Henry VI (1422–1461)
By strange coincidence the French king Charles VI died in 1422 within months of Henry V, leaving the infant Henry VI king of both England and France. In practice both countries were ruled by his royal uncles. Henry V’s able soldier brother John, Duke of Bedford became regent. But he returned to France to try to enforce the Treaty of Troyes and left the task of governing England to his ambitious younger brother Duke Humphrey of Gloucester in tandem with the King’s Council.
Bedford was as far-sighted as his brother Henry V and he saw that the only way to rule France was through the goodwill of the Duke of Burgundy, Philip the Good. His support was vital as the Burgundians controlled most of the northern part of the country, especially around Paris. Bedford shored up his nephew’s kingdom by establishing an Anglo-Burgundian alliance and signing a treaty with the Duke of Brittany. This left him free to extend the Anglo-French kingdom south of the Loire into the Orleanist–Armagnac territory of central and southern France, where the dauphin was acknowledged as king.
Bedford’s campaigns were constantly interrupted by the need to return home to sort out the King’s Council, in which the jealousies and intrigues between Duke Humphrey and the baby king’s equally ambitious great-uncle Henry Beaufort, Bishop of Winchester, often brought government business to a standstill. By 1429 Duke Humphrey was demanding that Beaufort be expelled from the Council as an agent of the pope following his election as cardinal. Bedford therefore deemed it more sensible to crown the seven-year-old Henry VI king than allow Duke Humphrey to remain as protector. From then on Cardinal Beaufort’s influence in the royal Council became paramount.
Bedford had already begun a more serious attempt at rooting out the dauphin by laying siege to the town of Orleans, which controlled one of the few bridges on the fast-flowing Loire river and was considered the key to the south. Had he succeeded in taking Orleans, the Anglo-Burgundian forces could have swarmed into central France. However, at this point the fortunes of France were transformed by Jeanne d’Arc or, as the English call her, Joan of Arc, a young peasant girl from Domremi between Champagne and Lorraine in the north-east.
Although Domremi was separated by many miles from Orleanist France in the south, Joan of Arc made her way across enemy country to reach the dauphin at his castle at Chinon, desperate to tell him of her vision that he was to be crowned King of France at Rheims in the heart of English-occupied France. Having pushed her way into his presence she proceeded to put steel into this self-indulgent man. No greater contrast could be imagined than that between the gorgeously dressed and cynical veteran of the French court and the naive Joan in her wooden sabots and home-made woollen garments. But her conviction that France’s greatest saints had appeared to her while she was watching her father’s sheep and thinking of the suffering of her divided country was so overwhelming that the dauphin too was swept away by her astonishing prophecy.
In an age of symbolism and allegory Joan of Arc, clad in the suit of white armour the dauphin had had made for her and with her hair shorn, seemed the embodiment of a holy angel descended to earth to fight for France. She changed the army’s mood from pessimism to inspired patriotism. On a horse from the royal stables, Joan of Arc was allowed to lead a brigade of French soldiers to relieve the defeatist garrison at Orleans. To the Orleanists’ astonishment, she managed to fight her way through the English besiegers and clambered within the battlemented walls of the city. Soon after she drove off the English by capturing one of their siege forts.
The siege of Orleans was lifted, and the townsfolk claimed Joan as their own, with the result that ever since she has been known as the Maid of Orleans. Shortly after, she won a pitched battle against the English at Patay, and a new determination was restored to the Orleanist army. It enabled the Maid to lead the dauphin north through Anglo-Burgundian France and have him crowned at Rheims as his ancestors had been since time immemorial. Although the dauphin had to escape south again as soon as the ceremony was over, something had happened to him in the echoing cathedral. When he received the sacred oils of kingship as the Archbishop of Rheims traced the sign of the cross on his forehead, the new king Charles VII was transformed into the Lord’s anointed for whom no sacrifice was too great.
Urged on by Joan, who had stayed in the north with the Orleanist troops, even the French inhabitants of the Anglo-Burgundian regions began openly to resist their foreign overlords. For though the Maid had accomplished her first purpose and the dauphin was now the figurehead for an increasingly united France, she had yet to achieve her second objective: that was to drive the English out of France.
It was then that the Maid’s luck turned. Her great merit had been the strength of her faith, but she was no trained general. She became over-confident and marched on Paris. When she utterly failed to take it, the mutterings against her grew louder among the dauphin’s advisers, who were already jealous of her influence. In May 1430, against military advice, she rashly tried to relieve the town of Compiègne, a former Burgundian possession on the dukedom’s western border which had rebelled against its overlord and which Duke Philip of Burgundy had surrounded. Having been wounded, she was on her way back to camp when she was captured by Duke Philip’s men-at-arms. Her white armour had made her all too visible.
Joan was thrown into prison, while the English and Burgundians considered ways of eradicating her with the least fuss. In her absence her enemies prevailed over the weak dauphin. In the end it was a French ecclesiastical court at Rouen under the Bishop of Beauvais that did the dirty work. The heroine of France was condemned to be burned to death for witchcraft. The dauphin did nothing to save her. Refusing to alter anything she had said about her visions the Maid of Orleans, weak and pale from captivity, was led out from her underground dungeon and tied to a stake in the market square at Rouen in Normandy. Logs were piled around her and set alight. St Joan, as she was to become, quietly muttered prayers to herself and never cried out during her final agony. Her ashes were thrown into the Seine.
However, the spirit of patriotism that Joan had released lived on after her. Twenty years later the English presence in France had been reduced to the port of Calais. Though Bedford brought Henry VI to France to be crowned in the year of her death, anti-English feeling prevented the ceremony being performed at Rheims. Instead he had to make do with Paris. But the coronation had little effect–in fact, it only encouraged the growth of French patriotism, and even the Burgundian-ruled northern towns turned against the English.
The process was made swifter by the death of Bedford’s wife, who was the Duke of Burgundy’s sister. Anglo-Burgundian relations had been strengthened by their personal ties, but they never really recovered after Bedford married Burgundy’s vassal Jacquetta of Luxembourg without his former brother-in-law’s permission. Was England planning to control Luxembourg too? From now on Burgundy allied himself to Charles VII, and threw his influence behind him to establish the French king at Paris.
Though fighting continued sporadically in France, marked by longer and longer truces, Bedford’s death in 1435 allowed a peace party to flourish in England, led by Cardinal Beaufort, and the Truce of Tours in 1444 was cemented by Henry VI’s marriage to the strong-willed Margaret of Anjou, a cousin of the French royal family. However, Beaufort’s wise policy did not jibe with the national mood, which was vehemently anti-French. When he died in 1447 his follower the Duke of Suffolk became a lightning rod for public opinion. As ever Duke Humphrey–though he had been exiled from court, disgraced by his wife’s alleged attempts to use witchcraft to bring about Henry VI’s death–continued to exercise his populist touch speaking out against the French marriage. His death under suspicious circumstances after he had been arrested by Suffolk created a public outcry.
But that was nothing to what was felt to be the national humiliation of the loss of Normandy and Gascony three years later. By now Suffolk was Henry VI’s chief minister. One of his principal councillors was Cardinal Beaufort’s nephew, Edmund Beaufort, Duke of Somerset, who held the position of governor of Normandy. Somerset disgraced Suffolk’s administration by failing to make sure of Normandy’s defences and by 1450 the duchy had passed back into French hands for good. Even in Gascony the patriotism Joan of Arc had first inspired finally prevailed. When French soldiers invaded, none of the Gascons took up arms against them. Even those towns with strong trade links to England, Bordeaux and Bayonne, went over to the French.
However, the Gascons were used to a greater degree of independence than their new masters were willing to allow, so in 1451 the elderly but distinguished commander John Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, whose war service stretched back to the Welsh wars of Henry IV, was despatched to aid the Gascons round Bordeaux. Unfortunately, in the half-century since Owen Glendower’s revolt there had been a few military developments which had passed the gallant Talbot by, and one of them was artillery. French artillery accordingly won the Battle of Castillon in the Dordogne in 1453, the engagement which at last ended the Hundred Years War. The once unbeatable longbow was finally outclassed. Perhaps because of his age, Talbot made a textbook error, leading a cavalry charge uphill against a fortified camp defended by 300 cannon. One in ten of his troops was killed before they reached the palisades, including Talbot himself. From that day the only English possession left in France was the staple town and port of Calais.
But the initial loss of Normandy and Gascony, even before Castillon had been fought, was enough in 1450 to get Suffolk impeached. There were suspicions that he intended to engineer the succession to the throne for his son, that he was in collusion with the French and that Somerset too was a traitor. So furious was the public mood that Henry VI was forced to banish Suffolk to prevent him being imprisoned. Even so, the duke was murdered on his way to exile in Calais. His headless body was washed up days later on the English coast.
Worse was to come. Only weeks later, Henry VI, who was said to be utterly at the mercy of his fierce French wife Margaret of Anjou, was forced to flee from the capital to escape an invasion by the men of Kent, led by an obscure Irishman named Jack Cade. Rebellion was their response to the government’s attempts to punish them, for they were commonly believed to have been behind the murder of Suffolk. They camped out on Blackheath and when they had defeated the king’s soldiers sent to round them up they went into London and exacted summary justice on royal favourites. It was only when wilder elements began to loot the fine shops that Londoners turned against Cade. Soon afterwards he was murdered, and the king returned from Kenilworth where he had been hiding.
Who was behind Jack Cade? Unlike the Peasants’ Revolt, Cade’s uprising included deeply dissatisfied burgesses and gentry, the so-called political nation, protesting against high taxes, incompetent government and the French débâcle. Cade claimed to be a Mortimer, that Welsh marcher family which was so closely connected to the Clarence Plantagenet line. There are some suggestions that the revolt had been orchestrated as a challenge to the Lancastrian line by the royal duke Richard of York. Through his mother Anne Mortimer (who was Lionel, Duke of Clarence’s heiress), Richard of York represented the senior branch of Edward III’s family. Thus according to strict arguments of heredity, if inheriting through the female line was no obstacle, York was the rightful heir to the throne. In fact not long after Cade’s death Richard, Duke of York did appear in London from his estates in Ireland, where he had been banished for the previous three years by Suffolk. He now became the focus of opposition to the Lancastrian regime.
There had been considerable enmity between Henry VI and his putative heir for some time, and relations had not been improved by York’s attempt through Parliament to have himself named as the then childless king’s successor. Nevertheless, at least initially, York does not seem to have intended to seize the throne. But in 1453 the birth of a son to Margaret and Henry altered his position vis-à-vis the crown. Now that he was no longer the automatic heir his feelings hardened towards Henry. Moreover, events began to play into his hands. The kindly Henry VI lost his reason. One chronicler reported that when the new Prince of Wales was put into his arms he kept looking down at the ground and seemed incapable of seeing the child.
Although the king’s madness was concealed and the King’s Council continued to rule for him, there was a distinct mood of disenchantment in the country. In 1454, Somerset was dismissed from government and the popular York was elected protector of England. Months later, however, the king’s sanity returned and he once more appointed Somerset to lead the Council, from which York was now excluded. York’s response was to raise an army against the king. At the first Battle of St Albans in Hertfordshire in 1455 he killed Somerset and captured Henry VI. The king was not capable of withstanding this new assault on his dignity and he lost his mind. Once again the Duke of York was named protector.
The first Battle of St Albans is generally taken to mark the beginning of the thirty years of sporadic civil war between the two branches of the Plantagenet kings known as the Wars of the Roses (in Sir Walter Scott’s phrase). A red rose was one of the badges used on their livery by the House of Lancaster, while a white rose was worn by the House of York.
The Duke of York had married into one of the most ambitious of the English magnate families, the Nevilles, the tentacles of whose Yorkshire clan twined round the power structure of northern England. The Nevilles became completely identified with the cause of York, owing to their long-running rivalry with their fellow northerners, the Percys, the traditional allies of the House of Lancaster. Especially important figures among the Nevilles were the Duke of York’s brother-in-law Richard Neville, Earl of Salisbury and above all his son who by marrying into the Beauchamp family became Earl of Warwick, known to history as Warwick the Kingmaker. The Beauchamp lands made him the wealthiest noble of the time.
Warwick and Salisbury had played key roles at the Battle of St Albans. Warwick was rewarded by being made captain of Calais, a position he kept despite the return of Henry VI to his senses in 1456, which meant the end of York’s protectorship. York remained a member of the King’s Council, which soon descended into feuding, and all over England the governmental structure began to collapse, and with it the rule of law. Fighting for booty in France had created an appetite among the nobility that did not die with the loss of Normandy and Gascony.
It became the habit for great lords to support retinues of soldiers dressed in their badges, a custom known as livery and maintenance. It would have been a common if unwelcome sight to see such bands of forty men or more–who pledged themselves like so many others to ride with their lord and ‘take his part against all other persons within the realm of England’, as one oath had it–galloping across the landscape in pursuit of vengeance. In many areas the local law courts stopped functioning, since these private armies simply overturned judgements in the local court that they disagreed with. As the local administration fell apart, the nobility indulged in raids against one another and in small wars. In a period of anarchy the strong man wins, at least temporarily. As captain of Calais, Warwick became a popular hero for using his personal wealth to attack the French.
In 1459 war between the Yorkists and Lancastrians broke out again. This time it was begun by the energetic queen deciding to make a pre-emptive strike against the Yorkists, whom she had been steadily trying to drive out of the King’s Council. Out of the blue she and her troops attacked the Earl of Salisbury but were defeated at the Battle of Blore Heath in Staffordshire. The action now moved to the Welsh marches and the heart of Mortimer country where Warwick was gathered with the Duke of York and his father the Earl of Salisbury preparatory to a fresh attack. Henry VI now showed unexpected decisiveness and, marching at the head of his troops, forced the unprepared conspirators to escape abroad–York to his estates in Ireland and the Nevilles to Calais. Queen Margaret then had Parliament declare all the Yorkist leaders attainted. That meant that they were sentenced to death and all of their property forfeited to the crown.
This aggressive action only upped the stakes for the Yorkists–now it was all or nothing. The following year, 1460, when Warwick and Salisbury returned at the head of an army containing the Duke of York’s eldest son, the future Edward IV, their aim was to make his father king instead of protector. At the Battle of Northampton, Warwick the Kingmaker captured Henry VI, who was wandering incoherently about the battlefield and their victory seemed complete. The queen was forced to escape north to Scotland.
York lost no time in crossing over from Ireland to demand the crown before Parliament, but the Lords refused him. Instead he again had to be contented with the title of protector, though he was now styled heir to the throne and made Prince of Wales. Whatever his titles, York was the real ruler of the country; Henry VI lived quietly in the Tower of London. But at the end of the year the protector was forced to hurry north to put down a revolt by Lancastrian Yorkshire magnates. At the Battle of Wakefield in December 1460 the Yorkists were severely defeated, and some of the most important Yorkist nobles lost their lives–including the duke himself. Warwick’s father Salisbury was publicly executed at the Lancastrian stronghold of Pontefract and York’s second son, the Earl of Rutland, was killed. York’s head was cut off after death, crowned with a paper coronet and stuck on the city of York’s walls as a dreadful warning.
Meanwhile Queen Margaret was making her way down from Scotland accompanied by Scottish soldiers to join up with the northern Lancastrian army which was now heading for London. The Scots had driven a hard bargain–in return for their aid Berwick was to be given back to Scotland. At St Albans in Hertfordshire on the road to London, the queen encountered Warwick who had marched north to stop her from reaching the capital. There she won a great victory and recaptured her husband.
As a foreigner Queen Margaret had not understood the national feeling about Berwick and the historic enmity between the Scots and the English. As the Scots travelled down through England they behaved like an invading army, which in many ways they were. Their looting and burning of English property in the end proved the French queen’s undoing, as the south began to turn against her. Londoners prevented the food carts bearing provisions for the queen’s army from reaching her, and Margaret herself hesitated to march straight into London for fear of the reception she would get.
The nineteen-year-old Edward, the former Earl of March–he had inherited his maternal uncle Edmund Mortimer’s title and, since his father’s death, Duke of York–seized the moment. Summoning an immense gathering of his retainers from the Mortimer estates in Wales and the Welsh marches, he advanced eastwards. Having defeated a Lancastrian army at the Battle of Mortimer’s Cross in Herefordshire in February 1461 he met up with Warwick and his army and reached London before Queen Margaret. At Westminster Hall a month later he was acclaimed king. He became Edward IV.