Henry IV (66 page)

By now the proactive strategy being pursued by the English was yielding results. Anglesey, a major source of provisions for the rebels, and Ceredigion were largely brought under control by January 1407, Flintshire by April; as the Welsh confidence of 1403–5 ebbed, submissions and defections multiplied.
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The great council of April 1407 stepped up the pressure: on 12 May, Prince Henry was reappointed as lieutenant of Wales for six months with a force of 600 men-at-arms and 1,800 archers. His first goal was to recover Aberystwyth and Harlech castles, held by Glyn Dŵr's men since late 1404. Cannons of up to four-and-a-half-tons, along with nearly 2,000 lbs (900 kilos) of powder, saltpetre and sulphur, were shipped up the Welsh coast to facilitate the task, although they were not an unqualified success and Aberystwyth's walls mostly withstood the bombardment.
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Nevertheless, by 12 September, with a blockade in place by land and sea, the Welsh captain of the castle, Rhys Ddu (Rhys the Black), agreed that if not relieved by Glyn Dŵr or his representative by 1 November he would evacuate the castle and perform homage to the English king; in return, Prince Henry swore not to assault the castle in the meantime and to allow Rhys and his fellows to leave unharmed provided they did not destroy the artillery or fortifications.
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The dramatis personae of witnesses to the agreement – the chancellor of Oxford University, the duke of York, the earl of Warwick and a dozen other English lords and knights – testified to its significance; even the king hoped to be there in time for the surrender. There was nothing unusual about such pacts in the context of Anglo-French or Anglo-Scottish siege warfare, and it implied a degree of respect for what the rebels had achieved. However, when Owain was told about it he reacted with fury, accusing Rhys and his men of treachery, and once Prince Henry had withdrawn to Gloucester for the parliament he hastened to Aberystwyth and occupied the castle in person, thereby nullifying the agreement. As an act of defiance this was impressive, but it barely held back the tide of English recovery. Within a few months the prince and his gunners were back at Aberystwyth, and in September 1408 the castle fell (although Owain himself was no longer there), whereupon Prince Henry departed for Westminster, leaving the recapture of Harlech to John and Gilbert Talbot.
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His confidence in
them was not misplaced: during the spring of 1409 Harlech too was recaptured, and with it Owain's wife, his son Lionel, two of his daughters and three of his granddaughters, who were all despatched to the Tower. His son-in-law Edmund Mortimer, whose defection in 1402 had so boosted Welsh morale, also perished during the siege,
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and with him died the last of the alliances from which a few years earlier Owain had hoped to gain so much: France, Scotland, the Percys, the Mortimers – all now quite impotent to come to the old warrior's aid.
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Valley by valley, the Welsh revolt shrank inexorably back to the north-western heartland whence it had sprung, and although occasional guerrilla raids continued to be launched, by 1409 life in most parts of Wales was returning to normal and English lordship being reimposed; this was now a society in submission.

With submission came its henchman: retribution. There was no reign of terror, although there were some executions, but even persistent rebels such as Henry Don were usually able to secure pardons. The price which the Welsh paid for nearly a decade of defiance came rather from their pockets, for pardons, personal or communal, did not come cheap, and almost every community had to buy one. The county of Carmarthen paid £4,000 between 1407 and 1412, while Brecon handed over £552 in 1410 alone to redeem fines imposed since 1401; the largest individual fines were those demanded of Owain's brother-in-law, John Hanmer, who had been captured in 1405 (£333) and Henry Don, who had led the revolt in Kidwelly in 1403 (£266).
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The English were certainly not heedless of the fact that such penalization might stir up another revolt, but to them the loss of rents and other perquisites of lordship which they had suffered provided sufficient justification for their imposition. The problem, however, was not only that an already impoverished population was ground down, but also that the economic recovery which might have restored the profitability of English estates in Wales was delayed. The king's own lordship of Brecon, which in the 1390s had usually brought him over £1,000 a year, yielded only about a third of this sum in 1409; a year before this, all the rents in the town of Carmarthen were still being remitted because of the destruction
the town had suffered in 1403 and 1405.
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Retribution also naturally provided opportunities for corrupt English officials to use threats or worse to line their own pockets; one who certainly did was Thomas Barneby, the notoriously venal chamberlain of North Wales.
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Punitive fines continued to be imposed during Henry V's reign, and it took not years but decades for English lordship in Wales once again to realize its potential.

Nor did it help that although the revolt was already languishing by 1409, it took a long time to die, for it had once again become the type of war to which the mountains and valleys of Wales were perfectly suited: a hit-and-run campaign aimed at the destruction of seigneurial resources and occasional kidnappings.
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Thus English castles still had to be reinforced and some communities still had to pay for their security. In November 1409 the earl of Arundel and other Marcher lords were told to repair post-haste to their lordships and continue the offensive, since their officials were still making truces with Glyn Dŵr.
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For Welshmen who had remained loyal to the crown there was also the danger of revenge attacks: as late as 1412, the esquire David Gam of Brecon was abducted by former rebels and handed over to Glyn Dŵr, although he was later freed in return for a ransom.
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And although the English border counties suffered little from raiding after 1407–8, the legacy of earlier ravages remained: still in 1411, more than 10 per cent of Shropshire's contribution to the lay subsidy was respited on account of the destruction it had suffered.
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As long as Glyn Dŵr remained at liberty, neither the hope nor the fear that the revolt was over could quite be extinguished. His last few years were spent as a fugitive with a price on his head, accompanied by his remaining son Mareddud, and when he died around 1415, shortly after declining Henry V's offer of a pardon, he was interred secretly so that his enemies should not desecrate his grave. There must have been occasions when he could have been betrayed, but his popular stature ensured that he never was; posterity would resurrect him as the embodiment of a Welsh nation.
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Scotland's leaders, in contrast, were becoming accustomed to English captivity. On the face of it, the capture of James I in the spring of 1406 put Henry in an enviable position: the two greatest Scottish border magnates (Douglas and Dunbar), the son of regent Albany (Murdoch Stewart), and the earl of Orkney, as well as their king, now resided in England, all of them prisoners except Dunbar who had fashioned his own chains. Like Edward III sixty years earlier, Henry had been handed the opportunity to dictate terms to the Scots, a point made to him by the commons in 1406, who asked him not to surrender his Scottish prisoners lightly.
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Hoping to woo, rather than drag, the Scots to the altar of peace, the king now displayed a victor's magnanimity. Scottish students, pilgrims and merchants were granted safe-conducts to visit or trade with England; Albany's glory-seeking nephew Alexander, earl of Mar, came to London to joust with the earl of Kent; the captivity to which the Scottish nobles were subjected was more honourable than custodial; and correspondence between the English king and the Scottish regent was generally respectful or even amicable, stripped clean of the patronizing bluster of overlordship.
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Much of it naturally concerned the fate of the prisoners. As far as is known, no terms were put forward during Henry's reign for the ransom of the Scottish king, and James believed this to be because Albany did not want him back; the regent was, after all, also the heir presumptive and doubtless had one eye on his own succession.
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James's frustration and sense of impotence are revealed in his poem
The King's Quair
, in which he
described his imprisonment ‘bewailing in my chamber thus alone, despairing of all joy and redemption’. Albany showed more interest in trying to secure the release of his son Murdoch, offering hostages for his parole in July 1407 as well as one of his daughters in marriage to Prince John, although when he was informed that the price could be as high as 50,000 marks the talks lapsed, and in fact Murdoch was not released until 1415. He would pay the price for his father's slighting of his royal nephew: in May 1425, a year after James was unleashed north of the border, he had Murdoch and two of his sons beheaded at Stirling.
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The crucial Scottish prisoner apart from the king was the earl of Douglas. As long as George Dunbar also remained in England, Douglas probably felt that his family's domination of southern Scotland was not seriously threatened, but by 1407 Dunbar, short of money and shorn of influence in England, was restless and negotiating with a sympathetic Albany for his repatriation.
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In March 1407, therefore, Douglas concluded an indenture promising the English king that he and his men would serve Henry ‘before all men and against all men’, the Scottish king excepted (but not the regent), for the term of his life, and was allowed to return to Scotland on parole.
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Here his presence soon came to be seen as a threat by Albany, and although Douglas returned to England as agreed, when he obtained another term of parole in April 1408 Albany also sanctioned the return of Dunbar, who disingenuously put it about that he had only defected to the English in order to help destroy the Percys. This was too much for Douglas: although he had indicated to Albany his consent to Dunbar's release, he now became fearful that his rival would rebuild his authority south of the Forth, and when his parole expired at Easter 1409
he absconded. The indignant English king wrote to Albany demanding his return and even hinting that he might take ‘little or right nought’ for Murdoch's release as long as Douglas was sent back, but in October Douglas and Dunbar agreed terms with Albany and all that was left to Henry was to rue his misjudgement and fire unchivalric blanks across the border.
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Douglas's price for consenting to Dunbar's return was the lordship of Annandale; although Dunbar was restored to his earldom of March, he was forced to concede almost undisputed authority south of the Forth to his rival; the ‘whorrle-bourlle’ (hurly-burly) of his eight-year self-imposed exile had cost him dear.
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Henry, too, was by now surveying a policy in ruins. If he had hoped to use the rivalry of the two border earls to put pressure on Albany, it had not worked out. Moreover, the return of their two leading magnates instilled the Scots with the confidence to resume the process of expelling the English cuckoos from their nests. Prince John had written many times to the king and council bemoaning their failure to provide him with the funds to maintain adequate defences on the March: the walls of Berwick had ‘mostly collapsed’, not least because of the damage inflicted by the king's artillery in 1405; the garrison of Jedburgh was threatening to desert; and that of Fastcastle scarcely dared venture out to forage for fear of ambush.
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Now he was proved right. Jedburgh was seized while its captain, Robert Hoppen, was in Berwick pleading with Prince John to pay his men's wages; its fortifications were razed under the supervision of Douglas's brother James to prevent it from being held by the English again, and it never was.
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Early in 1410 Fastcastle also succumbed to a force led by George Dunbar's son Patrick, and, soon after this, another of his sons, Gavin, and a bastard son of Douglas burned the town of Roxburgh, although the castle held out.
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By the summer it was believed that the Scots were planning an invasion. The English retaliated through Robert Umfraville, lieutenant to Thomas
Beaufort as admiral of the north, who led a flotilla of ten vessels manned by 600 men up the Firth of Forth, capturing fourteen ships before returning to Northumberland so loaded with provisions that the Scots called him ‘Robin Mendmarket’; after following this up with a raid through Jedworth forest, he was asked to replace Westmorland's son John Nevill as captain of Roxburgh. Shortly after this, talks were arranged to patch up a truce for a few months, but peace was no nearer.
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Like Edward III, Henry had discovered that the task of converting a trump-filled hand into a winning play was beyond him.

For the English administration in Dublin, the middle years of the reign were shifting and nervy. When the earl of Ormond died in September 1405, his heir was fifteen, and with Prince Thomas and his deputy, Stephen Le Scrope, absent opportunities arose not just for the Gaels but also for those among the Anglo-Irish who resented Ormond's influence to redress the balance of the past few years. Gerald, earl of Kildare, was now chosen as justiciar, and when Thomas, heir to the earldom of Desmond, reached his majority in March 1406, he was allowed his liberties and franchises, simultaneously receiving a pardon for any treasons he had committed (none, as far as is known).
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Yet Prince Thomas had invested too much in the Ormonds to allow their position to be eroded. Within a month of the third earl's death he had secured the wardship and inheritance of his heir, James the ‘White Earl’, and after Le Scrope returned in the autumn of 1406 he soon gave the new earl of Ormond effective control of his inheritance, even though he was five years younger than Desmond.
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The next few years saw the family's position consolidated: when Le Scrope sailed for England once more in January 1408, it was James, now seventeen, who replaced him as deputy, and when Prince Thomas eventually returned to Ireland in August 1408 he imprisoned Kildare and his three sons in Dublin castle, presumably for having flouted James's authority.
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A month later, Le Scrope died of the plague, so that when Prince Thomas returned to
England in March 1409 to be with his father a new deputy had to be found, and it was to another member of the Butler family that he turned, the young earl's half-brother Thomas, prior of the Irish Hospitallers at Kilmainham (Dublin). The White Earl he took with him as a member of his household, first to England and then in 1412 to France, an apprenticeship from which he would emerge to claim a position of dominance among the Anglo-Irish nobility through the first half of the fifteenth century.
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