AN EMPIRE IN CRISIS: IRELAND AND GUYENNE (1399–1405)
Challenges to Henry IV's rule during the early years of his reign came from every part of the king's dominions, including the lordship of Ireland and the duchy of Guyenne. Both of these had been claimed by the English crown since the mid-twelfth century, but they were very different. Guyenne, inherited rather than conquered, had barely been settled by English landholders, and its native Gascon lords and townsmen were described as ‘the king's loyal subjects’; they in turn expressed a consistent desire to maintain their attachment to the English crown, partly for commercial reasons and partly for fear of domination from Paris. The native or Gaelic inhabitants of Ireland, in contrast, were ‘the king's enemies’ or ‘the wild Irish’, an inferior and semi-barbaric people who stubbornly refused to accept the reality of conquest and settlement by English landholders.1 To make matters worse, their obduracy seemed to be paying off. During the thirteenth century, English rule in Ireland had expanded to include half or more of the surface area of the island, but since then a slowdown in the rate of emigration from England, a succession of political checks and lengthy minorities among Anglo-Irish landholders, and a vigorous Gaelic counter-offensive had eroded the settlers' position. Dazzled by visions of continental glory, neither the king nor the great English lords who held estates there prioritized Ireland; absenteeism became endemic and the task of upholding English rule was increasingly left to men of lesser rank.2 Meanwhile, those Anglo-Irish families which had made Ireland their home and had few remaining interests in England, such as the Geraldine earls of Desmond and Kildare and the Butler earls of Ormond, became increasingly acculturated to the local way of life, a tendency condemned as degenerate in the 1366 Statute of Kilkenny, which forbade intermarriage between native Irish and English settlers and prohibited the latter from using the Irish language, dress or pastimes. At the same time, intercourse between Westminster and the ‘English of Ireland’ grew more peevish, with much talk in the Irish parliament of the ‘liberties of Ireland’ and many unofficial treaties made with Gaelic lords.3 ‘Liberties’ certainly did not mean separatism, however: the Anglo-Irish needed the king of England as much as he needed them, and the earls of Ormond in particular were adept at securing privileges from the English monarchy, especially when they feuded with the Geraldines, as they often did.4
Power struggles in England exacerbated these problems.5 Richard II's 1394–5 campaign, the first by an English king in Ireland for nearly 200 years, was notable for its attempt to bring the native Irish lords into a more direct relationship with the crown and thus to establish a more inclusive framework for relationships between the competing polities on the island (although it naturally also aimed to reassert English control), but its achievements were largely undone by what followed.6 When Richard left Ireland in April 1395, he appointed Roger Mortimer, the twenty-one-year-old earl of March and Ulster, as his lieutenant there, but on 27 July 1398 Roger, having fallen under suspicion in England, was abruptly replaced by one of the rising stars of Richard's court, Thomas Holand, duke of Surrey. In fact, unbeknown to the king, Roger had been killed just one week before this, in a skirmish with the O'Byrnes at Kellistown (County Carlow).7 Yet another Mortimer minority (no earl of March since 1330 had lived beyond the age of 31) necessitated a second royal campaign, but the foreshortened fiasco that was Richard's 1399 expedition was the starkest reminder yet that policy towards Ireland was at times but a reed in the crosswinds of English factional rivalries.
Given that Roger's son and heir Edmund was not only earl of Ulster, lord of Connacht, Trim and Leix and the holder of half of Meath, but also had a plausible claim to Henry's throne, it would be surprising if his exclusion from the succession in 1399 was not greeted with some disquiet in Ireland. However, it was probably caution, or perhaps merely a breakdown in communications, which was responsible for the fact that two-and-a-half months on from Henry's coronation the chancellor and treasurer in Dublin were discovered still to be issuing writs in the former king's name and were crisply ordered to substitute HENRY for RICHARD.8 Yet Henry could hardly be faulted for not appointing the eight-year-old Edmund as his lieutenant. Perhaps more indicative of his intentions was the fact that the man he did appoint, Sir John Stanley, although well versed in Irish affairs, was only given £5,333 a year, more than half of which was to be raised from revenues within Ireland, which were always at the mercy of events. Royal lieutenants between 1361 and 1399 had usually been given between £6,000 and £8,000 a year and sometimes more.9 The reissue in December 1399 of the 1380 statute ordering absentee English landlords to return to Ireland or forfeit two-thirds of their profits was a further attempt to make the colony self-financing, but was largely unworkable because of the number of exemptions granted.10 Henry, it seemed, was intent on governing Ireland on the cheap, but, as his financial embarrassments mounted, even the relatively small amounts that the lieutenant was meant to receive from the English exchequer proved hard to secure.11
Aside from the retinue of 100 men-at-arms and 300 archers stipulated in Stanley's indenture, the defence of the ‘four loyal counties’ (Dublin, Kildare, Meath and Louth) was entrusted to Sir Edward Perers, who had been appointed as marshal of the armed militia of Ireland by Richard II, but proved a stalwart upholder of Lancastrian rule there. James Butler, earl of Ormond, who since the death by drowning of his rival, the earl of Desmond, in 1399 had emerged as the leader of the Anglo-Irish nobility, also showed himself more than willing to cooperate with the new regime.12 Yet the lieutenant's resources were woefully inadequate to his task. Despite attempts to pacify Art MacMurrough, the ‘chief captain of his nation and of all the Irish in Leinster’, he openly defied English authority in County Carlow and the northern part of the liberty of Wexford. In Ulster, meanwhile – where the discontinuity of Mortimer leadership had for years allowed the O'Neills of Tyrone to raise black-rent (protection money) almost at will, intermittently enforcing their demands with devastating raids – matters were further complicated during the summer of 1400 by the arrival of a Scottish fleet at Strangford Lough (County Down), which routed an English force led by the constable of Dublin castle.13 Stanley was eventually recalled by the king on 18 May 1401, less than halfway through his agreed three-year term, and was followed back to England by Thomas Cranley, archbishop of Dublin and former chancellor, who, in an interview with the king on 30 June, gave Henry a chilling account of the decay of English lordship in Ireland.14
Map 6 Ireland in Henry IV's reign
The king responded decisively, committing the lieutenancy to his second son Thomas – an attempt (despite the fact that Thomas was only thirteen years old) to demonstrate a more serious commitment to the colony by giving it a figurehead to act as a focus of loyalty for the Anglo-Irish, and perhaps for the Gaelic lords as well. As an earnest of his intentions, the king also promised Thomas £8,000 a year, all of which was to be drawn from the English exchequer.15 This striking change of direction was an acknowledgement not simply of the fact that his hope of making the English colony in Ireland largely self-supporting had failed, but also of the danger that the rapidly escalating Welsh rebellion might light a similar fire across the Irish Sea. Owain Glyn Dŵr had the same thought, and wrote to the Scottish king and the Irish lords in November 1401 to invite them to support his struggle against ‘our mortal enemies, the Saxons’, appealing to the kinship which bound the Celtic peoples and the fact that their eventual triumph had been foretold by Merlin, and adding pointedly that the longer the Welsh revolt continued, the longer would be the respite enjoyed by the Irish from the unwelcome attentions of the English. Calls for common action between England's Celtic neighbours had been issued before, and the threat of Ireland providing a base for Welsh rebels, to say nothing of the threat to the English colony there, became graver still with the defection of Edmund Mortimer in the summer of 1402.16 Edmund had acted as governor of Ireland in 1397–8, and if the foremost adult representative of the greatest English family in Ireland had decided to throw in his lot with the king's enemies, who was to say which way its clients and well-wishers would turn?
Prince Thomas thus stood in need of wise heads about him, and he was not disappointed. Archbishop Cranley, a man much praised by contemporaries, was reappointed as chancellor, and the Lancashire knight Sir Laurence Merbury as treasurer; both remained in office until 1406.17 Edward Perers stayed on as marshal, but overall responsibility for defence (under the prince's authority) was given to Sir Stephen Le Scrope, who was appointed deputy lieutenant and ‘governor of the wars’. The Navarrese esquire Janico Dartasso, who like Le Scrope had distinguished himself in Ireland under Richard II, also returned with Prince Thomas and would spend much of the reign there, serving as justiciar, mediator, army commander and admiral.18 Thomas and his deputies also established a good working relationship with the earl of Ormond, who in turn looked to the prince not to obstruct his attempts to expand his influence in Munster at the expense of the Geraldines.19
Ormond was not disappointed, for the prince needed whatever help he could muster. Before his arrival in Dublin in November 1401, a number of Gaelic lords had promised allegiance to his father's crown, and a brief foray in January 1402 secured the submission of others, but the protection of English enclaves was a Sisyphean task and often enough the best that could be offered to beleaguered towns was permission to make truces and trade with their Irish neighbours.20 In July 1402 the mayor of Dublin, John Drake, led a force of Dubliners to Bray (in the medieval county of Dublin) where they slew 493 Irish rebels, ‘all men of war’,21 but by February 1403 Janico Dartasso was reporting that he dared not proceed from Leinster into Ulster because the roads were too dangerous.22 The problem was not just the native Irish but also members of the Anglo-Irish gentry, one group of whom abducted the chief baron of the Irish exchequer, Richard Rede, while another murdered John Dowdall, the sheriff of Louth, in September 1402.23 This was the prelude to the revolt that broke out in Ulster in May 1403, which was supported not just by Scottish galloglass but also by Anglo-Irish knights and esquires. Carrickfergus was ‘totally burned’ and Sir Walter Bitterley, the royally appointed steward of Ulster during the earl of March's minority, killed. Initially the English government reacted with fury, but within a few years the perpetrators had been pardoned. Although this revolt preceded and was thus not a consequence of the Percy rebellion in England, it may well have been fomented by disgruntled supporters of the Mortimers, and was exactly the type of ripple effect the king must have feared following his usurpation and Edmund Mortimer's defection the previous year.24
It was shortly after this that Ormond, perhaps taking advantage of the disturbance, launched a ‘great war’ against the Geraldines to assert his superiority in Munster, for which he was scarcely reprimanded, let alone punished. Indeed he may have had covert official sanction, because he was high in Prince Thomas's favour, and in May 1403 had been deputed to open and adjourn the Irish parliament at Waterford.25 Such partisanship made it difficult for the lieutenant and his deputies to claim to be governing on behalf of all the English of Ireland, but by this time the prince was wearying of his task. Lack of money had undoubtedly hampered his effectiveness. In August 1402 Archbishop Cranley wrote to the king informing him that his son ‘has not a penny in the world . . . [and] his soldiers are departed from him, and the people of his household are on the point of departing’. In total, during the two years that Thomas remained in Ireland, only about 50 per cent of what his father had promised him was actually paid, and by the summer of 1403 his accumulated arrears stood at £9,156.26 On 1 September, with his sixteenth birthday approaching, his father gave him permission to return to England.27 He sailed from Dublin in November, and would not return for five years.
Thomas's departure left his deputy, Stephen Le Scrope, as the effective governor of Ireland, and it was clearly a surprise when two months later Le Scrope followed the prince back to England without making arrangements to cover his absence. A great council thus met in March 1404 to choose an acting governor, and although it was said – doubtless correctly – that the earl of Ormond was elected by the assembly, his appointment must have met with official approval, for he continued to hold office until Le Scrope's return and was reappointed when the deputy crossed to England a second time.28 The earl's first task was to suppress the continuing revolt in Ulster, for which he was granted a subsidy. During the next eighteen months he also took the opportunity to secure favours and promotions for a number of his friends,29 a policy resented by Desmond, Kildare and others, although to Prince Thomas it was a price worth paying for the political support he could offer. However, on 7 September 1405, aged around forty-five, Ormond suddenly died at Gowran (County Kilkenny). His death, said a Gaelic annalist, left the English of Ireland ‘very powerless’; it also threatened to unravel the prince's policy for governing his father's colony.30
Henry's approach to governing Guyenne reveals both similarities and differences from his approach to Ireland. The traditional oaths of homage and allegiance extracted from towns and nobles at the outset of the reign reflected the feudal, and thus in practice more conditional, basis of his rule in the duchy, as did the efforts made to consolidate the support of vassals with a history of loyalty such as the lords of Duras, Caumont, Montferrand and Lesparre.31 Nonpar de Caumont was confirmed as seneschal of the Agenais and received many favours, but it was the appointment of Gaillard de Durfort, lord of Duras, as seneschal of Guyenne which was especially noteworthy, for it was nearly a century since a native Gascon had held the post.32 His appointment was also a money-saving measure, for as in Ireland the king seems initially to have hoped to make the rule of Guyenne largely self-financing. The English officials upon whom he relied were of respectable but not exalted rank, such as Sir John Trailly, who was confirmed as mayor of Bordeaux, and his constable, the trusted Henry Bowet, but more influential than either was the experienced Francesco Ugguccione, archbishop of Bordeaux since 1384, a cleric of international stature and a future cardinal. Nevertheless, as the supplanter of a king born in Bordeaux and the son of John of Gaunt, whose pretensions there had aroused such hostility in the early 1390s, Henry's acceptance as king-duke was never going to be a formality.33 It was in the cities of Bordeaux and Bayonne that opposition to the new king was most vociferous, although only in the latter, where there was a brief takeover by an anti-Lancastrian faction, did it merit description as a rebellion.34 This was doubtless what prompted Durfort and Caumont to visit England in the spring of 1400, and to the appointment in May of Sir Hugh Despenser as the king's envoy to the duchy.35 A firm but tactful visitation of Bayonne during the summer of 1400 sufficed to restore order there, and in the spring of 1401 both cities received pardons.36
Map 7 The duchy of Guyenne
By this time, however, a mixture of bad luck (John Trailly and Nonpar de Caumont both died in 1400–1), rumblings of aggressive intent from Paris, and pleas from English supporters persuaded Henry that the retention of his duchy required the commitment of greater resources. Almost inevitably, it was Louis of Orléans who was the spearhead of French aggression. In January 1401 he persuaded Charles VI to make the dauphin duke of Guyenne, thereby signalling French intent to recover it.37 Three months later the powerful Archambaud de Grailly, Captal de Buch, was tempted by the offer of the county of Foix to abandon his family's customary attachment to the English cause: on 28 March 1401 he swore allegiance to Charles VI, and a week later did liege homage in person to Orléans. Henry had done what he could to retain Archambaud's loyalty, either pretending or convincing himself that this was merely a temporary deviation from his ‘natural’ English allegiance, and his consistent refusal to condemn the count was probably a factor in the latter's unwillingness to commit himself irretrievably to Orléans's camp.38 But meanwhile Duke Louis was busy staking his own claim in the duchy: already (since 1394) count of Angoulême, he was also granted the county of Périgord in May 1400 following the banishment and flight to England of the former count.39 The possession of these two counties meant that Orléans's personal domain now marched with the Bordelais, and a raid into Périgord in June 1401 left any remaining English supporters there in no doubt as to what the future held for them.40 Henry and his envoys expressed outrage at what they saw as Orléans's unprovoked attacks on English jurisdiction in Guyenne, but to Duke Louis, whose maximalist view of the French state saw the treaty of Brétigny as an aberration, the very presence of Englishmen claiming sovereignty within the borders of the French kingdom was a provocation.
Early in 1401 Archbishop Ugguccione wrote to Henry begging him to send the earl of Rutland, ‘the person who, after my lords your sons – who are still too young to labour thus far – is closest to your blood and to your heart’, and on 5 July the king's cousin was duly appointed lieutenant of Guyenne for three years at an inflated annual fee of £16,666.41 He arrived in September accompanied by an impressive retinue: Robert Lord Scales, the veteran Matthew Gournay, seneschal of Les Landes, Edmund Thorpe as mayor of Bordeaux, and William Farrington, who replaced Henry Bowet as constable and would remain in the duchy for the rest of the reign. The new ruling council in Guyenne also included Guilhem-Amanieu, lord of Lesparre, and Bertrand de Montferrand, who along with Ugguccione and Durfort provided a solid wedge of local support.42 Yet despite his semi-royal status and impressive list of powers, there is little to suggest that Rutland succeeded in imposing his authority in the duchy. Richard Ashton, keeper of the great stronghold of Fronsac on the Dordogne, proved reluctant to hand it over to him, and in May 1402 the English knights whom he led on to the field at Montendre were soundly beaten, even if the lieutenant himself did not take part in the combat.43 By September 1402 Rutland was thinking of returning to England, probably in order to ensure his inheritance of the dukedom of York following his father's death, but by November he had changed his mind; within another month he had fallen out with William Farrington and imprisoned the constable in his own castle of Bordeaux.44 In mitigation, Rutland could plead that he had great difficulty in securing cash from the English exchequer, and by May 1403 he had changed his mind once more and was on his way back to England, having (like Stanley in Ireland) completed barely half of his three-year term and received less than half of the amount promised to him. Meanwhile Orléans cemented the allegiance of the two greatest nobles in Guyenne, his cousin Charles, lord of Albret, whose appointment as constable of France he secured in February 1403, and Bernard, count of Armagnac, who (like Waleran of St-Pol) became his vassal in return for an annuity of 6,000 livres tournois. Brutal and feared, Bernard would support Duke Louis until his death, later giving his name to the Armagnac party.45
This was the prelude to a succession of French assaults on English-held towns and castles in Guyenne, combined with a coordinated attempt to cut naval supply lines and disrupt maritime trade between England and the duchy. The latter was always one of the aims of the attacks on English shipping. The sack of Plymouth by Guillaume de Chastel on 10 August 1403 owed much to its role as the principal port of embarkation for Guyenne.46 During the winter of 1403–4 naval blockades of Bordeaux and Bayonne were established.47 It was the land war, however, upon which the main French effort was focused, and it was Orléans, nominated as captain-general in Guyenne in March 1404, who orchestrated it.48 The main offensives were launched in mid-August and lasted for three months. To the east of Bordeaux, Constable Albret led a force of 1,500 men into the Limousin and Périgord, where a dozen English strongholds either surrendered or were stormed, including Courbefy, the most important Anglo-Gascon castle in the Limousin. Meanwhile Jean, count of Clermont, and Jean de Grailly, the sons of the duke of Bourbon and the count of Foix, respectively, led a campaign in the south of the duchy, first against Lourdes in the foothills of the Pyrenees and then into the southern Landes, some ninety miles south of Bordeaux, capturing another ten castles.49
On 22 July 1404, presumably having heard that a French assault was imminent, Henry wrote some two dozen letters to lords, prelates and towns in Guyenne, thanking them for their support and reminding them of their allegiance to the crown. One of these, couched in the friendliest terms, was to the count of Foix, suggesting that his son's adherence to the French party was contrary to the count's wishes and asking him to restrain his activities. This had some effect, for Archambaud, ambivalent as ever about his own allegiance, did attempt to limit the extent of his son's assaults.50 Yet his performance of homage to Louis of Orléans in 1401 had undoubtedly damaged the English cause. Around this time, an English clerk in Bordeaux drew up a list of the nobility of Béarn and Les Landes, estimating the number of English and French supporters in each region. In Les Landes it was said that the nobility were English to a man, but in Béarn (held by the count of Foix) only sixteen noble houses were reckoned to be reliable while three were sympathetic to the French, seven were split between English and French allegiance, and two had declared their neutrality. Given that no one seemed very sure which side their lord supported, such liquid loyalties are not to be wondered at.51
Meanwhile, loyal Gascons did what they could to repel the French onslaught: Gaillard de Durfort moved into the Agenais to defend Port-Sainte-Marie and a column of men from Bordeaux raided Albret's lands to the south of the city. However, the vacancy left by Rutland's departure in 1403 had not been filled, so that, encouraging letters apart, help from England did not stretch much beyond the modest retinues commanded by Sir William Farrington and Sir Matthew Gournay (the latter by now a septuagenarian), along with large quantities of wheat despatched from England between October 1403 and the summer of 1405 to relieve scarcity in the duchy, a measure of the efficacy of the French blockade.52 Yet although the French successes of 1404 had failed to deliver a decisive blow to the English and their supporters, the capture of over twenty strongholds to the south and east of Bordeaux, many of them surrendered in return for financial inducements, left the city dangerously exposed to future onslaughts. With many of Albret's troops wintering in Cognac, less than sixty miles to the north, matters did not bode well for the new year.
To counter the threat, Henry turned in early 1405 to one of his most trusted knights, Sir Thomas Swynburne, appointing him mayor of Bordeaux; it would be he and Farrington, along with the loyal Gascon lords and the citizen militias of Bordeaux, Bayonne and other towns, who for the next seven years would take responsibility for the defence of the duchy. Swynburne and Farrington, both by now middle-aged, belonged to that cadre of seasoned royal deputies who had spent much of their lives circling the perimeter of England's reach, learning to govern different outposts of the empire – a proto-colonial service.53 Farrington had been seneschal of Saintonge in the 1370s, lieutenant of the captain of Calais in the 1390s, and had taken part in both of Richard II's Irish expeditions. He had also served as an ambassador to Rome and Portugal, and was an experienced naval commander and an expert on the law of arms. Swynburne had served since the 1380s as keeper of Roxburgh castle, captain of Guines and then Hammes in the march of Calais, and most recently, in 1404, as ambassador to the Burgundian court. He was well known to the king, for he had jousted at St-Inglevert in 1390 and visited the Holy Land at the same time as Henry in 1392–3. Following his arrival in Bordeaux in May 1405 with a retinue of fifty men-at-arms and a hundred archers, he immediately set about strengthening the defences of the city and its outlying forts – and none too soon, for the summer of 1405 witnessed the most direct assault yet on the heartland of England's duchy. In mid-August, 1,300 men led by Bernard of Armagnac made their way down the Garonne, capturing half a dozen strongholds before arriving in late September before the walls of Bordeaux. His advance was timed to coincide with the arrival in the Gironde estuary of three Castilian galleys led by Louis of Orléans's ally Don Pero Niño, count of Buelna, in the hope that a joint blockade of the city by land and sea would force its surrender.54 Niño did manage to sail to within two miles of Bordeaux, doing a good deal of damage along the way, but he was driven off by the citizens on 26 September and a few days later Armagnac withdrew.55
Yet if Bordeaux and its hinterland had been saved, the survival of English Guyenne was in the balance. The crown's influence in Saintonge and the Agenais was dwindling, fighting in Périgord was almost continuous, and a French offensive in Les Landes led to the loss of Aire-sur-l'Adour. Bayonne was also threatened, and Gaillard de Durfort was sent to take control of the city.56 The Bordelais was becoming ever more isolated. Once again, however, the lethal power struggle at the heart of France's royal family came to the rescue of the Anglo-Gascons. After two years, during which Orléans's ascendancy had remained almost unchallenged, the new duke of Burgundy, John the Fearless – a ‘stunted, stern, suspicious man’ – chose the summer of 1405 to start asserting himself. Once again France was brought to the brink of civil war, and although on this occasion Orléans and Burgundy managed, just in time, to pull back from the edge, their mutual hatred made it almost impossible to coordinate French policy. It was, as ever, the Lancastrian usurper who was the chief beneficiary.57
Henry's imperial policy thus went through three phases between 1399 and 1405. At first he seems to have been reluctant to commit resources to the defence of his dominions. Financial caution, distrust of some members of the aristocracy, and the nonage of his sons must all have played a part in his thinking. By mid-1401, two factors in particular made him change his mind: the spread of the Welsh rebellion, which also posed a threat to Ireland, and the likelihood of war with France following the dauphin's creation as duke of Guyenne.58 His response – the second phase – was to look to the royal family for lieutenants, as his predecessor Edward III had done.59 Prince Henry, aged fourteen, was sent to his principality of Wales to exercise command; his brother was despatched to Ireland; the king's cousin, Rutland, was sent to Guyenne, and his half-brother John Beaufort was made captain of Calais. These appointments were not merely symbolic, although the symbolism of England's dominions under unitary family governance, each with its own great Plantagenet as the king's alter ego, was certainly important. Yet great men could not be fobbed off with inadequate resources, and Henry also made extravagant funding promises to his new viceroys. Here lay the catch, for the exchequer was quite unable to honour them, and Prince Thomas and Rutland both came home within two years. Their frustration is understandable, but compares unfavourably with Prince John's equally cash-starved ten-year tour of duty in the north. Nor were they replaced, despite Rutland demitting office and Thomas not returning to Ireland for five years. Instead – the third phase – the king now decided to rely on deputies, who might not have carried the inherent authority of a royal lieutenant but whose experience and local contacts were invaluable, as was the support of Gascon or Anglo-Irish nobles such as Durfort and Ormond, and of Archbishops Cranley of Dublin and Ugguccione of Bordeaux.
Nevertheless it proved difficult to stem the tide. By 1405, it was clear that Louis of Orléans had set his heart on the recovery of Guyenne and that Glyn Dŵr, despite recent reverses, had rekindled a fire long smouldering. A hundred years earlier, the British Isles had seemed on the verge of becoming the English Isles: the principality of Wales had been annexed, administrative structures were being created to service English rule in Ireland, and most of the Scottish nobility had submitted to Edward I. Just forty years earlier, in the 1360s, Guyenne had stood at the heart of a vast English domain encompassing between a quarter and a third of the French realm. By September 1405, the view across Henry's empire was a study in disintegration: one French army lay before Bordeaux; another marched through South Wales. Wherever Henry looked, he saw a landscape of castles and towns surrendered, raids, destruction and defection. The 1406 parliament was told by the speaker, Sir John Tiptoft, that no less than ninety-six strongholds in Guyenne had fallen to the French in the course of the previous year.60 The death of the earl of Ormond and the dalliance of Prince Thomas left a power vacuum in Dublin, as did the destruction of Percy power in the Scottish marches. Calais and its satellite fortresses were under constant threat of attack, their garrisons underpaid and restless. Here, as in Wales, Ireland and Guyenne, the balance of financial profit and loss had tipped unsustainably towards the latter. In sum, the English king simply did not rule the majority of what he claimed to rule, and he was beggaring himself in the attempt. The very survival of England's empire was in question.
1 For a ‘wild Irishman’, see Select Cases Before the King's Council, ed. Leadam and Baldwin, 86.
2 In the 1360s, however, a period of peace with France, Edward III gave his son Lionel of Clarence large resources to try to re-establish control of Ireland.
3 P. Crooks, ‘Representation and Dissent: ‘Parliamentarianism’ and the Structure of Politics in Colonial Ireland’, EHR 125 (2010), 1–34 at p. 28.
4 R. Frame, ‘Lordship Beyond the Pale: Munster in the Later Middle Ages’, in Limerick and South-West Ireland: Medieval Art and Architecture (British Archaeological Society Transactions 34, Leeds, 2011), 5–18.
5 A New History of Ireland II: Medieval Ireland 1169–1534, ed. A. Cosgrove (Oxford, 1987), 545; P. Crooks, ‘Factions, Feuds and Noble Power in the Lordship of Ireland, c.1356–1496’, Irish Historical Studies 35 (2007), 425–54.
6 R. Frame, The Political Development of the British Isles (Oxford, 1990), 216; J. Lydon, ‘Ireland: Politics, Government and Law’, in A Companion to Britain in the Later Middle Ages, ed. S. Rigby (London, 2009), 335–56, at p. 347; Crooks, ‘State of the Union’, 35–8.
7 Roger was in Irish dress and was thus not recognized by his killers (R. Davies, ‘Roger Mortimer VII, Fourth Earl of March’, ODNB, 39.403–4.
8 Foedera, viii.114–15 (15 December 1399); P. Crooks, ‘Factionalism and Noble Power in English Ireland, c.1361–1423’ (unpublished PhD thesis, Trinity College, University of Dublin, 2007). I am grateful to Dr Crooks for his advice on Anglo-Irish history in Henry's reign.
9 CPR 1399–401, 92; E 404/15, no. 133 (Stanley's appointment, 10 December). As deputy to Robert de Vere, duke of Ireland (1386–8) and justiciar of Ireland (1389–91), Stanley had gained a reputation for administrative competence and a disregard for the claims of the native Irish (M. Bennett, ‘Sir John Stanley’, ODNB, 52.226; E. Matthew, ‘The Financing of the Lordship of Ireland under Henry V and Henry VI’, in Property and Politics in Later Medieval English History, ed. A. Pollard (Gloucester, 1984), 97–115, at pp. 98, 109; Thomas Holand was promised £7,666 a year in 1398, all from the English exchequer (Saul, Richard II, 287–8).
10 A point noted by the council (POPC, i.182–3, April–May 1401, not 1402).
11 See, for example, £1,400 worth of uncashable tallies exchanged in November 1400: E 403/569, 21 November (also 26 October, 4 November, 9 December and 26 February); Steel, Receipt, 133, counted uncashable tallies to Stanley of £4,405, but some of these doubled as replacements for each other.
12 E 403/565, 16 December; CIRCLE PR 1 Henry IV, nos. 70, 127, 155 (Perers), 94 (Ormond); CIRCLE PR 2 Henry IV, nos. 24, 29, for Ormond, ‘the king's beloved cousin’.
13 Ancient Irish Histories, 17.
14 CPR 1399–1401, 397; CCR 1399–1402, 338; Ancient Irish Histories, 17; Wylie, Henry the Fourth, i.228–9; POPC, ii.43–52. Cranley was accompanied by the archbishop of Armagh; Usk heard them ‘complaining vehemently’ to the king (Usk, 134–5); D. Johnston, ‘Thomas Cranley’, ODNB, 14.10–11.
15 E 404/16, no. 728; Matthew, ‘Financing’, 98.
16 Owain's letter to the Irish lords, dated 29 Nov. 1401, did not reach its destination, since his messengers were beheaded (Usk, 148–53); cf. Lydon, ‘Ireland: Politics, Government and Law’, 345.
17 CIRCLE PR 3 Henry IV, no. 30; Cranley had also been chancellor in 1398–9; Merbury replaced him in July 1406. For Cranley, see the fulsome obituary in Ancient Irish Histories, 26–7.
18 CIRCLE PR 3 Henry IV, nos. 84, 137, 222, 251. Both Dartasso and Scrope had shown conspicuous loyalty to Richard II in 1399, accompanying him to Conway, where Dartasso refused to discard the king's livery badge; Le Scrope (the brother of William, executed at Bristol in July 1399) was suspected of involvement in the Epiphany Rising, but exonerated: S. Walker, ‘Janico Dartasso: Chivalry, Nationality and the Man-at-Arms’, in S. Walker, Political Culture in Later Medieval England, ed. M. Braddick (Manchester, 2006), 115–35; E. Curtis, ‘Janico Dartas: Richard II's “Gascon Esquire”: His Career in Ireland, 1394–1426’, Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland 63 (1933), 182–205; A. Dunn, ‘Loyalty, Honour and the Lancastrian Revolution: Sir Stephen Scrope of Castle Combe and his Kinsmen, c.1389–c.1408’, Fourteenth Century England III, ed. W. M. Ormrod (Woodbridge, 2004), 167–83.
19 Crooks, ‘Factionalism and Noble Power’, 257–64; CIRCLE PR 3 Henry IV, no. 112 (grant to Ormond of custody of Desmond lands in Tipperary), 192, 212.
20 CIRCLE PR 3 Henry IV, nos. 232–6 (indentures with Irish lords), 154; CIRCLE PR 4 Henry IV, no. 197 (making truces).
21 The king rewarded Drake by granting the city one of his personal swords as a special mark of favour; known as the Great Sword, it is still regularly used for its original ceremonial purpose: C. Blair and I. Delamer, ‘The Dublin Civic Swords’, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy (1988), 87–142.
22 New History of Ireland II, ed. Cosgrove, 544; Walker, ‘Janico Dartasso’, 123; Ancient Irish Histories, 18; CIRCLE PR 4 Henry IV, no. 93.
23 CIRCLE PR 3 Henry IV, no. 15; CPR 1399–1401, 519. Rede's kidnappers were pardoned, as were some but not all of those who murdered Dowdall; without their cooperation the county could not be defended: B. Smith, Crisis and Survival in Late Medieval Ireland (Oxford, 2013), 94–102; CIRCLE PR 4 Henry IV, nos. 48–59.
24 New History of Ireland II, ed. Cosgrove, 581; K. Simms, ‘The Ulster Revolt of 1404 – An Anti-Lancastrian Dimension?’, in Ireland and the English World in the Late Middle Ages: Essays in Honour of Robin Frame, ed. B. Smith (Basingstoke, 2009), 141–60; CIRCLE PR 4 Henry IV, no. 241; PROME, viii.261–2, 301–2.
25 Crooks, ‘Factionalism and Noble Power’, 280–92; CIRCLE PR 4 Henry IV, no. 192.
26 RHL, i.74; Wylie, Henry the Fourth, i.232–3. About £8,900 was sent across to him in 1402–3 (E 403/573, 21 July; E 403/574, 9 Dec.; E 403/576, 12 June). The figure of £18,000 for uncashable tallies given in Steel, Receipt, 133–4, conflates several attempts to replace the same assignments and thus exaggerates the level of crown default. See also B. Blacker, ‘A Lancastrian Prince in Ireland’, in History Ireland (1998), 22–6. In March 1403 a new indenture granted Thomas all the profits of the Irish administration without obligation to account to the English exchequer, but in return he was expected to sustain all the expenses of ruling the lordship, and in practice he found the revenues hard to collect (Foedera, viii.293).
27 CPR 1401–5, 188.
28 CIRCLE PR 5 Henry IV, nos. 35, 131; CIRCLE PR 6 Henry IV, no. 30; RHL, ii.29–35 (1404, not 1405); Le Scrope left ‘suddenly’, perhaps in connection with the talk in the January 1404 parliament of replacing Prince Thomas as governor (PROME, viii.279). Ormond's letters to the king dated 18 March ostensibly asked to be excused from office, but in reality were probably a plea for adequate funds to be made available to him.
29 One of Ormond's first acts was to pardon himself and his mistress, Katherine of Desmond, for having alienated and acquired lands without licence: Crooks, ‘Factionalism and Noble Power’, 264–9; CIRCLE PR 5 Henry IV, no. 118.
30 Crooks, ‘Factionalism and Noble Power’, 293–4 (quote).
31 C 47/25/6, nos. 28–9 (oaths of allegiance in 1399–1400; the Black Prince secured more than 1,000 oaths of homage when he became prince of Aquitaine in 1363); CGR 1399–1400, nos. 8–28; E 404/15, no. 161 (Caumont's indenture, 24 Feb. 1400). My thanks to Guilhem Pepin for his help with Guyenne in Henry's reign.
32 CGR 1399–1400, no. 53; Durfort's appointment concerned some on the king's council (POPC, i.181).
33 M. Vale, English Gascony (Oxford, 1970), 27–54; for Gaunt in Guyenne, see above, pp. 89–92.
34 CGR 1400–1, no. 10. Froissart, perhaps overstating the case, said Richard's deposition was greeted in Bordeaux with ‘great sorrow’ (Oeuvres de Froissart, xvi.211–21).
35 CGR 1399–1400, no. 146; CPR 1399–1401, 271.
36 CGR 1400–1, no. 10 (pardon to Bayonne, 14 March 1401); E 28/8 (pardon to Bordeaux, 9 May 1401); CGR 1400–1, nos. 26, 34, 49 (confirmation of trading and other privileges).
37 Pepin, ‘The French Offensives of 1404–1407’, 1–3. This provoked an angry response from Henry, who had appointed Prince Henry as duke of Guyenne in October 1399 (Lehoux, Jean de France, ii.216).
38 CGR 1399–1400, no. 172; CGR 1400–1, 113; Pepin, ‘The French Offensives’, 37–9.
39 Henry IV welcomed the count of Périgord and offered him money and help, but he failed to regain his county: Usk, 134; E 403/571, 28 October 1401 (gift of £120); E 404/16, nos. 773–4.
40 Vale, English Gascony, 46.
41 Rutland's indenture stated that if Henry could send one of his sons to Gascony (which was evidently to be desired), Rutland would relinquish his post and return to England (C 47/24/9, no. 6; E 404/16, no. 738; Vale, English Gascony, 31, 39–40, 43, 45, 48; E 403/565, 7 April, E 403/567, 11 June).
42 CGR 1400–1, nos. 31, 54, 79, 92 (Rutland's powers as lieutenant), 101, 113 (the council).
43 For Montendre, see above, p. 203. CGR1400–1, no. 111; CGR 1401–4, no. 79; Given-Wilson, ‘Quarrels of Old Women’, 31–2. Hugh Despenser also died in 1401.
44 Vale, English Gascony, 246; CGR 1401–4, no. 94 (September 1402), where Rutland was ‘former lieutenant’ and Fronsac was committed to Farrington. This may have been the source of their dispute; by November Rutland was ‘lieutenant’ once again (CGR 1401–4, no. 96). Given his slippery reputation and the fact that he had been deprived of the dukedom of Aumale three years earlier, he might not have thought his inheritance assured. Edmund duke of York died on 1 August 1402.
45 Saint-Denys, iii.69, commented on Albret's unsuitability as constable, since he was lame, short and feeble. For Armagnac, see Nordberg, Les Ducs et la Royauté, 75, 120.
46 Wilson, ‘Anglo-French Relations’, 190; for the Plymouth raid, above, p. 237.
47 Pepin, ‘The French Offensives of 1404–1407’, 3–10; Vale, English Gascony, 48–53; Foedera, viii.336 (expected invasion of Oct. 1403); POPC, ii.81 (escort for Anglo-Gascon wine convoy, Dec. 1403).
48 Autrand, Charles VI, 402.
49 Saint-Denys, iii.205, said Clermont took 34 strongholds and was much praised in Paris. He also said (iii.201) that many of the Bordeaux citizens hated Henry, so Albret tried to take the city by treachery; the execution in London of ‘traitors from the city of Bordeaux’ in 1403–4 lends this some support (CE, 399).
50 E 28/14, passim. For the confusion over the allegiance of the Count of Foix, see the letters in RHL I, 438–57; Pepin, ‘French Offensives of 1404–1407’, 8–9, 37–9. Henry wrote to Archbishop Ugguccione on 16 August 1404 apologizing for being so taken up with domestic problems that he had not had time to deal with overseas affairs, but now that the Scottish marches were peaceful he hoped soon to suppress the Welsh rebellion and intended to help the archbishop (CDS, v.281).
51 Vale, English Gascony, 154–5, 165–70; Pépin, ‘The French Offensive’, 36–9.
52 CGR 1401–4, nos. 110–13, 118, 121, 128–42, 149, 151, 158–61, 168; CGR 1404–5, nos. 2–4, 7–8, 17, 49, 52; POPC, i.222. Gournay may have been in his eighties rather than in his seventies: M. Jones, ‘Sir Matthew Gournay’, ODNB, 23.86–7. Hugh Luttrell was appointed mayor of Bordeaux to replace Edmund Thorpe in May 1404, but since he was MP for Somerset in the same year he may not have visited the duchy.
53 M. Labarge, ‘Thomas Swynburne’, ODNB, 53.527–8; S. Walker, ‘William Farrington’, ODNB, 19.130–1; CGR 1404–5, no. 12 (Swynburne's appointment, 14 March 1405).
54 Niño had been taken into Orléans's household earlier in the year: Wilson, ‘Anglo-French Relations’, 267.
55 Saint-Denys, iii.357–9, credits Armagnac with the capture of twenty strongholds, and said that he was paid by the citizens to abandon the siege of Bordeaux.
56 POPC, i. 250.
57 Saint-Denys, iii.331–45; Autrand, Charles VI, 404–7; Wylie, Henry the Fourth, ii.82 (quote). Orléans and Burgundy clashed in mid-August, only agreeing to be reconciled in mid-October.
58 See the opening speech in the 1401 parliament (PROME, viii.99).
59 Ormrod, Edward III, 414ff. Richard II made Gaunt duke of Guyenne in 1390. He also made Robert de Vere duke of Ireland in 1386, and his nephew, Thomas Holand, lieutenant in 1398, both of whom he was said to wish to make king of Ireland (Usk, 76–7).
60 PROME, viii.339.