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

by Mortimer, Ian

  At the end of his first parliament, on 19 November 1399, Henry could feel very satisfied with his performance. He had shown great tact in dealing with tricky matters, such as the earl of Warwick’s repeated requests to erase the official record of his confession, and the calls for the duke of Aumale to be executed. In matters of judgement, no victim had been dealt with harshly except John Hall, whose bloody fate met with universal approval. Thomas Haxey at last received a full pardon for presenting his petition for reforming the royal household, and William Rickhill was exonerated for obtaining the confession of the duke of Gloucester. Henry had also shown he had personal authority too. When parliament had almost collapsed in disarray, he had taken control of proceedings in person and impressed the assembly with an impromptu speech. And he had proved himself a man as good as his word in living up to his oaths not to levy direct taxes except in wartime. The only significant shadows in his first parliament were an awareness voiced by the commons that he was rewarding those who had supported him with more than he could afford, and an unease that he might have been too merciful in dealing with the Counter-Appellants.

  *

  On 17 December a group of men secretly met in a chamber of the abbot’s lodging at Westminster Abbey. They included five of the six Counter-Appellants who had been tried in the parliament and who had forfeited their titles. Only John Beaufort, Henry’s half-brother, was not there. With these five were the abbot of Westminster, the ousted archbishop of Canterbury, Roger Walden (who was being looked after by the abbot), the bishop of Carlisle, Master Pol (Richard’s physician), Sir Thomas Blount and Richard Maudeleyn, an esquire.31

  The reason why lowly Maudeleyn was present in such noble company was that he looked very like King Richard – so much so that he could impersonate the ex-king. Hence he was essential to the plan which these men now discussed. On 6 January 1400, Epiphany, Henry was planning to hold a great tournament at Windsor. The lords had been invited to attend. They planned to assemble their forces quietly at Kingston from 1 January. The lords themselves would go to Windsor on the evening of the 4th to assassinate Henry, the archbishop of Canterbury, and all four of Henry’s sons, and give the signal for their armies to advance and seize several leading towns. Richard Maudeleyn’s role was to dress in armour and act the part of the king so that Londoners would gather to the royal banner and march against anyone who continued to support Henry, until they could recover the real Richard from his place of imprisonment.

  What happened on 4 January is not exactly clear. According to one chronicle, the former duke of Aumale, Edward, dined with his father, the duke of York, on the evening of the 3rd and left an indenture of his confederacy confirming his involvement in the plot on the table, where his father could see it, prompting father and son to agree to betray the plot.32 According to another, a royal man-at-arms spent that night with a London prostitute and heard of the plot from her, she having slept the night before with a man in the service of one of the rebel lords.33 There are problems with both stories. With regard to the first, which is a deeply biased French source, it is extremely unlikely that men plotting treason would seal indentures of confederacy, for to do so would be an unnecessary security risk; it would be enough for them all to swear a solemn oath together. Rather this seems to be a literary device introduced by the chronicler to explain why it was that Edward betrayed the conspiracy and brought the news of the plot to the king. What is certain is that Edward was the only one of the lords gathered at that meeting on the 17th who was never punished by Henry. In fact he was not even charged with having been part of the conspiracy.34 Thus we may be confident that he broke the news to the king, as at least two other chronicles state.35 This might explain the second story, which seems to be a smokescreen to conceal the identity of Henry’s informant. It is very possible that Henry did not want anyone to know that Edward had betrayed his co-conspirators because he wished to continue to use him as a spy (which is what he did).

  Henry took action immediately on hearing the news. He sent a messenger directly to find Archbishop Arundel and to warn him of the likely attempt on his life. Then, taking his sons and Edward with him, he rode hard for London. The rebel lords set out at dusk with the intention of arriving at Windsor that night; Henry rode through the darkness by a long, circuitous route, to avoid them. On the road near the city he met the mayor of London, who was travelling with four attendants to inform the king that the rebel lords had six thousand men in the field. Henry and the mayor rode through the gates of London at nine o’clock that night, and roused the citizens. Henry ordered his sons to be safely lodged in the Tower and all the ports to be closed. He issued writs for the arrest of the rebel lords. Then he ordered a proclamation to be made, throughout the city, that whoever would ride with him on the following day would be well paid: eighteen pence per day for a mounted man with a lance, nine pence for an archer. The Londoners responded with determination. By the morning, Henry had an army.

  Henry marched out of London on 5 January. He sent Edward to meet the conspirators, to find out what their plans were by pretending to remain faithful to them. After him he sent two vanguards, one commanded by his half-brother, John Beaufort, and the other commanded by Sir Thomas Erpingham. The remainder of his army was ordered to follow him. No one was to ride ahead of the king’s horse on pain of death, he announced, for he himself wished to be the first man to engage the rebel army in battle. Edward told the rebel lords that two vanguards of the royal army were approaching and behind them was a huge force of men. Thomas Holland resolved to hold the bridge at Maidenhead as long as he could, but after darkness that evening, before Henry’s full army arrived, he fled towards Oxford.

  The rebels had badly miscalculated. They had believed that the whole country felt as aggrieved at Richard’s deposition as they did, and thus they convinced themselves that the people would rise in their favour. The opposite happened: the people rose in favour of King Henry. Henry’s quick thinking and strong leadership was crucial, but the real force to defeat the rebels came from the people. In Cheshire, the heartland of Ricardian support, the rebels took arms on 10 January and were in flight by the 12th.36 Thomas Despenser tried to flee from Cardiff by ship but the crew had no wish to help a traitor, and took him instead to Bristol, where the citizens beheaded him. In London, Richard Maudeleyn and a few other conspirators were rounded up by the authorities and hanged. In Devon, the forces of John Holland (formerly duke of Exeter) failed to rouse the people. Holland himself, who had remained in London, fled in a small boat hoping to reach the Continent but was twice blown back on the Essex coast. Deserted by his men, he tried first of all to find refuge with the earl of Oxford at Hadley Castle, but was fearful of being betrayed and so sought refuge in the house of the Ricardian sympathiser John Prittlewell. There he was arrested. He was placed in the custody of Joan, dowager countess of Hereford, Henry’s mother-in-law and mother-in-law of the murdered duke of Gloucester. She was in no mood for mercy. She had him dragged to Pleshey Castle, where Gloucester had been arrested, and assembled a mob to cut off his head. Thus died Richard’s half-brother. His nephew, Thomas Holland, earl of Kent and formerly duke of Surrey, died in Cirencester with the earl of Salisbury. The inn in which they were staying was surrounded by the townsfolk during the night. In the morning the two earls were arrested and handed over to Thomas Berkeley, but a fire started in the town. One story goes that the townsmen were afraid that the rebel lords’ servants were trying to burn down their houses to distract them and facilitate their lords’ escape, so they took the precautionary measure of beheading them. Whether true or not, their ultimate fate is not in doubt. The heads were sent to Henry in a basket.

  The failure of the Epiphany Rising, or the Revolt of the Earls (both names are regularly used to describe the rebellion), was predictable from the moment Henry heard that his life was in danger. If the rebels had succeeded in killing Henry and his four sons, they might have stood a chance of success. But even then it would only have been a slim chance. So
fervent had been the public in support of Henry since his landing that not even the law and the idea of divine legitimacy had been sufficient to preserve Richard. To murder the man commonly seen as the saviour of England, especially after he had been so merciful to the Counter-Appellants, would have resulted in civil war. The cold-blooded murder of four innocent boys of the royal blood – aged fourteen, thirteen, eleven and ten – would have caused widespread revulsion. And the majority of the fifty-eight lords who had attested to the sentence of perpetual imprisonment on Richard would not have acquiesced in Richard’s restoration but would have fought against him in the name of either the aged duke of York or the earl of March, Edmund Mortimer, if only to avoid Richard’s retribution.

  Rebels from Cirencester and other places were brought to Henry at Oxford Castle on 13 January. He personally sat in judgement. One of the captives deserved special attention. He was John Ferrour, the man who had saved Henry’s life in the Tower during the Peasants’ Revolt. We do not know whether he entreated the king to save him, reminding him of his earlier duty, or whether Henry recognised him. All we know is that Henry now repaid his debt, and ordered him to be released and pardoned. It is interesting that, despite the man’s change of allegiance, Henry’s loyalty and indebtedness after nineteen years remained paramount.

  In all twenty-six men were beheaded. Many more were pardoned. The clergymen involved (the abbot of Westminster, the bishop of Carlisle and Roger Walden) were arrested and tried in the Tower of London on 4 February. Walden and the abbot were released soon afterwards without charge; the bishop was condemned to death – despite his clerical status – but was kept in the Tower for a while and eventually pardoned. Nicholas Slake, who had been arrested by the Lords Appellant in 1388, then again in 1399, and yet again now, found himself forgiven a third time by Henry. As one modern commentator has written, it is difficult to account for this except by pointing to Henry’s consistent magnanimity.37 Only six men, including Sir Thomas Blount, received the full traitor’s death of being drawn, hanged, disembowelled, and forced to watch their own entrails burned before being beheaded and quartered. Blount’s execution resulted in one of the greatest displays of wit in the face of adversity ever recorded. As he was sitting down watching his extracted entrails being burned in front of him, he was asked if he would like a drink. ‘No, for I do not know where I should put it’, he replied.38

  ELEVEN

  A Deed Chronicled in Hell

  For now the devil that told me I did well,

  Says that this deed is chronicled in hell.

  Richard II, Act 5, Scene 6

  Henry rode back into London to rapturous applause, and shouts of ‘God preserve our lord King Henry and our lord the Prince!’1 But the Epiphany Rising had been deeply damaging. It had also been a distraction. His priority in January 1400 should have been the defence of the realm. Charles VI of France had refused to recognise him as king, and had refused even to meet his ambassadors, Thomas Percy, earl of Worcester, and Walter Skirlaw, bishop of Durham. Nor would he confirm the truce. Instead he had strengthened the castles on the borders of Picardy, forbidden all trade with Englishmen, and had gathered a fleet at Harfleur ready to invade South Wales and take possession of Pembroke and Tenby castles. Thus, when Henry processed into London and made his speech about taking an army further into France than even his grandfather and uncle had done, it was not a sudden whim.

  On 9 February 1400, Henry held a council meeting at Westminster. One William Faryngton was admitted into the royal presence: an envoy from Henry’s ambassadors in France. He brought with him letters of credence from the ambassadors with their seals attached, supporting the authenticity of the copy of a letter they had received from Charles VI.2 Extraordinarily, this letter was a confirmation of the truce which Henry had offered to renew at the end of the previous year. It had been sealed by Charles in Paris twelve days earlier, on 29 January.3 The ambassadors did not know what to make of such a sudden reversal of French policy. They did not believe that it boded well for peace. As they made clear through Faryngton, they still had not received safe-conducts to meet Charles. The council concluded that ‘it was more reasonable to expect war than a truce’.4

  It was not just the sudden unilateral acceptance of the truce which troubled the ambassadors. In Charles’s letter, the name of Richard II was followed by the expression ‘on whose soul God have mercy’, implying that he was dead. Their confusion is not surprising: exactly how did the French king, their enemy, know of Richard’s death before they did? Was it a mistake? They had no way of knowing. But with the benefit of access to the French records, we know that Charles had instructed his representative, Pierre Blanchet (by letters also dated 29 January), to tell the English ambassadors ‘that he had been advised of the death of King Richard’.5 Three other letters dated that day also show that Charles was disseminating news of the death to others. This was intentional; there had been no mistake.

  This brings us to the problem of Richard’s death, for about this time he did indeed die. There is no doubt about this; there is no possibility that he escaped or was rescued from Pontefract and went to live in Scotland, as was later claimed.6 But most historians rely on timing and motive in deciding whether Henry was guilty of murder or not. This is unfortunate, for motive is not the same as evidence, and to pretend it is is to risk introducing modern prejudices into a historical argument. While it is obvious that Henry had a motive to kill Richard – if Richard was dead, no one would be able to restore him – we can equally find motives for Henry not to kill Richard at this time. Henry was no fool, and he and his advisers would have been aware that to kill the ex-king immediately after the Epiphany Rising might prove counter-productive, for it might make people suspicious and perhaps even sympathetic for Richard’s cause. In particular, Henry would have been suspected of the same sort of arbitrary killing as Richard, who had murdered his uncle Gloucester. Thus there were good political reasons why Henry should not have killed Richard. This is not to say that he did not give the order, only to remind us that one cannot judge innocence or guilt on the strength of motive alone.

  The leading scholars in late fourteenth-century studies are, at the time of writing, quietly at variance over the issue of Richard’s death, one writing that he died ‘almost certainly on Henry’s orders’, another stating that it was the council’s direction that ‘Richard was to be disposed of’, another that ‘it is possible that Richard died a natural death’.7 The authors of his entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography state that ‘there is no evidence that he was murdered and his skeleton showed no sign of violence. He could have been starved to death or even starved himself.’ Notwithstanding this scholarly caution, there is hardly any subject more important in a study of Henry IV’s life than whether he murdered his cousin or not. Therefore the question must be dealt with in greater detail and with a sterner methodology than simply presenting a range of options.

  To begin with, it is necessary to stress that no chronicler was familiar with the details of the death at first hand. What each man wrote depended on his own point of view and what he had heard, and these things depended very much on what milieu he was part of. The pro-Ricardian French chroniclers, for example, were anxious to present Henry as a murderous usurper, and so they claimed that Richard had been killed on Henry’s orders. In the story circulated by the French author of The Betrayal and Death of Richard II, Henry sent one ‘Sir Piers Exton’ on 6 January to the castle in Kent where Richard was being kept, with instructions to kill him. When told that Richard was waiting for his dinner, Exton announced that the ex-king ‘should never eat again’. After a fight, in which the ex-king valiantly wrestled an axe from one of the seven men who now set about him, Sir Piers gave him repeated blows to the head, from which he died. This chronicle goes on to state that Richard was buried at Pontefract. In other French accounts, the killing took place not in Kent but at the Tower of London. But whatever the variations, the stories of violent death have long been recognise
d as propaganda.8 There was no knight called Piers Exton. It is exceptionally unlikely that a Ricardian sympathiser was allowed to witness the murder. And a forensic examination of Richard’s skeleton and skull revealed no sign of violence.9 The murder story was derived from a few circumstantial details and concocted for a French audience, in order to strengthen popular feeling against Henry.10 Unfortunately for Henry’s reputation, the same story served as excellent propaganda against his dynasty in England seventy years later, and thus it eventually found its way into sixteenth-century English historical works, and Shakespeare’s Richard II, whence it passed into popular currency.

  The information circulated in England in the immediate aftermath was that Richard voluntarily went without food and water, and died on 14 February 1400. Even the French chronicles which refer to the violent murder include some reference to starvation, such as that Richard ‘will never eat again’.11 Most chroniclers referred to his self-starvation, including those who did not believe it. The author of the Historia Vitae et Regni Ricardi Secundi stated that he ‘declined into such grief, langour and weakness that he took to his bed and refused any food, drink or other sustenance. Thus on 14 February … he died there [Pontefract] in prison. Others say, however, and with greater truth that he was miserably put to death by starvation there.’12 The Brut notes that he was ‘enfammed unto the death by his keeper’, dying after four or five days.13 Jean Creton wrote that, after the Epiphany Rising, Richard ‘was so vexed at heart by this evil news that from that time onwards he neither ate nor drank and thus, so they say, it came to pass that he died’.14 Similarly, a contemporary Londoner wrote that ‘for sorrow and hunger he died in the castle of Pontefract’, and the Dieulacres chronicler said that he died on 14 February, after twelve days without food and drink.15 Adam Usk also had him dying of hunger, partly out of sorrow and partly due to the tormenting of his keeper.16 Thomas Walsingham stated that he starved himself so that ‘the orifice leading to his stomach closed up … and he wasted away through natural debility, and finally died at the aforesaid castle [Pontefract] on 14 February’.17