Inglorious Royal Marriages Read online

  By the end of 1447, the court party, headed by Margaret and the earls of Suffolk and Somerset, controlled the king and government. However, the queen’s insistence on micromanaging may not have been an effort to meddle or usurp Henry’s authority at all. If the situation were viewed without the lens of a misogynist Francophobic medieval chronicler, it could be argued that Margaret knew her husband and his weaknesses better than anyone, and may have been acting in his best interests by keeping tabs on everything that was going on, making sure that no one else had a chance to control him or try to take over the government and possibly usurp the throne.

  The Duke of York, who viewed Somerset as his greatest rival at court, then took it upon himself to campaign for government reform. York saw himself as a loyalist to Henry for wanting to rid the court of corruption. But the opposition, comprised of anyone excluded from the court party, looked to York to lead their faction. That led to Henry removing him from the center of power by appointing him Lord Lieutenant of Ireland for ten years.

  By February 1448, when Henry had still not handed over Anjou and Maine, Charles VII took matters into his own hands and besieged the city of Le Mans in Maine. The English forces were unable to hold the city, and on March 16, Henry agreed to formally surrender, but only if the truce between France and England would extend until April 1450.

  Predictably, the surrender went over poorly in England. In an effort to smooth things over, Margaret urged Henry to promise compensation to the English landowners who had been dispossessed in Maine and were now returning, landless, to England. Henry pledged, but never paid up, engendering further ill will against the crown.

  In the spring of 1448, to reward the leaders of the court party for their service, Henry elevated Somerset from earl to duke. William de la Pole, the Earl of Suffolk, was also made a duke—the first time ducal rank was conferred on anyone other than a member of the royal family. Somerset and Suffolk now shared the same rank as York, who began using the surname Plantagenet, a resounding slap in the face to Henry VI, whose grandfather had snuffed out the last of that line, Richard II, and usurped Richard’s throne.

  York saw Somerset’s elevation to a dukedom as a deliberate attempt by the king to block his own dynastic and political ambitions, as well as a prelude to naming Somerset as his heir in the continued absence of offspring. After three years of marriage, the combination of the royal couple’s still-childless state, widespread dislike of Margaret, and Henry’s ineffectiveness as a ruler made fertile ground for the seedlings of civil war. The enmity between York and Somerset now hardened into a deadly rivalry with clear factions. By March 1449, pressures to do something about the situation across the Channel were such that the peace-loving Henry broke the truce with France, authorizing his troops in Breton to attack Fougères. In June, he launched a full-scale attack on Normandy. Charles VII retaliated by formally declaring war against England.

  The English scapegoated their sovereigns for these catastrophes. Rumors were spread that Margaret was illegitimate, and therefore unfit to be queen. Parliament called for a Resumption Act, whereby the crown would reclaim the lands Henry had given away to his cronies, but, predictably, the magnates who had received such largesse balked, preventing the act from becoming law. Henry’s response was to dissolve Parliament.

  According to a contemporary chronicler, by the 1450s “the realm of England was out of all good governance, for the King was simple [naive] and led by covetous counsel, and owed more than he was worth. His debts increased daily, but payment there was none. Such impositions [taxes] as were put to the people were spended in vain, for he kept no household nor maintained no wars.”

  In May 1450, the gentry of Kent rose up in revolt, led by Jack Cade, a prosperous gentleman who had penned a manifesto of grievances against the government. Cade’s objections to its corruption were shared by Parliament, as well as several members of the nobility. Running with an age-old lie that the lately murdered Duke of Suffolk had been Margaret’s lover, Cade frightened the citizens of Kent into believing that the queen intended to obtain vengeance by invading the county and burning their homes to the ground.

  Although Cade’s Rebellion began in the southeast of England, it swiftly gained momentum and was not restricted to the underclasses. Protestors included sheriffs, local officials, and two members of Parliament. Their concerns were universal. The violence soon spread to London. The king led his troops through the streets of the capital, but then bungled the city’s defense by splitting his army in two; the result was a bloodbath, with the rebels getting the better of the royalist troops. Henry’s soldiers mutinied. The madness continued into the summer. On June 29, the Bishop of Salisbury, who had officiated at Henry and Margaret’s wedding, and who some believe had cautioned the king to abstain from recreational sex with his wife, was torn to pieces by a frenzied mob, killed, in the opinion of Judge Gascoigne, “because he was the confessor of Henry VI and did not remedy the defects around the King nor depart from the King because these were not remedied.”

  On July 2, Cade led his followers across London Bridge and was presented with the keys to the city. But rioting and looting subsequently erupted throughout London. When Cade himself participated in the pillaging, his supporters accused him of hypocrisy and the tide began to turn for the royal army.

  At the height of the rebellion, the royal spouses parted ways. Resisting pleas from London’s Lord Mayor to remain in the city, Henry fled the capital instead, first to Greenwich, then west to the castle of Berkhamsted in Hertfordshire, and then to Kenilworth Castle in the Midlands. Margaret stayed behind at Greenwich throughout the rioting. It was she who was instrumental in putting an end to the mayhem by lending her name as guarantor of a general pardon to the rebels, although Cade was ultimately captured and stabbed in a standoff.

  Cade’s Rebellion was unsuccessful in that neither his manifesto nor the violence changed the way Henry ruled. But it did prove how easy it was to foment civil war, and was only a taste of the strife that Margaret and Henry would face for the next eleven years. Additionally, it exposed Henry’s weakness and Margaret’s strength: He had panicked in a crisis, returning to London only after his council had restored law and order, while Margaret stayed put. In her consort’s role as mediator, acting not on her own behalf, but always in her husband’s interests, she saw the calamity through to a resolution that would mitigate the damage.

  Meanwhile in France, Somerset surrendered Caen to the French. By the end of August 1450, England’s only remaining possessions in France were Aquitaine and the tiny strip of land surrounding Calais. The reputations of Henry and Margaret were permanently tarnished by the humiliating defeats their armies had suffered across the Channel.

  Somerset’s ignominious losses on behalf of the crown so infuriated York that he returned from Ireland without Henry’s permission, determined to lead an opposition party that demanded good governance and the sacking of Henry’s advisers.

  On November 6, 1450, when Henry opened Parliament at Westminster, some of the most powerful magnates arrived with armed forces behind them. Every day, a skirmish between the troops of Lancaster and York was expected; the antagonistic relationship between the dukes of York and Somerset was a powder keg waiting for a match. Riots did break out in the streets during this period, the first recorded occasion of “a great division between York and Lancaster,” according to a chronicle of the times.

  In May 1451, the subject of the royal couple’s childless state after six years of wedlock reared its head again when Thomas Young, an MP for Bristol and a York supporter, was thrown into the Tower of London for daring to suggest that “because the king had no offspring, it would be for the security of the kingdom that it should be openly known who should be heir apparent and named the Duke of York.”

  On August 23, English forces surrendered Aquitaine to King Charles VII. By the autumn of 1451, it was clear that despite the rising tensions between the Lancastrian party and t
he Yorkists, the king had no intention of instituting any governmental reforms, although nothing Henry had done was a success. He had lost France. His kingdom was controlled by the fifteenth-century equivalent of special interest groups. His treasury was deeply mired in debt. And he had no heir.

  Margaret’s own spies informed her that York was mustering an army, and she urged her husband to do the same. Henry balked. Margaret then appealed to his chivalry and affection for her. If Henry should be killed by York’s men, what would happen to her? Finally, but with great reluctance, the king agreed to take the necessary steps to raise an army.

  York issued a manifesto that openly blamed Somerset for ruining the country and giving the king advice that was disastrous to the realm. By February 16, 1452, civil war was imminent. Margaret and Henry, at the head of his army, marched toward Coventry, hoping to head York off as he moved toward the capital. By many accounts, the opposing armies were almost evenly matched in terms of numbers: twenty-four thousand troops under the king and twenty thousand under York.

  The forces met up in Kent, but it was Margaret, not her husband, who formed part of the party that was dispatched to negotiate a peaceful denouement; at that point, neither side was keen on actually coming to blows. However, York would return his allegiance to Henry only if the king punished the Duke of Somerset.

  Henry ordered Somerset’s arrest, on the proviso that York disbanded his troops—but no one was permitted to tell Margaret about it! Yet when the queen saw Somerset being force-marched out of his tent the following day, the sovereigns had a royal blowup. York arrived midargument to offer his obeisance to Henry, then realized he had walked in on a furious marital row. York also wondered why Somerset and the queen were present, because his deal with the king had been negotiated in secret. Then all four of them began to quarrel. Margaret shouted for York’s arrest, but her husband refused to comply. However, perhaps to appease her, Henry rescinded his order for Somerset’s arrest.

  In a calculated move to ensure more adherents at a time of impending crisis, in 1452, Henry elevated to the peerage his half brothers Edmund and Jasper. They were his mother’s sons from her second marriage to the Welshman Owen ap Maredudd ap Tewdwr; the Anglicized spelling, “Tudor,” was not adopted until 1459. Edmund was made Earl of Richmond, and Jasper, Earl of Pembroke. Henry was extremely generous to his half brothers, with gifts of land, material goods, and opportunities for political influence. In return the Tudors would always remain loyal to the Lancastrian cause.

  At long last, after nearly eight years of marriage, in April 1453, Margaret realized she was pregnant, and visited the shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham—where women often made pilgrimages in the hope of conceiving. There, she left an offering of pax, or thanks, for the long-awaited baby she was carrying. Yet rather than rush off to Henry with the terrific news that an heir was finally on the way, the queen confided her condition obliquely, through his chamberlain, Richard Tunstall, to tell, as Henry later wrote, “the first comfortable relation and notice that our most dearly beloved wife the Queen was enceinte, to our most singular consolation and to all true liege people’s great joy and comfort.”

  Regardless of the roundabout manner in which he learned of his wife’s pregnancy, Henry was so thrilled that he granted Tunstall an annuity of forty marks. Then he spent a whopping two hundred pounds on a commission with the royal jeweler, John Wynne of London, to create a “demi-cent” and to deliver it “unto our most dear and most entirely beloved wife, the Queen.”

  Meanwhile, in France, Charles VII triumphantly took Bordeaux on October 19, 1453. Three hundred years of British rule in Aquitaine had come to an end. Calais was now all that remained of the once-sizable English possessions on the Continent. In the eyes of his subjects, Henry VI was a disgrace to the memory of his father. York was perhaps the most livid of all, having personally spent years of his life and huge, unreimbursed sums from his own purse to maintain Henry V’s conquests in France.

  The king was now suffering from more than humiliation. During the first few days of August he was clearly ailing, showing signs of stress from the past several months of civil tension. On August 15, Henry was having dinner at Clarendon, his hunting lodge near Salisbury, when he complained of feeling inordinately sleepy. The next morning he had symptoms one might associate with a stroke: His head was lolling, he was paralytic, and he had lost the power of speech.

  According to the Paston Letters—a collection of fifteenth-century correspondence between members of the Paston family, as well as letters written to others—Henry had sustained a “sudden and thoughtless fright.”

  No one knows what precipitated the event. His army’s defeat in Bordeaux had shocked him, but did it send him into shock? Various medical speculations on the nature of Henry’s illness have been made, from depressive stupor to catatonic schizophrenia. But whatever caused his state is less important than its impact on history.

  When Henry showed no signs of improvement after several days, concern turned to panic. The queen conveyed her husband back to Westminster, continuing to conceal his condition from the public—something that could never happen today, with social media and a twenty-four-hour news cycle. Margaret most feared the Duke of York’s discovering the situation, as he might take the opportunity to stage a coup. But when it proved too difficult to keep Henry’s secret at Westminster, the queen removed him from the hub of government and brought him to Windsor.

  Seven months pregnant, Margaret of Anjou became the de facto ruler of England.

  Henry had suffered a complete breakdown of some kind, the manifestations of which were beyond mental or emotional incapacity. John Whethamstead in his Registrum, which chronicled the era, describes the episode as “a disease and disorder of such a sort . . . that he lost his wits and memory for a time, and nearly all his body was so unco-ordinated and out of control that he could neither walk nor hold his head up, nor easily move from where he sat,” adding that the king had become “as mute as a calf.” Henry was monitored around the clock by several pages and grooms, fed by these attendants, and supported by two of them whenever he was required to move from room to room.

  Describing his condition as non compos mentis, a term that doctors applied at the time to madmen whose mental illness revealed itself later in life, the king’s physicians tried all manner of cordials, ointments, laxatives, suppositories, and baths. They continued to assure Margaret that her husband would eventually recover, even though they had no firm diagnosis to give her. Perhaps, they theorized, he was possessed by devils. Henry’s council authorized the physicians to bleed him as often as possible in order to purge him of the evil humors that were undoubtedly responsible for his loss of faculties.

  With Henry utterly incapacitated and his unpopular wife, who displayed a tin ear for English politics, running the show, there was now no hope for unifying the court’s squabbling factions.

  At ten a.m. on October 13, 1453, Margaret gave birth to a son. Finally, after eight long years, the House of Lancaster had its heir. The queen named the boy after his father’s favorite saint, Edward the Confessor, whose feast day was also being celebrated on the date of the prince’s birth. But back at Windsor, Henry remained oblivious to the blessed event.

  The infant’s birth meant that York and Somerset could no longer squabble over the right to be named Henry’s heir, but it created a new set of problems: While Henry remained incapacitated, who would govern the realm during his heir’s minority? And if the king should die while his son was a baby, England would be in for a lengthy regency, just as it had been when he was an infant.

  Later that month, swaddled in an embroidered chrisom-cloth and russet-colored cloth of gold, Edward was baptized in an opulent ceremony at Westminster. Neither of his parents attended the christening—the king’s illness precluded his presence, and the queen could not appear in public until she had been churched, the ritual conducted forty days after childbirth to once again welcome
a mother into the bosom of the Church.

  It was necessary for Edward to be formally acknowledged by a council of magnates as heir to England’s throne. And when York’s name was deliberately omitted from the list, the duke took revenge through a convenient loophole: He reminded the other nobles that in accordance with established protocol, until the prince was presented to the king himself and acknowledged by him as his son, the succession could not be established. And, of course, Henry remained “uncurious and unconscious,” in the words of a contemporary chronicler, despite several efforts to rouse him and make him bless the infant.

  Because the public was unaware of their sovereign’s condition, all they learned, as word began to spread, was that he had failed to acknowledge Margaret’s son—only a partial truth—so rumors circulated, particularly during the winter of 1453 to 1454, that Edward was Somerset’s bastard, or that the child was a changeling smuggled into Margaret’s bed after she had given birth to a stillborn. This propaganda was all too credible, given Henry’s well-known prudish views on sex, his pious habits, and the fact that the royal couple had never before conceived during their first seven years of marriage.

  Meanwhile, York accumulated allies, including Henry’s childhood tutor, one of England’s wealthiest landowners, the Earl of Warwick, Richard Neville. Warwick had been a supporter of the Lancastrians until Henry confiscated one of his vast Welsh estates and gave it to Somerset. Charismatic and a smooth operator, the earl went about publicly proclaiming that Edward was not Henry’s son, and therefore the king would never acknowledge the child. York cagily kept his mouth shut, but by his not defending Margaret’s honor, his silence spoke volumes.

  Margaret never allowed these rumors of her adultery to crush her pride. On November 18, 1453, she was churched, quite grandly, at Westminster. Her robe was trimmed with 540 sable pelts. In her train were seven baronesses, eight countesses, and a half dozen duchesses, including the wives of both Somerset and York. The prince’s birth consolidated Margaret’s power rather than weakened it. From that moment on, the queen intended to dominate the political stage. Her aim was to protect Edward’s inheritance—the throne of England—at all costs, and her chief ambition was to crush the Duke of York. Because the king remained incoherent, Margaret of Anjou became the duke’s greatest adversary and the primary obstacle between him and the crown.