Henry Bolingbroke had a peripatetic existence as a child: his mother died of plague when he was only a year old; he was lucky to survive the Peasants’ Revolt; he was looked after by a variety of guardians and tutors while his father was away campaigning; and he lived in the households of both his father’s second and third wives. In spite of all this, he seems to have grown into a normal and well-adjusted adult. There can be little doubt that as a young man he exhibited all the qualities of kingship that his cousin Richard, the rightful king, did not have. A champion jouster and an experienced soldier who served with his father in Spain and with the Teutonic knights in Lithuania, he had travelled throughout Europe and the Mediterranean, and he had gone on pilgrimage to Jerusalem and visited the holy sites. He had learned sufficient guile to side with the Lords Appellant when they seemed to be winning, and to abandon them when it was apparent that they were not. His usurpation of the throne was generally welcomed by the population and most of the great magnates supported his accession. On the face of it, he should have been a popular and effective king. The problem of a disputed or not entirely legal succession, however, is that it leaves the way open for objectors to the regime, for whatever reason, to claim that it is illegitimate and that the usurper cannot therefore levy taxes, wage war, make land grants, treat with foreign powers or undertake any of the other myriad duties of royal government. Throughout his fourteen-year reign, Henry was plagued by shortage of money, unruly magnates, the Scots, the French, the Welsh and, finally, an uncooperative son.
A shortage of money was something that all English kings had to face most of the time, but it had not escaped the notice of Henry’s subjects that he had inherited not only the vast wealth of the duchy of Lancaster but also that of his wife, Mary de Bohun, co-heiress to the earl of Hereford. Mary gave Henry four sons – the eldest would become Henry V – and two daughters before dying giving birth to Philippa in 1394, with her wealth passing to her widower. All that, added to the income of the crown, should, it was not unreasonably supposed, have been more than sufficient to fund the court and run the country. However, Henry had made large grants of land and money to buy the loyalty of Richard II’s adherents and to reward his own followers, had rather unwisely given the impression that he did not intend to tax harshly (which many took to mean not at all) and, as he had little or no experience of government, was not able administratively to control court expenditure. While Parliament did grant him the customs duties on wool, exports of wool were down significantly and so therefore was revenue from that source. Henry was never able to live within his means, and, as one of his rallying cries had been the repudiation of Richard’s policy of making peace, a resumption of the war with France would entail even more expense.
In France itself, the removal of Richard and his replacement by Henry was regarded with horror. While quite prepared to discommode the English by supporting Henry in his attempt to recover his Lancastrian inheritance, the French court drew the line at his becoming king. They claimed to object to the deposing of a rightful king, but in reality the French were worried that Henry might reject the truce agreed by Richard and that war would follow. France, in any case, was in turmoil. In 1392, Charles VI, the Valois king, had gone barking (literally) mad, the first manifestation being his setting on and slaying members of his entourage, this followed by his wandering around the palace howling like a dog and forming the conviction that he was made of glass. While casual killing and the occasional bark might not matter overmuch, a belief that one is made of glass rather militates against taking the field in battle, or indeed doing anything very much, in case of becoming a breakage. Charles did have periods of lucidity, but these were to become fewer and shorter as time went on. While government theoretically remained in the king’s hands, the real power was exercised by his uncle, Philip, duke of Burgundy, when the king was mad, and by his brother, Louis, duke of Orléans, when he was sane. The two did not get on. Burgundy, who also ruled Flanders, was prepared to come to terms with the English in order to pursue his own interests in France and to protect Flemish trade, whereas Orléans coveted Aquitaine and also had ambitions in Italy (his wife was Italian). Burgundy supported the pope in Rome (as did England and most Flemings), while Orléans supported the Avignon claimant.
Although Henry IV sent emissaries to the French court assuring them that he stood by Richard’s truce – an action that did not find favour with the war party in England – Charles VI and Orléans refused to recognize him as king and were particularly incensed by his refusal to send Richard’s child queen, Isabel, back to France. Eventually, in 1400, she was repatriated but without her dowry, which Henry retained on the grounds that the ransom for Charles’s father, Jean II, had not been paid in full. In fact, Henry could not have refunded the dowry as there was nothing to refund it with. Calais cost a huge amount to run, particularly with piracy in the Channel once more rife, and, when the garrison mutinied because they had not been paid, Henry had to buy them off with cash borrowed from Italian moneylenders. And then, that same year, 1400, trouble flared up once more in Wales.
A land dispute involving a Welsh squire, Owain Glyn Dŵr, and an Anglo-Welsh Marcher Lord, Sir Reynold Grey of Ruthin, a great friend of Henry IV and a member of his council, had not been resolved to Glyn Dŵr’s satisfaction. Glyn Dŵr’s family was of impeccably Welsh origins, being descended from a variety of tribal chiefs, but had regularly married into English or Anglo-Welsh families – his own wife was a Hanmer, from a family that is still to this day influential in the Welsh Marches. Glyn Dŵr had studied law at Westminster and may have accompanied English armies on at least one punitive expedition to Scotland. But the failure of Parliament to support Glyn Dŵr was the catalyst for the most serious uprising in Wales since the conquest by Edward I in 1283. It was the result of long-held and simmering resentment of the harsh taxation policies of both the Marcher Lords and the central government, the preference given to English settlers and the Anglo-Welsh, the lack of career opportunities for local churchmen and administrators, and the unhappiness of local civil servants who had to implement policies with which they did not agree. In a very short space of time, the rebels had gathered an army of sorts, declared Wales independent and Glyn Dŵr Prince of Wales, and demanded the deposition of Henry of Lancaster and the abolition of the English language in Wales. They invaded the border towns, began the usual burning and looting, and occupied those English castles which had been only lightly garrisoned. The rebellion would drag on for another fifteen years and, while never a serious threat to the throne, it did distract the king and divert troops that might have been more profitably employed in France.
Meanwhile, despite the fact that Richard’s body had been displayed in public to show that he really was dead, there were those who believed, or purported to believe, that the ex-king was still alive, and who were prepared to foment trouble in his name or use the possibility that he was still alive as justification for insurrection. Henry faced a number of rebellions or potential rebellions during his reign, but the most serious was that of the Percy family in 1403. Henry Percy, earl of Northumberland, had been Henry Bolingbroke’s ally in the deposition of Richard II and, with his son Henry ‘Hotspur’, was responsible for guarding the northern Marches against the Scots. On 14 September 1402, Percy had trapped a Scottish army under Archibald Douglas returning from a raid into England and laden with plunder at Homildon Hill, about forty miles north of Newcastle. The Scots took up a defensive position on the hill in schiltrons – a form of massed phalanx which had been very effective in the days when the English would attack on horseback. The English, true to the now accepted tactical doctrine, stood back and opened the battle with the archers shooting into the schiltrons at a range of 200 yards. They could not miss and there was bloody carnage. Douglas realized that, as his own archers were outnumbered and ineffective, standing still would simply invite wholesale slaughter, so he ordered both his infantry and his mounted cavalry to charge the English. Down the hill they came, but they never met the English infantry. The English archers withdrew at a measured pace, stopping every few yards to loose another volley of arrows. The Scottish schiltrons faltered and then broke, pursued by the English. The numbers engaged on each side and the casualties are obscure, but very large numbers of Scots knights and squires were captured, including Douglas himself, who was blinded in one eye by an arrow.
It was after Homildon Hill that the Percy allegiance began to waver. There had already been arguments about the cost of policing the Marches and how much was paid or not paid to the Percys, and it was said that Hotspur had not been reimbursed for his campaigns against the rebels in Wales. Now there was a major dispute over who should receive the ransom of the Scottish prisoners. In the spring of the following year, the impetuous Hotspur was moving south, ostensibly to join the king in another campaign against the Welsh rebels, when he reached Chester on 9 July and proclaimed that Richard II was alive and that Henry IV was a usurper. Swelled by the enlistment of a party of the famed Cheshire archers, the army now adopted the white hart badge of King Richard. As Hotspur knew perfectly well that Richard was dead, he could not keep up the pretence that he was alive for long, and, as the ranks of the rebel army were being swelled by adherents coming in from the areas around Chester, Hotspur announced that he had discovered that King Richard was in fact dead, murdered by Henry of Lancaster, and that the rightful heir was Edmund Mortimer, earl of March, who was then twelve years old.
Edmund’s claim was derived from his mother, Philippa, who was a daughter of Edward III’s second son Lionel, formerly of Antwerp but since 1362 duke of Clarence. Lionel was, of course, older than his brother John of Gaunt, from whom Henry’s claim devolved, and, although it was weakened by being in the female line, it was a plausible claim nevertheless.69 As well as the accusations against Henry of usurpation and murder, the usual complaints of unjust taxation, public funds being diverted to private use, corruption in high places and evil counsellors were given another airing. At some stage, Hotspur had put out feelers to Owain Glyn Dŵr, and had he been able to join forces with the Welsh – for whom the French had already announced support – then Henry IV’s position would have become precarious indeed. As it was, the sixteen-year-old Henry of Monmouth, the Prince of Wales and future King Henry V, was in Shrewsbury as the commander, in name at least, of operations against the Welsh rebels. He and Hotspur had been friends, campaigning together in Wales, and the prince had learned a great deal from the scion of the Percys. Also on the prince’s staff in Shrewsbury was Hotspur’s uncle, Sir Thomas Percy, earl of Worcester, who on hearing the news promptly took off to join the rebels. If Hotspur’s army was to link up with Glyn Dŵr, they had to get across the River Severn and so headed for Shrewsbury, intending to cross using the two bridges there.
When the king heard that the younger Percy was in rebellion against the crown, he was at Derby, ironically taking an army north to aid the Percys on the Scottish border. Knowing well that he had to get to Shrewsbury and the Severn bridges before Hotspur, to say nothing of preventing the Prince of Wales being taken hostage, the king marched on Shrewsbury. On 20 July, after a forced march of thirty-two miles – a considerable feat even for a largely mounted army – he reached Shrewsbury just before Hotspur’s rebels, who were now faced with only two options: stand and fight, or give up the struggle. Three miles north of Shrewsbury at Hallescote is a low ridge running east to west and about 800 yards long, and it was on that ridge that Hotspur decided to make his stand. As usual, the chroniclers all differ over the size of the rebel army and all almost certainly exaggerate. If we assume the men-at-arms and infantry were in four ranks, then there may have been 2,400 of them, and if there were the same number of archers, or slightly more – by now a standard establishment in English armies – then Hotspur may have had around 5,000 troops altogether. The king probably had slightly more.
On the morning of Sunday, 21 July 1403, the royal army marched out from Shrewsbury and formed up on the flat plain south of the ridge and probably around 400 or 500 yards from it. It is not entirely clear how the king deployed his troops. The normal formation would have had three battles, or divisions, with two forward and one, commanded by the king, in reserve. It seems certain that the Prince of Wales commanded the left forward division, but, in view of what happened later, it seems that the king may have commanded the right forward battle. Perhaps there were only two battles after all, or there may have been three but with no reserve. The ground now is a mixture of private gardens and grassland, but in 1403 it was mostly planted with peas, which grew on canes put into the ground and thus both hindered movement and made it difficult to see much farther than about twenty yards. Today, the remains of fishponds can be seen, but these may date from a later period.
Now began a long process of negotiation intended to resolve the dispute without a battle. For most of the day, Thomas Westbury, abbot of Shrewsbury, accompanied by a royal clerk, scampered back and forth bringing offer and counter-offer. The king offered pardon if the rebels submitted, while Hotspur proposed all sorts of constitutional changes that could not possibly have been accepted by the king. It is difficult to see how either side could have compromised, and late in the afternoon the king came to the conclusion that Hotspur was deliberately prolonging negotiations in the hope of buying time for reinforcements from Wales to arrive. In fact, although Hotspur did not know it, Owain Glyn Dŵr was at that time a hundred miles away, consulting a fortune-teller at Carmarthen,70 and in any case the Welsh valleys were flooded and would have made any reinforcement from that direction very difficult.
In short, the battle could not be avoided and it was opened by the rebel archers. This was the first time that two English armies using the same tactical doctrine had faced each other, and at first it seemed that the rebel bowmen would overcome those of the king. Hotspur’s men were on the high ground and could see their target; the royal army had tramped through the peas to get within range and its own archers found it difficult to identify what they were shooting at. A contemporary account says that under the rain of rebel arrows the king’s soldiers were like ‘leaves that fall in the cold weather after frost’ and that, when the royal archers replied, ‘on both sides men fell in great numbers, just as the apples fall in autumn when shaken by the south wind’.36 It seems that at this point a portion of the royal army broke, presumably the rear rank of infantry, fearing that the king had been killed by an arrow. This was partially compensated for by the desertion to the king of a contingent of the rebel army led by its commander, one Richard Ramkyn, but the actual process cannot have been as tidy as the simple statement makes it seem. Men moving down the hill towards the royal army would have been assumed to be attackers, not deserters, and, as the royal ranks apparently opened to receive them, we may suspect that at some stage during the pre-battle negotiations Ramkyn had let the royalists know of his intention to change sides.37
For all his impetuous nature, Henry Percy was an experienced soldier and must have known that the best plan in his situation would have been to stay on the defensive and let the royal army attack him. This is how the English had been winning battles for the past sixty years and, given that Hotspur held the high ground and that he commanded the best archers in England, that would surely have been a winning ploy. That the rebel army now advanced downhill towards the king may not have been Hotspur’s intention – it may have been forced upon him. Most of the chroniclers agree that in the front rank of the rebel army was a contingent of Scottish knights, commanded by the now visually impaired Archibald Douglas. These men had all been captured at Homildon Hill and had agreed to fight for Hotspur in return for their release free of ransom. The sight of the king’s banner, with the king himself clad in plate armour covered in a richly embellished jupon, may have so inflamed Douglas that he cast common sense to the winds and rushed off, followed by his Scots, and Hotspur may have felt that he had no option but to support. In any event, the rebel infantry, led by Douglas, tramped down the hill and, despite suffering casualties from the royal archers, fell upon the king’s battle. The royal standard-bearer was cut down and fighting was fierce. King Henry apparently had three or possibly four knights wearing identical armour and royal accoutrements to act as decoys,71 and at least two of them were killed. The fate of England hung in the balance.
It was the young Prince of Wales who saved the day for his father. The chroniclers are, as ever, infuriatingly vague over the details of the battle, but what seems to have happened is that the rebels crowded towards the king – after all, if they could kill or capture him, then the battle was over and victory was theirs – with a much lesser press of Hotspur’s men facing the left of the royal army. Some accounts say that the Prince of Wales advanced his battle, broke through the rebel line, turned his battle about and attacked the rebels from the rear. This may, however, be crediting the prince with a higher degree of command and control and ability to manoeuvre than was possible in a chaotic situation where commands passed on by drum, trumpet and banner signals would be difficult to hear and even more difficult to obey. It seems more likely that the prince swung his division round ninety degrees to his right and attacked the rebels in flank. However he achieved it, the prince showed great personal bravery – at some stage, presumably when the armies were at a distance from one another, he had been hit in the face by an arrow but refused to leave the field72 – and considerable tactical acumen. The advantage had now swung to the royalists and, attacked on two sides and outnumbered, the rebel army began to disintegrate. When Hotspur was killed in the fighting, it was all over bar the slaughter. Those who were able to extricate themselves tried to get to the horse lines and safety, while those who stood their ground, before long in ever smaller groups, were left with no course open save surrender or death.
The victory was to King Henry, and the mopping up and pursuit of the fleeing rebels went on until midnight, whereupon the exhausted victors set about licking their wounds, cleaning their weapons and finding somewhere to sleep. The shaft of the arrow that had hit the Prince of Wales had been broken off but the head was still lodged in his upper jaw, so the king’s surgeon, John Bradmore, was summoned to extract it. He already had, or had a farrier make, a tool to extract it. First he enlarged the wound by pushing into it a series of wooden dowels coated in honey, which has antiseptic properties; once the hole was large enough, he inserted his extractor into the socket of the arrowhead, screwed up the tongs of the instrument so that they gripped, and finally removed the iron.38 In an age without anaesthetics, it must have been a long and incredibly painful process, but with a poultice of barley and honey all infection had gone within three weeks.73
We do not know the exact numbers of dead and wounded on both sides, but they were considerable and would perhaps have been even more had the royal army had to attack the rebels in their hill-top defensive position.74 Archibald Douglas was captured, yet again, and, having lost an eye at Homildon Hill, lost a testicle this time. Also in the considerable bag was Sir Thomas Percy, earl of Worcester. With the rebel army defeated, the reckoning was severe. Thomas Percy could expect no mercy: he had been a trusted adviser to the Prince of Wales and had deserted him. He was beheaded in Shrewsbury the day after the battle, along with the Shropshire knights Sir Richard Vernon and Sir Richard Venables. Hotspur’s body was initially buried, then disinterred and quartered, with Chester, Bristol, Newcastle and London each receiving one quarter, while his head went to be exhibited in York. Other rebels were dealt with summarily or after hasty trials. In York, the head of the Percy family, Henry, earl of Northumberland, submitted to the king and asked forgiveness, blaming the whole sorry business on his son, now conveniently dead. While Henry could perfectly reasonably have had the earl executed there and then, he decided to send him before Parliament, which decided that the earl’s behaviour fell just short of treason. The old survivor, having got away with a large fine and the redistribution of his castles and lands to more loyal subjects, might be supposed to have learned his lesson.
The dead from the battle that could be found were buried in a mass grave on the battlefield, just off the Whitchurch road. In 1406, King Henry issued a licence for the building of a chantry chapel on the site, which is still there, with a statue of the king on the gable end. Inside the chapel is a (modern) list of the knights known to have fought on each side, with depictions of their coats of arms. Looking at it, one is immediately struck by the number of families who had a soldier on each side of the conflict. There were Calveleys, de Burghs, Masseys, Stanleys, Browes, de Cokes and Greys on both sides. The most important thing for any medieval noble family was to retain its land and, as being on the wrong side in a civil war meant losing that land, it would have made sense to back both runners in a two-horse race.
Although the king’s victory at Shrewsbury put an end to the most serious rebellion of his reign, it was not the end of his troubles. French piracy was still rife in the Channel and there was little recourse except to encourage English sea captains to follow suit against French shipping. The seemingly interminable Welsh war was dragging on and attracting French raids in support of anything that would weaken England. And Richard II imposters sprang up in all sorts of likely and unlikely places, including one in Scotland whom the English could not catch. As was usually the case, money was short. The Parliament of 1404 insisted that the king had quite enough revenue of his own without further taxation and suggested that he might like to reduce the many grants and pensions that he had awarded since his assumption of the throne. As these grants had been made to benefit those who had supported his bid for the throne, they could not easily be reduced, and attempts by the court to reduce its costs by moving into castles that were less expensive to run met with little success. There was no money to pay for supplies for the army and the king’s purveyors had to resort to requisition; and, when there was no money to pay the troops, the officers were told to carry on at their own expense.
Despite the lack of money and a hostile parliament, the king survived. He had learned from the example of Richard II, who had defied Parliament and the magnates and had paid the price: Henry swallowed his pride and compromised. A small crumb of comfort was gratefully received in 1405 when the French captured the English town of Marck, three miles east of Calais. One of the officers of the Calais garrison, Sir Richard Aston, decided that enough was enough and took a detachment of 500 men-at-arms and light infantry, supported by 200 archers with twelve carts of arrows, to win it back. The ammunition carried in those carts must have been more than sufficient, as the result was a very pleasing slaughter, with fifteen French knights killed and several hundred prisoners taken. The commander, the count of St Pol, a notorious raider of southern English seaports, fled, divesting himself of his armour as he ran to find his horse. Elsewhere, French raids on the Isle of Wight and Dartmouth were robustly driven off, but the fact that they happened at all did nothing to portray the king as a staunch defender of the realm, however hard he tried.
Despite keeping his head and many of his estates in 1403, Henry Percy the elder, earl of Northumberland, had clearly not learned his lesson, for in 1405 he was once more involved in rebellion. This time, he entered into what was termed the ‘Tripartite Indenture’, an agreement between himself, Sir Edmund Mortimer, father of the Mortimer claimant to the throne, and Owain Glyn Dŵr, whereby they would depose Henry IV and divide England and Wales between them: Glyn Dŵr would take Wales and the Marches, Northumberland the north, and Mortimer the rest. Whether any of them seriously thought this would actually work, or whether it was just weasel wording to try to cement the alliance, can be debated, but in any event the rising was never going to be successful, if only because there was no central coordination and little idea of what to do once armies of sorts had been assembled.
One of the principal supporters of the rising was the fifty-five-year-old archbishop of York, Richard Scrope. Scrope had been promoted to the See of York by Richard II and owed his position more to his father’s success as a soldier and loyal servant of the monarchy rather than to any great theological acumen – although, being reckoned to be skilled in canon law, he had led the deputation that accepted Richard II’s supposedly voluntary abdication of the throne. He supported Henry IV’s accession and was one of the prelates who led him to the throne at his coronation. That being so, one can only assume that his involvement in the 1405 rebellion was the result of pressure from the local lord – Northumberland – although Scrope had preached against taxation of the clergy, would have been broadly sympathetic to the merchants’ dislike of taxation in any form, and may have been the author, or at least the editor, of the manifesto issued by the rebels. This latter repeated the usual gripes about oppressive rule and unjust taxation but also maintained that Henry had broken his oath not to depose Richard II.
The nub of the rebellion was swiftly eliminated when Ralph Neville, earl of Westmorland, a loyalist and long-term enemy of the Percys, and the king’s youngest son, John of Lancaster, marched against the rebels and defeated Scrope’s hastily assembled and ill-armed troops, mainly citizens of York. Scrope was arrested, as was the nineteen-year-old Sir Thomas Mowbray, son of the first duke of Norfolk, previously Earl Marshal of England, who had died in exile having fallen out with Richard II. Northumberland abandoned his erstwhile allies and fled to Scotland. The king intended to show no mercy: last time, he had forgiven the prime movers; now he would make it very clear that rebellion would not be tolerated. Rather than hand Scrope over to papal authority as he had done before in similar circumstances, only to find treasonous bishops were given a mere slap on the wrist, Henry decided that he would go on trial with the other captured nobles. The order went to London to send a team of justices to conduct the trial, and, when the country’s other senior cleric, Thomas Arundel, archbishop of Canterbury and a close personal friend of the king, heard that his fellow prelate was to be put on trial before a secular court, he rode all day and all night to Bishopthorpe in north Yorkshire, where the king was – no mean feat at the time for a fifty-one-year-old.75
Arundel reached Bishopthorpe on 7 June 1405 and pleaded with the king not to execute Scrope, reminding him of the last occasion a king named Henry had been responsible for the killing of an archbishop (Henry II and Becket). The king fobbed his old friend off, sent him to bed, put Scrope on trial that night, and had him beheaded with two others the next day. It was the first judicial execution of an archbishop and caused horror throughout England and Europe. Even if the death sentence was justified, which it surely was, to kill an ordained cleric, never mind an archbishop, was seen as shocking and allowed Henry’s enemies to claim that he had not only murdered an anointed king but one of God’s chosen servants as well. The pope in Rome was said to be appalled and to have laid curses on all involved, but his opposition was short-lived and probably mollified by a monetary payment, while an outbreak of miracle-working at Scrope’s tomb in York Minster did not last much longer. Eventually, in 1408, Pope Gregory XII officially exonerated Henry in return for a promise to found three religious houses. Shortly after the execution, Henry fell ill with what some alleged was leprosy. We know now, from examination of Henry’s skeleton, that he did not suffer from that most horrible of diseases to which there was then no cure, but it suited his opponents to put it about that he was being visited by divine punishment for his treatment of Scrope. Whatever it was that ailed the king, his health became progressively worse from 1408 onwards and eventually necessitated government being carried on by a council headed by Henry, Prince of Wales. It was a state of affairs that led to disagreements between father and son and King Henry to suspect his eldest son of plotting rebellion against him.
Northumberland was not to be allowed to get away with yet more treason; he had forced the king to divert his planned expedition to Wales to go north and deal with him, and Henry now began systematically to reduce those northern towns sympathetic to the rebellion. Northumberland tried to rally support in Wales, but there the uprising was beginning to collapse, and his brief trip to France achieved nothing, the French having quite enough internal troubles of their own. In desperation, Henry Percy decided to risk all on one final gamble and invaded England from Scotland in 1408. His army was tiny – probably no more than a few hundred, perhaps a thousand men at most. In addition to those soldiers he had raised in Scotland, he included retainers from his own lands in the north and the adherents of the bishop of Bangor and the abbot of Hayles. The invasion was short-lived. Before King Henry got anywhere near the area, the high sheriff of Yorkshire, Sir Thomas Rokeby, with a hastily raised force of loyalist retinues and arrayed archers, met Northumberland’s men near Knaresborough and chased them twelve miles south to Tadcaster, where they were unable to make a stand and retreated four miles west to Bramham Moor, south of Wetherby. Percy found a defensive position and awaited Rokeby, who arrived in the early afternoon of 14 February 1408, won the missile fight with his archers, and attacked Northumberland with his infantry. The result was never in doubt: the rebel army was smashed and very few got away back to Scotland. Henry Percy himself was killed fighting furiously in a rearguard action; he was decapitated and quartered, with his head exhibited on London Bridge. King Henry duly came north and meted out retribution from York, assisted by a crowd of informers anxious to prove their own loyalty and no doubt seizing the opportunity to settle old scores. Among those executed was the abbot of Hayles, but of the fate of the bishop of Bangor the chronicles are silent. Henry Percy’s titles and estates were forfeited by act of attainder.76
Meanwhile, in France, the descent into civil war had prevented effective action to capitalize on Henry of England’s problems. Had France been united, then, given Henry’s financial problems, the French might easily have taken Aquitaine, but, with the ever more frequent outbreaks of Charles VI’s insanity, power was increasingly being garnered by the dukes of Burgundy and Orléans, who, as we have seen, had very different agendas. Their enmity came to a very public head when, on the night of 23 November 1407, only a few days after a supposed reconciliation between the two, the duke of Orléans was set upon in a Paris street and bludgeoned to death, his hand having first been cut off to prevent it casting spells on the attackers. The assassination was widely believed to have been at the instigation of the duke of Burgundy, and he is said to have admitted it some days later.
France now split into two armed camps. The cause of the late duke of Orléans was taken up by his son’s father-in-law, the count of Armagnac, who gave his name to the Orléanist faction. This group controlled, in broad terms, most of France south of the River Loire, less of course English Aquitaine, while the Burgundians held the north – including, crucially, Paris – Flanders and most of the Low Countries. Brittany was generally neutral and Normandy too, with divided loyalties, managed to avoid taking sides. The duke of Burgundy had already signed a trade agreement with Henry IV, and the threat to Calais from Flanders was now lessened, the English wool trade picked up, and the English treasury began to look a little healthier.
In 1411, Paris was under siege by an Armagnac army and the duke of Burgundy appealed to Henry IV for help. At this stage, the Prince of Wales was leader of the king’s council during his father’s illness, and in September an English army of 800 men-at-arms and 2,000 archers, under the command of the thirty-year-old Thomas Fitzalan, earl of Arundel and nephew of the archbishop of Canterbury, landed at Calais. They then marched to Arras, joined with the Burgundian relieving army, and headed for Paris. On 9 November 1411, Arundel stormed the besiegers at the Paris suburb of Saint-Cloud and, having lifted the siege, marched back to Calais and sailed to England.
The following year, with the king recovered and the prince sidelined, English support went instead to the Armagnacs, who promised in return for military assistance against the Burgundians to support the annexation of Aquitaine to England (as opposed to it being a separate overseas province) – something which had already been enacted by the English parliament. Four thousand men were despatched under Thomas of Lancaster, King Henry’s second son and recently created earl of Aumale and duke of Clarence, who landed at La Hougue in Normandy. The landing was opposed by what the Brut Chronicle describes as 7,000 men-at-arms, but was probably a great deal less, under a Lord Hambe, and, having defeated them and taken prisoners for ransom, the English moved south to link up with the Armagnacs in Poitou. By the time they got there, the two French dukes, young Orléans and Burgundy, had come to uneasy and temporary terms, so Clarence led his army on a burning and looting spree through southern France to English Bordeaux, and only agreed to go home when he was bought off by the Armagnacs. The short peace between the two opposing French factions brought the professed agreement by both to the English annexation of Aquitaine, but, as neither Armagnac nor Burgundian could speak for the Valois king nor for the French parlement, the agreement was illegal and worthless. In any case, the peace was soon shattered when in 1413 Burgundians in Paris fell upon Armagnac supporters and began to slaughter them and set fire to their houses and buildings. Rioting was widespread and only quelled by the arrival of an Armagnac army and the nine-year-old dauphin Charles. Burgundy was forced to yield Paris to the Armagnacs and flee to Flanders, where he began negotiations for English support to regain his power.
Then, on 20 March 1413, Henry IV of England died, aged forty-seven. His tomb in Canterbury Cathedral is opposite that of the Black Prince, whose son Henry had put to death – a touch of irony presumably not intended at the time. His effigy shows a face old and bloated, and indeed it is almost as if Henry were two different people. Vigorous, an accomplished jouster, well educated, articulate and sociable as Henry Bolingbroke, he had been supported by the vast majority of those who mattered in his unseating of Richard II, and admired, as the Brut Chronicle puts it, ‘for his worthy manhood that often times had been found in him’. Once king, however, he faced uncooperative parliaments and at least eight rebellions during his fourteen-year reign. Increasingly suspicious and dogged by ill health, he survived by compromise and thus allowed much royal prerogative to be subsumed by Parliament – powers that it would be reluctant to give back. Although Henry maintained the English claim to the French throne – which Richard would have given up – he did little to advance it, and the war during his reign was one of raids, piracy and blockade. Militarily, Henry’s main preoccupation was the Welsh rising of Owain Glyn Dŵr, and with that and the need to quell rebellion elsewhere there was no money for major expeditions to Europe. Henry did little to change the organization and tactical deployment of English armies – there was no need – but he did promote the development of cannon, which, while present in most armies since the middle of the fourteenth century, had had little effect so far on the outcome of a battle.
Although the Welsh troubles rumbled on until after Henry’s death, even before Northumberland’s last rebellion they were in decline. Owain Glyn Dŵr had the support of many, perhaps most, of the native Welsh princes, but not of the common people nor of the Anglo-Welsh and the English settlers, and he controlled only limited areas of the country. The English commanded the seas and, with the exception of a few minor French landings, no reinforcement could come by that means. Most castles held out, and those few that did fall to the rebels were relatively swiftly recovered. The English fortified the Marches, hemming the rebels in and preventing sympathizers from England reaching them, and, while the Welsh could and did mount raids over the border into Shropshire, detachments of English mounted troops were on standby to pursue them. English supply routes into and out of Wales were secured, while English soldiers severed those of the Welsh. Many of Glyn Dŵr’s own family, including his wife, were taken prisoner and lodged in the Tower, and at least one of his sons was killed, as were increasing numbers of his senior commanders. Above all other factors, perhaps, there was that of finance. As the English exchequer grew healthier, English soldiers could be paid and supplies purchased, while Glyn Dŵr had to rely on ransom money and, when that ran out, on looting his own countrymen – not a policy guaranteed to maintain support for his cause. That the rebellion lasted as long as it did was due to the very sensible Welsh policy of not being drawn into a conventional battle, but to harry, ambush, snipe and raid and then fade away into the hills. But guerrillas cannot win a war all by themselves, and in the end a dogged English policy of attrition, control of the coastline, defence of the Marches and ensuring that even in times of financial difficulties sufficient money was always found to continue the campaign was bound to win in the end, and that it did was very much to the credit of Henry IV. Glyn Dŵr’s own fate remains a mystery. He was never captured and is thought to have died sometime in 1415, but by what cause and where his body lies is unknown.
Nor was Scotland to be a problem once Northumberland’s last foray from there was defeated. It was good intelligence and skilled seamanship in March 1406 that allowed the English navy to capture the heir to the throne of Scotland, James Stewart (later James I of Scotland), off Flamborough Head on his way to school in France; and it was good luck that his father Robert III died a month later, allowing the English to install yet another king of Scotland in the Tower. James was well treated but remained a prisoner for eighteen years, thus ensuring that England’s back door was reasonably secure.
Henry IV may not have been able to pursue the French war, but his son and successor certainly would. By the time he came to the throne, Henry of Monmouth had already proved himself as a soldier – at Shrewsbury, where he may have been following the guidance of more experienced commanders but where he nevertheless showed great courage and understanding of battle management; and subsequently in the Welsh wars, where, as his father’s health declined, the defeat of the insurrection was more and more left to him. He learned how to keep an army in the field in an underdeveloped country and how to conduct sieges, and he fully understood the importance of mobility and sound logistics, all of which would stand him in good stead for his future campaigning. He is generally considered to have been something of a lad during his apprenticeship – to have been rather fond of wine, women, song and dubious companions – and he certainly fell out with his father on numerous occasions, sometimes over foreign policy, more often when his father was concerned that young Henry was building an alternative court. But by the time his father died, he seems to have put such misbehaviour behind him.
In twenty-first-century Britain, the queen is head of the Church of England, but in truth religion no longer has a major influence, either in government or in most people’s daily lives. That was not the case in the medieval world, and any consideration of government and kingship then must take account of the position of the church. It is not easy in this secular, cynical, sceptical age of ours to fully comprehend the influence of religion on our medieval ancestors. Religion was a powerful instrument of social control.77 In medieval England, an instruction from the king was persuasive; that it was also an instruction from God made it doubly so. There were, of course, men who engaged in something approaching what we would today call the scientific method – nobody with any education thought the world was flat – but witchcraft and sorcery were largely tolerated until well into the sixteenth century. (The Inquisition, which equated witchcraft with heresy and burned practitioners at the stake, was never allowed into England – as much because it was foreign as for any theological reason.) The common man was, however, intensely superstitious. He believed that when he died he would either go to heaven, provided that he had prayed hard enough and had obeyed the dictums of the church, or otherwise would go to a very unpleasant eternity in hell, something that he was continually reminded of every time he glanced at the tympana above the churches’ doors. Things that were unexplained – a sudden storm, an earthquake, disease – were either expressions of God’s displeasure or the work of the devil.
The uneducated and the untravelled in any age are superstitious and religious fundamentalism thrives among the ignorant, but whether the great men of the realm similarly believed in the reality of a personal god and heaven and hell is more difficult to answer. They certainly said they did, and the number of chantries founded, benefices subsidized and donations to religious orders made by the nobility would seem to indicate that they did, as would the number of recorded death-bed statements of belief – although many donations and declarations may have been made in the hope of a favourable mention in the history books. While we might question whether some aspects of religious belief were more than skin-deep, at least among the wealthy and the educated, there is no doubting the power and influence of the church. Although it no longer had a monopoly of education – and there was an increasing demand for men who could read, write and do sums for the civil service of an increasingly complex government administration – the church had a finger in most royal and state pies. Archbishops were chancellors, bishops could lead armies, local government in the shires often went with religious appointments, and the church was one of the great landowners of the realm as well as being fabulously wealthy. Unlike in our present day, when the origin of most British bishops is lower middle class, bishops then were members of great families and would have had standing and influence in the church or out of it. Much international diplomacy was carried out by clerics, while the pope, whether in Avignon or Rome, had huge transnational influence.
It was, of course, in the interests of the church to maintain the status quo, and in the interests of the secular power – the king – to keep the support of the spiritual arm, hence the fear of heresy and the enthusiasm shown in its suppression.78 Clearly, some esoteric arguments contrary to accepted teachings could be tolerated, and much energy was expended on arguing about how many angels could dance on the head of a pin,79 or about the relative poverty of Jesus Christ, but anything that struck at the church’s power and influence had to be stamped on hard.
Ever since the first outbreak of the plague, strange cults and odd beliefs had been springing up, and one of the most prevalent English heresies of the time was Lollardy, which claimed to follow the teachings of John Wyclif, an academic born around 1330. Wyclif questioned the authority of the pope, produced a written English translation of the Bible, and objected to the doctrine of transubstantiation. Opposing the pope was something that many Englishmen and not a few English clergy would have had sympathy with, but translating the Bible into the vernacular was a different matter altogether. If the common people could read the Bible for themselves, then not only would priests – who were there to interpret, in all senses, the Latin of the Bible – be out of a job, but also people would see the inconsistencies inherent in the scriptures and perhaps question their whole validity. The doctrine of transubstantiation, meanwhile, taught that the bread and wine consumed in the mass turned into the actual flesh and blood of Christ once the supplicant had eaten them. While the validity of this could be debated and rests on faith rather than medical science, it was widely believed then and is still believed, or at least taught, by some Christian churches today.80 Wyclif said that the change into flesh and blood was symbolic, not actual, and in doing so he was questioning a basic tenet of the church’s teaching. Eventually, he was condemned by the pope, but he survived to die in his bed in 1384, partly through the protection of John of Gaunt and partly through reluctance on the part of the University of Oxford to admit that its doctors could be disciplined by the church.
The Lollards – so called from the mumbling sound of their prayers – went a little further than Wyclif might have wished. They opposed the pope’s practice of taxing the English clergy – and here they simply echoed the views of most Englishmen including Edward III – and they railed against corruption in the church and against the authority of the pope. Had they stopped there, they might have got away with it, but, when they extended their manifesto to declaring the pope the anti-Christ, calling for the abolition of the hierarchy of the church and, from around 1380, sending unlicensed preachers around the countryside with their English Bibles to spread their views, they became a direct threat to the established order and were declared heretics. Wyclif himself would not have supported the Peasants’ Revolt, but many of his followers did; and, although most would have done so anyway, whether Lollards or not, they were now seen as seditious as well as heretical.
Up to this point, heresy was not a civil crime but a clerical one, to be tried in clerical courts which could impose fines but not the death penalty or imprisonment. In 1401, however, Archbishop Arundel persuaded the recently crowned Henry IV to make heresy a secular crime, which meant that a man found guilty by a clerical court could be handed over to the civil power and executed – by the rather unpleasant method of burning. Only two Lollards were actually burned during Henry IV’s reign – it was only obdurate heresy that got a person burned: recantation brought a pardon, and many accused did recant at the last moment, sensible fellows that they were. One of these executions, of one John Badby, who was due to be burned to death in a barrel if contemporary artists are to be believed, was attended by Henry of Monmouth when Prince of Wales. The fire was lit, the victim began to scream. Henry ordered the fire to be put out and the man taken out of the barrel, and offered him a pardon and a pension for life if he would recant. The man refused, so Henry ordered him back in the barrel and the fire to be relit. The obdurate heretic duly burned to death.
While all kings expressed support for the church, even if they might be opposed to some of its practitioners from time to time, all the contemporary accounts of Henry V stress his religious piety as king. Partly this may be sycophantic, but, as Henry’s faith is mentioned more frequently than that of his predecessors or successors, we may assume that it played a significant part in his thinking. At this distance, it is impossible to tell whether his frequent insistence that he was under the protection of God was what he genuinely believed, or mere propaganda to reinforce his claims and encourage a population and army which did believe, but throughout his reign Henry remained a strong supporter of religious orthodoxy – indeed, to some he was a religious fanatic. Fanatics do not, however, command a mass following, at least not in England, and on balance it is likely that, while Henry was certainly a believer, he was an astute enough politician to realize the importance of not alienating so powerful a bastion of the establishment as the church.
Otherwise, Henry of Monmouth was described as being tall, slim and well muscled, with hazel eyes and thick brown hair; in character he was said to be single-minded – and, if he was to pursue the English claims in France, he would have to be. Unusually for the time, he had no mistresses as king, although there is no suggestion that his sexual proclivities were anything but normal. Henry V was crowned at Westminster on Passion Sunday, 9 April 1413, and the day marked by an unseasonal fall of heavy snow, seen by many as an omen, but of what no one was quite sure. Henry’s first task was to assure Parliament and the magnates that he intended to govern justly and to heal divisions. While he brought some of his own followers into government – chiefly Thomas Fitzalan, Thomas Beauchamp, the earl of Warwick, and as chancellor his half-uncle, Bishop Beaufort, the son of John of Gaunt out of his third wife and ex-mistress, Katherine Swynford – he retained many of his father’s officials, although he did dismiss the Chief Justice of the King’s Bench, Sir William Gascoigne.81 In seeking to heal old sores, he released the earl of March, the Ricardian candidate for the throne, from house arrest and had Richard II’s body exhumed from King’s Langley and reburied with much reverence, pomp and ceremony in the tomb that Richard himself had commissioned in Westminster Abbey.
Almost immediately, however, the new king became embroiled with the Lollard heresy in the shape of Sir John Oldcastle and his followers. Oldcastle, who was thirty-five in 1413, had been a loyal crown servant and was an experienced soldier who had served in the Scottish wars, in France with the English army sent to aid the duke of Burgundy in 1411, and against the Welsh rebels under Henry V when he was Prince of Wales. He had been summoned to Parliament as a knight of the shires and had served as sheriff of Herefordshire. It is probable that Oldcastle had long held unorthodox views – Herefordshire was notorious for religious radicalism – but it was only after the accession of Henry V that Archbishop Arundel felt able to challenge him openly, and Oldcastle was the first eminent layman to be tried for the Lollard heresy.82 Condemned out of his own mouth when he launched into a tirade against the pope and his prelates, he was handed over to the civil authority which, at the behest of the king, who had no wish to see an old friend brought low, sent him to the Tower to give him an opportunity to recant. He then escaped, went on the run and attempted to organize a revolt with the aim of kidnapping the king. It was hardly a revolt; indeed, far from being a serious attempt to overthrow the existing secular and religious establishment, it was more the desperate reaction of a man who sought revenge for the way he had been treated. The active participants – no more than a few hundred – were asked to rendezvous at St Giles’s Fields, outside London, on the night of 9/10 January 1414 in preparation for a march on London and the arrest of the king. However, the plot was betrayed to the authorities and, when the rebels arrived, they ran into an ambush. Oldcastle escaped, but most of his followers were rounded up. Over forty were executed and another seven, who were Lollards, were burned as heretics. Although his revolt died in the St Giles’s Fields trap, despite several offers of pardon Oldcastle would not give himself up, and while a number of those who sheltered him were punished, and in at least one case executed, he himself would not be captured until November 1417, after which he was executed by burning on 15 December of that year. It was the last serious internal threat to Henry V, who, having restored order within the kingdom, pacified Wales and defused doubts over the legitimacy of the Lancastrian succession, could now devote all his considerable energies to restoring English rights in France.