COUNCIL, COURT AND HOUSEHOLD
Next after the king in the chain of command, the immediate instruments for the implementation of the royal will, came the council and the household, the latter also serving as the hub around which coalesced the king's court. Although it did not lack political authority, the king's continual or Privy Council was more an executive than a strictly political body.1 It met almost daily in the Star Chamber at Westminster, usually without the king, although at times of pressure or crisis Henry might summon it to join him elsewhere. When asked to nominate his councillors in parliament, as in 1404 and twice in 1406, Henry gave between seventeen and twenty-two names, but this represented more a pool from which a quorum might be drawn than a list of regular attendees, and in practice business was often transacted by the king's three chief officers – the chancellor (who presided), treasurer, and keeper of the privy seal – often sitting with no more than three or four others; when the king was present, however, numbers could rise to a dozen or even above twenty.2
The council's remit was extensive: it heard petitions, advised the king on appointments, military commands and security, debated diplomatic initiatives, helped to plan campaigns, acted as the principal conduit for information between Henry and the Westminster offices, and had the legal power to subpoena witnesses, informants or suspects (heretics, spies, rumour-mongers), to take bonds and oaths and to impose fines or imprisonment, though not corporal or capital penalties. Sensitive cases, some involving the exercise of equitable jurisdiction, were sometimes referred to it, for which the king's legal officers would attend, although its relationship to the common law was carefully monitored.3 Its principal responsibility, however, was finance: it negotiated loans (and individual councillors were themselves regular lenders), determined priorities, juggled assignments on local revenues and drew up working budgets.4 At parliament's request, it was also meant to approve royal grants, leases, wages and expenses: the frequent addition to Henry's grants of the clause ‘with the assent of the council’ was one way in which he sought to guard against criticism of his generosity.5
With the exception of some changes following the 1403 rebellion, the composition of the council was fairly stable through the first seven years of the reign. The three chief officers apart, the bishops who attended most frequently were lawyers such as Richard Young of Bangor and (until they both died in 1404) John Bottlesham of Rochester and John Trefnant of Hereford.6 More influential than any of these was the dean of Hereford, John Prophet, who had served as clerk of the council under Richard II until dismissed in 1395, was reappointed in 1399, became Henry's secretary in 1402, and then keeper of the privy seal from 1406 to 1415.7 Archbishop Arundel was also present at a number of meetings during the first year of the reign and was frequently consulted ad hoc during the following three years, but only attended regularly after he was nominated as a councillor in the January 1404 parliament.8 Of the lay magnates, those most commonly present prior to Shrewsbury were the earls of Northumberland, Westmorland, Worcester and Somerset, but after the fall of the Percys, Westmorland spent more time in the north and Richard Grey, John Lovell, Thomas Berkeley and William Willoughby, all peers, joined Somerset as the senior lay councillors. Following his release from prison in late 1405 the duke of York also began attending, while the successive appointments as treasurer of William Lord Roos (1403–4) and Thomas Lord Furnivall, brother of the earl of Westmorland (1404–7), also gave the council a more secular profile.9
It was among the lesser lay members of the council that the greatest degree of continuity was to be found between 1399 and 1406. Henry relied heavily from the start of his reign on knights and esquires such as John Norbury, John Cheyne, Hugh Waterton, John Doreward and John Curson, and in time they were joined by others: Arnold Savage from late 1402, John Pelham and John Stanley from 1404.10 The influence of this knightly bloc was probably resented by some, and they in turn would not have forgotten the fate of Bussy, Green and Le Scrope in 1399. Yet Henry's councillors were more independent-minded than Richard's – as witness Savage's forthright criticisms when speaker of the commons. It was only in late 1406, when Prince Henry began to flex his muscles, that these knights and esquires – the king's men rather than the prince's – were relieved of their duties. The council over which Arundel presided in 1407–9 was more aristocratic though less unified, especially towards the end when the financial strain began to tell and the king's two eldest sons were vying to exert influence.
Given Henry's financial and other problems, it is not surprising that successive parliaments exhorted him to choose his councillors wisely and nominate them publicly. The first criterion for membership was naturally loyalty, but the king also valued men of intellectual calibre. Richard Young, bishop of Bangor and then Rochester, diplomat and member of the council from 1399 to 1405, was a lawyer of international stature who had acted as an intermediary between the pope and the emperor and was the author of several works on the Schism. Archbishop Arundel was a bibliophile whose library at his death was valued at £550, and a friend of the great humanist chancellor of Florence, Coluccio Salutati. Nicholas Bubwith, by turn king's secretary, privy seal keeper and treasurer, and his friend Robert Hallum co-sponsored a Latin translation of Dante's Divine Comedy. Thomas Langley, bishop of Durham, privy seal keeper, chancellor and another bibliophile, reorganized the administration of his palatinate and founded a chantry in Durham cathedral to teach grammar and song to poor children.11 Nor was it only the king's clerical councillors who left literary remains. Edward, duke of York, passed his time in detention in 1405 by writing Master of Game, a translation with additions of the hunting treatise, Livre de la Chasse, written by Gaston Phoebus, count of Foix (d.1391), which he dedicated to Prince Henry. John Tiptoft compiled a commonplace book into which he inserted ‘Tiptoft's Chronicle’; his son, who became earl of Worcester, was a noted humanist scholar.12
As well as intellectual breadth, what these men brought to government was a prudent formalism. The council laid stress on good record-keeping – to some extent, perhaps, a response to external pressure, but also the preferred approach of men of a scholarly disposition. John Prophet had kept a journal while clerk of the council in 1392–3, and his example was influential, for in October 1401 his successor, Robert Frye, received forty marks for his ‘great labours and work’ in writing out the acts of the council in past times.13 How far back ‘past times’ stretched is difficult to know, but this may represent an effort to collect and rationalize the records of the council with a view to maintaining them more systematically. Council records are quite full for the first seven years of Henry's reign, and the compilation of formularies by privy seal clerks such as Prophet and Hoccleve implies a methodical approach.14 The council liked lists – lists of duchy annuitants, of exchequer annuitants, of ‘the revenues of the kingdom of England’.15 Meanwhile, in 1402 John Leventhorpe began touring the country gathering archives for his ‘great project’, the Cowcher Books of the duchy of Lancaster, the massive and indispensable work of reference for the duchy council, which also had rooms at Westminster.16 Paradoxically, much of the evidence for greater attention to record-keeping comes from the early, financially most difficult, years of the reign, but out of this experimentation grew the systematic budgeting, more measured allocation of resources and stricter control of assignments that characterized the period of recovery after 1406.
The exhortations to Henry to choose his councillors carefully were intended not so much as criticism of either the personnel or the work of the council as an attempt to emphasize its public accountability and independence from the court. Under pressure from the commons to spend taxes on the purposes for which they had been voted, it was not easy for councillors to resist the simultaneous pressure of a king and court whose demands were many and urgent and whose priorities were often different. The lack of a clear distinction between Henry's councillors and his counsellors – those who travelled with the royal household or accompanied him on campaign, and from whom he habitually took informal advice – was part of the problem. Men such as Henry's half-brother and childhood companion John Beaufort, or his under-chamberlain and then household steward Sir Thomas Erpingham, to say nothing of Cheyne, Norbury, Waterton and other intimates of the king, personified a certain ambivalence in the operation of governance: dividing their time between meetings of the council and attendance on the king, they must constantly have found themselves pulled in different directions. Yet the cry of ‘evil counsellors’ was not much raised during Henry's reign, and there was no question of impeaching or dismissing from court those who resigned in 1401 or 1406. Most of them remained close to the king and continued to undertake important roles. Nevertheless, it was not just the commons who wished to see the council maintain a distance from curial interference which they considered appropriate to its fiscal remit, and that is why there was emphasis on its public accountability. Conflicts of interest were a recurrent concern: many of the clerks of the chancery were also fee'd or employed by members of the nobility during the early years of the reign, but the commons put a stop to this in 1406 by prohibiting them from serving on anyone else's council ‘in opposition to the king’.17
One area in which the council's remit expanded during Henry's reign was security. Philippe de Mézières – crusader, polemicist, chancellor of Cyprus and councillor to Charles V of France – was of the opinion that at least one-third of a king's military expenditure should be on espionage.18 Henry IV never spent more than a fraction of this on spies, but he knew the value of good information, and government documents are full of references to exploratores or espies sent to Paris, Calais and elsewhere to gather news about enemy intentions.19 Given that spying has rarely, if ever, been absent from war this is not surprising, but the undeclared and unpredictable nature of the Anglo-French war and the piecemeal Welsh revolt placed a premium on good intelligence. Vigilance was a habit Henry had learned early, in the dangerous 1390s, and which the conspiracies and betrayals of his first few years did nothing to break. In Wales, uncertainty about loyalties was endemic and both sides made constant use of spies, while almost anyone Welsh or with Welsh connections in England was suspect.20 In 1402, with his career as a crown lawyer stalled because of distrust of Welshmen, the chronicler Adam Usk left for Rome in search of advancement, only to find that even here the king's agents were watching him. ‘Adam,’ wrote a watchful English clerk at the Curia, ‘is reckoned amongst us all, on account of his words, to be in some degree not entirely faultless in relation to Owain Glyn Dŵr, and therefore we do not communicate with him openly about this or any other matter.’ Disappointed in his ambitions and shunned by the English at Rome, Usk eventually sought the bishopric he craved from the Avignon pope, but this brought him into contact with the earl of Northumberland and Lord Bardolf, by now refugees in Paris, resulting in 1407 in his outlawry, excommunication and deprivation of his benefices. A year later he was offered the chance to redeem himself. If he was prepared to go to Wales and ‘pretend to be one of Owain's supporters’ – in other words, to spy on Glyn Dŵr – then secretly slip away, the king might see his way to pardoning him: ‘and that is what happened,’ wrote Usk, ‘and it was this promise which saved my life’.21 Pardoned in March 1411, he returned to England to resume his career.
Usk's journey from watched to watcher casts a thin beam of light into one of the darker corners of early Lancastrian government. Spy-fever was rampant at Westminster, especially during the early years of the reign: there were spies at court, among the alien communities in London, foreign clergy, ambassadorial delegations and even in the royal household, and the king was frequently reminded to be discreet. Some of these allegations were true, for almost anyone sent abroad on official business – diplomats, clerics, merchants, heralds – was expected to keep their ears open for information that might be useful to their masters.22 Yet if spying on, and by, foreign powers was routine, more worthy of note under Henry was the extension of domestic surveillance, arguably the price paid by a usurper. Informers certainly believed they would be listened to. In 1400, at the time of the Epiphany rising, and again in 1408, after Northumberland's last rebellion, so many informers came forward to accuse neighbours or others against whom they bore grudges that it only made matters worse.23 However, it could end badly for them. Late in 1405 the approver John Veyse of Holbeach (Lincolnshire) accused fifty-nine heads of religious houses in England of secretly sending money to Glyn Dŵr, and although he was exposed as a liar and drawn and hanged, what is striking is the thoroughness with which his allegations were investigated.24
Concern over security encouraged the development of ‘a widespread system of public espionage’, at the centre of which was the council.25 Its powers to monitor the comings and goings of the king's subjects had burgeoned since the passing of the anti-papal statutes in the mid-fourteenth century and the inquisitorial role assigned to it by the anti-Lollard measures of the 1380s. Summoning suspects for interrogation was now routine.26 When treason was not merely suspected but manifest, as in January 1400 or July 1403, it would have been remiss not to send spies to learn what they could,27 but the failure to anticipate the Percy rebellion encouraged the adoption of a more proactive role. When Bardolf rode north in the spring of 1405, Lord Roos and Chief Justice Gascoigne were told to follow him. In September 1405, a wayfarer called John Kingsley unwisely prophesied to two esquires whom he met up with near Walsingham (Norfolk) that Glyn Dŵr's power would grow because he paid his followers the wages he promised them. He was reported to the village constables, arrested and placed in Norwich castle to await the king's pleasure.28 Were his travelling companions agents-provocateurs or merely loyal lieges following the king's order of July 1405 that ‘vagabonds’ spreading rumours should be arrested?29 The next year saw a clampdown on sorcerers, soothsayers and necromancers, as well as further measures against heretics and rumour-mongers.30 The net was cast ever wider, creating the opportunity for one enterprising rogue, Walter Forster of East Brainford (Essex), to promise suspects that ‘thei shuld be scraped owte of the kynges bokes’ in return for payment of a mark; he was brought before the King's Bench for extortion.31
Nor was economic espionage neglected, as exemplified by the deposition presented by an obscure vigilante called William Stokes to the king's council in 1411, naming merchants and ship-owners who had evaded customs duties and requesting a commission to set up a surveillance network. It was, he declared piously, the obligation of ‘every loyal subject and liege to safeguard and be diligent for the honour, prosperity and profit of the king’ – although presumably he was not unaware that rewards were offered to those who reported evasions.32 England was no police state – the means for that were lacking – but as the English government steadily extended its definition of criminal behaviour in the later Middle Ages it simultaneously extended its reach.33 Given the obstacles to rapid and reliable communication at the time, the information-gathering capabilities of Henry's government are impressive. The price, arguably, was the creation of a ‘culture of suspicion’, but governments generally mind less about this than do historians.34
Separate from the council, though not always as far removed from it as some would have wished, was the king's household. The household existed in order to service the king's domestic, religious and leisure requirements, to advertise his majesty through display and ceremony, to provide him with a mobile treasury (the chamber) and authoritative writing-office (the signet), to guard his person and to act as his personal retinue and command-centre when he went to war.35 In 1402–3 the number of people receiving fees or robes in the household was 522, in 1405–6 it was 644, although after this the number must have fallen.36 About 70 per cent of them were sergeants, valets, grooms, carters, huntsmen and falconers, constituting the service (or ‘downstairs’) element of the household, of whom a hundred or more were valets of the stables caring for its thousands of horses. The other 30 per cent were men of higher status: esquires, sergeants-at-arms, knights and clerks. The topmost rung comprised a dozen or so knights of the king's chamber and the household officers: the steward, chamberlain, keeper of the wardrobe, controller and cofferer; the king's secretary, confessor, almoner, physician and surgeon; the master of the king's horses and the dean of the chapel royal. The king's chamber and chapel formed his household within a household, the private apartments where he slept, prayed, relaxed, took counsel and conducted business.37 Access to it was controlled by the chamberlains, men of high status and great influence: John Beaufort was chief chamberlain from 1399 to 1410; his under-chamberlains were Thomas Erpingham (1399–1404) and Richard Grey of Codnor (1404–13). Running the hall – the public sphere of the household – was the responsibility of the steward, a post held by key players such as Thomas Rempston (1399–1401), Thomas Percy (1401–2) and John Stanley (1404–13), who had previously been steward of Prince Henry's household (1402–4). The keeper of the wardrobe was the chief financial officer, sometimes called the treasurer of the household; the controller and cofferer acted as the steward's and keeper's deputies. The chamberlain, steward and keeper were sometimes listed among the half a dozen ‘great officers of the realm’, a reminder that their political influence and spending power made them accountable to the kingdom as well as the king. The Merciless Parliament saw the execution of Simon Burley and John Beauchamp of Holt, Richard II's chamberlain and steward, as well as several chamber knights.
Henry's ministers did not incur such opprobrium. Rempston, Grey, Norbury and Erpingham (twice) were specifically commended by the parliamentary commons for their good service to king and kingdom. The dismissals of 1401, 1404 and 1406 from the household were not for political graft but for financial or xenophobic reasons. The same holds true for almost all parliamentary criticism of Henry's household: it was too large, its expenditure was out of control, it abused its right of purveyance, and some of its officers were incompetent, but parliament did not talk of it in the terms they had talked of Richard II's household, as a malign influence on the king, manipulating the flow of royal patronage and inclining him towards duplicitous or treasonous policies. Henry was often accused of being too generous, but his patronage was generally seen as even-handed.38
Two of the household's four main departments were permanently based in London, the other two itinerated with the king. The former were the great wardrobe, which dealt mainly in textiles and was based at Baynard castle near St Paul's, and the privy wardrobe, which was responsible for the armour, artillery and weaponry stored in the Tower of London. The latter two were the chamber, the king's personal treasury, and the wardrobe of the household, which paid the living expenses of the king and his servants. Chamber accounts were not audited at the exchequer and have not survived, but it is clear that thousands of pounds were usually carried around with the household, in addition to a hoard of plate and jewels, frequently pledged for loans – hence the loss of ‘countless treasure and crowns’ when the royal baggage train was caught in a flood in 1405.39 Exchequer and duchy of Lancaster liveries to the chamber averaged around £6,600 a year during Henry's reign, but all sorts of casual revenues and windfalls were also paid into it – fines, ransoms, forfeitures, douceurs, fees for licences or charters, the profits of episcopal temporalities sede vacante, occasional income from alien priories, and much else.40 Parliamentary or conciliar recommendations to reserve some of these sources for the wardrobe were in part an attempt to stop them being swallowed up by the chamber, for which the king resisted any suggestion of accountability. However, when the wardrobe was hard pressed, Henry sometimes authorized the transfer of sums from the chamber, around £10,000 in 1399–1401 and a further £5,445 between January 1405 and December 1406.41
The wardrobe often struggled for cash, and itineration placed additional strains on it. During the ritual half of the year, the series of solemn feasts from All Saints at the beginning of November to the Garter festivities at the end of April, the king spent most of his time in London or at Westminster, retiring for a few days or weeks at a time to Eltham, Windsor or Hertford, but between spring and early autumn he usually travelled north or westwards, staying for up to a month at favoured residences such as Pontefract, Kenilworth, Leicester or Woodstock. It was a way for the king to show himself to his people, hear complaints, gauge the political temperature of the shires and keep in touch with his supporters.42 However, it also obliged the household to requisition lodgings and supplies as it went, which often meant abusing its right of purveyance. Four of the five keepers of Henry's wardrobe ran up debts of £10,000 or more by the time they demitted office (Tiptoft was the exception). At Henry's death, unpaid bills of the household amounted to £31,500.43 The decline in household itineration following the onset of the king's illness in 1408–9 was one reason for the reduction in its expenditure.
The five or six hundred men of the household who received fees and robes comprised only the king's formal domestic establishment, the domus or hostiel du roy. The number of those ‘at court’ was often much greater. Nobles, prelates, knights, foreign ambassadors or even rulers, messengers, well-wishers and petitioners all gravitated towards the household, many of them bringing their own servants or retainers with them, often scores of them. Prostitutes, paupers and informers followed it, hoping for business, alms or reward.44 There must often have been well over a thousand people attached in varying degrees to the household, more than those who lived in most English towns, and it is not difficult to envisage the impact it had on neighbourhoods through which it passed, although naturally it also created opportunities.45 The household spent a lot of time in and around London, where it had well-established sources of supply for food, wine, cloth and much else, from which the capital's drapers, mercers, grocers and vintners made good profits, providing loans to the crown in return.
The royal bodyguard had been enlarged early in the reign following the Epiphany rising, but when the king went on campaign or faced rebellion, the household evolved into an army. For Henry's Scottish campaign in 1400, the household contingent numbered 244 men-at-arms and 1,227 archers, more than a tenth of the English forces; in March 1405, when he planned to enter Wales, it was 144 men-at-arms and 720 archers.46 Many of those who came to fight for him were his annuitants and retainers, men who were not in receipt of fees or wages and thus not of the hostiel, but the speed with which armies several thousand strong could be mustered was impressive, as demonstrated during the week preceding the battle of Shrewsbury. When the king campaigned in person the household also served as the nerve centre of the army, its officers responsible for musters and logistics as well as commanding detachments and securing towns or castles. When Archbishop Scrope rebelled, it was John Stanley, the steward, and his controller Roger Leche who were sent to York to secure the city ahead of the king's arrival.47 Men such as Stanley, Rempston, Erpingham and Grey were known not just for military but also for organizational ability. Between them they held several of the crucial strongholds of the realm: Rempston was constable of the Tower, Erpingham of Dover castle, Robert Waterton of Pontefract. Windsor was held successively by Hugh Waterton (chamberlain of the duchy of Lancaster) and Stanley, Nottingham by Rempston and then Grey.48
As a larger and more amorphous body than the household, the court is less susceptible to definition or quantification. It was the political hub of the realm, a locus of favour, advancement and intrigue. To it came those who sought office or pardon, who hoped to influence policy or lawsuits, or who simply wished to touch greatness or enjoy courtly revels. Usually the court was where the king was, but during the later years of Henry's reign the power centre of the kingdom, and thus arguably ‘the court’, shifted uncertainly between the king and the prince, whose power-base was the council. Already in February 1409 petitioners were beginning to address themselves not to the king and council but to the prince and the council. When the duke of Burgundy's ambassadors came to England seeking support in the summer of 1411, they approached both the prince and the king, separately.49
For most of the reign, however, it was the king who defined the character of his court, and three aspects of Henry's court in particular are worth noting. First, as already noted, it had a reputation for anticlericalism.50 ‘There were at that time,’ wrote Walsingham, ‘many knights and esquires, especially in the king's household (familia), who, instructed in the errors of the Lollards, had among other things little understanding of the Eucharist and the mass.’51 The number of royal familiars who openly questioned Eucharistic doctrine was probably very small, but the assaults on clerical temporalities at the Worcester councils of 1403 and 1405 and the Coventry parliament of 1404 lent credence to the chronicler's fears. Archbishop Arundel deplored the anticlerical bias of royal intimates such as John Cheyne, Robert Waterton, or Thomas Beaufort, who in June 1405 wrested Richard Scrope's archiepiscopal cross from his grasp before sentencing him to death.52 Part of the problem was that, when Arundel came to court, he was a rather isolated figure. Richard II had been criticized for being overly dependent on clerical advice, and few bishops attended Henry's court as a matter of routine during the early years of the reign, although several were councillors. The king's half-brother Henry Beaufort was a powerful figure, but it was not in the service of the Church that his talents were employed.53 The churchman personally closest to the king was Philip Repingdon, but his reformist views may not have inclined him to take a stand against the disendowment party. After 1406, with the promotion of Bowet, Langley and Bubwith to bishoprics, and with Arundel holding the chancellorship for three years from January 1407, clerical influence at Henry's court increased. Not, of course, that it was only churchmen who stood up for the Church: the king's friend John Norbury was commended by Walsingham for his vigorous opposition to the Lollard Disendowment Bill in 1410 – although it is telling that the chronicler believed him to be ‘one in a thousand’.54
The second noteworthy feature of Henry's court was the precedence accorded to the king's family, especially after the downfall of the Percys. Power and high office were now increasingly concentrated in the hands of the king's close relatives and it was made clear in a variety of ways that they constituted almost a separate caste or order at the apex of English society. This did not mean simply the queen and the king's sons; his half-brothers the Beauforts, his brother-in-law Westmorland, and his uncle and cousin, successive dukes of York, also fell within the family circle – although it did not extend further than that.55 Prince Thomas was steward of England, Prince John constable (after 1403), and Westmorland marshal. England's dominions and marches were parcelled out between them; there was a virtual moratorium on promotions within the peerage which might be seen to challenge their pre-eminence; and as the reign progressed more important posts were concentrated in their hands. Prince Henry replaced Erpingham as constable of Dover castle, while Edward of York replaced Rempston as constable of the Tower after the latter drowned in the Thames in November 1406. The king's sons were first to be dubbed Knights of the Bath on the eve of the coronation, first to be nominated to the Order of the Garter. There were, of course, rivalries within the royal family, but only in the last two years of the reign did they threaten its stability.
Thirdly, Henry's court was a thoroughly masculine place, where manly qualities were valued and few women were to be found. This may have been a reaction to complaints about the number of noble ladies at Richard II's court, but is more likely to have resulted from a combination of preference and circumstances.56 Henry's daughters, Blanche and Philippa, were sent abroad to be married aged ten and twelve, respectively. The only other woman apart from the queen who had comparable influence with the king was his ever-supportive mother-in-law Joan, countess of Hereford, a cultured, strong-willed and widely respected woman, to whom he entrusted the arbitration of a number of noble disputes and the upbringing of the heirs of his political enemies; she did not live at court, however, but in Essex, at Pleshey or Rochford.57 There is nothing to suggest that Henry disliked women: he had affectionate relationships with both his wives as well as his mother-in-law, and treated his stepmother Katherine Swynford with respect and consideration, confirming her jointure from Gaunt, granting her 1,000 marks a year from the honour of Bolingbroke, and according her a fine burial in the Angel Choir of Lincoln cathedral after her death on 10 May 1403.58 However, the years of campaigning, crusading and exile, and the military exigencies of his early years as king, forged strong bonds with his comrades-in-arms and he seems simply to have preferred male company.
The greatest woman at court was, naturally, the queen, who, even if she neither was, nor was expected to be, the mother of a future king, still had many roles to fulfil: companion, intercessor, symbol, diplomatic buffer, financial burden. As duchess of Brittany (and a princess of the French royal blood), Joan of Navarre had at times intervened effectively in great matters.59 As queen of England, she had the good sense to cultivate a degree of detachment from court politics, especially following the undeclared war with Brittany in 1403–5 and the bruising criticism of her servants in the 1404 and 1406 parliaments. Occasional references to her influence with the king – on behalf of the countess of Oxford in 1404, for scholars at Oxford or Cambridge, or even to secure a brief truce with Brittany in 1407 – demonstrate little beyond conventional queenly intercession, although she did retain men of political influence such as John Norbury and Thomas Chaucer, and the earl of Westmorland thought it worth paying annuities of between £50 and £100 to her secretary, Anthony Ricz, and the esquires of her chamber, John Periaunt and Nicholas Aldrewich.60
Yet if Henry's second marriage was a diplomatic failure, it seems personally to have been a success. One chronicler thought that she and Henry had two stillborn children.61 Just two years apart in age, Henry and Joan shared an interest in music and almost certainly a mutual affection. Her arrival, wedding and coronation in early 1403 were celebrated in great style, following which she and Henry retired to Eltham for eight weeks.62 Her relations with her stepchildren were good and her personal conduct unexceptionable. Henry is known to have fathered one illegitimate child before he married Joan, but there is no hint of infidelity once he was married and he was certainly no libertine.63 He resented the criticism of her followers and did what he could to mitigate parliament's strictures against them. He built new apartments for her at Eltham, gave her a tower hard by the great gate of Westminster palace to store her muniments and conduct her business, and in March 1403 granted her a dower of £6,666, nearly 50 per cent more than that of Anne of Bohemia.64 This was hopelessly optimistic, and she also found it hard to secure remittances from her dower lands in Brittany.65 Henry's inability to live up to his promises to Joan burdened his conscience. The will he drew up when he thought he was dying in January 1409 asked that she be endowed from the duchy of Lancaster, and once he recovered he tried to make proper provision for her, but what she received always fell well short of what she was promised.66
Henry's generosity to Joan was symptomatic of a purposefulness, almost wilfulness, in Henry's attitude to the finances of his court and household. Whatever he had, or was thought to have, promised about frugal government in 1399, and despite the chorus of criticism, he was determined that the public face of his monarchy would not suffer by comparison with that of Richard II. Had he and Charles VI arranged a summit, or if the prince had married one of the French king's daughters, Henry would assuredly have made it as splendid an affair as the festivities at Ardres in 1396. This was, after all, a man who had a set of nine matching robes – mantles, tabard, tunics, hat – made from the skins of 12,000 squirrels and eighty ermine.67 As it was, he spent some £40,000 on the arrivals and departures of Queen Isabella, Queen Joan and Princesses Blanche and Philippa, and great but unquantifiable sums on his and Joan's coronations.68 His two most distinguished guests were Emperor Manuel in 1400 and Cardinal Ugguccione in 1408. Henry ordered his retainers to ride to Dover to greet and escort them to him, and no expense was spared to impress them. If this was the conspicuous consumption that in the eyes of many made the cost of his household ‘excessive and outrageous’, the king probably considered it money well spent. No king – certainly no usurper – could afford to be thought of as a cheapskate.69
Equally to the point, Henry's household servants were close to his heart. Many of them had served him for decades through bad times and good. He tried to prioritize the payment of their fees and annuities and regretted his inability to do so. He remembered them by name in his will, asking that the lowly grooms of his chamber who cared for him night and day through his illness be rewarded, and he remembered them on his deathbed, recalling ‘those who have been dear to me’ and advising his son to ‘cherish their loyalty’.70 It was the steadfastness of such men upon which his kingship was founded, and he knew it.
1 There was confusion over terminology, with the Privy (continual) Council sometimes described as the Great Council: Signet Letters, no. 258; PROME, viii.244–5; Brown, ‘Commons and Council’; J. Kirby, ‘Councils and Councillors of Henry IV’, TRHS (1964), 35–65; Brown, Governance, 30–42.
2 Dodd, ‘Henry IV's Council’, 112; PROME, viii.152, 244–5, 338; POPC, i.295.
3 Thus a meeting on 8 July 1400 which considered the duchess of Norfolk's claim for dower and an allowance claimed by the bishop of Winchester was attended by eight of the king's justices and sergeants-at-law (C 49/67, no. 24); for the council's judicial work, see Select Cases before King's Council, ed. Leadam and Baldwin, Introduction; Brown, Governance, 132–4. Dodd identified over 150 petitions submitted to the council between 1399 and 1406 (‘Henry IV's Council’, 96). The 1399 and 1406 parliaments asked that personal actions not involving the king should be tried by common law, not the council (PROME, viii.79, 371). See also the letter from the royal clerk James Billingford to the chancellor in June 1400: ‘The king does not intend to seal anything concerning the common law with the seal he has in his own keeping, for which God be praised!’ (CDS, v, no. 882).
4 Harriss, ‘Budgeting at the Medieval Exchequer’, 179–96.
5 E 404 (warrants for issue), passim; PROME, viii.230, 279.
6 Brown, ‘Commons and Council’, 30; for Young's role as a councillor see Allmand, ‘A Bishop of Bangor’; he replaced Bottlesham at Rochester in 1404.
7 It was Prophete who inspired the regularization of council record-keeping from the early 1390s, testimony to the council's growing importance as well as important evidence of its composition and activities: Baldwin, King's Council, 388–90; A. Brown, The Early History of the Clerkship of the Council (Glasgow, 1969), 8–16. He was replaced as king's secretary by William Pilton, former receiver of the chamber (CPR 1405–8, 288).
8 See, for example, E 28/7, no. 70: John Doreward sent from the council to Otford to seek Arundel's advice on whether or not the liberties and franchises of Cork should be confirmed (31 Aug. 1400); Arundel received an annual fee of £200 after 1404 for being a member of the council (E 403/591, 2 May).
9 E 403/591, 12 June (duke of York).
10 During the first eighteen months of the reign, a further group of esquires and London merchants were also designated as continual councillors (William Brampton, Richard Whittington, John Shadworth – all Londoners – John Freningham and Thomas Coggeshall), but they either resigned or were dismissed following the 1401 parliament, possibly on grounds of ‘insufficiency’ (Brown, ‘Commons and Council’, 8). The inclusion of merchants on the council was novel, although there is little evidence that they attended regularly; their primary role was probably to help negotiate loans: Baldwin, King's Council, 151.
11 Harvey, Solutions to the Schism, 106–23, 134–6, 142; R. Swanson, ‘Robert Hallum’, ODNB, 24.713–6; C. Fraser, ‘Thomas Langley’, ODNB, 32.500–2. Arundel had befriended Salutati while in exile; they exchanged volumes and Arundel confided to him his fear that his library might be dispersed as a result of his exile. Salutati later wrote to express relief at the recovery of Arundel's books, and in his will of 1414 the archbishop made careful provision for their distribution after his death (J. Hughes, ‘Thomas Arundel’, ODNB, 2.564–10; Aston, Thomas Arundel, 318–19).
12 The Master of Game, ed. W. and F. Baillie-Grohman (New York, 1904); York was master of Henry IV's hounds. For Tiptoft, see HOC, iv.620–8.
13 Pur les grandz labours et travail queux il ad euz et sustenuz entour lescripture des actes du conseil en temps passez (E 403/571, 28 Oct. 1401; cf. also E 403/578, 6 March 1404; E 403/589, 13 Dec. 1406; E 403/591, 12 June 1407). For Frye (clerk of the council, 1399–1421) and Prophet, see Brown, The Early History of the Clerkship of the Council, 4–35.
14 BL Add. MS 24,062 (Hoccleve's formulary); BL Harleian MS 431 (Prophet's letter-book).
15 DL 28/4/1, fo. 31v (duchy annuitants, in duplicate, May 1400); E 403/569, 5 Feb. 1401 (exchequer annuitants); E 403/576, 20 July 1403 (clerks assigned ad componendum certos rotulos de renencionibus regni Anglie . . . ad quantum dicti renensiones se extendent, for consideration by king and council).
16 Somerville, Duchy of Lancaster, i.157–60.
17 PROME, viii.372; C. Smith, ‘A Conflict of Interest? Chancery Clerks in Private Service’, People, Politics and Community in the Later Middle Ages, ed. J. Rosenthal and C. Richmond (Gloucester, 1987), 176–91. During the 1390s at least a quarter of the forty-eight chancery clerks had close connections with Gaunt.
18 J. Alban and C. Allmand, ‘Spies and Spying in the Fourteenth Century’, in War, Literature and Politics in the Late Middle Ages, ed. C. Allmand (Liverpool, 1976), 73–101, at p. 87.
19 The usual formulation was ‘to discover the intentions and plans of the enemies of the king in France and to inform the king and council of their plans’, often including ‘with all possible haste’. Those sent were usually obscure (often merely ‘a certain messenger’), but might include merchants such as the London goldsmith John Bridd. For examples, see E 403/565, 4 Feb. 1400; E 403/571, 14 March 1402 (Bridd); E 403/585, 27 Feb. 1406; E 403/587, 26 June 1406; E 403/591, 23 June 1407. See also Ford, ‘Piracy or Policy’, 72; Sumption, Divided Houses, 289–91, 579–81; D. Crook, ‘The Confession of a Spy, 1380’, BIHR 62 (1989), 346–50.
20 Davies, Revolt, 164, 223.
21 Usk, xxv–xxxii, 238–9.
22 For allegations of spying and an order to Italians to correspond with their countrymen intelligibly, not by ‘ciphers or other obscure figures’, see POPC, i.182, 288.
23 SAC II, 534–5.
24 SAC II, 464–7; R. Griffiths, ‘Some Secret Supporters of Owain Glyndŵr?’, BIHR 37 (1964), 77–100.
25 Leadam and Baldwin, Select Cases in the King's Council, xxxiv–xxxviii (quote).
26 Forrest, The Detection of Heresy, 35–47; H. Richardson, ‘Heresy and Lay Power in the Reign of Richard II’, EHR 51 (1936), 1–28.
27 E 403/565, 4 Feb. 1400 (spy sent to Cheshire and Lancashire); E 403/578, 10 Dec. 1403 (Hugh Malpas sent to spy on Hotspur in July).
28 C 49/48, no. 6; Walker, ‘Rumour, Sedition and Popular Protest’, 31–2.
29 E 403/582, 18 July 1405; SAC II, 380–1.
30 POPC, i.288.
31 KB 9/186, no. 47 (2).
32 Baldwin, King's Council, 523–5; RHL, ii.303–8.
33 C. Given-Wilson, ‘Service, Serfdom and English Labour Legislation, 1350–1500’, in Concepts and Patterns of Service in the Later Middle Ages, ed. A. Curry and E. Matthew (Woodbridge, 2000), 21–37.
34 Forrest, Detection of Heresy, 233 (quote).
35 As the king's personal seal, the signet had special authority: in 1405 the chancellor, treasurer, and privy seal keeper wrote to Henry advising him to send letters under his signet to the bishops to persuade them to exact a tax from stipendiary chaplains, since ‘we are quite certain that the bishops, stipendiary chaplains and others will be more willing to accomplish your royal wishes in this matter than they would be by letters under the great or privy seal’ (POPC, ii.100). However, the signet was never accepted by the exchequer (Signet Letters, 3).
36 RHKA, 278. In 1405–6 Queen Joan's household was included. Wardrobe books only survive from 1402–3 and 1405–6, but the decline in expenditure after 1406 and the dismissal of aliens in the 1406 parliament make it likely that numbers were pruned.
37 ‘Relaxing’ included gaming, which cost Henry at least £400 in 1405–6 (BL Harleian MS 319, fo. 41v).
38 Dodd, ‘Patronage, Petitions and Grace’, 107; Harriss, Shaping the Nation, 76.
39 SAC II, 462. The king's chamber (camera Regis) had two separate, though related, meanings: (i) the king's private apartments; (ii) the king's privy purse. Two accounts of the receiver of the king's jewels survive (E 101/404/18 and 22), but no overall chamber accounts.
40 A windfall almost certainly paid to the chamber was a ‘new carrack’ belonging to Peter Oliver of Barcelona, captured by seven English balingers and other vessels, the hulk and rigging of which were valued at 4,000 marks and the master's goods at 1,500 crowns; he was said to have given these to the king ‘as a gift’ (E 28/23, no. 15; Antient Kalendars, ii.74).
41 Rogers, ‘Royal Household’, 371, 670; RHKA, 90–2.
42 When Henry spent a night at Bardney abbey (Lincolnshire) in August 1406, Philip Repingdon rode across from Lincoln and William Lord Willoughby from Eresby (Lincolnshire) to speak with him (Johannis Lelandi, vi.301). For household itineration, see G. Harriss, ‘Court of the Lancastrian Kings’, 15–18.
43 Thomas Tutbury (1399–1401) left debts of c.£10,300; Thomas More (1401–5) c.£12,000; Richard Kingston (1405–6) c.£10,700; Tiptoft (1406–8) paid off some of these, but Thomas Brounfleet (1408–13) left debts of at least £10,000 (RHKA, 108–9). For the payment of the king's debts after his death, see below, p. 522.
44 RHKA, 60, 69–70.
45 The assizes held by the clerk of the market of the household to requisition supplies continued to be resented: in 1403 it was said that the weights and measures he used were meant to have been burned in Richard II's reign (KB 9/186/47 (3); cf. RHKA, 48–53).
46 RHKA, 63; CPR 1405–8, 6.
47 CFR 1399–1405, 310.
48 RHKA, 190–5.
49 E 28/23, no. 24 (from the earl of Westmorland); below, pp. 493–4.
50 Above, pp. 377–8.
51 SAC II, 798 (and see pp. 424–6, 590); McNiven, Heresy and Politics, 72–8.
52 SAC II, 448–57, 480; the fact that Arundel's own nephew, the young Earl Thomas of Arundel, also sat in judgment on Scrope must also have distressed him. For Cheyne in 1399 and 1404, see above p. 288. In November 1406 at Charing Cross, Robert Waterton demonstrated his contempt for the orthodox preacher Richard Alkerton by offering him a curry-comb, implying that he merely wished to curry favour with prelates; he was master of the king's horses, hence presumably the curry-comb. A royal knight who ‘had never loved the Church’ told Henry in 1402 that the rumours that Richard was alive would not abate unless the friars were eliminated (CE, 392, 407; SAC II, 591).
53 Harriss, Cardinal Beaufort, 395–6 (‘He had no concern for the defence of the Church's liberties’).
54 Walsingham also commended the duke of York for his pro-clerical stance in 1404 (SAC II, 420, 590). The king was godfather to Norbury's son, called Henry, and to John Beaufort's son, also called Henry.
55 See, for example, the way they were styled as ‘our dearest brother’, ‘our dearest kinsman’, etc. in the charter witness lists: Biggs, ‘Witness Lists’, 414–15.
56 For ladies at Richard's court, see above p. 100; Richard created thirty-six Ladies of the Garter, Henry created ten, nearly all closely related either to himself or to another Garter knight (Collins, Order of the Garter, 79–83, 301–3).
57 She had custody of Richard de Vere, heir to the earldom of Oxford, and John Mowbray, heir to the earldom of Nottingham, after his brother's execution in 1405; in July 1410 she loaned 500 marks ‘in exoneration of’ all the taxpayers of Essex (E 403/580, 3 Feb. 1405; E 403/602, 2 Dec. 1409; POPC, i.348; CPR 1408–13, 216, 220; for arbitration, see CCR 1409–13, 305, 395; Sandler, ‘The Bohun Women and Manuscript Patronage’, 282–3).
58 DL 29/728/11990, m. 2; A. Goodman, Katherine Swynford (Lincoln Cathedral Publications, 1994); Henry also granted her four tuns of wine a year in Nov. 1399 (CPR 1399–1401, 58, 408). She lived at Lincoln from 1399.
59 In 1391, heavily pregnant and carrying her children in her arms, she burst into Duke John's bedchamber one night and threw herself to her knees to beg him to release the royal ambassadors whom he had imprisoned in a fit of temper. She also tried to mediate between him and his mortal foe Olivier de Clisson (Saint-Denys, i.724–7).
60 C. Ross, ‘The Yorkshire Baronage, 1399–1435’ (unpublished DPhil thesis, University of Oxford, 1950), 410. These annuities might have been connected with Westmorland's tenure of the honour of Richmond, which was claimed by successive dukes of Brittany. Periaunt was Master of Joan's Horses and his wife Joanna was one of the queen's six ladies-in-waiting, as was Aldrewich's wife Constance (E 101/405/22, fo. 31). The Periaunts were Bretons, but granted letters of denization in 1411–12. Norbury and Chaucer were both esquires of the queen as well as king's servants (CPR 1408–13, 144, 283, 298, 368, 460). Ricz was Welsh-born (Rhys) but domiciled in Brittany; he acted as proxy for Joan for her marriage to Henry at Eltham in April 1402 (M. Jones, ‘Joan of Navarre’, ODNB, 30.139–41; Foedera, viii.339).
61 Kingsford, English Historical Literature, 282, from a ‘Northern Chronicle’.
62 Among Joan's annuitants was the celebrated composer John Dunstaple, whose music was included in the Old Hall Manuscript (BL Add. MS 57, 950). A. Crawford, ‘The King's Burden?: The Consequences of Royal Marriage in Fifteenth-Century England’, in Patronage, the Crown and the Provinces in Later Medieval England, ed. R. Griffiths (Gloucester, 1981), 33–56, says (p. 35) that the wedding and coronation cost £1,500, but including the embassy to collect her from Brittany it was a lot more than that (for expenses connected with her journey, see E 403/573, 15 July 1402; E 403/574, 19–30 Oct., 22 Feb.). The marriage feast, for which the menu survives, was as lavish as that at the king's coronation (BL Harleian MS 279, fos. 45–6).
63 Henry's illegitimate son, Edmund Leborde, stated in January 1412 that he was in his eleventh year and was the son of an unmarried man and an unmarried woman. He was thus conceived in 1400 or 1401. He was described as ‘son of King Henry, scholar, of the diocese of London’, when granted a papal dispensation to proceed to holy orders and receive benefices of any kind once he reached lawful age. The dispensation was granted in consideration of the king's devotion to the pope (John XXIII) and the Roman Church; it is not known what happened to Leborde (CPL 1404–15, 314).
64 RHKA, 31; CPR 1401–5, 473; E 28/14, no. 234 (Eltham chamber); Strohm, England's Empty Throne, 153–72.
65 The exchequer issue rolls record many attempts to pay sums to her, and Crawford, ‘The King's Burden’, 42–3, lists several additions to her dower between 1403 and 1408, which, however, still left it well short of £6,666. She was obliged to surrender her rights in Brittany in Nov. 1404; the earl of Kent's attack on Brehat in 1408 was an attempt to force the islanders to contribute to her dower (Giles, 54).
66 Nicholls, Collection of Wills, 204.
67 E. Veale, The English Fur Trade in the Later Middle Ages (2nd edn, London, 2003), 20.
68 For expenses connected with Isabella, Blanche and Queen Joan, see POPC, i.136, 154 (Isabella); E 403/573, 8 May, and E 403/574, 27–30 Oct. (Joan); E 403/573, 15 and 21 July, 26 Sept. (9,500 marks handed over for Blanche's voyage to Germany, but this was far from the total cost). For Blanche's marriage, the ancient royal prerogative to levy a feudal aid for the king's daughter was revived.
69 The king would have been gratified to see the eulogy of him which Emperor Manuel sent to a friend in 1401: the king of ‘Britain the Great’, he said, ‘overflows with many merits and is bedecked with all kinds of virtues. . . . With his might he astonishes all, and with his sagacity he wins himself friends. . . . And he appears very pleasant in his conversations, gladdening us in all ways and honouring us as much as possible and loving us no less. And, while he has gone to excess in all his negotiations, he seems even to blush a little, supposing himself, alone of all, to fall short of what is needed, so magnanimous is this man’ (Barker, Manuel II Palaeologus, 178–80); cf. J. Lutkin, ‘Luxury and Display in Gold and Silver at the Court of Henry IV’, in Fifteenth-Century England IX, ed. L. Clark (Woodbridge, 2010), 155–78.
70 POPC, ii.12–13; Johannis Lelandi, vi.301; Political Poems and Songs, ii.121.