Battle Royal

by Hugh Bicheno

  Bishop Henry Beaufort, by 1424 the last male survivor of the first generation of Beauforts, was the crown’s principal creditor. He had been instrumental in denying Gloucester the regency in England and was his main rival in the Council. Their retainers came close to doing battle at London Bridge in October 1425, when Gloucester blocked what he believed was an attempt to take the infant king into the bishop’s custody. At issue were not only influence and power, but also surety for the bishop’s loans, on which the crown had defaulted.

  Bedford was obliged to return from France to mediate during 1426. There were many strands to the compromise eventually reached, including the appointment of the neutral Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, to be the young king’s governor. The core deal, however, was a partial financial settlement with Bishop Beaufort. In return the bishop resigned from the office of lord chancellor and the ruling Council.

  Bedford also required Beaufort to travel back with him to France in March 1427. As regent, Bedford was empowered to grant Beaufort permission to accept promotion to cardinal, which Henry V had refused him when the pope first proposed it in 1419. Beaufort’s career in papal service only briefly diverted his attention from English politics, but it gave Gloucester grounds to accuse him of divided loyalties when he resumed his place in the Council.

  With the new cardinal out of the way, Gloucester dealt with the threat from Edmund by an Act of Parliament stating that if Catherine remarried without the king’s consent, the husband would be stripped of his lands. The Act also specified that permission could only be granted by the king, then 6 years old, once he reached his majority. Finally, the Act also declared that any children of an unsanctioned marriage would still be members of the royal family, a proviso designed to give the royal uncles control over them. With his hopes thus dashed, Edmund departed for France to begin a long military career.

  In rebellion, Catherine left the court and moved to Wallingford Castle in Oxfordshire, part of her dower. There she proceeded to raise a family with her servant Owen Tudor, a man with no lands to lose, furthermore without benefit of clergy, thus finessing the letter of Gloucester’s act. Henry IV had deprived Welshmen of many civil rights during the last great Welsh revolt led by Owain Glyn Dŵr in 1400−12, but Owen Tudor had earned English rights by military service in France, even though his father was Glyn Dŵr’s nephew.

  The couple produced a child almost every year from about 1429. The first we can be sure of was named Edmund, which has led some to speculate that Beaufort might have been the true father. A second son, Jasper, was to be a major player in the Wars of the Roses. Another son and two daughters followed them. It is possible a last daughter died in childbirth along with her 35-year-old mother in January 1437, although by then Catherine had retired to Bermondsey Abbey outside London, and in her will wrote of a ‘grievous malady, in the which I have been long, and yet am, troubled and vexed’.

  Catherine was buried in Westminster Abbey. Her painted wooden funeral effigy in the abbey museum is one of the oldest surviving life-like depictions of any member of the royal family. We cannot be sure the original of a much-copied portrait profile of Henry V was painted from life (his right profile was disfigured by a near-fatal arrow wound at the 1403 Battle of Shrewsbury), but it fits a contemporary description of an oval face, a long straight nose, straight dark hair and a ruddy complexion.

  Apart from the nose his son fits this description barely at all, whereas the similarities between Catherine’s effigy and another much-copied portrait of Henry VI when he was 19 years old are striking. Mother and son shared the same hair, complexion, cheekbones, jaw-line, chin, rosebud mouth and arching eyebrows. More remarkably, a portrait of Catherine’s Tudor great-grandson Henry VIII at about the same age also shows a strong family likeness.

  Did Henry VI inherit his maternal grandfather’s schizophrenia? The condition commonly peaks between the ages of 15 and 25, with women experiencing a second peak between 25 and 35, and this may have been Catherine’s ‘grievous malady’. Even so, the heritability of schizophrenia from a single parent is low. It is much higher when both parents are afflicted, and Henry VI may also have inherited a predisposition to mental illness from his father, who had a messianic delusion that he could unite Christendom under his banner.

  Following Catherine’s death, Tudor took sanctuary at Westminster Abbey when summoned by Gloucester to appear before the Council. He was assured he could depart in safety, but was then arrested and locked up like a common criminal in Newgate prison. His confiscated worldly wealth was £137 10s. 4d, no small amount [about £87,500 in today’s purchasing power], but minuscule in comparison with Catherine’s dower.

  In a manifest charade Tudor ‘escaped’ early in 1438, was allegedly recaptured by John, Baron Beaumont, one of the king’s closest friends, taken to Windsor Castle and held there under the protection of none other than Catherine’s former suitor Edmund Beaufort. Owen was later pardoned and his property restored, and he became a member of the king’s household. Meanwhile his sons were placed in the care of the Abbess of Barking, sister of William de la Pole, Earl of Suffolk, the king’s chief minister. Owen never married and many years later, on learning he was to be executed, his last words were ‘that head shall lie on the stock that was wont to lie on Queen Catherine’s lap’.

  Upon the death of the king’s mother 20-year-old Jacquetta, dowager Duchess of Bedford, became the highest ranking lady in the royal family, with precedence over Gloucester’s ambitious second wife Eleanor Cobham. Eleanor had previously been Gloucester’s mistress when she was a lady-in-waiting to his first wife, Jacqueline d’Hainault, whom he brutally discarded in 1428. Consequently the duke was not in a position to adopt a high moral tone when a pregnant Jacquetta revealed she had married Richard Woodville not long after Catherine’s death.

  Also, Gloucester was once again struggling for influence with Cardinal Beaufort, who was delighted to see Gloucester’s highly eligible sister-in-law Jacquetta take herself off the political chessboard. Better still, although Woodville was the son of one of the late Duke of Bedford’s closest officials, and knighted by the duke himself, he had subsequently served under Suffolk – who began his service to the king as a protégé of the cardinal. Suffolk was also, by marriage, lord of the Woodville estate at Grafton in Northamptonshire.

  We may presume the newly orphaned young king was inclined to leniency towards a young woman whose conduct mirrored his late mother’s. It was in his gift to legitimate Jacquetta’s marriage, and he did so. However, in contrast to Jacquetta’s first visit to England after marrying Bedford, when she was inducted into the Order of the Garter, on this occasion the couple was not received at court and Woodville was fined £1,000 [£636,000].

  Cardinal Beaufort put up the money, nominally in exchange for a few of her manors, but clearly to bind the couple to his interest. Their exclusion from court may have been at the suggestion of Gloucester, but it also resolved the problem of protocol posed by the gross imbalance of rank between Jacquetta and Richard Woodville.

  If the noble councillors believed Richard had married Jacquetta for her money, they could not have been more wrong. Theirs was a lastingly passionate relationship, and she bore him fourteen children over the next twelve years. Given how dangerous childbirth was, that Jacquetta’s dower was for her life only and how politically exposed he would become if she died, Richard would certainly have restrained his enthusiasm if cold calculation played any part in the marriage.

  The couple returned to France, he to pursue his military career and she to attempt to secure her income from lands in Normandy that constituted a major part of her Bedford dower. With Burgundy now hostile, the English position in northern France was precarious, which kept Richard busy but would have made Jacquetta’s task difficult even if she had not been almost constantly pregnant. She appears to have shuttled across the Channel to give birth at Grafton, leaving the babies in her father-in-law’s household while she returned to France to pursue her claims – and get preg
nant again.

  It is to be expected that two such beautiful people as Jacquetta and Richard would produce stunningly good-looking offspring. Sadly, presumption is all we have, as no likenesses from life survive of either of the parents or any of their fourteen children – save one. Three copies survive of a lost original portrait of Elizabeth, their eldest child, painted after she married Edward IV. The least over-painted is at Queens’ College, Cambridge – she and her ill-fated predecessor Marguerite d’Anjou being the founders for whom the college is named. Although crudely executed, the portrait conveys a luminous quality, which helps to explain why Elizabeth Woodville became the first commoner queen regnant of England.

  The distinctive course taken by English history under Henry VIII may well have owed something to the mitochondrial DNA of Catherine and Jacquetta. Having acquired financial independence by fulfilling their dynastic duty as daughters, they found fulfilment with men who prized them as women above all. We know Owen Tudor’s last thoughts were of long-dead Catherine, and we may safely assume Richard Woodville’s were of Jacquetta in the grim hours before he, too, was beheaded.

  Sometimes love does conquer all: despite having turned their backs on the game of power, Catherine and Jacquetta became the common ancestors of every English monarch since 1485. Before that could happen, all those with a superior claim to the throne had first to wipe each other out. This they did in what was in essence a decades-long, murderously sordid dispute over an inheritance within a deeply dysfunctional extended family. It became merciless not despite but because the combatants had so much in common, and projected their own darkest intentions onto each other.

  This was something so humanly fascinating that the greatest author to adorn the English language wrote eight plays about it. Prudent sycophancy towards the dynasty under which he lived gave Shakespeare the unifying theme of his first historical series, three-part Henry the Sixth and Richard the Third, namely that divinely ordained order was overthrown by the deposition and murder of Richard II by his cousin Henry of Bolingbroke, Duke of Lancaster. Decades of strife ensued before the restoration of divine order under the Tudors.

  The theme is absent from his subsequent, more accomplished series from Richard the Second through two-part Henry the Fourth, leading to the patriotic apotheosis of Henry the Fifth. The final chorus laments that after Henry V’s early death, ‘so many had the managing, that they lost France, and made his England bleed’. The plays have indelibly coloured popular perception of late medieval England, and historians cannot ignore them.

  Nor should they: it was an extraordinary period in English history. Four of the six kings crowned between 1399 and 1485 were usurpers who killed their predecessors, undermining the concept of divine right as well as the prestige of the ruling class. A more mature appreciation of history and of human nature led Shakespeare to discount the role of divine judgement when he wrote the second, more psychologically penetrating series.

  *1 Buchan was killed and the Scots army annihilated by Bedford at Verneuil, the ‘second Agincourt’, in August 1424.

  I

  * * *

  House of Lancaster

  In his Commentaries Pope Pius II dismissed his contemporary Henry VI of England as ‘a man more timorous than a woman, utterly devoid of wit or spirit, who left everything in his wife’s hand’. The verdict of history is equally implacable: he was one of the most ineffectual and divisive monarchs with which any nation has ever been cursed. The only open question is how many of the disasters that characterized his reign can be attributed to his wife or his proverbial ‘evil councillors’, and how many to personal initiatives.

  Henry was at the younger end of the age bracket in which schizophrenia commonly declares itself when he assumed the full powers of personal kingship in November 1437. A portrait of him four years later shows the staring, vacant facial expression characteristic of the disease, and he ticked many other diagnostic boxes long before disabling symptoms became apparent. Chief among them were an inability to feel normal joy or pleasure (later portrayed as saintliness), extreme sensitivity to disagreement, inappropriate emotional responses to serious events (such as giggling at bad news), and no facility to weigh the likely consequences of his decisions, from which came a cavalier disregard for abiding by them.

  The word ‘childlike’ was often applied to him, which explains why he commanded (often exasperated) affection from so many. Children, however, are often cruel, and on occasions Henry acted in a way that can only be described as sadistic. One such was his vindictive persecution in 1441 of Eleanor Cobham, wife of his uncle the Duke of Gloucester, for treasonable necromancy. Suffolk was behind the prosecution, but he would not have dared attack a prince of the blood without the king’s support. Eleanor was paraded through the streets of London in her shift like a prostitute, and then imprisoned for life. Her alleged accomplices were first tortured to implicate her, and then cruelly executed.

  It was not the first time a Lancastrian king employed an accusation of witchcraft against an inconvenient woman. Henry V used it against his stepmother Joan of Navarre, but spared her a trial after legally stealing much of her dower. She was under house arrest first at Pevensey Castle in Kent, where her youngest stepson Gloucester was a frequent visitor. In 1429 Joan gifted her chapel and its furnishings to Gloucester’s wife Eleanor Cobham.

  Although Gloucester was not implicated in his wife’s supposed crimes and divorced her, his status as the king’s heir presumptive was irrevocably compromised. He was forced into retirement, leaving the way clear for Suffolk and other members of the king’s inner circle, to whom Henry began to grant the reversion of crown lands and offices held by the duke. For these to take effect Gloucester had to die. In 1447 he was arrested on a charge of treason and conveniently died in custody two days later. Suffolk was made a duke the following year.

  In July 1447 a court presided over by Suffolk convicted the late duke’s illegitimate son and eight others of plotting to kill the king and sentenced them to be drawn, hanged and quartered. Suffolk only appeared with a royal pardon after they had been dragged through the streets, cut down alive after hanging and stripped naked in preparation for ritual disembowelment. A visiting French delegation was disgusted by the charade, and reported that the people of London shared the sentiment.

  The episode marked the start of the cult of ‘Good Duke Humphrey’ among the common people, and a corresponding hatred of Suffolk. It is an error to believe that, like many another chief minister before and after him, Suffolk was simply the lightning rod for growing popular discontent with the king. Although many others shared in the ill-gotten spoils from Gloucester’s estate, Suffolk’s greed was particularly flagrant.

  Nonetheless, he undoubtedly did get blamed for the king’s failings. The once canonical view of Henry as a well-meaning soul misled by self-seeking courtiers has been comprehensively demolished.*1 Contemporary French and other non-English sources reveal that the manner in which England lost its French empire, which destabilized Henry’s reign, bears the imprint of the king’s own dithering personality.

  Seen through the lens of current understanding of schizophrenia this is not surprising. Henry was almost unsteerable by his councillors, evil or otherwise. They could, obviously, encourage him to pursue a certain policy, but only if it was in accordance with his inclinations. What they could not do was control its implementation, because his aversion to disagreement made it impossible to discuss the pros and cons of any particular decision.

  Anyone who has acted as an adviser to powerful individuals knows how to frame a question so the preferred outcome appears to be the correct answer. Medieval courtiers were masters of the process of subtle manipulation recently dubbed ‘nudge theory’. But in the end, and most acutely with regard to Henry VI, they had to be, above all, ‘yes’ men willing to greet every royal pronouncement as wise and insightful. ‘Yes – but’ men were compelled to walk a fine line with any monarch; in Henry’s case that line simply did not exist.


  A further contributing factor to Henry’s psychology was growing up in the overpowering shadow of the legendary father he never knew, and being schooled to govern as he had. Yet Henry V had been a terrifyingly focused and above all immensely brave individual, who came to the throne as a fully grown man and commanded respect and devotion not merely as king but also as a victorious leader of men in battle. Objectively his were shoes too big to fill: Henry VI did not even try.

  On the plus side his father and grandfather had crushed domestic challenges arising from the 1399 usurpation, and Henry VI’s absolute right to rule was fully accepted not only by the nobility but also by the country at large. The minority Council and the king’s uncles preserved and extended Henry V’s conquests, and sizeable assets reverted to the crown following the deaths of the dowager queens and his uncles. When Henry VI assumed personal kingship he was more politically and financially secure than his father had been, and disposed of considerably more patronage.

  Feudalism – the holding of lands in exchange for service or labour – had long ago ceased to provide the basis of political power in England. In its place, the country was a patchwork of ‘affinities’ – networks of those deriving benefit from noble patronage and influence (known as ‘good lordship’). Henry had a liveried retinue of over 300 knights and esquires, and the next largest personal following, a mere thirty-six of similar rank, wore the livery of the wealthy Humphrey Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, who owned manors in twenty-two counties. However, their affinities were an order of magnitude greater than their retinues.