Henry IV (67 page)

Fortunately for the English, the native Irish response during these years was sporadic and uncoordinated. In Louth, internal feuds siphoned off much of the energy of the O'Neills and O'Reillys, while raiding by the O'Connors, O'Donnells, O'Byrnes and the indomitable Art MacMurrough into Meath, Wexford and Kildare between 1405 and 1407 was met by vigorous counter-attacks from the citizens of Dublin and the prior of Connell, one of which yielded a rich haul of rebel heads and banners to be paraded through the city.
³³
Eight months later Scrope led an army including the young earls of Ormond and Desmond, first against MacMurrough in Leinster and then against the O'Carrolls and the Burghs of Clanwilliam, who were raiding Ormond's lands in Kilkenny; the ensuing battle of Callan (county Kilkenny) was said to have resulted in the death of 800 Irish and the capture of Walter Burgh. Shortly after Prince Thomas's return to the island in 1408–9 he was wounded in a skirmish at Kilmainham, to which he responded by conducting a campaign into Leinster and holding a parliament at Kilkenny.
³⁴

Yet all the time the territory under English control was shrinking: several towns were granted exemptions from imposts of one sort or another because they were so ruined by constant raids, and when Scrope summoned a parliament to Dublin in January 1407 it had to be moved to Trim because the city itself was not considered safe. In the summer of 1409, MacMurrough was still being bought off by the commons of Wexford.
³⁵
By June 1410 it was said that all the roads leading out of the four ‘loyal counties’ (Dublin,
Kildare, Meath and Louth) were too dangerous to travel.
³⁶
Despite this, Prince Thomas thought better of returning, and for the remainder of his lieutenancy Prior Butler and Sir Edward Perers carried the burden of responsibility for defending the colony on land while Janico Dartasso attempted to defend its coasts against Scottish and other attackers.
³⁷
What military success the colonists did enjoy was mainly due to the commitment of these deputies and the resilience of the Anglo-Irish community. Prince Thomas's lieutenancy came in for a good deal of criticism, some of it deserved: he spent less than three of his twelve years as lieutenant in Ireland, and although his complaints about underfunding were undoubtedly justified, it is also likely that as his interest in Ireland waned he began to siphon off some of what was given to him to support a princely lifestyle in England.
³⁸
Moreover, his support for the Butlers smacked of partisanship and evidently did not meet with universal approval. In August 1409, shortly after the appointment of Thomas Butler, Prince Henry tried to have his younger brother removed from the lieutenancy, and two years later further questions were raised in the council about the competence of the Dublin administration.
³⁹
Behind these lay the sibling rivalry between the princes that now muddied the trickle of policy seeping forth from Westminster, but the allegations were not followed up, for by this time English eyes were turned towards France.

Between 1404 and 1407, with coastal raiding in the Channel, French offensives against Guyenne and Calais, and the arrival of a French army in Wales, it must have seemed only a matter of time before hostilities with France would erupt into open war. The bushfire conflict in Guyenne, a war
of sieges fought largely by
routiers
, cost the English and their allies ninety-six castles in the duchy in 1405–6 alone – a figure credible enough for Tiptoft to present as a fact to the 1406 parliament – and although Louis of Orléans failed to take Bordeaux or even Bourg, despite a twelve-week siege of the latter in the winter of 1406–7, he continued to harbour hopes of expelling the English. In October 1407 the great castle of Lourdes in the foothills of the Pyrenees, having stood out for nearly two years, was finally lost, sold to the French by its captain Jean de Béarn for 32,500
écus d'or
, and the French won control of the county of Bigorre.
⁴⁰
Yet as long as the English held Fronsac on the Dordogne, ‘the principal fortress of all Guyenne’ according to the mayor of Bordeaux, Sir William Farrington, the Bordelais was secure, and it was to this end that English efforts were now mainly directed.
⁴¹
As it turned out, the fall of Lourdes marked the end of four years of French pressure in Guyenne and would be the last significant English loss in the duchy for a generation.

Despite the intensity of hostilities, the thirty-year truce of 1396 remained theoretically in place, although in practice it had to be supplemented by local truces, often of only a few months' duration but usually renewed, which meant that the English government was continuously involved in an interlocking series of negotiations. From early 1406, probably as a result of John of Burgundy's growing influence, hopes of peace and marriage were also revived, and in 1407 the English proposed that Prince Henry be betrothed to Charles VI's daughter Marie, although this foundered when she could not be persuaded to forsake the convent she had entered as a novice at the age of four.
⁴²
The chief obstacle to peace was, as ever, Orléans, who was trying during the autumn of 1407 to undermine the Anglo-Flemish rapprochement upon which Duke John of Burgundy's revenues largely depended, and to block payments from the French treasury to his rival. Whether it was this or simply the accumulation of years of loathing,
Burgundy now decided that the king's brother must be eliminated.
⁴³
On the night of 23 November 1407, Louis was visiting Queen Isabeau in her palace close to the Porte Barbette in Paris to console her for the recent loss of a child when a messenger arrived to tell him that the king wished to speak with him urgently. It was a trap. Barely had he stepped into the street when he was set upon by between fifteen and twenty men. ‘I am the duke of Orléans,’ he cried. ‘That is who we are looking for,’ they replied, hacking off his left hand, smashing open his skull and stabbing him repeatedly before dragging his corpse on to a rubbish heap. Two days later Burgundy confessed that it was he who had hired the assassins, then fled to Flanders. In March 1408 he returned in arms to Paris, presented an elaborate justification for his action, and received a pardon from the barely sentient Charles VI. This merely inflamed opinion further. To his widow Valentina and son Charles, the blood of Duke Louis cried for vengeance; many others, however, applauded his death, particularly in Paris where he had been detested.
⁴⁴

It was against the background of this blood feud which tore the French royal family apart that Anglo-French relations were conducted for the remainder of Henry's reign. Even when sane, Charles VI hardly knew what to do. In July 1408 Burgundy's pardon was revoked, a few months later it was restored; in March 1409 he and the fourteen-year-old Charles of Orléans were publicly reconciled in Chartres cathedral and the king and queen returned to Paris, but the upshot was that the governance of king and kingdom now fell into Burgundy's hands. As for Henry, the removal of Orléans could only strengthen his hand. News of the assassination reached him during the Gloucester parliament, where he happened to be entertaining the French king's ambassadors. Within a week an English embassy had been appointed to discuss terms for a ‘true final peace’, and a short-term truce had been concluded in Guyenne.
⁴⁵
Anglo-French relations now improved rapidly. The local truces in Brittany, Flanders and Guyenne were periodically renewed through 1408, a year which saw growing cooperation over the Schism and fewer outbreaks of cross-Channel
hostilities than at any time since 1401.
⁴⁶
By September this continuous diplomatic intercourse resulted in a general truce between the two countries for eighteen months and the renewal of talks about marriage, or even marriages, between the two royal houses, which by early 1409 had crystallized into a proposal for a match between Prince Henry and the French king's youngest daughter Catherine.
⁴⁷
By now the prince was stretching his diplomatic wings, and he too favoured marriage as the way to cement a peace with France – indeed he would eventually marry Catherine, though not until 1420.
⁴⁸
The fact that his growing authority in England coincided with Burgundy's ascendancy in Paris also meant that Anglo-French diplomacy now became a multilateral affair. Since, and even before, Orléans's assassination, Henry and Arundel had used the duke of Berry as their principal contact in Paris, but from the autumn of 1409 it was increasingly with Burgundy that they dealt.
⁴⁹
Hence the sumptuous and widely publicized Anglo-Burgundian jousts held at Smithfield in July 1409 and at Lille in December, probably as a cover for diplomatic overtures.
⁵⁰

Yet it took time to establish trust, and if the autumn of 1409 saw talk of peace, by early 1410 there was a growing conviction in both England and
France that Calais was about to be assaulted.
⁵¹
Henry Beaufort, who kept a closer eye than most on the barometer of Anglo-French enmity, opened the parliament of January 1410 with just such a warning, and the commons agreed with him.
⁵²
Had they known of a meeting of Charles VI's council in Paris in the same month, which heard a catalogue of Henry IV's crimes and a proposal that open war be declared, their fears would have been confirmed.
⁵³
Burgundy, now dominant in Paris, was indeed preparing an assault, but two developments in the spring made him change his plans. The first was the formation on 15 April 1410 of the League of Gien, a coalition of Orléanist or Armagnac lords (the dukes of Orléans, Berry and Brittany and the counts of Alençon, Clermont and Armagnac) sworn to rid France of those who acted contrary to ‘the welfare and honour of the king and kingdom’ – in other words, the duke of Burgundy and his supporters. Both parties in France now began summoning their retainers.
⁵⁴
The second, also in April, was the destruction by fire of the ‘enormous wooden tower’ the duke's men had been constructing in the church of St-Omer as a siege-platform to assault Calais. The monk of Saint-Denis claimed that the arsonist was a former English prisoner who had failed to pay his ransom; released and offered 10,000 nobles in return for destroying the tower, he persuaded one of the carpenters to throw Greek fire on it. Walsingham gave freer rein to his imagination: the Burgundians planned to fill their
apparatus mirabilis
with the decomposing remains of snakes, scorpions and toads which they had been collecting in jars, believing that when these were hurled over the walls of Calais the noxious fumes would poison the inhabitants and allow the besiegers to enter and take it. One of the town's residents thus volunteered, in return for 140 gold crowns, to go to St-Omer and burn it. The chroniclers agree that the resulting conflagration consumed not just the tower but the church and much of the town as well.
⁵⁵
Calais, however, was saved.

From the summer of 1399 until the autumn of 1405 Henry had faced military emergencies from every quarter, and the years 1405 to 1409 have something of the feel of clearing up after a storm. That the storm had passed there was no doubt; only in Ireland did hostilities continue at a comparable level to that of Henry's early years. The challenges of the second half of the reign were as much diplomatic as military, though no less intractable for that. Yet progress was made, and the year from mid-1408 to mid-1409 was a time of real optimism. The Welsh revolt effectively ended, there was still hope that the Scottish government in exile might deliver peace on the northern border, and Prince Thomas's return to Ireland – indicative in itself of the easing of tensions elsewhere – offered hope of progress there too. The spirit of cooperation over the Schism that bore fruit in the Council of Pisa also gave new impetus to the Anglo-French peace talks. It was Henry's misfortune that this brief period of détente coincided with the onset of his sickness, but whether he could have capitalized on it even if fit is questionable. Paradoxically, it was Burgundy's unchallenged dominance at the French court during the autumn and winter of 1409–10 that encouraged him to take a more belligerent stance towards England; like Louis of Orléans, he found that control of the government and its resources brought with it the responsibility to uphold the nation's honour and bare his teeth at its familiar enemies. Conversely, when the Armagnacs leagued against him in the spring of 1410, he warmed to the idea of English allies. Talk of peace was revived, and before the end of June the Anglo-French truce was renewed.
⁵⁶
Looking to the future, the simultaneous rise to power of Prince Henry and Duke John in 1409–10 would inaugurate a new era in Anglo-French diplomacy, but for the next few years, as they struggled to assert themselves, it brought rapid changes of fortune in France, rivalries and differences of opinion in the English council, and a succession of bewildering reversals of policy.

¹
For the text, see
Giles
, 39–42, with translation in
Welsh Records in Paris
, 116–17.
Giles
's date is supported by Davies,
Revolt
, 166–9 (who elucidates the prophetic lore underpinning it); Matthews dated it to 28 February 1406, supported by Kirby,
Henry IV
, 218, and Wylie,
Henry the Fourth
, ii.408–10. Northumberland and Bardolf were warned to leave Scotland by David Fleming, who was killed on 14 Feb. 1406 (
Scotichronicon
, 61–3, 176).

²
Giles
claimed that ‘after a short time, this evil bond of friendship was published’, but had Henry known about it he would presumably have used it in his indictment of Northumberland and Bardolf.

³
Davies,
Revolt
, 123–4. Symbolic of the restoration of order was the foundation by the anglicized Welshman, lawyer and MP David Holbache of Oswestry Grammar School in 1407.

⁴
E 403/589, 11 Dec.; E 403/591, 1 June, 23 June; Wylie,
Henry the Fourth
, iii.111–12; one of the cannons, nicknamed
The Messenger
, blew up when fired (Davies,
Revolt
, 253–4).