At the end of 1425, just three years into the reign of the infant Henry VI, the English polity, such as it was, was in turmoil. Although arrangements for the conduct of government during the King’s minority had been agreed shortly after Henry V’s death in 1422, these were now called into question by an acrimonious quarrel between the protector of England, the boy-king’s uncle, Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, and the chancellor of England, Henry Beaufort, bishop of Winchester.

Each man had his own ideas of how the king’s affairs should be managed in his name, although, it is fair to say with the benefit of hindsight, Duke Humphrey perhaps emerges from the affair with less credit. The decision of assembling Parliament at Leicester (very much in the heartland of Lancastrian power in England) was taken in view of the armed might that the two squabbling magnates brought to bear: Bishop Beaufort in his manor at Southwark, and Humphrey in the streets of London itself. In the autumn of 1425, their enmity had found an outlet in an actual armed fight on London bridge, and it was thus deemed necessary for Humphrey’s elder brother, John, duke of Bedford, to return from France, where he otherwise served as regent, and to preside over Parliament.

The Parliament was convened in something of a hurry: just 42 days were to elapse between its summons and assembly (the fourteenth-century tract, the Modus Tenendi Parliamentum stipulated a minimum of 40 days to allow the northern counties whose shire courts met in six-week intervals to conduct their elections). Conversely, the Commons rather dragged their feet in choosing their Speaker, at nine days taking rather longer than the two days this process normally demanded.

But what (according to a chronicler) gave the Parliament its name, were the armed retinues that the various lords brought to the assembly. The administration thus harked back to the fourteenth century, when it had been common practice for a proclamation to be made in Westminster Hall at the beginning of each Parliament, prohibiting the wearing of swords and other weapons. Also prohibited was the playing of silly games, as it had apparently become common practice to pull men’s hoods off their shoulders. Now, in 1426, the prohibition of bearing arms was reiterated. According to a London chronicler, ‘every man was warned and it was cried throughout the town that they should leave their weapons in their inns, that is to say their swords and shields, bows and arrows’.

Yet, the lords’ men were not cowed: ‘And then the people took great bats on their shoulders, and so they went. And the next day they were charged that they should leave their bats at their inns, and then they took great stones in their bosoms and their sleeves, and so went to the parliament with their lords.’ And so, the chronicler concluded, ‘some men called this Parliament the “Parliament of bats”.

In the event, it seems, it proved possible to get the session under way, and for Humphrey and Beaufort to plead their respective cases. The pleadings have come down to us in the form in which the clerk of the Parliament recorded them. There has to be some suspicion that he was a partisan of Beaufort’s, for much of what Duke Humphrey put forward sounds little short of petty to the modern observer. Among the stories he dredged up was one dating back to Henry V’s lifetime, when he had been accommodated in the palace of Westminster’s Green Chamber, and by virtue of the barking of a spaniel a man had been discovered hiding behind a wall hanging. This man had allegedly been induced by Bishop Beaufort to murder him, and for his pains was drowned in the Thames.

Beaufort for his part kept his statements dignified, and above all pointed to his ecclesiastical dignity in his defence. In the event, Bishop Beaufort was dismissed as chancellor, but at long last granted permission to accept the papal offer of a cardinal’s hat. He and duke Humphrey were made to seal their reconciliation with a formal handshake.

With that, the first session of a parliament was drawn to a close and the Lords and Commons were dispatched to their homes for Easter. The bulk of the assembly’s business was probably transacted in the month that followed their return on 29 April, a period during which the young king (still only four years old) was knighted by his uncle, the duke of Bedford.  

H.W.K.  

Further Reading:

R.A. Griffiths, The Reign of King Henry VI (London: Benn, 1981), 73-81

The Parliament Rolls of Medieval England (16 Vols., Woodbridge: Boydell, 2010), x. 276-317

While, during the Wars of the Roses, the political allegiances of individual noblemen are relatively easy to determine, those of individual towns are generally obscured. This is not surprising, for the notion of the corporate allegiance of a town is a difficult one.  While sometimes a few leading townsmen can be identified as active partisans of either York or Lancaster, that does not mean that they carried their fellow townsmen with them. Town authorities generally saw the safest course in giving their allegiance, outwardly at least, to whichever faction happened to be in charge. None the less, if commitment was not actively sought, it could not always be avoided. Towns in areas of strong Yorkist or Lancastrian lordship, or else on the route of campaigning armies, could find themselves drawn into conflict. Shrewsbury provides an instructive example.  Already the location of a major battle – when Henry IV defeated the Percys in 1403 – it was, geographically and politically, poorly placed to avoid involvement in the Wars of the Roses. Not only was it one of the major towns on the Welsh March (and, in the townsmen’s own characterization, ‘on off the keyes for the good ordre off the marches’) and a crossing point on the River Severn, it was also in the political orbit of Henry VI’s leading opponent, Richard, duke of York, whose great castle of Ludlow lay only 30 miles away. 

What this meant for the town was clearly illustrated in the early 1450s.  When York returned from Ireland in the autumn of 1450 to claim what he saw as his rightful place in Henry VI’s government, he passed through the town on his way to Westminster and was elaborately entertained by the borough authorities, who provided a pipe (about 100 gallons) of red wine.  Although so relatively modest a gift can hardly be interpreted as an endorsement of his opposition to the Lancastrian regime, the duke himself clearly believed that the town was a promising source of support.  On 3 February 1452 he wrote, from his castle of Ludlow, to his ‘right worshipful friends, the bailiffs, burgesses and commons of the good town of Shrewsbury’, outlining his grievances against the King’s chief minister, Edmund Beaufort, duke of Somerset and asking the townsmen ‘to come to me with all diligence … with as many goodly and likely men as ye may’.  The townsmen responded: some 60 of them, headed by an alderman, Roger Eyton, were later indicted for armed insurrection against the King at Ludlow. If, however, is an early mark of the town’s Yorkist sympathies and its readiness to support rebellion, that readiness, perhaps diminished by the ignominious failure of the 1452 rising, was much less apparent when York again raised rebellion in the Marches in 1459.  The bailiffs’ accounts reveal a state of some confusion amongst the town’s leaders, as they dispatched emissaries to detect the movement of rival armies, but that confusion was resolved in favour of Lancaster  In the aftermath of the Yorkist defeat at nearby Ludford Bridge, the victorious Henry VI wrote to them thanking them for resisting the passage of the Yorkist Edward Bourgchier, younger son of Viscount Bourgchier, Clearly, at least a faction among the townsmen saw the value of maintaining allegiance to the ruling house, and that faction was still in the ascendant at the time of the battle of Northampton in the following July when the town sent 61 men to fight for Henry VI.

Yet, although the borough authorities were ready to support the ruling house in the first part of the civil war of 1459-61, some senior townsmen had a very different inclination. Chief among them was Eyton, who was in the duke’s ranks at Ludford Bridge, and then fled with him to Ireland, but there were others. An action sued in the court of King’s bench in the Hilary term 1460 implies the existence of a strong Yorkist faction: Edward, prince of Wales, and other Lancastrian lords sued an action of trespass against Eyton, John Horde, head of the town’s principal family, and three other prominent burgesses.  The subject of the action is unknown – it disappears from the plea rolls with the change of regime – but there can be little doubt that it arose from some event in the Ludford campaign.

In these circumstances, it is not surprising that this Yorkist faction took control of the town after the Lancastrian defeat at Northampton. The duke of York, as he again made his way back from Ireland in the aftermath of that victory, was welcomed as he had been ten years earlier; and the town then spent £30 on dispatching 40 soldiers to fight for him in the campaign that led to his death on the field of Wakefield, a markedly greater sum than the £8 13s. 4d. spent on the troops it sent to fight for Lancaster at Northampton. Further, as the duke travelled north to his death, his son, Edward, earl of March, making ready for a campaign in the Marches, spent Christmas in Shrewsbury, receiving a payment of 40 marks from the town’s authorities for his ‘good lordship’. Although evidence is lacking, there can be little doubt that there was a Shrewsbury contingent at the earl’s victory at the battle of Mortimer’s Cross, fought about 35 miles south of the town, in the following February, as there certainly was at the battle of Towton some eight weeks later. It is not known how much was spent on sending soldiers to that decisive battle, beyond 16s. 8d. spent on a banner, but £20 was expended on sending 40 soldiers to the new King when he was at Bristol in early September 1461. The bailiffs’ account for 1462-3 records larger payments, with as much as £68 5s. laid out on the wages of soldiers sent to the King in the north and 10s. on another banner, presumably displaying the town’s arms, to be borne before its contingent.

Thus Shrewsbury, in the civil war of 1459-61, conformed to a common pattern amongst towns, namely giving outward allegiance to the ruling house, but there can be little doubt that the sympathies of the townsmen lay with the house of York. In the aftermath of the Yorkist seizure of government in the summer of 1460, they supported York with much greater enthusiasm than they had supported Lancaster in the immediately preceding period.  Further, although the town as a corporation was to gain little from Edward IV’s accession (beyond the routine confirmation of its charters), the leaders of the Yorkist faction in the town were rewarded, most notably Eyton, who found a place in the new King’s household and was granted the constableship of the town’s royal castle.

SJP

Further reading:

For a discussion of the misattributed statue: D.R. Walker, ‘An Urban Community in the Welsh Borderland: Shrewsbury in the Fifteenth Century’, University of Wales, Swansea, Ph.D. thesis, 1981, pp. 412-17.

For biographies of Roger Eyton and John Horde with a general discussion of the town in Henry VI’s reign, see L. Clark (ed.), The House of Commons, 1422-61 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).

The ‘Wars of the Roses’ were notable for their striking reversals of fortune, but perhaps none was so extreme as that which occurred between the rout of the Yorkist lords at Ludford Bridge in October 1459 and their victory at the battle of Northampton in July 1460.  At first sight, their cause had seemed irretrievably lost after their humiliating flight from Ludford Bridge and the forfeiture of their estates enacted in the Coventry Parliament of the following month. Yet nine months later they had captured the King, killed several leading Lancastrian lords, and resumed control of government. As a Yorkist poet reflected, very soon after the battle, ‘and som tyme, by enspeciall grace, Sorow is turned into gladnesse’. 

There were many factors in this dramatic reversal of fortune. If one were to emphasise the failings on the Lancastrian side, chief among them would be their unsuccessful efforts to dislodge the Yorkist lords from their strongholds in Ireland and Calais and the loss of political support occasioned by the extreme measures they took against the Yorkists in the Coventry Parliament.  It should, however, be stressed that the consequences of these failings were magnified by the skilfulness and speed of the Yorkist campaign that began when the Neville earls and York’s son, the earl of March (the future Edward IV) landed at Sandwich on 26 June 1460. This ensured that, when the two armies – the Lancastrians marching from Coventry, the Yorkists from London – confronted each other, only two weeks later, on the banks of the River Nene near Northampton, the Lancastrian army was outnumbered.  There had been no time for it to be joined by forces from the north under Henry Percy, earl of Northumberland, and John, Lord Clifford, militant and powerful exponents of the Lancastrian cause. None the less, it had certain compensatory advantages on the field.  Although smaller, it was largely drawn from baronial retinues, and thus better-trained than its Yorkist opponents, who, although afforced by professional troops from the Calais garrison, largely consisted of mass recruits. More importantly, it was drawn up in a powerful defensive position, with its rear defended by the river, its front by high ramparts and with major reserves of artillery to repel attack.  Indeed, according to the chronicle of John Wheathampstead, abbot of St. Albans, who provides one of the best contemporary accounts of the battle, these advantages gave its commander, Humphrey Stafford, duke of Buckingham, the confidence to repudiate Yorkist attempts to negotiate. 

Their calculations, however, were undone by an act of treachery.  On the face of it, Edmund (b.1416), Lord Grey of Ruthin, was an unlikely traitor to the Lancastrian cause.  Through his maternal grandmother, Elizabeth, a sister of Henry IV, he was the King’s second cousin, and his ties to the ruling house had been strengthened by his marriage to a sister of the earl of Northumberland.  Further his brother, Thomas, had been promoted to the peerage in 1450, and he himself had become a member of the royal council in the late 1450s.  He was clearly a trusted figure in the Lancastrian ranks, for he was given a position of command, perhaps in place of his brother-in-law, on the field of Northampton.  Yet he had reason to fear what a Lancastrian victory might mean for his personal fortunes.  Just before the death of Ralph, Lord Cromwell, in 1456, he had agreed to purchase from him, for the staggering sum of 6,500 marks, the great castle and lordship of Ampthill in Bedfordshire, a few miles from his main residence at Wrest. The difficulty was that Cromwell’s claim to this extensive property had been, violently and without justification, claimed by Grey’s cousin, Henry Holland, duke of Exeter. Grey had supported Cromwell in that dispute and now had grounds for concern that, should the Yorkists be defeated, the duke, who stood higher in Lancastrian counsels than he did, would have government support in winning the lordship from him. No contemporary chronicler suggests that this was the reason why Grey changed sides at Northampton, but the Tudor antiquary, John Leland (d.1552), no doubt reflecting a contemporary rumour, noted the potential connexion.

Whatever prompted Grey, his treachery was a significant factor in the Yorkist victory. Most of the chronicle accounts, one of which claims the fight lasted only half an hour, are specific on this point.  Wheathampstead gives the most circumstantial account: ‘as the attacking squadrons came to the ditch before the royalist rampart … Lord Grey with his men met them and, seizing them by the hand, hauled them into the embattled field’. The Welsh historian, Howell Thomas Evans (d.1950), did not hold back in his condemnation of Grey’s action: in the ‘sordid annals of even these sterile wars there is no deed of shame so foul’.  Its consequences were certainly immense.  It may be that the outnumbered Lancastrians would have lost the battle in any event, but they would have not done so in such a sudden fashion.  Since, due to Grey’s ‘deed of shame’, the Yorkists were able to overwhelm their defensive position, they were able to kill whom they would, and they took full advantage.  Buckingham, according to one account, ‘stondyng stylle at hys tente’, fell on the field, as did his three leading captains, John Talbot, earl of Shrewsbury, John, Viscount Beaumont, and Grey’s brother-in-law, Thomas Percy, Lord Egremond.   The Yorkists were also able to capture the King, who, although in himself a mere cipher, was an important prize.  Historical counterfactuals are generally more indulgent than informative, but it is interesting to reflect on what would have happened had the Lancastrians retained the King.  On 30 July the Yorkists, with the King in their possession, summoned the Parliament in which the duke of York, newly returned from Ireland, was to make his claim to the throne.  One wonders what would have been the status of this assembly had the King not been present to attend its opening, and whether it would have had the political and legal authority to pass the Act of Accord by which the Lancastrian line was disinherited.

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the Lancastrians lost a battle they did not need to fight. Their purpose in so quickly coming to battle was to prevent the Yorkists forces uniting on the duke of York’s arrival, imminently expected, from Ireland. Yet it does not need the benefit of hindsight to conclude that it would have been better to draw the Yorkists north. The potential success of such a tactic was to be exemplified at the end of the year, when the duke of York and the Neville earl of Salisbury met their deaths at the battle of Wakefield.  Had Northampton not been fought, Buckingham and Shrewsbury, both of whom left mere boys as their heirs, would have survived, and the events of 1461, for that reason among others, may have had a different result.

SP

Further reading

R.I. Jack, ‘A Quincentenary; the Battle of Northampton, July 10^th 1460’, Northamptonshire Past and Present, vol. 3 (1960), pp. 21-25

On 22 March 1454 John Kemp, cardinal archbishop of Canterbury, and Chancellor of England died suddenly. This left a gaping vacancy in one of the great offices of state at a critical time: the previous summer, King Henry VI had lost his mental and physical faculties. While Henry was ostensibly awake, he had fallen into a kind of stupor, and was unable to fulfil any of the functions of government. During the months of the King’s incapacity the lords of the council had muddled through as best they could, and had avoided any decisions on a more permanent arrangement for the event of the King’s continuing illness. But the choices of a new archbishop and a new chancellor were matters which, in an age of personal monarchy, could not be settled without reference to the King.

Parliament was at the time in session, formally presided over in the King’s absence by his relative, Richard, duke of York. Following the Chancellor’s death, the lords were in no doubt that the King, whatever his condition, needed to be consulted, and to this end on the 23^rd dispatched a delegation (consisting of William Waynflete, bishop of Winchester, Thomas Bourgchier, bishop of Ely, Reginald Boulers, bishop of Coventry and Lichfield, Richard Neville, earl of Warwick, John de Vere, earl of Oxford, John Talbot, earl of Shrewsbury, John, Viscount Beaumont, Henry, Viscount Bourgchier, Robert Bottyll, prior provincial of the English Hospitallers, William Neville, Lord Fauconberg, John, Lord Dudley, and John, Lord Stourton) to Windsor, where Henry VI was then residing.

Two days later, the envoys returned to Westminster and reported to the lords on their mission. When they had reached Windsor castle, they had found the King at dinner. While waiting for the monarch to finish his meal, the delegates decided that Bishop Boulers of Coventry and Lichfield should set out their questions to the King. This he did ‘most skilfully, solemnly and respectfully’, explaining the articles with which their peers had entrusted them, but failed to elicit any answer from Henry. Boulers then went on to lay before the King the other concerns with which they had been entrusted, including the need for an indication of his will in the matter of the appointment of a chancellor and an archbishop, but

to [these] matters, or to any of them, to any prayer or wish, doleful encouragement nor exhortation, nor any thing that they or any of them could do or say could they get any answer or sign, to their great sorrow and distress.  

At the suggestion of Bishop Waynflete the emissaries then went to their own dinner, before seeking a fresh audience of the King. They once again found Henry in his dining room,

and there they moved and roused him by all the ways and means that they could think of in order to have an answer of the aforesaid matters, but they could obtain no answer; and from that place they willed the king’s highness to go into another chamber, and so he was led between two men into the chamber where he lies; and there the lords moved and roused the king’s highness a third time, by all the means and ways that they could think of in order to have an answer of the said matters, and also desired to be informed by him if it should please his highness that they should wait on him any longer, and to have answer at his leisure, but they could obtain no answer, word or sign; and therefore with sorrowful hearts they came away.

PROME, xii. 258-9

For several days, the Lords prevaricated, struck by the realisation of the King’s complete inability to exercise his office. It was clear that what could be done by them collectively had reached its limits, and that a single individual needed to be assigned extraordinary power to act loco Regis. Eventually, they agreed that the duke of York should be granted the title of Protector, but they took care to ringfence his powers and limit their independent exercise.

On 30 March, the council, in response to a petition of the Commons, decided that Bishop Bourgchier of Ely should be recommended for elevation to the archbishopric. About the same time, the lords agreed to the appointment of York’s brother-in-law, Richard Neville, earl of Salisbury, as the new Chancellor, in itself a break with convention, as the office had not been held by a layman in more than 40 years.

The King would not recover until Christmas 1454, and when he did, professed to have no memory of what had occurred during the preceding 18 months. On 30 December, when Henry’s consort, Queen Margaret, introduced his son, the Prince of Wales to him, he was said to have declared that

he never knew him until that time, nor did he know what had been said to him, nor where he had been while he had been sick, until now. […] And she told him that the Cardinal was dead, and he said he never knew of this until that time; and he said one of the wisest lords in this land was dead.

Paston Letters ed. Davis, ii. 108

The King’s recovery brought an end to the earl of Salisbury’s chancellorship, when in March 1455 the office was reunited with the archbishopric of Canterbury in Thomas Bourgchier’s hands.

H.W.K

Further Reading;

R.A. Griffiths, ‘The King’s Council and the first Protectorate of the Duke of York, 1453-1454’, English Historical Review, xcix (1984), 67-82.

The story of the rise of the English Parliament is inextricably interwoven with the Crown’s acceptance in the 13th century that it should not in ordinary circumstances tax its subjects without the prior assent of the community of the realm. Hand in hand with this went an understanding that the King could only make such demands on its subjects on particular grounds. By the later Middle Ages it was accepted that taxation voted by Parliament should be applied to the defence of the realm, although it was understood that this included the King’s possessions on the European mainland.

Grants of taxation nevertheless remained controversial:

I pray God send you the Holy Ghost among you in the parliament house, and rather the devil, we say, than you should grant any more taxes!

John Paston wrote to his brother, Sir John, then a Member of Parliament, in March 1473 (Paston Letters and Papers ed. Davis, i. 361)

This was particularly the case when the war was going badly. In the aftermath of Henry V’s great victory at Agincourt in 1415 the Commons readily acquiesced to a string of taxes to fund fresh expeditions to France. Yet, just a few years later, as England’s French territory was lost piecemeal in the reign of Henry VI, the Commons increasingly pushed back. Wherever possible, they looked for taxes to be levied in the form of customs duties on imports and exports, or on any foreigners living in England. As for direct taxation, the Commons sent Henry VI’s finances into a tailspin by authorising repeated rounds of government borrowing, while delegating the task of agreeing the taxation by which these loans might be repaid to their successors in future Parliaments.

The memory of ever fresh taxes being poured into an apparent black hole as Henry VI’s French territory crumbled away was still fresh when Edward IV replaced him on the throne in March 1461, and the Commons in the Parliament that met at Westminster in November of the same year were no doubt relieved not to be asked for money in support of the new King’s ongoing fight against residual Lancastrian resistance to his rule. Just two years later, however, King Edward could point to the threat of a Scottish invasion in support of the restoration of Henry VI to request a grant of money from Parliament. In June 1463 the Commons agreed, on condition that the tax was to be used for the defence of the realm and for no other purpose. The bulk of the money was to be levied on the basis of a long-established assessment that determined how much every locality in England owed. A supplement, by contrast, was to be raised in the form of a special income tax on everybody who owned either lands returning annual revenues in excess of £1, or moveable goods worth more than £6 13s. 4d. More than half of the money was to be collected that same summer, and Parliament went into its summer recess on 17 June.

In the event, the projected Scottish campaign never took place, and the King instead used the money to pay the wages of the garrison of Calais, and to cover other routine expenditure. He clearly anticipated trouble, for when Parliament reassembled at York on 4 November, he sent the archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Bourgchier, to face the Lords and Commons, with instructions to prevent the assembly from any elaborate discussion by an immediate fresh prorogation until the following year.

The second half of the taxes granted earlier was to be collected about that same time, and the matter had clearly already been on the minds of the Commons, so they were ready for the King. Before the archbishop could send them packing, they found time to agree that their earlier grant of the income tax had been no grant at all, but merely an expression of intent. The chastened King had to agree to forego this special levy, as well as delaying the payment date of the remainder of the money from November to the following spring.   

Edward IV was not slow to learn his lesson. For the next four years, he did not approach Parliament for another grant of money, and when he eventually did so in May 1468, he took care to put the Commons in a good mood with plenty of blandishments and news of a royal wedding, that of the King’s sister Margaret to Charles the Bold, duke of Burgundy.

H.W.K.

Find more blogs from our Commons 1461-1504 project at the Commons in the Wars of the Roses page.

The importance of the reigns of the Lancastrian Kings, and above all that of Henry VI, for the codification of the rules governing parliamentary elections is well known.

It was in 1406 that a statute was passed which required the sheriffs of the English counties to make their returns in the form of indentures counter-sealed by the electors who had in each instance participated in the choice of the knights of the shire, and thereby laid the foundations for what is now the single most important source for the study of medieval parliamentary elections.

Subsequent statutes passed in 1410 and 1413 provided for financial penalties on any sheriffs who should make fraudulent returns, required prospective members to be resident in their constituencies on the date when the writs of summons were issued, and restricted the electoral franchise in the shires to those who not only dwelt within the county but were personally present in the county court on the day of the election.

But it was two final statutes, passed respectively in 1429 and 1445, that had the greatest significance in stratifying electoral procedure. The first drastically limited the county franchise, restricting it to those who held freehold land worth 40s. p.a., ostensibly on the grounds that social unrest threatened, since individuals of insufficient standing had claimed a voice in the elections equal to that of the wealthier knights among the electors; and at the same time added a year’s imprisonment to the penalty imposed on any sheriff making a fraudulent return.

The statute of 1445 for its part imposed qualifications of income and social status on men seeking election as knights of the shire, explicitly excluding men of the status of yeoman or below. There were now also rules for the conduct of the elections of City or borough Members in so far as the county sheriffs were involved in them, and new penalties for misconduct were introduced not only for these, but also for urban returning officers and – for the first time – individuals taking up seats to which they had not lawfully been elected.

Crucially, what this body of statutory legislation did not do was to establish a uniform system for the conduct of parliamentary elections. Rather, it simply fixed a series of financial penalties that an aggrieved party could exact from a sheriff or other returning officer deemed guilty of wrongdoing. As far as its regulatory impact went, it was to establish a limited body of ground rules for the conduct of county elections; where the urban constituencies were concerned it left the door open to a broad range of practices and conventions too varied to be discussed here.

Even in the shires, however, what actually happened at a parliamentary election was determined by circumstances on the ground. Central to this was the gathering of the county court, at which, under the terms of the electoral statutes, the formal election had to be held.  

If this seems like a relatively straightforward requirement, it was not necessarily so, for in most counties the court only met every four weeks, and in a number of northern counties as many as six weeks elapsed between courts.

This meant that the sheriffs had to be given considerable notice of any meeting of Parliament, and if an assembly was to be convened in haste, there was a risk that an election could be subject to challenge, or some MPs, elected with only days to spare, would arrive late. Indeed, in the northern counties sheriffs periodically had to summon extraordinary meetings of the county court ourtside the normal cycle in order to conduct elections in something resembling the manner required by statute.

In a crisis such as that which followed the rout of the Yorkist lords at Ludford Bridge in the autumn of 1459, the Crown might summon Parliament with unseemly haste, and accept that some county sheriffs were quite simply unable to hold an election, and that entire shires might thus go unrepresented. In 1459 this was the case for Hertfordshire and Sussex, while the sheriff of Shropshire as doggedly as dutifully held his election some nine days after Parliament had opened at Coventry

In other instances, electoral meetings might erupt into chaos as the supporters of rival candidates shouted for their men, and sheriffs and undersheriffs sought to keep order. All too often, such disorder was sparked by the presiding officers’ ultimately doomed efforts to establish which members of the baying mob were actually entitled to participate in the election under the terms of the electoral statutes: after 1429, the presiding officers were expected to swear each man attending as to whether he met the income qualification.

How practical this was in reality can only be guessed at: medieval electorates were no better behaved than their later successors. At Warwick in 1427 some of those present in the county court were said to have ‘shouted unreasonably’ in nominating Sir William Mountfort and Sir William Peyto for election as knights of the shire, and in the Norfolk elections of 1461 some were said to have shouted for two of the four candidates and others for the other pair.

Small wonder then, that for much of Henry VI’s reign the time-honoured practice of ‘arranging’ elections seems to have prevailed, and the shire courts were merely asked to assent to the return of candidates who had already been agreed upon by the leading men (and sometimes ladies) in the shire.

Just occasionally, the records suggest that a sheriff took this to extremes: one example of this was John Roger, sheriff of Berkshire in 1452-3. Whereas the Berkshire county court normally met at Abingdon, in 1453 the meeting convened by Roger for the parliamentary elections occurred at Chipping Lambourn, which just so happened to be the sheriff’s own place of residence.

To add to the suspicion of foul play, not only did Roger return his own young and inexperienced son Thomas, but the election return was countersealed by just 11 other men, half of whom were, as far as it is possible to tell, novice voters, suggesting that in avoiding the unpleasantness of a potentially riotous county court, Roger had instead settled the election at a congenial dinner party at his own house.  

H.W.K.

To find out more Hannes’s full length paper ‘Parliamentary Elections in the reign of Henry VI Revisited – Some New Perspectives on an Old Subject?’ is available here.

Hannes will be taking questions about his research between 5.15 p.m. and 6.30 p.m. on Tuesday 1 June 2021. To register for this Virtual seminar, please follow this link and click on ‘Book now’. If you cannot attend this session but wish to submit a question to Hannes, please send it to seminar@histparl.ac.uk.

The Lancastrian victories of the civil war of 1459-61 have a curious quality. Any victory in a campaign that ends in defeat has the air of the pyrrhic about it; none the less, it is striking that after success at Ludford Bridge, Wakefield and St. Albans, the Lancastrians found themselves, on the eve of the decisive encounter at Towton on 29 March 1461, on the defensive and with their King deposed. Certainly, the battle of Towton might have gone either way, but how was it that after the duke of York had been killed at Wakefield and the earl of Warwick defeated at St. Albans the Lancastrians found themselves playing no more than an even-money chance on that fateful day? The earl of March’s victory on the Welsh Marches at Mortimer’s Cross a fortnight before the engagement at St. Albans is an important part of the answer, but so too is what happened at St. Albans.

The facts of that campaign can be briefly set out. Fresh from victory at Wakefield, the Lancastrian army made its way south, plundering as it went, lavishing particular, but by no means exclusive, attention on the duke of York’s property at Grantham and Stamford. The earl of Warwick, meanwhile, who had remained with the King in London after the duke of York had departed north to meet his death, made preparations to meet this threat. The parliamentary session (the second of the assembly that had passed the Act of Accord in the previous October), which had convened on 28 January, was prorogued after only a few days, and, on 12 February Warwick’s army, hastily-assembled and with a high-proportion of ill-trained troops, set out on the road north. He chose to take the King with him, perhaps believing, vainly as it transpired, that the royal presence in his own ranks would deter the Lancastrian army from fighting. One Yorkist chronicler echoed this reasoning, seeing evidence of the depravity of the Lancastrians in the fact that they came against the King ‘his Baner displaied’.

The battle itself was quickly won by the Lancastrians. Warwick had chosen elaborately-defensive tactics, deploying his forces in an extended line with the town of St. Albans at its centre, but found himself surprised and outmanoeuvred by the speed and direction of the Lancastrian attack. The narrowness of the town’s streets hampered the movement of his forces, and it may be that the Lancastrian victory came even before the main Yorkist forces had engaged. The escape from the field of Warwick himself and the other Yorkist leaders (with the exception of Warwick’s brother, John, Lord Montagu, who was captured) is consistent with that conclusion.

From the Yorkist point of view, Warwick’s escape was one blessing from that humiliating day, but there was another less immediately obvious. The Yorkists lost not only the battle but also the body of, in the words of Warwick’s brother, George Neville, bishop of Exeter, ‘that puppet of a King’. He was retaken by the Lancastrians, found, at least according to a report made to the dauphin of France, ‘laughing and singing’ under a tree. This loss brought a new clarity of purpose to the Yorkist cause. Had the King remained in their hands, there would have been those amongst the Yorkist leaders (and their sympathisers more broadly) who would have argued that the Act of Accord should be maintained, with Henry VI as the nominal head of a Yorkist government. Such a middle way would have offered a path to reconciliation with some at least of the Lancastrian leaders. The loss of the King ended this as a practical option. Medieval government needed a King; the Yorkists had now lost him and with him the justification for their rule. The solution was obvious: the new duke of York (and former earl of March) must take the throne.

Just as losing Henry VI had some positive consequences for the Yorkists, regaining him was not the blessing it first appeared for the Lancastrians. It may be going too far to say, as one modern commentator has done, that possession of Henry’s person ‘brought immediate military and political paralysis to the queen’s hitherto successful forces … his presence inhibited action without his approval and his indecisiveness now infected the direction of affairs’ (B.P. Wolffe, Henry VI (1981), p. 329). One may doubt that even his most loyal adherents would have placed much value on his views, particularly in relation to military matters. Yet his recapture may have partly informed the major miscalculation that followed the battle.

Queen Margaret and her advisers chose not to exert every effort to take London. They were undoubtedly faced with practical restraints in the achievement of that aim: they did not trust themselves to prevent their troops plundering the city and feared the reputational damage that would have done (one well-informed London chronicler remarked that  the Lancastrians withdrew because ‘they demyde that the Northeryn men wolde have ben to creuelle in robbyng yf they hadde come to London’); they were aware that, even though the city authorities were divided on the wisdom of admitting them, the city populace was fiercely hostile; and, perhaps most worryingly, they knew that the new duke of York was advancing towards London with the army that had won at Mortimer’s Cross. Yet it may also be that the queen’s determination to attempt to press the advantage was diminished by the retaking of her husband. She may have considered that this had fulfilled the principal purpose of her move south, and that his person, hapless as it was, would serve to rally the uncommitted to her cause. As it transpired, however, the failure to take London was followed by the victorious entry of the duke of York and his acclamation as King on 4 March. Not surprisingly, one chronicler concluded that the Lancastrian retreat from London, ‘was the destruction of King Henry and his queen’. For the Lancastrians, St. Albans had, indeed, proved a pyrrhic victory; for the Yorkists, it had the appearance of a defeat but brought the consequences of a victory.

S.J.P

Find more blogs depicting the events of battles within the Wars of the Roses here.

There are no extant election returns for the Parliament, and the names of just 41 of its MPs survive. Forty, if not all of these men, sat for urban constituencies, the archives of which preserve their election. As it happens, the names of the Members for Bristol are not recorded, but the Readeption proved an episode that the town’s oligarchy, including several parliamentarians, would afterwards rather forget.

Among the parliamentarians in question was the wealthy merchant, John Shipwarde, returned for Bristol in 1453, 1459 and 1460. As well as sitting in the Commons, he played a busy role in the administration of the town, serving four terms as its mayor, the last of which he completed just over a fortnight before the summoning of the Readeption Parliament on 15 October 1470. His final mayoralty coincided with very troubled times. Beset by political crises and unrest, in the early months of 1470 the Yorkist King, Edward IV, faced a rebellion led by his brother, George, duke of Clarence, and Richard Neville, earl of Warwick. In Gloucestershire, two feuding magnate families, the Berkeley and Talbots, took advantage of his loss of authority to fight a private battle at Nibley Green, some 20 miles north-east of Bristol, on 20 March that year.

Shipwarde’s son and namesake and another Bristol burgess, Philip Meede, who had sat alongside Shipwarde in the Parliaments of 1459 and 1460, were implicated in this serious outbreak of disorder, since they were afterwards alleged to have sent armed assistance to the Berkeleys. Within a fortnight of Nibley Green, however, Clarence and Warwick were in retreat from the King’s forces. They fled to south-west England and from there to France, and during their flight they halted at Bristol where Warwick left his artillery. For the King, Nibley Green and the rebels’ reception at Bristol were worrying signs of disloyalty on the part of the burgesses, doubts  compounded by events just as Shipwarde’s mayoralty was ending. In mid- September 1470 Clarence and Warwick returned to England with leading supporters of the deposed Henry VI. After landing in the south-west, from where they had taken ship just a few months earlier, they again stopped at Bristol, this time to join forces with two other rebel lords, the earl of Shrewbury and Lord Stanley. Soon afterwards it was Edward IV’s turn to flee abroad, in his case to Flanders, and Henry was restored to the throne.

In late April 1471, following Edward’s return to England but before his decisive victory at the battle of Tewkesbury on 4 May, the opposing forces headed by Henry VI’s queen, Margaret of Anjou, were able to obtain money, supplies, artillery and reinforcements from Bristol. The town’s contingent in her army was led by its recorder, Nicholas Hervy, who was killed in the battle. Eight days after Tewkesbury, the victorious Edward wrote to the burgesses of Bristol to express his displeasure at their behaviour, although he was prepared to offer a full pardon to any of them who would sue for it, save for the ‘principall sturrers of rebellion’. He listed eight such principals, of whom the first-named was the dead Hervy and the second Shipwarde. Although Shipwarde was arrested and his property seized, his disgrace was short-lived, since he was pardoned and released just four months later. 

Hervy, the commander of the town’s contingent at Tewkesbury was a Cornish-born lawyer rather than a native Bristolian. Like Shipwarde, he was also returned to at least three Parliaments, although for other constituencies, Launceston in Cornwall in 1449 and the Wiltshire borough of Hindon in 1459 and 1467. He had however been associated with Bristol for several decades and had become its recorder in the later 1460s. Later family tradition would have it that he was knighted at Tewkesbury just before the battle began, a claim supported by at least one contemporary chronicler.

Although not among the townsmen arrested following Tewkesbury, Philip Meede, already associated with Nibley Green and the Shipwardes, fell under renewed suspicion following Edward IV’s recovery of the throne. In November 1471 he took the precaution of acquiring a royal pardon, but on the 26th of that month, just three days after his pardon was issued, the Crown ordered him and three other Bristolians, John Cogan, William Spencer (who had sat for Bristol in the Parliament of 1467) and Robert Strange (who would represent it in those of 1484 and 1485), to appear before the King and his council in the following January. While the reason for the summons is not recorded, it is worth noting that Cogan, Spencer and Strange were among those arrested with Shipwarde the previous spring. Like Shipwarde, however, Meede was not to incur lasting disgrace for his activities in 1470-1.

Much remains to be told about Bristol in this period, not least the names of its representatives in the Parliament that sat in the name of the restored Henry VI (although it is of course possible that the MPs in question included one or other of Shipwarde, Hervy and Meede), but it seems clear that the municipal authorities were far more supportive of the Readeption than they would later care to admit. 

C E M

Further reading: 

Peter Fleming and Michael Wood, Nibley Green: Gloucestershire’s forgotten battle (Stroud, 2003). 

The Maire of Bristowe is Kalendar ed. Peter Fleming (Bristol Rec. Soc. 67,*9 2015) 

Peter Fleming, Bristol and the Wars of the Roses 1451-1471 (Bristol, 2005) 

On 26 November 1470 a Parliament assembled at Westminster. This was in itself no remarkable event, even if there had been no such assembly for over two years. What was remarkable was that for the first time since the late summer of 1460 the writs for the Parliament had been issued in the name of Henry VI, who had been released from the Tower, declared restored to the throne, and installed in the bishop of London’s palace near St Paul’s just weeks earlier.

Following more than a year of popular unrest stirred up by the King Edward IV’s brother, George, duke of Clarence, and their cousin, Richard Neville, earl of Warwick, and a period of captivity at Warwick’s hands, in the summer of 1470 Edward IV had at last appeared to be secure on his throne. Warwick and Clarence had been driven into exile in France, and the King’s supporters seemed to be overcoming the insurgency in the north. Yet, when Warwick and Clarence returned at the head of a small invasion force assembled with French assistance, the King’s support melted away with alarming speed and at the end of September he himself had to take ship and seek refuge at the court of his brother in-law, Charles the Bold, duke of Burgundy.

Henry VI was declared King once more, and, as was by now becoming an established part of dynastic change. A Parliament was summoned to give formal sanction to the new constitutional arrangements. Yet, what the Parliament did, remains largely obscure today. While the record of the decisions of even the most contentious Parliaments of the Wars of the Roses were preserved, no Parliament roll for the assembly of 1470-1 seems to have been compiled.

The first and principal items of business can nevertheless be guessed at: on the precedent of 1461, Henry VI’s title to the throne, and the succession of his son, the Lancastrian Prince of Wales, would have been re-affirmed, and the decisions of 1460 and 1461 that called this into question disavowed. The same, or a separate act would have ensured that the acts of Parliaments and some other administrative decisions of Edward IV’s reign remained in force, even though his rule had been declared illegal: this, likewise had been done in 1461 with regard to the acts of the three Lancastrian Kings. Yet, the restored regime was highly insecure, and – in view of the presence in the new rulers’ ranks of Edward IV’s brother, George, duke of Clarence, and his cousin, the ‘Kingmaker’ earl of Warwick – had to tread carefully over any reprisals against the adherents of the house of York. By contrast with 1461, when a large number of Lancastrian loyalists had been attainted to treason, it is likely that in 1470 any act of attainder would have remained limited, perhaps restricted to Edward IV and the few men who had joined him in exile. Similarly, it is probable that any act of resumption cancelling Edward IV’s grants would have been moderated by the extensive issue of provisos exempting the recipient from the effects of the act. The receiver of the city of Exeter paid one of the city’s MPs, Richard Druell, 12d. for the cost of procuring just such an exemption even before Christmas 1470, and a petition for exemption by the abbess and convent of Syon also survives.

Perhaps the most awkward part of the constitutional retrenching concerned the position of the duke of Clarence. Although no explicit evidence survives, it may be reasonably suggested that the one concession made to him and Warwick by Queen Margaret was that in the event of the failure of Henry VI’s line, the crown should pass to him and his descendants. This represented a double insurance policy for the wily earl, whose grandchildren were thus all but guaranteed the throne by virtue of the respective marriages of his two daughters to Clarence and Henry VI’s son, Edward, prince of Wales. 

Before the Lords and Commons broke up for Christmas, there was one final item of business: as had been done repeatedly in his first reign, the King proclaimed a general pardon available to all comers, and in the four months that followed over 300 copies of the pardon were issued.

Parliament reassembled in the second half of January, and continued in session for other a month. By the end of February, however, the membership probably began to dwindle, as increasing numbers of Edwardian loyalists began to seek safety in ecclesiastical sanctuaries in the anticipation of fresh reprisals and arrests in the wake of Edward IV’s expected invasion.

Like Henry VI’s previous ‘final’ Parliament of 1460, the assembly may never have been formally dissolved, but simply dispersed in late March or early April, as the Yorkist monarch approached London. In 1478, and probably against the backdrop of the final disgrace of the duke of Clarence, its acts were formally declared null and void.

H.W.K.

Further Reading:

Rosemary Horrox, ‘1470: Introduction’ in The Parliament Rolls of Medieval England, ed. Chris Given Wilson et al. (16 vols., Woodbridge, 2005).

Hannes Kleineke and E.C. Roger, ‘Baldwin Hyde, Clerk of the Parliaments in the Readeption Parliament of 1470-1’, Parliamentary History, xxxiii (2014), 510-10.

Pardon Rolls of Edward IV and Henry VI, 1468-71 ed. H. Kleineke (List and Index Soc. ccclx, 2019).

Follow the research of our Commons 1461-1504 project via the Commons in the Wars of the Roses section of our blog.

On 10 October 1460 there occurred the most dramatic event in the history of the fifteenth-century Parliament. Henry VI’s cousin, Richard, duke of York, entered the parliament chamber and laid claim to the throne. The scene was described in a contemporary letter:

‘my lorde of york with viij hundred horse and men harneysed atte x of the clok …entred the paleis (of Westminster) with his swerde born uppe right by for him thorowe the halle and parleament chambre.  And ther under the cloth of estate stondyng he gave them (the assembled Lords) knowlich[e] that he purposed nat to ley daune his swerde but to challenge his right’. 

If he expected an enthusiastic reception to this unprecedented action, he was to be sorely disappointed. One chronicler records that ‘all the lords were sore dismaide’ at the claim, a dismay all the more surprising in light of the absence of the Lancastrian lords, who, although summoned, had not attended. This dramatic, and from York’s point of view, embarrassing, scene is not mentioned in the official record of the Parliament. This contents itself with a rather sparse record of what followed. Six days later, the duke formally submitted his claim in the most undramatic form of a written instrument delivered to the chancellor. The Lords agreed to give it a hearing but not an answer on the grounds that ‘the mater is so high, and of soo grete wyght’ that it could not be discussed without the King’s assent.

On the following day they put the matter before a compliant King and there followed a period of consultation in an effort to find arguments against the duke’s claim. These were duly drafted and were feeble enough to be easily repudiated by the duke. On 25 October the Lords arrived at the compromise that Henry should remain King but that York and his heirs should succeed him. Six days later York and his two eldest sons, the earls of March and Rutland took a formal oath in the parliament chamber to abide the accord, and the King promised his own adherence to its terms. Thus was the house of Lancaster, which had ruled for 60 years, was disinherited by parliamentary act.

In constitutional terms, this whole proceeding was confused. No contemporary would have accepted the notion that a King could be made by Parliament, for the King’s right to rule depended on hereditary right determined by, in the duke’s words, ‘Godds lawe, and all natural lawes’. In deposing the Lancastrian line, the Lords were accepting the duke’s claim that he was the true King, for he was descended from Edward III’s second son, Lionel, duke of Clarence, whereas Henry VI was descended from his third, John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster (no reference was made to the central objection that York’s title depended on female descent whereas the Lancastrian claim did not). The act merely recognised the validity of the Yorkist title, but it did so in an unsatisfactory and illogical fashion. The whole proceeding had depended on the compliance and assent of the King who was to be deposed. This assent was easily achieved in Henry VI’s case for he was a mere cipher – in the words of the papal legate, Francesco Coppini, ‘utterly devoid of wit or spirit’ – but, if the King had refused to cooperate, York’s claim could not have been discussed, let alone validated, in Parliament. More significantly still, the solution contradicted the very basis on which it was made. Either the duke was the rightful King or he was not. If he was, then Henry VI can have no right to rule until his death or abdication.

In truth, of course, the act of accord was determined not by constitutional theorising but by the practicalities of politics. York appears to have misjudged these when he dramatically made his claim. It may be that in the previous March, when he was visited in exile in Ireland by his most powerful ally, Richard Neville, earl of Warwick, the two men had agreed that the assertion of that claim was the only way they could find security. By the autumn, however, much had changed. In March the Lancastrians held the reins of government; now, after the successful Yorkist invasion of the summer, both government and the person of the King were in Yorkist hands. Further, oaths of loyalty to the person of Henry VI had been one of the means the invading Yorkist lords had employed to win over the uncommitted. As a result, Warwick may have come to see the continuation of Henry VI’s kingship under Yorkist control as the safest mode of proceeding. 

On this reading, York laid public claim to the throne to force the hands of his closest allies. It may thus be that the act of accord does not represent the rebuff to the duke it is often said to have been. Certainly, his claim to immediate possession of the throne was rejected, and his presumption in claiming it made to look just that. Yet he achieved as much as he could in the circumstances. In face of the hostility of the Lords as a body and the doubts of his leading ally, he had won the throne (at least, if Lancastrian resistance could be overcome) for his eldest son, even if he, some ten years older than Henry VI, did not live to take it himself. Further, it might be that his own succession would come not to depend on Henry’s death: the act of accord made provision for his accession in the event of Henry’s abdication. Indeed, this may have been its crucial point, the act intended simply to postpone Richard’s accession to a moment more politically propitious. Unfortunately, for him, the resistance of Queen Margaret and the Lancastrian lords meant that that day never came. He met his death at the battle of Wakefield at the end of the year.  

SJP

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