Henry IV (56 page)

The early months of 1405 saw Northumberland carefully trying to allay any suspicion that he had not returned to the fold. Writing to Henry from Warkworth on 12 January to excuse himself from attending a council meeting at Westminster because of his ‘great age and debility, and the long and arduous journey in wintertime’, he signed himself ‘Your Humble Matathyas’, as he had in June 1403, a reminder of the history of successful cooperation between him and the king. Two months later, after an absence of a year, he was once again attending meetings of the council.
¹⁸
The earl's reappearance at Westminster may have been designed to give him the opportunity to acquaint himself with the king's plans, and perhaps to test the waters with others sympathetic to his cause. What he would have discovered was that the king was planning soon to campaign in Wales; at the beginning of May, Henry moved to Worcester, then on to Hereford. Like Hotspur two years earlier, Northumberland probably hoped that the king's preoccupation with Glyn Dŵr would allow him time to gather support, but
first he had to neutralize the earl of Westmorland, and it was thus against his chief northern rival that his first move was directed. Hearing that Westmorland was staying with Sir Ralph Eure at the latter's castle of Witton-le-Wear near Bishop Auckland (Durham), he took four hundred of his retainers to surround it, only to discover that Westmorland had got wind of the plan and escaped to Durham. Frustrated, he instead (on 6 May) seized Robert Waterton, whom Henry had sent to parley with him, and retreated to where he felt safest – the far north.
¹⁹
Crossing the Tyne, issuing orders to his retainers for his principal strongholds (Prudhoe, Alnwick, Langley, Cockermouth, Warkworth) to be garrisoned and provisioned, he made his way, accompanied by Thomas Lord Bardolf, to Berwick, where, after taking possession of both town and castle, they ensconced themselves behind its massive walls and awaited the outcome of events.
²⁰

Initially they may have felt encouraged, for by about 20 May the authority of the king and his officers was being challenged in much of Yorkshire. In Cleveland, local gentry, including prominent Percy retainers such as Sir John Fauconberg and Sir John Colville del Dale, were said to have assembled 7,000 or 8,000 followers, whom they were encouraging to press for the redress of ‘troubles and failings’ in the kingdom. This uprising was halted in its tracks, however, when a royalist force commanded by Prince John and Westmorland arrived near Topcliffe, captured the leaders and dispersed their followers. But in the city of York more serious trouble was brewing.
²¹
Here the protesters were led by Richard Scrope, archbishop of York, and Thomas Mowbray, the earl marshal. Scrope was a man more closely associated with the previous than the current regime. Sent to Rome by Richard II in 1397 to seek the canonization of Edward II, he was rewarded with his archiepiscopal see on his return, and although he
acquiesced in Henry's usurpation there is no evidence of a personal rapport between him and the new king. Between 1399 and 1405 he kept his distance from the court, encouraging the northern convocation to prevaricate and negotiate over the king's demands for clerical taxation.
²²
It was a sermon he gave in York Minster which galvanized the citizens into action, probably on Sunday 17 May. He and Mowbray also drew up a list of grievances which they posted on the gates of the city, the doors of religious houses, and elsewhere along ‘highways and byways’, not just in York itself but in surrounding villages, where the archbishop was also said to have preached.
²³
By 27 May some 8,000–9,000 people, mostly citizens and clergy of York and its environs but also including gentry such as Sir William Plumpton, had gathered on Shipton Moor, just north of the city. Here they waited for three days – hoping, perhaps, that Northumberland and Bardolf might join them – but instead, on 29 May, they found themselves confronted by the army led by Prince John and Westmorland.

‘And thus, arrayed for battle,’ read the indictment later presented to parliament, ‘the said Richard [Scrope] and Thomas [Mowbray] and their other accomplices were captured on the same day on the said moor.’
²⁴
The truth, however, was not so straightforward. Negotiations were opened, during which Westmorland assured the archbishop and earl marshal that he would do his best to persuade the king to remedy their grievances. Apparently satisfied with this, Scrope and Mowbray encouraged their supporters to disband, but were then promptly arrested and taken to Pontefract castle. Henry, meanwhile, had left Hereford on 23 May, abandoning his campaign in Wales. On 28 May he was at Derby, whence he wrote to the council to say he had just heard that Northumberland, Bardolf and Mowbray (he did not mention the archbishop) had ‘risen against our royal majesty’ and telling them to meet him at Pontefract. Yet by 1 June, at Nottingham, he was already envisaging ‘the next archbishop of York’, and when he reached Pontefract on 3 June he apparently refused to speak to Scrope and ordered Sir John Stanley, steward of the royal household, to
seize the city of York into the king's hands.
²⁵
The king's fury, plain to all, was soon communicated to Thomas Arundel, who hastened northwards to intercede for his fellow archbishop. In the meantime Henry had moved on to York. Here the terrified citizens streamed out to meet him, ‘barefooted and bareheaded, wearing filthy rags, and, carrying swords in their hands [to surrender], they pleaded for pardon, weeping and wailing miserably’.
²⁶
Henry ‘rebuked them fiercely’ and ordered them back into the city to await his pleasure.

This was on Saturday 6 June. Early on the Monday morning, having ridden through the night, Thomas Arundel arrived at York; on seeing him, one of Henry's knights allegedly told the king that if Scrope were allowed to live, his supporters would abandon him. Arundel responded by warning Henry of the dire consequences of executing an archbishop, and advised him to submit Scrope to the judgment of either the pope or parliament. Affecting concern at Arundel's exhaustion, the king assured him that nothing would be done without his advice and told him to go and rest. Accounts differ as to what happened next, one asserting that Scrope was tried while Arundel was taking breakfast, another that Arundel was present at the trial but that Henry told him plainly that nothing he might say would save his fellow primate. Apparently not present at the trial was William Gascoigne, who walked out after insisting that the commission appointed by Henry had no authority to pass judgment on an archbishop.
²⁷
Deflecting his Chief Justice's scruples, Henry ordered the remaining members of the commission to proceed, and Scrope, Mowbray and Sir William Plumpton were speedily condemned to death, placed on scrawny nags, and taken outside the city where the York citizenry had been ordered to assemble. The spot chosen for their execution was in a field of barley beneath a windmill.
²⁸
When the nineteen-year-old Mowbray trembled at the sight of the sword, the archbishop comforted him and assured him that they would shortly be reunited in Paradise. According to one source, Scrope's last words were: ‘It is for the laws and good government of England that I die.’
His afterlife as a miracle-worker began almost immediately, and some believed that soon after this Henry contracted leprosy. Never before had an English king dared to execute a bishop, let alone an archbishop.
²⁹

Further executions followed, of townsmen, clergy and gentry, although the hundreds of pardons issued dwarfed the few dozen beheadings. York's liberties were suspended and a fine of 500 marks imposed on the city.
³⁰
Henry's main task now, however, was to deal with Northumberland and Bardolf, and this time he was determined that the northern strongholds would yield. By the evening of 9 June, the day after Scrope's execution, he was already at Ripon planning his campaign: a large army was gathered, ships were sent with supplies from the coastal towns of Yorkshire to await the king's arrival at Berwick, and an impressive array of guns and siege-engines assembled, one of which, according to Walsingham, was so huge that no fortification could withstand it.
³¹
There may have been a last-minute attempt at negotiation, but although Northumberland agreed to release Robert Waterton, it soon became clear that the time for forgiveness was past.
³²
By 21 June the king was at Newcastle. Langley, Cockermouth and Prudhoe castles surrendered, and by 1 July the royal army stood before Warkworth. According to Henry's own account, the captain initially refused to deliver the castle to him, whereupon the cannons were hauled up and seven shots fired at the walls, enough to bring the captain to his senses and ‘submit to our grace, high and low’.
³³
The garrison was allowed to depart, and five days later the king was before Berwick. Northumberland and Bardolf had fled to Scotland, promised refuge by Sir David Fleming, but even so the garrison of Berwick castle initially refused to surrender, so once again the cannons were brought up – this time including ‘the great
gun’ – and after one man had been killed by a ball which struck a tower the remainder surrendered. At least eight of them were beheaded, including William, son of Lord Greystoke, and the young Sir Henry Boynton of Acclam in Cleveland.
³⁴
Only Alnwick, under the command of the wily William Clifford, still held out, but when he heard the news from Berwick even he agreed to surrender, just in time to receive his customary pardon.
³⁵
With the fall of Alnwick, the Percy
caput
, on 14 July, the rebellion was over: Northumberland and Bardolf were adjudged traitors by the Court of Chivalry and the process of distributing their lands and goods began. At Durham on 20 July six of the ringleaders of the Cleveland uprising were condemned and executed, their heads despatched about the region. By the time Henry passed southwards into Nottinghamshire on 25 July, on his way back to Wales, the leathered and weathered features of some three dozen traitors crenellated the town gates of Richmond, Jarrow, York, Scarborough, Bishop Auckland, Helmsley, Yarm, Newcastle, Guisborough, Barmpton, Darlington, Barnard Castle, and doubtless elsewhere.
³⁶
And so the land grew quiet.

One of the purposes of the indictment presented to parliament a year later was to demonstrate a link between the various uprisings in the north during the summer of 1405. Northumberland, it was alleged, was ‘conspiring, plotting and conniving’ with Scrope and Mowbray ‘and also with my lords John Fauconberge, Ralph Hastings [leaders of the Cleveland rising] in their treasons and rebellions’.
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Initially, as he hastened north in late May 1405, Henry may have believed this to be the case, but the peers of parliament were not convinced.
³⁸
Northumberland and Bardolf, they eventually agreed, had acted treasonably and if caught would suffer the full penalties
of the law, but the behaviour of Scrope and Mowbray, while it ‘seemed to be’ treasonable, they declined to pass judgment on.
³⁹
Nor could the chroniclers agree on the extent of collaboration between the various risings. The closest that Walsingham came to depicting the four chief rebel lords as acting in concert was in his later, abbreviated account of the risings, when he said that ‘it was alleged (
ut fertur
)’ that the citizens of York ‘expected some encouragement (
confisi solatio
)’ from Northumberland and Bardolf; in his earlier and fuller account of the rising he distinguished quite carefully between the armies raised by Scrope and Mowbray ‘on the one hand’ and Northumberland and Bardolf ‘on the other’.
⁴⁰
John Hardyng also wrote two accounts of the risings: his first version (presented to Henry IV's grandson, Henry VI, in 1457) made no connection between Northumberland's acts of rebellion and the archbishop's protest movement, whereas his second (presented to the Yorkist king Edward IV six years later) claimed that Scrope and Mowbray were joined by a contingent of Percy retainers on Shipton Moor and that the gentry leaders of the Cleveland rising were beheaded ‘for the earl of Northumberland’; his intention being, apparently, to portray the cause for which Northumberland claimed to be fighting, the restoration of the ‘Yorkist’ line to the throne, as receiving the blessing of the martyred archbishop. The other contemporary chronicles, including the
Continuatio Eulogii
, ‘Giles’, and a northern account, treated Scrope's and Northumberland's rebellions as separate events and any link between them as little more than a coincidence of timing.
⁴¹

Yet to imagine that two, or even three, uprisings in the same region within the same month were quite unrelated, stretches credulity. There must have been, at the least, a degree of revolutionary contagion, with news from different parts of the north-east being carried back and forth, stirring new outbreaks of discontent and putting heart into those who, for one reason or another, felt aggrieved with Henry and his regime. Moreover, Percy retainers were certainly involved both in the Cleveland rising and at
Shipton Moor, although it does not necessarily follow that they were acting on the earl's orders.
⁴²
The different groups of rebels also shared certain grievances – especially, perhaps, resentment at the growing power of the earl of Westmorland. In Northumberland's case this is self-evident, but several chroniclers also placed Mowbray's dislike of Westmorland at the start – and thus, arguably, at the heart – of his alliance with Scrope, claiming that ‘ancient envy’ induced Mowbray to complain to the archbishop that Westmorland had deprived him of his family's traditional office of marshal of England and the lands that went with it, and that the archbishop began his rabble-rousing sermon on Shipton Moor by deploring the rift between Westmorland and Mowbray.
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Yet if Westmorland – brother-in-law to the king, regional lieutenant for an unpopular regime, and the man who had intervened decisively to halt Northumberland's move southwards in July 1403 – probably had little difficulty in attracting enemies in the north-east,
⁴⁴
there is little to suggest a deeper common purpose or shared ideology between Scrope and Mowbray on the one hand and Northumberland and Bardolf on the other. Northumberland's discontent requires little explanation. His humiliation in 1403–4, the loss of his son, and the surrender of much of his power in the north had left him isolated and bitter. His aim, as he made clear to Owain Glyn Dŵr, to Robert III of Scotland, and to Louis of Orléans, was to remove Henry from his throne. Bardolf's behaviour indicates that he shared this aim, although why he did so is far from clear; according to Walsingham he had opposed the king at two recent councils, but on what grounds the chronicler did not explain. It may have been family ties that brought him into the circle of disaffection: Northumberland acted with him as executor of his mother's will, and his daughter Anne was married to Sir William Clifford.
⁴⁵
In Mowbray's case, family ties were crucial. Aged thirteen at the time of his father's banishment in 1398 (a humiliation for
which he would have held Henry responsible), he was subsequently brought up in the household of Queen Isabella, an establishment unconducive to the fostering of sympathy for the Lancastrian cause. Having lost the marshal's office, Mowbray was already implicated in plotting against the king in February 1405, before a dispute over precedence with the earl of Warwick was decided in the latter's favour in the following month, adding to his sense of grievance.
⁴⁶
Like Bardolf, he was meant to go to Wales to serve against Glyn Dŵr in the spring of 1405, but instead of mustering with the king at Hereford he made his way to York and confided in Scrope.