Within a few days of his accession, Henry dispatched Thomas, earl of Arundel, to Wales with special powers to receive former rebels into the king’s grace and to grant them pardons at his discretion. The results were spectacular. Six hundred inhabitants of Merionethshire appeared before Arundel admitting that they deserved death as traitors but asking for mercy; when he granted them a communal pardon on Henry’s behalf, they fell on their knees and thanked God for the magnanimity of their king. More than fifty condemned rebels from Kidwelly were also spared death, fined and had their lands restored. This granting of pardons and restoration of lands to former rebels was not simply an act of royal mercy and charity. It was also highly profitable. In just two years Henry raised more than five thousand pounds—well over four million dollars in today’s currency—from fines collected from his Welsh lands.18
While it might be tempting to see fund-raising as the real reason for the whole exercise, it was nevertheless true that the pardons and restorations allowed those Welshmen who had been tempted to rebel to put the past behind them and make a clean start. The success of this policy was demonstrated by the fact that, although Owain Glyn Dw?246-136?r was still at large in the mountains (and never would be captured), at no time was he ever able to attract enough malcontents to raise the standard of revolt again. Significantly, too, there was a genuine attempt to pursue and punish corrupt royal officials who had abused their powers in the principality. Thomas Barneby, the chamberlain of north Wales, at first successfully evaded indictment by bribery, but Henry’s commissioners did not give up and a few months later he had to face thirty charges of extortion and embezzlement and was removed from office. Another royal official, Sir John Scudamore, the steward of Kidwelly, was similarly deprived of his post, even though it had been granted to him for life.19 Such actions did much to redress the balance: the king might penalise those who had rebelled against his authority, but he was also prepared to punish those who had abused it. Henry was demonstrably carrying out his oath to do right and equal justice for all in Wales. It was a policy that clearly won him friends in the principality, judging by the huge numbers of Welshmen who signed up for the Agincourt campaign.
The same was true of the rest of his kingdom. Violence against persons and property, riots and disorder, were endemic in medieval England.20 The principal reason for this was not simply that society was naturally more criminal, but rather an inability to obtain justice, which encouraged those who perceived themselves to be victims to seek redress or revenge themselves. Since there was neither a police force nor a public prosecution service to investigate crimes or indict criminals, the judicial process relied almost entirely on local men (and they were nearly always men) who served as jurors, sheriffs or justices of the peace. Inevitably, these were also the people most vulnerable to bribery, corruption and intimidation because they were dependent for their offices on the goodwill, power and patronage of the magnates and aristocrats, the super-rich whose landholdings and influence crossed county boundaries and ultimately led to the fount of all good things, the royal court and the king himself.
In Shropshire, where the most powerful magnate was Thomas, earl of Arundel, one of Henry V’s closest friends, a small group of his retainers had acquired a stranglehold on local administration. Their crimes ranged from the obvious—peculation, extortion, terrorising and destroying the countryside at the head of armed bands of men—to the ingeniously devious, such as securing the appointment of their opponents to the unpopular post of tax-collectors. Henry IV had not dared to intervene for fear of offending Arundel, whose support was essential in crushing the Welsh revolt, but Henry V had no such qualms. He appointed a special commission of central court justices from the king’s bench at Westminster with extraordinary powers to suppress the disorder in Shropshire. This was a bold move (commissions of this type had roused such violent popular opposition under Richard II that Henry IV had been afraid to use them and had never allowed the king’s bench to leave Westminster), but it proved its worth immediately. Over the course of the summer of 1414, almost eighteen hundred indictments were received and proceedings were begun against sixteen hundred individuals.21 The seven leading culprits were prosecuted, found guilty and forced to give bonds for the enormous sum of £200 each (the equivalent of $133,300 today) to keep the peace in future. Arundel himself was obliged to give a further bond of £3000 ($2,012,500 today) as a pledge for their good behaviour. This alone was a powerful demonstration that Arundel’s friendship with the king did not allow him, or his retainers, to be above the law.
In less sure hands, such exemplary punishment meted out to a powerful aristocrat and his supporters would probably have provoked a hostile reaction, possibly even armed revolt. The success of Henry’s policy is therefore all the more remarkable, particularly as the experience in Shropshire was repeated throughout the rest of the country. The knights and esquires of the shires, who should have been the natural upholders of local justice, were specifically targeted by Henry’s special courts and made to pay the price for deviating from that role. Critically, however, it was not such a high price that it drove them into opposition. Even Arundel’s notorious band of seven was given a second chance. They all received pardons and, more importantly, redeemed themselves by active military service: six of them served in Arundel’s retinue on the Agincourt campaign; the seventh remained at home as a captain entrusted with the guardianship of the Welsh marches.22 Many of their own servants, who had also been indicted for the same offences, played a vital role as archers at Agincourt.
Henry was also prepared to intervene personally to resolve disputes before they spiralled out of control. A revealing anecdote in an English chronicle proves that it was a far more terrifying experience to have to answer to the king in person than to his courts. Two feuding knights from Yorkshire and Lancashire were ordered before the king when he was just sitting down to dinner. Whose men are you? he asked them. Yours, they replied. And whose men had they raised to fight in their quarrel? Yours, they replied again. “& what authority or comaundement had ye, to raise up my men or my peeple, to fyght & slay eache othyr for your quarel?” Henry demanded, adding that “in this ye are worthy to die.” Unable to answer, the two knights humbly begged his pardon. Henry then swore “by the feith that he owed to God and to Seint George” that if they could not resolve their quarrel before he had finished his dish of oysters, “they should be hanged both two.” Faced with such a choice, the knights were immediately persuaded to settle their differences, but they were not yet off the hook. The king swore his favourite oath again and told them that if they, or any other lord within or without his realm “whatsomeever they were,” ever caused any insurrection or death of his subjects again, “they should die, accordyng to the lawe.”23 By sheer force of personality, Henry succeeded in establishing and keeping the king’s peace to a degree that was unprecedented, especially for a monarch who spent much of his reign absent from his kingdom. In doing so, he earned himself a reputation that extended far beyond the shores of England and even eclipsed his military successes in contemporary eyes. “He was a prince of justice, not only in himself, for the sake of example, but also towards others, according to equity and right,” wrote the Burgundian chronicler, Georges Chastellain; “he upheld no one through favour, nor did he allow wrong to go unpunished out of kinship.”24
Given Henry’s determination to promote reconciliation and restore peace and order to the country, it is ironic that the first serious challenge to his authority came not from one of his father’s enemies but from a trusted member of his own household. Sir John Oldcastle was a veteran of the Welsh wars who had served as a Member of Parliament for, and sheriff of, his home county of Herefordshire. It is a measure of Henry’s confidence in him that in 1411 Oldcastle had been chosen as one of the leaders of Arundel’s expedition to France to aid the Burgundians.25 Like many of the wealthy, literate and intelligent knights attached to the royal court under Richard II and Henry IV, Oldcastle had strong Lollard sympathi
es, and it was these that brought him into trouble. Lollardy was a precursor of the Protestant faith. Its roots lay in anticlericalism—anger and frustration at the wealth and privileges enjoyed by the Church and the inadequacy and corruption of its ministers—which had been strengthened by the growth in literacy among the gentry and urban middle classes. Knights, esquires, merchants, tradesmen and their wives who were capable of reading their own Bibles and, increasingly, owned or had access to a copy in English, were inclined to be more critical of the Church’s failure to measure up to the apostolic standards of the New Testament. More importantly, instead of simply looking to reform the Church, they were also starting to develop an alternative theology that made the Bible the sole authority for the Christian faith, rather than the Church and its hierarchy. They began to question, and even to deny, the central teachings of the Church. The most extreme among them believed that the Church had no valid role to play as an intermediary between the individual and God. They therefore rejected the seven sacraments performed by priests (baptism, confession, eucharist, confirmation, marriage, ordination and extreme unction) and anything which relied on the intercession of saints, such as praying to them, venerating their images or even going on pilgrimage. In the forthright words of Hawisia Mone, a convicted Lollard in the diocese of Norwich, going on pilgrimage served no purpose except to enrich priests “that be too riche and to make gay tapsters and proude ostelers.” On the evidence of his Canterbury Tales, one feels that Chaucer might not have entirely disagreed with this statement.26
The problem with identifying Lollardy as heresy was that it included many shades of opinion, not all of which fell outside the pale of orthodoxy. Even the new king’s loyalty to the Church could not be taken for granted. His grandfather, John of Gaunt, had been an early patron of John Wycliffe, the Oxford theologian who is regarded as the father of English Lollardy, and employed him to write tracts attacking papal supremacy and clerical immunity from taxation. The Lollards themselves believed that they had enjoyed the support of Henry IV, and Thomas, duke of Clarence, owned a copy of the Wycliffite Bible.27
Oldcastle’s heretical views were not in doubt. He was the “principal receiver, patron, protector, and defender” of Lollardy in England and was in touch with similar movements abroad: he had even offered the military support of his own followers to King Wenceslaus, who was carrying out a programme of seizure of Church lands in Bohemia.28 Tried and convicted of heresy, Oldcastle refused to renounce his faith and was sentenced to be burnt at the stake. At the king’s express request, a stay of execution was granted so that Henry could try to persuade his friend to submit, but before the forty days’ grace had elapsed, Oldcastle escaped from the Tower of London.29
It was at this point that what should have been a purely religious affair became a political one. Instead of going into hiding or fleeing abroad, Oldcastle decided to stage a coup d’état.30 The plot was to capture the king and his brothers by disguising himself and a group of his fellow conspirators as mummers for the annual Twelfth Night celebrations at Eltham Palace in January 1414. At the same time, Lollards from all over the country were to gather in St Giles’s Field, just outside the city gates, ready to take London by force. These plans were foiled by Henry’s spies, who discovered the plot and forewarned the king. (They, and two informers, were swiftly and generously rewarded by the king.)31 The court removed from Eltham and as the little bands of Lollards, armed with swords and bows, drifted into St Giles’s Field from as far away as Leicestershire and Derby, they were ambushed and overpowered. Oldcastle’s predictions that one hundred thousand men would rally to his cause were hopelessly exaggerated. Some seventy or eighty were captured, of whom forty-five were promptly executed as traitors; significantly, only seven were burnt as heretics.
It rapidly became apparent that Oldcastle’s revolt had little popular support, and having reacted swiftly and harshly to the initial threat Henry was now prepared to be merciful to the individuals involved. On 28 March 1414 he issued a general pardon to all rebels who submitted before Midsummer and in the following December he extended this to include those still in prison and even to Oldcastle himself, who had escaped capture and gone into hiding.32
Oldcastle’s revolt had precisely the opposite effect to the one that he had intended. Lollardy did not become a national state-endorsed religion, nor could it be any longer regarded as purely a Church affair that was irrelevant to the secular authorities. Instead, it had now become synonymous with treason and rebellion. One of the first acts passed by the next parliament which met at Leicester in 1414, just after the revolt, required all royal officials, from the chancellor right down to the king’s bailiffs, to investigate heresy and assist the ecclesiastical courts in bringing Lollards to justice. This resulted in a significant increase in heresy trials, convictions and burnings at the stake. Lollardy did not die out altogether, but it was disgraced, discredited and driven deeper underground.33
The crushing of Oldcastle’s revolt marked the victory of orthodoxy over heterodoxy. It was also a personal triumph for Henry V. He had survived an attempted coup by acting decisively, and in the process he had placed the Church under an obligation to himself which he did not hesitate to call in. The Agincourt campaign would be financed from the coffers of the English clergy and supported by the Church’s prayers, blessings and propaganda. The new king had demonstrably fulfilled his coronation oath to defend the Church and would continue to do so. Even Thomas Arundel, the archbishop of Canterbury, was forced to admit (perhaps through gritted teeth) that Henry V was “the most Christian king in Christ, our most noble king, the zealous supporter of the laws of Christ.”34 It was an accolade that would be repeatedly bestowed by many contemporaries and it was a significant one: it was yet another title that Henry V had taken from the king of France.35
CHAPTER FOUR
THE DIPLOMATIC EFFORT
Henry V had been king of England for only a few weeks when there was a dramatic turn of events in France. The uneasy peace that had existed between Armagnacs and Burgundians since the previous autumn exploded in the sort of mob violence which would be a hallmark of the French Revolution in the 1790s. On 28 April 1413 a Parisian rabble burst into the dauphin’s palace, the Hôtel de Guienne, overcame his guards and seized the dauphin himself. Not long afterwards the same fate befell his parents, and the king, again in a scene that strikingly anticipated the 1790s, was forced to put on the revolutionary emblem, the white hood.1
The revolt was led by one Simon Caboche, who, aptly enough, was a butcher by trade. It rapidly emerged that like most Parisians he was also a Burgundian by sympathy. All the Armagnacs who held senior positions in the royal households, including Edouard, duke of Bar, Louis, duke of Bavaria (who was the queen’s brother), and thirteen or fourteen of the queen’s ladies-in-waiting, were thrown into prison; some were murdered, others were executed, all were replaced by Burgundians. It was, as one Burgundian sympathiser coolly remarked, the best thing that had happened in Paris for the past twenty years.2
John the Fearless may have instigated these events because he felt he was losing control of his sixteen-year-old son-in-law, the dauphin, who was showing increasing signs of independence and had just dismissed his Burgundian chancellor. If he did, he was soon to reap the whirlwind. The dauphin bitterly resented the public humiliation that he had been forced to endure and determined to ally himself more firmly with the Armagnacs. And in May, his father, Charles VI, unexpectedly recovered his sanity. It was only a temporary reprieve, but it was enough to allow him to take advantage of a reaction against the bloodiness of the Cabochien coup to impose an equally temporary peace.3 By August, it was clear that the Armagnacs, with the help of the dauphin, were regaining control of Paris. Their device, or badge, emblazoned with the words “the right way,” began to reappear throughout the city and was again worn openly on their supporters’ clothing. The dauphin ordered the arrest of some of the most prominent Cabochiens and began replacing Burgundian officials with Armagnacs onc
e more. In the face of growing rumours that John the Fearless himself would be seized and made to stand trial for the murder of Louis d’Orléans, the duke decided that discretion was the better part of valour and took flight for Flanders. He did so without seeking the king’s permission to leave, as he was obliged to do, and, as his chancellor wrote with barely disguised pique to the duchess, “without telling me or his other officials, whom he has left in this town you can imagine in what peril.”4
For the moment, the Armagnacs enjoyed the sweet taste of victory again. Charles, duke of Orléans, made a triumphal entry into Paris, riding side by side with the dukes of Anjou and Bourbon and the count of Alençon. They were joined a little later by the two Gascons who had proved such a thorn in the side of the English in Aquitaine, Charles d’Orléans’ father-in-law, Bernard, count of Armagnac, and Charles d’Albret, who was now restored to his post as constable of France. Although peace was officially proclaimed, all Paris was full of armed men, and every single official appointed by the duke of Burgundy was ousted and replaced by an Armagnac.5
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