176
[chap.
ConsHtutional History.
His letter them to prove their goodwill towards him. The letter to the
to the king t o
intercepted, king was, as they afterwards said, intercepted by Somerset,
but if it had been delivered it could have made little difference.
Henry, with his half-brother the earl of Pembroke, the dukes
of Somerset and Buckingham, the earls of Northumberland,
Devonshire, Stafford, and Wiltshire, and a force of two thousand
men, advanced to S. Alban’s, and there on the 22nd the two
Firet battle parties met. Negotiation was tried in vain ; the Yorkists
May ∞J^s∙ demanded an interview with the king and the arrest of the
counsellors whom they hated. The royal party replied with
threats which they must have known that they were too weak
to execute ; and Henry was himself moved to declare that he
would be satisfied only with the destruction of his enemies.
Somerset A battle followed, in which the duke of Somerset, the earl of
Northumberland, the earl of Stafford, son of Buckingham, and
the lord Clifford, on the king’s side, were slain, and he himself
was wounded. Although in itself little more than a skirmish
which lasted half an hour, and cost comparatively little blood-
shed, the first battle of S. Alban’s sealed the fate of the king-
dom ; the duke of York was Completelyvictorious; the king
remained a prisoner in his hands, and he recovered at once all
the power that he had lost1.
Political The battle of S. Alban’s had one permanent result : it forced
the battle, the queen forward as the head of the royal party. Suffolk
φwenMar- first and Somerset after him had borne the brunt of the struggle,
the fore- and enabled the duke to say that it was against the evil coun-
ground. sellors, not against the king himself, that his efforts were
directed. The death of Somerset left her alone 2 ; the duke of
Buckingham, although loyal, was not actuated by that feeling
towards the house of Lancaster which moved the Beauforts, and
which drew down upon them in successive generations the hatred
of the opposition. The young duke of Somerset was too young
to have more than a colourable complicity with his father’s
ɪ Whethamatede, ɪ. 167 ; Stow, pp. 390-400; Archaeologia, xx. 519;
Paston Letters, i. 327-333 ; J. du Clercq, iɪi. e. 23.
2 See on Margaret’s spirit and attitude generally, Plummer, Fortescue,
PP- 53 ⅛q-
XVIIi.] Changes in the Ministry.
177
policy, although he was not too young to inherit the enmities
which his very name entailed upon him. Nor could the royal
party under Margaret’s guidance be said to have any longer any
policy but that of resistance to the duke of York. She had been
taught to believe, and no doubt believed, that he was accessory
to Cade’s rebellion and to the murder of Suffolk ; he was directly
answerable for the death of Somerset. York himself made Apparent
incomplete-
scarcely any pretence to the character of a reformer of the state; nessof the
it was to vindicate his own position, to dislodge the enemies who signs,
poisoned the king’s mind against him, that he rose in arms ; and
the charges against them, by which he tried to justify his hos-
tility, were such as tended rather to involve the accused in
popular odium than to indicate a treacherous intent. Still it
may be questioned whether the design of claiming the crown
had distinctly formed itself in his mind before this period.
That he regarded himself and was regarded by his party as
the fittest man to rule England, under a king so incapable as
Henry VI, could only be a justification of his proceedings in
the eyes of those who believed that such a sense of fitness gives
by itself a paramount claim to office. Under these circum- Changesin
. , the consti-
stances the struggle henceforth loses all its constitutional tutionaɪ^
features ; the history of England becomes the history of a civil the perκ>ι.
war between two factions, both of which preserve certain
constitutional formalities without being at all guided by con-
stitutional principles. Such principles neither actuate the
combatants nor decide the struggle : yet in the end they prove
their vitality by surviving the exhausted energies of both the
parties, and maintaining the continuity of the national life in
the forms which its earlier history had moulded.
351. Immediately after the battle the unhappy kinɛ admitted Changes in
, . ɪʌ & the ministry,
his victorious enemies to reconciliation : on the 26th of May
he summoned the parliament to meet in July1; and on the
29th he removed the treasurer, replacing him with the viscount
Bourchier, the archbishop’s brother2 : the government of Calais
1 Lords’ Report, iv. 936 : by another letter he directed certain lords
to bring up only their household servants and avoid setting a dangerous
example ; Ordinances, vi. 244.
a Paston Letters, i. 334.
VOL. III. N