Battle Royal

by Hugh Bicheno

  York did not, therefore, approach the ‘over-mighty subject’ standard set by John of Gaunt. There was no reason for Henry VI’s entourage to regard him as even a potential threat until, the king being still childless, he became the heir presumptive following the death of Gloucester in 1447. Initially York was treated with deference, and he was described as a ‘great prince of our blood’ in a royal commission of May 1436, by which he was first appointed the king’s Lieutenant of Normandy following the death of Bedford.

  The appointment pitched him into a potential disaster. As we saw in Chapter 2, Edmund Beaufort’s separate expedition, funded by his uncle Cardinal Beaufort, which might have drawn French forces to the west, was diverted to the Calais theatre, where Gloucester was confronting the treaty-breaking Duke of Burgundy. Meanwhile the French had recaptured Paris and most of the Île-de-France, and had taken the Channel port of Dieppe and its hinterland along the eastern flank of Normandy.

  The forces York brought with him permitted Talbot, whom he appointed Marshal of France, to blunt the French offensive. He himself led a campaign to restore English authority in the rebellious Pays de Caux, the large area between the northern Seine valley and the Channel. York’s principal contribution, however, was political and administrative. He restored the shaken confidence of the Norman Estates General, and in the process of stripping out reinforcements for Talbot he imposed discipline on predatory English garrisons. He inherited Bedford’s military and administrative staff, and continued his custom of hearing grievances in person, assuming the role of viceroy without having been authorized to do so.

  Neither in 1436−7 nor during his second lieutenancy in 1441−5 did York command men in battle. His was the leadership of an able administrator and an even-handed magistrate, who chose good subordinates and made sure they stayed good. Although he did not command the tribal loyalty that exalts the warrior prince, he was widely respected. He had a clear idea of how things should be done, but a high sense of his own worth made him a poor politician. He also regarded greed and corruption with lofty disdain, which made him no friends among his less high-minded peers.

  After Talbot went home following the 1436 campaign, York appointed Richard Neville, Earl of Salisbury and his wife Cecily’s oldest brother, as his military lieutenant. York had already requested permission to return home, and although his successor Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, was nominated in May 1437, he did not relieve York until November. Salisbury came at the request of Warwick, with whom he had recently concluded a double matrimonial alliance, but it gave York and his brother-in-law – who was eleven years his senior – an opportunity to get to know each other.

  York cited the expiry of the indentures of the men he had brought with him and the inability of the Norman exchequer to cover the cost of renewing them as the reason for wishing to relinquish his post. He was substantially out of pocket, as by the terms of his own indenture he was supposed to be reimbursed from the Norman exchequer, which was now bankrupt.

  When Warwick and his wife died in April 1439, Salisbury returned to England to administer their estate and to look after his own children’s interest in the succession, which was to keep him busy through the next decade. Asked to resume the lieutenancy, York demanded and was granted a promise of an annual subsidy of £20,000 [£12.72 million] from the English exchequer, plus the viceregal powers previously enjoyed by the Duke of Bedford.

  Although York was unable to recruit the nobles summoned by Parliament, a trio of effective field commanders were already in place. William Neville, Baron Fauconberg, another brother-in-law, had come with York in 1436 and was now Lieutenant-General of central Normandy. Thomas, Baron Scales, had spent his entire adult life in Normandy and was marshal and Lieutenant-General of western Normandy. York was to make him godfather to Edward, his eldest son.

  However the star, once again, was the newly returned Talbot, 53 years old in 1440. He had fought in Wales and Ireland before first being sent to Normandy in 1420 to separate him from the violent disputes with his peers in which he revelled. York now handed him the troops he had brought with him from England, and also thinned the Norman garrisons to provide him with additional forces. His role was to deal with the eastern sector, facing the main French thrust. Talbot’s fast-moving 1441 campaign was a tactical masterpiece that demoralized Charles VII’s new army and came close to capturing the king himself.

  In early 1442, anticipating the French would renew their offensive, York sent Talbot to England to request urgent reinforcements. This was the only period when the king devoted his full attention to events in France, and he gave Talbot all he asked for. He also created him Earl of Shropshire (although he became known as the Earl of Shrewsbury), and recreated the barony of Lisle for his namesake son. Talbot’s expedition did not, however, deliver the hoped-for returns. Royal enthusiasm for the strategy pursued by York and Talbot waned, leading to John Beaufort’s ill-fated 1443 expedition.

  On 28 April 1442 Cecily gave birth to the future Edward IV. Given the dynastic significance later attached to the circumstances of his birth, they repay close consideration. The marriage had been barren for ten years when Anne was born in August 1439 in Fotheringhay, York’s Northamptonshire castle. After the couple moved to Rouen, baby Henry was born in February 1441, but died unbaptised. Edward was baptized immediately after birth, without ceremony, in a side chapel of Rouen Cathedral. By contrast, after the next boy, Edmund, was born in May 1443, his baptism was a lavish occasion for public celebration.

  Nine months before Edward’s birth, York had been dealing with the Pays de Caux rebellion. He could perhaps have made a brief but fruitful visit to Cecily at Rouen in late July 1441, but many years later Edward’s youngest brothers (George, born in Dublin in 1449, and Richard, born at Fotheringhay in 1452) were in no doubt that Edward was the product of their mother’s adultery. In 1483 the Italian chronicler Dominic Mancini was told that when Cecily learned of Edward’s secret marriage to the commoner Elizabeth Woodville in 1464, she ‘fell into a frenzy’ and threatened to expose him as illegitimate.

  One has only to contrast the depiction, from life, of York in the book Talbot presented to Marguerite at Rouen in 1445, with portraits of Edward IV to doubt they could have been father and son. Furthermore, when Edward IV’s skeleton was measured in 1789 it was found he was 6ft 4in, much the tallest monarch in English history, and built in proportion. Following the recent discovery of the skeleton of York’s namesake youngest, the future Richard III, we know he was slightly built and were it not for severe scoliosis, which reduced his standing height below 5ft, would have been about 5ft 8in. This corresponds closely with a contemporary description of his father as small, dark and ‘spare’. Height is almost entirely hereditary, and although there are other cases where short men have had immensely taller sons, there are compelling reasons to doubt that this was one of them.

  Cecily, bereft and vulnerable after the death of baby Henry and left alone while York was fire-fighting the 1441 crisis, may well have looked for comfort from someone else. Perhaps the individual was indeed a strapping archer called Blaybourne, named in 1469 by her nephew Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, without contradiction from her son George, allied with him at the time against Edward. However, the most persuasive indication that Edward was a cuckoo is York’s coldness towards him. When they fled England in October 1459 he took Edmund with him to Ireland while Edward, the heir he should have wanted by his side, went with the Nevilles to Calais.

  So much of what followed fits the cuckoo hypothesis that to reject it requires the greater leap of faith. Had York denounced Cecily’s adultery it would have made him a laughing stock and would have caused a rift with both the Nevilles and the Beauforts. Conversely, by not doing so, he put his haughty wife in his debt. Perhaps working on the principle that if he kept Cecily pregnant she could not cuckold him again, he made sure she bore him Edmund a year later, and Elizabeth the following year.

  Following the failure of John Beaufort’s expedition
the king veered back to York, paying the £20,000 due to him at the end of 1443 unusually promptly. The truce negotiated at Tours in May 1444 greatly reduced York’s military expenses and permitted him to exercise a benevolent government that won him the lasting loyalty of the Anglo-Normans. Although he was not paid his dues for 1444, he was granted an appanage (a form of tenure traditionally awarded to younger sons of the French monarchy) of lands around Évreux in south central Normandy, worth £650 [£413,400] a year. In 1445 the king also gave his consent for York to pass his earldoms of March and Cambridge to Edward, and Rutland to Edmund, and even endowed Edmund with lands to go with what was an otherwise hollow title.

  York was never a member of a supposed ‘war party’ led by the Duke of Gloucester – who was anyway, by this time, a spent force. To the contrary, he fully embraced the alternative strategy accomplished by Suffolk at Tours in May 1444 and, as we have seen, organized a lavish reception for Marguerite d’Anjou at Rouen early in 1445. He also sent troops to support a 1444 French invasion of Alsace in 1444, led by the dauphin. Nor did he voice any criticism of the king’s decision to appease Charles VII with the cession of Maine – which was, after all, Edmund Beaufort’s fief.

  The reason York returned to England in September 1445 was straightforward: he was owed a great deal of money, his indentures were about to expire and he would not renew them unless his own contract was honoured. It was not a case of abandoning a sinking ship: Normandy was at peace, he was enjoying his viceregal role and was willing to resume it. At the suggestion of the king, he had even opened negotiations for a marriage between his son Edward and Princess Madeleine, Charles VII’s youngest daughter.

  York’s claim of £38,666 [£24.6 million] in arrears was a bargaining position. In the end he settled for £26,000 [£16.54 million] plus the borough of Waltham in Essex and the wardship of his 17-year-old son-in-law Henry Holland, who became Duke of Exeter when his father died in 1447. As a descendant of Edward III through both John of Gaunt and Thomas of Woodstock, Holland’s claim to being the heir presumptive after Gloucester’s death was as good as, and in Holland’s opinion better than, York’s. The king’s consent to the marriage between Holland and York’s 8-year-old daughter Anne in 1445 had been a mark of unqualified trust.

  Unable to obtain the terms he wanted to return to Normandy, York had no reason to object to the appointment of Edmund Beaufort, and, in the light of subsequent events, must have judged he was well out of it. Nor was he necessarily piqued not to be granted a prominent role in government, as he would have been well aware of Suffolk’s magpie-like attitude to power, and of the king’s aversion to disagreement. As it was, he attended numerous Council meetings and was a witness to most of the charters issued in 1446–8.

  In mid-1446 Bishop Adam Moleyns, Bishop of Chichester, Lord Privy Seal and a key member of the king’s inner circle, attempted to attribute the deteriorating situation in Normandy to York’s mismanagement. The duke petitioned the king to clear his name and in reply, Moleyns swore he never said such a thing, nor would he of a prince as eminent and highly respected as York. He had merely, he said, reported the opinion of unspecified others. This was, perhaps, a shabby bargaining ploy in the negotiation of the crown’s outstanding debt to York – but if so, it was singularly ill-advised.

  York was appointed Lord Lieutenant of Ireland in July 1447. It has been argued that this posting was intended to ‘get him out of the way’, but it manifestly did not. He was permitted to appoint a deputy and did so, not moving to Dublin until two years later. By that time the writing was on the wall for Normandy. Like many of his peers, York wisely sought to put as much distance as possible between himself and the doomed Suffolk administration.

  Trying to pacify Ireland was like ploughing the sea, but in the fourteen months York was there he received the submissions of several Irish clan leaders, and showed ‘good lordship’ to his tenants in Ulster. He also ensured the election of one of Queen Marguerite’s chaplains to the archbishopric of Dublin, and sided with James Butler, Earl of Ormonde, in his bitter dispute with Thomas Fitzgerald over the succession to the earldom of Kildare. This was a politically astute display of deference on York’s part: Ormonde’s namesake son was a member of Henry’s inner circle, and was created Earl of Wiltshire the same month that York finally moved to Dublin.

  Although hindsight permits us to see some straws in the wind, there is no evidence before 1450 that Richard of York was anything other than a loyal subject, who benefited greatly from the king’s ‘good lordship’, or that the king’s councillors believed him to be a threat even after he became the heir presumptive. Ironically, the break came about because, by governing Normandy and Ireland competently in the king’s name, he won a reputation around which those who had suffered as a result of the king’s fecklessness could rally.

  *1 Richard also inherited York’s earldom of Rutland, a landless, courtesy title.

  *2 From the table in Peter Karsten, The Military-State-Society Symbiosis.

  V

  * * *

  Faction and Feud

  It was not only in France that Henry’s dithering unwillingness to deal with inconvenient reality created a combustible situation. Failure to impose order on his unruly nobles, and to restrain the rapacity of his household, undermined royal authority at home as well. During the 1440s, fear of legal retribution eroded to the point that nobles and knights increasingly resorted to arms in territorial disputes and competition for local influence.

  The most serious breakdown was in the West Country, where a local rivalry was inflamed by Henry’s intervention. In 1441, he awarded the prestigious stewardship of the royal duchy of Cornwall to Thomas Courtenay, 13th Earl of Devon, a descendant of Edward I and husband to Margaret Beaufort, Henry VI’s aunt. This was the year Eleanor Cobham, the Duke of Gloucester’s wife, was convicted of witchcraft and Devon’s appointment was just one of several similar awards designed to affirm the Beaufort clan at a national level.

  The rather large fly in the ointment was that the office had previously been awarded, for life, to William Bonville, a member of Suffolk’s affinity. Bonville was the most prominent of a group of gentry and lesser nobility whose influence in the West Country had grown during Devon’s long minority (1422−33), when his mother devoted her best efforts to frustrating her son. She continued to reside at Tiverton, the seat of the earls of Devon, and to control half the revenues from the estate until her death in 1441.

  Bonville’s second marriage, in 1427, was to Margaret Courtenay, widow of John, Baron Harington, and daughter of the 12th Earl of Devon – hence Thomas Courtenay’s aunt. Bonville also married his namesake son from his first marriage to Margaret Courtenay’s daughter from hers.*1 From Devon’s point of view, it was bad enough that Bonville had gained so much from marriage with his own family. What made it all the more galling was that the dowager duchess’s occupation of Tiverton obliged him to make his residence at Colcombe Castle, 2 miles from Bonville’s main residence at Shute, which he had obtained by his marriage to Courtenay’s aunt.

  The Earl of Devon saw the appointment of Bonville in 1437 as royal steward in Cornwall for life as reflecting the government’s belief that his rival was now the pre-eminent political figure in the West Country. Despite the erosion of his family’s status, however, Devon’s electoral and legal patronage remained more extensive than Bonville’s. To prove the point he sent his retainers out to provoke Bonville’s, secure in the knowledge he could frustrate any legal recourse by his rival.

  Low intensity brawling began in 1439 and continued into 1441 despite a feeble royal attempt at arbitration. This was when the king appointed Devon to the stewardship of Cornwall, without revoking his prior grant to Bonville. Although the new appointment was promptly withdrawn, it was a classic illustration of the king’s unerring instinct for getting the worst of both worlds. The consequences could have been more immediately dire had chance not intervened through the death of Devon’s mother. Being able at last to take up residen
ce at Tiverton Castle seems to have mollified him. In December 1441 Devon and Bonville were formally reconciled and required to post bonds for future good behaviour.

  It is not clear whether Bonville renounced the stewardship of Cornwall, but Courtenay was definitely re-awarded it in 1444. Bonville, meanwhile, had been appointed seneschal (steward) of Gascony and sailed to Bordeaux in March 1443, not returning to Devon permanently until 1447. Possibly he judged the Cornwall office not worth the aggravation and concentrated instead on strengthening his political connections. He was with Suffolk at the betrothal of Marguerite d’Anjou in May 1444, and married his eldest daughter to William Tailboys, a member of the king’s household and Suffolk’s most notorious henchman.

  As a living embodiment of the collapse of the rule of law under Henry VI, Tailboys almost merits a chapter in his own right. He was a wealthy man with estates in Lincolnshire and in Northumberland, where he owned the large moorland estate of Redesdale. Yet he chose to become the leader of a gang of thugs that rampaged through southern Lincolnshire during most of the 1440s. He overreached himself in March 1448 when he assaulted a servant of Robert, Baron Willoughby, who had the influence to get writs issued against Tailboys and his followers. Suffolk, however, prevailed on the sheriff of Lincolnshire not to enforce them.

  Tailboys also developed a murderous hatred of Ralph, Baron Cromwell, another major Lincolnshire lord and a member of Richard of York’s ducal council. In 1443 Tailboys’ patron, Suffolk, had forced Cromwell to resign as Lord Treasurer after ten years’ service, and Cromwell returned the favour by leading parliamentary attacks on Suffolk. Incensed by this, in November 1449 Tailboys physically assaulted Cromwell as he emerged from Parliament.