It is not clear that he ever fully recovered from his affliction; the reports of his behaviour in succeeding years suggest that to some extent he had become feeble-minded. Yet the protectorate of York had now come to an end. He gave his resignation to the king at the palace in Greenwich; Somerset was duly released from the Tower and returned to the side of the monarch. Henry now also welcomed back to his councils the perceived enemies of York; he was behaving like the leader of a faction rather than as the ruler of the country. Naturally enough York deemed himself to be under threat. He felt obliged to make a preliminary strike but, in the process, he began the conflict that came to be known as the Wars of the Roses.
32
Meet the family
In the absence of her husband Margaret Paston decided to attack those who had turned her out of the manor house at Gresham; the violent affair was mentioned in the previous chapter. She called on her husband to send handguns, crossbows, longbows and poll-axes; her servants wore body armour. In the same letter she asked for a pound (450 grammes) of almonds, a pound of sugar and some cloth to make gowns for the children. The ordinary life of the world continued even in the face of extreme violence. Or it could be claimed that violence was as ordinary, and as unremarkable, as almonds and sugar.
It is sometimes surmised that in the fifteenth century the expression of emotion is different from that of our own time. But where, if anywhere, does that difference lie? A delicacy of emphasis, not generally found in the register of contemporary speech, can perhaps be found in the Paston letters. Of the Paston servants we learn that ‘they are sad [serious] and well advised men, saving one of them who is bald, called William Penny, who is as good a man as goes upon the earth, saving he will be a little, as I understand, a little cupshotten [drunk]; but he is no brawler, but full of courtesy …’ Immense shrewdness is also evident. ‘John Osborne flattered me,’ John Paston wrote, ‘because he would have borrowed money from me. In retailing of wood there it will be hard to trust him. He is needy.’ Again, in another letter, we learn that one man ‘had but few words but I felt by him he was right evil disposed to the parson and you; but covered language he had’.
In many respects it was a hard world, filled with threat. ‘I pray you beware how you walk if he be there, for he is full cursed-hearted and lumish.’ The meaning of ‘lumish’ is uncertain; it is a word that has gone forever. One husband believed that his wife’s child was not his. ‘I heard say that he said, if she comes in his presence to make her excuse, that he should cut off her nose to make her be known what she is, and if her child comes in his presence he said he would kill it.’ That may of course have been an idle threat. A tendency to extravagance is found in the period. Of the earl of Arran, John Paston writes that ‘he is the most courteous, gentlest, wisest, kindest, most companionable, freest, largest and most bounteous knight’.
Humour and irony are also to be found. When one son of Paston contracted a cold in damp Norwich he wrote that ‘I was never so well armed for the war as I have now armed myself for the cold.’ Resignation was a familiar theme. ‘If it thus continue I am not all undone, nor none of us; and if otherwise then & …’ Which is as much to say – well if we are undone, then so be it. There were striking phrases such as ‘I know you have a great heart’ and, sarcastically, ‘this is a marvellous disposed country’. ‘And so I am with the jailor, with a shackle on my heel.’ ‘This is a right queasy world.’ Of an indiscreet man it was said that ‘he is not secure in the bite’. Flattering an enemy was sometimes necessary because ‘a man must some time set a candle before the Devil’. ‘Towards me’ is written as ‘to me-wards’.
The syntax is often complicated with ‘wherefore’ and ‘insomuch’ and ‘therein’; the sentences are often long and convoluted, but throughout there is an energy or earnestness of expression that drives the narrative forward. The intricate constructions, replete with double negatives at every turn, suggest a world of great formality; but one animated by the sheer struggle for survival. That is what lends the correspondence its pace and urgency.
