Wars of the Roses (25 page)

The Lords and Commons combined to bring Suffolk down. The process began when the Duke’s long-standing enemy, Lord Cromwell, rose in Parliament and publicly accused Sir William Tailboys, Suffolk’s squire, of plotting to kill him. Suffolk denied that he knew anything about such a plot, but this did not help Tailboys: people believed him guilty, and he was fined £3000.

In Ireland, York was being kept informed of what was happening in England and holding himself in readiness to support the attack on Suffolk, anticipating that the fall of the favourite would provide an opportunity for him to elbow his own way on to the Council. His
informants had already told him that there were others of like mind to himself who desired reform of the administration and would be glad to see Suffolk go.

On 9 December Adam Moleyns, Bishop of Chichester, resigned as Lord Privy Seal. Moleyns, a political animal rather than a churchman, was a member of the court party, a former supporter of Suffolk who now believed that the Duke had abused his power and should be ousted from it. On 9 January, he was in Portsmouth, attempting to explain Suffolk’s misdeeds to an angry and unruly mob of sailors who were about to embark for Normandy. He had also brought their wages, long unpaid, but when he handed them over, the sailors found that they had received far less than was their due. They shouted abuse at the Bishop, denouncing him as the betrayer of England, and when he haughtily reminded them that they were insulting a man of God, his manner so incensed them that they fell on him and mortally wounded him. Later, it was alleged that, as he lay dying, he accused Suffolk of being responsible for the loss of Maine and Anjou. After the murder Parliament, which had been in recess over Christmas, refused to reassemble. Thus began the violent, watershed year of 1450.

Suffolk was frantically trying to consolidate his position. Early in 1450, with the help of the Queen, he secured a great matrimonial prize for his son John – his ward, the seven-year-old Lady Margaret Beaufort, a very wealthy little girl who was also the direct descendant of John of Gaunt and had a better claim to the throne than her uncle, the Duke of Somerset, whom many expected to be named heir-presumptive. Margaret’s claim had until now largely been overlooked because she was female and a child, but an ambitious husband, with the means and determination to do so, might well be successful in pressing it.

The significance of this betrothal was not lost on Suffolk’s contemporaries, some of whom drew the unlikely conclusion that he was in fact plotting the overthrow of Henry VI in order to secure a crown for his son and thereby establish the de la Pole dynasty on the throne of England. Others believed, perhaps correctly, that the Duke hoped to persuade the King to recognise Margaret Beaufort as his heir. Either way, the confusion surrounding the future succession proves that at the time the people of England had no clear idea as to who had the best claim to succeed a childless Henry VI.

When Parliament finally reassembled on 22 January, Suffolk felt it appropriate to justify his rule. He reminded the assembly how loyally his family had served the Crown, both in England and against the French, and declared he had been of late the victim of
‘great infamy and defamation’, and was much misunderstood. He swore he had never betrayed his king or his country. Was it likely he would do so for ‘a Frenchman’s promise’?

The Commons were unimpressed. Suffolk’s day was done; there had to be a scapegoat for the recent disasters and humiliations in France and misgovernment at home. On 26 January an angry Parliament petitioned the King that he be arrested and impeached, and the Duke was sent to the Tower of London while the Commons prepared a Bill of Indictment. The Lords had decided to keep a low profile until specific charges were made. While the Duke was in the Tower, there was a great armed presence of the watch of the city of London about the King and in the capital, ‘and the people were in doubt and fear of what should befall, for the lords came to Westminster and Parliament with great powers as men of war’. Influenced by York, the Council sent officers to Norfolk to put a stop to the local tyrannies there of Suffolk’s agents, Thomas Tuddenham and Henry Heydon.

On 7 February the Commons presented the King with a formal petition to indict Suffolk. There were many charges, the most serious being that in July 1447 Suffolk had treasonably plotted an invasion of England with the French ambassador and had divulged secret intelligence to the French. He had promised to cede Maine and Anjou to Charles VII ‘without the assent, advice or knowing of other [of] your ambassadors’, which had led directly to the loss of Rouen and other towns in Normandy. He had also plotted the deposition of King Henry with the intention of setting on the throne his own son John, whom he had betrothed to Margaret Beaufort, ‘presuming and pretending her to be next inheritable to the Crown’. Not once was the Queen’s name mentioned.

On 12 February, the King, using his royal prerogative, commanded that the charges against Suffolk be referred for his own decision, even though the Commons wanted the Duke arraigned at the bar of the Lords. Then Henry dithered for a month. His frustrated Commons, meanwhile, added on 9 March other charges to the petition, accusing Suffolk of ‘insatiable’ covetousness leading to the embezzlement of crown funds and taxes and the impoverishment of the monarchy, and influencing the appointment of sheriffs who would ‘fulfil his desires for such as him liked’. He had committed ‘great outrageous extortions and murders; manslayers, rioters and common, openly-nosed misdoers, seeing his great rule and might in every part of your realm, have drawn to him and been maintained and supported in suppressing of justice, to the full heavy discomfort of true subjects’. Much in these charges was certainly
justified, but there is no evidence that Suffolk planned to make his son king, nor that he had plotted with the French. Nor was he the only magnate to indulge in bribery and corruption on a grand scale.

Henry VI refused to allow any of the charges to be formally examined by Parliament. Instead, on 17 March, he called upon Suffolk to answer them. The Duke denied them all, describing them as ‘too horrible to speak more of, utterly false and untrue, and in manner impossible’. The Chancellor then informed him that the King held him ‘neither declared nor charged’ a traitor ‘in respect of matters mentioned in the first bill’. Because the Commons were loudly baying for Suffolk’s blood, the King conceded that there might be some truth in the second set of charges. The Queen, anxious to save the man who had arranged her marriage and been father-substitute and support to her ever since, had persuaded Henry that a sentence of exile should be sufficient to satisfy the Commons. When the storm had blown over and a suitable time had elapsed, Suffolk could be brought back and restored to favour. The King agreed to this, and sentenced Suffolk to exile for five years from 1 May.

The Commons and the people were furious. To them, it seemed that parliamentary justice had been circumvented by those whose proper function it was to enforce it. By his intervention the King had saved Suffolk’s life: the mood of Parliament was such that, had the Duke stood trial, he would undoubtedly have been condemned to a traitor’s death. The Lords were angry because they had not been consulted as to Suffolk’s fate. The Londoners, in particular, were incensed by the sentence: when the Duke was released from the Tower on 18 March, he went to his house at St Giles to prepare for exile, but a mob tried to force an entry, intent upon lynching him, and he was obliged to escape by a back door. Frustrated of their prey, the Londoners seized his horse and assaulted his servants instead. The Duke took refuge at his country seat at Wingfield in Suffolk, where he remained during the six weeks prior to his banishment. An emotional farewell letter to his son still survives, in which he urges the boy to be loyal to God and his sovereign.

On Thursday, 30 April, Suffolk sailed from Ipswich for Calais and exile with two ships and a little pinnace, which (according to a letter written by William Lomnour of London to John Paston in Norfolk on 5 May) he sent ahead with letters ‘to his trusted men in Calais to see how he should be received’. Later that day, in the straits of Dover, the Duke’s ship was intercepted by a fleet of small vessels which had been lying in wait for him, ‘and there met with him a ship called the
Nicholas of the Tower
’. The
Nicholas
was not a pirate ship, as
some later historians have suggested; Benet describes her as ‘a great vessel’, and she was in fact part of the royal fleet, her master being Robert Wennington, a ship-owner of Dartmouth.

Rumour later had it that, when Suffolk saw this ship approaching, he asked what name it bore, and when he was told he remembered an old seer who had once prophesied that if he could escape the danger of the Tower, he should be safe. Now ‘his heart failed him’. The master of the
Nicholas
‘had knowledge of the Duke’s coming from them that were in the pinnace’, and now he sent his men in a small boat to Suffolk to say ‘he must speak with their master. And so he, with two or three of his men, went forth with them in their boat to the
Nicholas
, and when he came there, the master bade him, “Welcome, Traitor!” ’ Suffolk was on the
Nicholas
‘until Saturday following, and some say he was tried after their fashion upon the articles of his impeachment and found guilty. And in the sight of all his men’ – presumably Suffolk’s small fleet was following – ‘he was drawn out of the great ship into a boat, and there was an axe and a stock, and one of the lewdest of the ship bade him lay down his head’. If he co-operated, he was told, ‘he should be dealt with fairly and die on a sword’. So saying, the sailor ‘took a rusty sword and smote off his head with half a dozen strokes, and took away his gown of russet and his doublet of velvet, mailed, and laid his body on the sands of Dover. And some say that his head was set on a pole by it.’ The head and body lay rotting on the beach for a month until the King gave orders for their removal to Wingfield Church for burial.

Suffolk died a much-hated man, and many rejoiced at his end. Political songs vilified him and gloatingly recounted his fall. The identity of his killers has never been established; presumably they acted on the orders of men who felt that the Duke should be made a scapegoat, or of those who wished to see him suffer a just punishment for his crimes, a punishment that the law had failed to provide.

Suffolk’s widow, the indomitable Alice Chaucer, broke the news of his death to the Queen, who was so grief-stricken that she could not eat for three days and wept continually during that time. After that, anger surfaced, and the desire for retribution. Suffolk might be dead, but she still had Somerset and other powerful supporters who would help her avenge him. But the days when the court party could rule unchallenged were now numbered, and there remained the deadly enmity between York and Somerset as the gravest threat to peace between the contending factions.

B
y 1450 the Lancastrian government had not only lost much of its credibility, but it was also bankrupt, with massive debts amounting to £372,000, increasing by about £20,000 each year. York was still owed £38,000. The cost of maintaining the royal household was a staggering £24,000 a year, twice what it would be twenty years later, while the King’s basic revenues yielded a mere £5000 annually. Other sources of income raised his annual budget to £33,000 – not nearly enough to live on and pay his debts as well. Thus the debts grew ever larger and the Crown’s capacity to pay ever less. Hitherto the government had relied on loans from Italian merchants and bankers, but even they were now wary of lending more money, being aware of the precarious state of the nation’s finances, and in the decade from 1450 they advanced only £1000 in total. Nor would Parliament vote sufficient taxation to meet the Crown’s debts or fund the war in France, which was still a major drain on the economy. Even members of the King’s household went unpaid and were forced to petition Parliament for their wages.

Under the influence of the court party, Henry VI had given away royal lands and estates on an unprecedented scale, and had thus lost the revenue from rents and dues on them. He had also lavished large sums on Eton and King’s College, and been criticised by Parliament for it. The court faction, whose members were the chief beneficiaries of Henry’s generosity, were milking the country dry, and had strongly resisted all attempts by Parliament to pass Acts of Resumption which would deprive them of their ill-gotten gains. There was no likelihood, therefore, of any immediate improvement to the Crown’s financial problems.

The people of England were largely united in their desire for political stability, firm government, and the restoration of law and
order. They were aware that the court party was manipulating the administration of law to the benefit of its individual members and their affinities, and that it so monopolised the King and the Council that there was little hope of any effective opposition emerging. The anonymous author of
An English Chronicle
wrote: ‘Then, and long before, England had been ruled by untrue counsel, wherefore the common profit was sore hurt and diseased, so that the common people, what with taxes and other oppressions, might not live by their handiwork and husbandry, wherefore they grudged sore against those who had the governance of the land.’