Foundation

by Peter Ackroyd

  Henry married Katherine of France, or Katherine of Valois, soon after the treaty with her father; they entered Paris in state and moved into the Louvre Palace. The king of course wished to crown his wife in Westminster, and on 23 February 1421 she was led to the abbey. The Valois and Plantagenet dynasties were united.

  Four months later Henry was in France once more, to counter French resistance and insurrection. He was obliged to fight for his gains, but during the siege of the town of Meaux he became ill; he relapsed into a fever and grew steadily weaker. He sensed that death was approaching, and he made a codicil to his will. He now had a son, only eight months old, and the child was given into the protection of one of his brothers. The duke of Gloucester would guide and support the infant Henry. On the last day of August 1422 the king died. The corpse was brought to London, and was buried with due solemnity in the abbey.

  No king won such plaudits from his contemporaries as Henry V. The misgivings about his wars in France were forgotten for the sake of celebrating his martial valour. He was devout as well as magnificent, chaste as well as earnest. He was as generous to his friends as he was stern to his enemies; he was prudent and magnanimous, modest and temperate. He was the very model of a medieval king. Yet there are some who have doubted that verdict. Shakespeare’s play Henry V can be interpreted in quite a different spirit as an account of a military tyrant who staked all on vainglorious conquest in France. What did he finally achieve? Once his French conquests were dissipated, and the dream of a dual monarchy dissolved, very little was left to celebrate. All was done for the pride of princes.

  One more elusive and unintended consequence, of the revival of the Hundred Years War by Henry V, can be recorded. The language of England was now spoken by all the king’s subjects. The letters of the king were always written in English, and the writer of The Deeds of Henry V invoked Anglia nostra or ‘our England’. The first document of royal administration written in English is dated in 1410. The London Guild of Brewers began to record its proceedings in English from the early 1420s, citing the fact that ‘the greater part of the Lords and the trusty Commons have begun to make their matters be noted down in our mother tongue’.

  The archbishops of Canterbury now spoke routinely of ‘the Church of England’ as an identifiable element of the Universal Church, and at a Church council in 1414 it was declared that ‘whether a nation be understood as a people marked off from others by blood relationship and habit of unity, or by peculiarities of language … England is a real nation’. The fact that the matter had to be asserted suggests that in previous periods this nationhood had not been self-evident. In the fifteenth century, too, there were persistent attempts to contrast the prosperous kingdom of England with the parlous state of France. It was a way of escaping from the inheritance of the French-speaking royalty and a French-speaking court that had shaped the governance of the three previous centuries.

  The first surviving letter written in English dates from the winter of 1392. A slightly later epistle, also written in English, is of more human interest. It was ‘written at Calais on this side the sea, the first day of June, when every man was gone to his dinner, and the clock smote noon and all our household cried after me and bade me come down. Come down to dinner at once! And what answer I gave them ye know it of old.’ You can hear the voices. Come down! Come down!

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  How others saw us

  The English were pronounced by other nations to be guilty of the sin of pride; that was their most prominent characteristic. The fourteenth-century French chronicler Jean Froissart described ‘the great haughtiness of the English, who are affable to no other nation than their own’. A German knight, Nicholas von Poppelau, visited the country in 1484 and complained that ‘the English think they are the wisest people in the world’ and that ‘the world does not exist apart from England’. Fifteen years later a Venetian traveller stated that ‘the English are great lovers of themselves and of everything belonging to them’. Whenever they see a handsome stranger, they say that ‘he looks like an Englishman’.

  Other nations were sure that the English had tails. The Greeks of Sicily, who were obliged to entertain the presence of English crusaders in 1190, referred to them as ‘the tailed Englishmen’. At the end of the thirteenth century the Scottish forces, besieged in Dunbar Castle, shouted from the battlements, ‘You English dogs with long tails! We will kill you all and cut off your tails!’ It is possible that the offence was originally that of long hair, worn down the back like a tail, and gradually became a term of general opprobrium.

  The French accused the English of being drunken and perfidious; the notion of la perfide Albion, current in the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, has a long history. They were aloof; they were phlegmatic; they were insensitive to their own suffering, and to the sufferings of others. They were not afraid of death. That is why they quarrelled with so much ferocity; they robbed and murdered one another quite openly. Sometimes they even killed their king. So they were known for their violence.

  The English themselves admitted many faults. The author of Vita Edwardi Secundi, writing early in the fourteenth century, maintained that his countrymen excelled ‘in pride, in craft and in perjury’. Ranulf Higden of Chester, in the same period, described his compatriots as drunken, greedy and dishonest. Their drunkenness was a common cause of complaint, so often described and condemned that it became almost a caricature. A papal envoy to England wrote in 1473 that ‘in the morning they are as devout as angels, but after dinner they are like devils’. Certain national characteristics may never change.

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  A simple man

  If Henry’s son had been declared king immediately on the death of his father, he would have been crowned in his swaddling clothes. It was deemed prudent, therefore, to wait until he had reached the age of understanding before he was anointed. Nothing spells disaster so much as a child king, however, surrounded by magnates who consult no interest but their own. Indeed in the course of his long reign, lasting for almost forty years, the fortunes of the ruling houses of England went through so many bewildering vicissitudes – so many reversals and surprises, so many victories and defeats – that the nineteenth-century critic, William Hazlitt, described the country as a ‘perfect beargarden’. This was the era in which were fought the series of battles that have become known as the Wars of the Roses.

  Three brothers supervised the minority of the infant king. They can be introduced as the dramatis personae. The first of them, the duke of Gloucester, was his younger uncle; it was he to whom Henry V had entrusted the life and safety of his son. His older uncle, the duke of Bedford, had been chosen by the dying king to protect and enlarge the conquered territories of France; the war continued as before. Henry Beaufort, the child of John of Gaunt and therefore the king’s great-uncle, was bishop of Winchester; he became chancellor of England and therefore its principal officer. He had been born illegitimate but the subsequent marriage of John of Gaunt to his mother, Katherine Swynford, rendered him legitimate.

  Brothers, legitimate or illegitimate, may fall out. Gloucester wished to be given the title of ‘regent’, effectively assuming control of the country. Instead at Bedford’s request he was only named as ‘protector’, obliged to yield precedence whenever his elder brother returned from France to England. Gloucester also quarrelled with Beaufort over the direction of the kingdom, and their rivalry reached such a pitch that in 1425 it precipitated them almost into internecine war. Beaufort gathered his army of retainers in Southwark, where his palace lay, and Gloucester ordered the mayor of London to close London Bridge against them. Bedford had to come over from France in order to arrange a compromise between them. They were dogs fighting over the bone of power.

  The new king, Henry VI, was formally crowned in the winter of 1429. The eight-year-old boy was carried into the abbey in the arms of his tutor; this suggests that he was a little frail, but he managed to survive the strain of the lengthy ceremony and walked down the ais
le unaided at its conclusion. It has been said that he remained a child all his life. At the end of 1431 he was taken to France, according to the treaty agreed by his father, where he was crowned in the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris. On the head of this young boy the lines of Valois and Plantagenet royalty had come together. At barely the age of ten he was the only male monarch ever to be king both of England and of France.

  It is significant however that, in the year before he came to France, the figure of Joan of Arc emerged as the inspiration and hope of the French army. That is one of the reasons why Henry was so prominently displayed in Paris. In May 1429, in a series of brilliantly executed skirmishes, she had lifted the English siege of Orleans and proceeded to recapture other French towns that had submitted to the enemy. Orleans had been the key to the English strategy, its fall meant to anticipate the general defeat of the French army. That victory had been snatched away. In a letter Joan wrote at the end of June to the citizens of Tournai, she declared that ‘the Maiden lets you know that here, in eight days, she has chased the English out of all the places they held on the river Loire by attack or other means; they are dead or prisoners or discouraged in battle’. She had begun a process that would end in the complete unravelling of the victories of the previous reign. At Joan’s urgent instigation the dauphin rode in triumph to the cathedral in Rheims, where he was crowned as Charles VII. Two kings, Henry VI and Charles VII, were now claiming supremacy over the French people. It would take another twenty years to assign victory to one of them.

  The affairs of France, ever since the death of Henry V, had not been well managed. Without the presence of this inspiring king, the enthusiasm for conquest seems slowly to have been dissipated. Disputes over strategy, between Bedford and Gloucester, did not augur well; Bedford was also denied the finances that he needed. It was said in the parliament house and elsewhere that French actions should be subsidized by the taxpayers of France. Among the English themselves the virtues and advantages of a dual monarchy were openly questioned. What was the point of owning or seizing territories in France when there was so much amiss in England? The king of England should reside in England, not in Paris or in Normandy.

  Yet the war continued, the French and English possessing neither the will nor the resources effectively to decide the matter. Charles VII entered an alliance with the new duke of Burgundy, formally apologizing for the assassination of the duke’s predecessor and promising to punish the guilty parties. Those areas of France under the influence of Burgundy now reverted to their allegiance to the Valois king, and Charles could truly claim to be the king of most if not all of the French. In the process Burgundy had deserted his English allies, in a move that profoundly shocked the infant king; Henry had burst into tears when he read the letter from the duke renouncing fealty. More than twenty years later he still recalled the event. ‘He abandoned me in my boyhood,’ he said, ‘despite all his oaths to me, when I had never done him any wrong.’ We might notice here the innate simplicity of the remark.

  The story of Joan of Arc is well known. Bedford led the war of words against her, denouncing her as a witch and an unnatural hag in the service of the devil. She had declared that the purpose of her mission was to recapture Orleans and expedite the coronation of the French monarch; after she had completed the latter object she seems to have faltered. She was wounded during a military skirmish in Paris, and was then captured by a force of soldiers led by John of Luxemburg. He sold her to Bedford, claiming a large ransom, and the Maid of Orleans was put on trial for witchcraft. The French king made no attempt to save her, and seems to have regarded her as no more than a casualty of war. In the spring of 1431 she was dragged to the stake in the marketplace of Rouen.

  The council of nobles held together for the duration of the young king’s minority; they were all men who had served under Henry V, and the shared memory of that king was at least as strong as their individual self-interest. The uneasy triumvirate of the three brothers survived until the death of Bedford in 1435. In 1437, in his sixteenth year, Henry declared that his minority had come to an end and that he would now begin to govern for himself. It is more likely, however, that someone made the decision for him. He relied on the judgment and advice of others, and it was said that he always agreed with the last person who had spoken to him. For two years he had been coached in the rights and duties of a king. It was time now to take the centre of the stage. Beaufort and Gloucester, the pre-eminent nobles after the death of Bedford, would in theory be obliged to incline to his wishes. Beaufort had been raised from bishop to cardinal eleven years before, but his elevation still left him below the rank and power of his sovereign. In the summer of 1437 Henry VI embarked upon a grand tour of his kingdom.

  So we may now survey the young king. The extant portraits, albeit somewhat idealized, display a man with a prominent jaw and a faintly pious or innocent expression. Concerning his character and judgment, no general agreement exists. He was of an honest and simple nature, but the virtues of ordinary life may not sit well upon a monarch. For some chroniclers he became the model of the saintly king, ‘without any crook of craft or untruth’; he was ‘pure and clean’, modest in success and patient in adversity. Yet to others he seemed to be a simpleton, an idiot, half-witted, a veritable ‘sheep’. Pope Pius II said of this devoted son of the Church that he was ‘more timorous than a woman, utterly devoid of wit or spirit’. The English churchmen had been gossiping to him. In truth a fifteenth-century king had to be aggressive and brutal; he had to possess innate authority; he had to be shrewd and courageous. Henry VI seems to have possessed none of these qualities. Those who condemned him as an imbecile and a natural fool were simply registering their disappointment. In any other sphere he would no doubt have passed as a devout and kindly man.

  Of his piety itself there can be no doubt. He would never conduct business, or move his court, on a Sunday. He rebuked any of his lords who swore, and his only declamatory language was ‘Forsooth, forsooth!’ His eminent contemporary, William Caxton, wrote that he ‘made a rule that a certain dish, which represented the five wounds of Christ as it were red with blood, should be set on his table by his almoner before any other course, when he was to take refreshment; and contemplating these images with great fervour he thanked God marvellous devoutly’.

  After the adhesion of the duke of Burgundy to the French cause, the endless war did not go well for the English. They still held on to Normandy, as well as parts of Gascony and Maine, but their aspirations to French supremacy were now at an end. Bedford, the commanding presence on the English side, proved impossible to replace. All the spirit had gone out of the enterprise of France. Step by step Normandy was being reclaimed by the French. It was perhaps unfortunate that Henry VI himself had no military experience or aptitude. His only visit to France was at the time of his coronation, and never once did he lead his forces into the field. He was emphatically a man of peace, more at home with his studies or his devotions; he was more intent upon his foundations, at Eton and elsewhere, or with his building works at Cambridge. In this he may not have been wholly misguided. Eton College and King’s College, Cambridge, remain the most enduring manifestations of his reign.

  When Paris fell to Charles VII in the spring of 1436, and the state of Normandy grew more disordered, Henry was inclined ever more favourably towards peace. Negotiations between the two sides accomplished precisely nothing, however, while the French continued their slow conquest of the disputed territories. The English did not have the men or the materials successfully to defend both Gascony and Normandy, while the central market town and garrison of Calais was always under threat from the forces of the duke of Burgundy. The French king offered a truce, and the possibility of England maintaining its control of Gascony and Normandy, on the condition that Henry VI renounced his claim to the French crown. The king and his council prevaricated, and sent out a series of confused responses. Henry’s council in Normandy said that they were dismayed and apprehensive like ‘a ship tossed about
on the sea by many winds, without captain, without steersman, without rudder, without sail’. The king could be construed as the substitute for captain and steersman, rudder and sail.

  Plenty of interested parties were of course ready to throw in their opinions. Beaufort and Gloucester were joined by a third such party. Richard, duke of York, had taken the place of Bedford as commander of the English forces; he was in fact Bedford’s nephew, and would continue the factional strife that already undermined English policy. In the complicated tangle of primogeniture he was now one of the likely and immediate heirs to the throne, being directly related to the fifth son of Edward III; Henry himself was descended from the fourth son. It may seem excessively obscure to a modern reader, but at the time all the protagonists knew exactly where they stood in relation to sovereignty; it was in their blood, literally, and guided their actions. Henry never trusted York.

  There is a further complication. John Beaufort, the nephew of Cardinal Beaufort and already made duke of Somerset, was despatched to France in order to relieve Gascony – much to the fury of York who was already facing great disturbances in Normandy and was desperately in need of fresh resources. It is easy to see how English policy was in disarray. York and Gloucester were part of the council that favoured fresh aggression and determination in the face of French attacks; Cardinal Beaufort preferred a policy of compromise and negotiation. The king, although temperamentally in favour of peace, demurred between the two factions. Somerset set sail for France in the summer of 1443, but achieved nothing in the field; finally he had the humiliation of taking refuge with York in Rouen. His army was disbanded and he sailed home. He died in the spring of the following year, and it was widely rumoured that he had committed suicide. The last great English enterprise had been a fiasco. The members of the ‘peace party’ at Westminster felt themselves to have been vindicated.