Henry IV (7 page)

There was thus both a cohesive Lancastrian affinity focused upon service and loyalty to its lord's causes and a Lancastrian affinity which was little more than the sum of its parts: a congeries of gentry fraternities that found it convenient to synchronize its fortunes with those of a great lord, provided
his interests did not impinge upon theirs. There were always some men prepared to die for their lord, but most retainers were capable of making their own decisions as to where their primary loyalty lay. Every lord, Gaunt famously declared to the commons in the parliament of 1384, was capable of disciplining his own retainers, but the truth fell somewhere short of this, and there were times when the behaviour of his retainers proved an embarrassment to him.
³³
Yet the real test of the affinity came at those moments of crisis when its leader set himself on a collision course with the crown. On the first occasion that this happened, in 1322, his retainers failed Earl Thomas and the result was near-obliteration.
³⁴
Despite the steady recovery during the next half-century, the wounds inflicted in the 1320s were hard to heal: the forfeiture of 1322 and subsequent re-grants had established rival claims to much of the Lancastrian inheritance, including those of the crown. To head these off, vigilance and circumspection were required; local disputes must not be allowed to escalate; royal favour must be nurtured, to stop up the mouths of the envious. Much also depended on the character of the man who occupied the throne. Favoured by Edward III, the house of Lancaster was advanced and exalted during the middle years of the fourteenth century, but Edward's death in 1377 brought to the throne a king under whom royal favour was not simply a route to advancement, but also a prerequisite for holding on to what one already had.

¹
For his date of birth, see I. Mortimer,
The Fears of Henry IV
(London, 2007), 364–5, based on E 403/431, Tuesday 1 June, and Henry's later household accounts which record evidence of alms distributed on his successive birthdays. His sisters were Philippa, born in 1360, and Elizabeth, born in 1363/4. For ‘Henry of Bolingbroke’, see
Brut
, ii.341, and
CE
, 361, 366 (based on a common source).

²
In 1269 Ferrers was offered the chance to redeem his lands, but the terms demanded of him were extortionate: R. Somerville,
History of the Duchy of Lancaster
(London, 1953), i.3–5; J. Bothwell,
Falling from Grace
(Manchester, 2008), 58, 97; J. Maddicott,
Thomas of Lancaster 1307–1322
(Oxford, 1970), 1, describes it as ‘a piece of legal chicanery’.

³
CP
, v.313. Since the twelfth century, the trend in England had been in favour of growing security of tenure for landholders, so that many forfeitures proved to be temporary, and those who had profited from political miscalculation knew that there was no certainty that they would hold on to what they had gained. However, the baronial wars of the 1260s proved to be the turning-point of this trend, with the crown henceforward taking a less lenient stance towards treason and rebellion, and a growing number of landholding families suffering forfeiture on a long-term or even permanent basis. Earl Edmund and his descendants would be the first and most notable beneficiaries of this policy, yet neither he nor his eldest son Thomas ever used the style ‘earl of Derby’. Thomas even went so far, fifty years after Evesham, as to appoint a chaplain to say masses for Ferrers's soul, apparently some form of expiation or at least ‘the product of a guilty conscience’: Bothwell,
Falling from Grace
, 92–8; Maddicott,
Thomas of Lancaster
, 320; Somerville,
Duchy of Lancaster
, i.9–10.

⁴
Maddicott,
Thomas of Lancaster
, 3, 22; by 1296, Edmund was the lord of 632 separate units of property and 49 demesne manors: R. Davies,
Lords and Lordship in the British Isles
(Oxford, 2009), 159.

⁵
Somerville,
Duchy of Lancaster
, i.26, 337; Maddicott,
Thomas of Lancaster
, 234–6.

⁶
K. Fowler,
The King's Lieutenant
(London, 1969).

⁷
Somerville,
Duchy of Lancaster
, i.40.

⁸
S. Waugh, ‘Henry of Lancaster, Third Earl of Lancaster’,
ODNB
, 26.569–72; Fowler,
King's Lieutenant
, 172, 225.

⁹
Somerville,
Duchy of Lancaster
, i.51–6.

¹⁰
A. Goodman,
John of Gaunt
(Harlow, 1992), 341, suggests a little under £12,000; Fowler,
King's Lieutenant
, 226, a little over.

¹¹
D. Green,
Edward the Black Prince
(Harlow, 2007), 63.

¹²
Maddicott,
Thomas of Lancaster
, 26, 331.

¹³
Knighton
, 52, 188; Fowler,
King's Lieutenant
, 214.

¹⁴
Goodman,
John of Gaunt
, 302–3.

¹⁵
Maddicott,
Thomas of Lancaster
, 12.

¹⁶
Goodman,
John of Gaunt
, 305–6; S. Walker,
The Lancastrian Affinity 1361–1399
(Oxford, 1990), 97.

¹⁷
Goodman,
John of Gaunt
, 308–9.

¹⁸
Maddicott,
Thomas of Lancaster
, 45–7, 245–9.

¹⁹
Fowler,
King's Lieutenant
, 181–5, 227–9; Walker,
Lancastrian Affinity
, 22.

²⁰
When he accompanied the king on the six-month ‘Reims campaign’ of 1359–60, his personal retinue numbered about 1,100 men; when he and the earl of Arundel made their entry to the papal court at Avignon on Christmas Eve 1354 to represent Edward III at the most lavish peace conference of the Anglo-French war so far, they arrived in a convoy of 200 horses, and for the two months that they remained there the hospitality which Lancaster extended was so bountiful that, according to Knighton, ‘all the court marvelled’: Fowler,
King's Lieutenant
, 201, 290;
Knighton
, 128.

²¹
Goodman,
John of Gaunt
, 317, 349; Walker,
Lancastrian Affinity
, 10–14; H. Castor,
The King, the Crown and the Duchy of Lancaster
(Oxford, 2000), 22. Gaunt's daily registers survive for the years 1372–6 and 1379–83 (
JGR I
and
JGR II
).

²²
Walker,
Lancastrian Affinity
, 14–22.

²³
Walker,
Lancastrian Affinity
, 40–1, 248.

²⁴
RHKA
, Chapter IV.

²⁵
Maddicott,
Thomas of Lancaster
, 65, 176–7, 265–96.

²⁶
Walker,
Lancastrian Affinity
, 32.

²⁷
Goodman,
John of Gaunt
, 372.

²⁸
Walker,
Lancastrian Affinity
, 42, 48.

²⁹
SAC I
, 92–3.

³⁰
Walker,
Lancastrian Affinity
, 140–1, 152–3, 192–206, 209, 224; Castor,
King, Crown and Duchy
, 53–8, 193–201; Maddicott,
Thomas of Lancaster
, 60.

³¹
Walker,
Lancastrian Affinity
, 94–102.

³²
Brut
, i.207, 216–24, 228–30, 245, 257–63; ii.309, 355. Even more explicitly Lancastrian in sympathy was the chronicle of Henry Knighton, canon of Leicester abbey, although readership of his Latin chronicle was much more restricted. Both Knighton and the
Brut
consistently referred to fourteenth-century earls and dukes as ‘good’, ‘gentle’, noble'; cf. A. Gransden,
Historical Writing in England II
(London, 1982), 72–5; C. Given-Wilson,
Chronicles
(London, 2004), 36–7.

³³
Westminster Chronicle
, 82; Walker,
Lancastrian Affinity
, 115, 242–8, 260. Compare Goodman,
John of Gaunt
, 334.

³⁴
Maddicott,
Thomas of Lancaster
, 295–6; the ‘Office of St Thomas of Lancaster’, composed shortly after Earl Thomas's execution, claimed that he had been ‘abandoned by his company of knights, treacherously deserted by [Robert] de Holland’ (
The Political Songs of England from the Reign of John to that of Edward II
, ed. T. Wright [Camden Society, London, 1839], 270–1). Holland, one of Thomas's most trusted servants, switched sides just a few days before Boroughbridge and was later assassinated by Lancastrian partisans.

Chapter 2

FATHER AND SON I (1367–1382)

On 12 September 1368, when he was seventeen months old, Henry of Bolingbroke's mother died in childbirth aged twenty-one. Duchess Blanche had been married to John of Gaunt for nine years and borne him six children, three of whom survived her. Commemorated by Chaucer in his
Book of the Duchess
and by Froissart in his poem
Joli Buisson de Jonece
(1373), where he described her as ‘young and beautiful . . . vivacious, happy, fresh and charming, gentle and sincere, modest in manner’, she would not be forgotten by her son, who twenty-four years later named his first daughter after her.
¹

For three or four years after his mother's death Henry was brought up with his sisters in the household of their sexagenarian great-aunt, Blanche Lady Wake, but soon after Gaunt's remarriage in September 1371 to the Castilian princess Constanza, the three children resided for the most part with their stepmother at Tutbury (Staffordshire), the chief Lancastrian stronghold in the Midlands.
²
Their governess here was the duke's mistress, Katherine Swynford, sister-in-law to Geoffrey Chaucer and former lady-in-waiting to Duchess Blanche. It was around the time of his second marriage that Gaunt and Katherine's public affair began, and in 1373 their first child was born, followed by three more in four years. Known as the Beauforts, they became valued friends to Henry, but his closest boyhood companion was probably Thomas Swynford, Katherine's son by her first marriage, who was just a year younger than Henry and was also brought up in the ducal household.
³

In 1374, having reached his seventh birthday and thus, by contemporary reckoning, passed from infancy to boyhood, Henry was given his own governor, the veteran Lancastrian esquire Thomas de Burton,
⁴
who in 1376 was replaced by William de Mountendre, a Gascon knight who had served in Gaunt's army in France in 1373–4.
⁵
By this time Henry was increasingly to be found at court with his cousin, the future Richard II, who was three months older than him.
⁶
On 23 April 1377 they were both knighted, along with another ten scions of the English nobility, by the dying Edward III at Windsor castle during the annual St George's day festivities, with Henry and Richard simultaneously inducted as Knights of the Garter.
⁷
It was also from this moment that Henry began to be styled as earl of Derby,
⁸
one of the five earldoms to which Gaunt could lay claim, and it was as earl of Derby that, three months later, he performed his most onerous public duty to date when he bore the principal sword, the Curtana, at his cousin's coronation. Edward III had died on 21 June 1377, and Richard II was crowned on 16 July at a ceremony presided over by Gaunt, the new king's senior uncle since the deaths of his elder brothers Lionel of Clarence in 1368 and Edward the Black Prince in 1376. Gaunt himself carried the Curtana during the coronation ceremony, but for the banquet in Westminster Great Hall which followed he relinquished it to Henry who, throughout the meal, ‘standing on the right hand of the king as he sat at table, held in his hand the said principal sword naked and drawn’ – a disciplined performance for a boy of ten.
⁹

Once Richard became king, Henry initially passed more time at court, regularly receiving gifts of robes, cloaks and shoes from the young king for the hunting and hawking seasons, for Christmas and Easter, and for the Garter festivities each April. Garter robes were of scarlet cloth, lined with belly fur and embroidered with garters of blue taffeta inscribed with the motto of the Order, ‘Honi soit qui mal y pense’.
¹⁰
Henry's courtly upbringing also encompassed occasions such as the wedding of Richard II's half-sister Maud Holand to Waleran of Luxemburg, count of St Pol, celebrated at Windsor during Easter week 1380, when Henry presented the bride with a goblet of gilded silver worth sixty shillings, paid for by his father.
¹¹
The next wedding of comparable significance in England would be Henry's own, and would mark his introduction to the more cut-throat side of court life.

It was Gaunt who arranged Henry's marriage. The object of his attentions was Mary, the co-heiress to Humphrey de Bohun, earl of Hereford, Essex and Northampton, who had died at the age of thirty in January 1373, leaving no sons, two underage daughters, and a very substantial inheritance. The elder daughter, Eleanor (born in 1366), was married to Gaunt's brother, Thomas of Woodstock, earl of Buckingham, probably in 1374.
¹²
What now happened to Mary (born in 1369–70) was naturally a matter of considerable interest to Buckingham. As long as she remained single, the entire Bohun inheritance would fall to him; were she to marry, he would be obliged to share it with her husband. Inconveniently, other duties now deflected his attention. On 3 May 1380, he indented with the king and council to lead an expedition to Brittany with a retinue of 5,000 men.
¹³
During the following two months he did what he could to ensure that the
Bohun patrimony did not slip from his grasp during his absence: on 8 May he obtained a royal grant of the custody of Mary's share of the inheritance during her minority; on 22 June Eleanor came of age and Thomas performed his fealty to the king for his wife's share of the lands.
¹⁴
Shortly before leaving he even took the precaution of bringing Mary to stay with her sister at Pleshey castle (Essex), where he arranged for her to be instructed by nuns with the intention that she should join the order of St Clare. According to Froissart, ‘the young lady seemed to incline to their doctrine, and thought not of marriage’.
¹⁵