by Jones, Nigel
James was kept in the Tower’s royal apartments. Henry’s accounts show that the constable, Sir Thomas Rempstone, was paid a generous daily six shillings and eight pence for his upkeep, and half as much again for his suite of attendants. James was allowed to pursue his interrupted education, becoming a skilled musician, a practitioner of the arts of war and a proficient poet. James’s poetic skills bore fruit when, at the end of his long captivity, he composed The Kingis Quair (The King’s Book), a famous manuscript in the literature of medieval courtly love. The poem, inspired by James’s reading of Boethius’s fashionable Consolations of Philosophy – with its concept of the wheel of fortune which alternately raised its human playthings to the heights of glory, before casting them down to the depths of despair – was a meditation on the circumstances of his own sad captivity:
The bird, the beast, the fish eke in the sea,
They live in freedom each one in his kind;
And I a man, and lacketh liberty;
What shall I say, what reason may I find,
That fortune should do so? Thus in my mind
My case I would argue, but all for nought:
There was no-one to give my woes a thought
The poet king’s verses, also much influenced by Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales – which, as Chaucer was the Tower’s former clerk of works, held pride of place in the Tower library – tells how he was in deep depression over his seemingly endless imprisonment when he saw from his window at the Tower a beautiful girl strolling in the garden below. He decided to marry his muse and eventually did so. This poetic romance was paralleled in James’s real life when, late in his imprisonment, he fell in love with Joan Beaufort, King Henry’s niece.
Things looked up for James when Henry IV died in 1413. The new king, Henry V, immediately had him brought back from Nottingham to the Tower and took him with him to France on his 1415 Agincourt campaign. However, it was only in 1424, after the death of James’s regent uncle Robert, that a ransom of 60,000 marks was finally squeezed from his impoverished Scottish subjects. James was at last freed to wed his Joan in Southwark Cathedral. He bore his bride back to a Scotland he had not seen for nearly two decades. James proved a competent king despite his long absence. But murderous Macbeth-style Scottish dynastic politics finally claimed James’s life as they had that of his brother. He was assassinated by a rival branch of his own family in 1437.
By the time Henry IV breathed his last in the Jerusalem Chamber of Westminster Abbey on 20 March 1413, he was a prematurely aged wreck, with his power already in the hands of his able eldest son. Henry V, tall and in his prime at twenty-five, proved more than capable of bearing the burden of kingship. On Henry IV’s death, he followed the custom established by his father and after riding to the Tower with ‘a great rout of lords and knights’, according to Adam of Usk, created a new company of Knights of the Bath. That night, on 8/9 April, a huge snowstorm engulfed the country, making the new knights’ cold vigil in St John’s Chapel even chillier. According to Adam, the snow ‘fell upon the hill-country of the realm and smothered men and beasts and homesteads, and drowned out the valleys and the marshes in marvellous wise’. Undeterred, Henry rode out from the Tower to Westminster for his coronation, acclaimed by cheering Londoners in the newly white streets.
Henry’s main aim was to bring the Hundred Years’ War to a triumphant conclusion. He began preparing an invasion of France almost as soon as he was crowned. In June 1413, he appointed an experienced fletcher, Nicholas Mynot, as the Keeper of the King’s Arrows at the Tower armoury. Mynot’s task was to replenish the store of longbows and arrows in the fortress, sadly depleted since the golden age of Edward III. The longbow was still the weapon that brought England’s formidably trained archers victory on the battlefield, and Henry was determined to use it to its full advantage in the coming campaign.
Mynot was not the only armourer at work in the Tower. William Merssh was the King’s Smith at the fortress, and in 1414 took on extra hired hands to make the newfangled cannons that would, in Shakespeare’s words, ‘afright the air at Agincourt’ and eventually replace bows and arrows as the artillery of battle. Merssh’s wife Margaret was also a qualified blacksmith who sweated alongside her husband in the Tower’s forges. Payments made to Margaret Merssh indicate that she was employed on the more delicate arts of ironmongery – and for that work specially suited to the Tower’s function as the chief state prison. One account records that she was paid thirty-five shillings (around £750 in today’s values) to make eighteen pairs of fetters and eight pairs of manacles for restraining the Tower’s resident captives.
The Tower was the nerve centre where the coming conflict with France was planned. It was to the fortress that London’s mayor and aldermen were summoned on 10 March 1415 for a momentous secret meeting at which the king informed them that he had decided to invade France that year, and that he needed money from his wealthy capital to finance the campaign. Henry built up a small invasion fleet to carry his army across the Channel – seven of the ships were moored in the Thames at the Tower’s wharf. Authority was also given to the ships’ masters to use force to abduct and impress men from the nearby riverside taverns to crew the vessels – the first recorded instance of the notorious press gang in English history. In the spring of 1415 Nicholas Mynot was ordered by an impatient Henry to take on another dozen fletchers at the Tower armoury workshop to step up production of the bows and arrows needed in France. Mynot was also authorised to purchase the necessary extra wood, feathers, wax and silk used in the bowmaker’s art.
Mynot’s work proved its worth at Agincourt, on 25 October 1415. Here Henry showed himself a warrior king worthy of his ancestors when he defeated a French army up to four times the size of his ‘happy few’ 9,000 Englishmen. The Tower’s bows and arrows and the new cannon ensured the downfall of the French. The slaughter was hideous, with some 6,000 Frenchmen dying for the loss of a mere 150 English slain. Many of the casualties were killed in cold blood on Henry’s orders after they had surrendered. Others died of suffocation imprisoned inside their heavy armour when they were unhorsed and entombed under a pile of bodies, fatally funnelled into a narrow gap between two woods. However, some 1,500 French knights and nobles survived to be brought to England to await the ransoms they would fetch for their captors.
The high-ranking captives suffered the indignity of being paraded through the streets of London by a triumphant Henry, before enduring the extra humiliation of sitting through a Te Deum thanksgiving for the victory at St Paul’s Cathedral. They were then brought to the Tower while the king went on to feast in his palace at Westminster. The most exalted prisoner was the French king’s young nephew, Charles, Duke of Orléans. Almost a contemporary of Henry’s – he was twenty-four – the young man had already had several brushes with death. His father had been assassinated when he was fourteen and he had seen his mother die of grief, while his first wife – his cousin Isabella, daughter of Charles VI of France – had died in childbirth only three years after their wedding.
At Agincourt, as joint commander of the French army, Charles had barely survived the battle. He was wounded several times and finally buried in his heavy armour under a mound of corpses – from which he had been extracted in the nick of time before asphyxiating. Treated by the king’s physicians, he slowly recovered in the White Tower. His younger brother, Jean of Angoulême, was taken prisoner with him, but was held separately from Charles at Groombridge Place in Kent, the home of the knight who had captured him, Sir Richard Waller.
The royal brothers would have more than enough time to recover from the wounds of Agincourt: their imprisonment would last for a quarter of a century. Henry, fearing that they would be viable rivals to his own claims on the French Crown, deliberately set their ransom impossibly high – and gave secret orders that they should never be released. Unaware of this, Charles put his enforced stay in the Tower to good use. Naturally of an artistic rather than a military bent, the duke, like his fellow royal captive James
I of Scotland, was an accomplished poet, and composed verse in the fortress: short, delicate roundels on such subjects as the changing seasons and courtly love. At first Charles wrote only in his native French, but as his confinement stretched from months into years, his familiarity with English grew and he began to compose verse in that language too. By the time of his eventual release in 1440 he was more fluent in his captors’ tongue than his own.
As with other royal prisoners, although the duke’s incarceration was long, it was not particularly rigorous. Unlike those held in the Tower for treason and similar high crimes, his royal wrists never felt the cold bite of Mistress Merssh’s manacles. Indeed, he was even allowed to hunt and hawk when he was temporarily taken from the Tower and lodged at various castles around the kingdom: Windsor, Wallingford and Pontefract among them. His writings, however, tell us that he was never reconciled to his loss of liberty, and suffered greatly from homesickness:
Envoi
Paix est tresor qu’on ne peut trop louer:
Je hais guerre, point ne la doit priser;
Detourbe m’a longstops, soit tort ou droit,
De voire France que mon Coeur amer doit.
(Peace is a treasure one cannot too much praise:
I hate war, which no-one ought to prize;
Right or wrong, it grieved me long,
To see France, to which my sad Heart is bound.)
He had to wait until after Henry’s death before the bulk of his vast ransom of 80,000 saluts d’or (worth £50,000 then, perhaps more than £2 million in today’s values) was finally raised. Even then, however, he had to sign a bond promising to pay a further 140,000 crowns when his liberty had been achieved. Another large sum was paid to win his brother Jean’s freedom.
Charles honoured this debt by marrying a rich third wife (his second spouse, Blanche, having died during his imprisonment). His bride was Mary of Cleves, daughter of the Duke of Burgundy. Mary’s enormous dowry enabled Charles to pay his debt to England, but he wrote that he had ‘experienced in my English prison such weariness, danger and displeasure that I many times wished I had been slain at the battle where they took me’.
Charles recovered his spirits sufficiently to father a son, who became King Louis XII of France and married Henry VIII’s sister Mary.
Henry V capped the Agincourt campaign by capturing his ancestral duchy of Normandy. In 1420 the Treaty of Troyes set the seal on his French conquests. England now controlled all France – including Paris – north of the River Loire, as well as Gascony in the south-west. The Treaty also gave Henry as a prize of war the hand of Catherine of Valois, daughter of King Charles VI of France, along with a handsome dowry. The treaty stipulated that Henry should succeed Charles as king of France in place of Charles’s son, the Dauphin Charles – who nonetheless retained effective control of south and central France. Henry’s dream of ruling over both England and France seemed so close that he could grasp it.
Henry and Catherine were soon blessed with a son, the future Henry VI, born at Windsor Castle on 6 December 1421. Then, in August of the following year, while besieging the town of Meaux, near Paris, Henry V died aged just thirty-four. His illness was diagnosed as dysentery, which was ravaging his army at the time. As the king’s condition was accompanied by ‘a bloody flux’ and wasting, it is more likely that the fatal disease was the cancer of the bowel that had killed his ancestor Edward I. Whatever the cause, the death of the king at the height of his power was a shattering blow to English hopes of maintaining their newly won French domains. Those hopes now rested with Henry’s nine-month-old baby boy.
Less than two months after Henry’s demise, Charles VI, the periodically insane French king, followed him into the shadows. Henry VI, the infant king of England, was now in theory monarch of France as well. As he had lain dying, Henry V had made what arrangements he could to secure the future of his Lancastrian dynasty on the thrones of both kingdoms. He appointed one of his brothers, John, Duke of Bedford, to rule as regent over France; and another, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, to govern England as Lord Protector to his infant son. Both brothers faced formidable problems: in France half the country did not recognise the foreign baby king, but were loyal to the Dauphin, now Charles VII. In England, a bitter factional power struggle broke out around the royal cradle.
As he grew into manhood it became clear that Henry VI’s character was totally unsuited to the taxing demands of medieval kingship. The king was weak, easily dominated and politically inept. Worst of all – like Henry III, Edward II and Richard II before him – he was uninterested in military matters; preferred aesthetic and religious pursuits (we owe him those masterpieces of English Perpendicular architecture, Eton College and King’s College Chapel, Cambridge); and – in stark contrast to his martial father and grandfather – was utterly incapable of leading an army in battle. He was the worst possible ruler to lead his kingdom through the turbulence about to engulf it. At the tender age of eight, Henry was taken to the Tower to spend the traditional night, and anoint thirty new Knights of the Bath, before his coronation. Crowned in London in 1429, and in Paris two years later, Henry grew up under the shadow of English losses as the fortunes of war turned decisively in favour of France.
Stronger characters than Henry filled the vacuum around his throne. Two branches of his Lancastrian dynasty – respectively descended from the first and second wives of Edward III’s son John of Gaunt – bid for the vacant seat of power. After John of Bedford’s death in 1435, a new faction stepped up to challenge the king’s uncle, Lord Protector Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester. The wealthy Beaufort family, led by Cardinal Henry Beaufort, Bishop of Winchester and Chancellor of England, were descended from John of Gaunt via his mistress and last wife, Katherine Swynford.
For two decades the animosity – bitter as only family rows can be – between Henry Beaufort and Duke Humphrey of Gloucester, paralysed policy and hindered good government. Beaufort, an able administrator, favoured imports of foreign cloth and peace with France. His rival ‘Good Duke Humphrey’ won huge popularity by advocating a protectionist policy benefiting native English wool producers. Loyal to the glorious memory of his brother Henry V, Humphrey also led the war party dedicated to continuing the conflict with France.
The ding-dong battle between Beaufort and Humphrey almost came to an actual clash of arms when Beaufort garrisoned the Tower against Humphrey and the London mob who backed him; refusing the royal duke entry to the fortress. The release in 1440 of Charles of Orléans from his long imprisonment in the Tower – which Beaufort arranged as a sop to France – was one of many bones of contention between them. In 1441 Beaufort, his power enhanced by being created a cardinal, decided to strike at his old enemy, whose loud protests at his rival’s peace policy were becoming a serious nuisance.
Beaufort’s chance came with Humphrey’s unwise second marriage to his mistress Eleanor of Cobham, a commoner. As Humphrey was heir apparent should his nephew King Henry die childless, Eleanor had the enticing prospect of becoming queen. After having her horoscope cast, she decided to give fate a nudge by melting a wax effigy of Henry in a fire. Discovered, Eleanor and her accomplices were charged with witchcraft, locked in the Tower, and tried before a Church court. Although her clerk, Roger Bolingbroke, was hanged, drawn and quartered – and another associate, Margery Jourdemain, aka ‘the witch of Eye’, was burned alive – Eleanor escaped the ultimate penalty. Instead, she was required to do public penance, walking barefoot through London for three days, before being confined to a succession of distant castles, ending up at Peel in the Isle of Man, where she died in 1457.
Although Humphrey was not involved in his wife’s sorcery, Eleanor’s disgrace broke his power. To be married to a witch was social and political death, but soon it resulted in Humphrey’s actual death too. First, Humphrey was marginalised, infrequently attending the Royal Council where the Beauforts were pulling the pliable young king’s strings. Finally, in 1447, he was arrested and twelve days later it was announced tha
t he had died of a seizure. Inevitably, rumours flew that he had been murdered. Old Henry Beaufort had won his vicious twenty-year feud with Humphrey. But he did not live long to savour it: within weeks he had died too.
Henry Beaufort’s political heir, William de la Pole, 1st Duke of Suffolk, was a passionate supporter of peace with France despite – or because of – the fact that both his father and his older brother had died fighting the French. Suffolk himself had been imprisoned in France after surrendering Orléans to Joan of Arc. Released to supervise Henry VI’s coronation as king of France, he became closely aligned with the Beauforts. He was given the task of negotiating the young king’s unpopular marriage to the French princess, Margaret of Anjou, in 1445. The marriage bargaining was especially delicate because Margaret’s father, Duke Rene, pleading poverty, refused to give her a dowry and demanded the two provinces of Maine and Anjou, captured by Henry V, in return for her hand. So desperate were the Beauforts and Suffolk for peace, that these outrageous terms were accepted – although they had to be kept secret for fear of the popular anger they would arouse. Duke Humphrey had sourly described Margaret as ‘a Queen not worth ten marks’. But the new queen would soon prove her worth in other ways.
Suffolk, who had succeeded Henry Beaufort as Chancellor of England, continued pursuing peace with France. Suffolk’s devious diplomacy incurred popular loathing, as did his manifest corruption. The final nail in his coffin, however, was the humiliating loss of Normandy in 1449. Exasperated by Henry’s failure to hand over Maine and Anjou, Charles VII launched a full-scale invasion, of those provinces and of Normandy itself. The French were everywhere victorious. The new head of the Beaufort family, John, 1st Duke of Somerset, who was Lieutenant of France, humiliatingly surrendered Rouen, and by December virtually the whole ancestral homeland of the Plantagenets was lost. The glorious victories of Edward III, the Black Prince, and Henry V were as if they had never been. It was a national humiliation. Somerset returned home in disgrace and committed suicide.
