Cardinal Beaufort—Patriot or Usurer?

Abstract

Even in his lifetime Henry Beaufort was a controversial figure. The Londoners envied his wealth and detested his policies; Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, denounced him as an ambitious schemer and a traitor; both pope and king punished him for his disobedience. Yet more than once he was extolled in parliament for his generosity, loyalty, patriotism and wisdom in affairs of state. These official encomiums preserved his reputation for a generation after his death. Upon them Stubbs built his pic ture of the cardinal as the defender of the Lancastrian constitu tion, the maintainer of Henry V's conquests and the wise seeker after a timely peace. ‘Far sighted and patriotic in his counsels’, he became ‘the mainstay of his house’, ‘ready to sacrifice his wealth and labour to the king’. It was scarcely Beaufort's fault that, at his death, the tokens of Lancaster's fall were already apparent. A different, less favourable, view originated with Edward Hall and was popularized by Shakespeare. In the scheme of retributive justice with which the new historiography clothed the Wars of the Roses, the cardinal and his family appeared as the principal fomenters of dissension. Hall's own detestation of Wolsey added a touch of venom to his strictures on the pride and avarice of Wolsey's predecessor.

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