Henry IV (92 page)

¹⁰
Even this was arguably not a ‘new summons’: E. Powell and K. Wallis,
The House of Lords in the Late Middle Ages
(London, 1968), 436. Tuchet descended from Joan, sister of Nicholas, Lord Audley (d.1391), but was not summoned until 1404 and died in 1408. John Talbot, John Oldcastle and Hugh Stafford were summoned to parliament in 1410–11 because they had married the daughters of peers, Lords Furnivall, Cobham and Bourchier, respectively.

¹¹
PROME
, viii.303, 348; S. Walker, ‘Erpingham, Thomas’,
ODNB
, 18.512–14. Henry V, following his father's lead, exercised similar care with peerage creations, although in Henry VI's minority the lords were more open-handed.

¹²
He issued only six licences to crenellate during his reign, five to royal knights or esquires (including John Stanley and Robert Waterton), the sixth for a house at the entrance to Dartmouth harbour to be fortified against seaborne attack (
CPR 1401–5
, 164, 219, 255;
CPR 1405–8
, 161, 207;
CPR 1408–13
, 160, 232).

¹³
PROME
, viii.89–90, 534–5. John Bussy's son John tried to recover the manors of Silkby and Dembleby (Lincolnshire) on the grounds that they had been enfeoffed by his father on the day he died, but his plea was eventually rejected in 1409 on the grounds that parliament had upheld the king's right to them ‘by way of conquest, because the said William Lescrope, John Bussy and Henry Green were destroyers of the said King Richard and of all his realm’. Arundel as chancellor gave this judgment, with the advice of the justices (C 49/68, no. 2).

¹⁴
PROME
, viii.33, 64, 69. In fact he allowed the widows of John Holand (the king's sister Elizabeth) and Thomas Despenser to sue for dower. Fee simple implied primogenitary heritability of land; tail, or ‘entail’, limited heritability to direct descendants, and could be further limited, for example, to males (‘tail male’); it was frequently employed along with a remainder clause, thus creating additional rights in the estate.

¹⁵
A curious entry in the Year Book for the first year of Henry's reign which records the trial of ‘G counte de H’ – usually taken to mean John, earl of Huntingdon – for high treason before ‘D counte de Westmorland’ and the lords at Westminster in January 1400, was fabricated either at the time or later as an example of ‘How a Lord shall be Tried by his Peers’ and is manifestly a forgery. It is difficult to think that Henry IV's lawyers could have been responsible for such a gross misrepresentation and such errors when the events in question were so recent (
Legal History: The Year Books
, ed. D. J. Seipp at
http://www.bu.edu/law/seipp/
).

¹⁶
E 37/28, and see above p. 163; one, Sir Alan Buxhull, was acquitted; and for John Ferrour's pardon, see above. p. 29.

¹⁷
PROME
, viii.109–10.

¹⁸
Statutes of the Realm
, ii.152 (c.v, Northumberland and Bardolf), 154 (c.xii, the 1400 rebels).

¹⁹
Foedera
, viii.529.

²⁰
They were not said to have
agreed
with the decision, as the fifty-seven lords who consented to Richard II's imprisonment in 1399 had done (
PROME
, viii.34–5, 110).

²¹
The word ‘attainder’ had been used during the fourteenth century in a general way as a synonym for ‘condemned’ or ‘convicted’, but now ‘by an etymological fancy which warped the meaning of the word’, it came to mean the ‘tainting’ or ‘corrupting’ of the blood (
Oxford English Dictionary
, i.761–2).

²²
For attainder see J. Bellamy,
The Law of Treason in England in the Later Middle Ages
(London, 1970), 177–205; the first parliamentary example of a
sentence
of corruption of the blood was in 1450 (Jack Cade); see also the bill against the duke of Suffolk
PROME
, xii.202–3). For corruption of the blood as a ‘legal doctrine’, see
Henry V: The Practice of Kingship
, ed. G. Harriss (Oxford, 1987), 39.

²³
PROME
, viii.42 (where ‘interruption of the blood’ is mentioned in the response to the petition).

²⁴
PROME
, viii.478–9, 532–5;
CPR 1408–13
, 195–6. Some lands were restored to John Lumley in 1405, but he was never summoned to parliament; his son Thomas was only summoned from 1461, when at the age of 53 he succeeded in having his grandfather's attainder reversed (Brown, ‘Authorization of Letters’, 137–8).

²⁵
PROME
, viii.411, 533–4;
CPR 1408–13
, 54, 353; T. Pugh,
Henry V and the Southampton Plot of 1415
(Gloucester, 1988), 130.

²⁶
Powell and Wallis,
The House of Lords
, 445–6, argued that corruption of the blood was used to seize entailed lands; if not, it facilitated the process.

²⁷
PROME
, ix.42–4, 69–70, 293–6. Thomas's 1421 petition stated that but for the 1401 judgment he ‘would have been heir in blood’ to his father. For his career, see A. Curry, ‘Montague, Thomas, Fourth Earl of Salisbury’,
ODNB
, 38.767–9.

²⁸
Harriss,
Henry V
, 38–40.

²⁹
Bellamy,
Law of Treason
, 116–17, 136–7, 156–64, 183–5, 204–5; Archer, ‘Parliamentary Restoration’, 101–2.

³⁰
PROME
, viii.231–2; Strohm,
England's Empty Throne
, 25–7; E. Powell, ‘The Strange Death of Sir John Mortimer: Politics and the Law of Treason in Lancastrian England’, in
Rulers and Ruled in Late Medieval England: Essays Presented to Gerald Harriss
, ed. R. Archer and S. Walker (London, 1995), 83–97.

³¹
PROME
, viii.289.

³²
PROME
, viii.88–9.

³³
PROME
, viii.233, 264: the petition said the lands they held to the use of others were ‘on the point of being forfeited if a remedy is not ordained’.

³⁴
Statutes of the Realm
, ii.152–4.

³⁵
Holand, born in 1383, was styled earl of Kent from 1403, but like Montague he did not recover all his family's lands; he died in 1408 (M. Stansfield, ‘Edmund Holand, Seventh Earl of Kent’,
ODNB
, 27.657–8).

³⁶
R. Archer, ‘John Mowbray, Second Duke of Norfolk’,
ODNB
, 39.579–81; although the lordship of Gower, long-disputed between the Beauchamp and Mowbray families, was granted to Warwick in 1405, the grant did not take effect.

³⁷
John Holand was still under age in 1413, but Henry V restored him to his father's earldom of Huntingdon when he came of age in 1414 (R. A. Griffiths, ‘John Holand, First Earl of Huntingdon and Duke of Exeter’,
ODNB
, 27.674–6). It is worth noting that none of the heirs of Henry IV's traitors were implicated in the 1415 Southampton Plot.

³⁸
Keen, ‘Treason Trials under the Law of Arms’, 85–103; Dunn,
Politics of Magnate Power
, 123; Bellamy,
Law of Treason
, 156–60.

³⁹
With the lands forfeited by Northumberland in 1405, note the distinction between those granted to Prince John, which were in tail male, and those granted to Westmorland, which were for life (
CPR 405–8
, 40, 50).

⁴⁰
The largest exchequer annuities to nobles apart from Beaufort's (above, p. 440) were Edmund duke of York's 1,000 marks, granted in 1385, and Thomas Percy's 500 marks, granted in 1399 in return for lands surrendered.

⁴¹
Above, p. 134 and see the king's quittance of Nov. 1402 to John Ikelyngton for surrendering to him £43,964, plus ‘a great sum in jewels and valuables’, almost certainly seized from Holt castle by Richard in 1397.

⁴²
The king and queen of Portugal (Henry's sister) wrote to Henry begging him to remit this sum, but he was reluctant to do so. Philippa wrote: ‘my most exceeding best beloved brother, you know well that he [Arundel] is now married not at all by his proper inclination, but on the contrary by your commandment, partly at my instance . . .’ (
RHL
, ii.92–102).
Original Letters
, i.53, has a letter from the earl to Henry begging pardon for not paying a debt he owed the king because of the great sums he had spent bringing Beatrix to England.

⁴³
G. Harriss, ‘Thomas Fitzalan, Fifth Earl of Arundel’,
ODNB
, 19.772–3; Steel,
Receipt
, 189. Earl Richard (d.1376) sometimes loaned £20,000 at a time to Edward III (C. Given-Wilson, ‘Richard Fitzalan, Third Earl of Arundel’,
ODNB
, 19.768–9). See Arundel's letter to the archbishop asking him not to believe the ‘complaints and suggestions’ which people were making to him and the king, dated December during ‘this present parliament’, probably 1411 (
POPC
, ii.117). The prince also retained the earl of Warwick for 250 marks after Warwick returned from the Holy Land in 1410 (Harriss,
Henry V
, 33).

⁴⁴
Before Prince Henry took charge of them in 1409, John Pelham guarded the Mortimer brothers (E 403/596, 4 Dec. 1408).

⁴⁵
Richard was, presumably, assuming that Duke Edmund would by then be dead.

Chapter 29

WAR AND DIPLOMACY

Not all those who cultivated a chivalric reputation also enjoyed battlefield success, but Henry did. He took part in three battles – Radcot Bridge, Vilnius, and Shrewsbury – and three times ended on the winning side. His ‘conquest’ of 1399 involved little actual fighting, but that was in part because of the speed and boldness of his campaign; in 1403, he again seized the initiative by catching up with Hotspur just nine days after hearing of his uprising. Henry's triumph in 1399 is sometimes attributed largely to Richard's folly, and much of the credit for the battle of Shrewsbury given to Dunbar and Prince Henry, but it is difficult not to think that the king made some of his own luck.

The Welsh revolt was a more intractable affair. Had Henry had the time and money to spend six months or a year in Wales, as Edward I had done, the story might have been different. Henry knew and copied Edward's tactics, marching a circuit around Snowdonia in 1400 and setting up a three-pronged invasion strategy from Chester, Shrewsbury and Hereford in 1402, much as Edward had done in 1277 and 1282–3, respectively. Yet it was only in 1402 that he was able to plan a strategy rather than fight fires. In September 1400 it was North Wales that was ablaze, a year later Carmarthenshire and Cardiganshire, in 1403 Carmarthenshire again, while in 1405 his aims were to halt the Franco-Welsh advance and relieve Coety castle.
¹
None of these campaigns lasted more than four weeks, partly because the weather closed in, although it was not by choice that they all fell in September or October. In 1401, 1403 and 1405 Henry's intention was to campaign in Wales earlier in the summer. Even so, the pleas of his supporters in Wales made it clear that they valued his presence there, and it is worth remembering that the year when he did not go, 1404, witnessed the peak of Owain's fortunes: the fall of Harlech, Aberystwyth and Kidwelly, the seizure of Cardiff, and the most intense period of
devastation of Shropshire and Herefordshire.
²
Unfortunately, this was simply not a war that could be won at a stroke, nor was it a war which offered much hope of chivalric glory. Nevertheless, the systematic devastation and pillage practised by his soldiers made survival difficult for the rebels, as well as putting heart into the English settlers and driving Glyn Dŵr's men back from the border counties.

In the first few years of the reign, the English response in Wales was bedevilled by confusion and disagreement as well as lack of funds. The Percys, convinced from an early stage of the need to negotiate with Glyn Dŵr, reckoned the king's insistence on
force majeure
to be pig-headed and Prince Henry's authority over them as irksome, especially after he was made the king's lieutenant at the age of sixteen in March 1403. The political aftermath of the battle of Shrewsbury, the prince's convalescence, and the crown's bankruptcy meant that not until early 1405 was it possible to invest in the strategy which ultimately proved successful: a combination of properly maintained garrisons in the principality and mobile troop concentrations in the marches.
³
This was quite different from the type of war the English were accustomed to fighting in northern France, though not dissimilar to that in Guyenne, which might explain the more pragmatic approach advocated by Hotspur and Worcester, both of whom had served long spells and held high office in the duchy.
⁴

Despite this, a decade of warfare in Wales provided the opportunity for strategic developments, the most enduring of which was the growth in the ratio of archers to men-at-arms in English forces. In the 1370s and 1380s the standard mixed retinue for English campaigns to France contained equal numbers of each, but by the time Henry V invaded France in 1415 the norm was three archers to each man-at-arms for mobile land forces and two to one for naval forces and garrisons.
⁵
Richard II's Scottish and Irish armies of 1385 and 1394 had included around twice and three times as many archers as men-at-arms, respectively. Initially Henry increased the
ratio: for his Scottish campaign of 1400 he had 11,314 archers and just 1,771 men-at-arms, the greatest preponderance of archers (6.5:1) in any medieval English army.
⁶
The force which Prince Henry maintained on the Welsh border in the summer of 1403 was made up of 2,500 archers and 500 men-at-arms (5:1).
⁷
These ratios might have been dictated by financial considerations (men-at-arms were paid twelve pence a day, archers six), by the social diversity of retinue captains, or by the belief that longbowmen would be more effective in dealing with difficult terrain and guerrilla skirmishing. On the other hand, it is clear from contemporary accounts of the battles of Humbleton Hill and Shrewsbury that in open-field battles also it was archers who constituted a commander's deadliest weapon, and the consensus within a few years on a ratio of around three to one acknowledged their attritional value in all forms of warfare. This was the ratio adopted for the army led by Clarence to France in 1412, for the Agincourt campaign three years later, and for most of the subsequent expeditions of the Hundred Years War.