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Although Henry IV was responsible for making the lovely Myosotis arvensis the symbol of loyalty to the absent under its popular name of Forget-me-not (during his years of exile he wore it in his collar with the words souveigne-vous de moy), it is true that to many readers of history his short reign is one of the least likely to intrigue the memory. This may be due to the ill health which settled upon him when he assumed the gold circlet and the ermine robe, but perhaps it can be traced more certainly to the fact that in many respects his few years of power seem like a continuation of the days of Richard. There was the same futility of military effort to enforce peace along the Scottish border and in Wales and a continuous planning to restore the once extensive English holdings in France without any real hope of success. Parliament continued to insist on the right to appoint the members of the royal council, and there was much criticism of extravagance in the royal household. Henry strove to repeat Richard’s unconstitutional scheme to secure himself a revenue for life, which indicates that he was in desperate need of funds. He had a sharp temper and no doubt he was irked that the restrictions set up to restrict Richard’s actions were being applied to him also. But having seen what his predecessor’s obstinacy led to, he forced himself to give in with reasonably good grace. Parliament’s negation of his gesture in the direction of a lifetime subsidy was so sharp and final that he never renewed the attempt.
In his youth Henry had been courageous and the possessor of qualities which won him popularity with the people. He had taken the risk of allying himself with the dissenters in 1388 when he believed it necessary to set new curbs on his cousin Richard, but in 1397 he stood beside the king in dealing with Thomas of Woodstock and the Earl of Arundel in the belief that the harsh opposition of these two malcontents had carried them into treasonable excesses. As a king he was quite a different man, beginning to realize perhaps that it is easier to criticize authority than to exercise it. He became cold-blooded, jealous, suspicious (even of his son and heir), and sometimes lacking in decision. These qualities may be charged to his ill health but they do not serve to win him any lasting degree of praise on the pages of history.
Even the campaigns he fought fail to enchain the interest, with the exception of the Battle of Shrewsbury, where he defeated the revolutionary forces of the Percys of Northumberland. The old earl had once been as regal as a king in the north country, but he is best remembered for the devious part he played in betraying Richard. His son, a hard-riding and tumultuous knight, is called in history Harry Hotspur. They felt, these haughty lords of the north, that the new king had not properly compensated them for their part in winning him the throne nor for the victory they won against the Scots at Homildon Hill. In the course of a bitter dispute with the son, the king drew a dagger and called Hotspur a traitor. The latter withdrew but cried from the threshold, “Not here, but in the field!”
The Percys expected help from Owen Glendower (as the name of their Welsh leader is spelled in modern histories) when they marched south with a hastily assembled army, but Henry expertly caught them at Shrewsbury before the Welsh could arrive. When the rebels were drawn up in battle array, the valiant Harry learned that his favorite sword had been left behind at the village of Berwick, where they had spent the previous night. It is reported that he turned pale, although this seems unlikely in such a well-tanned and vigorous, cut-and-cut-again fighting man.
“Then has my plough reached its last furrow,” he said.
Henry had taken the precaution of accoutering as many as thirteen knights of his own size in armor bearing the royal quarterings. Hotspur concentrated his efforts on cutting them down, hoping to reach finally the real king. Nearly all of the royal stalking horses had fallen to his second-best sword when an arrow pierced his brain and his spurs soon cooled among the heaps of the slain. Without his tempestuous leadership the rebel forces fell into disorder and the battle was over.
In one of his abortive campaigns against the Welsh, the king had a narrow escape from death. His own lance became dislodged during the night and fell upon him. This did no harm, for Henry had sought his couch without pausing to remove his armor.
Continual trouble arose out of the rumors that Richard was alive in Scotland. The ceaseless efforts of the king’s agents (the use of a secret service was not new, even then) finally resulted in locating the villain of the piece, a man named William Serle who had figured as one of the party responsible for the death of Thomas of Woodstock at Calais. In one of the truces arranged between the English and the Scots a provision was included that Serle was to be handed over to English justice. Henry, or the ministers acting for him, devised a singularly cruel method of punishment. Serle was publicly hanged at many points on the way south but always was cut down before dead. It was not until his stretched and mutilated neck could no longer withstand the further use of the rope that the rest of the sentence was carried out, with white-hot knives carving his midriff and removing his vital organs.
It was during a rebellion in the north that Henry allowed a judicial murder which did most to alienate the affections of the people. Archbishop Scrope of York, one of the leaders, was captured and immured in his own palace at Bishopsgate. The people of York begged for the life of the primate, but the king refused to listen. Archbishop Arundel of Canterbury posted north to ask that Scrope’s case be settled in Parliament or by reference to the Pope. While the king and the archbishop were discussing the matter at breakfast, two of the advisers of the king, the young Earl of Arundel and Thomas Beaufort, hauled Scrope out to face an irregular court, declared him guilty, and had him executed without any delay.
The country was horrified at the deed and Henry never recovered his popularity thereafter. It was generally believed, in fact, that he was stricken with leprosy on the day of Scrope’s execution.
Henry’s second marriage did not please the people. His new wife, Joanna of Navarre, was disliked for many reasons, but for two in particular, both having to do with money. She brought over a large retinue of her own people who had to be fed and clothed and supported generally out of the public funds. She herself displayed a greed for annuities, manor houses, and large estates which Henry, who was soft and yielding with her and as hard as flint with everyone else, did nothing to curb. There are many items in the issue rolls for sums to be paid to her, always in the amount of one hundred pounds (a very considerable figure in those days), “in part payment of a greater sum due to the said queen upon a private agreement made between the said queen and our present lord the king.”
After Henry’s death, the dowager Queen Joanna continued to live in England for another quarter of a century. She was at one point confined in solitary rigor by Henry V on a trumped-up charge of witchcraft, and of planning Henry IV’s death, and was relieved of much of her property before being allowed her liberty.
The story of their marriage is, however, one of the most interesting in the annals of this far from brilliant reign. While Henry was in exile, he was invited to the court of the Duke of Brittany, who is called in history John the Valiant, although at the same time it was conceded that he possessed the most vicious of tempers. In his old age the valiant John had espoused Joanna of Navarre, a daughter of another stormy petrel of history who was called Charles the Bad. Joanna, who was young enough to be his granddaughter, seemed attached to her elderly spouse, who was a handsome old tyrant and could be amusing and courtly when he so desired. They had a family of nine young children.
When Henry accepted the invitation he could not fail to be attracted by the handsome young duchess who had a brightness of good looks and a trimness of figure which verged only slightly on the voluptuous. She in turn was impressed with the manly proportions of the exile, his ruddiness of complexion, and his plume of golden hair. A spark must have passed between them which said all that they dared not put into words.
In November 1399 the violence of the old duke was quenched in death, which, coincided closely with Henry’s elevation to the throne of Engl
and. The very desirable Joanna proceeded at once with a plan to win for herself the honor of being the widower king’s second wife. She proceeded in the matter with the greatest circumspection. Without taking anyone into her confidence, she wrote to the Pope at Avignon, asking for a dispensation to marry again, provided the husband of her choice was not closer to her in blood than the fourth degree of consanguinity. No name was mentioned and the Pope saw no reason to put any obstacles in her way. Accordingly she received the dispensation, which had been executed on March 20, 1402. The fullest degree of punctiliousness had thus been observed and she lost no time in appointing a member of her household to go at once to England and inform Henry in great secrecy that no obstacle now remained to their union. A cool and designing lady, this comely Joanna of Navarre. She was depending on that spark which had undoubtedly passed from eye to eye as they met in the halls of the ducal palace or sat at close hand in the dining hall. Henry was still under her spell, for he proceeded at once with a marriage by proxy.
They seemed to be happy enough and certainly the new queen was a kind and faithful attendant during the years while his fatal illness fastened on the king.
The stubbornness with which she clung to her own desires and possessions was illustrated when a committee of the lords proceeded to investigate the adherents she had brought with her and who still remained in comfortable posts. She very reluctantly agreed to meet the wishes of the committee halfway. She must, she declared, keep a very few about her whose ministrations were necessary to her comfort. It was found later that the very few she had kept about her were as follows: two knights, a damsel of good birth and a chambermaid for each of her two young daughters, a cook who could prepare Breton dishes for them, two squires, two chambermaids, one mistress, one nurse, one messenger, eleven laundresses, and someone whose office was designated as a varlet launderer!
The pressure from Rome for active steps against the spread of Lollardy and unorthodox teaching generally had been getting stronger, but it is not to Henry’s credit that he bowed to the clerical demands. Arundel at Canterbury was unable to stand against the pontifical voice and may have been responsible for putting on the statute books a measure which came to be called in detestation de haeretico comburendo. It provided for all preachers of heresy, who refused to abjure before the diocesan, to be tried before the secular courts. The punishment was designated as death by burning at the stake for the manifest example of other Christians.
The administration of this barbarous law in Henry’s reign produced the first victims to suffer in the flames for their faith. The very first was a curate at St. Bennet Sheerhog in London named William Sawtree, who had previously been in the diocese of Norwich and had been convicted there of heresy. He had believed it right to worship Christ who died on the cross but not the cross itself. He was against pilgrimages on the ground that the money involved might be better employed in helping the poor. Finally he asserted his lack of belief in the doctrine of transubstantiation. Declared guilty of heresy, he had recanted but it was now learned that he had relapsed again. It was felt that an example had to be made and here was one with no powerful friends to fight for him. Sawtree was selected as the first to pay the penalty.
Arundel came up from Canterbury and sat on the case at St. Paul’s, surrounded by a group of the bishops. The poor little curate, who seems to have desired at the last moment to escape the consequences of his outspokenness, was first degraded and deprived of all his clerical honors and defenses. He was then turned over to the secular arm and was declared guilty. The king took the advice of the lords spiritual and temporal and decreed that he was to be burned to death in accord with the new statute. Sawtree accordingly was taken out to Smithfield and there burned in chains.
It was some years later that a second victim was selected. John Badby was not a priest but a tailor in Worcestershire, a man of good understanding and rare courage. He was so firm in the assertion of his beliefs that he also was condemned to death. The Prince of Wales, who was strongly orthodox in his opinions, went out to Smithfield and endeavored to win a recantation from the brave tailor by offering him a full pardon. Badby declined and the torch was applied to the fagots heaped up about him. His agonized screams when the flames enveloped him prompted the prince to make a final effort. He had the fire extinguished and offered life, liberty, and even a pension to the man if he would give in. The blackened lips quivered but the light in the eyes made it clear that his spirit was still stronger than his tortured flesh. A shake of the head declined the offer. The prince stepped back and the fagots were relighted.
That the fires of Smithfield were set to blazing in this period adds much to the feeling of gloom and depression aroused by the general picture of the reign of the first of the Lancastrians.
Although Henry may have acquired the germ of leprosy during his crusading jaunts in the East, his symtoms seem to point rather to a heart weakness. Toward the end of his life he began to fall into trances which so closely resembled death that many times those about him were convinced he had come to his end. It was during one of these cataleptic periods that his oldest son was supposed to have picked up the crown and carried it away with him. The fact that the monarch kept all his teeth until his death and that the condition of his face, when his tomb was opened centuries later, showed no signs of the ravages of leprosy should suffice to prove that he was carried away by some other form of disease.
For one who showed so much promise in his youth, his reign seems dull and sad.
CHAPTER II
The Welsh Magician
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AN OUTSTANDING figure during the reign of the gloom-laden Henry IV was a Welshman named Owen Glendower, who was generally believed to have supernatural powers. In Shakespeare’s play he presents his own case in a speech which begins, “… At my birth the front of heaven was full of fiery shapes.” Later the people of Wales declared that on the night when he was born the horses in the stables of his father, Griffith Vychan, stood in blood up to their fetlocks. It may be assumed that this great patriot was too realistic and clearheaded himself to believe he possessed magic powers, but clearly he saw the great advantage in having others believe it.
Although he has long been called by the simplified form of his name, his full title was Owain ap Griffith Vychan of Glyndyfrdwy. He was descended from the great Welsh family of Powys and this gave him a right of leadership which no one else in his day could claim. The family was wealthy, with large estates and strong castles in both North and South Wales.
That Owen Glendower was forced into assuming the leadership of the mountain people in their last concerted (and nearly successful) effort to shake off the Saxon chains does not in any degree detract from the place he still holds in Welsh memories. He was the last of the great patriots and so he is remembered above all others.
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To tell his story it is first necessary to explain the conditions which existed in the Marcher country, on the edge of which he maintained his broad domain. During Norman and Plantagenet days the English kings did not have large standing armies. The country was divided into wide tracts held by the barons, who were expected to join the king with all their dependents, armed and ready, in the event of war. There would have been small advantage in having standing armies because of the bad roads and the scarcity of bridges. The Scots could come down over the border and create havoc in the north, or the Welsh could issue out from their mountains and harry the western counties, and vanish into thin air, before the king with his trained troops could get to the scene of action. It was necessary, therefore, to maintain forces in the exposed areas which would always be ready to repel attack. This was done by a system of “farming out” the defense of the north and the west to certain great families. Whole counties were turned over to them, on their guarantee to maintain the safety of the borders. In the north there were the Percy and Neville families, in the west the Greys of Ruthin, the Talbots and the Mortimers of Wigmore and Chirk. They became known as Marcher barons, and
their powers verged on the absolute. In Wales the king’s writ did not run beyond the Wye, and so not only the safety of the land rested on the shoulders of the Marcher families but the administration of the law as well.
To maintain themselves in security and comfort in the sparsely settled country, the barons had to create principalities of their own. They brought in tillers of the soil as well as men skilled in the use of arms. Every kind of workman had to be recruited from the outside—doctors, spinners, tailors, carpenters, masons, blacksmiths, armorers, cooks, barbers. Over the people thus assembled about them the barons ruled like absolute kings, exercising the power of life and death, and being ever ready to use it. They made their own laws. And when a man crossed over the line beyond which the king’s writ did not run, he knew it was almost certain he would never return.
These principalities clustered around the strong castles erected by the barons at strategic points. The “Lordship courts” were held in the Great Halls and the justice meted out there was of the kind that might be expected from proud noblemen of no education and slight sensitivities. The common Englishman, knowing the folly of disputing those above him, had small chance of getting an honest verdict. The Welshmen, “those barefooted rascals,” had no chance at all. In fact, a native who appeared there was condemned from the start because he was not allowed to speak in his own defense or to summon witnesses.
It follows that the Welsh who were unfortunate enough to live under the Marcher barons had to accept roughshod tyranny without question or protest. They labored with fortitude and resignation, although underneath there was deep hatred of the intruders and a fierceness which manifested itself, when it came to open conflict, in the mutilation of the slain. Crosses were cut on foreheads and bodies were hacked and dismembered. No mercy could be expected and so none was given.
The Last Plantagenet Page 29