Humphrey’s career was over. The King denied him access to the Court, and he was removed from the Privy Council.[1001] Indeed in the later chroniclers we read of an attempt to bring him to justice, and of an indictment before the Council. He was accused, it is said, of malpractices during his Protectorate, especially of having caused men adjudged to die to be put to other execution than the law of the land allowed. A brilliant speech, if we are to believe the report, refuted the charges so successfully, that they were allowed to drop.[1002] This partial success, however, availed the Duke nothing, as his enemies had decided to remove him from their path, and for this purpose it was proposed to call a Parliament to which he was summoned, ‘the which parliament was maad only for to sle the noble Duke of Gloucester.’[1003] Suffolk, it seems, had laid certain accusations against him,[1004] and he had induced the King to summon this assembly, to crush the only man that stood in his way. At first Parliament was summoned to meet at Cambridge, but it was ultimately transferred to Bury St. Edmunds, a place where Suffolk was strong,[1005] and Gloucester weak, apart from a certain support from the Abbey there.[1006] Gloucester’s fate was sealed. With cunning ingenuity Suffolk spread a report that a rising led by Duke Humphrey might be expected any day, and he made elaborate preparations for guarding the King at each stopping-place on the way to Bury. Besides this, the almost incredible number of forty or sixty thousand men was collected and stationed round the town.[1007] Gloucester was ordered to attend the Parliament, and all waited to see whether he would come.[1008] Totally ignorant of the elaborate preparations for his reception, yet knowing the dangers which beset his path, Humphrey set out for Bury.[1009] Far from making any show of resistance,[1010] or coming to Parliament in a spirit of bravado, and followed by an overwhelming retinue, he came all unsuspicious that a trap had been laid for him, like an innocent lamb—so the chronicler quaintly puts it[1011]—hoping that he might be able to procure pardon for his imprisoned wife.[1012] The same chronicler, who was not one of those who sang the praises of Duke Humphrey, says that he was conscious of no evil in himself, and suspected nothing as he rode out on his last ride,[1013] accompanied by some eighty horsemen,[1014] no extraordinary retinue for a prince of the blood royal on a long, and possibly dangerous journey.
1448] DEATH OF GLOUCESTER
Parliament had been opened on February 10 with a speech from the Chancellor, Archbishop Stafford, who declared with suspicious unction, that ‘blessed was the man who walked not in the counsel of the ungodly,’[1015] but it was not until the 18th that the Duke of Gloucester arrived. When within half a mile of the gates of the town, he was met by two officers of the King’s household, who told him that the King wished him to go straight to his lodgings, and not visit the Court, since the weather was so cold for travelling; at least so was the message reported subsequently by some of the Duke’s retinue. It was eleven o’clock in the morning when Gloucester rode into the city by the south gate, and passing through the ‘horsemarket,’ turned to his left into the Northgate Ward. Here he passed through a mean street, and as he rode along, he asked a passer-by, by what name the alley was known. ‘Forsoothe, my Lord, hit is called the Dede Lane, came the answer. Then the inborn superstition of ‘the Good Duke’ asserted itself; so with an old prophecy he had read ringing in his ears, and a word of pious resignation on his lips, he rode on to the ‘North Spytyll’ outside the Northgate, otherwise called ‘Seynt Salvatoures,’[1016] where he was to lodge. Having eaten his dinner, a deputation came to wait upon him, consisting of the Duke of Buckingham, the Marquis of Dorset, the Earl of Salisbury, Lord Sudley, and Viscount Beaumont. This last in his capacity of High Constable placed the Duke under arrest by the King’s command. Two yeomen of the guard and a sergeant were appointed to take charge of the prisoner, who was removed from the care of his own immediate servants, some of whom, including Sir Roger Chamberlain, were arrested the same evening between eight and nine o’clock. The arrest passed off quietly, but three days later about twenty-eight more of Gloucester’s retainers, including his natural son ‘Arteys,’ were arrested and sent to divers places of confinement. This was on Shrove Tuesday, but it was unknown to their master, who was lying in a state of coma, so that for three days he neither moved nor had any feeling. Towards the end of this time, however, he recovered sufficiently to confess his sins, and to receive the last rites of the Church, and then sinking again he died, so it is related, about three o’clock in the afternoon of Tuesday, February 23, 1447.[1017]
Next day the news of his death was proclaimed, and his body was exposed, so that all might see that no mark of violence was upon him.[1018] His corpse was visited by many during the day, and towards evening he was disembowelled, placed in a ‘seryd cloth, and layd in a lead chest,’ encased in a coffin of poplar-wood. On the Saturday, just a week after his arrival in the town, Humphrey’s body was carried to the Grey Friars’ Monastery at Babwell,[1019] escorted thither by twenty torches borne by members of his own entourage; indeed, apart from the three crown officials who had been his gaolers, none but his personal retainers accompanied the cortège. On the Sunday the Abbot of St. Albans ‘dede his dirge,’ and the next day, after a mass had been said for the repose of his soul, his earthly remains were carried out on their last journey. By slow stages the coffin was carried to St. Albans, resting by night at Newmarket, Berkway, and Ware, and arriving at its destination on Friday the 21st. Here again was a dirge said for him, followed by Mass, and on the Saturday the body was placed in the ‘Feyre vout,’ prepared for him in his lifetime, amidst the lamentations of many of his faithful servants, and in the presence of the crown officials, who were the only outward evidences that a king’s son was being laid to rest.[1020] The whole ceremony of interment was that of a private individual, not that of a prince;[1021] the outward glamour of the pomp and circumstance which had accompanied his three brothers to the grave was absent. Humphrey died a prisoner, a disgraced politician, but he was followed to the grave by a band of genuine mourners. All the artificial adjuncts of his life, all the pride of power and position which had conspired to make him a great prince, had vanished, and he was laid in his last resting-place by loving hands, who took a mournful pleasure in thus honouring their dead master without any of that formal and unlovely ceremonial which disguises death as a pageant.
CHAPTER VIII
SOME ASPECTS OF GLOUCESTER’S CAREER
In spite of the circumstantial story which records the events of the last few days of Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, there hangs over the manner of his death a cloud which no existing evidence can entirely remove. Was he murdered, or was his death the result of natural causes? Such is the question to which the circumstances surrounding his last days give rise. Of contemporary chroniclers who give their opinion the Englishmen mostly agree in a quiet acceptance of the idea that arrest and disgrace so worked on an already weakened frame, that some kind of seizure was followed by collapse and death. Richard Fox, who gives the most detailed account of the tragedy of Bury, never for a moment suggests foul play, whilst Wheathampsted, the friend and follower of the dead man, clearly states that he died of sickness brought on by grief at his arrest.[1022] Hardyng carries this theory still further by describing the disease of which the Duke died as a sort of ‘parlesey,’ stating that he had been similarly attacked before,[1023] but an anonymous chronicler of Henry VI.’s reign, while describing the illness much in the same way as Fox and Hardyng—a paralysis of both mind and body—does not hesitate to hint fairly broadly that the disease did not take its origin from the natural state of the Duke’s health.[1024] The author of the English Chronicle reserves judgment. The truth about Gloucester’s death, he declares, is not yet known, but he quotes the Gospel to prove that there is nothing hid which shall not be made manifest;[1025] the London chronicler declares darkly that he was treacherously treated.[1026] Foreign contemporary writers go still further, and with one voice proclaim that Gloucester was murdered. Waurin states this as a bare fact, but his statements are not beyond dispute, for he adopts the same version as the continuator of the Historia Croylandensis, who says that the Duke was found dead in bed on the morning after his arrest.[1027] Mathieu de Coussy and Basin, both of whom were alive at the time, aver that it was a case of murder, and so it was generally believed on the Continent.[1028]
NATURE OF GLOUCESTER’S DEATH
As time passed on, the growing unpopularity of Suffolk unloosed men’s tongues, and the idea that Gloucester had been murdered gradually arose, and became a firm belief. It was obvious to all that the Duke’s death had been desired by Suffolk to increase his power, and within three years of the Parliament at Bury another Parliament was clamouring for the disgrace of this upstart, who with the help of the Queen had monopolised the government of the kingdom, and it was but a very thinly veiled accusation of murder which lay behind the articles of impeachment that he ‘wase the cause and laborer of the arrest, emprisonyng and fynall destruction of the most noble valliant true Prince, your right obeisant uncle the Duke of Gloucester.’[1029] That this was no more than an accusation of complicity in Humphrey’s disgrace which indirectly produced his last illness is an interpretation which the words cannot bear when we consider the facts of the case, for at the same time Gregory records that among the charges brought against Suffolk that of murdering ‘that nobylle prynce the Duke of Gloucester’ was one.[1030] Whatever the words of the impeachment may imply to us, it is plain that they bore but one meaning to the men of the time, and in view of the coming disgrace of the Queen’s favourite, public opinion was beginning to assert itself, for it is to be noticed that, when recording the death of Humphrey, Gregory ignored any question of murder.[1031]