The Fears of Henry IV: The Life of England's Self-Made King (51 page)

Henry had at last found in his new wife the sort of companionship he had lost with Mary’s death, nearly nine years before. In the early years of his reign we find occasional references to his pastimes – sword-fighting and hunting, and even an idiot or fool – but otherwise his time was heavily employed in the relentless business of state.
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There was precious little time for enjoyment, and only a handful of trusted old friends with whom to spend it. Now he had a constant, intelligent and trustworthy companion. She was passionate and determinedly loyal.
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She was also a woman with whom Henry could discuss business. Joan had, after all, managed the affairs of the duchy of Brittany. The following year Henry granted her a tower at Westminster in which to maintain an office. The business she took on included holding councils, handling and auditing accounts, and keeping charters and similar documents.
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She was clearly a hands-on sort of woman, more inclined to administrative
duties than needlework. In that, too, she seems to have been a good match for the king.

Unfortunately her arrival did not end Henry’s seemingly endless run of ill fortune. Joan herself cost the public purse an extra ten thousand marks (£6,666 13s 8d) per year from the day of her marriage, adding to Henry’s financial problems. The marriage of young Blanche to Count Rupert’s son was even more expensive, the dowry amounting to twenty thousand marks, half of which was due immediately.
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The exchequer was under greater pressure than ever, and not even the experienced Guy Mone was able to make the royal accounts balance. In February, Henry sacked Bishop Stafford and appointed Henry Beaufort chancellor of England. Glendower’s operations started again, and the prince of Wales – now formally appointed King’s Lieutenant in Wales – was forced to begin a campaign against him in North Wales, which cost more money. Then on 10 May Henry’s kind stepmother, Katherine Swynford, died. It cannot have been an easy honeymoon.

But all Henry’s problems to date were as mere whispers compared to what happened next. In July 1403 Henry heard that the whole Percy family – including the earls of Northumberland and Worcester, and Hotspur – had taken up arms against him. They had joined forces with Glendower and his prisoner, their kinsman Sir Edmund Mortimer.

Henry had a civil war on his hands.

FOURTEEN

A Bloody Field by Shrewsbury

I run before King Harry’s victory;

Who, in a bloody field by Shrewsbury,

Hath beaten down young Hotspur and his troops,

Quenching the flame of bold rebellion

Even with the rebels’ blood.

Henry IV Part Two,
Act 1, Scene 1

The betrayal and treason of the Percys must have shocked Henry even more than the Epiphany Rising. It had been their support which had allowed him to gather enough troops at Doncaster in 1399 to seize power, and it had been the earl of Northumberland himself who had taken Richard captive. Subsequently Northumberland had been the leading statesman in Henry’s councils and parliament. He and Hotspur had defended the north of England and worked alongside the prince in maintaining control in North Wales. Hotspur was the sole survivor of all those young men and boys who had been knighted with Henry in 1377. He too had been at St Inglevert and had fought with the Teutonic Knights. Thomas Percy, earl of Worcester, was even closer to Henry. He had been his principal representative in negotiations with France, and a leading member of the royal council. Like his brother, he had been a witness at Henry’s wedding, and, even more significantly, Thomas had been the man entrusted with the guardianship of Henry’s eldest son. Just a few months earlier Henry had chosen him to join his half-brothers in accompanying his new wife on her voyage to England. So what occasioned this rebellion against Henry? Was Henry even remotely aware of the impending danger to his regime?

The answer to these questions lies in the expectations of the Percy family. One of the reasons why they had wanted Richard II disempowered in 1399 was because he had sought to reduce their authority in the north. They had supported Henry in the hope that he would reverse Richard’s policy and provide ‘good government’ for the realm, where ‘good government’ meant a form of rule favourable to them. However, Henry had proved not to be their pawn. He had acknowledged his indebtedness to them with many grants in 1399–1401. But the positions he awarded
them transferred greater responsibilities, as well as power. What the Percys could not have foreseen was the strength with which the Scots and Welsh reacted to Henry’s insecure rule; their incursions and rebellions forced them to fulfil the responsibilities of their newly secured offices, and to fight expensive border wars in Scotland and Wales. Therefore they did not benefit financially from their positions as much as they had expected, but were more fully occupied than before in the defence of the realm. When they sought reimbursement of their expenses, the money was not forthcoming, because of the impoverishment of the treasury. This in turn was connected to Henry’s promises not to raise taxation. Ironically, it had been the Percys themselves who had forced him to make such promises, at Doncaster in 1399. The Percy family plan of having a tame monarch who would appoint them each to positions of power and levy no taxes turned into a nightmare scenario in which they themselves were responsible for the defence of a realm whose king was unable to meet their costs. Of course, they blamed Henry, not themselves.

Another irony underlying the revolt of 1403 is the Percys’ king-maker status. The very fact that they had been the principal actors in the elevation of Henry as a prospective leader in 1399 was one of the reasons why they now rebelled.
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To understand this, we need to remember that certain positions in medieval society conveyed an informal responsibility to act as a check on the king’s rule. The archbishops and some of the bishops took this responsibility very seriously. Thomas Becket is the most famous example, but throughout the fourteenth century there had been many others.
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It was possible for the great magnates to feel the same political obligation, especially the northern and marcher lords. The Lords Appellant – the heirs of the rebel earls of 1312 – themselves had taken on such a role in 1387. Hence the Percys felt obliged to act as an opposition. Richard had failed them, and had had to be deposed. Now Henry was failing them too. It was their responsibility, they felt, to act as a corrective force.

The problem for the Percys was that their idea of correction was totally out of line with the ideas of duty and homage which governed medieval society. Therefore Henry felt he could chastise them for stepping out of line, and he did. The first we read of this is Henry’s comment in his letter to his son – who was then with Hotspur – that Hotspur’s negligence was partly the reason for the fall of Conway Castle on 1 April 1401. Over the next eighteen months the relationship with Hotspur went from bad to worse. After the battle of Homildon Hill, Henry openly berated Northumberland for Hotspur’s failure to bring the captured earl of Douglas into parliament.
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According to the
Brut,
Hotspur went to see Henry in person to demand more money for his defence of the Marches. Henry,
having nothing in his treasury, tried to brush him off. Hotspur declared that he would not accept such an answer. In the ensuing argument, Henry punched Hotspur in the face.
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According to another chronicle, Henry drew a dagger and threatened Hotspur, who retorted with the challenge ‘Not here but in the field’.
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Whichever version is preferred, by the end of 1402 the friendship between the two had come to an end.

The breakdown of the relationship with Hotspur was not the sole reason for the rebellion. There were three other important factors. One was a growing friendship between the Percys and Glendower. Sir Edmund Mortimer’s decision to marry one of Glendower’s daughters and to side with the Welsh rebel – publicly announced in December 1402 – meant that Hotspur’s brother-in-law was in arms against Henry.
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A dialogue between the Percys and Glendower now opened up, acknowledging a common enemy in Henry. The second reason was that in Hotspur’s and Mortimer’s nephew, the twelve-year-old earl of March, they had a valid hereditary candidate for the throne, and one too young to resist their control. The third reason was the declining position of the Percy family in the north. Henry increasingly gave positions and incomes which the Percys had come to think of as their own to his brother-in-law, Ralph Neville, earl of Westmorland. Similarly, the justiciarship of Wales – which had been split between the earl of Northumberland and Hotspur – was given to Prince Henry in March 1403. Hotspur was not recompensed for his loss. Northumberland was, but the lands Henry allocated to him were those of the earl of Douglas, in Scotland, which had not yet been conquered. Furthermore, on the same day as Henry made his son King’s Lieutenant in Wales, he issued a commission for an enquiry into the prisoners taken at Homildon Hill. The reason he gave for placing the prisoners in the hands of a commission was that ‘they [the earl of Northumberland and Hotspur] cannot act honestly because of their interests’.
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It is not wholly surprising that the man who requested this commission was their rival, the earl of Westmorland.

Henry only vaguely anticipated the Percy rebellion; he could not possibly have seen what form it would take. He knew that his friendship with Hotspur was a thing of the past, but he remained confident that the senior members of the family would keep Hotspur in check. In May 1403 the earl of Northumberland wrote to the council reminding them that he and Hotspur were bound to be at Ormiston Castle in Scotland on 1 August to accept its surrender, and asking for payment of arrears for financial support.
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Henry had no reason to be perturbed by this letter; it was typical of those he had received over the last two years. The earl wrote again on 26 June. He stated that Henry had ordered him to receive Ormiston Castle, and that in order to do so he needed money quickly. He claimed that Henry
had promised him a sum but had not stated how much it would be or when it would be delivered. There may have been a veiled threat in the earl’s phrase that ‘the good reputation of the chivalry of your realm will not be kept in that place [Ormiston], resulting in dishonour and disaster to myself and my son who are your loyal lieges …’. There was a real concern in his refutation of the rumour that he and Hotspur had received £60,000 since Henry had come to England; the earl protested that they were still owed £20,000. He now urged Henry to command his treasurer to pay this sum for the safety of the kingdom. He signed the letter ‘Your Mathathias’.
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Henry was at Kennington when he received this letter. It greatly alarmed him. The demand from the earl for £20,000 for the safety of the realm had a double meaning: was it to protect England from the Scots or to protect him – Henry – from Hotspur? The signature ‘Your Mathathias’, in the earl’s own hand, emphasised the seriousness of the revolt. Mathathias was the father of Judas Maccabeus. The epithet ‘second Maccabeus’ in England referred to an ideal king; it had been applied to Edward III in his epitaph and had been associated with Henry on his return to England in 1399, when he had received the support of Northumberland. Thus, for Northumberland to claim to be ‘your Mathathias’ was for him to point out he was like a father to Henry. It had been Mathathias who had begun the resistance to King Antiochus’s tyranny, thus making Judas Maccabeus’s victories possible. ‘Your Mathathias’ was a reminder to Henry of just how much he owed Henry Percy, earl of Northumberland.
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Henry set off three days later, on 4 July.
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On 7 July he arrived at Newenham Priory in Bedfordshire, and spent two days there, moving to Higham Ferrers, in Northamptonshire, on the 9th. The next morning he wrote to the council, telling them that the prince had been successful in North Wales (he had destroyed Glendower’s manors of Sycharth and Glyndyfrdwy in May, and had recently relieved the siege of Harlech Castle). He asked the council to send the prince a thousand pounds immediately so he might keep up the good work.
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He added that it was now his intention to go towards Scotland ‘to give aid and comfort to our very dear and loyal cousins the earl of Northumberland and his son Henry in the fight honourably undertaken between them and the Scots’. On this basis historians have generally said that he had no notion of the approaching rebellion. But at the very end of the letter, there is a note to the council to give credence to what the bearer, Elmyn Leget, would say to them on Henry’s behalf. This was a common way of sending secret information: an oral message backed up by a letter of credence. Henry’s journey to see Northumberland and Hotspur almost immediately after receiving the Mathathias letter, when his relationship with Hotspur was one of enmity,
leaves little room for doubt that the secret message carried by Leget conveyed his suspicions about the Percys’ loyalty.