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

by Mortimer, Ian

  Henry only vaguely anticipated the Percy rebellion; he could not possibly have seen what form it would take. He knew that his friendship with Hotspur was a thing of the past, but he remained confident that the senior members of the family would keep Hotspur in check. In May 1403 the earl of Northumberland wrote to the council reminding them that he and Hotspur were bound to be at Ormiston Castle in Scotland on 1 August to accept its surrender, and asking for payment of arrears for financial support.8 Henry had no reason to be perturbed by this letter; it was typical of those he had received over the last two years. The earl wrote again on 26 June. He stated that Henry had ordered him to receive Ormiston Castle, and that in order to do so he needed money quickly. He claimed that Henry had promised him a sum but had not stated how much it would be or when it would be delivered. There may have been a veiled threat in the earl’s phrase that ‘the good reputation of the chivalry of your realm will not be kept in that place [Ormiston], resulting in dishonour and disaster to myself and my son who are your loyal lieges …’. There was a real concern in his refutation of the rumour that he and Hotspur had received £60,000 since Henry had come to England; the earl protested that they were still owed £20,000. He now urged Henry to command his treasurer to pay this sum for the safety of the kingdom. He signed the letter ‘Your Mathathias’.9

  Henry was at Kennington when he received this letter. It greatly alarmed him. The demand from the earl for £20,000 for the safety of the realm had a double meaning: was it to protect England from the Scots or to protect him – Henry – from Hotspur? The signature ‘Your Mathathias’, in the earl’s own hand, emphasised the seriousness of the revolt. Mathathias was the father of Judas Maccabeus. The epithet ‘second Maccabeus’ in England referred to an ideal king; it had been applied to Edward III in his epitaph and had been associated with Henry on his return to England in 1399, when he had received the support of Northumberland. Thus, for Northumberland to claim to be ‘your Mathathias’ was for him to point out he was like a father to Henry. It had been Mathathias who had begun the resistance to King Antiochus’s tyranny, thus making Judas Maccabeus’s victories possible. ‘Your Mathathias’ was a reminder to Henry of just how much he owed Henry Percy, earl of Northumberland.10

  Henry set off three days later, on 4 July.11 On 7 July he arrived at Newenham Priory in Bedfordshire, and spent two days there, moving to Higham Ferrers, in Northamptonshire, on the 9th. The next morning he wrote to the council, telling them that the prince had been successful in North Wales (he had destroyed Glendower’s manors of Sycharth and Glyndyfrdwy in May, and had recently relieved the siege of Harlech Castle). He asked the council to send the prince a thousand pounds immediately so he might keep up the good work.12 He added that it was now his intention to go towards Scotland ‘to give aid and comfort to our very dear and loyal cousins the earl of Northumberland and his son Henry in the fight honourably undertaken between them and the Scots’. On this basis historians have generally said that he had no notion of the approaching rebellion. But at the very end of the letter, there is a note to the council to give credence to what the bearer, Elmyn Leget, would say to them on Henry’s behalf. This was a common way of sending secret information: an oral message backed up by a letter of credence. Henry’s journey to see Northumberland and Hotspur almost immediately after receiving the Mathathias letter, when his relationship with Hotspur was one of enmity, leaves little room for doubt that the secret message carried by Leget conveyed his suspicions about the Percys’ loyalty.

  From Higham Ferrers, Henry went north, covering the sixty-two miles to Nottingham by the evening of 12 July. There he stopped, having heard rumours of Hotspur gathering the men of Cheshire. He wrote a brief letter to the council ordering them to close all the ports, and went southwest next morning, through Derby and Burton-on-Trent, reaching Lichfield on the 16th. All the Midlands counties’ sheriffs were ordered to send men immediately. The following morning he wrote an urgent letter to the council, the tone of which resembles that of a man in turmoil. Hotspur was in open revolt, proclaiming ‘King Richard is alive’, the rallying cry for those in opposition to the Lancastrians. Henry commanded all the members of his council to come to his aid immediately, with the sole exception of the treasurer, who was ordered to raise all the loans he could.

  This could very easily have become a last, pitiful letter from a beleaguered and betrayed king. It was not that he was isolated – Edward, duke of York, and the earl of Dunbar were with him, and so were perhaps two thousand men – but the forces gathering against him were numerous, skilled and motivated.13 Hotspur was at Chester, gathering the best archers England had to offer. The earl of Northumberland was gathering another army in the north, ready to march south and join Hotspur in the Welsh Marches. Glendower was gathering an army in South Wales, preparing to join the Percys at Shrewsbury. There they would meet, seize the prince and march against Henry.

  Immediate action was necessary. Henry could not afford to wait for the men of the Midlands counties. He summoned the earl of Stafford to come as quickly as he could and set out with what men he had for Shrewsbury. His only hope was to combine his forces with those of the prince, and to engage Hotspur in battle before the armies of Glendower and Northumberland could arrive. He had to reach Shrewsbury first. On that day, 17 July, Hotspur was gathering his men at Sandiway, about thirty-eight miles from Shrewsbury. Henry was at Lichfield, thirty-nine miles from the town.

  In working out what happened next we have a range of sources, the fullest of which are perhaps the least accurate.14 What is clear is that when Hotspur arrived at the gates of Shrewsbury on Friday the 20th, he found the town and its bridges held against him. Lack of battlefield experience over the years had not dulled the king’s strategic thinking. That almost bloodless engagement at Radcot Bridge in 1387 had been won by his bold use of a rapid advance to cut off the enemy’s line of retreat; that was exactly what he did now. He sent a contingent of men ahead to meet with the prince and to defend the town.15 He did not need to get his entire army to Shrewsbury to secure the town and the bridges; indeed, trying to do so would delay him. But sending a smaller force to meet with the prince allowed him to seize the initiative.

  It was a brilliant move. By holding Shrewsbury he not only cut off Hotspur from the possibility of meeting up with Glendower’s army, he also trapped him. When Hotspur arrived before the walls of Shrewsbury, he did not just find the town held against him and his plan in jeopardy, he found the king approaching from the east. Hotspur was caught between the town, the river and a royal army. There was nothing he could do but choose the site on which to do battle.

  *

  In the twenty-first century it is difficult to convey what ‘doing battle’ meant to Englishmen in 1403. We think of battles as fought by professional, trained soldiers, following strict orders. We think of structured formations and clear lines of command. And we tend to think of medieval people as constantly fighting. These images are misleading. Most of the men with Henry had been pressed to serve their king by the sheriffs of the counties. Apart from a few dozen knights and men-at-arms who lived, ate and slept border warfare with Hotspur, few had actually fought a full-scale pitched battle. More importantly, they had never faced fellow Englishmen in war. The English archers had shredded the tapestry of French chivalry at Crécy in 1346, and since then had dominated large-scale warfare in the same way that machine guns later dominated at the battle of the Somme. Never before had two armies of archers with longbows faced each other. Each man could shoot up to ten or twelve arrows a minute, with an effective killing range of half a mile. At short range their arrows could penetrate the strongest plate armour. To fight a thousand of them meant advancing into a rapid rain of sharp iron, so dense that it darkened the sky. These armies were both equipped with weapons which – to the medieval mind – were capable of mass destruction, and the result of the forthcoming battle was to change perceptions of warfare in England forever.16

  There were other reasons to fear the approach
ing clash of arms. In Anglo-French or Anglo-Scottish conflicts there was a respect for those high-status opponents who fought valiantly. If a man was unfortunate enough to be captured, he could normally expect his captor to ransom him. In civil wars these chivalrous niceties were dispensed with. Hotspur and all his followers were traitors to their king. The king, in their eyes, was a murderer and a usurper. There would be no hostage-taking; this was a conflict of absolute right against absolute wrong. Prisoners could expect to be executed, regardless of how valiantly they had fought or how wealthy they were. This disregard of rank, coupled with the fact that arrows do not distinguish between rich and poor, forced the leaders to anticipate an unprecedented deadliness to proceedings. The king and his son were as likely to be killed as their men-at-arms. Unless Hotspur could be persuaded to give himself up, what would follow would be the bloodiest, most horrific battle yet fought on English soil.

  Henry stayed at Haughmond Abbey on the night of Friday 20 July, four miles north-east of Shrewsbury.17 That evening he sent out spies and runners to ascertain the numbers of men with Hotspur and their location.18 They found Hotspur encamped with his men in Berwick Field, two miles outside the town. The chronicle of Jean de Waurin states that Henry was facing eighty thousand men; the Dieulacres chronicle gives sixty thousand. Both are wild exaggerations; John Capgrave states that Hotspur had fourteen thousand men with him, and this is more likely to have been the intelligence Henry received. Thomas Walsingham states that the king had fourteen thousand also.19 Whatever the true numbers, the detail Henry would have most wanted to know was how many Cheshire longbowmen were with Hotspur. Five thousand archers would have been comparable to Edward III’s archery strength at Crécy, easily capable of destroying an army six times its own size, if they had enough arrows. Hotspur had at least a thousand archers, perhaps more.

  That night, as Henry consulted with his fellow leaders, he must have realised that the defining moment of his kingship had arrived. This battle was not about two nations fighting over borders. This battle was about him. In many ways it was the battle of conquest which he had not had to fight in 1399, his own battle of Hastings, in which the one question to be resolved was whether he had the right to be king. If what he had done in 1399 and afterwards had been against God’s will – if he had broken the laws of God in dethroning Richard and starving him in prison – then he could expect an arrow to find him out. Being Henry, he took the canny precaution of asking two of his knights to wear his livery. Since it would be the sole purpose of the enemy army to kill him, he would confuse them.

  Next morning the runners reported that Hotspur had drawn his army up on a low hill in Berwick Field, a wide-open area sown with peas. The southern approach to this was difficult, being wet ground. The peas’ stems had been wound together, to trip up charging horses and advancing men. The weather was fine, the morning giving way to a hot July day. The earl of Dunbar urged Henry to start the battle as soon as possible. Henry agreed. He heard Mass, took a draught of wine, mounted his horse and gave the order to his marshal to advance.

  The king’s men were divided into two battalions, with the prince’s men providing a third force issuing from the town to the south. The vanguard, including the archers, was headed by the earl of Stafford. Henry himself took charge of the main army. In this formation they marched south from Haughmond along the Shrewsbury road, until they were due south-east of the enemy, who were drawn up on a low ridge.20 Hotspur had chosen his spot well, to force the king to attack him by riding up a gradual incline and into the sights of his archers, the classic defensive arrangement employed by English archer-dominated armies for the last seventy years. To advance against Hotspur in that position would be like throwing oneself into the embrace of several thousand murderous arrows. It was obvious that there was going to be a bloodbath.

  Henry spent the whole morning trying to avoid the need for battle. He sent the abbots of Shrewsbury and Haughmond to Hotspur, offering a safe-conduct to him if he wished to negotiate, or to send a representative if he wished to present a statement of grievances. Hotspur refused to come in person, but sent his uncle, the earl of Worcester. It seems likely that Worcester carried the Percys’ manifesto, a defence of their rebellion. It outlined Henry’s supposed acts of perjury and openly accused him of ordering Richard to be starved to death.21 Worcester repeated the old complaint about Henry’s inability to maintain a solvent exchequer, or to pay his debts. Henry acknowledged his financial problems, but, with regard to his supposed usurpation, pointed out that he had been elected king. He urged the Percys to put themselves on his grace. ‘I do not trust your grace’, Worcester replied. ‘Then on you lies the responsibility for the blood that will be shed this day’, replied the king.22 Another account states that Henry gave Worcester sufficient assurances that he believed he had done enough to avert the battle, but when Worcester returned to Hotspur he told him that Henry had refused to negotiate. Either way, the talks broke down. Henry decided he had done all he could. There was nothing left to do but attack.

  Going among the ranks of men, he urged them that day to fight well. He had been chosen to be king, he insisted to his men, and they would be doing God’s work if they would defend him. Victory would be to the common profit of the realm, he declared. The banners of St Edward and St George were fluttering above him, and the royal standard was beside him in the hands of Sir Walter Blount, one of the men he had asked to wear the royal livery. Henry appointed the earl of Stafford constable of England, and ordered him to lead the advance. The earl, thus honoured, gave the command for the vanguard to march forward. It was by this stage early afternoon.23

  Stafford was a brave man. He cannot have doubted that the Cheshire archers were capable of inflicting massive casualties on the vanguard. He would have known that the longbows were at their deadliest when facing an oncoming charge. Thus his force was doubly disadvantaged. He and his men would come within range of the Cheshire archers on the incline before they were able to shoot their own arrows, for stationary men on higher ground have more time to aim and can shoot further than those below them. As a result, Stafford needed his men to advance rapidly. But running forward through a murderous barrage of thousands of deadly arrows only made the task of shooting up a slope – albeit a gentle one – more difficult. Not only that, the Cheshire archers were entrenched, and they had shields to protect them. Nevertheless, shouting and hollering abuse at the Percys, the royal vanguard marched forward. With trumpets and clarions sounding and bows at the ready, Stafford led them into the battle. At a thousand yards from the hill, the first arrows may have reached them. A minute later the sky began to grow dark, as if a cloud was passing over them. Dust began to swirl around the advancing army, but it was not dust that blotted out the sun, it was a volley of arrows. In the words of Thomas Walsingham, ‘the king’s men fell as fast as leaves fall in autumn after the hoar frost’.

  No scholar sitting in his study surrounded by old chronicles can do justice to the feelings which now swept across that battlefield. No amount of analysis of the sources – even if the path of truth could be tracked through all the conflicting accounts – could summon up the fear, or the desperate fury of the combatants. Obscured by dust, with trumpets blaring, men screaming in agony and horses whinnying, Henry’s vanguard was cut to pieces. For the men in the front line, the terror must have been beyond anything any of them had ever experienced. But there were enough of them that they kept going, and pressed on towards the rebels. In the words of Jean de Waurin,

  after the arrows were exhausted, they put their hands to swords and axes with which they began to slay each other. And the men and horses were slain in such wise that it was pitiable to see. None spared his fellow, mercy had no place, each one tried only to escape and put himself at the head of his party, for there was no friend or relation but each man thought only of himself, so they fought with such equality of bitterness that it was a long time before one could conjecture to whom would remain the day and the victory. But at length, by
the prowess of the earl of Douglas and his companions, the king’s vanguard was overwhelmed.24

  The first words of this passage probably contain the key to understanding the battle. Although the Cheshire archers killed a great many men in the vanguard, they began to run out of arrows, allowing the vanguard directly to engage the rebel army’s position. It was the earl of Douglas who defeated them, and forced them back, not the rebel archers themselves.25 Thus it seems that, although the king’s vanguard under Stafford lost the initial stage of the battle, they performed the all-important task of sapping the strength of the Cheshire archers.