Foundation (History of England Vol 1) (55 page)

A truce among the parties, now on opposite sides of the Thames, was mediated by a group of churchmen led by the archbishops of York and Canterbury; they had remained in the Tower during the riots. It was also concluded that the rebels, having submitted their demands, would receive a royal pardon under the great seal on condition that they dispersed to their homes. The majority of them did so, gratefully enough, but Cade refused or repented his previous submission. He raised the standard of revolt once more, but he commanded too few followers to be a serious threat. He fled south, where he was pursued and cornered; he was arrested in a garden at Heathfield in Sussex and died of his wounds soon afterwards. The revolt had been put down, but not as a result of any of the king’s actions.

At this juncture the duke of York returned from his unwelcome post in Ireland. It is of some interest that Jack Cade had called himself John Mortimer, thus aligning himself with the York family name; York had inherited the Mortimer lands and title twenty-five years before, when his mother, Anne Mortimer, had died while giving birth to him. Some of Cade’s followers spread the report that he was the duke’s cousin. This relationship is most unlikely, but it was suspected at the time that York had in some indirect way helped to foment the rebellion against the king’s authority. He returned to England without the king’s permission and was immediately seen as a potential threat to Henry’s rule; it was at this time that the king appointed York’s enemy, Somerset, as the Constable of England. In a series of formal public declarations, passing between the king and York, the duke averred that he had returned in order to clear his name of any unwarranted suspicions concerning the late rebellion; he announced that he had come in order to help to reform the king’s household.
Henry duly invited him to join a ‘sad [wise or serious] and substantial council’.

This did not address the real problem concerning the enmity between York and Somerset after the debacle in Normandy. They blamed each other for the misconduct of the war, when in fact it was the king himself who should have incurred much of the responsibility for its failure. While Henry VI was still childless, York was the heir presumptive; but Somerset’s supremacy in the council of the king provoked York into the fear that he was about to be disinherited.

In September 1450, York came to Westminster with 5,000 men; he called for the dismissal of Somerset as well as others whom he believed to threaten him. But he moved a step too close to anarchy and civil war; his supporters led a noisy demonstration in Westminster Hall, and an attempt was made to assassinate Somerset. The Lords and Commons then intervened by promulgating a programme of reform in the king’s household; a bill to recognize York as the heir apparent was defeated. York retired to his ancestral estates, discomfited, and Somerset was still pre-eminent.

There followed a sequence of skirmishes and confrontations in which neither side could claim victory for its cause; York exercised his power against other magnates without consulting the king, and at the beginning of 1452 denounced Somerset for the fall of Normandy and declared that his rival was about to surrender Calais to the French. York marched south with his supporters, but was forced to withdraw his challenge in the face of overwhelming numbers raised by the rest of the nobility. No large Yorkist ‘party’ was ready to fight for his cause, and the majority of the other magnates disapproved of what looked very much like armed rebellion. He was forced to submit and sue for pardon, protesting all the while that he had acted ‘for the good of England’.

It seemed that Henry VI had prevailed but then, as has always happened in the history of England, an arbitrary and unforeseen circumstance turned the course of events. In the summer of 1453 the king fell into a stupor or, in the phrase of the period, his wit and reason were withdrawn. The origin of this malady is uncertain, and may lie in the series of humiliations and misfortunes that had beset the king since the beginning of his reign. But there was one
precipitate and immediate cause. The last battle of the Hundred Years War had just been lost by the English. The citizens of Bordeaux had asked to be returned to English sovereignty, and an army was duly sent to assist them under the command of the earl of Shrewsbury; in the subsequent battle the English were routed and Shrewsbury, trapped beneath his fallen horse which had been killed by a cannon ball, was despatched with a hand-axe. This was also the battle in which the region of Gascony was finally surrendered to the French.

So Henry declined into a state of catatonic silence and despondency that was to endure for the next eighteen months. He could not walk or even rise from a chair without help; he had no awareness of time, and lost the power of speech. A child was born to him and Margaret of Anjou, in the autumn of this year, but even the arrival of a son and heir did not enliven him. The duke of Buckingham brought the infant to the king at Windsor Palace and, according to a contemporary,

If he could have known or guessed the fate of the young prince of Wales, he would have had reason for his sorrow. Two months later the senior members of the council came to him, but ‘they could get no answer nor sign’.

In the absence of effective leadership the king’s council were obliged to turn to York; he was no longer heir apparent, according to the parliament house, but he was the senior nobleman in the kingdom. York had forgotten and forgiven nothing; he returned to London in the full heat of his anger. His great enemy, Somerset, was consigned to the Tower on the charge of betraying English
possessions in France. York also declared that Somerset as well as the king and queen had effectively tried to isolate and to silence him. Margaret of Anjou had always opposed York, but her antipathy became all the more marked when it seemed possible that York might try to supplant her young son. Here were the seeds of the subsequent bloodshed. She turned York into an enemy by regarding him as one. She presented a Bill in which she was to be granted the power to govern the country and appoint the great officers of state but, in March 1454, York was declared to be Protector of the kingdom.

Five doctors had been appointed to watch over the ailing king. It was believed that the dung of doves, applied to the soles of the feet, induced healing sleep. Milk was very good for melancholy. But the eating of hazelnuts discomforted the brain. Green ginger, on the other hand, quickened the memory. Awareness returned to Henry slowly and by degrees. It was reported that ‘the king is well amended, and has been so since Christmas day . . . On Monday afternoon the queen came to him and brought the lord prince with her; then he asked what the prince’s name was, and the queen told him Edward; then he held up his hands and thanked God thereof. And he said he never knew him till that time, nor knew what was being said to him, nor knew where he had been whilst he was sick . . . He said that he was now in charity with all the world . . .’

It is not clear that he ever fully recovered from his affliction; the reports of his behaviour in succeeding years suggest that to some extent he had become feeble-minded. Yet the protectorate of York had now come to an end. He gave his resignation to the king at the palace in Greenwich; Somerset was duly released from the Tower and returned to the side of the monarch. Henry now also welcomed back to his councils the perceived enemies of York; he was behaving like the leader of a faction rather than as the ruler of the country. Naturally enough York deemed himself to be under threat. He felt obliged to make a preliminary strike but, in the process, he began the conflict that came to be known as the Wars of the Roses.

32

Meet the family

In the absence of her husband Margaret Paston decided to attack those who had turned her out of the manor house at Gresham; the violent affair was mentioned in the previous chapter. She called on her husband to send handguns, crossbows, longbows and poll-axes; her servants wore body armour. In the same letter she asked for a pound (450 grammes) of almonds, a pound of sugar and some cloth to make gowns for the children. The ordinary life of the world continued even in the face of extreme violence. Or it could be claimed that violence was as ordinary, and as unremarkable, as almonds and sugar.

It is sometimes surmised that in the fifteenth century the expression of emotion is different from that of our own time. But where, if anywhere, does that difference lie? A delicacy of emphasis, not generally found in the register of contemporary speech, can perhaps be found in the Paston letters. Of the Paston servants we learn that ‘they are sad [serious] and well advised men, saving one of them who is bald, called William Penny, who is as good a man as goes upon the earth, saving he will be a little, as I understand, a little cupshotten [drunk]; but he is no brawler, but full of courtesy . . .’ Immense shrewdness is also evident. ‘John Osborne flattered me,’ John Paston wrote, ‘because he would have borrowed money from me. In retailing of wood there it will be hard to trust
him. He is needy.’ Again, in another letter, we learn that one man ‘had but few words but I felt by him he was right evil disposed to the parson and you; but covered language he had’.

In many respects it was a hard world, filled with threat. ‘I pray you beware how you walk if he be there, for he is full cursed-hearted and lumish.’ The meaning of ‘lumish’ is uncertain; it is a word that has gone forever. One husband believed that his wife’s child was not his. ‘I heard say that he said, if she comes in his presence to make her excuse, that he should cut off her nose to make her be known what she is, and if her child comes in his presence he said he would kill it.’ That may of course have been an idle threat. A tendency to extravagance is found in the period. Of the earl of Arran, John Paston writes that ‘he is the most courteous, gentlest, wisest, kindest, most companionable, freest, largest and most bounteous knight’.

Humour and irony are also to be found. When one son of Paston contracted a cold in damp Norwich he wrote that ‘I was never so well armed for the war as I have now armed myself for the cold.’ Resignation was a familiar theme. ‘If it thus continue I am not all undone, nor none of us; and if otherwise then & . . .’ Which is as much to say – well if we are undone, then so be it. There were striking phrases such as ‘I know you have a great heart’ and, sarcastically, ‘this is a marvellous disposed country’. ‘And so I am with the jailor, with a shackle on my heel.’ ‘This is a right queasy world.’ Of an indiscreet man it was said that ‘he is not secure in the bite’. Flattering an enemy was sometimes necessary because ‘a man must some time set a candle before the Devil’. ‘Towards me’ is written as ‘to me-wards’.

The syntax is often complicated with ‘wherefore’ and ‘insomuch’ and ‘therein’; the sentences are often long and convoluted, but throughout there is an energy or earnestness of expression that drives the narrative forward. The intricate constructions, replete with double negatives at every turn, suggest a world of great formality; but one animated by the sheer struggle for survival. That is what lends the correspondence its pace and urgency.

The status of the Paston family itself indicates social movement and change. Clement Paston was married to a bondwoman (albeit she became, by a medieval paradox, heiress to her brother who was
an attorney) and owned only a small farm in Norfolk; by dint of saving and borrowing he managed to send his son, William, to Eton College. In turn William Paston became a lawyer and was eventually appointed to be Justice of the Common Pleas; although his mother had been technically a villein he married into a gentry family. The next generation of the Paston family were themselves members of the gentry, and the male Pastons became knights of the shire. Within three generations the family had been transformed. This was a characteristic feature of English society.

Details in the Paston correspondence, assembled together, open up the world. ‘I pray you that Pitt may truss up in a chest which I left in your chamber at London my tawny gown furred with black and the doublet of purple satin and the doublet of black satin, and my writing box of cypress, and my book of the meeting of the Duke and the Emperor . . .’

You can also hear the people speak. ‘Forsooth when I came into the chamber there the first word I heard was this that you said to my Master, John Paston, “Who that ever says so, I say he lies falsely in his head.” ’