A Brief History of Britain 1066-1485

by Vincent, Nicholas

  He had developed a particular veneration for King Alfred, founder of the West Saxon dynasty, and in 1442 even petitioned the papacy to have Alfred canonized as a saint. His enthusiasm here was perhaps derived from a shared interest in education. Amongst his earliest and most personal ventures as king were the endowment of a university at Caen in Normandy immediately after his French coronation in 1431, followed by his foundation of a school, Eton College in the shadow of Windsor Castle, and of an attached university college, King’s at Cambridge, for whose endowment and government he showed particular concern. The university of Caen, within sight of the castle from which William of Normandy had planned his conquest of 1066, was one of the last, though by no means the least significant of the effects of the English occupation of Normandy.

  Like many of the greatest benefactors of higher education, indeed like many of the most avid readers of history, Henry himself had attended neither school nor university, and could in no way be considered an ‘educated’ man.

  Besides his interest in King Alfred, Henry showed equal devotion to the cult of St Edward the Confessor, turning the Confessor’s feast days on 5 January and 13 October each year into major occasions within the royal calendar. Rather remarkably, having first met his bride, Margaret of Anjou, in 1445, Henry seems to have waited until January 1453, perhaps even until the precise feast of the Confessor’s deposition on 5 January, to impregnate her with their only child, a son known as Edward of Lancaster, who was born on 13 October, the feast of the Confessor’s translation and coincidentally the anniversary of the accession of the Lancastrian dynasty with the coronation of King Henry IV on 13 October 1399.

  Henry VI was possessed of many qualities. The chief problem was that his private virtues very soon came to be seen as public vices. Generosity, forgiveness and mercy were all very well in a king, but they needed to be tempered with realism, force and justice. These qualities, the boy king signally lacked. One key here is supplied by Henry’s choice of personal emblem, the antelope. Antelopes supporting the heraldic arms of England and France were already displayed at his French coronation in 1431, when Henry was only nine years old, presumably chosen not so much by the King himself as by his councillors and in particular by his overbearing uncles. In the bestiary (the medieval encyclopedia of animal lore), the antelope is portrayed as a creature so wild that hunters can only catch it when its saw-like horns become caught in the branches of trees. The moral that it teaches is that playing in the thickets of worldliness merely threatens to kill both body and soul: admirable sentiments no doubt, but hardly appropriate to the education of a king who, by necessity, should have had rather more familiarity with the thickets of worldliness than was the case with Henry VI.

  As with so many aspects of fifteenth-century England, history loomed large over Henry VI’s court. His devotion to the memory and the feast days of Edward the Confessor might in some senses remind us of an earlier English King, Henry III, himself a mere boy for the first ten years of his reign, thereafter regarded as pious but ineffectual. It might also suggest that England, by the 1440s, was coming to bear a marked resemblance to the England of the 1040s and the reign of Edward the Confessor himself. Like Henry VI’s, the Confessor’s court had been riven by faction and blood feud, with its greater families possessing landed and financial resources superior to those of the King, capable of buying up the support of many lesser men. Like Henry VI after 1422, Edward the Confessor had been orphaned at a tender age, and the remarriage of his French mother, Emma of Normandy, like the remarriage of Henry VI’s mother, Catherine of Valois, had sown poisonous discord even within the English royal family. The Confessor’s wife, Edith daughter of Earl Godwin, like Margaret of Anjou, Henry’s Queen, was both mistrusted and seen as a far more effective politician than her husband.

  In the eleventh century, England itself had stood on the brink of feudal anarchy, dominated by aristocratic privilege, tending towards the breakdown of public authority, in which the wishes of the few prevailed over the interests of the many. What historians of the fifteenth century are inclined to describe as ‘bastard feudalism’ might better be seen as the first true emergence in English history, at least since the eleventh century, of precisely those tendencies towards anarchy and aristocratic self-interest which the French have always regarded as typically ‘feudal’. Once again, a sense of the past dominates a much later period, and behind the posturings of a Gloucester, a York or a Beaufort we can detect something of the spirit of Harold or Tostig, the Godwinsons, the Leofricsons and the warring dynasties of Northumbria.

  What is perhaps most remarkable about the first twenty years of the reign of Henry VI is not their turbulence but the mere fact that the King’s regime survived. Even amidst the farcical negotiations over Maine in the mid-1440s, through a piece of theatre splendidly stage-managed by William de la Pole, it had still been possible to persuade visiting ambassadors, come to prepare for Henry’s marriage to Margaret of Anjou, that all was well with the Lancastrian court and that the King was a simple but sound figure, surrounded by a family, including his kind uncle Humphrey, who did him proud. It was this act of subterfuge more than anything else that earned Pole promotion as Duke of Suffolk. Three years later, Pole had engineered the arrest and death of Duke Humphrey. Worse still, in 1449, attempting to wipe clean the reputation for heedless pacifism which had dogged his negotiations over Maine, Pole lent his support to an English attack upon Brittany, led by Edmund Beaufort, Duke of Somerset, once reputed the lover of the King’s mother. The attack only provoked the French to a full-scale declaration of war which in turn led to a swift collapse in English lordship. In October, Somerset surrendered Rouen, followed on 1 July 1450 by his surrender of Caen. By August, Cherbourg, the last English stronghold in Normandy, had fallen, and in the following year Charles VII launched an invasion of Gascony, taking Bordeaux in June and Bayonne, in the far south, two months later.

  The effects of such humiliation, like the defeats in Algeria upon the French after 1950, or in Vietnam upon the Americans after 1970, threatened cataclysm. Even before the fall of Caen, Pole was impeached for treason, banished and then, when the ship in which he hoped to flee was intercepted by privateers off the Suffolk coast, beheaded in the name of the ‘Community of the realm’, an amorphous entity that had made its last major interventions in national politics as long ago as the 1260s. England itself was flooded with refugees from the Normandy settlement, and by veterans of the Normandy campaigns, convinced that corruption and mismanagement, very close to the throne, were to blame for the public’s grievances. In January 1450, the bishop of Chichester was murdered by disgruntled soldiers who had waited too long for their pay. A few months later, so was the bishop of Salisbury, attacked at Mass by a mob of protestors, themselves perhaps the victims of a recent slump in the Wiltshire cloth industry caused by Burgundian embargoes on cloth exports. No one openly dared blame the King for these troubles, but in most minds it was self-evident that Henry VI was incapable of managing his own, let alone the nation’s affairs. In particular, there were demands for the forced ‘resumption’ of the patronage and largesse which Henry had lavished upon ministers such as Pole and Somerset, and which had contributed to the perilous state of the crown’s own finances.

  Somerset’s mishandling of the 1450 campaign led to temporary imprisonment on his return from France, and a permanent breach with Richard of York who held him to blame for the loss of Normandy and who seems to have considered it a matter of honour that Somerset be brought to account. A sense of honour slighted also inspired the actions of John Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, one of the most distinguished veterans of the war, a field commander for the past fifty years, perhaps first blooded at the battle of Shrewsbury in 1403, in almost permanent residence in Normandy since Henry V’s reign, and, although a witness to the surrender of Rouen in 1449, by this stage aged well over sixty, determined to have his revenge.

  Jack Cade

  In the midst of these disasters, England itself erupted in
to chaos with a rebellion in Kent led by an obscure demagogue, Jack Cade. In the summer of 1450, Cade incited disturbances across the south-east, complaining against government maladministration and corruption. As in the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, though on this occasion drawing its membership from an upper level of peasantry and minor gentry who feared that their own property was threatened by the troubles of the past few years, the rebels camped on Blackheath on the outskirts of London. Dispersed by the threat that the King was about to ride out against them, they unleashed a series of royalist raids against west Kent: a home-brewed variety of the ‘chevauchées’ previously employed by English armies in France. London itself seethed with outcry against corruption. The King fled to Kenilworth. The rebels sat in judgment upon his ministers, executing one or two of the smaller fry. As in 1381, it was the resistance of the propertied classes of London which brought an end to rebellion. Cade himself attempted flight into Sussex, where he was arrested and killed. His body was posthumously beheaded. If there were echoes of the reign of Edward the Confessor to the 1440s, then in 1450 then they were joined to echoes of 1381.

  Loss of Aquitaine

  In the midst of all this, a miracle seemed to present itself. The citizens of Bordeaux, resenting their new French rulers, took repossession of the city and its surrounding region in the name of Henry VI. John Talbot, veteran of the Norman wars, ‘England’s Achilles’, led an expeditionary force from England. The disasters of the past few years seemed on the verge of solution. On 17 July 1453, attempting to bring assistance to the town of Castillon on the river Dordogne east of Bordeaux, Talbot threw his troops against what he assumed to be a weakly defended French position. It was in fact an artillery battery into which the French had retreated. Undaunted, and determined, Don Quixote-like to prove his honour, Talbot charged. As is the inevitable consequence of cavalry advancing directly into cannon, at Castillon as in the Charge of the Light Brigade almost exactly four hundred years later, shrapnel triumphed over horse-flesh. Talbot was killed, his death at the age of sixty-six a fitting symbol of the end of British empire in France and of the futility of much that in the previous century had passed for chivalry. Bordeaux fell to Charles VII in October. After almost exactly three hundred years united to the English crown, Aquitaine was no longer an English colony.

  The Madness of King Henry

  1453 was indeed a year of miracles. On 29 May, two months before Talbot’s defeat at Castillon, Constantinople had fallen to the bronze cannon of the Ottoman Turks, bringing an end to a thousand-year-old civilization and to Christian empire in the East. On 13 October, the feast day of St Edward the Confessor, only a week after the fall of Bordeaux, Henry VI’s queen gave birth to a son, christened Edward. In the same year, a Kentish man named William Caxton, perhaps troubled by the recent disturbances following Cade’s revolt, moved his luxury goods business from London to Bruges. Following the lead of Johannes Gutenberg of Mainz, who in 1454 began distributing copies of a Bible, produced on a printing press using moveable metal type, the first great book to have been manufactured in this way and harbinger of a revolution in the distribution of learning that was to transform European intellectual life, Caxton subsequently set himself up as England’s first printer-publisher. His first English book, the Recuyell (or ‘collection’, from the French recueil) of the Historyes of Troye, was printed in 1473, followed almost immediately with the Game of Chess printed the following year. It was to history, followed shortly afterwards by war-inspired board games, that English publishing owed its origins and its earliest profits.

  In the meantime, as if in sympathy with the insanity of the times, King Henry VI went mad. As early as 1435, when news had been brought to him of the collapse of the Anglo-Burgundian alliance, the King is said to have wept in public. In the aftermath of Castillon, he entirely lost his reason. For several months he was unable to recognize his own family, or even to acknowledge the birth of his son. A sort of catatonic lethargy descended. It may have been genetic. He was, after all, the grandson of the mad King Charles VI of France. Yet the malady, if inherited, should then also have passed to his Tudor half-brothers, and his Valois cousins, which seems not to have been the case. His other grandfather, Henry IV, had suffered lengthy bouts of illness, though no attempt to prove Henry IV’s insanity has succeeded. Whatever the cause, the King’s madness mirrored the state of England as a whole.

  Houses of York and Lancaster

  By the summer of 1453, law and order were already collapsing in the English provinces. Disputes in East Anglia, between the followers of the Poles and those of the Mowbray dukes of Norfolk, or in Lancashire between the families of Stanley and Harrington, are only the most notorious, because the best documented of these spasms in the body politic. John Talbot, the hero of Castillon, had himself engaged in all manner of violence as an English landowner, from 1413 onwards. After 1450, the Talbots were at open war with the Berkeleys in Gloucestershire, imprisoning Lord Berkeley, seizing Berkeley Castle and demanding a large share of the Berkeley estate. There is a reminder here that even the chivalry of a Talbot could mask rather more violent impulses.

  Moreover, as in the eleventh century, the further that social order broke down, the more people began to jockey for position, to seek refuge within the affinity of the great, or to build up vaster and vaster estates precisely because only through land and the income it afforded could a great man acquire an affinity large enough to see off his rivals. The fate of Sir John Fastolf, as recorded in the Paston letters, can be regarded as a symptomatic of a wider breakdown in the social fabric. Raids on Fastolf’s estate by Pole and members of the court, culminated, after 1450, in an even more insidious series of attacks and occupations by Alice Chaucer, Pole’s widow and a granddaughter of the poet. Fastolf turned for defence to the dukes of Norfolk and York. By Richard of York, partly in repayment of a loan, partly as compensation for his ‘great labours and vexations’ on York’s behalf, he was given a spear-pointed diamond, listed by his executors as having been set in ‘a very rich collar called in English “a White Rose”’, valued at 4,000 marks: a most potent symbol of the degree to which the house of York, with its white rose, was now emerging as the only credible alternative to Henry VI and the Lancastrians with their collars of SSs.

  The further Henry VI declined into imbecility, the more this highlighted the position of York as the only credible alternative if a King were to be found capable of ruling. Yet even after Henry went mad, York was slow to act. His determination to punish what he regarded as the cowardice of Somerset had already led to two earlier flirtations with rebellion, in 1450 when he had returned from Ireland without permission from the court to stir up Parliament against the governing council, and in 1452, when he had once again attempted to use Somerset’s impeachment as a rallying cry for reform, in all probability hoping to secure his own recognition as next heir to the throne should Henry VI die childless. Even so, the penalties for treason, and the precedents set in the cases of Gloucester or Pole, were such that, only with reluctance would any politician demand a position at centre-stage. The breakdown in local order was matched to a fatal loss of confidence in central government. Even when York did move, in 1454, to accept a role as protector of the incapacitated king and as defender of the realm, the experiment was swiftly brought to an end, in part by the aggression of the Queen, who was determined that her own son, Edward of Lancaster, born in 1453, would now be recognized as heir to Henry VI, partly by the recovery of the King which, though only temporary, was used as a pretext to remove York from his office as protector.

  Wars of the Roses

  Too late to rescue the city of Paris in 1436, too cautious in 1441 to prosecute bold action against the French, too late in 1450 to play much role in the impeachment of Pole, when Richard did eventually act, in the summer of 1455 it was with excessive caution. At St Albans, in a battle fought between two more or less equal factions, he and his allies, headed by Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, defeated a force in theory commanded by Hen
ry VI, Somerset and the Percy affinity from Northumberland. Somerset was killed. Henry VI, deserted and wounded in the neck, was escorted by York to St Albans Abbey where York submitted on bended knee, being restored thereafter as the King’s protector.

  The first battle which Henry VI had fought took place on English soil and was a defeat for the house of Lancaster. It resolved nothing save for the hatred between York and Somerset. Instead it set a dangerous precedent. Over the next thirty years, whenever a political faction considered its demands unsatisfied, trial by battle was the preferred method of solving the dispute. These wars, the so-called Wars of the Roses, in no way rivalled the wars earlier fought in France. There were to be no prolonged sieges, no great ravishing of the English countryside to compare with the horrors inflicted on northern France after 1340 or on Normandy from 1417. Instead, what ensued was a series of battles almost without a war: a curtain raiser at St Albans, followed by the first real act in 1459–61, a second act in 1469–71 and a violent but apparently final coda in 1483–5.

  The battles themselves are poorly documented, for all that they and their sites have been pored over by military historians convinced that troop movements can be reconstructed, as if by magic, from a proper juggling with topography and the accounts that do survive. The overall outcome of each battle, by contrast, is not in doubt, the certainty here being supplied from the fact that virtually each encounter witnessed the death of a significant contingent of leaders or political players. These were literally killing fields, in which the chivalric games of joust and tournament turned into the most bitter sort of vendetta and blood feud. As each generation of players was carried dead from the pitch, another sprang up to take its place.