Henry V as Warlord

by Seward, Desmond

  He now knew how to deploy very limited manpower to maximum effect. At Harlech five Englishmen and sixteen Welshmen had held the castle against Glyn Dŵr for several years while at one stage only twenty-eight men had defended the town and castle of Caernarfon. He understood how to combine the lethal fire-power of his bowmen in a defensive position with mobility, by giving them horses; carrying their own fodder, if necessary, they could cover long distances very fast, dismounting to shoot when in action.

  There had been another crucial influence, Vegetius’s De Re Militari which for medieval commanders was the equivalent of a modern staff manual. Because of its fourth-century author’s preoccupation with infantry it had become especially popular in England after foot soldiers had learnt how to rout cavalry with arrow fire. There were several translations; some manuscripts which have survived were folded for carrying in the pocket on campaign. The section most read was the third, dealing with strategy and tactics, which we may be sure that Henry had studied closely. He noted Vegetius’s advocacy of the use of hunger to destroy the enemy.

  England had been horrified by the prospect of an independent Wales, and recognized that the war had been won by the prince. Here at last was the good governance promised by the king. Like so many gifted heirs, Henry was impatient for the power which he knew he was much better fitted to use than his ailing father.

  III

  ‘He Would Usurp the Crown’

  ‘… the king suspected that he would usurp the crown, he being alive, which suspicious jealousy was occasion that he in part withdrew his affection and singular love from the prince.’

  The First English Life of King Henry the Fifth

  ‘Fair son, how can you have any right to it when I myself have none, as you know very well?’

  Enguerrand de Monstrelet, Les Chroniques

  Henry IV thought his malady a divine judgement on him for killing Archbishop Scrope (who had become known in Yorkshire as ‘St Richard’). Many of his subjects thought the same. ‘The king after that time lost the beauty of his face,’ says Friar Capgrave. ‘For as the common opinion went, from that time until his death he was a leper, and ever fouler and fouler.’1 His face and hands were covered with huge pustules, ‘great pushes like teats’ and if the statue at York Minster (on a screen begun in 1425) is a true likeness, his nose spread horribly. The disease was conceivably venereal or perhaps tubercular gangrene, or it may have been some sort of embolism. His first attack, which made him scream that he was on fire, cleared up quickly enough, but the disease returned at intervals, accompanied by other afflictions. His mind was affected besides his body, making it impossible for him to govern. His court physician, Master Malvern, could do little for him so two Jewish specialists were brought from Italy, Messers Pietro di Alcobasse and Davido di Nigarello, but were no more effective. In 1408 he had a stroke and for some hours was thought to be dead.

  When incapacitated by ill health, as he was to be sporadically for the rest of his reign, he tried to rule through his friend Archbishop Arundel. However, the archbishop was ousted at the end of 1409, resigning as chancellor. Prince Henry and the Beauforts – his old tutor, Bishop Beaufort, and Sir Thomas Beaufort, now Admiral of England, were undoubtedly responsible for Arundel’s eclipse.

  The Beauforts were an extraordinary phenomenon, as able and energetic as they were ambitious. Their mother, Catherine Roelt, had been employed as a governess by John of Gaunt’s first duchess and they were all born when she was their father’s mistress, while his second duchess was still alive. They were legitimized retrospectively by the pope and King Richard only after Gaunt made Catherine his third wife in 1396. When legitimization was bestowed on them by their half-brother, Henry IV, the words ‘excepting the royal dignity’ were added to the patent on Arundel’s advice. Their close relationship in blood to the king, combined with their disqualification from any claim to the crown, made them an obvious counterweight to the great territorial magnates and the princes of the House of York. John Beaufort, Earl of Somerset, was the eldest but died in 1410, his widow marrying Prince Thomas, the king’s second son. Henry Beaufort, the next brother, had been born in 1375. A brilliant lawyer (both civil and canon), after studying at Aachen he became Bishop of Lincoln in 1398 and of Winchester in 1404. He was also a financier of genius, who quickly created a vast personal fortune out of his ecclesiastical revenues. His lifestyle was entirely secular, that of a great nobleman rather than a prelate, and he kept a mistress. Haughty and hot-tempered, he had a knack of making enemies, among them being Archbishop Arundel (who may well have disliked him for begetting a bastard on an Arundel niece). Thomas Beaufort, the third brother, who was made Earl of Dorset in 1412 – and later Duke of Exeter – was an unfailingly efficient and dependable soldier, in later years one of Henry’s most valued commanders. He had first fought at his young cousin’s side in Wales in 1405, a year during which he had played a key part in Archbishop Scrope’s murder. His wife was one of the Nevilles of Hornby and a distant kinswoman of his powerful brother-in-law, the Earl of Westmorland, a firm ally of the Beauforts.

  Prince Henry dominated the Council after Arundel’s departure, packing it with his most trusted friends – the Beauforts, the Earls of Arundel and Warwick, Lords Burnell and Scrope. Of these the latter is especially interesting, as the only man whose measure was never taken by the prince.

  Henry, third Lord Scrope of Masham, was a brilliant and attractive figure. Born in 1373 he was very rich and notably blue-blooded; in 1387 the Court of Chivalry had obsequiously described the Scropes as ‘graundes gentilhommes et de noblez’ ever since the Norman Conquest. A kinsman of the archbishop, he had shrewdly disassociated himself from the rising of 1405, being rewarded with the manors of Thirsk and Hovingham. He and his brother-in-law, Lord Fitzhugh, were deeply interested in Christian mysticism and are known to have read jointly Richard Rolle of Hampole’s Fire of Love. He spent great sums on his private chapel, whose vestments included over ninety copes, and owned eighty-three books, which was exceptional for a private secular library at that time. The prince was much impressed by ‘my kind lord of Masham’, sometimes inviting him to sleep in his bed. Scrope had escorted the Lady Philippa, Henry’s sister, to Sweden in 1406 when she married King Eric XIII. The prince appointed this gifted, complex and enigmatic Yorkshireman from the Dales to be Treasurer of the Royal Household.2 He was so successful that Archbishop Arundel was to retain him when he regained power.

  Scrope soon informed the Council that running the country would not be easy. In consequence of perennial deficits the Crown’s debts were huge. He estimated that the basic deficit for the year ahead was going to be over £16,000, without allowing for salaries. The prince had to extract more money from the Commons. After much decorous if heated wrangling he succeeded in convincing them that his priority really was ‘good governance’ and they granted it.

  He must have personally approved the Council’s decision to devalue the currency, providing extra revenue. At this date there was an endemic bullion crisis in Europe, a shortage of silver as well as gold. In 1410 the noble (the principal gold coin in circulation) was reduced in weight by twelve grains and the silver penny by three, other denominations being adjusted proportionately. The reform’s effectiveness was demonstrated by the English coinage keeping these weights for over half a century. However, it can scarcely have been a popular measure.

  The Commons were extremely nervous about the safety of the fortress and port of Calais, which since 1347 had been England’s military and commercial bridgehead in northern France, dominated by English settlers. In 1410 Prince Henry appointed himself Captain of Calais. He found the garrison’s pay chronically in arrears, the government owing over £9,000, and the men mutinous. Significantly, he nonetheless had estimates drawn up for the cost of maintaining Calais in time of war.

  Henry showed both subtlety and rock-like self-confidence in his treatment of the man who was potentially the most dangerous in the realm, the Earl of March. So fearful had the kin
g been of the very existence of Richard II’s rightful heir that he always kept him in custody. Instead the prince freed the seventeen-year-old earl, attaching him to his own household in much the same way that he himself had once been attached to Richard II’s – his father was too ill to demur. This ostensibly conciliatory approach, very carefully calculated, was to appear in Henry’s dealings with other magnates when he ascended the throne.

  By now the Duke of Burgundy was in full control of Paris where the lesser bourgeoisie and the academics, together with the mob, were his firm supporters. (His opponents were the wealthy bourgeois and high officials, together with the retainers and clients of the other princes of the Blood.) Duke John persuaded the Sorbonne to condemn posthumously the late Louis of Orleans as a tyrant, so that he could obtain a pardon from the king on the grounds that the assassination had been tyrannicide and not murder and that he was therefore guiltless. He endeared himself to the Parisians by lavishing gifts on the guilds (in particular that of the butchers who became his most bloodthirsty henchmen), by reducing taxes imposed by Armagnacs, and by executing several tax collectors. It was known that the Count of Armagnac was plotting to evict him from the capital at the point of the sword. Duke John now offered the hand of his daughter to Henry, together with four Flemish ports and future help in conquering Normandy, in return for immediate military assistance. In October 1411 the Earl of Arundel led 800 men-at-arms and 2,000 archers down from Calais to Paris, fighting side by side with the Burgundians to help them drive the blockading Armagnacs from their strong points at the bridge of St Cloud and St Denis. Such intervention did not please everyone in England.

  It pleased even fewer people in France. Apart from the Duke of Burgundy, the French did not welcome the reappearance of the English in their midst. Crécy, Poitiers and the many raids during which ‘the ancient enemy’ from over the Channel had killed, raped, looted and burnt and which had ceased only a quarter of a century before, were not forgotten. Moreover Arundel was a peculiarly aggressive and unpleasant figure. In his Chronique de Charles VI Jean Juvénal des Ursins, Bishop and Count of Beauvais, tells us that the English were so much disliked that it was difficult for them to find billets at Paris; decades later, in a letter of 1440, he cited with some bitterness the earl’s expedition as the beginning of France’s anarchy and devastation.3 It was probably during this year of 1411 that one of King Charles’s secretaries, Jean de Montreuil, wrote in his address A tout la chevalerie de France:

  When I see that they [the English] want to do nothing save lay waste and destroy this realm, from whom may God preserve it, and how they wage war to the death on all their neighbours, I hold them in such abomination and hatred that I love those who hate them and hate those who love them.4

  Prince Henry’s policies differed from his father’s in many ways. He was opposed by what some historians have called a ‘king’s party’ – which may well have been how contemporaries saw it. The opposition included not only old Archbishop Arundel and the king’s brother-in-law, the Earl of Westmorland (despite his Beaufort loyalties), but Henry’s younger brother, Thomas of Lancaster. Prince Thomas had quarrelled with the Beauforts over the inheritance of his wife, their brother’s widow. A year younger than Henry, the future Duke of Clarence had been the king’s Lieutenant in Ireland. Very much a soldier, with a passion for heraldry and a bastard son whom he cherished, he was a hot-tempered opponent. During conscious moments the king feared that the brothers might fall out after his death – he warned Henry, ‘I fear that he, through his high mind, will make some high enterprise against thee.’

  In November 1411 Henry IV recovered, dismissing Beaufort and reappointing Arundel as chancellor. Prince Thomas took his brother’s place on the Council. The Prince of Wales and his friends had infuriated the king by suggesting that he might consider abdication.

  There were further negotiations with the Burgundians and Armagnacs. Prince Henry realized that the former had most to offer. But in March 1412 the Armagnacs offered Aquitaine as it had been at its greatest extent under the Black Prince. In August Prince Thomas – recently created Duke of Clarence – together with his cousin, the Duke of York, led an expeditionary force of 800 men-at-arms and 300 archers across the Channel to aid the Armagnacs. Landing in Normandy they marched down to Blois, killing, burning and looting. At Blois, however, they were informed that the Armagnacs had given in to the Burgundians and that their ‘help’ was no longer required – not even by the Duke of Burgundy. ‘The Duke of Clarence and the English did innumerable evils, as many as any enemies could do, and said they would not leave the realm until they had received satisfaction and been paid their wages,’ Jean Juvénal records. They extorted heavy compensation, amounting to £35,000 in all, of which a third was in jewellery. Clarence obtained 40,000 gold crowns and a jewelled cross worth 15,000 crowns; the Duke of York 5,000 crowns and a cross valued at 40,000 crowns. Lesser magnates shared in the booty, receiving similar pay-offs though on a smaller scale. They then marched down to Bordeaux, killing, burning and looting as before, and also kidnapping children whenever they could for sale as servants in England. Their exploits and their plunder aroused interest and admiration at home. Yet Prince Henry had been strongly opposed to the expedition because it meant abandoning the Burgundians, whose alliance he considered of far more strategic value than anything which the Armagnacs could offer.

  The prince’s opposition did not please his father, who suspected he was planning to depose him. He may have contemplated rebellion but he was far too sensible to give way to the temptation. Nevertheless he was deprived of any share in government for the rest of the reign. In June 1412 he came to London with a whole host of supporters to put his views, after which he went on a sort of progress through England. The king feared he was plotting a coup d’état. At Coventry on 17 June the prince publicly proclaimed his innocence of any such intention, announcing that he was assembling troops purely to help his father conquer Aquitaine. He then came down to London accompanied by his men. There was a formal reconciliation between Henry IV and his heir, which satisfied neither. In September, after being accused of stealing the Calais garrison’s pay, he again came to London with a large armed following. He went straight to his father, unaccompanied, and after a tearful exchange they were reconciled for a second time.5

  Henry IV had reason to fear for his crown. He had deposed Richard with the promise that he would save the country from inept government but by now he was incapacitated. Despite inadequate revenue and widespread disorder the prince was justifiably confident that he could make the system work and give the country better administration and fairer justice.

  Henry of Monmouth’s precocious years of soldiering and politics had not prevented him from enjoying himself like other young men. Too many chroniclers speak of his dissipation for the traditional stories of a wild youth to be dismissed out of hand. The otherwise hagiographic Gesta admits that, ‘Passing the bounds of modesty, he was the fervent soldier of Venus as well as of Mars; youthlike he was fired by her torches.’6 The First English Life says ‘he exercised meanly the feats of Venus’ – using ‘meanly’ in the sense of ‘moderately’.7 Yet there is no record of any bastards. It may be relevant that his three brothers were curiously infertile in their marriages, only Thomas, the Duke of Clarence, begetting even a natural child.

  Prince Henry is supposed to have had other amusements, including the odd pastime of disguising himself and then beating up and robbing his own household officials though there is no mention of this before the sixteenth century. He certainly spent a good deal of time in London where he had a great town house, once the Black Prince’s – Coldharbour, near London Bridge, next to the church of All Hallows the Less. We know that his brothers, Thomas and Humphrey, were involved in a midnight brawl at a tavern in Eastcheap where they were drinking on 23 June 1410 and the uproar was such that the mayor and sheriffs had to be called to restore order; Thomas was involved in a similar disturbance the following year. Yet there is no evidence tha
t Henry was ever Falstaff’s ‘good shallow young fellow’. And whatever vicious friends the prince may have had, Falstaff was not among them. (The real-life Falstaff, Sir John Fastolf, was a hardbitten and very professional soldier with no time for frivolity.) He may have enjoyed the company of Sir John Oldcastle, who on one occasion arranged a wrestling match for him, but Sir John was scarcely famed for vice. Nevertheless, so distinguished a historian as McFarlane accepts the tales of his wildness, commenting that when he became king the ‘lawless and high-spirited youth became, as it were overnight, a bigot and a disciplinarian’.8

  One may ask from where did Shakespeare derive his portrait of Henry. It has long been known that his principal source was Holinshed’s Chronicles, which in turn was largely based on Edward Hall’s Union of the two noble and illustre families of Lancaster and York of 1548 and, through a copy in the possession of John Stow the antiquary, on a translation of Tito Livio’s official biography of 1437. (This translation, which includes details supplied by the family of the Earl of Ormonde who was with Henry in France, is The First English Life.) Shakespeare accepted much of the traditional portrait of a hero king yet his genius was too penetrating not to discern the megalomania and cruelty at which he hints once or twice.

  Henry’s seal as Prince of Wales