This Sceptred Isle

by Christopher Lee

  The Welsh harried, the Scots harried; but for Henry, the villain was in his own land and that villain was inevitably a Percy. The Percys ruled the north, were the lords of the Northern Marches and, most importantly, were the Northumberlands. Chief thorn in Henry’s mind was the Earl’s son Hotspur. As Lords of the Marches, the Percys had long protected the borders from the Scots and not always in the king’s interest but in their own as well. But if we think the individual ambition to protect their own lands from the raiders was justification to be suspicious of the Percys, then we should look deeper. The Percys had, after all, joined with Henry when he had landed in Yorkshire to claim his rights as John of Gaunt’s son. King Henry’s suspicion fell upon Hotspur’s brother-in-law, Edmund Mortimer. He had hired out soldiers to Glyndŵr. The king’s suspicion could not be ignored. Hotspur rose to challenge that charge and declared against the King. The romantic figure of Hotspur was to die; at the battle of Shrewsbury on 21 July 1403, Henry IV killed him.

  Hotspur’s father had no alternative but to bow at the knee. But he did not bow his heart. Others joined him in rebellion including the considerable figure of the Archbishop of York, Richard le Scrope (1350–1405). Scrope had been moved from Lichfield to York by Richard II in 1398. He was, as Archbishop of the Northern Province, close to the Percys. Nevertheless, he does not appear in the lists of rebellion when Henry IV overthrew Richard II. No one could be apolitical in such a high office, but Scrope was not, by reputation of his history a plotter. It is true that he officiated at Henry’s coronation, but by then that may have been prudence rather than politics. One respectable theory is that old Northumberland, seeking revenge for the death of Hotspur, convinced Scrope that the King was not to be supported. Scrope, with the nineteen-year-old Lord Mowbray, found himself leading a not very good army under the general command of Northumberland. At some point, Northumberland abandoned them. At Shipton Moor Scrope was confronted by a superior royalist army. He ended up first in Pontefract Castle, then at his own palace, Bishopsthorpe. Archbishop Arundel warned the King that, as a clergyman, Scrope should be tried for treason only by Parliament or the Pope himself. Henry ignored the ecclesiastic plea and Scrope was executed on 8 June 1405. The execution of a priest was normally unforgiveable. But we are here, at a moment of great schism in the Church. If there had been only one Pope at the time, Henry IV would probably have been excommunicated for Scrope’s execution. But the schism in the Church had left a Pope in Rome and a Pope in Avignon. Henry supported the Roman Pope, but if he punished Henry, the King might defect to Avignon. So, although the Church protested, Henry remained its child.

  By 1408 the Earl of Northumberland was dead, killed in battle against the King’s men at Bramham Moor, and Henry’s England was free from uprising if not from malcontents. But the King had leprosy. It was agreed among the courtiers, the Bishop of Winchester and Henry’s eldest son, also Henry, that the King should abdicate. Henry would never agree to that, but his stubbornness hardly mattered. He returned to the capital and died at Westminster in 1413. Henry IV left behind a country lacking unity and woefully in debt, and therefore dependent upon the goodwill and mercy of its magnates.

  The new King, a young man of twenty-five, almost immediately led his country towards the one thing that might have brought order and even unity: war with France. Before that could get under way, Henry V had to demonstrate if not magnitude then a sense of pragmatism. He proclaimed a pardon for old adversaries; he made a deal with the Scots for the release of Hotspur’s offspring and declared him Earl of Northumberland; he pardoned his cousin Edmund Mortimer who had connived with Scrope; he spectacularly brought what were said to be the remains of Richard II to London and had them placed with honour in Westminster Abbey; and, most wisely, he promised Parliament that whatever he had in mind, only Parliament could give the ultimate authority to a law being enacted. Henry V thus got his funding for his expeditionary force to France.

  In 1415, Henry and his archers were on the road to Agincourt. Even in the medieval age, national unity tended to be a consequence of foreign war, but only as long as the foreign war was won and didn’t cost too much in gold or in lives. Also, in this particular case, the English King had lucrative, and family, possessions and titles in France, and, like his forebears, he wished to fight to maintain or increase them. Moreover, the French had aligned themselves with the Scots and even with the Welsh. And Henry V appeared to believe in a sense of divine support, if not right. He seemed convinced that it was his task to conquer France and then lead soldiers from both nations on the great Crusade to recover Jerusalem.

  And so Henry claimed his right to the throne of France. The French were weak from civil conflict between the Burgundians and the Orléanists, the Royalists. The latter offered Henry a large part of Aquitaine, 850,000 crowns and Catherine, the daughter of King Charles VI. Henry was also negotiating with the Burgundians to let him enter France in safety, and he promised that he would take their side against the Orléanists if they would support his claim to the throne. On 11 August, in what was a considerable naval fleet, Henry began transporting 10,000 men across the Channel. Within the month, Harfleur was overcome. Not all was so easy with his large army. As is so often the case in the theatre of war, there were many more casualties from disease than wounds. Henry pared his army and sent thousands back to the English south coast. Then with some 1,000 knights and soldiers and 4,000 archers, he began the trek to Calais – the English stronghold on the northern coast.

  When they arrived close by Agincourt, this small English force was met by at least six times that number of French cavalry, footsoldiers and crossbowmen. There were perhaps 20,000 French cavalry and foot-soldiers, although one chronicler says there were, eventually, 60,000 French soldiers, but it would not have been possible to organize them all as a fighting force in that small area. There was parley during which Henry offered to return Harfleur. The French wanted him to give up all claim to the throne of France. This he would not do. Battle was joined. Henry’s bowmen pierced the confusion of French horsemen and foot soldiers and left them dead. Those captured stood and waited philosophically and maybe in relief, for this was medieval warfare when knights could easily be taken and then returned shortly after a ransom according to rank was paid. But then came the most unchivalrous calamity. The English feared they had been attacked from the rear and so ordered the prisoners to be slaughtered. It was a massacre of terrible proportions. The battlefield was a terrible French charnel house open to the skies. The English lost perhaps fewer than 300, the French, maybe 6,000, including slaughtered prisoners. The English army was so weakened by the campaign that it struggled to reach the safety of Calais. In the following month, November 1415, Henry V returned to England. He was the hero the nation had longed for.

  However, Henry’s own ambitions were not realized and for the next two years he set out to overcome Normandy by siege and steady attrition. An agreement was reached that Henry would indeed marry Catherine, the daughter of Charles VI, and at Charles’ death, Henry would become King of France. Henry and Catherine were married in June 1420. But by now Henry was desperate for a conclusion to the war. He took just one day’s honeymoon before he returned to the conflict. Exhausted, and vulnerable to disease, he was dead two years later. The hero, the wise and true Englishman, Henry V, left a united England and a miserable France. But the cost of victory had to be paid long after the bells finished chiming, and the new King, Henry VI, was but nine months old.

  Physically, Henry VI was weak. Mentally, he was probably simple; on some occasions, obviously so. He never much changed during his forty or so years on the throne. And when he was fifty, he was murdered.

  Henry V had wanted his brother, the good Duke Humphrey of Gloucester, to be Regent of England but the magnates of England had other ideas. They wanted the chance to run the country without a king, without a strong leader. Gloucester was given the title Protector, but the country was really in the hands of an aristocratic council and the seemingly inevitable str
uggle for influence. Henry VI never had the measure of this council. As for the war in France, Parliament took the view that the longer the war, the more campaigns to finance; the more territory gained, the more to administer, the greater the costs. And because the territories were so ravaged by war, they were quite incapable of generating anything for their own upkeep, never mind supporting the English forces and camp followers.

  The infant Henry VI knew little of this. Seven years later, in 1429, he was thought old enough to be crowned King of England. There was nothing special about the coronation. The English were used to boy-kings. They were also used to going to war. The coffers were usually bare but, however reluctantly, the business of intrigue and defending lands continued. The English were being held up on the southward march through France by the Armagnac possession of Orléans. Under the Earl of Salisbury they laid siege to the town. It wasn’t much of a siege. The English force was weak, badly supplied and in bad mood when the Earl himself was killed.

  It was at this siege that Joan of Arc made her famous appearance. She had, so it was said, a vision and she heard voices. And in March 1429, Joan of Arc went to the court of the Dauphin and told him of those voices and the message that he would be crowned King in Rheims. But first she had to deal with the English who, depleted and war-weary, fell back at Orléans. Joan of Arc then led the still sceptical Dauphin through Champagne, took Troyes and Châlons, and, on 17 July, as the voices had promised, the Dauphin was crowned King Charles VII in Rheims Cathedral.

  The Maid of Orléans believed her mission completed. She wanted no more of war. She wanted to go home but the court would not let her. In May 1430 she was captured by the Burgundians and sold to the English for 10,000 gold francs. The French King made no attempt to rescue her. She was burned to death on 30 May 1431. Four years on, Burgundy had abandoned the English for France. The war was a simple line of retreat for the English. In 1449 the French took Rouen and then defeated the English at Castillon in 1453. The Hundred Years War was effectively at an end, which was just as well because two years later, the English were at war with themselves in the Wars of the Roses.

  The conflict was a war of dynasties. On one side was the Beaufort family, bastard descendants of John of Gaunt and therefore Lancastrians (as was the King). On the other side was the King, Henry VI – kindly, soft, soon to be judged insane – and his new bride, Margaret. She was the seventeen-year-old Margaret of Anjou, married to Henry in a two-year truce with France. Margaret was a remarkable woman. She championed the Beauforts, set herself against the Duke of Gloucester, had him arrested and, so many believe, arranged his death.

  The politics were complex but the ambitions were simple. The factions that had, at the start of the King’s reign, fought for control of the government, now fought for the throne. Against this background, the country was in turmoil for another reason. In 1450 the Kentish rebellion led by Jack Cade was protesting against the government’s incompetence and oppressive taxes. His demands were prefaced by his plea that the monarch would rule honourably and that his people would defend the nation as the sovereign willed. But this peaceful and reasonable declaration is misleading. Cade and his henchmen believed that the King was surrounded by evildoers – persons of malice, he declared. He implied that the King broke the law at his will, but followed this with the satire that this surely could not be so because the King had sworn an oath that he would rule honourably. As to the sense of uprising that was abroad in the whole land, Cade said that the rumour-mongers at court were saying that the people were out to destroy the King’s friends and, after that, then the King himself and, once that was done, bring the good Duke of York to the throne:

  We will that all men know we blame not all the lords, nor all those that are about the king’s person, nor all gentlemen nor yeomen, nor all men of law, nor all bishops, nor all priests, but all such as may be found guilty by just and true inquiry and by the law. We will that it be known we will not rob, nor plunder, nor steal, but that these defaults be amended, and then we will go home.24

  This sounded reasonable. In practice, rebellion rarely replaces unreason with reason. In Cade’s rebellion, local grievances were brought out and displayed as part of the uprising. Barons and bishops were beheaded. Poles bore the heads of the once comfortable.

  Cade’s uprising was a simple, violent illustration of the breaking down of law and order. The anger towards those who governed was great enough to spark violence and a belief that demands would be met. Cade’s rebellion began on the day William Aiscough (or Ainscough), Bishop of Salisbury, was murdered by his own parishioners at Edington, suggesting local grievances as well as support for Cade’s wider rebellion. Another bishop, Adam Moleyns, Bishop of Chichester, was murdered by sailors in Portsmouth when he arrived to give them their backpay. The sailors were angry because the Bishop confessed to another’s crime. He admitted (or so they said) that the late Duke of Suffolk had plotted for a French invasion, that he had sold the French details of English defences and had been bribed to prevent English armies going to France. The navy, or possibly a pirate, caught up with Suffolk and beheaded him in a long boat. As for Cade, he was eventually chased off and killed during a skirmish at Heathfield in Sussex in 1450.

  Then, in 1453, the King went mad, or that is the lore of it. The King found his memory gone on too many occasions and his nature that of a child. What could be done? Queen Margaret saw her role as Protector of the Lancastrian cause. Yet it would be hard for her to raise forces to enforce that claim. Then, on 13 October of that year she gave birth, or so it was said, to a son who would be next in line to the Lancastrian throne. But there were suspicions that the new prince, Edward, Prince of Wales, was not the King’s son. However, it was also clear that the King was incapable of ruling. The power of the Duke of York – father of the future Richard III – in the Council was sufficient that, in March 1454, he, and not Queen Margaret, was declared Protector. For more than a year, he was monarch in all but title. But then, in 1455, the King recovered his wits. Queen Margaret was ready to do battle. So was York. By May of that year the Queen’s closest ally, Edmund, Duke of Somerset, was killed, and the King was taken prisoner. Margaret’s screams for revenge echoed about the House of Lancaster. The Wars of the Roses had started.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  1455–85

  The Wars of the Roses spread over thirty years. But they weren’t, as is sometimes imagined, one long war. Nor did anyone at the time call it this. The common title was introduced in the nineteenth century in Sir Walter Scott’s novel set in the Middle Ages, Anne of Geierstein, or The Maiden of the Mist (1829). There is an oblique reference to roses in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 1, but nothing more than that. The idea that the roses were the only symbols does not stand up. The protagonists wore the various symbols of their leaders. Who fought is supposedly a simple matter but it too has its ambiguities. On one side was the House of Lancaster; on the other, the House of York; but the houses of York and Lancaster came from the same dynasty, the same family tree: the Plantagenets. And just because there were Yorkists and Lancastrians did not mean that the wars were between Yorkshire and Lancashire. Just as in modern times, noble titles had little to do with places.

  Henry VI was of the House of Lancaster. The Lancasters commanded the Crown lands, for example, the Duchy of Cornwall. And they had all the Lancastrian earldoms: Lancaster itself, Derby, Lincoln, Leicester, Hereford and Nottingham. The other families who supported them gave them Somerset, Surrey, East Anglia and Devon. Then, with the Percys and the elder Nevilles in the Lancastrian camp, they had control of the northern strongholds.

  The Yorkist strength was in the Mortimer family, and their lands were mainly on the Welsh borders, the Marches. They had strong support in Kent, some in Norfolk, and, because of the younger Nevilles, they had the Earl of Warwick and Salisbury, and the estates of Wiltshire and the southern Midlands.

  An aspect of the build-up to this confrontation not to be disregarded was the fact that the King had co
me to the throne when he was only nine months old. Therefore the barons who ran the country on his behalf had, inevitably, become very powerful and factious. Maladministration, corruption and incompetent government were rife in England and all the main players had personal ambitions. None of these reasons, by themselves, account for the Wars of the Roses, but put them together and civil war seemed inevitable. Like the beginning of many conflicts, there was a peace of sorts, almost a phony war. Then, in the summer of 1460, the Earl of Warwick commanded the Yorkists against the Lancastrians of Henry VI at Northampton. Henry VI was on good ground, but he was deserted by Lord Grey of Ruthven who saw the lie of future land. Henry was captured but treated as monarch and put under house custody in London while Richard, the Duke of York, became de facto monarch. This of course, would have meant York succeeding to Henry on the latter’s death. Queen Margaret had other ideas and York’s days were truly numbered. Margaret was ensconced at Harlech Castle and she had troops in the north of England. She marched them on York where the two sides met in a terrible and uncompromising battle at Wakefield on 30 December 1460. York was killed. The Queen’s army marched south, beat Warwick on the way, and released the King. That should have been that: the House of Lancaster was back on the throne and the Yorkists were humiliated. But it wasn’t. The late Duke of York’s eldest son, Edward, the Earl of March, hoisted his father’s banner and joined with the bruised Warwick in Oxfordshire. Together they entered London in triumph.

  A week after he arrived in London, the Earl of March was ruling England and the Queen was heading north. Edward caught up with her at Towton Field in Yorkshire at the end of March 1461 and, in a snow blizzard, slaughtered hundreds of Lancastrians. Henry VI escaped with his life, but not his throne. The twenty-year-old Duke of York was crowned Edward IV and one-third of the estates in England changed hands.