The Strife of Parties

‘To the ryght hiegh and myghty Prince, oure most worschipfull and gretely redoubted lorde and fader, the Duke of Yorke, Protector and Defensor of Englonde.‘Ryght hiegh and myghty Prince, oure most worschipfull and gretely redoubted lorde and Fader, in as lowely wyse as any sonnes con or may we recomaunde us un to youre good lordeschip. And plaese hit youre hieghnesse to witte that we have receyved youre worschipful lettres yesturday by your servaunt William Cleton, beryng date at Yorke the xxix day of Maij, by the whiche William and by the relacion of John Milewatier we conceyve your worschipfull and victorious spede ageinest your enemyse, to ther grete shame, and to us the most comfortable tydinges that we desired to here. Where of we thonke Almyghty God of his yeftes, beseching Hym hertely to geve yowe that grace and cotidian fortune here aftur to knowe your enemyse and to have the victory of them. And yef hit plaese your hieghnesse to knowe of oure wilfare, at the makyng of this lettre we were in good helith of bodis, thonked be God; beseching your good and graciouse Faderhode of youre daily blessing. And where ye comaunde149us by your said lettres to attende specialy to oure lernyng in our yong age that schulde cause us to growe to honour and worschip in our olde age, Please hit youre hieghnesse to witte that we have attended owre lernyng sith we come heder, and schall here aftur; by the whiche we trust to God youre graciouse lordeschip and good Fadurhode schall be plaesid. Also we beseche your good lordeschip that hit may plaese yowe to sende us Harry Lovedeyne, grome of your kechyn, whos service is to us ryght agreable; and we will sende yow John Boyes to wayte on youre good Lordeschip. Ryght hiegh and myghty Prince, our most worschipfull and gretely redoubted lorde and Fader, We beseche Almyghty God yeve yowe as good lyfe and longe as youre owne Princely hert con best desire. Writen at your Castill of Lodelow the iij day of June.—Youre humble sonnes,‘E. Marche,‘E. Rutlond.’Soon after the duke had returned to London his presence was required at a Great Council summoned for the 18th of July, to consider the expediency of liberating on bail his great rival and personal enemy, the Duke of Somerset, who had been now seven months in prison.The Duke of Somerset.On this point York had only one piece of advice to offer, which was, that as he had been committed to custody upon suspicion of treason, the opinion of the judges should be taken before he was released from confinement. That he had remained so long without a trial was not unnatural, considering the nature of the times. It was a bold step indeed to try him at all, while there was a chance of the weak-minded king’s recovery; but this step was certainly resolved on. The 28th of October was the day appointed for his trial; and the Duke of Norfolk, who, as we have seen, had been the first to move the capital charge against him, was ordered by that day to be ready to produce his proofs. Meanwhile the lords concurred that it was clearly inexpedient to let him go, especially as the number of lords assembled was not so great as it should have been on the occasion; and the opinion of the Duke of York was not only agreed to, but at his request was put on record.149.1Six days later it was agreed at another meeting of the150Council that the Duke of York should return into the North with the Duke of Exeter in his custody, whom he was to confine in the castle of Pomfret as a state prisoner.150.1By these decisive steps the authority of the Duke of York was at length secured on something like a stable footing. During the remainder of his protectorate there could no longer be a doubt to whose hands power was committed; and England, at last, had the blessing of real government, able and vigorous, but at the same time moderate. The resolutions of the Council soon became known to the public. ‘As for tidings,’ wrote William Paston to his brother in Norfolk, ‘my lord of York hath taken my lord of Exeter into his award. The Duke of Somerset is still in prison, in worse case than he was.’ William Paston wrote in haste, but these were two matters of public importance to be mentioned before all private affairs whatever.150.2And yet the private affairs of which he wrote in the same letter will not be without interest to the readers of this Introduction.Sir J. Fastolf goes to reside in Norfolk.William Paston now reported to his brother that Sir John Fastolf was about to take his journey into Norfolk within a few days, and proposed to take up his residence at Caister. His going thither must have been regarded as an event not only in the neighbourhood of Yarmouth but even in the city of Norwich. At all events it was highly important to John Paston, whose advice the old knight valued in many matters. ‘He saith,’ wrote William Paston to his brother, ‘ye are the heartiest kinsman and friend that he knoweth. He would have you at Mauteby150.3dwelling.’ This must have been written in the latter part of July. Sir John did not actually go into Norfolk quite so soon as he intended; but he appears to have been there by the beginning of September.150.4There in his completed castle of Caister he had at length taken up his abode, to spend the evening of his days in the place of his birth, and on the inheritance of his ancestors. There during the next five years he spent his time, counting151over the items of a number of unsettled claims he had against the crown,151.1and meditating also, it would seem, on another account he had with Heaven. For the latter the foundation of a college151.2or religious endowment, in which were to be maintained ‘seven priests and seven poor folk’ at Caister, might possibly liquidate his debts. But in his transactions with his fellowmen he was certainly for the most part a creditor, and by no means one of the most generous. Instances will be found in his letters in abundance showing with what vehemence (testy old soldier that he was!) he perpetually insisted on what was due to himself;—how he desired to know the names of those who would presume to resist his agent, Sir Thomas Howes—how they should be requited ‘by Blackbeard or Whitebeard, that is to say, by God or the Devil’;151.3—how he noted that Sir John Buck had fished his stanks and helped to break his dam;151.4how he had been informed that at a dinner at Norwich certain gentlemen had used scornful language about him, and desired to know who they were.151.5In this perpetual self-assertion he seems neither to have been over-indulgent towards adversaries nor even sufficiently considerate of friends and dependants. ‘Cruel and vengeable he hath been ever,’ says his own servant Henry Windsor, ‘and for the most part without pity and mercy.’151.6So also on the part of his faithful secretary, William Worcester, we find a complaint of shabby treatment, apparently at this very time when the household was removed to Caister. To a letter in which John Paston had addressed him as ‘Master Worcester,’ the latter replied with a request that he would ‘forget that name of mastership,’ for his position was by no means so greatly improved as to entitle him to such respect. His salary was not increased by one farthing in certainty—only ‘wages of household in common,entaunt come nows plaira’—which apparently means, assured to him only during his master’s pleasure. When he complained to his master of this, all the satisfaction he obtained was that Sir John expressed a152wish he had been a priest, when he could have rewarded him with a living.152.1There 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.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, andMSS.still exist in his handwriting relating to the holding of manorial courts there.152.2He had also been Fastolf’s secretary in drawing up various statements regarding the wars in France in vindication of his master’s policy.152.3He was a man of literary tastes, who had already presented some compositions to his patron.152.4Later 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.152.5From 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.’152.6But153he 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 treatisede 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.153.1The 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.153.2Along 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.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 the154manner 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.154.1Stephen 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 RichardII.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.154.2Of this first wife of Stephen Scrope we know nothing,154.3155except 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 knight155.1whose 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.’155.2The 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.’155.3Such was the rough domestic discipline to which even girls in those days were occasionally subjected!156Some 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;156.1before which time we find various other proposals for her hand besides that of Scrope.156.2Among 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.156.3130.3W. Worc. In an almanac of that time I find the following note, which dates the beginning of the king’s illness on the 10th of August:—‘In nocte S. Laurentii Rex infirmatur et continuavit usque ad Circumcisionem Anni 1455, in p. . . .’ (?) (a word unintelligible at the end).MS.Reg. 13, C. 1.131.1W. Worc.131.2Nicolas’sPrivy Council Proceedings, vi. 140-2, 147-9, 154-5.132.1Nicolas’sPrivy Council Proceedings, vi. 163-5.132.2Patent Roll, 32 Hen.VI.m. 20.SeeAppendix to this Introduction.132.3No. 230.133.1No. 235.133.2Ibid.134.1No. 235.135.1Rolls of Parl.v. 238-9.135.2No. 235.135.3Rolls of Parl.vi. 295.136.1No. 235.136.2Rolls of Parl.v. 238-9.137.1Rolls of Parl.v. 239-40.137.2Ibid.240.138.1Rolls of Parl.v. 240.138.2Ibid.241.139.1Nos. 124, 240.140.1Nos. 238, 239.141.1No. 239.141.2No. 244.141.3Apparently Agnes Denyes had taken sanctuary at Westminster before her imprisonment. The manner in which Denyes here speaks of her daughter gives us reason to believe that she was a widow before he married her.142.1Nos. 240, 245.143.1Nicolas’sPrivy Council Proceedings, vol. vi. preface, pp. clxxviii.-ix.143.2Rolls of Parl.240-1.144.1Rolls of Parl.241.146.1Rolls of Parl.v. 242.146.2Ibid.243.146.3Rolls of Parl.244-5.146.4No. 249.147.1No. 247.147.2Nicolas’sPrivy Council Proceedings, vi. 174.147.3Rymer, xi. 351. Carte’sGascon and French Rolls.147.4Rolls of Parl.v. 252.148.1Nicolas’sPrivy Council Proceedings, vi. 178, 193-7. Nos. 247, 249.148.2Printed from the original inMS.Cott., Vespasian F. xiii. fol. 35.149.1Nicolas’sPrivy Council Proceedings, vi. 207.150.1Nicolas’sPrivy Council Proceedings, vi. 217, 218.150.2No. 254.150.3The manor of Mauteby, which came to John Paston by his marriage, was only three miles distant from Caister.150.4No. 260.151.1Nos. 309, 310.151.2Nos. 340, 350, 351, 385, 386, 387.151.3No. 125.151.4Nos. 160, 161.151.5No. 272.151.6No. 332.152.1Nos. 258, 259.152.2Add.MS.28,208, B.M.152.3Stevenson’sWars, ii. [519],sq.152.4‘Stellæ versificatæ pro anno 1440 ad instantiam J. Fastolfe militis.’MS.Laud., B. 23 (according to the old pressmark).152.5Letter 370.152.6In 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 (seevol. 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.153.1Itin. 368.153.2Tanner’sBibliotheca.Seealso a notice of William Worcester inRetrospective Review, Second Series, ii. 451-4.154.1No. 97.154.2Scrope’sHistory of the Manor of Castle Combe, pp. 264-283. TheMSS.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. 97.154.3She 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.155.1Letter 94.155.2No. 93.155.3No. 94.156.1SeeNo. 374.156.2Nos. 236, 250, 252.156.3We 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 entitledDitz de Philosophius(Sayings of Philosophers), of which the originalMS.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.began to exhibit symptoms of mental derangementtext reads “symptons”on its reassembling.136.2final . missingThe Strife of PartiesThe 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 we157know 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.’157.1A.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.157.2Joy 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—he158was 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.158.1On 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.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.158.2The 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,159York was deprived of the government of Calais which he had undertaken by indenture for seven years.159.1On 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,159.2but that considerable fears were entertained of an invasion of England.159.3But 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.159.4York 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 a160company 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.160.1Next 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 VolumeIII.160.2In 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.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 left161London 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.161.1For 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.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,162as the numbers were at first reported. This, however, seems to have been an over-estimate.162.1The 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.162.2Thus 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 EdwardII.; 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.162.3The 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.162.4Meanwhile the duke was made Constable of England, and Lord Bourchier, Treasurer. The defence of Calais was committed to the Earl of Warwick.162.5There was, however, no entire and sweeping163change made in the officers of state. The Great Seal was allowed to continue in the hands of Archbishop Bourchier.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.163.1The 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 which164account she requests his vote and influence in favour of John Howard and Sir Roger Chamberlain.164.1The 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;164.2and at the nomination the names of Berney, Grey, and Paston were received with great favour.164.3John 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.164.4Besides 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 from165the severe shock that he must have received by the battle of St. Albans,165.1had 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.165.2He 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.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.165.3Altogether 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 HenryIV.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,Disturbances in the West.and the West of England seems to have been disturbed for some time afterwards.165.4From a localMS.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 theMS.differently, and tells us that Lord Bonvile was driven into the city by defeat.165.5However this may be, the Earl of Devonshire did not allow the matter to rest. Accompanied166by 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.166.1That 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.166.2The 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.166.3The 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.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 to167exercise his functions, the Protector should be discharged of his office in Parliament by the advice of the Lords Spiritual and Temporal.167.1On 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.167.2The 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.167.3A.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.167.4The 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 his168place. 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 newrégime. 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.168.1At 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.168.2Again discharged.An Act of Resumption, rendered necessary by the state of the revenue, was the principal fruit of its deliberations.168.3The 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;168.4but with the exception of one single occasion, when it was necessary to169issue a commission for the trial of insurgents in Kent,169.1there is not a single record left to tell us what was done at them.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 JamesII., the reigning king of Scotland, who is said to have resented his death on the ground of consanguinity.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.169.2How 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.169.3A message more170calculated 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.170.1A 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.170.2The 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.170.3The 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.171Thus, 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.171.1Afterwards 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.’171.2The 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 severelywounded.171.3The king and queen.The separation of the king and queen is especially remarkable. During May and June they were more than a hundred miles apart; and in the latter month the queen had increased the distance by removing from Tutbury in Staffordshire to Chester. It was then that she was said to be waiting on my Lord of York and he on her. The exact interpretation of the position must be partly matter of conjecture, but I take it to be as follows. The Duke of York, as we find stated only a few months later, was in very good favour with the king but not with the queen;171.4and we know from Fabyan that the latter was at this time doing all she could to put an end to his authority. It appears to me that by her influence the duke must have been ordered to withdraw from the Court, and that to prevent his again seeking access to the king’s presence, she pursued him into the north. At Tutbury171.5she would block his way from Sandal up to London; and though for some reason or other she removed further off to Chester, she still kept an anxious watch upon the duke, and he did the same on her. Very probably her removal did give him the opportunity she dreaded of moving southwards; for he must have been172with the king at Windsor on the 26th of July when he wrote in Henry’s name that answer to the King of Scots of which we have already spoken.However this may be, Margaret soon after had recourse to other means to effect her object. In consequence of the Duke of York’s popularity in London, it was expedient to remove the king some distance from the capital.172.1He appears to have been staying at Windsor during July and the beginning of August. In the middle of the latter month he took his departure northwards. By the dates of his Privy Seals we find him to have been at Wycombe on the 18th, at Kenilworth on the 24th, and at Lichfield on the 29th. In September he moved about between Lichfield, Coventry, and Leicester; but by the beginning of October the Court seems to have settled itself at Coventry, where a council was assembled on the 7th.172.2To this council the Duke of York and his friends were regularly summoned, as well as the lords whom the queen intended to honour; but even before it met, changes had begun to be made in the principal officers of state. On the 5th, Viscount Bourchier, the brother of the Archbishop of Canterbury, was dismissed from his office of Lord Treasurer, and the Earl of Shrewsbury was appointed in his room. On the 11th, the archbishop himself was called upon to surrender the Great Seal, and Waynflete, Bishop of Winchester, was made Chancellor in his stead. Laurence Booth, afterwards Bishop of Durham, was made Lord Privy Seal.The new appointments seem to have been on their own merits unexceptionable,—that of Waynflete more especially. Whether the superiority of the new men was such as to make it advisable to supersede the old is another question, on which we would not attempt to pronounce an opinion, either one way or other. One thing, however, we may believe on the evidence of James Gresham, whose letters frequently give us very interesting political intelligence: the changes created dissatisfaction in some of the queen’s own friends, particularly in the Duke of Buckingham, who was half-brother to two of the discharged functionaries, the Archbishop of Canterbury and173Viscount Bourchier. Either from this cause or from a mere English love of fair-play, it would appear that Buckingham now supported the Duke of York, who, it is said, though at this time he had some interviews with the king and found Henry still as friendly as he could desire, would certainly have been troubled at his departure if Buckingham had not befriended him. About the Court there was a general atmosphere of suspicion and distrust. On the 11th October, the very day on which Waynflete was appointed Chancellor, an encounter took place between the Duke of Somerset’s men and the watchmen of the city of Coventry, in which two or three of the citizens were killed. And probably it would have gone hard with the duke’s retainers, had not Buckingham used his good offices here too as peacemaker; for the alarm-bell rang and the citizens rose in arms. But by the interposition of Buckingham the tumult was appeased.173.1A.D.1457.For about a twelvemonth from this time we find that the Court continued generally at Coventry,173.2occasionally moving about to Stafford, Coleshill, Chester, Shrewsbury, Kenilworth, Hereford, and Leicester.173.3The queen evidently feared all the while to bring her husband nearer London, lest he should fall once more under the power of the Duke of York. Meanwhile the want of a vigorous ruler became every day more apparent. Not only was Calais again in danger of siege,173.4but the coast of Kent was attacked by enemies, and within the kingdom a dangerous spirit of disaffection had shown itself in various places. On the Patent Rolls we meet with numerous commissions for keeping watch upon the coasts,173.5for arraying the country against invasion,173.6and for assembling theposse comitatusin various counties, against treasonable attempts to stir up the people.173.7During April the Court had removed to174Hereford,174.1apparently in consequence of some disturbances which had taken place in Wales under Sir William Herbert. Its sojourn upon the Welsh borders had an excellent effect, the burgesses and gentlemen about Hereford all declaring themselves ready to take the king’s part unless a peace were made. On the 1st of May it was reported in London that Herbert had offered, on being granted his life and goods, to return to his allegiance and appear before the king and lords at Leicester; so we may conclude the insurrection did not last long after.174.2

‘To the ryght hiegh and myghty Prince, oure most worschipfull and gretely redoubted lorde and fader, the Duke of Yorke, Protector and Defensor of Englonde.‘Ryght hiegh and myghty Prince, oure most worschipfull and gretely redoubted lorde and Fader, in as lowely wyse as any sonnes con or may we recomaunde us un to youre good lordeschip. And plaese hit youre hieghnesse to witte that we have receyved youre worschipful lettres yesturday by your servaunt William Cleton, beryng date at Yorke the xxix day of Maij, by the whiche William and by the relacion of John Milewatier we conceyve your worschipfull and victorious spede ageinest your enemyse, to ther grete shame, and to us the most comfortable tydinges that we desired to here. Where of we thonke Almyghty God of his yeftes, beseching Hym hertely to geve yowe that grace and cotidian fortune here aftur to knowe your enemyse and to have the victory of them. And yef hit plaese your hieghnesse to knowe of oure wilfare, at the makyng of this lettre we were in good helith of bodis, thonked be God; beseching your good and graciouse Faderhode of youre daily blessing. And where ye comaunde149us by your said lettres to attende specialy to oure lernyng in our yong age that schulde cause us to growe to honour and worschip in our olde age, Please hit youre hieghnesse to witte that we have attended owre lernyng sith we come heder, and schall here aftur; by the whiche we trust to God youre graciouse lordeschip and good Fadurhode schall be plaesid. Also we beseche your good lordeschip that hit may plaese yowe to sende us Harry Lovedeyne, grome of your kechyn, whos service is to us ryght agreable; and we will sende yow John Boyes to wayte on youre good Lordeschip. Ryght hiegh and myghty Prince, our most worschipfull and gretely redoubted lorde and Fader, We beseche Almyghty God yeve yowe as good lyfe and longe as youre owne Princely hert con best desire. Writen at your Castill of Lodelow the iij day of June.—Youre humble sonnes,‘E. Marche,‘E. Rutlond.’Soon after the duke had returned to London his presence was required at a Great Council summoned for the 18th of July, to consider the expediency of liberating on bail his great rival and personal enemy, the Duke of Somerset, who had been now seven months in prison.The Duke of Somerset.On this point York had only one piece of advice to offer, which was, that as he had been committed to custody upon suspicion of treason, the opinion of the judges should be taken before he was released from confinement. That he had remained so long without a trial was not unnatural, considering the nature of the times. It was a bold step indeed to try him at all, while there was a chance of the weak-minded king’s recovery; but this step was certainly resolved on. The 28th of October was the day appointed for his trial; and the Duke of Norfolk, who, as we have seen, had been the first to move the capital charge against him, was ordered by that day to be ready to produce his proofs. Meanwhile the lords concurred that it was clearly inexpedient to let him go, especially as the number of lords assembled was not so great as it should have been on the occasion; and the opinion of the Duke of York was not only agreed to, but at his request was put on record.149.1Six days later it was agreed at another meeting of the150Council that the Duke of York should return into the North with the Duke of Exeter in his custody, whom he was to confine in the castle of Pomfret as a state prisoner.150.1By these decisive steps the authority of the Duke of York was at length secured on something like a stable footing. During the remainder of his protectorate there could no longer be a doubt to whose hands power was committed; and England, at last, had the blessing of real government, able and vigorous, but at the same time moderate. The resolutions of the Council soon became known to the public. ‘As for tidings,’ wrote William Paston to his brother in Norfolk, ‘my lord of York hath taken my lord of Exeter into his award. The Duke of Somerset is still in prison, in worse case than he was.’ William Paston wrote in haste, but these were two matters of public importance to be mentioned before all private affairs whatever.150.2And yet the private affairs of which he wrote in the same letter will not be without interest to the readers of this Introduction.Sir J. Fastolf goes to reside in Norfolk.William Paston now reported to his brother that Sir John Fastolf was about to take his journey into Norfolk within a few days, and proposed to take up his residence at Caister. His going thither must have been regarded as an event not only in the neighbourhood of Yarmouth but even in the city of Norwich. At all events it was highly important to John Paston, whose advice the old knight valued in many matters. ‘He saith,’ wrote William Paston to his brother, ‘ye are the heartiest kinsman and friend that he knoweth. He would have you at Mauteby150.3dwelling.’ This must have been written in the latter part of July. Sir John did not actually go into Norfolk quite so soon as he intended; but he appears to have been there by the beginning of September.150.4There in his completed castle of Caister he had at length taken up his abode, to spend the evening of his days in the place of his birth, and on the inheritance of his ancestors. There during the next five years he spent his time, counting151over the items of a number of unsettled claims he had against the crown,151.1and meditating also, it would seem, on another account he had with Heaven. For the latter the foundation of a college151.2or religious endowment, in which were to be maintained ‘seven priests and seven poor folk’ at Caister, might possibly liquidate his debts. But in his transactions with his fellowmen he was certainly for the most part a creditor, and by no means one of the most generous. Instances will be found in his letters in abundance showing with what vehemence (testy old soldier that he was!) he perpetually insisted on what was due to himself;—how he desired to know the names of those who would presume to resist his agent, Sir Thomas Howes—how they should be requited ‘by Blackbeard or Whitebeard, that is to say, by God or the Devil’;151.3—how he noted that Sir John Buck had fished his stanks and helped to break his dam;151.4how he had been informed that at a dinner at Norwich certain gentlemen had used scornful language about him, and desired to know who they were.151.5In this perpetual self-assertion he seems neither to have been over-indulgent towards adversaries nor even sufficiently considerate of friends and dependants. ‘Cruel and vengeable he hath been ever,’ says his own servant Henry Windsor, ‘and for the most part without pity and mercy.’151.6So also on the part of his faithful secretary, William Worcester, we find a complaint of shabby treatment, apparently at this very time when the household was removed to Caister. To a letter in which John Paston had addressed him as ‘Master Worcester,’ the latter replied with a request that he would ‘forget that name of mastership,’ for his position was by no means so greatly improved as to entitle him to such respect. His salary was not increased by one farthing in certainty—only ‘wages of household in common,entaunt come nows plaira’—which apparently means, assured to him only during his master’s pleasure. When he complained to his master of this, all the satisfaction he obtained was that Sir John expressed a152wish he had been a priest, when he could have rewarded him with a living.152.1There 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.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, andMSS.still exist in his handwriting relating to the holding of manorial courts there.152.2He had also been Fastolf’s secretary in drawing up various statements regarding the wars in France in vindication of his master’s policy.152.3He was a man of literary tastes, who had already presented some compositions to his patron.152.4Later 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.152.5From 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.’152.6But153he 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 treatisede 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.153.1The 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.153.2Along 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.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 the154manner 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.154.1Stephen 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 RichardII.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.154.2Of this first wife of Stephen Scrope we know nothing,154.3155except 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 knight155.1whose 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.’155.2The 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.’155.3Such was the rough domestic discipline to which even girls in those days were occasionally subjected!156Some 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;156.1before which time we find various other proposals for her hand besides that of Scrope.156.2Among 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.156.3130.3W. Worc. In an almanac of that time I find the following note, which dates the beginning of the king’s illness on the 10th of August:—‘In nocte S. Laurentii Rex infirmatur et continuavit usque ad Circumcisionem Anni 1455, in p. . . .’ (?) (a word unintelligible at the end).MS.Reg. 13, C. 1.131.1W. Worc.131.2Nicolas’sPrivy Council Proceedings, vi. 140-2, 147-9, 154-5.132.1Nicolas’sPrivy Council Proceedings, vi. 163-5.132.2Patent Roll, 32 Hen.VI.m. 20.SeeAppendix to this Introduction.132.3No. 230.133.1No. 235.133.2Ibid.134.1No. 235.135.1Rolls of Parl.v. 238-9.135.2No. 235.135.3Rolls of Parl.vi. 295.136.1No. 235.136.2Rolls of Parl.v. 238-9.137.1Rolls of Parl.v. 239-40.137.2Ibid.240.138.1Rolls of Parl.v. 240.138.2Ibid.241.139.1Nos. 124, 240.140.1Nos. 238, 239.141.1No. 239.141.2No. 244.141.3Apparently Agnes Denyes had taken sanctuary at Westminster before her imprisonment. The manner in which Denyes here speaks of her daughter gives us reason to believe that she was a widow before he married her.142.1Nos. 240, 245.143.1Nicolas’sPrivy Council Proceedings, vol. vi. preface, pp. clxxviii.-ix.143.2Rolls of Parl.240-1.144.1Rolls of Parl.241.146.1Rolls of Parl.v. 242.146.2Ibid.243.146.3Rolls of Parl.244-5.146.4No. 249.147.1No. 247.147.2Nicolas’sPrivy Council Proceedings, vi. 174.147.3Rymer, xi. 351. Carte’sGascon and French Rolls.147.4Rolls of Parl.v. 252.148.1Nicolas’sPrivy Council Proceedings, vi. 178, 193-7. Nos. 247, 249.148.2Printed from the original inMS.Cott., Vespasian F. xiii. fol. 35.149.1Nicolas’sPrivy Council Proceedings, vi. 207.150.1Nicolas’sPrivy Council Proceedings, vi. 217, 218.150.2No. 254.150.3The manor of Mauteby, which came to John Paston by his marriage, was only three miles distant from Caister.150.4No. 260.151.1Nos. 309, 310.151.2Nos. 340, 350, 351, 385, 386, 387.151.3No. 125.151.4Nos. 160, 161.151.5No. 272.151.6No. 332.152.1Nos. 258, 259.152.2Add.MS.28,208, B.M.152.3Stevenson’sWars, ii. [519],sq.152.4‘Stellæ versificatæ pro anno 1440 ad instantiam J. Fastolfe militis.’MS.Laud., B. 23 (according to the old pressmark).152.5Letter 370.152.6In 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 (seevol. 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.153.1Itin. 368.153.2Tanner’sBibliotheca.Seealso a notice of William Worcester inRetrospective Review, Second Series, ii. 451-4.154.1No. 97.154.2Scrope’sHistory of the Manor of Castle Combe, pp. 264-283. TheMSS.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. 97.154.3She 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.155.1Letter 94.155.2No. 93.155.3No. 94.156.1SeeNo. 374.156.2Nos. 236, 250, 252.156.3We 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 entitledDitz de Philosophius(Sayings of Philosophers), of which the originalMS.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.began to exhibit symptoms of mental derangementtext reads “symptons”on its reassembling.136.2final . missingThe Strife of PartiesThe 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 we157know 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.’157.1A.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.157.2Joy 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—he158was 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.158.1On 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.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.158.2The 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,159York was deprived of the government of Calais which he had undertaken by indenture for seven years.159.1On 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,159.2but that considerable fears were entertained of an invasion of England.159.3But 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.159.4York 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 a160company 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.160.1Next 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 VolumeIII.160.2In 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.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 left161London 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.161.1For 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.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,162as the numbers were at first reported. This, however, seems to have been an over-estimate.162.1The 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.162.2Thus 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 EdwardII.; 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.162.3The 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.162.4Meanwhile the duke was made Constable of England, and Lord Bourchier, Treasurer. The defence of Calais was committed to the Earl of Warwick.162.5There was, however, no entire and sweeping163change made in the officers of state. The Great Seal was allowed to continue in the hands of Archbishop Bourchier.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.163.1The 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 which164account she requests his vote and influence in favour of John Howard and Sir Roger Chamberlain.164.1The 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;164.2and at the nomination the names of Berney, Grey, and Paston were received with great favour.164.3John 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.164.4Besides 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 from165the severe shock that he must have received by the battle of St. Albans,165.1had 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.165.2He 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.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.165.3Altogether 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 HenryIV.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,Disturbances in the West.and the West of England seems to have been disturbed for some time afterwards.165.4From a localMS.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 theMS.differently, and tells us that Lord Bonvile was driven into the city by defeat.165.5However this may be, the Earl of Devonshire did not allow the matter to rest. Accompanied166by 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.166.1That 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.166.2The 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.166.3The 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.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 to167exercise his functions, the Protector should be discharged of his office in Parliament by the advice of the Lords Spiritual and Temporal.167.1On 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.167.2The 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.167.3A.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.167.4The 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 his168place. 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 newrégime. 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.168.1At 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.168.2Again discharged.An Act of Resumption, rendered necessary by the state of the revenue, was the principal fruit of its deliberations.168.3The 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;168.4but with the exception of one single occasion, when it was necessary to169issue a commission for the trial of insurgents in Kent,169.1there is not a single record left to tell us what was done at them.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 JamesII., the reigning king of Scotland, who is said to have resented his death on the ground of consanguinity.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.169.2How 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.169.3A message more170calculated 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.170.1A 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.170.2The 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.170.3The 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.171Thus, 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.171.1Afterwards 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.’171.2The 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 severelywounded.171.3The king and queen.The separation of the king and queen is especially remarkable. During May and June they were more than a hundred miles apart; and in the latter month the queen had increased the distance by removing from Tutbury in Staffordshire to Chester. It was then that she was said to be waiting on my Lord of York and he on her. The exact interpretation of the position must be partly matter of conjecture, but I take it to be as follows. The Duke of York, as we find stated only a few months later, was in very good favour with the king but not with the queen;171.4and we know from Fabyan that the latter was at this time doing all she could to put an end to his authority. It appears to me that by her influence the duke must have been ordered to withdraw from the Court, and that to prevent his again seeking access to the king’s presence, she pursued him into the north. At Tutbury171.5she would block his way from Sandal up to London; and though for some reason or other she removed further off to Chester, she still kept an anxious watch upon the duke, and he did the same on her. Very probably her removal did give him the opportunity she dreaded of moving southwards; for he must have been172with the king at Windsor on the 26th of July when he wrote in Henry’s name that answer to the King of Scots of which we have already spoken.However this may be, Margaret soon after had recourse to other means to effect her object. In consequence of the Duke of York’s popularity in London, it was expedient to remove the king some distance from the capital.172.1He appears to have been staying at Windsor during July and the beginning of August. In the middle of the latter month he took his departure northwards. By the dates of his Privy Seals we find him to have been at Wycombe on the 18th, at Kenilworth on the 24th, and at Lichfield on the 29th. In September he moved about between Lichfield, Coventry, and Leicester; but by the beginning of October the Court seems to have settled itself at Coventry, where a council was assembled on the 7th.172.2To this council the Duke of York and his friends were regularly summoned, as well as the lords whom the queen intended to honour; but even before it met, changes had begun to be made in the principal officers of state. On the 5th, Viscount Bourchier, the brother of the Archbishop of Canterbury, was dismissed from his office of Lord Treasurer, and the Earl of Shrewsbury was appointed in his room. On the 11th, the archbishop himself was called upon to surrender the Great Seal, and Waynflete, Bishop of Winchester, was made Chancellor in his stead. Laurence Booth, afterwards Bishop of Durham, was made Lord Privy Seal.The new appointments seem to have been on their own merits unexceptionable,—that of Waynflete more especially. Whether the superiority of the new men was such as to make it advisable to supersede the old is another question, on which we would not attempt to pronounce an opinion, either one way or other. One thing, however, we may believe on the evidence of James Gresham, whose letters frequently give us very interesting political intelligence: the changes created dissatisfaction in some of the queen’s own friends, particularly in the Duke of Buckingham, who was half-brother to two of the discharged functionaries, the Archbishop of Canterbury and173Viscount Bourchier. Either from this cause or from a mere English love of fair-play, it would appear that Buckingham now supported the Duke of York, who, it is said, though at this time he had some interviews with the king and found Henry still as friendly as he could desire, would certainly have been troubled at his departure if Buckingham had not befriended him. About the Court there was a general atmosphere of suspicion and distrust. On the 11th October, the very day on which Waynflete was appointed Chancellor, an encounter took place between the Duke of Somerset’s men and the watchmen of the city of Coventry, in which two or three of the citizens were killed. And probably it would have gone hard with the duke’s retainers, had not Buckingham used his good offices here too as peacemaker; for the alarm-bell rang and the citizens rose in arms. But by the interposition of Buckingham the tumult was appeased.173.1A.D.1457.For about a twelvemonth from this time we find that the Court continued generally at Coventry,173.2occasionally moving about to Stafford, Coleshill, Chester, Shrewsbury, Kenilworth, Hereford, and Leicester.173.3The queen evidently feared all the while to bring her husband nearer London, lest he should fall once more under the power of the Duke of York. Meanwhile the want of a vigorous ruler became every day more apparent. Not only was Calais again in danger of siege,173.4but the coast of Kent was attacked by enemies, and within the kingdom a dangerous spirit of disaffection had shown itself in various places. On the Patent Rolls we meet with numerous commissions for keeping watch upon the coasts,173.5for arraying the country against invasion,173.6and for assembling theposse comitatusin various counties, against treasonable attempts to stir up the people.173.7During April the Court had removed to174Hereford,174.1apparently in consequence of some disturbances which had taken place in Wales under Sir William Herbert. Its sojourn upon the Welsh borders had an excellent effect, the burgesses and gentlemen about Hereford all declaring themselves ready to take the king’s part unless a peace were made. On the 1st of May it was reported in London that Herbert had offered, on being granted his life and goods, to return to his allegiance and appear before the king and lords at Leicester; so we may conclude the insurrection did not last long after.174.2

‘To the ryght hiegh and myghty Prince, oure most worschipfull and gretely redoubted lorde and fader, the Duke of Yorke, Protector and Defensor of Englonde.‘Ryght hiegh and myghty Prince, oure most worschipfull and gretely redoubted lorde and Fader, in as lowely wyse as any sonnes con or may we recomaunde us un to youre good lordeschip. And plaese hit youre hieghnesse to witte that we have receyved youre worschipful lettres yesturday by your servaunt William Cleton, beryng date at Yorke the xxix day of Maij, by the whiche William and by the relacion of John Milewatier we conceyve your worschipfull and victorious spede ageinest your enemyse, to ther grete shame, and to us the most comfortable tydinges that we desired to here. Where of we thonke Almyghty God of his yeftes, beseching Hym hertely to geve yowe that grace and cotidian fortune here aftur to knowe your enemyse and to have the victory of them. And yef hit plaese your hieghnesse to knowe of oure wilfare, at the makyng of this lettre we were in good helith of bodis, thonked be God; beseching your good and graciouse Faderhode of youre daily blessing. And where ye comaunde149us by your said lettres to attende specialy to oure lernyng in our yong age that schulde cause us to growe to honour and worschip in our olde age, Please hit youre hieghnesse to witte that we have attended owre lernyng sith we come heder, and schall here aftur; by the whiche we trust to God youre graciouse lordeschip and good Fadurhode schall be plaesid. Also we beseche your good lordeschip that hit may plaese yowe to sende us Harry Lovedeyne, grome of your kechyn, whos service is to us ryght agreable; and we will sende yow John Boyes to wayte on youre good Lordeschip. Ryght hiegh and myghty Prince, our most worschipfull and gretely redoubted lorde and Fader, We beseche Almyghty God yeve yowe as good lyfe and longe as youre owne Princely hert con best desire. Writen at your Castill of Lodelow the iij day of June.—Youre humble sonnes,‘E. Marche,‘E. Rutlond.’

‘To the ryght hiegh and myghty Prince, oure most worschipfull and gretely redoubted lorde and fader, the Duke of Yorke, Protector and Defensor of Englonde.

‘Ryght hiegh and myghty Prince, oure most worschipfull and gretely redoubted lorde and Fader, in as lowely wyse as any sonnes con or may we recomaunde us un to youre good lordeschip. And plaese hit youre hieghnesse to witte that we have receyved youre worschipful lettres yesturday by your servaunt William Cleton, beryng date at Yorke the xxix day of Maij, by the whiche William and by the relacion of John Milewatier we conceyve your worschipfull and victorious spede ageinest your enemyse, to ther grete shame, and to us the most comfortable tydinges that we desired to here. Where of we thonke Almyghty God of his yeftes, beseching Hym hertely to geve yowe that grace and cotidian fortune here aftur to knowe your enemyse and to have the victory of them. And yef hit plaese your hieghnesse to knowe of oure wilfare, at the makyng of this lettre we were in good helith of bodis, thonked be God; beseching your good and graciouse Faderhode of youre daily blessing. And where ye comaunde149us by your said lettres to attende specialy to oure lernyng in our yong age that schulde cause us to growe to honour and worschip in our olde age, Please hit youre hieghnesse to witte that we have attended owre lernyng sith we come heder, and schall here aftur; by the whiche we trust to God youre graciouse lordeschip and good Fadurhode schall be plaesid. Also we beseche your good lordeschip that hit may plaese yowe to sende us Harry Lovedeyne, grome of your kechyn, whos service is to us ryght agreable; and we will sende yow John Boyes to wayte on youre good Lordeschip. Ryght hiegh and myghty Prince, our most worschipfull and gretely redoubted lorde and Fader, We beseche Almyghty God yeve yowe as good lyfe and longe as youre owne Princely hert con best desire. Writen at your Castill of Lodelow the iij day of June.—Youre humble sonnes,‘E. Marche,‘E. Rutlond.’

Soon after the duke had returned to London his presence was required at a Great Council summoned for the 18th of July, to consider the expediency of liberating on bail his great rival and personal enemy, the Duke of Somerset, who had been now seven months in prison.The Duke of Somerset.On this point York had only one piece of advice to offer, which was, that as he had been committed to custody upon suspicion of treason, the opinion of the judges should be taken before he was released from confinement. That he had remained so long without a trial was not unnatural, considering the nature of the times. It was a bold step indeed to try him at all, while there was a chance of the weak-minded king’s recovery; but this step was certainly resolved on. The 28th of October was the day appointed for his trial; and the Duke of Norfolk, who, as we have seen, had been the first to move the capital charge against him, was ordered by that day to be ready to produce his proofs. Meanwhile the lords concurred that it was clearly inexpedient to let him go, especially as the number of lords assembled was not so great as it should have been on the occasion; and the opinion of the Duke of York was not only agreed to, but at his request was put on record.149.1

Six days later it was agreed at another meeting of the150Council that the Duke of York should return into the North with the Duke of Exeter in his custody, whom he was to confine in the castle of Pomfret as a state prisoner.150.1

By these decisive steps the authority of the Duke of York was at length secured on something like a stable footing. During the remainder of his protectorate there could no longer be a doubt to whose hands power was committed; and England, at last, had the blessing of real government, able and vigorous, but at the same time moderate. The resolutions of the Council soon became known to the public. ‘As for tidings,’ wrote William Paston to his brother in Norfolk, ‘my lord of York hath taken my lord of Exeter into his award. The Duke of Somerset is still in prison, in worse case than he was.’ William Paston wrote in haste, but these were two matters of public importance to be mentioned before all private affairs whatever.150.2And yet the private affairs of which he wrote in the same letter will not be without interest to the readers of this Introduction.Sir J. Fastolf goes to reside in Norfolk.William Paston now reported to his brother that Sir John Fastolf was about to take his journey into Norfolk within a few days, and proposed to take up his residence at Caister. His going thither must have been regarded as an event not only in the neighbourhood of Yarmouth but even in the city of Norwich. At all events it was highly important to John Paston, whose advice the old knight valued in many matters. ‘He saith,’ wrote William Paston to his brother, ‘ye are the heartiest kinsman and friend that he knoweth. He would have you at Mauteby150.3dwelling.’ This must have been written in the latter part of July. Sir John did not actually go into Norfolk quite so soon as he intended; but he appears to have been there by the beginning of September.150.4

There in his completed castle of Caister he had at length taken up his abode, to spend the evening of his days in the place of his birth, and on the inheritance of his ancestors. There during the next five years he spent his time, counting151over the items of a number of unsettled claims he had against the crown,151.1and meditating also, it would seem, on another account he had with Heaven. For the latter the foundation of a college151.2or religious endowment, in which were to be maintained ‘seven priests and seven poor folk’ at Caister, might possibly liquidate his debts. But in his transactions with his fellowmen he was certainly for the most part a creditor, and by no means one of the most generous. Instances will be found in his letters in abundance showing with what vehemence (testy old soldier that he was!) he perpetually insisted on what was due to himself;—how he desired to know the names of those who would presume to resist his agent, Sir Thomas Howes—how they should be requited ‘by Blackbeard or Whitebeard, that is to say, by God or the Devil’;151.3—how he noted that Sir John Buck had fished his stanks and helped to break his dam;151.4how he had been informed that at a dinner at Norwich certain gentlemen had used scornful language about him, and desired to know who they were.151.5In this perpetual self-assertion he seems neither to have been over-indulgent towards adversaries nor even sufficiently considerate of friends and dependants. ‘Cruel and vengeable he hath been ever,’ says his own servant Henry Windsor, ‘and for the most part without pity and mercy.’151.6So also on the part of his faithful secretary, William Worcester, we find a complaint of shabby treatment, apparently at this very time when the household was removed to Caister. To a letter in which John Paston had addressed him as ‘Master Worcester,’ the latter replied with a request that he would ‘forget that name of mastership,’ for his position was by no means so greatly improved as to entitle him to such respect. His salary was not increased by one farthing in certainty—only ‘wages of household in common,entaunt come nows plaira’—which apparently means, assured to him only during his master’s pleasure. When he complained to his master of this, all the satisfaction he obtained was that Sir John expressed a152wish he had been a priest, when he could have rewarded him with a living.152.1

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.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, andMSS.still exist in his handwriting relating to the holding of manorial courts there.152.2He had also been Fastolf’s secretary in drawing up various statements regarding the wars in France in vindication of his master’s policy.152.3He was a man of literary tastes, who had already presented some compositions to his patron.152.4Later 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.152.5From 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.’152.6But153he 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 treatisede 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.153.1The 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

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.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 the154manner 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.154.1Stephen 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 RichardII.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

Of this first wife of Stephen Scrope we know nothing,154.3155except 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 knight155.1whose 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.’155.2The 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.’155.3Such was the rough domestic discipline to which even girls in those days were occasionally subjected!

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;156.1before which time we find various other proposals for her hand besides that of Scrope.156.2Among 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

130.3W. Worc. In an almanac of that time I find the following note, which dates the beginning of the king’s illness on the 10th of August:—‘In nocte S. Laurentii Rex infirmatur et continuavit usque ad Circumcisionem Anni 1455, in p. . . .’ (?) (a word unintelligible at the end).MS.Reg. 13, C. 1.131.1W. Worc.131.2Nicolas’sPrivy Council Proceedings, vi. 140-2, 147-9, 154-5.132.1Nicolas’sPrivy Council Proceedings, vi. 163-5.132.2Patent Roll, 32 Hen.VI.m. 20.SeeAppendix to this Introduction.132.3No. 230.133.1No. 235.133.2Ibid.134.1No. 235.135.1Rolls of Parl.v. 238-9.135.2No. 235.135.3Rolls of Parl.vi. 295.136.1No. 235.136.2Rolls of Parl.v. 238-9.137.1Rolls of Parl.v. 239-40.137.2Ibid.240.138.1Rolls of Parl.v. 240.138.2Ibid.241.139.1Nos. 124, 240.140.1Nos. 238, 239.141.1No. 239.141.2No. 244.141.3Apparently Agnes Denyes had taken sanctuary at Westminster before her imprisonment. The manner in which Denyes here speaks of her daughter gives us reason to believe that she was a widow before he married her.142.1Nos. 240, 245.143.1Nicolas’sPrivy Council Proceedings, vol. vi. preface, pp. clxxviii.-ix.143.2Rolls of Parl.240-1.144.1Rolls of Parl.241.146.1Rolls of Parl.v. 242.146.2Ibid.243.146.3Rolls of Parl.244-5.146.4No. 249.147.1No. 247.147.2Nicolas’sPrivy Council Proceedings, vi. 174.147.3Rymer, xi. 351. Carte’sGascon and French Rolls.147.4Rolls of Parl.v. 252.148.1Nicolas’sPrivy Council Proceedings, vi. 178, 193-7. Nos. 247, 249.148.2Printed from the original inMS.Cott., Vespasian F. xiii. fol. 35.149.1Nicolas’sPrivy Council Proceedings, vi. 207.150.1Nicolas’sPrivy Council Proceedings, vi. 217, 218.150.2No. 254.150.3The manor of Mauteby, which came to John Paston by his marriage, was only three miles distant from Caister.150.4No. 260.151.1Nos. 309, 310.151.2Nos. 340, 350, 351, 385, 386, 387.151.3No. 125.151.4Nos. 160, 161.151.5No. 272.151.6No. 332.152.1Nos. 258, 259.152.2Add.MS.28,208, B.M.152.3Stevenson’sWars, ii. [519],sq.152.4‘Stellæ versificatæ pro anno 1440 ad instantiam J. Fastolfe militis.’MS.Laud., B. 23 (according to the old pressmark).152.5Letter 370.152.6In 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 (seevol. 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.153.1Itin. 368.153.2Tanner’sBibliotheca.Seealso a notice of William Worcester inRetrospective Review, Second Series, ii. 451-4.154.1No. 97.154.2Scrope’sHistory of the Manor of Castle Combe, pp. 264-283. TheMSS.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. 97.154.3She 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.155.1Letter 94.155.2No. 93.155.3No. 94.156.1SeeNo. 374.156.2Nos. 236, 250, 252.156.3We 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 entitledDitz de Philosophius(Sayings of Philosophers), of which the originalMS.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.

130.3W. Worc. In an almanac of that time I find the following note, which dates the beginning of the king’s illness on the 10th of August:—‘In nocte S. Laurentii Rex infirmatur et continuavit usque ad Circumcisionem Anni 1455, in p. . . .’ (?) (a word unintelligible at the end).MS.Reg. 13, C. 1.

131.1W. Worc.

131.2Nicolas’sPrivy Council Proceedings, vi. 140-2, 147-9, 154-5.

132.1Nicolas’sPrivy Council Proceedings, vi. 163-5.

132.2Patent Roll, 32 Hen.VI.m. 20.SeeAppendix to this Introduction.

132.3No. 230.

133.1No. 235.

133.2Ibid.

134.1No. 235.

135.1Rolls of Parl.v. 238-9.

135.2No. 235.

135.3Rolls of Parl.vi. 295.

136.1No. 235.

136.2Rolls of Parl.v. 238-9.

137.1Rolls of Parl.v. 239-40.

137.2Ibid.240.

138.1Rolls of Parl.v. 240.

138.2Ibid.241.

139.1Nos. 124, 240.

140.1Nos. 238, 239.

141.1No. 239.

141.2No. 244.

141.3Apparently Agnes Denyes had taken sanctuary at Westminster before her imprisonment. The manner in which Denyes here speaks of her daughter gives us reason to believe that she was a widow before he married her.

142.1Nos. 240, 245.

143.1Nicolas’sPrivy Council Proceedings, vol. vi. preface, pp. clxxviii.-ix.

143.2Rolls of Parl.240-1.

144.1Rolls of Parl.241.

146.1Rolls of Parl.v. 242.

146.2Ibid.243.

146.3Rolls of Parl.244-5.

146.4No. 249.

147.1No. 247.

147.2Nicolas’sPrivy Council Proceedings, vi. 174.

147.3Rymer, xi. 351. Carte’sGascon and French Rolls.

147.4Rolls of Parl.v. 252.

148.1Nicolas’sPrivy Council Proceedings, vi. 178, 193-7. Nos. 247, 249.

148.2Printed from the original inMS.Cott., Vespasian F. xiii. fol. 35.

149.1Nicolas’sPrivy Council Proceedings, vi. 207.

150.1Nicolas’sPrivy Council Proceedings, vi. 217, 218.

150.2No. 254.

150.3The manor of Mauteby, which came to John Paston by his marriage, was only three miles distant from Caister.

150.4No. 260.

151.1Nos. 309, 310.

151.2Nos. 340, 350, 351, 385, 386, 387.

151.3No. 125.

151.4Nos. 160, 161.

151.5No. 272.

151.6No. 332.

152.1Nos. 258, 259.

152.2Add.MS.28,208, B.M.

152.3Stevenson’sWars, ii. [519],sq.

152.4‘Stellæ versificatæ pro anno 1440 ad instantiam J. Fastolfe militis.’MS.Laud., B. 23 (according to the old pressmark).

152.5Letter 370.

152.6In 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 (seevol. 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.

153.1Itin. 368.

153.2Tanner’sBibliotheca.Seealso a notice of William Worcester inRetrospective Review, Second Series, ii. 451-4.

154.1No. 97.

154.2Scrope’sHistory of the Manor of Castle Combe, pp. 264-283. TheMSS.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.

154.3She 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.

155.1Letter 94.

155.2No. 93.

155.3No. 94.

156.1SeeNo. 374.

156.2Nos. 236, 250, 252.

156.3We 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 entitledDitz de Philosophius(Sayings of Philosophers), of which the originalMS.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.

began to exhibit symptoms of mental derangementtext reads “symptons”on its reassembling.136.2final . missing

began to exhibit symptoms of mental derangementtext reads “symptons”

on its reassembling.136.2final . missing

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 we157know 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

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

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—he158was 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

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.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

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,159York was deprived of the government of Calais which he had undertaken by indenture for seven years.159.1On 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,159.2but that considerable fears were entertained of an invasion of England.159.3But 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

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 a160company 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

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 VolumeIII.160.2In 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.

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 left161London 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

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.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,162as the numbers were at first reported. This, however, seems to have been an over-estimate.162.1The 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

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 EdwardII.; 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.162.3The 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.162.4Meanwhile the duke was made Constable of England, and Lord Bourchier, Treasurer. The defence of Calais was committed to the Earl of Warwick.162.5There was, however, no entire and sweeping163change made in the officers of state. The Great Seal was allowed to continue in the hands of Archbishop Bourchier.

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

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 which164account she requests his vote and influence in favour of John Howard and Sir Roger Chamberlain.164.1The 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;164.2and at the nomination the names of Berney, Grey, and Paston were received with great favour.164.3John 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

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 from165the severe shock that he must have received by the battle of St. Albans,165.1had 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.165.2He 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.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

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 HenryIV.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,Disturbances in the West.and the West of England seems to have been disturbed for some time afterwards.165.4From a localMS.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 theMS.differently, and tells us that Lord Bonvile was driven into the city by defeat.165.5However this may be, the Earl of Devonshire did not allow the matter to rest. Accompanied166by 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

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.166.2The 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.166.3The 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.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 to167exercise his functions, the Protector should be discharged of his office in Parliament by the advice of the Lords Spiritual and Temporal.167.1

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.167.2The 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

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

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 his168place. 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 newrégime. 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

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.168.2Again discharged.An Act of Resumption, rendered necessary by the state of the revenue, was the principal fruit of its deliberations.168.3The 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;168.4but with the exception of one single occasion, when it was necessary to169issue a commission for the trial of insurgents in Kent,169.1there is not a single record left to tell us what was done at them.

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 JamesII., the reigning king of Scotland, who is said to have resented his death on the ground of consanguinity.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.169.2How 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.169.3A message more170calculated 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

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.170.2The 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

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.171Thus, 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.171.1Afterwards 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.’171.2The 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 severelywounded.171.3

The king and queen.

The separation of the king and queen is especially remarkable. During May and June they were more than a hundred miles apart; and in the latter month the queen had increased the distance by removing from Tutbury in Staffordshire to Chester. It was then that she was said to be waiting on my Lord of York and he on her. The exact interpretation of the position must be partly matter of conjecture, but I take it to be as follows. The Duke of York, as we find stated only a few months later, was in very good favour with the king but not with the queen;171.4and we know from Fabyan that the latter was at this time doing all she could to put an end to his authority. It appears to me that by her influence the duke must have been ordered to withdraw from the Court, and that to prevent his again seeking access to the king’s presence, she pursued him into the north. At Tutbury171.5she would block his way from Sandal up to London; and though for some reason or other she removed further off to Chester, she still kept an anxious watch upon the duke, and he did the same on her. Very probably her removal did give him the opportunity she dreaded of moving southwards; for he must have been172with the king at Windsor on the 26th of July when he wrote in Henry’s name that answer to the King of Scots of which we have already spoken.

However this may be, Margaret soon after had recourse to other means to effect her object. In consequence of the Duke of York’s popularity in London, it was expedient to remove the king some distance from the capital.172.1He appears to have been staying at Windsor during July and the beginning of August. In the middle of the latter month he took his departure northwards. By the dates of his Privy Seals we find him to have been at Wycombe on the 18th, at Kenilworth on the 24th, and at Lichfield on the 29th. In September he moved about between Lichfield, Coventry, and Leicester; but by the beginning of October the Court seems to have settled itself at Coventry, where a council was assembled on the 7th.172.2To this council the Duke of York and his friends were regularly summoned, as well as the lords whom the queen intended to honour; but even before it met, changes had begun to be made in the principal officers of state. On the 5th, Viscount Bourchier, the brother of the Archbishop of Canterbury, was dismissed from his office of Lord Treasurer, and the Earl of Shrewsbury was appointed in his room. On the 11th, the archbishop himself was called upon to surrender the Great Seal, and Waynflete, Bishop of Winchester, was made Chancellor in his stead. Laurence Booth, afterwards Bishop of Durham, was made Lord Privy Seal.

The new appointments seem to have been on their own merits unexceptionable,—that of Waynflete more especially. Whether the superiority of the new men was such as to make it advisable to supersede the old is another question, on which we would not attempt to pronounce an opinion, either one way or other. One thing, however, we may believe on the evidence of James Gresham, whose letters frequently give us very interesting political intelligence: the changes created dissatisfaction in some of the queen’s own friends, particularly in the Duke of Buckingham, who was half-brother to two of the discharged functionaries, the Archbishop of Canterbury and173Viscount Bourchier. Either from this cause or from a mere English love of fair-play, it would appear that Buckingham now supported the Duke of York, who, it is said, though at this time he had some interviews with the king and found Henry still as friendly as he could desire, would certainly have been troubled at his departure if Buckingham had not befriended him. About the Court there was a general atmosphere of suspicion and distrust. On the 11th October, the very day on which Waynflete was appointed Chancellor, an encounter took place between the Duke of Somerset’s men and the watchmen of the city of Coventry, in which two or three of the citizens were killed. And probably it would have gone hard with the duke’s retainers, had not Buckingham used his good offices here too as peacemaker; for the alarm-bell rang and the citizens rose in arms. But by the interposition of Buckingham the tumult was appeased.173.1

A.D.1457.

For about a twelvemonth from this time we find that the Court continued generally at Coventry,173.2occasionally moving about to Stafford, Coleshill, Chester, Shrewsbury, Kenilworth, Hereford, and Leicester.173.3The queen evidently feared all the while to bring her husband nearer London, lest he should fall once more under the power of the Duke of York. Meanwhile the want of a vigorous ruler became every day more apparent. Not only was Calais again in danger of siege,173.4but the coast of Kent was attacked by enemies, and within the kingdom a dangerous spirit of disaffection had shown itself in various places. On the Patent Rolls we meet with numerous commissions for keeping watch upon the coasts,173.5for arraying the country against invasion,173.6and for assembling theposse comitatusin various counties, against treasonable attempts to stir up the people.173.7During April the Court had removed to174Hereford,174.1apparently in consequence of some disturbances which had taken place in Wales under Sir William Herbert. Its sojourn upon the Welsh borders had an excellent effect, the burgesses and gentlemen about Hereford all declaring themselves ready to take the king’s part unless a peace were made. On the 1st of May it was reported in London that Herbert had offered, on being granted his life and goods, to return to his allegiance and appear before the king and lords at Leicester; so we may conclude the insurrection did not last long after.174.2

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