Periods of great economic activity succeeded periods of slump, so that the familiar cycle of overconfidence and anxiety was always in motion; yet what we now call the gross domestic product of the country materially increased. When a ship coming from Dieppe landed at Winchelsea harbour in 1490, it contained satin and pipes of wine, razors and damask, needles and mantles of leopards’ skins, five gross of playing cards and eight gross of plaques stamped with the image of the Lamb of God. A trade in monkeys from Venice, described as ‘apes and japes and marmosets tailed’, flourished. An inventory of the household goods of Sir John Fastolf reveals that he purchased cloth from Zeeland (now part of the Netherlands), silver cups from Paris, coats of mail from Milan, treacle pots from Genoa, cloth from Arras and girdles from Germany. An old rhyme tells the story:
Hops and turkies, carps and beer,
Came into England all in a year.
In fact by the end of the fifteenth century, beer itself was coming out of England. It had once been imported from Prussia, but English merchants were soon carrying beer from London to Flanders.
Economic activity quickened in a variety of different spheres. A small native industry of glass-painting emerged, and carpet manufactories were established at Romsey in Hampshire. Great merchants now rivalled their competitors in Genoa or in Venice. William Cannynges of Bristol possessed, in 1461, ten ships and employed 800 sailors as well as 100 craftsmen. The ships of the merchants were in fact employed as a volunteer force working with the royal navy to patrol the seas and to defend the shores. The cities and towns that engaged in maritime trade, such as Bristol and Southampton, naturally flourished. John Cabot sailed out of Bristol for the New World in 1497, looking for new markets and new trade. The mercantile interest was successful in another sense; the more affluent merchants of the towns were now attending the parliament house, and pressing their demands for the exclusive management of what was not necessarily fair trade.
Iron from the Weald in Kent and the Forest of Dean in Gloucestershire was much in demand; other wooded areas, where timber was available to create the charcoal for smelting the ore, were fully exploited. In the Forest of Dean alone there were seventy-two forges. All Saints Church in the village of Newland, on the western edge of the forest, has a brass engraving of a miner. His leather breeches are tied below his knee, and he sports a wooden mine-hod over his shoulder in which to carry the iron ore; he holds a mattock or small pickaxe in his right hand, and between his teeth he carries a candle-holder or ‘Nellie’. He would, of course, work and dress as a small farmer when he was not mining. The silver mines of Cornwall and Devon, Dorset and Somerset, were expanded. It was said at the time that ‘the kingdom is of greater value under the land than it is above’. Productivity increased in the shipyards, the gunsmitheries and the bell foundries.
The reign of wool reached new heights during the rule of Henry VI and of his successor. The annual export of raw wool had declined a little from its peak in the fourteenth century but this was offset by a proportionate increase in the export of woollen cloth. Together they accounted for approximately 80 per cent of the country’s exports. English cloths were taken to the shores of the Black Sea, and were traded at the fair of Novgorod as well as the Rialto in Venice; they went to Denmark and to Prussia. The merchant adventurers, in control of the cloth trade, were exporting approximately 60,000 rolls of cloth each year by the end of the century.
It was a business that engaged a significant part of the nation; the wool was given to village women to comb and to spin before being sent to the weaver; to this day, an unmarried woman is known as a spinster. Once the wool had been woven into cloth it was given to the fuller for dyeing and then passed on to the shearman for finishing. The dominance of wool is the reason why the Lord Chancellor of England, until 2005, always sat upon a woolsack in the House of Lords. The towns that were involved in the cloth trade – notably Colchester – became larger and stronger. The fulling mills of the West Riding and the west of England turned ever faster. Broadcloth came from the Cotswolds and the Stroud Valley. As York and Coventry decayed, so villages like Lavenham in Suffolk with its famous ‘wool church’ thrived.
Wool raw and finished was indeed the motor of the fifteenth-century English economy, and as a result more and more land was preserved for the breeding of sheep. This in turn led to the enclosing of land for that purpose. Villages were moved or even destroyed to make way for the sheep-runs; the cultivation of grain gave way to rearing. The shepherds lived in wheeled huts that followed the flocks. In the late fifteenth century one Warwickshire antiquary, John Rous, complained in his Historia Regum Angliae of ‘the modern destruction of villages which brings dearth to the commonwealth. The root of this evil is greed … As Christ wept over Jerusalem so do we weep over the destruction of our own times.’ In his own county there are more than a hundred deserted villages, the vast majority of them cleared in the fifteenth century. The rights of freeholders and copyholders were in principle protected, but those who had dwelled on the land by custom could be evicted with impunity. Much of the population moved a few miles, perhaps, and continued working the land. A few were not so fortunate. That rootless phenomenon known then as ‘the sturdy beggar’ is first mentioned in the 1470s.
All things move in restless combination. There is a law of contrast at work in human history, whereby one development provokes a counter-development. Many people suffered from the pace of economic change, but others benefited from it. The successful small farmer was now paying rent for his land as a tenant, rather than performing labour duties; the small freeholder, known as the yeoman, is also more in evidence. The class of villein or serf gave way to the labourer working for a wage. The feudal economy had to a large extent been succeeded by a money economy.
Yet the prosperity of England was by no means evenly shared, and it is important to bear in mind the unimaginable extremes of poverty beside the perceived affluence of certain county towns and regions. The fact that the contrasts of life were more violent, and the insecurity of existence more palpable, rendered the people more passionate and more excitable. Theirs was a life more intense, more sensitive, more arduous and more irritable than our own.
33
The divided realm
Signs and portents of civil unrest, according to the native chroniclers, darkened the air of the mid-fifteenth century. A rain of blood fell in different regions, and the holy waters of healing wells overflowed. A huge cock was observed in the waters off Weymouth, ‘coming out of the sea, having a great crest upon his head and a great red beard and legs half a yard [45 centimetres] long’. Many people heard a strange voice rising in the air, between Leicester and Banbury, calling out ‘Bows! Bows!’ A woman in the county of Huntingdon ‘felt the embryo in her womb weeping as it were, and uttering a kind of sobbing noise’ as if it dreaded being born into a time of calamity.
The houses of York and Lancaster were in fact two sides of the same ruling family. The house of Lancaster was descended from the fourth son of Edward III, John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster; the house of York was descended from the fifth son of the same king, Edmund, duke of York, whose youngest son had married the great-granddaughter of the third son. They are sometimes described as the third and fourth sons respectively, but this omits one male child who lived for six months. Their closeness, however, bred only enmity and ferocity. Blue blood was often bad blood. It was like a fight breaking out among a small assembly; slowly it spreads, bringing in more and more people. But there is still a vast crowd standing outside the arena of combat, watching silently and incuriously or going about their familiar business.
York and his followers retired to their estates after the recovery of the king from mental incapacity and the return of Somerset to power, but in the spring of 1455 they were summoned to attend a great council at Leicester. York feared that this would be the occasion for his arrest or arraignment, and so he forestalled events by gathering his supporters and marching down towards London. He was joined by the representa
tives of one of the great families of northern England; York’s brother-in-law was Richard Neville, the earl of Salisbury, and the earl’s son was another Richard Neville, the earl of Warwick. Their inveterate enemies in the north, the family of the Percys, had taken the side of Somerset. So local enmities exacerbated the general conflict. Salisbury and Warwick, who came to be known as ‘Warwick the king-maker’, proclaimed that they had taken up arms to remove ‘our enemies of approved experience, such as abide and keep themselves under the wing of your Majesty Royal’.
They had at all costs to maintain the fiction that they were not marching against the king but against the king’s councillors; otherwise they would have incurred the charge of high treason. Nevertheless York’s army now faced the king’s army in open battle at St Albans. There had been some attempt at preliminary negotiations, but York feared that Henry was wholly in Somerset’s control and was therefore not to be trusted. So his forces entered the town at ten o’clock in the morning on 22 May 1455, and began a series of rapid raids in its main street and public spaces. They were looking for their enemies. Somerset and Henry Percy, the earl of Northumberland, had been marked for slaughter. They were tracked down and killed on the spot in a notable if not unique act of savagery. The king himself was wounded in the neck, as he sat beneath his banner in the market square, but he was not seriously injured. Sixty men were killed in the fighting, which lasted for only a couple of hours.
Once their victory was assured, York and the Nevilles submitted to the king. It was reported that they ‘besought him of his Highness to take them as his true liegemen, saying that they never intended to hurt his person’. Henry then ‘took them to grace, and so desired them to cease their people, and that there should no more harm be done’. York then escorted the king back to London, if escort is the appropriate word for an armed entourage, and four days later presented Henry with his crown in St Paul’s Cathedral. It might legitimately have been asked who was in charge. A friend wrote to John Paston, on that day, ‘as for what rule we shall have, yet I know never’. The king’s forces had been defied, and the king himself wounded; the order of the world had been turned upside down, and the governance of the realm placed in utmost peril. Yet who could have known or guessed that the combat of St Albans was the prelude to an internecine war that would continue for thirty years, provoke seven or eight major battles on English soil, and lead to the killing of some eighty nobles of royal blood? It has all the ingredients of a revenge tragedy. ‘By God’s blood,’ one Lancastrian noble screamed at the son of York on a later battlefield, ‘your father killed mine, and so will I do to you and to all your kin!’ We might be back in the days of the Anglo-Saxons, as if the years between had been a dream.
Within a short time after the battle the king had fallen prey to some malady, the nature of which remains unknown. It is easy to conjecture that he had relapsed into the same state of confusion as before, perhaps traumatized by his defeat, but he does not seem to have withdrawn completely from the world. He even managed to open the parliament in the summer of 1455. After a delay of some months York resumed the protectorate but the king, or his wife working in his name, let it be known to his councillors that he wished to be kept informed ‘in all matters as touching his honour, worship and safety’. The royal family were now more wary and defensive; they feared that York aspired to being king in all but name.
York’s most significant task was to defend the southern coast against French incursions and the northern frontier against the Scots; he was also obliged to protect the last remaining English settlement at Calais. So he named his ally, Warwick, as captain of that town. For all these preparations he needed money to be granted by the parliament house. That proved a complicated and arduous task, made infinitely more difficult when in February 1456 the king was brought by the lords to Westminster in order to abrogate the proceedings and effectively to overrule the protector. At that point York, resentful and weary, resigned or was made to resign from his post.
The king was now nominally in command, but the real power lay with his wife. Margaret of Anjou was according to a contemporary ‘a great and strong laboured [strong-minded] woman’ who arranged everything ‘to an intent and conclusion to her power’. She was certainly more masterful than her husband. Her essential purpose was now to safeguard the interests of her infant son and to make sure that he succeeded his ailing father. In this respect, York was still the principal enemy made all the more dangerous by the death of Somerset.
She moved the king and court to the middle of her landed estates around Coventry, with the castle of Kenilworth as her stronghold, thereby setting up a base of power as an alternative to York who remained in London. The citizens had taken up his cause, and the queen did not feel safe among them. The councils of the realm were literally divided, and the course of affairs seemed likely to drift. One contemporary observed that ‘the great princes of the land [pre-eminently York and Warwick] were not called to Council but set apart’.
For the next three or four years there is little mention of the king; he spent much of his time travelling through the midlands, staying at various favoured abbeys or priories. It is said that above all else he enjoyed sleeping. No speeches by the king are reported. He was ‘simple’; he upheld no household, and he prosecuted no war. Little or no attempt was made at governance, apart from the routine business of finance and patronage. Even in these spheres, however, the queen’s wishes and decisions were paramount. The Lancastrian court, and the Yorkist lords, watched each other eagerly and suspiciously; the air was filled with threat.
The court returned to Westminster, in the winter of 1457, accompanied by a force of 13,000 archers; it was widely believed that the king and queen had returned in order to overcome York and to overawe the city. Political life had always been a form of gang warfare, in a scramble for lands and riches. Now it showed its true face. The streets of the city were filled with supporters of the Lancastrians and the Yorkists; the younger relatives of the Lancastrians who had been killed at St Albans had come for vengeance.
Another source of unrest arose in that winter. In the summer of the year a French fleet had landed at Sandwich and devastated the town, a signal example both of the failure of English policy and of English weakness. The merchants of London, in particular, were horrified and outraged at the threat to maritime trade. In such an environment no one could feel safe.
Confronted with the possibility of civil war breaking out in the capital between the supporters of both sides, the principal figures reached a form of compromise in which the relatives of the dead were offered financial compensation for their loss. Money, in England, is always the best policy. This agreement was followed by what was known as a ‘love day’, in which sworn enemies literally joined hands and proceeded to a solemn service in St Paul’s Cathedral. But the love did not last. The royal court showed no favour to York or to the Nevilles, and in the spring of 1459 Henry ordered his loyal nobles to gather at Leicester with ‘as many persons defensibly arrayed as they might according to their degree’. The king was, in other words, calling for the armed retainers of the lords to be put at his disposal. A great council was held in June at Coventry, to which York and his supporters were not invited. At this assembly the renegade lords were denounced for their disloyalty.
York and Warwick now gathered their forces, and marched towards Worcester where they held their own council. Richard Neville, earl of Salisbury, was intent upon joining them with 5,000 men. The queen’s army intercepted him, however, on the road from Newcastle-under-Lyme; Salisbury beat off the attack, killing the queen’s commander and scattering what must now be called the enemy. The battle, lasting for more than four hours, claimed the lives of 2,000 men; the battlefield itself became known as ‘Deadmen’s Den’. So it had come to this. The English were fighting and killing the English, the men of Yorkshire against the men of Shropshire, the men of Wiltshire against the men of Cheshire.
Despite Salisbury’s victory, York and his allies were n
ow confronted by a large royal army bearing down upon them. They retreated from Worcester to Ludlow, where they established an armed camp. Yet it was clear enough that York was uneasy about confronting the king in open battle where he could be accused of high treason. A contingent of Warwick’s forces from Calais then deserted and, knowing themselves to be vulnerable, York and the Nevilles fled under cover of darkness; York returned to his old fiefdom, Ireland, while Warwick and Salisbury sailed to Calais. Their lands were seized by the king and they were declared to be traitors. Their cause seemed to have ended ingloriously.
The coastal defences of the country were now strengthened, with the possibility of an attack both from Calais and from Dublin; meanwhile, in the spring of 1460, Warwick sailed to Ireland in order to consult York on the next move. It came in the form of invasion. In the early summer of 1460 Warwick and Salisbury landed at Kent and began a march to the friendly territory of London. The leaders of the capital welcomed them and even offered them money. The Nevilles said that they had come to ‘rescue’ the king from his evil councillors; they professed nothing but goodwill towards Henry himself; they were not rebels, but reformers of the body politic; they wished to lighten taxation and to reduce the king’s debts; they pledged to reform the workings of the law and to lift the manifold oppressions of the king’s courtiers. It was the standard rhetoric of the period, but it was received warmly by the citizens and by the people of south-eastern England. It seems likely, however, that York and Warwick had brooded on the possibility of killing the king together with his wife and son. It should be remembered that these were all vicious and ruthless men.
Warwick remained in the city for only three days before marching north in search of the king’s army. He found it outside Northampton and, before sending his forces into battle, he ordered them to hunt down and kill the king’s entourage; the senior nobility and the knights were not to be spared. The fighting lasted less than an hour, and the victory went to Warwick after the slaughter of the king’s closest companions. Henry himself was taken into custody and once more escorted to London, where he was king only in name. ‘I follow after the lords,’ he is described as saying in a poem of the time. ‘I never know why.’ He was a puppet monarch. Nevertheless the queen and her son, the young Prince Edward, were still at large.
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