Richard Duke of Gloucester as Lord Protector and High Constable of England

RICHARD DUKE OF GLOUCESTER

AS LORD PROTECTOR

AND HIGH CONSTABLE

OF ENGLAND

‘The Consent and Good-Will

of all the Lords’

Annette Carson

Imprimis

Imprimatur

By the same author

Camel Pilot Supreme: Captain D V Armstrong DFC

Flight Unlimited (with Eric Müller)

Flight Unlimited ’95 (with Eric Müller)

Flight Fantastic: The Illustrated History of Aerobatics

Jeff Beck: Crazy Fingers

Welgevonden: Wilderness in the Waterberg

Richard III: The Maligned King

Richard III: A Small Guide to the Great Debate

Finding Richard III: The Official Account of the Retrieval and Reburial Project (Ed.)

(with J. Ashdown-Hill, D. Johnson, W. Johnson & P.J. Langley)

Camel Pilot Supreme: Captain D.V. Armstrong DFC

Domenico Mancini: de occupatione regni Anglie

Published by Imprimis Imprimatur

21 Havergate, Horstead, NR12 7EJ

annettecartson@btinternet.com.

© Annette Carson, April 2015, 2021

The right of Annette Carson to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the copyright holder.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

eISBN 978-0-9576840-5-8

Contents

Introduction

The overall objective of this study has been to establish a greater understanding of the offices of Lord Protector and High Constable as held by Richard, Duke of Gloucester during the months of April to June 1483, between the death of his brother Edward IV and his assumption of the throne as Richard III. Both offices have entailed consideration of how precedents were set and frameworks put in place for their effective operation within the administration of fifteenth-century England. The Lord Protector, when appointed, is generally recognized to have been a leading member of the government, but less well known is that the High Constable of England, as one of the Great Officers of State, wielded national powers which included some that were second only to the king himself, principally when dealing with rebellion, insurrection or any of the many other activities deemed to be treasonable.

In order to understand these two offices I have gratefully relied upon a handful of historians whose prior studies have provided excellent secondary sources in their chosen specialties: J.S. Roskell has been invaluable for the origins of the office of Lord Protector; P.L. Johnson has been my source for a synopsis of the protectorates of Richard, Duke of York; and M.H. Keen and G.D. Squibb have produced masterly works on the High Constable and his Court. This latter topic has been of interest to me since the early 2000s when, living abroad and working on Richard III: The Maligned King (published 2008), I sought information on the powers and competencies of the Constable’s Court. On my return I determined to rectify this gap in my knowledge. I also wanted to clarify the office of Lord Protector, since the standard biographies of Richard III seemed to assume that the holder was at liberty to make of it whatever he wished, and that it equipped a particularly ambitious or unscrupulous incumbent, i.e. Richard when Duke of Gloucester, with powers equivalent to those of a regent which provided a pathway to the seizure of supreme power. I now believe this to be an erroneous assumption, although understandable in view of the misleading way it was characterized by commentators of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries who knew nothing of the constitutional position it occupied. This position was, in fact, very precise: having been inaugurated and recorded by decision of the King’s Council in 1422 to apply during Henry VI’s minority, it had been set within a specific governmental framework that remained constant thereafter, with the protector’s tenure defined by Parliament each time a protectorate was subsequently established. Protectors were appointed in varying circumstances in the fifteenth century, but always when the king was indisposed or under-age and deemed unable to exert personal rule.

A keen appreciation of this constitutional dispensation had clearly been uppermost in the minds of those members of the governing King’s Council who confirmed Richard, Duke of Gloucester in the office of protector in May 1483.¹ Hence the sub-title of this essay is taken from those words of the chronicle of Crowland Abbey which record Richard’s appointment, with the precedent of 1422 still being cited sixty years after the event:

… Richard, Duke of Gloucester received that solemn office which had once fallen to Duke Humphrey of Gloucester who, during the minority of King Henry [VI], was called Protector of the Kingdom. He exercised this authority with the consent and the good-will of all the lords …²

The offices of Lord Protector and High Constable were among the highest in the realm, but for whatever reasons they have remained widely misunderstood and their precise significance is very often glossed over. In considering the career of Richard, Duke of Gloucester, to ignore the way in which the responsibilities of these offices impacted upon him is to overlook an important contributing factor. In particular the role of the Lord Protector, along with the question of what he was meant to protect, have suffered enormous distortion in the popular mind, especially since the title was employed in different contexts in later centuries and endured considerable disfavour after its association with Oliver Cromwell in the 1650s. When applied to Richard III it still evokes the age-old error that assumes his role to have been ‘protector of the sons of Edward IV’. Nothing could be further from the truth, as the facts will demonstrate, and indeed the title itself is very clear: Protector and Defender of the Realm and Church in England and Principal Councillor of the King. A review of secondary literature suggests that serious confusion exists in the historiography in this respect. For example, Professor Michael Hicks, while correctly confirming that Richard of Gloucester was ‘the only possible candidate to be protector’, and citing the precedents of Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester and Richard, Duke of York, writes confusingly of Duke Humphrey’s protectorship that it ‘conferred the right to protect the person of the king and the realm’.³ Hicks has also stated more than once that Richard of Gloucester in 1483 was ‘his nephew’s protector’.⁴

Whereas the origin of the office of protector is well established, much more difficult is to assign a date from which the ancient office of High Constable of England existed, although its early raison d’être in the mediaeval context of knighthood and military campaigning is self-evident. References date back to the thirteenth century at least, from origins as a standing lieutenant of the king delivering judgement in time of war. Edward IV asserted, perhaps rather grandiloquently, that it had existed since the Conquest. The High Constable was personally appointed by grant of the king; and it will come as no surprise that the powers and purview of the Constable and his Court were continually developed to suit changing circumstances as each monarch came to deal with increasing unrest. The task of tracing their development – one might even say their transformation – under the English kings of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries is significantly hindered by the paucity of coherent documentation, a hindrance which is much greater when examining the critically important Constable’s Court which left no records.

Since a major part of the High Constable’s sphere of jurisdiction came to embrace the crime of treason, some exploration has been necessary in that area of the law, including the increasingly creative development of attainder by successive monarchs. The leading study of the mediaeval law of treason is that by J.G. Bellamy, of which I have made extensive use, although this essay cannot pretend to cover the topic exhaustively. Key requirements have also been to address how Edward IV widened the scope of the crime of treason and how he employed his High Constables to deal with it, with their jurisdictions and summary powers entrenched in the wording of their grants of letters patent.⁵ His brother Richard, Duke of Gloucester, appointed for life in 1469, was his last and longest-serving High Constable and may be assumed to have consolidated the way in which the king desired the Constable and his Court to operate. This being the prerogative of the monarch alone, it would have remained unchanged until decreed otherwise by any subsequent king.

The foregoing considerations provide a number of strands of evidence that shed light on these two key offices which in 1483 became combined in Richard of Gloucester’s person. I believe it is important to take all this into account in order to produce a review of how he performed those combined duties in the circumstances of conflict that arose during the interregnum. Hitherto no study has attempted to establish the precise legal and constitutional precedents that governed his options and actions, and thus their implications have not been tested. They could, however, bring new and important evidence to bear on the events after Edward IV’s death.

The essay that follows has been structured so that Part I sets out the relevant historical background pre-1483 as concisely as possible, with Sections 1 to 3 based on the work of leading authorities. Section 1 addresses the office and responsibilities of the Lord Protector within their constitutional framework (including some revision of misreadings by the otherwise reliable Roskell); Section 2 outlines the office of High Constable of England, its jurisdiction and its special Court; and Section 3 details the accumulation of treasonable offences which might be brought before that Court, followed by additional comments on attainder (also addressing some misapprehensions). Section 4 comprises my summary of the very significant developments of the Constable’s office and powers which took place in the reign of Edward IV.

In Part II, which begins at the death of Edward IV, I use these findings to attempt a reappraisal of what is known of the actions of Richard, Duke of Gloucester, holder simultaneously of the office and dignity of Lord Protector of the Realm and High Constable of England. I offer an alternative interpretation of some major events of the period from April to June 1483, based upon what I hope is an understanding of his exalted rank, eminence on the national stage, and military and judicial offices, combined with an appreciation of the precedents, identified in Part I, with which he, his brother Edward IV and his father the Duke of York would have enjoyed a lifelong familiarity. It is perhaps also germane to mention that Gloucester’s royal heritage embraced the sobering knowledge that his brother’s two constables before him had been beheaded, and that both previous protectors had met with untimely deaths.

It remains a constant hindrance that the period of Gloucester’s protectorate is poorly documented yet extensively delineated in retrospect by enthusiastic narrators whose interpretations can scarcely be termed objective. Faced with a plethora of unreliable self-styled histories, memoirs and chronicles, the researcher must attempt to weed out speculation, opinion and storytelling in the hope of finding occasional nuggets of fact. This problem of misleading sources is discussed in the introduction to Part II. With this in mind it has been my policy to set aside the usual overlay of negative hindsight and instead to take a chronological approach to the period under review; in other words insights will be sought into how Richard as Lord Protector and High Constable might himself have perceived and responded to successive events as they unfolded, rather than as we perceive them from our twenty-first century seats of judgement. No man can directly control or predict the actions of others in a situation of developing conflict, no matter how Machiavellian it might be supposed he was. If we are to consider the implications of this new evidence it will be more productive, therefore, to follow the bare factual bones of incidents as contemporaneously reported, and use them to build up a potential alternative which may then be weighed alongside the more familiar traditional narrative.

PART I

AN OVERVIEW OF 15th-CENTURY ENGLISH CONSTITUTIONAL AND LEGAL FRAMEWORKS RELATING TO LORDS PROTECTOR AND HIGH CONSTABLES

Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester (L) and Richard, Duke of York (R), (Genealogical Roll of Henry VI)

1.

The Office of Protector and Defender of the Realm

(a) Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester

The office of Lord Protector was a fifteenth-century English innovation, having been adopted and defined eo nomine for the first time by the King’s Council and confirmed by parliamentary authority in 1422 upon the appointment of Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, when the throne was inherited on the death of Henry V by his nine-month-old son Henry VI. A brief examination of these circumstances will be useful at this point, since the Crowland Chronicle drew a direct parallel between the protectorate agreed in May 1483 for Richard, Duke of Gloucester (the details of which have not survived) and that of Duke Humphrey 61 years earlier.

In both protectorates the crown of England had been left in the hands of a child who had not yet reached years of discretion. In previous reigns there had been other arrangements for assisting a child-king to cope with the process of government, with variable degrees of success. In 1422, upon the late king’s death his council and other magnates made it abundantly clear that they took the governance of England upon themselves. Professor J.S. Roskell summarizes: ‘The available lords spiritual and temporal seem to have assumed that the royal authority had devolved upon them by reason of Henry V’s death and the tender age of his heir … it was they who must act, pending the appointment of a sworn council of the regular kind, not only as the king’s advisers but as virtually constituting the executive.’⁶ On his deathbed, by adding codicils to his existing will to address the impending constitutional position, Henry V had shown himself concerned to provide for the forthcoming interregnum between ruling monarchs: ‘Henry tried to safeguard the dynasty by providing in his testament for the royal power [in England] to be principally exercised during this minority by his younger brother, Gloucester.’ He was quite explicit that Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester should exercise a form of regency in England while Humphrey’s elder brother John, Duke of Bedford, was appointed regent in France. Yet Humphrey’s supreme position as regent in England was rejected by the Lords in Henry VI’s first Parliament, who instead established the office of ‘Defensor of this Reme and chief conseiller of the kyng’.⁷

For a long time Henry’s codicils were thought not to have survived; but there exists a manuscript copy of them in the records of Eton College which was transcribed and published in an article in 1981.⁸ The relevant section states, Volu[mus] etiam quod carissimus frater noster Humfridus dux Gloucestr’ habeat tutelam et defensionem nostri carissimi filii principales. Hence it is clear that when Humphrey claimed to the council that Henry V’s codicil had granted him tutelam et defensionem principales of the new king, he was quoting precisely the provisions of his brother’s codicil written in France five days before his death.⁹ As we shall see below, this wording amounted to the provision of a regency.

Before we explore the implications of this rejection of Henry V’s last wishes for the governance of the realm (which he evidently viewed as heritable along with a variety of listed material possessions), it is important to note that he also made specific arrangements for the actual custody and care of his son’s person as a minor king, ‘which was to rest with a group of magnates amongst whom Gloucester is never included’.¹⁰ Principal among them was the child’s great-uncle (Henry IV’s half-brother) Thomas Beaufort, Duke of Exeter.

Although they were