Henry V as Warlord (6 page)

However, the rising had lost Henry IV his chance to crush the Welsh. In August 1405 Marshal Jean de Rieux with 800 men-at-arms, 600 crossbowmen, and 1,200 light horse landed at Milford Haven. A Franco-Welsh army then marched into England to within eight miles of Worcester. But the king was inside the city with a strong force and they withdrew. The French went home the following spring.

There was a crisis of confidence in King Henry throughout the entire country. He had failed to crush the Welsh, while over the sea Bordeaux was in constant danger. French and Castilian privateers put every English seaman in fear for his life. The king spent too much on his household, squandered Crown revenues and defaulted on loans. The Parliament of 1406, which sat for no less than 139 days between March and December (including the Commons’ first all-night sitting), forced him to appoint a council to oversee financial policy in general and royal household expenditure in particular. The prince, although absent in Wales, was its nominal head while the Speaker of the House of Commons, Sir John Tiptoft, MP for Huntingdonshire, was made Treasurer of the Royal Household.

Tiptoft, who became Treasurer of England the following year, was to play an important part in Prince Henry’s life. He had joined Bolingbroke’s household as a young man and was with him on the march from Ravenspur. He had become a Knight of the Royal Household by 1403, the year in which he entered Parliament. Against his will but much to the king’s relief he was elected Speaker in 1406. He proved a consummate diplomat as well as an excellent administrator, retaining the confidence of both Henry and the Commons.
⁷

Prince Henry returned home in April 1406 just before the Welsh received their heaviest defeat so far, losing several thousand men. In June Lord Powys defeated Northumberland and Bardolf, who fled to France. By the end of the year Owain was on the defensive. In a policy which combined conciliation and savagery, Prince Henry lured men away from Owain with offers of a pardon and concentrated on re-taking castles.

Aberystwyth had been Owain’s headquarters since its capture in 1404. Prince Henry besieged the castle with 600 men-at-arms and 1,800 archers in June 1407. Six big cannon were shipped by sea from Bristol while others were brought by road – such as Henry IV’s favourite, the ‘Kinge’s Gonne’, weighing four-and-a-half tons. This was brought from Nottingham accompanied by 971 pounds of saltpetre, 303 pounds of sulphur and 538 pounds of made-up gunpowder. Vast amounts of gunstones, bow staves, bowstrings and arrows were assembled at Hereford. However, the castle was defended by the redoubtable Rhys the Black, Owain’s ablest lieutenant, and the English made slow progress, two of their biggest guns blowing up. In September Rhys agreed to surrender if not relieved by All Saints’ Day (1 November) but Owain, threatening to behead him, slipped briefly into Aberystwyth with reinforcements. The besiegers had to starve the castle into surrender. They were not helped by a dreadful winter, the worst in living memory, or by the dense woods.

Yet Anglesey, the granary of North Wales, had been subdued in 1406–7. In consequence not only was Aberystwyth doomed but Owain and his men were beginning to starve in their Snowdonian fastness. Adam of Usk crowned his bizarre career (prebendary in Wales, successful lawyer in London, convicted horse-thief, banished man, papal chaplain in Rome, down-and-out in Flanders) by joining them as a double-agent. He gives us some idea of the life they led – ‘sorely tormented with many and great perils of death and capture and false brethren, and hunger and thirst, and passing many nights without sleep for fear of the attacks of foes’.

Although by now in his late sixties Northumberland made a last attempt to raise England against the House of Lancaster. During the terrible winter of 1407–8 he and Lord Bardolf crossed the frozen Tweed but on 19 February their little army – mainly Percy tenants – was routed by the Sheriff of Yorkshire in the snow at Bramham Moor near Tadcaster. The Earl was killed and Bardolf died of his wounds the same night. It meant that Henry IV was at last secure on his throne. The supporters of Richard II and the Earl of March had been broken or driven underground, the Percies were destroyed and the tide was turning against the Welsh. The heir to the Scots throne, the future James I, had been intercepted on his way to France and would spend the next eighteen years in English captivity – King Henry joked that he himself could teach him French. And the French no longer had time to help the Welsh.

In France a duchy was not just a title as in England (save for Lancaster) but a huge concentration of rich estates whose dukes commanded large armies of vassals. The Dukes of Burgundy and Orleans had long disputed which of them was to control the poor mad king. Finally John of Burgundy had Louis of Orleans hacked to death one dark November evening in Paris, in the rue Vieille-du-Temp. The body was left lying in the gutter, its hands cut off to stop necromancers using it to raise the Devil. Louis’s successor Charles (the poet duke) had married as his first wife Richard II’s widow Isabel and wanted war with England; by contrast the Burgundians wanted peace since war would damage Flemish trade. When Isabel died in 1409 Charles married the daughter of Bernard, Count of Armagnac, who was a hardbitten southern nobleman of such forceful personality that the Orleanists were rechristened Armagnacs. John of Burgundy was a small, ugly man, cynical and treacherous. Besides his duchy he ruled the county of Flanders and held court at his two capitals of Dijon and Brussels with regal pomp. His two great blocks of territory (a vast area of eastern France and what is today Belgium and Holland) were separate; if he could secure the lands between, his power would enormously increase. The squabbles of Burgundians and Armagnacs grew bitterer and bloodier every day.

Meanwhile Prince Henry presided over Owain’s final destruction. In the summer of 1408 Aberystwyth was at last starved into surrender, Rhys the Black marching forlornly into the hills. Early in 1409 Harlech too surrendered, Glyn Dŵr’s entire family save for one son being taken prisoner; Sir Edmund Mortimer had ‘brought his days of sorrow’ to an end in the castle, dying during the siege. Henceforward Henry watched Welsh affairs from afar. Owain launched a last campaign in 1410 but his men were cut to pieces, his principal lieutenants including Rhys the Black being captured – to be hanged, drawn and quartered immediately. Glyn Dŵr roamed the mountains with an armed band for another three years. No one knows where or when he died.

Henry V’s Welsh wars prepared him for the conquest of France. He had learnt siegecraft and gunnery (while agreeing with his father that it was cheaper to defend a castle than to capture one). He had also learnt how to control large areas of conquered territory by carefully sited small garrisons – using systematic terror, artificially induced famine and calculated conciliation to hold down the hostile population. He had employed Edward I’s coastal fortresses as they had been during the thirteenth-century conquest of Wales; as strong-points reinforced and revictualled by ship, from whence to rush in fresh troops to isolated garrisons and launch surprise attacks. One day he would use France’s inland waterways in the same fashion.

He now knew how to deploy very limited manpower to maximum effect. At Harlech five Englishmen and sixteen Welshmen had held the castle against Glyn Dŵr for several years while at one stage only twenty-eight men had defended the town and castle of Caernarfon. He understood how to combine the lethal fire-power of his bowmen in a defensive position with mobility, by giving them horses; carrying their own fodder, if necessary, they could cover long distances very fast, dismounting to shoot when in action.

There had been another crucial influence, Vegetius’s
De Re Militari
which for medieval commanders was the equivalent of a modern staff manual. Because of its fourth-century author’s preoccupation with infantry it had become especially popular in England after foot soldiers had learnt how to rout cavalry with arrow fire. There were several translations; some manuscripts which have survived were folded for carrying in the pocket on campaign. The section most read was the third, dealing with strategy and tactics, which we may be sure that Henry had studied closely. He noted Vegetius’s advocacy of the use of hunger to destroy the enemy.

England had been horrified by the prospect of an independent Wales, and recognized that the war had been won by the prince. Here at last was the good governance promised by the king. Like so many gifted heirs, Henry was impatient for the power which he knew he was much better fitted to use than his ailing father.

III

‘
He Would Usurp the Crown
’

‘… the king suspected that he would usurp the crown, he being alive, which suspicious jealousy was occasion that he in part withdrew his affection and singular love from the prince.’

The First English Life of King Henry the Fifth

‘Fair son, how can you have any right to it when I myself have none, as you know very well?’

Enguerrand de Monstrelet,
Les Chroniques

H
enry IV thought his malady a divine judgement on him for killing Archbishop Scrope (who had become known in Yorkshire as ‘St Richard’). Many of his subjects thought the same. ‘The king after that time lost the beauty of his face,’ says Friar Capgrave. ‘For as the common opinion went, from that time until his death he was a leper, and ever fouler and fouler.’
¹
His face and hands were covered with huge pustules, ‘great pushes like teats’ and if the statue at York Minster (on a screen begun in 1425) is a true likeness, his nose spread horribly. The disease was conceivably venereal or perhaps tubercular gangrene, or it may have been some sort of embolism. His first attack, which made him scream that he was on fire, cleared up quickly enough, but the disease returned at intervals, accompanied by other afflictions. His mind was affected besides his body, making it impossible for him to govern. His court physician, Master Malvern, could do little for him so two Jewish specialists were brought from Italy, Messers Pietro di Alcobasse and Davido di Nigarello, but were no more effective. In 1408 he had a stroke and for some hours was thought to be dead.

When incapacitated by ill health, as he was to be sporadically for the rest of his reign, he tried to rule through his friend Archbishop Arundel. However, the archbishop was ousted at the end of 1409, resigning as chancellor. Prince Henry and the Beauforts – his old tutor, Bishop Beaufort, and Sir Thomas Beaufort, now Admiral of England, were undoubtedly responsible for Arundel’s eclipse.

The Beauforts were an extraordinary phenomenon, as able and energetic as they were ambitious. Their mother, Catherine Roelt, had been employed as a governess by John of Gaunt’s first duchess and they were all born when she was their father’s mistress, while his second duchess was still alive. They were legitimized retrospectively by the pope and King Richard only after Gaunt made Catherine his third wife in 1396. When legitimization was bestowed on them by their half-brother, Henry IV, the words ‘
excepting the royal dignity
’ were added to the patent on Arundel’s advice. Their close relationship in blood to the king, combined with their disqualification from any claim to the crown, made them an obvious counterweight to the great territorial magnates and the princes of the House of York. John Beaufort, Earl of Somerset, was the eldest but died in 1410, his widow marrying Prince Thomas, the king’s second son. Henry Beaufort, the next brother, had been born in 1375. A brilliant lawyer (both civil and canon), after studying at Aachen he became Bishop of Lincoln in 1398 and of Winchester in 1404. He was also a financier of genius, who quickly created a vast personal fortune out of his ecclesiastical revenues. His lifestyle was entirely secular, that of a great nobleman rather than a prelate, and he kept a mistress. Haughty and hot-tempered, he had a knack of making enemies, among them being Archbishop Arundel (who may well have disliked him for begetting a bastard on an Arundel niece). Thomas Beaufort, the third brother, who was made Earl of Dorset in 1412 – and later Duke of Exeter – was an unfailingly efficient and dependable soldier, in later years one of Henry’s most valued commanders. He had first fought at his young cousin’s side in Wales in 1405, a year during which he had played a key part in Archbishop Scrope’s murder. His wife was one of the Nevilles of Hornby and a distant kinswoman of his powerful brother-in-law, the Earl of Westmorland, a firm ally of the Beauforts.

Prince Henry dominated the Council after Arundel’s departure, packing it with his most trusted friends – the Beauforts, the Earls of Arundel and Warwick, Lords Burnell and Scrope. Of these the latter is especially interesting, as the only man whose measure was never taken by the prince.

Henry, third Lord Scrope of Masham, was a brilliant and attractive figure. Born in 1373 he was very rich and notably blue-blooded; in 1387 the Court of Chivalry had obsequiously described the Scropes as ‘
graundes gentilhommes et de noblez
’ ever since the Norman Conquest. A kinsman of the archbishop, he had shrewdly disassociated himself from the rising of 1405, being rewarded with the manors of Thirsk and Hovingham. He and his brother-in-law, Lord Fitzhugh, were deeply interested in Christian mysticism and are known to have read jointly Richard Rolle of Hampole’s
Fire of Love
. He spent great sums on his private chapel, whose vestments included over ninety copes, and owned eighty-three books, which was exceptional for a private secular library at that time. The prince was much impressed by ‘my kind lord of Masham’, sometimes inviting him to sleep in his bed. Scrope had escorted the Lady Philippa, Henry’s sister, to Sweden in 1406 when she married King Eric XIII. The prince appointed this gifted, complex and enigmatic Yorkshireman from the Dales to be Treasurer of the Royal Household.
²
He was so successful that Archbishop Arundel was to retain him when he regained power.