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

by Mortimer, Ian

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  Henry spent the summer in the north, travelling by boat between his castles and pilgrimage sites.46 The long stays at Lancastrian castles might have been part of a money-saving measure but just as probably they were due to the difficulties he was now experiencing when travelling by road. The man who once jousted along with the best of them, and had won praise from Boucicaut, now rode on a brass saddle, or possibly a form of litter.47 Although this meant that his speeds on occasion were as fast as they had been in 1403 (fifteen or sixteen miles per day), there were protracted periods of rest between these journeys. In order to be at Gloucester on 20 October, for the next sitting of parliament, he set out from York on 21 September, giving himself a full month to cover a journey of less than two hundred miles. Some of that was probably undertaken by river: from Bishopthorpe along the River Ouse to Cawood, for example, and along the River Trent from Nottingham to Repton.48 At Evesham Abbey, on the River Avon, he rested for six days. From there he could have been rowed the rest of the way to Gloucester.

  The 1407 parliament, which opened on 24 October in Gloucester Abbey (now the cathedral), was orchestrated by Archbishop Arundel from the moment it opened. As chancellor, it was Arundel who delivered the opening speech. The purpose of the parliament, he announced, was nothing less than that they should ‘honour the king’.49 He then outlined three reasons. First they should honour him because Henry had upheld the liberties of the cities and boroughs of the kingdom – a direct appeal to the representatives of the boroughs who had given him such a hard time in the previous parliament. They should honour him because of his maintenance of the law and in particular his own personal efforts to defend the realm in war. And thirdly, they should honour him because ‘he had shown such great compassion and clemency that, in the case of anyone who had offended against him … who had been willing humbly to acknowledge his offence and beg for grace and mercy for it, the king had been so full of compassion that he had been quicker to show mercy than the person who had committed the offence had been to request it’.50

  Henry was not present to hear this parade of his cardinal virtues. This was undoubtedly by design, as he could easily have come down the river from Evesham in time for the parliament.51 Nevertheless, it was very unusual. It was even more unusual for the purpose of the parliament to be that of honouring the king. When he did arrive, on the second day, Henry kept silent, only speaking (so far as we can tell from the parliament roll) when told to do so by Archbishop Arundel. After the commons had chosen their Speaker to be Thomas Chaucer (son of the poet Geoffrey Chaucer), the discussions started. At the first plenary session, on 9 November, the crucial debate was held concerning the Thirty-One Articles. Arundel managed it perfectly. The commons pressed their usual request for ‘good government’ and reminded the king that they had made their grant in the previous parliament with high expectations upon the performance of the council. To this Arundel deftly replied that he had already spoken to them about this matter, and had provided them with a written schedule of the council’s actions. Then he added that many members of the council had, over and above the call of duty, made good the shortcomings of the commons’ finance through loans from their own estates. Since the commons had not seen to offer any reward or gratitude for this, or for the council’s labours in running the affairs of state, the councillors no longer wished to be bound by their oaths to observe the Thirty-One Articles.

  The commons were taken by surprise. They had no response. Rather lamely, Thomas Chaucer changed the subject and presented the commons’ complaint against royal purveyors. Tiptoft gave them as sharp a rebuke as Arundel had dealt: if there was a purveyor who was breaking the law, then he should be reported to the sheriff in the same way as any other lawbreaker, and he would be tried. On Tuesday 14 November the commons asked that a committee of lords be appointed to discuss matters of state with them; Arundel of course put himself at the head of the list of the six lords appointed by the king. But this was nothing compared to his strategy for extricating sufficient taxation out of the commons. On 21 October, the lords met in the abbey council chamber. There Arundel put to them the question of how much taxation would be needed to defend the realm adequately. No doubt he produced his defence budget, worked out in council earlier in the year. The lords agreed that what was required was nothing less than one and a half tenths and fifteenths, plus a continuation of the wool subsidy for three years. Arundel then asked that a committee of twelve commoners be appointed to attend a meeting of the lords. The members of the committee appointed were astounded when it emerged that they were to take back the details of the sum they were required to grant. The rest of the commons were outraged, but the alternative was to be held responsible for the inadequate defence of the realm and for failing to ‘honour the king’. They were mollified by Henry’s declaration that he would not again levy direct taxation for two and half years – until March 1410, a promise he put in writing to each of them, and kept – and they were pleased with his grant that the commons in future could have the right to discuss the state of the realm in his absence. But otherwise the commons had been forced to confront a stark reality: they could not continue to blame the king for the problems of the realm. He had been nearly a year out of power, and yet their complaints had not abated. The solution to their demands lay in a combination of adequate finance through taxation, to be spent on properly costed priorities, with tight financial controls and competent military leadership. It was not the continual denigration of the king.

  The parliament of 1407 was thus something of a lesson in medieval governance to all participants. The commons were used to seeing the throne as the centre of their political battleground. Henry too had always believed that it fell to him personally to deal with the issues of government. But as a result of his illness, and the collapse of royal authority in the Long Parliament, the battleground had shifted away from the throne. Of course Arundel had help in his restoration of Henry’s royal power, especially from Henry’s half-brothers, John and Henry Beaufort and Thomas Langley, all of whom were on the committee to the commons in November 1407; but otherwise Arundel must be given the credit.52 And so too must Henry, for appointing Arundel in the first place. It had taken just a year to halt the decline of the royal fortunes, and the process marked a watershed in Henry’s government.

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  Henry remained for some days at Gloucester. He was still there when he received news of an extraordinary story unfolding in France, which was to have the most profound implications for England. Henry’s sworn enemy, the duke of Orléans, had been making himself increasingly unpopular amongst the French nobility, partly for his philandering and raping of noblewomen (including his sister-in-law, the queen of France) and partly because of his rivalry with his cousin, the duke of Burgundy.53 On Wednesday 23 November he had attended a reception in Paris for the recovery of the queen from the birth of her twelfth child, who had died after only a day. As the duke joined the other guests in trying to rouse the queen’s spirits, a messenger entered with a summons: the king wished to see him immediately at the Hôtel de St Pol. The duke politely left, and set out into the cold winter evening with five attendants. As he rode past an empty house on the rue Barbette, seven or eight masked men rushed out and attacked him. They dragged him from his horse, hacking off the hand with which he clung to the saddle, and stabbed him repeatedly in the face and body as he lay on the ground, eventually smashing open his skull to finish him off.

  When Henry first heard about the murder, he was told that it was the work of a lord whose wife had been seduced by the duke.54 But over subsequent days it emerged that, far from being a crime of passion, it was a coldblooded political assassination. The duke of Burgundy had suspiciously fled Paris. Later he would return at the head of an army and admit his guilt.

  Regardless of who was responsible, the duke’s death immediately changed the political landscape. Orléans had been the most important manipulator of power in the French council since the death of the old duke
of Burgundy in 1404. He was also the principal member of the royal family agitating for war with England. Ever since 1399 he had been at pains to show that he felt Henry had betrayed him with his revolution, and his three bellicose letters to Henry in 1402–3 had merely been the written expositions of his anger. In September 1406, he personally led an army to attack English castles in Gascony at Bourg and Blaye, and had kept up the siege of Bourg until January 1407. There was no doubting his resolve to continue with such hostilities, especially since Charles had supported him by creating the dauphin nominal duke of Aquitaine. Thus his death immediately relieved the anxiety in Gascony. It also scotched any possibility that he would fulfil his offer to the earl of Northumberland in 1405 to assist him in attacking Henry in England.55

  When it emerged that the duke had been assassinated by his own cousin, however, the crime assumed a wholly new complexion. Hatred of Henry in France had been particularly stirred up by the rumours that he, a member of the English royal family, had ordered his own cousin, Richard, to be murdered. The horror Frenchmen felt at this injustice was now transferred to their own royal family. They could hardly maintain that the crime of cousin murder barred Henry from the throne of England when members of their own royal family were busy hacking each other to pieces for similar political motives. Worse, the various plotters began to appeal to King Henry, the enemy of France, for protection and help. As France slipped towards civil war, the protagonists of the various factions each sought help from Henry. As for Glendower, he could no longer pretend to his fellow Welshmen that the French would offer them military assistance.

  For the moment all these military implications were far off, and the first thought in Henry’s mind was that the duke’s death allowed the truce with France to be finalised. As it happened, news of the murder arrived at Gloucester at the very time the French ambassadors were present for the truce. On the penultimate day of the parliament, Henry renewed his commission to his own ambassadors – Thomas Langley, Sir Thomas Erpingham, Sir Hugh Mortimer and John Catterick – and the following day added his second son, Thomas, to the team. With the assassination of the key French agent for war, the way to peace in Gascony was clear, and it took the negotiators just six days to reach a settlement. The truce was concluded on 7 December and ratified by the council in the king’s name on the 10th.56

  By then Henry himself was on his way back to Eltham, travelling slowly by way of Cirencester to Windsor and probably from there along the Thames. At Eltham he spent Christmas, free from the worries of both government and disempowerment. With the prince making headway against Glendower, the Scots king in his custody, his French adversary dead, his finances improving and the truce proclaimed in Gascony, it was the easiest Christmas of his reign. There were only two black clouds in the otherwise relatively clear winter sky. One was his worsening health. The other was the earl of Northumberland’s last stand.

  SEVENTEEN

  Golden Care

  Why doth the crown lie there upon his pillow,

  Being so troublesome a bedfellow?

  O polish’d perturbation! Golden care!

  Henry IV Part Two, Act 4, Scene 4

  In France they called it ‘the big winter’, in England ‘the strong winter’ or ‘the great frost and ice’. Animals died in their thousands, rivers froze – even the Baltic Sea froze. Clerks picked up their pens to write only to find the ink frozen in their inkwells.1 Nevertheless, at the depth of this cold, the earl of Northumberland and Lord Bardolph decided to enact their latest plot to dethrone Henry. Perhaps they had had enough of flight, having gone from England to Scotland, to Wales and finally to France in their hope of finding a sympathetic lord who would give them an army. Or maybe they thought that they would have the advantage of surprise, the winter being so severe that the normally muddy roads were frozen solid, allowing them a faster advance. Either way, in January 1408 the rebel lords crossed once more into England and attempted to rally their supporters with the old cry, ‘King Richard is alive’.

  Henry himself was designing artillery at the time, or to be specific ‘a large cannon … newly invented by the king himself’.2 Guns had always interested him. Gunners travelled with him to Lithuania in 1390, and he had taken several cannon into Scotland in 1400. His accounts reveal that he had thirty-nine guns and cannon stored at the Tower.3 In 1401 he had equipped the prince with six artillery pieces, including ‘two large double cannon’ with which to attack Conway Castle, and had taken cannon into Wales on his own expeditions.4 In 1405 the big guns proved their worth in action against the earl of Northumberland’s castles. When Henry wished to help his eldest son in the siege of Aberystwyth, he sent him ‘our great cannon’ and a quarter of a ton of gunpowder from Nottingham. This may have been the two-ton giant ‘The Messenger’ which blew up during the siege. Notwithstanding this setback, powerful guns had clearly become a lasting feature of the English military scene, and Henry wanted to do his part in improving them. We do not know how successful his own design of 1408 was, but the payment of more than £210 to the same man the following year for iron and coal to make more cannon suggests that the project was not unsuccessful. The general idea seems to have been to manufacture an unrivalled series of large iron bombards with which to smash down the castle walls of his potential enemies.5

  There had been signs before January 1408 that the earl of Northumberland and Lord Bardolph would raise the cry of rebellion again. In July 1407 one of Lord Bardolph’s servants was captured carrying seditious letters and imprisoned in Nottingham Castle. In August a letter from the earl of Northumberland to the constable of Warkworth Castle led to the discovery of a plot to stage a rising in the north. But nothing can have prepared Henry for the surprise advance in January. It came just when he was finally free from widespread criticism. News of his illness and discomfort inclined many lords to believe that God was punishing Henry for his misdeeds. Therefore they did not need to bother holding him to account. It is ironic, but the more people who believed that Henry’s illness was divine retribution for his sins, the less justification there was for taking up arms against him.

  Henry heard of the rebels’ incursion on 15 February 1408.6 That day he ordered forces to be raised against Northumberland and Bardolph and prepared to set out for the north. But before the month was out, news reached him that the rebellion was over. Sir Thomas Rokeby had led a small force north to meet the rebels at Grimbald Bridge, near Knaresborough. Having pursued the earl and his troops to Tadcaster, Rokeby set men along all the roads to the town, not allowing them to escape undetected. Realising that the hour had come, the earl drew up his forces on Bramham Moor, on 19 February. Rokeby’s men attacked with fury, charging beneath the banner of St George.7 Northumberland himself was their first target. He was killed on the battlefield. The prelates who had thrown in their lot with him were all captured, including the bishop of Bangor, the prior of Hexham and the abbot of Halesowen. Lord Bardolph fled but was chased and forced to turn and fight. In the ensuing conflict in the snow he was so badly hacked about that, when he was finally overpowered, he was fatally wounded. He died that night. The rebellion was over before it had properly begun.

  Despite this relieving news, Henry decided he would press on to the north. He was at St Albans on 2 March and Leicester on the 12th. There he paused for three or four days before moving to Nottingham.8 His journey from there was at least partly by boat, for several places at which he is known to have stayed were on the River Ouse.9 From 26 March to 6 April he stayed at Wheelhall, seeing to the punishments and rewards due as a result of Bramham Moor. The abbot of Halesowen was executed. The others were treated more leniently. The bishop of Bangor was sent to be imprisoned in Windsor Castle. The prior of Hexham was tried for treason and later pardoned. Of course, Rokeby and his friends were well rewarded, Rokeby himself receiving several of the late earl’s manors. As for the earl of Northumberland, his body was cut up and exhibited around the realm, at Berwick, Lincoln, Newcastle and York. His grey-haired head was set on a pi
ke on London Bridge. Thus ended the life of the man who had been instrumental in raising Henry to the throne, and had betrayed him.

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  Henry spent Easter 1408 at Pontefract Castle. He remained there for the feast of St George; it was the first time in his reign that he was not at Windsor to oversee the Garter festivities in person. His illness was impinging more and more on his freedom of movement and his ability to govern. On 25 April he delegated to the earl of Westmorland the right to pardon or punish six captured rebels. Leaving Pontefract on the 30th he made his way to Leicester by road, and there rested. He did not stay at the castle. Instead, from the quiet sanctuary of Birdsnest Lodge two miles outside the town, he wrote a note in English and in his own hand to Archbishop Arundel, thanking him heartily for ‘the great business that you do for me and for my realm, and trusting plainly in your good counsel, and hoping to God to speak to you hastily and thank you with good heart’. He signed the letter ‘Your true friend and child in God, H[enry] R[ex]’.10