A Brief History of Britain 1066-1485

by Vincent, Nicholas

  To his household, Richard had already recruited a loyal body of Cheshire archers; Cheshire had been part of his estate even before the death of Edward III and it had been to Cheshire that he already turned during the crisis of 1387. Whilst his archers slept in the same room with him, calling him ‘Dycun’, the tone for the rest of the court had changed. Exalted titles, an insistence that courtiers address Richard as ‘majesty’ or ‘prince’, marked the King’s new aloofness. According to one chronicler, it became the King’s custom to sit enthroned ‘from dinner till vespers, talking to no one but watching everyone. When his eye fell on a courtier, regardless of rank, that person had to bend the knee towards the King.’ The last sovereign to behave in such a way had been Empress Matilda, during her brief period of power in the 1140s, who had insisted on remaining seated whilst her lords stood and who, as a result, had been chased out of London for her arrogance.

  Some historians have suggested that, by 1397, Richard was losing touch with reality, his paranoia and his isolation symptoms of mental instability. Those who caught sight of the King’s dancing costume adorned with one hundred oranges of silver gilt, or his ‘hanselyn’ (perhaps another doublet) embroidered with water, rocks and leeches, and embellished with thirty whelks and mussels of silver gilt and fifteen cockles of white silver, might have been forgiven for supposing that the days of Caligula or Nero were come again. Even so, such luxurious self-indulgence does not in itself spell madness. If the King was mad, it is remarkable that his move against the Appellants, when it came, was so well-timed and executed.

  In July 1397, without apparent warning, Richard ordered the arrest of the Duke of Gloucester and the earls of Arundel and Warwick. John of Gaunt, by now an old man, outwardly reconciled to the King since his return from Spain, stood mutely by. In Parliament, summoned that September under the gaze of 200 of Richard’s Cheshire archers, the three Appellants were indicted for treason. Arundel was convicted and carried to execution at precisely the same spot on Tower Hill where Burley, the King’s tutor, had been beheaded nine years before. Gloucester, the King’s uncle and the brother of John of Gaunt, had already been promised that the King would show him ‘the same mercy as was shown to Burley’. In Parliament it was announced that the duke had been carried off to Calais where he had died; the suspicion, later confirmed as fact, was that he had been stifled there under a feather bolster, at Richard’s command. Thomas Arundel, Archbishop of Canterbury and brother of the disgraced earl, was exiled for life, as was the Earl of Warwick, dispatched to that remotest of wildernesses, the Isle of Man.

  Rebellion

  For those who remained, most notably for Thomas Mowbray, now Earl of Norfolk, and Henry Bolingbroke, earl of Derby, these were dangerous days. Although in theory pardoned for their part in the events of 1388, neither of them could ignore the signs of tyranny and paranoia at court. Mowbray mentioned plots at court to Bolingbroke. Bolingbroke mentioned them to his father, John of Gaunt, who in turn informed the King. Mowbray and Bolingbroke quarrelled, not least because Bolingbroke blamed Mowbray for the murder of his uncle, Gloucester. The King insisted that a duel be fought, but then just as suddenly cancelled his command, in September 1398, imposing exile on both parties. Bolingbroke was promised that he might seek his father’s lands, should John of Gaunt die during his absence overseas. In fact, at Gaunt’s death, the following February, the King seized the entire honour of Lancaster into his own hands, disinheriting Bolingbroke. Confident that he had dealt with the situation, Richard then crossed once again to Ireland. Bolingbroke had little alternative but to act. He landed at Ravenspur in Holderness on 1 July 1399. The Duke of York, Richard and Bolingbroke’s uncle and the last surviving son of Edward III, threw in his lot with the rebellion. So did the Duke of Northumberland, Henry Percy, and his son, another Henry, known as ‘Hotspur’, perhaps on the understanding that Bolingbroke was merely demanding his personal rights and reform of the realm, more likely already aware that deposition was the only means by which the King could be silenced. The King himself returned from Ireland to Conway in north Wales, where he was met by Northumberland and promised that Bolingbroke, who would meet him at Flint, sought only his own inheritance. At Flint, Bolingbroke took the King captive, carrying him off to imprisonment at the Tower.

  Henry IV

  For the second time in the century, an aristocratic rebellion had imprisoned the King. Like Edward II in 1326, also taken captive in Wales, Richard II was kept out of the public gaze and, in secret, persuaded to abdicate. Those who ‘received’ his abdication, including Henry Bolingbroke and Archbishop Arundel, declared that Richard had gone voluntarily, surrendering his signet ring to Bolingbroke as a token of his desire that Bolingbroke succeed him as king. In all probability, there was nothing voluntary about it. Parliament accepted the fait accompli. A charge sheet was hastily prepared against the former King and his tyranny, and on 13 October, a Monday, clearly chosen because it was the greatest day in the liturgical year for the Westminster monks, the feast day of their own saint Edward the Confessor, Bolingbroke was crowned at Westminster as King Henry IV. For his coronation, Archbishop Arundel employed the very oil of St Thomas, first discovered by Edward II, prized by Richard II, and which henceforth was to be used at the coronation of at least three further English kings. Stored in a golden vessel shaped like an eagle, and said to have been given to St Thomas by the Virgin Mary, this substance in theory conferred even greater honour on the kings of England than was conferred on the kings of France by their own holy oil stored at Rheims, brought down from heaven by a mere dove not by an imperial eagle or by Christ’s own mother. The coronation of 1399 was also quite possibly the first occasion when the stone of Scone, confiscated from the Scots a century earlier, was used in the inauguration of an English King. To crown so unlikely a king as Henry IV required every trick in the Westminster dressing-up box.

  Richard II, meanwhile, was dispatched to Pontefract castle, within Henry’s own honour of Lancaster. There he died, perhaps stifled like Gloucester, perhaps having starved himself to death. It was surely no coincidence that it had been at Pontefract that Edward II had condemned to death Henry’s own ancestor, the first of the great Lancastrian rebels, Thomas of Lancaster. In 1387, almost at the moment of his joining the Lords Appellant in rebellion against the King, Henry Bolingbroke had named his own second son Thomas, the second figure in family history to bear the name Thomas of Lancaster. In his lifetime, Richard II had requested burial at Westminster. Henry IV ignored this wish and instead had Richard, his cousin, interred at the Dominican friary at King’s Langley. The significance here was also plain enough. It was at King’s Langley that Edward II had buried Piers Gaveston. In death, Richard was to join not his royal ancestors but a hated royal catamite, beheaded for his abuse of power. In an almost equally fitting echo of the past, at much the same time that Richard was buried, Thomas Lord Despenser, a great-grandson of another equally notorious favourite of Edward II, was seized in rebellion at Cardiff, carried off to Bristol and there executed by the mob. Truly, Richard II’s had been a reign haunted by England’s past.

  For the English of the fourteenth century to have killed one king (Edward II), might be considered a misfortune. To have killed two began to look like deliberate carelessness. Henry IV might pose as God’s anointed, his coronation timed to coincide with the feast day of the pacific Edward the Confessor. But the Confessor’s feast itself fell on the eve of the anniversary of the Battle of Hastings, 14 October, and Henry IV’s accession itself marked almost as dramatic a debut for the new king as William of Normandy’s victory of 1066. In 1327, Edward III, hustled on to the throne a few years or decades before his time, had at least been the son of the previous king, born in the purple. In 1399, by ending the rule of a dynasty more than two hundred and fifty years old, Henry IV proclaimed himself every bit as much a usurper as William of Normandy three centuries before.

  Taking a short-term view, the problems of legitimacy that were to haunt fifteenth-century politics
were the outcome of the Lancastrian revolution of 1399, ensuring that after Richard II no king could sleep soundly in his bed. Viewed in the longer term, the accession of Henry IV and his Lancastrian dynasty was itself the product of a slow slide towards violence and usurpation begun as long ago as the 1290s with the gathering pace of warfare on England’s frontiers, the emergence of treason trials against leading subjects in which death was the inevitable sentence, and the incremental way in which revenge and the desire for vengeance were established as driving forces within aristocratic politics.

  At the time of his accession, Henry IV’s greatest strengths were his piety and his wealth. In the 1390s, as Earl of Derby, he had twice volunteered to crusade against the pagans of Lithuania. On the second occasion, when the campaign ended prematurely, he had travelled as a pilgrim to Jerusalem, the ultimate goal of all crusaders. As heir to the honour of Lancaster and the lands of John of Gaunt, he already had the prospect of an annual income of at least £12,000. Combined after 1399 with the estates of the crown, this rendered him perhaps the wealthiest man, in terms of his personal fortune, to have ruled England since the Conquest of 1066. This brought further problems, however, since it persuaded the Commons that Henry IV no longer had need of subsidies voted by Parliament. Indeed, it was widely supposed that, before ascending the throne, the new King had proclaimed his intention to live ‘off his own’, without the crippling taxes that for the past fifty years had poisoned relations between crown and taxpayers. If Henry made any such undertaking, then he very soon came to regret it.

  From the shadows, both foreign and domestic issues emerged to tarnish Henry’s claims to legitimacy. To the costs of maintaining the affinity of Lancastrian knights and retainers he had inherited from his father were now added those of the royal household. Henry’s personal finances spiralled out of all control. Far worse, as early as January 1400, within only three months of his coronation, a plot emerged to kill the King and his sons and to restore the deposed Richard II. It was in the subsequent reprisals that Lord Despenser was murdered by the Bristol mob. Richard II’s own demise, announced within a few weeks, was another immediate consequence of this threat to the new regime. The King’s knights were put to good use in Scotland, in August 1400, when they were amongst a major force of over 15,000 men sent north in an attempt to persuade King Robert III to recognize Henry’s title as king. For the rest, it was left to the Percys, for the past fifty years or more virtually independent rulers of the northern March, to impose order on the Scots, inflicting a major defeat upon Scots raiding parties at Homildon Hill in September 1402. Meanwhile, as early as September 1400, within only a month of his return from the north, Henry IV was confronted with rebellion in Wales.

  Owen Glyn Dwr

  Owen Glyn Dwr, distantly descended from the ancient princes of Deheubath, more closely allied to such English marcher families as Lestrange and Hanmer, and himself previously attached to the household of the fitzAlan earls of Arundel, declared himself ‘prince of Wales’, gathering together a small band of supporters and crackpots, complete with his own bard, a man named Crach Ffinant, ‘the prophet’. The initial spur to his rebellion appears to have been rivalry with a local English lord. Deeper tensions underpinned its success, including longstanding Welsh resentment of the English monopolization of offices and the professions. What might have seemed a small gang of malcontents very soon swelled into a full-scale army, capable of sacking English border towns and declaring, with echoes of the 1290s, its determination to ensure ‘the obliteration of the English language’. As in the 1290s, when the English king and his army appeared to defy the rebels, Owen and his men merely vanished ‘into the woods’. English armies, as had been revealed in the reign of Edward I, in the short term were no match for native guerrilla resistance. By 1401, the Glyn Dwr revolt had spread across Wales. Welsh students at Oxford and Cambridge were said to be abandoning their studies, and Welsh labourers leaving English employment in order to swell the rebel ranks. Glyn Dwr himself laid siege to Carmarthen where his new standard, a golden dragon on a white field, was unfurled.

  In the longer term, like previous Welsh risings, this was a doomed venture. The English control of the coastline, even despite such temporary setbacks as the Welsh seizure of Cardiff, Aberystwyth and Harlech, ensured that pressure could always be brought to bear. Unlike the Scots at Stirling Bridge or later at Bannockburn, Glyn Dwr’s men never risked pitched battle with an English army, lacking either the desperation or the resources to inflict a defeat upon Henry IV that might have tipped the balance from rebellion into a full-scale revolt in the name of Welsh independence. Glyn Dwr himself could hardly claim the titles or bloodlines of a Robert de Bruce. Even as early as 1405, his fortunes were on the turn, although he continued to summon ‘parliaments’, to issue documents under his own princely seal dated according to the years of his reign, and for a further ten years, until his ultimate disappearance into legend after 1415 (the exact year of his death and its circumstances have never been securely established), to pose as a thorn in the flesh of English imperialism. As in Ireland, where from the 1360s the Statute of Kilkenny had enshrined earlier moves towards apartheid, forbidding English settlers to intermarry with the native Irish, to use the Irish language, or to have recourse to Irish law, one effect of Welsh intransigence was an even more draconian discrimination by the English against the Welsh. Meanwhile, the costs and the diversions of the campaign of Glyn Dwr, and the repeated failure to capture Glyn Dwr himself, mocked all claims by Henry IV to have brought peace or prosperity to the English people.

  Furthermore, Glyn Dwr proved adept at concerting his efforts with those of the Scots, the French, the Irish, and most dangerously of all with Henry IV’s domestic critics. In 1405, a French force some two and a half thousand strong landed at Milford Haven combining with the Welsh in raids into Worcestershire. The Welsh were still raiding into Merioneth in 1415, the year of Henry V’s great victory at Agincourt. The Welsh revolt caused annual losses estimated as high as £8,500 to the King’s Welsh estate, leave alone the costs of sending armies against Glyn Dwr in each year after 1401. By 1401, indeed, there were so many demands being made on the King’s treasury that there was not even enough money to pay the messengers delivering them.

  Battle of Shrewsbury

  In the same year, a letter to the King, apparently from the former heretic, Bishop Repyndon of Lincoln, declared that ‘joy has turned to bitterness…evils multiply themselves everywhere and hope of relief fades from the grieving hearts of men’. The Parliament of 1402 was the first since the deposition of Richard II to be asked to grant subsidies as well as to continue the customs duties on wool. In the following year, news reached the King of an alliance between the Percys, his erstwhile allies, and Glyn Dwr. The outcome was the first true battle to have been fought on English soil since Evesham in 1265. Outside Shrewsbury, on 21 July 1403, Henry IV met the Percys in force. The King himself was nearly killed, his standard hurled to the ground. His eldest son, the future Henry V, was seriously wounded by an arrow in the face. The younger Percy, ‘Hotspur’ was killed in the action. His uncle, the King’s cousin, Thomas Percy, Earl of Worcester, was captured and executed. His father, Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, was tried and convicted of trespass rather than treason, and ultimately pardoned. Hotspur’s body was carried off for burial at Whitchurch, but when rumours began to circulate that he had survived the battle, the King ordered that the body be exhumed and displayed in Shrewsbury market place, propped up between two mill stones. It was then ritually dismembered and its parts sent for display to the four corners of the realm. At the field of battle, over the common pit into which many hundreds of the slain had been thrown, the King endowed a chantry college, only the second such institution, since Battle Abbey built by William the Conqueror after Hastings, to have been founded by an English king on the site of his victory, and in this instance, as at Hastings, commemorating the victory by a King of England over an army of Englishmen.

  Death of
an Archbishop

  The battle of Shrewsbury ended neither the Glyn Dwr rebellion nor the refusal of Henry IV’s enemies to recognize Henry as legitimate king of England. Northumberland rebelled again in 1405, being joined by the Earl of Norfolk. For reasons that remain unclear but which perhaps derived from his kinship to the Percys, the rebellion was also joined by Richard Scrope, Archbishop of York, one of those churchmen who had previously striven hardest to justify the deposition of Richard II and the accession of the Lancastrian dynasty. At the first sign of the King’s reaction, Northumberland fled, seeking refuge in Wales, then in Scotland, eventually being killed in 1408, his body posthumously quartered and his head sent for display on London Bridge. Scrope, however, paraded his continued defiance of the King. Like an earlier archbishop of York of the 1130s, leading out his militia in war against the Scots at the Battle of the Standard, he insisted on appearing armed and in armour, at the head of a private army of eight or nine thousand men. As this should remind us, like King Stephen in the 1130s, Henry IV after 1399 had been challenged first by the Scots, then by the Welsh, and now not only by English rebels but by English rebel bishops. History, as we have seen, has a tendency to repeat itself.

  No match for the royal army sent against him, Archbishop Scrope then surrendered. He was carried off to Pontefract, the castle where Richard II had spent his last days five years before. Whilst the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Arundel, sped northwards to plead for mercy, and whilst the King himself gave assurances that nothing untoward was about to happen, Scrope was condemned to death by a kangaroo court of laymen and lawyers and executed, at Clementhorpe, just outside the city of York. Five blows of the axe are said to have been required before his head was severed. He thus became the first English bishop to have suffered judicial execution since the foundation of the English Church nearly a millennium before, and the first bishop since Thomas Becket to have been killed, as it was assumed, at the direct order of an English king. The coincidence that both Henry II, the ‘murderer’ of Archbishop Becket, and Henry IV, the ‘executioner’ of Archbishop Scrope, shared the same name was not lost on contemporaries. A cult sprang up at York associated with the late archbishop and, by September 1406, measures had to be taken to cordon off Scrope’s tomb in York Minster with high barriers. Henry IV, who had been anointed with Becket’s oil at his coronation in 1399 and who had chosen to be buried in Canterbury Cathedral close to Becket’s shrine, rather than amongst his Plantagenet ancestors at Westminster, had in effect re-enacted the circumstances of Becket’s murder, if not in a cathedral then within easy sight of one. The precedent that his actions set, not least for the judicial execution of bishops on charges of treason (a charge to be levelled with bloody results throughout the sixteenth century), was a baleful one. Scrope’s execution was followed by something approaching nervous collapse on behalf of the King.