Warring cousins

One of the many side-dramas of the Montfortian era in England was the bitter ongoing feud between the Lord Edward (later Edward I) and Robert de Ferrers, 6^th earl of Derby (1239-79). These men were cousins, and very alike in some ways: both were ambitious, belligerent, full of energy and willing to stoop to low methods to gain their ends. They differed in that Edward learned from his mistakes, while Robert seemed intent on compounding his.

The arms of the 6th earl

The origins of their feud are debatable. It may have stemmed from Edward’s sale of his cousin’s wardship to the queen and Peter of Savoy in 1257, though such transactions were not uncommon. Equally it may have stemmed from mere personal animosity between men who were too similar to endure each other’s presence. Whatever the case, it soon led to conflict.

Robert struck first. In 1263, when the whole of England was on the verge of civil war, he attacked and captured three of Edward’s castles. Which ones are not stated, though Robert probably focused on ravaging his kinsman’s estates in Derbyshire and the High Peak country. In early February he turned south and sacked Worcester, destroying both the town and the Jewry. On 5 March he almost had Edward cornered at Gloucester, but the latter managed to slide out of the trap by tricking Henry de Montfort into accepting a truce. Robert was so furious at Henry’s gullibility he ‘struck in his spurs’ and galloped off back to the north country.

Chartley castle

A few weeks later, after the royalist victory at Northampton, Edward went on the offensive. He blazed through Robert’s lands in Derbyshire, throwing down castles and extorting protection money from the earl’s tenants. This was part of a two-pronged campaign: at the same time Edward’s ally, Prince Dafydd of Wales, led an army of Marchers over the border to ravage the Ferrers estates in Staffordshire. Robert was in London with Earl Simon, apparently unwilling or unable to defend his lands.

The wheel of fortune took another dramatic spin at the Battle of Lewes on 14 May, where Edward and his father, Henry III, were captured. This enabled Robert to launch a counter-offensive and chase Dafydd back into Wales. He was then attacked from an unexpected quarter. In December Earl Simon summoned Robert to London to answer ‘divers trespasses’ in the king’s name. He duly turned up and was thrown into the Tower. Either Robert’s actions had got out of hand, or Simon used them as a pretext to imprison the earl and seize his lands.

After Simon’s death at Evesham in August 1265, Robert was handed an opportunity to redeem his fortunes. Both Henry and Edward were willing to take him back into the fold, and he was offered a royal pardon. For reasons that are still unclear, Robert threw the offer back in their faces and went back into rebellion. He and his allies were defeated at Chesterfield in May 1266, where Robert didn’t exactly cover himself in glory. He was discovered hiding under a pile of woolsacks in a local church, and sent to prison at Windsor in a cage mounted on a wagon.

In 1269, after three years of captivity, Robert was swindled out of his inheritance. In one of the great medieval stitch-ups, the king and his sons forced the earl to sign away his lands under impossible terms of recovery. They were granted to Henry’s second son, Edmund, who became Earl of Lancaster. This formed the basis of the great Duchy of Lancaster enjoyed by John of Gaunt, Henry of Bolingbroke et al.

In a later age Robert’s head would have decorated a pike on Tower Bridge. Instead his life was spared. After the death of Henry III and Edward’s departure on crusade, the now-landless earl mustered his followers and tried to recover his lands by force. In 1271 he briefly occupied one of his estates in Berkshire, only to be driven away by Edmund of Lancaster. Two years later he popped up again in Staffordshire and stormed Chartley Castle, one of his old strongholds.

England was now threatened with another civil war. Robert gained the support of Earl Warenne and Earl Gilbert de Clare, while his lieutenant Roger Godberd waged a guerilla campaign in the Midlands. Ferrers loyalists in the High Peak launched attacks on Nottingham, and swore an oath to kill Edward when he returned to England. The situation was rescued by the prompt action of the regents. Edmund and his colleagues Roger Mortimer and Reynold Grey raced north to crush the northern conspiracy, and in 1274 Chartley was retaken in a brutal assault that slaughtered most of Robert’s surviving followers.

The fugitive earl escaped into the wild. When Edward finally returned, the new king took a surprisingly conciliatory line. Instead of destroying his old foe, he allowed him to sue for his lands at law. Robert managed to regain the manor of Chartley (though not the castle, which was staffed by a royal garrison) and the manor of Holbrook in Derbyshire. Thus he redeemed a fragment of his inheritance, and regained a stake in the landed affairs of the realm. Robert was quiet for the rest of his days, which were short: he died of the gout in 1279, aged just forty.

Old resentments died hard among the medieval aristocracy. Robert’s heir, John Ferrers, spent his life lobbying unsuccessfully for the return of his father’s estates. Perhaps to get him out of the kingdom, Edward II made John seneschal of Gascony and packed him off to govern the duchy. This proved a disaster as John deliberately ill-treated the Gascon nobility in order to cause trouble for the king. Even Philip IV of France, no friend to the Plantagenet regime, was moved to declare:

“The said John de Ferrers, we learn, behaves thus because just as the late king of England disinherited the said John’s father, so he wishes to disinherit his and our son Edward II, but may this enterprise, with God’s help, not succeed; but, if it is true, let him perish in his iniquity”.

Philip’s wish came true. The Gascon gentry had a straightforward method of dealing with oppressive outsiders, and arranged to have John murdered. He died of ‘noxious poison’ in 1312, the luckless son of a luckless father.

Hanging out with Matilda

When it comes to the Plantagenet boys, certain clichés abound. Bad King John is the wicked softsword who lost all his lands in France and ran away from every fight. Henry III is a pious mediocrity (for pious read ‘dull’) whose fifty-plus years on the throne amount to one big blur in the public imagination. Edward I is the hawkish, hard-driving Hammer of the Scots, more machine than man - yes that is a dorky Star Wars reference - and the most ideal Hollywood foil since Basil Rathbone.

"You've come to Nottingham once too often, pal."

Clichés exist for a reason, of course, and it can be just as tiresome to play the revisionist. There is some truth in the above, but not the whole truth. Others will stand surety for John and Henry, but for my sins I chose to specialise in Longshanks. The result has been quite the study in human behaviour, in which plenty of complete strangers have felt obliged to tell me exactly what they think; not only of Edward, but the deplorable state of my personal morality and intellectual standards. I am grateful, of course.  

Talking of human behaviours - and the point of this post - it may come as no surprise to discover that Edward was just as fallible as anyone else. Peel back the clichés, delve deeper into the records, and a human being emerges. In recent months I have been researching the war against France from 1294-1303, Edward’s most difficult and expensive campaign and a complete misfire according to most historians. The ‘grand flop’, as Michael Prestwich memorably put it.

Well. It wasn’t as floppy as all that, in my humble opinion. No more so than any other Angevin expedition from the days of John to Edward II, and at least Longshanks came away with a result. That’s for another time, but today I wanted to talk about his peculiar behaviour in the aftermath of the campaign.

Kissing cousins...

In October 1297, after several weeks of messy to and fro, Edward struck a truce with his enemy, Philip IV of France. The ceasefire was temporary, and followed by several more rounds of talks over the following months. A final agreement was reached at Tournai in February 1298, nowadays a city in western Belgium near the French border.

It might be assumed these talks were conducted in an atmosphere of tension and barely concealed hostility. Far from it. Edward and Philip were cousins, after all, and the war was essentially a family quarrel. A Dutch eyewitness, Lodewijk van Velthem, describes the negotiations as one long round of glittering feasts and parties, in which Edward spent money like it was going out of style. He staged a particularly magnificent feast at Saint-Bavon, where nobles from all over Europe danced and drank the night away. Edward’s allies, Count Guy of Flanders and the duke of Brabant joined in the festivities, though none could rival the brilliance of Edward’s feasts. 

Edward had certainly come prepared to entertain. The accounts for the Flanders expedition show he brought a well-equipped squadron of minstrels and dancers. Two were from the household of the earl of Lincoln, while one was an acrobatic dancer or saltatrix with the intriguing name of Matilda Makejoy.

It seems Edward was in no hurry to go home, to face angry barons and William Wallace raging in his fury. While the king enjoyed himself over the winter months, counter-operations against Wallace were entrusted to Earl Warenne. Rickety old Warenne hated Scotland - the weather played hell with his joints - and had already lost his dentures at Stirling Bridge. But he was the man on the spot, and had to labour on the Godforsaken northern border while Edward played tag with Mistress Makejoy.

The king’s behaviour at this time drew sharp criticism from contemporaries. Pierre Langtoft, usually an admirer, slammed Edward for:

“Idleness and feigned delay, and long morning’s sleep,

Delight in luxury, and surfeit in the evenings,

Trust in felons, compassion for enemies,

Self-will in act and counsel…”

This is all very reminiscent of Edward’s forebears. Similar charges of sloth and debauchery were aimed at grandpa John, while Henry III was nobody’s idea of a dynamic warrior-king. Yet the Angevins were a complex brood, and not so easy to pigeonhole; John and Henry were capable of astonishing bursts of energy, to the bewilderment of monkish chroniclers such as Matthew Paris.  Like every good little tabloid hack, he wanted everything simple and one-dimensional. Poor Matthew: one can easily picture him sweating and cursing as he desperately struck out the offending bits from his chronicle, after Henry asked to see it.

The same behaviour patterns can be discerned in Edward, who did eventually put his dancers back in their box and return to duty. But fathers live in sons, as Philip Augustus remarks to Henry II in the Lion in Winter, and we might do well to think a little harder about these people. Because they were people, not automatons or walking clichés.

Henry the Prudent

We've had Richard the Brilliant, so here's Henry the Prudent. In case I get accused of favouritism, this post is a lot longer simply because Henry reigned for 24 years as opposed to Richard's 2, and there is a lot more to say. 

Personal, as some clever person once said, is not the same as important. That maxim can be applied to Henry VII, who since the mid-20th century has been a favourite target for romantic novellists and Ricardians. Jean Plaidy got the ball rolling by describing Henry as a 'Welsh monkey', and in recent times Facebook has not been Henry's friend: 'slug face', 'slant-eyed sex offender', 'dead dork', and 'cowardly treacherous murdering usurper' have been some of the milder insults thrown his way in 2013. One historian has even proposed that poor old Henry wasn't a 'Tudor' at all, but a bastard on both sides of his family.  

I won. Get over it

The level of hatred, directed at a man who died over five hundred years ago, is startling in its intensity. Ricardians might argue that Henry had it coming, considering his part in the blackening of his predecessor's reputation. I would argue that Henry's character defects are less important than what he did as king, even if at times inseparable (more of that later). So, leaving aside his personality and his share in the blame for Richard's deconstruction, let's have a look at his actions as a ruler. 

Henry's chief aims were to survive and hand his crown onto his son (the thought of handing it on a daughter probably brought him out in a cold sweat at nights). Even if he achieved nothing else, this would represent a triumph for a man with no real claim to the throne, won via force of arms and a hefty slice of luck. As it turned out, for Henry the wielding of power was not just some fortunate accident, but his 'vocation and destiny', as S.B. Chrimes had it.  

When he came to the throne, Henry was very much an unknown quantity, in hock to his eyeballs to the King of France and little more than a lucky adventurer. Apart from stamping on frequent rebellions at home, he had to gain a bit of respect abroad and convince foreign powers to take him seriously. This he did with a vengeance, throwing aside the old Plantagenet daydreams of conquering France, while at the same time diddling the French out of vast sums of money, marrying his children into the Spanish and Scottish royal families and concluding beneficial treaties with Europe's major powers. Mediation and diplomacy, backed up by limited military force if necessary, were Henry's weapons, and he handled them adroitly. By the end of his reign, the lucky usurper was on equal terms with Aragon and Castile, the Valois and the Hapsburgs - 'all of them learnt to forgo attempts to subvert him; all learnt to respect his strength; all preferred his goodwill to his hostility'.

At home, Henry was something of a conservative, chiefly concerned with security - unsurprising, considering the number of plots and rebellions he had to cope with. Like Richard, Henry was concerned with the maintenance of law and order, and did what he could to curb the corruption and incompetence of justices. He proclaimed that his laws and ordinances were made 'for the politic well peace, and good rule and for the profit, surety and restful living of his subjects...nothing is more joyous than to know his subjects live peaceably under his laws and increase in wealth and prosperity.' 

To back up these fine words, Henry decreed that every justice of the peace should be proclaimed four times a year, with a threat of fines and dismissal for every omission. Anyone who felt aggrieved at the behaviour of a justice might seek redress from the king - again, this sounds remarkably similar to the actions of Henry's predecessor. 

Francis Bacon heaped praise on Henry as a law-maker, and stated that he was the greatest royal legislator since Edward I. This was perhaps excessive, and there is no space here to recite all of Henry's 192 statutes, but a couple are worth mentioning. One cracked down hard on the abuse of women, stating that the abduction, defiling and marrying against their will of 'maids, widows and wives' was a felony. Another provided that poor people who could not afford the expense of going to law could - at the discretion of the chancellor - be represented by counsel free of charge. 

Now we come to the elephant in the chamber: Henry's avarice. The clichéd image of him as a grim sobersides who divided his time between persecuting Yorkists and triple-checking accounts is a difficult one to shake, and there is a bit of truth to it. Following the death of his wife and eldest son, Henry took a turn for the worse (impossible to avoid discussion of his character here) and indulged in increasingly dodgy and extortionate ways of keeping his subjects in line. After Henry's death, his chief financial whiz Edmund Dudley was arrested and coughed up a document listing no less eighty-four examples of individuals whom Henry had persecuted for their money. Below are a few examples, again taken from Chrimes:

'Item Peter Centurion a Genenois was evil intreated and paid much money and upon malicious ground in my consience.

Item one Haslewood was kept long in prison and paid a great sum of money upon a light ground.

Item a poor gentleman of Kent called Roger Appleton paid 100 marks upon an untrue matter.

Item Sir Nicholas Vaux and Sir Thomas Parr paid 9,000 marks upon a very light ground...'

What seems clear is that the ageing Henry was prepared to twist the law in order to get at his subjects' purse-strings, suggesting that his understandable desire for solvency and security was degenerating into base greed and paranoia. The increasing use of bonds and recognizances against his nobles, and his petty and spiteful treatment of Catherine of Aragon, also give the impression of a man degenerating mentally as well as physically. 

Unpleasant and oppressive as some of his measures were, Henry was not a tyrant. His financial chicanery pales next to the savagery of his son and the Catholic fanaticism of his grand-daughter Mary. He was remarkably merciful to his enemies, indulging in no wholesale executions and doing what he could to reconcile the surviving Yorkists: the exception being the ruthless elimination of Edward, Earl of Warwick, done to ensure that Henry could secure his son Arthur's marriage to Catherine of Aragon.   

To conclude my little essay, Henry VII came to England on a wing and a prayer and left it solvent, secure, free of internal warfare and a respected, if not major, power in Europe. Not bad for a dork. 

     

Happy Birthday...

...though I nearly missed it, to John de Vere, 13th Earl of Oxford, born on this day in 1442. Oxford was an extraordinary survivor, and without him the Tudor dynasty might have never been established. His life reads like some improbable adventure story, especially between the years 1471-85, which is why I have devoted this rather long blog post to him.

John de Vere, 13th Earl of Oxford

In an era of shifting loyalties and even shiftier personalities, Oxford stood out for his deathless loyalty to the House of Lancaster, even when the Lancastrian cause was all but dead and buried. Born the second son of the 12th Earl, another John, he was just twenty when his father and elder brother Aubrey were convicted of high treason and executed at Tower Hill within six days of each other. Both men had been convicted of plotting against the Yorkist King Edward IV, and their deaths may explain Oxford's unwavering commitment to bringing down the Yorkist regime.

For the time being he had no choice but to grin and bear it. Throughout the 1460s he kept up a reasonably convincing pretense of loyalty to a king he loathed, and was allowed to inherit his attainted father's titles and lands. In 1465 he was made a Knight of the Bath at the coronation of Edward's queen, Elizabeth Woodville, but in 1468 was committed to the Tower on suspicion of conspiring against the king. He probably only saved his head by dishing the dirt on two of his co-conspirators, who were sent to the block instead of him. A pretty unsavoury act, you might think, but the line between survival and the chop was often a mere hair's breadth in those days. Oxford had no intention of going the same way as so many of his peers.

He was released from the Tower and received a pardon in 1469, but King Edward would have done better to separate Oxford's body and soul when he had the chance. By July of that year Oxford had joined the disaffected rebels led by the Earl of Warwick - later known as The Kingmaker - and took part in the Edgecote campaign. He then fled overseas to join Henry VI's exiled Queen, Margaret of Anjou, and her son Prince Edward. In 1470 he joined Warwick and Clarence's invasion of England, which sent Edward IV fleeing into exile and restored Henry VI.

Edward IV

Alas, poor Henry. His wits were completely gone by this point, and he apparently had to be tied to his horse to prevent him sliding off when he was shown to the people. Mad or not, he was still the rightful anointed King of England to many, including Oxford. When Edward IV invaded England to reclaim his crown (England was pretty much Invasion City) he was confronted by an army commanded by Warwick. Cue the Battle of Barnet.

Oxford was in charge of the Lancastrian right wing. Frothing to get at the enemy, he led his men in a blood-and-thunder charge through thick mist directly at the opposing division. Depending on which source you believe, the Yorkists were either led by Lord Hastings or the teenage Richard, Duke of Gloucester. Whichever was in command, he could do little to prevent his division being smashed to bits by the ferocity of Oxford's charge.

Sadly, Oxford's victorious men got carried away and pursued the fleeing Yorkists for miles, or else got lost in the mist. Their commander managed to scrape together a few hundred of them and led them back to the field. Warwick's men, alarmed by the sudden appearance of troops behind them, mistook Oxford's livery badge, a star with streams, for King Edward's sun in splendour - or "Sunne in Splendour" for Sharon Penman fans - and loosed arrows at them. Panic swiftly spread through the Lancastrian ranks, and soon Warwick's army was scampering in all directions. The Kingmaker was caught and disposed of with a knife to the eye while trying to escape, while Oxford fled north with two of his brothers and just a few men for company.

A few days later the last remaining Lancastrian army was shattered at Tewkesbury. Prince Edward was slaughtered on the field, his mother packed off back to Anjou, and poor mad Henry died in the Tower of a lethal fit of depression induced by a club to the back of his head. The fat lady had sung until she was hoarse for Lancaster, and surely it made sense for any surviving loyalists to make their peace with the triumphant Edward IV.

Not Oxford. Undaunted by these catastrophes, he made his way to France from Scotland, got together a bunch of ships and turned to piracy, preying on Yorkist shipping in the Channel. From lord of the manor to Long John Silver. In England his lands were seized and his loyal wife, Margaret, subjected to great hardships, even being obliged to make her living as a seamstress for a while. Fancy a noblewoman having to work for a living, eh?

St Michael's Mount in Cornwall

Tired of playing pirate, in 1473 Oxford tried to land at St Osyth in Essex, but was repelled. A few months later he popped up in Cornwall, where he seized the remote fortress of St Michael's Mount and dared the Yorkists to prise him out. A brave gesture, but pretty futile by this point: the capture of one pipsqueak of a fortress in Cornwall wasn't likely to cause Edward IV many sleepless nights. Even so, Oxford held the Mount against repeated assaults until February 1474. At last, deserted by most of his men and injured by an arrow-wound to his face, he was compelled to surrender, and carted off to prison at Hammes Castle near Calais.

Oxford was a prisoner for ten years. During that time his widowed mother was forced to sell her lands for about half their annual value to Richard of Gloucester - that's Saint Dickon of Middleham, by the way - and his old ally, the Duke of Clarence, executed by King Edward after one nefarious antic too many. It may have been Clarence's death that prompted Oxford to make an attempt at either suicide or escape: in 1478 he escaped his prison, scaled the walls of the castle and hurled himself into the moat, breaking both his legs. The guards fished him out before he could drown, and carried him back to pokey.

So now the Lancastrian cause consisted of a few scattered malcontents, one nobleman languishing in custody with busted legs, and an obscure quarter-Welsh exile named Henry Tudor. A pretty hopeless cause, but everything changed when Edward IV caught a chill while out boating and died unexpectedly in 1483. Much shenanigans ensued, the precise details of which will be squabbled over (probably via Facebook) until Doomsday, but the upshot was that the dead king's youngest brother, Richard of Gloucester, emerged from the scrum with the crown and the 'III' after his name.

Richard III

Whatever you make of Richard, his vile usurpation/rightful accession acted as a magical kiss of life to the ailing Lancastrian patient. His brief two-year reign was beset with rebellions and conspiracies, most of them focusing on the pretender across the Channel, Henry Tudor, he of the Welsh blood and extraordinarily dubious claim to the throne. Henry's first attempt at an invasion in 1483 fizzled out, but his cause was boosted when Oxford suddenly appeared at his court in Brittany.

The subtle earl, plenty more than just a bone-headed soldier, had spent the years since his accident cultivating the friendship of his gaoler at Hammes, Sir James Blount. When Richard III gave orders for Oxford to be transferred to England, Blount instead released his prisoner and rode with him to join Tudor. Henry was apparently "ravished with joy incredible" at acquiring Oxford for an ally, and the cherry on the cake was when Oxford rode straight back to Hammes and fetched the garrison to join the steadily growing rebel army.

Along with Henry's uncle Jasper, Oxford was the most experienced soldier at Henry's command, and was part of the ragbag army of exiles and French mercenaries that landed at Milford Haven in 1485 and marched to the fateful meeting with Richard III's forces at Bosworth.

Oxford commanded Henry's vanguard at the battle. Determined to make up for his mistakes at Barnet, he employed some clever tactics, ordering his men to stay within ten feet of their standards and maneuvering to keep the sun and the wind behind him as he advanced up the hill to meet Richard's vanguard. The Yorkists, led by the Duke of Norfolk, broke their teeth on Oxford's well-ordered lines. At some point Norfolk himself was slain, possibly in single combat with Oxford himself. Shortly afterwards Richard launched his famous last charge, to meet with glory and death just a sword's-length from Henry Tudor.

With the accession of Henry VII, the wheel of fate had turned again for Oxford. He was restored to all his estates and titles and loaded down with important offices, including Lord Admiral. Bosworth was not to be his last fight, and he led the line again for King Henry at Stoke and Blackheath, but he would never again be reduced to poverty, piracy or prison. In the fullness of time he died, full of years and honours, at Castle Hedingham in 1513. Highly thought of by his peers, the last word on him goes to the Countess of Surrey, who wrote:

"I have found my lord of Oxford a singular very good and kind lord to my lord and me, and steadfast in his promise...for him I dreaded most and yet as hitherto I find him best."

"Steadfast in his promise" serves as a fine epitaph for John de Vere, a man who never wavered from the oath he swore to his king.