The Hundred Years War - Desmond Seward [104]
By 1444 Cardinal Beaufort, grown very old, had withdrawn from politics. But his faction retained control, its leader being the Earl of Suffolk, whom Warwick had despised and whose régime was as harsh as it was incapable and corrupt, he and his greedy colleagues ruthlessly using their position to extort money, estates and commercial privilege, even employing their retinues to overawe law courts and seize desirable properties. Yet there was a better side to Suffolk ; he was a poet and even something of a mystic, loyal to his friends, and in his own incompetent way he tried to serve his King. After fighting in France for many years—with notable lack of distinction—he now agreed with the majority of the Council that England must make peace at all costs and would be lucky to retain Normandy and Guyenne.
Early in 1444, having first asked the Council for a formal indemnity from any blame, Suffolk led an embassy to a conference at Tours. The French were not prepared to make any concessions. In desperation Suffolk offered to surrender Maine in return for a two-year truce, presumably hoping to reach a lasting peace within that time ; he dared not make this clause public and so it was kept secret. He also betrothed King Henry to King Charles’s niece, the sixteen-year-old daughter of René of Anjou, titular King of Sicily.
News of the Truce of Tours was greeted with xenophobic fury throughout England. However, it was received very differently by the English in France—with ‘immense and indescribable joy’ according to Basin. This was the first break in hostilities since 1419, and after being ‘shut up for years behind town walls or in castles as though condemned to life imprisonment, living in fear and danger, they were marvellously happy at escaping from their long incarceration’, and ‘gave themselves up to dancing and feasting with yesterday’s enemies’. Basin’s description suggests what uncertain, claustrophobic and altogether terrifying lives the English must have led in Lancastrian France.
Henry VI and Margaret of Anjou were married in 1445. The beautiful foreign Queen, dark-haired and strong-willed, was hated from the very beginning, partly because she was a Frenchwoman and partly because of her support for Suffolk and her enmity towards the Duke of Gloucester. It was said that England had bought a Queen ‘not worth ten marks a year’, while in a contemporary English chronicler’s opinion : ‘Fro this tyme forward King Henry never profited ne went forward, but fortune began to turn fro him on al sides.’ Margaret speedily dominated her feeble, gullible husband, ensuring that he supported Suffolk, who was created a Duke in 1448. She also pressed Suffolk to honour his pledge to surrender Maine. News of the new Duke’s secret promise had, after all, leaked out, infuriating the English still further. They had reason to be angry; most of Maine was peaceful and apparently even loyal, while between its capital, Le Mans, and Alençon, the frontier made by the river Sarthe was held by a line of strong castles. But at the end of 1445 King Henry promised the French that he would give up Maine by the following April, the truce being extended until April 1447.
Before Maine could be surrendered, Gloucester and York would have to be muzzled. The former had already lost considerable prestige after the condemnation of his Duchess, Eleanor Cobham, in 1441 on a charge of trying to kill the King by witchcraft so that her husband could succeed to the throne. Moreover old Cardinal Beaufort had turned King Henry against his uncle. But Suffolk had to make sure. After circulating a rumour that Gloucester was about to rise in revolt, he arrested him without warning at Bury St Edmunds on 18 February 1447 : probably he died of a stroke brought on by rage, but public opinion believed that Suffolk had murdered the ‘Good