There is a legend that in September 1387 Henry Bolingbroke, Earl of Hereford – the future Henry IV of England – hurried from Windsor to Wales to be present at the birth of his first child. When he crossed the River Wye near Walford the ferryman told him that his wife had borne a son. So delighted was the earl by the news that he at once gave the man the right to all the ferry’s dues and tolls.
The boy was delivered in the gatehouse of Monmouth Castle in South Wales. (It is ironical that someone who was to inflict so much misery on the Welsh should have been born in Gwent.) His father was the son of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, who was himself the third son of King Edward III; in consequence Bolingbroke was first cousin to the king, Richard II, whose father had been the Black Prince. Edward’s eldest son. Yet the child was not christened Edward or Richard but Henry, like Bolingbroke. Almost certainly this was because of Gaunt’s marriage to the heiress of the earls of Lancaster. They were a younger branch of the Plantagenets, descended from Henry III, who, so Gaunt claimed in private, were the rightful heirs to the throne of England.
Little Henry’s mother, Mary Bohun, was one of the two immensely rich co-heiresses of the last Bohun earl of Hereford. Originally she had been destined for a convent but Gaunt would not let so rich a prize slip through his hands and obtained her hand in marriage for his son, who secured his late father-in-law’s title. Mary gave Bolingbroke three more sons and two daughters before her death in 1394 aged only twenty-four.
She belonged to one of the most august of medieval England’s noble families. The Bohuns were of Norman descent, having come with the Conqueror and originated from Bohon in Normandy. They intermarried with the Plantagenets on several occasions and Mary was descended from Edward I. Her father, hereditary High Constable (leader in battle) of England, besides being Earl of Hereford, had been Earl of Northampton and Earl of Essex. He had married a daughter of the Earl of Arundel and was closely related to every noble house in the land. Her sister and co-heiress had been married to Gaunt’s younger brother, Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester – her husband’s uncle. The vast Bohun inheritance had been divided between the two girls, the Welsh estates going to Mary, which was why Bolingbroke was Earl of Hereford and why Henry was born at Monmouth. Her son’s memories of her must have been slight but when he became king – perhaps in response to the magnificent effigy of his step-mother which lay beside that of his father in Canterbury Cathedral – he immediately commissioned a figure of her to be erected over her tomb at Leicester.
Apart from the king himself, the most important kinsfolk of the ‘House of Lancaster’ as it would soon be called, were the Beauforts. These were a left-handed branch of the family, Gaunt’s children by his third wife Catherine Roelt (usually referred to as Catherine Swynford) who arrived in this world long before their parents’ had been married and who took the name of ‘Beaufort’ from a castle of Gaunt’s in France. They numbered three exceptionally able sons – John, Henry and Thomas – and a daughter, Joan, who married the rich, powerful and ambitious Earl of Westmorland.
Henry of Monmouth’s life was tranquil enough during the ‘Quiet Years’ of King Richard’s stormy reign. He shared a bedroom and a governess with his brothers, though later the boys usually lived apart from one another. He had a nurse to whom he was devoted; as soon as he came to the throne he settled a generous pension on her. He visited his grandmother Joan, Countess of Hereford, who lived until 1419 and of whom he was clearly very fond; in the will he was to make in 1415 he twice describes her as ‘our dearest grandmother’. It is reasonable to suppose that he was made miserable by the death of his mother when he was only seven. We know that he had at least one dangerous illness during childhood, being taken seriously ill at Leicester when he was eight. Otherwise we have very few details about his early years since no one saw him as a future king of England. The exception may perhaps have been Gaunt, that slightly sinister grandfather who despite careful marrying and constant scheming had failed to secure the throne which he coveted for himself in either Castile or Portugal.
No doubt Gaunt was visited fairly frequently by his grandson at his country palace in the Midlands, Kenilworth in Warwickshire. The duke had recently rebuilt this massive red sandstone castle out of his vast wealth. Although partly demolished during the Civil War enough of its once magnificent dining hall remains for one to obtain an idea of what it looked like in Henry’s day. However, the timbered banqueting room known as ‘The Plesaunce’, next to a lake in the grounds, has long since vanished. During his reign he would frequently hold his court at Kenilworth which was clearly a favourite residence.
Henry’s principal tutor was his formidably gifted young uncle, Henry Beaufort. However, there seems to be no justification for the claim that he was at Oxford when Beaufort was chancellor of the university. According to the Monk of Westminster’s chronicle the boy enjoyed the usual amusements of the nobility of the period, especially hunting and falconry – for both of which he developed a passion which lasted all his life. Obviously he was taught the military arts. He learnt to play the harp – the duchy of Lancaster’s accounts include an item of 8d for harp strings for him – and also the gittern, which may have begun his love of music. (He is known to have played the harp later in life, when campaigning in France.)1 He learnt to read and write French and English, and also some Latin which he began to study when he was eight. One presumes that like most boys of his class he saw little of his father.
Then in October 1398 the eleven-year-old ‘lord Henry of Monmouth’ was summoned to court by his cousin Richard II. Although given £500 a year ‘of the king’s gift’ the boy was in fact a hostage and in some peril. His father Bolingbroke had just been banished, in a long delayed settling of accounts, for his role in destroying Richard’s favourites ten years before and also because he was the heir of John of Gaunt, the richest magnate in England. It was only a year since Richard had had another uncle, the Duke of Gloucester, murdered in his prison at Calais – smothered in a featherbed, despite the duke’s pleas for mercy ‘as lowly and meekly as a man may’. Young Henry was uncomfortably near to the throne.
His father, Henry Bolingbroke, Earl of Derby and Duke of Hereford, was handsome and well built, with curling moustaches and a small forked beard like the king’s. Born in 1367 and three months younger than Richard he was doubly a Plantagenet as has been seen. Although self-indulgent and a womanizer, he was a keen and extremely able soldier, fond of fencing and jousting, who had been on crusade. He had visited the Knights of St John at Rhodes and the beleaguered kingdom of Cyprus and had fought at the side of the Teutonic Knights in Prussia and Lithuania against Europe’s last pagans. Indeed he was the most travelled of all the Plantagenets, having journeyed to Venice and Milan, Vienna and Prague. Wherever he went he was accompanied by a household band of drummers, trumpeters and pipers, and was an accomplished musician himself. He was surprisingly well read in both French and English, French being his preferred language, and occasionally quoted Latin.
Despite these courtly qualities Bolingbroke had little in common with King Richard, who had never forgotten the earl’s part in the rebellion against his authority in 1387, in routing his favourites’ army at Radcote Bridge in 1388 and in bringing about their deaths; he may even have suspected Bolingbroke of plotting to depose him at the time. Although he promoted the earl to Duke of Hereford in 1398, Richard was determined that Bolingbroke should never succeed to Gaunt’s enormous estates. Later that year, through Gaunt, Bolingbroke informed the king that the Duke of Norfolk had warned him that Richard had still not forgiven them for what had happened at Radcote; then, in the king’s presence, he accused Norfolk of being a traitor. Norfolk denied the charges, whereupon Richard referred the dispute to a parliamentary committee. The committee – which everyone knew to be controlled by the king – ordered a trial by battle.
The duel was to take place at Coventry on St Lambert’s Day (16 September) 1398 and would have been the social event of the year. Bolingbroke was the fa
vourite because of his known strength and skill. On the appointed day he entered the lists in armour, his white war-horse barbed with blue and green velvet, sumptuously embroidered with swans and antelopes of goldsmiths’ work. His opponent’s charger was caparisoned in crimson velvet embroidered with mulberry trees and lions of silver. But the king threw down a baton from his dais and stopped the fight. He banished Norfolk for life, Bolingbroke for ten years – he wanted neither to win, but to destroy both of them.
Any small boy would be thrilled at the prospect of his father fighting in such a combat. No doubt young Henry of Monmouth was disappointed that it did not take place. He must surely have been downcast by the sentence of banishment – which was also the reason for his summons to court.
King Richard was an alarming figure, neurotic and overbearing, untrusting and untrustworthy, prone to fits of furious rage. Besides having had his uncle, Gloucester, murdered he had had the Earl of Arundel beheaded at the Tower without trial in that same year of 1398. In addition he had recently sentenced the Archbishop of Canterbury (Arundel’s brother) and the Earl of Warwick to perpetual banishment, the latter only just saving his life by grovelling for mercy. All of these had been involved in the rebellion of 1388 like Henry Bolingbroke, with whom the king was not yet finished. By this stage of his reign on some days Richard sat crowned on his throne from dinner, which was at 9.00 a.m., until dusk, every day, in total silence amid his courtiers; anyone who caught his eye had to kneel. Since the previous year he had been negotiating for his election as the Holy Roman Emperor (in place of Emperor Wenzel the Drunkard, soon to be deposed). An aesthete whose court was one of the most elegant in Europe, his fastidious mannerisms no doubt astonished his youthful hostage, such as his pioneer use of handkerchiefs – ‘little pieces [of cloth] made for giving to the lord king for carrying in his hand to wipe and cleanse his nose’. But the King’s delicate ways never inhibited him from shedding blood. Although Richard seems to have taken a liking to young Henry, it must have been unnerving for the boy to realize that this awe-inspiring figure, the realm’s crowned and anointed sovereign who was always so aware of his own majesty, was the enemy of his – Henry of Monmouth’s – banished father.
Although Richard was showing signs of megalomania he was far from stupid – in fact he was too intelligent for his own good. This was particularly evident in his attitude towards the Hundred Years War, in which both his father and his grandfather had won such glory. The conflict between France and England had arisen earlier in the century because of the French monarchy’s attempts to assert its authority over the English kings’ duchy of Guyenne in south-western France whose capital was Bordeaux; and partly because of Edward III’s claim to the French throne as the heir of his maternal grandfather, Philip IV. After some striking victories Edward had secured, by the Treaty of Brétigny in 1360, most of south-western France in full sovereignty, including not only Guyenne but Poitou and the Limousin together with many other districts. In return for this he agreed to abandon his claim to the French throne. Yet he had not succeeded in regaining all the lands in France which his ancestor Henry II had ruled in the twelfth century, a notable omission being the duchy of Normandy. What is more, the shrewdness of Charles V and the Constable du Guesclin quickly regained for France the territories ceded at Brétigny.
Richard realized that England simply could not afford to continue the war, that its expense was a grave source of weakness to the monarchy. On several occasions during the 1380s Parliament had refused to grant the taxes needed to pay for it, showing an obvious desire for more control of the central government. He admired French civilization and French luxury and was unusual for his age in being unmoved by considerations of military glory. He was correct in thinking that England, a comparatively poor and thinly populated land, should not embark on overseas conquest. However, he overestimated the strength of France, which was largely illusory despite the wealth and splendour of the Valois monarchy and of the French nobility; not only were the latter much too rich and independent but their king was afflicted by increasingly lengthy fits of insanity so that there was no national leadership. It has been argued that at this date France was not a nation but a collection of nations. Yet, although there was unquestionably great diversity in dialect and custom, this is an exaggeration. If semi-independent, the great nobles nonetheless regarded the king as the principal political figure in the country, as did the lesser nobility, even if there might not have been the close relationship which existed in England between Crown and Parliament. So determined was Richard to secure an Anglo-French peace that he seriously contemplated separating Guyenne from the English crown, with his uncle John of Gaunt as its duke and independent sovereign. The scheme came to nothing, but the English king compromised with a truce for twenty-eight years. He had already married the French king’s daughter, Isabel, in token of his good faith. In addition he had gone so far as to try to make the Church in England switch its allegiance from the Urbanist pope at Rome to the Clementist pope at Avignon since the latter was supported by the French.
Richard was unpopular with all classes, save in a very few parts of the country. His attempts to free the monarchy from the dictates of Lords and Commons, his high-handed treatment of great noblemen and of the City of London, his inefficient government and personal extravagance, above all his arbitrary taxation – of the sort which had provoked the Peasants’ Revolt – were resented in particular. His pro-French policy was detested although it might have resulted in lighter taxation. His uncle, the murdered Duke of Gloucester, had led an anti-French lobby which rejoiced on hearing of the slaughter of ‘those rare boasting Frenchmen’ by the Turks at Nicopolis in 1396 although they had been on a crusade. The English remembered with pride the conquests of Edward III and the Black Prince, the victories of Crécy and Poitiers, a king of France being brought prisoner to London. They remembered too, with keen nostalgia, the loot and ransoms which had flooded back across the Channel; there was no longer the prospect, formerly open to all classes, of making one’s fortune from plundering in France. Moreover one has only to read Chaucer (whose verse was extremely popular in court circles and who had been born half a century before Henry), to realize that French had ceased to be the language of the ruling class, even of intellectuals, although still used sometimes for formal or official purposes; as king, Henry’s correspondence was always in English. Indeed there was a widespread feeling of hatred and disdain towards the French. In a poem of this period Eustache Deschamps has an English soldier shouting, ‘Dog of a Frenchman [Franche dague], you do naught but drink wine all day long!’2
There was also an element of fear. French privateers were constantly harrying English shipping and raiding the South Coast. Froissart reports that the English said openly that their own king might be their ruin – ‘His heart is so French that he cannot hide it, but a day will come to pay for all.’3
Richard’s unsuccessful plan of creating Gaunt independent Duke of Guyenne, had been to some extent inspired by the hope that he would leave England and settle at Bordeaux. He was much too close to the succession. The king was childless and in 1398 his second wife Isabel of France was still only nine while the heir presumptive to the throne, Edmund Mortimer, Earl of March – heir by descent from Edward III’s second son through the female line – was seven. There was a rumour, recorded by the chronicler John Hardyng, that Gaunt had commissioned a forged chronicle containing a fable which purported to establish his son’s right to the throne. Gaunt’s wife, Blanche of Lancaster, had been the senior descendant of Edmund Crouchback, Earl of Lancaster, who was generally believed to have been the second son of Henry III and younger brother of Edward I. In reality (said the fable) Edmund had been Henry III’s eldest son but had been set aside and made to appear the younger because of his deformity – in consequence all the English kings since then had reigned unlawfully and Henry Bolingbroke was the rightful sovereign. Hardyng says that Gaunt had copies of the forged chronicle placed in a number of influential monaster
y libraries. Whether Gaunt was responsible or not, the tale was certainly in circulation by 1399 even if it was nonsense.4
‘Old John of Gaunt, time-honoured Lancaster’, Henry’s magnificent and semi-regal grandfather, died in February 1399 aged fifty-nine – a ripe old age by contemporary standards. England had never seen so rich and powerful a prince of the blood. He possessed thirty castles together with countless manors, mainly in the north, the Midlands and Wales, and was able to raise 1,000 men-at-arms and 3,000 archers in time of war. His duchy of Lancaster was an independent state in all but name, inside whose boundaries the king’s writ was largely ignored. In London his palace of the Savoy was as splendid as any of his royal nephews’. In March Richard, despite previous assurances to Bolingbroke that he would allow him to inherit his father’s estates, announced that the late Duke of Lancaster’s lands and possessions were forfeit to the crown and that Bolingbroke’s banishment was for life.
Now that he had added so substantially to his resources the king decided to take an expedition to Ireland where the Pale – the tiny area around Dublin and Kildare which was the only region directly controlled by the English – was in serious danger. In 1398 the Lord Lieutenant, the Earl of March (the heir presumptive to the throne) had been ambushed and killed near Kells by the O’Tooles and the O’Briens. The ‘Wild Irish’ led by Art MacMurrogh, King of Leinster, had swarmed into the Pale where they were still slaying, burning and looting. Richard and his army landed in January. He left his timid and inept uncle Edmund, Duke of York, behind as ‘Keeper of England’ while as hostages he took with him Henry of Monmouth, Bolingbroke’s half-brother Henry Beaufort and Humphrey of Gloucester – son of the murdered duke. He had intended to take the Earl of Arundel’s son as well, but the young man escaped to France where he joined Bolingbroke. Richard also proclaimed March’s son heir presumptive.
Henry V as Warlord Page 2