It may well be true that ‘Henry Bolingbroke would have been a happier man if, like his father John of Gaunt, he had lived and died as duke of Lancaster’, but that was not a luxury Richard II was prepared to allow him.1 Insecure and vindictive, Richard had come to the conclusion by the mid-1390s that the house of Lancaster presented a challenge to the fullness of his kingship, a threat magnified in the king's mind by the lack of personal empathy between him and Henry, and the history of conflict between him and both Gaunt and his son during the 1380s. Nor, it must be said, had Gaunt and Henry gone out of their way to allay the king's fears. The immensity of Lancastrian power, built up over a century, solidified by social and political developments during the second half of the fourteenth century and thrust to the forefront of national politics by the lack of active kingship in the 1370s and 1380s, was not something they tried to hide. Richard initially responded by constructing an affinity of his own and a court party from which Gaunt and Henry were excluded, but when in 1398–9 the opportunity arose to disassemble the Lancastrian edifice, he could not resist it.
The revolution of 1399 brought the best out of Henry. Purposeful and ruthless – as he had to be – he initially secured the throne almost without opposition, but soon discovered that the kingship of a usurper was qualitatively different from that of a legitimate monarch. Even with kings as manifestly unsuitable as Edward II or Richard II, it took ten or fifteen years for baronial exasperation to turn to talk of deposition and twenty for the threats to be realized; Henry was on the throne for just three months before the first attempt to unseat him. The soldierly qualities for which he was renowned, allied to a quiet strength of character which before 1399 had been subordinated to that of his father, now served him well. Yet early misjudgements cost him dear. By 1403, the power he had entrusted to the Percys, combined with the evaporation of the hopes attending Richard's removal, brought him to the brink of disaster. Popular revulsion at the death of Archbishop Scrope – Henry's second great mistake – marked the nadir of his reign and his reputation.
His response was both practical and tactical. He elevated his family to a position of unchallenged dominance in the realm, a process entailing close management of the nobility, implacability towards traitors and relentless propagation of his dynasty and its destiny. The deeper state he created made extensive use of spies and informers. He militarized the royal household and surrounded himself with a protective shield of retainers. Yet armour-plated kingship came at a price. There was resentment throughout the reign at the public power enjoyed by the king's retainers, and a sense that Henry was as much the prisoner as the master of his affinity. Only during the last few years of the reign did Prince Henry begin to rein them in.
In the shires and boroughs this power was mediated through the offices of sheriff, mayor and justice of the peace; at Westminster, it manifested itself in the composition of the Privy Council and parliament. Under the twin pressures of financial insolvency and royal incapacity, the role of the council was formalized, reflected in its better record-keeping and responsibility for financial planning as well as its enhanced role in matters such as security and law enforcement. Under Prince Henry in 1410–11, it became an alternative locus of power in the realm, but with active kingship its role was more administrative than political. Parliament, in contrast, was by definition a political body. The rumbustious atmosphere of many of Henry's parliaments was to some extent deceptive, for although they were argumentative they were not threatening to the king. The habitual mood was of querulous disappointment. Yet the atmosphere also betokened a genuinely competitive forum for interest groups: it meant that proceedings focused on the best means to achieve the ‘good and abundant governance’ desired by the commons rather than the collision of factions, and it helped the government to avoid the charge of cronyism. The fact that many of the commons were closely – and their speakers very closely – connected to the king could well have lent plausibility to such a charge, but in reality it was often the king's most committed supporters who were his fiercest parliamentary critics.
This criticism focused on the question of solvency, the essence of good and abundant governance. The fact that the joint efforts of king, council and parliament only briefly came close to achieving it (in 1407–9) is attributable to several factors: the high cost of protecting England's shipping and ports, defending its marches and dominions and suppressing rebellions; the simultaneous collapse of revenues from those dominions, so that colonies or outposts which had once produced a profit or at least enjoyed a degree of self-sufficiency were now a constant drain on resources; the decline by around 20 per cent during the first quarter of the fifteenth century in the exchequer's income from indirect taxation; and the increase by roughly the same percentage in the domestic charges of government – household, affinity and administration – charges which the king viewed as politically imperative but which also reflected the extravagance of a youth who had never known insufficiency. Yet fiscal innovation was unwelcome in late medieval England: the experimentation of 1404–6 proved barren, the reversion to traditional methods after 1407 more productive.2 Despite this, the government's credit never quite ran out, although as time went by it found itself increasingly reliant for loans on a narrowing circle of Londoners, ministers, councillors and other committed supporters, whose influence on policy grew accordingly.
Henry's overriding foreign policy consideration was always France, his aims reasonably consistent. He wanted a lasting peace, preferably sealed by the marriage of Prince Henry to a French princess; failing that, he wanted to preserve the truce for as long as possible; the minimum requirement was to retain Guyenne and Calais, because a usurper who mislaid his empire would struggle for credibility. The fact that Henry was able to pursue broadly the same foreign policy towards France as Richard II had done without incurring the same opprobrium is explicable in part by the fact that it took a man untainted with the whiff of Francophilia to pursue a credible policy of peace with the national enemy. In the event, the barrage of hostility from Louis of Orléans and his acolytes soon led to the collapse of meaningful peace talks, while the slide towards civil war in France after 1407 made the outcome of negotiations increasingly unpredictable. It did, however, eventually allow Henry to take the initiative, and in so doing to reveal what lay closest to his heart – the retention of Guyenne, to which he had a recent Lancastrian, as well as a long-standing royal, claim. Yet in general the steadily deflating rhetoric of Henry's diplomacy is a measure of the puncturing of his ambition: the extravagant language of overlordship which so irritated the Scots during the first three years of the reign all but vanished thereafter, and although he continued to style himself ‘king of France’ (as did his successors until the nineteenth century) this was irrelevant to the real diplomacy of the reign.
The connections between the Welsh revolt, the upsurge of resistance in Ireland, and the hostility of the Scottish magnates (until checked at Humbleton Hill) are not easy to pinpoint, but what they obviously shared was ambivalence towards the imperial pretensions of a king whose authority was challenged even in his homeland. The Mortimer following, even the Mortimer name, probably lent an air of legitimacy to the king's opponents in Ireland; they certainly did in Wales. Here and on the northern marches landed and military power had become concentrated in fewer and greater hands during the fourteenth century, and when trust was lost, as with the Percys in 1402–3, the consequences were correspondingly greater.3 Yet the defeat of the Percys only created another dilemma: how to govern (or defend) the north without them? It was a problem replicated elsewhere. The dominions Henry inherited in 1399 constituted a ramshackle and unruly empire, governed by separate laws, customs and languages and ruled under a miscellany of titles – lord of Ireland, duke of Guyenne, or even, in the case of the Channel Islands, duke of Normandy.4 In practice, the king's hold on them was dependent on the support of enough people in each whose interests were served by upholding and exploiting the privileges and powers the crown could offer them: the Butlers in Ireland, the gated communities of Wales, the Gascon lords who feared French domination, the townsmen of Calais, Dublin and Bordeaux whose prosperity depended on commerce with the mother country.5 That the offices, annuities and grants which secured their compliance tended with time to become hereditary meant that the distinction between public and private authority in England's dominions became blurred, and although Henry held on to his empire there was a growing sense that English rule was exercised in the conditional tense. Clarence's 1412–13 campaign achieved its goal in the medium term, but within another forty years Guyenne would be lost, English administration would be reduced to a ‘lytell cornere’ of Ireland, and, against a background of collapsing marcher revenues, a native Welsh squirearchy was increasingly usurping the lands and offices of its former masters.6
Conflict resolution displayed similar tendencies, with international truces routinely supplemented by local agreements, which in practice stood the best chance of securing a respite from war. Individuals and communities desperate to save their homes, families and livestock resorted constantly to private compacts with their tormentors, frequently accompanied by protection money. In theory, treaties with rebels or enemies of the English crown – terrorists in modern parlance – were treasonable; in practice the king usually had little option but to sanction them, acknowledging his inability to protect his subjects from the ‘hard war’ inflicted on them.7 Characteristic of such agreements was the double marriage contract in April 1410 between the children of Janico Dartasso and John (Eòin) Mór, younger brother of Donald, Lord of the Isles. From an English point of view, its aim was to bring peace to Ulster, for Mór had pursued his interests there with vigour and stood in need of a royal pardon, which Henry granted him at the same time as he licensed the marriages.8 Yet this compact between a footloose Navarrese adventurer, who through service and marriage had acquired a stake in Irish political life, and the brother of a Highland chieftain who barely noticed the Scottish king's authority except to flout it – a private treaty born of an attempt to solve a public problem – was far from untypical of some of what passed for international diplomacy in this age of dysfunctional kingship. Henry simply lacked the resources to govern his empire effectively. More than £70,000 was passed from the exchequer to Prince Henry between 1401 and 1413 to suppress the Welsh revolt, and at least an equivalent sum lost in seigneurial revenues as a result of the disorder.9 Yet the commons were not always sympathetic to the king's problems. Reluctant to grant taxation for what they construed as rebellion, they argued that the way to deal with ‘barefooted buffoons [the Welsh]’ or ‘wild Irishmen’ was for the lords who held estates there to remain in their castles and defend them. When the king told the parliament of January 1404 that, as well as having to safeguard Calais and the seas, he was effectively at war in Wales, in Scotland, in Ireland and in Guyenne, they replied, ‘These things do not trouble England much.’10 Their England could be a little place.
There was a certain irony in this, for one of the consequences of the accession of a duke of Lancaster was that England became a more geographically integrated nation. When Richard II journeyed to the north of his kingdom, it had something of the feel of a state visit; when Henry did so, it was more like a homecoming. Northern knights now outnumbered southern ones in the royal affinity, while northern magnates and prelates – the Percys, Westmorland, Langley, Roos, Bowet – enjoyed great influence at Westminster.11 Not that integration was necessarily welcome: the rising associated with the name of Archbishop Scrope suggests that the ‘problem of the north’ went a good deal deeper than Percy disaffection. Yet equally noteworthy is the lack of a corresponding ‘problem of the south’ during the reign of the first Lancastrian king, at least after January 1400. The decapitation of several great southern magnate affinities during the Epiphany rising probably had something to do with this, but so did Henry's efforts to build relationships with Londoners and former followers of Richard II in the southern shires.12
Henry's personality was, on the whole, well suited to kingship. He kept his friends close and his enemies afraid. Steely and watchful, not to say sly, he also had an easy charm and a wry wit that gave him an aura of accessibility and helped him to work through diplomatic problems, although at times obstinacy clouded his judgement. His refusal to talk to Glyn Dŵr in 1401–2 cost him dear. On the other hand, his championing of chivalric values allowed him to make close friendships with like-minded knights and nobles, and his militant piety won him many plaudits. A dutiful son and a faithful and attentive husband, he drew strength and comfort from his family. He had an erratic compassion – for women, for paupers – which sat rather incongruously with his savagery towards traitors, but stemmed in part from a religiosity based on something deeper than contractual obligation.13 There were, as he knew, sins he had committed that only God could forgive. Cultured, educated and sceptical, he encouraged the English Church to take its pastoral role seriously, promoted men of learning to his council, took more than a passing interest in guns, music and theological disputation, and fathered a royal family which was one of the most cultivated in English history.
Of the king's friends, the one who did most to ensure his survival was Archbishop Arundel, an outstanding public servant whom Henry came to think of as a spiritual father-figure.14 Throughout the reign, this political alliance that grew into a wary but sincere friendship was at the heart of England's affairs. As primate, Arundel stamped his authority on the English Church from the moment of his restoration, but his experience of secular government also gave him an understanding of the needs of the crown, and there were doubtless some members of his flock who saw his commitment to Henry's kingship as the alliance of the shepherd and the wolf.15 Yet his situation was a difficult one, for without the king's support he stood little chance of defeating Lollardy or healing the Schism – and royal support came at a price. Driven by instinct, as well as by a vocal reformist group at court and in parliament, Henry played on the fears of the ecclesiastical hierarchy to bring the English Church under closer secular control and, through parliament, to introduce a limited measure of reform. Arundel in turn played on the king's fear of radical-inspired sedition and took his stand on fundamentalist Christian doctrine, a tactic that occasionally served him well. More often, however, he was forced to give ground. Privately, he and Henry were probably not that far apart in their devotional preferences, and they could take equal credit for the fact that, despite what each saw as undue provocation, the public alliance of Church and crown held fast. The crushing of Oldcastle's revolt in January 1414 sealed that alliance, a fitting culmination to Arundel's primacy, which ended with his death a month later.
Henry's most significant achievement was the restoration of the consensual style of politics practised by Edward III, but overborne by Richard II. Such an assertion is naturally subject to caveats, the most obvious being that consent was generally sought within restricted circles – though certainly not as restricted as during the 1390s. The difference was palpable. No longer was parliament the plaything of royal or magnate faction, veering giddily between servile acquiescence and violent antipathy to the king and his supporters. Whatever reverses and frustrations Henry suffered in parliament, he did not threaten or intimidate the commons; he held his nerve and acknowledged the limitations of royal power. From the time that he first came out in opposition to Richard II, he demonstrated a consistency of character and principle, born of a belief in government by consent. That did not mean that he surrendered his prerogative; he insisted from the start of his reign that the rights and powers he inherited from Richard II were diminished not a jot, and it was upon this assumption that he and his successors acted. It is not just the kingship of Henry IV but also that of Henry V, Edward IV, Henry VII and Henry VIII which gives the lie to the idea that the deposition of 1399 – not, after all, the first royal deposition in medieval England – led to a lasting curtailment of monarchical power in England.
Henry IV's great misfortune was to become sick just at the moment when he appeared to have won his dynasty a measure of security. Despite the imprecision of contemporary descriptions, there is enough correlation between them to indicate that Henry suffered from more than one medical condition. The skin disease – perhaps psoriasis – mentioned in 1387–8, 1399 and 1405 probably grew more acute as he aged, and the graunde accesse he suffered in 1406 is likely to have been a prolapsed rectum. His collapse in the summer of 1408 was probably a coronary thrombosis, resulting in blocked arteries and steadily increasing problems with blood circulation, leading eventually to necrotic ulcers which, by the last year of his life, seem to have turned gangrenous (the ‘festering’ or ‘putrefaction’ mentioned by Usk and Strecche). During the last months, perhaps years, of his life, Henry must have endured great pain, retaining his regnal power until the end only through a ferocious effort of will. Yet what followed the onset of his illness vindicated his rule. That there were rivalries and policy disagreements was inevitable, but they were contained (unlike in France), and in general the collective willingness of the extended Lancastrian clan to place the preservation of royal authority above personal interests was impressive. This was the moment that witnessed the coalescence of that familial system of government – revolving around the prince and future king, his brothers, his uncles Henry and Thomas Beaufort, Westmorland, and adopted sons such as Chichele, Erpingham, Tiptoft and Langley – which for the next twenty-five years, through Henry IV's illness, Henry V's absences, and Henry VI's minority, worked to ensure the survival of the Lancastrian dynasty into the second half of the fifteenth century.16
Henry V's stunning victories in France cemented and strengthened this coalition, and although its cohesion was tested by the enmity of Humphrey of Gloucester and Henry Beaufort, and depleted by natural wastage through the 1420s – Clarence died in 1421, the king in 1422, Westmorland in 1425, Thomas Beaufort in 1426, Erpingham in 1428 – broadly speaking, it held until the death of Bedford (Prince John) in 1435 and the coming of age of Henry VI a year later. What followed destroyed it: the rise of a court party centred on the duke of Suffolk, financial collapse, humiliation abroad and above all the ineptitude of Henry VI. By the time the last of Henry IV's sons, Humphrey, died or was murdered in 1447, he had come, almost unthinkably, to be seen as an enemy, even a traitor, to the Lancastrian regime. Meanwhile the special relationship between the dynasty and its original heartland had been allowed to atrophy, and by the time the Wars of the Roses began at St Albans in 1455, the descendants of men who had fought and died for Henry IV and Henry V were as likely to be followers of the duke of York.17 By the spring of 1461, two centuries after its foundation, the house of Lancaster had lost its duchy, its affinity and its crown.
1 Pugh, Southampton Plot, 26 (quote).
2 Harriss, Shaping the Nation, 59–61; M. Ormrod, ‘England in the Middle Ages’, in The Rise of the Fiscal State in Europe, c.1200–1815, ed. R. Bonney (Oxford, 1999), 42.
3 M. Brown, Disunited Kingdoms: People and Politics in the British Isles 1280–1460 (Edinburgh, 2013), 237–47.
4 Ruddick, ‘English Identity and Political Language’; Griffiths, ‘The English Realm and Dominions’.
5 Davies, Revolt, 221–2; Vale, English Gascony, 53; New History of Ireland II, ed. Cosgrove, 534–5; Frame, ‘Lordship Beyond the Pale’, 5–18.
6 Harriss, Shaping the Nation, 517–27; Scattergood, Politics and Poetry, 38 (quote).
7 See his pardon to the tenants of Whittington (Shropshire) in 1408 (CPR 1408–13, 30; cf. Davies, Revolt, 234–6).
8 For these negotiations, see CPR 1408–13, 183, 190; Walker, ‘Janico Dartasso’, 44; S. Kingston, Ulster and the Isles in the Fifteenth Century (Dublin, 2004), 43–4, 51–2, 60, 166, 190; Wylie, Henry the Fourth, iii.164–8; CDS, iv.145; Foedera, viii.527.
9 The real cost was higher still (Davies, Revolt, 259–61).
10 CE, 399 (Isti non inquietant multum Angliam). For the commons' unwillingness to fund the Welsh war, see PROME, viii.423, 427, 459–60. Cf. Brut, ii.357 (‘wild Irishmen’).
11 RHKA, 227–33.
12 It was a southern chronicler who claimed that, despite constantly raising taxes, the king was always greatly loved (amantissimus) by his people (Kingsford, English Historical Literature, 277).
13 For example, he granted two pence a day to Isabella Taylor of London, who had seven children but had gone blind and could not support her family (E 403/571, 17 Oct. 1401; E 404/27, no. 387); two rabbits a week to the ‘poor oratrice’ Maude Merlond to feed herself, when she asked for one (E 28/9, no. 73); and six pence a day to Matthew Flint, ‘toothdrawer’, to enable him to practise his art for ‘any poor lieges of the king who may need it in the future without receiving anything from them’ (CPR 1399–1401, 255).
14 Cf. ‘yowre true frend and chyld in God’, ‘your trewe sone Henrye’ (Signet Letters, nos. 717, 736). Arundel was fourteen years older than Henry.
15 See, for example, the letter of Arundel to Henry of 7 Dec. 1404 apologizing for the fact that the convocation just ended had failed to sanction the king's demand for a subsidy from stipendiary chaplains, swearing that he had done his best to secure this despite unanimous opposition, recommending to the king that the diocesans should put pressure on the chaplains directly, and offering to expedite this if king and council were in agreement (BL Cleopatra Ms E ii 252 (265).)
16 J. Catto, ‘The King's Servants’, in Henry V: The Practice of Kingship, ed. G. Harriss (Oxford, 1987), 75–95, at pp. 81–2.
17 Castor, King, Crown and Duchy, 40–9, 305–12; R. Storey, ‘The North of England’, in Fifteenth-Century England 1399–1509, ed. S. Chrimes, C. Ross and R. A. Griffiths (Manchester, 1972), 129–44, at p. 138.