Tudor Queens of England (6 page)

ll.5

However, in using his bride in this way, the King was giving hostages to fortune. Supposing that the peace negotiations did not succeed? In that event there was a risk that his dove of peace would turn into a raven of discord. Even the Marquis of Suffolk was sceptical of success and took pains to warn the House of Commons on 2 June that a favourable outcome was by no means assured.

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He was also anxious to refute the claims that were already being made, that he had offered unauthorized concessions. He had, he insisted, made no such offers but had confi ned himself strictly within the limits set out in the King’s instructions. As a precaution, he insisted that his protestation be minuted, which was duly done (and is the reason why we know about it). At the same time, the feuding within the English Council was refl ected in a public discourse that represented the Queen as symbol of surrender and mocked her father who, for all his extravagant pretensions, was unable to provide a suitable dowry for his daughter. As the duration of the truce ticked away the negotiations became increasingly urgent, but all that they achieved was an extension of the truce. The discussions were friendly enough but the negotiating positions on both sides were intractable. Militarily, the French had the upper hand and were not disposed to make any concessions; specifi cally they would not admit English claims to Normandy. The English, on the defensive, were caught between Henry’s urgent desire for peace and the political storm that any further concessions would arouse. They could not yield ground either. The embassies came and went. A meeting between the Kings was promoted, agreed, postponed and postponed again. Meanwhile Margaret, whose personal investment in a successful outcome was considerable, was doing her best. Writing to her uncle in December 1445, she offered to ‘employ

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herself effectually’ in the cause of peace ‘in such wise that you and all others, ought herein to be gratifi ed’.

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On 22 December, Henry proceeded to make the unilateral gesture that is usually attributed to Margaret’s infl uence. He renounced his claim to the duchy of Maine in favour of Renée. This was not done through formal negotiation and undermined the position that his delegates were trying to sustain; moreover it brought peace no nearer and served merely to confi rm the impression in England that the French were not interested in a settlement on any reasonable terms. Margaret was blamed for this surrender and those who had seen her arrival as symbolic of submission appeared to be justifi ed. As her arch critic, Thomas Gascoinge, wrote:

this king of England, Henry VI, granted and gave Maine and Anjou at the request of his Queen, Margaret, daughter of the Duke of Lorraine who calls himself King of Sicily …

and that aforesaid Queen of ours begged the King of England that [they] so be given to her father at the urging of William Pole, Duke of Suffolk and his wife who earlier had promised to re

quest it.8

This was written well after the event and was a slander on Suffolk but it expresses a widely held view, both at the time and later. By the end of 1445, the Queen’s traditional function as a mediatrix between her husband and her father’s kindred had turned sour indeed. The harder she tried and the more successful her efforts, the more unpopular she was likely to become. Had she fulfi lled her primary duty and started bearing Henry children the criticism might have been more muted but that did not happen. There does not appear to have been anything wrong with their relationship. Despite Henry’s later mental problems and his reputation for extreme piety, at this stage his health and his sexual interest in his wife appear to have been entirely normal. It was just that she did not conceive – and this of course provoked the gossips no less than her peacemaking activities. There is little doubt that during the early days of her marriage, Margaret was a victim of Henry’s political enemies, because apart from some ineffectual attempts to promote the peace negotiations, she had no public role. The surrender of Maine in return for an extension of the truce was critical in this respect. Not only was the Queen now represented as dominating her feeble husband but she was also using that control to diminish his honour rather than to enhance it. Shortly after it was being publicly said

that the king was fi tter for a cloister than a throne, and had in a manner deposed himself by leaving the affairs of his kingdom in the hands of a woman, who merely used his name to conceal her usurpation, since, in accordance with the laws of England, a queen consort hath no power,

but title only …9

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This was an opinion which was to be voiced with increasing insistence over the coming years and it was not good for the credibility of the regime. By this time also the divisions within the Council and among the English nobility were assuming dangerous proportions. At the end of December 1446 the Duke of York was replaced as governor in France by Edmund Beaufort, Marquis of Dorset, the Cardinal’s nephew, and the Duke of Gloucester was arrested and charged with treason at the parliament that was held at Bury St Edmunds in January 1447. The parliament had been carefully convened in a place far from Gloucester’s main bases of support and he would almost certainly have been convicted but he spared them the embarrassment of a trial by dying (apparently of natural causes) on the 23 February.

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All these developments were factional moves against the leading opponents of that conciliatory policy in France, which was fronted by the Marquis of Suffolk, but which was, it seems, really the policy of Henry VI and his queen. It may be signifi cant that the English establishment in Normandy were strongly opposed to York’s removal. At the same time the English offi cials in Maine were dragging their feet and at least two deadlines for the handover passed with nothing accomplished. Commissioners were appointed to accomplish the handover but even they prevaricated and Dorset, who had issued the formal instructions, seems to have been convinced that the surrender was a mistake. By March 1448 Charles was becoming exasperated, and deployed a show of force against Le Mans. This did the trick, and on 15 March Maine was fi nally ceded, amongst bitter recriminations on the Eng
lish side.11 This sur
render did little to promote the still-fl agging peace negotiations but it did enhance the careers of two of those who were now Henry’s most trusted advisers. In March Edmund Beaufort was created Duke of Somerset, and in June William de la Pole was raised from the Marquisate of Suffolk to a Dukedom. With Richard of York having been shunted off to Ireland and Humphrey of Gloucester dead, the King’s failure to maintain a balance within his council was becoming increasingly clear. The ineptitude of English policy in France at this point beggars belief because the ‘peace party’, having secured its domination of the King’s Council and surrendered any initiative in negotiation, attempted to recover its position by breaking the long standing truce. In March 1449 a mercenary captain in English service seized the town and fortress of Fougères on the Breton border. The story of this escapade is immensely complicated but de Surienne seems to have acted with the full complicity of the English governor, although the motivation for the attack remains obscure. It may have been intended to intimidate the Duke of Brittany or to inject some much-needed credibility into the English negotiating position. It seems to have been intended as little more than a gesture because, having carried out his attack, de Surienne was left to his own devices and the

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town was soon recaptur

ed.12 H
owever, Charles understandably regarded it as unprovoked aggression and, picking up what he saw as a challenge, launched his armies against Normandy. On 10 November 1449 Rouen fell, and the English position in northern France collapsed completely. Attempts were made to send reinforcements, but these were frustrated by a shortage of munitions and a lack of money. With the fall of Caen in January 1450, the only English foothold left outside of Gascony was Calais.

The repercussions of this disaster were immediate. Unable to blame the King directly, the Duke of Suffolk became the scapegoat. The House of Commons seized upon the confession made

in extremis
by Adam Moleyns, the Keeper of the Privy Seal, who had been murdered at Portsmouth early in January, to frame a variety of charges against him, and he was impeached on the 7 February. A total of eight articles were framed, including responsibility for the surrender of Maine and Anjou, but his real crime was his failure to secure Normandy – in spite of the fact that he had never held the governorship, which had gone from the Duke of York to the Duke of Somerset some time before. The King tried to have the charges respited but the Commons were insistent and were strongly supported outside Parliament. Had Suffolk been tried, he would almost certainly have been found guilty; in order to prevent this, Henry stepped in and banished his friend for fi ve years. He did this unilaterally, without any consultation or process of law. On his way into exile in May the Duke was seized at sea and summarily executed.
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Before his elevation to the marquisate, William de la Pole had been Steward of the Household and he, together with Adam Moleyns, had come to symbolize that household dominance of the Council that was so bitterly and widely resented. Now both of them had died at the hands of assassins and when Jack Cade’s men rose in rebellion in Kent later in 1450, household government was among their leading grievances, ‘the law’ they declared bitterly, ‘serveth for nought else but to do wrong’
.14

All this lightning was striking close to the Queen. She had been a friend of Suffolk’s because he had so patiently negotiated for her marriage and Alice, his wife, was one of her ladies. The Duke of Somerset was also a friend who had performed many good offi ces for her. Her position made it inevitable that her closest associates would be those household offi cers who, in 1450, were being so much vilifi ed. Cade’s supporters had the Duchess of Suffolk and William Booth, Margaret’s Chancellor, on their ‘hit list’, as well as the Duke of Somerset. Despite this and her reputation, her political role at this stage was in fact negligible. Her endowment of 10,000 marks (£6,600) a year made her a very rich woman and she was a generous patron, running a large household of her own. In 1447 she petitioned her husband for permission to found a new college in Cambridge 30

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on the grounds that the university had seen ‘no college founded by any Queen of England hithertoward’. The foundation stone of Queens’ college was laid on 15 April 1448. A sizeable collection of her letters show her working hard on behalf of clients – sometimes her own servants, sometimes others who had sought her intercession. She secured benefi ces for her chaplains and confessors, offi ces for lay petitioners and lucrative marriages for her ladies – or at least for those who were not already wed. The King in turn was generous to her. Realizing that the fi nancial diffi culties of the Crown had somewhat reduced her dower, in 1446 he settled on her for life an additional £2,000 worth of lands, drawn mainly from the Duchy of Lancaster and comprising the Honours of Tutbury, Leicester and Kenilworth.

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This was also given precedence over all other Duchy grants, an additional security if times should become still harder. Margaret also received a number of rich wardships and other lucrative privileges and concessions. This did not make her popular with other disappointed petitioners, although it was hardly her fault. Cade did not directly attack her but many of his shots came close and almost her only known political intervention came in connection with that rebellion. Realizing (perhaps better than Henry) the seriousness of the threat that he represented and the importance of some kind of conciliation, she urged the general pardon that the King issued on 6 July 1450 – although whether she did it as a kneeling supplicant, with her hair unbound in the classical pose of the mediatrix, we do not know.

Although Henry and Margaret spent a great deal of time together and celebrated most of the major feasts in each other’s company, the years passed without any sign of the longed-for pregnancy. Inevitably there were mutterings that ‘she was none able to be queen of England … for because she beareth no child …’

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but eventually, in the spring of 1453 and after nearly eight years of marriage, the feat was accomplished and Margaret conceived. There was great rejoicing, in which the King joined, but then, when she was about six-months’

pregnant, disaster struck. Earlier in the year the King had appeared to be in good health and good spirits. At the end of April he had been intending to make an extended progress to pacify some of the discontents which were plainly visible but by the end of July news had been received of the crushing defeat at Castillon in Gascony and of the deaths of the English commanders, the Earl of Shrewsbury and his son. Nobody knows whether this news (which presaged the end of English Gascony) drove Henry over some hitherto unsuspected edge but within a few days he was in the grip of a mysterious condition, which it has been suggested may have been catatonic schizophrenia. Bereft of speech and of all understanding, he became a kind of vegetable. Nobody knew what to do, either medically or politically and for several weeks it was hoped that he

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would recover as quickly as he had succumbed. It was in these circumstances, on 13 October 1453 that Margaret was delivered of a son, who was promptly named Edward, after the Confessor whose translation feast it was. Archbishop Kemp, the Duke of Somerset and the Duchess of Buckingham stood as his godparents. We do not know whether the Queen might have taken a political stance in other circumstances. As it was the circumstances of her confi nement and convalescence effectively took her out of the equation – for the time being. Margaret’s household accounts for this period survive among the records of the Duchy of Lancaster, and we know (for example) that her chancellor Lawrence Booth was paid £53 a year and that she was spending no more than £7 a day on feeding her servants and herself. One intriguing entry records that she gave the generous sum of £200 to one of her ladies on the occasion of her marriage. It has been speculated that this young lady was Elizabeth Woodville, who was one of her attendants and who married at about this time. Certainly ‘Isabella, Lady Grey’ (her married name) features among the Queen’s attendants not long after. Because the birth of Edward so adversely affected the prospects of the Duke of York, it was to be expected that Yorkist rumours would surround her delivery. The child was not Henry’s; alternatively the real child had been born dead and the King’s supposed heir was a changeling. Margaret knew of these slanders and did not forget them but they made no difference to her political position. Although nothing was said about the King’s condition when Parliament reassembled in November, it was clear by then that some interim arrangement for the government of the realm was unavoidable. A Great Council was called on 12 November and, as soon as it assembled, it became clear that the Duke of Somerset, bereft of the King’s support, was in deep trouble. The Duke of Norfolk accused him of treason with reference to the fi ascos in France and he was arrested and conveyed to the Tower