The Fears of Henry IV: The Life of England's Self-Made King (36 page)

All the cards were now in Henry’s hands. Richard had nothing left with which to bargain. He did not even have the means with which to approach Henry, for Henry could just as easily imprison the next man Richard sent, and then the next. It was down to Henry to make the decisive move. A siege of Conway could take some time, and his army was so unwieldy and
expensive that already he had had to send some men home. So he decided to lure Richard out into the open. On or about 15 August he sent the earl of Northumberland to the king at Conway with a large force of men with orders to arrest him.

Northumberland had a plan, devised by Thomas Arundel (according to Jean Creton, a Frenchman staying with Richard).
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He concealed the bulk of his forces at the foot of a mountain, guarding a pass. Then he went ahead to the castle with only five men, and asked to see the king. When admitted to the royal presence he promised Richard that all Henry wanted was his inheritance and that justice be meted out to the five men who had procured the death of his uncle, Thomas of Woodstock. The earl proposed that Henry and Richard would ride together and hold a parliament at London at which Henry would be reinstated as duke of Lancaster and Hereford, and steward of England, and the criminals would be punished. To impress Richard with the sincerity of this offer, Northumberland swore upon some relics that Henry would honour these terms to the letter.
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Richard had little choice. The alternative was flight, but he knew he was unlikely to be able to escape Henry that way for long. So he decided to go along with the earl’s suggestion, thereby luring Henry into a false sense of security. According to Jean Creton, Richard said to the earl of Salisbury, after Northumberland had withdrawn, that he would persuade Henry to take the route south through Wales. Then, at his order, certain Welshmen would rise and capture him. ‘I swear to you’, he said to Salisbury, ‘that whatever assurances I may give him [Henry], he shall surely be put to a bitter death for this outrage and injury that he has done to us. Doubt it not, there shall be no parliament held at Westminster on this matter.’
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But Richard spoke too soon. Soon after setting out, he found himself surrounded by Northumberland’s men, who now formed his escort. He had fallen into the trap.

Henry received news of Richard’s capture via a messenger who had travelled through the night, reaching Chester at daybreak on the 16th. He summoned his lords and captains and set out shortly afterwards, following the coastal road towards Flint Castle, to which Richard had been taken. The army which accompanied him that morning was overjoyed at the news. They set out in ordered columns, playing horns and trumpets as they marched. Richard heard the noise, and watched them approaching from the top of the castle. He now had visible proof that it was all over. There were no bushes or trees to obscure his view: he could see for himself the substantial forces Henry had at his command. The realisation that the nation had deserted him affected him deeply. As he watched the army
surrounding the castle, he began to pray, according to Creton. ‘Good Lord God! I commend myself into your holy keeping, and cry you mercy, that you may pardon all my sins; since it is your pleasure that I should be delivered into the hands of my enemies; and if they cause me to die, I will take death patiently as you took it for us all.’
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Richard at this point declined to take food. He had been reluctant to eat at Rhuddlan (where he had stopped briefly on the way to Flint), perhaps for fear of being poisoned, and had only accepted bread and wine when Northumberland himself had offered it to him. Now again he chose to fast. Northumberland reported this to Henry, and Henry decided to wait outside the castle until Richard had eaten. So Richard was forced to sit down and dine. Fearing the worst, he bade his fellow prisoners sit down with him, and eat. The king sat at the table solemnly. But still he did not eat. Eventually Henry went to the gate of the castle and sent his herald in to fetch out the unimportant men with the king. Creton was one of them. By his own admission, he was more frightened than he had ever been in his life. The herald announced to Henry in English that these men were French. Henry spoke to them in their own language, and assured them that their lives would be spared. Then he went into the chamber in which the king was sitting at the table.

Henry bowed low before the king, and approached. He bowed low again, sweeping his cap to the floor.

Richard took off his own hat. ‘Cousin of Lancaster, you are right welcome’, he declared.

Henry bowed again, and addressed the king in English. ‘I have come without being summoned by you for the following reason. The common report of your people is that you have for the last twenty or twenty-two years governed them very badly and very rigorously, and they are not content with this. But if it please the Lord, I will help you to govern them better than they have hitherto been governed.’

In the words of Jean Creton Richard responded, ‘fair cousin, since it pleases you, it pleases us as well’.

Then Henry spoke to everyone else there individually, including the bishop of Carlisle. There was only one person to whom he refused to speak. He told an elderly knight of his to pass a message to the earl of Salisbury. The knight announced that the earl should not expect to be spoken to any more than he had spoken to Henry when he had been in Paris. Reference to that event, when Salisbury had told the French king that Henry was a traitor, and asked him to refuse to let Henry marry Mary of Berry, caused the earl to be silent and afraid.

Henry led Richard to Chester, and had him secured in the castle keep.
The royal party remained there for three days, agreeing that parliament should be summoned, as the earl of Northumberland had promised the king. The notice required to hold a parliament was forty days; writs of summons dated 19 August were sent out announcing a parliament would be held on 30 September, the day after Michaelmas. With that important element of government again in place, the bureaucracy which had stopped functioning since 9 August started slowly to regain its usual efficiency. The civil servants knew who and where their king was, and they knew in whom sovereign power lay. That these two facts were not embodied in the same man was not essential for them to do their work.

Henry, his companions and the remainder of the army took Richard and headed towards London on the 20th. The first night after leaving Chester there was an unsuccessful attempt to liberate the king. At Lichfield, on or about 23 August, Richard himself made an attempt to get away, lowering himself from a window. After that there were no more chances. The king was placed under a twenty-four-hour armed guard, with ten or twelve men detailed to watch him closely. In this state he was conducted to London.

On the last day of August, two miles out of the city, Henry was met by the mayor and aldermen. He presented Richard to them. ‘What would you have me do with him?’ he asked, probably referring to the request of an earlier embassy asking him to have the king beheaded.
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‘Take him to Westminster’, they replied. So Richard was conducted to the Palace of Westminster and lodged there for the night. The following day he was led to the Tower, with a mass of people surrounding him at a distance and jeering. Men-at-arms kept the space around him clear, so that everyone could see his face. The hatred of the crowd was bitter. They called him a ‘little bastard’, or a ‘wicked bastard’.
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An attempt to murder him as he was paraded through the city was narrowly averted by the mayor and aldermen.

While Richard was being taken to Westminster, Henry entered the city of London in triumph. He rode around to the principal gate of the city, Aldgate, in order for his procession to be seen to best effect. ‘Long live the good duke of Lancaster!’ shouted the rapturous crowds, ‘God bless Henry of Lancaster!’ Jean Creton, who recorded the procession, declared in dismay: ‘had the Lord Jesus Christ himself arrived, he could not have been greeted with more pleasure by the citizens’.

With the crowds’ shouts and blessings ringing in his ears, Henry rode to St Paul’s Cathedral and dismounted. He entered the old cathedral in full armour and walked solemnly towards the high altar, where he knelt and prayed. Then, rising, he turned to his left. There stood a stone tomb.
Nearby hung a lance and a shield. The shield bore the royal coat of arms. In this tomb his father had finally been reunited with his much-loved mother. Henry looked at it, and remembered his father, and perhaps recalled Chaucer’s stories of his mother’s dancing and singing. At that point the tension gave way, and all the stress and fears poured out of him in tears and uncontrollable emotion. With all the crowd watching, Henry wept.
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*

The months of July and August 1399 rank as the most important yet in the life of Henry of Lancaster. Through deliberate and well-planned action he had transformed himself from an exiled traitor into a national hero. He had been acknowledged as the sole and undisputed leader of the popular movement for justice, and he had been recognised as the man who would wield royal power when (and not if) Richard’s ability to rule was officially terminated. Finally, he had received the king as his prisoner and placed him under guard in the Tower of London. They had been the most extraordinary two months.

Nevertheless, September was to be even more important, for it was now that Henry had to reckon the full weight of what he had achieved. That meant not just taking stock of the situation but identifying what to do next. Some things were clear. The king’s position had to be diminished, so that he would never again be able to exert his personal form of government. Henry had to be restored to all his titles and estates, as did the other disinherited lords, including Thomas Arundel, who had to be reinstated as the archbishop of Canterbury. But what of the future? Indeed, the one question which mattered above all others – the defining question of the rest of Henry’s life – now had to be addressed. What were his own intentions with regard to the throne?

This is a hugely difficult question. Paradoxically, this is not because it is difficult to come up with an answer; it is because there are so many answers. For a start, we could say simply that the strength of support he had received since marching south from Pontefract had convinced him that he could and should make himself king in place of Richard. But this does not mean that he had always intended to supplant him. If we ask ourselves the question
when
Henry decided to make himself king, the complexity of the question is revealed. It is not hard to envisage Henry as a boy dreaming of taking his cousin’s place and leading a chivalric nation in war, like his grandfather Edward III. Likewise there is no reason to doubt that his grandfather’s entailment persuaded him absolutely that he was Richard’s legitimate heir. A man who grows up
believing he is the heir to the throne is unlikely ever to be able to let go of such an idea. As the years passed, and Richard showed no sign of producing a child, Henry’s awareness of his position and responsibility as the heir must have grown stronger. But desire, belief and duty are not the same as intention, and even an intention needs the context of a particular set of circumstances in order to be understood. Although one popular historian has claimed that Henry’s promise to the abbot of Saint-Denis to help him recover Deerhurst Priory was a clear indication of his intention to take the throne, these two things cannot be directly connected; Henry only promised to ‘do what he could’, and this may have related to his future status as a duke rather than as a king.
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Had the huge army which had gathered around him at Doncaster sought the coronation of the eight-year-old earl of March, he would have had difficulty in resisting such demands. As a result it is fair to say that, while he had hoped since childhood that he would one day become king, and had every intention of ascending the throne if he could, he was not a conqueror in the sense that he would now make himself king against the will of the governing classes. It was, rather, their support which convinced him that it was the best course of action both for him and them.

It is this combination of the necessity of removing Richard from power and the widespread support for Henry as a leader that best answers our question about his intentions towards the throne in September 1399. The people had not called for another boy-king like Richard, nor for an old man like Duke Edmund; they wanted a responsible warrior-leader like Edward III had been in his thirties and forties. Given the death of the popular earl of March in 1398, Henry (aged thirty-two) was the obvious candidate. Thus it is likely that Henry swore the Doncaster oath on the basis that, while he had promised not to
seize
the throne, he knew that once Richard had abdicated, the way would be clear for him to inherit it. If parliament accepted the king’s abdication, Henry would become king.

It all sounds perfectly straightforward. But there was a problem. Despite everything he had been told all his life, and despite his personal conviction that he was next in line for the throne, it now emerged that Henry was not Richard’s legal heir.

This statement needs some explanation, for, by the terms of Edward III’s entail, Henry
was
the heir, without any doubt. The reason we can be so categorical in saying that circumstances had changed is because, when it came to actually claiming the throne, he did not use this document. In fact, he did not even mention it. He claimed the throne not as the heir of
his grandfather, Edward III, but as the heir of Henry III, his double great-great-great-grandfather, who had died in 1272.
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Many writers down the years have puzzled over the problem of Henry’s succession. Some have suggested that Henry wanted to draw attention to his double royal descent from Henry III, through both his father and his mother, in contrast to the single royal descent of Edmund Mortimer (which was through his grandmother). This is very doubtful. If Henry claimed a right of inheritance through his mother, he would only add strength to Mortimer’s claim to the throne, which rested entirely on a woman’s ability to convey a right of succession. Thus any reference to a claim through a woman rendered Henry lower in the order of succession than all the Mortimers. For this reason it is not possible to accept that Henry’s claim to the throne through descent from Henry III was due to a wish simply to demonstrate his mother’s as well as his father’s royal ancestry.