She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth (49 page)

But there were limits to what York could do. He could act with self-conscious even-handedness, but he was still a subject, a private individual with private interests, not the anointed king. And any suspension of disbelief about the duke’s ability to turn the ship of state from the rocks towards which it was drifting under Henry’s motionless hand was undermined by the inconvenient presence of the duke of Somerset – the glaring exception to York’s policy of inclusion – who was waiting and watching from behind the Tower’s walls for a chance to strike back against his enemy.

It came with startling suddenness. On Christmas Day 1454, sixteen months after he had last shown any sign of knowing who or where he was, the king began at last to respond to those around
him. His recovery proved to be as rapid as his collapse. Five days later, Margaret brought their fourteen-month-old son to see his father. Henry gazed at the toddling prince in wonder and asked his name; ‘then he held up his hands and thanked God thereof’, a well-informed correspondent reported from the court at Greenwich. ‘And he said he never knew him till that time, nor knew not what was said to him, nor knew not where he had been while he has been sick till now.’

The king’s return to his senses provoked euphoria both among his subjects – the bishop of Winchester and the prior of Clerkenwell were said to have ‘wept for joy’ after speaking to him for the first time – and in Henry himself: ‘He says he is in charity with all the world, and so he would all the lords were.’ But, as this artless optimism made all too clear, the king’s senses had never included any comprehension of the reality of politics, a circumstance which his restoration to health did nothing to change. Nor, of course, did it give all of Henry’s subjects reason to celebrate. With the king once more able to walk and talk, the principle of conciliar rule that underpinned the duke of York’s protectorate abruptly evaporated. The reassertion of Henry’s personal rule meant the re-emergence of the royal household as the centre of political gravity, as well as the renewed influence of the royal kinsman who had led the king’s government until the onset of Henry’s illness. Somerset was freed from the Tower at the end of January and declared to be not a traitor but a ‘faithful and true liegeman and subject’, and York could only watch with disillusion and dread as the noble consensus he had so painstakingly nurtured as the bedrock of his power fell away beneath his feet. On 9 February he was removed from office as protector, and shortly afterwards the duke and his men rode away from the court for the greater security of his own estates.

This time, however, York’s exclusion from government did not, as it had done in 1451, mean political isolation. The great Neville family, led by York’s brother-in-law Richard Neville, earl of Salisbury, and Neville’s eldest son, another Richard, earl of Warwick, had by now concluded that their best chance of protection in their
vicious region-wide feud with the Percys lay in solidarity with York. The Percys, meanwhile, in a tangled amalgam of cause and consequence, had identified their own best interests with Somerset and the renaissance of the household regime. As a result, York’s renewed stand-off with the court could no longer be so easily dismissed as the tantrum of a dissident magnate whose private interests had been thwarted. Instead, the duke’s position was bolstered by the political and practical force of the Nevilles’ support, while at the same time the court regime was compromised by its increasingly close identification with a partisan faction.

And this time, the stand-off was quickly broken. Somerset summoned the nobility to a great council meeting at Leicester in May – an ominous development for York and the Nevilles, who saw in this move the beginnings of a manoeuvre to destroy them, even before Somerset left London for Leicester with the king riding happily at his side at the head of an intimidatingly large body of troops. Counterattack appeared to York to be the best – perhaps last – hope of defence, and he moved south at speed with his Neville allies and the biggest army they could muster. On 22 May, they intercepted the heavily armed royal party at St Albans, twenty miles north-west of the capital. There it rapidly became clear that the irresistible logic by which division had become confrontation now dictated that confrontation would become civil war.

York, Salisbury and Warwick, believing now that only Somerset’s permanent removal from Henry’s side could secure their own safety, demanded the surrender of ‘our enemies of approved experience, such as abide and keep themselves under the wing of your Majesty Royal’. It was a point on which Somerset and the Percys were hardly likely to capitulate, and for the other nobles in the king’s train, whatever their private relationship with Somerset, the horrifying spectacle of three great magnates marching in arms against their monarch was enough to convince them to draw their own swords in Henry’s defence.

The first blows were struck at around ten in the morning, when York’s troops forced their way into the town. Fighting continued
for several hours, with soldiers skirmishing in the narrow streets, trampling bloodstained feet through byres and kitchen gardens, and hacking through wattle-and-daub walls for the purposes of ambush or escape. This was physically confined combat, lacking the unconstrained brutality of the battlefield, and it produced no wholesale slaughter: probably fewer than a hundred men had been killed by the time it became clear that York and the Nevilles had achieved a decisive advantage. But among the dead – almost certainly the victims of a deliberate manhunt rather than the vagaries of war – were the Nevilles’ principal enemy, Henry Percy, earl of Northumberland, and the duke of Somerset himself.

The king had taken no part in either the abortive attempt at negotiation that had preceded the battle, or the fighting itself, instead sitting haplessly under his banner in the market square while his greatest nobles fought to the death in the streets around him. He had still contrived to be wounded in the mêlée, the unsuspecting victim of an arrow that grazed his neck. But, walk and talk though he might, it was now apparent with unprecedented clarity that Henry was no more than a pawn who, with good intentions and utter malleability, would endorse any views that his current custodians might espouse. For now, that meant extending his royal grace to York and the Nevilles as they knelt before him, and expressing the magnificently vague hope, it was reported, that ‘there should no more harm be done’. Then the king obediently mounted his horse and rode in procession back to London with the duke he had left the city to oppose. There, on Sunday 25 May, surrounded by York’s guards, he sat in state in the Gothic splendour of St Paul’s Cathedral to receive his crown from the duke’s hands. It was an imposing demonstration of York’s mastery, but also a pointed and very public exhibition of his loyalty. The duke – whose options, like everyone else’s, were narrowing as the familiar certainties of the political world began to disintegrate – was staking his future on an attempt to recreate the protectorate that had allowed him to govern England as a loyal servant of the rightful king.

But there was one person at least who no longer recognised this brand of loyalty. Margaret had not accompanied her husband north toward Leicester, and so had been spared the horrifying spectacle of the bloodletting at St Albans. But her disquiet at the implications of York’s victory was manifest. By the time her husband re-entered London’s gates in the duke’s company, his queen had retreated with their son behind the reassuringly immense walls of the Tower.

Margaret had no history of irreconcilable personal antipathy to York: she had known him since 1445, when he escorted her through Normandy as a fifteen-year-old bride on her way to meet her husband for the first time. Since then she had regularly included the duke, his wife and servants among the recipients of the gifts the queen traditionally distributed each new year, and during York’s earlier estrangement from the court in 1453 his duchess, Cecily Neville, had written to Margaret to appeal for her help in healing a breach that was, she explained, causing the duke ‘infinite sorrow, unrest of heart and of worldly comfort’.

But Margaret had also been close to the duke of Somerset, whose youthful talent for securing the friendship of French queens had clearly not deserted him. In the autumn of 1451 Margaret had bestowed on him the large annual sum of
£
100 as a signal (and costly) mark of her favour, and two years later, only a matter of weeks before the duke was incarcerated in the Tower, he had stood godfather to the young Prince Edward. Margaret had acquiesced, then, in York’s appointment as protector – at the cost of both Somerset’s imprisonment and the failure of her own attempt to rule – but it was evidently not her preferred choice for the disposition of her debilitated husband’s government. Still, she was a queen, by venerable tradition an advocate for political harmony, and York’s public commitment to her son’s rights as prince of Wales persuaded her to bow to the force of majority opinion among the nobility.

However, Margaret’s political compass was radically reset by the events of the early months of 1455. Somerset, newly released from
his prison quarters, had come out fighting as the champion of her husband’s personal authority. And York, in response, had taken up arms against his king. There could be no doubt where the queen’s sympathies lay as she waited for news from St Albans, or of the horror with which she received word of Somerset’s violent death and her husband’s capture by the duke of York. York might protest his fidelity to Henry, but faithful subjects, in Margaret’s view, did not either kill the king’s chief counsellor or attempt to subject their sovereign lord to their own will. Henry was no longer immobilised by illness, which surely rendered York’s efforts to renew his protectorate wholly illegitimate. Not only that, but York’s very identity only served to compound the deep distrust with which the queen now regarded him.

The blood relationship with the royal line of succession on which the duke had dwelt so often in claiming a stake in Henry’s government also, in Margaret’s eyes, now made him a threat. The king was descended in the male line from the third son of Edward III; York in the male line from the fourth. Through his mother, however, the duke could trace his ancestry back to the second son of Edward III. Until now, it had been unthinkable that this senior claim through the female line could ever be used to challenge the authority of an anointed king. But then again, it had also been unthinkable that two royal dukes should fight to the death at the head of their armies in the streets of a prosperous English town while the king looked on in dazed bewilderment. And it might easily be noted that a claim through the female line had been the basis on which Henry himself had once been crowned king of France.

York, so far, had uttered no public word that was not scrupulously loyal. But if he was prepared to impose his will at sword-point on an adult and sentient king, how much – or how little – restraint might he show if it were a question of bowing the knee to Margaret’s eighteen-month-old son? The queen’s own family history was hardly reassuring. Her father René, his loyal daughter believed, had been rightfully king of Sicily, Naples and Jerusalem, but had been unable to claim what was his because of the
challenge of dynastic rivals. Now her son’s future was at stake, and, if her husband was unable to rally his own cause, then it was up to Margaret, his devoted consort, to act in his place.

Her move would have to be made carefully. Treading delicately across this uncertain and unfamiliar ground, Margaret emerged from the Tower to rejoin her husband. A week after the crown-wearing at St Paul’s, king, queen and prince travelled first to Windsor Castle, and then on to Hertford, while York and his allies set about the awkward task of underpinning their renewed power. When parliament met at the palace of Westminster a month later, surrounded by heavily armed men wearing the colours of York and the Nevilles, public blame for the battle at St Albans was placed squarely on the shoulders of the dead duke of Somerset, who was conveniently unable to object; ‘and nothing done there never after this time to be spoken of ’, reported a nervous correspondent in the capital. (‘After this is read and understood, I pray you burn or break it’, he told the recipient of his letter, ‘for I am loath to write anything of any lord. But I must needs; there is nothing else to write.’)

His anxiety was understandable; it was hardly likely that St Albans could be expunged from the collective memory of the political classes at a stroke of the parliamentary pen. Only a day before the bill was passed, the earl of Warwick, the younger of the two Neville earls, had openly quarrelled with another nobleman, Lord Cromwell, over where responsibility lay for ‘the steering or moving of the evil day of St Albans’. And, even though Somerset’s death had removed one bitter personal rivalry from the political equation, it had done so at a terrible cost. Noblemen were accustomed to the risks of war, but war fought overseas, with the odds stacked in favour of the rich and powerful: why kill a lordly enemy, after all, if a large ransom could be secured by keeping him alive? Now noble English blood had been spilled by English hands on English soil. There could be no mistaking the stakes for which this dangerous game was being played, and the heirs of those who had died might seek revenge, not reconciliation, as their prize.

That York’s de facto ascendancy required some formal validation
to make effective government possible, meanwhile, was all too evident: violent disorder continued unchecked across large parts of England and Wales while the nobility circled one another warily in the capital. Less clear was the means by which that validation should be achieved. After months of fraught negotiation, the solution on which parliament settled in November 1455 was that the duke should once again be installed as protector of the realm, exactly as he had been in the spring of 1454. But this time the porous edifice of his authority began to crumble from the moment it was established. Despite reports that ‘some men are afeared that he is sick again’, Henry was no less capable of ruling for himself that November than he usually was – which was not saying much, but did, nevertheless, go a long way towards undermining York’s claim to act in his place. Nor was there any viable consensus among the lords that might serve as ballast for the duke’s rule. Instead, York’s attempt to impose a controversial financial retrenchment – a wide-ranging act of resumption, intended to cut royal expenditure and re-establish crown finances on a sound footing – precipitated his protectorate into crisis after just three months.