Between Papacy and Empire: Cardinal Henry Beaufort, the House of Lancaster, and the Hussite Crusades

Cardinal Henry Beaufort’s career as papal legate and anti-Hussite crusader was as scandalous as it was brief. Commanded in 1427 by Pope Martin V (1417–31) to spearhead Christendom’s efforts to extirpate the Hussite heresy in Bohemia, Beaufort eventually succeeded in raising a crusading army in England in the summer of 1429 with money from the papacy and the proceeds from taxation levied in the Holy Roman Empire. Beaufort then shocked contemporaries by taking his crusading army not to Bohemia, but instead to France, where it was deployed in support of Lancastrian ambitions. Current scholarship fails to make full sense of Beaufort’s career as anti-Hussite crusader because it has largely viewed it through the prism of Anglo-papal relations. This article will demonstrate that Beaufort’s crusading legation can be far better understood when situated in its contemporary continental context. Framing Beaufort’s career more carefully in the context of papal and imperial politics makes possible a fundamental reassessment of his crusading legation, and highlights hitherto unrecognised factors which pushed him to the fore of the efforts to crush Hussitism. A close study of the responses to Beaufort’s anti-Hussite efforts also points to the hope and concern he generated across Christendom, revealing how historians have underestimated the importance of Beaufort’s legation to the crusading movement in the fifteenth century and the interest which crusading legations could arouse among contemporaries.