Tower: An Epic History of the Tower of London (16 page)

Henry and Catherine were soon blessed with a son, the future Henry VI, born at Windsor Castle on 6 December 1421. Then, in August of the following year, while besieging the town of Meaux, near Paris, Henry V died aged just thirty-four. His illness was diagnosed as dysentery, which
was ravaging his army at the time. As the king’s condition was accompanied by ‘a bloody flux’ and wasting, it is more likely that the fatal disease was the cancer of the bowel that had killed his ancestor Edward I. Whatever the cause, the death of the king at the height of his power was a shattering blow to English hopes of maintaining their newly won French domains. Those hopes now rested with Henry’s nine-month-old baby boy.

Less than two months after Henry’s demise, Charles VI, the periodically insane French king, followed him into the shadows. Henry VI, the infant king of England, was now in theory monarch of France as well. As he had lain dying, Henry V had made what arrangements he could to secure the future of his Lancastrian dynasty on the thrones of both kingdoms. He appointed one of his brothers, John, Duke of Bedford, to rule as regent over France; and another, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, to govern England as Lord Protector to his infant son. Both brothers faced formidable problems: in France half the country did not recognise the foreign baby king, but were loyal to the Dauphin, now Charles VII. In England, a bitter factional power struggle broke out around the royal cradle.

As he grew into manhood it became clear that Henry VI’s character was totally unsuited to the taxing demands of medieval kingship. The king was weak, easily dominated and politically inept. Worst of all – like Henry III, Edward II and Richard II before him – he was uninterested in military matters; preferred aesthetic and religious pursuits (we owe him those masterpieces of English Perpendicular architecture, Eton College and King’s College Chapel, Cambridge); and – in stark contrast to his martial father and grandfather – was utterly incapable of leading an army in battle. He was the worst possible ruler to lead his kingdom through the turbulence about to engulf it. At the tender age of eight, Henry was taken to the Tower to spend the traditional night, and anoint thirty new Knights of the Bath, before his coronation. Crowned in London in 1429, and in Paris two years later, Henry grew up under the shadow of English losses as the fortunes of war turned decisively in favour of France.

Stronger characters than Henry filled the vacuum around his throne. Two branches of his Lancastrian dynasty – respectively descended from the first and second wives of Edward III’s son John of Gaunt – bid for the vacant seat of power. After John of Bedford’s death in 1435, a new faction stepped up to challenge the king’s uncle, Lord Protector Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester. The wealthy Beaufort family, led by
Cardinal Henry Beaufort, Bishop of Winchester and Chancellor of England, were descended from John of Gaunt via his mistress and last wife, Katherine Swynford.

For two decades the animosity – bitter as only family rows can be – between Henry Beaufort and Duke Humphrey of Gloucester, paralysed policy and hindered good government. Beaufort, an able administrator, favoured imports of foreign cloth and peace with France. His rival ‘Good Duke Humphrey’ won huge popularity by advocating a protectionist policy benefiting native English wool producers. Loyal to the glorious memory of his brother Henry V, Humphrey also led the war party dedicated to continuing the conflict with France.

The ding-dong battle between Beaufort and Humphrey almost came to an actual clash of arms when Beaufort garrisoned the Tower against Humphrey and the London mob who backed him; refusing the royal duke entry to the fortress. The release in 1440 of Charles of Orléans from his long imprisonment in the Tower – which Beaufort arranged as a sop to France – was one of many bones of contention between them. In 1441 Beaufort, his power enhanced by being created a cardinal, decided to strike at his old enemy, whose loud protests at his rival’s peace policy were becoming a serious nuisance.

Beaufort’s chance came with Humphrey’s unwise second marriage to his mistress Eleanor of Cobham, a commoner. As Humphrey was heir apparent should his nephew King Henry die childless, Eleanor had the enticing prospect of becoming queen. After having her horoscope cast, she decided to give fate a nudge by melting a wax effigy of Henry in a fire. Discovered, Eleanor and her accomplices were charged with witchcraft, locked in the Tower, and tried before a Church court. Although her clerk, Roger Bolingbroke, was hanged, drawn and quartered – and another associate, Margery Jourdemain, aka ‘the witch of Eye’, was burned alive – Eleanor escaped the ultimate penalty. Instead, she was required to do public penance, walking barefoot through London for three days, before being confined to a succession of distant castles, ending up at Peel in the Isle of Man, where she died in 1457.

Although Humphrey was not involved in his wife’s sorcery, Eleanor’s disgrace broke his power. To be married to a witch was social and political death, but soon it resulted in Humphrey’s actual death too. First, Humphrey was marginalised, infrequently attending the Royal Council where the Beauforts were pulling the pliable young king’s strings. Finally, in 1447,
he was arrested and twelve days later it was announced that he had died of a seizure. Inevitably, rumours flew that he had been murdered. Old Henry Beaufort had won his vicious twenty-year feud with Humphrey. But he did not live long to savour it: within weeks he had died too.

Henry Beaufort’s political heir, William de la Pole, 1st Duke of Suffolk, was a passionate supporter of peace with France despite – or because of – the fact that both his father and his older brother had died fighting the French. Suffolk himself had been imprisoned in France after surrendering Orléans to Joan of Arc. Released to supervise Henry VI’s coronation as king of France, he became closely aligned with the Beauforts. He was given the task of negotiating the young king’s unpopular marriage to the French princess, Margaret of Anjou, in 1445. The marriage bargaining was especially delicate because Margaret’s father, Duke Rene, pleading poverty, refused to give her a dowry and demanded the two provinces of Maine and Anjou, captured by Henry V, in return for her hand. So desperate were the Beauforts and Suffolk for peace, that these outrageous terms were accepted – although they had to be kept secret for fear of the popular anger they would arouse. Duke Humphrey had sourly described Margaret as ‘a Queen not worth ten marks’. But the new queen would soon prove her worth in other ways.

Suffolk, who had succeeded Henry Beaufort as Chancellor of England, continued pursuing peace with France. Suffolk’s devious diplomacy incurred popular loathing, as did his manifest corruption. The final nail in his coffin, however, was the humiliating loss of Normandy in 1449. Exasperated by Henry’s failure to hand over Maine and Anjou, Charles VII launched a full-scale invasion, of those provinces and of Normandy itself. The French were everywhere victorious. The new head of the Beaufort family, John, 1st Duke of Somerset, who was Lieutenant of France, humiliatingly surrendered Rouen, and by December virtually the whole ancestral homeland of the Plantagenets was lost. The glorious victories of Edward III, the Black Prince, and Henry V were as if they had never been. It was a national humiliation. Somerset returned home in disgrace and committed suicide.

Outraged English opinion demanded a surviving scapegoat; and the hated Suffolk fitted the bill. Oblivious of the gathering storm, Suffolk inflamed popular hostility by marrying his son John to his seven-year-old ward, Lady Margaret Beaufort, a possible claimant to the throne. (Indeed,
although she would never rule herself, Margaret would go on to found England’s Tudor dynasty.) Suffolk’s move was widely seen as furthering his own ambition to be the power behind Henry’s shaky throne.

When Parliament reassembled after the Christmas recess on 26 January 1450, hatred against Suffolk was at boiling point. Ignoring the duke’s plea that he was the victim of ‘Great infamy and defamation’, Parliament impeached him and hustled him off to the Tower. Suffolk’s plight was summed up in a gloating popular ballad:

Now is the fox driven to hole!

Hoo to him, hoo, hoo!

For if he creep out

He will you all undo
.

For a fortnight the duke remained in the ‘hole’ while the Commons drew up a bill of indictment against him. Suffolk was accused not only of handing over Maine and Anjou to the French, but also of planning a French invasion of England; and plotting to depose Henry VI in favour of his own son John. Suffolk was also charged with having conspired with his French friends to release Charles of Orléans from his long imprisonment in the Tower. The king and queen, who since he had arranged her marriage had regarded Suffolk as her second father, were desperate to save their favourite minister. In March Henry took the case out of the Commons’ hands, declaring that he would decide Suffolk’s fate. Parliament’s defiant response was to add yet more charges to the list, focusing on Suffolk’s blatant corruption.

He had, the new indictment stated, ‘committed great, outrageous extortions and murders … suppressed justice … been insatiably covetous … embezzled the king’s own funds and taxes … to the full heavy discomfort of his true subjects’. Suffolk, summoned from his Tower cell, indignantly denied the charges as ‘too horrible to speak of … utterly false and untrue’. But Parliament was implacably set on destroying the duke. In a final effort to save him by putting him beyond his enemies’ reach, Henry sentenced Suffolk to be banished for five years from 1 May 1450.

Freed from the Tower on 18 March, the fallen duke made for his house in St Giles to collect his belongings. But a mob of Londoners, furious that their prey had ‘crept out of his hole’, broke into the house, and assaulted Suffolk’s servants. The duke himself escaped via the back door, fleeing to his Suffolk estates where he lay low until Thursday 30
April – the last day before his appointed exile was to begin. He sailed from Ipswich for Calais, the port which, largely thanks to him, was now England’s only possession in northern France. He never arrived. Off Dover, his vessel was intercepted by a flotilla which had been lying in wait, led by a large warship the
Nicholas of the Tower
.

As its name indicates, this ship was usually moored off the Tower’s wharf. The current constable of the Tower was Henry Holland, the young Duke of Exeter. He had inherited the office from his father two years before when he was just seventeen. Cruel and rapacious, Exeter was a chip off his father’s old block, who was immortalised in the nickname of the fiendish instrument of torture which the old brute had introduced to the Tower’s orchestra of terror. The rack, which pulled its victims’ limbs on ropes over rollers, stretching, tearing and eventually dislocating them, was dubbed ‘The Duke of Exeter’s daughter’. Years before, a clairvoyant had told Suffolk that if he could ‘escape the danger of the Tower’ he would be safe. Having got out of the fortress itself, Suffolk now learned with a sinking feeling the name of the ship to which he was rowed across the choppy Channel waters, and remembered the soothsayer’s warning. His fears were confirmed when he was hailed by the ship’s master, one Robert Wennington, with the chilling greeting, ‘Welcome, traitor!’

Suffolk was detained aboard the
Nicholas
for more than twenty-four hours while a kangaroo court tried him on the articles of impeachment drawn up by Parliament. He was found guilty on all counts. The
Paston Letters
, a chronicle written by an East Anglian gentry family who knew Suffolk well, tell what happened next: ‘He was drawn out of the great ship into a boat, and there was an axe and a stock [block], and one of the lewdest of the ship bade him lay down his head.’ Then, disdaining the axe, the executioner ‘took a rusty sword and smote off his head with half a dozen strokes, and took away his gown of russet, and his doublet of velvet, mailed, and laid his body on the sands of Dover. And some say that his head was set on a pole by it.’

Margaret of Anjou was told of Suffolk’s messy end by the duke’s widow, Alice Chaucer, granddaughter of the poet Geoffrey Chaucer. The young queen is said to have wept continuously for three days, refusing all food. Then, drying her tears, Margaret vowed vengeance. It was rumoured that Margaret and Henry were determined to wreak revenge for Suffolk’s death
on the county which had succoured his killers: Kent. Suffolk’s closest ally on the Royal Council, the Crown Treasurer, Lord Saye, was said to be planning to depopulate the county, turning peasants and landlords off their land and replanting it as a massive hunting reserve. Kentishmen of every class, including lords and MPs, united against the threat.

By the end of May groups of armed men, assembling across the county to celebrate Whitsun, had formed a rebel army. They had a leader, called Jack Cade. Like Wat Tyler, the Kentish rebel leader of seventy years before, Cade was probably a soldier who had served in France. His aliases included ‘Jack Amend-all’ and, significantly, ‘John Mortimer’, which gave a clue as to the real moving spirit behind the revolt. Mortimer was the maternal family name of Richard, Duke of York, the kingdom’s wealthiest magnate and an able administrator and soldier. Descended from Edward III via both his parents, he had an arguably better claim to the throne than the Lancastrians who sat on it. This had not mattered under the competent rule of Henry IV and Henry V who were both more than capable of seeing off challenges to the Crown. But now that the sceptre rested in the trembling hand of Henry VI, York began to wonder whether the right Plantagenet ruled. He was the obvious leader of a growing opposition to the corrupt and incompetent government.

By mid-June Cade’s army had arrived at Blackheath – where Wat Tyler’s rebels had once camped. The court sent emissaries to hear Cade’s demands. After these were flatly rejected, a royal army of 20,000 gathered, and Cade retreated into Kent. A force under Sir Humphrey Stafford and his brother William was sent in hot pursuit, while the bulk of the royal army remained in London. Cade sprang an ambush at Sevenoaks on 18 June. After a hard fight, the Stafford brothers were killed, their army routed, and the victorious rebels marched once more against London.