John Paston wrote of one hired gang that ‘no poor man dare displease them, for whatsoever they do with their swords they make it law’. He had direct experience of such violent behaviour. In a petition to the archbishop of York he wrote of ‘a great multitude of riotous people, to the number of a thousand persons or more’ who ‘broke, despoiled, and drew down’ his manor house at Gresham; they ‘drove out my wife and servants there being, and rifled, took, and bore away all the goods and chattels’. The gang then fortified the manor, and kept out Paston himself as well as the king’s Justice of the Peace.
Another gang, commanded by William Tailboys, was under the protection of Suffolk; it will be remembered that Suffolk, with the queen, helped to control the council of the realm. Tailboys and his ‘slaughterladdes’ were accused of three murders as well as charges of trespass and assault; but Suffolk helped him to escape justice. ‘On lordship and friendship’, it was said, ‘depends all law and profit.’ The spirit of misrule prevailed over the land, and the king could do nothing about it.
When Paston’s manor house was plundered and taken, his adversary procured a royal letter asking the sheriff of Norfolk to show ‘favour’. Paston was powerless in these circumstances, and he was advised to place himself under the protection of the duke of York. In 1454 one of Henry’s knights who had done well out of the French wars, Sir John Falstolf, laid aside money to bribe a sheriff; he wanted a jury that would favour his suit in a legal case. It is clear enough that the juries of the period were, on a routine basis, bribed or intimidated.
In an interpolation to his version of The Game and the Playe of the Chesse William Caxton castigated ‘the advocates, the men of law and the attorneys of the court’, describing ‘how they turn the laws and statutes at their pleasure, how they eat the people, how they impoverish the community’. We may read for instruction a great juridical text of the period, Sir John Fortescue’s De Laudibus Legum Angliae – ‘In Praise of the Laws of England’ – and even applaud the development or ‘evolution’ of justice; but in practice the law was rotten and worm-eaten. We may say the same of the parliament house and of the court. It is not to be expected that any human institution will be other than rackety and only partially competent; only in histories do they proceed with ease to their ordained end.
All these forces of disorder and injustice came to a head in 1449. In that year Henry’s authority had suffered a mortal blow when Charles VII, on the pretext that the English had broken the terms of a formal truce agreed two years earlier, marched into Normandy with the ambition of expelling the English altogether from his territories; his success was evident and immediate. The towns, hitherto occupied by the English, surrendered without a fight to the three French armies who advanced upon them from various directions.
In November 1449 the parliament house met in the face of the grave news from France and at its second session, in early 1450, the duke of Suffolk was accused of treason. It was alleged that he had planned to assist the invasion of England by Charles VII, and that he was willing to place his castle in Wallingford at the French king’s disposal. The charge may seem unrealistic, but at a time of failure and suspicion it was believed. Those responsible for the fiasco in France had to be made to pay in one form or another. At the same time the chancellor of England, Archbishop Stafford, resigned his post. Suffolk was placed in the Tower, where a bill of impeachment was drawn up against him; the king now intervened and brought these proceedings to an end. Henry could not countenance the spectacle of his chief minister and adviser being humiliated.
The Commons were not to be diverted, however, from their display of public anger and revenge. They put forward a second set of charges, among them the evident fact that Suffolk had protected William Tailboys from arrest and imprisonment. The king now called the lords to his inner chamber in the palace at Westminster, where he repudiated the jurisdiction of parliament by placing Suffolk under his own ‘rule and governance’. It was a peculiarly maladroit manner of proceeding, but there seemed at the time to be no alternative. A few weeks later Henry announced that Suffolk would be banished from the realm for a period of five years. Suffolk set sail from Ipswich at the end of April, bound for the Low Countries; but he did not reach his destination. The ship in which he sailed was detained, and he was taken on board another vessel where he was quickly tried by the sailors. He was decapitated with a rusty sword, and his body dumped on a beach near Dover.
The French king’s recapture of Normandy took only a year and six days. By the summer of 1450 the English forces had been expelled from most of the towns and cities of France; only Calais and parts of Gascony remained. In a portrait of the time Charles VII was described as Le Très victorieux Roi de France. A French chronicler remarked that ‘never had so great a country been conquered in so short a space of time, with such small loss to the populace and to the soldiery’. Henry’s marriage to Margaret of Anjou had done less than nothing to consolidate English rule in France, and indeed Margaret was blamed by many for having engineered or expedited the final disaster. A rhyme went around at the time, ‘The king’s son lost all his father won’. The war of a hundred years was almost over.
It is hard to exaggerate the damage to the king. Not only had he failed in his bid for military conquest, he had actually been forced to surrender territories which the English monarchy had previously held by right. From this time forward Henry effectively lost control of his realm, and in the absence of leadership the confusion turned into chaos. It was also reported, in the parliament of 1450, that the king’s debts had more than doubled in sixteen years; at this point the merchants of London, individuals and corporations, withdrew their financial support. That is another reason for the dynastic struggle of the Wars of the Roses; the king did not have the money to administer the country. There were fears that this was becoming what was known as a ‘wild world’. A man who called himself ‘Queen of the Faery’ preached in the towns and villages of Kent. In Canterbury a fuller by the name of ‘Blue Beard’ tried to muster a force or fellowship of men about him. Kent here is the key.
The fact that the head of Suffolk had been found near Dover, and that the shipmen involved in the execution were men of Kent, inevitably placed that independent and sometimes recalcitrant shire under suspicion. The king’s representative there threatened that the whole county would be laid to waste and turned into a deer park; but the men of Kent already had cause for complaint. The unsuccessful war against France had severely affected the maritime trade on which their prosperity relied. The coast was attacked with impunity by corsairs from France and Brittany. Agnes Paston wrote that a friend of the family ‘had been taken with enemies, walking by the sea side’. She went on to pray that ‘God give grace that the sea be better kept than it is now, or else it shall be perilous dwelling by the sea-coast’.
The beleaguered men of Kent rallied at Calehill Heath in the neighbourhood of Ashford at the end of May 1450; they gathered at a meeting place that had been employed for many hundreds of years. The old spirit of place asserted itself in times of uncertainty and danger. On this heath they elected as their leader and representative Jack Cade, and under his guidance they marched towards London; by 11 June they were encamped on Blackheath within sight of the capital. In their declaration they averred that ‘they call us risers and traitors and the king’s enemies, but we shall be found to be his true liege men’. Instead they attacked his advisers or, as they were commonly known, the ‘evil counsellors’; as a result of their machinations, ‘his lordship is lost, his merchandise is lost, his commons destroyed, the sea is lost, France is lost, himself so poor that he cannot afford his meat or drink’. They knew, by whispers or by rumours, the parlous state of his finances. The rebels also denounced the manifest perversions of local justice and the oppressions of local magnates, exposing indirectly the confused state of the entire realm.