Apart from four months in 1421, Henry V was away from England for the last five years of his reign. In his absence the kingdom was governed by his brothers, the Dukes of Bedford and Gloucester, in rotation, aided by a standing council. Bedford held the office of keeper (Custos) until the end of 1419, when he was relieved by Gloucester, who held the position until the king’s return in February 1421. Bedford resumed the role in June 1421, but was summoned to France again in April 1422, to be replaced once more by Gloucester.
The keepers were responsible for the routine government of the realm, presiding over parliaments in the king’s absence. They were also in charge of the defence of the borders with Scotland and control of Wales. Henry reserved for himself all other matters to do with international relations, prerogative and grace (promotions, rewards and pardons) and handling petitions. He sent a barrage of peremptory commands from saddle and camp. No matter was too small to escape his attention, be it a payment of annuities, ordering restitution for an act of piracy or supervising the treatment of his prisoners in England. There was no doubt in anyone’s mind who was ruling England, even if he were on the banks of the Seine.
Particularly distinctive was the king’s use of English in correspondence sent under his privy seal. English had been used from time to time in official records since the reign of Edward III, but the language of government and the law was predominantly Latin and French. Henry’s adoption of English when in France was deliberate, and many letters were in his own dictated words. Among his correspondence were reports designed for public consumption: news bulletins. The war was presented as a great national struggle bringing glory to the motherland. Other bodies and corporations followed his regal example and began to keep records in English, ‘our mother-tongue … honourably enlarged and adorned’,17 as one London livery company proudly noted.
Henry’s deputies were successful in protecting his rear while he was campaigning. The attempts of the Duke of Albany to recover Roxburgh and Berwick, English outposts in Scotland, were decisively repulsed by Bedford in the autumn of 1417. Thereafter the Wardens of the Marches, the Earls of Northumberland (restored in 1416) and Westmorland, held the Scots in check, and even started taking the war to them.
Wales, too, was kept firmly under control. On becoming king, Henry had initiated a policy of reconciliation: pardons were offered to all remaining rebels if they would submit and commissions were established to enquire into abuses by his own officers (though communities were still required to purchase the king’s grace with large fines). Many Welsh were even recruited into the king’s armies – a phenomenon made immortal by Shakespeare in his none too flattering portrait of the common soldiers Fluellen and Williams. From 1415 Owain Glyn Dwr disappears from the English record – although in later Welsh legend he never died. His sole surviving son, Maredudd, finally made his peace in 1421.
Sir John Oldcastle was still at large when Henry sailed to France in 1417, but he was eventually tracked down in Wales and captured. He was brought before parliament, condemned and executed that December. Lollards were still considered a threat, the occasional suspect being arrested and tried. Ireland was subjected to the ruthless rule of John Talbot, Lord Furnival, which ensured that there would be no danger from that quarter. Thus was England kept secure for Henry in his absence.
Henry’s relations with the Church were more fraught. For two years, as the Council of Constance struggled to resolve the Great Schism, no pope was recognised officially, so Henry in effect governed the Church in England as well as the secular realm. Pope Martin V, elected in November 1417 with English support, attempted to reassert his authority over appointments. In return for papal support for Henry’s cause in France, he put pressure on the king to repeal the Statute of Provisors and Praemunire, under which the exercise of papal authority in England had been restricted. Henry would have none of it.
In particular he was incensed at the behaviour of Henry Beaufort. Beaufort had been sent to the Council of Constance as the king’s envoy in 1416. He had, on the king’s instructions, swung the English delegation to support the election of a new pope prior to addressing the question of reform, thus abandoning the German position championed by King Sigismund. The pope was willing, as a reward, for Beaufort to be promoted to cardinal. Martin V went one step further, however, and made him his legate a latere, with full papal authority over the affairs of the Church in England and exemption from the jurisdiction of Canterbury. Henry was furious. Beaufort was threatened with the full force of the Act of Praemunire, which forbade the acceptance of papal promotion without royal approval. For two years he was out of royal favour. Eventually he made his peace: a reconciliation marked in 1421 by the grant of a huge loan to the king. Henry would neither tolerate the insubordination of his closest adviser, nor allow for a moment any challenge to his de facto control over the Church within his realm.
Henry used his control of the Church not only to secure his own promotions and appointments to high office but also to advance his personal programme of monastic reform. This was partly propagated through his own monastic foundations set up in the first year of his reign and clustered around his royal estate at Sheen, west of London. These were new orders which adhered to strict and austere rules. In 1421, when he was back in England briefly, he took on the reform of the wealthy and somewhat lax Benedictine order as well. He urged a meeting of monastic representatives to tighten their discipline and drew up proposals for closer observance of their rule. His suggestions were quietly rejected, however, and more modest proposals adopted. The Black Monks went largely on their comfortable way.
Henry’s attempt to initiate monastic reform occurred during the meeting of parliament and convocation in May 1421. Eleven separate parliaments were held during his reign, an average of more than one a year. Four were held in his absence. As Prince of Wales he had learnt the necessity of managing the Commons. All the Speakers elected by MPs were king’s men, and a solid phalanx of MPs returned to the House at every election backed the Crown. Nobles exercised patronage in their counties to secure such support. The Beaufort bloc, for instance – often a dozen or so strong – was managed by Sir Thomas Chaucer, the poet’s son, who was the Speaker five times between 1407 and 1421.
The Crown may have been able to mobilise a party of King’s Friends in the House, but it did not always have its own way. A short parliament in December 1420, with Gloucester presiding, truculently requested that future sittings should no longer be held in the king’s absence, and that parliament’s bills should be answered in England in person, not by the king somewhere in France. It also insisted (with the Treaty of Troyes in mind) that an assurance given by Edward III in 1340, that his people would never be subject to French law, be reissued.
MPs responded to their electors, and the electorate, though not yet formally defined in the counties, included many folk of modest means from whose ranks the archers of the king’s armies were recruited, and who bore the principal burden of direct taxation. For seven years they voted Henry’s government unprecedented sums. The victories won by the king, the tangible benefits of greater security at home and on the borders, the potential winnings to be made in France and the stimulus of government spending to the economy made him a popular monarch. But by 1420 the taxpayers were beginning to feel that they had paid enough. The tax take from the beginning of the reign (and concentrated between 1414 and 1419) averaged over £100,000 a year. Signs of resistance to these payments emerged in Cheshire in 1416, even though it was then a royal palatinate. By 1421 the royal finances were in deficit and many of the crown jewels had to be pledged in order to sustain the war. That spring the king resorted, in effect, to a forced loan. In Lincolnshire, and no doubt elsewhere, he commanded, ominously, that the names be taken of those who declined to lend.
The remorseless search for money led Henry to the rapacious exploitation of legal technicalities in an effort to swell his coffers – a practice later followed by Henry VII. Many of his subjects were caught out in this way, particularly widows who found their property confiscated because their husbands had not been careful enough in their will provision. The unfortunate Beatrice, Lady Talbot, widow of one of Henry’s oldest and most loyal companions in arms who had died during the siege of Rouen, was Portuguese. Her husband had failed to take out appropriate letters of denizenship for her. All the inheritance, not just her dower, were seized by the exchequer. She was not allowed to reclaim it until she had agreed to pay a fine of over £1,500. The king’s stepmother, Joan of Navarre, was even more disgracefully treated. In October 1419 he ordered her arrest on the trumped-up charge of sorcery so that he could confiscate her dower worth £6,000 per annum. (He may also have resented his stepmother personally: a widow herself, she had married his father in what was almost certainly a love match in 1403.)
The king’s increasingly heavy rule was driven not only by financial need, but by a continuing fear of challenges to the throne. His concern at times bordered on paranoia. He would not let the Earl of March, whom he took to France, lead a normal, independent life befitting a man of his station. An obscure and probably illegitimate member of the earl’s family, Sir John Mortimer, who had served the king in war since 1415, was arrested and imprisoned in 1418 on the accusation of uttering seditious words. In April 1422, after a failed attempt to escape from the Tower, he was arraigned for treason on the grounds that an escape from prison while facing a charge of treason was itself an act of treason. There were signs that Henry was beginning to behave despotically. It was a tendency spotted by Adam of Usk in the last words he wrote in his chronicle in May 1421 about the forced loans to finance the king’s forthcoming return to France:
The lord king is now fleecing everyone with any money, rich or poor, throughout the realm … No wonder, then, that the unbearable impositions being demanded from the people … are accompanied by dark – though private – mutterings and curses, and by hatred of such extortions: and I pray that my supreme lord may not in the end like Julius (and others) incur the sword of the Lord’s fury.18
It is doubtful that Henry V would have suffered Caesar’s fate, but his early death certainly came in time to save his reputation from the imputation of tyranny.