The Fears of Henry IV: The Life of England's Self-Made King (46 page)

Henry was alarmed. He was facing a crisis, and it showed every sign of worsening. In explaining why he needed more money he could not help but draw attention to his failure in Scotland and his unpopularity in Wales. The four offices of his household (wardrobe, great wardrobe, privy wardrobe and chamber) had spent a total of nearly £60,000 over the first year of his reign, and much of this had been in Wales and Scotland.
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The commons saw an opportunity to take the initiative. With regard to Wales, they submitted no fewer than eleven petitions for action. These included such measures as barring Welshmen from buying land in England, from holding public office in the border towns and from prosecuting an Englishman in Wales. Although Henry tried to minimise the extent of the anti-Welsh legislation, and refused to rule out granting a general pardon for those involved in Glendower’s rising, he could not resist the swell of anti-Welsh sentiment around him, and was forced to agree to most of the commons’ demands.

Such were the circumstances when, on 26 February, Henry was presented with a petition on behalf of the prelates, proposed by Thomas Arundel, archbishop of Canterbury. A relapsed heretic, William Sawtre, had been tried in convocation and deemed guilty, whereupon the clergy demanded the ‘customary’ death sentence of burning at the stake. This was unusual; it certainly was not customary in England to burn people for lapsing into heretical ways. It
was
customary to burn women for petty treason – attempting to kill their husbands or lords – but burning heretics had previously only been known on the Continent and in Ireland.
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Nevertheless, on 26 February Henry issued the order for the mayor of London to burn Sawtre in a public place in the city. The horrific sentence was carried out on 2 March. Sawtre thus became the first man in England officially to suffer death by burning for heresy, being packed into a barrel and set upon a great fire.
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At the end of February the commons tackled Henry over the key issue of the parliament. His officers were nearly all friends from the Lancastrian household, with little or no experience of national government. Henry was trying to run the country as if it was a large extension of the duchy
of Lancaster. Henry’s view was that he had appointed officers whom he could trust absolutely: men who had already shown they were prepared to follow him on crusades, into exile and even into a revolution. But that was just the point: they served Henry, not England. It made his kingship resemble Richard’s in that it was a personal form of government. Over the subsequent days he was forced to remove his faithful Lancastrian officers, including Thomas Rempston, Thomas Tutbury, Thomas Erpingham and John Scarle, and replace them with men who had gained their experience under Richard II. None of these men fell from favour; all remained close to Henry and were found other positions in the royal household. Nevertheless, the key positions of government were now vested in men who were of sufficient experience to manage affairs of state and of sufficient rank to resist Henry’s personal commands.
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The new chancellor was Edmund Stafford, bishop of Exeter, who had served as chancellor to Richard II. Thomas Percy, earl of Worcester, became the new royal steward, just as he had been under Richard II. Thomas More and Thomas Brounflete, respectively treasurer and controller of the royal household, had also been civil servants in Richard II’s reign. Such appointments were a severe correction to Henry’s government. Yet the commons went even further, and presented a petition that the king should name his officers in parliament, and define their duties, and not replace them before the following parliament. In addition, they requested that he should do the same with the royal council.
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It was a sharp attack on Henry’s authority, being an attempt by the commons to hold Henry’s officers and the council to account. Although their petition was not granted, Henry’s new officers were indeed sworn in before the king in parliament. As for the council, the more powerful magnates began to take a greater role, at the cost of Henry’s Lancastrian officers.
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The encroachment on the royal prerogative was obvious, and there was nothing Henry could do.

By the second week in March Henry had been forced into a number of tight corners. He had been forced to agree to almost all the anti-Welsh legislation.
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His obedient household officers had been replaced with magnates strong enough to question his rule. His financial embarrassment had been exposed. He had agreed to make concessions regarding immediate payment for items purveyed to the royal household. His council had been altered at the commons’ request. Yet despite all this, he still had not received his grant of taxation. This did not come until 10 March. Afterwards he declared his refusal to accept the principle that the king should answer the commons’ petitions before they had made their grant, but in reality he had been forced to do so already. It was a turning point in the relationship between the king and the commons.

It was also on 10 March, the last day of the parliament, that Henry gave his assent to the most famous piece of legislation of perhaps his whole reign. It arose from a petition put forward by the prelates, supported by a commons’ petition against the Lollards. The prelates asked that no one in England ‘should presume to preach publicly or secretly without first having sought and obtained a diocesan licence’ and that no one ‘should teach, hold or instruct anything, secretly or openly, or produce or write a book, contrary to the Catholic faith’. Judgement was to follow within three months of the arrest. The petition ended by specifying that if the wrongdoers refused to abjure their heretical faith, then royal officers should be assigned by the king to carry out the sentences ‘lest these wicked doctrines and heretical and erroneous opinions, or their authors or supporters in the said kingdom, be maintained or in any way increased, which God forbid’.
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In theory, this amounted to something not far short of the state persecution of heretics. Henry, ‘with the consent of the magnates and other nobles of his kingdom present at this parliament’, granted the petition in full. And he added certain further clauses; for example: that heretics shall pay a fine to the king in proportion to the magnitude of their crime. With regard to heretical books, Henry declared that they should be delivered to diocesan officials within forty days of the proclamation of the statute. And then – to make matters absolutely clear – it was pronounced that such persons found guilty and refusing to abjure their heresy, or being pronounced relapsing after abjuring, should ‘be publicly burned in a high place …’ to ‘strike fear into the minds of others’.

De heretico comburendo
(about the burning of a heretic), as the statute became known, did indeed strike fear into the minds of others, being the most stringent and terrifying religious legislation ever enacted in England and the legal basis for Mary I’s burnings in the sixteenth century. But why did Henry, who had placed such emphasis on mercy at the outset of his reign, not only support the petition but even enlarge upon it? Can this be reconciled with what we know of Henry’s character and personal priorities?

At fifteen, Henry had been conventionally religious. By thirty-three, he was spiritually more sophisticated. The process was one of constant development, from his crusade and pilgrimage to the emergence of his personal spirituality, reflected in his worship of the Trinity. In his anointment with the oil of St Thomas at his coronation we can see how religious symbols had increased in importance as he himself had assumed a greater political role. That he should have acquiesced to requests for a tightening up of religious control, in line with the demands of both the commons and
the prelates (led by his close friend Thomas Arundel) is hardly surprising. For a king wishing to be seen as absolutely devout, the enshrinement of Sawtre’s punishment in statute law was a test easily passed.

But beyond this, it is possible to see other, more personal factors at work, such as Henry’s own seriousness, his individualism and his conservatism. The evidence of this parliament shows Henry trying to manage the realm in an authoritarian fashion, trusting his obedient household staff rather than the magnates, who might hold him to account. It indicates a strong desire to retain control, and this in turn reveals a personal commitment to government. This explains why it was that a would-be merciful king enacted
de heretico comburendo.
It was meant to be the ultimate threat – and indeed only once more in his reign was a man burned for relapsing into heresy – but it was also meant to show that Henry was as firmly committed to stamping out religious dissent as he was to eradicating its political equivalent, treason. Mercy was all very well in theory, but, as he had learnt from the Epiphany Rising, there were limits to how merciful a king really could be.

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Henry was stung by the intensity of the criticism in the 1401 parliament but it was not without justification. Across the kingdom, officers of the king were attacked as they tried to gather taxes. The women of Bristol fought a battle with the tax collectors, shouting that the king had promised not to demand a subsidy so they would not pay. The townspeople of Dartmouth in Devon chased a royal tax collector to the quay and forced him to flee for his life in a rowing boat. In the small Somerset town of Norton St Philip, a tax collector and his servant were killed. Local support for the murderers – who had inflicted more than a hundred wounds on their victims – prevented them from being brought to justice. At Abergavenny three thieves were freed from the gallows, Robin Hood-style, by archers who killed Sir William Lucy, the officer responsible for carrying out the executions.
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Law and order was collapsing, and Henry was unsure how to respond.

Part of Henry’s problem was that he was removed from the actual events on the ground. There being no equivalent of a ‘news service’, he only heard about such failures when someone told him. Fearing his reaction at such implicit criticism, few men were so bold. One who was able to speak plainly to him was his confessor, Philip Repingdon. Repingdon was about twenty years older than Henry, and had known him nearly all his life. He was the abbot of Leicester and chancellor of the University of Oxford, and had been present in the parliament of 1401. When he spoke to Henry
about the lawlessness of the realm, Henry listened. Indeed, the king was so shocked that he asked Repingdon to write down his comments in a letter.
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The text of the long letter which Repingdon eventually wrote on 4 May (three days after the murders at Norton St Philip) is still extant.
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‘Most illustrious prince and lord’, he began, ‘may it please your most gracious highness to look with your customary consideration upon me, your majesty’s most humble servant, who prostrates himself at your feet quite desolate with grief … Never since my youth do I recall hearing such foreboding in wise men’s hearts, because of the disorder and unrest which they fear will shortly befall this kingdom. For law and justice are exiles from the kingdom; robbery, killing, adultery, fornication, persecution of the poor, injury, injustice and outrages of all kinds abound, and instead of the rule of law, the will of the tyrant now suffices.’ Repingdon did not pull any punches. ‘Now widows, the fatherless and orphans wring their hands and tears flow down their cheeks, whereas recently, at the time of your entry into the kingdom of England, all the people were clapping their hands and praising God with one voice, and going forth, as did the sons of Israel to meet Christ on Palm Sunday, crying out to heaven for you, their anointed king, as if you were a second Christ, “Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord”, our king of England.’ Repingdon concluded that perhaps twenty thousand people in England deserved execution because of the collapse of law and order.

The combination of the 1401 parliament, Repingdon’s report and the murder of royal officials shocked Henry into action. No one could accuse him of being lazy before this date but henceforth he began to apply extraordinary energy to the business of running the realm. His claims to be a new warrior-king in the image of his grandfather, he now realised, were inappropriate and inadequate to guarantee justice and safety from attack. Consequently he tried to involve himself personally at almost every level of government. According to Adam Usk, he went to Norton St Philip to remedy the problems there. On the financial front, he dutifully removed Norbury as treasurer and appointed the experienced official Laurence Allerthorpe in his place. Nor did he shirk international diplomacy: he issued new commissions for a new round of discussions with the French and personally received ambassadors from the duke of Milan, the king of Sweden and Denmark, and Count Rupert, the new Holy Roman Emperor.
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Similarly he personally received information about the treaty with the Scots. Diplomatic papers concerning the duke of Guelderland were brought to him for his consideration. And all the while he was personally receiving almost all the petitions presented to the government, dealing with as many
as forty per week and delegating barely a handful to the council.
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Somehow, despite this wholehearted involvement in domestic and foreign business, he still managed to find time to enjoy himself. A payment was made about this time for compensation to a knight who had fought with the long sword against the king and been wounded in the neck.
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And Henry found the time to indulge himself in physical love too. Edmund Lebourde, his only illegitimate child, was born in this year.
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