ABSTRACT
These arrangements had some unsatisfactory features. Of one something has been said already, that there was absolutely no formal provision for liaison between the English council and Bedford as the regent of France. The provision that when Bedford was in England Gloucester must automatically give way to him was not calculated to promote harmony between the brothers. The fact that, at the very beginning of the minority, the peers of the council and the man who as protector was to preside over them had already found themselves at loggerheads boded ill for the future. A schedule of provisions concerning the council approved in parliament in 1423 suggests that further difficulties were appearing early. The first of them declared that ‘neither my lord of Gloucester, nor no other man of the council, in no suit that shall be made to them, shall no favour grant, neither in bills [petitioning] for right, or office, or benefice, [whose decision] belongs to the council; but shall only answer that the bill shall be seen by all the council, and the party suing so have answer’. Still more disturbing was the sixth provision: ‘forasmuch as it is too great a shame that unto strange countries our sovereign lord shall write his letters by the advice of his council… and singular persons of the council to write the contrary: that it be ordained that no man of the council presume to do it, on pain of shame and reproof’.5 What precisely was in the mind of those who drew up this provision is not explicit, but almost certainly they were moved by Gloucester’s determination to pursue his wife Jacqueline’s rights in Hainault. This he could not do without straining the Anglo-Burgundian alliance, and we know that this danger was brought to the attention of the English council.6
