Wars of the Roses (30 page)

York’s failure resulted from his inability to co-ordinate the isolated pockets of political unrest that he himself had stirred into a cohesive movement, while the support of Talbot of Shrewsbury, the renowned hero of the French wars, undoubtedly contributed to Henry’s success.

On 7 April the King issued a general pardon to all those who had risen against him, from which York was not excluded, and on 12 August following, in the same spirit of reconciliation, Henry visited
York at Ludlow Castle during the annual royal progress. But the court party had no intention of extending the hand of friendship to York; instead, they successfully excluded him from the Council. Humiliated and disgraced, the Duke was once again left in political isolation, and for the next year or so the court party, led by Somerset with the backing of Cardinal Kempe, who became Archbishop of Canterbury in 1453, was once again supreme.

From 1452 onwards the Queen endeavoured to court popularity with the people, believing that the best way to earn it was by reconquering Aquitaine and restoring peace to Henry’s disturbed territories. In March 1452, the King received a letter from the citizens of French-occupied Bordeaux, begging for deliverance from the conquerors. But there was no money with which to finance an armed expedition, and though there were plenty of good soldiers ready to defend England’s honour, there was nothing to pay them with. Margaret wrote, explaining the problem, to her kinsman Philip of Burgundy, who responded warmly and sent a large sum of money to finance the army and a fleet of ships. The King was therefore able to dispatch Talbot to France with a small but efficient force of 3000 men. On 17 October, Talbot marched on Bordeaux, whose citizens took heart and evicted the French garrison, and the city was restored to English hands. This unexpected good news, together with tidings that the friendship between Charles VII and Burgundy was deteriorating, served to lighten the mood of the people of England. After Bordeaux fell to Talbot, other towns in western Gascony speedily expelled the French and welcomed the Earl’s army with rejoicing. It seemed that the tide of war was turning.

Campaigning ceased in the winter, and the King’s thoughts turned to his half-brothers, Edmund and Jasper Tudor, who were now in their early twenties and very dear to him. In the spring of 1452 both had accompanied the Queen on a progress through the Midlands, visiting the Pastons at Norwich and Alice Chaucer at Wallingford. The brothers had then become members of the King’s immediate entourage. On 23 November, Henry raised them to the peerage, Edmund being created Earl of Richmond in Yorkshire, and Jasper Earl of Pembroke. These were royal titles that had previously been borne by the King’s late uncles of Bedford and Gloucester, and as such the Tudor brothers were given precedence over all other Englishmen below the rank of duke.

After spending Christmas at Greenwich, the King and Queen returned to London where, on 5 January 1453, at a magnificent ceremony in the Tower of London, Henry invested his half-brothers
with the trappings of their earldoms, giving them rich gowns of velvet and cloth-of-gold, furs, saddles, and fine caparisons for their horses. On the 20th, the new earls were summoned to Parliament for the first time. From now on they would be given a voice in government and admitted to the King’s counsels.

Henry was generous to his half-brothers and gave them several grants of land and money; each enjoyed an annual income of around £925. Edmund was endowed with the estates of the honour of Richmond to support his new rank, but Jasper had to wait for the lands belonging to the honour of Pembroke, because they were held by someone else. When in London, Edmund was allowed the use of Baynard’s Castle – later to be the city residence of York – while Jasper owned a house in Brook Street, Stepney. Edmund prospered in his earldom of Richmond as a result of exporting his wool from Boston in Lincolnshire. The estates that Jasper later acquired were mainly in south Wales, and his wealth therefore lay in coal-mining and in trade centred on the port of Milford Haven.

In return for all this the Tudors would remain utterly loyal to Henry VI till their lives’ ends, protecting his interests in the regions under their control and serving on his Council. They would also support him against York. Jasper was particularly popular in Wales because of his paternal connections, and those lands under his rule became firmly Lancastrian. As York also had great territorial interests in Wales, the principality would come to play an important part in the Wars of the Roses.

Early in 1453, the heroic Talbot swept through the region around Bordeaux, recapturing town after town. These successes, the first the English had enjoyed in thirty years, gave rise to cautious optimism back home. But when, in the spring, Talbot wrote asking the Queen to send reinforcements, Parliament hesitated and made excuses, leaving Talbot fuming and kicking his heels in frustration at what he saw as unnecessary prevarication.

Nevertheless, the success of Talbot in the Bordelais ensured that for the time being Parliament’s loyalties lay firmly with the government and not with York. When it met at Reading on 6 March, it had been purged of all the Duke’s supporters, and was primarily Lancastrian. The Tudor brothers were present, taking their seats as the premier earls of England, and the Commons petitioned the King to recognise them as his legitimate uterine brothers, born of the same mother, and requested him to ensure that they were not disabled in law in any way as a result of their father being Welsh. The King
graciously acceded to these requests and granted the estates of the earldom of Pembroke to the hitherto titular Earl Jasper.

This Parliament was much more amenable than its predecessor. It did pass an Act of Resumption, but it only applied to grants made to York and those who had supported him. It then voted the King and his immediate dependants a reasonable income from customs dues and the best of the estates that were to be resumed by the Crown. Generous provision was also made for the Queen, who was granted new lands as part of her dower.

Then, in response to a petition presented by the Commons, an Act of Attainder was drawn up against Sir William Oldhall, York’s chamberlain and Speaker in the last Parliament. His crime had ostensibly been to support Jack Cade in 1450, and he was also charged with having stolen goods from Somerset, but it was really his support of York in 1452 that had given offence, although York was not mentioned in the attainder.

Oldhall fled to sanctuary at the priory church of St Martin-le-Grand near Newgate in London, but he was mistaken in thinking himself safe there, for one night a group of nobles of the court faction breached the sanctuary and dragged him out ‘with great violence’. The Dean of St Martin’s was outraged at this violation of the sacred law of sanctuary and made a strong complaint to King Henry, who, notwithstanding the protests of his lords, ordered that Oldhall be allowed to return to the church. However, when the attainder against him became law, his goods were confiscated and distributed among his enemies, Somerset receiving his estate at Hunsdon.

Clearly Parliament believed that York would rise again in rebellion, for it authorised the King to raise 20,000 archers at the expense of the shires and boroughs for six months’ service, if and when they were requested for the defence of the realm. Finally, on 24 March, her betrothal with John de la Pole having been dissolved, Margaret Beaufort was given into the custody of Edmund and Jasper Tudor as their ward. Henry had probably already decided that she should marry Edmund and so bring him her rich inheritance.

In February 1453 the Queen had been distressed by the death of her mother, Isabella of Lorraine, after a long and painful illness, and donned dark blue mourning. However, in April she was cheered by the realisation that she was at long last to bear her husband a child – hopefully a male heir. Curiously, the Queen did not break the news to Henry herself, but asked his chamberlain, Richard Tunstall, to convey ‘the first comfortable relation and notice that our most dearly beloved wife the Queen was
enceinte
, to our most singular consolation and to all true liege people’s great joy and comfort’, as
the King later recorded. He was so delighted with the news that he rewarded Tunstall with an annuity of forty marks. He then commissioned his jeweller, John Wynne of London, to make a jewel called a ‘demi-cent’, and commanded him to deliver it ‘unto our most dear and most entirely beloved wife, the Queen’. It cost £200, a great sum at that time.

Henry had meanwhile been quietly restoring to their former positions all those officers of his household who had been dismissed at York’s request. The activities of these men had been the basis of many complaints made by York, Cade and others, but Henry never learned from his mistakes and by July 1453 they all had regained their former influence.

It was an unsettled and gloomy early summer, despite the Queen’s advancing pregnancy. There was tension in the north between the Percies and the Nevilles, who had long been feuding. Talbot was beset on every side by the French in Gascony; and there was unrest and disorder throughout the kingdom.

Parliament had still not voted Talbot the reinforcements he so badly needed, and in the spring of 1453 Charles VII had taken advantage of this and invaded Aquitaine, bringing with him three armies, all of which converged on Bordeaux from different directions. By the middle of June the French had advanced as far as the town of Castillon, whose inhabitants smuggled out a desperate plea for help to Talbot. The Earl’s instinct counselled caution, as did his captains, but his knightly principles would not allow him to abandon those in distress, and in July he occupied Castillon. Shortly afterwards he received intelligence that the French were withdrawing, but this was not true. On 17 July, Talbot led his men out of the town and gave chase to the ‘retreating’ army, which suddenly turned and confronted him. The French used their new artillery to devastating effect, pushing the English back to the banks of the River Dordogne, where Talbot was cut to pieces with a battle-axe. When the English soldiers learned of his death they quickly surrendered.

Talbot’s death deprived the English of their best commander, the only man who could have stemmed the tide of the French advance on Bordeaux. News of the disaster and of the loss of one of England’s greatest warrior heroes prompted a frantic Queen Margaret hastily to summon Parliament. Parliament now acted – too late. At the King’s request it voted enough money to finance the 20,000 archers, who were to be dispatched with all speed to Gascony in the hope of saving Bordeaux. But corrupt bureaucracy and local inefficiency stood in the way and not a single soldier enlisted. On 19 October
1453 Charles VII entered Bordeaux in triumph, and graciously permitted the English garrison to sail for home unmolested. Thus ended three hundred years of English rule in Aquitaine, and thus ended also the Hundred Years War, which had dragged on intermittently since 1340 – a war England could never have hoped to win.

Of England’s former possessions in France only Calais remained, and even that was only saved from the French because they had agreed not to cross territory owned by the Duke of Burgundy, and his dominions surrounded Calais on the landward side. Even Calais’ economic importance was fading with the decline of the wool trade. Strategically, however, it remained an important military base, and would continue to be so throughout the Wars of the Roses, when it was used as a springboard, not for the invasion of France, but of England itself.

There was no avoiding the fact that the King himself was to blame for the defeat. His subjects felt that, had he shown something of the martial spirit of his father, France might not have been entirely lost. Instead England stood humiliated and disgraced. No one was more incensed than York, who had striven so hard and invested so much money in order to maintain Henry V’s conquests. And to add insult to injury, Parliament failed to vote any compensation to those loyal inhabitants of the former English territories who had lost everything, nor was there any pay awaiting returning soldiers stunned by defeat.

It was no coincidence that the end of the Hundred Years War should coincide with the outbreak of the Wars of the Roses. The one was one of the chief causes of the other.

D
uring the first days of August 1453, it became clear that Henry VI was unwell. He had been under severe strain in recent months and this was beginning to take its toll. On 15 August the King was at his hunting lodge at Clarendon, near Salisbury in Wiltshire, when he complained of feeling unnaturally sleepy at dinner. The next morning, he appeared to have completely lost his senses: his head was lolling, and he was unable to move or communicate with anyone. He had, state the Paston Letters, taken a ‘sudden and thoughtless fright’ that utterly baffled his contemporaries. It is possible that the immediate contributory factor was the shocking news of the defeat of Castillon.

The Queen and Council were extremely alarmed by this turn of events, especially as Henry’s condition showed no signs of improvement as days, and then weeks, went past. Margaret took him back to Westminster and made every effort to conceal his incapacity from his subjects for as long as possible. If York, in particular, were to hear of it, she feared he would almost certainly try to seize power.

Margaret now found herself, at seven months pregnant, completely responsible for the government of England. At first she hoped to remain with her husband at Westminster, but it soon became clear that his illness could only be concealed by removing him to Windsor.

What Henry VI suffered in 1453 was a complete mental breakdown, which is hardly surprising given his character and the stress engendered by the catastrophes and tensions of his reign. Whethamstead says that ‘a disease and disorder of such a sort overcame the King that he lost his wits and memory for a time, and nearly all his body was so unco-ordinated and out of control that he
could neither walk nor hold his head up, nor easily move from where he sat’. Henry later said that he had been totally unaware of what was going on around him, and that all his senses were in a state of prolonged suspension. He was ‘as mute as a calf’, spending his days in a chair, looked after by attendants. Some medical historians have diagnosed his condition, on the evidence available, as catatonic schizophrenia – complete mental withdrawal from normal life. Other modern experts have described the illness as a depressive stupor. Henry’s contemporaries had only one word for it: madness.