The Fears of Henry IV: The Life of England's Self-Made King (17 page)

When this most shocking and dramatic of parliaments drew to a close, Richard invited all the lords to dine with him at Kennington on the last day of May. It was no more than an act of formal politeness. Richard’s half-brother, John Holland, at this point returned from serving with John of Gaunt in Castile and was created earl of Huntingdon. What Henry thought of this rehabilitation of his sister’s seducer and Ralph Stafford’s murderer is not clear, but it is noticeable that there are no gifts to Holland in his account book. On 2 June the Lords Appellant were granted £20,000 towards their expenses in raising armies to bring the traitors to justice, and soon afterwards all the participants in the parliament departed. Henry’s bargemen – equipped in his red and white livery – rowed him back up the Thames to his house in London.
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He was still there on 15 June but left shortly afterwards.
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He had won the war, as it were. Yet Richard was still on the throne, and his fellow Appellants had proved themselves as vindictive as the king. They also now knew Henry would not always agree with them, nor follow their guidance. He would follow his own mind. When the time came for Richard to seek revenge, would they all defend one other?

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Henry left London in June 1388 with plans to fight the Scots.
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For some, this will summon up a picture of him fighting at the battle of Otterburn – ‘the battle won by a dead man’ – but in fact Henry was not there. Instead the name we associate with that battle is that of his cousin, Henry ‘Hotspur’ Percy, the heir of the earl of Northumberland. Hotspur had acquired his nickname on account of his fast and daring escapades against the Scots.
He was the Warden of the East March, and thus he was in command when the Scots invaded Northumberland in late July or early August. At Otterburn the Scottish commander, the earl of Douglas, was mortally injured; but before he died he ordered his body to be concealed beneath a bush and his banner to be borne into the thick of the fighting. As the battle continued into the evening and after dusk, and even by moonlight, so his men took heart and pushed the English back. Hotspur’s brother, Ralph Percy, was badly wounded and Hotspur himself was captured after a protracted encounter with Sir John Montgomery.

Given the involvement of two of his Percy cousins in the battle, and considering that the third Percy brother, Thomas, was acting as an intermediary between John of Gaunt and Henry at that time, it would not have been surprising if Henry had intended to be at Otterburn.
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After all, he was young, and eager for action. However, Jean Froissart, who supplies most of the information we have for the campaign, does not mention Henry at Newcastle before the battle, although he names a number of leaders on both sides. Nor does he mention him at Otterburn itself.
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At the very least, one would have expected the chronicler Henry Knighton to mention Henry in his account of the battle, if he had been present. He does not. It seems therefore that he was not there, nor in any way connected with Hotspur’s campaign.

At the same time as the earl of Douglas invaded Northumberland, a second Scottish force under the earl of Fife invaded Westmorland and Cumberland, and wrought terrible destruction on the town of Appleby and many of the villages in the vicinity. This alternative field of hostilities may have been Henry’s destination. The man in command of the West March was Lord Beaumont, an eminent tournament fighter and Henry’s second cousin twice over. However, close examination of the evidence shows that Henry was not there either. In all probability, he did not get further than Nottingham.
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His reason for failing to reach his destination may have been his wife’s illness, for about this time the physician Geoffrey Melton was summoned from Oxford to attend her at Kenilworth, to which place Henry now returned.
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When parliament assembled at Cambridge in September 1388, the members had every reason to be disappointed in the Appellants. The last time they had met they had seen Henry and the four other lords enter in their cloth of gold suits, arm in arm. They had seen them put themselves forward as the agents of good government. Now, seven months later, England had suffered serious attacks in Scotland, and had squandered the taxation for
the war. Hotspur was a prisoner, Beaumont a disappointment. The earl of Arundel had been exposed as a profiteer, having taken expenses for four months at sea when he had only served for three.
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Men wearing the livery collars and insignia of these lords were committing crimes in various places around the country, and the common people felt powerless to resist them. The practice of lords protecting their supporters in this way – usually referred to as ‘maintenance’ – had supposedly been stamped out fifty years earlier. Now it had come back, and the Appellants were as guilty as the king. To add to the difficulties, employment was in crisis, with beggars tramping from parish to parish, looking for work and resorting to crime if they failed to find it. Far from governing well, the Appellants had apparently resigned their responsibilities and were acting in their own self-interests.

From 9 September to 17 October, the commons led discussion on these issues. No one should be permitted to issue livery badges and collars, they claimed. Henry’s was one of the most noticeable livery insignia. The famous Lancastrian livery collar of interlaced esses was in use by this time; the previous year he had distributed collars with ‘swages’ (circular metal designs) to his supporters, William Bagot, John Stanley and Lord Darcy.
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His goldsmith’s account for 1387–8 is positively dripping with references to lordly collars and badges, including a mulberry design (Mowbray’s livery badge). The king offered to stop his retainers using livery badges if it would encourage others to do likewise; but the lords objected. The commons’ petition was carried over to the following parliament, pending an investigation.

This piece of lordly obstructionism was almost the full extent of the lords’ achievement in this parliament. There was one other: it appears that it was the lords who introduced the first public health statute. ‘So much dung, filth, and entrails of dead beasts and other corruptions is cast into ditches, rivers and other waterways, and many other places, within about and near to the cities, boroughs and towns of the realm … that the air is greatly corrupted and infected and many maladies and other intolerable diseases do daily happen …’
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They ordered fines of £20 to be levied on all those who had not remedied the situation within a year, and passed the responsibility for keeping the streets clean to local officers. Apart from this, there was no significant agenda for reform. The Appellants as a group seem to have opted to sink back into the mass, as if the rebellion had never happened. They had been a single-cause party, and after the removal of Richard’s friends (and the reason for their opposition) they had little in common. An interesting footnote to this lack of lordly engagement is that, in the absence of a lordly legislative programme, the commons put forward an exceedingly detailed and comprehensive petition regarding the labour system. It resulted in the
statute which made communities responsible for providing for poor people and itinerant labour-seekers, and so established the precedent which remained the basis for the poor law until the nineteenth century.

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Henry probably left the Cambridge parliament early, judging from the fact that his third son must have been conceived midway through the parliament.
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He returned to Kenilworth to his wife and children and remained with them intermittently into the New Year.
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He and the other Appellants were no doubt hoping that a quieter, less contentious stance would allow a new normality to develop. But in the fourteenth century, when opposition lords lessened their pressure on the king, they became vulnerable. At Christmas, when most of Richard’s opponents returned to their own castles, the king told some of his friends who had escaped the carnage of the Merciless Parliament that now things were safe enough for them to return to court. Sir John Golafre – whose possessions had been distributed to Henry and others – returned openly. So did Sir John Lovell and Sir Thomas Blount, both of whom had fled from the Appellants. A banished clerk, Richard Medford, now resumed his post as Richard’s secretary.
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In February 1389, the three senior Appellants – the duke of Gloucester and the earls of Arundel and Warwick – gathered again in London. There is no indication that Henry was with them. But then, on 13 February, the king wrote to Henry Reede, armourer of London, ordering him to deliver a breastplate to Henry as a gift from the king.
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Was this a sign of reconciliation? Or was it something else, a warning perhaps?

Given that Richard invited Henry on to his council shortly afterwards, this gift has come to be seen as a sign of peace. One leading historian of the period has taken it as an indication that Richard was ‘cultivating’ Henry.
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Another has gone further and stated that it ‘marked the growth of a warmer and more intimate relationship between them’.
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But there may have been more to this gift than meets the eye. For a start, there is nothing to suggest that this breastplate was an unusually expensive item; the breastplate which Henry bought in 1388 cost him £1 6s 8d, and it would have taken a far more substantial present than this to make Henry believe that Richard genuinely valued him. And there are good reasons to suspect that this ‘gift’ was not really a gift at all. The day it was given – 13 February – was the anniversary of the judgement on de Vere, de la Pole, Tresilian and Archbishop Neville. The person who had originally owned it, Sir John Beauchamp of Holt, was a man whom Richard had admired so much that he raised him to the rank of baron in a letter patent (the first time this had ever been done) and stood as godfather to his son.
Beauchamp had never taken his seat in parliament because he had been executed by Henry and the other Appellants as a traitor. So for Richard to give Henry this particular breastplate on this particular day was an exceptionally loaded present. It reminds us of John of Gaunt going to see Richard in 1385, wearing a breastplate under his gown. Richard may well have been telling Henry that, whatever had been agreed in the Tower in December 1387, he would not forgive him for the proceedings of the subsequent parliament.

Henry attended the council meeting in the Palace of Westminster on 3 May 1389.
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He was the only one of the Lords Appellant present. Thus he was the only Appellant sympathiser there to see the pro-Appellant chancellor and treasurer sacked, the justices replaced, and the duke of Gloucester and the earl of Arundel removed from the royal council. Henry was appointed to the council in their place, possibly in recognition of the fact that his superior royal status had been the key factor in preventing Gloucester from seizing the throne. Henry can have taken little pleasure in his new position, however, for Richard publicly announced that he would now take responsibility for government on himself once again. He would end the war with France quickly and peacefully. He would justify this to the people through reduced taxation: half the grant for the war was to be returned. In furtherance of this, he immediately despatched a peace delegation; a truce was agreed within six weeks. To Henry it looked very much as though he would never emulate his grandfather, never lead an army in France, never be more than a jousting puppet at the court of King Richard.

As he rode back to Kenilworth a few days later (where his wife was about to give birth to their third son), he must have been torn.
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On the one hand, Richard had successfully dislodged him from his kinsmen and fellow Appellants. He had also removed Henry’s chances of winning glory in the war. On the other, Henry had apparently managed the transition from Appellant to the royal council. He had prevented Gloucester from seizing the throne, and had prevented Richard carrying out his threat to make Roger Mortimer his official heir. He had survived these problems amazingly well, considering he was still only twenty-two. The problem was that his success was so fragile. As it happened, Richard would never forgive him for riding against de Vere, nor for sanctioning the deaths of so many of his friends.
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His political survival was a delicate balancing act, not a solid achievement. Perhaps he would have need of that breastplate sooner rather than later.

FOUR

Iron Wars

In thy faint slumbers I by thee have watch’d,

And heard thee murmur tales of iron wars.

Henry IV Part One,
Act II, Scene 3

Battles, plots and parliamentary storms are all exciting and undoubtedly important but they tend to overshadow less dramatic events of equal political significance. While Henry had been arguing with Richard, and tentatively searching for a middle way between the senior Appellants and the king, his father had been seeking his fortune in Spain. After landing in Galicia in the autumn of 1386, John had brought the region under control, albeit with heavy losses. He had then concluded an agreement with João I of Portugal, reinforcing the alliance of 1373 between Portugal and England (which, incidentally, is still in force today: the longest lasting peace treaty in the world). As part of this agreement, his daughter Philippa had married João, and the combined Anglo-Portuguese army had invaded Castile. John, having taken a leaf out of his father’s book and adopted the title of ‘king’ of the kingdom he claimed, seized on the offer of a favourable peace settlement. As part of the deal he gave his daughter Catalina in marriage to the grandson and heir of Enrique de Trastámara, the usurper who had murdered her grandfather. By this John prevented his wife from avenging her father’s death but brought peace to Castile and the guarantee that her family would once again rule. It also brought him a lot of money: one hundred thousand pounds in cash and a valuable pension of ten thousand marks (£6,666) per year. He had been by far the richest man in England before this; now his income had almost doubled. Money, he must have felt, would never again be a worry for the dukes of Lancaster.