The Demon's Brood (34 page)

Awareness of his inadequacy explains why Henry relied so much on Suffolk and Somerset; yet he was very conscious of being a king and ‘diligent in dealing with the business of the realm'.
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He took special care when appointing bishops, choosing theologians instead of the usual canon lawyers, frequently men whom he had encountered as court chaplains. He also did his best to see justice was administered fairly and every year spent months on progress, hearing appeals in the provincial law courts: hundreds of documents survive with his signature, often annotated by him.
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Because of his fragile dignity, once or twice he hanged men who had insulted it, although he much preferred to pardon them. He detested cruelty, ordering a traitor's impaled quarter to be taken down and buried.

Henry did not see his marriage in terms of sexual satisfaction or begetting a much-needed heir, but as ‘a sacramental pledge of peace'.
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Even so, he respected Margaret of Anjou as ‘a woman of great wisdom'.
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Admittedly, his sexuality seems peculiar by today's standards if not to clerics of his time. Blacman tells us approvingly that he had a horror of nudity, male or female. Riding through Bath, Henry was shocked to see men taking the waters naked, while when ‘a certain great lord' brought a troupe of young ladies with bare bosoms to dance before him at Christmas, he was so outraged that he left the room.

As a young man, Henry had cronies, the closest being his tutor's son, Henry Beauchamp, whom he created Duke of Warwick and loaded with gifts, but who died in 1446 at only twenty-one. (The duke had shared his piety, reading the entire psalter every day.) Another was Gilles de Bretagne, the Duke of
Brittany's brother, who also died early – strangled in his cell by French gaolers. The king was on excellent terms with members of his household.

The next world mattered most to him. His foundations at Eton and Cambridge had a spiritual purpose, the former designed as a chantry for priests to say Mass for his soul (if seventy boys were given a free education), while sixty of the seventy fellows at King's College were to study theology – only ten would read canon law, common law, astronomy or medicine. He planned two huge complexes to which he devoted long hours, but the chapels alone were built. Even these were not completed until long after his death, and that at Eton is merely the choir of the building he had in mind.
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A mystic influenced by the
Devotio Moderna
– the fifteenth-century religious revival – who practised solitary prayer, Henry meditated on Christ's sufferings and the Real Presence with an intensity that no doubt induced hallucinations. On occasions of state he wore a hair shirt. Yet his library was not restricted to works of piety and included ancient chronicles that he enjoyed reading, among them a copy of Bede's
Ecclesiastical History of the English People
. His interest in the past inspired him to campaign for Alfred the Great's canonization.
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Apart from his breakdown in 1453 there is no recorded instance of mental collapse. As a Carthusian, Blacman was accustomed to search out qualities that suited men for his own demanding form of hermit life, one of which was sanity, and he saw Henry as sane and a natural contemplative. Understandably, the king found his calling a burden. His chamberlain, Sir Richard Tunstall, told Blacman how Henry ‘complained heavily to me [about this] in his chamber at Eltham, when I was alone there with him employed together with him upon his holy books . . . There came all at once a knock at the king's door from a certain mighty duke of the realm, and the king said: “They do so interrupt me that by day and night I can hardly snatch a moment to be refreshed by reading.”'
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Some lines from a Latin poem by Henry, translated in the next century, convey how daunting he found his role as king.

Who meaneth to remove the rock

Out of the slimy mud,

Shall mire himself, and hardly scape

The swelling of the flood.
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England was unsettled by the ‘Great Slump' of 1440–80, a dearth of gold and silver coin due to a shortage of bullion.
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Farm produce sold for less, with even a fall in rabbit prices, while cloth merchants found difficulty selling their goods abroad. There was hardship everywhere, worsening with the loss of Norman and Gascon trade (the cost of wine soaring in the taverns) and from bad relations with Burgundy and the Hansa ports. In some areas violence and cowed juries were endemic since bastard feudalism – paying retainers (annuities) to local gentry – meant that every magnate had his own ‘affinity' or private army.

On 17 July 1453 French cannon wiped out Old Talbot's troops at Castillon, which meant that Gascony was lost for ever. Henry's mind gave way at the news, afflicted by a mysterious malady probably inherited from his grandfather Charles VI. (Lasting too long to have been schizophrenia, it sounds as if it had more to do with amnesia than depression.) In March 1454 the council appointed York as Protector, whereupon he sent Somerset to the Tower.

Most magnates distrusted York, but he had supporters. Besides the Duke of Norfolk, the Earl of Devon and Lord Cromwell, they included his Neville kinsmen, the Earls of Salisbury (brother-in-law) and Warwick (nephew), who had their own feud with Somerset. He rewarded the Nevilles by imprisoning their enemies in the north country, Lord Egremont and the Duke of Exeter, and making Salisbury chancellor. The sworn foe
of Henry's ministers and courtiers, York planned to cut the royal household drastically, taking back lands the king had granted away from the Crown. Other plans included improved defences for Calais and the Scottish border, with measures to prevent the flight of bullion, all of which were welcomed by the London business community.
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‘Blessed be God, the king is well amended, and hath been since Christmas Day', the Pastons were informed early in January 1455. ‘And he saith he is in charity with all the world.'
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Somerset became first minister again, in no forgiving frame of mind, with spies everywhere who were said to be disguised as friars or sailors. When York and his friends learned they would not be summoned to a council of the realm at Leicester they feared the worst. Their letters to the king receiving no answer, they marched on London (where York was popular) to plead their case at the head of 3,500 armed men.

Henry and Somerset, with the Duke of Buckingham and the Earls of Devonshire, Northumberland, Pembroke and Wiltshire, had left London for Leicester on 21 May, escorted by their households who numbered about 2,000. Few bothered to bring armour. When they rode into the main street of St Albans towards 9.00 am the next day, York's followers blockaded each end and, after the king refused to surrender Somerset, killed seventy-five of the royal party, including Somerset, Northumberland and Lord Clifford who were targeted. Henry was wounded in the shoulder by an arrow before sheltering in a tanner's cottage. York lost only two dozen men.

The ‘battle' of St Albans left several young noblemen with kindred to avenge. The vendetta gradually expanded into a nationwide faction fight involving the entire ruling class, since the magnates could not avoid taking sides and dragged in their ‘affinities'. What made civil war inevitable was the queen's suspicion that York was aiming at the throne. Described by a contemporary as ‘a great and strong laboured woman, for she spareth no pain to sue her things to an intent and conclusion',
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Margaret replaced Somerset as leader of the court party. Anticipating armed confrontation, she made Henry move the court to the Midlands to Kenilworth Castle (the ‘Queen's Bower), Chester Castle or the cathedral priory at Coventry, from where she could call on support from duchy of Lancaster tenants.

Henry fell ill in November 1455 (although not from insanity), York securing a second protectorate, which ended when the king recovered in February. Henry's wish for peace showed in a declaration that the late Duke of Gloucester had been loyal and no traitor (contrary to the court party's insistence) and in the Earl of Warwick's appointment as Captain of Calais. He defused a quarrel between Warwick and the new Duke of Somerset during a council at Coventry in 1456, and the next year he accepted York's oath never to resort to arms, if warning him he would not be pardoned again.

‘King Henry stood consistently for conciliation, mediation, compromise, reconciliation and arbitration, repeatedly seeking to settle the differences between York and Somerset and then between York and Somerset's heirs', a modern historian comments. ‘He had a remarkable capacity to forgive and to start again.'
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His approach was epitomized by the ‘loveday of St Paul's' in March 1458. (A loveday meant celebrating the end of a quarrel.) At his invitation, accompanied by huge escorts, the magnates of England came to London, where the government promised to repay York and the Nevilles the sums they were owed, and Warwick was appointed lord high admiral. In response, they agreed to have requiems said for those killed at St Albans. Both factions attended a Mass of reconciliation at the cathedral, arm in arm, the Duke of York leading the queen by the hand.

But in the autumn Warwick was attacked at Westminster by the royal household, having to hack his way through to the Thames and escape on a barge. Instead of apologizing, the queen ordered his arrest, whereupon he fled to Calais. She
then decided to destroy York's party by attainder, at a parliament to be held in Coventry in autumn 1459.

The Yorkist peers' only hope was to go to Kenilworth and force Henry to drop the proceedings. Salisbury marched south with 5,000 men to join York in Shropshire, defeating at Blore Heath a force sent by Margaret to intercept him and killing its commander, while Warwick sailed back from Calais with 600 veteran troops. In October the Yorkists occupied Worcester. When a royal army advanced to meet them, they prepared to fight at Ludford Bridge, but lost their nerve and fled during the night, York taking refuge in Dublin, Salisbury and Warwick at Calais.

The ‘Parliament of Devils' (as Yorkists called it) met in November 1459. York was attainted for being behind Cade's revolt, for rebelling in 1452, for St Albans, for breaking oaths sworn at Coventry in 1457 and on the loveday, for Blore Heath and for Ludford Bridge. His followers were attainted with him by a majority of peers, who took an oath to defend the Prince of Wales's right to the throne. Henry knew that this ended any hope of peace, but could not overlook York questioning his son's legitimacy.

In exile York and the ‘lords of Calais' ran a smear campaign, claiming Henry was simple minded and run by evil advisers – he had given away so much to them that nothing was left for him to live on. The whole country was ‘out of all good governance'.
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They also alleged that Margaret's son was a bastard, and accused her of poisoning the Earl of Devon.

In June 1460, bringing with him the Calais garrison and York's seventeen-year-old heir Edward, Earl of March, Warwick landed at Sandwich. Warmly welcomed at London despite resistance from royal troops at the Tower, he marched to the Midlands to confront the king and 5,000 supporters, who were waiting on the bank of the River Nore near Northampton, behind a deep ditch defended by cannon. Not only did the Yorkists outnumber them, but rain spoilt their gunpowder and their right wing
changed sides. It was all over in half an hour, Warwick's men targeting the enemy's leaders – the Duke of Buckingham being cut down with an axe outside the royal tent. Henry was taken to London, where Warwick and Salisbury ruled in his name. When York arrived from Ireland in September he claimed the throne as heir of the Earls of March, telling the House of Lords, ‘though right for a time rest and be put to silence, yet it rotteth not nor shall it perish'.
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The lords rejected his request for Henry to be deposed, but agreed to an ‘Accord' by which he would become king on Henry's death.

We can guess how the king felt about York's claim from what he said later, when a prisoner at the Tower. ‘My father was king of England and wore the crown of England in peace for the whole of his reign. And his father, my grandfather, was king of the same realm. And I, as a child in the cradle, was peaceably and without any protest crowned and approved as king by the whole realm, and wore the crown for forty years, and every one of my lords did me royal homage and swore to be true to me.'
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As it was, many great magnates stayed loyal to him, refusing to accept the Accord and joining the queen at Hull with their retainers, so that soon she had a large army. Early in December, the Duke of York and Salisbury went north to disperse it, but were routed near Wakefield, the duke being killed, while Salisbury was taken prisoner and executed. Their heads were stuck over the gates of York, the duke's crowned with a paper crown. Margaret's army, 12,000 strong, then marched south to rescue the king, pillaging towns en route and doing grave harm to Henry's cause.

On 17 February, trying to intercept them at St Albans, Warwick's smaller force was attacked from behind at dawn, fleeing after heavy casualties, although the earl escaped. Henry, whom they had brought with them, was found sitting under an oak tree, smiling at their discomfiture. However, terrified of ‘Northern men', London refused to admit the royal army and Margaret dared not antagonize the Londoners by forcing
her way in. After a few days, the royal couple and their troops retreated to York.

Unless the Yorkists replaced Henry VI, they faced extermination.
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On 28 February 1461 Warwick rode into the City with York's son Edward, Earl of March, who had just defeated a royal army on the Welsh border. Declared king on 4 March, ‘Edward IV' issued a proclamation denouncing Henry's rule, listing the complaints made by Jack Cade. Wild rumours circulated – from Brussels Prospero di Camulio reported, ‘They say here that the queen of England, after the king abdicated in favour of his son, gave him poison.'
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