1415: Henry V's Year of Glory

by Mortimer, Ian

  *

  MAT At Constance, the day of reckoning had come for the soul of the late John Wycliffe – at least in terms of its earthly fate. Forty-five articles against him – forty-five possible instances of heresy in his writings – were re-examined and condemned anew. To these were added a further 266 examples of his heretical teaching. Regardless of any good he had done in his lifetime, a sentence was drawn up condemning not only his books but also his memory.

  For Henry, this was justification of his condemnation of the Lollards. For Jan Hus, Jerome, and their supporters, it was a declaration of ominous intent.

  Monday 6th

  Rogationtide – the days between Rogation Sunday and Ascension Day – saw more religious processions. Most communities carried crosses around their parishes, asking for God’s blessing upon the fertility of the soil. Church bells were rung and banners carried, but there was no feasting. Instead, men and women were expected to fast again, eschewing meat for three days as in Lent, until Ascension Day itself.9

  Henry granted £10 to his servants Thomas Green and John Mede, this sum having been confiscated from the constable of Berkhamsted Castle as a fine for allowing the escape of two felons from the castle.10 He issued a commission of inquiry into the circulation of false coin in Cambridgeshire – his second inquiry of this year into the treasonable practice of counterfeiting money.11 And he commissioned Sir James Harrington, the duke of York’s lieutenant of the East March, and eight other men to arrest a total of thirty-one named men who had breached the truce agreed between Henry and the Scottish regent, the duke of Albany. They were to be imprisoned in Berwick Castle ‘until they have made due reformation of their incursions’.12

  *

  At Constance, at the time of vespers (early evening), the emperor publicly took back the duke of Austria into his favour. In the Franciscan monastery, the duke went down on his knees three times before the emperor and submitted himself, his castles, cities, towns, vassals and subjects unreservedly to Sigismund. He begged to be forgiven for his crimes against the emperor and against the Church, and everyone present. He submitted himself absolutely to the authority of the council and begged only that the pope’s life be spared, and promised that, if this was granted, he would bring him back to Constance.

  Sigismund was satisfied. He took the town of Freiburg, where John XXIII was staying, into his own hands, and ordered that the pope be guarded day and night, with twelve guards during the day and twenty-four at night. Cardinal Fillastre noted in his record of events that things had turned out as he had foretold: the pope had exchanged one threat for a far worse one. Now he stood to lose everything.13

  Wednesday 8th

  Henry granted two lords, his brother Thomas and his cousin the duke of York, letters of protection for his forthcoming voyage.14 He ordered that the royal revenues from Carmarthen should be handed over to the mayor and burgesses of the town ‘as the Welsh rebels razed the walls and the citizens are robbed nightly as a result’.15 And Sir John Tiptoft – the long-standing Lancastrian supporter who had risen to prominence as Speaker of the Commons during his father’s reign – was formally appointed seneschal of Aquitaine.16 This seems to have been the first positive move Henry made with regard to Gascony since his uncle’s return in the summer of 1414.

  The same day the constable of Dover was commissioned to levy £80 from the people of Sandwich in the case of Katherine Kaylewates of Flanders. The patent letter explained how she had been robbed of goods to that value, contrary to the truce between England and Flanders, and how the king wished to provide remedy for her.17 Henry was allowing nothing to threaten the fragile series of alliances and non-aggression pacts that he had carefully built up since his accession.

  Thursday 9th: Ascension Day

  The sixth Thursday after Easter was Ascension Day, the commemoration of Christ’s ascent into Heaven. The church bells were rung once more, and processions were held in which the clergy of the great churches carried their valuable relics through the streets of their towns. Those who had been fasting for the last three days found relief in the form of the great feast.18 And, in Henry’s case, special oblations were made. In 1413 he had marked Ascension Day with a gift of £2 to a Franciscan friar, on top of his usual gifts.19

  At about this time, Henry left Westminster and headed west, to Reading. Before he did so, he granted authority to Sir Robert Umphraville and Sir James Harrington to prorogue the truce with Scotland, or to negotiate a new one. This was merely a precautionary measure, pending more specific arrangements that would follow in a week’s time.20

  Friday 10th

  At Reading Henry dictated a letter addressed to an unnamed group of men – possibly the mayor and aldermen of London.21 ‘In the name of the Holy Trinity we have taken our road along our next voyage, to be made personally by us … and have promised to pay our lords and others of our retinue for a quarter of a year, and have promised each of them to pay another quarter, the one following, at the time we embark, which is not far off,’ he declared. He went on to explain what had been explained at the first day of the great council in April: that the grants and subsidies would not be sufficient to cover the second payment in advance. However, he did not mention that various lords had agreed to accept payment for this second quarter in arrears; instead he asked that the recipients of the letter loan him as much money as they could, sending it to Sir John Pelham and William Esturmy, who would deliver such security for the loan as necessary.

  Henry’s presence at Reading at this time has convinced some writers that he was on a pilgrimage. This might have been the case; the Brut also refers to Henry riding about the land on pilgrimages before his voyage to France. But if that was the purpose of his journey he did not go much further than Reading, and certainly did not visit St Winifrid’s well, or Holywell, in North Wales, as some writers have supposed.22 Holywell was about eight days’ journey from Westminster, each way; and Henry, having left Westminster on the 9th, was soon back there.23 Most probably he had set out for Winchester or Southampton and today received news that sent him hurrying back to London.

  While Henry was dictating his begging letter at Reading, Bishop Courtenay was compiling a dossier of the promises made by the Armagnac lords in the time of the late king, Henry IV. When John the Fearless had been in power, the Armagnacs had taken it upon themselves to promise Henry IV that they would help him recover his inheritance of Gascony, and recognise his sovereignty over the duchy of Aquitaine. The Treaty of Bourges had been proof of their acknowledgement of Henry’s right to the whole of the region. It had not escaped Courtenay’s notice – nor Henry’s – that the Armagnac lords had reneged on their earlier promises. For the purposes of demonstrating the justice of Henry’s cause, the Treaty of Bourges was now dug out from its coffer in the Tower of London and sent to Lambeth, where Courtenay started reading it. It would have no bearing on the negotiations with France but it would have great importance in persuading those at the council of Constance of Henry’s right to feel aggrieved – among them the Holy Roman Emperor.24

  Also today, four men were commissioned to enquire into a long-running dispute at Lynn (now King’s Lynn) in Norfolk. Lynn was at this time a large and very prosperous town with a population in the region of five thousand, with valuable trading connections with the Baltic. However, it was within the lordship of the bishop of Norwich. Prior to 1406, the bishop of Norwich had been Henry Despenser, ‘the fighting bishop’. At the time of Henry IV’s return to England in 1399, the men of Lynn had sought to overthrow Despenser by attempting to place themselves directly under the patronage of the new king. Costly legal battles had followed, in which the mayor and burgesses and the rest of the community had become heavily indebted to the gild merchant of the town, owing more than £450. After Despenser’s death, the gild merchant sought to recover this money from the mayors who had led the legal battle to oust Bishop Despenser. The result had been a bitter row that no man seemed able to sort out. Henry’s instructions, enrolled today, mark yet
another royal attempt to solve the dispute, which would carry on for another couple of years.25

  *

  In France, in the seneschalcy of Nîmes, the arrière-ban was proclaimed.26 This type of call-out was the most severe: any man who did not obey it was to forfeit all his lands. The reason for this proclamation was that Henry’s subjects in Gascony ‘had taken many towns in France’. The truce had run out, the duke of Bourbon had recommenced hostilities at the head of 6,000 men and the English were responding. Whether they had really taken many towns is open to question, but the fact that the war was opening up not just in the Saintonge – where the duke of Bourbon was now threatening Blaye, on the north side of the Gironde – but also near Nîmes in the south of France reminds us that Henry’s Gascon policy was proving dangerous. He might have been preparing to go to war with France in order to secure the sovereignty of the region, but he showed little concern for his lands there, or for his Gascon subjects.

  Saturday 11th

  One possible explanation for the shortness of Henry’s visit to Reading is that he had – as he claimed in his letter – set out on the road to war, going to Southampton via Reading, but that some news brought him back the following day to the capital. If this is the correct explanation, then the most likely reason is that he had heard that his ambassadors to Constance had now returned. The earl of Warwick, Sir Ralph Rochford and Lord Fitzhugh entered London today; Sir Walter Hungerford had arrived back yesterday.27 So there was a very good reason why Henry turned back to the capital straightaway. No doubt he wanted to hear all the news of proceedings against the pope, and how things stood at the time they departed.

  *

  At around this time two envoys from Prussia were admitted to the king’s presence. They were Peter Benefeld and Hans Covolt of Danzig. The Grand Master of the Teutonic Knights, a military order based in Prussia that continued to fight crusades every year in the north of Lithuania, had commissioned them in January to come to England to seek payment of sums totalling over 10,000 marks that Henry IV had promised to pay the Order. They had set out from Marienburg on 27 March, and probably arrived in London about a month later. They had then spent ten days seeking an audience with Henry, and they may have seen him just before he set out for Reading.

  Their first audience amounted to very little. They received no promises – only the news that the king was very busy. He was also not inclined to smile on knights from distant lands asking for large amounts of money, even if he did owe them. They were told it would be three weeks before he could see them again.28

  Sunday 12th

  Of all the families that had rebelled against Henry IV, none had done so with greater force and greater losses than the Percy family. The three principal members of the family – Henry Percy, earl of Northumberland, his brother Thomas Percy, earl of Worcester, and Henry ‘Hotspur’ Percy, son and heir to the earl of Northumberland – had originally sided with Henry IV, and supported him, becoming his most trusted advisers. But they had sought to control him, and Henry IV was not the sort of man who looked kindly on attempts to influence his royal prerogative. Nor had the Percy family realised that, in becoming responsible for the safeguarding of the north, they would end up more indebted than they had been under Richard II. So they had rebelled. At the battle of Shrewsbury Hotspur and the earl of Worcester had paid with their lives. At the battle of Bramham Moor in 1408, the old earl of Northumberland followed them into the grave.

  Although this was in many respects a victory for the Lancastrians, it was not a satisfactory permanent state of affairs. The heir to the earldom of Northumberland was the young Henry Percy, Hotspur’s son, who had been abandoned in Scotland by the old earl and imprisoned by the Scots. Thus there was no hereditary lord locally to guard the East March. That responsibility had been given officially to the duke of York who performed it through a deputy, Sir James Harrington. This was not the same as having an earl on hand to raise his feudal tenants and wider retinue to resist the Scots. As Henry Percy was now of age, his release, restoration and return to Northumberland would be strategically useful to Henry.29

  Henry’s plan was to exchange Mordach, earl of Fife, for Henry Percy. He had already set a provisional date of 27 May for taking Mordach from the Tower and sending him back to his father, the duke of Albany. Today at Westminster he gave instructions for drawing up the safe conducts for the Scottish magnates who had been designated to negotiate and agree the transfer of the two men. These included Mordach’s own son and heir (Robert Stewart), George Dunbar (son and heir of the Scottish earl of March), three other lords, the duke of Albany’s secretary, and twenty servants.30

  Monday 13th

  The emperor, the cardinals and the prelates gathered this morning in the cathedral at Constance. The bishop of Salisbury said Mass, and afterwards it was declared that the citation against the pope had been promulgated throughout the city, being posted on doors as well as read aloud. At this point Cardinal Zabarella rose and declared that the cardinal of Cambrai, Pierre d’Ailly, had received a papal bull from John XXIII yesterday evening in which he had declared that his proctors would be cardinals d’Ailly, Zabarella and Fillastre. Cardinal Zabarella added that he had only just seen this instruction, and was unsure what to do. Cardinal Fillastre stood and declared that he had only heard of his appointment that morning at 7 o’clock, and he did not intend to accept it.

  All this sounds remarkably petty, but proceedings were about to take a turn for the ridiculous. The bishop of Posen went into the pulpit and declared that three cardinals should accompany the representatives of the nations and go to the door of the cathedral and formally summon the pope (who was still at Freiburg, as everyone there knew). Only the nations’ representatives went; not a cardinal stirred. The cardinals started arguing about which ones should go to the door. The cardinal of Pisa declared that it should be two junior cardinal deacons who should perform the duty. The cardinal of Bari replied that in his thirty years of being a cardinal, it had always been the representatives of the three ranks of cardinal who performed such functions. This led to an argument about whether there had been a similar case in the past. The reason why the nations and the emperor had so strongly resisted the cardinals becoming a nation in their own right is very vividly revealed by this event. They were like a bunch of old hens clucking away about whose role it was to summon a nonexistent cockerel into the hen house. In the meantime, the prelates representing the four nations had gone to the door, summoned the pope, come back and announced he was not there, as everyone knew.

  Cardinal Fillastre and Cardinal Orsini and eight bishops, two from each nation, were then deputed to hear witnesses give evidence against the pope in the Franciscan friary. This took place in the afternoon. Ten witnesses came forward, including several bishops – enough ‘to prove the pope’s waste and maladministration … through simony and corruption, etc, especially his reckless alienation of church property for his own profit … all leading to the conclusion that he should be suspended’.31

  The proceedings against the pope clearly fascinated all those who took part in them. Cardinal Fillastre described them in detail, and they were also mentioned by the papal notary, Jacob Cerretano, and Ulrich Richental. None of them even mention that a petition on behalf of Jan Hus was presented today, in the same Franciscan friary, or that a number of important lords came in person to see it presented to the cardinals and bishops. Among them were Lord Henry Lacembok, Lord John of Chlum, Lord Wenceslas of Dubá, nine other named lords, and several others unnamed. It was an impressive delegation on behalf of a man whom many already regarded as a condemned heretic.

  The petition was read out by Hus’s friend, Peter of Mladoňovice. He told the cardinals how Lord John of Chlum and Lord Wenceslas of Dubá had been requested by Sigismund to induce Jan Hus to attend the council under an Imperial safe conduct. He explained that Hus had agreed, in order to remove the stain of ill-repute from Bohemia, and had come of his own free will to Constance. But although he had been neith
er tried nor convicted, he had been imprisoned, even though everyone else was allowed to come and go freely, including representatives of the popes Gregory XII and Benedict XIII. Hus was now ‘so cruelly chained and reduced to so slender a diet that it is to be feared that, his strength being exhausted, he might be in danger of losing his reason’. Peter insisted that the reverend fathers observe the emperor’s safe conduct and bring the case of Jan Hus to a speedy end, stating that ‘the lords put particular confidence in the eminent rectitude of your paternities’.32

  Wednesday 15th

  Henry met his council in the Star Chamber at Westminster. One might have thought that the matters to be discussed would have touched on the affairs at Constance. Somewhat surprisingly, the only subject mentioned for which we have any evidence was wine. Or more particularly, what to do with wine-laden vessels captured at sea. Henry decided that warrants should be drawn up under the privy seal and directed to the mayor and bailiffs of Winchelsea, to value the wines that had been taken there, and to deliver them to Thomas Chaucer, the king’s butler. It was also decreed that letters should be sent to William Soper and John Eastgarston, customs officials at Southampton, declaring what should be done with Scottish, French and Breton wine-laden ships taken at sea, and what was to be done with wine in Flemish ships. Along these lines, another warrant was sent to Sir Thomas Carew, John Clifford and Robert Rodyngton, who were instructed to deliver their captured ships to the customs officials of Southampton, unless they were Flemish.33

  Following the return of the ambassadors from Constance, including Sir Ralph Rochford, Henry formally handed over the castle of Somerton to his brother Thomas, duke of Clarence.34 The temporalities of the see of Coventry and Lichfield, which should have been handed over to the new bishop, John Catterick, soon after his appointment on 1 February, were now finally made over to him in his absence – just ten weeks late.35 One cannot help thinking that the government had taken advantage of Catterick’s absence at Constance to keep as much of the episcopal revenue as they could. Also today, letters of protection were drawn up for Edmund Mortimer, earl of March, who was going to France on Henry’s expedition.36 Mortimer might have been a weak soldier but it was vital that he should be with the army. Left in England, with such a strong claim to the throne, who knows what treason might have been effected in his name? His presence on the expedition was an example of Henry keeping his friends close and his enemies closer.