THE SEARCH FOR SOLVENCY (1404–1406)
By early 1404, it was clear that more systematic ways of addressing the crown's financial problems had to be found. Thus far, it had survived – just – by supplementing unpopular taxation with equally unpopular loans, padded out by windfalls, forfeitures, and the forbearance of those who used their private resources to pay their soldiers' wages, but patience was becoming exhausted, the exchequer's and household's debts were spinning out of control, annuities were not being paid, and as the theatres of war and rebellion fanned out, obligations continued to mount.1 On top of this, piracy and a succession of wet summers had by 1403 caused English wool and cloth exports, the revenues from which constituted the exchequer's primary source of recurrent taxation, to shrink from an annual average of £39,000 in 1399–1402 to just £26,000.2 Yet the parliament which met on 14 January 1404 at Westminster was determined that if the king was to be granted taxation he would have to agree to structural reform.3 There were a number of ways in which this might be achieved: if household expenditure could not be reduced, then the household could be starved of cash; new and more acceptable forms of taxation could be devised; restrictions could be imposed on royal grants and annuities; greater efforts could be made to assign specific revenue streams to specific areas of expenditure, thus ensuring prioritization according to needs (although needs might be perceived differently); the king could also be encouraged to maximize his ordinary revenues, for example the yield from crown lands. One way or another, each of these expedients was tried, but the results were not encouraging.
As their speaker, the commons chose the straight-talking Arnold Savage, but although he was now a privy councillor and can hardly have been unaware of the crown's predicament, he went straight on to the attack.4 The king, he declared, made ‘undue and unwise’ grants; the royal household was badly managed and overstaffed; ministers could not be trusted with taxes; purveyance was continuously abused. When Henry asked him why the commons were so ‘ill-disposed and discontented’ with him, Savage replied that it was no wonder, considering the burdens he placed on his people; if reform was not implemented, ‘we do not see how your realm will be well governed’. At this point the king retired to Windsor for a few days, where he pardoned the earl of Northumberland – for Savage had even had the audacity to hint that unless the earl was restored the commons might not make any kind of grant.5 In the end they did make a grant, but not of a fifteenth and tenth: the ‘new and extraordinary (novam et exquisitam)’ tax they sanctioned was a nominal 5 per cent levy on landed or moveable income.6 Behind this lay a desire to shift the burden of taxation from the poor to the king's wealthier subjects, but the reluctance with which it was agreed makes it clear that it was not motivated by any spirit of philanthropic self-sacrifice, rather on account of fear of the popular backlash likely to follow the grant of another lay subsidy. The commons insisted that no mention of the tax be made on the parliament roll and that all records relating to its collection be destroyed, so that it could not be used as a precedent. How much they thought it would yield is not clear: £12,000 of the proceeds were to be given to the king to clear his debts, with the remainder being paid not into the exchequer but to four war-treasurers who would be responsible for ensuring that it was spent entirely on defence rather than being diverted by the king and his ministers to other purposes. If by 15 May the king had not raised an ‘army on the sea’ to defend the realm, the entire grant would be null and void.7
What soon became apparent was that the cost of this naval force alone, estimated at £9,546, was likely to exceed the entire proceeds of the tax. Shrouded in confusion from the start, its lack of transparency was a powerful inducement to evasion and it appears to have yielded no more than about £9,000, of which at least £6,526 went directly to the war-treasurers.8 The appointment as war-treasurers of three London citizens and a chamberlain of the exchequer was most unwelcome to the king. An expedient last tried in the 1380s, it had the effect of depriving the crown of the flexibility to distribute income as it wished, which was in fact precisely what it was designed to do, thereby ensuring that taxes voted for war were spent on war.9 In practice, however, it threatened even the routine obligations of government, including annuities. Payment of the £20,000 and more of exchequer annuities promised by Henry or his predecessors was a running sore. Parliament had stipulated in 1401 that customs revenue should not be used for this purpose and that new annuitants must declare the value of grants they already held from the crown. In 1402 the over-assignment of shrieval revenues led to Henry agreeing that those whose grants bore the earliest dates should be preferred over those with more recent grants, but that precedence should be given to paying the debts of the royal household. Now, however, the king declared that although certain ordinary sources of revenue should be reserved for the household, those who held annuities assigned on them should nevertheless be paid in full.10 This was unrealistic. In fact, crown revenues came under such pressure in 1404 that by July the king had to put a complete stop on the payment of exchequer annuities, an embarrassment acknowledged in the October parliament when it was agreed to suspend them retrospectively for a year from Easter 1404.11 This was a decision fraught with political danger. Henry had relied on the unpaid service of his annuitants to suppress rebellions and campaign in Wales and Scotland during the early years of the reign, but the longer annuities remained unpaid the fewer were likely to respond. After 1404, Henry's military summonses ceased to refer to his annuitants and referred only to his retainers or retinue, a presentational strategy shifting the emphasis from financial obligation to loyalty.12
Unfortunately the stop on annuities did little to improve the situation in the household either, despite the fact that expenditure in the great wardrobe dropped from an annual average of £11,100 between 1399 and 1403 to just £2,800 between 1403 and 1406 – the main reason why the overall cost of the household departments fell from £41,700 during the first four years of the reign to £32,300 over the next three years.13 Thus the commons did (through the war-treasurers) succeed in one of their main objectives, which was to squeeze the household's sources of supply, but any expectation that annual expenditure in the wardrobe could be kept to £12,100 (the upper limit, or certum, proposed in January 1404) was hopelessly unrealistic. In fact the wardrobe spent almost exactly double this during the following year, so that by January 1405, when wardrobe keeper Thomas More demitted office after four years, he left debts totalling some £12,000, of which £7,000 had been incurred during the previous fifteen months.14 Most of these were purveying debts, the inevitable safety valve for a household starved of ready cash, but a deeply unpopular expedient cited by Archbishop Scrope and others as a prime cause of disaffection with Henry's kingship.15
Thus while 1404 proved to be a year of relief for lay taxpayers, the impact on annuitants and household creditors of the measures adopted in the January parliament was severe. In addition, Henry found it impossible to fund any sustained military activity. During the five months that Prince Henry spent on the Welsh border between 1 July and 21 November 1404, just £934 was passed to him; the king failed for the first time since 1400 to campaign in Wales in person, and Glyn Dŵr duly enjoyed his most successful year thus far.16 Naval operations, thanks to the conditions attached to the commons' grant, were better supported, but Guyenne and Ireland were more or less left to fend for themselves.17
A letter from the council to the king in early June 1404 revealed the scale of its task. Henry had asked his councillors to send money urgently to the prince, who was on his way to Wales. Their response was to itemize with rueful clarity the crown's obligations.18 First, £900 of loans raised during the January parliament, mainly to pay Welsh garrisons, had not yet been repaid. Secondly, £2,000 of the subsidy granted by parliament had been earmarked to repay a loan from the city of London. Thirdly, members of the council had advanced a total of £533 which would have to be repaid.19 Fourthly, the king had ordered the war-treasurers to send £333 to Prince Thomas to clear his debts, £866 to three London merchants to repay loans, and £200 to the great wardrobe to cover the cost of St George's Day liveries. With their fifth point, the scale of the councillors' problem became grimly apparent. For the promised naval force of 600 men-at-arms, 1,200 archers and forty-two ships, the two admirals were owed £9,546, some of which had been paid, and more, ‘God willing’, would be paid this week, thanks to the archbishop of Canterbury, the chancellor (Henry Beaufort), Hugh Waterton, John Norbury, Thomas Knolles and ‘the good people of London’, all of whom had advanced unspecified sums, but a further £2,348 would have to be borrowed within the next six weeks. Sixthly, £666 of the subsidy in Norfolk was needed for the expenses of the royal household. Seventhly, Prince John had been promised £4,000 for the keeping of the East March, a part of which had been assigned to him from the subsidy in Yorkshire and Lancashire, but for the rest ‘he can have no payment’. Eighthly, £533 of the £1,000 promised to the earl of Somerset as captain of Calais was still due to him; a further £200 was needed for the repair of ships, and £100 for the expenses of the king's envoys at Calais. In summary, the amount needed simply to cover the most pressing of the crown's commitments was around £20,000, and the councillors had no idea where they might borrow this. Worse still, they had heard reports from several counties that the subsidy granted in January was going to raise less than had been hoped, while the wool and cloth customs were so overburdened with assignments that ‘little of them remains’. And thus, they concluded, they had no idea what to do next but to await the ‘most excellent and wise advice’ of their sovereign lord.
Yet if the council's letter demonstrated the disparity between the crown's revenue and its commitments, embedded in it were pointers to the way forward, notably a detailed analysis of obligations and priorities, and a policy of trying to match specific sources to specific requirements. The latter was not new – the wool customs of Hull and Boston, for example, had been ring-fenced for the payment of the Percys as March wardens in 1401–3, and up to a half of the wool subsidy had been regularly reserved for Calais since 1390 – but its application would become more systematic and provide a greater level of security for vital areas of expenditure during the second half of the reign.20 For the moment, however, it was clear that a breakdown of government credit had occurred, and although Henry's loyal backers in London had not forsaken him,21 in the short term the exchequer was largely reliant on a diminishing circle of the faithful such as Thomas Arundel, Hugh Waterton, John Norbury, Henry Bowet, John Lovell, the earl of Westmorland, the chancellor (Henry Beaufort) and treasurer (William Lord Roos), many of them privy councillors.22
There was still the option to put pressure on the Church to grant more, especially tempting in 1404 since clerical tenths would come directly to the exchequer rather than to the war-treasurers, but risky in view of the already high incidence of clerical discontent. At the council held at Worcester in September 1403 Henry had rebuked the clerics for ‘enjoying peace at home’ while he criss-crossed the country putting down rebellions, whereupon a pack of royalist knights and esquires suggested that all the bishops present be stripped of their treasure and horses and sent home on foot. Arundel's indignation persuaded the king to call them off on that occasion, but only on condition that the archbishop summon convocation and try to convince his suffragans of the king's necessity. The result, however, was no more than a half tenth along with a few hundred pounds in loans, so in the summer of 1404 the archbishops were once more induced to summon their convocations, and this time each granted a whole tenth, although both imposed conditions.23 Yet clerical tenths would not solve the king's problems: their combined yield was around £16,000, less than half that of one lay fifteenth and tenth, and by August it had become clear that the hand-to-mouth measures of the past six months could be sustained no longer. On 25 August, therefore, at a great council at Lichfield, writs were issued for parliament to meet on 6 October.
The second parliament of 1404 – nicknamed ‘Unlearned’ (Illiteratum) because the writs of summons forbade the return of lawyers as MPs – met not at Westminster but at Coventry. The reason why lawyers were excluded was because it was thought that they spent too much of their time on their clients' business and not enough on that of the realm. There were suspicions that Henry had gone further than this and told the sheriffs whom they should return as knights of the shire; true or not, such gossip was uncomfortable for a king who had levelled precisely the same charge against his predecessor.24
The main topic, inescapably, was finance, for it was clear that different measures were required from those adopted in January. Two proposals were discussed, one targeting the wealth of the Church, the other that of lay landholders. The first came from the parliamentary knights and certain ‘leading men’ of the realm, described by Walsingham as ‘less knowledgeable than heathens’, who proposed that the temporalities of the Church be confiscated for one year.25 Their spokesman was the privy councillor and diplomat John Cheyne, a known critic of the Church who represented a powerful body of opinion, and the upshot was a ‘mighty altercation between clerics and laymen’, with the laity claiming that while they risked their lives and emptied their coffers to defend the realm, the clergy ‘had been sitting at home doing nothing, being no help to the king at all’.26 Once again this provoked a furious response from Arundel, who pointed out (correctly) that the clergy had granted more tenths than the laity had granted fifteenths and tenths, and that they also prayed ceaselessly for the king and the realm. Cheyne professed himself underwhelmed by the latter point, but Arundel was undeterred. Supported by Archbishop Scrope and, significantly, by a number of temporal lords including Edward, duke of York, he reminded the knights that they had recently (in 1401) persuaded the king to confiscate the lands of the alien priories on the grounds that this would increase the crown's revenues, yet in reality it was they, not the king, who had benefited from the seizures. ‘While you grow proud and enrich yourselves on these things,’ Arundel went on, ‘the king is in need and suffers penury, as he did before’; and when a copy of Magna Carta was produced to show that those who threatened the liberties of the Church were liable to excommunication, the plan was dropped.27 In a sense, though, the pressure worked, for ten days after parliament adjourned, Arundel convened the southern convocation, which voted to grant one-and-a-half tenths, followed two weeks later with a tenth from the northern convocation.
Although Walsingham presented the clash at Coventry in terms of clergy versus laity, he also pointed out that the reason why some of the lay lords supported the bishops was because when, earlier in the parliament, the knights had proposed a resumption of crown lands granted out during the last forty years, a measure which would have seriously affected the incomes of many members of the nobility, the bishops had vigorously opposed the idea.28 The idea of resuming the royal patrimony, the second main proposal discussed, had been gaining ground for several decades and was acquiring quasi-constitutional status: if the king were to take back the lands which had formerly belonged to the crown and use the revenues from them to support his wars and other expenses, rather than granting them to his supporters, then it was possible to envision a future in which he would no longer need to come cap in hand to parliament for taxation.29 Unfortunately, there were too many vested interests involved for this to be a realistic proposition, although Henry did show some interest in the idea, agreeing to resume for one year the profits of royal lands granted out since 1377. He also promised to set up a commission to examine all grants made by him and his predecessors since 1366, and it was probably on this basis that the commons granted taxation, although if that was the case they were to be cruelly disappointed: opposed by the lords and barely encouraged by the king, the commission proved a dead letter and the plan was shelved.30
This was ungrateful of Henry, for the Unlearned Parliament was in the end as open-handed as its predecessor had been tight-fisted. It granted the king two full lay fifteenths and tenths, one to be collected before Christmas, the other during the course of 1405; it extended the wool customs and tunnage and poundage until September 1407; and it repeated the attempt to raise more from the wealthier members of society, first as noted by allowing the king to take one year's profits from royal lands granted out since 1377, and secondly by granting him 5 per cent of the value of all lands and rents worth more than £333 a year.31 Naturally such generosity came at a price: once again, Henry had to agree to the appointment of war-treasurers, and once again he was told that if within three months he had not raised adequate forces for the defence of the sea, the Scottish and Welsh marches, and Guyenne, then the parliamentary grant would be null and void. Lest there be any misunderstanding, the terms of the grant also included the draconian threat that anyone who tried to cite royal or exchequer authority to use these subsidies to pay for debts already incurred, rather than for ‘the defence of the realm in time to come’, would be guilty of treason.
Nevertheless, the combined total of between £90,000 and £100,000 from the lay and clerical subsidies allowed military operations to resume in the spring of 1405, although the unremitting military commitments, the legacy of debt from the previous year, and the successful operation of the war-treasurers system, which continued to deprive Henry of the freedom to determine his own financial priorities, meant that there was also still much resort to borrowing.32 Yet Henry was learning his lessons: the new war-treasurers appointed in the Coventry parliament were Thomas Lord Furnivall, a privy councillor whom Henry shrewdly appointed as treasurer of the exchequer three weeks after parliament was dissolved, presumably in an attempt to blur the line between his twin responsibilities, and Sir John Pelham, an utterly dependable chamber knight who had shared Henry's exile in 1398–9 and had custody of the Mortimer brothers from 1406 to 1409. Sympathetic to the king's problems, they were prepared at times to advance substantial sums to him.33 Even so, by August 1405, with the north barely subdued and a French army in Wales, Henry felt obliged to call another great council to Worcester.34 Despite the alarm bells so recently sounded by Scrope's rebellion, it was once again to the clergy that he turned, and once again a bitter row ensued, but on this occasion no clerical tenth was forthcoming. Henry was paying the price for his duplicity, and to make matters worse, on the return from Wales the royal wagon train was caught in a flood which swept away carts, treasure and even, it was said, some of the king's crowns.35
Following the Worcester council of September 1405, Henry spent a month in the Midlands, mainly at Kenilworth, before returning to London. He remained in the vicinity of the capital for the next eight months.36 The country was uneasy, with rumours of an imminent Scottish invasion and continuing disturbances in the north, Breton and Norman pirates circling for prey, and the French expeditionary force wintering in Pembrokeshire. Early in December a parliament was summoned, initially to Northampton, then to Coventry, then to Gloucester (in order to support Prince Henry in Wales), but in February a French fleet was spotted gathering at the mouth of the Thames and it was decided to switch it to Westminster.37
Although the Long Parliament of 1406 met on 1 March and was not dissolved until 22 December, it spent less than four months of that time actually sitting. Its deliberations reflect the rapidly developing situation through the year, with priorities changing from one session to the next and decisions made in March or June being reversed in November or December, and only at the very end was a compromise worked out. The issues which concerned it were a mix of the old and the new. Finance, the role of the council and the need to protect English shipping and to prosecute the wars in Wales and Guyenne were by now standard fare, but to these were added the (unexpectedly difficult) question of ratifying the sentences against the lords who had rebelled in 1405 and the settlement of the order of succession to the crown.38
The first session lasted for five weeks before adjourning on 3 April for Easter. As their Speaker, the commons chose Sir John Tiptoft, a young knight of the king's chamber with impeccable Lancastrian credentials and an abundance of political talent. Despite Henry's apparent enthusiasm for the choice it is difficult, given the language used by Tiptoft, to believe that he acted as a royal stooge, although at times the opinions he expressed were probably less his own than those of the members who had elected him. Indeed it was the king's trust in him which allowed him to be so outspoken.39 There was, at any rate, a good deal of plain speaking from the start, focused principally on the household, the keeping of the seas, Wales and Guyenne. As usual, Henry wanted taxation, but this the commons would not grant without receiving assurances in return. All that the king was prepared to concede for the moment was that a date be set for the expulsion of some French and Bretons (mainly servants of Queen Joan) thought to be inflating the cost of the royal household. The real issue of the moment, however, was the defence of English shipping, for which it was agreed that the merchants and ship-owners of the realm would receive the proceeds of tunnage and poundage, plus one-quarter of the wool subsidy, for seventeen months from 1 May, in return for which they would fit out a fleet to patrol the seas. Agreeing even this much evidently involved some harsh words, and on the last day of the first session Tiptoft rose to deny a rumour that certain members had spoken about the king ‘other than they should have’, as a result of which Henry bore a ‘heavy heart’ towards the commons. Henry graciously reassured them that he still thought of them as his loyal subjects.40
By the time the second session was due to begin on 26 April events had moved on. On 22 March James, earl of Carrick, the heir to the Scottish throne, was seized by English privateers off Flamborough Head (Yorkshire) on his way to France, and brought to London. Two weeks later his father, Robert III, died, apparently of grief, whereupon the eleven-year-old became King James I of Scotland, but it would be another eighteen years before he was sent back to his kingdom.41 Fortune also favoured the English counter-insurgency in Wales: in January troops were landed on Anglesey, the start of a campaign to slip a noose around Snowdonia and strangle Glyn Dŵr into submission; during the spring, the remaining French troops in Pembrokeshire departed; and on 23 April, St George's Day, a fierce encounter left around 1,000 Welsh rebels dead, including one of Glyn Dŵr's sons.42 Meanwhile, Bishop Beaufort had been sent to Calais on 26 March to discuss a lasting Anglo-French peace sealed by a royal marriage.43 It was thus with cautious optimism that the lords and commons reconvened at Westminster, but at this point the king's health collapsed. Early on the morning of 28 April, he wrote from his lodge in Windsor Great Park informing the council that ‘an illness has suddenly affected us in our leg’, causing him such pain that his physicians had advised him not to travel, especially on horseback; nevertheless he hoped to come to London in three or four days. A few hours later he wrote again to say that his condition had worsened and advised the council to proceed without him.44 This may have been the prolapsed rectum of which it was later claimed that he had been cured with a treatment devised by the fourteenth-century physician John of Arderne (Adam Usk also said that Henry suffered from ‘rupture of the internal organs’). Both the condition and the treatment were painful: the remedy advocated by Arderne recommended first bleeding the leg before concocting an ointment called unguentum apostolorum, so named because it included twelve principal ingredients. When this was heated and applied to the prolapsed part of the rectum, ‘it schal entre agayn’, whereupon it should be dressed to prevent it protruding once more. If necessary, the procedure could be repeated several times.45 Presumably this was not necessary, or at least not immediately, for Henry left Windsor the next day, travelling by water to Kingston and then on to Westminster, and on 1 May the royal household took up residence at the bishop of Durham's inn at Dowgate, where it remained until 6 July.46 It took months, however, for the king to recover, and from now on his energy declined.
Parliament thus initially (on 30 April) reconvened without the king, and although he was fit enough to attend sittings on 15, 22 and 24 May, and on 7 and 19 June, at other times he was absent (for example, on 8 and 25 May) and messengers had to be sent back and forth between Westminster and Dowgate.47 Yet few allowances were made for Henry's health. Returning initially to the question of aliens, the commons obliged him to agree to the deportation within three weeks of forty-four named Bretons and Frenchmen. This was followed by a request that the king nominate his councillors in parliament and agree to a bill defining their role, one aim of which was to furnish them with the power to monitor royal grants. Although not intended as criticism of the individuals concerned (since the seventeen councillors whom Henry nominated on 22 May were largely the same men who had served on the council over the previous few years), the bill was designed to reassert the independence of the council from the court and, given the king's health, to establish its powers on a formal basis. Behind such moves, as ever, lay a desire to reduce spending and bring order to crown finances, fundamental to which was the cost of the royal household. The latter, Tiptoft told the king, was ‘full of rascals (de raskaille) for the most part’, while his ministers ‘wickedly deceived’ him. When asked whether a parliamentary committee would be permitted to audit the accounts of the war-treasurers appointed at Coventry, Henry replied that ‘kings were not wont to render account’.48 Yet in the end he yielded – the first time that the principle of parliamentary audit of ministerial accounts had been conceded. His reward, if such it was, was the addition of 12d in the pound to tunnage and poundage paid by alien merchants, though only for a year. This would not do a great deal to relieve the exchequer.
By this time Henry Beaufort and his fellow commissioners had returned (on 22 May) from Calais, and in the light of their discussions and of the unpredictability of the king's health an act was passed for the succession of the crown. The main English proposal at Calais was for Prince Henry to marry one of Charles VI's daughters (the ex-queen Isabella seems still to have been the bride of choice).49 Should the king die and the prince marry, but then himself die before fathering a son, there was thus a possibility that the throne would pass to his (hypothetical) daughter rather than to one of his three adult brothers. Such a risk to the dynasty's recently won throne was not one with which the lords and commons were comfortable, especially since the succession of a Lancastrian princess was bound to reopen the question of the earl of March's claim through a daughter of Edward III. It was therefore decided, in the ‘Act for the Inheritance of the Crown’ passed by parliament on 7 June, to entail the crown in the male line, meaning that Prince Henry's heir, should he fail to produce a son, would be his brother Thomas.50 Doubtless the act was designed to double as retrospective legitimation of Henry's claim through the male line in 1399, although this was not made explicit. The main purpose was to provide a greater degree of security for the future of the dynasty and the peace of the realm, although it would not have escaped notice that unquestionably legitimate kings with unquestionably legitimate heirs had no need for parliamentary legislation on the succession; and within six months it would be reversed.
Ratifying sentences of treason against convicted rebels should have been more straightforward, but when, on the last day of the second session, Henry invited the lords to affirm the guilt of Northumberland, Bardolf, Scrope, Mowbray and their adherents, they proved surprisingly reluctant to do so, preferring instead to offer Northumberland and Bardolf another three weeks to make their submission, and postponing any decision on Scrope and Mowbray.51 Wariness about extending the scope of treason and lingering unease at the king's execution of the archbishop probably explains their hesitancy. Those responsible for Scrope's death (which can only have included Henry) were, after all, under sentence of excommunication, even if Archbishop Arundel had as yet declined to publish Pope Innocent's bull.52 News may also have arrived that Northumberland and Bardolf were by now in Wales, having fled Scotland in the spring after being warned that they were about to be betrayed. After being worsted by Edward Lord Charlton in a skirmish in June 1406 they slipped across the Channel, where they spent several months failing to drum up support in Paris for an invasion of England.53
By 6 July, nearly three weeks after the second session ended, Henry was at last fit enough to leave Bishop Langley's hostel, and by the end of the month he was at Walsingham priory – ‘England's Holy Land’ – where he spent two days, presumably praying at the healing shrine of the Virgin, before moving on to Lynn for a week (4–11 August) to bid farewell to his daughter Philippa before she left for Denmark. Her retinue, as befitted a queen-in-waiting, numbered nearly 150, headed by Bishop Henry Bowet and Richard, brother of the duke of York, all clad in green and scarlet livery.54 Such obligatory splendour did not come cheap – at least £4,200, and probably a good deal more, was needed to pay for Philippa's send-off – and even before parliament's adjournment the exchequer had launched a borrowing campaign which, by 28 July, had raised over £16,000 in loans, secured on the tenths granted by York and Canterbury convocations during the summer; in addition, a subsidy of half a mark was granted from normally exempt clergy such as mendicants, chantry priests and stipendiary vicars.55 Yet no sooner was money raised but it was spent: between mid-May and mid-August £11,500 was disbursed to the three elder Lancastrian princes for Wales, Ireland and the Scottish marches, and a further £4,600 to support the royal household's summer itineration.56 That accounted for the clerical tenths.
As summer passed, however, it became increasingly apparent that it was from France that the real threat would come. Having teetered on the brink of civil war in October 1405, Louis of Orléans and John of Burgundy had managed to bury the hatchet for long enough to agree on a twin-pronged offensive in the autumn of 1406, with John besieging Calais and Louis Bordeaux, and by the time Henry returned to London in mid-September preparations for both were well in hand.57 To accompany these assaults, a letter written by Charles VI on 2 October called upon the English people to rise up against ‘he who now holds the rule of England’ and restore the crown to its ‘true heirs’, promising them such help as he had already given the Welsh – although whether many Englishmen read the letter is doubtful.58 Alarmed, Henry tried to head off the French with another embassy to Paris offering Prince Henry's hand in marriage (though not to Isabella, who on 29 June had married Charles, son of Louis of Orléans), redress for past injuries and security for French, Flemish and Breton fishermen, but it was in vain, and by 20 October the council was impressing ships and summoning royal retainers to join the army which the king proposed to lead ‘to the rescue of Calais’.59 It would be difficult in such circumstances to conduct business as normal, and although the third session of parliament did eventually begin on 18 October, and sat for at least five days, it was probably suspended shortly after this and did not meet again until 18 November.60
By this time the crisis at Calais had passed. As before, it was no royally led expeditionary force but the ungovernable enmity of Burgundy and Orléans which saved the town. Despite their show of amity over the past twelve months, the stranglehold which Louis had established over the French treasury since 1404 was making John the Fearless's position financially untenable, and it was imperative for him to increase his revenues from Anglo-Flemish trade. This, however, meant making a mercantile truce between England and Flanders, a policy towards which Louis was always opposed.61 The Burgundians had in fact been conducting negotiations to this end (not always openly) for the past three years, and the impressive army which John mustered to threaten Calais in October 1406 was to some extent an exercise in pressurizing Henry to accept his terms – although that does not mean that he would not have used his army if he felt that he had a chance of taking the town. Around 11–12 November, however, with winter approaching, he abandoned the siege and returned to Paris, complaining that Louis – who had left for Bordeaux in mid-September – had starved him of the funds needed to complete the task. By the time Louis returned to Paris on 18 February 1407, the Anglo-Flemish mercantile truce had been concluded (30 November) and ratified by Charles VI (15 January 1407).62
The collapse of the Anglo-French marriage talks was one reason why parliament decided in December to annul the Succession Act passed in June and revert to the traditional order of inheritance by heirs general rather than restricting it to heirs male. Whether Prince Henry had fully acquiesced in the June act may be doubted, and with his authority growing following the king's illness he was probably keen to assert the right of any of his children to inherit the crown.63 The second Succession Act was one of a number of compromises agreed during the third session of parliament, although the fact that it lasted for five weeks (18 November to 22 December) indicates that there was much hard bargaining. The king had already decided on his return to London on 14 September to relieve the merchants of the task of safeguarding the sea, which, he claimed, was not working, and thus, from 22 October, to cancel the additional 12d on tunnage and poundage paid by alien merchants since mid-June.64 This may be an indication that alternative sources of revenue were under discussion, but if so further concessions would be required from Henry, principally in relation to conciliar control of expenditure. The nomination of a council of sixteen on 27 November was a step in this direction, but within three weeks it had been superseded by a new and different list of councillors. Whereas the 27 November list still included the knights who had attended over the previous few years (Hugh Waterton, Arnold Savage, John Cheyne), the council nominated in December was aristocratic in composition, including no one below the peerage apart from (ex officio) the steward of the royal household, Sir John Stanley, and the new keeper of the wardrobe, Sir John Tiptoft, appointed on 8 December. Tiptoft's first act as keeper was to persuade the king to agree, once the Christmas festivities were over, to retire to ‘some convenient place’ where, with conciliar advice, a programme would be drawn up to ensure that in future the household was under ‘moderate governance . . . to the pleasure of God and of the people’.65 The most significant change in conciliar personnel, however, was the fact that Prince Henry now began to attend more regularly. The first few months of the parliament had seen the commons urging the prince to hasten to Wales to take command of operations there, but by the autumn there was a growing sense that he was needed at Westminster.66 However, it would be a few years before Prince Henry became dominant, for on 30 January Archbishop Arundel was reluctantly persuaded to replace Thomas Langley as chancellor, and with the prince still much occupied in Wales in 1407–8 it was the archbishop who assumed leadership of the council.67
The reconstituted council was strong throughout on both military and administrative experience, with the duke of York, the earl of Somerset, Richard Lord Grey and Hugh Lord Burnell having played leading parts in the French and Welsh wars, and each of the three current chief ministers (Thomas Langley, Lord Furnivall and John Prophet) chaperoned by his predecessor (Henry Beaufort, William Lord Roos and Bishop Bubwith).68 John Stanley also boasted a wealth of governmental experience; not so Tiptoft, although he would amply repay the faith placed in him. Yet it was not merely its composition but also the power entrusted to it that marked the dawn of a new era in the history of Henry's council. Thirty-one articles, drafted by the lords and presented by the commons, formed the basis of a fundamentally altered relationship between king and council.69 Henry was now to govern ‘entirely and in all cases’ by the council's advice, and a number of councillors were to remain with him constantly; they were to oversee household finance; no new royal grants which diminished the crown's revenues were to be made; the king was only to hear petitions on Wednesdays and Fridays and members of the council were to be present; if courtiers or others tried to sway his mind, the council was to be consulted before any action was taken; councillors themselves were not to show favour to friends or suitors, and as far as possible were to act honestly and in unison; departmental heads were to initiate enquiries into their offices. All this the new councillors swore in parliament to uphold, although Arundel stressed that only if adequate revenues were granted by the commons would they be able to fulfil their side of the bargain. Henry also swore in parliament to abide by the articles, though only ‘saving his estate and the prerogative of the crown’, and only until the next parliament.
Further concessions on either side cemented the deal: there would be no new war-treasurers, but the accounts of earlier ones would be audited; in allocating royal revenues, priority would be given to annuities – many of the lords and commons being themselves annuitants, for whom the virtual stop on payments over the past two or three years had become a test of loyalty; and Northumberland and Bardolf were duly convicted of treason, although tellingly nothing further was said about Scrope or Mowbray. All this was agreed by 17 December, following which the king was granted one tenth and fifteenth and the wool subsidy was renewed until September 1408.70 At the last minute, a suggestion from the commons that ‘certain lords’ should be personally responsible for repaying the tenth and fifteenth, should it not be spent correctly, threatened to derail the settlement; the king was furious, the lords ‘refused point blank’ to admit such liability, and the commons backed down. Four days before Christmas, at the conclusion of a sitting which dragged on deep into the night, the deal which had taken nearly ten months to broker was struck.71
Yet three years of conflict, debate and experimentation had brought no structural reform. Since January 1404, the search for solvency had thrown up proposals for ecclesiastical disendowment, the resumption of crown lands, new forms of taxation, the appointment of war-treasurers and parliamentary auditors, the suspension of annuities, the imposition of a certum on the wardrobe, the expulsion of aliens, the devolution of naval defence to merchants, and an about-turn from extreme niggardliness in March 1404 to uncommon liberality eight months later. By December 1406, almost every one of these experiments had been shelved (although some would be revived), and parliament had returned to the tried and tested route of direct and indirect subsidies, placing its faith in a privy council backed by statutory powers to enforce royal compliance. The answer, it seemed, lay not in new remedies but in making the existing system work, and no one knew more about the existing system than Archbishop Arundel, who now entered upon his third term as chancellor of the realm.
1 The discharge of John Ikelyngton in Nov. 1402 probably marked the end of substantial windfalls (PROME, viii.163). For the Percys paying their forces from their own revenues, see CDS, v, no. 915. For a commission to raise loans in October 1403, see POPC, ii.72–6 (not 1402). Despite heavy borrowing in the autumn of 1403 the incidence of failed assignments once again rose alarmingly during the winter, amounting to some £15,000 in the Michaelmas term, which saw paltry cash receipts (Steel, Receipt, 89–90).
2 Wool exports fell from 16,400 sacks in 1401–2 to 10,200 sacks in 1402–3, the lowest export total for 60 years, and did not recover until 1405–6; cloth exports (less valuable for taxes) fell from 47,000 cloths in 1401–2 to 27,000 cloths in 1402–3: Carus-Wilson and O. Coleman, England's Export Trade, 55–6, 122, 138; A. R. Bridbury, Medieval English Clothmaking: An Economic Survey (London, 1982), 119.
3 Parliament was first summoned to Coventry on 3 Dec. 1403, but postponed on 24 Nov (PROME, viii.221).
4 CPR 1401–5, 236. He attended the great council held at Sutton (Surrey) on 11 Jan., called presumably to prepare a case for taxation to be presented to the parliament. He had also been speaker in January 1401 (above, p. 180).
5 PROME, viii.222–3, 230–1, 239, 242, 279 (the ‘Durham Newsletter’, an independent account of the exchanges between Henry and Savage).
6 SAC II, 394–7. Each holder of a knight's fee was to pay twenty shillings; landholders who did not hold by knight service were to pay one shilling for each twenty shillings per annum they held; those with less than twenty shillings of land but moveable goods valued at twenty pounds would also pay one shilling in the pound.
7 The figure of £12,000 was not the expected yield of the tax, but the amount to be handed directly to the king: cf. M. Jurkowski, C. Smith and D. Crook, eds, Lay Taxes in England and Wales 1188–1688 (Kew, 1998), 74–5. The details were duly omitted from the parliament roll, but preserved by Walsingham and on the subsidy roll: S. Chrimes and A. Brown, Select Documents of English Constitutional History 1307–1485 (London, 1961), 212–14; SAC II, 394–7; CFR 1399–1405, 251–4.
8 PROME, viii.226; E 403/579, 17 June. Parliament had failed to specify the process by which the tax was to be levied, so the justices had to be called in to do so (POPC, ii.270).
9 The war-treasurers were John Hadley, Thomas Knolles, Richard Merlawe (all Londoners) and John Oudeby (RHKA, 121–30).
10 PROME, viii.105, 107, 210, 240. For the compilation of a ‘great roll’ of royal annuitants in January 1401 for inspection by the king and the barons of the exchequer, see E 403/569, 5 Feb. 1401.
11 PROME, viii.294; RHKA, 129, 136.
12 Compare E 403/567, 4 June 1400 and POPC, i.121 (service in Scotland), POPC, i.185 and E 403/573, 4 July 1402 (service in Wales) and E 403/579, 8 April 1404 (to resist French ‘malice’), all of which summoned both annuitants and retainers, with E 403/589, 24 Oct. 1406 (the rescue of Calais), E 403/591, 1 June 1407 (service in Wales) and E 403/608, 28 Aug. 1411 (for service ‘over the sea’), which referred only to the king's retainers. The distinction between the king's annuitants and his retainers is not clear, and the change probably mainly a matter of presentation. In 1404–5, the payment of annuities became a matter of grace rather than right. When the king's esquire, John Golafre, received his annuity it was made clear that it was because he had accompanied the king to Wales and the north: E 159/182, rot. 3d; cf. G. Harriss, Cardinal Beaufort (Oxford, 1988), 13; A. Brown, ‘The Authorization of Letters under the Great Seal’, BIHR 37 (1964), 125–56.
13 RHKA, 94.
14 PROME, viii.240–2: it was agreed in January 1404 that the household's revenues were to be taken from the sheriffs' farms, the petty custom, the profits of the hanaper, escheats, the alien priories, ulnage duties on cloth and the ancient custom on wool (RHKA, 108, 129).
15 RHKA, 112; above, p. 274.
16 E 101/404/21, fos. 14–16 (prince's household account). See the prince's letter to Thomas Arundel begging him to intercede with the king to send him funds, as he had nothing with which to pay his soldiers and had had to pawn his plate; and the king's letter to the council, 29 August, saying he ‘cannot at present be honourably accompanied’ to Wales – that is, that he could not afford a retinue to go with him (ANLP, no. 296; POPC, i.234). When Cardiff was besieged in December, its citizens begged Henry for help, but he ‘neither came nor sent help’, and the town was burned (CE, 401).
17 Of £6,526 disbursed by the war-treasurers in summer 1404, around £4,000 went to the two royal admirals, Thomas Beaufort and Thomas Lord Berkeley (E 403/579, 17 June).
18 POPC, i.265–70 (1404, not 1405, for York was in prison in June 1405; Henry was at Nottingham on 31 May in both 1404 and 1405).
19 £333 from Lord Lovell (assigned to him on the subsidy in Wiltshire), £100 from Henry Bowet, bishop of Bath and Wells, and £100 from Hugh Waterton. This money had been sent to Carmarthen, but it had in addition been necessary to assign £636 from the subsidy in Somerset towards the payment of the South Wales garrisons' wages for June, which was proving a problem since only £200 had been collected in Somerset.
20 CDS, v, no. 893; E 28/8, no. 69; cf. E. Wright, ‘Henry IV, the Commons and the Recovery of Royal Finance in 1407’, in Rulers and Ruled in Late Medieval England, ed. R. Archer and S. Walker (London, 1995), 72; Grummitt, ‘Financial Administration of Calais’, 298; Harriss, Shaping the Nation, 64–5. A letter from Richard Aston, lieutenant of Calais, dated 17 August, said the garrison's wages were ‘two entire years and more’ in arrears (RHL I, 287).
21 It was often to Londoners that Henry turned in a crisis. As he hastened towards Shrewsbury in July 1403 to confront Hotspur, a group of London merchants (John Woodcock, John Walcott, Thomas Knolles, Richard Whittington, John Hende and Richard Merlawe) almost instantaneously raised nearly £1,000 to send to him. Almost exactly the same group of Londoners raised over £3,000 in July 1405 as he raced north to face Northumberland and Bardolf (E 403/576, 20 July, 4 Sept.; E 403/582, 18 July; E 403/585, 9 Nov.).
22 Steel, Receipt, 127, 138. Councillors might also waive their fees and expenses: Richard Clifford, bishop of Worcester and keeper of the privy seal, agreed to accept £50 for conducting Princess Blanche to Cologne, ‘freely and gratuitously’ writing off the remainder of the £111 owed to him (E 403/578, 20 Oct. 1403).
23 SAC II, 381–3, 410–11 and n. 583; Ormrod, ‘The Rebellion of Archbishop Scrope’, 168–71; the Canterbury convocation insisted in May that the Church's liberties be confirmed and its goods be exempt from purveyance, but granted an additional sum of two shillings in the pound on normally exempt benefices valued at over five pounds. For the negotiations with the York convocation in June, see above, p. 275.
24 PROME, viii.281–2; lawyers had been excluded from parliament once before, in 1372. For the nickname, see SAC II, 419; for interference in elections, see CE, 402; CR, 178; and above, pp. 275–6. In fact the number of royal retainers elected in October, sixteen, was actually six fewer than had been elected in January (HOC, i.164–5).
25 Walsingham has two accounts of this episode, with differences of emphasis (SAC II, 419–25, 795–803).
26 Cheyne was not speaker of the commons, as Walsingham says (the speaker was Sir William Esturmy), nor was he an elected MP; he presumably attended parliament as a privy councillor.
27 It was Richard Young, bishop of Rochester, who threatened the knights with Magna Carta; he was known as ‘Canterbury's Mercury’ because he gave voice to Arundel's thoughts (SAC II, 422–3). Walsingham said Arundel was inspired by reading a passage from the life of St Edmund of Abingdon (d.1240). Papal bulls concerning alienations of land by the king and magnates prejudicial to the crown were sent to Coventry to be consulted (Antient Kalendars, ii.70). It was also during this parliament that Arundel complained to Henry about some household knights, whom he called Lollards, who turned their backs on the Eucharist; see below, pp. 418–19.
28 SAC II, 798–9; PROME, viii.291–5.
29 RHKA, 137–8; B. Wolffe, The Royal Demesne in English History (London, 1971), 76–86. The 1399 parliament made such a proposal in general terms (PROME, viii.49).
30 Only about twenty cases of resumption followed (Wright, ‘Recovery of Royal Finance’, 70), although the idea did not submerge: when John Beaufort was promised £1,000 of land in 1406, they were to be from those que non sunt parcella corone (E 403/585, 26 March 1406).
31 PROME, viii.288–90, 294–5. Members of the royal family and holders of coastal or marcher castles were excluded from the grant of one year's profit from royal lands, the assessment of which ran from Easter 1404 to Easter 1405; it was extremely difficult to enforce and seems to have raised very little. The 5 per cent tax on lands over £333, granted by the temporal lords and ladies, yielded just £997 (Jurkowski, Smith and Crook, eds, Lay Taxes, 75–6).
32 Loans to the exchequer and uncashable tallies between April and November 1405 each amounted to around £10,000, as did the debts of the new wardrobe keeper, Richard Kingston, over two years, despite the fact that he received £5,445 from the king's chamber (E 403/585, 27 Oct., 10 Dec.; Steel, Receipt, 90–3; RHKA, 107–8; BL Harleian MS 319, Kingston's account book from Jan. 1405 to Dec. 1406).
33 They loaned the exchequer at least £5,500 between June and November 1405: E 403/582, 18 July; E 403/585, 27 Oct., 10 Dec. For Pelham, see J. Roskell, The Commons in the Parliament of 1422 (Manchester, 1954), 210.
34 John Darell, the treasurer's clerk, brought to Worcester rolls, memoranda and other documents predicti thesaurarii intime tangentis, as well as tallies relating to the taxes granted in 1404 (E 403/582, 18 July).
35 Walsingham said that the king's advisers again proposed that the bishops be obliged to hand over their treasure and horses without further ado, but he may have confused this with the September 1403 council; he described the treasure lost in the floods as the king's thesauro impreciabili et coronis suis, but the incident is not mentioned in the wardrobe account book (SAC II, 462–3).
36 For Henry's itinerary, see BL Harleian Ms 319, fos. 6–38. He spent Christmas, New Year and Easter at Eltham, late April at Windsor, and three spells totalling around four weeks at Hertford castle.
37 There was also a suggestion in December that Henry might go to Bordeaux, but as usual this came to nothing: Signet Letters, nos. 514, 523; POPC, ii.280; PROME, viii.319; Foedera, viii.414–15 (Scottish invasion). For rumours in the north, see C 49/48, m. 6, discussed by Walker, ‘Rumour, Sedition and Popular Protest’, 31–2.
38 For the official record, see PROME, viii.318–416.
39 Tiptoft was born around 1378, had been in Henry's service since 1397, and may have shared his exile in 1398–9: L. Clark, ‘John Tiptoft’, ODNB, 54.832–3; and A. Pollard, ‘The Lancastrian Constitutional Experiment Revisited: Henry IV, Sir John Tiptoft and the Parliament of 1406’, Parliamentary History 14 (1995), 103–19.
40 PROME, viii.331–4. The agreement with the merchants stipulated that their fleet(s) should be manned by 2,000 fighting men from 1 May to 1 November, and 1,000 men from 1 November to 1 May.
41 Scotichronicon, viii.60–3; Walsingham reported that when Henry heard that James was being sent to France to learn French and courtly etiquette, he dissolved into laughter and declared, ‘Well, if gratitude were a Scottish trait, they would have sent this youth to me to be brought up and educated, for I too know the French language’ (SAC II, 472–3). Henry Sinclair, earl of Orkney, was captured with him, by men of Great Yarmouth and Cley.
42 SAC II, 470–1; Davies, Revolt, 121–3; eight of a squadron of twenty-eight ships presumably sent to bring the French back from Pembrokeshire were also captured by the English (SAC II, 474–5).
43 The English ambassadors remained there from 26 March to 22 May: E 404/22, no. 239; Nordberg, Les Ducs et la Royauté, 127; Foedera, viii.432–5.
44 POPC, i.290–2.
45 John Arderne, Treatise of Fistula in Ano, ed. D'Arcy Power, EETS 139 (London, 1910), xii, 74, 130; Usk, 247. The principal ingredients of the ‘green ointment of the Twelve Apostles’ were white wax, pine resin, aristolochia, incense, mastic, opoponax, myrrh, galbanum and litharge. Arderne wrote his treatise in 1376 and died soon after, but a post-1413 translator of his work added in the margin ‘With this medicine was King Henry of England cured of the going out of the lure’ (prolapsed rectum).
46 BL Harleian Ms 319, fos. 21–6.
47 PROME, viii.335–53.
48 PROME, viii.347; CE, 409 (reges non solebant compotum dare).
49 Foedera, viii.435. Monstrelet (i.126) added that if an Anglo-French marriage were concluded, Henry might agree to allow the prince to succeed him forthwith; Monstrelet's account has a number of errors, however, placing the talks in Paris and naming Francis de Court (called ‘earl of Pembroke’) as chief English ambassador, and an offer by Henry to abdicate is very unlikely. Yet Henry was serious about an Anglo-French marriage for the prince, and in mid-May wrote in support of the idea to Charles VI and his council (E 403/587, 18 May).
50 PROME, viii.341–7, 358–60; if Thomas then died without a son, Prince John would succeed, then Humphrey. The duchy of Lancaster was excluded and would remain heritable by the king's heirs general.
51 PROME, viii.411.
52 Bennett, ‘Henry IV, the Royal Succession and the Crisis of 1406q’, 16–17.
53 Usk, 214–15; Davies, Revolt, 123; Saint-Denys, 426–32 (but the French chronicler's subsequent report of a great victory for the Percys over the king and Prince John is fantasy).
54 Wylie, Henry the Fourth, ii.442–9; for Philippa's expenses, see E 101/406/10 and E 101/405/10.
55 The tax on unbeneficed clergy was deeply unpopular and raised little, though £1,694 was received from it on 12 July: E 403/587, 18 May, 7 June (orders to speed up collection of customs); E 401/638, 12 and 28 July; SAC II, 470–3; Steel, Receipt, 94, mentions £12,000 of loans, but there are additional sums on the issue rolls.
56 Around £4,500 was passed to Prince Henry for operations in Wales, £4,300 to Prince John and the earl of Westmorland for the Scottish marches, and £2,720 to Prince Thomas for Ireland (E 403/587, 18 May, 6 Aug., 14 Aug.; for household receipts, see BL Harleian MS 319, fo. 2v).
57 On 21 April, John the Fearless replaced Louis as captain-general of French forces in Picardy and West Flanders, while Louis became captain-general of Guyenne: Pépin, ‘The French Offensives of 1404–1407’; Schnerb, Jean Sans Peur, 194–201; R. Famiglietti, Royal Intrigue: Crisis at the Court of Charles VI (New York, 1986), 54–60; Nordberg, Les Ducs et la Royauté, 127–51. The Channel Islands were raided in late July (RHL II, 115).
58 BL Add Ms 30,663, fos. 277–9 (partly reproduced in Saint-Denys, iii.428–30): Henry is ille qui modo regimini Angliae occupat, who had lost any right to the throne he might have had ex tam multiplicibus ab eo commissis criminibus; the letter was given to the earl of Northumberland to take back to Scotland with him.
59 Foedera, viii.451–6 (5 Oct.); E 403/589, 7 Oct., 24 Oct.; Monstrelet, i.126, said the reason why Orléans opposed the Henry–Isabella marriage proposal in the spring was because he intended to marry her to his son.
60 PROME, viii.322, 350, 353.
61 Philip the Bold had regularly extracted between 100,000 and 200,000 livres a year from the French royal treasury; during 1406 John received no more than 37,000 livres: Autrand, Charles VI, 407–8.
62 BL Add. Charter 58,420; POPC, i.292–4; Foedera, viii.469–76 (published in England on 10 March 1407). John got no further than Saint-Omer, about 35 kilometres from Calais, in October; here his army mustered, cut down 32,000 oaks to construct siege engines, then disbanded.
63 His agreement to the June act is emphasized a little too insistently (PROME, viii.342, 354–61). For a statement of the ‘traditional’ view, see RHL I, 20. ‘Two great letters patent’ containing the Succession Act were delivered to the treasury on 20 May 1407, consulted by Henry V in May 1413, and ‘shown’ to Henry VI in June 1453, before being returned to the treasury in October 1454 (Antient Kalendars, ii.84).
64 PROME, viii.389, 404–6. Henry may have been diverting their revenues. By mid-October he wished to impress their ships for his planned expedition to Calais; however, the merchants were permitted to receive part of the wool subsidy until 24 Nov. to cover their outlay (CCR 1405–9, 156–7).
65 POPC, i.295–6. Thomas Brounfleet, a household administrator for twenty years and formerly Richard II's butler, was chosen as the king's controller (in effect the deputy treasurer of the household).
66 PROME, viii.330, 347.
67 SAC II, 498–9.
68 Brown, ‘Commons and Council’, 24–6; PROME, viii.323. Prophet had replaced Bubwith as keeper of the privy seal on 4 October 1406, though Bubwith was retained on the council (E 404/22, nos. 159, 273).
69 PROME, viii.366–75; POPC, i.296–8 (amendments by the council to an earlier draft); G. Dodd, ‘Patronage, Petitions, and Grace: The Chamberlains' Bills of Henry IV's Reign’, in The Reign of Henry IV: Rebellion and Survival, 1403–1413, ed. G. Dodd and D. Biggs (York, 2008), 126–31; Wright, ‘Recovery of Royal Finance’, 71–2.
70 RHKA, 136–7; PROME, viii.369–70 (for 17 Dec.); 363–5 (for audit of Pelham's and Furnivall's accounts; war-treasurers would not be appointed again until 1449).
71 SAC II, 480–3.