Amongst the many problems bequeathed to the English government by the premature death of Henry V and the accession of his baby son, Henry VI, in 1422, was that of his queen consort, Katherine of Valois: what was to be done in the probable event that she, not yet 21, wanted to remarry? Her remarriage into the family of one of England’s great lords would raise an obvious difficulty, threatening the delicate balance of interests on which rule through a minority council depended. The only great family who would favour such a match was the one who made it; in the eyes of the other lords, most notably, perhaps, the head of the that council, Henry V’s brother, Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, it was far better that Katherine should remain unmarried. In these circumstances, her amorous connections, whether real or imagined, were a matter of concern to the council. There was a rumour in the mid-1420s that she intended to marry the young Edmund Beaufort (b.c.1406), count of Mortain, nephew of Cardinal Beaufort. Since the tension between the duke and the cardinal was one of the defining political features of the early years of the reign, it was natural that the duke, and others besides, should have feared such a match.

A ‘statute’ enacted in the Parliament of 1427-8 has been seen in this context. Its expressed purpose was, rather grandly, ‘the salvation of the honour of the most notable estate of the queens of England’. To that end it decreed that ‘no man of whatsoever estate or condition’ should marry such a queen ‘without the especial licence and assent of the King … being of the age of discretion’. He who had the temerity to do the contrary should forfeit all his lands and goods for the term of his life.

Historians have generally been happy to follow the contemporary source, ‘Giles’s Latin Chronicle’, in drawing an explicit connection between this statute and the prospect of a Beaufort marriage. A passage written soon after the queen’s death in January 1437 states that she had wanted to marry Edmund but, to prevent this union, Gloucester and other lords of the council had decreed that any successful suitor would suffer forfeiture and a traitor’s death. In the view of the author of this passage, the queen made her famous marriage to the Welsh esquire, Owen Tudor, who was perhaps a member of her household, because Owen had no goods to forfeit.

Yet there are some obvious interpretative problems here. The author either did not know of the precise terms of the ‘statute’ or else he misrepresented it, magnifying its penalties which did not include a traitor’s death. This implies that he was aware that the ‘statute’ itself provided a poor explanation for the apparent frustration of the Beaufort marriage. The penalty proposed, forfeiture of goods and lands for life only, was simply not sufficient to deter Beaufort. As a younger son, he had little of his own to lose and Katherine would have brought him wealth out of proportion to the loss of his own property. In short, if the ‘statute’ was designed to prevent the Beaufort marriage, it was singularly ill-designed for the purpose.

The statute was also ill-designed in a related sense. Its concluding part notes that the ‘disparagement’ of the queen’ was to be avoided because it would ‘blemish’ the King’s ‘estate and honour’. Yet the limited punishment proposed for any successful suitor, loss of property for life, was such as to encourage her to disparage herself, an invitation that the queen took in marrying the near-propertyless Tudor.

A ‘statute’ which brought about one of the very outcomes it was explicitly designed to avoid needs explanation, and that explanation probably lies in a drafting compromise.  The form in which the originating bill records the assent of the Lords suggests its nature. The spiritual peers gave only a conditional approval: they agreed only ‘as ferforthe as the said bille is not agains the lawe of God and of his cherche but stondeth therwithe and emporteth no dedly synne’. Their difficulty lay in the potential conflict between the Church’s doctrine on the freedom of marriage and the penalty imposed upon anyone who should have the courage to marry the queen. If that difficulty remained even when that penalty was a comparatively mild one, it is a fair speculation that they would have refused their consent if the penalty had been more severe. The probability is that the temporal peers had sought deterrent penalties, perhaps even the traitor’s death suggested by ‘Giles’s Latin Chronicle’, but that the resistance of the spiritual peers forced upon them the toothless measure that was eventually passed.

This parliamentary resistance may have extended beyond the spiritual peers. The originating bill records the assent only of the Lords, not that of the Commons, and this omission explains another mystery attaching to the ‘statute’, namely why it was not formally enrolled as one.  Although it was certainly (and erroneously) promulgated as such in the immediate aftermath of the Parliament, it was omitted when the statute roll was drawn up, probably because, for the royal judges who supervised the compilation of the roll, the lack of the Commons’ assent invalidated it as a statute. But here yet another mystery arises.  Not only is the ‘statute’ omitted from the statute roll, but the originating bill, once enrolled on the roll of the Parliament of 1427, is now no longer there. The relevant membrane has been excised. If this had happened in the immediate aftermath of the Parliament then the reason might lie in the contemporary controversy over the bill’s terms, but it occurred much later, sometime between the early-seventeenth century, when the enrolled bill appears in antiquarian copies of the roll, and 1767, when the parliament rolls were prepared for publication. Accidental loss is improbable, but the reason for its removal must remain as one of the several mysteries of this curious ‘statute’. 

SJP

Further reading

R.A. Griffiths, ‘Queen Katherine of Valois and a Missing Statute of the Realm’, in King and Country; England and Wales in the Fifteenth Century (London, 1991), pp.  103-13.

G.O. Sayles, ‘The Royal Marriages Act 1428’, in Scripta Diversa (London,1982), pp. 285-9.

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

What makes good television? Certainly not the often humdrum details of historical reality with which the professional historian has to concern him or herself. It is thus an interesting experience to be invited to provide historical insights to the producers of a new screenplay, as I was in the summer of 2018, and to see at first hand what aspects of history concerned or inspired the production team, what made it into the final cut, and what had to be sacrificed to the requirements of cinematography.

The film ‘The King’ was to have important scenes set in the Parliament chamber, and while we know a good deal about the technicalities of parliamentary procedure, conversations with the production team’s researcher brought home just how little we know of the physical aspects of the scene in the meeting place of (in this instance) the Lords. Would the lords invariably wear their Parliament robes? Would the bishops and abbots wear mitres? And what of the head dress, if any, worn by the temporal lords? Would those present sit in a neat hierarchical order? How would the lords address each other, or the King? How would a debate unfold? And (my particular favourite) what would peers hold in their hands during its course?

The few contemporary or near-contemporary depictions we had available, proved unhelpful. The well-known images from Wriothesley’s Garter book which purport to show Parliament under Edward I and Henry VIII respectively, and which in later centuries formed the basis for wood cuts and engravings of Parliament, postdated the scenes that were to be recreated on screen by more than a century. Chronologically closer are images from the foundation charters of King’s College, Cambridge, and Eton College, which show the Lords and Commons bare-headed at prayer, but they do not show their subjects in the setting of a parliamentary session. Illuminations from early 15^th century manuscripts of chronicles depicting a (in any event fictitious) scene of Henry IV’s usurpation and Richard II’s deposition in a pseudo-parliamentary session, are colourful, but unhelpful. (I stopped short of suggesting to the researcher that he might like to prop a ladder against Henry V’s chantry chapel in Westminster abbey to get a closer look at the attire of the carved figures of bishops and lords found there!)

The director’s assistant who consulted me took down every detail I could provide with great enthusiasm, and was not to be put off by my repeated insistence that so much of what he wanted to know was simply un-knowable. The eagerness of the production team to be as true to historical reality as possible, at least where the set was concerned was touching: some weeks later, during the filming, I took a call from the researcher to say that the clerks of Parliament who, true to the Wriothesley image, had been placed in a central location were in the camera’s way, so would I mind if they were moved to a table on one side of the room? (I did not.)  

Do the parliamentary scenes in ‘The King’ do justice to the reality of the early 15^th century Parliament? Perhaps as much as we can say is that a fifteenth century peer transported from his own time onto the film set might recognise the occasion for what it was intended to be (although he might marvel at the language used). What is perhaps more tantalising for the historical practitioner is the sobering realisation of the limitations of our knowledge. Almost two centuries ago, the doyen of German medieval historiography, Leopold von Ranke, postulated that the ultimate aim of all historical inquiry should be to establish ‘wie es eigentlich gewesen’ (what it was really like). The experience of trying to inform a recreation of events, if anything, drives home just how far from that goal we still are.

H.W.K.

An up to date account of the meeting places, setting and procedure of Parliament in the first half of the fifteenth century will appear in the introductory survey to The History of Parliament: The Commons 1422-1461 ed. Linda Clark, to be published by Cambridge University Press later this year. Our Medieval MP of Month series will give you a sample of the individuals profiled in these volumes.

On 21 May 1420 Henry V’s great victories in France, and the divisions in the French kingdom that had allowed them, culminated in the treaty of Troyes. Charles VI of France, incapacitated by recurrent bouts of madness over nearly 30 years, agreed that, on his death, the kingdom of France would not be inherited by his son and heir, the Dauphin, Charles (the future Charles VII), but would pass instead to Henry V, who would take as his wife the Dauphin’s sister, Katherine. In the meantime, the English king would rule France as Charles VI’s regent.

The unification of the crowns of England and France, almost unimaginable at the outset of Henry V’s reign in 1413, had become a reality, at least in so far as realities are manifest in treaties. In truth, of course, there were obstacles, ultimately insurmountable ones, in the way of that unification. The Dauphin still controlled more than half of France and had neither incentive nor inclination to accept his disinheritance. Thus, in the summer and autumn following the treaty, Henry V continued to campaign as he had done since 1417, reducing to obedience Dauphinist strongholds to the south and east of Paris, most notably Melun. He was thus absent from Westminster when Parliament gathered there on 2 December 1420.

One might have expected this Parliament to have assembled in celebratory mood. The king had vindicated his dynasty’s claim to the French throne, albeit not entirely on the terms Edward III had claimed it in 1340 (the treaty of Troyes did not precisely address the grounds on which Henry was to assume the French throne: was it because he had the superior hereditary right over the line he was to supplant, or was he doing so as the adopted heir of the rightful king?). There was also the promise that the financial burden of maintaining the French war would be lifted from the taxpayers of England: the conflict was now not a war between two nations but a civil war in the kingdom of France between Henry V, as regent of Charles VI and heir-apparent to the French crown, and the Dauphinists, as rebels against their king, and so the burden of maintaining the war should thus fall exclusively on French taxpayers.

Yet there was another side to this optimistic picture. The siege of Melun, which had lasted four months, had demonstrated that the war would not come to a swift conclusion, and many must have shared the opinion of one modern historian that the treaty was ‘not so much a guarantee of peace as the prime cause of continued war’. [Curry, ‘Parliament of December 1421’, in Parliament Rolls of Medieval England, ix. 246.]  In such circumstances, whatever the theoretical arguments against further taxation, any relief from war taxation might be a very temporary expedient. It was also possible to see the treaty in terms of loss rather than profit from the English point of view. For many among the Commons and the Lords, particularly perhaps those who had campaigned in France, the treaty had supplanted an outcome that was far more desirable than the unions of the two crowns, namely that Normandy, the conquest of which was then complete, should be re-annexed to the English crown to be held in full sovereignty. Yet, under the terms of the treaty, Normandy, the most valuable province of the kingdom of France, was once more to be part of the realm of France and to become subject to Henry V not as king of England but as king of France.

These concerns explain why the Parliament following the treaty proved the most difficult of the reign. The Commons in their petitions presented a surly and xenophobic face. Many of them must have listened doubtfully to the opening speech of Chancellor Langley, extolling the treaty as ‘the welcome conclusion of peace [to] the undoubted advantage and perpetual happiness of all this kingdom of England’. Even setting aside the consideration that the treaty of Troyes was no peace, the Commons were sensitive to its other potential disadvantages. It promised a future in which the king of England would be routinely absent from England, not only on campaign but also as the ruler of another and larger kingdom. They thus successful petitioned that, if Parliament should be in session during one of those absences (as, indeed, the present assembly, was), the king’s return should not result in a dissolution. Another of their petitions addressed a much more central issue. They asked for the confirmation of an undertaking made by Edward III when he had laid claim to the French throne in 1340, namely that Englishmen ‘should never be nor ought to be in subjection or obedience to the kings of France … or to the kingdom of France’, in other words England was to retain its sovereignty even though its king was also king of France.

In some ways, the fears expressed by this Parliament set the tone for the Parliaments of the remainder of the 1420s. No direct taxation was either asked or granted during this assembly, and the last two Parliaments of the reign granted between them only one full subsidy (about £37,000). No further subsidy was granted until the Parliament of December 1429. By then the military situation – the failure of the siege of Orleans and the defeat at the battle of Patay – had turned decidedly if not decisively against the English, and all realistic hope of establishing a dual monarchy in the hands of Henry V’s young son, Henry VI, had been lost. The Commons may have viewed the loss with indifference, for they had certainly done nothing to make it a reality. Had Henry V not died in August 1422 leaving a baby as his heir, his force of character may have shaken the Commons out of their indifference, but that is a doubtful surmise. By the end of his reign the euphoria of the victory at Agincourt had given way to war-weariness and a conviction, on the part of the Commons, that the defeat of the Dauphin would not be bought with English money.

SJP