Henry VI

by Bertram Wolffe

  In 1449 and 1450 England was in the grip of political, military and economic disasters which constituted a damning indictment of Henry’s personal rule since 1437. However, incompetent and unreliable as the king had proved to be, direct criticism of him was muted and almost non-existent, for the king could do no wrong. No prudent person would criticize the king himself, unless he was able and willing to take his criticism to its logical conclusion and challenge his possession of the throne. That possibility had already found expression by 1450, but as yet there was no determined or convincing alternative candidate for the kingship. A real change of government was therefore out of the question. Nevertheless, in 1450 the Commons assembled in parliament, backed up by popular rebellion, did achieve the next best thing. They exacted retribution from Henry’s advisers and the executants of his policies for the evils of misgovernment and current disasters.

  The parliament called for 6 November 1449 assembled and deliberated in an atmosphere of mounting crisis. In France, after the renewal of hostilities in May 1449, Henry suffered humiliating military disasters leading to total defeat in war such as no king of England had experienced since the reign of John. It was a picture of unmitigated gloom, not only on land, where the defeat and dissolution of his armed forces terminated in the complete expulsion of the English from Normandy, but also by sea. With no adequate naval force, without the French seaboard, and deprived of the Breton alliance, Henry was unable to keep the narrow seas open for trade. He could not stop a damaging series of French raids on English coastal towns in the south and east. He not only could not prevent piracy but actually licensed some himself. Most notorious here was an attack by Robert Winnington on the Bay salt fleet of Hanseatic, Flemish and Dutch ships in May 1449, made under protection of Henry’s letters of marque. In the opinion of the Prussian agent in London, in June 1450, the Kentish rebels rose primarily to demand the restoration of the lost Hanseatic trade and the punishment of pirates who were supported by Henry’s entourage, some of whom had shares in their enterprises.12 Sea-borne trade with Normandy, Poitou and Gascony collapsed. From 1447 Philip duke of Burgundy chose to impose one of his periodic protectionist embargoes on the entry of English cloth to the Low Countries for the benefit of his cloth-making towns in Flanders, Brabant, Holland and Zeeland. Over all the ports of England between 1448 and 1449 exports of cloth fell by 32 per cent and miscellaneous exports by 35 per cent, while imports of wine dropped by 50 per cent in 1450. In 1449–50 exports from Sandwich, the hub of Kentish trade, fell from 182 sacks of wool to 25, and woollen cloths from 2,078 to 237. Wine imports dropped from 1,042 to 271 tuns.13 These were the circumstances in which the centre of affairs moved from royal court and council to parliament where the chief agent of Henry’s policies, the duke of Suffolk, was impeached, and all those associated with Henry’s government and household came under attack. In June 1450 the south-eastern shires rose in rebellion to support the actions of parliament. It was the Commons in parliament, not the Lords, who now destroyed the king’s chief executive, and the major cause of his downfall as revealed by the articles of impeachment was the loss of Normandy. Apportioning blame for this disaster was to become a major issue in domestic politics for the rest of the reign.

  The first mention at a high level that the loss of Normandy was even a possibility came in a quarrel between the dispossessed lieutenant, Richard duke of York, and Henry’s chief diplomatic agent, the keeper of the privy seal and bishop of Chichester, Adam Moleyns. This must have taken place not later than 6 July 1449,14 when York was at last constrained to take up his uncongenial new post in Ireland, to which he had been appointed in 1447, to get him out of the way. York petitioned the king to clear his name against Moleyns’s alleged slander that it was his past misconduct as lieutenant in Normandy which was responsible for impending disaster there. A frightened but casuistic Moleyns claimed in reply that he would never be such a fool as to criticize a prince as powerful and beyond reproach as the duke of York, that Normandy was still not lost if it was effectively reinforced, and that he was anyway known in the council as a consistent advocate of the vigorous policy of defence,15 of which York had been the prime exponent. One of the better chroniclers asserts that it was during and immediately after the Winchester session of 16 June to 16 July 1449 that common report first began to single out Suffolk, not York, as to blame for everything: for defeats at the hands of the Scots in the previous autumn, for the current losses to the French and for the king’s impoverishment, as revealed by a desperate request for assistance from Somerset, York’s supplanter as lieutenant in Normandy, which Henry could not meet and which he ordered to be read out in the full parliament. The same source noted the truculence of the Commons in this assembly and their refusal to make any effective grant of supply unless Henry agreed to resume all the grants he had made from his livelihood. Henry’s adamant refusal caused its dissolution on 16 July.16

  As the first parliament of 1449 had refused to provide finance for the urgent needs of the defence of Normandy, another parliament was called almost immediately, for 6 November. When it assembled, all criticism concentrated on Suffolk’s head. Before it met, Rouen, the capital of Normandy, was lost and the new lieutenant, Somerset, had made his first humiliating surrender to the French. The brave but minor captain Sir Thomas Kyriell had been commissioned to raise a relieving force, but this turned out to be pathetically small; too little and too late as always with this king, says one latin chronicle. In any case, it could not leave until the following March. On 9 January some of its discontented, unpaid soldiery, waiting to embark at Portsmouth, murdered the keeper of the privy seal, Adam Moleyns, and he, it seems, in extremis, made specific allegations against his colleague Suffolk of responsibility for the surrender of Maine, of which the troops were accusing him.

  Consequently on 22 January 1450 Suffolk, using the defence which had served him well in 144717 when he had been accused of engineering the surrender of Maine, petitioned the king, detailing the long, loyal and costly service of himself and his family to his House, and alleging himself the victim of widespread, malicious, baseless slander, ‘almost in every Commons mouth’, originating from the confession of the dying Privy Seal, that he was guilty of some unspecified treason with the French. He asked that his desire to answer any man’s general or specific charges be entered on the parliament roll. Such aggressive defence, backed up by Henry, had worked well in 1447. This time it did not. Four days later, he ventured to address the Commons in person in his defence, but they immediately reacted with a deputation to the chancellor requesting his commitment to ward, since, they said, he had now, by his own actions, personally admitted the strength of the rumours against him.18

  There is one solitary, anonymous chronicle account which alleges that Lord Cromwell put the Commons up to this attack, a royal councillor prepared to ruin a fellow councillor for mere personal reasons.19 Suffolk had exercised his ‘good lordship’ on behalf of the king’s squire William Tailboys of South Kyme in Lincolnshire, a near neighbour to Cromwell at Tattershall, and at odds with one John Dymoke, who in turn had invoked the ‘good lordship’ of Cromwell. In 1448 Dymoke secured a powerful commission of oyer et terminer headed by the earl of Salisbury and Cromwell, which was preparing to do justice on Tailboys when it was superseded, at his petition, by one with more restricted power, composed of three judges and only one lay member. Tailboys had thus successfully petitioned the council against that first commission and the clerk of the council had minuted his petition that certain persons ‘be assigned and no other’. Tailboys, also an enemy of the Pastons, operating under the protection of Suffolk, is normally portrayed as the very personification of the evils of ‘good lordship‘.20 In these years he was actually attendant on the king’s person. He had a spell in the Marshalsea in consequence of his dispute with Dymoke, but Suffolk presided, with Viscount Beaumont, over negotiations which ultimately led to Henry’s pardoning him, on 8 November 1448, after Dymoke had been given some degree of satisfaction. In a furth
er dispute Cromwell’s castle at Tattershall was used as a prison to hold one of Tailboys’s men whom, his master alleged, in an appeal to Viscount Beaumont for help, Cromwell was determined to hang as a common thief. Finally, on 28 November 1449 Cromwell was jostled, with, it seems, murderous intent, by Tailboys, at the very entrance to the council chamber in Westminster palace. Consequently he was again put in prison, this time in the Tower, for brawling in the palace precincts.

  It is true that when the original indictment of Suffolk was rejected, further charges laid against him included a reference to his connection with Tailboys, alleging that he had intervened to pervert the course of justice in his favour, but there is no need or justification for thus reducing Suffolk’s impeachment primarily to this low, sordid plane of a personal vendetta.21 To do so is to ignore the high issues of national policy and responsibility most prominent in the indictment, which the pettiness and patent absurdity of some of the lesser charges in the impeachment cannot conceal. Moreover, it is hardly likely that Henry, who in spite of his other shortcomings was consistently loyal to those who served him loyally, would have taken Cromwell into his closest personal service as his household chamberlain after the death of his principal agent and loyal minister Suffolk if he had been the prime mover in it.22 All other sources, of which Davies’s English chronicle is typical, stress the initial initiative of the Commons themselves here over matters of high policy: ‘All the people of this land and especially the Commons, cried against the said duke of Suffolk and said he was a traitor and at instance and petition of the said Commons of the parliament holden at Westminster he was arrested and put in the Tower.’23 This impeachment, the first since Suffolk’s grandfather Michael de la Pole, minister of Richard II, had been brought low in 1386, was in reality an indictment of the whole of Henry’s regime. It was the first stage of a threefold attack on the inefficiency of his royal government, the second being the acts of resumption and the third the rising of the Cade rebels in support of the activities of the Commons.

  Suffolk had risen to eminence without any great achievement to his credit. In 1428 he became commander of the English forces before Orleans on the death of Salisbury and was responsible for raising that siege; later he lost the battle at Jargeau where he was captured. On his release he became a member of the council and in 1433 the steward of the household. From that moment he was constantly in the king’s presence and employed about the king’s business, acting as proxy for his master, whether laying a foundation stone at King’s or marrying Margaret of Anjou; sitting in judgement on a minor traitor or leading a major embassy. We have the evidence from both Henry and Suffolk that the policy towards France was Henry’s and that Suffolk was only the faithful executant. On the question of overseas affairs he was therefore unjustly accused. On the other hand, as the minister closest to the king, he must have had extensive influence. He used that position to his own financial advantage, but we have no evidence of him using it to influence the king wisely in matters of high policy. For his sins of omission in this respect he merited the attack made on him.

  On Tuesday 27 January the chancellor informed the king and lords, in the council chamber of parliament, of the Commons’ request for impeachment. The lords took the measured advice of the judges, which was that no specific charges had been brought against Suffolk, and they unanimously advised against his arrest. They would not willingly provide one of their order as a scapegoat for the collapse of policies which were royal policies. But the very next day the Speaker of the Commons, in his own House, before a deputation of the chancellor and lords whose presence they had requested, made the most specific and alarmist accusations to press home their charge: the king was in danger, Charles of France was making ready to invade England. Suffolk had planned this and had fortified and provisioned his castle of Walling-ford to serve as a place of refuge and succour for the invaders. This in itself should now be sufficient suspicion of treason to compel proceedings, they said, although they had further accusations to prepare. On the basis of these wild, baseless allegations Suffolk was sent to the Tower.

  On 7 February the further charges were ready. Again, in their own House, through their Speaker William Tresham and before another delegation of the chancellor and a notable number of lords, they formally accused and impeached William de la Pole, duke of Suffolk, of high treason. Tresham handed the bill of accusation to the chancellor and the lords with the request that it should be enacted and proceedings taken against the duke according to the law and custom of the kingdom of England. The charges could hardly have been more specific. They said that on 20 July 1447, in the parish of St Sepulchre in the ward of Farringdon Within, he had conspired with the French embassy to facilitate a French invasion, to kill the king and make his own son John king by virtue of his marriage to his ward, the Lady Margaret Beaufort, daughter of the elder Beaufort duke of Somerset who died in 1444, pretending her to be next in line of succession to the throne in default of Henry’s issue. Since his arrest that marriage had now in fact been solemnized. For bribes and promises, they said, he had earlier, while the first of the king’s councillors, contrived the release of the duke of Orleans on 20 January 1439, clean contrary to the will of Henry V, to the end that the king’s great adversary might conquer Henry’s realm of France, duchies of Normandy and Gascony and counties of Anjou and Maine. This was now finally about to be accomplished as a result of Suffolk’s unauthorized promise to surrender Anjou and Maine to the Angevins, made at Tours in 1444, and his revealing the king’s innermost diplomatic and military secrets to his adversaries in 1447. He alone was responsible for the failure of all the great embassies and had on one occasion in the Star Chamber actually boasted of his honoured place in the councils of the French king. He had been responsible also for the duke of Brittany’s inclusion among the subjects and allies of Henry’s adversary at Tours in 1444, so that he too became an enemy, thereby causing the imprisonment of Henry’s loyal sworn man Gilles of Brittany and putting him in peril of his life. Apart from his alleged attempt on the throne, all these original charges against Suffolk were thus concerned with foreign affairs and the conduct of the war. He was in fact impeached for the loss of Maine, Anjou and Normandy. Many of the things alleged had indeed happened, though not by Suffolk’s fault or instigation. There is a remarkable parallel here with the dilemma confronting King Charles II two centuries later, when he fought to prevent the impeachment of a loyal servant, the earl of Danby, arraigned on similar capital charges of collusion with the French, when he had in fact merely been carrying out his master’s own, pro-French policies.

  On 12 February 1450 the bill of impeachment was read before the Lords, who decided to send it to the judges for advice. But Henry would not have this done. Consequently, like Danby in 1679, Suffolk remained in the Tower. On 7 March the lords then present in parliament declared by a majority that he ought to be brought to his answer. The Commons meantime had not been idle and on 9 March they requested yet another lords’ deputation to receive eighteen further charges: a truly formidable hotchpotch of half truths and untruths, repetitive in their general purport, but with even further spurious circumstantial details added. Suffolk was now charged with sole responsibility for the failure of the Armagnac marriage, and the consequent loss of the allegiance of the great lords of the Midi, since he was alleged to have given Charles VII advance notice of those plans. He was also charged with responsibility for persuading Henry to bind himself to a personal meeting with his great adversary in France, a plan of great potential danger for the king’s safety and of impossible financial cost. This he had achieved, they said, by causing the French ambassadors to be admitted to Henry’s presence for a secret discussion, without the assent or knowledge of other lords of the council. He was also charged with the responsibility of sending English soldiers to fight for the dauphin against Henry’s German allies after the truce of Tours. They claimed he had alienated Henry’s patrimony in Gascony, most notably to his nephew by marriage, Jean de Foix, viscount of
Castillon, whom he had also made earl of Kendal, and that he had secured £1,300 worth of English revenues for Margaret of Anjou’s aunt, the queen of France. Now, for the first time, allegations of his malign and corrupt influence on government at home were brought in. For sixteen years, it was said, he had also bled the king white, causing Henry to squander his inheritance on him and his friends; he had wasted the king’s treasure, the £60,000 left by Lord Sudeley in the treasury when he resigned the treasurership (1446); he had also misemployed subsidies, purloined obligations, procured offices for unworthy persons, interfered with the normal course of justice and nominated sheriffs.

  On 9 March Henry had him brought out of the Tower to Westminster to the parliament chamber, ostensibly to receive copies of these charges against him. Under the friendly guard of three household esquires he was then lodged for safety in the jewel house tower of the palace and given time to prepare an answer. Three days later he was brought back to the parliament chamber and on his knees before the king and lords utterly denied the original treasonable charges. On two points he was able to make statements which are at least, in part, verifiable from the records: other councillors knew as much as he did about the intended delivery of Maine (some others certainly had from late July 1447); the dead Moleyns, not he, had been the actual deliverer of Maine, which was also true. On a third point he did not deny his claim, made in Star Chamber, to knowledge of Charles VII’s privy counsels, but he had made it, he said, to demonstrate the strength of his declared belief in the sincerity of the French king’s desire for peace (i.e. he had been mistaken in this, but not disloyal). For the rest, significantly, he declared himself willing to prove his innocence ‘in what wise the king will rule him to’. He made no claim for trial by his peers. He put his fate entirely in Henry’s own hands.