The Fears of Henry IV: The Life of England's Self-Made King (39 page)

*

Parliament resumed its session on the day after the coronation. It had previously met on 6 October, when the restored archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Arundel, had delivered the opening speech. Henry was a ‘wise and prudent man’, the archbishop had declared. He had been ‘sent by
God through his great grace and mercy to govern the realm … and wished to be ruled and advised by the wise men and elders of the realm, for his own advantage and assistance and that of all his realm’.
⁸
These were high ideals indeed, especially as Henry was about to preside over a parliament which included men who had plotted against his life. Therefore it is important to ask what Henry’s intentions as king actually were. How far did he wish to be ruled by the ‘wise men and elders’? What was his vision of his kingship?

The most important element of Henry’s kingship was his intention to end his cousin’s experiment in autocratic rule. It comes as no surprise to see that one of Henry’s first acts as king was to repeal the proceedings of the Revenge Parliament. This of course reduced the power of the monarch, for it wiped out Richard’s perpetual grant of the wool subsidy. Henry also repealed the judgements on those who had been condemned in the Revenge Parliament, and reinstated the decisions of the Merciless Parliament as lawful and correct, even though he himself had not agreed with all of the verdicts at the time. He annulled the blank charters by which Richard had sought to control the sixteen counties and London, and had them publicly destroyed by the chancellor. All this was expected of him: it was the understanding upon which he had been welcomed back to England.

Henry’s plans for governing in future (as opposed to undoing the wrongs of the past) may be connected back to the oath he swore at Doncaster, and in particular his policy of not levying direct taxation in peacetime. Through Sir Thomas Erpingham and the earl of Northumberland, he assured the prelates of his intention not to levy taxes except in times of war. Unlike Richard, Henry would ‘live off his own’, as he put it: from the revenue of customs duties, the royal estates, the royal treasury and his own great Lancastrian inheritance.

At the same time as promising the prelates that he would not levy taxes, he promised them that he would not tolerate heresy. This religious dimension to his vision of kingship is in keeping with everything we know about his religious orthodoxy prior to his accession: from his washing paupers’ feet on Maundy Thursday to his journey to Jerusalem. But his very accession enlarged his spiritual conviction. As Arundel had proclaimed, it had been by God’s grace that he had redeemed England from Richard’s rule. In fact, his personal crisis in 1398–9 seems to have brought out the sense of the divine particularly strongly in him, marked by a number of references to the Trinity. The peace treaty he had sealed with the duke of Orléans in France earlier in the year had been agreed ‘in the name of the Almighty and the most holy Trinity’.
⁹
The motto he gave to his new order of chivalry –
Tria juncto in uno
(‘the three joined in one’) – was a direct
reference to the Holy Trinity. Occasionally he ended his letters not with a wish that the Almighty would keep the recipient in good health but that ‘the Blessed Trinity would grant you joy and health always’.
¹⁰
Others wrote to him with this same salutation, including his lifelong friend Richard Kingston, his sons Henry and John, his half-sister Catalina, and his future wife, Joan of Navarre.
¹¹
Later in life he continued to make his devotions to the Trinity, and to incorporate images of the Trinity into his buildings. Parliamentary petitions were offered to him ‘in honour of the Trinity’.
¹²
Most significantly of all, he requested to be buried at Canterbury Cathedral and was laid to rest alongside his uncle and fellow Trinity follower, the Black Prince, in the Trinity Chapel. Indeed, he may have originally been attracted to the Trinity precisely because it had been famously sponsored by the Black Prince, a chivalric hero.
¹³
Whatever the reason for it, such particular and consistent devotion to the Trinity points to a firm and pious outlook, underlined by his declaration against heresy.

These elements of Henry’s kingship – the determination to rule in conjunction with the great men of the realm, taxation only in wartime, religious orthodoxy, and the establishment of a chivalric order – are all reminiscent of Edward III’s kingship. Even the language in which he made his speeches – English – harks back to Edward III’s use of English to stir up nationalist sentiment. These parallels between Henry in October 1399 and Edward III are not a coincidence. By 1399, Edward III’s reign had come to be seen as a golden age, being peaceful at home and glorious abroad: everything which Richard II’s reign was not.
¹⁴
Hence we find Henry likened to his grandfather out of hope as well as the obvious parallel between their knightly virtues. Edward III’s epitaph in Westminster Abbey recorded that he was ‘the undefeated warrior, a second Maccabeus’. When Arundel preached Henry’s virtues to the people, he described him also as ‘another Maccabeus’.
¹⁵
Similarly, Edward III’s epitaph states he was ‘a merciful king, the bringer of peace to his people’. On the day of the coronation, Adam Usk overheard Henry promising Archbishop Arundel that he would ‘strive to rule his people with mercy and truthfulness in all matters’.
¹⁶
As will be seen, mercy was perhaps the most pronounced of all the elements of Edward III’s kingship which Henry now adopted for his own, and it was present from the start.

In this light of modelling his reign on that of Edward III, it is no surprise to see that Henry’s vision of kingship included warfare. Just as Edward III had won great victories in France and Scotland, so Henry promised to win them too. As it happened, the Scots attacked Wark Castle during the parliament, taking advantage of the fact that the wardens of the Marches (the earls of Northumberland and Westmorland) were both at Westminster.
The Scots seized the wife and family of Thomas Grey and held them to ransom, and destroyed Wark, in contravention of the truce. Shortly after this, on 10 November, Henry received a letter from the king of Scotland, Robert III, refusing to acknowledge him as king and loftily declaring that past breaches of the truce should be discussed at Haddenstank, a point well within English territory, as if that was now the official border.
¹⁷
Henry’s reaction was uncompromising. In an emotional speech to the lords on 10 November, Henry declared his intention to lead an army against the Scots.
¹⁸
As for the war with France, although his initial move was to make peace, and to secure that peace through a marriage between one of his sons and Isabella, when that hope foundered he stated his warlike intentions in a speech during a procession through London. ‘I swear and promise to you that neither his highness my grandfather King Edward, nor my uncle the prince of Wales, ever went so far forward in France as I will do, if it please God and St George, or I will die in the attempt.’
¹⁹

As a result of all this, we have a clear picture of Henry’s vision of his kingship at the outset of his reign as that of a pious and conservative leader, merciful to his people, leading them in victorious battles overseas, maintaining peace at home, working with parliament and facilitating the economic prosperity of the nation. This innate conservatism goes a long way to explain why Henry was so popular at his coronation, in the wake of the radically individual Richard. His ideas about kingship were familiar to all: reminiscent not only of Edward III but also of the Old Testament kings: ‘merciful to their people and terrifying to their enemies’. Yet this was a form of kingship whose most vivid colours had already begun to fade. An early fifteenth-century king could not hope to impose spiritual orthodoxy on his people and avoid controversy. Lollardy had affected the religious outlook of the Church in England too much for there to be complete unity ever again. Similarly, it was increasingly hard to equate overseas warfare with economic prosperity at home. Overseas wars cost a lot of money, and that meant direct taxation. Victories over the French, Scots and Spanish still had their place (as shown at Agincourt in 1415), but such conflicts were difficult to justify economically. The mechanics of war were changing too, with guns and longbows replacing the massed charge of knights, so that chivalry had lost much of its purpose. Lastly, the relationship between king and parliament had changed. Whereas Edward III had been forced to work closely with parliament, Henry unwittingly compromised himself at the outset, in declaring his objective of cooperating with parliament as a matter of principle (a position from which he later had to withdraw). Therefore, although Henry’s vision reflected the greatest form of kingship then known, it was already out of date. Even
if he managed to satisfy a few or all of his competing priorities for a short while, he could not continue to do so for long. It sounded magnificent to his people, and resounded in parliament, but it was much easier to announce than to perform.

*

Henry’s principal aims in his first parliament were to make his dynasty secure and to administer justice for those who had benefited from, or been victimised by, the old regime. In line with the first of these, he created his eldest son prince of Wales, duke of Aquitaine and earl of Chester – the traditional titles for the king’s son to bear – and had him recognised in parliament as heir to the throne. He also gave him the title of duke of Lancaster. All four of his sons were nominated as Knights of the Garter. No matter what happened to Henry himself, his dynasty was as safe as he could reasonably make it.

Justice was a much more complicated issue. Many people at that parliament wanted Richard to be put to death. Many more wanted those who had benefited from his reign to be punished as traitors. Part of the problem was that the very concept of treason had been greatly enlarged by Richard to encompass anyone who dared disagree with him: in Richard’s own words ‘he is a child of death who offends the king’.
²⁰
Thus the first step towards re-establishing justice in such matters was to reaffirm Edward III’s Statute of Treasons as the proper measure by which traitors should be judged. This was done on 15 October.

Nothing, however, could entirely smooth the path which Henry and those at that parliament had now to tread. When the Speaker, John Doreward, asked that all of Richard II’s ‘evil counsellors’ be arrested, many saw an opportunity to revenge themselves on Richard’s companions. William Bagot, who had been captured in Ireland and brought back in chains by Peter Bucton, was the first ‘evil counsellor’ summoned before parliament, on 16 October.
²¹
He had already submitted a bill to Henry which outlined a defence of sorts, based partly on his alerting Henry to Richard’s ill will in March 1399. But the main thrust of his defence was that the duke of Aumale had been the principal ‘evil counsellor’. He directly accused the duke of at least two treasonable acts (being an accessory to the murder of the duke of Gloucester and expressing a desire that Henry himself might be killed). He was asked whether he stood by the terms of his bill, and he swore that he did. ‘It was you’, he said to the duke in person, ‘who said that if the duke of Gloucester, and the earls of Arundel and Warwick, and others were not killed, the king would never be able to exercise his regal power to the full.’ In addition, he stated that
Mowbray and himself had urged Richard to resign in favour of Henry. Richard had retorted that he would never do so on account of his belief that Henry ‘is a worthless man at heart, and will always remain so. Besides, if he were to rule the kingdom, he would want to destroy the whole of God’s Holy Church.’
²²

Henry felt the need to defend himself on this point. ‘With the grace of God, I will show such a prediction to be quite false’, he declared, adding that he had taken a vow to uphold, protect and support God’s Church with as much zeal as any of his predecessors. ‘But I hope to see men appointed to churches who are worthy of their position, unlike many of those who were appointed in Richard’s reign.’
²³

Meanwhile Edward, duke of Aumale, was seething with fury at Bagot’s accusations. He knew he was now on trial for his life. ‘If the duke of Norfolk maintains that I sent two yeomen to Calais to see to the duke of Gloucester’s death’, he bellowed, referring to Bagot’s informant, ‘then I say that he lies falsely, and I shall prove it with my body!’
²⁴
And with that he flung his hood at the feet of Bagot in the middle of the hall, challenging him to a duel.

Henry was in a difficult position. Both men were guilty. But Bagot had probably saved Henry’s father from being murdered in January 1398 and had subsequently been a useful informer. As for the duke of Aumale, despite being Richard II’s adopted brother, he had been part of the plot to arrest the king in July, triggering his flight to North Wales. His father, the duke of York, had practically acted as kingmaker at Berkeley. Despite their guilt, Henry could not afford to punish either man severely. He ordered the duke to pick up his hood and return to his seat.

Bagot was asked why he had consented to so much of the bad advice which the king had received. His reply is revealing of the fear which had prevailed at court during the last days of Richard’s rule. ‘Is there any one among you all who, if King Richard had demanded a certain thing from you, would have dared to disagree with him, or not have complied with his order?’

John Norbury, whom Henry had appointed treasurer, stepped forward and claimed that he for one would have refused. But Norbury was a mere esquire, and protected by Henry. It was hardly fair to compare him in his current safe position with the dukes and earls in Richard’s line of sight a year earlier. Henry himself had been forced to accede to the proceedings of the Revenge Parliament. He knew that Bagot was speaking the truth.