The Demon's Brood (33 page)

He moved cannon on to an island in the river, to shorten the range, protected by earthworks. Wooden bridges brought other guns nearer the walls. A floating siege-tower, higher than the ramparts, was mounted on two barges. After several attempts at relief had failed, Meaux surrendered in May. The Bastard of Vaurus was hanged from his own execution tree, after which his head was stuck on a lance next to it with his body wrapped in his banner at the foot. A trumpeter who had mocked the king from the walls was beheaded while the donkey beaters vanished into dungeons; 250 prisoners were sent to Paris in barges, chained by the legs, many dying of starvation; 800 more were shipped to England to work as ‘indentured servants' – slaves.

Henry returned to Paris, rejoining his queen, who had borne him a son. In July, however, there were public prayers for the Heir and Regent of France. Although a very sick man, the king tried to ride to the relief of a Burgundian stronghold besieged by Dauphinists, but was carried back to Vincennes in a litter. ‘Because of a long period of over work, he had contracted a high fever and dysentery, which so weakened him that the doctors dared not give him medicine.'
²⁸
Told that he was on the point of death, he appointed Gloucester Regent of England but under Bedford's authority. Bedford was to be Regent of France although only if Philip of Burgundy declined the post. Henry also instructed Bedford to concentrate on saving Normandy should the war go badly.

The king died at Vincennes in Friar Netter's arms on 20 August, aged only thirty-five. There was a moment when he feared for his salvation, screaming as if in reply to an evil spirit, ‘Thou liest, thou liest, my portion is with the Lord Jesus Christ!'
²⁹
(Significantly, he left orders in his will for 20,000 Masses to be said for the repose of his soul.) As his cortège passed through London to lie in state at St Paul's a man stood in front of every house, holding a flaming torch. ‘Among Christian kings and princes before him none could be compared', wrote the octogenarian Walsingham on almost the final page of his
chronicle.
³⁰
Henry's helm, sword and shield still hang above his tomb at Westminster, in the chantry chapel for whose building he gave instructions in his will.

Despite his demon's energy, Henry V did not have the resources to complete his grand design. The unwinnable war he bequeathed ended in bankruptcy and humiliation for the Lancastrian monarchy, then destroyed it, since Henry's marriage to the daughter of an insane Valois gave England a king unfitted to rule. His ultimate legacy was the Wars of the Roses.

God can send no greater curse on a country than a ruler of limited understanding

Philippe de Commynes
¹

At Clarendon in August 1453, told that his troops had been defeated in Gascony, Henry VI fell into a coma. Unable to speak, understand or walk, he needed to be fed with a spoon. When he recovered, on Christmas Day 1454, he was informed that his queen, Margaret of Anjou, had borne a son. Astonished, the king asked if the child's father was the Holy Ghost.

Yet Henry should not be written off as a mental defective. Despite his oddity, his lovable personality inspired deep affection and loyalty among those who knew him well. ‘He was a simple man, without any crook or craft of untruth', wrote John Blacman, a Carthusian monk and former royal chaplain. ‘When in the end he lost both the realms, England and France, which
he ruled before, along with all his wealth and goods, he endured it with no broken spirit, but a calm mind.'
²
Revisionist historians dismiss this as Tudor propaganda, but it has now been established that Blacman died before the Tudors came in.
³
It was no accident that Henry VI was late medieval England's most popular saint, another Edward the Confessor.
⁴

Born at Windsor in October 1421, Henry was nine months old when he became king, England being ruled by the council with the Duke of Gloucester as titular Protector. In September 1423 he attended Parliament, peers pledging their loyalty while he ‘shrieked and cried and sprang'.
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At seven, he was given a tutor, Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, a paladin of the wars in Wales and France, who was renowned throughout Europe for his courtesy and was one of the best read Englishmen of his age. In 1429 the boy king was crowned at Westminster. England was at peace, well governed, even if Gloucester and Cardinal Beaufort vied for control of the council.

Across the Channel, the Duke of Bedford seemed firmly in control as regent. Normandy was an occupied country, with English colonists – troops who had bought confiscated land cheap, artisans given free houses in the towns – while the rest of Lancastrian France was garrisoned by English troops and run by Burgundian officials at Paris. The Parisians fought loyally for him against the Dauphinists, and in 1424 his victory at Vernueil appeared to confirm Anglo-Burgundian invincibility.

The first setback came in 1429 when Orléans, besieged by the English as the key to the Dauphinist heartland, was relieved by Joan of Arc. Worse still, she led an army through occupied territory to Rheims Cathedral (the traditional crowning place of French kings) for the dauphin's coronation. For a time, the English were terrified, convinced that the ‘Witch of Orléans' was using sorcery, but she was captured by Burgundians who
handed her over to them. Cardinal Beaufort then took care to revive their morale by ensuring that she was tried and burned at Rouen.
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There was no longer hope of final victory, so Bedford concentrated on holding what had been conquered. It was important Henry should be seen by his French subjects as their king and, after spending six months at Rouen, he went to Paris for his coronation at Notre-Dame on 16 December 1431. The Parisians cheered his ‘
joyeuse entrée
', but Beaufort, who crowned the boy, upset them by using the English Sarum rite instead of the Gallican, while they were disgusted by a parsimonious, badly cooked coronation banquet. Nor was there any lessening of heavy tax burdens.

The death of Bedford's wife, Anne of Burgundy, in November 1432 spelled disaster. Her brother, Duke Philip, changed sides a few days after Bedford himself died in 1435, recognizing Charles VII as King of France. Henry wept on receiving a letter from Philip no longer addressed to his sovereign. Yet despite losing Paris the next year, the English hung on in the north-west, beating off a Burgundian attack on Calais. There was a vociferous war party, led by the Duke of Gloucester (a veteran of Agincourt where he had been wounded ‘in the hams'), while there were plenty of good commanders in the field – Lords Scales, Willoughby and Talbot, and the young Duke of York.

However, because of Henry's lack of any sense of reality where money was concerned, it became increasingly difficult to finance campaigns in France. When his minority ended, he gave away nearly 200 royal manors to knights and squires of the Body, who kept the rents for life. Characteristically, he refused to accept £2,000 in gold from Cardinal Beaufort's executors unless it went towards endowing his colleges at Eton or Cambridge. His annual revenue sank to no more than £30,000 a year when his household alone cost £24,000, and the Crown was nearly £400,000 in debt.

Only western Normandy and parts of Maine remained immune from French raids, English colonists taking refuge in towns or castles. Meanwhile, Charles VII, the despised dauphin, had matured into a formidable ruler determined to regain his lost provinces. In 1443 Henry, who loathed bloodshed and regarded it as a Christian duty to make peace with his uncle, sent the Earl of Suffolk (in practice his first minister) to Charles, seeking an end to the war. In return for a promise to surrender Maine, Suffolk secured a two-year truce and Charles's niece as a bride for Henry. The daughter of René of Anjou, titular king of Sicily, Margaret was a beautiful, intelligent and high-spirited girl of sixteen, whom Henry married in 1445 – naïvely supposing that the marriage meant lasting peace.

Most Englishmen opposed the surrender of Maine, but in 1442 Humphrey of Gloucester, the war party's leader, had been discredited by the discovery that his duchess was trying to kill Henry with witchcraft – her warlocks having contacted ‘demons and malign spirits' – so that he could inherit the throne. In 1447 Suffolk had Gloucester arrested on a false charge of treason, the duke dying from a stroke brought on by rage, although many people suspected murder. Meanwhile the warlike Duke of York had been replaced as Lieutenant of Lancastrian France by the more biddable Edmund Beaufort, Duke of Somerset, and made Lieutenant of Ireland to keep him out of the way.

In 1448 Maine was handed over despite the local English commanders' reluctance and the truce extended for another two years. Intent on ending the war, the king became so pleased with Suffolk that he made him a duke.

To save money, English garrisons in Normandy were reduced. Then in May 1449 Somerset broke the truce, seizing the town of Fougères as a bargaining counter in securing the release of Henry's friend Gilles de Bretagne, who had been imprisoned by
the French. Charles VII responded by sending 30,000 troops, who captured Rouen in October, and Harfleur and Honfleur during the winter. Somerset held out at Caen but in April 1450 the last English relief force was annihilated by the new French cannon at Formigny, Caen falling in July. ‘And this same Wednesday was it told that Shirburgh [Cherbourg] is gone and we have not now a foot of land in Normandy', John Paston was informed on 19 August.
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By late summer 1451 Gascony had gone too.

All England felt humiliated as destitute settlers flooded back across the Channel, parading through Cheapside with their bedding and begging in the City's streets. In January 1450 Adam Moleyns, Bishop of Chichester and former privy seal, was lynched at Portsmouth for betraying Normandy. Before dying, he blamed the Duke of Suffolk. When the duke was impeached in March, Henry – whose policies were the real reason for its loss – insisted on his acquittal. Fleeing to Calais, Suffolk's ship was boarded by sailors and he was beheaded with a rusty sword over the gunwale of a boat.

In June an armed mob from Kent stormed into London, led by ‘Jack Cade', an Irish ex-soldier who used the name Mortimer, claiming he was the Duke of York's kinsman. They wanted to kill the king's ministers, because of whom ‘his lands are lost, his merchandise is lost, his commons destroyed, the sea is lost, France is lost, himself so poor that he may not pay for his meat and drink'.
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Taking no notice of Henry, who rode through the streets in armour telling them to go home, they robbed, raped and stole, broke open gaols and freed criminals. The treasurer, Lord Saye and Sele, was caught and beheaded. Finally the infuriated Londoners took up arms, evicting this ‘multitude of riffraff' after a two day battle on London Bridge.
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Cade was tricked by a false pardon, then hunted to his death.

Ignoring Somerset's unpopularity, Henry made him his first minister. Unabashed, the duke set about recouping himself with grants of royal land for the estates he had lost across the Channel. Owed huge sums by the government, York was enraged, while he also suspected Somerset of plotting his destruction. Assembling an armed force at Blackheath, in February 1452 he charged him with losing Normandy and planning to sell Calais, demanding that he be put on trial. However, York found himself confronted by a much bigger royal army. Peers who had supported him were forced to kneel in the snow in their shirts and beg for pardon; lesser men were executed. He was replaced as Lieutenant of Ireland by the Earl of Wiltshire and made to swear at St Paul's that he would never again take up arms.

During the summer Somerset's prestige rocketed when the Earl of Shrewsbury (‘Old Talbot') recaptured Bordeaux, regaining Gascony overnight. A parliament at Reading in March 1453 agreed to everything Somerset asked for and he appeared to be in complete control. Nevertheless, he was unable to eliminate Richard, Duke of York.

York, a small, sharp-faced man, had been born in 1411, his father being the Earl of Cambridge who had plotted to kill Henry V at Southampton. Through his mother Anne Mortimer he was heir to Edward III's second son, while the Lancastrians descended only from a third son. Inheriting the lands of York, March and Ulster, a prince of the blood, he was the greatest nobleman in England and expected to be treated as such. (His pride of birth showed in using Plantagenet as his surname, the first of his family to do so since Count Geoffrey.) During his time in Ireland, the semi-regal respect given to him as viceroy heightened his resentment at exclusion from government at home.

There is no good likeness of Henry VI. We only know that he was tall, slender and handsome. Sixteenth-century copies of a
lost portrait show an anxious-looking man with worried eyes, who clasps his hands nervously. A portrait in a window at King's College Chapel gives the same impression of anxiety. Shabby clothes did not help – John Blacman tells us that he usually wore an ordinary burgess's gown with a rolled hood and a farmer's round-toed boots.