The Fears of Henry IV: The Life of England's Self-Made King

by Mortimer, Ian

  Today we are familiar with the image of an embattled political leader chairing a round of meetings with his cabinet in order to stave off opposition within parliament. In January 1404 this was unusual. Negotiations about finance clashed with the very dignity and majesty of kingship. But the last four years had taught Henry that he needed to play the political game in order to maintain the confidence of the people. Thus he decided to pre-empt the likely complaints about another request for taxation by summoning a meeting of the council to Sutton on Friday 11 January, three days before parliament was due to meet. Among other things he probably outlined the amount of money he required and the novel way in which he intended to raise it, through a form of land-based income tax. A shilling on every pound of annual income was to be levied – a rate of five per cent – with each holder of a knight’s fee being liable for £1. Those without a land estate were to be taxed at five per cent on the value of their goods and chattels. In order to get all the possible opponents on board from the start, the Speaker of the 1401 parliament, Sir Arnold Savage, who had been so harsh in his criticism of Henry’s requests for money, was also invited to attend the council meeting.

  On Monday the 14th parliament assembled at Westminster. Henry’s half-brother, Henry Beaufort, delivered the opening speech. After his initial sermon, he listed the reasons for summoning the parliament. According to a newsletter preserved in Durham, the first reason he gave was that Henry had received further challenges from the duke of Orléans and the count of St Pol, which were ‘a great outrage and disgrace to our lord the king, and a shame and offence to the whole realm’. Other issues included the defence of three regions – Gascony, the south coast of England and the Scottish Marches – the government of Ireland (following the return to England of Prince Thomas), the ordinances for Wales, the reimbursement of costs incurred in the suppression of the Percy revolt, and the trial of the earl of Northumberland. Sir Arnold Savage was elected Speaker the following day.

  Henry may have thought that such a long list of threats to the safety of the realm should have been sufficient to consolidate the varying interests in parliament. He was in for a shock. Savage, far from taking the king’s message to the commons, now took it upon himself again to lead them in defying royal policy. When the royal council requested a grant of money in order to meet all these needs, Savage turned against Henry. ‘The king has sufficient wealth to support and provide for all these policies, if he would be well-guided’, he declared, ‘and for this reason do not trust in having any subsidy from the commons until we know how the king’s wealth has been spent, and in what manner.’ He proceeded to demand information about grants to various ladies amounting to £50,000 per year and a single grant to Francis the Lombard of £8,000 per year, through his letters patent. Speaking directly to the king, he said, ‘you should be well advised by your high council on these aforesaid matters, because your commons have no wish to bear as much as they have previously’.

  Henry must have been dismayed, and searched for a response. ‘It would be a great shame and disgrace to repeal and annul our letters patent’, he said, not very convincingly.

  Savage did not back down. The matter could easily be amended, he said, without annulling the letters, by paying recipients of £100 annuities just £10. ‘And therefore you should be advised by your council to make the best ordinances that you can for the aforesaid matters, because your commons are very discontented that the goods of the realm are in such a way given to those who will never bring it honour or profit.’

  Henry’s powers of argument seem to have deserted him. All he could do was express his ‘amazement that the commons were so ill-disposed towards him’.

  ‘It is nothing to wonder at’, Savage replied, ‘because the whole realm knows that every year you have had a tenth and a fifteenth from your lieges. In addition, they are often harassed and compelled to take part in expeditions in Wales and elsewhere without any wage, but at their own expense. Besides, your ministers and purveyors do not pay anything for the provisions taken for your use, to such an extent that one of your ministers owes various people £6,000 or more for provisions, and this is a key reason why the commons are not as well-disposed towards you as they were previously. There are also certain lords of your council who lead and advise you with a very evil intention, against the honour of your person and the profit of the realm, and of this you will be informed more fully later; and for this reason may it please you to discuss all the aforesaid matters with your wise council, and also to order your affairs in the way that your commons outline to your council, and then you will enjoy peace and quiet within your realm. And if not, we do not see how your realm will be well-governed.’1

  This stunning rebuke, coming from a man he had been hoping would help him, left Henry speechless. It was a direct threat to royal government, questioning his fitness for the throne. Appalled, Henry rose and left the chamber, just as Richard II had done when his fitness to rule had been similarly attacked in 1386.

  Henry, however, was a different shape of character from Richard. Rather than smoulder in ire at Eltham, waiting for a grovelling apology for the insult to his royal dignity, he sent his chancellor, Henry Beaufort, and the treasurer, Lord Roos, back to parliament to explain in more detail the reasons why he needed this grant. Savage, having attacked royal policy in the king’s presence, had no compunction about speaking his mind to the chancellor and treasurer. He demanded that the royal accounts be subjected to public scrutiny and asked again that a committee of commons should be appointed to discuss business in conjunction with the lords.

  Over the course of five or six days, Henry came to terms with this new wave of parliamentary opposition, and decided to deal with the matter personally. He came back into parliament on 28 January only to hear Savage demand that the lords should voice openly their views on the state of the king and the realm. This was a tacit reference to the rumours that other lords besides the Percys were of the opinion that Henry was guilty of murder and perjury. Immediately Archbishop Arundel sternly rebuked Savage. Savage had his answer ready. ‘It would be more honourable for these lords to make clear their wills at this point than to be found disloyal afterwards.’ But Henry had recovered from his shock and was prepared to argue his case.

  ‘As regards my person’, said Henry, ‘it is known to the whole realm that I am the true heir of Lancaster. It is also known how I was driven out of the realm, and how I was returned to it, and how afterwards I was chosen by all the lords of the realm to be its governor and king; and for those reasons it seems to me that I have a good right.’

  Savage realised he had been neatly side-stepped. If he wished to urge the disloyalty of some lords further, he would end up speaking on their behalf, leaving himself open to accusations of treason. All he could do was to request that the champion of royal opposition, the earl of Northumberland, be brought into the parliament to plead his case, ‘and if it were found that he had trespassed in any way against the Crown, that Henry should, of his special grace, grant him a charter of pardon, and if no fault should be found in him, that it should then please him to cause him to be restored to all his lands just as he had been before’.

  Northumberland had already been granted his life; Savage’s request was tantamount to letting him go unpunished for impugning Henry’s character and title and plotting rebellion. Henry immediately replied that he did not want to grant such a request before he had had a chance to consult his council on the matter. He adjourned the meeting.

  It was the right move at the right time. It calmed the situation. Pardoning Northumberland was no longer the outright demand of a hostile commons, it became a matter of royal grace. Henry rode to Windsor, where the earl was being held, and told him to present a petition seeking a pardon. He also invited the earl to ride with him to London, to present his petition in parliament. There the lords heard the earl’s case, and conveniently deemed him guilty of trespass but not treason, and sentenced him to be fined. Henry gracefully forgave the earl the f
ine, and formally accepted his renewed allegiance. With that, there was no further questioning of Henry’s royal dignity. The figurehead of opposition was humbled before Henry. At last, three weeks after parliament had opened, the commons could now be expected to discuss the key issue, Henry’s new tax.

  It was not an easy discussion. The commons wanted concessions on a scale personally humiliating to Henry. They demanded that four members of his household, including his confessor, be sacked. Henry objected that they had done nothing wrong, but right or wrong had nothing to do with it; the commons were principally interested in exploring their ability to control the king. They demanded that all foreigners be excluded from the royal household, with the exception of a very few personal assistants to Queen Joan. They demanded a limit on royal expenditure through the household, slashing its budget from £42,000 per year to £12,100.2 They demanded that Henry name his council in parliament. To all these measures Henry had to agree, in order to get his grant of taxation. When, finally, the tax was granted, the commons insisted that four war treasurers should receive the money and that they would ensure it was only used to fight Glendower and to defend the coasts and the Scottish Marches. Furthermore, all reference to this tax was to be wiped entirely from the written records of government, including even the parliament roll.

  In the midst of these discussions a letter arrived, purporting to be from Richard II in Scotland. So popular had the rallying cry ‘King Richard is alive’ become that it had become expedient to put forward a living ex-king to be a focus for the dissent. The man chosen, Thomas Ward of Trumpington, was welcomed at the Scottish court. Jean Creton went to visit him there in 1402, believing at the outset that he was genuinely Richard II, only to find later that year that the man was an impostor. Nevertheless, the false Richard did not actually need to do anything in order to satisfy his supporters; he had merely to exist as a rival king in order to sap the strength of Henry’s kingship. The letters now received in parliament were sealed with Richard’s privy seal, which had been removed in 1399 by William Serle. With such letters in circulation Henry could do nothing but summon Richard’s erstwhile keeper into parliament and ask him what he thought of them. The man declared he would fight a duel with anyone who declared Richard II was alive.3 It was only superficially a solution to the problem. As Henry was well aware, his real enemy in this debate could not be harmed, being less substantial and more popular than a ghost.

  The parliament of January 1404 was humiliating from beginning to end. Ironically, the commons were only further weakening Henry’s kingship by placing such fetters on his expenditure. For the new tax was very far from being sufficient to solve Henry’s problems; it probably raised no more than £10,000.4 As a consequence many annuities of loyal crown servants could not be paid, and the officers responsible for the financial administration of the kingdom were faced with ever-increasing debts. Quite what the new queen must have thought on learning that the majority of her servants had to leave the country we can only guess, but it is likely that Henry bore that shame particularly heavily, especially considering his comments to Savage about the shame in annulling the ‘grants to ladies’ in the early days of the parliament.

  Was it all worth it? No doubt Henry would have said yes, it was, for the simple reason that he had survived. He had been drawn into a political situation similar to Richard II’s in 1386, and yet he had managed to avert a rising similar to that of the Lords Appellant which followed that assembly. He had stooped so far and compromised his royal dignity far more than Richard would have done. And whatever humiliations he had had to endure, he was the stronger for surviving them. He was learning new political lessons with every blow struck at him. The most telling sign of this is the list of councillors which he was forced to announce in parliament. It included the usual intimates, namely two of his half-brothers (Henry and John Beaufort), his brother-in-law Westmorland and his close friend Archbishop Arundel. But it also included Lancastrian retainers of the sort who had come in for so much criticism in the parliament of 1401, such as Hugh Waterton and John Norbury. Similarly, the Lancastrian Sir Thomas Erpingham had quietly been reappointed steward of the household the previous November. The council and household were packed with his supporters. And, most interestingly, among all these Lancastrians and old friends there was the lone critical figure of Sir Arnold Savage. Far from holding a grudge against him, Henry sought to put his critical faculties to constructive use. Where Richard would have held a grudge, and looked for a chance to execute a man who dared to speak so harshly against him, Henry sought an opportunity to accommodate the man’s skills within the government. That difference, the ability of the tree to bend and sway in the storm, was one of the key reasons why Henry survived and Richard did not.

  *

  Henry went down to Eltham for Easter (30 March) 1404, but was back at Westminster shortly afterwards. On 15 April – his thirty-seventh birthday – the French invaded Dartmouth. The following day, the duke of Burgundy, who had hitherto restrained his nephew, the duke of Orléans, from taking France into war against England, fell mortally ill. The day after that, Henry learned that a new plot was being hatched against him. Out of the frying pan of parliament and into the fires of invasion and rebellion: the spring of 1404 was shaping up to be a sequence of renewed challenges.

  The plot of Margaret, countess of Oxford, was the sixth against Henry in four years.5 In some ways it was the strangest of them all. It involved a series of local prelates and the countess inviting the duke of Orléans and the count of St Pol to invade England by a certain route in Essex the previous December, and to march on Henry in the name of King Richard.6 That had not happened, of course, but still the plot developed as the plotters involved more and more people, shifting their expectations to a projected meeting between the supposedly living Richard II and Owen Glendower at Northampton on Midsummer’s Day 1404. The first Henry seems to have known of it was on 17 April, when he despatched his loyal esquire Elmyn Leget and Sir William Coggeshall to Essex to arrest three men: John Staunton, a servant of the countess of Oxford; John Fowler, a canon of St Osyth; and John Nele, a goldsmith. At the same time he ordered a precautionary fleet to assemble at Sandwich.

  By any reckoning, it was a half-baked plan. The plotters themselves seem to have been very patient in their plotting, and we have to suspect that there was a certain degree of catharsis for the countess in the whole process. She was not only the mother of Richard’s favourite, Robert de Vere, but a first cousin of the Percys. Discussing ways to bring down Henry’s government seems to have occupied her agreeably in the wake of Shrewsbury and the loss of her kin. In reality, a French invasion was never likely to rouse the people into deposing Henry; more probably it would have been seen as a threat. If the attack on Dartmouth at this time was anything to go by, the French were not welcome. A well-organised series of defensive measures forced the invaders to fight immediately on landing there. Even the women of Dartmouth joined in the resistance. The French lord of Château Neuf – a man who had been vociferously against Henry – was killed, and many prisoners taken, including the lord’s brothers. Another attack by the count of St Pol on the Isle of Wight similarly met with stiff resistance. Regardless of what the people of Essex might have thought of the idea of an invasion in the name of Richard II, the French parties to the countess’s plot had no illusions about being greeted as a relieving army on landing in southern England.

  Henry himself seems to have given little time to the plot. Long before the first confessions came – Staunton made his at the end of May – he had departed for the north. He wrote to the mayor of Dartmouth from Nottingham on 25 May asking him to bring five of his prisoners for questioning about the French plans.7 Perhaps it was in this way that he learned of the secret negotiations between the French and Glendower, which resulted in a treaty sealed the following month. His enemies were massing against him, and increasingly acting in conjunction with each other. In June the Cistercian abbot of Revesby Abbey (Lincolnshire) preached
a sermon claiming that there were ten thousand men in England who believed ‘King Richard is alive’.8 With East Anglia seething with treason, and the Percy castles in the north holding out against Henry (despite the earl of Northumberland’s surrender), and the enmity of the Welsh, French and Scots, Henry was under attack on all the points of the compass.

  Henry’s motive for moving north had nothing to do with any of these outward pressures. By June he was aware that his resources were woefully inadequate. The January 1404 parliament had practically disempowered him. He thus retreated to his own estates, and tried to live more like a Lancastrian magnate, using the wherewithal of his own manors. By 21 June he was at his castle of Pontefract; after that he kept close to Lancastrian lands for several months, spending almost all of September, for example, at Tutbury Castle. Even this measure did not save sufficient money to alleviate the situation. It was for want of men and money that two of the most important castles in North Wales – Harlech and Aberystwyth – now fell to Glendower. Harlech had been defended by just five Englishmen and sixteen Welshmen.9 They had successfully held the immensely strong castle against Glendower and had even locked up their castellan who had been on the verge of surrendering, but in the end they opted for a peaceful surrender. Henry must have cursed; it would be very difficult to win it back again.

  Henry did have one piece of good luck at this time. William Clifford, a retainer of the earl of Northumberland, brought William Serle to him in June.10 Henry could take a particular satisfaction in administering justice to the man who had personally killed his uncle. More importantly, Serle’s capture was a dramatic propaganda coup. He confessed he had stolen Richard’s signet ring in 1399, and that he had used it to seal the letters from the false Richard in Scotland. He also confessed that he knew the Scottish Richard to be an impostor.11 There was no doubt as to his sentence: he was to be drawn, hanged, disembowelled with his intestines being burnt before him, beheaded and quartered. It was the same full traitor’s death as that suffered by John Hall five years earlier, with one dramatic refinement. He was to be drawn through the streets of all the towns through which he passed on the way to London, going the long way, through East Anglia. Furthermore, he was hanged in each place and cut down while still alive, before being drawn on to the next town.12 In this way, over the next six weeks he was drawn through the streets of Pontefract, Lincoln, Norwich and many towns in Suffolk, Essex and Hertfordshire. Those ten thousand who said ‘King Richard is alive’ were now shown the man who had created the lie. This demonstration went a long way to persuading the clergy and commoners that it would be useless from now on to campaign against Henry in the name of Richard II. Combined with the betrothal of Richard’s widow, Princess Isabella of France, to her cousin Charles, son of the duke of Orléans – by which the French royal family demonstrated that they believed Richard truly to be dead – the name of Richard II was stripped of its political potency. For many years men continued to profess faith in the Scottish impostor but only on an individual basis. Never again was there a serious rebellion in the name of the murdered king.