This repeated criticism can give the impression that kingship itself was in disrepute. But the criticism was invariably specific and personal: an individual ruler had failed to live up to the requirements of the office. As has often been pointed out, deposition is a tribute to the strength of the institution. If the king had been an irrelevance it would have been unnecessary to remove him. The dynastic element may have made deposition easier in the later fifteenth century, but it was never an easy option. On the contrary, the threat to domestic stability posed by deposition, or the threat of deposition, brought its own braking mechanism into play. In times of crisis, support for royal authority was recognized as the most effective bulwark against disorder. This was not, of course, a new perception. One can see it throughout the middle ages, and beyond. Within the fifteenth century it explains how the disastrous reign of Henry VI limped on for as long as it did. The period 1449-50, for instance, was arguably the nadir of the Lancastrian monarchy, with the fall of Rouen signalling the loss of Normandy, the parliamentary impeachment of the duke of Suffolk, the central figure in the political regime for the last decade, and Jack Cade’s rebellion, culminating in an unresisted attack on London. But in the short term Henry VI’s government rallied remarkably, and at least part of the explanation must be that the shock of the Cade rising, accompanied as it was by the lynching of a number of royal servants, had concentrated the minds of the political elite on the need to prop up the regime.
That recovery was fatally weakened by Henry’s mental collapse in 1453. But even then the growing threat of civil war, as the duke of York moved into overt opposition, probably did more to encourage than to undermine the sense that the regime must be defended. Only when civil war was a reality, and the question was no longer how to avert war but how to stop it, did more members of the political community begin to reconsider their alliance. But even as late as the battle of Towton in 1461 Lancaster could still muster the larger forces, and it was only the unexpected victory of the smaller side that gave York’s heir, Edward, the throne. He then shrewdly consolidated his victory by presenting himself as a king who would heal the divisions of the past ten years. But the ultimate beneficiary of this perception of the crown as the best defence against disorder was undoubtedly Henry VII. The traditional view that Henry succeeded in establishing royal authority after 1485 in spite of his leading subjects is wrong. Richard III’s usurpation had demonstrated the fragility of the stability restored by Edward IV and had plunged England back into factional conflict. In the short term Richard himself lacked the moral authority to reunite the realm, although had he won at Bosworth there is little doubt that most of his opponents would have regrouped around him. This, after all, is what ultimately happened to Henry IV after Shrewsbury, Edward IV after Towton or Henry VII after Stoke. In the event, Richard was killed in battle, and it was Henry Tudor who benefited from the perception that the best hope of averting another generation of war lay in shared obedience to the de facto ruler.
Fifteenth-century rulers were well aware of this perception, as can be seen in the way they manipulated the threat of opposition to garner support for themselves. As Paul Strohm has shown, the most dramatic examples are Henry V’s presentation of Old castle’s rising and the Southampton conspiracy early in his reign as far more threatening than was in fact the case, with the corollary that the king’s escape demonstrated God’s providential care for his chosen ruler. Richard, duke of Gloucester, was surely attempting the same manoeuvre in late April 1483, when his seizure of Edward V was accompanied by claims of an intended rising by the Woodvilles, the young king’s maternal kin. Although contemporary observers were evidently unconvinced, Richard thought the strategy worth repeating in June, as he began to move towards taking the crown for himself, when he again claimed that he had survived a conspiracy to overthrow him.
Given this, it becomes less surprising that the threat of disaffection, let alone of civil war, could positively strengthen a regime. Such thinking constituted an intensification of, rather than a departure from, the usual reasons for obeying the king. These formed a spectrum from the divine to the worldly. At one extreme was the belief that the king was God’s representative on earth, to whom obedience was required by divine law. At the other, it was recognized that obedience could be profitable, bringing favour and reward from a grateful monarch. The sense that the king should be obeyed as a means of securing order fell between these extremes in that it was both ideological and pragmatic. The furtherance of order was a moral and religious imperative, but it was also desirable for practical reasons.
In discussing the question of why kings were obeyed, recent writing has tended to emphasize either the private benefit or the public weal model. In reality, of course, both motives were always present, and present in proportions which even the individuals concerned would probably have found impossible to calculate. The middle ages lacked that clear dividing line between the personal and public which is now considered desirable in the political arena. Politics were built on personal relationships, and this was seen as a strength rather than a weakness: ‘Obeisaunce doon for love is more stedefast than that the whiche is doon for lordschip or for drede’.4 Similarly, patronage was not just about ‘buying’ support. Far from being a mechanistic exercise, to be rated less highly by ideologically minded historians than the claims of the public good, gift-giving had its own powerful and widely shared ideological imperatives.
The question of securing obedience is important because medieval kings lacked a standing army or police force, and although they had a central administration it was primarily concerned with recording and disseminating rather than enforcing the king’s wishes. When a king wanted something done he turned to his subjects and ordered them to take action on his behalf. By and large, for the reasons discussed above, he was obeyed. It is true that there were limits to that obedience. Subjects were well able to distinguish between the king and his agents. A command in the king’s name, from one of his councils, for instance, clearly commanded less obedience than a direct personal command, a reminder that the power of the late medieval monarchy was still personal rather than institutional. The difference can be seen in Clement Paston’s warning to his brother John in 1461 that Edward IV was losing patience. ‘On the xjth of October the King seide “We have sent two privy sealys to Paston by two yeomen of our chamber, and he disobeyeth them; but we will send him a-noder tomorrowe, and by Gods mercye and if he come not then he xall dye for it. We will make all oder men beware by him how they xall disobeye our writinge”.’ Clement urged his brother, ‘by mine advice. . . come to the Kinge wards . . . and when ye come ye must be suer of a great excuse’.5
World History
