There is a further complication. John Beaufort, the nephew of Cardinal Beaufort and already made duke of Somerset, was despatched to France in order to relieve Gascony – much to the fury of York who was already facing great disturbances in Normandy and was desperately in need of fresh resources. It is easy to see how English policy was in disarray. York and Gloucester were part of the council that favoured fresh aggression and determination in the face of French attacks; Cardinal Beaufort preferred a policy of compromise and negotiation. The king, although temperamentally in favour of peace, demurred between the two factions. Somerset set sail for France in the summer of 1443, but achieved nothing in the field; finally he had the humiliation of taking refuge with York in Rouen. His army was disbanded and he sailed home. He died in the spring of the following year, and it was widely rumoured that he had committed suicide. The last great English enterprise had been a fiasco. The members of the ‘peace party’ at Westminster felt themselves to have been vindicated.
In these unpromising circumstances Henry VI sent a personal envoy to negotiate directly with the French king.William de la Pole, duke of Suffolk, had already served in the French wars and had become one of the king’s most favoured councillors. He travelled to the French court at Tours in the spring of 1444 where both sides, exhausted by war and attrition, came to a relatively easy truce for the space of ten months. The treaty was sealed with a kiss. As part of the pact Henry VI was to marry the daughter of the Duke of Anjou, one of the most powerful families at the French court; she was also the niece of the French king. Margaret of Anjou, in the company of Suffolk, sailed to England in the following year.
So there came to England one of its most forceful queens. It was not long before it was widely reported that she ruled her husband; one London chronicler, John Blocking, declared that she was cleverer than Henry and of a more powerful character. She was ‘a great and strong and active woman who spares no effort in pursuing her affairs’. She found her favourite in Suffolk, who had arranged her marriage, and together they controlled the general policy of the council. It was Margaret, for example, who played a leading role in the negotiations with the French; she was trying to bring the members of her extended family into happy unison. So it was that her husband secretly agreed to cede the province of Maine to the Valois king, in exchange for the security of a general peace. Maine had been an English possession since it had passed to Henry II in 1154 as part of his Angevin inheritance; that older Henry had been born in its capital, Le Mans. The news of its forfeiture provoked discontent and dismay among many of the king’s councillors; even the king’s envoys in France were opposed to the surrender they had come to negotiate, and insisted on a signed declaration that they had come only in the higher purpose of peace. The treaty, after much confusion and suspicion as a result of Henry’s vacillation, was finally sealed.
Gloucester, the leading figure among those who had once favoured war with France, was now in eclipse. His power and authority had been notably undermined, not least in the prosecution of his wife for witchcraft on the grounds that she had sought the king’s death by means of the black arts. It is possible that he now planned to move against Suffolk, or in some way to gain control of the king. In 1447 a parliament was summoned to Bury St Edmunds, an unusual setting for that assembly. Gloucester arrived for the opening of the proceedings but, on the day following his arrival, he was arrested in his lodgings on the charge of high treason. A few days later, he was found dead in his bed. It was widely believed he fell ill immediately after his arrest; he had been struck down by anxiety and dismay. He may have died of natural causes, in a most unnatural world. It may of course have been a case of judicial murder, at a time when such events were not uncommon.
The death of Gloucester did not enhance the king’s authority. Henry had not proved himself during his personal rule; he was as negligent in his conduct of English affairs as he had been vacillating in his prosecution of the war. He had given away to his favourites more royal lands than any of his predecessors; his debts rose higher and higher, while it was an open secret that the members of his household were purloining money from the royal income. All the perquisites of royal favour – offices, pensions and wardships among them – were being drained. On certain occasions Henry granted the same office twice to different people.
