Henry V as Warlord (9 page)

Henry’s piety was given concrete expression in the two monasteries which he founded during the very first year of his reign. Both were for orders much in fashion at the time. The Carthusians, for whom he endowed a charterhouse at Sheen near London, were respected far and wide for their holiness, cherished for the power of their prayers to save men from the consequences of sin. They were much more active and outward-looking than modern Carthusians, having a profound and widespread influence on popular devotion. They took retreatants into their charterhouses and gave spiritual council to the serious laity. The Bridgettine monastery of Syon at Twickenham nearby (later removed to Brentford), which he began building in the same year, was for an order of women and men founded by St Bridget, Queen of Sweden, less than a quarter of a century before. The king also contemplated establishing a house of Celestines, an order of monks with a strict interpretation of the rule of St Benedict, at Sheen, but they had too many French associations and he reluctantly abandoned the scheme.
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His piety was certainly far too conventional for the Lollards who, if the tradition recorded by Foxe is to be credited, referred bitterly to him as ‘the prince of priests’. The Lollards or ‘Bible Men’ insisted that true religion could only be learnt from the Scriptures. (Which was why, alone in Western Europe, England had in 1408 banned translations of the bible.) They considered that among priests the pope was anti-Christ and that bishops, canons, monks and friars all transgressed the Ten Commandments. The friars in particular were children of Cain, according to Wyclif (the Lollards’ founder); apostates and idolaters who practised murder, robbery and seduction. The Carmelites – the order to which Patrington and Netter belonged – were said to bear a strong resemblance to the fourth of the beasts of Daniel in the Apocalypse, with its iron teeth and claws and ten horns. All organized bodies within the Church were contrary to Christ’s teaching, the principal duty of a priest being to preach the Gospel. Lollard beliefs were summed up in the
Twelve Conclusions
which had been nailed to the door of St Paul’s in 1395. These rejected transubstantiation, auricular confession, praying to the saints, pilgrimages, indulgences, celibacy (which, they claimed, led to unnatural lust and child murder), and the wealth of the Church. In addition the
Conclusions
attacked the goldsmiths’ and armourers’ trades as luxurious and sinful. Such opinions contained the seeds of social as well as religious revolution, which might just conceivably have plunged England into the same bloody millenarian wars which convulsed Bohemia. One of the reasons for the sect’s failure was its inability to attract followers from among the ruling class save for a handful of knights and small landowners, most of whom were anti-clericals rather than religious reformers.
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There were exceptions, however.

The leader of these ‘cursid caitifs, heires of dirknesse’, was Sir John Oldcastle, from Herefordshire, who had done good service during the Welsh wars. The
Gesta
says of him that ‘slaughtering and pillaging the Welsh secured his promotion to knighthood’. He was a valued friend of the king, even if he had gone on Clarence’s expedition to France. During the Parliament of 1410 he had led a group of like-minded anti-clerical knights of the shire, most of whom had served with him against Glyn Dŵr; a modern historian has compared them to ‘Cromwellian Ironsides’. Nevertheless, however violent John Oldcastle’s career may have been, he possessed a considerable intellect, and corresponded with the Bohemian heresiarch Huss. Suddenly, in March 1413, just after the king’s accession to the throne, Archbishop Arundel informed Henry that a heretical book found in London, in the shop of a limner (illuminator) in Paternoster Row, belonged to Sir John. The King did not realize how serious his trusted friend was in his curious views – he had just sent twenty-six wrestlers to amuse Henry at Windsor – and tried to persuade so useful a servant to deny them. Oldcastle prevaricated, ignoring a citation to appear before Arundel. Eventually the king had him arrested and sent to the Tower in chains. During his trial Sir John insisted that the Host remained plain bread at the consecration and that there was no need for auricular confession, finally shouting at the tribunal that pope, prelates and friars ‘will drag you down to hell’. He was excommunicated and sent back to the Tower. He escaped shortly after, with the help of fellow Lollards, in October 1413.

Oldcastle went underground at safe-houses in London to organize a Lollard rising. Posters stuck on church doors claimed that ‘100,000 men’ were ready to fight for the new opinions. In almost every English county his agents summoned the people to rise, as the artisans and labourers had done in the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. The Lollard programme attracted considerable support, as much because of economic misery as from religious feeling. Sir John was to be regent, while the king, nobility and clergy were to be placed under restraint, and the abbeys dissolved and their riches shared out. Many Lollards anticipated the Taborites of Bohemia in dreaming of a new Jerusalem. Oldcastle and his friends – Sir Roger Acton, Sir Thomas Talbot, Sir Thomas Cheyne – were more than mere anti-clericals who wished to purify the Church.
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Sir John modelled his
coup d’état
on that of Richard II’s would-be restorers in 1400. He planned to smuggle armed Lollards disguised as mummers into Eltham Palace where Henry was keeping Christmas and seize him and his brothers on Twelfth Night (6 January) 1414. Some sources say he meant to kill them. The second stage would be the arrival of a Lollard army in London; men from all over England were to assemble at Fickett’s Field, just outside Temple Bar in St Giles Fields, on Wednesday 10 January. However, one Thomas Burton (later rewarded with 100 shillings as a ‘king’s spy’) kept Henry fully informed throughout. At 10 o’clock on the evening of Twelfth Night the mayor and his men-at-arms raided a carpenter’s shop at the Sign of the Axe near Bishopsgate. They found the carpenter and seven other Lollards dressed as mummers, among them a squire of Oldcastle’s, about to set off for Eltham. Despite the failure of the plot’s first stage Sir John did not call off the assembly at Fickett’s Field of – in the words of the
Gesta
– ‘this same raven of treachery with those of his crows who, as arranged, were to flock to him from almost every part of England’.
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The King was waiting for them with his troops. As they arrived in the grey hours before dawn they were arrested. For all the boasts of ‘100,000 men’ only 300 came to the field, of whom eighty were captured – the rest, including Oldcastle, fled into the gloom. Three days later, on 13 January, seven of the prisoners who were proven Lollards suffered the ‘burning death’ – fires lit beneath them as they hung in chains from gibbets. During the next fortnight another twenty-five were hanged in batches; four new pairs of gallows, popularly named ‘The Lollers’ Gallows’, were erected in St Giles Fields for the purpose. Henry felt more secure by the end of January and the remaining prisoners were eventually freed on payment of heavy fines. Sir Roger Acton, Oldcastle’s principal lieutenant, was among those executed, who ‘for the space of a month was swinging on the gibbet’ records Adam of Usk. However, the chief organizer of this pitiful little conspiracy was not caught until 1417. Writing at the end of 1416 the author of the
Gesta
says that Sir John ‘lurked in holes and corners out of the sight of men, and indeed still does, like another Cain, a vagabond and a fugitive on the face of the earth’.
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Strangely enough Oldcastle had been smuggled out of London by the Archdeacon of Westminster and was later sheltered by the Abbot of Shrewsbury and the Prior of Wenlock – all three Benedictine monks. The monastic community at Westminster had long been known for stubborn fidelity to King Richard and it seems hostility to the Lancastrian usurpers was still so strong that orthodox Catholics were ready to ally with heretics against the regime. It is also known that when he was on the run Sir John was in contact with Glyn Dŵr’s son, Maredudd, who had not yet submitted to Henry V and continued to roam the Welsh hills.

During the Parliament which met at Leicester in April 1414 a savage statute was enacted against Lollards. Every secular official, including mayors, was required to take an oath to root out heresy in his district, being empowered to arrest, question and imprison suspects. Even if those accused were acquitted, they were to be kept under observation for years afterwards. There were more burnings, such as that of the London furrier John Claydon in 1415. The Lollards were broken and driven underground.

As Jeremy Catto has written, ‘from the Leicester Parliament of 1414 until the triumph of toleration in the eighteenth century, religion was established and enforced by public authority, and dissentient voices were subjected to the rigour of statutory felony. By contrast, before 1400 religion was outside the competence of the secular power.’
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In clerical matters the king was in many respects the precursor of Henry VIII, and began to institutionalize the concept of a national church. In part his attitude stemmed from formalist piety, in part from dislike of any challenge to his authority. Over a century before the title was actually used Henry V would act as though he were ‘supreme governor of the church of England’.
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The new king proved no less effective in secular matters. One of his most impressive achievements was his swift restoration of law and order. Throughout his father’s reign, despite the promises of ‘good governance’ of 1399, England had been convulsed by banditry and rioting, cowed by bribery and intimidation. Henry V’s policy was a characteristic blend of neatly gauged conciliation and merciless punishment. His campaign against disorder began at the Leicester Parliament; in the words of Chancellor Beaufort it was ‘for the chastisement and punishment of the rioters, murderers and malefactors who more than ever abound in many parts of the kingdom’. This was followed by a frenzy of judicial activity. Since murder and robbery had been particularly prevalent in the north west Midlands, the Court of King’s Bench sat at Lichfield and Shrewsbury for over a month, issuing 1600 summons. There were commissions of inquiry in Derbyshire, Devon, Nottinghamshire, Yorkshire, and in North and South Wales. These were regions where treasons, felonies and trespasses had been especially widespread. By the autumn of 1414, King’s Bench had a huge backlog of cases. The king, who watched the court closely and sometimes intervened, cleared the backlog by declaring a general pardon extending even to murderers and rapists – charters of pardon were purchased by nearly 5,000 persons. Fines were used in other cases in preference to prison sentences, with the hint that military service was a sure way of regaining royal favour. Henry read personally all petitions addressed to him, a practice which he continued when campaigning abroad. His success is shown by the fact that disorder did not return during his reign, not even in the long periods when he was away in France.
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His priority was plainly law and order, not the punishment of crime. This has to be seen in the context of his preparations for war and need to recruit an army. Under strict discipline criminals can make excellent fighting men, as their aggressive instincts are directed at enemies abroad and away from the population at home. It has been estimated that as many as twelve per cent of Edward III’s troops were outlaws serving in hope of a pardon and although no similar analysis exists for his great-grandson’s soldiers the percentage was no doubt very similar.

Henry was only able to achieve as much as he did during the fifteen months before his invasion fleet sailed for France because he had an unusually gifted team of administrators, men with whom he had worked in 1409–12. These included all the key members of his council; Bishop Beaufort (Chancellor), the Earl of Arundel (Treasurer) and John Prophet (Privy Seal), together with Langley, Bishop of Durham, and Chichele, Bishop of St David’s, who have been described, not inaptly, as ministers without portfolio.
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They attended the rather larger meetings of the Royal Household which was soon widened to admit the Dukes of Bedford and Gloucester, the Earl of March, Lord Fitzhugh, Sir Thomas Erpingham, and Richard Courtenay, Bishop of Norwich. Council and Household both met regularly for discussions whose minutes sometimes read like those of any modern board meeting. On Sunday 27 May 1415, for example, the Council met to nominate individuals for specific duties and specialized committees: Chichele, Lord Scrope, Sir John Mortimer and two clerical diplomats were to brief envoys to the Duke of Burgundy; Bedford and Bishop Beaufort were to consider the redemption of pawned crown jewels; Bishop Beaufort was to pressure the bishops to take more steps against Lollards; other committees were nominated to deal with such matters as policy for the seneschal of Guyenne, appointing commissions of array in every county, supplies for the invasion fleet and sailors’ pay. The council could be ruthless enough, especially where money was concerned; on the previous Friday it had summoned ten Italian merchants before it, ordering them to furnish a war loan of £2,000 – when this was refused the Italians were promptly sent under guard to the Fleet prison.

The king tried to enlist the sympathy of all Europe by stressing his moderation. He declared that he was ready to forego his own claim to the throne of France if the French would give him Aquitaine as it had been in 1360, after the Treaty of Brétigny. His envoys travelled everywhere, putting their master’s case and complaining of French injustice towards him. Meanwhile, inexorably, he made his preparations for war. He was too busy to be on his guard against danger at home.

In some quarters the new dynasty was still resented. As late as the summer of 1415, when Henry was on the point of launching his invasion of France, another extremely serious anti-Lancastrian plot very nearly succeeded. On 1 August the Earl of March came suddenly to Porchester Castle from where the king was directing the embarkation. He demanded an audience and revealed that his brother-in-law, the Earl of Cambridge, had tried to enlist him in a plot to overthrow Henry. He was to be denounced in a proclamation as ‘Henry of Lancaster, usurper of England’. As Cambridge later explained in a confession, ‘I purposed to have had the aforesaid earl [of March] into the land of Wales without your consent, to confer upon the earl the sovereignty of this land if that man whom they call King Richard had not been alive, as I know very well he is not.’ (This was in reference to the pseudo-Richard in Scotland.)
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Henry Percy, Hotspur’s son, not yet restored to his grandfather’s earldom, was to cross the border into England with a Scots army and raise the North, while a Davy Howell was to hand over the royal castles in Wales, where Owain’s old followers were waiting to rise. Howell, a distinguished commander, seems to have known nothing of the plot. In addition Sir John Oldcastle and his Lollards would raise the Welsh border and the West Country. It was the old alliance of Percy, Mortimer and Glyn Dŵr.