Part 17
There are, indeed, in more than one of Worcester’s letters in this collection symptoms of ill-concealed chagrin and disappointment. Nor were such feelings unnatural in one who, probably out of regard for an ill-appreciated hero, had devoted the best energies of his life to the services of such a master as Fastolf. [Sidenote: William Worcester.] A native of Bristol, the son of one William Worcester, who lived in St. James’s Bec in that town, he was descended by the mother’s side from a wealthy family of Coventry, and often called himself, instead of Worcester, by his mother’s maiden name of Botoner. Born in the year 1415, he had entered the university of Oxford in 1432, and been four years a student at Hart Hall, now Balliol College; after which he had gone into Fastolf’s service. For many years he had been steward of Sir John’s manor of Castle Combe in Wiltshire, and MSS. still exist in his handwriting relating to the holding of manorial courts there.[152-2] He had also been Fastolf’s secretary in drawing up various statements regarding the wars in France in vindication of his master’s policy.[152-3] He was a man of literary tastes, who had already presented some compositions to his patron.[152-4] Later in life he wrote a book of annals, which is an important historical authority for the period. It seems to have been about a year before his master’s death that he set himself assiduously to learn French, under the tuition of a Lombard named Caroll Giles.[152-5] From this instructor he had purchased several books, and Henry Windsor suspected he had run himself into debt in consequence. He had fairly owned to Windsor ‘he would be as glad and as fain of a good book of French or of poetry, as my master Fastolf would be to purchase a fair manor.’[152-6] But he had a special object in view in which a knowledge of this language was important; for he had begun translating, at Fastolf’s request, from a French version, Cicero’s treatise _de Senectute_. This work appears to have been left on his hands at Sir John Fastolf’s death, and on the 10th of August 1473 he presented it to his patron’s old friend, Bishop Waynflete, at Esher. ‘Sed nullum regardum recepi de episcopo’ (but I received no reward from the bishop), is his melancholy comment on the occasion.[153-1] The work was ultimately printed by Caxton in 1481. Worcester was an assiduous collector of information on topics of every description, and a number of his commonplace books remain at this day. But like many men of letters after him, he found that industry of this sort may look in vain for any reward beyond the satisfaction of gratified curiosity.[153-2]
[Footnote 152-2: Add. MS. 28,208, B.M.]
[Footnote 152-3: Stevenson’s _Wars_, ii. [519], _sq._]
[Footnote 152-4: ‘Stellæ versificatæ pro anno 1440 ad instantiam J. Fastolfe militis.’ MS. Laud., B. 23 (according to the old pressmark).]
[Footnote 152-5: Letter 370.]
[Footnote 152-6: In previous editions it was here remarked:--‘This French zeal appears to have excited the contempt of some of his acquaintances--among others of Friar Brackley, who nicknamed him Colinus Gallicus.’ The discovery of additional letters, formerly published in a Supplement, but now incorporated with the series, seems to show that this was an error, or at all events very doubtful. It is clear from Letter 404 that a certain ‘W. W.’ and Colinus Gallicus were different persons (_see_ vol. iii. p. 213, note 3), and the references to ‘W. W.’ at p. 230 as the knight’s secretary and one of his executors remove any doubt that we might otherwise entertain that he was William Worcester. But a new difficulty arises from that identification, that Friar Brackley calls ‘W. W.’ an Irishman, which William Worcester was not; and the references at p. 220 of the same volume would imply that he was really an Irishman in nationality, and also a one-eyed man of dark visage. Such may have been Worcester’s personal appearance; but why was he called an Irishman?
It is with some hesitation that I hazard a new conjecture as to the person nicknamed Colinus Gallicus; but on comparing the different passages where that nickname occurs, I am inclined to think it was meant for Judge Yelverton.]
[[p. iii. 230 = Letter 417; p. iii. 220 = Letter 409]]
[Footnote 153-1: Itin. 368.]
[Footnote 153-2: Tanner’s _Bibliotheca_. _See_ also a notice of William Worcester in _Retrospective Review_, Second Series, ii. 451-4.]
Along with the announcement that Sir John Fastolf was about to go into Norfolk, William Paston informed his brother that the old knight’s stepson, Stephen Scrope, would reside at Caister along with him. [Sidenote: Stephen Scrope.] Of this Stephen Scrope our Letters make not unfrequent mention; but the leading facts of his history are obtained from other sources. He was the son of Sir Stephen Scrope, by his wife Lady Milicent, who married Fastolf after her husband’s death. At the time of this second marriage of his mother, young Scrope was about ten or twelve years of age, and being heir to a considerable property, his stepfather had the management of his affairs during his minority. Bitterly did he complain in after years of the manner in which Sir John had discharged the trust. According to the unfeeling, mercenary fashion in which such matters were then managed, Fastolf sold his wardship to Chief-Justice Gascoigne for 500 marks; ‘through the which sale,’ wrote Scrope at a later date, ‘I took sickness that kept me a thirteen or fourteen years [en]suing; whereby I am disfigured in my person and shall be whilst I live.’ Gascoigne held this wardship for three years, and by right of it intended to marry Scrope to one of his own daughters; but as the young lad’s friends thought the match unequal to his fortune, Fastolf bought the wardship back again.[154-1] Stephen Scrope, however, when he grew up, was not more grateful for the redemption than for the original sale of his person. ‘He bought me and sold me as a beast’ (so he writes of Sir John Fastolf), ‘against all right and law, to mine hurt more than 1000 marks.’ In consequence of the stinginess of his stepfather he was obliged, on coming of age, to sell a manor which was part of his inheritance and take service with Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester in France; by whom, according to his own account, he had some hope of obtaining restitution of the lordship of the Isle of Man, which had belonged to his uncle the Earl of Wiltshire in the days of Richard II. But Sir John Fastolf got him to give up his engagement with the duke and serve with himself, which he did for several years, to the satisfaction of both parties. Afterwards, however, on some dispute arising, Scrope returned to England, when Sir John sent home word that he must pay for his meat and drink. To do this he was driven to contract a marriage which, by his own account, was not the most advantageous for himself; and his stepfather, instead of showing him any compassion, brought an action against him by which he was deprived of all the little property that his wife had brought him.[154-2]
[Footnote 154-1: No. 97.]
[Footnote 154-2: Scrope’s _History of the Manor of Castle Combe_, pp. 264-283. The MSS. formerly at Castle Combe, to which Mr. Scrope refers in this work, have since been presented by him and Mr. Lowndes, the present lord of the manor, to the British Museum. One of them we have reprinted in No. 97.]
Of this first wife of Stephen Scrope we know nothing,[154-3] except that she died and left him a daughter some years before we find any mention of him in the Paston correspondence. His necessities now compelled him to resort to the same evil system of bargaining in flesh and blood of which he had complained in his own case. ‘For very need,’ he writes, ‘I was fain to sell a little daughter I have for much less than I should have done by possibility,’--a considerable point in his complaint being evidently the lowness of the price he got for his own child. It seems that he disposed of her wardship to a knight[155-1] whose name does not appear; but the terms of the contract became matter of interest some time afterwards to John Paston and his mother, when Scrope, who, besides being disfigured in person, was probably not far from fifty years of age, made an offer for the hand of Paston’s sister Elizabeth, a girl of about twenty. The proposed match did not take effect; but it was for some time seriously entertained. Agnes Paston writes that she found the young lady herself ‘never so willing to none as she is to him, if it be so that his land stand clear.’[155-2] The reader will perhaps think from this expression that the young lady had been pretty early taught the importance of considering worldly prospects; but there were other motives which not improbably helped to influence her judgment. ‘She was never in so great sorrow as she is now-a-days,’ wrote Elizabeth Clere to John Paston, as a reason for concluding the matter at once with Scrope, if no more desirable suitor presented himself. Her mother would not allow her to see any visitor, and was suspicious even of her intercourse with the servants of her own house. ‘And she hath since Easter the most part been beaten once in the week or twice, and sometimes twice in one day, and her head broken in two or three places.’[155-3] Such was the rough domestic discipline to which even girls in those days were occasionally subjected!
[Footnote 154-3: She is not unlikely to have been the lady mentioned in No. 97. ‘Fauconer’s daughter of London, that Sir Reynold Cobham had wedded.’ This I find need not have been, as I have stated in a footnote, the widow of Sir Reginald Cobham of Sterborough, who died in 1446; for there was an earlier Sir Reginald Cobham, whose widow Elizabeth was married to William Clifford as early as 1438. (_Inquisitions post mortem_, 16 Hen. VI. No. 31.) Thus there is the less difficulty in attributing Letter 97 to a much earlier date than that assigned to it by the endorsement.]
[Footnote 155-1: Letter 94.]
[Footnote 155-2: No. 93.]
[Footnote 155-3: No. 94.]
Some years certainly elapsed after this before either Stephen Scrope found a wife or Elizabeth Paston a husband. The former ultimately married Joan, the daughter of Richard Bingham, judge of the King’s Bench; the latter was married to Robert Poynings, whom we have already had occasion to notice as an ally of Jack Cade in 1450, and a ringleader in other movements a few years later. This second marriage appears to have taken place about New Year’s Day 1459;[156-1] before which time we find various other proposals for her hand besides that of Scrope.[156-2] Among these it may be noted that Edmund, Lord Grey of Hastings, wrote to her brother to say that he knew a gentleman with property worth 300 marks (£200) a year to whom she might be disposed of. No doubt, as in similar cases, this gentleman was a feudal ward, whose own opinion was the very last that was consulted as to the lady to whom he should be united. But it is time that we return to the current of public affairs.[156-3]
[Footnote 156-1: _See_ No. 374.]
[Footnote 156-2: Nos. 236, 250, 252.]
[Footnote 156-3: We ought not to leave unnoticed one fact in the relations of Scrope and Fastolf which is much more creditable to both of them than the disputes above mentioned. In the year 1450, Scrope translated from the French and dedicated to Sir John, ‘for his contemplation and solace,’ a work entitled _Ditz de Philosophius_ (Sayings of Philosophers), of which the original MS. is now in the Harleian Collection, No. 2266. That Fastolf was a real lover of literature, and encouraged literary tastes in those about him, there can be no question.]
_The Strife of Parties_
[Sidenote: The king’s recovery.] At Christmas, to the great joy of the nation, the king began to recover from his sad illness. He woke up, as it were, from a long sleep. So decidedly had he regained his faculties, that, first, on St. John’s Day (27th December), he commanded his almoner to ride to Canterbury with an offering, and his secretary to present another at the shrine of St. Edward. On the following Monday, the 30th, the queen came to him and brought with her the infant prince, for whom nearly twelve months before she had in vain endeavoured to bespeak his notice. What occurred at that touching interview we know from a letter of Edmund Clere to John Paston, and it would be impossible to wish it recorded in other words. ‘And then he asked what the Prince’s name was, and the queen told him “Edward”; and then he held up his hands and thanked God thereof. And he said he never knew till that time, nor wist what was said to him, nor wist not where he had been whilst he hath been sick, till now. And he asked who was godfathers, and the queen told him; and he was well apaid. And she told him that the cardinal (Kemp) was dead; and he said he knew never thereof till that time; and he said one of the wisest lords in this land was dead.’[157-1]
[Footnote 157-1: No. 270.]
[Sidenote: A.D. 1455.] On the 7th of January, Bishop Waynflete and the Prior of St. John’s were admitted to speak with him, and finding his discourse as clear and coherent as they had ever known it, on coming out of the audience chamber they wept for joy.[157-2]
[Footnote 157-2: _Ibid._]
Joy was doubtless the prevailing sentiment among all ranks and classes of people; but there was one to whom the news of the king’s recovery must have afforded a delight and satisfaction beyond what any one else--unless it were Queen Margaret--could possibly derive from it. The Duke of Somerset had now lain in prison more than a year. The day appointed for his trial had passed away and nothing had been done. It certainly casts some suspicion upon the even-handed justice of the Duke of York, that his adversary was thus denied a hearing; but the fault may have been due, after all, to weakness more than malice. In cases of treason, when once a trial was instituted against a leading nobleman, a conviction was, in those days, an absolutely invariable result; but this made it a thing all the more dangerous to attempt when it was hopeless to expect the positive sanction of the king. The real cause, however, why Somerset was not brought to trial can only be a matter of conjecture. His continued confinement, however harsh, was, according to the practice of those days, legal; nor was it till six weeks after the king’s recovery that he was restored to liberty. A new day, meanwhile, and not a very early one, was fixed for the hearing of charges against him. On the morrow of All Souls--the 3rd of November following--he was to appear before the Council. This was determined on the 5th of February. Four lords undertook to give surety in their own proper persons that he would make his appearance on the day named; and orders were immediately issued to release him from confinement.[158-1]
[Footnote 158-1: Rymer, xi. 361.]
On the 4th day of March, he presented himself at a Council held before the king in his palace at Greenwich. The Duke of York was present, with ten bishops and twenty temporal peers, among whom were the Protector’s friend, the Earl of Salisbury, Lord Chancellor, the Earl of Worcester, Treasurer of England, and the king’s half-brother, the Earl of Pembroke. His accuser, the Duke of Norfolk, was absent, probably not without a reason. In presence of the assembled lords, Somerset then declared that he had been imprisoned without a cause and confined in the Tower of London one whole year and more than ten weeks over, and had only been liberated on bail on the 7th of February. So, as he declared there was no charge made against him for which he deserved to be confined, he besought the king that his sureties might be discharged; offering, if any one would accuse him of anything contrary to his allegiance, that he would be ready at all times to answer according to law and like a true knight. [Sidenote: Somerset released.] His protestations of loyalty were at once accepted by the king, who thereupon declared that he knew the duke to be his true and faithful liegeman, and wished it to be understood that he so reputed him. After this, the mouths of all adversaries were of course sealed up. The duke’s bail were discharged. His character was cleared from every insinuation of disloyalty; and whatever questions might remain between him and the Duke of York were referred to the arbitration of eight other lords, whose judgment both
## parties were bound over in recognisances of 20,000 marks, that they
would abide.[158-2]
[Footnote 158-2: _Ibid._ 362, 363.]
The significance of all this could not be doubtful. The king’s recovery had put an end to the Duke of York’s power as Protector, and he was determined to be guided once more by the counsels of the queen and Somerset. On the 6th March, York was deprived of the government of Calais which he had undertaken by indenture for seven years.[159-1] On the 7th, the Great Seal was taken from the Earl of Salisbury and given to Thomas Bourchier, Archbishop of Canterbury. These changes, or at least the former, promised little good to the country; and in the beginning of May we not only find that Calais stood again in imminent danger of siege,[159-2] but that considerable fears were entertained of an invasion of England.[159-3] But to the Duke of York they gave cause for personal apprehension. Notwithstanding the specious appointment of a tribunal to settle the controversy between him and Somerset, it was utterly impossible for him to expect anything like an equitable adjustment. A Council was called at Westminster in the old exclusive spirit, neither York nor any of his friends being summoned to attend it. A Great Council was then arranged to meet at Leicester long before the day on which judgment was to be given by the arbitrators; and it was feared both by York and his friends, the Earls of Salisbury and Warwick, that if they ventured to appear there they would find themselves entrapped. The ostensible ground of the calling of that council was to provide for the surety of the king’s person; from which it was fairly to be conjectured that a suspicion of treason was to be insinuated against persons who were too deservedly popular to be arrested in London with safety to the Government.[159-4]
[Footnote 159-1: Rymer, xi. 363.]
[Footnote 159-2: _Privy Council Proceedings_, vi. 234-8.]
[Footnote 159-3: On the _Patent Roll_, 33. Hen. VI. p. 19 _d._, is a commission dated 5th May, for keeping watch on the coast of Kent against invasion.]
[Footnote 159-4: _Rolls of Parl._ v. 280-1.]
[Sidenote: York and his friends take arms.] York had by this time retired into the north, and uniting with Salisbury and Warwick, it was determined by all three that the cause assigned for the calling of the Council justified them in seeking the king’s presence with a strong body of followers. On the 20th May they arrived at Royston, and from thence addressed a letter to Archbishop Bourchier, as Chancellor, in which they not only repudiated all intention of disloyalty, but declared that, as the Council was summoned for the surety of the king’s person, they had brought with them a company of armed followers expressly for his protection. If any real danger was to be apprehended they were come to do him service; but if their own personal enemies were abusing their influence with the king to inspire him with causeless distrust, they were determined to remove unjust suspicions, and relied on their armed companies for protection to themselves. Meanwhile they requested the archbishop’s intercession to explain to Henry the true motives of their conduct.[160-1]
[Footnote 160-1: _Rolls of Parl._ v. 280-1.]
Next day they marched on to Ware, and there penned an address to the king himself, of which copies seem to have been diffused, either at the time or very shortly afterwards, in justification of their proceedings. One of these came to the hands of John Paston, and the reader may consequently peruse the memorial for himself in Volume III.[160-2] In it, as will be seen, York and his friends again made most urgent protest of their good intent, and complained grievously of the unfair proceedings of their enemies in excluding them from the royal presence and poisoning the king’s mind with doubts of their allegiance. They declared that they had no other intent in seeking the king’s presence than to prove themselves his true liegemen by doing him all the service in their power; and they referred him further to a copy of their letter to the archbishop, which they thought it well to forward along with their memorial, as they had not been informed that he had shown its contents to the king.
[Footnote 160-2: No. 282.]
In point of fact, neither the letter to the archbishop nor the memorial to the king himself was allowed to come to Henry’s hands. The archbishop, indeed, had done his duty, and on receipt of the letter to himself had sent it on, with all haste, to Kilburn, where his messenger overtook the king on his way northwards from London. But the man was not admitted into the royal presence; for the Duke of Somerset and his friends were determined the Yorkists should not be heard, that their advance might wear as much as possible the aspect of a rebellion. York and his allies accordingly marched on from Ware to St. Albans, where they arrived at an early hour on the morning of the 22nd. Meanwhile the king, who had left London the day before, accompanied by the Dukes of Buckingham and Somerset, his half-brother, Jasper Tudor, Earl of Pembroke, the Earls of Northumberland, Devonshire, Stafford, Dorset, and Wiltshire, and a number of other lords, knights, and gentlemen, amounting in all to upwards of 2000, arrived at the very same place just before them, having rested at Watford the previous night. Anticipating the approach of the Duke of York, the king and his friends occupied the suburb of St. Peter’s, which lay on that side of the town by which the duke must necessarily come. The duke accordingly, and the Earls of Salisbury and Warwick, drew up their forces in the Keyfield, outside the barriers of the town. From seven in the morning till near ten o’clock the two hosts remained facing each other without a blow being struck; during which time the duke and the two earls, still endeavouring to obtain a peaceful interview with the king, petitioned to have an answer to their memorial of the preceding day. They were told in reply that it had not been received by the king, on which they made new and more urgent representations. At first, it would seem, they demanded access to the royal presence to declare and justify their true intentions; but when this could not be obtained, they made a still more obnoxious request. They insisted that certain persons whom they would accuse of treason should be delivered into their hands, reminding the king, as respectfully as the fact could be alluded to, that past experience would not permit them to trust to a mere promise on his part that a traitor should be kept in confinement.[161-1]
[Footnote 161-1: No. 283. _Rolls of Parl._ v. 281-2.]