Henry IV (91 page)

Acts of attainder – which were often passed against those already dead and in any case precluded any defence – had an unsavoury future ahead of them, and the lords were uneasy about refinements in their interpretation.
²⁹
Whether Henry kept his word not to extend the definition of treason is a moot point. The lords were unwilling to be pushed too far, as they made clear in January 1404 by declaring that Northumberland was only guilty of trespass. The conviction of fifteen friars and others in 1402 for what was in effect treason by words could arguably be construed as falling
within the terms of the 1352 act as ‘compassing’ or ‘imagining’ the death of the king, but treason by words was a grey area and, as the king discovered, jurors were reluctant to convict on such grounds.
³⁰
Yet arguably the most bizarre extension of the idea of treason came not from the king but from the commons when they insisted in November 1404 that any person found to be misappropriating the subsidies granted for war ‘shall incur the penalty of treason’.
³¹
This was not the same as calling it treason, but it highlighted another development of Henry's reign, the sentencing to a traitor's death of men not actually convicted of treason. For his involvement in Gloucester's murder, John Hall was condemned in the first parliament of the reign ‘to suffer as harsh a death as could be adjudged or imposed upon him’ – drawn, disembowelled, hanged, beheaded and quartered – though treason was not mentioned.
³²

The spate of conspiracies during the first half of the reign certainly led Henry to mete out more condign punishments. William Clerk, the Cheshire scribe who criticized the king with both spoken and written words, does not seem to have been convicted of treason, but nevertheless had his tongue and right hand cut off before being decapitated, while the drawn-out agonies of William Serle were, as the king admitted, more dreadful than any traitor had suffered before. Harsher penalties also extended to forfeitures: when Hotspur and Worcester were posthumously convicted in the parliament of January 1404, their entailed and enfeoffed lands were forfeited, as well as those they held in fee simple, while the lands they held to the use of others were only excluded following a petition from the commons.
³³
The judgments of 1406 against Northumberland and Bardolf and the rebel lords of 1400 were also careful to state that none of the lands which any of them had held to the use of others should be forfeited to the king and that any grants he had made from such lands were null and void; these were also probably in response to a common petition.
³⁴

Yet if the road to recovery for the heirs of traitors was growing longer and the chances of complete restoration of their ancestors' property diminishing, in practice Henry usually allowed them to rehabilitate themselves:
Edmund Holand and Thomas Montague were recognized as earls of Kent and Salisbury, respectively, when they came of age despite their forebears' convictions for treason.
³⁵
The stages of the reconciliation process are exemplified in the case of John Mowbray, son of Henry's old foe and brother of the young earl of Nottingham executed with Archbishop Scrope in 1405. In 1407, aged fifteen, John was placed in the care of the king's mother-in-law, the countess of Hereford, with an allowance of £200 a year for his maintenance; in 1410 he joined the king's household and recovered some of his lands, and in the following year his wardship and marriage were sold for £2,000 to the king's brother-in-law the earl of Westmorland, who married him to his daughter Katherine and restored to him, probably at the king's behest, the title of Earl Marshal which had been such a bone of contention between the two families before 1405. Finally, three weeks before Henry IV's death, John received livery of his lands and was recognized as earl of Nottingham, although he continued to badger Henry V and Henry VI for the restoration of his full rights.
³⁶
Henry IV habitually used trusted members of his family to oversee the rehabilitation of his opponents' heirs: the countess of Hereford had custody of Richard de Vere, heir to the earldom of Oxford, as well as of John Mowbray. John Holand, son of the earl of Huntingdon, was brought up by his mother Elizabeth, the king's sister, while Richard, son of Thomas Despenser, married another of Westmorland's daughters, although he died in 1413 before reaching his majority.
³⁷
However, none of these traitors' heirs recovered their ancestors' lands in full, which tended to make them more dependent on service to the crown to supplement their landed income.

As to the king's conduct of treason trials, this was generally consistent, at least in cases where laymen were involved. The sentences on the Cleveland and Northumberland rebels in July 1405 were given in the Court of Chivalry and according to the law of arms, presided over by the sixteen-year-old Prince John as constable of England. Charges against Northumberland and Bardolf were also first brought in the Court of Chivalry before
being moved to parliament, which is doubtless also how the earl of Worcester was dealt with at the battle of Shrewsbury. It was by now the customary way of conducting treason trials in time of rebellion. When it came to clerics, the treason trials of Henry's reign aroused more controversy. Archbishop Scrope was also probably tried, along with the layman Thomas Mowbray, in the Court of Chivalry, with Sir William Fulthorpe acting as the constable's lieutenant; it was not the procedure per se that Chief Justice Gascoigne objected to, but the right of the Court of Chivalry to try a man of the cloth, let alone an archbishop.
³⁸
The fact that a London jury simply refused to take part in the trial of the friars in 1402, and the prolonged and inconclusive trials in the 1406 parliament, indicate further unease about Henry's treatment of clerics and suggest that he had not entirely assuaged the fears expressed about treason in his first parliament. However, he did not put women to death: the countess of Oxford and Lady Despenser, both of whom had almost certainly plotted to remove, if not kill, the king, were each imprisoned for less than a year.

If Richard II had striven to master the aristocracy, Henry IV showed how they might be mobilized in support of the crown – not by veering capriciously between threats and prodigality, but by firmness, consistency and partnership. In one respect he was fortunate, for after 1399, with the duchy of Lancaster now held by the crown, its territorial resources dwarfed those of any duke or earl, marking a decisive shift in the balance between the landed power of the crown and that of the nobility. Capitalizing on this, Henry systematically exalted the power and prestige of his family by abstaining from new creations, promotions, or grants in fee which might allow other noble families to establish regional power-bases.
³⁹
The alternative, making them dependent on the crown, naturally came at a price: John Beaufort's chief source of income was the £1,000 annuity granted to him in 1404, and such grants placed enormous strain on the exchequer.
⁴⁰
Yet Henry made sure that even great nobles of unquestioned loyalty knew their place. Thomas Fitzalan, earl of Arundel – whose father, Richard, Henry had colluded in condemning to death in 1397 – took as great a risk as Henry
himself when, as an eighteen-year-old, he returned to England in the summer of 1399, but although he was restored to his father's lands and title and made a Knight of the Garter he received little else and lost much. In 1397 Richard II had confiscated not just the Fitzalan lands but also the vast store of cash and valuables accumulated by Thomas's grandfather and stored by his father at Holt castle (Clwyd). Little or nothing of this was returned to him after being removed by Henry in 1399.
⁴¹
While still a minor, Earl Thomas also purchased from Henry for ‘a sum of gold’ the right to marry whom he wished, but within a few years the king, keen to cement the Anglo-Portuguese alliance, pushed him into a marriage with Beatrix, illegitimate daughter of the king of Portugal, for which he was mulcted £1,333.
⁴²
Being obliged in 1405 to concede precedence to the earl of Kent must also have piqued him, for all this was despite years of service in Wales, at the battle of Shrewsbury and helping to suppress the northern risings in 1405, as well as a catastrophic fall in income from his great marcher lordships of Bromfield and Yale, Oswestry, Chirk and Clun. No wonder that the young earl eventually threw in his lot with Prince Henry, who in 1407 retained him for an annual fee of 250 marks; he continued to drift steadily out of the king's and his uncle the archbishop's orbit. His relief when Henry V became king induced him to lend £3,000 to the exchequer in 1414–15, although he had declined to advance loans to Henry IV.
⁴³

Yet if Henry could be a hard taskmaster, there was no question of a policy of deprivation of the landed nobility; those who remained loyal remained secure, as Henry had promised them in 1399 that they would. It was those who did not who were cut down to size, their families reduced to dependency on royal grace for even a limited measure of recovery. The king – or at any rate the Lancastrian dynasty – enjoyed a high level of
support from most of the nobles after 1403 and from practically all of them after 1405. Henry learned from the mistakes of his early years. It was the combination of a regional power-base with an unparalleled series of military commands, bolstered by influence at court and on the council, which had emboldened the Percys to challenge the king in 1403. Never again was a family permitted to accumulate such power, whatever its status. By birth, the three greatest families in the land apart from the king's were the Beauforts, the Mortimers and the house of York. Each in turn was put firmly in its place. However much the king trusted the Beauforts – and he did – the less than wholehearted confirmation of their act of legitimation in 1407 made it clear that they were not in the line of succession. The earl of March, whose great estates in Wales, Ireland and England and embarrassingly close kinship to the king qualified him for the role of pretender, was never treated in public as a member of the royal family. Although not persecuted, he was watched closely, especially after 1405, and denied the customary honours of a young nobleman of his standing such as election to the Order of the Garter.
⁴⁴
The grant to Prince Thomas of the dukedom of Clarence in July 1412, shortly before March came of age, was a calculated snub, making it clear that this title, created for Edmund's great-grandfather Lionel and derived from the Mortimer honour of Clare (Suffolk), would not be returning to the family for the foreseeable future. Emasculated by his ancestry, Edmund became a pawn in the intrigues of others, not just the Percys but also the king's cousins, the house of York. As for the latter, if Constanza Despenser's allegations of her brother Edward's complicity in the plot to abduct the Mortimer boys in February 1405 are to be believed, then all three children of Duke Edmund (d.1402) tried at one time or another to unseat the Lancastrian dynasty in favour of March, for it was their younger brother Richard, earl of Cambridge, who was the chief plotter in 1415. What motivated them was surely not a disinterested attachment to the principle of royal primogeniture; more likely, perhaps, that, despite their avowed aims, such scheming was born of a lingering hope that Richard II's desire to pass his throne to Edward might yet be realized.
⁴⁵
It was always the issue of legitimacy that snapped most doggedly at Henry's heels, and the problem of whom to trust even within the extended royal family never quite went away.

¹
The earls of Devon, Oxford and Suffolk were politically insignificant; Warwick died in 1401 and the king's uncle, York, in 1402; much was expected of Stafford and Kent, but they died in 1403 and 1408, each aged twenty-five, the latter childless, the former leaving a one-year-old son.

²
Harriss,
Cardinal Beaufort
, 23–67, and his articles on John, Henry and Thomas Beaufort in
ODNB
, 4, 625–32 (Henry), 637–8 (John), and 643–4 (Thomas).

³
The king originally granted 1,000 marks a year to John Beaufort's son, Henry, whose godfather he was; in Nov. 1404 this was increased to £1,000 and transferred to John himself, until lands could be found ‘which are not parcel of the crown’ (
CPR 1401–5
, 477; E 403/585, 26 March 1406). Thomas Beaufort's grant of the honour of Wormegay (Norfolk) in 1405 was for life, not in fee
CPR 1405–8
, 105).

⁴
The prince also became duke of Lancaster and Aquitaine and earl of Chester in the 1399 parliament. After John Beaufort's death his earldom of Somerset was kept for his son, but it may have been felt that such a great family ought to be represented by an earl at its head.

⁵
On the grounds that marquis was ‘an alien name in the kingdom’ (
PROME
, viii.164–5).

⁶
For the demotions in the 1399 parliament see above, p. 189. Thomas Mowbray should be added to their number, for although not judicially stripped of his dukedom of Norfolk it was denied to his family for twenty-five years (R. Archer, ‘Parliamentary Restoration: John Mowbray and the Dukedom of Norfolk in 1425’, in
Rulers and Ruled in Late Medieval England: Essays Presented to Gerald Harriss
, ed. R. Archer and S. Walker (London, 1995), 99–116, at pp. 101–2)

⁷
He was, however, granted a life annuity of 400 marks in 1409 (
RHKA
, 194).

⁸
For Berkeley, see
Catalogue of the Medieval Muniments at Berkeley Castle
, ed. B. Wells-Furby (2 vols, Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society, Bristol, 2004), xl–xli.

⁹
K. McFarlane,
The Nobility of Later Medieval England
(Oxford, 1973), 172–6, who tabulated rates of extinction (mainly through forfeiture or failure of male heirs) set against replacements through new summonses to parliament; cf. Harriss,
Shaping the Nation
, 97.