In these unpromising circumstances Henry VI sent a personal envoy to negotiate directly with the French king. William de la Pole, duke of Suffolk, had already served in the French wars and had become one of the king’s most favoured councillors. He travelled to the French court at Tours in the spring of 1444 where both sides, exhausted by war and attrition, came to a relatively easy truce for the space of ten months. The treaty was sealed with a kiss. As part of the pact Henry VI was to marry the daughter of the Duke of Anjou, one of the most powerful families at the French court; she was also the niece of the French king. Margaret of Anjou, in the company of Suffolk, sailed to England in the following year.
So there came to England one of its most forceful queens. It was not long before it was widely reported that she ruled her husband; one London chronicler, John Blocking, declared that she was cleverer than Henry and of a more powerful character. She was ‘a great and strong and active woman who spares no effort in pursuing her affairs’. She found her favourite in Suffolk, who had arranged her marriage, and together they controlled the general policy of the council. It was Margaret, for example, who played a leading role in the negotiations with the French; she was trying to bring the members of her extended family into happy unison. So it was that her husband secretly agreed to cede the province of Maine to the Valois king, in exchange for the security of a general peace. Maine had been an English possession since it had passed to Henry II in 1154 as part of his Angevin inheritance; that older Henry had been born in its capital, Le Mans. The news of its forfeiture provoked discontent and dismay among many of the king’s councillors; even the king’s envoys in France were opposed to the surrender they had come to negotiate, and insisted on a signed declaration that they had come only in the higher purpose of peace. The treaty, after much confusion and suspicion as a result of Henry’s vacillation, was finally sealed.
Gloucester, the leading figure among those who had once favoured war with France, was now in eclipse. His power and authority had been notably undermined, not least in the prosecution of his wife for witchcraft on the grounds that she had sought the king’s death by means of the black arts. It is possible that he now planned to move against Suffolk, or in some way to gain control of the king. In 1447 a parliament was summoned to Bury St Edmunds, an unusual setting for that assembly. Gloucester arrived for the opening of the proceedings but, on the day following his arrival, he was arrested in his lodgings on the charge of high treason. A few days later, he was found dead in his bed. It was widely believed he fell ill immediately after his arrest; he had been struck down by anxiety and dismay. He may have died of natural causes, in a most unnatural world. It may of course have been a case of judicial murder, at a time when such events were not uncommon.
The death of Gloucester did not enhance the king’s authority. Henry had not proved himself during his personal rule; he was as negligent in his conduct of English affairs as he had been vacillating in his prosecution of the war. He had given away to his favourites more royal lands than any of his predecessors; his debts rose higher and higher, while it was an open secret that the members of his household were purloining money from the royal income. All the perquisites of royal favour – offices, pensions and wardships among them – were being drained. On certain occasions Henry granted the same office twice to different people.
He was generous, too, in the bestowal of new honours; in the eight years between 1441 and 1449 he created ten barons, five earls, two marquises and five dukes. Even the most impartial observer must have concluded that he was unduly diluting the reserves of patronage. Existing barons and dukes might also have surmised that their rank, at the very least, was not necessarily being exalted. Henry had never known any other position than that of monarch; he took his wealth and power for granted. He did not understand the value or importance of what he bestowed. He was always ready, and even eager, to pardon people; he was following the model of his Saviour. But this generosity did not endear itself to those who believed themselves to have been wronged.
He was too weak to arbitrate between the more powerful nobles of the reign; this encouraged them to take matters into their own hands, and to solve by force or threat the disputes that should have been resolved by a strong king. As a result armed feuds between the powerful families presaged the greater civil conflict of the Wars of the Roses. The king was supposed to guide and to lead his nobles; that was part of their compact with the court. They were the natural supporters of the anointed monarch. They did not wish for a weak king, and they were more secure if a king was strong. But, if they were masterless, then all order was destroyed.
The consequences were obvious to all. With the death of the duke of Gloucester, the duke of York became the direct heir to the throne. Yet Henry still did not trust him and, to lessen his capacity for influence at court, he was despatched to Ireland as lord lieutenant. For two years York refused to take up the appointment, but in the summer of 1449 he sailed across the Irish Sea. The command of the English armies in France was then given to the new duke of Somerset, Edmund Beaufort, brother of the supposed suicide. Suffolk and Somerset were now aligned against York. York and Somerset would soon enough become rivals almost to the death. These were the fruits of Henry’s ‘personal rule’ that would end in the bloodiest dynastic dispute in English history.
A more general sense prevailed that the rule of the law had been left in abeyance. ‘The law serves of nothing else in these days,’ the men of Kent said in a declaration of 1450, ‘but to do wrong.’ All was accomplished by ‘bribery, dread or favour’. The extant letters of the period, particularly those of the Paston family, are filled with accounts of wrongdoing that went unpunished and of nobles who exercised justice (if that is what it can be called) for their own advantage. Endless stories were told of armed gangs threatening tenants, besieging manors and invading courts of justice.
John Paston wrote of one hired gang that ‘no poor man dare displease them, for whatsoever they do with their swords they make it law’. He had direct experience of such violent behaviour. In a petition to the archbishop of York he wrote of ‘a great multitude of riotous people, to the number of a thousand persons or more’ who ‘broke, despoiled, and drew down’ his manor house at Gresham; they ‘drove out my wife and servants there being, and rifled, took, and bore away all the goods and chattels’. The gang then fortified the manor, and kept out Paston himself as well as the king’s Justice of the Peace.
Another gang, commanded by William Tailboys, was under the protection of Suffolk; it will be remembered that Suffolk, with the queen, helped to control the council of the realm. Tailboys and his ‘slaughterladdes’ were accused of three murders as well as charges of trespass and assault; but Suffolk helped him to escape justice. ‘On lordship and friendship’, it was said, ‘depends all law and profit.’ The spirit of misrule prevailed over the land, and the king could do nothing about it.
When Paston’s manor house was plundered and taken, his adversary procured a royal letter asking the sheriff of Norfolk to show ‘favour’. Paston was powerless in these circumstances, and he was advised to place himself under the protection of the duke of York. In 1454 one of Henry’s knights who had done well out of the French wars, Sir John Falstolf, laid aside money to bribe a sheriff; he wanted a jury that would favour his suit in a legal case. It is clear enough that the juries of the period were, on a routine basis, bribed or intimidated.
In an interpolation to his version of The Game and the Playe of the Chesse William Caxton castigated ‘the advocates, the men of law and the attorneys of the court’, describing ‘how they turn the laws and statutes at their pleasure, how they eat the people, how they impoverish the community’. We may read for instruction a great juridical text of the period, Sir John Fortescue’s De Laudibus Legum Angliae – ‘In Praise of the Laws of England’ – and even applaud the development or ‘evolution’ of justice; but in practice the law was rotten and worm-eaten. We may say the same of the parliament house and of the court. It
is not to be expected that any human institution will be other than rackety and only partially competent; only in histories do they proceed with ease to their ordained end.
All these forces of disorder and injustice came to a head in 1449. In that year Henry’s authority had suffered a mortal blow when Charles VII, on the pretext that the English had broken the terms of a formal truce agreed two years earlier, marched into Normandy with the ambition of expelling the English altogether from his territories; his success was evident and immediate. The towns, hitherto occupied by the English, surrendered without a fight to the three French armies who advanced upon them from various directions.
In November 1449 the parliament house met in the face of the grave news from France and at its second session, in early 1450, the duke of Suffolk was accused of treason. It was alleged that he had planned to assist the invasion of England by Charles VII, and that he was willing to place his castle in Wallingford at the French king’s disposal. The charge may seem unrealistic, but at a time of failure and suspicion it was believed. Those responsible for the fiasco in France had to be made to pay in one form or another. At the same time the chancellor of England, Archbishop Stafford, resigned his post. Suffolk was placed in the Tower, where a bill of impeachment was drawn up against him; the king now intervened and brought these proceedings to an end. Henry could not countenance the spectacle of his chief minister and adviser being humiliated.
The Commons were not to be diverted, however, from their display of public anger and revenge. They put forward a second set of charges, among them the evident fact that Suffolk had protected William Tailboys from arrest and imprisonment. The king now called the lords to his inner chamber in the palace at Westminster, where he repudiated the jurisdiction of parliament by placing Suffolk under his own ‘rule and governance’. It was a peculiarly maladroit manner of proceeding, but there seemed at the time to be no alternative. A few weeks later Henry announced that Suffolk would be banished from the realm for a period of five years. Suffolk set sail from Ipswich at the end of April, bound for the Low Countries; but he did not reach his destination. The ship in which he sailed was detained, and he was taken on board another vessel where he was quickly tried by the sailors. He was decapitated with a rusty sword, and his body dumped on a beach near Dover.
The French king’s recapture of Normandy took only a year and six days. By the summer of 1450 the English forces had been expelled from most of the towns and cities of France; only Calais and parts of Gascony remained. In a portrait of the time Charles VII was described as Le Treès victorieux Roi de France. A French chronicler remarked that ‘never had so great a country been conquered in so short a space of time, with such small loss to the populace and to the soldiery’. Henry’s marriage to Margaret of Anjou had done less than nothing to consolidate English rule in France, and indeed Margaret was blamed by many for having engineered or expedited the final disaster. A rhyme went around at the time, ‘The king’s son lost all his father won’. The war of a hundred years was almost over.
It is hard to exaggerate the damage to the king. Not only had he failed in his bid for military conquest, he had actually been forced to surrender territories which the English monarchy had previously held by right. From this time forward Henry effectively lost control of his realm, and in the absence of leadership the confusion turned into chaos. It was also reported, in the parliament of 1450, that the king’s debts had more than doubled in sixteen years; at this point the merchants of London, individuals and corporations, withdrew their financial support. That is another reason for the dynastic struggle of the Wars of the Roses; the king did not have the money to administer the country. There were fears that this was becoming what was known as a ‘wild world’. A man who called himself ‘Queen of the Faery’ preached in the towns and villages of Kent. In Canterbury a fuller by the name of ‘Blue Beard’ tried to muster a force or fellowship of men about him. Kent here is the key.
The fact that the head of Suffolk had been found near Dover, and that the shipmen involved in the execution were men of Kent, inevitably placed that independent and sometimes recalcitrant shire under suspicion. The king’s representative there threatened that the whole county would be laid to waste and turned into a deer park; but the men of Kent already had cause for complaint. The unsuccessful war against France had severely affected the maritime trade on which their prosperity relied. The coast was attacked with impunity by corsairs from France and Brittany. Agnes Paston wrote that a friend of the family ‘had been taken with enemies, walking by the sea side’. She went on to pray that ‘God give grace that the sea be better kept than it is now, or else it shall be perilous dwelling by the sea-coast’.
The beleaguered men of Kent rallied at Calehill Heath in the neighbourhood of Ashford at the end of May 1450; they gathered at a meeting place that had been employed for many hundreds of years. The old spirit of place asserted itself in times of uncertainty and danger. On this heath they elected as their leader and representative Jack Cade, and under his guidance they marched towards London; by 11 June they were encamped on Blackheath within sight of the capital. In their declaration they averred that ‘they call us risers and traitors and the king’s enemies, but we shall be found to be his true liege men’. Instead they attacked his advisers or, as they were commonly known, the ‘evil counsellors’; as a result of their machinations, ‘his lordship is lost, his merchandise is lost, his commons destroyed, the sea is lost, France is lost, himself so poor that he cannot afford his meat or drink’. They knew, by whispers or by rumours, the parlous state of his finances. The rebels also denounced the manifest perversions of local justice and the oppressions of local magnates, exposing indirectly the confused state of the entire realm.
Some among them, however, directed more personal criticism at Henry. William Merfield declared, at the market in the ancient hamlet of Brightling in East Sussex, that the king was ‘a natural fool and would often hold a staff in his hands with a bird on the end, playing therewith as a fool’. This must refer to some children’s toy; how Merfield came to know the fact is unclear. Harry Mase, a weaver from Ely, said that the king ‘looked more like a child than a man’ and that within a short time the ship imprinted on the coinage would be replaced by a sheep.
One of the words on the lips of Cade’s men was ‘common weal’ or ‘commonwealth’, being the grand polity of king and kingdom, lords and commons; the subject owes obedience to the king, but the king must also strive for the welfare of the subject. All the estates of the realm were, or should be, united in an association of duty and responsibility. It was this association, by implication, that was being undermined by Henry and his advisers.
The forces of the king reacted quickly enough to the threat; while Cade’s followers were encamped on Blackheath, emissaries from the king arrived on 13 June and ordered them to disperse. They also carried pardons with them. The king had wanted to go to them in person, emulating the bravery of the young Richard II seventy years before, but his advisers at first demurred. Several thousand men were gathered; 3,000 pardons, at least, were eventually issued. On the morning of 18 June Henry did advance upon Blackheath, with a large contingent of soldiers and guns, but the rebels had already dispersed under cover of the darkness of the previous night; they had been warned about the arrival of the royal army. It was a precautionary measure in another sense; to have fought against the king’s banner was manifest treason. Some of the king’s men, under the command of Sir Humphrey and Sir William Stafford, then pursued them; the rebels trapped them with an ambush, in which the Staffords were killed. The first blood had gone to the men of Kent.
The blood was soon avenged. Several lords rode into Kent where they exacted retribution, a measure of force that only provoked the rebels still further. A period of confusion followed in which the lords, faced with mounting reaction, quarrelled with one another and in which some soldiers deserted to the rebel cause. The king and his companions, together with the justices of the realm, then fled London
and retreated as fast as they could to the safety of the midlands; the mayor of London had begged the king to remain in the capital, but he refused. It was another example of the king’s lack of valour.
When they heard reports of the king’s retreat, Cade and his followers reassembled on Blackheath at the end of June; on the following day they entered Southwark, and commandeered the inns and hostelries of that district. Cade himself – who had become known as ‘the Captain’ and as ‘John Amend-All’ – stayed at the White Hart Inn, along the high street, that became the headquarters for the rebellion. The white hart had of course been the emblem of Richard II.
On 3 July Cade and his men crossed London Bridge, cutting the ropes of the drawbridge so that it could not be later raised against them, and proceeded to occupy the guildhall. In that place of justice several royal servants were convicted of high crimes against the country, and summarily executed at the fountain opposite Honey Lane known as the Cheapside Standard. The sheriff of Kent, one of the most hated, was dragged to Mile End where he was beheaded. Cade retired to the White Hart, in order to formulate his plans.
The Londoners, alarmed at the scale of the riot and damage along the streets of their city, now determined to prevent Cade from entering London once more across the bridge. A force of citizens confronted the rebels and a pitched battle, or series of battles, ensued. Cade, thwarted, determined to burn down the drawbridge; the Londoners, joined also by the remainder of the king’s servants who had escaped immediate justice, managed to close the entry-gate. Many perished in the flames of Cade’s fire.
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