey duke of Gloucester, the archbishop of York laboured mightily at Windsor to gain Henry’s acceptance.7 But this lime Gloucester and the other lords of Henry’s council, with the cardinal absent, persuaded him to send back a resounding disavowal, dated from Langley 011 30 August, of any intention whatsoever to put his French title in abeyance. The cardinal’s proposed terms in fact bore a remarkable likeness to the ones previously put forward on behalf of Charles VII by that Burgundian embassy to London in late September 1435 which had then been so furiously rejected.8 Three main propositions were now specifically selected for rejection as ‘right unreasonable’: temporary renunciation of the French title, release of the duke of Orleans without ransom, and restitution of dispossessed lay and ecclesiastical properties during the truce. A cogently argued, detailed and outspoken memorandum of advice, by that part of the council still in England, was appended to the answer to supply reasons for the rejection. Acceptance would ‘show too great a simpleness and lack of foresight in him that accepteth it’, because of the irreparable loss involved for Henry in damaged prestige, firmness and credibility of purpose and shaken legal title.9 But the basic fear expressed in this council memorandum was of an insidious French reconquest of Normandy under cover of a truce. It is nevertheless significant that in one important respect Henry’s answer differed from the conciliar advice appended to it, because he still agreed to release the duke of Orleans for a fixed period in return for hostages and financial pledges, but specifically and only in order that he might work towards the achievement of a peace and would return to captivity by a definite date if he failed.10

  The young king thus appears to have changed his mind under different pressures. In the event this final English decision, mixing general intransigence with some concession over Orleans, was of little significance because the French king, although he subsequently denied it, did not think fit even to send his ambassadors back to the conference with any answer at all.11 Henry, for his part, speedily agreed to efforts being made for a new convention to be held in March or April 144012 and then, under further pressure and after further bitter argument in the council, finally agreed unilaterally to the release of the duke of Orleans, specifically to further the cause of peace. Charles VII for his part did summon a meeting of the Estates General to Orleans for 25 September 1439 to advise on the Gravelines proposals, and then adjourned it to Bourges for February 1440 because the dauphin would not attend. This reassembly was prevented by the revolt of the French nobility and the dauphin known as the Praguerie. There are two quite contrary versions as to whether the assembly at Orleans reached a decision13 over peace negotiations, but the remonstrances which the princes, including the released Orleans, later addressed to Charles from Nevers in 1442 accused him of evasion and procrastination over the Gravelines proposals.14 This elicited the reply that he had only engaged in those negotiations to secure the release of the duke of Orleans and that for nothing in the world would he ever abandon to the English any territory unless it was to be held in the sovereignty and jurisdiction of his crown. For a perpetual record of the matter he had ordered this reply to be registered in his chambre des comptes.15

  It appears, therefore, that short of a complete English military victory, now a remote possibility, a final peace could only ever be obtained on the basis of Henry’s renunciation of his claim to the French crown and arms, and a willingness to hold whatever he did hold in France on the same terms as Charles VII’s other vassals. This solution would have been gladly accepted by the inhabitants of Normandy. The duchy of Normandy by 1439 was neither a mere unwilling English colony nor a limb severed from the Valois kingdom of France. The uncertainty about the outcome of interminable, elaborate, ineffective peace negotiations was more disturbing to the duchy than the military reverses which the English cause undoubtedly suffered, on balance, between 1435 and 1441. In truth only two of these reverses adversely affected Normandy, and even they did not endanger the English occupation as a whole, that is, the loss of Dieppe in 1435, with its valuable port and its herring trade, and the French recapture of Louviers in 1440, which brought an isolated French garrison within fifty miles of the capital, to the south of Rouen. Otherwise the permanent English losses of this period were well outside the duchy, being isolated fortresses then still remaining to the south, east and north of Paris, notably Montereau (1437), Montargis (1438), Meaux (in 1439 while the Gravelines conference was in session), Creil and Pontoise (1441). These merely confirmed the verdict of the 1429–30 campaign that the Ile de France was lost for ever. What worried the particularist sentiments of the people of the duchy was not English oppression but the inadequacies and possible impermanence of the English occupation as indicated by the repeated negotiations for peace. At Arras the Norman towns would have been quite happy with terms which left Normandy to the English crown, as it had been held by the Plantagenets.16 From 1435 withdrawal to the frontiers of the duchy, seemingly made inevitable by the general pattern of the military reverses, and the necessary concentration of all government and administration at Rouen, led to a growing desire there to consolidate what was still held, to hold on to Normandy and Maine and nothing more.17 This was the ambition of the Anglo-Norman establishment, including the old warrior servants of Bedford like Sir Thomas Scales the seneschal, Sir Andrew Ogard and Sir William Oldhall, who were to figure so prominently in York’s council and entourage when he became Henry’s lieutenant there; also the public servants which the new university of Caen, Bedford’s foundation, began to produce, and Henry’s Norman councillors like the ex-abbot of Mont St Michel, the abbot of Fécamp, and Zano di Castiglione, bishop of Bayeux, friend of Gloucester and York. But during these years the alternative, coherent policy to peace, consolidation and strengthening of what was still held, as expressed notably by York’s ‘energetic but frustrated efforts to retain the duchy as a Lancastrian domain’, received little appreciation or purposeful support from Henry and the English council at home, because it would have closed the door to the pursuit of other possible courses: the abiding dream of further conquest and the ultimate realization of a completely Lancastrian kingdom of France.

  In June 1441 Henry’s council in Normandy wrote the young king an emotional and exaggerated letter imploring effective decisions and assistance in the grievous sickness of that body politic, the duchy of Normandy, which, they said, God had committed to his change. The hearts of his subjects, they said, were cast down, enfeebled, frozen and withdrawn from his love by their fears for the future. They alleged he had abandoned his charge ‘as a ship tossed about on the sea by many winds, without captain, without steersman, without rudder, without sail, tossed, staggering and driving among the stormy waves, filled with the storms of sharp fortune and all adversity, far from the haven of safety and human help’. Specifically they complained that they had been buoyed up with false and contradictory hopes; his letters to them had long since announced the imminent arrival of the duke of Gloucester as his lieutenant. He did not come. The arrival of the Duke of York had now been repeatedly promised to them and to various towns in the duchy, at various dates. They now equally had no hope of this. They had last written at the fall of Creil: they now wrote urgently to
inform him of the impending siege of Pontoise. Lord Talbot was raising all the troops he could to do his best there, but it was a great misfortune for Henry that such an able and loyal servant could not be given the means to act effectively.18 Similar sentiments, in flowery Latin rather than Norman French, had been expressed somewhat earlier by Gloucester’s friend in Bayeux, Zano di Castiglione, who appealed ominously to history. The name of King John, who lost the duchy of Normandy for the English, was still held in execration there he said. What was needed was another Henry V and vital English self-interest by itself ought to secure the sending of adequate military aid for its defence, because the only alternative to effective defence of the duchy would ultimately be a repeat of the 1066 Norman invasion of England.19

  Finally John Smert Garter King of Arms also expressed the apparent, genuine widespread feelings of apprehension and neglect when he wrote urgently to the chancellor in England from Cherbourg in 1441. A chance encounter with a poursuivant of the duke of Alençon, who was on his way to the chancellor of Normandy at Rouen, as Garter made his way downstream to Harfleur, had alerted him to impending betrayals of various English-held strongholds to the enemy, one of which, Argentan, had just been saved by this timely information. The duke of York had meantime at last taken up his post as lieutenant. Garter, sent by him on embassy to the duke of Brittany, now had great hopes of York and of the king’s goodwill towards Normandy. He had just taken leave of York and wished him well, the very day he marched out of Rouen towards Pontoise. He had himself given York other unspecified secret information he had acquired about the ‘injustice which reigned in the king’s jurisdiction and of the vices and sin which were among the people of our nation’, and he pinned his hopes on York being able to overcome these and to re-establish justice on a triumphant return from Pontoise.20

  The facts about the supreme direction of affairs in Normandy since the end of Henry’s minority had certainly not been encouraging. The young king showed no intention of appearing a second time in person in his French domains as the leader of his people. Consequently there had now to be a viceroy and there were few who could undertake such a post. The king’s honour and the pride of Normandy demanded he should be a powerful prince of the blood royal. The last conciliar appointment had been Richard duke of York, Humphrey of Gloucester’s former ward, the prince of the blood royal nearest to Henry apart from the Beauforts and the Holand earl of Huntingdon. York had been commissioned on i May 1436, while still not twenty-five years old, but already an experienced soldier, and with Talbot’s assistance in 1436 and 1437 had effectively consolidated the English position in upper Normandy and Picardy. According to later generations, apparently on lost contemporary Norman authority, he had also established good order and justice.21 His commission had not been designed to extend beyond the attainment of Henry’s majority22 and he himself was consequently pressing to return by April 1437. The young king seems already to have been reluctant to employ York in any capacity. His name was conspicuous by its absence from the new council appointed by Henry in November 1437 to mark his own assumption of power.