A Brief History of Britain 1066-1485

by Vincent, Nicholas

  Probably in 1430, and entirely in secret, she married a Welshman, a junior member of the royal household, named Owen Tudor. Later legend suggested that they had met at a court entertainment when an inebriated Tudor fell into her lap, or that her admiration for her future husband stemmed from having glimpsed him naked, bathing in a river. In France, it was rumoured that Owen was the bastard son of an alehouse keeper. In reality, he was sprung from a Welsh family of some distinction, albeit, like most such families, of dense and confusing genealogy. His ancestors could trace their descent from Ednyfed Fychan (Edynfed ‘the Little’), steward in the 1230s, to Llywelyn the Great, prince of north Wales. In Welsh terms, Owen’s family ranked amongst the upper gentry, with wide estates, alabaster tombs and all the trappings of gentility. In England, this counted for little, not only because the Tudors were related to Owen Glyn Dwr, whose rebellion for a time they had supported, but because the Glyn Dwr rebellion had itself encouraged disparagement and legal discrimination against the Welsh. Charles Dickens, was almost certainly parodying the pride and pretensions of families such as the Tudors when, in Bleak House (1852), he created the character of Mrs Woodcourt, with her verses quoted from ‘“Crumlinwallinwer” and the “Mewlinnwillinwodd” (if those are the right names, which I dare say they are not)’ and her boasted descent from ‘Morgan Ap-Kerrig’. In much the same way that the readers of Dickens were invited to sneer at the absurd Mrs Woodcourt, so the court of Henry VI sneered at the descent of Owen Tudor. What it did not do was deny that Owen Tudor had been legitimately married to the King’s mother, or claim that the children of this marriage, Edmund born c.1430, and his younger brother, Jaspar, were bastards. On the contrary, when Catherine of Valois died in 1437, and the whole scandal for the first time came into the open, the Duke of Gloucester did his best to ruin Owen Tudor who for a period was placed under arrest at Newgate (from which, like so many prisoners from so many medieval prisons, he promptly escaped).

  Not only did the court of Henry VI accept that Edmund and Jaspar were legitimate, but it seems to have raised no questions about their rather peculiar names. These names, however, and especially the choice of the name ‘Edmund’ for the elder son, may mask an even deeper family scandal, suggesting that Edmund Tudor was not the son of Catherine of Valois and Owen Tudor, but an illegitimate child born of the pre-existing affair between Catherine and Edmund Beaufort, Henry VI’s cousin. The facts here remain unproved, although they are certainly bizarre. They carry us yet further into the Dickensian world of royal genealogy with its false identities and multiple plot-lines. What is beyond doubt is that the Tudors, Edmund and Jaspar, were well treated by Henry VI. In 1452, they were promoted to earldoms. In due course, Edmund Tudor was permitted to marry a daughter of another of the King’s Beaufort cousins, John Beaufort, Duke of Somerset, the elder brother of Edmund Beaufort. This union produced a single child, born in 1457, three months after Edmund Tudor’s sudden death from plague, and at a time when the child’s mother, Lady Margaret Beaufort, was herself a mere thirteen years old. The son, christened Henry in honour of the King, was the offspring of perhaps the most significant teenage mother in English history. He will recur at the very end of our story, emerging, like the demon king in a pantomime, to claim the English throne.

  In the meantime, and before we take flight from this maze of family relationships, there is one further kink in the Lancastrian family line which must be pointed out. We have already seen that the Mortimer descendants of Lionel, Duke of Clarence, the elder brother of John of Gaunt, possessed claims to be considered the senior heirs to Richard II and the main Plantagenet bloodline. At the very beginning of the reign of Henry V, just as the King had been about to embark for the Agincourt campaign, these claims had been asserted one again, when in the so-called Southampton Plot, the Earl of Cambridge, the King’s cousin, had conspired to promote his brother-in-law, Edmund Mortimer, Earl of March, as King in Henry V’s place. Edmund Mortimer himself had betrayed the conspiracy. Cambridge was executed. Nonetheless he left behind a son, named Richard, who in due course, following the deaths both of Edmund Mortimer, in 1425, and of Edward, Duke of York, killed at Agincourt, became heir to the joint Mortimer and York estates, descended on both his mother and his father’s side directly from Edward III. By the 1430s, Richard, Duke of York, as this boy was styled, could pose as quite the most plausible of Henry VI’s potential competitora for the English throne.

  The same dynastic politics which had earlier brought strength to Kings Henry IV and V now threatened scandal and subsidence. The roots of the vast royal family tree spread so wide that they undermined the very claims upon which the house of Lancaster had been founded. Throughout the 1420s and early 1430s, whatever efforts Bedford made to prop up English rule in France were negated by the refusal of Gloucester to approve subsidies, by the ongoing rivalry between Gloucester and the Beauforts, and by the underlying problems of crown finance, caused chiefly by the decline in wool exports. Regardless of success or failure in war, crown revenues from customs and taxation had declined from an average of £70,000 in the 1360s to a mere £30,000. Even before the death of Henry V, the annual defence budget of £52,000, excluding the costs of war in France, had to be set against a total annual revenue for the crown of just £56,000, leaving in theory nothing whatsoever to pay for military operations beyond defence, and a mere £4,000 to cover the costs of the entire royal household and establishment. The mathematics here were not to be defied. The French enterprise was unsustainable. This did not prevent strenuous efforts being made to salvage it, any more than the mathematics of later empires, British, Nazi or Soviet as the case might be, persuaded their rulers that such empires were doomed.

  In France itself, starved of supplies, their wages unpaid from year to year, the commanders around John, Duke of Bedford developed a stoicism fit to rival that of veterans of the German eastern front after Stalingrad. These were violent, professional soldiers, convinced that their own bravery and camaraderie were being sabotaged by politicians closer to the throne. Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, and other such useless ‘golden pheasants’ might boast of their feats of arms, having dipped no more than a toe in the real fighting. Those left to face the heat of the day grew bitter and increasingly convinced that corruption on the home front was undermining their efforts.

  Henry VI

  The Dual Monarchy

  Gestures and symbolism for a while might mask the underlying truth. Hurrying forward the date of the King’s coronation, special celebrations were arranged in England in November 1429 and in France in December 1431, at which Henry VI, though still a boy, was ceremonially crowned and invested with his realms. At the coronation banquet in 1429, the full range of symbolism was deployed to broadcast the King’s authority. Custards shaped into the leopards of England or the fleur-de-lys of France accompanied each course, and large pastry centre-pieces displayed the figures of St Edward the Confessor and St Louis (Henry VI’s sainted English and French ancestors), St George of England and St Denys of France. Similar symbolism, including the re-enactment of significant scenes from recent history, was arranged for the King’s ceremonial landing at Calais, on 23 April 1430, the feast day of St George, and for his entry into Paris in December 1431, the first Sunday in Advent, prior to his coronation in the cathedral of Notre-Dame. Nonetheless, the very fact that this coronation took place in Paris rather than in the traditional coronation church of Rheims, and the fact that Henry was kept waiting for more than a year at Calais and Rouen before it was judged safe to escort him to Paris, revealed a harsher reality: English government was not only bankrupt but in the process of losing the military side of the war. English authority in France was no more substantial or long-lasting than the pastry delicacies at Henry’s coronation feast.

  Joan of Arc

  The chief turning point here, the Lancastrians’ Stalingrad, is generally reckoned to have occurred at Orléans in 1429. It involved an illiterate seventeen-year-old peasant girl from the far eastern frontiers of France,
Joan of Arc. Convinced that she had been called upon to restore the dauphin, disinherited for the past ten years, to his rightful position as King, and that she was acting as the mouthpiece for voices, including those of saints Michael, Katherine and Margaret who chose to speak through her, Joan sought out the dauphin on the Loire. Whether genuinely convinced, or merely keen to manipulate her for political ends, various figures at the dauphin’s court claimed to identify her as the Pucelle or ‘Maid’ whose restoration of France had been prophesied since the 1390s. Joan not only brought a new messianic spirit to the French resistance at Orléans, from where the English were compelled to withdraw, but forced the dauphin’s hand, persuading him to lead a triumphal progress to Rheims. There, on 17 July 1429, having been greeted by crowds shouting ‘Noel!’, as if Christ himself were come again, he was crowned as King Charles VII.

  It was this, more than anything, that persuaded the English political leadership to opt for almost immediate coronation of the seven-year-old Henry VI, as King both of England and France. Having been accorded an honoured place at the coronation of Charles VII, Joan herself was captured less than a year later, at Compiègne, north of Paris, attempting, as at Orléans, to bring her miraculous powers to bear upon an English siege. In 1431, at Rouen, she was tried, renounced her many sins, but then, two days later, changed her mind and claimed that once again her voices had spoken to her. The relapse into heresy was her undoing. She was publicly burned, her naked body exposed to the crowd before incineration, and the ashes thrown into the Seine.

  The irony here is that Joan’s spirit of prophecy, so significant to the revival of French morale, was one to which King Henry V, the chief author of that English conquest against which Joan had fought, had been peculiarly attuned. Perhaps precisely because he had passed so much of his life in the company of men, with barely a passing acquaintance with his mother or wife let alone with other women, Henry V had a peculiar respect for female spirituality, both in its power for good and its potential for evil. We have already considered the Church’s wider scepticism about female saints and their supposed gifts of prophecy: from whom were such gifts derived, from God or from the Devil? Regardless of such reservations, and despite the suspicions that he is said to have entertained against his own step-mother, Queen Joan, accused after Henry IV’s death of sorcery and traffic with hidden powers, Henry V had been an enthusiastic patron of religious women and in particular of the order of St Bridget of Sweden, introduced by the King to a new foundation at Syon Abbey on the opposite bank of the Thames to his Carthusian priory at Sheen. The nuns of Syon, who, like the Carthusians, continued to play a significant role in the religious life of Henry VI, popularized the prophetic ‘Celestial Visions’ of their foundress: emotion-charged images of Christ and his mother not dissimilar to the visions seen by the distinctly unofficial St Julian of Norwich. Joan of Arc with her voices and her visions was merely a militant embodiment of the spirit of prophecy first detected in Bridget.

  The French Campaign Goes Sour

  Even after the trial and ‘martyrdom’ of ‘Saint’ Joan, the rot in England’s French empire might have been stopped. Bedford was a more than competent commander. Cardinal Beaufort was prepared to extend massive loans to the crown, more or less single-handedly propping up the English war effort from the revenues of his see of Winchester. The problem was that Beaufort and the council could not agree what these war efforts should involve. Moreover, other members of the royal family began to rise within the council, most notably Richard, Duke of York, appointed on Bedford’s death as lieutenant and effective vice-regent in France, and Margaret of Anjou, daughter of René, Count of Anjou and titular King of Naples, an impoverished but well-connected French heiress, niece to King Charles VII, in 1444 married to Henry VI of England as part of attempts to broker an Anglo-French peace.

  Neither Richard of York’s appointment as lieutenant in France nor the King’s French marriage did anything to stem the tide that was already running against English rule in France. The Anglo-Burgundian alliance which, for the past twenty years had been crucial to the maintenance of Henry V’s French empire, collapsed in 1435, only a week after the death of Bedford. In 1436, before Richard of York had even taken up his appointment as Bedford’s successor, Paris fell to the French, with the Bastille the very last English outpost to be surrendered. Attempts to negotiate a more permanent peace, not least through the marriage of Henry VI and Margaret, led only to accusations from veterans and hotheads alike that the spirit of Henry V was being betrayed. Whilst France fell, Richard of York haggled over whether he was to be titled ‘regent and governor’ or merely ‘lieutenant general’ of this disintegrating empire. As with all military disengagements, the problem was how to justify negotiating away territory that itself had been won only at a heavy cost in English blood.

  A sense of England’s historic destiny in this instance determined the choice of valiance and defeat rather than surrender and victory. In particular, the attempt to broker peace in the mid-1440s by the surrender of Maine, the region immediately to the south of Normandy, a crucial frontier zone since at least the time of William the Conqueror, ended in fiasco when what was intended as a surrender to René of Anjou, Henry VI’s father-in-law, in practice turned out to involve a handover to Charles VII, de facto King of France. Veterans such as Sir John Fastolf, whose wages had not been paid throughout the 1420s and 30s but who instead had been compensated with grants of land in the conquered territories of Normandy and Maine, found themselves deprived of precisely those rewards which their stalwart defence over the past twenty years had appeared to guarantee. The sense of betrayal and resentment was palpable. Where the union established between Normandy and England after 1066 had lasted a century and a half, those who had dreamed of a similar enrichment of English settlers in Normandy after 1417 found their empire collapsing after barely thirty years.

  In the meantime, the greatest of the armchair generals, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, was himself destroyed by a combination of family politics and court gossip. His first marriage, to a claimant to the county of Hainault, had ended in the late 1420s in farce and embarrassment, when his attempts to win back his wife’s lands in Flanders resulted in military failure, a breach in Anglo-Burgundian relations and a declaration from the papacy that the marriage itself was illegal and therefore annulled. Duke Humphrey had promptly married his mistress, Eleanor Cobham, with whom, for the next ten years, he established a notably literary circle, with their country retreat near Greenwich, their salon of poets, historians and astrologers, and their collection of priceless books, many of them brought from Italy and shedding a Renaissance glow of ‘humanism’ amidst Greenwich’s rain and mud.

  The problem lay with the astrologers. By 1440, with the King still unmarried and childless, and with Humphrey of Gloucester next heir to the throne, his duchess began to consult various of the most eminently respectable astrologers over the prospects for the King’s health. The astrologers told her that Henry VI might suffer a severe illness in the summer of 1441. She also, no doubt with thoughts for her own childlessness, took advice from a wise woman named Margery Jourdemayne, known as ‘the witch of Eye’ and as ‘an ancient pythoness’, over what potions or charms might enable her to bear her husband a son and heir. Amidst the fevered atmosphere of Henry VI’s court, when these precautions were disclosed, they were taken as proof of treasonable sorcery. Eleanor was sentenced to public penance, walking barefoot to three London churches on successive days carrying a taper, and thereafter to perpetual imprisonment. She died, more than ten years later, still a prisoner. The astrologers were drawn and quartered. Margery the witch was burned.

  Duke Humphrey spent the remaining few years of his life as a disgraced and disgruntled presence about the court. His clashes with the Duke of Suffolk resulted, in 1447, in his arrest in a Parliament meeting in the de la Pole heartlands at Bury St Edmunds. His death, in custody, was blamed upon a stroke, but the official explanation was widely disbelieved. The spirit of Joan o
f Arc, and the hysteria that it had engendered, had themselves infected the processes of politics and the royal court. The books which Duke Humphrey helped import to England, and which still constitute one of the great treasures of the Bodleian Library in Oxford where many of them came to rest, shed not only the glow of the Italian Renaissance but a rather more sinister aura of plot and conspiracy. The spirit of the Borgias was wafted far north of the Alps.

  In all of this, the King himself played a merely passive role. This passivity, more than anything else, helps to explain the breakdown in royal authority that gathered pace throughout the 1440s. Ten months old at the time of his succession, Henry VI had grown up as a sensitive and apparently intelligent spectator to the disputes that divided his uncles. Certain characteristics in the young king early began to attract notice, if not yet alarm. He was generous to a fault. He was inclined to pardon and to extend mercy. He disliked the taking of animal, let alone of human life. He was fastidious in his habits, shunning the company of women. As late as 1448, by which time he was in his mid-twenties and had been married for three years, the sight of men bathing naked in the hot water pools at Bath led him to demand that the local bishop intervene to put an end to such scandals. He was much given to the study both of religion and of the past, to meditation on the cross and the five wounds of Christ, to the avoidance of all travel on Sundays (apparently claiming precedent from the reign of the Anglo-Saxon King Edgar), and to a large part of that devotional programme that contemporaries knew as the ‘devotio moderna’ (‘the modern style of religion’).