On 16 May it was rumoured in London that Henry himself would march against the Scots.42 In fact it was York who was employed, as though he was still Protector, to lead an army north against James II of Scotland who had declared war, broken the truce and brazenly offered York support in asserting a claim to the throne.43 On 28 June, writing to Charles VII, he had declared his belief that York was the rightful king of England,44 thus indubitably revealing how widespread such notions were, even if hardly mentioned in England, or entertained by York himself. In face of this threat of foreign invasion a vehement and contemptuous defiance under the great seal was sent to James in Henry’s name from Windsor on 26 July and another by York on 24 August when he reached Durham. York’s appearance in the North was sufficient to cause James to retire from Northumberland.45
In the summer of 1456, therefore, the feeble-minded king, while reasserting his nominal rule, seems at last to have admitted the advisability of employing York in a prominent role in the government of the realm. For a king who was no longer able to govern or lead his armies in the field, this was a most sensible decision, even a generous one, considering York’s earlier defiance of his wishes to chose his own advisers, and the hurt he had received at his hands. But round about 17 August all was now changed by the actions of the rash and despotic queen. She either persuaded her husband to remove himself, or carried him off, to her castle of Kenilworth, where the defences were strengthened with cannon and other implements of war against his rival.46 A considerable battery of twenty-six new field guns (serpentines), a culverin and other armaments were further added in the spring.47 Henceforward it is difficult to believe that there was any conscious, identifiable purpose of Henry’s own behind his different movements. It is out of the question that he was simply being taken down to sport in the Midlands, away from the unruly Londoners, as Ramsay suggested.48 For one thing the establishment of the court at Coventry was marked by a complete change in the great offices. The two Bourchier brothers, archbishop and viscount, lost their posts, Bishop Wainfleet of Winchester becoming chancellor and the Talbot marcher earl of Shrewsbury treasurer. Margaret’s own chancellor, Laurence Booth, was given the key central administrative office of keeper of the privy seal on 24 September and made bishop of Durham when Salisbury’s brother Robert Nevill died in July 1457.49 Contemporary opinion blamed the queen for these developments. At Oxford Thomas Gascoigne wrote that it was all her doing: she had had Henry removed for safe keeping to her seat ‘in Cheshire’.50 From this point, Gascoigne continues, Queen Margaret conducted the affairs of the kingdom at her will, by right means or wrong, not caring which, as various people said: ‘What will be the end of it God knows’. Gascoigne died in March 1458. Queen Margaret was not prepared to see York’s employment continued and reacted accordingly. The Paston Letters reveal that she had been in the Midlands all the summer with the infant prince, at Tutbury on 15 May, when another battle on the St Albans pattern was rumoured;51 at Chester on 7 June, when York had been at Sandal in Yorkshire. Each of them was then said to be watching for a move from the other.52
Professor Storey has recently produced another explanation for Henry’s withdrawal from the southern part of his kingdom. He sees it as a response to new armed risings, this time in Wales, by York’s Welsh tenants, which revived Henry’s fears about York’s intentions. If York was not personally involved, after Dartford and St Albans it was natural to think that he was. Sir Walter Devereux of Weobly, York’s tenant and constable of his castle of Wigmore, had raised and held the city of Hereford in support of York’s Dartford expedition and had been indicted of treason there before Somerset and his fellow commissioners during Henry’s punitive visit in August 1452.53 He had been arraigned there a second time, before Lord Audley and William Yelverton on 20 July 1453, when he pleaded the 1452 pardon which he had meantime purchased. After the Yorkist victory at St Albans, a special act of parliament affirmed its validity.54 But at Easter 1456 he was involved, with his son-in-law Sir William Herbert of Raglan, the future Yorkist earl of Pembroke, in the intimidation of a coroner at Bradwardine and of the king’s justices at Hereford. Here they imprisoned the mayor and held the city a second time for several days over the murder of one Walter Vaughan. They compelled the unfortunate justices there to pronounce death sentences on several allegedly innocent Hereford men, whom they then proceeded to hang. On 8 August 1456 they assembled a considerable force at Hereford, stated to number 2,000 men, and on the 10th marched on Carmarthen and Aberystwyth castles. These they took by assault, imprisoning Henry’s Tudor half-brother Edmund, whom they found at Carmarthen, and at Aberystwyth they seized Robert ap Rees, the keeper of the seal of the principality. This they used to appoint themselves as a royal commission, holding sessions and freeing felons and malefactors. There was conflict over the control of these two castles. York had now taken over Somerset’s posts of constable there, but had been as yet unable to expel Somerset’s Welsh deputy, Griffith ap Nicholas. A petition accepted by the 1455 parliament from Griffith ap David ap Thomas, who had fallen foul of Somerset’s deputy and been imprisoned by him, authorized York to expel him from these castles after the end of February 1456, but meantime Henry granted them to his half-brother Jasper earl of Pembroke, before York could take possession.55 In August York was in arms in the border country opposing the Scots, dutifully facing the nation’s external enemies in the place of his unmartial and enfeebled king. These disturbances in Wales may have appeared to be the acts of his subordinates, committed with his approval, and it is possible that news of their seizure of the Welsh castles reaching London did cause the feeble Henry to lose his new-found trust in York and withdraw for safety to the queen and prince at Kenilworth. He had certainly never been prone to trust him for long, or to give him the benefit of the doubt. Whatever the immediate cause of Henry’s withdrawal from the south, whether he fled to the queen’s protection, or she had him carried off there, the result was the same. His retreat to Kenilworth and Coventry proved to be semi-permanent.
August 1456 began a complete change in Henry’s pattern of movements. Windsor, Sheen, Eltham and Kennington, Eton, Winchester and Canterbury now saw him no more. The court took up residence in the Midlands. Westminster palace alone, save for the occasional transit stay at Berkhamsted, and at the queen’s manor of Greenwich, housed him on his one or two visits south. His itinerary over the next four years cannot be continuously plotted in detail, possibly partly due to a chance absence of household accounts, but also due to the severely diminished level of government business, less even than during his first madness. The government of the realm had been largely abandoned. From mid-August 1456 until Salisbury and Warwick took him into custody at the battle of Northampton on 10 July 1460, even without counting occasions when a monastery provided a convenient night’s lodging in transit, he now spent fully one-third of his time in abbeys and priories.56 There was no precedent for a king thus spending so much time in religious houses, except for the solitary example during the financial crisis of 1433–4 when, as a boy of twelve, the council had put him in the care of the abbot and prior of Bury from Christmas to Easter. The comparative seclusion and time-absorbing ritual of monastic life now became especially attractive and congenial to him and at the same time eased the financial straits of the fugitive royal household, largely cut off from its normal sources of supply. Queen Margaret’s castles of Kenilworth, refortified and refurbished with new ordnance, and, to a lesser extent, Leicester, were the royal residences used. Specific contemporary references to his state of health in these years are rare, but in 1457 there was mention of the inordinate amount of sleep he had required since St Albans57 and the Crowland chronicler, who in 1460 closely observed him in his own abbey, in retreat from the world during Lent, aptly remarked that he had fallen into a weak state of mind after remaining for a time in a state of imbecility and held the government of the realm in name only.58
The civic records of Coventry, where the priory now provided his favourite residence of all, preserve
accounts of his visits both before and after his initial illness. The contrast is instructive. In 1451 the ‘receavinge the king’ reveals quite a lively monarch, complimenting the mayor on his speech of welcome: ‘Well seyde Sir Meyre, take your hors’; summoning him and his brethren to talk with him in his chamber, and treating them to a short discourse on the governance of the city. When he bade them farewell at the city bounds he gave them another homily, which the clerk thought worthy to be recorded verbatim. It was to the effect that although they had not asked it of him, he had decided to make their bailiffs sheriffs in token of the good order prevailing in this best ruled of cities, but if they would continue to enjoy his good lordship they must allow no riots or conventicles in their midst and take no liveries from lords, knights or esquires. By contrast, on the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross (14 September) 1457 it was Queen Margaret who made the triumphal entry into the city, greeted by adulatory pageants of prophets and patron saints, cardinal virtues and nine conquerors to do her honour. The conquerors were Hector, Alexander, Joshua, David, Judas, Arthur, Charlemagne, Julius Caesar, Geoffrey of Bouillon and, finally, St Margaret herself, represented slaying a great dragon by a miracle. Henry went silent and unnoticed. Were it not for one specific reference to his presence, and hopes for his good health, in Judas’s oration, for the tun of wine which the mayor gave him and for the presents given to his household men, by advice of his council, there would be no knowing that he was there at all. Naturally he was still shown all kingly deference, but no more of his speeches were recorded then or on subsequent visits other than notes of his formal expressions of thanks. It was Queen Margaret alone who came from nearby Kenilworth at Corpus Christi, specially to view the famous pageants. Moreover, when a great council held there from February to March 1457 came to an end, the mayor and his fellows discovered to their cost that even the special honours which they had expected to reserve only for the arrival or departure of a king and had never before shown to a queen, had now always to be shown to this queen, on pain of her grave displeasure.59 The civic records of Coventry do show that Henry could now again take part in processions and services and thus once again perform the dignified duties of kingship. Otherwise his activities were at a very low level. The two ecclesiastical great officers, the chancellor and the keeper of the privy seal, and the courtier treasurers Shrewsbury and Wiltshire, seem to have been kept mainly in attendance on him,60 but at his best he carried out the duties of government only for brief, intermittent periods. The words of an anonymous English chronicler thus now succinctly expressed the situation: ‘the reame of Englonde was out of all gouernaunce … for the kyng was simple … held ne householde ne meyntened no warres’.61 So it appeared to this southern chronicler, with an absentee king, a constant fear of French invasion and nothing being done to recover the lost French lands.
The view of this chronicler is supported by the meagre documentary evidence. Little was done beyond the dispensation of patronage,62 and the devising of financial shifts for the maintenance of the court. The council in Star Chamber at Westminster continued a few routine activities, while some instruments of Henry’s government from Coventry were now issued by advice of ‘the lords of his household and council’.63 That the withdrawal to the Midlands was envisaged as semi-permanent is confirmed by the special administrative arrangements made for household finance. William Grimsby, treasurer of the chamber and keeper of the jewels with the king, and also under-treasurer of the exchequer at Westminster, had a deputy, Richard Davy, clerk of the jewels, who was authorized to act for him at Westminster during his absences with the court. These two were given powers at their discretion to earmark sums of money and assignments at the exchequer for household use, to be recorded on the exchequer receipt rolls as ‘for the king in his chamber by the hand of William Grimsby’, who was to render account to no one except Henry in person.64 From 12 March 1456 followed three years and eight months without a parliament, a period unique in the reign.65 This was possible because no parliament was now required to secure the fundamental source of English government finance, the customs and subsidies, because the 1453 parliament had at last granted them to Henry for life. A major part of these had been set aside for the maintenance of Calais, but from December 1458 £1,000 each quarter were secured in loans for four years from the mayor and society of the Calais Staple for household expenses, in return for licences to export wool and woolfells free of customs duties, and a monopoly of export through the Calais Staple of all wools and woolfells exported to the Low Countries.66 Otherwise the household, apart from monastic and civic charity, and loans from its own wealthier members,67 now came to depend on a new monopoly of the so-called hereditary revenues of the crown. Grimsby was able to pre-empt all possible sources of revenue from the sheriffs in the shires, however small.68 Some sheriffs, many of whom were also members of the household,69 were made directly responsible for paying household wages. The sheriff of Somerset and Dorset, for example, henceforth had to pay for the whole upkeep of the royal pack of hounds.70 All manner of fines imposed by the exchequer for non-return of writs, etc., or by the law courts for gaol escapes, etc., were similarly pre-empted. A fine on the earl of Devon for his transgressions ‘vi et armis’ against Nicholas Radford was among these, though a subsequent entry of this as a ‘mutuum per duas tallias’ from the chamber to the exchequer indicates that it was not collected.71 When such dues proved difficult to levy, as in the case of the issues of the temporalities of the vacant bishopric of Durham, special commissioners might be appointed, though in this case officials of the bishopric resisted attempts to levy the money and payment had to wait until Margaret’s chancellor and keeper of the privy seal, Laurence Booth, was himself put into the vacant bishopric.72 Efforts were also made fully to exploit the crown’s feudal dues for the benefit of the household. Fines for licences to enter into inheritance were paid directly into the chamber, or jewel house, at Coventry.73 Writs and proclamations were issued to distrain all men holding lands worth £40 per-annum or more to become knights at Pentecost 1457, and fines totalling £1,089 from those who failed to comply had been levied for the household by May 1460.74 Grimsby was also made responsible for the purveyance of victuals for the household75 and Davy removed Henry’s jewels from the exchequer of receipt to Coventry on 7 December 1456.76
The English chronicle records that the royal debts increased daily as creditors could get no payment and that heavy impositions on the people lost Henry their hearts, because they could see no end-product from them, other than the queen and courtiers lining their own pockets. He instanced ‘taxes, tallages and fifteenths’,77 but there was no new parliamentary taxation levied at all after 1453 and the resentment can only have been caused by household purveyance, by the exploitation of the hereditary revenues by the household at Coventry and, possibly, by an attempt to levy the grant of archers made by the Reading parliament in 1453 in the changed circumstances of 1457. It is possible that when preparations were at last made to apportion the 1453 grant of archers among the counties and cities, in November and December 1457,78 there was still nothing sinister about this. Dilatory routine alone may have been responsible, since the original grant had not envisaged their being made available before Easter 1456.79 Defence of the realm in any case became an immediate, unavoidable issue when the French landed at Sandwich in late August 1457 and there were numerous commissions of array issued for defence of the coasts in August and September.80 In November 1457 an approver charged one Robert Burnet of Stepney with uttering treasonable words about Queen Margaret herself raising men, but these were alleged to be for service overseas in default of action by Henry himself who had ‘lost all his father had won’, and was no longer himself capable of raising any army. Burnet also uttered the rash thought that it would have been better, in his opinion, if Henry’s hurt at St Albans had been fatal.81 The Yorkists later claimed that this attempt to levy the archers in 1457 was an example of Lancastrian tyranny, but this cannot be proved or disproved.
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bsp; Henry’s move to Kenilworth in August 1456 thus signified the collapse of normal political life. Signs are that in the autumn of 1456 Henry was still not entirely hostile to York, although the queen had already become notorious for this. York was able to attend a great council meeting, summoned to Coventry on 7 October 1456, when he was reported as standing well with Henry, but not with the queen, who would have had him ‘distressed’ if the duke of Buckingham had not prevented it. Buckingham appeared to be the most powerful peer then present at court, having likewise saved the young duke of Somerset from the wrath of the Coventry townspeople, after his men had killed several of them in an affray. The ministerial changes in which his two Bourchier half-brothers lost their offices were reported by the same informant to be much resented, and due to the queen’s wishes.82 A much longer great council, held there from 15 February to 14 March 1457, was specifically called to settle internal dissensions: ‘for the restful rule of our land and subjects and the surety of the same’. The lists of writs of summons and the presence list given in the Coventry Leet Book confirm that York was again summoned and attended, but not Salisbury or Warwick. This second meeting of a great council at Coventry in 1457 was most probably the assembly, as Stubbs surmised, of which an undated, partisan account later appeared in the parliamentary attainder of the Yorkists in 1459. If so it indicates that consequent on York’s initial bad example in the use of armed force to further his objectives at Dartford in 1452 and at the first battle of St Albans, he was still held primarily responsible for the disturbed state of the kingdom. According to this later, partisan account in 1457 at Coventry he was again made to take another solemn oath to eschew the ‘wey of fayt’. The duke of Buckingham, no longer his protector at court this time, implored Henry on his knees to make this his last, final offer of royal mercy for such an offence.83
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