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By Root 1150 0

with massive debts amounting to £372,000, increasing by about £20,000 each year. York was still owed £38,000. The cost of maintaining the royal household was a staggering £24,000 a year, twice what it would be twenty years later, while the King’s basic revenues yielded a mere £5000 annually. Other sources of income raised his annual budget to £33,000 – not nearly enough to live on and pay his debts as well. Thus the debts grew ever larger and the Crown’s capacity to pay ever less. Hitherto the government had relied on loans from Italian merchants and bankers, but even they were now wary of lending more money, being aware of the precarious state of the nation’s finances, and in the decade from 1450 they advanced only £1000 in total. Nor would Parliament vote sufficient taxation to meet the Crown’s debts or fund the war in France, which was still a major drain on the economy. Even members of the King’s household went unpaid and were forced to petition Parliament for their wages.

Under the influence of the court party, Henry VI had given away royal lands and estates on an unprecedented scale, and had thus lost the revenue from rents and dues on them. He had also lavished large sums on Eton and King’s College, and been criticised by Parliament for it. The court faction, whose members were the chief beneficiaries of Henry’s generosity, were milking the country dry, and had strongly resisted all attempts by Parliament to pass Acts of Resumption which would deprive them of their ill-gotten gains. There was no likelihood, therefore, of any immediate improvement to the Crown’s financial problems.

The people of England were largely united in their desire for political stability, firm government, and the restoration of law and order. They were aware that the court party was manipulating the administration of law to the benefit of its individual members and their affinities, and that it so monopolised the King and the Council that there was little hope of any effective opposition emerging. The anonymous author of An English Chronicle wrote: ‘Then, and long before, England had been ruled by untrue counsel, wherefore the common profit was sore hurt and diseased, so that the common people, what with taxes and other oppressions, might not live by their handiwork and husbandry, wherefore they grudged sore against those who had the governance of the land.’

The wealthy and influential London merchants were loudest in deploring the endemic disorder, being particularly anxious to see stable government restored, so that the economy could recover. Their sympathies naturally lay with those who opposed the court faction, and later they would support York in his struggle against that faction.

People were also appalled by what had been happening in France. Early in 1450 English troops began returning from Normandy, having fled before the victorious advance of the armies of Charles VII. In small groups, ‘in great misery and poverty’, they trudged along the roads that led from the Channel ports, begging and stealing as they went. Pitiful and starving as they were, some terrorised the countryside; a few were arrested and hanged. Others caught the imagination of a people infuriated by the humiliation of defeat, compounding their grievances against the government.

There was growing disorder in parts of Wales, which posed yet another problem for those in power. The Welsh in these areas suffered from neglect by absentee lords or exploitation by rapacious ones, such as William Herbert of Raglan. Herbert was York’s steward in the lordship of Usk in south-east Wales, and he was ambitious, greedy and totally, unscrupulous. Contemporary chroniclers gave him a bad press: the annalist of Gloucester Abbey called him ‘a cruel man, prepared for any crime’, while the author of the Brief Latin Chronicle describes him as ‘a very grave oppressor and despoiler of priests and many others for many years’. Herbert was by no means the only oppressor of the Welsh: the native-born Gruffydd ap Nicholas subverted royal authority to devastating effect.

The trouble was that