It was not too difficult a task, for the House of Lancaster had never been wholly secure. The legitimacy of Henry IV’s title had been challenged by aristocratic factions during his reign. Reopening the Hundred Years War offered a lifeline to the Lancastrian dynasty because it would simultaneously raise the prestige of the dynasty and concentrate the minds and energies of the nobility on a quest for glory and riches. As Shakespeare’s Henry IV advised his son:
Be it thy course to busy giddy minds
With foreign quarrels; . . .
Giddy minds sobered at the prospect of fortunes. In 1412 an army commanded by Henry IV’s second son, Thomas, Duke of Clarence, returned from France with £35,000 which was shared among the thirteen noblemen who had accompanied the expedition. Revealingly, several had left home heavily in debt.5 The Agincourt campaign showered honour on Henry V and his lords, but they had to wait until the start of the piecemeal conquest of Normandy in 1417 to acquire the dividends they expected. These soon flowed freely as the Crown parcelled out French lands and titles. The Earl of Warwick became the count of Aumâle, the Earl of Stafford became Count of Perche, the Earl of Dorset became Count of Mortain and the Earl of Shrewsbury became Count of Clermont. French baronies and manors were scattered among lesser captains.
The new Anglo-French aristocracy quickly dissolved after 1440 as the Lancastrian empire in France disintegrated. It had always been underfunded, since English taxpayers were averse to underwriting enormous bills for wages, equipment and shipping, and so the Crown had borrowed heavily, creating a spiral of debt. Overstretched English forces were pushed back towards the Channel, and, with Henry VI negotiating from a position of strategic weakness, peace talks came to nothing.
War had failed to strengthen the Lancastrian monarchy by uniting and enriching the nobility; rather, it left them disgruntled, shamed and, in the case of the Duke of York, out of pocket. Recriminations were inevitable and varying degrees of blame were attached to the Dukes of Suffolk, Somerset and York. None was an outstanding commander or diplomat, but even if they had been, they had to contend with a King without political acumen or charisma.
Henry VI’s father, Henry V, had epitomised that heroic, Arthurian brand of kingship which seduced the hearts of noblemen. Warrior kingship was not for Henry VI; he was withdrawn, torpid and preferred pious meditation to the tiltyard or hunting field. He had been born in December 1421 and astrologers blamed his dull humours on the baleful influence of the moon.6 The moon king stood five feet and nine inches tall and was utterly without presence, so much so that some of his humbler subjects likened him to a child or a simpleton, for which impertinence they were hanged. Their diagnosis had not been too far off the mark, since between August 1453 and August 1454 Henry suffered a physical and mental breakdown which deprived him of his senses. When he recovered, he discovered (allegedly to his amazement) that he had fulfilled that most basic of royal duties, fathering a son and heir.
Clysters, enemas and bloodletting may somehow have cured the royal distemper, but the nobility failed to contrive a remedy for a lethargic and fallible king. The upheavals that followed the downfall of Suffolk were a prelude to a decade of increasingly bad-tempered bickering between aristocratic factions. All agreed that Henry VI could rule only under tutelage, but who could be trusted as his mentors? On one side stood his wife, Margaret of Anjou, the high-spirited and wilful daughter of a French princeling who was rich in titles (he was titular King of Naples) and poor in revenues. A few months after their marriage in 1445 Margaret had persuaded Henry to surrender the French provinces of Maine and Anjou. The King was under her thumb, an arrangement which suited those nobles who believed her preferable to York, whose integrity and disinterest were questionable.
York saw himself as an ideal protector by right of blood (he was descended from Edward III through both his parents) and he was the richest peer in the country. He was allied to two other super-rich lords, his kinsmen, Richard Neville, Earl of Salisbury, and his son Richard, Earl of Warwick (Warwick the Kingmaker). All three possessed extensive estates in Wales and the Scottish marches which provided reservoirs of soldiers. But while York could threaten his fellow peers, he could not unite them.
Whatever faction they followed, or even if they took refuge in neutrality, individual noblemen became increasingly anxious about their security. The attempted murder of Ralph, Lord Cromwell, in Westminster Palace at the end of 1449, the killing of Suffolk and three other ministers during the next year, and York’s claims that a knot of courtiers had planned to assassinate him as he travelled back from Ireland generated a sense of paranoia. Violence became part of public life and its presence justified aristocrats of all affinities summoning their dependants whenever a political crisis seemed imminent. Fearful lords backed by armies were disinclined to compromise.
Humphrey Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, sensed the new mood. In 1450 he was prudently purchasing gunpowder and during the next ten years repeatedly summoned his retainers, who, in turn, called up their servants and tenants. The Duke could muster two thousand fighting men, all distinguished by the Stafford livery of scarlet and black jackets and the badge of the Stafford knot. They did not save him or his eldest son from being injured in 1455 when York, Salisbury and Warwick confronted Henry VI at St Albans. Exasperated by royal temporising, Warwick stormed the town and captured the King, who had been wounded in the neck by an arrow. The dead included York’s enemy Edmund Beaufort, Duke of Somerset, and the Nevilles’ northern rivals, Henry Percy, second Earl of Northumberland, and Thomas, Lord Clifford. These killings were calculated. They added the element of vendetta to political life.
Long before St Albans Henry had become a monarch to whom things happened rather than a ruler who made them happen. After St Albans he was under the thumb of the Yorkist peers, but by 1458 the Queen had reasserted her authority. Queen Margaret’s aims were to preserve the dynasty and sustain an aristocratic party strong enough to withstand the Yorkists. Their elimination offered the best hope of security and it was temporarily achieved in 1459 after York’s defeat at Ludford in Shropshire. Immediately after the battle, the Coventry Parliament passed acts of attainder stripping all prominent Yorkists of their titles and estates. Henceforward, they were fighting to recover their livelihoods and, in the following year, they won the Battle of Northampton and once again captured the King.
Shakespeare’s insight into York’s character suggested that he had long coveted the crown, which is probably correct, although he proceeded with circumspection, setting an example which would be followed by his fourth son, Richard, Duke of Gloucester. With Henry his prisoner, York claimed the throne in October 1460 and triggered several months of intermittent fighting in which he and Salisbury were killed and Margaret regained control of her husband. They lost the final assay at the Battle of Towton in 1461, which confirmed York’s nineteen-year-old eldest son Edward, Earl of March, as King. Margaret hustled Henry towards Scotland and exile. In 1464 he was persuaded by former Lancastrian partisans to return, was taken and imprisoned in the Tower.
Edward IV’s propaganda exploited the commonplace notion of England as a garden (it was used by Shakespeare in Richard II) that had been untended and become overgrown with ‘weeds which must be mown down’.7 Edward carried a scythe and, at the same time, was bent on reviving heroic kingship. One of his scribblers declared:
Of a more famous knight I never read
Since the time of Arthur’s days.8
The rhetoric had some substance. A tall, courageous and likeable prince, Edward did all in his power to govern wisely, promote the welfare of his subjects and achieve solvency. Yet the cold reality was that he owed his throne to a coalition of noblemen who all wanted to be rewarded, none more than Warwick the Kingmaker. The conflict had also created a body of alienated lords who had lost kinsmen and forfeited titles and lands by attainder. Over a hundred landowners were deprived in this way, though they could regain their assets through conspicuous loyalty and good behaviour.
&
nbsp; Just over half the aristocracy (thirty or so peers) had taken an active part in the fighting between 1459 and 1461 and, of these, Yorkist partisans were a minority. Edward had, therefore, to reunite the peerage, secure its cooperation and create a knot of lords dependent on his favour as a counterbalance to Warwick. He more or less succeeded, but seriously underestimated Warwick’s rapacity, egotism and intoxication with power.
The Earl parted company with Edward IV and common sense in 1469. He stage-managed three small-scale uprisings against the King in which the insurgents claimed that Edward had fallen under the spell of an upstart nobility, most notably the relations of his queen, Elizabeth Woodville. She was the daughter of a minor Lancastrian peer and the widow of a Lancastrian knight who had been killed at the second Battle of St Albans in 1460. It was not her connections which angered Warwick, but the fact that her family were elbowing the Nevilles aside in the queue for royal patronage.
Indirect pressure having failed, Warwick cobbled together an alliance with Edward’s capricious younger brother George, Duke of Clarence (‘false, fleeting perjur’d Clarence’), Margaret of Anjou and various Lancastrians peers who had joined her in exile. This consortium of old antagonists briefly restored Henry VI to the throne in 1470 and compelled Edward to flee to Flanders. He returned in 1471, quickly rallied his supporters and defeated the Lancastrians at Barnet and Tewkesbury. Their leaders, including Warwick, who was cut down ‘somewhat fleeing’ from Barnet, were killed or executed after the battles. Henry VI was murdered in the Tower, and his son, Edward, Prince of Wales, had died in the fighting at Tewkesbury. An unprecedented blood-letting was a warning to the nobility.
Unlike the earlier phase of the Wars of the Roses, which had been fought over the issue of how best to rescue the country from Henry VI and install honest and efficient government, the contest between 1469 and 1471 was no more than selfish aristocratic power-broking. Before and after the tumults, Edward had an excellent record of kingship.
Edward’s death at the age of forty-one in 1483 opened the final stage of the wars. Again, the conflict revolved around a blatant struggle for power; no issues were at stake. Within a week of the King’s death, his brother Richard, Duke of Gloucester, and Henry Stafford, second Duke of Buckingham, agreed to try their hand at kingmaking. Each was rich, amoral and ruthless. Richard had long cultivated a sense of his own destiny. ‘What am I Lord and what is my family that thou has brought me this far – then has raised me to this,’ he declared in the preamble to the charter for his college at Middleham in 1478.9 He had much to thank God for: he was a royal Duke, the richest and most powerful man in the kingdom and could rely on the retinues of his northern clients.
Alleging that Edward IV’s marriage to Elizabeth Woodville had infringed canon law (but not laying the claim before the Church courts), Gloucester and Buckingham deposed the thirteen-year-old Edward V and imprisoned him and his younger brother Richard, Duke of York, in the Tower of London. Both Dukes overawed London with troops summoned from the North and the Welsh Marches and intimidated the nobility by the summary executions of Lords Grey and Rivers (kinsmen of Elizabeth Woodville) and William, Lord Hastings.
After a rushed coronation, Richard III (1483–5) doled out rewards to his accomplices: the dukedom of Norfolk and the Mowbray estates were given to Lord John Howard. The title and lands had belonged by marriage to the Duke of York, who had been betrothed to marry Lady Anne Mowbray when they had been six and eight, and the Prince’s rights to the dukedom had been confirmed by statute. Howard’s promotion and enrichment at the young Duke’s expense confirmed what was widely rumoured: that he and his elder brother had been murdered in the Tower on Richard III’s orders.
Richard’s cynical and brutal manipulation of power shocked the country, divided Yorkist supporters and, since he had overridden the laws of property and inheritance, alienated landowners of all ranks. Richard’s moral claim to the throne was as flimsy as his legal; there was no reason whatsoever to imagine that Edward V would have proved an incompetent king when he came of age. Fear and anger led to a number of localised uprisings in the autumn of 1483 in favour of Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, a Lancastrian exile with a tenuous but valid title to the throne. Buckingham defected to the king-in-waiting, but was caught and executed. He had been deserted by his Welsh tenants, who refused to risk their lives in the madcap adventure of a notoriously tight-fisted landlord who needed an armed escort whenever he visited his lands in the Marches.
Richard III’s authority remained precarious and fell apart quickly in 1485. Richmond landed on the western coast of Wales, marched unopposed to Market Bosworth in Leicestershire and defeated Richard in a short battle on 22 August. The King’s supporters fought with little or no enthusiasm and two commanders of large contingents, the Earls of Derby and Northumberland, showed a benevolent neutrality towards Richmond. The pitch of hatred towards Richard was so intense that the victors broke with hallowed tradition and abused his corpse.
Legend has it that Derby found Richard III’s crown in a thorn bush and handed it to Henry VII (1485–1509), a symbolic reminder that, like his Yorkist and Lancastrian predecessors, he owed his throne to an aristocratic faction. He kept it, although a tiny rump of diehard Yorkists with nothing to lose attempted a comeback with a bogus Richard, Duke of York (in fact one Lambert Simnel, a craftsman’s son), and were beaten at the Battle of Stoke-by-Newark in 1487. Henry VII followed the policies of Edward IV and national recovery was swift. Stability was restored and the nobility was grateful.
5
As a True Knight:
Honour and Violence
and the Wars of the
Roses
Stable government equalled security for all forms of property. For this reason alone, the aristocracy had most to lose from civil wars. Why, then, did the English nobility jeopardise its lands and its lives by resorting to the politics of the sword? Shakespeare blamed a collective insanity. ‘England hath long been mad,’ declares Henry VII at the end of Richard III. It was a simple diagnosis that accorded with the commonplace metaphor which likened a nation to the human body. Its organs, limbs and brain worked in unison and its internal humours, which governed the emotions and its overall health, were balanced. In late medieval England the body politic seemed infected with recurrent spasms of lunacy. Its symptoms were most virulent among the aristocracy, who functioned as the country’s brain. They were accomplices in the inflation of violence and the proliferation of disorder and rejected the notion that the nobility had a duty to protect the kingdom from anarchy.
Unravel the motives of those noblemen who began and prolonged the Wars of the Roses and two questions emerge. Did the men produce the times, or did the times the men? Some modern parallels offer clues. The characters and careers of the big players – Suffolk, York, his sons Clarence and Gloucester, and Warwick the Kingmaker – suggest that they would have flourished in Chicago during the prohibition era, or as entrepreneurs in post-Communist Russia. They were ambitious, tough, ruthless opportunists, and, in the cases of Gloucester and Warwick, probably psychopathic.
A pack of blackguards perhaps, but they persuaded other aristocrats to join them in hazarding lives, titles and lands in what were always potentially fatal enterprises. The odds of survival were discouraging. Between 1455 and 1485 seven dukes, nine earls and nineteen lords were killed in action or beheaded after battles. Losers suffered Parliamentary attainder, which deprived them of titles and lands. Nearly four hundred landowners were penalised, although about two-thirds of the attainders were eventually rescinded. In the meantime, their estates were distributed among the winners. When the losers recovered their property, they often discovered that it had been exploited or neglected. Thomas, Lord Roos, whose Midland manors were returned after twenty-four years in 1485 found that they had been mismanaged by their interim owner William, Lord Hastings, who had even stolen the lead from the roof of Belvoir Castle in Leicestershire.1
While Roos was contemplating his dilapidated home,
James Blount, Lord Mountjoy, was compiling a balance sheet of the gains and losses of the aristocracy during the wars. He concluded that it had fared badly, but the experience had been instructive. Blount warned his two sons against taking the ‘state of baron’ and urged them to suppress any ‘desire to be great around princes, for it is dangerous’.2 High politics were nasty, dangerous and best shunned. The Blount boys were infinitely better off away from court and looking after their own affairs.
Those noblemen who had ignored the perils of political engagement in an age of faction, or tried to sidestep it, believed that they were in the hands of God. He was omniscient, opaque and perverse, insofar as his dispensations did not always conform to what humans considered best for themselves. What outwardly appeared as caprice was in reality the unfolding of a divine providence whose ultimate purpose was hidden. This consoled Sir John Paston after he had backed the defeated Lancastrians at Barnet in 1471:
God has shown himself marvellously like Him that made all, and can undo again when Him list [wishes]; and I can think that by all likelihood shall show Himself as marvellous again and that in short time . . .3
He did, but not as Paston had hoped. The Yorkist victory at Tewkesbury less than a month later turned out to be another Yorkist miracle. As one court rhymester wrote afterwards, the battle proved that God had intended Edward IV to be ‘the true inheritor of the crown’. Sir John survived his error of judgement, but the family did not tempt fate again: in 1485 his son ignored a call to arms to fight for Richard III.
Supernatural forces could penetrate the future. Necromancy and astrology had a considerable hold on the aristocratic imagination, understandably in precarious times. In 1441 Eleanor, the wife of Henry VI’s last surviving uncle, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, consulted a witch to discover whether he would succeed the still childless King. Regal ambitions may have prompted George, Duke of Clarence, to dabble in witchcraft in 1477. At various times he, his brother Gloucester and Warwick accused Elizabeth Woodville of using sorcery to seduce Edward IV. As Richard III, Gloucester went a step further and had the Queen formally denounced as an enchantress during the 1484 Parliament.4 He did so on the twin assumptions that the charges were credible and that witchcraft could be efficacious.
Aristocrats: Power, Grace, and Decadence: Britain's Great Ruling Classes from 1066 to the Present Page 6
