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

by Mortimer, Ian

  On the political front, Henry now experienced an amazing piece of luck. On 22 March the eleven-year-old James Stewart, son and heir of the king of Scotland, had been captured in a boat off the coast of Norfolk. Two weeks later, the boy’s father, King Robert III, died. That meant the new king of Scotland was in Henry’s custody at the Tower (along with Glendower’s son). Not surprisingly, Scottish politics fell into disarray.

  On the personal front, however, Henry’s luck dissolved, for his health collapsed. After the end of the first session, he took the royal barge down the river to Eltham, where he celebrated Easter (11 April).20 Two days later he made a grant to his physician, Louis Recoches.21 He stayed at Eltham as long as possible before leaving for the Garter festivities, only embarking at Greenwich on the 22nd.22 His bargemen transported him as far as Kingston upon Thames, where he stayed the night, being conveyed the rest of the way to Windsor the next day, St George’s Day itself.23 At Windsor his health rapidly deteriorated. On 28 April, two days after parliament was meant to have resumed sitting, he wrote to the council from a lodge in the park, saying that a sudden illness had attacked his leg, and his doctors had advised him not to travel by horse, in order ‘to avoid the grave peril’. He added that he hoped to be at Staines by the evening and to travel by water to London, arriving in three or four days. Later that same day he wrote saying that his leg was now so bad that he could not travel at all. He directed parliament to discuss the safety of Gascony and to make arrangements for conducting his daughter Philippa to Denmark, as he had agreed she should be married there in early May.24

  It is unlikely that Henry reached London until 4 May. When he did arrive, he stayed at the hostel of Thomas Langley, at Dowgate (at the bottom of what is known today as Dowgate Hill), and not at Westminster. From Dowgate he could easily travel the short distance to Westminster by boat, and at the same time keep his distance from the parliament. There is no doubt that this was due to his continuing illness. In his letter to the council he describes the ailment as ‘une grande accesse’, which relates to a sudden illness in general, a fit or an ague (intermittent fever), correlating with his inability to ride a horse, and reminding us of his burning skin complaint of the previous summer.25 Given Henry’s long stay at Kenilworth after the Welsh campaign of 1405, and his continued presence near the river after his return to London, it is likely that his skin problem had never entirely gone away.26 The references to his ‘uncurable’ skin disease in the chronicles (albeit misinterpreted as leprosy) further support the idea that this was an ongoing illness. So too does the reference to ‘his physicians’ (in the plural). The royal household ordinances made provision for just one physician and one surgeon.27 All this paints a picture of Henry quietly fighting both his own body as well as his enemies.

  Henry attended the second session of parliament on at least nine occasions.28 The rest of the time he stayed at Thomas Langley’s house. He communicated with his council through letters sealed with his privy seal, and did little in person. On the days when he attended parliament he seems to have stayed a short while and then returned to Dowgate. The pattern is so unlike his usual behaviour that we can only conclude that his illness had become his preoccupation. Indeed, his physical illness and the increased stress of running the government in such circumstances together seem to have led to a sudden crisis of confidence. On 22 May he appeared in parliament and directed that a bill he had drawn up should be read out on his behalf. In it he asked to be relieved of certain aspects of government ‘because he alone would not be able fully to devote his attentions to the same as much as he would like’.29 His bill went on to name his council, hoping that thereby ‘he might be further relieved in his royal person of the aforesaid concerns’. Most significantly, the council was given the power to endorse or refuse bills issued by the king’s officers, acting almost as a collective regent. On 7 June, Henry attended parliament to hear the magnates and prelates acknowledge his son Henry as the heir apparent, with his male heirs succeeding after him. In the context of his illness and the fact that the prince had already been recognised as heir apparent (in the first parliament of his reign), the reason would appear to have been Henry’s own anticipation that he might not live to see his fortieth birthday.

  The initiative in this second session of parliament clearly lay with the king, or, rather, the king’s illness and stress. The measures of 22 May were not a parliamentary solution to the king’s problem but his own suggestion, as recorded on the roll. He still had not received the grant of taxation for which he had originally summoned parliament, even though three months had passed. In that time he had heard the commons speak of their wish that he should deliver them good government, and had heard them speak disparagingly of him personally. He had largely resigned his authority, putting the government into the hands of the council. If the 22 May bill had been an attempt to appease the commons, Henry’s agreement should have been sufficient to unlock the taxation he required. But the commons were still not satisfied. All they granted was an extra shilling in the pound on the duty on foreign merchants’ goods for the defence of the realm. According to an oblique reference in one chronicle, they were angry that, despite their large grant of taxation in the October 1404 parliament, Henry had failed to take back all the royal grants made since 1367.30 On 19 June, Sir John Tiptoft delivered the commons’ demand that they should be permitted to audit the accounts of the two war treasurers appointed in October 1404. This is the occasion when Henry is said to have tersely replied, ‘kings are not wont to render account’. Nevertheless, the commons insisted that he allow them to appoint a committee of enquiry. Henry had to give in. With no taxation forthcoming, he adjourned the parliament until 13 October.

  *

  As the members of parliament returned to their homes to oversee the harvest, Henry set about preparing to accompany his daughter, Philippa, to Lynn, from where she would sail to Denmark. Although she should have been there two months earlier, he did not rush. However, it is very interesting that he did not sail to King’s Lynn; he went by road. Had his legs been as sore as they were in April, when the short trip from Windsor to Staines was beyond him, he would not have been able to undertake such a journey. As it was, he not only undertook it, he rode or was carried at nearly the same speed as he had travelled when fully fit.31

  Yet something was profoundly wrong with Henry. On the way to King’s Lynn he made a sudden trip to Walsingham, where there were two holy wells capable of effecting miraculous cures. Very shortly afterwards, having said goodbye to his daughter for the last time, he swiftly travelled to Bardney Abbey, near Lincoln, where he locked himself away in the abbey library. Not only that, he actually kissed the relics kept in the church there, to receive their full healing power.32 Bardney Abbey held the tomb of St Oswald, a northern Christian king killed in battle whose bones had effected many cures. In the library Henry could have read about St Oswald’s shrine curing children of fevers, and driving devils out of frenzied men, and even bringing men back from the point of death.33 After this trip Henry returned south: he made no move towards Wales, even though Lord Bardolph and the earl of Northumberland were known to be consorting in arms with Glendower. The clergy had agreed to a grant in Henry’s favour, and a substantial loan had been raised too, but Henry himself seems to have lost the will to fight.

  The evidence suggests that in 1406 Henry was coming to terms with the fact that he would never be well again. All his life he had been very active, a jouster, a crusader, a soldier and a man who liked to take charge of things personally. Now his entire world had been thrown apart by his illness. If we are right in interpreting this as having been ongoing and worsening since 1405, a temporary abatement in the symptoms (allowing him to ride) would not necessarily have led to restored confidence and vigour. It was the future which mattered, and the future looked bleak. Never would he do what his grandfather and uncle had done, and ride at the head of an army into France. Never would he defeat Glendower on the battlefield. And it was all due to an i
llness, God’s will and divine punishment. With the deaths of Richard II and an archbishop on his conscience, Henry may well have feared that he deserved such affliction. As we shall see, the language of his last will (written just over two years later) strongly repeats how sinful he was, and how he had misspent his life, at a time when such sentiments were anything but orthodox. It would thus seem that almost every aspect of his life was in turmoil – his identity as a man of action, his outlook on government and his relationship with God – and he had little to look forward to but pain, death and damnation.

  This defeatism was very much in evidence when he returned to parliament in October. He was late in arriving. When he did turn up, news came of an attack by the duke of Burgundy on Calais, and it would appear that Henry postponed parliament to allow his council to deal with that threat.34 When they reassembled on 18 November, the commons immediately launched a bitter series of criticisms of the king. They accused him of trying to divert the money intended for the defence of the seas into the exchequer. The Speaker asked him to force the lords to explain how ‘evil governance’ had been allowed to prevail. The lords and commons were both adamant that he should change his settlement of the Crown to allow daughters to inherit the throne. The discussions grew more and more bitter. The commons were deeply unhappy at the thought that Henry was proposing to resign power to a council composed of his friends and relations, over whom they had even less control than they did over the king. Henry was asked to reappoint his council, and he did so on 27 November, in an almost unchanged format.35 That was not good enough. Over the following days the commons forced him to sack the faithful Hugh Waterton, as well as Sir John Cheyne and Sir Arnold Savage. They also sacked Henry’s old friend Richard Kingston as treasurer of the household and brought in Tiptoft to replace him. And they started to rewrite the clauses governing Henry’s resignation of his administrative duties. What they proposed was so radical that Henry lost his temper and threatened them with a trial of strength. But strength was the one thing he no longer had, and he was left isolated, weak and unable to resist their will.

  The ‘Thirty-One Articles’, to which he eventually agreed, was not his own solution to the problem of his illness but that of parliament. Henry would have to devote two days a week (Wednesdays and Fridays) to seeing his council and receiving petitions. He was to intervene in no quarrels, even those of his own household, but was to submit them to the arbitration of the council. The council was to take over the administration of Henry’s household, chamber and wardrobe offices. He was not allowed to make gifts to anyone. He was given just £6,000 to cover his household expenses (half the drastically reduced allowance stipulated in the January 1404 parliament). He was not to intervene in any disputes which could be dealt with by the common law. The queen was to pay a sum out of her allowance for the time she spent with the king in his household. Henry was to be subjected to the sort of supervision given to Richard II as a ten-year-old boy. And all he could do was to assent, for the sake of obtaining the essential tax. On 22 December the commons agreed to a single tenth and fifteenth. An Act was passed against religious and political sedition, and parliament began to disperse, leaving only a committee of members to oversee the accurate enrolment of proceedings.

  Henry went to Eltham to spend Christmas with his queen. He was physically weak and despondent. He had let his and his family’s royal authority be trampled by parliament. Nor had it resulted in unlocking sufficient funds for the exchequer: the grant of taxation had not been that generous, and the long sitting had been very costly. The expenses of the seventy-four county members alone came to more than £2,500; those of the burgesses may have amounted to considerably more.36 The chronicler Walsingham suggested that the total cost amounted to the whole value of the tax, which, though an exaggeration, makes a point.37 The disputations had added nothing to the standing of the royal family. The council instructed Henry that, as soon as Christmas was out of the way, he should take himself off into the country somewhere, and live quietly and cheaply.

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  Ironically, at the moment when Henry’s reputation was at its lowest, a figure from his glorious heyday came to England. Lucia Visconti arrived to marry the earl of Kent at Southwark on 24 January. Henry gave her away at the church door.38 He could hardly have avoided reflecting on how much had happened in the fourteen years since they had last met. Then he had been the chivalric hero in his mid-twenties, an earl in the prime of life, and she, at twenty-one, had swooned. Now she was in her mid-thirties and past her prime, and he was an incapacitated king heavily reliant on his second wife and his council, with more problems than he could have believed he would ever have had to face in 1393. If she did not avert her eyes from his out of respect for his royal dignity, what did she see? That through this man she might have been a queen? Or that she could have been married to a majestic invalid? Whatever her thoughts, Henry must have silently asked himself which of the two was uppermost in her mind.

  After the wedding Henry returned to Westminster. In the royal chapel on 30 January he directed Thomas Langley to relinquish the great seal to his old friend Archbishop Arundel. Arundel thereby became not only the most prominent member of the council but chancellor too. It heralded the height of his political career: for the next few months he was effectively the ruler of England, a sort of prime minister. Together with the prince, who now attended the royal council, he set about reforming the government. Money from direct taxation – the tenths and the fifteenths – could henceforth be directed to pay for the expenses of the royal household.39 Revenues which had in the past been paid in cash to the household were now required to be paid directly to the exchequer. Payments from the treasury were to be authorised more regularly. The budget was subjected to a process of prioritisation, with defence being given top priority. And through Sir John Tiptoft, treasurer of the royal household, he managed to reduce Henry’s household expenses by ten per cent. In this way, the government’s finances were gradually brought under control.40

  The employment of Archbishop Arundel was a pragmatic move on Henry’s part. It marks a point of realisation that he could not govern personally, however well-meaning he was. He could not control all the departments of the household, nor could he dictate national priorities and expect his treasurer to meet all the expenses. Most of all, he realised that his very attempt to govern in this manner allowed his critics to attack him. Had he been successful and glorious in his military expeditions he might have been forgiven, but by 1406 it was impossible to ignore that he had failed to deliver on a number of his own policies, most notably Wales. The Thirty-One Articles, coupled with his physical weakness, seem finally to have shocked Henry into doing what he had always publicly promised to do – to rule with the advice of the great men of the realm – and in the way that the commons expected him to do it: by openly subjecting himself to their counsel. To oppose such measures would only result in more criticism, whereas, by giving up control and working with those who sought to rebuild the royal finances and restore trust in the government, he might yet recover the dignity of the Crown.

  In this way, Henry came to rely more closely than ever on Archbishop Arundel, whose political fortunes had been intertwined with his own now for twenty years. As chancellor, the archbishop dominated the council, both intellectually and politically, as evidenced in a number of council proceedings.41 Such pre-eminence led to clashes between him and the twenty-year-old prince, Henry of Monmouth. Young Henry may have seen the limitations placed on his father as a dangerous precedent for controls which might one day be placed upon him. In addition, it was almost inevitable that questions would arise over whether or not a chancellor-archbishop had authority to direct a prince. In February 1407 Arundel confirmed the Act legitimising the Beauforts, Henry’s half-brothers, but he introduced a clause which barred them from the throne. The Beauforts, thus slighted, seem to have taken against the archbishop, and supported the prince against him.42

  This shift of the political initiative to the arc
hbishop and prince, coupled with his illness, meant that the year 1407 was not one of great activity for Henry. Abiding by the council’s direction that he should reside cheaply away from London, he stayed at Hertford Castle for much of February and March. Although he stated in a letter dated 5 February that he wished to lead a military campaign against the French, either from Calais or in Gascony, this was quickly scotched by the council.43 In April he went to Windsor for the Garter feast, and stayed there a month. Affairs of state – dealing with the mutiny of the Calais garrison, for example, who seized the wool of English merchants in lieu of their unpaid wages – were mainly handled by the council in his absence. It would appear that when he did try to act in defiance of the Thirty-One Articles, Archbishop Arundel took measures to undermine him. On 20 April a writ was sent to the exchequer ‘from the king’ – for which read ‘from Arundel’ – demanding that the Articles be properly observed by officers even if the king were to issue a writ to the contrary.44 Arundel was determined that Henry would swallow his reforming medicine, every last drop.

  The council sat continually for nine weeks, during which time Henry remained in the Thames area, presumably receiving petitions on Wednesdays and Fridays, as he had promised to do. After this period, in June, he travelled north to the Lancastrian estates, keeping in touch with the archbishop by letter. Despite the distance, the archbishop continued to rule him. On 1 June Henry declared that he would lead an army into Wales; nine days later he retracted this, probably on the advice of the archbishop, who knew that Henry was neither physically nor politically strong enough to lead a campaign. When Henry’s old comrade-in-arms Sir Thomas Rempston drowned in the Thames, and the duke of York was appointed by the council to replace him as constable of the Tower, Henry ordered his most important prisoners (namely the young king of Scotland and Glendower’s son) to be taken from the Tower to Nottingham Castle, indicating that he remained uncertain about the duke’s loyalty. Again, he was overruled by the council. A third example of Henry’s plans being thwarted came after the archbishop had already summoned the next parliament to meet, at Gloucester. Although the writs for this had been despatched on 26 August, Henry declared on 22 September that he would lead a force to help the prince in the siege of Aberystwyth.45 There is no doubt that he was ardent for glory, and longed to be present at the surrender of Aberystwyth Castle, but equally there is no doubt that he was financially and politically ill equipped to take arms in person. He might have been motivated by a wish to be seen leading his men even at the point of death, like his great-great-grandfather, King Edward I, exactly a century earlier. But in 1407 there was no room for such chivalric histrionics, and Archbishop Arundel was quick to make sure the council’s careful financial measures were not all blown in a rash campaign.