Although no settlement by Richard exists today, this does not mean one never existed, especially as we should expect it to have been destroyed by Henry. (The originals of both Edward I’s settlement of 1290 and Edward III’s of 1376 have been lost, almost certainly destroyed by those who did not agree with them.) In Richard’s case we may be reasonably confident that he did draw up a settlement of the throne, for two reasons. One is the logical argument outlined above: Henry’s failure to use Edward III’s settlement suggests it had been rendered void by a later royal decree. The second reason is that Richard’s will of 16 April 1399 – through not naming a ‘successor’ but implying his identity – suggests that the succession was clarified by a separate document. The reason for a separate document in 1399 was not just to supplant the 1376 entail; there was a real risk that the ageing and arthritic duke of York might die while Richard was in Ireland, so there was a need for the succession beyond him to be clearly delineated. This was especially the case as the next in line after the duke was his eldest son Edward, who was with Richard in Ireland.
Given these circumstances, it is likely that Richard drew up a settlement of the throne in conjunction with his will in April 1399, in much the same way as Edward III had drawn up his entail in conjunction with his will in October 1376. Richard’s settlement apparently threw out the Lancastrian claim altogether (Henry had been declared a traitor by this time) and designated Edmund of York as the heir apparent, followed by Edward, duke of Aumale (Richard II’s adopted brother). Edward’s younger brother, Richard of Conisburgh, was probably named as well, as third in line and a potential keeper of the realm in case Edward became king while still in Ireland. Evidence that such a settlement was widely known in September 1399 and that it named all three of these men is to be found in the chronicle of Jean Creton, who noted that the assembly of 30 September 1399 was asked whether they would prefer any of these three – Edmund, Edward or Richard of Conisburgh – to be king instead of Henry. The gathering preferred Henry, of course, and in so doing they set aside the king’s right to appoint his successor. In line with this, when Henry himself made provision for the succession in the summer and autumn of 1406, it was done on both occasions in parliament. This, then, was the basis of the Lancastrian claim in 1399: that only males could inherit the throne and all attempts by previous kings to settle the inheritance without consulting parliament were without any basis in law and thus void.
APPENDIX THREE
Henry’s Children
Henry and Mary were married on or about 5 February 1381. For the early years of their marriage, they lived apart. Mary remained with her mother, the countess of Hereford, who was paid for her upkeep.1 Despite this, McFarlane declared that ‘they must have met occasionally, for on 16 April 1382 the countess of Derby gave birth to her first child, a son who not unnaturally failed to live; his father was sixteen, his mother thirteen’.2 This statement is wrong: the child failed to live because he never existed. The source for McFarlane’s statement was Wylie’s Reign of Henry IV, but this was based on a misreading of the original Lancastrian account book in The National Archives (DL 28/1/1). Wylie noted this as:
Data uni armigero voc’ Westcombe de dna’ mea’ Princessa de Bokyngham portanti domino meo nova quod domina sua erat deliberata de puero Apr. 16th, 1382, by order of Duke of Lancaster (66/8).3 [Given to an esquire called Westcombe of my Lady the Princess of Buckingham for bringing to my lord news that his lady was delivered of a boy … £3 6s 8d].
And the next entry reads:
Ap. 18th 1382 at Retheford [Rochford?] magistre pueri predicti (40/-) nurse pueri predicti (26/8).4 [… to the master of the aforesaid boy £2, [to the] nurse of the aforesaid boy £1 6s 8d].
Given the entry relating to the master and nurse, which seems to be a payment made on Henry’s orders, Wylie has presumed that the earlier entry relates to a son of Henry’s by Mary, and that Henry is confirmed as the father by the following entry, in which Henry clearly paid for the nurse. This in turn misled McFarlane and many others less discerning. One recent compilation has given this boy a name, ‘Edward’, and states that he lived for only four days.5
The original document reads as follows:
Et dat[a] uni armigero qui attulit d[omin]o suu[m] annidonu[m] de domina mea Princessa xiijs iiijd … Et dat[a] uni armigero voc[atur] Westcombe d[omi]ni de Bokyngham portanti d[omi]no meo nova quod d[omi]na sua erat deliberat[a] de pu[er]o per mandat[um] d[omi]ni mei Lanc[astrie] xvj die Aprilis lxvjs viijd.6 [And given to an esquire who brought to the lord his New-Year gift from my lady the princess [of Wales] 13s 4d … And given to an esquire called Westcombe of Lord Buckingham for carrying to my lord news that his lady was delivered of a boy, by the order of my lord of Lancaster [dated] 16 April £3 6s 8d].
This shows that the messenger was not Henry’s own but in the service of his uncle Thomas of Woodstock, earl of Buckingham, and that the lady who had given birth to a son was not Henry’s wife but his (i.e. the messenger’s) mistress. This was Henry’s sister-in-law, Eleanor Bohun, countess of Buckingham. The boy was Humphrey, known as Humphrey Bohun, who became duke of Gloucester on Thomas’s death in 1397. Confirmation of this is to be found in Thomas’s Inquisitions Post Mortem, most of which refer to his son as being ‘15 and more’ (i.e. in his sixteenth year) in October–December 1397, and so born in the year October 1381–October 1382.7 The reason for the payment being ordered by John of Gaunt (as duke of Lancaster) to be paid by Henry’s treasurer was that John was with Henry at the time the news arrived. It was also by John’s order (not Henry’s), on 18 April, that the payments were made to the master and nurse of the infant.
Henry’s first son was Henry of Monmouth, later Henry V, who was born in Monmouth Castle on 16 September 1386.8 Until recently this date has been open to question, for other sources record his date of birth as 9 August 1387.9 In Monmouth itself all the public commemorations of the birth of the town’s most famous son are proudly marked ‘1387’. However, Henry IV’s accounts as earl of Derby for 1387–8 clearly show that Thomas, his second son, was born before Christmas 1387, as Christmas livery was purchased for his nurse in that year.10 If Thomas was born before Christmas 1387, his older brother cannot have been born later than the winter of 1386–7. Thus the date of 16 September 1386 must be preferred over 9 August 1387, not as a matter of likelihood but due to the impossibility of the later date applying to Henry. Tallying with this is the fact that Henry IV’s household was at Monmouth in September 1386 and was not there in August 1387.11 In 1403 Henry V made a Maundy payment to seventeen paupers, indicating that he was then in his seventeenth year (following his father’s example), and so born before Maundy Thursday 1387.12 On the strength of this and evidence cited by Christopher Allmand, Henry V’s date of birth is as certain as that of any late medieval king, and the references to his birth in 1387 are incorrect.13
Henry’s second son, Thomas, was born in the autumn of 1387, as stated above. It is possible that the date of 9 August 1387 wrongly assigned to Henry V is in fact the date of Thomas’s birth. It would appear that he was born in London, for Henry made a gift to the midwife who had assisted at the birth in London on 25 November 1387.14 A London birth would also explain why Thomas is never given a topographical surname, except in relation to his family (Thomas of Lancaster).
Henry’s third son, John, was born on 20 June 1389.15 His fourth son, Humphrey, was born in the autumn of 1390. Henry received news of Humphrey’s birth on or about 1 November 1390 at Königsberg, from an English sailor.16 It appears likely therefore that he was born in mid-to-late September 1390.
Henry’s elder daughter, Blanche, was born in the spring of 1392 at Walmsford, near Peterborough.17 Henry’s account for 1391–2 refers to payments for gowns for his sons and Blanche’s nurse in May 1392. No payments for her appear in relation to Christmas 1391, so she was not born before the end of that year.
It was in the summer of 1394 that Mary (Henry’s wife) died, giving birth to their youngest daughter, Philippa. Giv
en that the child survived, Mary probably died after the actual birth rather than during it. Thus the date of her death is the nearest we can get to a reliable date of birth for Philippa. We currently cannot be more precise than a little before 6 July, the day Mary was buried at Leicester.18 The ODNB gives 4 July as the date of her death.
In 1401 Henry had an illegitimate son, Edmund Lebourde, by an unknown woman. The boy was raised in England and educated in London. Henry wrote to Pope John XXIII to grant a dispensation for him to enter the Church in late 1411, and this was granted on 15 January 1412. Nothing more is known of him.19
Henry had no children by his second wife, Joan of Navarre.
APPENDIX FOUR
Casualties at the Battle of Shrewsbury
As noted in the text, some rather fanciful figures are quoted by the chroniclers for the number of participants in the battle of Shrewsbury. Jean de Waurin in particular stretches belief far beyond breaking point by stating that eighty thousand men were in the host which faced Henry.1 The modern guide to Battlefield church is hardly more restrained in suggesting there were thirty thousand royal troops and twenty thousand rebels. Even some usually reliable contemporary writers, such as Thomas Walsingham and the author of the Dieulacres chronicle, say that there were fourteen thousand men in each army, with the implication that there were twenty-eight thousand men present on 21 July 1403. Against this, the number of slain is in several cases said to be under two thousand. If this was the case, and only one in twenty men perished, why do all the chroniclers agree that it was one of the bloodiest battles ever fought on English soil?
The key problem in assessing the scale of the battle is this tendency of chroniclers to exaggerate numbers. Armies are enlarged to biblical proportions as well-educated, cloistered writers wrote their dramatic accounts in the only language of battle they knew: a mixture of Old Testament stories, classical history and earlier chronicles. In general, unless they could talk up a skirmish to sound like the great battles of the past, it would hardly merit inclusion in a book. But from the mid-fourteenth century there was an increasing desire to know accurate casualty figures, at least with regard to men of quality. After Crécy the victors collected the heraldic surcoats of the dead, thereby accounting for the knights and esquires killed. As a result, casualty figures (as opposed to the total numbers involved) can be a more accurate way to approach the scale of a battle. Of course casualty figures are often exaggerated too. Adam Usk states that sixteen thousand men died at Shrewsbury, and the Scottish chronicler Wyntoun suggests seven or eight thousand.2 Nevertheless, correlating the various lower figures allows us a greater degree of reliability, if only for the reason that the smaller a number is, the easier it is for contemporaries to count, or estimate, accurately.
The starting point has to be the mass grave. Several chroniclers mention this, and interestingly they give different figures for the number of bodies in it. This suggests they were not all using the same source. The Dieulacres chronicle, which gives the total number of dead as between five and six thousand, states that the mass grave contained the suspiciously precise figure of 1,847 bodies.3 The Brut states 1,100 bodies.4 Other accounts mention the mass grave but give no number of corpses.5 There can be little doubt therefore that a mass grave of some sort existed. It is also worth noting that the narrative of the battle implies that many men died in the same space, with the wounded royal vanguard dying under the hooves of charging horses. A mass grave would have been a sensible solution to the problem of burying all these bodies quickly.
This brings us to the well-known set of dimensions given to the grave: apparently it was 159 × 60 feet, and 60 feet deep. Leaving aside the incredible depth, which may be a mistranscription of IX (nine) for LX (sixty), there are reasons to doubt these dimensions. Allowing six square feet for each corpse, this would equate to a burial of 1,802 bodies. However, medieval burials were not so regular (bodies were often piled on top of one another), and we have to suspect that the dimensions were based by the writer on the reported number of dead, not an observation of the grave itself. In addition, a grave of that area with a depth of just nine feet – let alone sixty – would be very difficult to back-fill evenly, and we would expect considerable subsidence on the site. None is to be seen, except the sunken and overgrown area associated with the fishponds of the collegiate buildings. Although large numbers of bones have reportedly turned up near the battlefield church in the past, archaeologists today have great difficulty finding any, even though thousands of decaying corpses would not have been carried very far. Given that the church was constructed within six years of the battle, it is unrealistic to suggest the mass grave lies very far from the site. The lack of subsidence in the vicinity and the paucity of bones on archaeologists’ spades allows us to infer we are looking for a relatively small number of corpses, not seven or eight thousand.6
The figures in the Dieulacres chronicle, given above, imply that only a third of the dead were buried in the mass grave. The Brut suggests only the 1,100 who were buried in the mass grave were killed. The continuation of the Eulogium Historiarum has a total of just 1,600 men dead.7 On this basis, it would seem unreasonable to suggest that more than three thousand men were killed, and perhaps as few as 1,600 died on the battlefield, with several hundred of those not being buried in the mass grave (being of higher status). This causes us to address the main question again: why was it universally described as such a bloody battle?
Consider the number of men of quality killed. Capgrave and Walsingham both mention a total of two hundred Cheshire knights and esquires, plus an unknown number of common men.8 This is likely to be a reasonably accurate figure, for the surcoats could easily have been counted. This many men of quality is not a high proportion of the dead when compared to battles like Crécy or any other battle in which the English archers took part, but it is a high figure for a hand-to-hand battle, and it is a very high figure for English losses. Traditionally men of quality were ransomed, not killed. Archers do not take hostages, however, and herein we probably have the real reason for the horrific descriptions of the battle. The Dieulacres chronicle gives the figures of twenty-eight knights dead on the king’s side and eight on Hotspur’s. Many of these knights can be identified from the various chronicle accounts.9 The total – thirty-six dead knights – bears comparison with the forty or so knights killed at Towton (1461), which is usually described as the bloodiest battle of the Wars of the Roses. It was not so much the numbers killed that made reports of the battle so deadly, it was the indiscriminate method of killing. If we consider the likelihood that the people who would have spread the story of the battle to the chroniclers were among the ‘knights and esquires’, we can immediately see why they were horrified by what they had seen.
The figure of fourteen thousand in the king’s army may be a little exaggerated, but it is unlikely that Henry would have fought a battle with many fewer, and to his forces we must add those guarding the prince. That his vanguard was defeated by the Cheshire archers despite this, and yet Hotspur’s army fought on until the evening, suggests that Hotspur had a force which, if smaller, was not negligible. If Henry had fourteen thousand men, and if four thousand of those were in the royal vanguard which fled during the battle, and three thousand of the royal army were badly wounded and died later (as Walsingham states), and about half those actually slain on the battlefield were in the royal army, then maybe as many as eight thousand men (considerably more than half the royal army) either fled during the battle, were badly injured or killed. Furthermore, if one-third of the injured whom Walsingham describes later died of their wounds, then one in seven men in the royal army did not survive the encounter. And this was the winning side. Similarly, if Hotspur had a force of about ten thousand – easily enough to overwhelm Henry’s vanguard – and if one thousand of those were killed on the battlefield and a similar number were wounded as on the royal side, we can understand why the battle was shocking despite there being fewer than two thousand corpses in the mass grave.
At the start of the day there had been twenty-four thousand men; at the end there were just six thousand royal troops standing, surrounded by two thousand corpses and between three and four thousand injured and dying men. The rest had fled. For the knights and esquires who circulated accounts of the conflict, it was especially shocking to see several hundred heraldic surcoats in the dust. It is not going too far to say that it was at Shrewsbury that the northern English gentry was forced to realise that loyal service in a fifteenth-century civil war necessitated facing the risk of an indiscriminate and ignoble death, whichever side they were on.
The Fears of Henry IV: The Life of England's Self-Made King Page 62
