Part 18

For the answer made to this demand, and for the details of the battle which ensued, we may as well refer the reader to the very curious paper (No. 283) from which we have already derived most of the above

## particulars. We are not here writing the history of the times, and it

may be sufficient for us to say that York and his friends were completely victorious. The action lasted only half an hour. [Sidenote: Battle of St. Albans.] The Duke of Somerset was slain, and with him the Earl of Northumberland, Lords Clifford and Clinton, with about 400 persons of inferior rank, as the numbers were at first reported. This, however, seems to have been an over-estimate.[162-1] The king himself was wounded by an arrow in the neck, and, after the engagement, was taken prisoner; while the Earl of Wiltshire, and the Duke of York’s old enemy, Thorpe, fled disgracefully. When all was over, the duke with the two earls came humbly and knelt before the king, beseeching his forgiveness for what they had done in his presence, and requesting him to acknowledge them as his true liegemen, seeing that they had never intended to do him personal injury. To this Henry at once agreed, and took them once more into favour.[162-2]

[Footnote 162-1: John Crane, writing from Lambeth on Whitsunday, three days after the battle, says, ‘at most six score.’ No. 285. Another authority says, ‘60 persons of gentlemen and other.’ _English Chronicle_, ed. Davies, p. 72.]

[Footnote 162-2: Nos. 283, 284, 285.]

Thus again was effected ‘a change of ministry’--by sharper and more violent means than had formerly been employed, but certainly by the only means which had now become at all practicable. The government of Somerset was distinctly unconstitutional. The deliberate and systematic exclusion from the king’s councils of a leading peer of the realm--of one who, by mere hereditary right, quite apart from natural capacity and fitness, was entitled at any time to give his advice to royalty, was a crime that could not be justified. For conduct very similar the two Spencers had been banished by Parliament in the days of Edward II.; and if it had been suffered now to remain unpunished, there would not have existed the smallest check upon arbitrary government and intolerable maladministration.

Such, we may be well assured, was the feeling of the city of London, which on the day following the battle received the victors in triumph with a general procession.[162-3] The Duke of York conducted the king to the Bishop of London’s palace, and a council being assembled, writs were sent out for a Parliament to meet on the 9th of July following.[162-4] Meanwhile the duke was made Constable of England, and Lord Bourchier, Treasurer. The defence of Calais was committed to the Earl of Warwick.[162-5] There was, however, no entire and sweeping change made in the officers of state. The Great Seal was allowed to continue in the hands of Archbishop Bourchier.

[Footnote 162-3: No. 284.]

[Footnote 162-4: No. 283.]

[Footnote 162-5: No. 285.]

It remained, however, for Parliament to ratify what had been done. However justifiable in a moral point of view, the conduct of York and his allies wore an aspect of violence towards the sovereign, which made it necessary that its legality should be investigated by the highest court in the realm. Inquiry was made both in Parliament and by the king’s Council which of the lords about the king had been responsible for provoking the collision. Angry and unpleasant feelings, as might be expected, burst out in consequence. The Earl of Warwick accused Lord Cromwell to the king, and when the latter attempted to vindicate himself, swore that what he stated was untrue. So greatly was Lord Cromwell intimidated, that the Earl of Shrewsbury, at his request, took up his lodging at St. James’s, beside the Mews, for his protection. The retainers of York, Warwick, and Salisbury went about fully armed, and kept their lords’ barges on the river amply furnished with weapons. Proclamations, however, were presently issued against bearing arms. The Parliament, at last, laid the whole blame of the encounter upon the deceased Duke of Somerset, and the courtiers Thorpe and Joseph; and by an Act which received the royal assent, it was declared that the Duke of York and his friends had acted the part of good and faithful subjects. ‘To the which bill,’ said Henry Windsor in a letter to his friends Bocking and Worcester, ‘many a man grudged full sore now it is past’; but he requested them to burn a communication full of such uncomfortable matter to comment upon as the quarrels and heartburnings of lords.[163-1]

[Footnote 163-1: No. 299.]

[Sidenote: The Parliamentary elections.] But with whatever grudge it may have been that Parliament condoned the acts of the Yorkists, it seems not to have been without some degree of pressure that the duke and his allies obtained a Parliament so much after their own minds. Here, for instance, we have the Duchess of Norfolk writing to John Paston, just before the election, that it was thought necessary ‘that my lord have at this time in the Parliament such persons as long unto him and be of his menial servants (!)’; on which account she requests his vote and influence in favour of John Howard and Sir Roger Chamberlain.[164-1] The application could scarcely have been agreeable to the person to whom it was addressed; for it seems that John Paston himself had on this occasion some thought of coming forward as a candidate for Norfolk. Exception was taken to John Howard, one of the duke’s nominees (who, about eight-and-twenty years later, was created Duke of Norfolk himself, and was the ancestor of the present ducal family), on the ground that he possessed no lands within the county;[164-2] and at the nomination the names of Berney, Grey, and Paston were received with great favour.[164-3] John Jenney thought it ‘an evil precedent for the shire that a strange man should be chosen, and no worship to my lord of York nor to my lord of Norfolk to write for him; for if the gentlemen of the shire will suffer such inconvenience, in good faith the shire shall not be called of such worship as it hath been.’ So unpopular, in fact, was Howard’s candidature that the Duke of Norfolk was half persuaded to give him up, declaring, that since his return was objected to he would write to the under-sheriff that the shire should have free election, provided they did not choose Sir Thomas Tuddenham or any of the old adherents of the Duke of Suffolk. And so, for a time it seemed as if free election would be allowed. The under-sheriff even ventured to write to John Paston that he meant to return his name and that of Master Grey; ‘nevertheless,’ he added significantly, ‘I have a master.’ Howard appeared to be savage with disappointment. He was ‘as wode’ (_i.e._ mad), wrote John Jenney, ‘as a wild bullock.’ But in the end it appeared he had no need to be exasperated, for when the poll came to be taken, he and the other nominee of the Duke of Norfolk were found to have gained the day.[164-4]

[Footnote 164-1: No. 288.]

[Footnote 164-2: Nos. 294, 295.]

[Footnote 164-3: No. 291.]

[Footnote 164-4: No. 295.]

Besides the act of indemnity for the Duke of York and his partisans, and a new oath of allegiance being sworn to by the Lords, little was done at this meeting of the Parliament. On the 31st July it was prorogued, to meet again upon the 12th November. But in the interval another complication had arisen. The king, who seems to have suffered in health from the severe shock that he must have received by the battle of St. Albans,[165-1] had felt the necessity of retirement to recover his composure, and had withdrawn before the meeting of Parliament to Hertford; at which time the Duke of York, in order to be near him, took up his quarters at the Friars at Ware.[165-2] He was well, or at all events well enough to open Parliament in person on the 9th July; but shortly afterwards he retired to Hertford again, where according to the dates of his Privy Seals, I find that he remained during August and September. [Sidenote: The king again ill.] In the month of October following he was still there, and it was reported that he had fallen sick of his old infirmity;--which proved to be too true.[165-3]

[Footnote 165-1: _See_ Rymer, xi. 366.]

[Footnote 165-2: No. 287.]

[Footnote 165-3: No. 303.]

Altogether matters looked gloomy enough. Change of ministry by force of arms, whatever might be said for it, was not a thing to win the confidence either of king or people. There were prophecies bruited about that another battle would take place before St. Andrew’s Day--the greatest that had been since the battle of Shrewsbury in the days of Henry IV. One Dr. Green ventured to predict it in detail. The scene of the conflict was to be between the Bishop of Salisbury’s Inn and Westminster Bars, and three bishops and four temporal lords were to be among the slain. The Londoners were spared this excitement; but from the country there came news of a party outrage committed by the eldest son of the Earl of Devonshire, on a dependant of the Lord Bonvile, [Sidenote: Disturbances in the West.] and the West of England seems to have been disturbed for some time afterwards.[165-4] From a local MS. chronicle cited by Holinshed, it appears that a regular pitched battle took place between the two noblemen on Clist Heath, about two miles from Exeter, in which Lord Bonvile having gained the victory, entered triumphantly into the city. A modern historian of Exeter, however, seems to have read the MS. differently, and tells us that Lord Bonvile was driven into the city by defeat.[165-5] However this may be, the Earl of Devonshire did not allow the matter to rest. Accompanied by a large body of retainers--no less, it is stated, than 800 horse and 4000 foot--he attacked the Dean and Canons of Exeter, made several of the latter prisoners, and robbed the cathedral.[166-1]

[Footnote 165-4: No. 303. _See_ also a brief account of the same affair in W. Worcester’s _Itinerary_, p. 114.]

[Footnote 165-5: Jenkins’s _History of Exeter_, p. 78.]

[Footnote 166-1: _Rolls of Parl._ v. 285. It may be observed that the bishopric was at this time vacant, and the dean, whose name was John Hals, had received a papal provision to be the new bishop, but was forced to relinquish it in favour of George Nevill, son of the Earl of Salisbury, a young man of only three-and-twenty years of age. Godwin _de Præsulibus_. Le Neve’s _Fasti_. Nicolas’s _Privy Council Proceedings_, vi. 265.]

That one out of the number of those great lords who had been attached to the government of the queen and the Duke of Somerset should thus have abused his local influence, was pretty much what might have been expected at such a juncture. But the effect was only to strengthen the hands of York when Parliament met again in November. The situation was now once more what it had been in the beginning of the previous year. The day before Parliament met, the Duke of York obtained a commission to act as the king’s lieutenant on its assembling.[166-2] The warrant for the issuing of this commission was signed by no less than thirty-nine Lords of the Council. The Houses then met under the presidency of the duke.[166-3] The Commons sent a deputation to the Upper House, to petition the Lords that they would ‘be good means to the King’s Highness’ for the appointment of some person to undertake the defence of the realm and the repressing of disorders. But for some days this request remained unanswered. The appeal was renewed by the Commons a second time, and again a third time, with an intimation that no other business would be attended to till it was answered. [Sidenote: York again Protector.] On the second occasion the Lords named the Duke of York Protector, but he desired that they would excuse him, and elect some other. The Lords, however, declined to alter their choice, and the duke at last agreed to accept the office, on certain specific conditions which experience had taught him to make still more definite for his own protection than those on which he had before insisted. Among other things it was now agreed that the Protectorship should not again be terminated by the mere fact of the king’s recovery; but that when the king should be in a position to exercise his functions, the Protector should be discharged of his office in Parliament by the advice of the Lords Spiritual and Temporal.[167-1]

[Footnote 166-2: _Rolls of Parl._ v. 285.]

[Footnote 166-3: _Privy Council Proceedings_, vi. 262.]

[Footnote 167-1: _Rolls of Parl._ v. 285-7.]

On the 19th of November, accordingly, York was formally appointed Protector for the second time. Three days afterwards, at Westminster, the king, whose infirmity on this occasion could scarcely have amounted to absolute loss of his faculties, committed the entire government of the kingdom to his Council, merely desiring that they would inform him of anything they might think fit to determine touching the honour and surety of his person.[167-2] The business of the nation was again placed on something like a stable and satisfactory footing; and Parliament, after sitting till the 13th December, was prorogued to the 14th January, in order that the Duke of York might go down into the west for the repressing of those disorders of which we have already spoken.[167-3]

[Footnote 167-2: _Ibid._ v. 288-90.]

[Footnote 167-3: _Ibid._ 321.]

[Sidenote: A.D. 1456.] Unluckily, things did not remain long in a condition so hopeful for the restoration of order. Early in the following year the king recovered his health, and notwithstanding the support of which he had been assured in Parliament, York knew that his authority as Protector would be taken from him. On the 9th of February, as we learn from a letter of John Bocking, it had been anticipated that he would have received his discharge in Parliament; but he was allowed to retain office for a fortnight longer. On that day he and Warwick thought fit to come to the Parliament with a company of 300 armed men, alleging that they stood in danger of being waylaid upon the road. The pretence does not seem to have been generally credited; and the practical result of this demonstration was simply to prevent any other lords from going to the Parliament at all.[167-4]

[Footnote 167-4: No. 322.]

The real question, however, which had to be considered was the kind of government that should prevail when York was no more Protector. The queen was again making anxious efforts to get the management of affairs into her own hands; but the battle of St. Albans had deprived her of her great ally the Duke of Somerset, and there was no one now to fill his place. It is true he had left a son who was now Duke of Somerset in his stead, and quite as much attached to her interests. There were, moreover, the Duke of Buckingham and others who were by no means friendly to the Duke of York. But no man possessed anything like the degree of power, experience, and political ability to enable the king to dispense entirely with the services of his present Protector. The king himself, it was said, desired that he should be named his Chief Councillor and Lieutenant, and that powers should be conferred upon him by patent inferior only to those given him by the Parliament. But this was not thought a likely settlement, and no one really knew what was to be the new _régime_. The attention of the Lords was occupied with ‘a great gleaming star’ which had just made its appearance, and which really offered as much help to the solution of the enigma as any appearances purely mundane and political.[168-1]

[Footnote 168-1: No. 322.]

At length on the 25th of February the Lords exonerated York from his duties as Protector; soon after which, if not on the same day, Parliament must have been dissolved.[168-2] [Sidenote: Again discharged.] An Act of Resumption, rendered necessary by the state of the revenue, was the principal fruit of its deliberations.[168-3] The finances of the kingdom were placed, if not in a sound, at least in a more hopeful condition than before; and Parliament and the Protector were both dismissed, without, apparently, the slightest provision being made for the future conduct of affairs. Government, in fact, seems almost to have fallen into abeyance. There is a most striking blank in the records of the Privy Council from the end of January 1456 to the end of November 1457. That some councils were held during this period we know from other evidences;[168-4] but with the exception of one single occasion, when it was necessary to issue a commission for the trial of insurgents in Kent,[169-1] there is not a single record left to tell us what was done at them.

[Footnote 168-2: _Rolls of Parl._ v. 321.]

[Footnote 168-3: _Ibid._ 300. A more sweeping bill for this purpose, which was rejected by the Lords, states that the revenue was so encumbered ‘that the charge of every sheriff in substance exceedeth so far the receipt of the revenues thereof due and leviable to you (_i.e._ the king), that no person of goodwill dare take upon him to be sheriff in any shire, for the most party, in this land.’ _Ibid._ 328. Additional illustrations of this fact will be found in Nicolas’s _Privy Council Proceedings_, vi. 263-4, 272-3, and Preface lxxv-vi.]

[Footnote 168-4: Nos. 334, 345, 348.]

[Footnote 169-1: _Privy Council Proceedings_, vi. 287.]

Yet the machine of state still moved, no one could tell exactly how. Acts were done in the king’s name if not really and truly by the king, and by the sheer necessity of the case York appears to have had the ordering of all things. But his authority hung by a thread. His acts were without the slightest legal validity except in so far as they might be considered as having the sanction of the king; and in whatever way that sanction may or may not have been expressed, there was no security that it would not afterwards be withdrawn and disavowed.

And so indeed it happened at this time in a matter that concerned deeply the honour of the whole country. The outbreak of civil war had provoked the interference of an enemy of whom Englishmen were always peculiarly intolerant. The Duke of Somerset slain at St. Albans was uncle to James II., the reigning king of Scotland, who is said to have resented his death on the ground of consanguinity. [Sidenote: The King of Scots.] In less than six weeks after the battle, ‘the King of Scots with the red face,’ as he is called in a contemporary chronicle, laid siege to Berwick both by water and land. But the Bishop of Durham, the Earl of Northumberland, and other Lords of the Marches, took prompt measures for the relief of the town, and soon assembled such a force as to compel James not only to quit the siege but to leave all his ordnance and victuals behind him.[169-2] How matters stood between the two countries during the next ten months we have no precise information; but it is clear that England, although the injured party, could not have been anxious to turn the occasion into one of open rupture. Peace still continued to be preserved till, on the 10th of May 1456, James wrote to the King of England by Lyon herald, declaring that the truce of 1453 was injurious to his kingdom, and that unless more favourable conditions were conceded to him he would have recourse to arms.[169-3] A message more calculated to fire the spirit of the English nation it would have been impossible for James to write; nevertheless, owing either to Henry’s love of peace, or to his lack of advisers after his own mind, it was not till the 26th of July that any answer was returned to it. On that day the Duke of York obtained, or took, the liberty of replying in Henry’s name. To the insolence of the King of Scots, he opposed all the haughtiness that might have been expected from the most warlike of Henry’s ancestors. Insisting to the fullest extent on those claims of feudal superiority which England never had abandoned and Scotland never had acknowledged, he told James that his conduct was mere insolence and treason in a vassal against his lord; that it inspired not the slightest dread but only contempt on the part of England; and that measures would be speedily taken to punish his presumption.[170-1]

[Footnote 169-2: _Three Fifteenth Century Chronicles_, 70 (edited by me for the Camden Society): _Privy Council Proceedings_, vi. 248-9.]

[Footnote 169-3: Lambeth MS. 211, f. 146 b.]

[Footnote 170-1: Lambeth MS. 211, f. 147. Rymer, xi. 383.]

A month later the Duke of York addressed a letter to James in his own name, declaring that as he understood the Scotch king had entered England, he purposed to go and meet him. He at the same time reproached James with conduct unworthy of one who was ‘called a mighty Prince and a courageous knight,’ in making daily forays and suddenly retiring again.[170-2] The end of this expedition we do not know; but we know that not long afterwards Henry changed his policy. The letter written by the Duke of York in the king’s name was regularly enrolled on the Scotch Roll among the records of Chancery; but to it was prefixed a note on the king’s behalf, disclaiming responsibility for its tenor, and attributing to the duke the usurpation of authority, and the disturbance of all government since the time of Jack Cade’s insurrection.[170-3]

[Footnote 170-2: Lambeth MS. 211, f. 148. This letter is dated 24th August 1456.]

[Footnote 170-3: Rymer, xi. 383.]

The glimpses of light which we have on the political situation during this period are far from satisfactory. Repeated notice, however, is taken in these letters of a fact which seems significant of general distrust and mutual suspicion among the leading persons in the land. The king, queen, and lords were all separated and kept carefully at a distance from each other. Thus, while the king was at Sheen, the queen and her infant prince were staying at Tutbury, the Duke of York at Sandal, and the Earl of Warwick at Warwick.[171-1] Afterwards we find the queen removed to Chester, while the Duke of Buckingham was at Writtle, near Chelmsford in Essex. The only lord with the king at Sheen was his half-brother the Earl of Pembroke. His other brother, the Earl of Richmond, who died in the course of this year, was in Wales making war upon some chieftain of the country whose name seems rather ambiguous. ‘My Lord [of] York,’ it is said, ‘is at Sendall still, and waiteth on the queen, and she on him.’[171-2] The state of matters was evidently such that it was apprehended serious outrages might break out; and reports were even spread abroad of a battle in which Lord Beaumont had been slain and the Earl of Warwick severely wounded.[171-3]

[Footnote 171-1: Nos. 330, 331.]

[Footnote 171-2: No. 334.]

[Footnote 171-3: No. 331.]

[[Earl of Warwick severely wounded.[171-3] _text has superfluous close quote_]]