Tudor Queens of England (7 page)

.17
While Somerset was still in charge an attempt had been made to exclude the Duke of York from the Council but York was a prince of the blood, who had been Henry’s putative heir and Norfolk favoured him. The suggestion was raised that he should be made protector of the realm for the duration of the King’s illness, but this was immediately challenged by Margaret who in January 1454, with the full backing of Henry’s household offi cers, put forward her own claim to the regency. As one observer wrote: the Queen hath made a bill of fi ve articles, desiring those articles to be granted: whereof the fi rst is that she desireth to have the whole rule of this land; the second is that she may make the Chancellor, Treasurer, the Privy Seal and all other offi cers of
this land …18

Although she had her supporters outside the household, this was a demand of revolutionary implications and where the idea came from remains a mystery. 32

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During the recent precedent of Henry’s own minority, no one (least of all Catherine herself) had suggested the Queen Mother as Regent – nor had Isabella made any such claim during the frequent illnesses of Charles VII. It seems that motherhood had transformed a fairly conventional, not to say ornamental, consort, into a determined and ambitious player in the dangerous game of power politics. The unprecedented and unexpected nature of this bid played into the hands of the Duke of York, who was clearly determined to use the King’s illness as a pretext to establish and secure his own position and those of his ‘well willers’. He was nominated to open Parliament on the King’s behalf on 14 February 1454

and that was a step in the desired direction, but the death of John Kempe, the Archbishop of Canterbury, on 22 March, forced the issue. A new appointment was urgent and only the King or his designated replacement could nominate. On 28 March a fi nal attempt was made to get some sense out of Henry when Margaret brought in his infant son to receive his blessing. When that failed, on 3 April, York was appointed Protector on the same terms that Humphrey of Gloucester had enjoyed 32 years earlier. The Queen’s bid appears to have been simply ignored. That, as it was to turn out, was a serious mistake. The Duke of York went through the motions of reluctance to accept the appointment but in fact he was highly gratifi ed and immediately secured the appointment of his brother-in-law, the Earl of Salisbury, to the vacant chancellorship. His position was not strong enough to enable him to remodel the Council and all the remaining offi cers continued in post, but Salisbury was a valuable ally. His other appointments were not numerous, or obviously partisan, and the translation of Thomas Bourgchier from Ely to Canterbury, which occurred at some time after 23 April, introduced a noticeably conciliatory voice. The most obvious focus of opposition was the royal household, now controlled by Margaret, but beyond a little trimming for fi nancial reasons he was not strong enough to attack it. After all, the King might recover at any moment. Beside which, he had other priorities. Apart from Calais, English France was lost and the whole coastline in enemy hands because, despite the defeats, there was still no peace. Unpaid, the garrison of Calais mutinied and there were unresolved aristocratic faction fi ghts going on all over England. In Ireland, too, York had diffi culty in restoring the authority that he had formerly exercised there. This turbulent situation exposed the protector’s limitations, and it has been fairly claimed that he acted less like a surrogate king, determined to impose impartial justice, and more like the leader of a magnate faction concerned to consolidate his position. Only in the north of England did he have any success in bringing peace and that was by supporting the Nevilles in their bid to destroy the Percies. In other words, it was a factional victory.

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Then, at Christmas 1454, Henry recovered as suddenly as he had collapsed; or at least, he recovered suffi ciently to resume his formal duties. He is reported to have been as a man awakening from a deep sleep, delighted to see his son (now 15 months old), and curious to know what had happened during his

illness.19
Whether he ever recovered fully is a moot point because, although he remained occasionally determined to assert himself, both his willpower and his judgement seem to have been permanently impaired. The immediate consequence was the release of the Duke of Somerset, although apparently strict conditions were applied, which should have kept him out of the political arena. At some time in February 1455 the Duke of York resigned his powers into the King’s hands and, on 4 March, Somerset’s sureties were discharged and the charges against him dismissed. The court party swiftly augmented its strength on the council, and the new chancellor was dismissed in favour of the Archbishop of Canterbury. By April the Duke of York and his friends had every reason to fear a regime of partisan revenge and when a Great Council was summoned to Leicester on 21 May, they abruptly withdrew from the court, fearing punitive measures against them. This was tantamount to an act of rebellion, and when the court was on its way to Leicester it was intercepted by York and Warwick with a retinue of some 4,000 armed men. On the court side, Buckingham and Somerset were also ‘well accompanied’ and the result was the fi rst battle of St Albans on 22 May. The courtiers were routed and the Duke of Somerset was killed. Henry was present in person and, after the battle, was honourably conducted to the Abbey, where the Duke of York renewed his homage and fealty.
20
Where Margaret may have been is not apparent but after the battle she retreated to Greenwich. The Duke of York’s supporters justifi ed his action on the grounds that ‘the government, as it was managed by the Queen, the Duke of Somerset and their friends, had been of late a great oppression and injustice to the people …’ but there are no contemporary complaints to

that effect.21

It must have seemed that York’s domination of the Council would now be secure, but the situation was not in fact so simple. Despite his undoubted feebleness, the King could not now be ignored, as he had been at the height of his illness. Nor was York in a position to displace those offi cers who had been appointed earlier in the year. Most important of all, the death of the Duke of Somerset had left the leadership of the court party in doubt. There was no favourite of suffi cient status. In theory the King himself was the leader, but in practice it was now his strong-minded spouse. As Sir John Bocking wrote on 9 February 1456: ‘The Queen is a great and strong laboured woman, for she spareth no pain to sue her things to an intent and conclusion to her power …’

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Consequently, although the Duke of York was again made protector in November 1455, he soon found himself in the impossible position of being confronted by a political adversary who had unique access to the monarch and who could not be removed by any means short of assassination. He resigned the protectorship on 25 February 1456 and Margaret embarked upon a three-year period of unoffi cial but very real power. As long as Henry was King she would be

alter rex
. Between the summer of 1456 and the summer of 1459 the court spent almost half its time within her power base in the West Midlands. It was at Coventry in October 1456 that Archbishop Bourgchier was dispossessed of the Great Seal in favour of William Waynefl ete and Henry Viscount Bourgchier was replaced as Treasurer by the Earl of Salisbury
.22
At the same time Lawrence Booth became Keeper of the Privy Seal. Waynefl ete was the King’s confessor and Booth the Queen’s Chancellor. Although Archbishop Bourgchier was not a party man, his displacement was a partisan move, as were the other appointments. The Great Council duly confi rmed these offi cers, but Margaret’s fi ngerprints are all over this. Members of the Council were expected to show the same deference to her as they did to the King and on formal occasions the King’s sword was borne before her. When the royal couple entered Coventry (again) in September 1457

Henry was almost invisible behind the pomp that accompanied the Queen. There was no institutional basis and no theoretical justifi cation for such pretensions. Margaret used Edward’s Council as Prince of Wales and her own stake in the duchies of Cornwall and Lancaster but for the most part she relied upon sheer will power and strength of character. Although it was the basis of her power, no concept of the consort’s position had ever envisaged such a situation. Only the accepted principle that it was the consort’s duty to uphold the honour of her Lord lent any support to her position and that had always been understood in a quite different sense. Of course, she had allies and resources. Humphrey Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, John Talbot, Earl of Salisbury, and Thomas, Lord Stanley were all close associates. The overstrained Exchequer could be (to some extent) relieved by using the revenues assigned to Edward, by this time a child of about 5. Margaret’s implacable hostility to the Duke of York may have been partly personal, because both had abrasive personalities, but it may also have been dynastic. York was a Prince of the Blood, who had generally been recognized as Henry’s heir before the birth of the Prince of Wales and would be so again if the Prince should meet with any kind of accident. There is no evidence that York had any designs on the Crown before 1457 but the Queen was sharply suspicious and defensive of her son’s position – so defensive, indeed, that the Duke and his affi nity decided eventually that the only solution to her intransigence was a complete change of regime. She was almost equally fi erce against the Earl of

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Warwick and that was to have serious implications in due course. Although some of Margaret’s aggressive assertiveness has come to us through the medium of Yorkist propaganda, there is plenty of contemporary evidence of the perception that she was the real ruler of England; ‘every lord in England at this time durst not disobey the Queen, for she ruled all that was done about the King, which was a good, simple and innoc

ent man …’23 H
er advocacy of Lawrence Booth for the vacant see of Durham in 1457 was nothing if not preremptory. By comparison, Henry appears a man bemused, most notably in public for his passivity, and in private for an almost pathetic desire to reconcile the controversies with which he was surrounded. He was nothing like as hostile to York as Margaret but he seems to have been consistently overruled by her urgent representations. When the French attacked Sandwich in August 1457 (just to remind the English that there was still a war on), Henry did insist on the court returning to Westminster, but far too late for any effective countermeasures to be taken. His greatest effort to effect reconciliation was the so-called ‘love day’ of 25 March 1458, which succeeded to the extent of persuading Margaret and York to process hand in hand, but in the event solved nothing.

The partisan nature of the regime was by this time not only obvious but blatant. Neither the Duke of York nor his followers were either admitted to the Council or received any kind of favour. As one observer put it ‘… my lord of York hath been with the king, and is departed again in right good conceit with the King, but not in great conceit with the Queen …’ And therein lay the rub. Henry continued in his ineffectual way to seek some sort of conciliation, but Margaret would have none of it, and she was by this time clearly the dominant partner in the relationship. So the situation continued to deteriorate until the court left again for Coventry in the spring of 1459. By this time someone had decided that the time had come to force an issue. It was not the King, and the suspicion naturally points to Margaret but she may, in this case, have been persuaded by some of her own more extreme supporters. Whoever was responsible, at the Great Council held in Coventry in June 1459, the Duke of York and his leading adherents were indicted for treason. This was, as it may have been intended to be, the signal for a full-scale military confrontation. The two sides were reasonably well matched both in terms of magnates and of the retinues of which both armies were comprised. On 23 September the Lancastrians were defeated at Bloreheath, but about three weeks later were victorious at Ludlow. As Agnes Strickland somewhat melodramatically put it, ‘the martial blood of Charlemagne was fl owing in [Margaret’s] veins’. With the situation thus stalemated, a parliament was convened at Coventry on 20 November, which duly convicted the indicted lords, and on 11 December all those lords who were gathered at Coventry, which meant most of the court 36

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faction, swore a special oath, not only to the King, but also to the Queen and the Prince of Wales. Henry’s crown was now clearly at stake.

York, meanwhile, had returned to Ireland, where his position was unaffected by his attainder. The Earl of Ormond and Wiltshire had been appointed in his place but the King’s writ no longer ran in Ireland and the parliament there continued to support the Duke. His son, the Earl of March, with other Yorkist leaders, took refuge with the Earl of Warwick in Calais, where the King’s writ did not run either. Plainly the realm was now falling apart. On 26 June 1460, March and his colleagues returned to England in force and, after some deliberation, they were welcomed into London. Bypassing the Tower, which was held against them, they set out to fi nd the King at Northampton. There they defeated Henry’s forces on 10 July, killing the Duke of Buckingham in the process, and brought the King back to London. Although he was helpless and virtually a prisoner, their intention seems to have been to renew their allegiance and merely to enforce the repeal of the attainders against them. However, his son’s victory brought the Duke of York back from Ireland with a very different agenda. Parliament had been summoned to meet on 7 October, and on 10 October the Duke made a formal claim to the throne on the ground of lineage alone, without reference to Henry’s incapacity