A Great and Glorious Adventure

by Gordon Corrigan

  When the king heard that the younger Percy was in rebellion against the crown, he was at Derby, ironically taking an army north to aid the Percys on the Scottish border. Knowing well that he had to get to Shrewsbury and the Severn bridges before Hotspur, to say nothing of preventing the Prince of Wales being taken hostage, the king marched on Shrewsbury. On 20 July, after a forced march of thirty-two miles – a considerable feat even for a largely mounted army – he reached Shrewsbury just before Hotspur’s rebels, who were now faced with only two options: stand and fight, or give up the struggle. Three miles north of Shrewsbury at Hallescote is a low ridge running east to west and about 800 yards long, and it was on that ridge that Hotspur decided to make his stand. As usual, the chroniclers all differ over the size of the rebel army and all almost certainly exaggerate. If we assume the men-at-arms and infantry were in four ranks, then there may have been 2,400 of them, and if there were the same number of archers, or slightly more – by now a standard establishment in English armies – then Hotspur may have had around 5,000 troops altogether. The king probably had slightly more.

  On the morning of Sunday, 21 July 1403, the royal army marched out from Shrewsbury and formed up on the flat plain south of the ridge and probably around 400 or 500 yards from it. It is not entirely clear how the king deployed his troops. The normal formation would have had three battles, or divisions, with two forward and one, commanded by the king, in reserve. It seems certain that the Prince of Wales commanded the left forward division, but, in view of what happened later, it seems that the king may have commanded the right forward battle. Perhaps there were only two battles after all, or there may have been three but with no reserve. The ground now is a mixture of private gardens and grassland, but in 1403 it was mostly planted with peas, which grew on canes put into the ground and thus both hindered movement and made it difficult to see much farther than about twenty yards. Today, the remains of fishponds can be seen, but these may date from a later period.

  Now began a long process of negotiation intended to resolve the dispute without a battle. For most of the day, Thomas Westbury, abbot of Shrewsbury, accompanied by a royal clerk, scampered back and forth bringing offer and counter-offer. The king offered pardon if the rebels submitted, while Hotspur proposed all sorts of constitutional changes that could not possibly have been accepted by the king. It is difficult to see how either side could have compromised, and late in the afternoon the king came to the conclusion that Hotspur was deliberately prolonging negotiations in the hope of buying time for reinforcements from Wales to arrive. In fact, although Hotspur did not know it, Owain Glyn Dŵr was at that time a hundred miles away, consulting a fortune-teller at Carmarthen,70 and in any case the Welsh valleys were flooded and would have made any reinforcement from that direction very difficult.

  In short, the battle could not be avoided and it was opened by the rebel archers. This was the first time that two English armies using the same tactical doctrine had faced each other, and at first it seemed that the rebel bowmen would overcome those of the king. Hotspur’s men were on the high ground and could see their target; the royal army had tramped through the peas to get within range and its own archers found it difficult to identify what they were shooting at. A contemporary account says that under the rain of rebel arrows the king’s soldiers were like ‘leaves that fall in the cold weather after frost’ and that, when the royal archers replied, ‘on both sides men fell in great numbers, just as the apples fall in autumn when shaken by the south wind’.36 It seems that at this point a portion of the royal army broke, presumably the rear rank of infantry, fearing that the king had been killed by an arrow. This was partially compensated for by the desertion to the king of a contingent of the rebel army led by its commander, one Richard Ramkyn, but the actual process cannot have been as tidy as the simple statement makes it seem. Men moving down the hill towards the royal army would have been assumed to be attackers, not deserters, and, as the royal ranks apparently opened to receive them, we may suspect that at some stage during the pre-battle negotiations Ramkyn had let the royalists know of his intention to change sides.37

  For all his impetuous nature, Henry Percy was an experienced soldier and must have known that the best plan in his situation would have been to stay on the defensive and let the royal army attack him. This is how the English had been winning battles for the past sixty years and, given that Hotspur held the high ground and that he commanded the best archers in England, that would surely have been a winning ploy. That the rebel army now advanced downhill towards the king may not have been Hotspur’s intention – it may have been forced upon him. Most of the chroniclers agree that in the front rank of the rebel army was a contingent of Scottish knights, commanded by the now visually impaired Archibald Douglas. These men had all been captured at Homildon Hill and had agreed to fight for Hotspur in return for their release free of ransom. The sight of the king’s banner, with the king himself clad in plate armour covered in a richly embellished jupon, may have so inflamed Douglas that he cast common sense to the winds and rushed off, followed by his Scots, and Hotspur may have felt that he had no option but to support. In any event, the rebel infantry, led by Douglas, tramped down the hill and, despite suffering casualties from the royal archers, fell upon the king’s battle. The royal standard-bearer was cut down and fighting was fierce. King Henry apparently had three or possibly four knights wearing identical armour and royal accoutrements to act as decoys,71 and at least two of them were killed. The fate of England hung in the balance.

  It was the young Prince of Wales who saved the day for his father. The chroniclers are, as ever, infuriatingly vague over the details of the battle, but what seems to have happened is that the rebels crowded towards the king – after all, if they could kill or capture him, then the battle was over and victory was theirs – with a much lesser press of Hotspur’s men facing the left of the royal army. Some accounts say that the Prince of Wales advanced his battle, broke through the rebel line, turned his battle about and attacked the rebels from the rear. This may, however, be crediting the prince with a higher degree of command and control and ability to manoeuvre than was possible in a chaotic situation where commands passed on by drum, trumpet and banner signals would be difficult to hear and even more difficult to obey. It seems more likely that the prince swung his division round ninety degrees to his right and attacked the rebels in flank. However he achieved it, the prince showed great personal bravery – at some stage, presumably when the armies were at a distance from one another, he had been hit in the face by an arrow but refused to leave the field72 – and considerable tactical acumen. The advantage had now swung to the royalists and, attacked on two sides and outnumbered, the rebel army began to disintegrate. When Hotspur was killed in the fighting, it was all over bar the slaughter. Those who were able to extricate themselves tried to get to the horse lines and safety, while those who stood their ground, before long in ever smaller groups, were left with no course open save surrender or death.

  The victory was to King Henry, and the mopping up and pursuit of the fleeing rebels went on until midnight, whereupon the exhausted victors set about licking their wounds, cleaning their weapons and finding somewhere to sleep. The shaft of the arrow that had hit the Prince of Wales had been broken off but the head was still lodged in his upper jaw, so the king’s surgeon, John Bradmore, was summoned to extract it. He already had, or had a farrier make, a tool to extract it. First he enlarged the wound by pushing into it a series of wooden dowels coated in honey, which has antiseptic properties; once the hole was large enough, he inserted his extractor into the socket of the arrowhead, screwed up the tongs of the instrument so that they gripped, and finally removed the iron.38 In an age without anaesthetics, it must have been a long and incredibly painful process, but with a poultice of barley and honey all infection had gone within three weeks.73

  We do not know the exact numbers of dead and wounded on both sides, but they were considerable and would perhaps have been even
more had the royal army had to attack the rebels in their hill-top defensive position.74 Archibald Douglas was captured, yet again, and, having lost an eye at Homildon Hill, lost a testicle this time. Also in the considerable bag was Sir Thomas Percy, earl of Worcester. With the rebel army defeated, the reckoning was severe. Thomas Percy could expect no mercy: he had been a trusted adviser to the Prince of Wales and had deserted him. He was beheaded in Shrewsbury the day after the battle, along with the Shropshire knights Sir Richard Vernon and Sir Richard Venables. Hotspur’s body was initially buried, then disinterred and quartered, with Chester, Bristol, Newcastle and London each receiving one quarter, while his head went to be exhibited in York. Other rebels were dealt with summarily or after hasty trials. In York, the head of the Percy family, Henry, earl of Northumberland, submitted to the king and asked forgiveness, blaming the whole sorry business on his son, now conveniently dead. While Henry could perfectly reasonably have had the earl executed there and then, he decided to send him before Parliament, which decided that the earl’s behaviour fell just short of treason. The old survivor, having got away with a large fine and the redistribution of his castles and lands to more loyal subjects, might be supposed to have learned his lesson.

  The dead from the battle that could be found were buried in a mass grave on the battlefield, just off the Whitchurch road. In 1406, King Henry issued a licence for the building of a chantry chapel on the site, which is still there, with a statue of the king on the gable end. Inside the chapel is a (modern) list of the knights known to have fought on each side, with depictions of their coats of arms. Looking at it, one is immediately struck by the number of families who had a soldier on each side of the conflict. There were Calveleys, de Burghs, Masseys, Stanleys, Browes, de Cokes and Greys on both sides. The most important thing for any medieval noble family was to retain its land and, as being on the wrong side in a civil war meant losing that land, it would have made sense to back both runners in a two-horse race.

  Although the king’s victory at Shrewsbury put an end to the most serious rebellion of his reign, it was not the end of his troubles. French piracy was still rife in the Channel and there was little recourse except to encourage English sea captains to follow suit against French shipping. The seemingly interminable Welsh war was dragging on and attracting French raids in support of anything that would weaken England. And Richard II imposters sprang up in all sorts of likely and unlikely places, including one in Scotland whom the English could not catch. As was usually the case, money was short. The Parliament of 1404 insisted that the king had quite enough revenue of his own without further taxation and suggested that he might like to reduce the many grants and pensions that he had awarded since his assumption of the throne. As these grants had been made to benefit those who had supported his bid for the throne, they could not easily be reduced, and attempts by the court to reduce its costs by moving into castles that were less expensive to run met with little success. There was no money to pay for supplies for the army and the king’s purveyors had to resort to requisition; and, when there was no money to pay the troops, the officers were told to carry on at their own expense.

  Despite the lack of money and a hostile parliament, the king survived. He had learned from the example of Richard II, who had defied Parliament and the magnates and had paid the price: Henry swallowed his pride and compromised. A small crumb of comfort was gratefully received in 1405 when the French captured the English town of Marck, three miles east of Calais. One of the officers of the Calais garrison, Sir Richard Aston, decided that enough was enough and took a detachment of 500 men-at-arms and light infantry, supported by 200 archers with twelve carts of arrows, to win it back. The ammunition carried in those carts must have been more than sufficient, as the result was a very pleasing slaughter, with fifteen French knights killed and several hundred prisoners taken. The commander, the count of St Pol, a notorious raider of southern English seaports, fled, divesting himself of his armour as he ran to find his horse. Elsewhere, French raids on the Isle of Wight and Dartmouth were robustly driven off, but the fact that they happened at all did nothing to portray the king as a staunch defender of the realm, however hard he tried.

  Despite keeping his head and many of his estates in 1403, Henry Percy the elder, earl of Northumberland, had clearly not learned his lesson, for in 1405 he was once more involved in rebellion. This time, he entered into what was termed the ‘Tripartite Indenture’, an agreement between himself, Sir Edmund Mortimer, father of the Mortimer claimant to the throne, and Owain Glyn Dŵr, whereby they would depose Henry IV and divide England and Wales between them: Glyn Dŵr would take Wales and the Marches, Northumberland the north, and Mortimer the rest. Whether any of them seriously thought this would actually work, or whether it was just weasel wording to try to cement the alliance, can be debated, but in any event the rising was never going to be successful, if only because there was no central coordination and little idea of what to do once armies of sorts had been assembled.

  One of the principal supporters of the rising was the fifty-five-year-old archbishop of York, Richard Scrope. Scrope had been promoted to the See of York by Richard II and owed his position more to his father’s success as a soldier and loyal servant of the monarchy rather than to any great theological acumen – although, being reckoned to be skilled in canon law, he had led the deputation that accepted Richard II’s supposedly voluntary abdication of the throne. He supported Henry IV’s accession and was one of the prelates who led him to the throne at his coronation. That being so, one can only assume that his involvement in the 1405 rebellion was the result of pressure from the local lord – Northumberland – although Scrope had preached against taxation of the clergy, would have been broadly sympathetic to the merchants’ dislike of taxation in any form, and may have been the author, or at least the editor, of the manifesto issued by the rebels. This latter repeated the usual gripes about oppressive rule and unjust taxation but also maintained that Henry had broken his oath not to depose Richard II.

  The nub of the rebellion was swiftly eliminated when Ralph Neville, earl of Westmorland, a loyalist and long-term enemy of the Percys, and the king’s youngest son, John of Lancaster, marched against the rebels and defeated Scrope’s hastily assembled and ill-armed troops, mainly citizens of York. Scrope was arrested, as was the nineteen-year-old Sir Thomas Mowbray, son of the first duke of Norfolk, previously Earl Marshal of England, who had died in exile having fallen out with Richard II. Northumberland abandoned his erstwhile allies and fled to Scotland. The king intended to show no mercy: last time, he had forgiven the prime movers; now he would make it very clear that rebellion would not be tolerated. Rather than hand Scrope over to papal authority as he had done before in similar circumstances, only to find treasonous bishops were given a mere slap on the wrist, Henry decided that he would go on trial with the other captured nobles. The order went to London to send a team of justices to conduct the trial, and, when the country’s other senior cleric, Thomas Arundel, archbishop of Canterbury and a close personal friend of the king, heard that his fellow prelate was to be put on trial before a secular court, he rode all day and all night to Bishopthorpe in north Yorkshire, where the king was – no mean feat at the time for a fifty-one-year-old.75

  Arundel reached Bishopthorpe on 7 June 1405 and pleaded with the king not to execute Scrope, reminding him of the last occasion a king named Henry had been responsible for the killing of an archbishop (Henry II and Becket). The king fobbed his old friend off, sent him to bed, put Scrope on trial that night, and had him beheaded with two others the next day. It was the first judicial execution of an archbishop and caused horror throughout England and Europe. Even if the death sentence was justified, which it surely was, to kill an ordained cleric, never mind an archbishop, was seen as shocking and allowed Henry’s enemies to claim that he had not only murdered an anointed king but one of God’s chosen servants as well. The pope in Rome was said to be appalled and to have laid curses on all involved, but his oppos
ition was short-lived and probably mollified by a monetary payment, while an outbreak of miracle-working at Scrope’s tomb in York Minster did not last much longer. Eventually, in 1408, Pope Gregory XII officially exonerated Henry in return for a promise to found three religious houses. Shortly after the execution, Henry fell ill with what some alleged was leprosy. We know now, from examination of Henry’s skeleton, that he did not suffer from that most horrible of diseases to which there was then no cure, but it suited his opponents to put it about that he was being visited by divine punishment for his treatment of Scrope. Whatever it was that ailed the king, his health became progressively worse from 1408 onwards and eventually necessitated government being carried on by a council headed by Henry, Prince of Wales. It was a state of affairs that led to disagreements between father and son and King Henry to suspect his eldest son of plotting rebellion against him.

  Northumberland was not to be allowed to get away with yet more treason; he had forced the king to divert his planned expedition to Wales to go north and deal with him, and Henry now began systematically to reduce those northern towns sympathetic to the rebellion. Northumberland tried to rally support in Wales, but there the uprising was beginning to collapse, and his brief trip to France achieved nothing, the French having quite enough internal troubles of their own. In desperation, Henry Percy decided to risk all on one final gamble and invaded England from Scotland in 1408. His army was tiny – probably no more than a few hundred, perhaps a thousand men at most. In addition to those soldiers he had raised in Scotland, he included retainers from his own lands in the north and the adherents of the bishop of Bangor and the abbot of Hayles. The invasion was short-lived. Before King Henry got anywhere near the area, the high sheriff of Yorkshire, Sir Thomas Rokeby, with a hastily raised force of loyalist retinues and arrayed archers, met Northumberland’s men near Knaresborough and chased them twelve miles south to Tadcaster, where they were unable to make a stand and retreated four miles west to Bramham Moor, south of Wetherby. Percy found a defensive position and awaited Rokeby, who arrived in the early afternoon of 14 February 1408, won the missile fight with his archers, and attacked Northumberland with his infantry. The result was never in doubt: the rebel army was smashed and very few got away back to Scotland. Henry Percy himself was killed fighting furiously in a rearguard action; he was decapitated and quartered, with his head exhibited on London Bridge. King Henry duly came north and meted out retribution from York, assisted by a crowd of informers anxious to prove their own loyalty and no doubt seizing the opportunity to settle old scores. Among those executed was the abbot of Hayles, but of the fate of the bishop of Bangor the chronicles are silent. Henry Percy’s titles and estates were forfeited by act of attainder.76