What has replaced the search for a new monarchy is an awareness that the long fifteenth century was not some sort of political turning point. The dynastic whirligig of 1461-85 left those on board feeling rather seasick - as one Paston correspondent wrote in 1471, the year of Edward IV’s return to power, ‘the worlde, I ensure yow, is right qwesye’.6 But there was no sense that political life had been fundamentally changed as a result. Change was held within established parameters, defined ideologically by contemporary expectations of what constituted the proper ends and means of government, and practically by what was possible for a medieval king. What one sees is an oscillation of political authority within those parameters, as individual kings, and the circumstances in which they found themselves, changed, rather than a linear progression from one style of government to another.
The king’s role did not change. It remained, to paraphrase Sir John Fortescue, the maintenance of peace both outward and inward. Peace outward was to be achieved by diplomacy and warfare. None of the kings of the fifteenth century was free of war or the threat of war, but the period is dominated by the long defeat of English pretensions in France after the glory days of Henry V. For an earlier generation of historians the loss of English territory in France led directly to the Wars of the Roses, as unemployed troops came home and a thuggish aristocracy turned on each other for want of foreigners to beat up. This is oversimplistic. But at least one contemporary in the post-war world, the writer William Worcester, was prepared to argue for the resumption of foreign war as a salve for domestic ills. His remedy was never really tested, although Richard III for one may have been sympathetic. Edward IV’s invasion of France in 1475 ended in the English being paid to go away, which was surely not what Worcester had in mind, and Henry VII’s Breton expedition was something of an aberration in a reign characterized more by diplomacy than the resort to arms.
Worcester may, though, have had a point. Not because the English elite were bully boys who had to have some outlet for their violence, or even because war forged bonds of common interest within the elite. Experience suggested that foreign war tended rather to intensify existing attitudes to the crown. A king like Henry V, with a united nobility behind him, could benefit hugely from war, but it could not mend fractured relationships, and Richard II gained almost nothing politically from his successful campaign in Ireland in 1394-5. But what Worcester’s view reflects is surely a failure, at least among the elite, to come to terms with defeat. England had been exposed as a rather small player on the European stage. This did not square with the English view of themselves. As Pope Martin V noted rather sourly in 1427, ‘[England] considers itself better than all other Christian nations’.7 He was talking about the religious sphere, but the English capacity for self-congratulation went wider than that and living with defeat cannot have been easy.
The king’s other role, the maintenance of peace inward, required him to ensure, in Richard III’s words, that ‘alle his true subgiettes shalle leve in rest & quiete, and peasibly enyoie theire landes, lyvelodes & goodes according to the lawes of this his land’. How this was to be done could be easily summed up, although not perhaps so easily achieved. The king was ‘to see due administracione of Justice thoroughe out this his Realme to be had, and to reforme, punysshe and subdue alle extorcions & oppressions in the same’.8 What this usually meant was that the king was to provide the context in which the law could be effectively upheld by others: the thousands of Englishmen who contributed to the law as professional judges, lawyers or court officials, or as amateurs summoned to sit on juries. This enabling role is well described in a parliamentary petition of 1474 describing a breakdown of law and order in Herefordshire and Shropshire. The jury summoned to report on the cases proved extremely unwilling to take on the task, finally admitting in open court ‘that they durst not present nor say the trouthe of the defautes before rehersed, for drede of murdyng, and to be myscheved in their owne houses, consideryng the grete nombre of the said mysdoers, and the grete berers uppe of the same, withoute that they had especiall comfort of the kyng’s goode grace, and assistence of the lordes there present’.9 The king also had a more direct role to play in dealing with disputes that the usual mechanisms of the law could not easily handle, such as feuds between the great men of the reign or cases involving his own servants.
The negative view of the fifteenth century put heavy emphasis on its collapse into lawlessness and violence. Part of the century’s rehabilitation has been the playing down of violence, on the grounds that it was given so much emphasis in contemporary sources not because it was the norm but because it was the shocking and unacceptable exception. Maddern and others have seen the threat of violence as a ritualized prelude to negotiation and settlement. But it is clear that contemporaries did believe that there was a swelling tide of lawlessness and violence. They may simply have been wrong, and they were certainly at times exaggerating for effect, as in the parliamentary petition quoted above which draws a lurid picture of ‘daily’ robberies, murders, rapes, riots and extortions. But the perception remained important, and ultimately responsibility for solving the problem of lawlessness rested on the king’s shoulders. Contemporaries were well aware that one of the clearest signs of faltering control at the centre was an upsurge in violent self-help, such as occurred in the later 1450s or during Edward IV’s struggle to retain his throne in 1469-70.
If the king’s role remained constant, so, to a great extent, did the means at his disposal for fulfilling it. Any government has two requirements: the personnel to carry out its orders and the resources to meet the cost. Fifteenth-century kings, as already discussed, had only a small full-time bureaucracy and relied largely on their subjects to act on their behalf when ordered to do so. But kings also looked to a growing number of men whom they regarded as being their servants rather than merely their subjects, although that service was ad hoc rather than full-time. That relationship was increasingly formalized by membership of the royal household, which was growing in this period and which under the Yorkist kings stood at several hundred men, not counting the full-time menial servants who kept the king and his court fed, clothed and housed. Although all subjects were under a general obligation to obey the king, his servants were particularly bound to carry out his wishes and were the obvious choice for tasks which touched the king particularly closely. Most were drawn from the ranks of the gentry, including members of urban elites, and thus had local influence of their own that they could put at the king’s disposal,
Although that influence was enhanced by the knowledge that they were acting on the king’s behalf.
Service to the crown was thus largely voluntary, and potentially this was the main limitation on the king’s freedom of action: an unacceptable command might not be obeyed. Indeed moralists were in no doubt that such a command should not be obeyed, and that servants’ own souls were in hazard if they did wrong in response to a superior’s command. In practice it is clear that the incentives to obey were sufficiently powerful to enable even unpopular or discredited regimes to function at a basic level. One reason for this was surely that kings, in relying on their leading subjects, were tapping into traditions of local self-government by men who undoubtedly had their own agenda but were committed to the rest and quiet and peaceable enjoyment of their lands which the king was charged to maintain.
By the late middle ages the cost of government was largely met by taxation. In peacetime the main form of taxation was indirect: the customs and subsidies granted by parliament on a range of exported and imported goods. In practice this had become a permanent tax, something recognized by the growing willingness of parliament to grant it to kings for life, and of new kings to collect it before parliament had met to grant it. It was permanent, too, in another sense. Richard II was the last medieval king to try to amend the range of goods on which it was levied to maximize its yield. His fifteenth-century successors regularly agonized about the need to make sure that duties were not evaded, but made no attempt to increase income by bringing the level of duty into closer line with the realities of English trade. Thus wool continued to be taxed more heavily than cloth, even when cloth exports began to outstrip those of wool. There was a similar inflexibility about the other form of taxation: the lay subsidies granted by parliament, normally on the grounds that money was essential for the defence of the realm. This was a direct tax on personal assets other than land, but since 1334 had become a fixed lump sum and individuals were no longer assessed on their wealth. In spite of this lack of flexibility, fifteenth-century kings did little to experiment with new forms of taxation. Henry VI’s government turned to an income tax on land and office in 1436, although problems of assessment meant that it raised relatively little. Edward IV was granted a tenth of one year’s income from land, offices and annuities to help finance his 1475 campaign to France, and Henry VII resorted to the same tactic in 1489. The way in which the relevant parliamentary acts stress the exceptional nature of the grants shows that there were fears that this would prove the thin end of a wedge and income tax would become a regular element in taxation, although in fact it did not.
Part of the reason why fifteenth-century kings were wary of too many new taxes was surely the explosion of opposition which had followed the last experiment: the poll taxes of 1377-80. But it must also have stemmed from the perception on the part of parliament and others that kings now had greater private resources on which to draw. Initially kings had encouraged this belief. Henry of Lancaster’s accession in 1399 brought the duchy of Lancaster and half the earldom of Hereford into crown hands, and Henry had assured his first parliament that he intended to live off his own. This was a way of distancing himself from his predecessor, Richard II, who had conformed to the medieval definition of a tyrant by pillaging his subjects’ property, but Henry IV presumably believed that it was a practical proposition. The duchy of Lancaster, even before its augmentation by Henry’s own marriage to the Bohun co-heiress, was the greatest estate of its time. If Henry did believe his own rhetoric he must have been soon disabused. Edward IV, another usurper keen to score points against the bankrupt regime he had displaced, was more cautious in his choice of words, telling the Commons in his first parliament, ‘yf I had eny better good to reward you withall then my body, ye shuld have it, the which shall alwey be redy for your defence’.10 But his accession had brought the duchy of York and the earldom of March to the crown, and the idea that kings ought to be able to manage on their own resources did not go away. Richard III paid indirect tribute to it by not asking his first parliament for a lay subsidy, although it did grant him the customs revenues for life.
The augmentation of the crown lands in the fifteenth century had another consequence. The lands needed a full complement of officials (stewards, bailiffs, parkers and the like) and thus represented a massive increase in the amount of patronage at the king’s disposal. This was used as a way of funding the increase in the size of the household, with servants being paid by grants of office rather than a cash fee. It also meant that in virtually every county in England there were now royal servants holding local office, giving the royal connection a quasi-institutional identity beyond the court. For most recent commentators this has been seen as a source of strength to the monarchy, providing a valuable bridge between the centre and the shires. But it can be argued that it was not without its dangers, identifying the king with one element within local society in a way that made it harder to claim that he was lord of all. If so, it was a price which fifteenth-century kings showed themselves ready to pay.
Against this background of continuity, the flavour of individual reigns could be very different. Monarchy was still personal. It also entailed an extremely demanding balancing act. It was the king’s job to have the last word: to pronounce judgement or make the decision. But before doing that it was his duty to take counsel, formally through his councils or parliament, or informally by consulting family and friends. Counsel was the focus for many of the contemporary anxieties about individual kings. Were they listening to enough advice, not just to one or two favourites? Was it the right sort of advice, what contemporaries would have called ‘substantial’ counsel, offered by experienced men who were not just telling the king what he wanted to hear? Both anxieties were triggered by Richard II, who was perhaps the most autocratic of medieval kings, but even the more conciliatory Henry IV did not entirely escape criticism on the second account. As Henry V’s reign suggests, however, kings could get away with ignoring advice if their rule was perceived as successful. An attack on the sources of counsel was usually, as mentioned earlier, a coded attack on royal policy.
In other ways too kings had to balance distance against accessibility. Because they were the last source of help in a troubled world petitioners needed to be able to reach them, but access should not be too easy or the king’s ‘specialness’ would be diminished. Similarly, kings should not be a soft touch, as Henry VI was perceived as being, but should be capable of saying ‘no’ when necessary. Edward IV was well known for his easy affability to nervous petitioners, but he could drive a servant from court simply by refusing to look at him. Political life, as we have seen, was about personal relations - about ‘love’, or its absence. But it was also anchored in ‘dread’ - the deference due to the divinely ordained king. It was hardly surprising that many kings had problems with this balancing act. But the king remained indispensable. The turmoil of the Wars of the Roses, culminating in the accession of a man with no claim to the throne, paradoxically demonstrates the necessity and the strength, not the weakness and irrelevance, of the late medieval monarchy.
World History
