A Fine and Terrible Mystery Episode 13: Fantastical Duke of Dark Corners

This is the thirteenth episode in my investigation of the strange life of Sir Thomas Malory, author of Le Morte d’Arthur.  Episode 1 can be found here.

They synergize like two planes in a Cubist painting.  Hilary Mantel and Robert Bolt both imagined the lesser known 16^th century figure, Thomas Cromwell, sometimes having him speak with the same dialog derived from historical sources, (such as Roper’s contemporary biography of Sir Thomas More.)  Yet they’re so different.  Cromwell in Mantel’s Wolf Hall and Bringing Up the Bodies is a tough but sympathetic, aspiring rationalist at odds with an intellectually vain and philosophically hypocritical More.  Thomas Cromwell in Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons is an amoral, manipulative bureaucrat willing to send a literal saint to the block to further his ambition.  For the novelist they’re an exquisite lesson in how to direct an audience’s empathy.  For the historian, they’re cautionary evidence demonstrating that even when so much is known, judgments of character remain dangerously subjective.

Sir Humphrey Stafford, Duke of Buckingham was Sir Thomas Malory’s great enemy.  He personally arrested Malory and he led the Nuneaton court of indictment which presented the most serious charges against him.  Who was he?

If you’ve been following this series you know I’m naturally empathetic to Malory, not only because of the suggestions within the sometimes scant and ambiguous biographical evidence but also because of the beauty and cultural importance of his masterwork.  Nevertheless, by inclination and properly schooled by the example above, I also want to study Buckingham with as much empathy as possible.  My goal in the last weeks, as I’ve read everything I could find about him, has been not only to distill a set of representative events in his life but to understand what he cared about, what he loved and hated about himself, what he feared, to understand to what extent necessities drove him and what they were, to appreciate what he accomplished in the hope that a character would emerge which might subsequently lead to fair and perspicacious historical analysis.  The approach is not without precedent:  Ian Mortimer has recommended a similar strategy for understanding and interpreting ambiguous evidence in the life of Edward II.

Carole Rawcliffe, the formidable historian and preeminent biographer of the Staffords, The Staffords, Earls of Stafford and Dukes of Buckingham, might well say I’ve taken on a fool’s errand, she writes in her introduction,  “a balanced history of the Staffords, dealing fully with each of the three Dukes of Buckingham and their finances, cannot now be written.”  Probably.

Nevertheless, she takes a significant step along that path herself and, early on, paraphrasing K. D. McFarlane provides a succinct, important insight about the general character of 15^th century great noblemen, including the Staffords, “…they took a close personal interest in the control and management of their estates… They shared with their contemporaries a consuming  desire ‘to exploit every imagined right, to push every promising advantage to it limit;’ nor were they alone in their insistence upon stringent economies at all levels of expenditure.”  Wealth and status for 15^th century English nobility, whose wealth derived predominantly from land ownership and rents, was a deadly zero sum game:  what you won, another lost.  Many actions and decisions were compelled by necessity and to fall was to fall from a great height indeed as Suffolk’s exile and death showed.

The Stafford line itself begins with Ralph de Tonei, a Norman knight, rewarded for his part of the Duke William’s conquest of England with a grant of more than 100 confiscated manors.  By Sir Humphrey’s time the Stafford’s had diverse holdings throughout England, however, their primary source of revenue were their holdings in the southern Welsh Marches, (the border lands between Wales and England.)  Geography may not determine character, but it certainly affects it.  I recall driving through the Scottish borders a few years ago and found myself thinking that the difficult terrain, the density of hills and glens explained so much of that area’s history.  The gloriously beautiful southern Welsh Marches are not so rugged, but they’re more than wild enough to challenge overlordship by  a family of a different culture.  After very careful financial analysis, Rawcliffe observes that by 1450 Stafford’s real annual income was insufficient to meet his expenses, in spite of careful and possibly natural parsimony, apparent, for example, in his not increasing the compensation of esquires raised to knighthood even though their corresponding expenses were heavier.

He was born in 1402, (making him about the same age as Malory.)  His father died the next year and his mother, the dowager countess and one of the richest women in England, held back a significant portion of his inheritance until her death when he was 36.  In 1421, she fought a protracted legal battle against King Henry V over the apportionment of her aunt Mary of Bohun’s estates the loss of which led to a reapportionment of the inheritance and a great consolidation of their property in the southern Welsh Marches.  Collecting rents there was notoriously difficult, dangerous and unpredictable.  The lengthy case coupled with not being entrusted to fully manage his financial affairs (which would determine so much of his and his family’s success or failure generally) shaped him.  He was in the terrible position of having responsibility but lacking complete authority.

He first saw military service in France at the age of 18.  Later, his dukedom was awarded for several years of loyal service to the crown.  But the financial benefits from his service were never sufficient to offset the structural financial issues inherent in his English estates.  Rawcliffe states that he lacked the qualities necessary for a great statesman or leader and that he was in many ways “an unimaginative and unlikable man.” I’ve personally found very little that would particularly characterize his leadership in France one way or the other.  What does stand out are two events related to Joan of Arc.  Guillaume Manchon, in his deposition reported that someone, probably a cleric, said something positive about Joan and that Stafford, enraged, drew his sword and chased him to a place of sanctuary and would have stabbed him until he was reminded that it was a holy place.  Then there was the incident in the prison tower at Rouen on May 13, 1331 in which Stafford drew on Joan herself.  The two incidents suggest that even as he neared 30, he was impulsive, insecure and possibly superstitious.

In 1438 he was granted the crown manor of Atherstone and he acquired Maxstoke Castle, both in Warwickshire.  It was the same year in which he intimidated Sir William Monfort and his son Sir Baldwin Montfort, forcing Sir William “to sign away all their legal rights to the family estates, hand over any relevant documents and disclaim all knowledge of previous settlements to their advantage.”  It was extortion.  All three incidents indicate Stafford was attempting to move his revenue base east from the Welsh Marches to wealthier and more pacific Warwickshire, possibly seizing on a change in the balance of power.  Richard Beauchamp, the 13^th Earl was still at Rouen and would die the next year to be replaced by his fourteen year-old son.  It was an obvious strategy which easily brought him into conflict with established Warwickshire gentry with close ties to the Beauchamp’s, such as the Malorys.

In 1441 Eleanor Cobham, the ambitious wife of the King’s popular uncle Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, was tried for necromancy and a speculative plot against the King.  It was a thinly veiled attack on Gloucester himself by the Beaufort party and Stafford was one of three Earls who led the lay Commission.  Six years later, he participated in the arrest of Gloucester and may have been involved in his suspicious death 5 days after.  Stafford thus arranged to be on the winning side of a long standing political quarrel and received Penshurt manor as his share of the spoils.

In the Parliament of 1445, he staged a high stomached fight over ducal pre-eminence.  Henry VI had stated earlier that Harry Beauchamp, the newly made Duke of Warwick would have pre-eminence over Stafford as Duke of Buckingham when he came of age.  The strife between the two parties was so great that Parliament engineered a curious compromise of switching pre-eminence between the two every year.

Interestingly the Paston Letters contain one of Stafford’s personal letters from about this time.  It’s a letter to Viscount Beaumont, whose son married Stafford’s daughter.  The letter explains that Stafford is currently unable to pay the portion of his daughter’s dower currently owed and is otherwise unremarkable.  To my knowledge it’s the only personal correspondence of his that’s survived.

Another Paston Letter provides a careful and visceral contemporary description of what may have been one of the most tragic events in Stafford’s life.  John Norwood writes to Viscount Beaumont that on June 4, 1447 in Coventry during the Corpus Christi mystery plays, Stafford, his son Richard and their company encountered Sir Robert Harcourt and members of his affinity.  The two companies immediately fell “in hands together” (meaning into a brawl) because “of an old debate that was between them.”  Harcourt buffeted Stafford’s head with his sword.  Stafford’s son Richard then went after Harcourt but stumbled and was stabbed in the back by one of Harcourt’s men and subsequently died.  Two of Harcourt’s men were killed in the riot as well.

Returning to the spirit in which I began, you might reasonably ask where are the moments of heroism, the revelations of affection or love or insight?  I’ve looked for them but haven’t found them.

Perhaps that absence is the most important evidence of all.

Sir Humphrey Stafford was one of the richest and powerful men of his time, yet we never see him taking a considered preeminent role in politics or war.  Rather, he consistently chose to act as one of a group.  He didn’t direct the fall of Gloucester, but chose to be a notable participant once he recognized it served his personal interest.  Perhaps his greatest accomplishment was what he achieved in making his fortunes less dependent on the difficult Welsh marches and more on the safer, richer lands of Warwickshire.  On multiple occasions he was high tempered and quick to violence, jealous of his social position.  Later in life he was reputedly cruel to Cecily Neville, Duchess of York, which is consistent with his role in Eleanor Cobham’s trial and his behavior with Joan of Arc, too.  He may well have been a misogynist or at least reacted violently to women who  were less than obsequious, behavior and emotions which may have had their source in his relationship with his mother.

The question of why he persecuted Malory remains.  Nevertheless, his interest in acquiring Warwickshire property is the mostly likely cause of their conflict and Stafford’s sometimes unscrupulous methods for pursuing that interest with others must necessarily call into question any of his judicial actions against Malory.

Episode 14 can be found here.

(The first image is Sir Humphrey Stafford by William Bond.  The second image is a recent photograph of the southern Welsh Marches by the author.)