Battle Royal

by Hugh Bicheno

  Cade’s men crossed the river into London and Exeter ordered Lord Scales, the Keeper of the Tower, to hand over Saye and Cromer for a formal trial at the Guildhall. Cade now lost control of his men, who dragged the two men out of the Guildhall for summary execution. Saye was beheaded at Southwark and Cromer at Mile End, perhaps seeking to tie the Essex contingent to the Kentish men in common guilt. Instead the Essex group, which had not gone through the same process of radicalization, went home. Cade’s men then began behaving like a conquering army and on 8–9 July, after a day of looting and indiscriminate violence, Scales led out the Tower garrison to win back control of London Bridge in a savage battle.

  The next day – very bravely, given that it seemed to be open season on bishops – Cardinal Archbishop John Kemp of York (who had replaced John Stafford, Archbishop of Canterbury, as Lord Chancellor after the fall of Suffolk) and Bishop William Wainflete of Winchester crossed the bridge and persuaded Cade and his men to sign up for a royal pardon. Although Kemp proposed it and prepared the documents, he did so at the instigation of Marguerite.

  The leader of the rebellion signed the pardon as Mortimer, but would be killed as Cade five days later. He fled when a ‘Writ and Proclamation by the King for the Taking of Cade’ was issued shortly after the rebellion, placing a price on his head, and was fatally wounded when resisting arrest on 12 July. His body was brought back to London and underwent a mock trial before being beheaded and quartered. The head was displayed on the bridge he had once crossed in triumph, and his body parts were sent to Blackheath and to Norwich, Salisbury and Gloucester, three cities whose senior clergy had been attacked.

  This was the sole reprisal for the rebellion – the pardons were respected for everyone else who did not rebel again. Kemp emerged from the crisis with his prestige greatly enhanced, and with the deepest respect for Marguerite. It was one of her many great misfortunes that he was to die in the midst of the next great crisis to envelop the Lancastrian regime.

  As reports of these events filtered across the Irish Sea, York became increasingly worried. The fate of his Mortimer ancestors and his father’s death on the block for conspiring to put Edmund Mortimer on the throne were burned into his psyche. Although only 3 years old when his father was executed, York himself had spent the next eight years in the custody of the regicide Robert Waterton. He had every reason to be alarmed that his name was on so many seditious lips, and was enraged to learn that members of the king’s household were seeking to deflect their culpability onto him.

  York also felt that the collective honour of English chivalry had been defiled by the manner in which Somerset surrendered Normandy, the details of which lost nothing in the telling by destitute members of his old Anglo-Norman affinity who came to him in Ireland. They, supported by his chamberlain William Oldhall, fixed in York’s mind the erroneous belief that the uprisings in England were caused by discontent over the loss of Normandy.

  The only real link between Normandy and the disturbances was a widespread belief that the increases in taxation to maintain the province had been misappropriated by the king’s rapacious household. Apart from the displaced Anglo-Normans, few in England felt the humiliation of defeat as strongly as York. For most, including his peers, the Normandy crisis had been like a festering boil, brought to a head by the failure of the king’s misguided peace policy, and lanced by the deposition and murder of Suffolk.

  The Commons still had scores to settle with the king’s government, but these were over money. The parliaments of 1449–51 made the king’s resumption of alienated crown lands and revenues a condition of voting further taxation. Henry fought a rearguard action to protect his household, until he lost his nerve across the board in the face of Cade’s revolt. The murders of Suffolk and Saye did the crown a backhanded favour, as they had indulged the king’s whims so that his household could continue to enjoy its privileges and extortion rackets. With them dead, it was easier for Henry to distance himself from his own previous behaviour.

  One can only keep reality at bay for so long, and the dam broke in 1449−50, taking with it the painfully maintained illusion of the king’s majesty. He was revealed as a rather pitiable figure, not hated but certainly not revered. The loss of crown income from the French provinces was the ultimate reality check, although this was offset to a certain extent by a drastic decrease in military expenditure. The appointment as Lord Treasurer of wealthy John, Baron Beauchamp of Powick, announced an intention to restore order to the royal finances.

  York was one of the magnates most affected, in absolute terms, by the loss of Normandy and the Acts of Resumption, but it was a small proportion of his overall wealth. In relative terms the biggest loser was Somerset, who lost a great deal more than York in Normandy, and who needed those lands to maintain the income required of a duke. Although he lacked the means to develop an affinity, common interest gave him a ready-made following among the minor nobles – particularly those created during the 1440s – who also stood to lose much of their wealth if resumption was pursued too vigorously.

  Once Marguerite recovered from the shock of bereavement following the murder of her father figure Suffolk, she must have looked with very cold eyes indeed on the household men whose failures had exposed her husband’s frailties so cruelly. Henry remained away from London from July to the end of September 1450. At some point the queen joined him at Kenilworth, and brought him back to Westminster in the first week of October.

  She then accompanied him to the palace of William Wainflete at Bishop’s Waltham in Hampshire. She probably suggested the visit to lift Henry’s spirits, as Wainflete was the inspiration and executor for the king’s beloved Eton College project. The royal couple returned to London at the end of October and spent most of the next three months in Westminster, at last attending to business.

  The timings are important, because hindsight permits us to see that the first substantial domino in the descent to civil war fell during this period. Somerset had returned to England in early August with no expectation of further royal favour, but his prospects were transformed when the king learned that York intended to make an unauthorized return from Ireland. Henry must have gone into panic mode again: nothing else can explain why he sent orders to his officers in north Wales and Cheshire to prevent York landing, and to arrest him if he did so.

  Finding other ports closed to him, York landed at his lordship of Denbigh in north-east Wales on 7 September 1450 and proceeded south to Shrewsbury, in Shropshire. There, on the 12th, he met John Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, his namesake son Baron Lisle, and Lord Lionel Welles, a Lincolnshire baron who had married John Beaufort’s widow. We do not know why they were there and what was said, but after the meeting York sent a letter to the king, explaining his reason for returning: ‘I have been informed that diverse language has been said of me to your most excellent estate which should sound to my dishonour and reproach, and charge of my person.’

  After asserting his unqualified loyalty, he humbly requested the king to permit him to confront his detractors and clear his name. The letter came too late. On 11 September Henry appointed Somerset as Constable of England, a post previously held by the totally loyal and militarily unsullied Duke of Buckingham. Possibly Buckingham had tried to reason the king out of his panic, and had resisted the move towards confrontation. The appointment also offended John Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk and hereditary Earl Marshal, who was outraged to be made subordinate to a man he despised.

  York learned of this and more when he reached the capital of his Marcher lordships at Ludlow, and his second letter to the king was considerably less conciliatory. In it he demanded an explanation why orders had been given to arrest him and for a jury to be empanelled to indict him for treason. He also alleged that orders had been issued to imprison his stewards Walter Devereux and Edmund Mulso, and to execute his chamberlain, William Oldhall.

  All these allegations appear to be true, and confirm that the king and his entourage had convinced themselves that York was
bent on seizing the throne. The murder of William Tresham, Speaker of the 1449–50 Parliament, while travelling to meet York wearing the king’s livery chain, further fed their paranoia. In fact Tresham’s killing was carried out by retainers of Lord Edmund Grey of Ruthyn (whom last we saw involved in the Ampthill dispute) over yet another Bedfordshire property dispute. Henry fled to Kenilworth again.

  By the time York reached London in late September, the die was cast. He was received graciously when the king returned (pausing at St Albans to learn if it was safe to do so), but the presence of Somerset was a red rag. York issued a widely circulated ‘bill’, in effect a manifesto, which echoed the terms of the Kentish petition and requested full authority to salvage the regime from enemies internal and external.

  Although York’s bill was a blunt assertion of the king’s incompetence to choose his own ministers, Henry did not reject it outright. As usual flinching from face-to-face confrontation, he had said nothing during their meeting, but replied in writing that the duke’s request would be put to the Chancellor, and promised a greater role in government for a ‘sad [solemn] and substantial council in which we have appointed you to be one’.

  Marguerite had a good relationship with Duchess Cecily, dating back to their first meeting at Rouen in 1444, and must have suspected the arrest orders of August–September were a tactical error on Henry’s part. However, now that he was overcompensating for his earlier weakness, she would have prudently kept her views to herself. After learning that York’s primary purpose had been to clear his name, and that his demands had only hardened in response to the king’s appointment of Somerset as Constable of England, she may have regretted not being more forthcoming with her husband.

  Sadly, there was now no going back. York had thrown down the gauntlet and it remained to be seen what support he commanded from his peers and the Commons. It may be that Marguerite proposed the visit to Bishop’s Waltham not only to get her brittle husband away from the febrile atmosphere at Westminster, but also to show confidence in Somerset by giving him a free hand to rally a household unmanned by mortal terror.

  VIII

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  House of Neville

  Among the strongest supporters of Henry VI’s prerogative to choose his own ministers were the father and son Earls of Salisbury and Warwick. They were to play a decisive role in the Wars of the Roses, and Warwick has gone down in history as ‘the Kingmaker’. They were the junior branch of the great northern Neville clan, and owed their rise to national prominence to a combination of relentless dynastic ambition and astoundingly good fortune.

  The Nevilles also owed much to Henry VI’s favour, and the large retinues they brought to London in June 1450 played an important part in quelling disorder and securing the capital. Salisbury and Warwick remained in London for the rest of 1450, seeking to ensure that the lands they held by favour of the king were exempted by him from the Acts of Resumption passed by Parliament. This brought them into collision with York after he demanded wholesale resumption as a first step to restoring good governance.

  Consequently they supported Somerset as a less-bad alternative to the ‘sad and substantial council’ promised by the king, in which York’s influence might have predominated, as it already did in the Commons. York’s chamberlain William Oldhall – whom the king had ordered hanged earlier in 1450 – had been elected Speaker in replacement of the murdered Tresham. Although nobody could have predicted it at the time, Oldhall’s election marked the high tide of York’s campaign to be formally recognized as the heir presumptive, and to make himself the king’s chief minister. It would ebb quickly.

  The Duke of Norfolk, who had struggled against the Suffolk affinity in East Anglia and the South East, and wanted the king’s household purged of its remaining members, supported York. However, ranged against them were lords outraged by York’s solidarity with the Kentish petition. These included the Duke of Buckingham, whose palace at Penshurst had been attacked, and Lord Scales, who had battled Cade on London Bridge. The defection of Scales, long one of York’s councillors and godfather to Edward, his eldest son, was painful.

  In addition, York’s determination to ruin Somerset through acts of resumption earned him the opposition of all the other lords who stood to lose from them. Among the minor peers ranged against York, one who stood out both as a Kentish lord and as one who owed everything to royal favour was Richard Woodville, recently created Lord Rivers thanks mainly to the fact that his wife, Jacquetta, had been Queen Marguerite’s lady-in-waiting since 1444.

  On 1 December 1450 Yorkist supporters (presumably Anglo-Normans) attempted to kill Somerset at his lodgings at the Dominican monastery of Blackfriars, which the mob looted on finding him gone. The next day York rode in with a large force of retainers to restore order. He arrested one of the ringleaders and handed him over to the king, who passed him on to Salisbury for execution. York also lodged Somerset in the Tower, and then had him spirited away by river on a barge belonging to the Earl of Devon. Despite York’s prompt action the damage was done and his standing as the champion of good order was tarnished.

  It all went downhill for him very quickly in the new year. As a first step to undermine York’s influence the king – no doubt at the urging of Somerset – nominated York to a commission charged with conducting assizes in order to quell continuing unrest in Kent. If he obeyed the king’s summons he would lose popular support, so York did nothing. Then, at the end of January, another Kentish rebellion was sparked by a man who had been a member of York’s household in Ireland, who revived the fears of royal retribution that had sparked Cade’s rebellion, and once again portrayed York as the man to restore good governance.

  The king at last acted decisively, riding into Kent with Somerset, Exeter, Shrewsbury, Lisle, Roos and Cromwell, the last now anxious to disassociate himself from York. According to William Gregory, Mayor of London in 1451, they conducted assizes at Canterbury that concentrated on punishing those of Cade’s men who had rebelled again after taking the king’s pardon, and for:

  Having more favour towards the Duke of York than to the king, and the condemned men were drawn hanged and quartered. Nine men were beheaded, at the same time, at Rochester, their heads sent to London at the king’s command, and all set upon London Bridge; and at another time twelve heads were similarly brought to London at the king’s command. Men in Kent call it the harvest of heads.

  On return to London, the king dispensed with all talk of a ‘sad and substantial council’ and York found himself increasingly marginalized. In part this was because the French had embarked on the conquest of Guyenne and Gascony, and to continue to remonstrate with the king about the loss of Normandy would have seemed unpatriotic. Somerset was appointed Captain of Calais and Lord Rivers was commissioned to assemble reinforcements to send to Guyenne in Devon.

  When Parliament was summoned in early May to vote money for Rivers’ expedition, Thomas Young, one of York’s MPs, tried to link the funds to a declaration that his master was the heir presumptive. This led to Young’s arrest, the suspension of Parliament, and a series of measures making it abundantly clear that the king not only rejected York’s pretension to become his first minister, but also intended to exclude him from any role in his government whatsoever. The worm had turned with a vengeance.

  A high proportion of all the peers and peers’ offspring killed in battle or executed during the Wars of the Roses were first- or second-generation descendants of Ralph Neville, 1st Earl of Westmorland. Furthermore, it is improbable that tensions would have escalated to full-blown civil war if Henry VI had retained the loyalty of the main branch of the Nevilles.

  There was a Beaufort ingredient in this mix, as well. Within months of the death of his first wife in 1396, Ralph married 18-year-old Joan Beaufort, sister of the future cardinal and a recent widow with two daughters of her own. Joan captivated her 32-year-old second husband, bore him fourteen children, and had him wrapped around her little finger.

  Three years af
ter their marriage, Joan’s half-brother Henry IV seized the throne. Although Ralph owed his title to Richard II, he supported Henry’s usurpation and held the North for him against the rebellious Percy clan in 1403, 1405 and 1408. Finally, in 1415, while Henry V was away on the Agincourt campaign, Ralph defeated an invading Scots army much larger than his own at Yeavering in Northumberland.

  Ralph’s family by his first marriage did not stand a chance against Joan. John, Ralph’s eldest son from his first marriage and heir to the earldom of Westmorland, agreed a settlement sometime before his death in 1420, whereby he would inherit only the ancestral Neville castles and manors of Raby and Brancepeth in Durham.

  Richard, Joan’s eldest son by Ralph, got almost everything else – which by 1425, when his father died, was a great deal. He became the largest secular lord in Yorkshire with his seat at Sheriff Hutton, and the largest in the county of Richmondshire with his seat at Middleham. He also inherited the wardenship of the West March with his seat at Penrith in Cumberland, and the stewardship of most of the northern duchy of Lancaster estates.

  Ralph added to his second family’s prosperity by means of matrimonial larceny. He married William, his third son by Joan, to the feeble-minded heiress of the barony of Fauconberg. After the death of his brother, Baron Latimer by marriage, he claimed the title and took effective possession of the lands of the barony, both assigned to George, his fourth son. He married his fifth son, Edward, to Elizabeth Beauchamp, Baroness Bergavenny by right. He also used his influence to accelerate the ecclesiastical career of his second son, Robert, who became Bishop of Salisbury at the age of 23 in 1427, two years after Ralph’s death.