THE KING AND HIS IMAGE
The chronicler John Strecche, a canon of Kenilworth priory who saw Henry as a potentially great but flawed king, penned the following portrait of him: ‘This King Henry was elegantly built, of great strength, a vigorous knight, brave in arms, wise and circumspect in his youthful behaviour, always fortunate in battle, successful in his deeds and gloriously victorious everywhere, brilliant at music, marvellously learned and most upright in morals.’1
Henry's credentials as a warrior were not in doubt; more striking is Strecche's claim for his musicianship. The employment of between four and ten minstrels in his household was no more than would be expected of any great noble, but his gifts to two ‘singing clerks’ of Gaunt's chapel in 1392 and to an unspecified number of clerks to sing for his younger sons at Kenilworth in 1397–8 are suggestive of an interest in polyphony.2 Singing was always at the heart of the medieval chapel royal, but the first half of the fifteenth century saw its musical accomplishments reach new heights, supported by a surge in the number of chaplains there and at St George's College, Windsor. Although most of the evidence for this dates from Henry V's reign, it was a process that began under his father, who in turn was influenced both by Gaunt's patronage of noted musicians and by the polyphonic style now in vogue.3
The most compelling evidence for the musical development of the chapel royal at this time is to be found in the Old Hall Manuscript, a collection of mainly three-voice mass movements and motets by several leading composers of the late fourteenth century and early years of the fifteenth century. Most of these are prefaced by the composers' names, and two of them (a Gloria and a Sanctus) are ascribed to ‘Roy Henry’. The manuscript was probably first compiled around 1417–20 for the chapel of Prince Thomas, by then duke of Clarence, after whose death in 1421 it passed into Henry V's chapel and further ‘layers’ were added. Whether ‘Roy Henry’ was Henry IV or Henry V has been much debated, although current opinion favours the latter.4 However, while there is some evidence for Henry V's musical ability, there is a good deal more for his father's, not least Strecche's comment.5 Henry IV is also the first king known to have paid one of his chaplains, John Bugby, to teach grammar to the boys (choristers) of his chapel. According to the mid-fifteenth-century Liber Regie Capelle, there were meant to be separate masters for song and grammar, but instruction in singing and grammar were so closely linked, the latter being a prerequisite for the former, that Bugby's appointment may indicate a more serious turn in the chapel's musical aspirations.6 However, even if Henry IV was not the composer of these pieces, the patronage of musicians by his sons, the brilliance of their chapels and the adventurous musical programmes adopted there and at institutions such as St George's College, Windsor, are testimony to their upbringing in an ambience that was at the forefront of contemporary musical innovation. A serious interest in serious music became a Lancastrian family habit. With their encouragement, the English chapel royal became famed for its virtuosity, and by the mid-century was admired throughout Europe for the quality of its chant.7
The evidence for Henry's literary and educational interests is less equivocal. As well as appointing the first known grammar master in the chapel royal, he was also the first English king known to have appointed a keeper of the king's books, for which two desks were built in the king's new study at Eltham.8 When there was time, he took the opportunity to read more widely, as at Bardney abbey in 1406. A list of the king's books which ended up in the hands of a London stationer a few years after his death can only represent a fraction of his collection, but affords clues to his literary tastes.9 His historical works consisted of Higden's Polychronicon and a volume of Smale Cronykles. A ‘book called Gower’ was probably either a copy of the Confessio Amantis, which the poet had dedicated to him, or the volume of praise poems Gower is known to have presented to the king.10 The remaining books were religious works: two psalters, one glossed in Greek (although Henry is most unlikely to have known any Greek); a Catholicon, a popular Latin grammar and dictionary; a copy of Gregory the Great's Moralia in Job, one of the most widely read exegetical works of moral instruction; and two bibles, one in Latin and one in English.11 Although Henry could read Latin, his ownership of an English bible implies a desire for a more accessible text to allow him to arrive at his own understanding of the Scriptures. Like the Moralia in Job, it brings to mind Capgrave's comment that Henry enjoyed discussing ethical questions, and his ownership of a silver bookmark suggests that his books did not simply gather dust on the shelves of his desk.12
The values of between £5 and £10 given for these volumes indicate that they were illuminated, but they cannot have compared with the luxury manuscripts bought or commissioned by Henry. Two in particular stand out. On his way to the Holy Land in 1393, probably at Venice, he acquired a three-volume antiphonary illuminated in the prestigious Bartolo workshop in Siena which he presented to the Franciscans of Mount Syon at Jerusalem, where it can still be seen.13 Equally, if not more splendid, was Henry's Great Bible (Magna Biblia), illuminated by Herman Scheere and still in the British Library. At 2 ft × 8 in (63 × 43 centimetres), with 350 folios and 166 illuminated initials, it is the largest English bible to have survived from the Middle Ages and may have been intended for readings in the chapel royal.14 It has several illuminations of St Jerome in his study, showing desks perhaps similar to those built for Henry at Eltham. His son recognized the beauty and value of the volume: in his last will of June 1421, Henry V directed that although it was currently deposited with the nuns of Syon (Middlesex), it was to be returned after his death to the possession of his as yet unborn son. Such sentiments lend support to the argument that it was Henry IV and Henry V, rather than the traditional Edward IV, who were the real founders of the royal library in England.15 Nor was the care Henry had taken with his sons' education before 1399 allowed to lapse, for shortly after he came to the throne he granted an annuity of ten marks to John Wodehouse to teach grammar to Princes Thomas and John. Monstrelet said that all the king's sons were ‘well educated in knowledge’ (bien adrecez en science).16
One chronicler, writing much later, believed Henry also to have been a great builder, but in truth his architectural legacy was inferior to most of his predecessors and successors.17 Richard II spent about £900 a year on building works, Henry IV £700, and Henry V £1,400, although the figures for Henry IV and V do not include sums spent on the duchy of Lancaster houses and castles, which were not placed under the control of sheriffs and thus separately funded. Henry IV's most important new projects were the gatehouse of Lancaster castle and the rebuilding of Eltham palace. The Lancaster gatehouse was begun in 1399 and not completed until late in Henry V's reign. Paid for by the duchy at the rate of 200 marks a year, it had two imposing octagonal towers surmounted by projecting battlements topped off by twin towers with machicolations.18 In an age known for its greater emphasis on comfort and less on defensibility, the architect at Lancaster was clearly under orders not to compromise. Above the central archway was a niche with a statue of John of Gaunt flanked by shields with the arms of the king and the prince of Wales – a monument to dynastic power in the north.
Eltham may have had a moat, a drawbridge, and a ‘great wall’ (over which the duke of York was alleged to have planned to climb at Christmas 1404), but it was not a castle. It was Henry's favourite retreat, where he brought his new queen for eight weeks in 1403 and where he usually spent Christmas.19 Barely had he become king when he set in train the building of a grand new suite of royal apartments to the west of the chapel. In addition to the usual service areas (kitchen, buttery, pantry, scalding-house, larder, saucery, and a latrine adjoining the moat), this included a new royal chamber, 38 ft by 18 ft (11.5 × 5.5 metres), parlour, 51 ft by 13 ft (15.5 × 4 metres) oratory and study, all constructed of timber with wainscoted ceilings, bay windows, stone fireplaces and connecting spiral staircases (wyndyngstaires). Next to the king's chamber there was also a ‘secret chamber’, divided by a partition wall (entreclose). The windows in his chamber were glazed with crowns, shields, collars, flowers, birds, beasts and babewyns alongside the customary Souvenez vous de moi, the arms of St George, and figures of St George, the Trinity and the Salutation of the Virgin.
The king's new study, a place for seclusion and contemplation, had less Lancastrian and more sacred imagery; its seven-light window was filled with the figures of St John the Baptist, St George, Becket, the Trinity, St John the Evangelist and (in the middle, occupying two windows) the Salutation of the Virgin. These were Henry's favourite devotional images: among the New Year gifts he distributed in 1402 were a golden tabernacle of the Trinity garnished with pearls and a sapphire, another with images of the Coronation and Salutation of the Virgin, and a golden tablet of St George on a tower.20 His study had a ‘great desk’ on two levels ‘to keep the king's books inside’, another, smaller desk, and two benches in which books were probably kept as well. He may also have kept his chessboard here.21 Nearby were separate chambers for the king's confessor and the keeper of his jewels. In 1403, work began on a complementary suite of rooms for Queen Joan, two storeys high and 35 ft (10.668 metres) wide, including a parlour and two withdrawing chambers, one on each floor, with bay windows. By the time this was completed in 1407, at least £1,100 had been spent at Eltham under the supervision of the king's master carpenter, a post held from 1399 to 1404 by Hugh Herland, the man responsible for the hammer-beam roof of Westminster great hall, and thereafter by Thomas Tuttemond.22 Yet although the new royal apartments at Eltham reveal something of the way Henry spent his leisure, it was also a place for work. Elsewhere in the palace there were individual chambers for officers and friends whose advice the king most frequently sought: John Beaufort (chamberlain), Thomas Erpingham (under-chamberlain), the treasurer of England, the steward, treasurer and controller of the household, John Norbury and Mary Hervy, governess to Henry's younger children. The amenities at Eltham were certainly conducive to relaxation – it had a ‘great garden’ with vines, a park in which jousts were held to entertain the Byzantine emperor at Christmas 1400, a bath-house and a dancing chamber (camera tripudiancium) built by Richard II – but no king could escape the cares of ruling for long.23
Government records show just how burdensome those cares were. On average, Henry responded to around fifty or sixty petitions a week. Most of these were requests for grace or favour: lands, offices, benefices, custodies, pardons for crime, requests for forfeited goods or allowances of timber, venison, even rabbits.24 More time-consuming financial and judicial decisions would be siphoned off to the council or the justices, but Henry dealt with matters concerning the royal grace in person.25 Naturally he did not do so unaided. Before petitioners were admitted to the king's chamber, they would already have had to convince the chamberlain or his deputies that theirs was a deserving cause. The quality of the advice the king received mattered greatly, not just from his chamberlains and councillors but also from intercessors. The mediation of intercessors was crucial, and intercession a routine and accepted method of securing royal favour, seen not so much as undue influence (although it could become that) as another way for the king to take counsel.26 The royal chamber was a crowded arena at times when the king was hearing petitions. It was ‘for the quiet and tranquillity of our royal person’ that Henry announced in November 1402 that in future he would only deal with petitions on Wednesdays and Fridays, to leave more time for ‘our other honest occupations’.27
Of these, there were many. Between October 1404 and August 1405, Henry ordered the issue of some 1,500 letters under the great seal and many hundreds more under the privy seal and signet, as well as dealing with 2,500 or so petitions. This was in addition to presiding for six weeks at the parliament of October 1404, holding at least three great councils, conducting negotiations with foreign powers, preparing an expedition to Wales in the spring, spending most of June and July in the north dealing with the risings of Scrope and Northumberland, then returning in August to confront the French expeditionary force in the Welsh marches. This was an age of overwhelmingly personal kingship.
Nevertheless, Henry managed to maintain an aura of accessibility, a welcome contrast to the ‘kingship of distance’ cultivated by his predecessor.28 Negotiations between the king and speakers in parliament were strongly worded and often exasperating, but they were negotiations in a way that the toxic exchanges of Richard's parliaments were not. This ‘conversationality’ was also one of the characteristics of the poetry circulating amongst the clerks and lawyers who worked in the Westminster offices or the royal household, which was political and critical without being menacing.29 Whether or not it is literally true that Richard II used to sit on his throne after dinner ‘talking to no one but watching everyone’, obliging those who caught his eye to bend the knee, it suggests a kingly style far removed from that of Henry IV and Henry V, who preferred after dinner to have a cushion placed on the sideboard in the royal chamber, against which they ‘would lean for the space of an hour or more to receive bills and complaints from whomsoever would come’.30
Accessibility was one facet of the regal image which Henry projected. John Strecche also claimed of the king that: ‘all the people of his realm were so moved by the sight of him that in many towns his face – a sweet sight to his friends, a fearsome one to his enemies – was painted and fashioned in prominent places so that people could always gaze at him and observe his countenance and features’.31
The only surviving contemporary statue of the king stands above the east window of Battlefield chapel, Shrewsbury, which does not seem to be the prominent position envisaged by Strecche; nor is Henry known to have commissioned any portrait paintings of himself, unlike Richard II.32 It may be that what the chronicler meant was that it was the king's supporters who erected images of him, as Henry did for his father at Lancaster, but if so his testimony is uncorroborated. Yet it would be unwise simply to dismiss it. Propagation of royal imagery focusing on the personal representation of the monarch became more common at this time, and Henry was at the forefront of the trend.33
It is in this context that the proliferation of the king's collars and other badges, and the controversy they aroused, needs to be seen. Legislation to restrict the distribution of livery badges had been under discussion for over twenty years. Cheap to manufacture and easy to distribute, badges were powerful symbols of allegiance and hence, in the right circumstances, of factionalism. The first significant attempt to control their distribution was the 1390 ordinance, but the abuse of power by Richard II and the Counter-Appellants in 1397–9 led to much stricter regulations being introduced in the 1399 Statute of Liveries. This prohibited their distribution by lords, and limited the king's distribution of them to members of his household or life retainers of the rank of esquire or above, who, moreover, were only permitted to wear them in the king's presence.34 In the parliament of 1401, Arnold Savage had tried to go further than this and abolish all livery badges, including the king's. Henry managed to resist this demand, however, and the resulting statute permitted him and Prince Henry to go on distributing badges to their followers of the rank of esquire or above. Yet such special pleading on behalf of the Lancastrian affinity clearly caused unease, and Henry also had to promise not to distribute his lesser livery of the crescent and star to men below the rank of esquire.35
Henry showed little sensitivity to these concerns. England after 1399 was flooded with SS collars, the dozens proudly displayed on the tomb effigies of lords, knights and esquires affording one indication of their ubiquity, the 192 collars handed out by Henry during his 1399 campaign another.36 The 200 or so senior members of the king's household, the 250 knights and esquires whom he retained, and many of the peers would have received collars, as did others not formally retained by Henry or employed in his household such as the poet John Gower and Robert Waterton's wife Cecily.37 In total, the number of persons permitted to wear them could well have reached a thousand. The SS collar also decorated the initial letter of a royal charter to the town of Gloucester in 1399, the civic sword given to the mayor of Dublin in 1402, and the signet used by both Henry IV and Henry V, although not the new great seal made in late 1406, heraldic badges being considered inappropriate for instruments of state.38 Items of plate and jewellery distributed by the king were commonly engraved with other Lancastrian motifs such as eagles, swans, greyhounds and even red roses, but it was the SS collar that was the hallmark of the dynasty.39
Henry seems to have thought that his collars conferred membership of something akin to a chivalric order – in 1400 he gave a ten marks' annuity and a collar to one of his esquires ‘so that he may maintain the said order’ – and at times disregarded the undertakings he had given. In 1406, for example, he gave a collar to one of his sergeants-at-arms ‘notwithstanding the statute [of 1399]’, and he continued to have crescents made and presumably therefore distributed.40 The SS collar also became an emblem of English monarchy abroad: eight were sent to his sister Philippa in Portugal in 1401, another six to the Bohemian court in 1405.41 Many of the collars noted in exchequer accounts were made for the king's use, some of them very ornate and costly: for his wedding in 1403, he paid the London goldsmith Christopher Tyldesley £385 to fashion a gold collar engraved with the motto Soveignez and adorned with the letters S and X in enamel, nine large pearls, twelve large diamonds, eight rubies and eight sapphires. A similarly elaborate collar for Queen Joan cost £333.42 The collars which the king gave to most of his supporters were far simpler, usually costing between six and eight shillings, although some were said to be worth as much as twenty pounds.43
Badges aroused strong feelings on both sides. John Gower thought of his collar as a gift from heaven, a mark of loyalty and nobility,44 but to others, ever since Gaunt began distributing them in the 1370s, they had been seen as inimical to peace and unity. Richard II's purpose in donning his uncle's livery in 1394 may have been to signal the restoration of political harmony, but its effect was quite the opposite, inducing the earl of Arundel to complain about the king's partisanship.45 At times of tension, badges were seized or hastily discarded. At Bayonne during the revolt of 1400, people wearing Henry's collars were arrested; when the rebel earl of Kent arrived at Sonning (Berkshire) en route for Cirencester in January 1400, he snatched the collars from the necks and the crescents from the arms of those guarding Queen Isabella and cast them away, declaring that they would never be worn in England again.46 Kent would be dead within a week, but SS collars remained ubiquitous both in England and abroad through the first half of the fifteenth century. With time, they doubtless came to be identified with English as much as Lancastrian kingship, but when Edward IV ascended the throne in 1461 they were put away, replaced by Yorkist suns and roses. The SS collar never quite seems to have transcended its perception as the badge of a faction.
If the SS collar was the chief visual medium used for propagandizing the dynasty, Henry presented his persona as essentially chivalric and martial. Hence the dubbing of forty-six Knights of the Bath on the eve of the coronation. However, it did not escape Froissart's notice that although it was Knights of the Bath who accompanied him to Westminster abbey, the insignia which he himself chose to wear was that of the Garter.47 Founded by that model of chivalric kingship, Edward III, the Garter provided a ready-made opportunity for the king to demonstrate his commitment to martial ideals. Initially this was problematic, for most of the Knights of the Garter in 1399 were Richard II's nominees and unsympathetic to the usurper, perhaps even considering it their duty to overthrow him. In the event, the attrition rate amongst them during the first six years of the reign was so high – four perished during the Epiphany Rising, another four at the battle of Shrewsbury, and a further ten died of various causes – that by 1405 it had proved possible to reconstitute the Order almost entirely (one reason, perhaps, why the putative ‘order’ of the Bath failed to flourish).48 Most of Henry's replacements were unexceptionable. They began with the king's four sons before alternating between scions of aristocratic houses (Arundel, Warwick, Stafford, Westmorland and Kent), loyal followers with unimpeachable military reputations (Thomas Beaufort, Rempston, Erpingham, Stanley, and Lords Willoughby, Roos, Lovell and Grey) and the kings of Castile, Portugal and Denmark.49 Nevertheless, the combined effect was to turn England's premier knightly fraternity into an extension of the Lancastrian affinity, for the first criterion for election was always loyalty. This is unsurprising, for the cohesion of the fraternity was severely tested by the Epiphany Rising and the battle of Shrewsbury (all three Percys were Garter knights). By 1405, however, unity had been restored, and henceforth, although political reliability continued to determine election, military reputation carried more weight: Lords Burnell, Charlton, Talbot and FitzHugh had all played key roles in Wales or the north, while Robert Umfraville and John Cornwall were two of the most renowned warriors of their day.50
This elision between dynasty and fraternity is symbolized by Henry's presentation in 1401 to the college of St George at Windsor of a set of blue vestments including an orphery decorated with the life of Thomas of Lancaster. He also set in motion the institutionalization of the order that was to gather pace in his son's reign.51 In 1400, he had the Windsor Tables compiled, a list of members to be displayed in the chapter house. It is possible that the first surviving statutes of the Garter were drawn up in 1402, though more likely that they date from 1415.52 It must at any rate have been at Henry IV's prompting that in 1399 Canterbury convocation asked that the feast of St George, ‘the spiritual patron of all English soldiers’, be celebrated as a national feast day.53 By the latter half of the reign the fame of the company was spreading. The catalyst for the eight-a-side tourney between England and Hainault in 1409 was a letter to the king from Jean de Werchin, seneschal of Hainault, the most famous jouster of his age, asking to be allowed to issue a collective challenge to the Garter knights. Henry interpreted this as a request to take on all twenty-six and politely suggested that Werchin restrict himself to one, Sir John Cornwall, who would act as the Order's champion (the first time that the Garter was referred to as an order). In the same year the Veronese knight Pandolf Malatesta challenged the earl of Warwick (KG since 1403) to uphold the honour of the Garter in personal combat.54 All this was, to be sure, good courtly entertainment, but the fall in the number of Ladies of the Garter during Henry's reign, just ten as opposed to thirty-six under Richard II, was also symptomatic of the renewal of the order's original ideals, which had to some extent been diluted during the last quarter of the fourteenth century.55
Henry's reign also witnessed the growth of an esprit de corps among the Garter knights. In December 1408 messengers were sent out to summon them to London, for what purpose is not stated, but it can hardly have been for the annual St George's day feast.56 Two Garter Knights, Lords Willoughby and Roos, jointly founded a guild of the fraternity of St George at Boston.57 In 1409, the members clubbed together to pay for repairs at St George's Chapel.58 Most of them must also have contributed to the building of the Hospitaller castle at Bodrum (Turkey), begun in 1404, for of the twenty-two shields of arms of English benefactors encircling that of the king on the north wall of the castle, seventeen belonged to Garter knights.59 Henry encouraged this spirit of solidarity by attending the festivities at Windsor every year except 1408, when he was in the north clearing up after Northumberland's final rebellion, and by committing large sums to maintain the annual celebrations: in 1411 it was estimated that St George's day would cost £972. Hoccleve's two ballads written in 1414 to ‘the most noble King Henry V and the most honourable company of the Garter’ reflected the order's reversion under his father to the ideals of Edward III. The policy behind this was not opaque: the growing fame of the Order shone a light on Henry's reputation and reinforced the chivalric values of the aristocracy in general and the Lancastrian affinity in particular, as it continued to do under Henry V, who appointed the first registrar of the Order in 1414 and the first Garter King of Arms three years later.60 Some, perhaps, thought that the Order and its patron saint were becoming too closely associated with the regime. It is striking that the earl of March, despite reaching his majority in 1412, was never elected, despite (or rather because of) his proximity to the royal family. It is also striking that Archbishop Scrope's 1405 manifesto appealed to St George as the ‘special protector and advocate of the kingdom of England’ – not just of the king, but also of those who sought to reform the king's government, and who perhaps looked askance at the Lancastrianization of England's national saint.61
Rarely did Henry miss an opportunity to remind his subjects of his reputation as a warrior – part of the reason, perhaps, why he continued to proclaim his intention to campaign at home and abroad even after he fell sick. In the autumn of 1405 he was said to be preparing to go to Guyenne, in 1406 to Calais, in 1407 to Wales; in 1408 he led his retainers to Yorkshire to intercept Northumberland and Bardolf, although by the time he got there the revolt was over. In 1411 he was still hoping to lead an army to Calais, in 1412 to Bordeaux.62 In fact the last time the king took the field was during his 1405 Welsh expedition, but he was reminding his people that he still saw it as his duty to uphold the martial values of English kingship. So, too, the great Christian ideal of crusading. In 1410 he told a Prussian envoy that if he could make peace with France he would like nothing more than to go to Prussia again, and in the meantime would not stop any of his subjects from going. Even as death loomed, he had not abandoned hope of returning to the Holy Land, as foretold at the time of his anointing with Becket's oil.63 Despite the crusader disaster at the battle of Nicopolis in 1396, there was reason for optimism among Christians at this time. Timur's victory over the Ottoman Sultan Bayezid at Ankara (July 1402) raised the hope that he might be persuaded to join an anti-Muslim alliance, and when the great conqueror followed this up by despatching the Dominican friar John Greenlaw to the west to propose an extension of trading contacts, western rulers responded enthusiastically. Greenlaw had travelled widely in Asia Minor and in October 1400 Pope Boniface had appointed him archbishop of Sultania (Azerbaijan).64 The French welcomed him, Enrique of Castile sent an embassy to Timur's court, and Henry gave Greenlaw letters for his friends in the region to try to stir up anti-Muslim sentiment.65 To the emperor of Abyssinia Henry expressed his joy at the rumour that he planned to recover the Holy Sepulchre from the enemies of the faith, adding that he too had visited Jerusalem and very much hoped to return. Similar letters were sent to the emperors of Trebizond and Constantinople and the king of Georgia. Henry wrote to Timur himself and his son, Miran Shah, thanking them for their support for Christians in the east and congratulating them on the defeat of Bayezid. Greenlaw also carried letters for Michael Steno, doge of Venice, and King Janus of Cyprus, both of whom were friendly towards Henry and would be instrumental in any crusading enterprise.66
Henry's response to Timur was in line with that of other Western European monarchs who, especially since Nicopolis, viewed the Ottomans as a real threat to Christianity and anyone who opposed them as a potential ally. In fact Timur was also a Muslim, although more tolerant than some towards Christian merchants and pilgrims, but he died in 1405 and before long the Ottomans renewed their relentless expansion. Nevertheless, Henry continued to offer moral support to crusading orders as far as circumstances permitted and was remembered after his death as a king who fought not just for England but for Christendom.67 It was ‘for love of our Saviour's cross’, said Strecche, that he had warred in faraway places against unbelievers, thereby earning much praise. John Capgrave expressed similar sentiments forty years later.68
Patronage of duels and tournaments was another way for Henry to keep his chivalric credentials in the public eye. Within a few months of his accession he had arranged for Janico Dartasso and Sir John Cornwall to enter the lists against two followers of Louis of Orléans who had come to England hoping to uphold French national honour but were soundly beaten at York.69 The vitriol accompanying the French challenges of 1401–3 and the English humiliation at Montendre in May 1402 persuaded the king to refrain from further combats, but by 1406 they had resumed, and continued until the end of the reign.70 Especially notable, not least because they led to resounding English triumphs, were the visit in 1406 of the dashing young Alexander, the Scottish earl of Mar, to joust at Smithfield with the equally dashing young Edmund, earl of Kent, and the week-long eight-a-side combat between England and Hainault in 1409, also at Smithfield, at which the Hainaulters were led by Jean de Werchin but still lost to the English, captained by John Beaufort, by a score of seven to one.71
Despite being couched in the language of chivalric brotherhood, there was a sharp jingoistic edge to these challenges. Some combats, however, had a more deadly purpose. Early in 1402 the Hampshire knight Percival Sonday was accused by Yevan ap Griffith Lloyd of treason, and the king ordered that a duel be held at Smithfield; Sonday won and Henry granted him an annuity of forty marks, while his accuser was put to death. Four years later, again accused of treason, Sonday had to fight another duel against the esquire John Walsh; once again he was the victor, while Walsh was immediately drawn to Tyburn and hanged. On 12 August 1407 two citizens of Bordeaux, one of whom had accused the other of incitement to treason, entered the lists at Nottingham in the king's presence, but on this occasion, after they had fought for a while on both horse and foot, the king called a halt, declaring both combatants to have done their duty and discharging them.72 This was always a king's prerogative, but exercised by Henry in a more chivalric way than Richard had done nine years earlier at Coventry. To preside over jousts – a fusion of self-help, regal authority and divine justice – was, in Adam Usk's view, one of the trappings of regality.73
If Henry's martial reputation was one of his most exploitable assets, his greatest liability was his questionable assumption of the throne. Even before he became king, chancery and exchequer clerks were being drilled in the art of damage limitation. Documents issued by the administration did not use words such as ‘invasion’ or ‘expedition’ to refer to the events of 1398–9. Henry's summer campaign was his ‘first arrival’ (adventus) or ‘recent landing’ (applicatio); the minimal resistance he encountered was ‘the malice (malitia) of King Richard and other enemies of the lord’. Nor was the term ‘exile’ used to describe his time in Paris, since it would imply that he had returned unlawfully; rather, he was said to have undertaken a ‘certain journey’ (quodam viagio) or ‘crossing to foreign parts’ (transitum versus partes transmarinos), while his inherited duchy lands were not those which had been confiscated, but those he had held ‘before his coronation’ (ante coronacionem suam). This avoidance of terminology which implied force or illegality on Henry's part was maintained with striking consistency by the new government.74
Lancastrian propaganda has long been recognized as both mendacious and effective. To expect it to have been anything other than mendacious would be naïve. It is the business of governments to dissemble; the propaganda of governments is the white noise of history. Yet if the euphemisms and subterfuges employed by Henry to justify his actions did not differ in their essentials from those of his predecessors or successors, the methodical way in which they were carried through was impressive. The thirty-three articles condemning Richard and the text of Henry's claim to the throne, spoken and written in English, reached a wide audience, reproduced in whole or in part by chroniclers summoned to witness the high drama enacted at Westminster in September 1399, and echoed in the work of Chaucer, Gower and popular versifiers. Copies of the Record and Process, or something like it, were also sent abroad.75 Government policies were widely proclaimed and given a disingenuous gloss. The unpopular decision to suspend annuities in 1404 was read out in more than a hundred places up and down the realm, and explained not in terms of insolvency (the real reason) but by the need to distinguish between the deserving and the undeserving, a construction designed to appeal to annuitants who used the same arguments to differentiate those who should be compelled to work, the able-bodied, from those who could not.76 Omission might also be propagandist, as with the studied avoidance in government documents of any discussion of the Mortimer claim: Hotspur was accused of allying with the Welsh and Scots, of ‘calling us Henry of Lancaster and saying that Richard II is still alive’, but no mention was made in government records of his call to put the earl of March on the throne.77
Yet if some historians chose to go on believing Henry's propaganda for half a millennium or more, it does not follow that his contemporaries did likewise.78 Hope, expectation and frustration, ever the handmaids of political change, meant that the language of reform and renewal escaped the control of its propagators and was taken up by friend and foe alike as the standard by which to judge the new regime's performance. Time and again the king's words came back to him in shades of meaning, sometimes querulous or reproachful, sometimes simply baffled. Accusations of Henry's extravagance, wilfulness and wastefulness, of succumbing to the blandishments of flatterers and ignoring inconvenient truths, even of tyranny – the substance of his charges against Richard – surfaced early in the new reign in the petitions of the parliamentary commons, the poetry of advice and complaint, and the manifestos of his enemies. The framing device used by the author of Mum and the Sothsegger, a poem probably written in 1405, was that of the narrator's search for someone bold enough to tell the king of the grievances of his people, because no truth-teller (sothsegger) could be found in the royal household, where all were in thrall to Mum, the personification of weak-willed sycophancy.79 When Henry ‘first came to land’, his subjects felt free to complain to him, but now those who did so risked imprisonment or worse, while the parliamentary commons feared the consequences of speaking out.80 Only in a dream did the narrator find comfort, in the form of an old beekeeper who assured him that ultimately truth would prevail. The poem was by no means inimical to Henry but rather an exercise in loyal criticism larded with complaints about the ills of society and the traditional failings of its orders and estates: monks, friars, bishops, nobles, knights, townsmen and labourers. Yet the central message, that the king lacked someone to tell him the truth, was unmistakable.
Even the supportive John Strecche admitted that Henry ‘lost the greater part of the love of his people’, because he failed to keep the promises made at his accession. Poets such as the privy seal clerk Thomas Hoccleve and the king's esquire Henry Scogan reflect this loss of trust.81 Hoccleve's plea for the reinstatement of his annuity was not simply a personal matter; the leitmotiv of monetary fraud running through the Regement of Princes (c.1411) also served as a commentary on the government's financial incompetence. Scogan's Moral Balade, which was addressed to the king's sons or possibly to the royal household more generally, warned against the dangers of a life of luxury and frivolity. These authors were not outsiders, certainly not enemies of Lancastrian kingship; it was the servants and supporters of the regime who constituted their audience.82 Yet, needless to say, Henry's enemies also ensured that the language of deceit and mismanagement rebounded on him. The manifestos attributed to the Percys in 1403 and Archbishop Scrope in 1405 echo the Record and Process in their talk of harsh taxation, parliamentary manipulation, wasteful government and corrupt counsel.83 Popular verses in praise of Hotspur and Edmund Mortimer have not survived, nor unsurprisingly has the ‘bag’ of ‘privy prose . . . ballad-wise’ referred to in Mum and the Sothsegger as bursting with popular opinions on the king's vices and virtues, although echoes of them are to be found in chroniclers’ comments.84 Popular report, marching with prophecy and dissolving into rumour, had the potential to inflict real damage on the king, as with the gathering belief that Richard was alive, the Chinese whispers about his undertakings regarding taxation, the martyr-cult focused on Richard Scrope's tomb, or the alleged link between Henry's ‘leprosy’ and the archbishop's death. The suppression in 1401–2 of Welsh minstrelsy (described improbably as ‘the cause of the insurrection and rebellion in Wales’) and the vain attempts to deny access to Scrope's tomb in York Minster were largely ineffective.85 Nor was it only among the poor that rumour ran riot: there was, and still is, no certainty as to who was complicit in each of the plots and risings of 1400 to 1405, but the roll-call of those obliged to deny their involvement is testimony to the web of speculation.86
Nothing indicates the king's failure to suppress dissent better than his response: the hanging of the friars in 1402, the clampdown on ‘vagabonds’ spreading rumours, the beheading of the hermit and prophet William Norham at York in 1403.87 Henry had a keen sense of the power of spectacle to create shock and awe, and some of his coups de théâtre were jarringly memorable, such as the piecemeal dismemberment of William Clerk at the Tower in 1401, William Serle's stations of the cross from Yorkshire to London in the summer of 1404, the parcelling out of traitors' heads between a dozen or more north-eastern boroughs in the summer of 1405, or the beheading of Archbishop Scrope outside the walls of his city before an audience of prostrate and semi-naked citizenry. Political theatre conveyed a myriad of messages. The bonfire of Richard's blank charters at the London Guildhall in November 1399 was designed to signal the end of government by tyranny. Relatively minor triumphs were celebrated almost like a second Crécy or Poitiers. Following the Epiphany Rising, a parade was led through the city streets to St Paul's by Archbishop Arundel chanting the Te Deum in thanksgiving for the sparing of the king's life; the defeat of a Breton raiding party at Dartmouth in April 1404 occasioned another procession, again accompanied by the Te Deum, this time to the Confessor's shrine at Westminster, where the king delivered a sermon to offer the victory to God.88 The new great seal cast in late 1406 was iconographically the finest of the late Middle Ages in England, an intricate, yet integrated, perpendicular reticulation of the patron saints of English monarchy (Michael, George, Edward the Confessor and Edmund the Martyr), which also incorporated the change from France Ancient to France Modern and Prince Henry's arms as prince of Wales, duke of Cornwall and earl of Chester, a fusion of national and dynastic destiny.89 Visibility was one of the salient features of Henry's kingship. By turns feared and revered, he ensured that royal power could never be ignored.
1 BL Add. MS 35,295, fo. 262r. The Henry IV section of Strecche's chronicle has not been printed; the Latin reads as follows: Hic rex Henricus forme fuerat elegantus, viribus fortis, miles strenuus, in armis acer, in omni actu tirocinii sagax et circumspectus, in bello semper fortunatus, in factis felix et victor ubique gloriosus, in musica micans et mirabiliter litteraturis et maxime in morali.
2 By 1408–9 Henry had only four minstrels (E 101/405/22, fo. 32); for singing clerks see DL 28/1/3, fo. 3v (1392); DL 28/4/1, fos. 13v–14r (1397–8). For Mary de Bohun's and Joan of Navarre's interest in music, see above, p. 78, and below, p. 421.
3 By 1402 there were eighteen chaplains in the king's chapel, more than enough for polyphonic pieces. Henry's statutes for Fotheringhay college in 1410–11 stipulated that there should be twelve chaplains, eight clerks and thirteen choristers and that a skilled instructor should be chosen to train them: F. Harrison, Music in Medieval Britain (London, 1958), 22, 27. Some of the best polyphonic pieces of this period can now be heard on Music for Henry V and the House of Lancaster by the Binchois Consort, director Andrew Kirkman, with text by Philip Weller (CD, Hyperion Records, 2011); I am grateful to Susan Boynton, Andrew Kirkman and Philip Weller for their help with this section. For numbers of chaplains, see R. Bowers, ‘The Music and Musical Establishment of St George's Chapel in the Fifteenth Century’, in St George's Chapel Windsor in the Late Middle Ages, ed. C. Richmond and E. Scarff (Windsor, 2001), 171–212, at pp. 177–83. In the 1390s Gaunt was employing the French composer Henry Pycard: J. Caldwell, The Oxford History of English Music I (Oxford, 1991), 119.
4 M. Bent, ‘Old Hall Manuscript’, in New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. S. Sadie and J. Tyrrell (2nd edn, 2001), xviii.376–9. The manuscript is BL Add. MS 57,950 (‘Roy Henry’ inscriptions on fos. 12v and 80v); Caldwell, Oxford History of English Music I, 114–15. It may be that in a manuscript composed during his son's reign, Henry IV would have been referred to as ‘Roy Henry le pere’, or ‘le quart’.
5 Compare Harrison, Music in Medieval Britain, 221, who argued for Henry IV as ‘Roy Henry’, claiming that ‘there is no contemporary evidence for Henry V's musical ability’, but noted that strings were bought in 1397–8 for the future Henry V's zither (cithara): DL 28/1/6, fo. 36v.
6 Bugby was retained in 1401 for £5 a year pur apprendre et enformer les enfants de notre chapelle en la science de gramaire (Wylie, Henry the Fourth, iv.208); Liber Regie Capelle, ed. W. Ullmann with a Note on the Music by D. H. Turner (Henry Bradshaw Society 92, Cambridge, 1961), 57, 66; A. Cobban, The King's Hall within the University of Cambridge in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1969), 19–20, 60–4 (who also noted, p. 186, that John Cooke, one of the Old Hall composers, was a clerk of the chapel in 1402–3).
7 A. McHardy, ‘The Chapel Royal in the Reign of Henry V’, in Henry V: New Interpretations, 128–56, at pp. 138–42; G. Harriss, ‘The Court of the Lancastrian Kings’, in The Lancastrian Court: Proceedings of the 2001 Harlaxton Symposium, ed. J. Stratford (Donnington, 2003), 1–18, at p. 13.
8 Ralph Bradfield, keeper of the king's books, was a valet of the royal chamber (Summerson, ‘An English Bible’, 109–15; CPR 1408–13, 470); for Eltham, see below, p. 389.
9 Passing references to Henry's books include a chest full of books buried by John Holand at Dartington (Devon) and forfeited after his execution in 1400 (E 101/699/25), and a payment to Alice Drax of London for binding some royal books in July 1411 (E 403/608, 23 July).
10 L. Staley, Languages of Power in the Age of Richard II (Philadelphia, 2005), 347.
11 J. Stratford, ‘The Royal Library in England before the Reign of Edward IV’, in England in the Fifteenth Century, ed. N. Rogers (Stamford, 1994), 187–97; Summerson, ‘An English Bible’, 115. Henry also borrowed a copy of Gregory the Great's works from Archbishop Arundel (Aston, Thomas Arundel, 319n).
12 J. Lutkin, ‘Goldsmiths and the English Royal Court 1360–1413’ (unpublished PhD thesis, Royal Holloway and Bedford New College, 2008), 117. I am grateful to Jessica Lutkin for sending me a copy of her thesis; De Illustribus Henricis, 111.
13 Treasures of a Lost Art (Metropolitan Museum of New York, 2003), 58–9. It is displayed in the Studium Biblicum Francescanum, Jerusalem.
14 BL Royal 1 E IX. It was one of the main display items in the British Library's 2011 exhibition Royal: The Manuscripts of the Kings and Queens of England.
15 As argued by Stratford, ‘The Royal Library in England’, 193–7.
16 Somerville, Duchy of Lancaster, i.177; Monstrelet, ii.337; for their tutors in 1397–9, see above, p. 306. Henry also maintained the usual thirty-two scholars at Cambridge during his reign (E 28/8, no. 6; E 101/405/14, fos. 20–1).
17 Johannis Lelandi, I (2), 310: in palatiis quae aedificavit rex Henricus nullus in regibus eo gloriosor in diebus suis (anonymous). Henry completed Richard II's great rebuilding of Westminster Hall under the direction of his master-mason, Henry Yevele, added a new gate to the palace, ‘facing the king's highway, to the west’, and built new defensive towers at Calais and Southampton, the latter stocked with guns; there were, as ever, constant repairs and maintenance; the council noted in 1411 that £1,000 needed to be spent ‘for repairing castles and manors’: H. Colvin, R. Allen Brown and A. Taylor, History of the King's Works: The Middle Ages (2 vols, London, 1963), i.199, 532–3; E 403/608, 12 and 15 May 1411; POPC, ii.11.
18 Colvin et al., King's Works, ii.69, 2–3.
19 See Itinerary pp. 542–5. He spent Christmas at Windsor in 1402 and at Abingdon in 1403, probably because Eltham was being reconstructed, but the only time after 1403 that he was not at Eltham for Christmas was in 1410; he also spent Easter there four times and paid many other visits. For the duke of York's escapade, above, p. 264.
20 E 101/404/18, mm. 2, 4.
21 Colvin et al., King's Works, ii.930–7; DL 28/1/4, fo. 17v (chessboard); E 101/502/21 and 23 (desks and glazing).
22 E 101/496/7; E 28/14, no. 234. For Herland and Tuttemond, see E 404/24, nos. 103, 497.
23 E 101/502/21.
24 Brown, ‘Authorization of Letters under the Great Seal’, 125–56; Dodd, ‘Patronage, Petitions and Grace’, 126, points out that ‘grace’ could in practice mean back payment for wages still owing; in 1404–5, the payment of annuities became more of an act of grace than a right. When Maude Merlond, a poor oratrice from Portugal, asked the king for permission to take one rabbit a week from Sumbury park for her sustenance, the king told her she could take two (E 28/9, no. 73).
25 G. Dodd, Justice and Grace: Private Petitioning and the English Parliament in the Late Middle Ages (Oxford, 2007), 236–7.
26 Dodd, ‘Patronage, Petitions and Grace’, 115–16. When the king imprisoned rather than beheaded forty-five men after the Epiphany rising, ‘it was said to them that they should sue before the king himself through their friends in the meantime in order to have charters of the said king concerning their aforesaid grace and pardon’ (E 37/28).
27 Foedera, viii.282; this was endorsed by the commons in the thirty-one articles of 1406 (PROME, viii.370); by 1424 it meant that petitions were received on a Wednesday and answered on a Friday (Select Cases in King's Council, ed. Leadam and Baldwin, xvi, xix).
28 Saul, Richard II, 453–4.
29 Nuttall, Creation of Lancastrian Kingship, 130; note also the almost chatty way in which Henry's parliaments were reported in the Continuatio Eulogii (CE, 395, 399, 409).
30 G. Stow, ‘Richard II in the Continuatio Eulogii: Yet Another Alleged Historical Incident?’, Fourteenth-Century England V, ed. N. Saul (Woodbridge, 2008), 116–29; Dodd, ‘Patronage, Petitions and Grace’, 105.
31 BL Add. MS 35,295, fo. 262r (Et omni popolo regni sui in visu fuerat affectuosus ita ut eius faciem, amicis dulcem, insidis terribilem, per multas civitates pingeretur et formeretur in locis spectabilibus ut sic quod ad eum sepius posset populus intueri, et eius formam faciei vultumque videre).
32 Henry employed four ‘king's painters’, all Londoners, but their recorded output consisted of banners, shields, the gaily painted royal barges and other such practical tasks: Thomas Gloucester (life appointment from 1400: E 28/8, no. 18); Thomas Prince (annuity of £30 for his office in 1401: E 403/569, 26 March); Thomas Wright and Thomas Kent (E 101/405/22, fo. 30; E 403/612, 20 May); The Navy of the Lancastrian Kings, ed. S. Rose (Navy Records Society, 123, London, 1982), 17–18, 82.
33 J. Watts, ‘Looking for the State in Medieval England’, in Heraldry, Pageantry and Social Display in Medieval England, ed. P. Coss and M. Keen (Woodbridge, 2002), 243–67.
34 RHKA, 236–43; Saul, ‘The Commons and the Abolition of Badges’, 302–15.
35 PROME, viii.148–9.
36 DL 28/4/1, fo. 15v; D. Fletcher, ‘The Lancastrian Collar of Esses: Its Origins and Transformation down the Centuries’, in The Age of Richard II, ed. J. Gillespie (New York, 1997), 191–204.
37 The case of the Scottish esquire Richard Maghlyn is instructive: he was granted a collar in 1408 when he did homage to Henry, but was not formally retained for a further year (RHKA, 235).
38 Henry V also had a second ‘signet of the eagle’, in use from 1413 (Signet Letters, 4, 8; DL 28/4/8, fo. 12v).
39 See the king's jewel accounts of 1401–3 (E 101/404/18 and 22; also BL Harleian Ms 319, fo. 42r). Henry inherited many artefacts with Richard II's livery signs on them, but often had them reworked before giving them away (Stratford, Richard II and the English Royal Treasure, 119).
40 Walker, Lancastrian Affinity, 94–6; E 403/589, 3 Nov. 1406; E 403/605, 28 Sept. 1410.
41 Lutkin, ‘Goldsmiths and the English Royal Court’, 155.
42 E 403/589, 3 Nov. 1406; Lutkin, ‘Goldsmiths and the English Royal Court’, 155–8.
43 In 1407, five collars cost £1 13s and thirteen cost £4 4s (E 403/591, 13 and 18 July); in 1403, seven cost £2 13s and twelve cost £4 8s. However, Sir Walter Hungerford valued his collar at £20 (CPR 1399–1401, 385).
44 Fletcher, ‘The Lancastrian Collar of Esses’, 202.
45 Above, p. 89.
46 Vale, English Gascony, 37; SAC II, 286–7; see also CPR 1405–8, 277 (the seizure of one of Thomas Mowbray's collars in 1399) and CPR 1399–1401, 385 (the seizure of Walter Hungerford's collar in 1400).
47 Above, p. 149.
48 Pilbrow, ‘The Knights of the Bath’, passim.
49 Henry was the first king to nominate European rulers for the Garter; all three had close kinship ties to the English royal family, although his choices were also designed to strengthen diplomatic relations.
50 H. Collins, The Order of the Garter 1348–1461 (Oxford, 2000), 109–18, 292–3 (list).
51 R. Barber, Edward III and the Triumph of England (London, 2013), 280, 295–6, 468; E 403/571, 9 Dec. 1399; CPR 1408–13, 265, 394; The Inventories of St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle, 1384–1667, ed. M. Bond (Windsor, 1947), 44.
52 Collins, Order of the Garter, 16 and n. 41.
53 Henry also had St George represented on his great seal and in his stained glass at Eltham: J. Good, The Cult of St George in Medieval England (Woodbridge, 2009), 81.
54 Collins, Order of the Garter, 242–3; Given-Wilson, ‘Quarrels of Old Women’, 37–8.
55 Collins, Order of the Garter, 92–107, 301–3; no ladies received robes before 1405 or after 1409.
56 E 403/596, 4 Dec. 1408.
57 John Milner (personal communication).
58 CPR 1408–13, 267, 315.
59 R. Dennys, Heraldry and the Heralds (London, 1982), 102–3.
60 POPC, ii.11; Collins, Order of the Garter, 31–2, 118, 213, 216, 262.
61 Good, Cult of St George, 82.
62 E 101/405/25, m. 2A; E 403/606, 23 March 1411; SAC II, 608–10; POPC, ii.33, 120; CPR 1405–8, 361; CPR 1408–13, 321. In August 1411 a council was summoned to discuss the king's plan to go abroad (E 403/608, 28 Aug. 1411).
63 Lloyd, England and the German Hanse, 124; below, p. 516 (Jerusalem in 1413).
64 Original Letters, i.5 5–6; Wylie, Henry the Fourth, i.313–15.
65 Referred to as the king's eastern correspondence, these letters were in fact endorsed ‘Jerusalem’ and would be better described as his Jerusalem correspondence (BL Cotton Nero B XI, fos. 172–5, endorsement on fo. 173v). Greenlaw left England in February 1403. The letters are printed in RHL I, 419–28.
66 See the letter to Henry from Queen Anglesia of Cyprus offering to intercede with her brother, the duke of Milan (RHL II, 21 Feb. 1405), and the decree of the Venetian Senate in 1407 commenting on Henry's goodwill towards the republic (Calendar of State Papers Venice, i. no. 155).
67 He wrote to Enrique of Castile urging him to support the Hospitallers at Rhodes following a visit by the prior of the Hospital to England in 1410 (BL Harleian MS 431, fo. 12; Foedera, viii.654); see also his letter to the pope concerning the Grand-Master of the Teutonic Knights and his support for the building of Bodrum castle (above, p. 397).
68 BL Add. MS 35,295, fo. 262r; De Illustribus Henricis, 99–101.
69 SAC II, 302–4. They were Charles de Savoisy and Hector de Pombriant; Walsingham described them as ‘arrogant and abusive’, but thought one of them to be Italian, perhaps because Sir Richard Arundel did joust with an Italian in the same year. The mayor and aldermen of York erected a chamber for the king, pour veier certeines poyntz darmes faitz deinz le palaice lerchevesques (E 101/502/22).
70 Above, p. 203; PROME, viii.102; Given-Wilson, ‘Quarrels of Old Women’, 37–42; Giles, 60. Jousts were held several times a year, mostly at Smithfield: E 101/404/18, mm. 1–2; E 403/571, 22 Nov. 1401, 1 March 1402; E 403/573, 4 April 1402; E 403/591, 1 June 1407; E 403/605, 3 June 1410; E 403/606, 23 March 1411.
71 Giles, 43; Brut, ii.369–70; Great Chronicle of London, 87; SAC II, 478–9; Given-Wilson, ‘Quarrels of Old Women’, 37–9. The king paid the expenses of Werchin (‘the original Don Quijote’) and his companions (E 404/24, nos. 533, 538). He also rewarded English knights who went abroad to perform feats of arms, such as John Cornwall in 1409 and Walter Hungerford in 1406 (E 404/24, no. 487; Foedera, viii.436).
72 E 403/571, 1 March 1402; E 403/573, 4 April 1402; Brut, ii.368–9; Pepin, ‘The French Offensives of 1404–1407’, 33; CGR 1407–9, no. 25; Chronicle of London, 1089–1483, 90.
73 Usk, 176.
74 See, for example, DL 29/728/11987; SC6/1157/4; DL 28/4/1, fos. 6r, 19r; E 403/564, 6 November; DL 28/1/10, fo. 32v. Richard's administration referred to these events quite differently: see, for example, the chamberlain of Chester's account cited above, p. 133.
75 J. Scattergood, Politics and Poetry in the Fifteenth Century (New York, 1972), 115–16; Chronicles of London, 56, 61.
76 Nuttall, Creation of Lancastrian Kingship, 126; M. Rubin, Charity and Community in Medieval Cambridge (Cambridge, 1986), 68–71.
77 Foedera, viii.313.
78 See the comments of Clarke and Galbraith, ‘Deposition of Richard II’, 137.
79 Mum and the Sothsegger, ed. M. Day and R. Steele (EETS, London, 1936). Helen Barr, The Piers Plowman Tradition (London, 1993), 23, proposed a date of ‘shortly after 1409’ for the poem, but early 1405 seems more likely, as its original editors suggested. It certainly dates from Henry IV's reign and was written after 1402, since it refers to the friars hanged at Tyburn and to the king's decision in 1402 to hear petitions twice a week (ll. 120, 420, 1672; Foedera, viii. 282). The reference to licensed and unlicensed preachers (ll. 408–14) is more likely to refer to the 1401 Lollard Statute than Arundel's Constitutions of 1407–9 (PROME, viii.123). There are resonances with the parliament of October 1404, which discussed the resumption of crown lands and granted generous taxes, thereby helping to restore solvency to the royal household, but the passage exhorting prelates to counsel the king carries no reference to the fate of Archbishop Scrope in 1405.
80 Mum and the Sothsegger, ll. 143–70.
81 BL Add. MS 35,295, fo. 262r; Hoccleve also emphasized the need for truth-tellers (Regement of Princes, 70); E 404/15, no. 115 (£20 annuity to Henry Scogan ‘our esquire’, 4 Dec. 1399). There is no evidence for the tradition that Scogan tutored the king's sons (cf. D. Gray, ‘Scogan, Henry’, ODNB, 49.313–14).
82 Nuttall, Creation of Lancastrian Kingship, 58–66, 109–22; Scattergood, Politics and Poetry, 19–32; G. Dodd, ‘Changing Perspectives: Parliament, Poetry and the “Civil Service” under Richard II and Henry IV’, Parliamentary History 25 (2006), 299–322.
83 Above (manifestos), pp. 223 and 274.
84 For example, that in 1401 the people began to grumble against purveyance, or the quip that his decision to tax stipendiary vicars and friars for the first time in 1405 made Henry the first king to have got so many priests to pray for him: Usk, 160–1; SAC II, 314, 470; CE, 389; Mum and the Sothsegger, ll. 1343–5.
85 Foedera, viii.185, 255; PROME, viii.211, 362; SAC II, 454–6; Raine, Historians of the Church of York, iii.291–4; Signet Letters, nos. 941, 944. In 1401 a soothsayer, John Kyme, was brought before the council (Select Cases in Council, ed. Leadam and Baldwin, xxxiv); the order to the bishop of Lincoln (Repingdon) on 2 January 1406 to search out and imprison soothsayers, magicians and necromancers and, if necessary, bring them before the king was probably more for religious than for political reasons (Foedera, viii.427–8; POPC, i.288).
86 An example is the investigation into the abduction of the Mortimer boys (SAC II, 430–3).
87 Usk, 122–3; SAC II, 380; CE, 397.
88 Usk, 89; SAC II, 402–5.
89 The seal was probably used for the first time on 16 Nov. 1406. The change from France Ancient to France Modern, perhaps prompted by the hope that Prince Henry might marry a Valois princess, reduced the number of fleurs-de-lys to three: J. Cherry, ‘Some Lancastrian Seals’, in The Lancastrian Court, ed. Stratford, 19–28, at pp. 20–2; M. Heenan, ‘The French Quartering in the Arms of Henry IV’, The Coat of Arms 10 (1968–9), 215–21; Bennett, ‘The Royal Succession’, in Rebellion and Survival, 25; I am grateful to Dr Adrian Ailes for his comments on Henry's seals.