Royal Murder Page 14

  Whatever the truth of the gossip, which seems to have been heard by everyone in England except Henry, a powerful political bond was to remain between the two until it was severed by a rusty sword.

  It was told that Henry fell in love with Margaret’s portrait before he saw her, and the artist must have presented an accurate likeness because the king was in no way disappointed when they met and remained in love with her until his murder twenty-six years later. Nor did her lack of a dowry worry him despite his never-ending financial difficulties which were largely attributable to his altruistic attitude to money. Margaret of Anjou was so poor that after the vessel carrying her was beached in a gale at Porchester she had to pawn “divers vessels of mock silver” to pay the crew. The marriage took place at Titchfield Abbey on April 23, 1445, and when she arrived in London her new subjects, anxious for the stability of a direct heir and captivated by her beauty, enthusiastically greeted her with marguerite daisies in their caps. Had they known that Suffolk had secretly agreed to return the hard won territories of Anjou and Maine to Duke Rene as the brideprice they would have been crying for blood.

  After the queen was crowned in Westminster Abbey on May 30, the sixteen-years-old girl was soon aware of the court intrigue which surrounded her saintly and unsuspecting husband. The Duke of Gloucester discovered Suffolk’s secret pact with Margaret’s father, and because of this and the threat he posed to Cardinal Beaufort and the Lancastrian faction, the queen regarded him as her arch-enemy. She set to work to impress Henry that his new-found happiness was endangered by the machinations of his uncle Gloucester. This frightening thought made him take an uncharacteristic action which led to the first death in the dynastic struggle first known as the Cousins’ War. This name reflected the fact that Edward III had left eleven children to dispute the succession; later the conflict was referred to as the Wars of the Roses.

  Aware that Gloucester’s greatest support lay in London, the king arranged for a Parliament to be held in February, 1447, at Bury St Edmunds which was loyal to Suffolk and the Lancastrian party. On the second day a messenger arrived at Gloucester’s quarters with a request that he present himself before the king. It appeared to be such a routine summons that the duke immediately set off without bothering to buckle on his sword belt, but as he entered the royal chamber he must have immediately sensed the ominous atmosphere.

  One can easily imagine the scene: the king grim-faced and silent; beside him Queen Margaret, her lips giving a hint of her satisfaction, while Suffolk, standing close to his royal master and mistress, does nothing to hide his expression of triumph.

  Even before Gloucester made his formal greeting Suffolk’s voice rang out, accusing him of slandering the queen and plotting against his liege lord. Realising the danger of his position, Gloucester immediately began to declare his innocence. Having refuted the charges, he approached the king’s dais and asked Henry if he did not remember how he had looked after him when he was a child.

  Henry remained silent and Margaret answered for him, “The king knows your merits, my lord.”

  At a pre-arranged signal guards stepped forward, surrounded the duke and escorted him to his quarters where he was kept under strict house arrest. Three days later he was dead.

  We do not know how he died, and if it was murder who was responsible. It seems unlikely that pious Henry VI would have been involved in an assassination plot, and some modern historians believe it possible that the duke might have died of a stroke brought on by indignation at his treatment. Holinshed wrote: “Some judged him (the Duke of Gloucester) to be strangled, some affirmed that a hot spit was put in at his fundament, others wrote that he was smouldered (smothered) between two feather beds, and some have affirmed that he died of very grief.”

  The body was displayed publicly to demonstrate that no violence had been done to it, but this did nothing to allay the suspicion that Queen Margaret and Suffolk had plotted the duke’s murder — there were any number of ways a prisoner could be killed without his corpse being marked. To the people Gloucester became a posthumous hero and King Henry must have been dismayed at the dislike so many of his subjects felt for his beloved young wife, a feeling which intensified when the embarrassing terms of the marriage settlement became known.

  To add to Henry’s problems Cardinal Beaufort died two months after Gloucester. This gave Suffolk full control of the Lancastrian party but such was the resentment against him that he demanded an opportunity to defend himself before the Council. Though officially vindicated after he had presented his case, the move did nothing to appease popular indignation. And although the Lancastrians no longer needed to fear Gloucester, there was still the Duke of York, who was now heir to the crown should the king die without issue. To remove him from the sphere of influence Suffolk arranged for him to be made Lieutenant of Ireland, a stratagem which kindled “a torch of rage” in the duke’s breast. Even so, Suffolk could not halt the tide which was running against himself and the queen.

  In March, 1449, Charles VII of France renewed his campaign against the English by invading Normandy with new and devastating artillery trains. It meant the collapse of Suffolk’s peace policy and to add insult to injury Duke Rene, father of the queen on whom the policy had been based, rode beside the French king. One by one the cities held by his son-in-law fell . . . Evereux, Lisieux, Mantes, Louviers, Gourney and finally Rouen.

  As the news reaching King Henry from across the Channel became gloomier and gloomier, the Yorkists seized the opportunity to attack Queen Margaret in a statement which claimed that “the king was fitter 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 her name to conceal her usurption since, according to the laws of England, a queen consort hath no power but title only.”

  The hostility against Margaret was dramatically demonstrated in January, 1450, when the Lord Privy Seal, Bishop Moleyns of Chichester, was murdered in Portsmouth by the very soldiers and sailors he had gone to pay. His “crime” was that he had assisted in arranging the royal match. But it was Suffolk who received the most universal opprobrium; men declared that his policies had lost English territory which had been so hardly won by the king’s glorious father, and this “lover of the French” must atone for his scheming. On January 26, 1450, Parliament impeached him and he was imprisoned in the Tower of London.

  The king managed to get the hearing postponed until March but then Parliament introduced a Bill of Attainder in which Suffolk was accused of giving aid to France, misappropriating funds from the royal treasury and plotting to put his son on the throne. Henry saved him from execution by summarily banishing him for five years, but the citizens of London were so outraged by the king’s lenient treatment of the duke, whom they dubbed “Jackanapes”, that they tried to take the law into their own hands. Suffolk managed to escape being lynched by leaving his house in St Giles through a rear exit; minutes later the mob broke in and ill-treated his servants.

  On April 30 he left Ipswich for Flanders, but in the Channel his ship was overhauled by a Yorkist vessel, the Nicholas of the Tower, and the duke was taken aboard as a captive. After a mock trial he was placed in an open boat in which a block had already been set. An Irish sailor, “the lewdest of the ship, bade him lay down his head . . . and took a rusty sword and smote off his head within half-a-dozen strokes, and took away his gown of russet and his doublet of velvet mailed.”

  The boat then landed on the shore of Dover where the body was unceremoniously thrown on the sand while the head was fixed upon a stake.

  When the news of the murder reached Queen Margaret she locked herself in her apartments and, refusing food and solace from her ladies-in-waiting, abandoned herself to her grief. When she emerged three days later all could see that she was a changed woman. There was a new air of determination about her, determination to avenge the man who had played such an important role in her life and determination that her husband should be preserved from his
enemies.

  Five months later she and Henry discovered that it was not just the Yorkists, who had engineered the death of the favourite, that they had to fear; following the Feast of Pentecost for 1450 the followers of the enigmatic rebel Jack Cade began their march on London. The identity of Cade, who was also known as John Amend-all, still remains a mystery, but he was certainly a gentleman and one of great organising ability. The men of Kent who followed him were not peasants such as had swarmed after Wat Tyler but were squires, farmers and artisans who passionately believed in Cade’s succinct demands. These centred round the belief that King Henry should take back the crown lands which he had so freely bestowed on his friends so that their revenues would lighten the tax burden. Cade’s manifesto The Requests of the Captain of the Great Assembly in Kent also complained that the people of Kent had been extortioned by tax-gatherers and that justice was not impartial. There were demands that those responsible for the loss of English possessions abroad and for mis-government at home should be punished, and that the Duke of York should be recalled from Ireland which suggested that there had been a Yorkist hand in the penning of The Requests of the Captain.

  Troops under the command of Sir Humphrey Stafford were sent against the insurgents when they assembled at Blackheath, and when they retreated to Sevenoaks Sir Humphrey followed too swiftly with the result that he only had part of his force when the rebels suddenly turned and attacked him. He was slain in the rout and Jack Cade buckled on his armour before returning to Blackheath in triumph. One effect of the victory was to make the royal troops, who were loyal to the person of the king but not necessarily to the Lancastrian party, question why their comrades had fallen to fellow Englishmen, and soon it seemed that they were becoming dangerously sympathetic to John Amend-all and his demands for reform. Henry hastily disbanded them and retired to Kenilworth while a more reliable army could be assembled.

  Cade now took possession of Southwark and on July 2 he led his men over London bridge into the city which, fearful of the rebels’ threats to burn it down, offered no resistance. At first Cade managed to maintain strict discipline among his followers, leading them back to Southwark at nightfall. The next day he returned and Lord Say, the Lord Treasurer, and his son-in-law Cromer, the sheriff of Kent, were executed and their decapitated bodies dragged through the streets while their heads were paraded on poles. Many Londoners had been sympathetic to Cade’s cause, but this changed on the third day when Cade robbed the house of an alderman — an act which was to ruin his cause.

  It seemed an uncharacteristic action — though it appears he only took some jewels belonging to the Duke of York which the alderman held in pawn — but he needed money to buy supplies for his men in order to prevent them foraging for themselves. The robbery made the citizens nervous; and when it was followed by some pillaging, they decided to seize London Bridge on the night of July 4. At ten o’clock they marched on to it and, backed up by soldiers from the Tower, stood their ground when Cade attacked it from Southwark.

  A savage battle was fought in the narrow space between the houses and shops which lined either side of the bridge; fire began to sweep through these wooden structures but the conflict continued amidst the smoke and flame until, according to one chronicler, “some desiring to eschew the fire leaped on his enemy’s weapon, and so died; fearful women with children in their arms, amazed and appalled, leaped for fear into the river.”

  By morning the rebels drew off, painfully aware that the Londoners had done the king’s work for him. When the Chancellor, Cardinal Kemp, offered Cade and his men a general pardon at St Margaret’s church in Southwark, they accepted it with relief and dispersed. Soon Cade, no doubt uncomfortably remembering the fate of Wat Tyler’s followers, repented his credulity. With his hardcore companions he unsuccessfully attacked Queensborough Castle; as a result he was attainted and his pardon declared invalid on a technicality. His hopes of raising a fresh army at Rochester came to nothing and he fled on horseback. He was finally discovered hiding in a garden in Kent and after a brave fight was slain by a country gentleman named Alexander Iden, after which his head was parboiled and placed over the Drawbridge Tower of London Bridge.

  With the rebellion over Henry and Margaret sought a champion to replace the murdered Suffolk, and they found one in Edmund, the second Duke of Somerset and a nephew of the late Lancastrian leader Cardinal Beaufort. He had been the ineffectual commander of the English forces in France and the public were stunned when this man, who was held responsible for England’s defeats across the Channel, was made Constable of England, commander-in-chief of the army in the absence of the king and Supreme Judge in the Court of Chivalry. Popular feeling was expressed by giving a hero’s welcome to York who crossed the Irish Sea and hurried to London to confront Henry.

  “The great rumour that is universally in this your realm is that justice is not duly ministered,” he declared and added that he would assist the king to reform the kingdom. Henry’s reply was to promise him a larger share in the government, after which York went to Fotheringay Castle to await the forthcoming assembling of Parliament.

  According to tradition it was at this stage that the contesting factions took roses as their symbols. Somerset met the Earl of Warwick in the Temple Gardens by the Thames, and soon angry words were exchanged during which the duke plucked a red rose, whereupon Warwick picked a white one. Their companions followed the example so that the flowers became party badges, the red rose for the House of Lancaster and the white for York.

  By the end of the year political tension electrified the atmosphere of the capital; armed men emboldened by the party emblems they wore swaggered in the taverns loyal to their factions, the Dukes of York and Norfolk paraded through the city with three thousand followers at their backs, a mob pillaged the houses of Somerset and his supporters, and the Lord Mayor ordered the narrow thoroughfares to be fenced across with chains to deter running crowds of rioters.

  When Parliament convened in January, 1451, the powerful Yorkist party had a bill passed to attaint the memory of Suffolk — how this posthumous insult must have enraged Queen Margaret. Another bill called for the removal from about the person of the king of the Duke of Somerset, the widowed Duchess of Suffolk and thirty members of the Lancastrian court party. King Henry agreed only to the exile of some of the minor people named, and was adamant that Somerset should remain.

  In May, in one of his moments of misjudgement, York, persuaded a Bristol representative named Young to move that as the king was childless the duke should be officially declared heir apparent. The Yorkist majority in the Commons cheered the proposal, but the Lords rejected it as they had no wish to see York as their master. Following this Henry dissolved Parliament and Young was imprisoned in the Tower.

  For the remainder of the year the situation appeared to be one of stalemate; Somerset remained in power while York brooded in the country, yet throughout the kingdom there was a sense of impending conflict which was made more bitter by the news from the Continent of more English fortresses falling to the French. In the following February York yielded to the ever increasing pressure for positive action and issued this manifesto: “I, after long sufferance and delays, though it is not my will or intent to displease my sovereign lord, seeing that the said Duke (Somerset) ever prevaileth and ruleth about the King's person, and that by this means the land is likely to be destroyed, am fully concluded to proceed in all haste against him with the help of my kinsman and friends ... to promote ease, peace, tranquillity and the safeguard of all this land, keeping me within the bounds of my liegance.”

  When Henry heard that York was advancing on London with an army of over ten thousand men, he acted with unusual determination — probably inspired by his beloved queen — and marched to meet him. This positive response unnerved the duke who was not yet psychologically prepared to make war on his anointed sovereign; to him the enemy was Somerset. Therefore he bypassed the royal army by crossing the Thames at Kingston and made for Kent where he hoped t
o be reinforced by the old followers of Jack Cade. In this he was disappointed, and when he learned that Henry's army was approaching his camp at Dartford he agreed to meet the Bishops of Ely and Winchester who acted as envoys for the king.

  Having explained that he had not taken up arms out of disloyalty to the crown but to protect himself from his enemies, York went on to demand that all persons “noised or indicted of treason” should be brought to trial. This was promised, and as Somerset was the chief person on the treason list, the duke was told that the king had given the order for his committal, and that a new Council would be summoned in which the duke would be included.

  Forgetful of even recent history, York declared that he was well satisfied and would comply with the request to dismiss his forces. When this was done he arrived bare-headed at the king's pavilion. What happened next was out of keeping with Henry’s honourable character; it savoured more of Queen Margaret.

  No sooner had he bowed to the king and launched into a tirade against his enemies than a curtain behind the king was pulled aside and Somerset stepped forward, challenging the duke to mortal combat. Furious at allowing himself to be betrayed so easily, York turned to leave but was told that he was now a prisoner. Somerset urged the king to have him tried and executed immediately, but Henry had a pious horror of bloodshed and allowed him to be freed after he had taken an oath at St Paul's that he would not raise a force without the king’s permission. The defeated duke then retired to his castle at Wigmore.

  The' threat of civil war had turned into a triumph for the Lancastrians and the king, who underlined it by making a progress to the West Country and through the Welsh Marches. In each town the citizens who had supported York begged for mercy with symbolic nooses round their necks, and true to form Henry bestowed pardons upon them. Once the royal procession moved on Somerset saw to it that their halters were put to practical use.