The War of the Roses

by Timothy Venning

  Marginalized senior royal relatives took the lead in the forcible removal of previous kings’ ‘evil counsellors’: Edward II’s estranged wife and elder son were the leaders of the revolution of 1326–7; Richard’s uncle Gloucester and cousin Henry of Bolingbroke were among the ‘Appellants’ in 1387; Henry removed Richard in 1399; and York was accused of suspicious encouragement to rebels in 1450 and defied the King in arms in 1451–2. So was it plausible for courtiers or the King to believe that York was aiming to emulate Henry of Bolingbroke? Or did the fact that a second arrested Duke of Gloucester had died mysteriously in custody in royal hands in fifty years (1397 and 1447) exacerbate the problem that Humphrey’s arrest had been meant to solve, i.e. removing or intimidating the King’s untrustworthy heirs? It is more likely that Humphrey died naturally than that he was poisoned, but that was not how contemporaries saw it10–and arguably it lessened the chances that York would ever permit himself to be taken alive by the King’s officials. Was Humphrey dead more dangerous than Humphrey alive, in increasing the chance of York defying the King with armed force? Was the real ‘first act’ in the slide to civil war the Duke’s arrest in 1447, neither the fall of Normandy nor the Cade rebellion?

  Crucially for the future, Somerset–a personal foe of York by 1450, as shown by their repeated claims against each other–inherited Suffolk’s role as Henry VI’s most powerful magnate courtier after 1450 and was regarded as close to the Queen (he was rumoured to be the father of her son).11 His faction, in which the semi-royal Dukes of Buckingham and Exeter were prominent, continued to monopolize office and favour and exclude York despite the threat posed by the latter’s vast estates in the north and the Welsh Marches. Genealogy and family tradition mattered a great deal in fifteenth century noble politics, and Buckingham was the heir in the female (Bourchier) line of the executed Duke Thomas of Gloucester and Exeter was the head of the Holland descendants of Richard II’s loyal half-brothers, enemies of the ‘usurper’ Henry of Bolingbroke. Both had a distant claim on the throne, and could be plausibly elevated to heirship if York was disinherited and the Beaufort claim was disallowed through illegitimacy–or the Beauforts could call on their alliance in joint enmity to the heirship ‘front-runner’ York. There was, in effect, an alliance of the junior royal lines against the next line to Henry’s, that of York, with Somerset representing the family of John ‘of Gaunt’ by his third marriage.

  York united the lines of Edward III’s second and fourth sons, Lionel and Edmund. He had inherited his mother, Anne Mortimer’s, extensive Marcher lands–and her claim to the throne via Edward III’s second surviving son, Lionel. Richard II had recognized the March line as his heirs, and its descent via the female line was not an insuperable legal problem–after all, the English kings claimed the French throne by that means. This genealogical seniority to the House of Lancaster (descended from John ‘of Gaunt’, the third surviving son of Edward III) made York more of a threat than his father Richard, Earl of Cambridge (descended from the fourth son, Edmund of Langley) had been. The latter had already been executed in 1415 for plotting to murder Henry V before the Agincourt campaign. To add to the danger, York had made a name for himself as a reasonably successful military commander in Normandy in the early 1440s (unlike his successor, Somerset’s older brother John Beaufort) and had opposed Suffolk’s unsuccessful governorship and policy there. He was a magnet for returned captains and soldiers disgruntled at the inadequate support they had received from Suffolk’s regime at home in the final years of Henry V’s Continental empire. The popular anger at this ‘betrayal’ and its focus on Suffolk and his cronies as the villains was shown in Parliament and the Cade revolt in 1449–50. ‘Cade’ claimed to be from York’s Mortimer family,12 so was he an ally of the Duke?

  The alienation of York, sent out of England by Suffolk’s government to carry out the (usually titular) titular governance of Ireland in person in 1449, from the dominant faction at court thus continued after Suffolk’s death. Far from solving the conflicts by removing the perceived chief ‘evil counsellor’ attacked in Parliament in 1450, the politically dangerous monopolizer of Royal patronage, Suffolk’s death only led to new problems. There were allegations at court that the exiled York had been behind the popular outbreaks of 1450, and that they were aimed at removing the childless Henry from the throne in his favour. (The Cade rebels denied this.13) Whether or not this finally alienated the threatened Queen from York, the Duke was not trusted with any major office or role at court after his return from Ireland. Indeed, amidst the continuing factional confrontations York’s leading supporter Sir William Oldhall (in trouble at court as a leader of Parliamentary action against the Suffolk regime) was ostentatiously dragged out of sanctuary at St Martin’s-le-Grand in London by Somerset’s men in a blatant sign of official ill-will to the Duke.14 A first military confrontation between York’s armed supporters and the King occurred at Dartford in March 1452, though on this occasion the greater numbers of the royal faction’s troops enabled the mediating senior clerics to persuade York into a formal submission.15

  The tension between court/magnate factions over the correct policy towards France was inevitable, and the disgrace of the loss of both Normandy and Aquitaine in 1450–3 led to Suffolk’s enemies blaming him for incompetence or even deliberate sabotage of the English war-effort. His attempt to win a long truce with Charles VII by the Anjou marriage and the ‘goodwill’ abandonment of undefendable Maine in 1445–8 had been exploited by the French who had returned to the attack as soon as it was convenient–as was probably inevitable. But as far as Suffolk was concerned, the alternative was a financially exhaustive and politically risky long-term war where failure could see overwhelming public demands for York’s recall from Ireland to take command. Retrenchment at court would, however, have enabled more troops to be sent to Somerset’s army in Normandy, giving him a better chance of holding out–and in 1448–50 court prodigality continued unabated. This was a major mistake by Suffolk, though cutting back would alienate his avaricious clients and threaten his power as well. The political storm that broke in 1449 was at a lower level than magnate criticism, being centred on Parliament in the first instance (with demands to sack and prosecute the ‘corrupt’ ministers reminiscent of the ‘Good Parliament’ in 1376)16 and then a violent popular outbreak. Indeed, Henry arguably made matters worse by not giving in and dismissing Suffolk at the first Parliamentary demands in July 1449, at a time when he still held Normandy and the blackmailing MPs were prepared to fund a new army if he sacked Suffolk–which would have helped to raise a larger army than was actually gathered in winter 1449–50. This might have held onto Normandy, at least in the short term–long-term defence of the ‘open’ frontier and the walled towns against Charles VII’s large army and artillery was unlikely. Instead, Henry dismissed Parliament and had no money to pay for reinforcing Normandy in autumn 1449,17 and the French invasion proceeded with only a small English expedition–under a minor captain, Sir Thomas Kyriell, not the capable and popular York–to try to halt it. The King’s failed gamble on dismissing Parliament to save his chief minister, then having to call a new one in less favourable circumstances later, is reminiscent of Charles I’s actions with the ‘Short Parliament’ in 1640. To that extent, Henry bore major responsibility for the debacle in Normandy in 1449–50–as he did for vainly writing admiring letters to his hostile uncle Charles VII in the mid-1440s assuring his goodwill and promising to hand over Maine by a certain date when he could not be sure this would be practicable.18 (What if his local garrison-commanders refused to do it?) In reality, Henry was as guilty as Suffolk of naivety and incompetence in his French policy of the 1440s, and his extravagant expenditure at court made his ability to raise armies less possible.

  The Cade revolt, as in 1381, focussed on Kent and led to a march on London and ‘lynch-law’ by the armed protesters in the streets. (Henry, unlike Richard II in 1381, hid in the Midlands.) The extent of the anger and violence seems to have been unexpected, and prob
ably Suffolk was too preoccupied with the danger from dissident magnates of royal blood which the Crown had faced in 1387–8 and 1399–a problem seemingly warded off by sending York to Ireland. The popular anger was bound to focus on Suffolk, given his visible monopoly of patronage and policy. But this raises the question of why an adult king had allowed one minister such a free rein, and thus Henry’s culpability for the crisis. Already in the 1440s the evidence of popular rumour, recorded in the chronicles of Harding and Capgrave, spoke of Henry being scorned by his most outspoken subjects as a simpleton.19 The probability is that he was easily led by unscrupulous courtiers into giving them excessive grants rather than judiciously buying support from a wider ‘constituency’. The likely fate for a king who had such an ‘unbalanced’ use of patronage had been seen in the fall of the over-rewarded and recklessly greedy Despensers in 1326 and of Suffolk’s ancestor Michael de la Pole in 1386, if not the grants Richard II had made to his favourites (a somewhat wider circle) in 1397–9. Henry thus neglected his first duty as a political leader–and his generous grants to his favourite projects, such as King’s College Cambridge, can also be seen in the light of reckless favouritism rather than of piety alone.20 The land-grants that Henry had been making since his effective majority (1437) were subject to a sweeping review and cancellation by Parliament in the early 1450s, an indictment of nationwide perceptions of their fair distribution of assets among the landed gentry and nobles. Like Edward II and Richard II, the King was perceived to be the tool of a greedy and politically disastrous faction. But it is clear that Edward and Richard both asserted themselves after their political ‘defeats’ (1310 and 1387–8) in angry retaliation against those who had constrained them. The executions of ex-rebel Thomas of Lancaster in 1322 and of some of the ‘Lords Appellant’ in 1397 were the King’s work, though encouraged by their ‘ultra’ supporters. In Henry’s case, his personal role in the ‘reaction’ in the 1450s is absent–at least from the time of his mental collapse in 1453. This helped to save his reputation in subsequent decades and he became known posthumously as a saintly fool not a villain, though it should be pointed out that any ‘evidence’ of this attitude in post-1485 works may have been influenced by his nephew Henry VII’s propaganda efforts to have him canonized.21

  Henry VI’s unwillingness to see the necessity of balancing grants among different factions at court was coupled with an undoubted political reliance on one group of lords. The latter were confident enough of his support (or his indifference to injustice) to abuse their power and manipulate local politics for their own benefit. Significantly, the major disturbances of 1449–50 broke out in areas under the dominance of Henry’s favourite ministers, the beneficiaries of his lavish patronage–Suffolk in East Anglia, Lord Treasurer Fiennes in Kent and Sussex, and Bishop Ayscough in Wiltshire. All of these men, Suffolk in particular, had a collection of offices and grants of royal lands in their regions unprecedented for generations; the last such political ‘monopolists’ had been the favourites of another weak king, Edward II’s Despenser allies, who met a similarly grisly fate at the hands of their enemies when overthrown. Their local leadership of society had been delegated to their clients in their absence at court, and the latter were abusing the processes of government and justice without any prospect that the King would intervene.

  As in 1326, 1387, and 1399, the King was seen to be partisan and not carrying out his duty to see justice imposed, and the victims ended up by taking revenge themselves; this ‘anarchy’ of local armed feuding was underway well before the explosion of anger caused by the loss of Maine and Normandy in 1448–50 and so had other causes. It also preceded the return of soldiers from the evacuated lands in France and so was not due to unemployed soldiers or ruffianly retainers used to having their way by force; the infamous and long-running feud of the Courtenays and Bonvilles in Devon was descending into armed clashes as early as 1440–1.

  Henry’s lack of discrimination or common sense in his lavish generosity with grants of Crown lands and local offices were complained of at the time in the 1440s, and were later indicted by Lord Chief Justice Fortescue as an example of how not to run a just and successful government.22 To that extent the monopoly of royal favour and receipt of grants by the Suffolk-Beaufort faction in the 1440s was both a reason for and a result of the young King’s naïve ineptitude, and it reflected his insecurity about his potential heirs–Humphrey and then York–who were the main political ‘alternatives’ as his senior advisers. The early death of Henry’s elder uncle John, Duke of Bedford, aged forty-six, in September 1435 was thus a political disaster as he had ‘held the ring’ between Humphrey and the Beauforts in their power-struggles since 1422. Had he been alive in the 1440s he might have been still in office as lieutenant of Normandy (his regency there would have lapsed on Henry’s ‘majority’ in 1437) and so been unable to rein in the King’s extravagance and reliance on venal courtiers. But if he had been back in England Suffolk’s and the Beauforts’ misrule would have been less likely, and so a violent Parliamentary ‘purge’ and popular revolt in 1450 have been averted. Would this have lessened Henry’s estrangement from York? (It would also have meant that Bedford’s widow, Jacquetta of St Pol, would have been unavailable to marry Sir Richard Woodville, meaning that York’s controversial daughter-in-law-to-be, Elizabeth Woodville, was never born.)

  Henry VI was not the first king to act with injustice and suspicion towards his relatives, and ambitious courtiers were always ready to accuse a monarch’s kin of treason with the hope of obtaining their confiscated lands and offices. But it is symptomatic that those kings who listened to and acted on such stories were the ones who were later accused of bad governance and placed under restraint or overthrown–Henry III, Edward II and Richard II. Even Henry V had accused his stepmother, Joan of Navarre, of witchcraft on uncertain evidence, imprisoned her, and seized her property (the main reason for the prosecution?), but she was allowed respectable accommodation while in disgrace–Leeds Castle–and eventually exonerated. Duke Humphrey’s second wife, Eleanor Cobham, similarly accused of plotting to kill the King, was condemned, divorced, and deported to the Isle of Man for life–possibly due to a Beaufort plot to ensure that she did not give Humphrey any heirs to challenge them for the succession.23 Humphrey was not guiltless in his alienation from the King in the early 1440s, having been threatening Cardinal Beaufort with violence and/or political ruin for two decades and had been conspicuous for his petulant disloyalty to Bedford in the 1420s. He had been opposing the King’s conciliatory French policy noisily in recent years. But proceeding to the extreme of arresting him was politically unwise. Crucially, Humphrey had had no children either by Eleanor or by his first wife, Jacqueline of Holland. Due to the papal ruling confirming the latter’s disputed first marriage (regarded as void by her and Humphrey) in 1428,24 Humphrey’s children by her would have been bastardized, but any children Humphrey had had by Eleanor would have been next in line for the throne in 1447–53 and the Suffolk faction would duly have feared them not York as the ‘reversionary interest’.

  Henry’s responsibility for the disasters of 1440s–not a ‘holy fool’? Henry used to be regarded as ultra-pious even before his illness in 1453, influenced by his prudish religiosity and his foundation of King’s College Cambridge; thus the blame for the disastrous policies of the 1440s could be placed on an unscrupulous Suffolk whose greed, incompetence, and acquisition of offices and lands were listed in the hostile 1450 Parliament. Even that implied that Henry was too open to the influence of unscrupulous advisers, while absolving him from the active part in ministerial misrule laid against Richard II. The requirement of Parliament after Suffolk’s fall that all royal grants of Crown lands during his adult reign be ‘resumed’, i.e. cancelled,25 need not imply that he had committed these controversial alienations to ‘unworthy’ favourites as a conscious policy. Excessive generosity also marked his attitude towards his educational projects. But has his later ‘simpleton’ reputation after his 1453 breakdown bee
n ‘back-dated’ to the period before his illness? It is now thought by historians such as Bertram Wolffe that he played a more active role in the diversion of influence and patronage to the Suffolk faction than was once thought. The records show that he made his rash of lavish grants to 1440s courtiers and their clients in person, many being politically unwise, and was requested to reverse some at the time. The King was in full possession of his faculties, and showed signs of spendthrift habits. His favouritism was notable. At the very least he showed a degree of political incompetence in his lack of evenhandedness, and was over-willing to lavish power and influence on a small group of congenial advisers.26 Like Edward II and Richard II, he had no concept of the political need for ‘balance’ or for wooing powerful nobles whom his personal friends disliked.

  The contrast with his father, his uncle Bedford, and paternal grandfather is notable. So is his complete lack of interest in taking up the family cause of fighting for his French Crown–though he was a crowned sovereign of France, unlike his ancestors. His response to the rising disasters after 1429 is marked, and in contrast to what was normally expected of an English king –and would have been expected of him, as he had had the usual ‘knightly’ military training in arms under the veteran Earl of Warwick as a teenager. He was no pacifist at this stage, being prepared to endorse a large-scale military campaign by his court favourite Somerset to the Loire in 1443 to secure his lands though after that he naively put faith in the good will of his uncle (and new uncle-in-law) Charles VII in 1444–8. In this crucial period he also showed no interest in ‘negotiating from strength’, not building up his forces ready for a potential military clash if the ‘peace-policy’ failed as Charles was doing. It is probable that he entirely misread Charles’ intentions, putting his faith naively in a projected meeting between them set for 1446–7, which never took place–and where his politically shrewd and unscrupulous counterpart would have run rings round him. Instead he instituted a secret negotiation with Charles via his episcopal diplomats, led by Bishops Moleyns and Ayscough, and in modern parlance ‘left out of the loop’ his experienced commanders in France (e.g. York) who would have been hostile but at least knew the local military situation. He even privately promised to hand over Maine in December 1445 without any clear guarantees of an end to French claims on Normandy in return.27 The entire concept of a ‘reverse dowry’–land being given by the husband to his wife’s family, not the other way around–on his marriage in 1445 was unusual, though evidently judged worthwhile to secure a truce after the failure of the Somerset offensive in 1443.