Battle Royal

by Hugh Bicheno

  In the king’s case this was further multiplied by direct patronage. When Henry assumed personal kingship there were only 61 lay peerages, several of them multiple holdings by one peer – 3 dukedoms, 14 earldoms and 43 baronies. By 1450 he had created or recreated 36 more – 6 dukes, 2 Marcher lords, 2 marquesses, 8 earls, 2 viscounts and 16 barons. Even today, largely honorific life peerages are an important element of government patronage; in the fifteenth century, men would do almost anything to be granted the lands and legal privileges of hereditary nobility.

  The king also had in his gift over a thousand royal offices. These were additional to those in his private estate, which included the principality of Wales (conjoined with the earldom of Chester), the dukedoms of Cornwall, Lancaster and Hereford, earldoms of Leicester, Lancaster, Derby and Northampton, the barony of Halton in Cheshire, the royal appanage of Richmondshire and the royal peculiar of Hexhamshire. Royal appointments were commonly devolved to the members of the king’s household, but he could revoke them all at will.

  Alongside these many advantages, however, Henry faced challenges in the form of changes to the deep political culture of the nation, which would expose his failings to a higher degree of public scrutiny. His reign saw the ruling house complete the transition from being a French family that governed England to being an English family struggling to retain its holdings in France. English only became the language of government under Henry V, the first monarch since the Norman Conquest to use it in his private correspondence.

  The monarchy lost some of its majesty along with the element of mystery when the king’s subjects could better understand how they were governed – although the genie of doubt about the natural order of things was already well out of the bottle. In the fourteenth century a diffuse proto-Protestant religious movement known as Lollardy followed the lead of the lay theologian John Wycliffe in rejecting the corruption of the Church. Papal authority had already been severely undermined by the French capture of the papacy from 1305 to 1378, followed by a vituperative schism between rival papacies at Avignon and Rome.

  In the midst of all this, starting in 1348, repeated pandemics of bubonic, pneumonic and septicaemic plagues, known collectively as the Black Death, nearly halved the population. Unfortunately the best of the clergy took a deadly hit from the plague, which in its airborne, almost invariably fatal pneumonic form, struck down the most diligent among them as they tended to the dying. Meanwhile the bubonic plague wiped out even cloistered communities, whose grain stores were magnets for infected rats.

  Secondary consequences included a sharp decline in rental income as the countryside became depopulated. Many landowners were compelled to enter into agreements with the reduced labour force, under which they assumed the capital costs and most of the risks in return for, typically, half the produce. The Church’s relative income, however, increased steadily through donations. The massive transfer of wealth from secular to clerical hands eventually led to the clergy’s expropriation and the Protestant Reformation – but long before that, outrage at the venality of the princes of the Church had reached boiling point.

  Wycliffe produced the first partial translation of the Bible into English in 1382. In February 1395, 122 years before Martin Luther nailed his Ninety-Five Theses, in Latin, to the door of the castle church in Wittenberg, a group of Lollards nailed their Twelve Conclusions, in the vernacular, to the door of Westminster Hall, the heart of secular government in England.

  Although Wycliffe and his followers had enjoyed the protection of John of Gaunt and other nobles who wished to get their hands on Church wealth, this ended after the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt, which Wycliffe condemned but one of whose leaders, John Ball, preached Lollardy. Widespread unrest opened noble eyes (in particular Gaunt’s, after his Savoy palace was sacked by the London mob) to the threat it posed to their own authority. After he seized power, John of Gaunt’s son Henry IV forbade translation and private ownership of the Bible, and authorized the burning of heretics.

  The name ‘Peasants’ Revolt’ is, anyway, an historical solecism. It was more like a strike by agricultural workers empowered by their relative scarcity, led by minor officials and smallholders. The old historical consensus of medieval England as a peasant society where people were tied to the land by communal obligations, as in mainland Europe and Scotland, has long since been demolished. There is compelling evidence, as early as the thirteenth century, of a sizeable body of hired labour, and that land was a commodity owned by individuals – of either sex – who could buy, sell and bequeath it at will.*2

  As they did in their simultaneous conquest of Sicily, the Norman invaders of 1066 simply overlaid their authority on existing laws and customs. Anglo-Saxon property rights were refined by the contractual basis of feudalism, with the concept of binding contracts remaining after the link between land and service eroded. As a result England was a highly litigious society, which demanded at least a pretence of impartiality from state officials.

  Impartiality was something that Henry VI’s administration signally failed to provide. He certainly must have known Richard II’s downfall was precipitated by his illegal seizure of entailed Lancastrian lands from his cousin, who overthrew him to become Henry IV. He did not appreciate, however, that the cumulative effect of many small abuses of power by royal household members and their affinities could have a similar effect. Even when not committed in his name, every unpunished arbitrary act by his household diminished his sovereign authority.

  Although England had been governed for fifteen years without domestic disturbances by his minority Council, once he was free to do so Henry seldom stayed at the Palace of Westminster, preferring Windsor Castle, Sheen, Eltham, Kennington and, after 1447, Gloucester’s opulent palace at Greenwich. He ruled through a small number of trusted ministers, in permanent attendance during his ‘progresses’ through the country. Apart from a two-year period in 1442−3, when he was fully taken up with a strategy he hoped would lead to peace in France, his tours averaged three months per year between 1437 and 1453.

  In principle Henry’s regular peregrinations should have enabled him to gain the trust of his kingdom. Unfortunately they sowed ill will instead, because his entourage did not pay the roaming court’s bills to local suppliers. Also, he mainly stayed at royal palaces, within a growing cocoon of liveried retainers. Chief among those most constantly with him was Suffolk and his own close associate John Sutton, created Baron Dudley in 1440. Two who became part of Henry’s inner circle thanks to Cardinal Beaufort’s influence were the erudite Adam Moleyns, made Bishop of Chichester in 1445, and Reginald Boulers, made Abbot of Gloucester in 1437 and Bishop of Hereford in 1450.

  Three others were Henry’s bosom friends. The closest was the royal chaplain William Ayscough, appointed Bishop of Salisbury shortly after Henry assumed personal kingship, and subsequently the king’s confessor. James, Baron Beaumont, had been the king’s companion since infancy and was created the first ever viscount in the English peerage in 1432. Another royal friend was James Fiennes, created Baron Saye and Sele in 1447, who probably abused Henry’s trust more than any other.

  The young king’s alienation of crown revenues through gifts to his favourites was similar to the behaviour of his ill-fated great-uncle Richard II. Ironically, the principal beneficiary of Richard’s fecklessness had been his uncle John of Gaunt, who thereby built up the affinity that made it possible for his own son to seize the throne and found the Lancastrian dynasty. One of the few things Henry VI’s grandfather and father agreed on was that none of their subjects should become as over-mighty as the founder of their dynasty had been.

  At the same time pressure for territorial expansion and consolidation was growing, because landowners’ incomes per acre declined in absolute terms from the middle of the fourteenth century. Land ownership was a zero-sum game and nobles could only expand their holdings through inheritance, marriage or royal gift. Among the most valuable forms of royal patronage were permission to marry and the assignm
ent of wardships – the care and control of wealthy orphans during their minorities. In the case of orphan girls, their estates were generally captured by their guardians through marriage to their own sons.

  A startling illustration of this involved the girl co-heirs of the wealthy Humphrey Bohun, Earl of Hereford, Essex and Northampton. After Eleanor, the elder, married Edward III’s youngest son Thomas of Woodstock, they pressured Eleanor’s sister Mary into becoming a nun, to give them sole possession of the Bohun inheritance. Thomas’s older brother John of Gaunt abducted Mary from the convent and, following payment of a large fine to his nephew the king, married her to his own eldest son, the future Henry IV.

  Not the least of Henry V’s reasons for embarking on a career of conquest was to provide an outlet for the martial energy and the rapacity of his land-hungry nobles. The Norman Conquest of 1066 had established a unitary English state under a monarchy kept strong by ensuring that few nobles were ever permitted to accumulate the large contiguous holdings that enabled the great French lords to defy their king. The exceptions were the lords expected to police the borders (Marches) of Wales and Scotland. Unsurprisingly, they were historically the most troublesome of the king’s subjects.

  In 1326 Queen Isabella and her lover, the Welsh Marcher lord Roger, Baron Mortimer, overthrew and killed her husband Edward II. Four years later, by then Earl of March, Roger suffered a degrading death at the end of a rope, was attainted (see explanation below) and all his titles and lands declared forfeit by the young Edward III.

  The Scots Marcher Henry, Baron Percy, helped overthrow Richard II and was created Earl of Northumberland by a grateful Henry IV. Although Percy’s son Harry ‘Hotspur’ rebelled and was killed at the 1403 Battle of Shrewsbury, the father was spared retribution. He was attainted for another failed rebellion two years later, after which he fled to Scotland. Three years later his head ended up adorning London Bridge.

  There was usually a third act to the cycle of treason and exemplary punishment. Attainder, also known as ‘corruption of blood’, dec-lared the individual a non-person in a legal sense and so terminated rights of both patrilineal and matrilineal inheritance. Thus the attainted noble’s forfeiture of hereditary titles and lands also deprived his family. Punishing the innocent sat ill with medieval concepts of kingship, however, and attainder was rarely sustained.

  Thus the ancestral Mortimer lands and the earldom of March were restored to Roger’s grandson in 1354, while Percy’s attainder was revoked and the earldom restored to Hotspur’s son in 1416. In part this was because of the strategic importance of the lands in question and the deep local roots of the Mortimer and Percy affinities; but it also illustrated how respectful of property rights even kings had to be.

  There was another consideration. A subject permanently deprived of his family lands could only hope for redress by force of arms. He might claim to be rebelling only to recover his patrimony, as Henry Bolingbroke did in 1399, but in practice he could only be secure if the monarch was overthrown. Meanwhile, if the king kept the expropriated lands he was regarded as a thief, and if he awarded them to others he would experience the paradox of patronage succinctly summed up by the infamous Mayor James Curley of Boston: ‘Every time you do a favour for a constituent, you make nine enemies and one ingrate’.

  In sum, successful kingship was a balancing act requiring a wide range of political skills. The main reason why primogeniture became the sanctified mechanism of succession was to avoid a civil war every time a king died; but another reason to abide with one ruling family was that the heir could be expected to have learned the necessary skills by observing them exercised by his father. Henry VI was denied the opportunity to learn from his father and, bombarded by exhortation to live up to the idealized example of a man with whom he never formed a living bond, must have secretly resented his memory.

  In practical terms the most burdensome part of Henry V’s legacy was the war in France. His son was the antithesis of a warrior and regarded conquered Normandy as more trouble than it was worth – something his father’s generation could never accept. However, in early 1447 the leading figures of the old guard departed the scene when Cardinal Beaufort died sixteen days after Humphrey of Gloucester. Their furious disagreements had caused their influence to decline once Henry VI assumed personal kingship and they had, anyway, fought each other to a standstill by 1440.

  Uniquely for the period we have handsome contemporary likenesses of the two men: a crayon copy of an earlier drawing from life of Gloucester as a young man, and Van Eyck’s portrait of the plainly dressed cardinal in his late fifties, the earliest naturalistic painting of any Englishman. Apart from the Lancaster nose, it is hard to discern a family likeness; but both project a strength of character sadly lacking in their young nephew and king.

  For all their rancour they were princes of the blood devoted to their dynasty. Both shared Henry V’s vision of Christendom united under a dual Lancastrian monarchy, and differed only on the means to pursue what was, objectively, an insane ambition. Gloucester could never bring himself to accept that his brother’s legacy was unsustainable, but by the end of the 1430s the cardinal had reluctantly concluded that Henry VI was a broken reed.

  Unfortunately Beaufort tried to salvage the Lancastrian dynasty’s fortunes while simultaneously advancing the interests of his younger relatives. Although this was normal behaviour by senior prelates – the word ‘nepotism’ comes from the favours showered on their nipoti (nephews, often actually sons) by popes and princes of the Church – it was to have tragic consequences for his king, and for England.

  *1 Notably by Bertam Wolffe’s exhaustively researched biography.

  *2 This evidence was unearthed by Alan Macfarlane in his groundbreaking The Origins of English Individualism.

  II

  * * *

  House of Beaufort

  The Beauforts took their family name from their birthplace, a castle in the Loire valley owned by their father John of Gaunt, 15 miles east of Angers, the capital of Anjou. The four Beaufort siblings, John, Henry, Thomas and Joan, were born illegitimate during the 1370s, but in 1396 John of Gaunt married their mother, Katherine Swynford. Church law viewed all the children of parents who married as legitimate, no matter when the marriage took place. Further legitimated by papal decree and royal charter, the Beauforts regarded themselves as – and the bordure of their coat of arms proclaimed them to be – the cadet branch of the Lancastrian dynasty.

  English civil law was less accommodating with regard to inheritance, something emphasized by their half-brother Henry IV when he barred the Beauforts from the succession. Henry’s policy was to keep them closely tied to his own family by curtailing any independent ambition they might entertain. Thus he revoked the senior titles and the lands awarded by Richard II to John, the eldest of the Beauforts. Instead, Henry gave him a revocable annuity of £1,000 [£636,000]. John retained the earldom of Somerset and the lands settled on him by their father, but these yielded only another £1,000.

  Likewise, when Bishop Henry Beaufort resigned as Lord Chancellor following his appointment to the wealthy see of Winchester, Henry IV’s attitude towards him changed. Even though the bishop performed his office admirably during the Percy rebellion and had undone a simultaneous French threat to Calais through skilled diplomacy, the king now began to view everything he did with suspicion. Perhaps with good reason, as the bishop was a key figure in Prince Henry’s attempt to supplant his father’s authority.

  When, after distinguished military and diplomatic service, John Beaufort died in 1410, within four months his widow Margaret Holland, a wealthy woman in her own right, was betrothed to Thomas, Duke of Clarence, Henry IV’s second son. Clarence claimed custody of John’s heirs and took possession of the income from John’s estate. This went plainly against John’s will and was contested – with little success – by Bishop Henry, his brother and executor.

  Only 9 miles north of Beaufort lay Baugé, scene of the disastrous battle in which th
e king’s younger brother, the Duke of Clarence, met his death in 1421. The two eldest surviving sons of John Beaufort, who accompanied their stepfather on the Anjou campaign, were captured after the battle. The younger, 15-year-old Thomas, was released in 1427 through a prisoner exchange arranged by Cardinal Beaufort, but died four years later. Seventeen-year-old John Beaufort, Earl of Somerset, remained in French hands until 1438. John’s captivity was prolonged because his mother refused to diminish the estates she administered in his name.

  The rivalry between the Duke of Gloucester and Cardinal Beaufort also added to the young earl’s misfortune, as the French first demanded an exchange for the Duke of Bourbon, captured at Agincourt. After Bourbon died in captivity they proposed an exchange for the Count of Angoulême, held as surety since 1412 for the Duke of Orléans’s debt to Clarence, John’s late stepfather. Gloucester prevented both exchanges.

  After Henry VI assumed personal kingship he lent a sympathetic ear to the petition of Edmund, John’s youngest brother, on his sibling’s behalf. Agreement was reached for John’s ransom to be offset by the payment due from Angoulême, plus the release of the Count of Eu, captured at Agincourt, whose ransom John purchased from the crown for £24,000 [£15.26 million]. The debt was crippling, as even after inheriting the Holland lands from his mother John’s annual income was only £2,250 [£1.43 million].

  In his absence Edmund, after his courtship of Queen Catherine was thwarted, was made Count of Mortain, near the border with Maine in western Normandy, and took service under Bedford. He saw some action in 1427 and a great deal in 1429, a year of multiple English defeats following Jeanne d’Arc’s relief of Orléans, during which Bedford made him a constable of the army. Edmund formed part of the escort for Henry VI from Rouen to Paris for his coronation as king of France in November 1430, during which he first met Richard, Duke of York, at the time a member of the young king’s household.