Henry IV (72 page)

⁴²
RHL I
, 108.

⁴³
Although she never returned to England after 1386, she corresponded regularly with her brother and others in England, at times letting her wishes be known with some vigour, as when she helped to secure a pardon for her old friend Bishop Henry Despenser in 1401 (Russell,
English Intervention
, 541–6; J. Geouge, ‘Anglo-Portuguese Trade during the Reign of João I of Portugal, 1385–1433’, in
England and Iberia in the Late Middle Ages, 12th to 15th Centuries
, ed. Maria Bullon-Fernandez (London, 2007), 121–33, at p. 127; Tiago Faria, ‘Court Culture and the Politics of Anglo-Portuguese Interaction in the Letters of Philippa Plantagenet, Queen of Portugal’, in
John Gower in Late Medieval Iberia: Manuscripts, Influences, Reception
, ed. A. Saez-Hidalgo and R. F. Yeager (Woodbridge, 2013). Philippa's hand in arranging the earl of Arundel's marriage to her step-daughter Beatrix was also an attempt to strengthen relations (below, p. 449).

⁴⁴
RHL I
, 191.

⁴⁵
W. Childs,
Anglo-Castilian Trade in the Late Middle Ages
(Manchester, 1978), 43–6.

⁴⁶
CPR 1408–13
, 234; cf.
Signet Letters
, nos. 691–3.

⁴⁷
Foedera
, viii.312, 345, 351–2;
RHL I
, 191.

⁴⁸
Gutierre Diaz de Gamez,
The Unconquered Knight: A Chronicle of the Deeds of Don Pero Niño, Count of Buelna
, ed. J. Evans (Woodbridge, 2004 reprint), 100, 110, 131;
Saint-Denys
, iii.159.

⁴⁹
Diaz de Gamez, The Unconquered Knight
, 122–3;
Foedera
, viii.425–6.

⁵⁰
She and João also fathered the ‘Illustrious Generation’, which included King Henry the Navigator: Russell,
English Intervention
, 526–48; A. Goodman, ‘Philippa of Lancaster, Queen of Portugal’,
ODNB
, 44.38–9.

⁵¹
Foedera
, viii.561–7; Ana Echevarria Arsuaga, ‘The Shrine as Mediator’, in
England and Iberia in the Late Middle Ages, 12th to 15th Centuries
, ed. Maria Bullón-Fernández (London, 2007), 47–65;
RHL II
, 287;
POPC
, ii.24–6, 118.

⁵²
Foedera
, viii.593, 617–21, 703, 705, 721, 770, 772;
RHL II
, 309, 311–12, 318, 326. See C 49/48, no. 12 and
CPR 1408–13
, 474, for a case involving a Spanish cargo seized by John Hauley junior of Dartmouth.

⁵³
Foedera
, ix.12; in the past England had allied with Aragon at times of tension with Castile.

⁵⁴
Carus-Wilson and Coleman,
England's Export Trade
, 122–3, 138.

⁵⁵
J. Ramsay,
Lancaster and York
(2 vols, Oxford, 1892), i.150–1, notionally adjusted in line with the comments of M. Ormrod, ‘Finance and Trade under Richard II’, in
Richard II: The Art of Kingship
, ed. J. Gillespie and A. Goodman (Oxford, 1999), 155–86, at pp. 176–8.

⁵⁶
A. Ruddick,
English Identity and Political Culture in the Fourteenth Century
(Cambridge, 2013), 104–7, 129–30.

⁵⁷
PROME
, viii.536;
Foedera
, viii.719. The later years of Henry's reign saw many letters of denization granted (R. Griffiths, ‘The English Realm and Dominions and the King's Subjects in the Later Middle Ages’, in
Aspects of Late Medieval Government and Society
, ed. J. Rowe (Toronto, 1986), 83–105, at p. 101).

⁵⁸
For anti-Welsh legislation see Davies,
Revolt
, 282–4, and above, p. 188. The 1366 Statute of Kilkenny erecting a cordon sanitaire between English colonists and native Irish was reissued in 1402 and 1409, and the first parliament of Henry V's reign ordered a general expulsion of the Irish from England, although Irish graduates, lawyers, professed religious, ‘merchants of good repute’ and those who had inheritances in England were excepted:
CIRCLE PR 1401–2
, no. 255;
PR 1402–3
, no. 247 (a man of Irish blood ‘freed from all Irish servitude’);
CR 1405–6
, no. 3 (a ‘mere Irishman’);
Ancient Irish Histories
, 19, 22;
PROME
, ix.28. See also A. Ruddick, ‘English Identity and Political Language in the King of England's Dominions: a Fourteenth-Century Perspective’, in
Fifteenth-Century England VI
, ed. L. Clark (Woodbridge, 2006); J. Gillingham, ‘Conquering the Barbarians: War and Chivalry in Twelfth-Century Britain and Ireland’,
The Haskins Society Journal
4 (1992), 67–84.

⁵⁹
PROME
, viii.136–7, 145 (legislation), and ix.11 (Rees ap Thomas);
Usk
, xxi–xxix; BL Add. MS 24,062, fo. 71r (royal letter for enforcement of laws); SC 1/43/61 (slaying of Welshmen).

⁶⁰
The Views of Hosts
, xii (quote).

Chapter 23

ENGLAND, THE PAPACY AND THE COUNCIL OF PISA (1404–1409)

In addition to neighbours and traders, the third major strand in Henry's foreign policy was Anglo-Papal relations. In one sense, this had become easier since the outbreak in 1378 of the Great Schism. Popes, whether Roman or Avignonese, feared losing the support of secular rulers and tried not to antagonize them, which meant inter alia that they were slower to throw their weight behind disputatious clerics, be they primates or parish priests. In the long term, this contributed to the spread of Gallicanism – the movement towards national Churches in which secular authorities arrogated to themselves more of the powers that had once been exercised by either the Papacy or the Catholic hierarchy in the name of a universal Church. Yet the Schism also made international relations more complicated, for it imposed on rulers the moral duty to restore unity to the Catholic Church while simultaneously anathematizing those with whom they had to negotiate in order to do so. Henry certainly wanted to resolve the Schism, but, like other secular rulers, he did not want that resolution to entail reversal of the gains made by the crown in extending its authority over the Church. Among those gains he would have counted the extension of royal justice to include criminal clergy and the limits imposed on the papal right to make appointments to the English Church. It was around such questions that the relationship between kings and their archbishops often turned.

Despite his service and commitment to the Lancastrian regime, Archbishop Arundel never forgot that he was first and foremost the head of the Catholic Church in England. Nothing tested his relationship with Henry as sorely as the execution of Archbishop Scrope. The right of clergy to claim immunity from secular justice was an issue which had caused controversy for centuries, most famously during the quarrel between Henry II and Becket in the 1160s. What was at stake in Henry IV's reign was not benefit of clergy (which covered felonies, and had been relatively clearly defined in the statute
Pro Clero
of 1352) but the vaguer concept of clerical privilege,
especially in relation to bishops.
¹
What Scrope was accused of in 1405 was treason, and although treason was not clergyable (as the first convocation of the reign acknowledged), it was certainly not customary to put great clerics to death: Alexander Nevill, archbishop of York, and Arundel himself had both been accused of treason, in 1388 and 1397, respectively, but were exiled rather than executed. Nevertheless, convocation in 1399 expressed outrage at the way in which churchmen had been arrested, imprisoned and even hanged on the orders of secular authorities during Richard II's reign, and evidently expected better from Henry.
²

A test case arose almost immediately: that of Thomas Merks, bishop of Carlisle. Despite pressure from the commons, Henry had been careful in October 1399 not to put Merks on trial in parliament along with the Counter-Appellants (of whose crimes some regarded him as equally guilty), but three months later, when Merks joined the Epiphany rising, he lost patience. Those who committed treason, the bishop was informed in the Tower on 28 January, would be dealt with by the law of the land, clerical immunity notwithstanding; a week later he was condemned to death.
³
This was the first time since the Conquest that a bishop had been sentenced to death in England, and Arundel promptly summoned a meeting of prelates to register its disapproval. Adam Usk attended this meeting: ‘more crimes have been committed against prelates in England than in the whole of Christendom’, he fulminated, while Arundel reminded the delegates of the case of Thomas de Lisle, bishop of Ely, whom Archbishop Islip (1349–66) had taken by the hand and led away rather than allow him to stand trial in a secular court.
⁴
Yet Henry had decided to make an example of Merks, and on 15 March wrote to the pope insisting that he be degraded and handed over ‘plainly and summarily’ to secular justice; if not, the king would proceed as he saw fit. During the summer, however, probably in response to Arundel's pleas, Henry relented, and on 28 November 1400
Merks was pardoned, although the king made it clear that this was only as an act of special grace, and he was not reinstated to his see.
⁵

Yet if Henry eventually drew back from the ultimate sanction in Merks's case, his clemency did not extend to lesser clerics. In February 1401 the Canterbury scribe William Clerk was mutilated and decapitated for disparaging the king; June 1402 saw the hanging of the friars and other clerics for claiming that Richard II was still alive.
⁶
This was the largest number of clergy executed at one time in England, and again Arundel responded. Three months later in parliament he and his suffragans presented a petition asking the king to confirm
Pro Clero
, specifically including ‘treason which does not concern the king or his royal majesty’, as well as common theft and highway robbery, among the crimes that ought to be clergyable, since it was an offence to God and a violation of ecclesiastical liberty to sentence clerks accused of these crimes in secular courts. Theft and highway robbery Henry was prepared to concede (thereby clarifying to the clergy's benefit a point which the 1352 statute had left uncertain), but in the case of treason, even if it did not directly concern the king, Arundel was told to consult with his bishops and, before the next parliament, draw up guidelines to ensure that they should not be allowed to purge themselves of their crimes and thus evade proper punishment. If Henry considered these guidelines inadequate, he would devise ‘another remedy, in such a way as shall become evident’; in other words, if the clergy did not ensure that treasonous clerks were suitably punished, then he would.
⁷

Pending agreement on these guidelines, the issue of clerical immunity receded for a while, perhaps because the king stayed his hand – for example, in the case of the three abbots who conspired with the countess of Oxford in 1404.
⁸
Then came Scrope's execution. High treason may not have been clergyable, but was Scrope a traitor? The parliament of 1406 had its doubts. Even if he was, did the Court of Chivalry (or possibly just an ad
hoc tribunal of royal
familiares
) have the right to condemn him? Chief Justice Gascoigne had his doubts, and the rapid growth of the archbishop's martyr-cult suggests that many others did too. Was Scrope degraded before trial, as he should have been, or was his archiepiscopal cross simply wrested from his grasp? Such irregularities at once placed Henry on the defensive, and had Arundel not held back from publishing Innocent VII's bull of excommunication, a breakdown in Church–crown relations might have followed. Yet despite his opposition to Scrope's execution, Arundel still tried to save the king from the consequences of his action.
⁹

It may be that Henry's hand was forced by retainers who threatened to desert him if Scrope was not put to death, but he had also had enough of clerical opposition to his rule and probably felt that a terrible example was required. Scrope's ‘army’ had included hundreds, if not thousands, of clerics, and well might the king have wondered what message it would convey to execute an earl for rebellion but to leave a bishop untouched. Yet whether or not his retainers really would have deserted him, those ‘knights who never loved the church’ were not simply figments of the chroniclers' imagination. It was not just Wyclifites who called for churchmen to be subject to royal justice.
¹⁰
On the other hand, Gascoigne's refusal to condemn Scrope represented an approach characteristic of legal opinion in Henry's reign. He and his fellow Chief Justice William Thirning were generally careful to observe the jurisdiction of Church courts, and so, in certain respects, was the king, as indicated by his response to the episcopal petition of 1402.
¹¹
In legal terms, Henry believed himself to be within his rights in executing Scrope, for if it was treason of which he was guilty, it was decidedly treason of concern to the king. Whether it was sensible to do so is a different matter, but the fact that he managed, with Arundel's help, to contain the fallout, probably persuaded him that his show of force had been vindicated. In February 1408, when Lewis Byford, bishop of Bangor, the prior of Hexham, the abbot of Hailes and several monks and chaplains joined Northumberland and Bardolf's last rebellion, Henry
treated them with circumspection, hanging only the abbot (who was a renegade from his house and was captured in arms) while pardoning the others, although Byford was imprisoned for several months and deprived of his see.
¹²
Henry had made his point, and by and large he had got away with it.

However, it was not so much the issue of clerical immunity as the Statutes of Provisors, which deprived the papacy of both patronage and revenue, that led to England being described on occasion as a ‘disobedient nation’.
¹³
In theory, the First Statute of Provisors (1351) forbade all papal provisions (appointments) to English benefices, and was given teeth two years later when the Statute of Praemunire outlawed appeals to the Curia. In practice, both Edward III and Richard II allowed limited evasion of the statute when it suited them to do so, although quite sparingly. A second statute in 1390 strengthened the penalties against those who sought provisions from Rome, but in the following year a moderation (
soefferance
) permitted the king to negotiate individual cases with the pope. What this meant was that he could issue licences to evade the statute or, if he wished, sanction suits against unwelcome provisions. Although it was only agreed for a trial period in the first instance, it gave the crown a loophole too valuable to be discarded and was renewed by Henry IV at the start of his reign.
¹⁴