Part 5

[Footnote 38-2: It would appear that he had also an estate at Therfield, in Hertfordshire, as shown by an inscription in the east window of the north aisle of the parish church, in which were portraits of himself and his wife underwritten with the words, _Orate pro animabus domini Willelmi Paston et Agnetis uxoris ejus, benefactorum hujus ecclesiæ_ (Chauncey’s _Hertfordshire_, 88).]

[Footnote 39-1: Blomefield, viii. 127.]

[Footnote 39-2: _Patent Roll_, 4 Henry VI., p. 2, m. 13; Blomefield, viii. 102. A further notice relating to Judge Paston has been given me by Sir James Ramsay in the following memorandum:--‘£432 for arrears of salary due to late William Paston, paid to his executor, John Paston, from _parva custuma_ of the port of London. L.T.R. Enrolled Customs Account of Henry VI. (entry 8 Nov. 37 Hen. VI.--Mich. 38 Hen. VI.)’ in Public Record Office. So the arrears of the judge’s salary were only paid in 1458, fourteen years after his death.]

[Sidenote: John Paston’s marriage.] The notices of John Paston begin when he was on the eve of marrying, a few years before his father’s death. The match was evidently one that was arranged by the parents, after the fashion of the times. The lady was of a good family--daughter and heiress of John Mauteby, Esq. of Mauteby in Norfolk. The friends on both sides must have been satisfied that the union was a good one; for it had the one great merit which was then considered everything--it was no disparagement to the fortunes or the rank of either family. Beyond this hard business view, indeed, might have been found better arguments to recommend it; but English men and women in those days did not read novels, and had no great notion of cultivating sentiment for its own sake. Agnes Paston writes to her husband to intimate ‘the bringing home of the gentlewoman from Reedham,’ according to the arrangement he had made about it. It was, in her words, ‘the first acquaintance between John Paston and the said gentlewoman’ (one would think Dame Agnes must have learned from her husband to express herself with something of the formality of a lawyer); and we are glad to find that the young lady’s sense of propriety did not spoil her natural affability. ‘She made him gentle cheer in gentle wise, and said he was verily your son; and so I hope there shall need no great treaty between them.’ Finally the judge is requested by his wife to buy a gown for his future daughter-in-law, to which her mother would add a goodly fur. ‘The gown,’ says Dame Agnes, ‘needeth for to be had; and of colour it would be a goodly blue, or else a bright sanguine.’[40-1]

[Footnote 40-1: No. 34.]

[Sidenote: Character of his wife.] ‘The gentlewoman’ thus introduced to John Paston and the reader proved to the former a most devoted wife during about six-and-twenty years of married life. Her letters to her husband form no inconsiderable portion of the correspondence in these volumes, and it is impossible to peruse them without being convinced that the writer was a woman not only of great force of character, but of truly affectionate nature. It is true the ordinary style of these epistles is very different from that of wives addressing their husbands nowadays. There are no conventional expressions of tenderness--the conventionality of the age seems to have required not tenderness but humility on the part of women towards the head of a family; the subjects of the letters, too, are for the most part matters of pure business; yet the genuine womanly nature is seen bursting out whenever there is occasion to call it forth. Very early in the correspondence we meet with a letter of hers (No. 47) which in itself is pretty sufficient evidence that women, at least, were human in the fifteenth century. Her husband was at the time in London just beginning to recover from an illness which seems to have been occasioned by some injury he had met with. His mother had vowed to give an image of wax the weight of himself to Our Lady of Walsingham on his recovery, and Margaret to go on a pilgrimage thither, and also to St. Leonard’s at Norwich. That she did not undertake a journey of a hundred miles to do more efficient service was certainly not owing to any want of will on her part. The difficulties of travelling in those days, and the care of a young child, sufficiently account for her remaining in Norfolk; but apparently even these considerations would not have deterred her from the journey had she not been dissuaded from it by others. ‘If I might have had my will,’ she writes, ‘I should have seen you ere this time. I would ye were at home, if it were for your ease (and your sore might be as well looked to here as it is there ye be), now liever than a gown, though it were of scarlet.’ Could the sincerity of a woman’s wishes be more artlessly expressed?

Let not the reader suppose, however, that Margaret Paston’s acknowledged love of a scarlet gown indicates anything like frivolity of character or inordinate love of display. We have little reason to believe from her correspondence that dress was a ruling passion. The chief aim discernible in all she writes--the chief motive that influenced everything she did--was simply the desire to give her husband satisfaction. And her will to do him service was, in general, only equalled by her ability. During term time, when John Paston was in London, she was his agent at home. It was she who negotiated with farmers, receiving overtures for leases and threats of lawsuits, and reported to her husband everything that might affect his interests, with the news of the country generally. Nor were threats always the worst thing she had to encounter on his account. For even domestic life, in those days, was not always exempt from violence; and there were at least two occasions when Margaret had to endure, in her husband’s absence, things that a woman ought to have been spared.

[Sidenote: The Manor of Gresham.] One of these occasions we proceed to notice. The manor of Gresham, which William Paston had purchased from the son of the poet Chaucer, had been in the days of Edward II. the property of one Edmund Bacon, who obtained from that king a licence to embattle the manor-house. It descended from him to his two daughters, Margaret and Margery. The former became the wife of Sir William de Kerdeston, and her rights were inherited by a daughter named Maud, who married Sir John Burghersh.[41-1] This moiety came to Thomas Chaucer by his marriage with Maud Burghersh, the daughter of the Maud just mentioned. The other became at first the property of Sir William Molynes, who married Bacon’s second daughter Margery. But this Margery having survived her husband, made a settlement of it by will, according to which the reversion of it after the decease of one Philip Vache and of Elizabeth his wife, was to be sold; and William, son of Robert Molynes, was to have the first option of purchase. This William Molynes at first declined to buy it, being apparently in want of funds; but he afterwards got one Thomas Fauconer, a London merchant, to advance the purchase-money, on an agreement that his son should marry Fauconer’s daughter. The marriage, however, never took effect; the Molynes family lost all claim upon the manor, and the same Thomas Chaucer who acquired the other moiety by his wife, purchased this moiety also, and conveyed both to William Paston.[42-1]

[Footnote 41-1: _Inquisitions post-mortem_, 27 Edw. III., No. 28, and 30 Edw. III., No. 42. Blomefield inaccurately makes Maud, whom Sir John Burghersh married, the daughter of Edmond Bacon instead of his granddaughter.--(_Hist. of Norf._ viii. 127.)]

[Footnote 42-1: No. 16. Blomefield gives a somewhat different account, founded doubtless on documents to which I have not had access. He says that Margery, widow of Sir William Molynes, settled her portion of the manor on one Thomas de la Lynde, with the consent of her son Sir William Molynes, who resigned all claim to it.]

[[Footnote 41-1: _Inquisitions post-mortem_, 27 Edw. III., _comma after “III.” missing_]]

The whole manor of Gresham thus descended to John Paston, as his father’s heir. But a few years after his father’s death he was troubled in the possession of it by Robert Hungerford, son of Lord Hungerford, who, having married Eleanor Molynes, a descendant of the Sir William Molynes above referred to, had been raised to the peerage as Lord Molynes,and laid claim to the whole inheritance of the [Sidenote: Claimed by Lord Molynes.] Molynes family. He was still but a young man,[42-2] heir-apparent to another barony; and, with the prospect of a great inheritance both from his father and from his mother, who was the daughter and sole heir of William Lord Botraux, he certainly had little occasion to covet lands that were not his own. Nevertheless he listened to the counsels of John Heydon of Baconsthorpe, a lawyer who had been sheriff and also recorder of Norwich, and whom the gentry of Norfolk looked upon with anything but goodwill, regarding him as the ready tool of every powerful oppressor. His chief patron, with whom his name was constantly coupled, was Sir Thomas Tuddenham; and the two together, especially during the unpopular ministry of the Duke of Suffolk, exercised an ascendency in the county, of which we hear very numerous complaints. Heydon persuaded Lord Molynes that he had a good claim to the manor of Gresham; and Lord Molynes, without more ado, went in and took possession on the 17th of February 1448.[43-1]

[Footnote 42-2: According to the inquisition taken on his father’s death (_Inq. p. m._, 37 Hen. VI., No. 17), he was over thirty in June 1459. If we are to understand that he was then only in his thirty-first year, he could not have been twenty when he first dispossessed John Paston of Gresham. But ‘over thirty’ may perhaps mean two or three years over.]

[Footnote 43-1: No. 102.]

To recover his rights against a powerful young nobleman connected with various wealthy and influential families required, as John Paston knew, the exercise of great discretion. Instead of resorting at once to an

## action at law, he made representations to Lord Molynes and his legal

advisers to show how indefensible was the title they had set up for him. He secured some attention for his remonstrances by the intercession of Waynflete, bishop of Winchester.[43-2] Conferences took place between the counsel of both parties during the following summer, and the weakness of Lord Molynes’ case was practically confessed by his solicitors, who in the end told Paston to apply to his lordship personally. Paston accordingly, at no small expense to himself, went and waited upon him at Salisbury and elsewhere, but was continually put off. At last, on the 6th of October, not, as I believe, the same year, but the year following, he succeeded in doing to Lord Molynes to some extent what Lord Molynes had already done to him. He took possession of ‘a mansion within the said town,’ and occupied it himself, having doubtless a sufficiency of servants to guard against any sudden surprise. After this fashion he maintained his rights for a period of over three months. The usual residence of Lord Molynes was in Wiltshire, and his agents probably did not like the responsibility of attempting to remove John Paston without express orders from their master. But on the 28th of January 1450, while John Paston was away in London on business, there came before the mansion at Gresham a company of a thousand persons, sent to recover possession for Lord Molynes. They were armed with cuirasses and brigandines, with guns, bows, and arrows, and with every kind of offensive and defensive armour. They had also mining instruments, long poles with hooks, called cromes, used for pulling down houses, ladders, pickaxes, and pans with fire burning in them. With these formidable implements they beset the house, at that time occupied only by Margaret Paston and twelve other persons; and having broken open the outer gates, they set to work undermining the very chamber in which Margaret was. Resistance under the circumstances was impossible. Margaret was forcibly carried out. The house was then thoroughly rifled of all that it contained--property estimated by John Paston at £200[44-1]--the doorposts were cut asunder, and the place was left little better than a ruin. Further, that there might be no mistake about the spirit in which the outrage was perpetrated, the rioters declared openly, that if they had found John Paston, or his friend John Damme, who had aided him with his counsel about these matters, neither of them should have escaped alive.[44-2]

[Footnote 43-2: No. 79.]

[Footnote 44-1: A value probably equal to about £3000 of our money.]

[Footnote 44-2: Nos. 102, 135.]

John Paston drew up a petition for redress to Parliament, and another to the Lord Chancellor; but it was some months before his case could be attended to, for that year was one of confusion and disorder unparalleled. It was that year, in fact, which may be said to have witnessed the first outbreak of a long, intermittent civil war. History has not passed over in silence the troubles of 1450. [Sidenote: Troubled times, A.D. 1450.] The rebellion of Jack Cade, and the murder of two bishops in different parts of the country, were facts which no historian could treat as wholly insignificant. Many writers have even repeated the old slander, which there seems no good reason to believe, that Jack Cade’s insurrection was promoted by the intrigues of the Duke of York; but no one appears to me to have realised the precise nature of the crisis that necessarily followed the removal of the Duke of Suffolk. And as we have now arrived at the point where the Paston Letters begin to have a most direct bearing on English history, we must endeavour in a few words of historical retrospect to make the matter as clear as possible.

_The Duke of Suffolk_

[Sidenote: Fall of the Duke of Suffolk.] As to the causes of Suffolk’s fall we are not left in ignorance. Not only do we possess the full text of the long indictment drawn up against him this year in Parliament, but a number of political ballads and satires, in which he is continually spoken of by the name of Jack Napes, help us to realise the feeling with which he was generally regarded. Of his real merits as a statesman, it is hard to pronounce an opinion; for though, obviously enough, his whole policy was a failure, he himself seems to have been aware from the first that it was not likely to be popular. Two great difficulties he had to contend with, each sufficient to give serious anxiety to any minister whatever: the first being the utter weakness of the king’s character; the second, the practical impossibility of maintaining the English conquests in France. To secure both himself and the nation against the uncertainties which might arise from the vacillating counsels of one who seems hardly ever to have been able to judge for himself in State affairs, he may have thought it politic to ally the king with a woman of stronger will than his own. At all events, if this was his intention, he certainly achieved it. The marriage of Henry with Margaret of Anjou was his work; and from Margaret he afterwards obtained a protection which he would certainly not have received from her well-intentioned but feeble-minded husband.

[Sidenote: The king’s marriage.] This marriage undoubtedly recommended itself to Henry himself as a great means of promoting peace with France. The pious, humane, and Christian character of the king disposed him favourably towards all pacific counsels, and gave him a high opinion of the statesman whose policy most obviously had in view the termination of the disastrous war between France and England. King René, the father of Margaret of Anjou, was the brother of the French king’s consort; so it was conceived that by his and Margaret’s intercession a permanent peace might be obtained, honourable to both countries. For this end, Henry was willing to relinquish his barren title to the kingdom of France, if he could have been secured in the possession of those lands only, such as Guienne and Normandy, which he held irrespective of that title.[45-1] He was willing to relinquish even the duchies of Anjou and Maine, King René’s patrimony, though the latter had long been in the possession of the English. It was of course out of the question that Henry should continue to keep the father of his bride by force out of his own lands. Suffolk therefore promised to give them up to the French king, for the use of René and his brother, Charles of Anjou; so that instead of the former giving his daughter a dower, England was called upon to part with some of her conquests. But how would the English nation reconcile itself to such a condition? Suffolk knew well he was treading in a dangerous path, and took every possible precaution to secure himself. He pleaded beforehand his own incompetency for the charge that was committed to him. He urged that his familiarity with the Duke of Orleans and other French prisoners lately detained in England brought him under suspicion at home, and rendered him a less fitting ambassador for arranging matters with France. Finally he obtained from the King and Council an instrument under the Great Seal, pardoning him beforehand any error of judgment he might possibly commit in conducting so critical a negotiation.[46-1]

[Footnote 45-1: Stevenson’s _Wars of the English in France_, i. 132.]

[Footnote 46-1: Rymer, xi. 53.]

His success, if judged by the immediate result, seemed to show that so much diffidence was unnecessary. The people at large rejoiced in the marriage of their king; the bride, if poor, was beautiful and attractive; the negotiator received the thanks of Parliament, and there was not a man in all the kingdom,--at least in all the legislature--durst wag his tongue in censure. The Duke of Gloucester, his chief rival and opponent in the senate, was the first to rise from his seat and recommend Suffolk, for his services, to the favour of the Crown.[46-2] If he had really committed any mistakes, they were as yet unknown, or at all events uncriticised. Even the cession of Maine and Anjou at this time does not seem to have been spoken of.

[Footnote 46-2: _Rolls of Parl._ v. 73. That Gloucester secretly disliked Suffolk’s policy, and thought the peace with France too dearly bought, is more than probable. At the reception of the French ambassadors in 1445, we learn from their report that Henry looked exceedingly pleased, especially when his uncle the French king was mentioned. ‘And on his left hand were my Lord of Gloucester, at whom he looked at the time, and then he turned round to the right to the chancellor, and the Earl of Suffolk, and the Cardinal of York, who were there, smiling to them, and it was very obvious that he made some signal. And it was afterwards mentioned by-------- (_blank in orig._), that he pressed his Chancellor’s hand and said to him in English, “I am very much rejoiced that some who are present should hear these words. They are not at their ease.”’--Stevenson’s _Wars of the English in France_, i. 110-11.]

Happy in the confidence of his sovereign, Suffolk was promoted to more distinguished honour. From an earl he was raised to the dignity of a marquis; from a marquisate, a few years later, to a dukedom. He had already supplanted older statesmen with far greater advantages of birth and pre-eminence of rank. [Sidenote: Suffolk’s ascendency.] The two great rivals, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, and Cardinal Beaufort, were both eclipsed, and both died, within six weeks of each other, two years after the king’s marriage, leaving Suffolk the only minister of mark. But his position was not improved by this undisputed ascendency. [Sidenote: A.D. 1447.] The death of Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, aroused suspicions in the public mind that were perhaps due merely to time and circumstance. Duke Humphrey, with many defects in his character, had always been a popular favourite, and just before his death he had been arrested on a charge of treason. That he could not possibly have remained quiet under the new _régime_ is a fact that we might presume as a matter of course, but there is no clear evidence that he was guilty of intrigue or conspiracy. The king, indeed, appears to have thought he was so, but his opinions were formed by those of Suffolk and the Queen; and both Suffolk and the Queen were such enemies of Duke Humphrey, that they were vehemently suspected of having procured his death.[47-1]

[Footnote 47-1: An interesting and valuable account of the death of Duke Humphrey, from original sources, will be found in _The Hall of Lawford Hall_, pp. 104-13.]

Complaints against the minister now began to be made more openly, and his conduct touching the surrender of Anjou and Maine was so generally censured, that he petitioned the king that a day might be appointed on which he should have an opportunity of clearing himself before the Council. On the 25th of May 1447 his wish was granted, and in the presence of a full Council, including the Duke of York, and others who might have been expected to be no very favourable critics, he gave a detailed account of all that he had done. How far he made a really favourable impression upon his hearers we do not know; but in the end he was declared to have vindicated his integrity, and a proclamation was issued forbidding the circulation of such slanders against him in future, under penalty of the king’s displeasure.[48-1]

[Footnote 48-1: Rymer, xi. 173.]