The Fears of Henry IV: The Life of England's Self-Made King (25 page)

For Henry, Constanza’s death came as a shock. Although he had lost many members of his family in his youth, nobody close to him had died in recent years. Unusually (for late medieval England), all five of Henry’s children were alive and well; his father had passed fifty years of age, and he himself was healthy and fit, to judge from his regular jousting. He had grown close to his stepmother since she had come to England and he had entered her household, at the age of four. She had never been as close to John as Henry’s mother had been; nevertheless she had won much affection from the Lancastrian entourage. She was always high on Henry’s list of New Year presents. Hearing of her death, John decided that she should be laid to rest at Leicester, in the Lancastrian collegiate church there, but that the funeral should wait until he had returned to England. He wanted to attend. In the elaborate and expensive burial arrangements he demonstrated that he too had grown much fonder of his Castilian princess than he had anticipated on her arrival in England in 1371.
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The news of the duchess’s death was thus a tragedy such as Henry had not previously known. But it was nothing compared to the next news which reached him. His own wife, Mary, was dead.
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Her death left him devastated. It was her sixth confinement, and all the previous children had been born safely. There was no reason to suspect anything different would happen this time. But Philippa, in being born, had joined her siblings in motherlessness. Henry knew all about that; he and his sisters had been in the same position twenty-five years earlier. His eldest son, Henry of Monmouth, was nearly eight: almost the same age as Henry’s elder sister had been when their mother had died. Little Blanche was just two.
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If Henry was with his father in France at the time, news of this death must have made both men regard each other with the utmost sympathy. John had been twenty-eight – only a year older than Henry now – when Blanche had died. Henry no doubt cast his mind back over his days with his wife: the musical interests they shared, their fine books, praying together, discussing matters of state together – even down to little aspects of daily life, such as the meals they shared. It comes as no surprise to read that Henry went into mourning for a whole year.
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As if these deaths were not tragedy enough, on 7 June, at Sheen, Queen Anne died. Richard too was utterly distraught. He ordered the entire palace to be destroyed. He demanded that her funeral be the most lavish ever held. The court around him held its breath, quaking at his fearful anger. Away from the court, the nation was deeply troubled. This run of royal
deaths was surely ominous for the country. Walsingham referred to the period in his chronicle as ‘the Death of Ladies’. For Richard it marked a personal tragedy as great as Henry’s, for Richard had genuinely loved his wife. At her magnificent funeral on 3 August, the earl of Arundel turned up late. He then made his excuses and asked permission to leave early. Hearing this disrespectful request, the grieving king lost control of himself. He took a rod from one of his attendants and beat the earl so hard about the head that the earl bled profusely over the floor of the church. The result was confusion, fear and delay, as Arundel was arrested and dragged away to the Tower. It was nightfall before the ceremony was over.

The funerals of the duchess Constanza and the countess Mary took place in a much more sober atmosphere, at Leicester, on consecutive days at the beginning of July. Black cloth in huge quantities adorned the church of St Mary. Henry and his father attended, joining in the procession with other members of the family and the Lancastrian retainers. First, on Sunday 5 July, Constanza was buried. Mary was laid to rest in the Lady Chapel on the following day. Interestingly, Henry never commissioned an effigy of her. Although Richard commissioned two men to make images for the queen’s tomb the following April, and the work was finished by July 1397, it was not until after Henry’s death that a likeness was constructed for his wife.
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The most likely explanation is that he initially wanted a double effigy to be made for them both when he himself died, so that they would lie together (a plan changed by his accession to the throne and the necessity of him having an altogether grander place of burial).

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In August 1394, seven weeks after the funerals of the Lancastrian ladies, John of Gaunt held a meeting at Pontefract Castle. The principal male representatives of the dynasty were present: Edmund, duke of York; his son, Edward, earl of Rutland; and Thomas, duke of Gloucester. It is very likely that Henry was there too. The outcome of this meeting was a letter to the king stressing that, although a person of low estate had entered the palace and uttered things to dishonour John, ‘touching the royal estate’, John had always worked for the benefit of the king and the realm.
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It seems that someone had accused him of plotting to obtain the crown for himself or his son, for this was an assembly of the male heirs of Edward III. If Henry was present at that meeting at Pontefract, then the first, second, third, fourth and sixth in line to the throne were all there, according to the entail, and if Edmund’s younger son, Richard, was also present then that would mean every potential beneficiary of Edward’s entail attended that meeting.
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As soon as the letter was despatched, John started preparing for his trip to Gascony. Shocked by French proposals that the duchy of Aquitaine should eventually be held by the dukes of Lancaster and not the more prestigious and powerful king of England, a number of Gascon lords had refused to accept John’s lordship. It now fell to him to reassert English control of the duchy. His departure left Henry once more in charge of Lancastrian affairs in England, and once more vulnerable.

At the end of September, when John set sail, Richard appointed his uncle Edmund, duke of York, keeper of the realm. It was the betrayal which both Henry and John had long been expecting. Since 1331 the keeper of the realm had been the member of the royal family foremost in the order of succession, regardless of how old or young he was. Whenever a non-royal regent had been selected in the distant past, it was either because the heir to the throne was himself abroad, under-age or in custody. Henry was none of those things. Thus for Richard to appoint Edmund was not just a prevarication – a temporary refusal to decide between the claims of March and Lancaster – it was a public refutation of the pre-eminence of the Lancastrian claim.
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Richard had timed this insult to perfection. John was sailing away, and would be gone for a year. Henry was left standing, publicly stripped of his position in the order of succession. At the same time, Thomas Talbot – the leader of the Cheshire uprising against John of Gaunt, Henry and the duke of Gloucester – was transferred from the Tower of London to the more comfortable surroundings of Windsor Castle, and quietly permitted to escape. All proceedings against him were dropped, by order of the king.
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Even though he had openly accused John of treason, and had confessed that he had roused the Cheshire men to kill three senior members of the royal family, he went unpunished. Three years later, when John specifically demanded that Talbot be brought to justice, Richard did nothing.

This raises another spectre which must have haunted Henry in the autumn of 1394. Talbot had been recruited as one of the king’s personal knights in 1392.
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Cheshire was ardently royalist, the earldom of Chester being an ancestral title of the eldest son of the king. Why would the men of Cheshire have risen up in arms against their beloved king? Explanations in the past have centred on the war providing employment for the king’s archers in Cheshire, and that their protest was against the peace, not against the king. That may be correct as far as the rebels themselves were concerned. But it does not explain why this loyal knight led the rebellion, nor why he went unpunished if he was acting against the king’s wishes, nor why one of his stated ambitions was to kill Henry. Talbot’s second-in-command during the rising was Nicholas Clifton; he was not punished
either, and in 1396 he too was recruited by Richard, despite his actions in 1393 being clearly treasonable. Furthermore, when Talbot surrendered, proceedings against him were dropped after only three days.
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This does not suggest the man was acting as the leader of a local rabble but one who knew he was protected at the highest level. Despite the king’s public statements against Talbot in the parliament of 1394, it is very difficult to avoid the conclusion that Richard was protecting him, and that Talbot believed he spoke honestly for Richard in wishing that Henry was dead. This flies in the face of most historical writing about the relationship between Henry and Richard. Most scholars are of the opinion that Richard and Henry were friendly to one another in the 1390s. According to one leading writer, Henry was ‘in favour with Richard’ at this time.
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According to another, ‘Richard … now did his best to win over to his side this young and popular kinsman [Henry] … from now onwards Derby became a member of a new and differently constituted court group’.
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Such views – especially the last – are mistaken. Henry had just been dismissed by Richard as a receiver of petitions. His status as second in line to the throne had just been publicly denied. The king patently bore no ill will to two men who had called for Henry and his father to be murdered. These are hardly grounds for close friendship between men of great pride.

Similarly, we may ask how often Henry was with the king? The usual way of assessing this is the proportion of royal charters which a magnate witnessed. In the years 1393–7 Henry witnessed fourteen out of forty-two royal charters.
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Not a small number, it would appear, but three of those were in early 1395 when Richard was out of the country. Three were during or just after parliaments, when Henry was at Westminster anyway. The others point to about five dates when Henry met the king, over the course of four years. Although we know that Henry visited court more often than this, the charters do not show him becoming a member of a ‘court group’, still less of him being ‘in favour’.

This use of negative evidence – the measurable
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of evidence which we might reasonably expect to exist had the friendship been genuine – can be pushed further. How many diplomatic missions was Henry appointed to in these years? None. How many royal castles was he given custody of, together with the incomes attached to them? None. How often did he attend court when parliament was not sitting? Hardly ever. Compare this with the pile of honours and favours heaped upon Henry’s younger cousin, Edward of York. Edward had been given the stewardship of Bury St Edmunds in 1390, and the keepership of the castle of Oakham, together with the forest of Rutland and the shrievalty of the same county. In 1391 he had been given the joint keepership of the forest of Bradon, had been
appointed an admiral, and had been given the important captaincy of the town and castle of Calais. The following year he was empowered to negotiate a truce with France. He accompanied Richard on his Irish visit in 1394–5, was given a second earldom (Cork). On his return to England he was made a feoffee of the lands of the late queen. He was then given the keepership of Brigstock Park and sent to France to negotiate another peace treaty and to arrange the royal marriage, being permitted to secure his own marriage to a member of the French royal family at the same time. And so it went on. Every year, those in favour with Richard received lucrative grants, honours and positions of responsibility. And what did Henry receive in these years? Nothing. When Richard had wanted to open up a diplomatic channel with King Sigismund of Hungary in January 1394, the obvious person to send was Henry, who had already met Sigismund, and had received gifts from him on his travels. Instead, Richard sent his half-brother, the earl of Huntingdon. Coming in the same month as Henry’s dismissal as a receiver of petitions and Richard’s refusal to acknowledge him as his heir, this amounted to a third instance of Richard simply ignoring Henry. And what had Henry done to deserve being ignored? He had won fame, gone on crusade, sired sons, visited Jerusalem, and proved himself pre-eminent as a tournament fighter. Each of these was a significant achievement in the chivalric world of 1394 and each one marked another of Richard’s failings. Looking at the situation from Henry’s point of view, we can only see Richard’s behaviour towards him as being driven by jealousy and characterised by spite.

For these reasons, we should view the appointment of Edmund of Langley to be keeper of the realm in 1394 as the moment when Richard’s previously subtle attempts to undermine Henry became public. Far from being a favourite, Henry was denied any of the usual marks of royal dignity. Shortly before leaving for Ireland, Richard appointed ambassadors to treat with Scotland. Henry was not one of them. We cannot say that such a task was below him – it was not below the dignity of the earl of Northumberland or the bishop of Durham – but Henry was never appointed to such a position of responsibility, or any similar position for that matter. In July 1395, when the touchy question of a royal marriage with the French royal family had to be discussed, and while John of Gaunt was still in Gascony, Richard had to appoint a member of the English royal family to represent him. Henry, aged twenty-eight, would have been the ideal choice. Instead, Richard chose Edward of York. By then it was abundantly clear to Henry that the king had not forgiven him for joining the Appellants in 1387, and would never forgive him. Instead Richard wanted his uncle Edmund of York to be his heir, with the idea that Edmund’s
son Edward would succeed him. All John’s hopes, as well as Henry’s own, looked like being dashed by Richard.