SOMERSET, John

Many aspects of John Somerset’s long and eventful career command attention, not least being his unique status as the only physician known to have sat in Parliament before the sixteenth century. This biography is based on C. Rawcliffe, ‘A Fifteenth-Cent. medicus politicus: John Somerset, Physician to Hen. VI’, in The Fifteenth Cent. X ed. Kleineke, 97-120, to which, save in the case of quotations or unless otherwise stated, the reader is referred for supporting evidence and for more detailed information about contemporary medical practice. Since they were required to enter minor orders if they wished to study as undergraduates at Oxford or Cambridge, elite members of the English medical profession generally retained the tonsure after leaving university and became priests, thereby rendering themselves ineligible for election to the Commons. The close association between spiritual and physical health and the confessional nature of the physician-patient relationship so characteristic of late medieval therapeutics clearly encouraged this practice. F. Getz, Medicine in the English Middle Ages, chap. 1. Less creditably, the prospect of rich livings and high ecclesiastical office proved irresistible to men whose acquisitiveness was the traditional butt of satirists such as John Gower and Geoffrey Chaucer†. C. Rawcliffe, ‘The Doctor of Physic’, in Historians on Chaucer ed. Rigby, 297-318. A few independent spirits followed the example of their Italian peers by marrying and pursuing a secular life, although it is worth noting that Somerset’s distinguished contemporary, Gilbert Kymer, physician to Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, allegedly repudiated his wife in order to secure preferment as dean of Salisbury and chancellor of Oxford university.

As a twice-married layman, Somerset proved adept at exploiting other sources of patronage, rising to become one of the leading figures at the court of his royal patient, Henry VI, and exercising considerable influence at the heart of government. His success is all the more remarkable given the obscurity of his background. There is certainly no evidence to support Bertram Wolffe’s assumption that he was the ‘John, bastard of Somerset’ who received a legacy from Cardinal Beaufort in 1447 and who was therefore ‘probably’ the illegitimate son of Beaufort’s elder brother, the earl of Somerset. B.P. Wolffe, Hen. VI, 45, n. 57. Despite his volubility about his triumphs and reversals in later life, Somerset was reticent about his origins, noting only that he came from London, and, indeed, being described as a Londoner shortly after he died. A striking combination of academic ability, personal charisma and professional skill more than compensated for any lack of family connexions, although he may possibly have been related to Robert Somerset, a minor figure in civic politics who served as warden of the Drapers’ Company during the later fourteenth century. Significantly, in 1448 Somerset was involved in the endowment of a chantry in St. Sephen’s church, Colman Street, which lay in a part of London where Robert had previously been active. He also maintained links, as a trustee and mainpernor, with a wide circle of city merchants, booksellers and tradesmen, among some of whom he perhaps spent his boyhood. All that we know for certain, however, is that his sister, Agnes, became a nun at the small Cistercian priory of Wintney in Hampshire, eventually serving as prioress for eight years before her death in 1460. During that time she cared for their widowed mother, who initially lived there as a pensioner at Somerset’s expense. He also gave money for the ‘reparacion’ of the ‘pore priory’: C1/19/65. Wintney could boast none of the cachet of the richer and more fashionable nunneries, being more likely to appeal to the daughters of the lesser gentry and of moderately affluent tradespeople.

Already regarded by some critics as outdated and unduly conservative, the teaching of medicine at both Oxford and Cambridge was conducted exclusively at postgraduate level. As a minimum requirement, students had first to graduate in the Liberal Arts and thus demonstrate proficiency in the trivium (grammar, rhetoric and logic) and quadrivium (mathematics, music, geometry and astronomy), which together laid the foundations of a medical syllabus based almost exclusively on the work of Ancient Greek authorities. Aged about 14 or thereabouts, Somerset began his studies at Oxford in the early 1400s, but had yet to complete the trivium when plague struck the university and he decided to move permanently to Cambridge. By 1410 he had become a fellow of Pembroke College, establishing a close and mutually beneficial relationship with his new alma mater until a property dispute some 40 years later brought their association to a painful and recriminatory end. By the time of his first appointment, as master of the grammar school at Bury St. Edmunds in 1418, Somerset bore the title ‘artium et grammatices [sic] professor et bachilarius in medicinis’, Cott. Tiberius B IX, f. 180. being qualified, like most physicians, to teach the young as well as to practise medicine.

On the face of things, the post of provincial schoolmaster (which, at a salary of 40s. a year, paid far less than Somerset might expect to earn from treating one wealthy patient) appears an unpromising start to a glittering career. But a number of factors made it appealing to such an ambitious and talented scholar, at least in the short term as a step to better things. For a start, it offered free accommodation in the nearby Benedictine abbey, which boasted a magnificent library of over 2,000 books and an atmosphere conducive for those of an academic disposition. Somerset was at this point engaged in the protracted period of study necessary to secure a doctorate in medicine and would almost certainly have made use of the abbey’s enviable collection of specialist literature. VCH Suff. ii. 309, 312. The community, which included John Lydgate (already recognised as the ‘official’ poet to the House of Lancaster), and William Curteys (destined to become the greatest of Bury’s late medieval abbots), has been described as ‘wealthy, privileged, celibate, rich in books and heavy with tradition’, differing in few respects from that of an affluent Oxford or Cambridge college. D. Pearsall, John Lydgate, 27; G. McMurray Gibson, ‘Bury St. Edmunds, Lydgate and the N-Town Cycle’, Speculum, lvi. 69. The school itself was highly successful, attracting pupils from leading families across the region and presenting ample opportunity for the cultivation of useful contacts. R.S. Gottfried, Bury St Edmunds and the Urban Crisis, 207-9. Foremost among them was Thomas Beaufort, duke of Exeter, a notable benefactor of the abbey, where he was eventually to be buried. It is clear from Somerset’s grateful tribute to Beaufort as his first patron that he either owed his appointment to the duke’s intervention or was taken up by him soon afterwards.

Other influential connexions were made over the next few years, most notably as a result of attempts, spearheaded by the above-mentioned Gilbert Kymer and by Henry V’s celebrated surgeon, Thomas Morstede, to found a ‘Faculte of Physik’, or medical ‘commonalty’, in London. Designed on the continental model to improve the education, licensing and regulation of all the city’s practitioners, this pioneering foundation set out to achieve in the capital what parliamentary legislation had previously failed to accomplish at a national level. C. Rawcliffe, ‘A Crisis of Confidence? Parl. and the Demand for Hospital Reform’, Parlty. Hist. xxxv. The project got off to a promising start, with Somerset being named as one of the surveyors of the new Faculty in 1423, but despite Morstede’s close ties with the civic elite and the backing of leading members of the nobility who had served overseas, it soon collapsed through a lack of popular and civic support. Evidence of only one item of business survives, involving a suit for damages brought by an aggrieved patient against a prominent surgeon, whom Somerset and his fellow arbitrators completely exonerated from blame. Their decision hinged upon a learned display of astrological expertise (then the bed rock of academic medicine) and can have done little to persuade ordinary Londoners that reform lay in their best interests. J. Colson and R. Ralley, ‘Medical Practice, Urban Politics and Patronage’, EHR, cxxx. 1102-31. Whatever disappointment he may have felt at this unfortunate outcome, Somerset was at least able to develop a closer working relationship with Morstede, who numbered Thomas Beaufort among his many royal and aristocratic patients. Whether Morstede used his considerable influence to secure his younger colleague’s appointment as the duke’s physician or whether Beaufort had already been sufficiently impressed by Somerset’s credentials remains uncertain. In either event, both practitioners attended the duke during his lengthy final illness, and they together headed the list of witnesses to the will that he made on his deathbed in December 1426.

Four years previously, Beaufort had been chosen by the dying Henry V to act as governor of his infant son. It was not until 1427 that Somerset officially began to serve as physician to the young King (along with Morstede as royal surgeon), but we can reasonably assume that he owed this much-coveted position to a final act of patronage on the duke’s part. Ralph Griffiths’ assumption that Somerset entered the service of Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, after Beaufort’s death, and was promoted through his influence is the result of confusion between Somerset and Gilbert Kymer, whose biographies appear to have been conflated: R.A. Griffiths, Hen. VI, 62, 245-7. However impressive his formal qualifications may have been – and he was by then one of very few Englishmen to possess a doctorate in medicine – the competition for preferment at court remained intense at a time when French or Italian practitioners were generally held in higher regard. His additional experience as a teacher clearly worked in his favour, since his principal task, besides safeguarding Henry VI’s health, was to smooth his transition from ‘the female world of the nursery’, D. Morgan, ‘The House of Policy’, in The English Court ed. Starkey et al., 36. to the aristocratic milieu presided over by his new guardian, Richard, earl of Warwick, and to assist in the tuition of ‘good manners, letters, languages, nurture and courtesy’. Griffiths, 52. Even so, like many of his predecessors, Somerset found it difficult to secure appropriate remuneration, and initially complained of the ‘tresgraunt et importable charge’ of service at court. PPC, iii. 287-8. Arrears are again recorded in 1432: iv. 131. Once the royal council had formally approved his salary of £40 a year (charged upon the fee farm of London) in February 1428, he successfully petitioned for a retrospective payment dating back to the previous Easter, along with the livery of fur-lined robes traditionally allocated to royal physicians twice a year from the great wardrobe. After this uncertain start he was invariably assured of preferential treatment.

In his capacity as ‘nostre cher bien ame chere meistre’, Somerset saw Henry VI crowned king of England in November 1429 and travelled with him to France in the following spring for his second coronation, being made a generous allowance of 40 marks to cover his expenses. E404/46/299. Within the year he was granted an estate in the bailliage of Caen, which had recently been surrendered by the duke of Bedford’s personal physician. Centred upon the lordships of La Remuée and Rolleville, to the north and east of Harfleur, Somerset’s new properties bore a nominal value of 577 livres tournois, but were probably worth far less. Archives Nationales, Paris, Dom Lenoir 8/379, 9/110-11; R.A. Massey, ‘Lancastrian Land Settlement in Normandy’ (Liverpool Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1987), 108-9, 362-3. He was, in any case, an absentee landowner, being more concerned to gain the recognition of his distinguished medical colleagues in Paris and Rouen. His presence beside the nine-year-old monarch at Rouen during the Christmas festivities of 1430 was recorded in his own hand on the fly-leaf of the ‘Bedford Book of Hours’, where he described himself in grandiloquent terms as ‘domini regis ad personam servitor et sanitatem vitaque conservationem consulens’. Add. 18850, f. 256. Because of his impressive academic qualifications Somerset has been named as the putative author of the anonymous Tractatus de regimine principum ad regem Henricum Sextum, which survives in a presentation copy, presumably made for the King himself. Since he was not, as the writer describes himself, ‘religiosus’, this seems unlikely, although he would have been quite capable of producing such a manual. Following in the steps of Aristotle, who had reputedly provided similar advice for the young Alexander the Great, he envisaged himself as a guide, who would direct his young pupil along the path to wellbeing, virtue and wisdom, equipping him to rule effectively over his people. Such, at least, was the plan, which at first seems to have gone well.

In April 1431 Somerset was granted a corrody worth five marks a year from Cirencester abbey and in October 1432 an annuity of £60 (over and above that of £40 already assigned to him during pleasure and subsequently confirmed for life), specifically for ‘his services about the King’s person, both in teaching him and preserving his health’. CPR, 1429-36, p. 241. Although at this point Henry seemed strong, lively and intelligent, his extended stay in France had failed to inspire the desired level of enthusiasm for English rule and his Parisian coronation had proved a sorry disappointment. It was in part ‘to erase the memory of this fiasco’, Pearsall, 171. that a triumphal entry into London was devised for him on his return home in February 1432, probably by John Lydgate and the common clerk, John Carpenter II*, who both described the event at length. The fulsome tribute to the trivium and quadrivium offered in one of the pageants was designed to flatter the young king and – by inference – Somerset, who, as an indispensable member of the royal entourage, would almost certainly have ridden in the procession.

The decision, approved by the royal council in November 1433, that Henry should visit Bury St. Edmunds for Christmas and spend some time at the abbey has been described as a cost-cutting exercise designed to save Household expenses. A.S.G. Edwards, ‘Introduction’, The Life of St. Edmund, King and Martyr, 1-3. The current financial situation would certainly have warranted such an expedient, but the choice of location and the fact that (after a predictably lavish reception) Henry remained there quietly as a guest of Abbot Curteys for the next four months suggest that Somerset had perhaps recommended a period of rest and recuperation out of the public eye in a place he knew well. Whatever concerns he may have harboured about the King’s health remain a matter of speculation, but the fact that Henry lodged for part of his stay in the prior’s residence where he could enjoy the benefits of sweet streams, fresh air (‘aerem salubrem’), a pleasing landscape and ‘the delectable scent of the vineyard’ accords perfectly with contemporary ideas about the ideal environment for convalescence. Mems. St. Edmund’s Abbey, ed. Arnold, i. 275; iii. pp. xxx-xxxi; W. Dugdale, Monasticon Anglicanum ed. Caley et al., iii. 113; C. Rawcliffe, ‘The Concept of Health’, in Le Interazioni fra Economia e Ambiente Biologico nell’ Europa Preindustriale ed. Cavaciocchi, 317-34. When the royal party finally left, on St. George’s day 1434, all its members, presumably including Somerset, were admitted to the abbey’s spiritual fraternity and John Lydgate began work on his metrical life of St. Edmund to commemorate the visit. Mems. St. Edmund’s Abbey, i. 275; Harley 2278, ff. 4v, 6.

The vexed question of Henry VI’s capacity to rule, or, more accurately, the extent of his reliance upon the judgement of others, looms large in any assessment of Somerset’s increasing prominence as a political figure from the late 1430s onwards. As the King’s personal physician and former tutor, who had in many respects assumed the role of a father-figure to the young man, Somerset could clearly expect to enjoy continuing marks of favour. Yet the scale of his preferment, which far exceeded anything previously enjoyed by leading members of his profession, gives the clear impression that he was able to exploit his position in order to become one of the ‘mandarins’ who stepped in to fill a vacuum at the very centre of power. The evidence is persuasive. In April 1437 he exchanged the above-mentioned annuity of £60 for a more lucrative life-tenancy of the manor of Ruislip in Middlesex, for which he was soon paying no rent and which, almost certainly on his recommendation, was to revert to the university of Cambridge when he died. (Another member of the royal Household, his future parliamentary colleague, Thomas Wesenham*, stood surety on his behalf for the first of these undertakings). CFR, xvi. 221. Three months later a pension of £33 a year was assigned to him from the abbey of Bury St. Edmunds, being increased to £40 shortly afterwards. This he surrendered, along with the £40 paid to him annually from London, in December 1439 when, through an unprecedented act of royal patronage, he became the first physician to serve as warden of the exchange and mint in the Tower of London and as chancellor of the Exchequer.

We should not take too seriously Somerset’s claim, made years later when he was embittered by his loss of political status, that none of the fees awarded to him by the Crown had ever been paid. Even so, there can be little doubt that, at this point in his career, the transmutation of these various annuities into land and offices would have brought him a far greater and more secure income, as well as a signal opportunity to extend his sphere of influence. On his own conservative estimate, the wardenship of the exchange and mint was alone worth £45 a year, over and above the considerable profits (potentially generating an additional £115 or more) to be made through commercial speculation. Somerset’s successor as warden claimed to have made £160 p.a. from the office: C1/19/65. Since the office of chancellor offered even greater potential for personal enrichment, Somerset was soon able to purchase an estate of some 760 acres in and around Heston, Isleworth and Osterley in Middlesex, which lay conveniently close to the royal palace at Sheen. He then began building the ‘great messuage’ at Isleworth which became his principal residence when he was not at court. CAD, v. A13416. These estates were valued at £19 p.a. in Nov. 1464, when Somerset’s ‘great messuage’ was said to have been ‘newly built’: C145/319/20. Some had evidently been acquired by 1436, when he was taxed on land worth £8 p.a. in Mdx. and Norf.: E159/212, recorda Hil. rot. 14 (vi) d. According to A.B. Emden, he gave property in Swaffham, Norf., to Pembroke College, but no evidence is cited: Biog. Reg. Univ. Oxf. iii. 1728. A life-tenancy of the nearby manors of Ham, Petersham and Sheen in Surrey, for which he paid a minimal rent to the Crown, served to consolidate these holdings. Personal as well as political reasons may have prompted Somerset to acquire a country estate, as he had probably married by then. Agnes, his first wife, is not, however, mentioned until May 1441, when the two of them were granted a corrody at Merton priory in Surrey as yet another reward for Somerset’s ‘praiseworthy service’ to the King. His territorial interests extended far beyond the Home Counties, as we can see from the gift to him and his heirs of land in Northallerton, Yorkshire, in 1440, followed two years later by the lease for life of two-thirds of the manor of Bassingbourn and the bailiwick of Badburgham in Cambridgeshire, ostensibly at a rent of 100 marks a year, but before long free of charge. The other third was to revert to him on the death of the dowager duchess of Bedford: CPR, 1441-6, pp. 150-1.

Paradoxically, given the fact that his growing wealth and influence derived from constant proximity to a weak and suggestible monarch, we know comparatively little about the medical advice that Somerset actually offered his royal patient. The decision to suspend the kiss of homage customarily exchanged between Henry and his tenants-in-chief at the opening of the Parliament of 1439, lest he contract ‘an infirmite most infectif’, was almost certainly made on Somerset’s recommendation, with appropriate reference to the opinion of other ‘noble fisisseanes and wise philosofors bifore this tyme’. PROME, xi. 306. The reassembly of the second session of this Parliament at Reading rather than Westminster in January 1440 may also have been urged by Somerset as a precautionary measure, although the government had good reason to welcome such a move, for which the continuing threat of plague served as a useful pretext. PROME, xi. 236. But he undoubtedly intervened to dissuade Henry from laying the foundation stone of King’s College chapel, Cambridge, in September 1444, likewise because of the risk then posed by ‘the aier and the pestilence’. Mems. St. Edmund’s Abbey, iii. 246; Wolffe, 141. The need to protect the King and safeguard his health had meanwhile assumed a more overtly political dimension in July 1441, as a result of the trial for witchcraft of Eleanor, duchess of Gloucester, who was accused of conspiring with others to forecast the King’s sickness and death and thus, implicitly, her husband’s accession, as heir presumptive, to the throne. At a time when judicial astrology was becoming increasingly popular in court circles, many physicians were tempted to stray into the forbidden field of divination in order to satisfy demanding patrons. One such was Somerset’s former colleague in the London ‘Faculte of Physik’, Thomas Southwell, who had allegedly conspired with Roger Bolingbroke, a priest and ‘necromancer’ in Duke Humphrey’s service, to predict Henry’s demise. Both men, who had studied at Oxford, were condemned to death, being quite probably the victims of a well-orchestrated plot to neutralise the government’s most outspoken critic. Somerset, by contrast, emerged with an enhanced reputation from the crisis, during which it fell to him and John Langton, a royal chaplain and master of Pembroke College, to produce a more optimistic horoscope that would allay concerns about the precarious future of the House of Lancaster. Despite the extravagant plaudits bestowed upon his astrological accomplishments by others, Somerset seems to have entrusted the more complex calculations to his young protégé, Roger Marchall, another Cambridge-trained physician. Contrived with ‘a great show of learning’ that masked some doubtful conclusions, their combined efforts further underscored the ascendency of Cambridge university as a focus of royal patronage. J.D. North, ‘Astronomy and Mathematics’, in Hist. Univ. Oxford, ii, ed. Catto and Evans, 107-8.

That Somerset played a key role in the execution of Henry’s VI cherished educational projects is clearly apparent from the outset. In September 1440 he was commissioned first to assess the goods of the alien priories in England and then to act as a one of 12 distinguished trustees of their confiscated lands and rents, preparatory to the endowment of a royal collegiate foundation at Eton with assets worth 1,000 marks a year. It was, significantly, to include a grammar school intended for 25 ‘poor and needy scholars’, along with ‘any others whatsoever and from wherever in our kingdom of England’ who wished to learn ‘the basic rudiments of grammar free of charge’. PROME, xi. 345-6. At the same time, he and Langton were empowered (together with John Fray†, the chief baron of the Exchequer) to acquire land in Cambridge and elsewhere to the annual value of £200 for the support of a new college dedicated to St. Nicholas at the university. According to the terms of the foundation charter, which was drawn up in the following February, the two colleagues were also among those trusted members of the royal Household, including Bishop Aiscough of Salisbury, who were charged with the production of its statutes. As a first step toward the ratification of all these various measures, parliamentary approval was sought early in 1442 for the arrangements with regard to Eton, and, not surprisingly, Somerset seemed the obvious choice of helmsman to steer them safely through the Commons.

Although, unlike Thomas Charlton*, his fellow shire knight for Middlesex, Somerset did not belong to an established local family, he could hardly be dismissed as little more than a royal placeman. His construction of a residence at Isleworth and his service from 1439 onwards as a member of the Middlesex bench suggest that he already maintained a presence in county society, even though his duties at court clearly took priority. He does not, for example, appear to have attended any of the Middlesex parliamentary elections, or to have involved himself in office-holding there. On the other hand, however, the county had a long tradition, extending back to the fourteenth century, of returning men who were employed at court or as office-holders at Westminster, while also frequently choosing Londoners or the members of families that had once been based in the City. J.R. Freeman, ‘Political Community in 15th-Cent. Mdx.’ (London Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 2002), 156-9, 179, 205-9; The Commons 1386-1421, i. 504-5. Somerset’s status as a landowner clearly helped him to consolidate links with such people. Along with Thomas Burgoyne*, he was, for example, involved in 1444 in the property transactions of his Isleworth neighbour, Geoffrey Godelok*, who, in turn, acted with Ralph Legh* as one of his trustees for land in Twickenham. CP25(1)/152/92/112, 114; CAD, ii. C2456.

Somerset’s oratorical skills served him well in the Commons. The endowment of Henry VI’s college at Eton was one of the major items of business considered by the short and comparatively uncontentious Parliament of 1442, occupying three of the 15 membranes of the parliament roll and encountering no apparent obstacles. Soon afterwards, in May 1442, as the building was well advanced, he assumed office as surveyor of the works at the new college, as well as at the Tower and the royal palaces at Sheen and Westminster, which badly needed repair before Henry’s forthcoming marriage. In the event, this appointment came to nothing, since either Henry himself or his advisors opted for a radical change of plan, whereby Eton and St. Nicholas’s in Cambridge (now renamed King’s College) would be more closely connected to each other and redesigned on a far grander and more ambitious scale. Work on the statutes of King’s was temporarily suspended in July 1443 to be resumed by Somerset and his colleagues three years later, once parliamentary approval had been secured for an extensive endowment. PROME, xi. 439-71; Wolffe, 140-3. On this occasion his presence in the Commons was not evidently required, although he remained closely involved in the project, and also in setting up ‘the Quenes college of sainte Margerete and saint Bernard’, which was envisaged as a companion to King’s under the patronage of Margaret of Anjou. Not only did he help to compile the statutes in 1447-8, but he also donated funds of his own for its upkeep, while encouraging other Middlesex landowners, such as Henry Somer* and John Shorditch* to lend their support. W.G. Searle, Queens’ Coll. 15-16, 19; Harl. 7048, f. 5. The full extent of Somerset’s involvement in this ambitious programme, which has been regarded as a rare, if not unique, expression of Henry’s personal interests, remains open to debate. That, as a highly regarded teacher and academic, he actually helped to direct a ‘corporate enterprise’ planned and implemented by leading members of the Household, perhaps in the face of capricious and intermittent royal intervention, is by no means impossible. J. Watts, Hen. VI and the Politics of Kingship, 168-71. The erroneous assumption that Somerset was ‘king’s almoner’ (170, n. 192) is based on a misreading of E28/66/19, where Somerset’s name, which has been deleted, appears next to a reference to that official. At the very least, he and Langton appear to have been instrumental in persuading Henry to favour Cambridge rather than Oxford, a decision reinforced not only by Oxford’s association with heresy but also by the suspect connections maintained by some of its alumni with the duke of Gloucester.

Two other matters considered by the Parliament of 1442 would have commanded Somerset’s attention. The first arose from the trial of Gloucester’s wife, whose case had not been heard in a secular court because of apparent uncertainty as to the legal status of peeresses in such circumstances, an issue that was now formally resolved. PROME, xi. 367-8. Of more pressing concern to him as both chancellor of the Exchequer and a prominent member of the royal chamber was the ongoing demand by the Commons for restructuring of the Household’s finances and the imposition of ‘good and sadde rule’ upon an increasingly profligate establishment. These complaints evidently had some effect, at least to the extent that, between 1442 and 1444, larger sums were transferred from the Exchequer to the Household, easing its dependence upon credit, in the form of unpaid tallies. PROME, xi. 137-8. Here again, we encounter the question of Somerset’s role as one of King Henry’s most trusted servants. How far did his influence extend beyond an entirely legitimate interest in health and education into the realms of politics and finance?

Somerset has been identified by Bertram Wolffe as one of the dozen ‘prominent members of Henry’s entourage’ who were not councillors, but ‘whose names appear frequently as witnesses to the King’s acts of state’. Wolffe, 104-5. He may, in fact, have attended council meetings; and he certainly commanded the ear of those who did, as a letter of 1442 from his friend, Thomas Bekynton, the King’s secretary, makes plain. Having been sent to Bordeaux to negotiate a marriage between Henry and the count of Armagnac’s daughter, Bekynton complained that that his mission would founder ‘withoute hasty remedy’ in the form of practical support. To this end, he begged his ‘right welbeloved and entirely trusted Maister’ to ‘sture and call upon my lords of the king’s counsaill to pourvey such remedye in this partie, in all goodely hast, as yt maye be to the king’s pleasure’, a request which highlights Somerset’s rhetorical gifts (honed through years of formal study), while alluding wittily to his professional skills as a healer. Letters Margaret of Anjou (Cam. Soc. lxxxvi), 85-86. Bekynton was not alone in seeking the assistance of such a powerful figure, although he may have been unusual in not having to pay for it. Three years later, for example, the corporation of London awarded Somerset a robe, a fur-trimmed cloak and 20 marks a year for life, along with a one-off payment of 100 marks, in return for his ‘notable industry and labour expended with the lord king for expediting the [award of the City’s] new charter and other arduous business assiduously facilitated and undertaken by him’. Corp. London RO, Jnl. 4, f. 84. As further proof of its ‘reverence’ for Somerset, his friend, the royal brick-maker William Veysy*, was admitted to the freedom shortly afterwards, having perhaps also secured the post of civic water-bailiff, which he already held, through the physician’s earlier intervention on his part. The two men appear to have forged a close and mutually profitable relationship through their joint involvement in successive royal building projects, including Eton, as well as in the re-foundation of the above-mentioned chantry in Colman Street. It was almost certainly because of this connexion that Veysy was returned to the two Parliaments of 1449 for boroughs with which he had no previous association. In return, he agreed to act as Somerset’s feoffee, and eventually as the administrator of his estate. His fellow representative for Lyme Regis in February 1449 was, significantly, another outsider, the Londoner Andrew Kebell*, who owed his appointment as comptroller of the pipe at the Exchequer to Somerset’s patronage. Since Kebell went on to sit for Melcombe Regis alongside his Exchequer colleague, John Gloucester II*, in the following November, there can be little doubt that Somerset was using his influence to secure the presence in the Commons of men who could be trusted to defend the government’s increasingly vulnerable financial position.

During this period, Somerset was able further to consolidate his already formidable network of clientage by making a second marriage to Alice Cawood, the widow of John Cerf, one of his colleagues in the Exchequer, and quite possibly the sister of another, Robert Cawood, who was clerk of the pipe between 1431 and 1449. She brought him an interest in the Yorkshire estates and holdings in Lincolnshire that had passed to her in fee simple on Cerff’s death in 1444, although her decision to remarry cost her the life-tenancy of other property which was conditional upon her remaining single. Any such losses were, however, easily offset by the steady stream of gifts, douceurs and gratuities that continued to flow in Somerset’s direction. Additional windfalls, such as the goods of a condemned heretic, who was executed in 1440, the securities of £60 forfeited from the unlucky mainpernors of a serial offender five years later, and the right to sue out writs and letters patent free of charge for life, form the tip of a massive iceberg whose depths can just occasionally be glimpsed.

Made at a time when the conduct of Henry VI’s advisors invited far greater and more unwelcome scrutiny, Somerset’s self-righteous assertion that he had never taken ‘brybes for forderaunce of men … ne for spedyng of causys, bot evere kepte myn handys inpollute fro accepcions of gyftys’ seems hard to credit. Nor, on the face of things, does his claim to have existed frugally ‘on esy lyvelod that never man of myn occupacions in any kynges tyme of so lytel lyved’ carry much conviction. C1/19/65. It would, however, be unduly cynical to dismiss his protestations as no more than a well-aimed jibe at his nemesis, the notoriously corrupt William de la Pole, duke of Suffolk, or a belated attempt to distance himself from the allegations of ‘covetise’ levelled against members of the royal court. From Classical times onwards, medical practitioners had been advised to counter their invidious reputation for greed by engaging in conspicuous acts of charity towards the deserving poor. Generosity was especially desirable in those who cared for kings and princes, since they provided an example for the monarch, as physician of the body politic, to follow. As one of the trusted courtiers involved in setting up Henry’s major charitable foundations, Somerset clearly felt the need to establish a suitably impressive institution of his own, regardless of expense. This costly undertaking also illuminates his relationship with the pious and well-educated Londoners to whom he turned for inspiration and advice, while offering welcome support for their own devotional activities. He had, for instance, recently played a prominent role in securing royal approval for the incorporation of an exclusive fraternity of the Virgin Mary at the church of All Hallows Barking, near the Tower, which numbered such leading citizens as Thomas Canynges*, Henry Frowyk I* and Hugh Wyche* in its ranks. Surv. London: All Hallows Barking, i. 13.

Rather than founding a school, as might be expected, Somerset decided to endow a chapel, religious fraternity and almshouse in Brentford, Middlesex, not far from his country residence. King Henry readily granted a licence in 1446 for the acquisition in mortmain of property worth £40 a year for its upkeep, while promising his ‘beloved and faithful attendant’ that he would lay the foundation stone of the chapel ‘with our own hands and at our charges and expenses’. CPR, 1446-52, p. 29; Rawcliffe, ‘John Somerset’, 109-10. Somerset reciprocated by funding a priest to pray for the King and queen there and by adopting an unusual dedication to the Nine Orders of Angels, whose cult was popular in royal circles. It flourished at the nearby Bridgettine nunnery of Syon, a Lancastrian house which regarded the physician as its ‘special benefactor and friend’. Add. 22285, ff. 6v, 70v. That the city of London furnished an appropriate model for Somerset to work from is hardly surprising given his long connexion with the above-mentioned John Carpenter II, the principal executor of Richard Whittington†, who had been heavily involved in setting up the latter’s celebrated college and almshouse of St. Michael Paternoster. Besides sharing a passion for education, the two men were associated in various property transactions on behalf of other like-minded individuals. In 1431, for example, Carpenter conveyed ‘a tenement or tavern’ in Paternoster Row to Somerset, who eventually released his title to the bookbinder and stationer, Peter Bylton; Guildhall Lib. London, 007/EM/07/H/058; C.P. Christianson, Directory of London Stationers and Book Artisans 1300-1500, 80. and a decade later they served as trustees of property in Hertfordshire and Middlesex together with Carpenter’s namesake and putative kinsman, the future bishop of Worcester, who had collaborated with Somerset on the foundation of Eton and was then attempting to convert the ‘almost desolate’ hospital of St. Anthony into a civic grammar school and liturgical centre. CPR, 1436-41, pp. 510-11, 55; C. Rawcliffe, ‘The Eighth Comfortable Work’, in The Church and Learning in Late Medieval Society ed. Barron and Stratford, 394-5. John Carpenter II died before Somerset’s plans came to fruition, but Reynold Pecock, a long-serving master of Whittington’s college, and John Colop, who had helped him to implement some of the late mercer’s philanthropic bequests, were able to provide the necessary expertise as trustees and co-founders of the new almshouse at Brentford. W. Scase, ‘Reginald Pecock, John Carpenter and John Colop’s “Comon-Profit” Books’, Medium Aevum, lxi. 261-74. As well as attracting the support of local landowners and many of Somerset’s colleagues in the Household and Exchequer, the fraternity appealed to members of the civic elite whose innovative approach to charity embraced schools and libraries as well as poor relief.

If Somerset’s many ostentatious ‘dedys of devocion, mercy and pitee’ did not reduce him to poverty, as he subsequently claimed, they certainly involved a significant investment, which, initially at least, yielded handsome dividends so far as his personal reputation was concerned. C1/19/65. A glowing tribute to his sympathy for ‘the naked, the hungry and the wretched’ appears in the dedicatory epilogue appended to the second recension of the Vita Henrici Quinti by an anonymous chronicler now known as the Pseudo-Elmham. Thomae de Elmham Vita et Gesta Henrici Quinti, ed. Hearne, 340. The work had originally been commissioned by Somerset’s colleague at court, Walter, Lord Hungerford†, apparently to replace an earlier vita by the Italian humanist Tito Livio, who had been writing as much to glorify his patron, the duke of Gloucester, as the late King. On Hungerford’s death, in 1449, Somerset saw the work to its conclusion, being rewarded with a fulsome address in florid Latin that praised his knowledge of medicine and astrology and his achievements in raising Henry VI as a healthy and virtuous prince, but most of all his generosity to the poor.

Other assessments of Somerset’s character proved considerably less flattering, especially as his position as one of the King’s longest-serving and most influential confidants came increasingly under threat. His probity was, ironically, first called into question as a result of his activities as a collector and donor of books, not all of which appear to have been his own. He was probably in attendance upon King Henry at the Bury St. Edmund’s Parliament of 1447, when the sudden and suspicious death of Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, removed a great patron of learning as well as an implacable opponent of the court party. On the questionable assumption that the duke had died intestate, a commission was promptly set up to administer his effects, Somerset being an ideal candidate to serve upon it. Having been promised a large consignment of books (including works on medicine) from the ducal library through the good graces of Gilbert Kymer, the authorities at Oxford wrote first to Henry VI and then to his ‘most celebrated doctor’, in a vain attempt to implement the duke’s wishes. Epistolae Academicae Oxon. i (Oxf. Historical Soc. xxxv), 253. As time passed their tone grew increasingly accusatory until, in 1450, when Somerset and most of his fellow courtiers were facing a violent backlash for years of misrule, they petitioned Parliament for help in recovering the missing legacy. By September of that year the outlook seemed very bleak: James Fiennes*, Lord Saye, another of the administrators, had been beheaded by the Kentish rebels and demands were being made for Somerset’s removal from court when Archbishop Stafford wound up the commission and ordered an inquiry into its conduct. After long delays and constant prompting, the senior clergy appointed to this task pronounced their final verdict on Somerset in May 1453, not only exculpating him from any suspicion of wrongdoing, but actually praising his readiness to comply promptly with their demands. Since the investigation was headed by his old friend, Thomas Bekynton (who was by the then bishop of Bath and Wells), a degree of scepticism on this score may well be justified, especially as Somerset had already presented at least one of Duke Humphrey’s ‘lost’ books to Gonville Hall, Cambridge, as a personal gift, while others found their way to the library of King’s College. Not coincidentally, Somerset’s belated olive branch to Oxford university, in the form of some books and a set of gold-embroidered vestments, was extended in 1452 just as Bekynton’s inquiry neared its conclusion and his relations with Cambridge had broken down irretrievably.

The ongoing dispute over Gloucester’s books throws into relief the far more serious problems encountered by Somerset and other members of the ‘old guard’ within the royal chamber as the political climate grew more turbulent. However specialized their services may have been, physicians were as vulnerable as other courtiers to the threat posed by ambitious newcomers, hungry for promotion. Many of them hitched their fortunes to those of King Henry’s new favourite, the marquess of Suffolk, whose appointment as chamberlain in February 1447 spelled trouble for Somerset not only as a potential rival for King Henry’s ear, but more immediately as the occupant of two particularly desirable offices. Within a matter of days he faced a painful interview with the marquess over his future as chancellor of the Exchequer and warden of the mint, being obliged to surrender whatever right he might have to dispose of the reversion of the chancellorship, while relinquishing the wardenship altogether. Suffolk, meanwhile, was busily lining his pockets with backhanders from hopeful clients who were prepared to gamble large sums of money on the trade in reversions without any certain guarantee of success. This unedifying affair would have gone unrecorded, no doubt like countless others, were it not for a lawsuit some five years later in which Somerset provided a long and detailed testimony describing exactly how vicious the battle for preferment had become. Transcribed in full in Rawcliffe. ‘John Somerset’, 117-20. As we have seen, his attempt to occupy the moral high ground by claiming to have personally resisted all bribes and blandishments carries little conviction, but, for all its special pleading, his testimony still provides a unique insight into the dysfunctional nature of Henry VI’s household. It also reveals the extent to which shrinking reserves of royal patronage, in the form of hereditary titles to offices of state, had become accessible to only the highest or most powerful bidders.

By 1452 Somerset may well have deemed it expedient to exaggerate the extent of Suffolk’s animosity towards him and his own fear of reprisals should he refuse to comply with his demands. It is, even so, easy to see how his amour propre must have suffered as the marquess harangued him into submission (while, in a telling display of casual arrogance, forcing him to stand ignominiously by a ‘cupborde’). He did not, however, leave their encounter empty-handed, for John Lematon*, who was then Suffolk’s preferred candidate for both the wardenship of the mint and the reversion of the chancellorship, agreed to compensate him to the tune of 1,000 marks for any financial losses. The entire sum was ‘paied truly’ and spent straight away by Somerset on a precisely itemised list of ‘Goddys werkys’, including his new almshouse and chapel. While conceding that his successor had behaved courteously towards him, Somerset nevertheless reflected with grim satisfaction upon Lematon’s fury as the marquess suddenly decided to favour a more influential suitor. Having accepted the douceur of 100 marks proffered by Lematon on the assumption that he was about to acquire a long term and extremely lucrative hereditary interest in the two offices, Suffolk promised Thomas Thorpe* the reversion of the chancellorship, ‘to have to hym self and hys heyres malys’ immediately after Lematon’s death, thereby greatly reducing the value of Lematon’s investment.

Thorpe made a formidable adversary, whom Somerset knew well through their long years of service together in the Exchequer, having employed him from time to time to transact financial business on his behalf, and also sharing custody with him of the estates of one of the archbishop of Canterbury’s wards. Yet Lematon was not prepared to surrender without a fight, and attempted to renegotiate the terms of his original letters patent to include two or three of his younger brothers as co-recipients with him of the reversion in survivorship. Not only did his efforts proved futile, but he died suddenly in 1449, leaving Somerset, who still enjoyed a life interest in the chancellorship, smugly to invoke Cato’s warning about the foolishness of gambling upon the mortality of others. The full story eventually came to light as a result of litigation in the court of Chancery over a bond in 200 marks surrendered by Lematon to his agent, the London draper, Peter Caldecot, which his executors refused to honour. Their claim that it had been conditional upon Caldecot’s ability to obtain the revised letters patent, and was thus void, was dismissed as a blatant falsehood by both the draper and Somerset, whose annoyance at being dragged into the affair prompted a sanctimonious attack upon the executors’ mendacity. The suggestion that he ought to have reimbursed Lematon for some of his losses also rankled, as did persistent rumours that he himself had profited from Suffolk’s corrupt regime.

Although his diatribe against Lematon’s executors was almost certainly justified, Somerset may have been a less impartial witness than he sought to appear. Since the debt of 200 marks had originally been owed to Robert Cawood, his kinsman by marriage, as well as to Caldecot, it looks as if he had a vested interest in securing its payment. He was also close to Philip Malpas*, another draper involved in recovering the money, who had close links with the Exchequer and was later to assist in the reconfiguration of his almshouse. C1/19/61; CAD, v. A13416. More to the point, his vociferous complaints regarding ‘the false voyce and noyce that the fende reysith nowh on good men ungylty’ should be seen in the wider context of the personal abuse that he had endured over the previous three years, as rising levels of disorder in the provinces, English losses in France and growing indignation over financial mismanagement at home precipitated a major crisis in government. Whatever factions and rivalries may have festered within the Household, most of its members were deemed guilty by association with Suffolk, and held responsible with him for causing these problems. His murder in May 1450, while crossing the Channel to begin a period of exile overseas, provoked the inevitable reaction. As both chancellor of the Exchequer and principal physician of the royal body, Somerset ranked prominently among the unpopular favourites who, in the words of Cade’s rebels, had congregated ‘dayly and nyghtely’ around the King, and were indicted before a commission of oyer and terminer at Rochester in the following August. C.L. Kingsford, English Historical Literature, 359, 364-5. With unintended irony, a satirical dirige composed shortly after Suffolk’s death pilloried him as one of the ‘traitours’ who alone would mourn the passing of ‘Jake Napes’, and he was fortunate to escape relatively unscathed. Political, Religious and Love Poems ed. Furnivall (EETS, xv), 9. An attempt by the Commons of November 1450 to have him removed, along with other undesirables, from the royal court was successfully challenged by Henry VI, who managed to save a small number of those ‘accustumed contynuelly to waite uppon his persone’ from the purge. PROME, xii. 184-5.

Having sailed dangerously close to the wind, Somerset continued to receive his customary livery from the royal wardrobe, and, against all odds, remained in office at the Exchequer. He also survived an initial attempt by Parliament to recover some of the property given by King Henry to his more notorious favourites. Not even he, however, could avoid a second and more comprehensive Act of Resumption passed in 1451, which resulted in the award of his holdings in Northallerton to Thomas Cross*, one of the clerks of the Exchequer, CFR, xix. 78. and the confiscation of his beloved manor of Ruislip. The loss of income and status was compounded by a seething sense of resentment at the fact that King’s College promptly asserted the reversionary interest in the manor which he himself had secured for Cambridge university and took possession of it. Incensed by what he regarded as a gross act of betrayal by the institution that he had helped to found, Somerset launched a characteristic riposte in the form of a Queremonia … de ingratitudine universitatis Cantebrigiae, cast in 82 lines of impeccable, if sententious, Latin hexameters. Not surprisingly, given its date of composition, the poem reflects the same acute sensitivity to charges of acquisitiveness and impropriety apparent in his Chancery deposition, while concluding with a nostalgic recollection of his time at Oxford, evidently in the hope of effecting a long-overdue reconciliation.

Somerset’s political star was, however, now on the wane and he seems henceforth to have exercised little, if any, of his former influence on matters of state. A combination of advancing years and profound disillusionment may account for his apparent inactivity, but he was more probably preoccupied with the care of his royal patient, who succumbed in the summer of 1453 to the catatonic stupor that was to render him insensible for the next 17 months. We know little about Somerset’s role in the early stages of King Henry’s treatment, although the stress of dealing with such an intractable condition almost certainly took its toll on his own health. The assembly of a team of five eminent practitioners in late March 1454 with authority, confirmed on 6 Apr. following, to perform a wide range of invasive medical and surgical procedures on the King provides the first clear sign that he had either been replaced or, more probably, had retired because of illness or exhaustion. Having contracted an unspecified ‘seknesse’, he died childless shortly after 3 Apr. 1454, when he settled all his goods and chattels ‘in London and elsewhere within the realm’ upon John, Viscount Beaumont, John Say II* and the recorder of London, Thomas Billing*. CCR, 1447-54, pp. 497-8. Both Queen’s College and Syon abbey celebrated his obit, the former on 18 Apr. and the latter one day later.

No doubt because Somerset’s various charitable projects had, indeed, consumed most of his resources, but also as a result of the complexity of his financial affairs, the settlement of his estate took several years and gave rise to a number of lawsuits. We cannot even be sure that he actually made a will. His sister Alice, the prioress of Wintney, claimed that he had done so, while the chantry priest whom she accused of withholding some of the 100 marks placed by him in a coffer for the support of their widowed mother, maintained that the executors had refused to act. It is, however, clear that on 4 June 1454 the bishop of London’s commissary assigned the administration of Somerset’s goods to one of his servants, along with the above-mentioned William Veysy and William Barnaby, a London chaplain, and that they subsequently referred to him as having died intestate. In 1451 Barnaby had conveyed all his goods and chattels to Somerset and his wife, Alice: CCR, 1447-54, p. 273. Their task proved arduous, not least because Somerset had, like many other Exchequer officials, been involved in the sometimes questionable trade in tallies, the recovery of which could prove problematic. The widow of his former colleague, Andrew Kebell, for instance, refused to surrender one for £20 due to Somerset from the fee farm of Shrewsbury, which he had promised to a servant; and the sheriff of Somerset and Dorset proved equally reluctant to hand over another worth £16. All three administrators had been accorded royal pardons by 1456, but it took another eight years for the management of Somerset’s almshouse, chapel and fraternity in Brentford to be placed upon a secure footing. Despite reductions in its personnel, the foundation continued to experience financial problems, although it still retained the support of the well-educated and devout Londoners whose scholarly and religious interests so closely reflected his own.