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

by Mortimer, Ian

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  In the spring of 1400, Henry moved to Eltham Palace, which now became his favourite residence.38 The accommodation and facilities had been extensively remodelled and extended by Edward III and Richard II, so that it was already one of the most comfortable royal houses in England. Henry improved it still further. He added a large study and a great chamber for himself, above a cloister leading to the chapel, together with a kitchen, a buttery, a larder and a parlour. These were all built of timber with stone chimney stacks. The parlour had six stained-glass windows decorated with birds and ‘baboons’ or grotesques. The great chamber was heated by two fireplaces and lit with three bay windows, the middle one bearing stained-glass emblems of his kingship and the Lancastrion motto, Souveignez vous de moi (‘remember me’ or ‘will you remember me?’). A window beside the door was decorated with figures of the Trinity and the Salutation. More Trinity and Salutation figures gazed down at him from the seven windows of his study, along with four saints. He had two desks constructed to furnish the study, one specifically for him ‘to keep his books in’. He also had a small private oratory built, with a rood-loft (for musicians to perform) and a spiral staircase for ease of access from his chamber.39 Such additions are reminiscent of Henry as he appears in the accounts of his youth: bookish, pious, conscientious, musical and a relatively private man for a medieval king.

  How much quiet time he had in which to enjoy his study and private quarters was a different matter. He had an armed expedition to Scotland to organise. His resolution to carry through this plan was hardened when his second offer to open negotiations with the Scots was ignored in early January.40 The Epiphany Rising, the threat of war with France and the burial of Richard then distracted him, but by May he was again thinking that he should demonstrate in Scotland that he was worthy of the crown of England, and capable of living up to the high standards which he had publicly set himself at his coronation.

  Two pieces of good fortune in the spring assisted him in organising this campaign. The first was a letter from the Scottish earl of March, George Dunbar, which he received at the beginning of March.41 Dunbar had fallen out with the duke of Rothesay, son and heir of Robert III, on account of the duke’s rejection of his daughter as a prospective bride. In his letter he offered to switch his loyalty from the king of Scotland to Henry. Dunbar was clearly a valuable ally, being a sound military commander and in possession of secret information of particular importance to Henry.42 Seeing a great opportunity, Henry wrote back warmly, issuing a safe-conduct for him to come to England. The other piece of good fortune was that Henry’s negotiators in France managed to bring about a mutual confirmation of the twenty-eight-year truce, which still had twenty-four years left to run. With this finally agreed on 18 May, Henry could march north without fear of leaving England open to a French invasion.43

  Despite these turns of events, Henry still had a significant problem to overcome. He had no means to pay for an army. This perhaps explains why, on 24 May, he offered Robert III a third opportunity to renew the peace between England and Scotland, as the French had just done. Once more King Robert ignored him. In theory Henry could have solved his financial predicament by summoning a parliament and asking the commons for a grant, but in practice that would take far too long. Just to summon parliament required forty days’ notice, and, presuming there was a grant, it would take time for the money to be gathered. So he decided to use a different method for organising the defence of the realm. Summoning an army to muster at York on 24 June, he asked the magnates to supply men for his expedition directly. All those lords who had received a grant from Henry himself or his predecessors (Edward III, the Black Prince, John of Gaunt, or Richard II) would lose their lands if they refused to fight in Scotland. It was a clever way of testing loyalty and raising a cheap army at the same time. But it also had the side effect of putting Henry’s popularity to the test. It became essential that all those participating should gain in some way from the expedition. If they did not, Henry would have lost a measure of their loyalty, as well as their respect.

  The army was large. A total of 13,085 fighting men attended, not including the mariners and other support staff who kept the forces supplied.44 Of these, 1,771 were men-at-arms; the remaining 11,314 were archers. Henry’s two eldest sons – Henry (aged thirteen) and Thomas (twelve) – also travelled with the army, as part of their military education. They took eight single and six double cannons (the latter having two barrels) and eight hundred pounds of gunpowder.45 Such was the size and scale of the force that the Scottish king sent negotiators at the last moment; but their instructions were to try and delay the army’s progress rather than to present realistic terms. They offered a perpetual peace along the lines agreed by Edward III and Robert Bruce in 1328.46 Henry naïvely believed that Robert III was in earnest, and wrote to the council asking for further details of the treaty in question. That meant a long delay. Jousts were held to keep the men occupied, and Sir John Cornwaille performed so impressively that Henry awarded him the hand in marriage of his own sister, the recently widowed Elizabeth.47 All the while his army was eating up its supplies, and the wages he had promised the men were depleting his small reserves. Henry had to ask for loans from the bishops and his trusted Lancastrian supporters. And the waiting was all in vain. The treaty of 1328 was unworkable – it had not been called the ‘Shameful Treaty of Northampton’ for nothing – and Henry could hardly use it as the basis for further negotiations. Realising he had been fooled, he demanded that Robert III do homage to him for Scotland in Edinburgh on 23 August, and gave the order to march north.

  Henry crossed the border on 14 August and advanced to Leith. The duke of Rothesay offered ‘to avoid Christian bloodshed’ in the traditional way by fighting him in person with one, two or three hundred supporters, but Henry did not take him up on his offer. Instead, he merely reissued his demand that the king of Scotland perform homage. Henry approached Edinburgh, expecting obeisance. The king of Scotland stayed away. The Scots reverted instead to their time-honoured tactic of withdrawing in the face of an English army. They knew from centuries of experience that no English force could stay in the north perpetually; there was a limit to their patience as well as to the king’s purse and their food supplies. Seeing Edinburgh Castle fully garrisoned by the duke of Rothesay himself, and knowing his small financial resources were all but exhausted, Henry realised the extent of his strategic predicament, and agreed to talks at the cross between Edinburgh and Leith.

  Henry had already shown himself to be naïve in two respects: believing that the Scottish emissaries were sincere in seeking peace and expecting the Scots would do battle against his eleven thousand archers. Now he showed his lack of kingly experience a third time. Despite never having led a diplomatic embassy before, he took charge of the English negotiations in person. The Scots ambassadors tricked him. Two years later, when one of them, Sir Adam Forrester, was brought to him in chains at Westminster, Henry stated that Forrester, ‘by many white lies and subtle promises, had suddenly caused the king to leave the land of Scotland’ in 1400.48 What these ‘subtle promises’ were may be deduced from matters arising from the colloquium between Edinburgh and Leith issued to a later set of English negotiators. The principal question was whether the king of Scotland owed homage and service to the king of England, and, if so, whether he should be summoned to attend parliament in England.49 Forrester seems to have argued to Henry that the king of Scotland had assumed that he was not a subject of the king of England as he had not been summoned to parliament. Maybe he promised Henry that Robert III would obey a future summons? Either way, Forrester must have offered some form of political bait. And Henry fell for it. He returned to England almost immediately, recrossing the border with his army on 29 August.

  Henry had failed. There is no other way to look at this expedition. There were some slight advantages – at St Albans, the chronicler Thomas Walsingham was left with the impression that he had ravaged the north, and there were some naval su
ccesses during the campaign – but otherwise all Henry had achieved was to demonstrate that the English still had the ability and will to muster a large, well-equipped army.50 All those whose loyalty he had drawn on had nothing to show for their efforts. There was no glory, no strategic victory, not even a diplomatic settlement. Why? After all, it was not yet a year since the commons and lords had collectively cheered him at his coronation. And it had been a huge army. Henry was not a rash man; how could he have miscalculated so badly?

  For a start he probably ran short of provisions.51 His Lancastrian officers were not used to supplying armies on this scale. For this Henry himself must take the blame; great war leaders make sure they delegate to officers who will not fail to supply the army in the field. But there were other reasons for the failure. Henry was primarily a tournament fighter – an individualist – and had some way to go before he could be considered a fully-fledged general. This is not to say that he was weak tactically; later events would prove that he had lost none of the sharp battlefield thinking he showed at Radcot Bridge. But on the broader strategic front he had much yet to learn. Had he known about his grandfather’s continual warfare strategy, he would not have withdrawn entirely from Scotland but would have kept up the pressure on the Scots, to make sure they made good their promises. Similarly, he overestimated his skills in taking on the negotiating role personally. However clever he was, he simply did not have the experience. The Scottish negotiators ran rings around him.

  To add to these problems, he had difficulty coming to terms with money. His attitude was that financial matters were beneath him. ‘Kings are not wont to render account’, he later declared.52 We can understand where this attitude came from: he had grown up as the son and heir of the richest man in England, and had never had to shuffle his funds to make ends meet, let alone go without. So he had no way of realising at the time how his promises not to levy taxation would tie his hands as king. Not only could he not raise further money for his campaign, what money was coming in was still being diverted to pay for his own invasion. Grants to his supporters had already exceeded £22,000, and the duchy of Lancaster itself was in debt.53 The customs revenues were in free-fall, and the harvest of 1400 had not been good.54 If Henry had not had his loyal Lancastrian supporters to call upon, and substantial loans from the prelates, he would have found it difficult to keep the army in the field as long as he did.

  But probably the most important reason for Henry’s failure in Scotland was the man himself. His character was not what men expected in a warrior-king; he was just too serious. Henry was never ‘a blithe hero’, as some historians have suggested; he was logical, scrupulous and fervent, and (at this juncture) sincere to the point of naïvety. However much he had studied kingship, he was no Edward III. His grandfather had understood the value of books but he never built himself a study. Rather Edward built halls and roasting houses, hunting lodges and dancing chambers, and spent his time with his companions feasting, jousting, hunting and planning the next campaign. Then he delegated to his leading lords missions in which they could compete for glory. Henry’s friends were fewer in number, and many of those who pretended to be his friends were untrustworthy, and he knew it. His companions did not want to serve him; they wanted to control him, or even remove him. How could Henry display an ease of manner with his subjects, and inspire them to feats of glory, when he was waiting for one of them to stab him in the back?

  No English king ever again led an army into Scotland. The age of asserting English sovereignty (as opposed to merely claiming it) was over. The claim itself was not dropped until the sixteenth century, but from now on the kings of England had to prioritise domestic security over the sovereignty of Scotland. Partly this was a result of Henry’s actions: having destabilised the realm by dethroning a monarch, no English king for the next hundred years felt sufficiently secure at home to mount a northern expedition on the scale required. By then Scotland was firmly established in its independence, and English sovereignty of Scotland was as unrealistic as English sovereignty of France.

  Henry was back at Newcastle by 2 September. He was at Durham for the next two days, and at Northallerton for the next two. By then his army had disbanded, each group of men wending their ways over the rain-soaked roads to their villages. As they retreated, a large number of Scotsmen gathered to inflict a massacre, but they were met in Redesdale by Sir Robert Umfraville on 29 September, who routed them, killing two hundred men and taking many prisoners. Henry issued writs from Pontefract summoning a parliament to meet at York on 27 October, perhaps hoping to resolve his failure in Scotland. Then he rode further south. At Northampton on 19 September, he stopped. Urgent messages had reached him, about a rising in Wales.55 A gentleman of Welsh birth had defiantly claimed the title ‘prince of Wales’ three days earlier, and had sworn to kill him and his eldest son. That man was now marching with nearly three hundred followers to burn the town of Ruthin.

  Such an insurrection could not be ignored. Nor could its charismatic leader. His name was Owen Glendower.

  TWELVE

  The Great Magician

  Against the great magician, damn’d Glendower.

  Henry IV Part One, Act III, Scene 1

  Owen Glendower – or Owain Glyn Dŵr, as he is called in Wales – was descended from the ancient princes of Wales on both his mother’s and father’s sides. His inheritance from his father included the lordship of Glyndyfrdwy, or Glyn Dŵr, in North Wales, after which he was named. Despite his lineage, he was not a natural rebel, or even a natural Welsh partisan. He was in his early forties, and had spent much time in England. He had trained as a lawyer at the inns of court in London, and his wife was English, a daughter of the lawyer Sir David Hanmer. He had served as an esquire of the earl of Arundel – Henry’s kinsman and fellow Appellant – and he and his brother Tudor had fought for the English at Berwick against the Scots in 1384. His grandmother was an Englishwoman and his sister married an Englishman. Nevertheless, despite all these English connections, on 16 September 1400 Owen was proclaimed prince of an independent Wales and swore enmity to Henry and his eldest son.

  It was an extraordinary act for a man who had previously been loyal to the English Crown. The reason is often said to have been an argument between him and Lord Grey of Ruthin over a piece of land, but this hardly explains why his revolt assumed the aspect of a nationalist uprising from the outset. The extant correspondence between Lord Grey and Glendower suggests a longer, more complicated story.1 Glendower had been led to believe in early 1400 that he would receive a charter from King Henry making him the master forester and warden of Chirkland, a marcher lordship in North Wales. In this he was deceived. Moreover, a friend warned him that Grey had sworn ‘to burn and slay in whatever part of the country which he [Glendower] was secured in’. Glendower replied in a belligerent letter on 11 June 1400. He boasted that he had stolen some of Grey’s horses and declared, ‘as many men that you slay and as many houses that you burn for my sake, as many will I burn and slay for your sake, and doubt not that I will have bread and ale of the best that is in your lordship’. Grey replied shortly afterwards, denying that he had said these things about burning and slaying, and insisting that Glendower had heard false reports of this matter. Grey added that he would make all the details known to the king and his council, and that, because of the treason and theft confessed in his letter, he would obtain for him ‘a rope, a ladder and a ring, high on a gallows for to hang; and thus shall be your ending’.

  Such tensions meant that Henry was aware of the danger of a rebellion in North Wales long before the September proclamation. But he urged Grey and the other local landowners to follow a policy of conciliation.2 No doubt he felt that, until actual hostilities broke out, there was nothing to be gained from direct intervention, and there was a risk that a strong hand might exacerbate the crisis. As it was, enough Welshmen took up arms for Glendower to destroy several towns in the region. From Glyndyfrdwy he and about 270 men – including his brother Tudor, his tw
o English brothers-in-law and his son – set off for Ruthin, which they plundered and burned on 18 September 1400. Over subsequent days they destroyed the other regional towns one by one: Denbigh, Rhuddlan, Flint, Hawarden, Holt, Oswestry and Welshpool.3 Had Sir Hugh Burnell not met Glendower in battle on 24 September, the Welsh revolt would have spread across North Wales. But that day Burnell, leading the men of Shropshire, Staffordshire and Warwickshire, defeated Glendower on the bank of the River Severn, not far from Welshpool. Glendower fled from the battlefield. Eight days after being proclaimed prince of Wales, he was a fugitive.