The Political Career of William Ayscough, Bishop of Salisbury, 1438–50

Summary

The fifteenth century boasts an impressive cast of pantomime villains. William Ayscough, bishop of Salisbury, may not be one of the most famous of these men, but nonetheless ranks among their number. He was roundly denounced by contemporaries, with a London chronicle decrying him as one of the ‘traytours aboute the kynges persone’, the first continuation of the Croyland chronicle alleging that he was guilty of ‘detestable crimes’ and another commentator remarking that he was a ‘covetous’ man, who was ‘holde suspect of meny defautes’. This criticism has been broadly accepted by historians. In particular, R.L. Storey argued that Ayscough was ‘Suffolk's closest associate in the royal court, and a close runner-up in popular odium’; John Gillingham depicted him as one of the villainous ‘gang of three’, who constituted a corrupt influence at the heart of court; and John Hare claimed that he was ‘one of the dominant figures in the government’, who had ‘played a prominent role in some of the more unpopular acts of the regime’, especially the fall of Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, and the loss of France. These denunciations were embraced by Henry VI's leading biographers of the twentieth century: to Ralph Griffiths, he was an ‘infamous’ figure, who was ‘prominently linked with the household’; to Bertram Wolffe he was a slimy ‘courtier bishop’, and one of the most assiduous supporters of William de la Pole, duke of Suffolk. John Watts’ subsequent work dramatically reinterpreted the politics of Henry VI's reign, yet even while he laid the underlying blame on the king himself he still censured Ayscough, asserting that he enjoyed ‘a disproportionate influence in the king's counsels’ and was ‘bound up with the management of curial power’. This condemnation has been sustained in the most recent works on the period, such as the biographies of Henry VI by David Grummitt and James Ross, the latter of which held that Ayscough belonged to a coterie of individuals whose ‘control of government and policy in the 1440s, coupled with a concern to further their own interests … [means that] they must accept a degree of responsibility for the disasters that manifested themselves in the English state and its dominions in 1450’. In short, the image first conjured up by the pens of the fifteenth century – that of Ayscough as a grasping, scheming, courtier bishop – has remained, and is still present today.