1446 should thus have been a year of great events. On 2 January Garter, also charged with unspecified verbal messages, bore Henry’s greetings to his uncle, written by Michael de Paris and signed by the king, reaffirming his intention to cross to France.19 The practical details of implementing the truce were not proving difficult. Between the end of March and early May a quite successful convention was held at Evreux and Louviers to settle arguments about disputed revenues and alleged excesses and violations by both sides.20 But who would implement the surrender of Maine? It could hardly be done without the cooperation of the king’s lieutenant in France and the government in Rouen; also of Edmund Beaufort, marquis of Dorset and count of Maine,21 and of the garrisons there who claimed to hold it in his name. The duke of York had gone home to attend parliament and defend his reputation in the autumn of 1445.22 Although his term of office had expired at Michaelmas 1445, for many months he daily expected orders to return, though this was obviously now bound up with the king’s projected journey. Parliament was told on 9 April that the king, of his own mind and by divine inspiration, not by the promptings of his council, had determined to go to France to meet his uncle in September 1446 and duly revoked the clause of the treaty of Troyes forbidding negotiations with the ‘dauphin Charles’ without the consent of the Estates.23 30 April, the date for the projected surrender of Maine, passed unnoticed, at least as far as the official records went. Mathew Gough bore personal messages from Henry to Charles on 2 July.24 York, still in England, was promised wages for 200 spears and the bows on 20 July, three months in hand at the lower English rates and then month by month at the higher French rates, in anticipation of his return, presumably as Henry’s right-hand man. The council proceeded to solicit loans and to arrest shipping for the king’s expedition on the same day.25
The idea was for a personal convention of the two kings on the river between Meulan and Mantes.26 The Estates of Normandy granted 130,000 livres tournois. In preparation for the meeting Charles VII had Jean Jouvenal des Ursins, bishop of Laon, draw him up a schedule of transcribed documents relative to his rights in the English occupied lands, to the claims of the kings of England to the French crown and to the validity of the treaty of Troyes.27 But doubts had been voiced on the English side; the meeting might have to be postponed until the following March.28 Moleyns and John Sutton, Lord Dudley, appointed to go on embassy29 originally to arrange the day and place, in fact went to request a postponement, a most unwelcome suggestion to Charles, so he said, and in his eyes a great detriment and injury to the cause of peace. So important did he consider it that he flatly refused to agree, thus putting his nephew Henry in default of yet another promise. He insisted on sending yet another embassy to England to bargain about it. Cousinot and Havart, appointed for this purpose on this their second embassy, did not arrive in London until December when the original final date for the meeting (1 November), like the original date for the surrender of Maine (30 April), was now past. Effusions of good will from Charles VII did not conceal the hard fact that he now made fulfilment of the promise to surrender Maine a sine qua non of fixing a new date for the personal meeting. Cousinot and Harvart, he maintained, could be given formal seisin of Maine and they could give a secret, conditional undertaking to prorogue the personal meeting of the two kings in advance if necessary, but to no one except to Henry and Suffolk.30 Nothing at all was achieved on either of these two points and by the following February (1447) Moleyns and Dudley, with the French secretary Michael de Paris, were back again in the French court at Tours, accompanied by Mathew Gough, by which date the expiration of the truce itself had once more become imminent (1 April 1447). On 22 February 1447, at the second treaty of Tours, they secured a further breathing space to 1 January 1448, during which time the two kings should come together at a place and time still to be fixed.31
What had gone wrong? It is easy to imagine the many misgivings which Henry VI’s councillors had over his dual, personal decisions for the cause of peace to ‘employ a great part of his heritage which he had had in France [Maine], and de propriae personae commercio [this personal meeting with Charles VII]’.32 This latter would be a costly and hazardous affair. The finance and logistics of mounting another expedition, at least on the scale of the coronation chevauchée, or of Somerset’s more recent 1443 expedition, probably simply could not have been managed successfully in the time available before the original date of 1 November 1446, less than twelve months ahead. It has been suggested that postponement began because of the high politics involved in the decision as to who should accompany him in the highest position of authority. The recalled York? Apparently as late as 20 July 1446 he received positive reassurance on this score. The ailing Gloucester? Who among the princes of the blood could best be trusted to implement the king’s policies to which he had committed his agents, in the Angevin marriage and the truce of Tours? In the event it was another royal deputy, Edmund Beaufort, now earl of Somerset,33 who finally received the appointment of king’s lieutenant in December 1446,34 but he was not to set foot in Normandy until March 1448! Pliancy in the furtherance of Henry’s wishes, rather than military or administrative ability, was now the most desirable qualification for this office. However, Somerset in his own right as a prince of the blood and a hitherto successful soldier, the victor of Harfleur in 1440, of the relief of Calais in 1442 and Bedford’s successor in the campaigns in Maine and Anjou, would appear to have had the military competence for the office.
The dangers inherent in personal interviews between kings and princes in the fifteenth century, and their conspicuous, inevitable lack of success for one side or the other, have been graphically preserved for us by Philippe de Commynes.35 Yet the fervour with which both sides had greeted the original suggestion at the deadlocked meeting of the great embassy showed that personal decisions by the two kings alone could determine the issue. It could be that, having reacted on impulse to Précigny’s original stage-managed suggestion, Henry’s advisers later more prudently feared that he would be as clay in the hands of his wily uncle. The sad and simple explanation is that the English had allowed themselves to become hooked on a series of truces of limited duration, each extension of which Charles VII now made dependent on one condition after another. Ultimately, quite other issues, involving the allegiance of Brittany, fatally endangered the truce. It was a diplomatic game in which the French had early gained the upper hand and never subsequently lost it.
After the second treaty of Tours, 22 February 1447, Moleyns and his companions returned to London to announce the coming of a second large-scale, high-powered French embassy to London, this time headed by Dunois, Beauvau, Cousinot, Havart and Jean Jouguet, notary and secretary of the king of France. No diplomatic stone was left unturned by Charles VII to secure a peace satisfactory to himself thereby. He even wrote in advance to the city of London on 2 May 1447, soliciting its good offices for the success of his embassy.36 On 1 July Henry designated the duke of Buckingham, Suffolk, Moleyns, John, Lord Scrope and John, Lord Dudley to negotiate with them.37 On 27 July 1447 a new treaty was signed, extending the date for the personal meeting to i May 1448. It appears from the next subsequent extension of the truce recorded that the truce itself was likewise extended at the same time, exactly to the same date and not beyond that date.38
These concessions were only bought on 27 July 1447 by the most solemn undertaking in the form of letters patent, exemplifying Henry’s personal promise of 22 December 1445 to surrender Maine, written by the clerk of the council Thomas Kent and handed over to the French ambassadors in the presence of the earl of Somerset, who personally stood to lose most by the loss of Maine, ‘and many others of our blood and of our council’, ‘after great and ripe deliberation’.39 A final date, and Charles VII at least meant it to be so, was fixed for the surrender of Maine: 1 November 1447. Was the matter now out in the open at last? There had been rumours; Suffolk had already been blamed. As recently as 25 May 1447, as a result of his petition to Henry, he had been granted
the opportunity to make a solemn declaration in the king’s chamber, in the royal presence before eight spiritual and lay peers, including York ‘and others our servants, familiars and domestics’, that he had never been a party to any proposals for the surrender of Maine. The king wished to silence the malicious rumours stirring about this.40 Now, only two months later, Henry was formally binding members of his council and entourage to the execution of that same execrated policy which had in truth been his own for the last two years. Charles VII, in his instructions to his ambassadors, had made it an absolute condition binding on his negotiators that they must now have the firmest possible undertaking to deliver Maine before making any other treaty.41 This was the crunch over Maine and administrative action followed swiftly the next day to secure its implementation. By signet letter, which he signed in the presence of Suffolk on 28 July 1447, Henry ordered the English captains Mathew Gough and Fulk Eyton to receive Maine from the hands of Edmund Beaufort, earl of Somerset, not in his capacity as his lieutenant of Normandy and France, but as count of Maine by Henry’s grant, and styled the marquis and earl of Dorset because this had been his title when he had received this former patrimony of his uncle Bedford. Somerset and his lieutenants in Maine and Anjou were commanded to provide soldiers if necessary, at the request of Gough and Eyton, to effect the surrender.42 The same day (28 July) a personal letter, written by Rinel and signed by Henry, went off to Charles VII, informing him what had been done about the surrender of Maine and announcing a further embassy, led by the bishop of Norwich, the king’s councillor, going to Lyons on the affairs of the church, which would visit him on the way.43 It was this embassy, consisting of Walter, bishop of Norwich, Robert Botyll, prior of St John, John, Lord Dudley, Vincent Clement, president of the chamber of accounts at Rouen, and Thomas Kent, clerk of the council, which confirmed the 27 July agreement at Bourges on 15 October 1447 and secured, by way of reward for Henry, a further extension of the truce from i May 1448 to 1 January 1449.44 Charles VII wrote to Henry on 17 October with the news of it, Garter delivered the letter and was sent back with a reply on 11 December 1447. In this Henry joyously confirmed the extended truce and informed Charles that he was now sending the earl of Somerset to Normandy to deal with any past or future infractions of the truce.45
By this date, of course, Henry’s royal gift of all he held, or rather of all Somerset held by his previous gift, in Anjou and Maine should have been handed over to Charles VII’s emissaries. But serious difficulties began when Gough and Eyton presented themselves at Le Mans before their comrades-in-arms, Somerset’s lieutenants Osborne Mundeford, captain of Le Mans and Beaumont-sur-Sarthe, and Sir Richard Frogenhall, captain of Mayenne. Nothing more than a polite charade ensued in which Mundeford declined to make the delivery because the king’s agents did not have specific orders signed and sealed from the middleman, Somerset, and he had no letters of discharge either from Henry or from Somerset. Gough and Eyton retired to await further instructions.46 It was a full month before they could be ordered by Henry from Eltham to try again, now armed with letters patent for Mundeford’s and Frogenhall’s discharge and sufficient acquittances.47 On 28 October, when he realized that 1 November 1447 must pass without his promise being fulfilled, Henry sent peremptory orders to Somerset to secure the obedience of his officers, in an angry letter accusing him of besmirching his honour and incurring his bitter displeasure.48
Cousinot and Harvart had duly appeared as Charles VII’s plenipotentiaries at the council house at Le Mans on 31 October 1447, to arrange the final delivery. They were received by Mundeford, now supported by Sir Nicholas Molineux, master of the chamber of accounts at Rouen, and Thomas Dirhill, viscount of Alençon in the English obedience. They had meantime contrived further delaying tactics. They presented themselves as formally nominated in a notarial instrument, attested under Henry’s French seal at Rouen on 9 September, to negotiate terms of compensation for all those about to be dispossessed of lands and property in Maine, before any surrender could be discussed.49 Protracted negotiations on 1 November made no progress. The exasperated French presented notarially attested copies of all the relevant, authentic documents, which were subjected to minute scrutiny. They were then queried because of two alterations in them and because the notaries concerned were unknown to the English. The Englishmen knew that Henry was to receive a licence from Charles VII for the Angevins to make alliances with him for their lives, and truces to cover Anjou and Maine for twenty years. These must be delivered first, they now said. The French replied that they were being kept for safety along with the other original documents in Sablé. The Englishmen could be taken there and allowed to examine all the original documents. As for the compensation, Somerset had already received what had been requested on the occasion of the treaty of 27 July 1447 in London, as the duke of Buckingham, Suffolk, Adam Moleyns, lords Scrope and Dudley and the secretary Master Thomas Kent could testify. They said that the whole question of universal peace could turn on the surrender of Maine. Every sovereign prince could and ought, in a treaty of peace, to dispose of his subjects’ goods and chattels without their consent or will, as both canon and civil law affirmed. Those who opposed him in this incurred capital penalties.50 All this was to no avail. Finally a deputation of English knights and esquires, led by John de Montague, bastard of Salisbury, and Sir John Fastolf’s proctor, John Daubenay, interrupted the proceedings, demanding compensation on their own behalf and on behalf of many others. The Frenchmen retired under protest, with nothing achieved, and the Englishmen withdrew to the chapter house of the cathedral to draw up a notarial instrument of the proceedings, sealed and attested by the bishop and chapter, priests and notaries and by some forty knights, esquires and others.51
It is difficult not to accept the charge of ‘subterfuges and pretences and simulations’ levied by the French against Gough and Eyton. The situation was farcical where those who were designated by Henry to provide his envoys with soldiers to enforce the surrender were the very officers who were called upon to make it. On 30 December 1447 Gough actually reached agreement with Charles VII’s commissioners, Dunois, Brézé and Beauvau, on the objections raised by Mundeford and Frogenhall, and formally bound himself to make the surrender by 15 January 1448. But his colleague Eyton, who was conveniently not then present, refused to ratify it, demanding further delay until Candlemas (2 February). On 14 January Charles VII even accepted this further extension.52 At the end of December Charles VII had sent out heralds to proclaim the latest extension of the truce, made on 15 October 1447,53 to 1 January 1449, and in fact he was still concerned to play the issue of Le Mans in a low key because he was secretly planning alternative action, the first mobilization of his new army. He had no desire as yet to see any resumption of hostilities and he had no intention of being deemed the truce-breaker. At this stage, apparently still in some hopes of a peaceful surrender, he decided to appeal to the only other possible authority, Henry VI’s council in Rouen, to ask them to discipline Gough, Eyton, Mundeford and the rest and to declare them outside the operation of the truce. Since the expiration of York’s lieutenant-governorship, English France and Normandy had been nominally ruled by a commission, prominent on which were Sir Thomas Hoo, chancellor of France and Normandy, and Sir Robert Roos, both agents and signatories of the original truce of Tours. Somerset, although appointed to succeed York in December 1446, had still not set foot in Normandy. Meantime, by 20 January 1448, Hoo knew that the French mobilization was in progress and wrote with the utmost alarm and urgency to Brézé, as the author and very originator of the truce, he said, and with whom he claimed to be on intimate terms, desperately imploring him to halt it. In spite of Gough and Eyton, he declared, Le Mans would be peacefully given up.54 The upshot of a conference at Rouen at the end of January was a further and final extension of the delivery date to 8 February 1448 at the cost of formally outlawing Gough, Eyton, Mundeford and their fellows should they not comply.55
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