The Fears of Henry IV: The Life of England's Self-Made King (20 page)

Now it becomes clear where all those sweets and sweetmeats went, and all that ale and wine. There was little to do on board for the next three weeks except eat, drink, pray and tell stories. It was summer, so we may suppose that the weather was fine, but even so, cramped on board for three weeks, the voyage cannot have been pleasant for Henry and his men.
Perhaps they practised their swordsmanship on deck as the boat rocked its way across the North Sea and then the Baltic. There were about two dozen knights and esquires with him, including Thomas Erpingham, Thomas Swynford, Peter Bucton, Thomas Rempston (his standard-bearer), John Clifton, Richard Goldsborough, John Loveyn, Sir John Dalyngrigge, John Norbury, John and Robert Waterton, Ralph Rochford, Richard Dancaster and Hugh Waterton (his long-serving chamberlain). At least five of these men had taken part in the jousts of war at St Inglevert (Swynford, Bucton, Rochford, Dalyngrigge and Dancaster).
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No doubt they also joined with Henry in gambling on throws of the dice (to which he was addicted, like most of the medieval royal family) and board games, such as chess and draughts, and ball games, such as fives
(jeu de paume).
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Henry also had an altar set up in his cabin, and his chaplain Hugh Herle was on board, so prayer would have occupied more of his time. Finally, he had also brought his falconer with him, so no doubt he and his men had fun sending up their birds of prey to pursue the smaller sea birds.

On 8 August Henry landed at Rixhöft, in Poland, and disembarked with a few of his men. He spent the night in a mill near Putzig before riding to the port of Danzig (modern Gdansk), where the ship docked. From there he sent his heralds out to announce his arrival and to offer his assistance to the marshal of the Teutonic Knights, Engelhard Rabe. While he waited for his messenger, he whiled away a few hours jousting, and managed to injure himself, so that a doctor was urgently required to staunch the bleeding.
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On hearing that Marshal Rabe was already in arms, and that the
reyse
was underway, Henry gathered his fighting men and chased after him, through Elbing and Braniewo, Brandenburg and Königsberg. He arrived at Insterberg Castle. – a fortress of the Teutonic Knights – on the 21st. The following day he finally met Marshal Rabe, on the banks of the River Memel, near Ragnit.

Henry probably did not fully understand the nature of the war in which he now found himself. It had changed since the days of his grandfather and the earl of Warwick. The key change was the baptism of King Jagiello, in 1386. In theory this meant that all of Lithuania was now Christian, which would have left the Teutonic Knights with no pagans to fight. However, although the conversion of Lithuania was almost complete, there were still substantial elements of paganism left to stamp out in ‘the Wilderness’, as the north of medieval Lithuania was called (roughly the same area as modern Lithuania). That was where the knights were about to campaign now. It was a vast tract of marshy land, the paths slippery with mud and blocked by fallen trees.

That was not the whole story. A fuller picture has to take account of
the political machinations of Vitold, or Vytautas, cousin of Jagiello. Vitold was an ambitious man who, in the 1380s, had converted to Christianity and allied with the Teutonic Knights against Jagiello. He had betrayed them, and made peace with Jagiello, but in 1389 he had decided to grasp another opportunity to make himself king of Lithuania and had renewed his alliance with the Teutonic Knights. His vision of a united Lithuania under his rule was very different from Jagiello’s Polish–Lithuanian empire. The campaign which Vitold was now waging, and which Henry was supporting, was directed against Jagiello’s brothers, Skirgiello and Karigal. These men had also been baptised. Thus it could be said that Henry was taking part in a crusade against fellow Christians as well as pagans. Although he believed he was fighting for the glory of God and the Teutonic Knights, it would be more accurate to say he was fighting in the name of Vitold, a man of questionable loyalty to the Christian cause, against the subjects and allies of a Christian king.

A week later, coming to the River Wilia, the Anglo-Teutonic army and their allies (the Livonians and Vitold’s Lithuanians) saw Skirgiello’s Russo-Lithuanian army on the other side. A battle ensued, in which the archers with Henry played a key part.
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The cover of arrow fire permitted the knights to advance and engage the enemy on the far bank. One of Henry’s knights, Sir John Loudham, was killed here. Enemy losses amounted to three hundred dead. Three Russian leaders (‘dukes’) and eleven other lords (boyars) were captured. After a night’s rest on the battlefield, Henry sent Loudham’s body back to Königsberg for burial. The rest of the army pushed on through the mud towards Vilnius.

Vilnius was a wooden city, protected by a strong castle, filled with archers. Henry led the first attack on the walls on 4 September, using English gunners as well as his knights. According to both German and English sources, it was the valiant attacks of the English which allowed a flag bearing the cross of St George – the patron saint of the Teutonic Knights as well as the English – to be raised above the town parapet.
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Contemporary English reports put the number of dead after this onslaught at around four thousand, although this is surely an exaggeration.
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But the castle protecting the town held out. Three weeks later, Henry was still ensconced in a waterlogged camp of cold, disease-ridden, despondent men. All the edible luxuries he had obtained in England had been consumed. He was now dependent on Vitold for supplies. After a month, he and his fellow soldiers had had enough. The gunpowder had been used up. Men were dying of the inevitable diseases to be found in temporary army camps. Two of Henry’s men (Thomas Rempston and John Clifton) had been captured by the enemy. Henry made an attempt to secure their release –
we do not know whether he was immediately successful – and then marched back towards Insterberg.
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From there he took his men to Königsberg, where he set up his winter quarters.

*

There were several reasons why Henry did not return to England directly after his return from the
reyse.
It was so late in the year that storms could be expected on the long voyage, which meant it would be both miserable and dangerous at sea. Two of his men were probably still held captive, and to leave them behind would be dishonourable. Henry himself was ill, and needed the attentions of a physician from Marienberg.
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And he had no wish to return and have to put up with the bitterness of the English court. Although Henry learned on 1 November 1390 that he now had a fourth son, Humphrey (named after Mary’s father), that in itself was insufficient to tempt him to return. He was independent on his travels, and that independence suited him.
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Besides, he liked these German knights with whom he had been fighting and bonding. Like Boucicaut, they had both spiritual virtue and martial skill. They had pride in themselves, as men and as fighters. They thought of themselves as soldiers of Christ. They were dedicated. They knew how to enjoy themselves too, with their hunting and jousting.
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They espoused all the virtues in which Henry also believed.

At Königsberg Henry listened to music, feasted, prayed and attended the funeral of one of his esquires. He had captured some pagan boys on the
reyse,
and now had them baptised and installed them in his own household for their education. His accounts note payments for carrying his hunting gear – two cartloads of it – to go hunting with Marshal Rabe. He wrote letters home, and sent them via his esquires, paying each time twenty marks (£13 6s 8d) for their delivery.
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The noblemen sent their entertainers and musicians to each other, and in this way Henry and his six minstrels – his trumpeters, pipers and a percussionist – would have been exposed to different tunes and rhythms.
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One Hans the Hornpiper seems to have gone down very well, for Henry gave him several large payments.
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Although foreign beers had been imported into England before this time, now Henry was able to sup continental beverages in quantity.
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He also saw the horses of Eastern Europe, and came face to face with Russian troops. Presents given to him, for his amusement, sport or curiosity, include three bears, hawks, a wild bull and an elk.
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It is not clear what he did with all these animals, least of all the elk.

Henry remained at Königsberg from November until 9 February, when he removed his household to Danzig. Arriving there on 15 February, he lodged at the house of one Klaus Gottesknight, while his retinue lodged
at a bishop’s house in the town. A group of clerics gathered to sing to him.
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Three fiddlers came to play to him in Lent, receiving a whole mark (13s 4d) as a reward.
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On 5 January he doled out many gifts to his minstrels, knights, esquires, grooms, valets and servants, giving most of them a warm fur gown against the bitter cold of the winter. Another of his servants died, and he paid for a tomb to be built for him at Königsberg. A series of pilgrimages occupied him in Holy Week: he visited at least four churches each day, and gave alms to the poor wherever he went. On Maundy Thursday (23 March) he gave alms, clothes and shoes to twenty-four paupers (that being the day he entered his twenty-fourth year).
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Finally, at the end of the month, after a deluge of gifts, alms and goodbyes, he stepped on board his ship again and set sail for England. With him went John Ralph and Ingelard of Prussia, two of the several boys he had converted to Christianity.
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It took his pilot four weeks to guide the ship across the twelve hundred miles home.
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*

Henry’s first voyage overseas magnified his reputation in England in every possible way. Not even his glorious grandfather, Edward III, had actually taken part in a crusade. His other grandfather had reached Stettin (eighty miles north-east of Berlin) on his 1352 expedition, but if he actually joined the
reyse
that year, his exploits were neither notable nor memorable. As far as anyone in England was aware, Henry was the first member of the English royal family to take part in a holy war since Prince Edward (later Edward I), more than a hundred years earlier.

A more subtle aspect, of which everyone would have been keenly aware at the time, was that Henry had been representing England. Some writers in the past have called Henry’s expedition ‘semi-diplomatic’, even though there was no specific foreign-relations purpose to Henry’s voyage.
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But there was one sense in which Henry’s journey did have a diplomatic dimension: he was a walking advertisement for England, with regard to his appearance and largesse, and his men were an advertisement for the supremacy of the English longbow over all other weapons of war. This is an important fact to bear in mind, for when Englishmen heard that Henry had won a river battle against the pagan Russians, and when they heard that it was an Englishman in Henry’s entourage who first placed the flag of St George on the walls of Vilnius, they understood these as
English
victories. They knew also that these acts had been witnessed by men from many other countries: from Germany, Hungary, Poland, France and Italy. Henry had been exporting the idea that the English royal family still bred warriors of the stature of Edward III and Duke Henry.

We get a real sense of this inspiration and national pride from reading the chronicle of the monk of Westminster. In a very telling passage, the monk wrote that Henry landed on 8 August 1390 at Danzig. This is actually wrong – Henry landed, as we have seen, at Rixhöft – but in that very error we have good evidence that the chronicler received his information from one of the men who sailed with Henry, for most of them did disembark at Danzig. It is not hard to picture an esquire from Henry’s retinue sitting down with a cup of wine in the hearing of a number of clerics at Westminster, and telling them the story of how Henry had marched to join the marshal of Prussia against the king of Lithuania at the head of fifty lances and sixty bowmen, and how, on the banks of the River Memel, Marshal Rabe had ridden forth to greet Henry with ‘his face wreathed in a smile of pleasure’. The esquire went on to say that at the battle to cross the river three Russian ‘dukes’ were captured by the ‘Christians’ and three others killed, and three hundred men were left for dead, with Skirgiello fleeing for his life. Of course there was no reference to the fact that Skirgiello himself was a Christian. In his version of this story, ‘the king of Lithuania’ fled from Henry and holed himself up in the citadel of Vilnius. Although the siege was ultimately unsuccessful, in the conquest of the town the Prussian marshal seized 8,000 prisoners for conversion, and the master of the Livonians took a further 3,500. And, of course, the man who first planted the flag of St George on the walls of Vilnius became not one of Henry’s men but Henry himself.
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Such is the nature of story telling, especially stories about deeds of valour.

Henry did everything he could to live up to this reputation. The news of his crusading success followed on from that of his prowess against Boucicaut at St Inglevert, and Henry was keen to demonstrate his fighting skills on English soil. He set about amassing new armour: jousting helmets and visors, bascinets for war, bascinets with aventails (hanging mail collars), vambraces, rerebraces, manifers (gauntlets), breastplates, lances of steel and wood, mail coverings and swords. On 24 June, Henry was supplied with new armour and eighteen lances for a tournament.
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Shortly afterwards, he went up to London, from which he travelled by barge to Lambeth, and then on to Kennington, where another joust was to take place.
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For this he bought another eighteen lances, and dressed in spangles, as he had done at his earliest recorded tournament.
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In September, at Hertford, Henry started planning for the next tournament, this one to be at Waltham on 6 October.
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These were all supposedly jousts of peace, but even so Henry obtained new steel lances, just in case he would be challenged to the ultimate test.