Henry VI’s illness came upon him while he was staying at his
hunting lodge in Clarendon, near Salisbury. It struck suddenly and
overwhelmingly, and although for several weeks the king’s condition remained a
secret, when he failed to recover it became impossible to conceal the fact that
he was profoundly and shockingly unwell. The men around him had no specific
name for his ailment; they could only describe its symptoms. ‘The king …
suddenly was taken and smitten with a frenzy and his wit and reason withdrawn,’
wrote one. To another he was merely ‘sick’. He became completely helpless,
removed both from his wits and the world around him to the point of total
vacuity. He recognised no one. He could not speak or respond in any way to
questions. He could neither feed nor clean himself, since he had no control of
his arms or legs and could not even keep his head up. He had no sense of time.
No physician could stir him. No medicine could stimulate him. His grandfather
Charles VI of France had also suffered numerous bouts of insanity, but, whereas
Charles’s madness had led him to scream in pain, smear himself in his own waste
and run deranged through the royal palaces, Henry was simply mute and inert: a
kingly nothing.
Even when sane, Henry had been a fairly weak and impotent
force in government. Now that he was so obviously indisposed, however, Somerset
and the rest of his counsellors were presented with a dire problem. When the
king was healthy, they possessed an animated if ineffectual puppet through whom
government could legitimately be carried out by a small group working as his
chosen ministers. But with the king devoid of reason and will, their mandate to
rule in his name disappeared. The king had all the will and capacity of a
newborn baby, which meant that a situation similar to Henry’s long minority in
the 1420s was once again upon the realm. There was a royal person who could be
said to reign, but he had no ability whatever to rule. Just as in the 1420s, a
communal response was required.
Although the turbulence in England and the dire situation in
the meagre rump of English France demanded constant attention, a political
reaction to Henry’s illness was nevertheless delayed as long as possible,
probably with the dual aim of hoping, rather vainly, that he would recover and
waiting for the queen’s pregnancy to reach its term. The second of these came
to pass, on 13 October 1453 – the feast day of Edward the Confessor, one of the
holiest and most venerated saints in England, with special importance to the
royal family. In a chamber at Westminster, Margaret of Anjou was delivered of
her first child, a boy. The child was called Edward, a princely name that not
only spoke to the auspicious day of his birth but recalled times of greater
glory: the days of the baby’s great-great-great-grandfather Edward III.
‘Wherefore the bells rang in every church and Te Deum [was … ] sung,’ wrote one
observer. The duke of Somerset stood godfather at Prince Edward’s baptism.
If the birth was cause for great joy, it was also clear that
the torpor of the boy’s father could no longer be ignored. It was important to
construct a working government, and it was vital that this government should be
genuinely inclusive. The king’s mental collapse had coincided with, and may
indeed have contributed to, a huge escalation of violence, particularly in the
north of England. Long-simmering hostility between the Neville and Percy
families, who were rivals for power in Yorkshire, Cumbria and Northumberland,
had descended into more or less open warfare. On 24 August 1454 Thomas Percy,
Lord Egremont and an army of retainers numbering perhaps a thousand ambushed a
wedding party celebrating the marriage of Sir Thomas Neville and Maude
Stanhope. The immediate cause was a disputed inheritance: the beautiful manor
and castle of Wressle, which had once belonged to the Percys, would come into
the hands of the Nevilles by way of Sir Thomas’s marriage to the Stanhope heir.
But this was one small battle in a much bigger struggle: the Percys sensed,
with some justification, that the Nevilles were gradually displacing them as
the most powerful family of the north. This, in turn, was a pressing problem
for central government. The north of England appeared to be on the brink of
civil war, as all pleas and instructions to cease hostilities issued by
Somerset’s government had been ignored. Since the feud involved the two most
powerful families in the region, there was no authority save the king’s that
was able to put a stop to massive and disastrous bloodshed.
As soon as Prince Edward was born, a great council of all
the senior lords and churchmen in the realm was summoned to meet as soon as
possible. At first, the intention was to exclude York from its membership, but
on 24 October a letter was sent, addressed ‘By the king’ to his ‘right trusty
and well-beloved cousin’, summoning the duke from his estates to attend the
gathering in London. It is not clear who drafted the letter, since it is signed
in Henry’s name. However, the messenger who took the letter was told to advise
York to put aside ‘the variance betwixt’ him and Somerset, and to ‘come to the
said Counsail peaceably and measurably accompanied’, with the aim of securing
‘rest and union betwixt the lords of this land’.
York arrived at Westminster on 12 November, but he did not
come in a conciliatory mood. His first action was to have his sometime ally the
duke of Norfolk launch a vehement attack on Somerset before the council, once
again accusing him of treason in losing France. Norfolk demanded Somerset’s
imprisonment and in the confusion and crisis of the moment, browbeaten by his
aggressive demands, a majority of the lords assembled consented. The duke was
arrested and sent to the Tower to await trial. A few days later the lords once
again gathered in council at the Star Chamber, and were individually ‘sworn on
a book’ that they would keep their ‘troth and allegiance … to the king’. After
several years of failure, York was now finally at the centre of affairs.
He did not occupy his position unchallenged. In January 1454 the queen, having recovered from the birth of Prince Edward, made her own bid for power. Margaret had long been close to Somerset and to the royal household through which so much of government had proceeded, and it seems that her intention was to fight York’s dominance by any means she could. The dumbstruck King Henry had shown no signs of recognising his son – when Margaret and Humphrey duke of Buckingham took the baby to see his father at Windsor Castle, ‘all their labour was in vain, for they departed thence without any answer or countenance saving only that once he looked on the Prince and cast down his sword without any more’. Nevertheless it was clear that, in possession of the baby, Margaret had the opportunity to build a different, rival power base to York’s. In the new year she published ‘a bill of five articles’ in which she demanded ‘to have the whole rule of this land’, as well as the right to appoint all the great officers of state, sheriffs and bishops, and ‘sufficient [livelihood] assigned her for the King and the Prince and herself’.
Margaret’s efforts were bold, but they were not
unprecedented. Although female rule was uncommon in the fifteenth century, it
was not completely unknown. England’s own history held examples: Queen Isabella
had ruled as regent for Edward III between 1327 and 1330, and before her
Eleanor of Aquitaine had been granted extensive powers of governance during the
reigns of her husband Henry II and her son Richard the Lionheart. Perhaps more
pertinently, Margaret had in her early life seen her mother and grandmother
taking command of government in Anjou and Naples while Duke René languished in
captivity. However, in the crisis of 1453–4, the last desire of the English
lords (or, for that matter, the parliamentary commons) was to experiment with a
new model of female rule. Margaret’s bill was cordially rejected. As a
mollifying measure on 15 March 1454, the five-month-old Edward was created
prince of Wales and earl of Chester. This was as far as accommodation with the
queen went.
A week later Margaret’s close ally, Cardinal Kemp,
archbishop of Canterbury and chancellor of England, died. In desperation the
lords sent another delegation to the king, to see if they could coax from him
some indication of whom he wished his new archbishop to be. Once again, they
reported to the parliament, which took a keen interest in the king’s condition,
that they could get ‘no answer nor sign’. The lords left ‘with sorrowful
hearts’.8 The crisis of authority had worsened. On 27 March the lords in
parliament agreed to elect Richard duke of York as protector of the realm and
chief councillor. His rise was complete.
There were many who held grave reservations about York’s
suitability for the role of protector. Their fears were not realised. Although
he appointed as the new chancellor Richard Neville, earl of Salisbury –
patriarch of the Neville family whose feuding with the Percys was tearing apart
the north – York’s government attempted in general to be tough, even-handed and
non-partisan. He went in person to the north to make a serious attempt to
arbitrate between the Nevilles and the Percys. In the course of this he
imprisoned his own son-in-law, the violent and feckless Henry Holland, duke of
Exeter, in Pontefract Castle, as punishment for involving himself in the
northern war and thereby directly disobeying the oath sworn by all the lords to
keep and respect ‘royal’ authority during the king’s illness.
York appointed himself captain of Calais and resumed his
lieutenancy of Ireland, but these were actions natural and conducive to strong
leadership rather than representative of his seizing the spoils of office.
Other grants, which were modestly made, were given out on non-partisan lines:
the queen, the duke of Buckingham, and Jasper and Edmund Tudor all received
lands or offices during York’s protectorship, whereas men supposedly closer to
him – such as Salisbury’s eldest son the earl of Warwick (also called Richard
Neville) – received nothing. Yet there was one glaring area in which York’s
policy of peace and conciliation failed: he could not normalise relations with
Edmund Beaufort, duke of Somerset. Throughout 1454, Somerset remained locked
away in the Tower. He kept keenly abreast of news from the outside world
through a network of undercover agents: ‘spies going in every Lord’s house of
this land: some gone as [friars], some as shipmen … and some in other wise;
which report unto him all that they can see …’ To have killed Somerset would
have been a destructively divisive act. In prison, therefore, he was able to
study the situation and bide his time, hoping, as the popular image had it,
that Fortune’s wheel would shortly give another turn.
#
On Christmas Day 1454, more than a year after he had been
stricken, Henry VI woke up. His senses flooded back as quickly as they had
first rushed out of him. Two days after Christmas he was ordering his almoner
to deliver gifts of thanks to the shrine at Canterbury, and on Monday 30
December Queen Margaret took the fourteen-month-old prince to see his father.
Henry ‘asked what the prince’s name was, and the Queen told him Edward; and
then he held up his hands and thanked God thereof’. He had no memory of
anything that had been said or done during his stupor. But he seemed extremely
happy to have recovered. When his ministers found that he could once more speak
to them ‘as well as he ever did’, they ‘wept for joy’.
The same could not be said for York. Henry’s recovery did
not simply end the protectorate: it led directly to the reversal of most of the
means York had pursued over the course of the last year. By 26 January 1455
Somerset had been released from prison and by 4 March the charges of treason
against him were dropped. York was formally stripped of the protectorate on 9
February. In a sign of the absolute repudiation of York’s primary case against
Somerset – that he was treasonably negligent in his dealings with the French –
York was stripped of his captaincy of Calais and it was awarded once more to
Somerset. York’s ally Richard earl of Salisbury was forced to resign the
chancellorship. In mid-March Salisbury’s son, the earl of Warwick, was ordered
to release Henry Holland, the scheming and belligerent duke of Exeter, from his
entirely deserved place in prison at Pontefract.
As Somerset and his allies raced back into their old
positions in government and at the side of the king, York and the Nevilles were
forced to abandon court. Despite the protector’s genuinely purposeful actions
in trying to maintain government during the royal madness, he now found himself
stripped of his posts, authority and dignity as though he had been a usurper.
The only possible conclusion York could draw was that with Somerset beside the
king, he would forever be treated as an enemy of the crown: denied his proper
place in the realm as if he were nothing but a scoundrel and a rebel. York had
been bound by the king and a council of the lords to keep his peace with
Somerset until June, on pain of a fine of twenty thousand marks. But peace was
no longer an option. With the Nevilles, York now went north to follow the only
course of action that was left to him: he began to raise an army.
York and the Nevilles – led by the earls of Salisbury and
Warwick, father and son – were now thrown together in a friendship of common
cause. Between them, they controlled much of northern England, and since the
Nevilles existed in a state of war-readiness owing to their struggles with the
house of Percy, it did not prove difficult for the allies to raise their
retainers to form a small army during the spring of 1455. They had, by their
own later admission, ‘great might of men in diverse countries, much harness
and great habiliments of war’. It is important to note that for York the purpose of raising an armed force was to remove Somerset and the ‘traitors’ around the king; this to his mind was a very different matter from rebellion – and certainly dynastic rebellion – against Henry VI himself. It is questionable, however, how many of the men who served beneath him would have appreciated the subtle difference. All the same, they were raised with efficient haste in April and May, and the news of York and the Nevilles’ mobilisation, although perhaps not its scale, soon reached the court and council at Westminster.
Somerset at this point panicked and dithered.
Notwithstanding the London populace’s general preference for York over him, the
obvious course of action ought still have been to raise a royal army, set to
defend the capital, and allow a repeat of the Dartford conflict of 1452 to
occur. Instead, a decision was taken to move the king’s household and the lords
attending the king north. A great council – not quite a parliament, although
the summonses went out on a broad scale to England’s lords, along with a
selection of hand-picked knights expected to be favourable to Somerset’s regime
– was called to meet at Leicester, a town in the heart of the duchy of
Lancaster, the king’s private landholding. York and his allies were invited, so
it seems that at least one aspect of the Dartford episode was in mind: the
government hoped to impose a new settlement upon Somerset and York, and most
likely one that would embarrass York in public with an oath of loyalty of the
type he had been forced to swear at St Paul’s. This was not something York was
prepared to countenance. He may also have thought of the fate of Humphrey duke
of Gloucester, who had been summoned to a parliament in Bury St Edmunds in 1447
and had never returned.
There was the distinct possibility of armed confrontation at
Leicester. In mid-May, as the king and his supporters prepared to travel north,
requests were sent to lords and townsmen along the route, requiring them to
send armed men to the king ‘wheresoever we be in all haste possible’. The
destination for assembly was the town of St Albans, in Hertfordshire, which lay
conveniently along the road between London and Leicester. On the morning of
Tuesday 20 May the king and his entourage set out from Westminster along this very
route. Ahead of them went messengers with letters to York, Salisbury and
Warwick, demanding that they disband their armies immediately and come to the
king attended by no more than 160 men each in the Nevilles’ case, and two
hundred in the case of York.
By the time the letters reached York and the Nevilles, they
had reached Royston, a town a few miles south-west of Cambridge, and less than
a day’s ride from St Albans. They replied to the orders to disband with a letter
addressed to the chancellor who had replaced Salisbury: Thomas Bourchier, the
forty-four-year-old archbishop of Canterbury. ‘We hear that a great rumour and
wonder is had of our coming, and of the manner thereof, toward the most noble
presence of the king oure most [re]doubted sovereign lord,’ they wrote. It was
vital for York and his allies that they should establish themselves as the true
defenders of the common good in the face of Somerset’s treacherous government,
so they added that ‘we intend not with God’s grace to proceed to any matter or
thing, other than with God’s mercy shall be to his pleasure, the honour,
prosperity and weal of our said sovereign lord, his said land and people’. More
ominously, the Yorkists also promised the chancellor that for the sake of the
kingdom they would do whatever ‘accordeth with our duty, to that that may be
the surety of [the king’s] most noble person, wherein we will neither spare our
bodies nor goods’.
By the time the letter reached Chancellor Bourchier, the
king’s party had left Westminster. The men around Henry hardly consisted of a
partisan group: the king was attended by men as diverse in their political
outlooks as his faithful half-brother Jasper Tudor, earl of Pembroke, the Percy
patriarch Henry Percy, earl of Northumberland, the independent-minded Humphrey
duke of Buckingham, the former Yorkist ally Thomas Courtenay, earl of Devon,
and the earl of Salisbury’s brother William Neville, Lord Fauconberg. Other
great nobles included the earl of Wiltshire and Lords Clifford, Ros, Sudeley,
Dudley and Berners. Perhaps in anticipation of confrontation, Queen Margaret
was left behind, and only one bishop travelled with the king – although several
others probably followed at a safe distance. The party passed out of London and
by nightfall on Wednesday 21 May they were lodged in Watford, seven miles south
of St Albans. At dawn they rose to continue their journey, planning to arrive
in the town in good time to settle and enjoy their midday meal at the splendid
abbey. But as morning arrived, so did a messenger, bearing the alarming news
that York and his army were close by: they had camped the night in Ware, and
not only were they ahead of the king’s party on their way to St Albans, but
they were said to have with them around three thousand men. The king’s party
numbered closer to two thousand.
The sense that something between an armed showdown and a pitched battle was looming sparked action in the royal party. Conciliatory action was urgently required. Early on the morning of Thursday 22, Somerset was abruptly relieved of his post as constable of England, by which he commanded the king’s military forces. He was immediately replaced in the office by Humphrey duke of Buckingham, who as the most senior duke at the king’s side had the presence to represent the royal interest, but was far less personally obnoxious to York and the Nevilles. Buckingham seems to have believed that he would be able to negotiate a settlement without bloodshed.The party rode on to St Albans, arriving at about 9 a.m. The Yorkists had arrived two hours earlier, and were camped in the Key Field, just to the east of the town centre. There were ‘diverse knightes and squiers unto ther party’, and they were perfectly visible to the king’s party as they came to a halt in the middle of St Albans on St Peter’s Street, below the massive silhouette of the abbey church. The townsmen, realising that their lives and homes were in some peril, manned the defences, which took the form of barricades around the unwalled settlement. They were reinforced by knights loyal to the king, and between 9 and 10 a.m. messengers passed between the two sides as they tried to negotiate a settlement.
The talks with York were conducted by the dukes of
Buckingham and Somerset, who claimed that they were speaking directly for the
king. It is unlikely that Henry knew very much about what was happening: he had
not seen York’s initial petitions and one of the first stages of negotiation
involved York’s demand that the letters he had sent should actually be placed
under the royal nose. Henry may have recovered from his illness, but his role
at St Albans remained passive and symbolic.
York’s principal demands had not changed but only hardened
since Dartford. He wanted Somerset and he was prepared to use any means to
obtain him. In response to this, Buckingham could do little but stall for time,
and await both the bishops who were following behind the royal party and the
military reinforcements that had been requested from around the country. He
asked York to remove his men to a nearby town for the night, while negotiations
could continue through suitable proxies. And he absolutely refused to hand over
the duke of Somerset.
Whether or not York was prepared to continue negotiations
into a second day will never be known. At around 10 a.m., while talks were
continuing, men under the earl of Warwick grew sick of waiting and began an
assault against the barricades on the fringes of the town. Within St Albans,
the king’s banner was raised over the royal forces. The talking time was over.
Fighting had begun.
Defence of the barricades was commanded by Thomas, Lord
Clifford, an experienced soldier who had served for some time in the north,
battling the Scots in the marches. He was later considered to have manned the
barriers to St Albans ‘strongly’, and probably held the line outside the town
for about an hour.17 York, however, had the superior numbers, and around 11
a.m. the skirmishing was turning in favour of the attacking forces. Warwick
took a flanking party to the thoroughfare known as Holywell Street, which led
into St Peter’s Street, where the royal party were massed. They smashed down
palisades and the walls of houses and finally broke open an entry point between
two inns, known as the Key and the Chequer, through which their men could pour
into the town, blowing trumpets and shouting ‘Warwick! Warwick! Warwick!’ at
the top of their voices. As soon as they clapped eyes on the king’s forces,
‘they set on them manfully’.
St Albans was soon overrun. Amazingly, it seems that
Buckingham and Somerset had failed to prepare for the possibility that the
barricades would fall so swiftly, for as the town bell was rung in urgent alarm
and fighting spilled from street to street, there was a general scramble for
the defenders to pull on their full armour. They were unprepared and
overwhelmed, and when one of York’s allies, Sir Robert Ogle, brought several
hundred men crashing into the marketplace, blades slashing and arrows fizzing
through the late morning air, the short conflict was effectively decided in
favour of York’s men. From the puncturing of the barriers the fighting lasted
around half an hour. But it was a shocking experience all the same.
In the middle of the mêlée stood the king himself, terror
presumably spreading across his pale, round face, for the son of Henry V had
managed to reach the age of thirty-three without ever having stood before a
siege or in the chaos of a battle. Like the best of his lords, he was
imperfectly armoured, and was lucky to survive when a stray arrow bloodied his
neck. (‘Forsothe and forsothe,’ the king is said to have remarked, employing
his favourite and only oath, ‘ye do foully to smite a king anointed so.’) For
his protection, if not the maintenance of his royal dignity, Henry was hustled
into a nearby tanner’s cottage to hide while the street fighting played out. As
he left, his banner, which in every battle was to be upheld to the death, was
easily pulled to the ground, its defenders scattering into the streets.
After only a short stay in his reeking hideaway, Henry was
captured and taken away to proper safety in the precincts of the abbey. York’s
men had absolutely no interest in doing him physical damage, for it was a
crucial component of the duke’s political campaign to argue that he was
fighting for and not against the king. But Henry’s companions were not so
lucky. York and the Nevilles had come to St Albans to eliminate their enemies,
and in the disorder they had created, they were able to achieve their goal. By
midday, when hostilities came to a conclusion, the streets groaned with
bloodied and injured men. Given the numbers of combatants – probably around
five thousand in total – it is slightly surprising that fewer than sixty were
killed. But of the dead men there were three of great significance. First was
Thomas, Lord Clifford, who had so bravely held the town’s defences while the
first hour’s blows were traded. Second was Henry earl of Northumberland, the
most senior male in the Percy family and as a result the chief enemy of the
Nevilles. And third was the greatest enemy of them all: Edmund Beaufort, duke
of Somerset.
Somerset had fought for the duration of the battle of St
Albans. Although he may have been an unlucky commander, he was at least used to
seeing military action during his long service in France. Several chronicles of
the battle record that after the king had been taken to the abbey, and as
fighting was coming to its conclusion on St Peter’s Street, Somerset was pushed
back into defending a tavern under the sign of the Castle. At his side was his
son Henry Beaufort, nineteen years old and already a courageous warrior.
Whereas the earl of Wiltshire had timidly, if pragmatically, fled the scene of
the battle disguised as a monk, the Beauforts stood their ground and struggled
to the very last. Young Henry Beaufort was wounded so severely in the fighting
that he left St Albans dragged on a cart and close to death. His father was not
so fortunate. It was he over whom the whole conflict had arisen, and he was a
marked man from its outset. Eventually overcome by his enemies, Somerset was
dragged from the tavern and hacked to death in the street. With the end of his
life arrived the end of the battle. Troops aroused by the bloodshed continued
to create havoc in the streets, but this was now an armed rout, rather than a
purposeful battle. Safe beneath the high vaulted ceilings of the abbey church,
York, Salisbury and Warwick respectfully took Henry VI before the shrine of St
Alban himself, then requested that they now be received as his faithful subjects
and advisers. The king, who had absolutely no choice in the matter, accepted
that the lords had ‘kept him unhurt and there … granted to be ruled by them’.
As soon as this was done, York gave the order for all violence outside the
abbey to cease. His orders were eventually obeyed. But it was only some time
later that anyone dared to gather up the bloodied corpses of Somerset and the
rest of the men killed on the streets of St Albans, in a day of violent
upheaval that would leave its stain on England for two generations to follow.
#
Henry was escorted back to London by the Yorkists on Friday 23 May and deposited in his apartments in the palace of Westminster, before moving on to the bishop’s palace. The following day he was paraded before the city of London ‘in great honour … the said duke of York riding on his right side and the earl of Salisbury on the left side and the earl of Warwick with his sword’, and on Sunday 25 May in a ceremony at St Paul’s he sat in state and was handed his crown by the duke of York. All this presented a picture of majesty and kingly authority, but it was even more spurious than it had ever been. For even if he could be presented to the public in stately highness as ‘a king and not as a prisoner’, beside the three lords who had emerged victorious from St Albans, it was quite obvious that now more than at any time before, Henry VI was a royal cipher.
Meanwhile, as York worked to establish for the second time his authority as the chief councillor of the king and the effective governor of England, stories of the battle of St Albans began to spread. They circulated in England and they crossed the Channel: within days the fracas was the talk of diplomats across Europe. On 31 May 1455 the Milanese ambassador, who had left London earlier in the month, wrote a letter from Bruges to the archbishop of Ravenna in which he reported the ‘unpleasant’ news that in England ‘a great part of the nobles have been in conflict’. ‘The Duke of York has done this, with his followers,’ wrote the ambassador, recounting the deaths and injuries that had befallen Somerset and his allies. Yet if the violence was shocking, there was a seasoned pragmatism in the ambassador’s report. York, he wrote, ‘will now take up the government again, and some think that the affairs of the kingdom will now take a turn for the better. If that be the case, we can put up with this inconvenience.’ Three days later the ambassador filed an update confirming his earlier notes. ‘Peace reigns,’ he wrote. ‘The Duke of York has the government, and the people are very pleased at this.’
Even if this was true, it would not last for long.
