NOBLES, REBELS AND TRAITORS
Henry's reliance on his family and affinity was to some extent a consequence of the dearth of active and reliable allies among the aristocracy during the early years of his reign – which also helps to explain why, especially after the Epiphany rising, he entrusted so much power to the Percys.1 When they in turn proved unreliable, it was the Beauforts and their brother-in-law Westmorland, all four of whom the king routinely referred to as his brothers, who took their place.2 John, the eldest of the Beaufort brothers and the king's chivalric companion in his youth, held the powerful post of royal chamberlain from the beginning of the reign and in 1401 was made captain of the town of Calais, although he rarely went there in person; he also acted as the king's chief emissary, taking Queen Isabella to France in 1401, escorting Princess Blanche to Germany in 1402, and conducting Joan of Navarre to England in 1403. Until his death in 1410 he was the lay magnate closest to the king. Bishop Henry Beaufort's acquisition of the chancellorship in March 1403 enhanced the family's influence; he too was entrusted with some of the most sensitive diplomatic missions of the reign, especially to France; wealthy and worldly, he could be relied upon not to place the needs of the Church above those of the state. Thomas, the youngest brother, was a soldier and a courtier with a puritanical streak who served for long periods as admiral and under Prince Henry in Wales, and was later held up as an exemplar of chivalric noblesse; later in the reign he would act as captain of Calais castle and for two years as chancellor, the first layman to do so for a quarter of a century. Their sister Joan was married to Westmorland, a regular councillor before Shrewsbury and thenceforward the agent of royal power in the north. From mid-1403 until early 1407 it was the Beauforts above all who held sway in Henry's councils, yet unlike the Percys they never acquired a regional power-base they could call their own. Henry Beaufort may have held the richest see in England, but it was not his ‘country’, while John and Thomas remained largely dependent on crown service, office, annuities, limited term grants and wardships for their income.3 Henry IV was not a man to trip on the same stone twice.
Nor did the king show any desire to replenish the ranks of the aristocracy. Reacting to the scorn that had greeted the duketti bonanza of 1397 and unwilling to jeopardize his family's exclusivity, Henry bestowed only three great titles in the course of his reign: his eldest son became prince of Wales in 1399, his second son duke of Clarence in July 1412, and his half-brother Thomas Beaufort earl of Dorset in the same month.4 When it was suggested in the 1402 parliament that John Beaufort resume the marquisate he had forfeited in 1399, he was persuaded to decline it, at the king's urging if not command.5 Bearing in mind that four dukes, a marquis and an earl were taken down a rank in the first parliament of the reign, Henry thus demoted twice as many great nobles as he promoted.6 In part this was because the number of peers of baronial rank who were politically active was small (although many more were militarily active). The most important of them was Richard Lord Grey of Codnor, whose family had been summoned to parliament since 1299 and whose ubiquitous service as councillor, admiral, diplomat, commander in Wales and under-chamberlain of the royal household for the last nine years of the reign might well have won an earldom from a less cautious king. He was, in effect, the king's replacement for the earl of Worcester.7 William Roos, William Willoughby, John Lovell and Thomas Berkeley all served on the council during the first half of the reign and undertook important military or diplomatic tasks, while Thomas Nevill Lord Furnivall replaced Roos as treasurer for two years before his death in 1407.8 After 1406 Hugh Lord Burnell, who had campaigned repeatedly with Prince Henry in Wales, also joined the council, swept along with the tide that brought the earls of Arundel and Warwick and other retainers of the prince to Westminster.
Below the level of the baronage Henry also liked to keep men hungry, one result of which was that the first quarter of the fifteenth century witnessed the steepest decline in the number of parliamentary peers of any twenty-five-year period during the later Middle Ages, from 102 to 73.9 The only case of a new summons to parliament which arguably involved discretion on the king's part was that of John Tuchet, whose first summons in January 1404 was as much a reward for his service at the battle of Shrewsbury and in Wales as a matter of pedigree.10 Under Edward III or Richard II, men such as Thomas Erpingham, John Stanley and perhaps others would probably have been elevated to the peerage, but despite Erpingham's public commendations in the parliaments of 1404 and 1406, expressly designed to elicit royal generosity, Henry was unmoved.11 Such self-restraint belies the notion that Henry's experience as a great lord under Richard II led him to adopt a more indulgent approach to the nobility.12 The liberality for which the king was sometimes held to account by the commons was not exercised in favour of his nobles. What he demanded from them was loyalty and service; what he offered them was the security of tenure denied to him by Richard II – provided they remained loyal.
For traitors, however, the penalties were dire and becoming direr. The convictions of 1387–8 and 1397–8 occasioned deep unease about the use of treason for political purposes – not merely the process of Appeal, which effectively denied a defendant the ability to defend himself, but also the degradation of great families and their dependants and the feuds and property disputes which ensued. Henry's summary execution of Le Scrope, Bussy and Green at Bristol in July 1399 did nothing to calm these fears, for although (not yet being king) he did not bring treason charges against them, he nevertheless declared their property forfeit by right of conquest, since they were ‘destroyers of King Richard and of all his realm’.13 On what precedent, if any, he based his claim to forfeiture by conquest is not clear. No wonder he had to give assurances at his enthronement that he had no intention of seizing further property through conquest, or that the 1399 parliament was wary, for Henry was after all one of the men behind the first parliamentary Appeal of Treason in 1388. Before the session ended he was also obliged to give undertakings that Appeals would never be introduced to parliament again, that he would keep to the definition of treason set down in the 1352 Statute, and that in matters concerning treason he would act ‘in a quite different manner’ from Richard II. However, two further requests, that the heirs of convicted traitors of ‘ancient ancestry’ should be allowed their inheritances both in fee simple and in tail, and that the widows of lords convicted of treason be permitted to sue for dower, merely elicited the response that the existing laws should be observed.14
Three months later, confronted by manifest treason in the shape of the Epiphany Rising, Henry tempered his justice with a little mercy, as he had promised to do at his coronation, but not a lot. Since the leaders of the rising – the earls of Huntingdon, Kent and Salisbury, and Lords Despenser and Lumley – had conveniently been lynched, the proceedings at Oxford castle on 11–12 January concerned the lesser conspirators.15 Tried before the steward and marshal of the royal household, about two-thirds of the ninety accused were pardoned, although some were sent to prison for a time. Of the principal culprits, twenty-seven were sentenced to be drawn, hanged and quartered, but only four suffered this fate, the others being simply decapitated to spare them the agonies of a traitor's death.16 When parliament next met, in January 1401, the lynching of the five lords was confirmed as treason even though they had not been sentenced by due process of law, but only the lands they held in fee simple were forfeited, nothing being said about entailed or enfeoffed lands – that is to say, lands in which others also had rights, either through conditional inheritance grants (entails) or post-mortem trusts (enfeoffments to use).17 Five years later, however, a statute was enrolled which extended this judgment to include lands which they had enfeoffed to their own use, whether to themselves or to others. This was identical to the sentence imposed on Northumberland and Bardolf in the same parliament (1406). If what the king intended was clarification of their sentence, there is no record of it being discussed in parliament, and it is not clear on what authority Henry amplified the judgment of 1401.18 This may be why on 28 May 1408, by which time Salisbury's son Thomas was twenty and working his passage towards redemption, the king issued an exemplification of the parliamentary judgment of 1401 confirming that his forfeiture had applied only to lands held in fee simple. This had never been enrolled as a statute.19
Albeit that it was not described as such, parliament's decision to condemn the five rebel lords in 1401 was an act of attainder, although the recording of the names of twenty-five lords ‘who were present at the said declaration’ implies some hesitancy about the procedure.20 Attainder was not new, but it now acquired a sharper edge in conjunction with the novel idea of corruption of the blood between those convicted of treason and both their ancestors and their heirs.21 Henry's reign saw this notion of corruption of traitors' blood become more explicit. Paradoxically, there is no direct evidence that sentences including corruption of the blood were passed at this time; references to it are found only in the petitions for pardon from its implications and the responses to them, suggesting that this ‘legal doctrine’ may have grown up as a precaution on the part of petitioners rather than by judicial decree.22 When Thomas Haxey petitioned in 1399 for reversal of the sentence of treason passed on him by Richard II, despite the fact that he had already been pardoned, Henry's response was that he should be ‘restored to his name and fame’ so that his heirs could inherit from him, since the 1397 judgment had ‘interrupted’ the blood between him and his heirs and forebears.23 Within another decade, ‘interruption’ had become ‘corruption’, more emphatic though probably not different in legal effect. Thus Ralph Lumley's son John petitioned the 1411 parliament that he might be restored to ‘the name and ability’ of being the son and heir of his father and his other ancestors, ‘notwithstanding that the blood between the said Ralph and the said supplicant [John] was corrupted’. Almost identical wording was used by Ralph Hastings when he petitioned the 1410 parliament for restoration of the lands forfeited by his brother Richard in 1405, and by Ralph, son of Sir Henry Green, in 1411, even though Green's father had not been attainted of treason in 1399.24 William Lasyngby, a Yorkshire lawyer implicated in the 1405 rising, was that rarity, a traitor who survived. Convicted before Chief Justice Gascoigne but for some reason not executed, he was pardoned his treason in February 1408 at the request of Prince Henry, but still had to petition the 1411 parliament for restoration of his and his descendants' name and ability to sue for return of his forfeited possessions, since his attainder had corrupted the blood between him and his heirs and between them and ‘all their ancestors’. Ironically, Lasyngby was one of the judges in the treason trials of the Southampton conspirators in 1415.25
It may be that these petitions, with their emphasis on the ability of a traitor's descendants to inherit from any of their ancestors, were designed to cover all eventualities in a world of increasingly complicated tenurial arrangements.26 The road to recovery was certainly becoming longer, more complex, and more dependent on royal grace, as exemplified by Thomas Montague's struggle to be treated as his father's heir. Although recognized as earl of Salisbury when he came of age in 1409, he was only restored to the entailed lands his father had held at his death. In 1414 he petitioned for the judgment of 1401 to be overturned, but this was refused; only in 1421, by which time he had been an earl for twelve years and proved his worth to Henry V, was he actually acknowledged as ‘heir in blood’ to his father and granted inheritance of his lands by right, rather than as an act of grace – the crucial distinction both for him and for his own heirs. Even now, however, Henry V kept the lands held at the time of his forfeiture by Salisbury's father, either jointly or individually to his own use, or which others had held to his use, in fee simple.27 It is similarly worth noting that when Hotspur's son was allowed the title of earl of Northumberland in 1416 he was not restored to his grandfather's earldom but created de novo. The judgments of 1403–6 against his father and grandfather were thus upheld and the family's rehabilitation presented as an act of grace.28
Acts of attainder – which were often passed against those already dead and in any case precluded any defence – had an unsavoury future ahead of them, and the lords were uneasy about refinements in their interpretation.29 Whether Henry kept his word not to extend the definition of treason is a moot point. The lords were unwilling to be pushed too far, as they made clear in January 1404 by declaring that Northumberland was only guilty of trespass. The conviction of fifteen friars and others in 1402 for what was in effect treason by words could arguably be construed as falling within the terms of the 1352 act as ‘compassing’ or ‘imagining’ the death of the king, but treason by words was a grey area and, as the king discovered, jurors were reluctant to convict on such grounds.30 Yet arguably the most bizarre extension of the idea of treason came not from the king but from the commons when they insisted in November 1404 that any person found to be misappropriating the subsidies granted for war ‘shall incur the penalty of treason’.31 This was not the same as calling it treason, but it highlighted another development of Henry's reign, the sentencing to a traitor's death of men not actually convicted of treason. For his involvement in Gloucester's murder, John Hall was condemned in the first parliament of the reign ‘to suffer as harsh a death as could be adjudged or imposed upon him’ – drawn, disembowelled, hanged, beheaded and quartered – though treason was not mentioned.32
The spate of conspiracies during the first half of the reign certainly led Henry to mete out more condign punishments. William Clerk, the Cheshire scribe who criticized the king with both spoken and written words, does not seem to have been convicted of treason, but nevertheless had his tongue and right hand cut off before being decapitated, while the drawn-out agonies of William Serle were, as the king admitted, more dreadful than any traitor had suffered before. Harsher penalties also extended to forfeitures: when Hotspur and Worcester were posthumously convicted in the parliament of January 1404, their entailed and enfeoffed lands were forfeited, as well as those they held in fee simple, while the lands they held to the use of others were only excluded following a petition from the commons.33 The judgments of 1406 against Northumberland and Bardolf and the rebel lords of 1400 were also careful to state that none of the lands which any of them had held to the use of others should be forfeited to the king and that any grants he had made from such lands were null and void; these were also probably in response to a common petition.34
Yet if the road to recovery for the heirs of traitors was growing longer and the chances of complete restoration of their ancestors' property diminishing, in practice Henry usually allowed them to rehabilitate themselves: Edmund Holand and Thomas Montague were recognized as earls of Kent and Salisbury, respectively, when they came of age despite their forebears' convictions for treason.35 The stages of the reconciliation process are exemplified in the case of John Mowbray, son of Henry's old foe and brother of the young earl of Nottingham executed with Archbishop Scrope in 1405. In 1407, aged fifteen, John was placed in the care of the king's mother-in-law, the countess of Hereford, with an allowance of £200 a year for his maintenance; in 1410 he joined the king's household and recovered some of his lands, and in the following year his wardship and marriage were sold for £2,000 to the king's brother-in-law the earl of Westmorland, who married him to his daughter Katherine and restored to him, probably at the king's behest, the title of Earl Marshal which had been such a bone of contention between the two families before 1405. Finally, three weeks before Henry IV's death, John received livery of his lands and was recognized as earl of Nottingham, although he continued to badger Henry V and Henry VI for the restoration of his full rights.36 Henry IV habitually used trusted members of his family to oversee the rehabilitation of his opponents' heirs: the countess of Hereford had custody of Richard de Vere, heir to the earldom of Oxford, as well as of John Mowbray. John Holand, son of the earl of Huntingdon, was brought up by his mother Elizabeth, the king's sister, while Richard, son of Thomas Despenser, married another of Westmorland's daughters, although he died in 1413 before reaching his majority.37 However, none of these traitors' heirs recovered their ancestors' lands in full, which tended to make them more dependent on service to the crown to supplement their landed income.
As to the king's conduct of treason trials, this was generally consistent, at least in cases where laymen were involved. The sentences on the Cleveland and Northumberland rebels in July 1405 were given in the Court of Chivalry and according to the law of arms, presided over by the sixteen-year-old Prince John as constable of England. Charges against Northumberland and Bardolf were also first brought in the Court of Chivalry before being moved to parliament, which is doubtless also how the earl of Worcester was dealt with at the battle of Shrewsbury. It was by now the customary way of conducting treason trials in time of rebellion. When it came to clerics, the treason trials of Henry's reign aroused more controversy. Archbishop Scrope was also probably tried, along with the layman Thomas Mowbray, in the Court of Chivalry, with Sir William Fulthorpe acting as the constable's lieutenant; it was not the procedure per se that Chief Justice Gascoigne objected to, but the right of the Court of Chivalry to try a man of the cloth, let alone an archbishop.38 The fact that a London jury simply refused to take part in the trial of the friars in 1402, and the prolonged and inconclusive trials in the 1406 parliament, indicate further unease about Henry's treatment of clerics and suggest that he had not entirely assuaged the fears expressed about treason in his first parliament. However, he did not put women to death: the countess of Oxford and Lady Despenser, both of whom had almost certainly plotted to remove, if not kill, the king, were each imprisoned for less than a year.
If Richard II had striven to master the aristocracy, Henry IV showed how they might be mobilized in support of the crown – not by veering capriciously between threats and prodigality, but by firmness, consistency and partnership. In one respect he was fortunate, for after 1399, with the duchy of Lancaster now held by the crown, its territorial resources dwarfed those of any duke or earl, marking a decisive shift in the balance between the landed power of the crown and that of the nobility. Capitalizing on this, Henry systematically exalted the power and prestige of his family by abstaining from new creations, promotions, or grants in fee which might allow other noble families to establish regional power-bases.39 The alternative, making them dependent on the crown, naturally came at a price: John Beaufort's chief source of income was the £1,000 annuity granted to him in 1404, and such grants placed enormous strain on the exchequer.40 Yet Henry made sure that even great nobles of unquestioned loyalty knew their place. Thomas Fitzalan, earl of Arundel – whose father, Richard, Henry had colluded in condemning to death in 1397 – took as great a risk as Henry himself when, as an eighteen-year-old, he returned to England in the summer of 1399, but although he was restored to his father's lands and title and made a Knight of the Garter he received little else and lost much. In 1397 Richard II had confiscated not just the Fitzalan lands but also the vast store of cash and valuables accumulated by Thomas's grandfather and stored by his father at Holt castle (Clwyd). Little or nothing of this was returned to him after being removed by Henry in 1399.41 While still a minor, Earl Thomas also purchased from Henry for ‘a sum of gold’ the right to marry whom he wished, but within a few years the king, keen to cement the Anglo-Portuguese alliance, pushed him into a marriage with Beatrix, illegitimate daughter of the king of Portugal, for which he was mulcted £1,333.42 Being obliged in 1405 to concede precedence to the earl of Kent must also have piqued him, for all this was despite years of service in Wales, at the battle of Shrewsbury and helping to suppress the northern risings in 1405, as well as a catastrophic fall in income from his great marcher lordships of Bromfield and Yale, Oswestry, Chirk and Clun. No wonder that the young earl eventually threw in his lot with Prince Henry, who in 1407 retained him for an annual fee of 250 marks; he continued to drift steadily out of the king's and his uncle the archbishop's orbit. His relief when Henry V became king induced him to lend £3,000 to the exchequer in 1414–15, although he had declined to advance loans to Henry IV.43
Yet if Henry could be a hard taskmaster, there was no question of a policy of deprivation of the landed nobility; those who remained loyal remained secure, as Henry had promised them in 1399 that they would. It was those who did not who were cut down to size, their families reduced to dependency on royal grace for even a limited measure of recovery. The king – or at any rate the Lancastrian dynasty – enjoyed a high level of support from most of the nobles after 1403 and from practically all of them after 1405. Henry learned from the mistakes of his early years. It was the combination of a regional power-base with an unparalleled series of military commands, bolstered by influence at court and on the council, which had emboldened the Percys to challenge the king in 1403. Never again was a family permitted to accumulate such power, whatever its status. By birth, the three greatest families in the land apart from the king's were the Beauforts, the Mortimers and the house of York. Each in turn was put firmly in its place. However much the king trusted the Beauforts – and he did – the less than wholehearted confirmation of their act of legitimation in 1407 made it clear that they were not in the line of succession. The earl of March, whose great estates in Wales, Ireland and England and embarrassingly close kinship to the king qualified him for the role of pretender, was never treated in public as a member of the royal family. Although not persecuted, he was watched closely, especially after 1405, and denied the customary honours of a young nobleman of his standing such as election to the Order of the Garter.44 The grant to Prince Thomas of the dukedom of Clarence in July 1412, shortly before March came of age, was a calculated snub, making it clear that this title, created for Edmund's great-grandfather Lionel and derived from the Mortimer honour of Clare (Suffolk), would not be returning to the family for the foreseeable future. Emasculated by his ancestry, Edmund became a pawn in the intrigues of others, not just the Percys but also the king's cousins, the house of York. As for the latter, if Constanza Despenser's allegations of her brother Edward's complicity in the plot to abduct the Mortimer boys in February 1405 are to be believed, then all three children of Duke Edmund (d.1402) tried at one time or another to unseat the Lancastrian dynasty in favour of March, for it was their younger brother Richard, earl of Cambridge, who was the chief plotter in 1415. What motivated them was surely not a disinterested attachment to the principle of royal primogeniture; more likely, perhaps, that, despite their avowed aims, such scheming was born of a lingering hope that Richard II's desire to pass his throne to Edward might yet be realized.45 It was always the issue of legitimacy that snapped most doggedly at Henry's heels, and the problem of whom to trust even within the extended royal family never quite went away.
1 The earls of Devon, Oxford and Suffolk were politically insignificant; Warwick died in 1401 and the king's uncle, York, in 1402; much was expected of Stafford and Kent, but they died in 1403 and 1408, each aged twenty-five, the latter childless, the former leaving a one-year-old son.
2 Harriss, Cardinal Beaufort, 23–67, and his articles on John, Henry and Thomas Beaufort in ODNB, 4, 625–32 (Henry), 637–8 (John), and 643–4 (Thomas).
3 The king originally granted 1,000 marks a year to John Beaufort's son, Henry, whose godfather he was; in Nov. 1404 this was increased to £1,000 and transferred to John himself, until lands could be found ‘which are not parcel of the crown’ (CPR 1401–5, 477; E 403/585, 26 March 1406). Thomas Beaufort's grant of the honour of Wormegay (Norfolk) in 1405 was for life, not in fee CPR 1405–8, 105).
4 The prince also became duke of Lancaster and Aquitaine and earl of Chester in the 1399 parliament. After John Beaufort's death his earldom of Somerset was kept for his son, but it may have been felt that such a great family ought to be represented by an earl at its head.
5 On the grounds that marquis was ‘an alien name in the kingdom’ (PROME, viii.164–5).
6 For the demotions in the 1399 parliament see above, p. 189. Thomas Mowbray should be added to their number, for although not judicially stripped of his dukedom of Norfolk it was denied to his family for twenty-five years (R. Archer, ‘Parliamentary Restoration: John Mowbray and the Dukedom of Norfolk in 1425’, in Rulers and Ruled in Late Medieval England: Essays Presented to Gerald Harriss, ed. R. Archer and S. Walker (London, 1995), 99–116, at pp. 101–2)
7 He was, however, granted a life annuity of 400 marks in 1409 (RHKA, 194).
8 For Berkeley, see Catalogue of the Medieval Muniments at Berkeley Castle, ed. B. Wells-Furby (2 vols, Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society, Bristol, 2004), xl–xli.
9 K. McFarlane, The Nobility of Later Medieval England (Oxford, 1973), 172–6, who tabulated rates of extinction (mainly through forfeiture or failure of male heirs) set against replacements through new summonses to parliament; cf. Harriss, Shaping the Nation, 97.
10 Even this was arguably not a ‘new summons’: E. Powell and K. Wallis, The House of Lords in the Late Middle Ages (London, 1968), 436. Tuchet descended from Joan, sister of Nicholas, Lord Audley (d.1391), but was not summoned until 1404 and died in 1408. John Talbot, John Oldcastle and Hugh Stafford were summoned to parliament in 1410–11 because they had married the daughters of peers, Lords Furnivall, Cobham and Bourchier, respectively.
11 PROME, viii.303, 348; S. Walker, ‘Erpingham, Thomas’, ODNB, 18.512–14. Henry V, following his father's lead, exercised similar care with peerage creations, although in Henry VI's minority the lords were more open-handed.
12 He issued only six licences to crenellate during his reign, five to royal knights or esquires (including John Stanley and Robert Waterton), the sixth for a house at the entrance to Dartmouth harbour to be fortified against seaborne attack (CPR 1401–5, 164, 219, 255; CPR 1405–8, 161, 207; CPR 1408–13, 160, 232).
13 PROME, viii.89–90, 534–5. John Bussy's son John tried to recover the manors of Silkby and Dembleby (Lincolnshire) on the grounds that they had been enfeoffed by his father on the day he died, but his plea was eventually rejected in 1409 on the grounds that parliament had upheld the king's right to them ‘by way of conquest, because the said William Lescrope, John Bussy and Henry Green were destroyers of the said King Richard and of all his realm’. Arundel as chancellor gave this judgment, with the advice of the justices (C 49/68, no. 2).
14 PROME, viii.33, 64, 69. In fact he allowed the widows of John Holand (the king's sister Elizabeth) and Thomas Despenser to sue for dower. Fee simple implied primogenitary heritability of land; tail, or ‘entail’, limited heritability to direct descendants, and could be further limited, for example, to males (‘tail male’); it was frequently employed along with a remainder clause, thus creating additional rights in the estate.
15 A curious entry in the Year Book for the first year of Henry's reign which records the trial of ‘G counte de H’ – usually taken to mean John, earl of Huntingdon – for high treason before ‘D counte de Westmorland’ and the lords at Westminster in January 1400, was fabricated either at the time or later as an example of ‘How a Lord shall be Tried by his Peers’ and is manifestly a forgery. It is difficult to think that Henry IV's lawyers could have been responsible for such a gross misrepresentation and such errors when the events in question were so recent (Legal History: The Year Books, ed. D. J. Seipp at http://www.bu.edu/law/seipp/).
16 E 37/28, and see above p. 163; one, Sir Alan Buxhull, was acquitted; and for John Ferrour's pardon, see above. p. 29.
17 PROME, viii.109–10.
18 Statutes of the Realm, ii.152 (c.v, Northumberland and Bardolf), 154 (c.xii, the 1400 rebels).
19 Foedera, viii.529.
20 They were not said to have agreed with the decision, as the fifty-seven lords who consented to Richard II's imprisonment in 1399 had done (PROME, viii.34–5, 110).
21 The word ‘attainder’ had been used during the fourteenth century in a general way as a synonym for ‘condemned’ or ‘convicted’, but now ‘by an etymological fancy which warped the meaning of the word’, it came to mean the ‘tainting’ or ‘corrupting’ of the blood (Oxford English Dictionary, i.761–2).
22 For attainder see J. Bellamy, The Law of Treason in England in the Later Middle Ages (London, 1970), 177–205; the first parliamentary example of a sentence of corruption of the blood was in 1450 (Jack Cade); see also the bill against the duke of Suffolk PROME, xii.202–3). For corruption of the blood as a ‘legal doctrine’, see Henry V: The Practice of Kingship, ed. G. Harriss (Oxford, 1987), 39.
23 PROME, viii.42 (where ‘interruption of the blood’ is mentioned in the response to the petition).
24 PROME, viii.478–9, 532–5; CPR 1408–13, 195–6. Some lands were restored to John Lumley in 1405, but he was never summoned to parliament; his son Thomas was only summoned from 1461, when at the age of 53 he succeeded in having his grandfather's attainder reversed (Brown, ‘Authorization of Letters’, 137–8).
25 PROME, viii.411, 533–4; CPR 1408–13, 54, 353; T. Pugh, Henry V and the Southampton Plot of 1415 (Gloucester, 1988), 130.
26 Powell and Wallis, The House of Lords, 445–6, argued that corruption of the blood was used to seize entailed lands; if not, it facilitated the process.
27 PROME, ix.42–4, 69–70, 293–6. Thomas's 1421 petition stated that but for the 1401 judgment he ‘would have been heir in blood’ to his father. For his career, see A. Curry, ‘Montague, Thomas, Fourth Earl of Salisbury’, ODNB, 38.767–9.
28 Harriss, Henry V, 38–40.
29 Bellamy, Law of Treason, 116–17, 136–7, 156–64, 183–5, 204–5; Archer, ‘Parliamentary Restoration’, 101–2.
30 PROME, viii.231–2; Strohm, England's Empty Throne, 25–7; E. Powell, ‘The Strange Death of Sir John Mortimer: Politics and the Law of Treason in Lancastrian England’, in Rulers and Ruled in Late Medieval England: Essays Presented to Gerald Harriss, ed. R. Archer and S. Walker (London, 1995), 83–97.
31 PROME, viii.289.
32 PROME, viii.88–9.
33 PROME, viii.233, 264: the petition said the lands they held to the use of others were ‘on the point of being forfeited if a remedy is not ordained’.
34 Statutes of the Realm, ii.152–4.
35 Holand, born in 1383, was styled earl of Kent from 1403, but like Montague he did not recover all his family's lands; he died in 1408 (M. Stansfield, ‘Edmund Holand, Seventh Earl of Kent’, ODNB, 27.657–8).
36 R. Archer, ‘John Mowbray, Second Duke of Norfolk’, ODNB, 39.579–81; although the lordship of Gower, long-disputed between the Beauchamp and Mowbray families, was granted to Warwick in 1405, the grant did not take effect.
37 John Holand was still under age in 1413, but Henry V restored him to his father's earldom of Huntingdon when he came of age in 1414 (R. A. Griffiths, ‘John Holand, First Earl of Huntingdon and Duke of Exeter’, ODNB, 27.674–6). It is worth noting that none of the heirs of Henry IV's traitors were implicated in the 1415 Southampton Plot.
38 Keen, ‘Treason Trials under the Law of Arms’, 85–103; Dunn, Politics of Magnate Power, 123; Bellamy, Law of Treason, 156–60.
39 With the lands forfeited by Northumberland in 1405, note the distinction between those granted to Prince John, which were in tail male, and those granted to Westmorland, which were for life (CPR 405–8, 40, 50).
40 The largest exchequer annuities to nobles apart from Beaufort's (above, p. 440) were Edmund duke of York's 1,000 marks, granted in 1385, and Thomas Percy's 500 marks, granted in 1399 in return for lands surrendered.
41 Above, p. 134 and see the king's quittance of Nov. 1402 to John Ikelyngton for surrendering to him £43,964, plus ‘a great sum in jewels and valuables’, almost certainly seized from Holt castle by Richard in 1397.
42 The king and queen of Portugal (Henry's sister) wrote to Henry begging him to remit this sum, but he was reluctant to do so. Philippa wrote: ‘my most exceeding best beloved brother, you know well that he [Arundel] is now married not at all by his proper inclination, but on the contrary by your commandment, partly at my instance . . .’ (RHL, ii.92–102). Original Letters, i.53, has a letter from the earl to Henry begging pardon for not paying a debt he owed the king because of the great sums he had spent bringing Beatrix to England.
43 G. Harriss, ‘Thomas Fitzalan, Fifth Earl of Arundel’, ODNB, 19.772–3; Steel, Receipt, 189. Earl Richard (d.1376) sometimes loaned £20,000 at a time to Edward III (C. Given-Wilson, ‘Richard Fitzalan, Third Earl of Arundel’, ODNB, 19.768–9). See Arundel's letter to the archbishop asking him not to believe the ‘complaints and suggestions’ which people were making to him and the king, dated December during ‘this present parliament’, probably 1411 (POPC, ii.117). The prince also retained the earl of Warwick for 250 marks after Warwick returned from the Holy Land in 1410 (Harriss, Henry V, 33).
44 Before Prince Henry took charge of them in 1409, John Pelham guarded the Mortimer brothers (E 403/596, 4 Dec. 1408).
45 Richard was, presumably, assuming that Duke Edmund would by then be dead.