The Fears of Henry IV: The Life of England's Self-Made King (50 page)

One Scottish prisoner, the earl of Douglas, was noticeable by his absence. He had been wounded in five places and had lost an eye at Homildon Hill, but he did not die of his injuries, and was fit enough to fight another battle within the year, so it was probably not his physical health which
kept him away from Westminster. The most likely explanation for the earl’s absence lies in Hotspur’s attitude towards Henry. Hotspur was increasingly resentful towards the king for not reimbursing him his expenses upon demand. His letters had assumed an increasingly arrogant tone over the last eighteen months, and the lucrative offices which Henry had given him and his family had not soothed his temper. Most of all, his brother-in-law, Sir Edmund Mortimer, had been a prisoner in the mountains of Wales for the last six months, and Henry had not even tried to ransom him. Henry had agreed to help raise the ransom for Lord Grey of Ruthin, but not Mortimer. Perhaps he suspected that Mortimer might have given himself up too easily into the clutches of the Welshman. Either way, it did not bode well for the restoration of good relations with Hotspur.

The parliament of 1402 was not nearly so bruising as that of 1401. All the same, some hard questions were raised about finance. The commons asked where Richard’s great treasure had gone: John Ikelington, Richard II’s clerk and the custodian of £44,000 of the hoard, was examined and acquitted. The money, it turned out, had all been given to the Percy family to defend the Scottish border. Another tough question was why Henry had appointed his personal friend, Henry Bowet, as treasurer. Was this not a return to his personal style of government, exercised through personal friends, about which parliament had warned him the previous year? Henry managed to resist a demand to examine his officers, but was forced to sack Bowet and replace him with a more experienced man.
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Guy Mone, bishop of St David’s and Richard II’s treasurer in 1398, was given the unenviable task of righting the royal finances. Only after this, and after agreeing to a large number of petitions against the Welsh, against the friars and against the foreign priories, was the tax granted on the last day of the parliament (25 November 1402).

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In late August, while he had been dashing around the Midlands, preparing to lead his three armies into Wales, Henry had received a letter from his estranged friend, Louis, duke of Orléans, the brother of the French king. It was stupefying.

I, Louis … am writing to tell you that, with the aid of God and the blessed Trinity, in the desire which I have to gain renown, which you in like manner should feel, considering idleness the bane of lords of high birth who do not employ themselves in arms … I propose that we should meet at an appointed place, each of us accompanied by one hundred knights and esquires … there to fight each other until one of us surrenders, and the victorious man may do with his prisoners as he pleases
… I propose (after hearing your intentions) to be at my town of Angoulême, accompanied by the aforesaid number of knights and esquires. Now, if your courage be such as I think it is, for the fulfilment of this deed of arms, you may come to Bordeaux, when we may depute properly qualified persons to fix on a spot for the combat …
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Not surprisingly, Henry did not immediately respond. After all, what was Louis thinking of, challenging a king to a duel? But – as with his interrogations of the friars – Henry was unable to ignore a good argument; he was determined to have the final word. And where a point of honour was concerned, Henry knew that it had to be the one whose honour was impugned who answered the challenge. Ten days after parliament broke up, he sent a reply:

We write to inform you that we have seen your letter, containing a request to perform a deed of arms, and from the expressions contained therein, we understand that it is addressed to us, which has caused us no small surprise for the following reasons. First, on account of the truce … in which you yourself are a party. Second, on account of the alliance that was made between us at Paris, which you swore to uphold in the presence of our well-beloved knights and esquires, Sir Thomas Erpingham, Sir Thomas Rempston and John Norbury, to whom you gave letters, sealed with your great seal, reciting this treaty of alliance …

Since you have seen fit, without any cause, to act contrary to this treaty … we therefore inform you that we have annulled the letter of alliance received from you, and henceforth throw aside all love and affection towards you, for it seems to us that no prince, lord, knight or any person whatsoever ought to demand a combat from him with whom a treaty of friendship exists. In reply to your letter, we add that considering the very high rank in which it has pleased God to place us, we are not bound to answer any such demands unless made by persons of equal rank with ourselves. With regard to what you say, that we ought to accept your proposal to avoid idleness, it is true that we are not as often employed in arms and honourable exploits as our noble predecessors have been; but all-powerful God may, when he pleases, make us follow their steps, and we, through the indulgence of his grace, have not been so idle but have used our time to defend our honour …
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He finished off with a threat to invade the French-occupied parts of Gascony, at a time and place of his own choosing, and he urged Louis to be more circumspect in his letters in the future.
Politicking though these letters are, they reveal another dimension of Henry’s perseverance: an adamant streak that prevented him from letting go of any question of his kingly status. No Welsh rebels were allowed to go unchecked, no friars were allowed to get away with sedition, and certainly no French prince could be permitted to deny him his title. He was a king, and that very fact had become the most important thing in his life. If anyone doubted it, he would answer them personally, defending his character and his royal status to the last.

Louis was of a similar proud disposition, and scorned Henry’s reply in his next letter. He described it as ‘a New Year’s gift’ and added:

In regard to your ignorance, or pretended ignorance, whether my letter could have been addressed to you, your name was on it, such as you received at the font, and by which you were always called by your parents when they were alive. I did not give you your new titles because I do not approve of the manner in which you attained them …
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And his justification for going against his own treaty of peace – a copy of which Henry had sent him – was that he ‘never conceived it possible you could have done against your king what it is well known you have done’.

This was the crux of the matter. Few Frenchmen could understand why Henry had removed Richard from the throne, and even fewer approved of it. As they probably believed that Henry had violently killed Richard through the offices of ‘Sir Piers Exton’, there was an extra shock associated with this story, similar to that felt in England when it emerged that Richard had had his own uncle murdered. Thus Louis would have felt deeply embarrassed by the fact that he had promised to support Henry, and had agreed a treaty with him. So he felt obliged to defend his honour, and the only way he could do that was by challenging Henry to combat. That Henry would probably make mincemeat of Louis in the lists was neither here nor there; kings did not accept challenges, so it went without saying that there would be no duel. Louis was seeking to defend his dignity just by issuing the challenge. Henry should simply have ignored it.

But Henry could not ignore it. He sent another, even longer letter back to the duke, stating that ‘we ought not to reply to your request [for the duel] nor to your accusations … however, as you attack our honour, we send you this letter …’. He turned Louis’ pretended eagerness for combat in his first letter into the hot-headedness of youth, which then he claimed had taken ‘a frivolous turn’. But the most interesting lines in all this sword-rattling concerned Richard’s death. Henry wrote:

In regard to that passage in your letter, where you speak of the decease of our very dear cousin and lord, on whose soul God have mercy, adding ‘God knows how it happened, and by whom caused’, we do not know what you mean by this; but if you mean, or dare to say, that his death was caused by our order or consent, that is a lie, and will be a lie every time you say it, and this we are ready to prove, through the grace of God, in personal combat, if you be willing and have the courage to dare it … As to your saying that … ‘at the time you made the alliance with us, you never imagined that we should have acted against our very dear lord and cousin, as is publicly known to have been done by us’ we reply we have done nothing against him but what we would have dared to do before God and the whole world … By the honour of God, of our Lady, and of my lord St George, when you say [that Henry had less regard for Richard’s life than the French royal family] you lie falsely and wickedly, for we hold his blood dearer to us than the blood of those on your side … and if you say that his blood was not dear to us in his lifetime, we tell you that you lie … This is known to God to whom we appeal, offering our body to combat against yours, in our defence as a loyal prince should do, if you be willing or dare to prove it.
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In these letters, Henry seems to have been genuinely and deeply moved to defend himself. The matter of dethroning Richard is dealt with simply and confidently: he had done nothing which he need be ashamed of ‘before God and the whole world’. But the accusation that he had murdered Richard clearly troubled him. He could not have protested his innocence more fervently. This is fascinating, for, as we have seen, Henry
did
issue an order for Richard to be killed or deprived of sustenance. Was his denial anything more than perjury, deceit and blasphemy?

On the face of it the answer to this is no. Yet that inflexible negative implies a character totally contrary to the serious, spiritual, conscientious Henry we know from other sources. So it is hardly satisfactory in a biography simply to say he was lying and leave it at that. Let us consider the lie from his point of view.

Henry’s letter denying his involvement was very probably worded in conjunction with members of his council, in which forum it was necessary to maintain that Richard had starved himself to death. Nevertheless, Henry’s appeals to God and the Virgin suggest that he had convinced himself that the death had been predicated by matters beyond his control. The explanation for this is a question of fault. For example, Froissart records that Henry had promised to preserve Richard’s life
unless
he took part in a plot against him. Henry may thus have believed that Richard’s
death was an inevitable consequence of the Epiphany Rising, and thus the fault of those who had sought his (Henry’s) own death. This is illustrated when we consider the references in this last letter to ‘his [Richard’s] blood’ for this would include Richard’s half-brother and nephew. They had also been killed,
but not by Henry.
It had been the people of Cirencester and Pleshey who had destroyed Thomas and John Holland. Likewise, it had not been Henry but a judge who had sentenced Richard’s illegitimate half-brother, Sir Roger Clarendon. This is how Henry could have convinced himself that he was innocent of the murder in the eyes of God. Others had ‘executed’ him, his death being a consequence of the plot to free him. Thus Henry was able to deny his guilt by refusing to accept personal responsibility for what had been a political act carried out for the security of the kingdom. Politicians in all ages have felt similarly inclined to draw a line between public expediency and personal conscience.

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Henry spent Christmas 1402 at Windsor, preparing to go to Southampton to meet his bride. The formal arrangements had taken a long time to sort out. The Navarrese themselves had presented no difficulty; Charles III of Navarre referred to Henry as ‘our most dear brother’ before the end of the year. But the French put up a stiff resistance. This included not only the French royal family but Joan’s Breton vassals, who were opposed to the marriage. The Bretons sought the intervention of the duke of Burgundy. The royal duke went to see Joan at Nantes in October 1402. She would have to surrender control of Brittany, he told her, and custody of her male children. To marry Henry, Joan would have to give up her sons (the youngest of whom was just seven), her friends, her title and her home for the past sixteen years. It cannot have been an easy decision.

Nevertheless Joan departed from Nantes on 26 December, accompanied by her two young daughters (Blanche and Margaret). Henry had sent his half-brothers, John and Henry Beaufort (the earl of Somerset and the bishop of Lincoln respectively), and the earl of Worcester to accompany her on the voyage. She boarded on 13 January and spent the next five days being thrown about on wintry seas. The rough weather meant that the ships had to put in at Falmouth on 19 January 1403.
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Three days later, Henry was at Farnham in Surrey, probably still unaware that Joan had landed.
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But as soon as he heard, he gave orders to head westwards. Joan was taken slowly from Falmouth via Bodmin to Okehampton, twenty-two miles from Exeter, where she was on 27 January.
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By the 28th Henry was at Clarendon Palace, in Wiltshire, fifty miles from Exeter. With Joan travelling slowly from the west, and Henry rapidly from
the east, they were on course to meet near Exeter. On the 30th they were entertained in that city, amid much celebration, together at last.

From Exeter the royal party made its way via Bridport and Salisbury to Winchester Cathedral, where they were married on 7 February by Henry’s half-brother, Bishop Beaufort. The old bishop of Winchester, William Wykeham, was too ill to preside (he died the following year), but it may have been as a special favour to him – foremost of the prelates in lending Henry money – that Henry chose his church for the wedding. The newly rebuilt nave was truly splendid. The king’s younger sons, John and Humphrey, were in attendance, as was most of the English aristocracy, and a lavish feast was held, costing £522 12s.
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The menu for this survives, showing that Henry and his bride were treated to roast cygnets, ‘capons of high grease’, venison, griskins, rabbits, bitterns, stuffed pullets, partridges, kid (as in young goat), woodcock, plover, quails, snipe, fieldfares, cream of almonds, pears in syrup, custards, fritters and subtleties decorated with crowns and eagles. One of the highlights was a cake in the shape of crowned panthers, each panther having flames issuing from his mouth and ears. Henry’s wedding present to Joan was a fantastic jewelled collar costing £385, ‘with the motto
Soveignez
and the letter “S”, ten amulets garnished with nine pearls, twelve large diamonds, eight rubies, eight sapphires, with a great clasp in the shape of a triangle with a great ruby set in the same and garnished with four great pearls’.
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Following the wedding, the royal party returned to London, and were received by the citizens on Blackheath. They processed into the city, to Cheapside, and from there to Westminster, where the queen was crowned on 26 February, with more feasting and jousting. Following the festivities, Henry took Joan to Eltham, and toured Kent, returning to his favourite palace, Eltham, for Easter.