Henry V as Warlord (8 page)

IV

‘
No Lordship
’

‘… you have no lordship, not even to the kingdom of England, which belongs to the true heirs of the late king Richard.’

Archbishop Boisratier to Henry V

‘John [Oldcastle] purposed to have slain the king and his lords at Eltham, that is to say, on Twelfth Night in the evening.’

A Chronicle of London

H
enry V was such a successful king that it is hard to appreciate how at the start of his reign he was far from secure. Two months after his accession a poster nailed to the door of Westminster Abbey claimed that Richard II was alive in Scotland. It had been written by John Whitelock, a yeoman who had taken sanctuary in the abbey with three accomplices after spreading the story all over London. Richard II may have been safely dead but the Earl of March was unquestionably still alive and no longer a minor. Apart from its own household men, few people at this time felt a natural loyalty to the House of Lancaster.

He took no chances with Gruffydd ap Owain (Glyn Dŵr’s son), Murdoch, Earl of Fife (the Regent of Scotland’s son) and James, King of Scots. One of his first acts as king was to recommit these three to the custody of the Constable of the Tower of London. Although lodged comfortably enough at Windsor and Kenilworth as well as the Tower – then a royal palace besides being a fortress and often a scene of court life – it is clear they were under constant surveillance. Gruffydd was to disappear into obscurity while Murdoch was ransomed by his father for the vast sum of £16,000. The King of Scots was not so lucky. He had already been a prisoner for seven years, since the age of eleven. He had no hope of release so long as Henry lived, even though the English might go through the motions of negotiating, and was not freed until 1423, a year after the king’s death, having by then spent eighteen years as a prisoner of the English. Later he wrote poignantly how much he had envied birds and beasts, fishes of the sea, in their freedom during his ‘deadly life full of pain and penance’ and that he had been ‘despairing of all joy and remedy’. When he did return to Scotland he proved a ruler of outstanding ability – and a strong Scotland was the last thing Henry wanted. The Scots were already traditional allies of the French in their ‘auld alliance’ and he was determined to use every means in his power to prevent them from going to the assistance of his prey across the Channel. He had no qualms about inflicting ‘pain and penance’ on King James.

Henry was crowned on Passion Sunday (9 April) by Archbishop Arundel, in the midst of a blizzard. ‘On the same day,’ records Adam of Usk, ‘an exceeding fierce and unwonted storm fell upon the hill country of the realm, and smothered men and beasts and homesteads, and drowned out the valleys and the marshes in marvellous wise, with losses and perils to men beyond measure.’ An eyewitness of the coronation told the Monk of St Denis that a large number of those present in the abbey thought that March should have been crowned instead, and that civil war seemed likely.
¹
It was noticed that during the ceremony the king seemed oddly gloomy and that he ate nothing at the coronation banquet. It was rumoured that he did not eat for three days afterwards.
²
The inference is that he had an uneasy conscience, as someone who in his heart admitted to himself that he was an usurper.

These rumours are of vital importance for any understanding of Henry V’s psychology and of his basic motives, of what really drove him. He must have been only too well aware that if March did not have supporters who were prepared to rise for him in armed revolt, and that if there was not much popular interest in the earl himself, there were nonetheless many who acknowledged privately that a glaring injustice had been done in depriving the rightful heir to the throne of his inheritance. During Richard II’s reign the March claim to the succession had been recognized publicly not once but twice by Parliament, as vested in the person of the earl and, previously, of his father. And recognition by Parliament had played a key part in the House of Lancaster’s usurpation. If ever Henry betrayed any hint of uneasiness, of self-questioning, it was now, during his coronation – and perhaps also on his deathbed. His insecurity has not received sufficient attention from historians.

Nevertheless from the very beginning of his reign Henry displayed extraordinary self-confidence in governing and at once began to apply the policy of carefully calculated conciliation which he had developed in Wales. The Earls of Huntingdon, Oxford and Salisbury – sons of the conspirators of 1400 – had their family estates restored, while steps were taken to persuade Hotspur’s son to come home from Scotland and inherit his grandfather Northumberland’s earldom. Lord Mowbray, brother of the rebel magnate who had perished with Archbishop Scrope in 1405, was invested as hereditary Earl Marshal of England, and permission was given to make votive offerings at the archbishop’s shrine in York Minster. The brother and heir of the slippery Duke of York was created Earl of Cambridge. Richard II’s body was brought from its obscure resting place and re-interred in the magnificent tomb he had had made for himself at Westminster Abbey. The gesture stressed that, whatever strange tales might come out of Scotland, Richard was dead.

Archbishop Arundel was replaced as chancellor by Bishop Beaufort. The old archbishop’s nephew, the Earl of Arundel, became treasurer. Contrary to the late king’s fears there was no trouble from the Duke of Clarence – now the heir to the throne – though to some extent the new monarch cut him down to size by creating their two younger brothers, John and Humphrey, Dukes of Bedford and of Gloucester.

By all accounts Henry V was already impressive at twenty-five – tall, well built and handsome. If the painting in the National Portrait Gallery (a sixteenth-century copy) is a true likeness, he had a florid, clean-shaven face with a high forehead, a long and commanding nose, full red lips, hazel eyes and auburn hair cut in a pudding basin crop – the fashionable military haircut of the day. This may well have been how he looked before ceaseless campaigning aged him prematurely and before he grew his beard. The contemporary sources also agree that he was unusually fit and muscular, wearing his armour ‘like a light cloak’ and, allegedly, able to run down a deer. However, according to the French astrologer Jean Fusoris, who was presented to him in the summer of 1415, despite a lordly manner and noble bearing he looked more like a prelate than a soldier. Complex, if dynamic and vital, reserved and secretive, icily cold, with complete self-control, he was someone very difficult to know and understand. He said little and listened much. He both wrote and spoke Latin as well as French and English, and had probably acquired some knowledge of Welsh: He possessed a large library to which he was always adding, reading avidly; his books included histories of the Crusades, treatises on hunting, devotional treatises and such contemporary works as Chaucer’s
Troilus and Criseyde
, Lydgate’s
Life of Our Lady
and Hoccleve’s
De Regimine Principum
– the last two dedicated to him as the patron of both authors. According to Tito Livio, ‘he delighted in songs and musical instruments.’
³

Henry was almost obsessively conventional and orthodox. ‘Every age has its own mentality’, if Jung is to be believed, and the king’s seems to have been wholly in tune with that of the first half of the fifteenth century. There was nothing eccentric about him save for his dynamism. He appears to have subscribed wholeheartedly to the fashionable cult of pessimism. ‘At the close of the Middle Ages, a sombre melancholy weighs on people’s souls,’ says Johan Huizinga. ‘All that we know of the moral state of the nobles points to a sentimental need of enrobing their souls with the garb of woe.’ Huizinga emphasises that ‘all aristocratic life in the latter Middle Ages is a wholesale attempt to act the vision of a dream’, explaining that ‘the passionate and violent soul of the age, always vacillating between tearful piety and frigid cruelty … could not dispense with the severest rules and the strictest formalism’. Such attitudes were displayed by the king throughout his reign. When he lay dying and claimed that, had he lived, he would have gone on to recapture Jerusalem he was not indulging in a personal flight of fancy but doing no more than express a duty acknowledged by every contemporary western monarch.
⁴
On every formal occasion he made use of the language and forms of chivalry, enlisting symbolism to enhance their dignity. Commenting on his death the dauphinist Jean Juvénal des Ursins, who was often hostile towards him, noted that Henry dispensed the same justice to poor folk as to great. The king’s justice for humble people (to whom he and his campaigns had brought so much misery) derived from a chivalrous belief, at that time much in vogue, that it was a knight’s duty to protect the weak. This, rather than all the wearisome exhortations in Lydgate’s and Hoccleve’s doggerel, also reinforced his genuine conviction that a ruler must provide ‘good governaunce’. But when all is said and done, Henry must remain as much of an enigma to historians as he was to contemporaries. The most one can say with confidence about him is that friends and foes admired and feared him, and that they did not love him. The sole qualities with which the chroniclers credit him are military skill, strict and indeed harsh justice, and ostentatious piety.
⁵

His religious experience seems to have been conventional in the extreme. He possessed the fashionable respect for Carthusian monks, though he did not share Lord Scrope’s taste for mystical literature. He was constantly going on pilgrimage to the shrines of wonder-working saints and had the ‘mechanistic’ religion of his period to a very uncomplicated degree. He heard several Masses a day, recited the psalms of the little office, and made a point of not allowing himself to be interrupted when at prayer. As soon as his father died and he was king, the
First Life
informs us that Henry:

called to him a virtuous monk of holy conversation, to whom he confessed himself of all his offences, trespasses and insolencies of times past. And in all things at that time he reformed and amended his life and manners. So after the decease of his father was never no youth nor wildness that might have any place in him, but all his acts were suddenly changed into gravity and discretion.
⁶

The same admiring source also says that ‘from the death of the Kinge his Father until the marriage of himself he neuer had knowledge carnally of weomen’.

Indeed what struck observers most about Henry was his piety. Chroniclers are unanimous in agreeing that he had some sort of religious conversion on ascending the throne, as a result of which he dismissed his former boon companions. Some historians (like Edouard Perroy) may consider him a hypocrite yet his God was clearly very real to him. Nevertheless his beliefs must seem very strange and alien, even to the most traditionally minded twentieth-century Catholic. He had a fervent devotion for the undeniably eccentric St John of Bridlington – the canonization was purely local – a wonder-working Yorkshire holy man who had died as recently as 1379 and possessed a reputation for curing physical deformities besides casting out evil spirits; he was also said to have walked on the water. Henry’s spiritual life had some faintly sinister undertones, what the late E. F. Jacob terms ‘his dark superstitious vein’.
⁷
No doubt the king was normal enough in refusing to let even the greatest in the land interrupt him when he was hearing Mass, in his constant visits to shrines, and in consulting hermits. Yet he also had a strong and well-attested belief in demons and in witchcraft.

It may be that Henry’s dark side was evident in his choice of confessors. He apparently favoured a combination of distinguished intellect and fanatical orthodoxy. John of Gaunt had begun a Lancastrian tradition of taking Carmelite friars instead of Dominicans as confessors and ambassadors, roles which they performed for the House of Lancaster for over a century. The first spiritual adviser whom the king appointed after his accession was the learned provincial of the ‘white friars’, Steven Patrington, who had been one of Wyclif’s original opponents at Oxford. However, he was seldom available after 1415 when he was made Bishop of St David’s.

Patrington was succeeded as Henry’s confessor by the next Carmelite provincial, Thomas Netter, who in some ways seems to have stepped from the pages of a Gothick novel. Netter (sometimes called Walden, from having been born at Saffron Walden) was obsessed by hatred of Lollardy; his own order called him ‘the hammer of heretics’, ‘the swiftest fire that ever smote the trunk of heresy’. He had co-operated with Friar Patrington in writing
Fasciculi zizaniorum Magistri Joannis Wyclif
, in its day considered to be a mighty work of refutation, and he later produced a mammoth compilation which defended the Catholic faith against proto-Protestant heresies. Almost as soon as the king had ascended the throne Friar Netter preached a sermon at Paul’s Cross accusing him of being lukewarm in persecuting Lollardy. Perhaps revealingly, his rebuke inspired the reverse of resentment. Shortly after, Henry announced that he was raising the standard of the church, as heir of ‘Duke Moses, who slew the Egyptian that he might deliver Israel’, since it was well known that certain priests were profaning the word of God, sowing discord with the pestilential seed of Lollardy. He quickly came to esteem Friar Netter.

This earlier, English, Torquemada had been at Badby’s trial and burning in 1410. He claimed that he had seen a spider running across the heretic’s face as he burnt, trying to get into his mouth, a creature so large and horrible that several men were needed to beat it off.
⁸
That the king had such confidence in Netter tells us a good deal about him.