‘Now thou dost penance. Look! how they gaze.

See! how the giddy multitude do point,

And nod their heads, and throw their eyes on thee.’[969]

The loss of prestige to Humphrey was very great,[970] and it came at a time when his power in the kingdom was beginning to wane. Never again does he appear as a man of influence in the councils of the King; all the old fire of the days of the Protectorate is gone, and it is probable that he leaned far more on his wife than has ever been suspected. Till her disgrace young Henry seems to have had a strong affection for his uncle, but thereafter the simple-minded King, separated from the woman who had influenced him, turned from his uncle to other advisers, who had fewer claims to his regard, and no wiser heads than the discredited Humphrey. Indeed this incident is a definite milestone on the road to complete disgrace which the Duke was now treading. Ever since the time when he began to drop out of public life his influence in the kingdom had been slowly passing away. He had tried to reinstate himself in the popular favour, and thus strengthen his hands against his enemies, by his attack on Beaufort and on the policy of releasing Orleans, but the attempt missed its mark, and had only provoked this act of retaliation from his opponents. Hitherto the cry against him had been merely one of mismanagement and factiousness, but here we find the first signs of the charge of treason, with which he was ultimately assailed. It would seem that the Beaufort faction had now decided not only on his humiliation, but on his ultimate removal, for if he were to succeed to the throne, their power would be gone. Humphrey had not the determination nor the strength to meet this new attack, and he gradually gave way before the organised assault he had now to face. He had come to the critical time of his life, and his weak character, still further weakened by his moral failings, was unable to cope with the situation. His face was set towards the shadows, he knew it, and yet he had no strength to fight his way back to light and power. Though his physical capacities were unimpaired, all signs of moral force had disappeared from his character.

1442-4] LOSS OF INFLUENCE

Gloucester continued to attend the Council, but we see very little recorded beyond his mere presence; occasionally he would act as a guarantor for a loan from that prince of money-lenders, Cardinal Beaufort,[971] or throw in sarcastic comment when the same cardinal used his position to exact special conditions under which the loans were made.[972] Most of his time was probably spent at his manor of ‘Plaisance’ at Greenwich, in the house on which he had spent so much money, and surrounded by the park which he had himself enclosed. It was here, at any rate, that in September 1442 he dated his decision in the matter of a dispute which had arisen at the Monastery of St. Albans.[973] For the rest, he seems to have devoted his attention to the care of his soul. He was already assured that masses would be said for him in perpetuity at Oxford, and in 1442 we find him in the rather strange company of the Archbishop of York and others, securing by the gift of certain manors a perpetual chaplain to pray for the souls of the donors themselves and of their children at the Church of St. Katharine at Gosfield.[974] The bitterness of strife was over, the political game was passing into other and younger hands, and these two old rivals made up their differences in a united hope for eternal salvation.[975] A year later Humphrey determined to devote the alien Priory of Pembroke, which had been given him by Henry V., to the same purpose of masses for his soul, but there seems to have been some doubt as to where he should place the gift. Adam Moleyne, Dean of Salisbury—he who had acted for the Council in accusing Eleanor—had the intention of securing the Priory of Pembroke for the Dean and Chapter of Salisbury, and went so far as to request and obtain from the Council a licence for this transfer.[976] Humphrey, however, refused to be driven to alienate his property in any way of which he did not approve, and three months later we find a charter assigning the alien Priory of Pembroke to the Abbey of St. Albans in accordance with a Royal Licence obtained as far back as 1441.[977] In spite of his inactivity, Gloucester did not entirely retire from public life, but his influence was gone, and the petition of the Parliament of 1442 that ladies of rank should have the same privilege as their husbands, and be tried by the peers for indictable offences,[978] shows his weakness, for this petition, which became a statute, is by way of a censure on the judicial system that had allowed the Duchess of Gloucester to escape with her life.

1442–4] MARRIAGE OF HENRY VI.

But if Gloucester was passing into the background, so were also the chief actors who had flourished with him on the political stage, though no cloud hung over them as over the late Protector. Archbishop Kemp, as we have seen, was beginning to think more of the next world than of this; Lord Cromwell’s day was passing, and the great Cardinal himself was now content to direct others in scenes where he had been formerly the chief actor. The Beaufort party was now represented in the forefront of the battle by the Duke of Somerset and the Marquis of Dorset, both nephews of the Bishop of Winchester, and in close alliance with them was William de la Pole, Earl of Suffolk. This last had served in the French wars ever since the death of his brother at Agincourt, but of late he had been turning his attention to home politics. He had steadily increased the importance of his position, and by his connection with the House of Beaufort he now found himself one of the chief of those who so jealously surrounded the King. He it was, therefore, who was chosen to be head of an embassy to France,[979] which was to carry through a piece of Beaufort manœuvring. The King had reached a marriageable age, and it was considered advisable that he should look to France for a bride. The question remained, to whom should overtures be made? The embassy to France was to pave the way for the carrying out of a scheme proposed by the Duke of Orleans, that Henry should marry Margaret of Anjou, daughter of René, Duke of Lorraine and titular King of Sicily and Jerusalem. Though a man of no personal possessions, René was in the innermost circle of the French Court, owing to the fact that his sister was Queen of France, and his brother, Charles of Anjou, one of the King’s chief advisers. Such a marriage, therefore, presupposed some kind of agreement between the nations at war, and Suffolk was chosen to procure such an agreement.

The idea of the marriage was unpopular in England, as Suffolk himself acknowledged,[980] and it is probable that this unpopularity was based on the resistance to the match made by Gloucester. This time it was no factiousness in Gloucester that led him to oppose the plans of his opponents, for he was adhering to a policy which he had favoured from the first, when he warmly supported the project of a marriage with one of the daughters of the Count of Armagnac. This match, as well as the Anjou alliance, had been proposed by Orleans at a time when he was in alliance with the discontented Princes of the Praguerie, and was intended to draw Armagnac into an alliance with the English, part of a large scheme for uniting the discordant elements of the French kingdom with the English invaders. This idea was the product of the Beaufort policy which had released the Duke of Orleans, a reversion, in fact, to the methods of Henry V., who had won France with the help of Burgundy. Steps had been taken to open negotiations, and in 1442 an embassy, of which Thomas Beckington, formerly Gloucester’s Chancellor and now the King’s Private Secretary, and Sir Robert Roos, one of the Duke’s literary friends, were the heads, was despatched to Bordeaux for this purpose.[981] The French forces had invaded Gascony, and John of Armagnac, with the enemies of England encamped on his borders, had to tread warily in the matter of an English alliance. Delay was inevitable, and in spite of the best intentions on the Armagnac side, the negotiations were for the time abandoned.[982]

Gloucester had heartily supported the whole idea, since it was conceived in the same spirit as that alliance with Burgundy which had helped to bring half France under the dominion of Henry V. Though we may well doubt the wisdom of this plan, we must acknowledge that it was consistent with Gloucester’s past policy, and that in this instance he did not sacrifice what he thought to be right to his desire to oppose his rivals. It may be that he had learnt wisdom; it may be that recent events had taught him his increasing weakness, and had led him to a less narrow view of party politics. He certainly espoused this plan put forward by the party he had opposed so long, and took a personal interest in details of the embassy, for he was kept informed of the progress of affairs by Beckington, who, as soon as he returned, went down to Greenwich to tell him what had been done and what had been left undone.[983]