The Fears of Henry IV: The Life of England's Self-Made King (48 page)

To the wet sea-boy in an hour so rude;

And in the calmest and most stillest night

With all appliances and means to boot,

Deny it to a king? Then, happy low, lie down!

Uneasy lies the head which wears a crown.

Henry IV Part Two,
Act 3, Scene 1

By Christmas 1401, Henry’s hopes of reviving the glorious kingship of Edward III had been destroyed. Only two years after his triumphant coronation, he was under pressure in almost every area of his responsibility. Bitter feelings against him were spreading as food became increasingly scarce and purveyors continued to requisition food for the royal household.
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Thomas Walsingham recorded a story about a new attempt on the king’s life. A vicious three-toothed iron implement was concealed in his bedstraw, which would have skewered him when he lay down on it.
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Such a story is almost certainly untrue.
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Nevertheless, it illustrates how unpopular Henry had become in certain quarters. Facing a three-pronged barbarous instrument of torture was not an edifying image for a pious warrior-king

Part of the reason for his declining popularity, and a fundamental reason for the lawlessness of the country, was the soaring price of corn. The harvest of 1400 had been bad; now that of 1401 failed too, so that wheat had doubled in price.
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This coincided with a dramatic drop in revenue from wool exports. These had once benefited Richard II to the tune of £47,000 per year but now barely reached £39,000.
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Thus, just as Henry had greater need to call for money from the wool merchants, they had less ability to pay. Similarly, as his purveyors came under heavier pressure to find food for men in royal service, those from whom they were taking the food had less to give. The result was that they themselves ended up contributing to the breakdown of law and order. It was a vicious circle, and one which could not be ended simply by dropping the import duties on corn until midsummer the following year, as the council suggested.

Circumstances such as these made it very difficult for Henry to act in what he would have considered a kingly way. He might have considered matters of finance beneath his dignity but he could hardly ignore the weight of loans under which the exchequer was operating. At the same time he could hardly put all royal business on hold until his finances were more securely established. This extended far beyond his need to maintain law and order. The marriage of his daughters to potentially important allies was another very expensive royal responsibility. There was a solution to this problem: the old feudal responsibility for every knight’s fee to pay an aid of twenty shillings on the marriage of the king’s eldest daughter. But levying such an aid for the first time in living memory was not likely to soothe the anger of those who had felt betrayed by the demand for taxation in the last parliament. Lords of manors would simply pass on the expense to the tenants. As Adam Usk later put it: ‘the king imposed a tax on the whole kingdom in order to marry his daughters’.
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But if Henry wanted Blanche to marry the heir of the Holy Roman Emperor, he had little choice. Besides, he knew there would be another expensive royal wedding before long. His own.

Henry’s relationship with the widow Joan of Navarre was one of the real surprises of his reign. She was the same age as him, the daughter of Charles the Bad, king of Navarre, and Joan de Valois, daughter of King John II of France. Thus she was Henry’s third cousin twice over. By her previous husband, the duke of Brittany, she had eight children. Following the duke’s death, she had acted as regent in Brittany during the minority of her eldest son. She was not just a Navarrese princess, she was an important member of the French royal family.

Such a match was bound to cause shock waves in society, on both sides of the Channel. England was on the verge of war with France, and had been since the revolution. As recently as November 1401 the council was considering the question of how ‘to counter the malice of those of France who wanted war’.
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Such was the fear that it was deemed necessary to summon a great council to discuss the matter in January. Henry accordingly kept his discussions about the marriage secret. Nevertheless, he could hardly conceal the presence of Navarrese ambassadors at his court. When his council asked what the ambassadors had come to talk about, he would say only that they would be told in due course.
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Although it is not known when Henry and Joan first met, they were probably already acquainted when Henry travelled to France for the celebrated meeting at Ardres in 1396 and the subsequent royal wedding at Calais. On that occasion he stayed almost a month in France, and had several opportunities to see her. They would have met again at the Garter
feast at Windsor in April 1398, which Joan attended with her husband.
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It is likely that they met again during Henry’s exile, when his marriage to Mary of Berry was being discussed.
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No marriage at this stage was possible, of course, as the duke of Brittany was still alive. But after the old duke’s death in November 1399 it seems that the idea swiftly entered Joan’s mind, if not Henry’s too. Within three months she sent ambassadors to Henry, and on 15 February 1400 wrote him a letter which is almost intimate in its expression of good wishes:

My most dear and honoured lord and cousin,

Forasmuch as I am eager to hear of your good estate – which may our Lord make as good as your noble heart can desire, and as good as I could wish for you – I pray you, my most dear and most honoured lord and cousin, that you would tell me often of the certainty of it, for the great comfort and gladness of my heart. For whenever I am able to hear a good account of you, my heart rejoices exceedingly. And if, of your courtesy, you would like to hear the same from over here – thank you – at the time of writing my children and I are all in good health (thanks be to God, and may He grant the same to you) as Joanna de Bavelen, who is bringing these letters to you, can explain more plainly … And if anything will please you that I am able to do over here, I pray you to let me know; and I will accomplish it with a very good heart according to my power. My most dear and honoured lord and cousin, I pray the Holy Ghost that He will have you in his keeping.

Written at Vannes, 15 February, the duchess of Brittany.
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The tone of this letter leaves no doubt that there was a genuine closeness between Henry and Joan. It goes far beyond the usual politeness between a member of the French royal family and the king of England, especially considering that it was written a few days after the English ambassadors at Calais had warned Henry that war with France was more likely than peace. But there is more here to suggest a genuine closeness. Intimacy is the sole purpose of the letter: apart from its kind thoughts, it says nothing of consequence.
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It implies – in Joan’s thanks to Henry for asking after her health – that he had already written a letter to her. And it reveals that Joan, like Henry himself, was a believer in the power of the Trinity (as shown by the reference to the Holy Ghost). They were more than just friends; they shared a spiritual outlook.

Their courtship was conducted in secret and from afar. Ambassadors conveyed their communications to each other, never putting anything in writing as sensitive as the above letter. The obstacles to their relationship
were not just limited to the likelihood of war between their countries and the disapproval of the French Crown. France recognised the pope at Avignon, Benedict XIII; the English recognised the Roman pontiff, Boniface IX. In order for Henry and Joan to marry, they had to obtain a dispensation, as they were related within the degrees of consanguinity prohibited by the Church. Not until 20 March 1402 did Joan obtain a bull from Pope Benedict allowing her to marry Henry. Immediately she empowered her ambassadors, Antony and John Rhys, to arrange the ceremony. They did so with great speed. She was married to Henry by proxy just two weeks later, at Eltham, on 2 April 1402. Present to witness proceedings were Henry’s half-brother, John Beaufort, and several of his closest friends, including the archbishop of Canterbury and all three Percys, namely the earls of Northumberland and Worcester, and Hotspur.
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The form of words used on this occasion included ‘thereto I plight thee my troth’, the first recorded appearance of the well-known phrase.
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Marriage was just the beginning of the struggle. As soon as the deed was done, Henry had to explain to his kingdom why he was marrying a Frenchwoman at this particular time. The English people were astonished. For her part, Joan had to persuade the rest of the French royal family that she could marry their enemy: the man who had ousted King Charles’s son-in-law and thus deprived his daughter of the throne of England. She also had to persuade Benedict XIII to grant her permission to live among schismatics (those who supported his papal rival). But Joan was a resourceful and determined woman. Henry too had made up his mind.

These problems show that this was far from being a marriage of convenience. So it is likely that it was yet another royal love affair, like so many royal partnerships in the late middle ages.
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Yet all royal marriages have a political dimension, however emotionally and spiritually close the couple may have been. In Henry’s case this is made clear by simultaneously arranging his two daughters’ marriages as well as his own. Blanche was already betrothed to the son of the Holy Roman Emperor, and was about to set out for the Rhineland; and Philippa’s hand was the subject of discussion between Henry and the king of Denmark. These multiple negotiations indicate that Henry was looking at connections with ruling houses not just to cement alliances with other countries but in order to achieve a wider recognition of his dynasty. If he could persuade everyone else in Europe to accept him as the rightful king of England, and if he himself could marry a French duchess, how much longer could the French refuse to recognise him as king of England?
With his lofty ideas of kingship sinking like a ship beneath the choppy waves of insolvency, rebellion and revolt, he needed every bit of recognition he could get.

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Henry’s marriage was almost the only happy development in his life. In February 1402 he received a letter from his fourteen-year-old son Thomas, in Ireland, saying that several royal officers had deserted because he had been unable to pay them. The treasurer of England proved unable to balance the books, and was replaced by Henry’s faithful clerk, Henry Bowet (now the bishop of Bath and Wells). In March the earl of Crawford, a Scottish admiral in the pay of Louis d’Orléans (who had turned against Henry along with the rest of the French royal family), began to harass English shipping.
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In April Glendower ambushed and captured his archenemy Lord Grey of Ruthin and carried him off gleefully into the mountains, demanding an exorbitant ransom. The council advised Henry against permitting his daughter Philippa to marry King Eric of Denmark, much to Henry’s annoyance. But by far the most worrying development was the discovery of a new threat to the Lancastrian dynasty. Rumours were circulating that Richard II was still alive.

Whether the Ricardian rumours of March–June 1402 count as the third revolt against Henry’s rule is difficult to say. Certainly men were accused of attempting to overthrow Henry, and to kill him and his sons, and to reinstate Richard as king, and so there is no doubt that it constituted a serious threat.
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But the means by which they hoped to achieve these things are unclear. It is hard now to discern any coordination of the various strands of discontent, beyond the fact that many of the dissidents were friars. It is possible that there were no actual plots at all, just widespread sedition. Considering the people’s proven ability to dethrone a king, popular rumour could easily result in a real plot if left unchecked. The line between rumour and rebellion was not as clear as it had once been.

The discontented were united in one respect: they believed that, if Richard II was still alive, he should be restored to the throne. By that reckoning, strangely, it did not matter if he was actually dead. Those disaffected with Henry’s kingship could take up arms in the name of Richard II and fight for his right still to be king
if he
was still alive. Whom they would actually crown if they were successful was a minor detail. The main objective was removing Henry, not restoring Richard.

The plot was first discovered in early May, when a priest was arrested at Ware in Hertfordshire. Before he was executed, he named many collaborators. Already the rumours about Richard’s survival had spread abroad.
In April Jean Creton was sent by the French king to Scotland to discover whether the man there who claimed to be Richard was genuinely him. Although Creton quickly discovered – to his great disappointment – that the Scottish Richard was an impostor, he obviously did not circulate such information in England. On 9 May Henry issued an order to the sheriffs to take action against those who said Richard was alive. Two days later he wrote to the master of the Dominicans at Oxford warning him to keep his preachers under control. His words had little effect. A few days later, the prior of Launde was arrested and executed for treason.
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On 27 May the prior of the Dominicans at Winchester was seized, as was the rector of Horsmonden (Kent). The head of the Cambridge Dominican house was taken into custody, along with one of his brethren. They and several other clergymen were committed to the Tower on 3 June.
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A further proclamation had to be issued two days later against seditious preaching ‘in taverns and other places where people gather’.