The Fears of Henry IV: The Life of England's Self-Made King

by Mortimer, Ian

  Henry returned to England and probably went directly to Windsor to attend the Order of the Garter ceremony on St George’s Day. Two weeks later, on 6 May, using his full string of honorific titles ‘Henry of Lancaster, earl of Derby, Hereford and Northampton, lord of Brecon’, he appointed Richard Kingston his treasurer for war.18 Kingston set about purchasing horses and stores with which to join the crusade assembling at Marseilles on 1 July. Henry crossed to Calais, where he and his knights awaited their letters of safe-conduct. Their wait was in vain. It is normally presumed that Richard wrote to the French king asking him not to allow Henry to go on the crusade. Whether this is correct or not, Henry’s representatives were unable to obtain permission for him to travel through France.19 His half-brother John Beaufort had to go on to Marseilles without him. Henry knew that if he wanted to prove himself in arms, there was only one option left: Lithuania.

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  The fourteenth-century crusades in Lithuania are not as well known as those of the twelfth century in the Holy Land or the Reconquista in Spain. The days of long campaigns in the Middle East were practically over, and although there were two or three military expeditions against Mediterranean Turks and Arabs at the end of the fourteenth century, these were relatively rare. Those who took part sought not to gain great territorial empires but rather strategic victories on behalf of Christendom. Lithuania remained practically the sole arena for crusades of conquest, for one region, Samogitia, was still pagan, and it was there that the Teutonic Knights held the frontier.20

  The Teutonic Knights had been founded in 1128. Like other military orders, such as the Hospitallers and the Templars, they undertook to protect the Christian pilgrims travelling to Jerusalem. After the fall of Jerusalem in 1187, they refounded themselves as a monastic brotherhood at Acre. After forty years of protecting pilgrims, they set out to fight pagans in Prussia, and merged in 1237 with the Brothers of the Sword, an order which held various Prussian lands, including Livonia. The fall of Acre in 1290 again left them homeless; another period of uncertainty followed, and it was not until 1309 that they established themselves at Marienberg. From then on, their expansion was at the cost of the pagan Lithuanians. In 1386, the conversion of Lithuania began, with the baptism of the king, Jagiello. By 1390 the Teutonic Knights were hardly crusaders at all; they were more like a militant Christian state in their own right, making alliances with their neighbours and fighting enemies of various faiths, including fellow Christians.

  It might seem a little extreme to us that a young man such as Henry, eager to prove himself in arms, should venture to the far edge of Europe. It would not have appeared that strange in 1390. From London, Lithuania is only about half as far as Jerusalem and although geographical features inhibited travel by land or water in a straight line, the most substantial detour was the need to sail around Denmark, which meant the onus fell on the sailors. Besides, it is probable that the real reason for our surprise is our comparative ignorance about medieval Lithuania and our presumption that our medieval ancestors knew very little about the world. Because of its crusades, Lithuania probably figured more prominently in the medieval English conscience that it does in the modern English mind. A number of English knights had made the journey there to fight with the Teutonic Knights. Sir Robert Morley had died there, Sir John Breux had served there with Lord Lovell, Sir Hugh Hastings had been there, as had Sir William Scrope of Bolton and three of his cousins, one of whom died there in 1362. And this is just to quote a handful of examples known from evidence given in heraldic lawsuits; it is probable that most knights and lords in England knew someone who had served in Prussia on the reyse (as the annual expeditions were called). Henry would have known more than most. In addition to his new friend, Boucicaut, there was his own grandfather the great duke of Lancaster, who had travelled to Germany with the intention of fighting on a reyse in 1352. His deceased father-in-law, the earl of Hereford, had campaigned in Prussia, as had the sons of the earl of Devon, and Thomas Holland, earl of Kent. The Ufford family had been campaigning in Lithuania since at least 1331, with one son, Thomas, taking part in three crusades, in 1348, 1361 and 1365. Another veteran of the Prussian crusades was Henry’s fellow Appellant, Thomas Beauchamp, earl of Warwick, who had set out for Lithuania with his younger brothers, William and Roger, in 1367. The earl’s late father had left a particularly inspiring story, as he had returned from Lithuania in 1364 with a pagan prince, whom he had had baptised in London. Last and most importantly there was Henry’s own jousting companion and cousin, Hotspur, who had been to Lithuania in 1383. It was by no means an easy way of winning glory – memorial panes of heraldic glass to dead English knights were to be seen in many churches in Eastern Europe – but it was a well-established route to the combined heights of spiritual salvation and fame in arms.21

  Henry returned from Calais by 28 May.22 He did not try to persuade the French king to change his mind about the safe-conduct but instead set about organising everything he would need for the forthcoming expedition. The intense excitement is vividly preserved in the enrolled accounts, which testify to his men rushing here and there, buying necessities or having them made, arranging for carriage of some items and the repair of others. Money was clearly no worry to the young man who intended to travel in the highest luxury. A sum of about 24,000 Aragonese florins – about £2,700 – was given to him by his father from his Spanish treasure, and this was followed in early June with a further thousand marks. John was enormously generous and clearly supportive of his son’s venture.

  The list of items which Henry obtained is an excellent source for the lifestyle of the very richest men of the English court. The range of foodstuffs is particularly striking. At one point in the account the reader is left with the distinct impression that Henry must have raided a sweetshop. Just one bill to a London confectioner, amounting to £4 16s 8d, paid on 4 July 1390, included:

  7 lb. of ginger

  11 lb. of quince jam

  4 lb. of a conserve of pine nuts

  2 lb. of caraway seeds

  2 lb. of ginger sweets

  2 lb. of preserved cloves

  3 lb. of citronade [a lemon marmalade?]

  2 lb. of ‘royal sweets’

  4 lb. of red and white ‘flat sugars’ [sugar loaves]

  6 lb. of ‘sugar candy’

  3 lb. of ‘royal paste’ [made of flour and sugar]

  2 lb. of aniseed sweets

  2 lb. of sunflower seeds

  2 lb. of mapled ginger

  2 lb. of barley sugar

  2 lb. of digestive sweetmeats

  1 lb. of nutmeg

  2 lb. of red wax

  and two quires of paper.23

  And this was just one bill. On another occasion the clerk of the spicery had to pay out £10 6s 7d for four-and-a-half hundredweight (506 lb., or 230kg) of almonds, a hundredweight (112 lb.) of rice, 14 lb. ginger, 14 lb. pepper, 14 lb. cinnamon, 10 lb. of sugar syrup, 7 lb. 12 oz. ‘sugar caffetin’ (loaves of sugar), six gallons of honey, 1 lb. of saffron, ½ lb. of mace, ½ lb. of cloves, ½ lb. of cubebs, 1 lb. of sandalwood (a food colouring), forty gallons of strained verjuice (a sour liquor for cooking), 1 lb. of cumin and 6 lb. of ground rice.24 Beyond this, the same clerk had to account for other quantities of the same foodstuffs, and many other exotica, including quantities of dates, currants, liquorice, figs, raisins, saffron, caraway seeds, aniseed, alkanet (a red food colouring), galingale (warm spice powder), and pistachios.

  In addition to the spicery there were purchases for the kitchen, the saucery, the poultry, the scullery, the chaundry (cleaning), the buttery and the pantry. The clerk of the saucery entered one bill ‘for thirty-six gallons of vinegar’. Similarly large orders were noted for the buttery. Very large quantities of ale were obtained, normally at a cost of 1½ or 2d per gallon (so for £1 he could buy 960 pints of the best ale). It arrived in barrels of twenty-four gallons. Large quantities of Gascon wine were also purchased, and huge quantities of meat. No individual provider was able to supply
the amounts which Henry desired, and so the accounts are peppered with payments, for example, for ten flitches of bacon bought at Bolingbroke (12s 6d), or forty sheep bought at Boston (72s). Henry seems to have been just as keen on fish as his maternal grandfather, whose favourite food was salmon.25 At most places where Henry stopped, we read of payments for fish. He ate many more varieties than the average modern consumer, the range of fish eaten on Fridays (a non-meat day in the Catholic Church) being a sign of high status. His accounts record payments for a vast array including salt fish, whale (oil?), herring, cod, conger eels, many sticks of freshwater eels (twenty-five eels per stick), flat fish, sturgeon (by the barrel), pike, whelks and porpoise (which was considered a fish in medieval times). In Prussia he was to pay for bream, lampreys, roach, tench, ray, crabs, lobsters, thornbacks, plaice, flounder and trout. Later, when he visited the Mediterranean, he regularly ate many more kinds. Eating fish remained a lifelong passion: in later years, when he was king, magnates gave him presents of fresh fish.26

  As Henry made his way north with Mary (five months’ pregnant with their fourth child), he assembled the other necessities for his journey. Ten cauldrons, six spits and two pairs of racks for hanging cauldrons. A frying pan. A new tapestry, and cords to hang it in his dining hall. His armour. Repairs to his favourite sword. Even canvas aprons for the cooks. His horses had to be taken to Boston, if they were going on the crusade, or back to Bolingbroke if they were remaining in England.

  Henry also sent a clock to Bolingbroke. This is a detail which seems not to have sparked much attention, but it deserves particular notice if only for the fact that it was portable. The entry reads ‘to John the Clockmaker for a pannier bought from him for the transportation of one clock from London to Bolingbroke 8d’.27 This was presumably a clock which Henry already owned, for there is no payment for the making of the said clock to John or anyone else. The extraordinary thing is that clocks at this period were all turret clocks, and not remotely portable: they were constructed in situ. No portable clocks are known to have existed for another half-century, when the spring mechanism was developed which permitted table-top clocks to be designed and built. But here we have a reference to a clock small enough that it could be carried. Moreover, Henry was not prepared to leave it in his London house while he was away. Given what has previously been said about Henry’s logical mind, with all the implications for his attitude to timekeeping and the structure of the day, it is not surprising to know that he was one of the very few fourteenth-century individuals who personally owned a clock. But if he owned a portable timepiece in 1390 – the earliest recorded such item – that would be extraordinary.

  At Boston, eleven days were spent fitting out the ship. Although we have no record of what sort of ship this was, the largest vessels of the day are estimated to have been little more than 100 feet (30m.) in length; and given Henry’s purpose, status and retinue, it is unlikely that he had requisitioned a much smaller vessel. Carpenters were sent aboard with timber and wainscot to provide Henry and his knights with cabins in the vessel, each neatly done with wood panelling and fitted with a hammock. In Henry’s cabin there was also a lamp. Extensive repairs were carried out to the boat, both carpentry and tarring, to ensure its seaworthiness. Cages were built on deck for the large numbers of live chickens they were taking. A stall was built for the cow they were taking to provide them with fresh milk. Cases were carried on board with the 3,400 eggs required for the voyage. Henry’s armour, flags, tents, horses, chests of clothes and all the cooking equipment and supplies were carried aboard. Finally, on 19 or 20 July, everything was ready. Henry said goodbye to Mary and his three sons at Lincoln, and returned to Boston.28 A flotilla of smaller vessels towed the great ship and three hundred men, dozens of horses, three hundred and sixty chickens and one cow away from the dock and out into the open waters of the North Sea.29

  Now it becomes clear where all those sweets and sweetmeats went, and all that ale and wine. There was little to do on board for the next three weeks except eat, drink, pray and tell stories. It was summer, so we may suppose that the weather was fine, but even so, cramped on board for three weeks, the voyage cannot have been pleasant for Henry and his men. Perhaps they practised their swordsmanship on deck as the boat rocked its way across the North Sea and then the Baltic. There were about two dozen knights and esquires with him, including Thomas Erpingham, Thomas Swynford, Peter Bucton, Thomas Rempston (his standard-bearer), John Clifton, Richard Goldsborough, John Loveyn, Sir John Dalyngrigge, John Norbury, John and Robert Waterton, Ralph Rochford, Richard Dancaster and Hugh Waterton (his long-serving chamberlain). At least five of these men had taken part in the jousts of war at St Inglevert (Swynford, Bucton, Rochford, Dalyngrigge and Dancaster).30 No doubt they also joined with Henry in gambling on throws of the dice (to which he was addicted, like most of the medieval royal family) and board games, such as chess and draughts, and ball games, such as fives (jeu de paume).31 Henry also had an altar set up in his cabin, and his chaplain Hugh Herle was on board, so prayer would have occupied more of his time. Finally, he had also brought his falconer with him, so no doubt he and his men had fun sending up their birds of prey to pursue the smaller sea birds.

  On 8 August Henry landed at Rixhöft, in Poland, and disembarked with a few of his men. He spent the night in a mill near Putzig before riding to the port of Danzig (modern Gdansk), where the ship docked. From there he sent his heralds out to announce his arrival and to offer his assistance to the marshal of the Teutonic Knights, Engelhard Rabe. While he waited for his messenger, he whiled away a few hours jousting, and managed to injure himself, so that a doctor was urgently required to staunch the bleeding.32 On hearing that Marshal Rabe was already in arms, and that the reyse was underway, Henry gathered his fighting men and chased after him, through Elbing and Braniewo, Brandenburg and Königsberg. He arrived at Insterberg Castle. – a fortress of the Teutonic Knights – on the 21st. The following day he finally met Marshal Rabe, on the banks of the River Memel, near Ragnit.

  Henry probably did not fully understand the nature of the war in which he now found himself. It had changed since the days of his grandfather and the earl of Warwick. The key change was the baptism of King Jagiello, in 1386. In theory this meant that all of Lithuania was now Christian, which would have left the Teutonic Knights with no pagans to fight. However, although the conversion of Lithuania was almost complete, there were still substantial elements of paganism left to stamp out in ‘the Wilderness’, as the north of medieval Lithuania was called (roughly the same area as modern Lithuania). That was where the knights were about to campaign now. It was a vast tract of marshy land, the paths slippery with mud and blocked by fallen trees.

  That was not the whole story. A fuller picture has to take account of the political machinations of Vitold, or Vytautas, cousin of Jagiello. Vitold was an ambitious man who, in the 1380s, had converted to Christianity and allied with the Teutonic Knights against Jagiello. He had betrayed them, and made peace with Jagiello, but in 1389 he had decided to grasp another opportunity to make himself king of Lithuania and had renewed his alliance with the Teutonic Knights. His vision of a united Lithuania under his rule was very different from Jagiello’s Polish–Lithuanian empire. The campaign which Vitold was now waging, and which Henry was supporting, was directed against Jagiello’s brothers, Skirgiello and Karigal. These men had also been baptised. Thus it could be said that Henry was taking part in a crusade against fellow Christians as well as pagans. Although he believed he was fighting for the glory of God and the Teutonic Knights, it would be more accurate to say he was fighting in the name of Vitold, a man of questionable loyalty to the Christian cause, against the subjects and allies of a Christian king.

  A week later, coming to the River Wilia, the Anglo-Teutonic army and their allies (the Livonians and Vitold’s Lithuanians) saw Skirgiello’s Russo-Lithuanian army on the other side. A battle ensued, in which the archers with Henry played a key part.33 The cover of arrow fire permitted the k
nights to advance and engage the enemy on the far bank. One of Henry’s knights, Sir John Loudham, was killed here. Enemy losses amounted to three hundred dead. Three Russian leaders (‘dukes’) and eleven other lords (boyars) were captured. After a night’s rest on the battlefield, Henry sent Loudham’s body back to Königsberg for burial. The rest of the army pushed on through the mud towards Vilnius.

  Vilnius was a wooden city, protected by a strong castle, filled with archers. Henry led the first attack on the walls on 4 September, using English gunners as well as his knights. According to both German and English sources, it was the valiant attacks of the English which allowed a flag bearing the cross of St George – the patron saint of the Teutonic Knights as well as the English – to be raised above the town parapet.34 Contemporary English reports put the number of dead after this onslaught at around four thousand, although this is surely an exaggeration.35 But the castle protecting the town held out. Three weeks later, Henry was still ensconced in a waterlogged camp of cold, disease-ridden, despondent men. All the edible luxuries he had obtained in England had been consumed. He was now dependent on Vitold for supplies. After a month, he and his fellow soldiers had had enough. The gunpowder had been used up. Men were dying of the inevitable diseases to be found in temporary army camps. Two of Henry’s men (Thomas Rempston and John Clifton) had been captured by the enemy. Henry made an attempt to secure their release – we do not know whether he was immediately successful – and then marched back towards Insterberg.36 From there he took his men to Königsberg, where he set up his winter quarters.