The Wars of the Roses - Alison Weir [62]
Each year, there were several religious festivals at which the King kept great state, and on these occasions hundreds of nobles, gentry, knights and squires would come up from the country to see him wearing his crown and feasting in public. All would be fed and lodged at the Crown’s expense. Those who wished to gain access to the King might wait for weeks, for the sovereign was at the centre of an intricate web of patronage manipulated by predatory nobles and besieged on every side by those seeking appointments, redress in law or some other mark of favour. His courtiers tended to group together in factious cliques that produced an atmosphere of suspicion, jealousy and intrigue.
The court customarily set trends in codes of manners, dress and taste, and it was normally the monarch who was the arbiter of such fashions, but Henry VI considered himself above such worldly vanities, preferring to encourage public morality and private piety. He did extend his patronage to literature, music, art and architecture, but his court could not be described as the centre of culture or learning as later courts were.
Henry VI’s household was large, unwieldy and corrupt. Its officers abused his patronage and wasted the Crown’s resources, with catastrophic consequences for the economy, earning themselves great unpopularity among the magnates, most of whom were excluded from this privileged circle. In 1433, during the minority, it had cost £13,000 a year to run the royal household; by 1449 the annual cost was £24,000. Even in 1433, the household was £11,000 in debt, and that figure rose steadily over the years. Complaints were made by the Commons in Parliament about the bad influence exerted over the King by his household, that he was unduly extravagant in his gifts to household officers, and that his favour to them was destroying the impartiality of royal justice. Henry, however, paid little heed. As long as he had sufficient money for his foundations, he was content. From time to time he would put pressure on the Exchequer to relieve his household from its mounting debts, but he had little incentive to do more because he himself had a private income drawn mainly from the duchy of Lancaster. Parliament was concerned, however, and in 1440, responding to a petition from royal servants whose wages had long been unpaid, it announced that £10,000 a year would be made available for the next five years through taxation, to help clear the debts of the royal household. The King’s subjects, who had to foot the bill, were not best pleased.
One night in January or February 1438, Owen Tudor, with the help of a priest, escaped from Newgate gaol, ‘hurting foul his keeper’ in the process. In March he was recaptured and returned to prison. However, by July he had been moved to the custody of the Constable of Windsor Castle. He remained there two years before being released on a huge bail of £2000 in July 1439, on condition that he agreed not to attempt to go anywhere near Wales. On 10 November the King was ‘moved by special causes’ to grant him a general pardon for all offences committed before the previous October; again, his original offence was not specified.
From then on, Owen Tudor never looked back. The King, ‘by especial favour’, granted him a pension of £40 per annum out of his own privy purse, and Tudor settled down to a life of comfortable obscurity for the next twenty years. Lodged in the royal household until around 1455, he was treated with respect and kindness by the King, his stepson, who made him several grants of land and in 1459 increased his annuity to £100. In February 1460 he was appointed Keeper of the King’s Parks in the county of Denbigh, and we may assume that by this date he had been allowed once more to take up residence in his native Wales.
In 1459 an unnamed Welshwoman bore Tudor a bastard son, David Owen, at Pembroke Castle. When Owen Tudor’s grandson, Henry Tudor, invaded Wales in 1485, David