Yet the severity of the punishment did not deter other rebels. In the autumn of 1401 an attempt was made to assassinate Henry, by means of an ‘infernal machine’ with poisoned spikes placed in his bed. The plan fared no better than the attempt by another assassin to smear his saddle with a deadly poison. Yet Henry was aware that dangerous forces were working against him.
Protests grew of a different kind. Despite the king’s early promise to avoid taxation, he was soon obliged to break his word. In the parliament of 1401 the chief justice revealed that the deposed king’s ‘treasure’, if such it was, had disappeared into thin air. The real costs of defending and administering the realm were increasing to such an extent that the king was already heavily in debt. The Commons eventually granted his request for aid by taxation, but in return they submitted various petitions and complaints; only when these appeals were granted was their consent to taxation obtained. This would be the pattern for all of Henry’s parliaments. He would receive money only when he satisfied the demands of the Commons. In that sense he was not a strong king. The parliament of 1399, however illegally assembled and constituted, had in effect sanctioned the coronation of a new sovereign. Why should it not now attempt to curb that monarch’s power?
In the summer of 1403 his erstwhile allies, the Percy family, rebelled against his rule. They joined a Welsh prince, Owen Glendower, who had formally defied the English king. Henry Percy, the earl of Northumberland, and his son, Hotspur, had been charged with the defence of the north against Scottish raiders. They had hoped by their early support of Henry’s invasion to enjoy the spoils of victory. To their surprise and alarm, however, they found themselves obliged to maintain the defences of their northern lands without any proportionate help from Henry. It had been rumoured in the parliament house that the Percy family had been granted £60,000 from the king. They denied this, claiming that they had received only £20,000. Where had the money gone?
Hotspur had come to Westminster, at the end of 1402, and demanded more money in the presence of the king. The result was a bitter confrontation. One chronicler asserts that the king punched Hotspur in the face, while another reports that he drew a dagger upon him. Whatever the truth of the matter, their alliance was broken. The Percys had another grievance against the king, in theory more serious but in practice a convenient excuse for their rebellion. They accused the king of betraying his oath. He had promised them, on first landing in Yorkshire, that he had no designs on the throne. This was in later weeks found to be a palpable fiction. But from the beginning they must have been at least aware of the possibility of Richard’s overthrow.
In the summer of 1403 Hotspur gathered an army at Chester, and proclaimed that King Richard was still alive. This was the familiar rallying cry for all those who opposed the king. Owen Glendower was poised to move from Wales, and Henry Percy was mustering his forces in the north. The king moved rapidly and expeditiously. He sent an army to Shrewsbury, the town where the rebels were supposed to muster. When Hotspur arrived there, he found the gates shut against him. While he paused outside the town, the king’s army advanced. The opposing forces met at Berwick Field, 2 miles (3 kilometres) outside Shrewsbury. Hotspur had with him 1,000 archers, and he placed them on top of a ridge from which they would be able to see the king’s men approaching. Henry had taken the precaution of asking two of his prominent supporters to wear his livery, since he knew well enough that he was the real target of Hotspur; if three Henries were on the field, it might prove confusing.
The king’s men advanced up the slope, and were met by thousands of arrows shot from the longbows of the Cheshire men. The sky grew dark, and the carnage began. The king’s men fell, according to one chronicler, ‘as fast as autumn leaves fall in autumn after the hoar frost’. On the death of one of the king’s commanders, the earl of Stafford, the vanguard of the royal army gave way and began to flee. Henry now had to act promptly to prevent a rout and bloody defeat. So he gave orders for the main body of the army to advance, and he threw himself into the action.
‘There was such slaughter’, one chronicler wrote, ‘that the like had not been seen in England for a long time.’ The royal soldiers seemed to prevail, and Hotspur staked everything on a charge against the king. Henry fell back, so that Hotspur and his followers were lost in the general mêleée. When they faltered, they were cut down. Hotspur was among the dead. The king’s son, Henry, received a wound to his skull. Yet he lived. He was one of the victors to celebrate the king’s triumph. It seemed that Henry IV had truly been anointed by God.
Two years after the battle of Berwick Field, however, another insurrection emerged in the north. The archbishop of York, Richard Scrope, rose up against royal government and issued a manifesto or list of grievances to the effect that Henry was demanding too much taxation; the burden upon his subjects, secular and clerical, had become insupportable.
It was not a successful rebellion, and within a few days the forces of the archbishop forsook him or were taken into custody. The earl of Northumberland, having survived his son’s defeat outside Shrewsbury, was again implicated in the uprising and fled to Scotland. Scrope himself was captured and beheaded, part of Henry’s crude and brutal attempt to beat off all opposition. Yet the murder of an archbishop was, in the context of the time, an act of blasphemy; it invited comparisons with the murder of Thomas Becket in the thirteenth century. Henry IV avoided much of the public obloquy that fell upon Henry II, but his private character was more severely affected. To the insecurity of his throne was added the impurity of sacrilege.
The death of the archbishop weighed on his conscience. He was riding his horse on the afternoon of 8 June 1405 – the day of Richard Scrope’s execution – when he was struck by some force so powerful that ‘it seemed to him that he had felt an actual blow’. That night he suffered a nightmare in which he cried out ‘Traitors! Traitors! You have thrown fire over me!’ When his attendants reached him, he complained that his skin was burning. This was the time when he became afflicted with a mysterious illness that was rumoured to be leprosy; since the sickness came and went over the next few years, that is unlikely to be the true diagnosis. It is more probable that Henry had contracted syphilis. As a young man he had gone on crusade to the Holy Land, and the crusaders were notorious for carrying back the venereal disease.
Yet he had passed through the fire, and from 1406 onwards there were no serious attempts to take the throne. He remained cautious; he remained stubborn; he was ever vigilant. He realized, unlike his predecessor, that he did not have the power or the resources to confront the great magnates of the land; so he equivocated, and he compromised. He permitted his nobles to enjoy a measure of independence and influence that had been denied to them in Richard’s reign. He allowed himself to be in part ruled by a council of notables. He was a good manager of men. The Crown was poor, and the treasury all but exhausted; local law was not kept, and the districts of the country were ruled by local faction. The possibility of riot and robbery was always close. Yet the king did not fall. It might be said that he muddled through, were it not for the fact that his abiding aim was to preserve his own authority and to maintain a new national dynasty. In these respects, he was successful.
His hopes devolved upon his eldest son. Henry of Monmouth, prince of Wales, had been wounded in the skull at the battle of Berwick Field, but this wound did nothing to dampen his martial fervour. He loved battle, and lived for warfare. From the age of fourteen he had served, and succeeded, in various battles and skirmishes against the Welsh insurgents. He joined the king’s council in 1406, on his return from Wales, and at once took a leading part in affairs. He was nineteen years old, and of course gathered about him the younger members of the nobility. One chronicler noted ‘the great recourse of the people unto him, of whom his court was at all times more abundant than the King his father’s’. As such he was seen as the unofficial ‘opposition’ to the already ageing king and his advisers, inclined to more purposeful and energetic activity both at home an
d abroad. It was the dynamic of youth against age, hope and optimism against experience and fatigue.
The king himself, beset by illness, steadily withdrew from public affairs. He left his palace at Westminster and retired to the archbishop of Canterbury’s residence at Lambeth; then he moved further out to Windsor. In this period, from the beginning of 1410 to the end of 1411, the prince of Wales successfully administered the kingdom on his father’s behalf. An expeditionary force was sent to assist the duchy of Burgundy against the depredations of the French. At the same time a determined effort was made to resolve the finances of the king. In September 1411 it is reported that the prince approached his father and advised him to abdicate ‘because he could no longer apply himself to the honour and profit of the realm’.
But then Henry IV struck back. He could not permit his royal identity to be put at risk. What else did he have left, after a decade of weary power? While breath lasted in him, he would rule. At the end of the year some of the prince’s supporters were arrested. A parliament was called, in the course of which a motion was proposed that the king should abdicate in favour of his son. It was debated, with all due decorum, but then rejected. It seemed that the prince had been outwitted. The rumour then spread that the prince was contemplating open revolt, thus reawakening fears of civil war. The rumour was quashed. It was then whispered that the prince had confiscated money due to the English garrison at Calais. In the summer of 1412, he came to London to deny this and to defy his enemies; but he brought with him an army or what was called ‘a huge people’.
The prince was also accompanied by his favourite young lords. He was wearing a peculiar costume of blue satin which, according to the translator of his first biography into English, was punctuated by ‘eyelets’ or round holes from each of which a needle was hanging upon a thread of silk. The significance of this dress is not immediately clear.
He strode into Westminster Hall, and told his supporters to remain there while he sought the king. He found him in a chamber and asked for a private interview; in the presence of four courtiers Henry asked his son ‘to show the effect of his mind’. Whereupon the prince made a long and impassioned speech, at the end of which he went down on his knees and produced a dagger. ‘Father,’ he is reported to have said, ‘I desire you in your honour of God, and for the easing of your heart, here before your knees to slay me with this dagger. My lord and father, my life is not so desirous to me that I would live one day that I should be to your displeasure.’ There was more to the same effect, a peroration that reduced the sick king to tears. Father and son were thus reconciled.
This scene is rendered in the second part of Shakespeare’s Henry IV, a play that with its successor Henry V has more than any other preserved the image of this age. Whether it is a faithful image is another matter. Nevertheless the pictures of the young Henry carousing with Falstaff and Bardolf, of Justice Shallow and Mistress Quickly, of Pistol and Doll Tearsheet, are now effectively part of English history. It was said that the prince worshipped at the altars both of Venus and of Mars. Since his youth and early maturity were spent in fighting wars in Scotland and in Wales, Mars must have been in the ascendant.
The mutual respect between father and son was not destined to survive for long. Six months after this affecting interview Henry IV, worn out by guilt and illness, died in the Jerusalem Chamber of Westminster Abbey. In his will, drawn up two years before, he had described himself in English as a ‘sinful wretch’, a ‘sinful soul’ and ‘never worthy to be a man’ whose life had been ‘misspent’. These are not the traditional testamentary words and reveal a human being who was suffering a severe sense of spiritual unworthiness. Henry IV was, after all, unique among English kings in having killed one monarch and one archbishop. Yet he had survived, albeit only to the age of forty-six. He had faced down rebellions and conspiracies; there had been attempts made on his life, and efforts to force him to abdicate. But in the end he confounded his enemies. He had instituted a royal dynasty – the house of Lancaster, part of the Plantagenet legacy – that would endure for three generations.
The king’s body was washed, his brain and his bowels were removed; he was then embalmed in a mixture of myrrh, aloes, laurel flower and saffron. He was wound in strips of waxed linen before being dressed in a long robe. His brown beard was smoothed over the throat, and the crown placed upon his head. The right hand clutched his golden orb, while the left hand touched his sceptre. In this state he was taken down to the cathedral at Canterbury where he was buried and where his tomb can still be seen.
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Old habits
The world was in a condition of decline and decay; there was no ‘progress’, no ‘evolution’ and no ‘development’. If you needed an image of medieval thought, it would be that of the slow movement of a descending spiral. Everywhere you looked, suffering and violence and corruption held the mastery. That was the state of the earth. The most that could be hoped for was stability and steadiness; the degeneration might therefore be arrested for a moment. The four humours of man must be held in balance; the universe itself was established upon the harmonious union of the four elements, the cold earth for example having an affinity with the cold water. The manifest uncertainties of life, and the anxiety aroused by them, compounded the need for stability.
Order was the first principle, sustaining the great chain of being. That is why so much concern was attested for hierarchy and degree, with all the ‘estates’ of society carefully designated and maintained. Nothing must get out of balance. The past was revered beyond measure. Historical writing was recognized as a set of lessons or moral illustrations. The great writers were those who most closely imitated previous masters. The philosophers of the past were more acute, the architects more subtle and the rulers more eloquent. The medieval delight in ritual and ceremony was in itself a veneration of custom.
Just as medieval law was based upon precedent, so medieval society was governed by habit. Custom was the great law of life. The earliest written records show its importance. In the sixth century Aethelbert, the king of Kent, described his laws as those which had been long accepted and established; this would mean in practice that a large body of oral tradition was passed from generation to generation by the men of Kent. The witan or Anglo-Saxon assembly was to be made up of the wisest men, namely those who ‘knew how all things stood in the land in their forefathers’ days’. An eleventh-century treatise in Anglo-Saxon affirms that the landowner should ‘always know what the ancient tradition of the land is, and what the custom of the people is’. Surely ‘custom’ would go back into prehistoric times? This atavism was the expression of a deeply communal society, whereby the ties binding people together were almost unbreakable.
In the feudal society of the Normans the serf or villein was also known as consuetudinarius or custumarius, meaning ‘a man of custom’. His rights and duties were upheld by a body of customary law that would not allow outright oppression or enslavement. It would perhaps be better to say that the people of England lived by custom and not by law. Rights and duties were perpetual. No lord, however great, would willingly violate such a tradition. It would be against nature. At an important trial in 1072 the bishop of Chichester, Aethelric, was brought in a cart to expound and explain ‘the old customs of the laws’. So a continuity was maintained even after William the Conqueror’s invasion. It could not be otherwise. It was the essential life of the country. The unanswerable complaint of the labourer or the villager was that ‘we have never been accustomed to do this!’
Another aspect of this historical piety may be mentioned. Any institutional or administrative change, introduced by the king and council, had to be explained as a return to some long-lost tradition. Any innovation that had endured for twenty or thirty years then in turn became part of ancient custom. Nothing was good because it was new. It was good because it was old. It was closer to the golden age of the world. So the existing structure of things had at all costs to be protected. Any piece of legislation was sai
d to be a ‘declaration’ of the existing law, the revelation of something previously hidden. In the reign of Henry III the barons of the realm announced ‘Nolumus leges Angliae mutari’ – ‘we do not wish the laws of England to be changed’. Government itself was established upon habitual forms and institutions. The Black Book or royal household manual of 1478, in the reign of Edward IV, urged the treasurer to seek out ‘good, old, sad [serious], worshipful and profitable rules of the court used before time’.
Custom was therefore immemorial. In the words of the period it was ‘from time out of mind, about which contrary human memory does not exist’. It was expected that the same practice and habitual activity would go on forever until the day of doom. There was no reason to envisage anything else. That final day might in effect be the day when the customary round grew ragged and creaked to a halt. Who could tell?
Customs could be of inexplicable mystery. If the king passed over Shrivenham Bridge, then in Wiltshire, the owner of the land was supposed to bring to him two white domestic cocks with the words ‘Behold, my lord, these two white capons which you shall have another time but not now’. If a whale was stranded on the coast near Chichester, it belonged to the bishop except for the tongue, which was taken to the king; if a whale landed anywhere else along the shores of his diocese, the bishop was permitted to have only the right flipper. There were urban, as well as country, customs. At Kidderminster in Worcestershire, on the day of the election of the bailiff, the town was controlled for one hour by the populace; they spent the time throwing cabbage stalks at one another before pelting the bailiff and his procession with apples. The porters of Billingsgate decreed that any stranger entering their market was obliged to salute a wooden post set up there and pay them sixpence; the man was then adopted by two ‘godparents’ among the porters. If an unmarried man was condemned to death in London, he was pardoned if a woman applied for his release on condition that he married her.
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