Crown & Country: A History of England Through the Monarchy (40 page)

In these benign circumstances, the polished machinery of English government adapted easily. Acting in the name of the ‘community of the realm’, the nobility made arrangements for the rule of the cradle king. They divided the government of England and France between the king’s two uncles, each of whom was assisted by a council.

Then, in 1429, the nine-year-old boy was crowned king of England at Westminster Abbey. The form of the coronation was unique and, reflecting his position as king of two realms, much of the French coronation ritual was incorporated into the English service. The boy surveyed the pomp and splendour ‘saddely and wysely’ as the crown was placed on his head. This brought a formal end to the regency. But it did not mean that others ceased to rule in Henry’s name.

In France, meanwhile, important victories were won. And, despite the rallying of the French by Joan of Arc, the situation seemed sufficiently stable in 1430 for Henry’s council to decide that the time had come for the ten-year-old Henry VI to take possession of his second kingdom. In April 1430, the young king, accompanied by the nobility, senior bishops and a large army, went to Rouen. There the court remained for a year. A month into the sojourn Joan of Arc was captured. But it was too risky and too expensive to escort Henry to Reims, the traditional place where French kings were crowned. Instead, in December 1431, Henry was taken to Paris, where he was crowned Henri II in Notre-Dame. The event was not a success. The English and French clergy quarrelled and the Parisians rioted. Within a month Henry was bustled back to Calais and thence to England. It was to be his first and last visit to France.

Whether France remained English would depend on the kind of king Henry VI turned out to be. And no effort was spared to turn him into another edition of his great father. For the first four years of his life he was brought up, as Henry V had wished, with his mother. But in 1427–8 Queen Catherine had an affair with a dashing young nobleman, Edmund Beaufort, later duke of Somerset. And a year or two later she married an attractive Welsh squire of her household, Owen Tudor, by whom she had four children.

Thereafter, his mother saw little of Henry. Instead, responsibility for his upbringing was given to Richard Beauchamp, earl of Warwick, who was appointed Henry’s governor, tutor and master. Warwick seemed ideally qualified for the role. He was one of Henry V’s closest companions, and was brave, cultured and pious. And he tried hard to inculcate Henry with the same qualities. Two little suits of armour and a long-bladed sword were bought for the boy.

At first, all seemed to go well and Henry was described as a promising boy, unusually tall and advanced for his age. But there were worrying signs. He was indecisive. He was generous to a fault and he loved pardoning people. But of the sterner virtues that were indispensable to fifteenth-century kingship there was not a trace.

What had gone wrong? Maybe the veterans of Agincourt had tried too hard. The legacy of his French grandfather, the feeble Charles VI, who had died insane, cannot have helped. Not did his warring uncles, each with his diametrically opposed vision of how the war with France should be fought or whether it should be fought at all. Each sought to dominate the boy and capture him for his own point of view. In so doing, they appear to have stunted his mind and paralysed his will. As for Henry III and Richard II before him, a royal minority proved to be a personal, as well as a national, disaster.

In short, Henry never became his own man. Indeed, by fifteenth-century standards he never became a man at all since his passion was not war but religion.

How a king wishes to be remembered takes us to the heart of his king-ship. And Henry’s chosen monument was not a battlefield or a great castle; instead it was the chapel at Eton College. As he said to a group of scholars there: ‘be you good boys, gentle and teachable, and servants of the Lord’. It was a good recommendation for earnest schoolboys; it was a poor model of kingship in the fifteenth century. Nowadays we think of Eton as the most famous school in the world. But the school as such was more or less incidental to Henry’s purpose. Instead he was interested in the size and scale of the chapel. He wanted it to become one of the biggest, richest and holiest churches in England. As long as Lincoln Cathedral, as wide as York Minster, his very own Westminster Abbey. But, thanks to constant changes of plan, which led him to demolish parts already built and start again, only a fragment of the vast scheme was finished at the time of his fall from power. It is an apt symbol of a reign that began with high hopes and a magnificent inheritance and ended in failure and disaster.

But not merely was Henry unwarlike. Once he took government into his own hands, he pursued an active peace policy. He detested war. It was cruel. It was costly. And above all it destroyed Christian unity. Henry was the only king since the Conquest never to have commanded an army. He was even prepared to surrender parts of his father’s conquests. This was to incur the wrath of the English nobles, who had done so well out of the war.

The most dramatic signal of Henry’s intentions came in 1444, when, at the age of twenty-two, he married a French princess, Margaret of Anjou.

Margaret was the symbol of the controversial peace policy with France. Moreover, after she came to England and married her impressionable husband, she became its most effective partisan as well. This played into the hands of its opponents. The English always distrusted politically active queens, especially when they were foreign. And especially when, like Margaret, they looked suspiciously like a French secret agent at the heart of the English court.

Soon the worst fears of the English nobility came true. By the time Henry was thirty he had lost everything his father had won. Only Calais remained in English hands. Thanks to Henry, a hundred years of war with France had yielded nothing and the prestige of the English crown was destroyed at home and abroad.

But most lethal for the monarchy was the fact that the war, like most unsuccessful wars, was marked by vicious quarrels between the English generals. Most dangerous was the feud between Richard, duke of York, and Edmund, duke of Somerset. Both were members of the royal house, and York arguably had a better claim to the throne than Henry himself. Both his parents were descended from Edward III’s sons – his paternal grandfather was Edmund, duke of York, and his maternal great-great-grandfather was Lionel, duke of Clarence. And he was by far the richest noble in the land with a string of estates and a large following. As such he resembled another great landowner of royal blood who fancied he held the balance of power in England: John of Gaunt.

York was an energetic soldier. He had commanded the armies in France and served as English viceroy in Ireland. In all this, he contrasted strongly with the timid Henry VI. York’s bitter rival and the king’s new favourite, the duke of Somerset, was a man of a similar stamp. He, too, was royal and Lancastrian after a fashion, as he descended from John of Gaunt – but via Gaunt’s liaison with his long-term mistress and eventual third wife, Catherine Swinford. And he had been a much-decorated soldier as a young man. But, in 1449–50, having succeeded York as commander in France, Somerset surrendered first Rouen and then Caen and all Normandy to the French with scarcely a blow struck. Gascony, English for 300 years, followed. At best it was staggering incompetence. York thought it was treason and never forgave Somerset. Their quarrel now dominated English politics and led to civil war.

But it was the popular and parliamentary outrage at the catastrophe in France that brought the two dukes back to England. As news of the loss of Normandy reached London, the House of Commons turned on Henry’s government. Ministers were accused of treason abroad and misgovernment at home. They had lost France, bankrupted the king and perverted justice. And what Parliament began popular violence completed as several leading councillors were done to death by mobs. Worse was to follow. In the summer Kent rose in revolt and the rebels, led by Jack Cade, entered London. Henry fled, leaving Queen Margaret to negotiate a settlement of sorts.

Both Somerset and York now took their chance. Cade had called on Henry ‘to take about his noble person his true blood of the royal realm, that is to say, the high and mighty prince the Duke of York’. And, on cue, York had returned from Ireland, proclaiming his loyalty to Henry on the one hand but, on the other, presenting himself as the great white hope of good government against the corrupt court clique – and Somerset in particular. Somerset, for his part, had already returned from France. His aim was to defend his reputation. He hardly needed to have bothered as Henry, with a confidence that is scarcely credible bearing in mind Somerset’s performance in Normandy, immediately turned to him as the military strongman of his tottering regime.

The dukes’ roles were now defined. Somerset became Henry’s chief minister while York set himself up as the leader of an increasingly disloyal opposition. Their relationship was further poisoned by the problem of the succession. Henry’s marriage was still childless. In these circumstances, York had an excellent claim to succeed Henry and Somerset a more doubtful one – though it was greatly strengthened by his ‘Lancastrian’ blood and Henry’s favour.

The next few years were an extraordinary switchback. In the autumn of 1450, events seemed to be running strongly in York’s favour. He was received enthusiastically by Parliament and Somerset was sent to the Tower. But York had ‘gone too far without going far enough’. His professed loyalty to Henry meant that he could not force his services on the king – and Henry would not accept them any other way.

The tables were now turned. Somerset was released and resumed his old place in government. Two years later, York, despairing of making headway any other way, took up arms. He justified his rebellion by claiming, in time-honoured fashion, that it was not directed against Henry himself but against his evil councillors in the court, especially Somerset. But, receiving little popular or noble support, he was forced into a humiliating surrender and submission. Then, in 1453, Queen Margaret, still barren after eight years of marriage, ‘miraculously’ became pregnant. York seemed destined for oblivion.

But, once again, events somersaulted. The English suffered a final, shattering defeat in Gascony and Henry VI, probably in reaction to the news, had a mental breakdown. His stupor was so severe that for months he had to be spoon-fed.

Three months after the onset of Henry’s illness Margaret gave birth to a son and the future of the Lancastrian dynasty seemed secure. But Henry acknowledged his son only with the flickering of his eyes and he could not even raise a finger in the government of his kingdom. Without a king as the final decision-maker, England was paralysed. Who would act in his name? Margaret – her position immeasurably strengthened as mother of the heir – put herself forward as queen regent. But Margaret commanded little support among the lords. Instead they nominated the duke of York as protector and defender of England.

York ruled England for close to a year. And he did so well and moderately – in everything, that is, apart from his treatment of Somerset. Somerset was promptly arrested and held in prison without trial for the duration of the protectorate. But at Christmas 1454 Henry’s bout of insanity ended as suddenly as it had begun. Things now came full circle once more. York was dismissed from the protectorate and Somerset released and reinstated. But this time York was not prepared to accept the reversal. And this time he had allies – powerful ones.

One of the symptoms of the decline of royal government under Henry VI was the growth in the number and intensity of private feuds in the localities. Worst was the dispute between the two great northern families of Neville and Percy. The fatal development of 1455 was the alignment between the Percy–Neville feud in the north and the struggle between York and Somerset in the centre. The Nevilles, led by the earls of Salisbury and Warwick, allied with York, the Percy earl of Northumberland with Somerset. York and his allies marched on London and the two sides met in the marketplace at St Albans. York triumphed: Somerset was cut down in the street and Henry, deserted beneath the royal banner, was slightly wounded in the neck. Civil war had begun.

Once more York professed loyalty to Henry and once more he became protector. But he had overreached himself. The situation was quite different to 1454. The king was no longer mad; there was an heir to the throne; and the Lancastrian nobility had regrouped. York resigned as protector. But the country was still close to anarchy and the king had slumped into apathy. Instead Queen Margaret took the reins of power. She rallied the nobility to the crown and in 1459 she brought charges against York. He was left more or less isolated and fled to Ireland.

But the Yorkists remained a powerful force. Less than a year later York’s son Edward and the earl of Warwick raised an army and defeated and captured Henry at Northampton. York himself returned from exile and entered London in royal state. In the ensuing parliament York formally laid claim to the throne. He was greeted with a shocked silence, because no one – not even York’s followers – wanted a repetition of the usurpation of 1399. So York was forced to accept a compromise: Henry would remain king while he lived, and York would succeed only after his death. But they all reckoned without Margaret’s ferocious mother love.

Margaret refused to see her son’s inheritance forfeit and broke the truce when she led the Lancastrian forces against York. Margaret was victorious: York was killed in battle and his head, adorned with a paper crown, displayed on the walls of York.

But Henry VI was at this time, according to the pope, ‘more timorous than a woman, utterly devoid of wit and spirit’. He was a broken man, ill, helpless and utterly incapable of ruling. Nor had the death of York ended the challenge to the throne. For York’s son, Edward, and his allies were still at large. And Margaret’s act of vengeance against York had raised the stakes. Promises counted for nothing. It was kill or be killed; rule or be crushed by the victors.