By 1399 the English had had enough of their tyrannical king, and a mass movement to depose him was led by Henry of Lancaster, or Bolingbroke as he is sometimes known. The two cousins met in north Wales at Flint, and when Richard saw that he had no supporters he surrendered. At a meeting of Parliament, Henry of Lancaster stood before an empty throne and claimed the crown. He was careful not to claim it by right of Parliament, because what Parliament gave Parliament might take away. Likewise he did not claim it by right of conquest, for that too might be challenged by another conquest. But his claim was understood to be founded on a mixture of the two. Thus the Lancastrian revolution, which put the descendants of John of Gaunt on the throne, was achieved almost bloodlessly.
The new king, who was crowned Henry IV, had probably not planned to kill his predecessor. But when at Christmas that year a conspiracy to restore Richard to the throne was uncovered, it became clear that there was no room for two kings in one country. Richard, who was being held prisoner in Henry’s Lancastrian stronghold Pontefract Castle, was accordingly murdered, and it was disingenuously announced that he had perished from self-inflicted starvation.
LANCASTRIAN AND YORKIST
Henry IV (1399–1413)
Despite the profound instability the Lancastrian revolution caused, in the first twenty years of the new dynasty Parliament reached a peak of influence to which it would not return for another 200 years. The rightful heir was the Earl of March, grandson of the childless Richard II’s senior uncle Lionel of Clarence, who was Edward III’s third son. The usurper Henry IV therefore had particular need of the Lords’ and Commons’ support–so the meeting of Parliament became an annual event. Ever since Magna Carta the tradition had grown up that the power of the king was limited by the need to confer with the King’s Council. Now consultation became more important than ever.
A key part of that Parliament was the House of Commons. For more than 150 years lawyers, well-to-do townsmen, merchants and small landowners had been responsible through the Commons for raising the king’s taxes in the shires. Although the aristocracy with their vast estates and private armies continued to be the crown’s advisers, the Commons’ control of taxation left the kings of England no option but to listen to the middle classes’ petitions. Uniquely in Europe, by the early fifteenth century it was firmly established that the Commons as well as the nobility or the king were the initiators of new laws. By the beginning of Henry V’s reign in 1413 it had become the accepted custom that when the House of Commons sent a bill for the royal signature the king might throw it out but he could not change its form to suit himself. English freedoms versus continental royal absolutism became a matter of pride for educated Englishmen.
Since the Commons consisted of both the country gentry and the commercial classes, there was never in England the sense of separate castes that prevailed abroad. Instead common interests bound together the small landowner or country gentry and the merchant. The English class system always surprised foreign observers by its flexibility, with people moving swiftly up and down the scale through marriage and successful careers. In particular, the merchant’s daughter had become an instrument for increasing the family fortune, as the merchant class benefited from expanding trade, improved education and better health and as the population and the economy at last recovered from the effects of the Black Death. The men who ran the wool trade took over the building of richly decorated parish churches from the lords of the manor–these may be seen in the ‘wool churches’ of East Anglia, of which the finest examples are at Long Melford, Sudbury and Lavenham.
The wealthier merchants were also putting up large townhouses, often of brick–a material not used since the Romans. The architecture became domestic rather than defensive–the castle was dying out as a rich man’s home. The broad windows in such castles as were built in this period, for example at Herstmonceux in Sussex, indicate that the crenellations above them were added purely for decoration.
As these fortunes were being made from England’s growing share of international trade, which was increasingly regulated by treaty, towns and cities became much more sophisticated and complex organisms. Incorporated by royal consent or charter into legal entities, they had their own governments, with powers to make their own laws and hold their own elections, which the king had to respect. Wealth created a more defined class system in towns, which became more oligarchical–controlled exclusively by well-to-do tradesmen, especially clothiers, who elected one another. Trade became standardized too. The craft organizations–the guilds–had powers to perform spot checks on merchants’ and craftsmen’s premises to make sure that standards were being complied with.
But the guilds’ powers were not just regulatory. Along with the town corporations, they were patrons of a new standard of English urban civilization. They provided charitable functions for the poor, and city grammar schools for their own children. They arranged the processions and music which were so constant an accompaniment to fifteenth-century life. Everybody, whatever their circumstances, knew the Bible stories thanks to the celebrated guild plays, of which the best known are those at York, performed on large wagons moving around the city. In the City of London the immense wealth of the Fishmongers’, the Goldsmiths’ and above all the Mercers’ or clothiers’ guilds were made dramatically visible in the magnificent halls that still stand today; the guilds continue to manage fortunes in real estate accrued over the centuries, enabling them to carry out generous charitable work. Like their magnate equivalents, the heads of guilds were allowed to wear their own uniforms or livery. No less than the individual merchants, the guilds were responsible for a further transformation in church architecture in the erection of chantry chapels, tacked on to the main body of churches to house the many guild altars. This led to an increase in the numbers of church personnel, as altar priests were specially engaged just to chant masses all day long to ease the afterlife of the souls of departed members.
As more and more sons of clothiers, merchants and shopkeepers such as butchers and bakers benefited from education, scriveners or copiers were kept busy writing out books for their burgeoning audience–until close English trade links with the Burgundian Netherlands brought a printer named William Caxton to England with a printing press with movable type. When he imported one of the presses in 1474, invented by the German Johan Gutenberg, middle-class literacy took off as never before, and the homes of small tradesmen soon contained as many books as those of the upper classes.
Despite all these progressive tendencies, another strong current in fifteenth-century England was the return of feudalism, or the rule of barons, thanks to the weakness of the crown. The Lancastrian kings’ reliance on Parliament increased the powers of the Lords, bringing bloody inter-generational factionalism and the sort of anarchy not seen since Stephen. Traditionally the two places where feudalism remained almost unadulterated were the border lands guarding England from Wales and Scotland, where independent armies and a palatinate system had prevailed since the early Norman kings. It was from the border lords that the first challenge to the new regime came.
As the name suggests the power base of the Lancastrian dynasty was in the north-west, where Henry IV owned huge swathes of Lancashire and Yorkshire. Indeed Henry of Lancaster had secured the throne with the aid of his fellow northern magnates, above all the soldiers of the Percys of Northumberland. It was the Percys’ loyalty during the uneasy early days of the new regime that had kept the Scots out of England–but Henry IV had not rewarded them as they considered their due. Full of pride in their family–as the old saying went there was only one king in Northumberland and that was not the king of England–they were soon nursing a grievance. In particular, they had not become the key advisers in the King’s Council they had been led to believe they would. Thus, when a Welsh rebellion broke out within a year of Henry’s accession, a desire for revenge and kinship links persuaded the Percys to join it.
In 1400 a new Welsh war for independence was touched off by a quarre
l over land resolved in the English law courts in favour of the English marcher baron Lord Grey of Ruthin and against the Welsh landowner Owen Glendower. Glendower’s calibre as a general and the disaffection the Welsh felt for their overlords were a potent combination, and Glendower became so confident that he summoned a Welsh Parliament, acknowledged the French pope at Avignon instead of Rome and made a legal treaty allying himself as Prince of Wales to the French king Charles VI, father-in law of the deposed Richard II. When a French troopship arrived at Carmarthen Bay and the Earl of Northumberland’s son Harry Percy, who had been sent to Wales to put down the rebellion, started intriguing with the conspirators the Welsh revolt became an attempt to overthrow the new dynasty. By 1403 its leaders were aiming not only for an independent Wales but to reinstate the rightful heir to the throne of England, the Earl of March. Chief among the disaffected nobles was the marcher lord Sir Edmund Mortimer. Himself descended from Edward III through his grandfather Lionel of Clarence, he linked the Percys and Glendower to the Earl of March: he was respectively Harry Percy’s brother-in-law, Owen Glendower’s son-in-law, and uncle to the Earl of March.
In July 1403 at the Battle of Shrewsbury on the Welsh borders Henry IV intercepted the Percy armies led by Hotspur (as the Scots had admiringly named Harry Percy) on their way to join up with the Welsh under Glendower. Hotspur was killed by his former pupil, Henry IV’s son Henry of Monmouth, the future Henry V. The immediate threat of a general rising was temporarily beaten off, though Glendower escaped. But in 1405 a new rebellion broke out, this time led by Hotspur’s father the Earl of Northumberland. Since the Archbishop of York, Richard Scrope, the second most important churchman in England after the Archbishop of Canterbury, was one of the northern leaders it had to be crushed with the utmost severity. To considerable disquiet Scrope was executed, even though as a churchman he was not subject to secular law.
By the deaths of Richard II and Archbishop Scrope, Henry IV had shown he was quite capable of ruthless acts to safeguard his dynasty, but it was at great mental cost. Henry of Lancaster was not the natural material of which usurpers are made, being of a melancholy and religious disposition, and he never attempted to root out the Clarence Plantagenet line by killing March. He was said to have been struck with leprosy in 1407 at the moment that Archbishop Scrope was executed. By all accounts the rapid decline which ended with his death at the age of forty-six began with a nervous breakdown that year.
As the king became steadily more incoherent and unaware of his surroundings, power devolved to his close family circle. His son, the future Henry V, with the help of his half-uncles, the ambitious Beaufort sons of John of Gaunt, began to take control of the King’s Council, undermining the influence of Henry IV’s chief adviser, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Arundel. In 1413 the king’s health finally gave out and he died in the Jerusalem Chamber of the Palace of Westminster–thus fulfilling an old prophecy that he would die in the Holy Land.
Henry V (1413–1422)
Though Henry V inherited his father’s strong religious convictions, in the new king’s case they served to reinforce his sense of himself as a born ruler. Unlike his father, he had no blood on his hands. A deep inner conviction of the rightness of any cause he adopted, such as his grandfather’s claim to the French throne, gave boldness to a decisive and obsessively disciplined character. His wiry physique had been honed in the saddle since the age of thirteen in the Welsh campaigns. Though his reputation when he became king was that of an outstanding warrior who had got the better of Hotspur, in the best-known portrait of him he more resembles a priest with his cropped hair and solemn, austere look. Although numerous legends suggest a wild youth as Prince Hal, including an incident in which he is said to have struck his father’s chief justice Sir William Gasgoigne, many of them seem to have been invented after his death.
What can be said for sure is that Henry V had the ability to move his audiences to follow him anywhere. Oratorical gifts and outstanding military abilities, which enabled him to recapture the ancient English territory of Normandy and make his son the next King of France, inspired feelings of profound devotion among the English. Like his father, Henry had only a short reign, but those nine years were exceptionally glorious, and his victories in France attracted the enthusiastic support of the House of Commons, which raised taxes for each new war without argument. The unique popularity of the hero-king gave the Lancastrian dynasty an emotional sanction and legitimacy it had previously lacked.
The new Lancastrian king had succeeded to the throne without a hitch, but his first task was to restore peace at home. To this end he mollified his potential opponents, granting a free pardon to Owen Glendower and his supporters, releasing the Earl of March from prison and putting up a magnificent tomb to Richard II at Westminster Abbey. Although Henry V had replaced his enemy Archbishop Arundel as chancellor with one of his Beaufort relations, the king shared Arundel’s conservative views.
Under Henry V the Lollard heresy was pursued far more strenuously than before. Even his old friend and fellow campaigner the Welsh marcher knight Sir John Oldcastle, a keen follower of Wyclif who may have been the model for Shakespeare’s Falstaff, was tried and arrested for heresy in the second year of his reign. After attempting to lead a rising known as the Oldcastle Plot, intending to take the king prisoner at his palace at Eltham in south London, Oldcastle escaped to his hereditary lands in the Welsh marches. With his subsequent recapture and execution at the Tower of London, the Lollard threat to orthodoxy was extirpated, and the doctrines of the Catholic Church were not to be challenged again for over a hundred years. Henceforth Lollardy became an underground movement with a considerable following in the West Midlands and among some better-educated artisans. Though something of its independent spirit dripped quietly into the English bloodstream, it no longer had a following within the establishment.
With peace at home, Henry V turned his energies abroad, convinced of the need for a just war on behalf of his royal patrimony. In 1360 by the Treaty of Brétigny Edward III had agreed to give up his claim to the French throne in return for Aquitaine. Yet the treaty had never been fulfilled–Aquitaine had never been returned, while its rump Gascony was being reduced, so the English claim to the French throne remained in place. Henry was determined to have the whole of Aquitaine at the very least, and if possible Normandy as well, and now was a good moment to act.
The intermittent madness of Charles VI, which had been afflicting him for over thirty years, had badly weakened the French administration. It was made more ineffective still by the internecine rivalry within the royal family, in particular between the king’s brother, the Duke of Orleans, and the king’s cousin, the Duke of Burgundy, known as John the Fearless or Jean Sans Peur. In 1407 Orleans was murdered at Burgundy’s behest, and a civil war erupted. On one side were the Armagnacs, the Orleanist party headed by the Count of Armagnac, whose home was in southern France near Aquitaine; on the other side were the Burgundians, whose power base lay in the north east of Paris.
Embassies came and went between England and the two French parties, but in terms of territory returned to the English little progress was made. By 1414 Henry V’s patience was wearing thin, and he soon concluded that the only way to break the deadlock was to send an English invasion force to France. There was considerable support for war. The City of London with its Gascon trade raised large loans for Henry, and Parliament granted extra taxes to help recover his rightful possessions from Normandy down to Aquitaine–both Houses had been convinced by an address he gave them that his claim to the French throne should be enforced. A new fleet was assembled at Southampton, and the truce which had begun with Richard II’s marriage came to an end–the Hundred Years War resumed. By the summer of 1415 the ships and the guns, the heralds and the trumpeters, the drummers and the minstrels, were ready, and in early August the king and his troops sailed for Harfleur in Normandy, the gateway to northern France. This force of 9,000 men was intended only to open the campaign–it was no
t a full-scale invasion. But things did not go according to plan, and it was not until late September that the port yielded. Food was always hard to come by in enemy territory, and the effort of besieging and an epidemic of dysentery had greatly weakened the men.
As a result the campaign had to be abandoned in favour of making for the greater safety of the English port of Calais. But to reach it the English had to march through hostile territory. Following the course that his grandfather Edward III had taken before Crécy, Henry V and his exhausted army made their way north. After crossing the Ternoise river at Blangy they found their way to Calais blocked by a great French army, at least 40,000 strong. It was drawn up at a little village named Agincourt. In those late October days the odds were against the English. But the French commanders made one significant mistake which would give the English the advantage: they had chosen to fight on a very narrow plateau surrounded by hedges which did not allow them enough room to manoeuvre their formidable forces.
Despite Henry V’s personal austerity, he took the greatest care of his soldiers. He introduced surgeons into the army, his archers had horses to ride and, in imitation of Caesar, pontoons or portable bridges were always carried so that English soldiers stayed dry and comfortable crossing rivers. Unlike other armies English besiegers were housed in weatherproof wooden huts built by the siege train of engineers, carpenters and joiners. Henry always personally oversaw the victualling, to ensure that his men were well fed. Wherever the English army marched, on the nearest sea a flotilla of boats groaning with provisions followed. For the king knew, as Napoleon is said to have remarked centuries later, that an army marches on its stomach. He also took steps to prevent his vital longbowmen running out of arrows. Geese were specially reared on common land throughout England in order to provide the feathered tips for the million arrows the royal armies ordered each year. And it was forbidden by royal decree to use ashwood for the wooden clogs that most country dwellers put on against the mud. This was because ash provided the best wood for the arrows’ shafts.
The Story of Britain Page 27