The Fears of Henry IV: The Life of England's Self-Made King (53 page)

It was at this stage in the battle that the earl of Stafford was killed.
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All resistance to Douglas now gave way. The king’s vanguard ran back in terror. Walsingham states that four thousand of Henry’s men fled.
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In the meantime the Cheshire archers ran down the slope and ripped their arrows out of the dead and dying bodies of the king’s vanguard, and started shooting again. Seeing his vanguard in flight, Stafford’s banner down, and the enemy charging towards him, Henry knew that it fell to him to show leadership, to stop the fleeing men. Regardless of how many knights were wearing royal armour, there was only one genuine king, and only he could give the decisive order to advance. Having sent a message to the prince to attack Hotspur’s army on the flank, thus further diverting the archers, Henry commanded his trumpeters to give the signal for the main body of the army to charge.

The two armies clashed at the foot of the slope, near where Battlefield church stands today. Almost every chronicler stresses how bitter the fighting was. It was ‘the heaviest, and unkindest, and sorest battle that had ever taken place in England’, wrote the author of the
Brut,
‘for there was the son against the father, and the brother against the brother, and kin against kin’.
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According to Waurin, the rebels were encouraged by the appearance of victory, and charged into the fray ‘where the cry and noise were loudest on all sides, trumpets and clarions made a marvellous clamour’. Waurin continues with the most evocative descriptions of the fighting:

and it was horrible to hear the groans of the wounded, who ended their lives miserably beneath the hooves of the horses. There was such slaughter of men whose bodies lay soulless that the like had not been seen in England for a long time … for as I have heard tell by word of mouth and by writing it is not found in any book of this chronicle that there was ever in the kingdom of England since the conquest of Duke William so horrible a battle or so much Christian blood spilled as in this one … King Henry who was concerned in this matter more than any man, disturbed by the defeat of his vanguard, which was destroyed, with a loud voice began to exhort his men to do well, and throwing himself
into the battle did many a fine feat of arms so that on both sides he was held to be the most valiant knight, and it was said for certain that on that day with his own hand he slew thirty of his enemies …
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Even allowing for exaggeration, there is no doubt that Henry himself led his men straight into the thick of the fighting. The king’s presence only exacerbated the viciousness of the situation, for the strategic aim of both sides was to kill the enemy leader. Those Cheshire archers who still had arrows now aimed through the swirling dust cloud at the king. Those who were fighting the prince on the flank aimed at him. One arrow flew from the bow of a Cheshire archer straight into the prince’s face while the visor of his war helmet was raised, penetrating into his skull just below his left eye. Despite this, as the hand-to-hand fighting raged, Hotspur saw his position weakening. His archers were all but a spent force, and his men-at-arms and infantry were being overwhelmed by Henry’s. The situation was growing desperate. Something had to be done.

What happened next is one of those moments when history itself turns to watch in solemn admiration at the courage of men. Hotspur decided to stake everything on one great charge straight towards the king. Gathering thirty of his most trusted supporters, including the earl of Douglas and his uncle, the earl of Worcester, he urged them all to couch their lances together in preparation.
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Henry himself was still in the thick of the fighting, oblivious of the impending force of thirty knights about to smash their way through to him. But the earl of Dunbar saw what was happening, and immediately understood that the king was in great danger. A group of charging mounted knights with lances could suddenly smash their way through a mass of infantry and motionless cavalry, scything through the battle. Dunbar shouted to Henry, urging him to withdraw. Henry seems to have been reluctant; if anyone saw his banner leaving the battlefield they would presume that all was lost. But there was simply no time to lose. As Hotspur and his fellow knights charged through the fighting infantry, Dunbar persuaded Henry to fall back. In so doing the oncoming knights were drawn further and deeper into the killing mass. If Henry had looked back he would have seen the brave Sir Walter Blount, still holding the royal standard, struck down.
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He would have seen several of his other knights slain. But he would also have seen Hotspur’s charge fail as the thirty were caught on the swords of the royal men-at-arms, their horses’ legs broken by the axes of the infantry who, unable to flee, stood and fought for their lives.

No one knows who wielded the blow which stopped Hotspur. But gradually the charge of the thirty knights slowed to a halt, and the royal soldiers
in their fury rushed in and cut him down. On seeing Sir Walter Blount killed as he wore Henry’s spare royal armour, the rebels sent up the shout that ‘King Henry’ was dead, and started yelling ‘Harry Percy King’. Encouraged, the rebel army renewed their efforts. Astounded, Henry raised his visor and yelled back, ‘Harry Percy is dead!’ Again he roared it, ‘Harry Percy is dead!’ That was it; the challenge was over. In his own mind, and in his own conscience, God had spoken. It had not been an unequivocal judgement in his favour, as the wound his son had received was so grave it was unlikely that he would live, but Henry had been given the victory. The rest of the battle was a foregone conclusion from that moment on. The rebels, seeing their beloved Hotspur dead, and the earls of Worcester and Douglas and several other knights being led from the battlefield as prisoners of the king, knew they were defeated. One instant they had been fighters for justice, striving to rid England of an unjust ruler; the next they were traitors, fugitives from justice. There could be no mercy for them. They would be chased down and slaughtered unless they fled. In a very short time the battlefield was cleared of all those who could run, leaving the king’s men to cut the throats of those who could not, as twilight settled down across the field of bloody corpses and trampled peas.

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We tend to judge battles historically by how famous they are today. By that reckoning, Shrewsbury barely ranks in the top twenty. It was not like the great battles of the previous century, all of which had been gloriously won or lost against the Scots or the French. It had much more in common with the inglorious civil wars of the later fifteenth century. Indeed, it is possible to describe it as the first battle of the Wars of the Roses, the series of conflicts between the houses of Lancaster and Mortimer or York for the throne. Yet even that comparison is misleading, for it was followed by fifty years of domestic peace. If it was the first ‘War of the Roses’, then it is a strange episode, for it started on about 9 July 1403 and was over within a fortnight. That is hardly the pattern of a dynastic struggle.

But therein lies the importance of Shrewsbury. By his timely and decisive action, Henry prevented Hotspur’s rising from becoming a full-blown dynastic conflict. It was a very serious rising – it had three earls among its leaders and a suitable hereditary candidate for the throne in the form of the young Edmund Mortimer – and it could easily have led to a more general civil war. It is thus valid to pose the question, what if Henry had lost? What was really at stake that day?

If Henry had been killed at Shrewsbury, the royal army would have fled and the wounded prince would probably have been captured. Power
in the north would have shifted back decisively in favour of the Percys. The Lancastrian claim to the throne would have been left between the captive ailing prince and his brother, Thomas of Lancaster, who was still in Ireland. The Lancastrians would have been ousted. Hotspur, being a rash fellow, may well have tried to claim the throne for himself, by right of conquest, but it is unlikely he would have achieved widespread support outside the north, and so we can see him being forced to accept the young Edmund Mortimer, his wife’s nephew, as king. How different English history would have been if Edmund Mortimer – a weak, unconfident character with no aptitude for war or even kingship – had succeeded to the throne instead of the victor of Agincourt! And how differently Henry IV would be viewed now if he had lost at Shrewsbury. What would he have been to the intervening centuries but an example of God’s judgement on a man who dared to overthrow and murder a divinely anointed king?

The course of English history teetered on this confrontation. Never before had a Plantagenet king led his men to victory in a pitched battle on English soil, and yet Henry had now done so, by showing chivalric leadership of the highest order. The significance of divine retribution on Hotspur, and
not
Henry, was powerfully felt throughout the realm. In symbolic terms, it was of profound importance. Hotspur’s body was initially carried off to Whitchurch for burial, but that night Henry gave orders for it to be brought back to Shrewsbury. The hero’s corpse was placed in a sitting position and propped against an axe stuck between two great millstones, so everyone could see he was dead.
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Later the head was cut off and sent to be displayed in York. The battlefield too acquired a symbolic status. Although only about two thousand men had died, more than half of those present had either fled in fear or had been badly wounded or killed.
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A large number of the dead – between 1,100 and 1,800 – were placed in a mass grave. Certainly a large number of men had died in a relatively small space.
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The king’s vanguard had been torn apart by the arrows of the Cheshire archers. Many of the wounded had been trampled to death in the same place. Dozens of Hotspur’s men had perished there too, overwhelmed by the king’s army. Building a church on the battlefield was not only respectful to the dead, it was a powerful statement. The church told people that they could expect a similar fate to Hotspur if they defied the king. The message equally applied to Glendower’s Welsh rebels, just across the border.
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It would have been easy, in such victorious circumstances, to have lapsed into complacency. At this point in his chronicle, Jean de Waurin launches into a paean of honour to Henry (extraordinarily, for a Frenchman).
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But, contrary to Waurin’s assumption that he returned in triumph to Westminster,
Henry neither went to Westminster nor lapsed into self-congratulatory inactivity. The men he had just crushed had once been his ardent supporters, not his enemies. Killing Hotspur had not reversed any of their complaints against his rule. Most significantly, Hotspur’s father was still at liberty, with an army, and Glendower was likewise in the field. To return to Westminster and pretend a triumph would have been foolish.

Henry wrote to the earl of Westmorland on 22 July, the day after the battle, ordering him to take immediate action against Northumberland, and to arrest him if possible. On the 23rd he showed the earl of Worcester Hotspur’s dead body, and let him weep over the corpse. When that lachrymose ceremony was complete, he had the earl beheaded for treason along with two other knights captured in the battle, Sir Richard Vernon and Sir Richard Venables. Then he set off to the north in pursuit of Northumberland. He was at Nottingham at the end of the month and reached his great fortress of Pontefract by 4 August.
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There was no doubt as to the earl of Northumberland’s complicity in the Percy revolt. Their manifesto had borne his name as well as those of Worcester and Hotspur, and the number of men whom he had gathered at Tadcaster showed that he had every intention of marching against the king. When he learned of the defeat at Shrewsbury and his son’s death, he retreated to Newcastle upon Tyne. With Westmorland advancing to intercept him, and Robert Waterton in the field preparing to cut off his retreat, Northumberland had little room for manoeuvre. Unfortunately for him, the loyal men of Newcastle had also heard of Hotspur’s defeat. They refused to admit his army and would only allow him within the walls with a small retinue. For some reason Northumberland decided this was still a suitable course of action and entered the town, leaving his army outside. Outraged at being abandoned, with Waterton and Westmorland in the field, Northumberland’s men attacked the town. Hastily Northumberland disbanded the army and slipped away, taking refuge in Warkworth Castle. He was still there when Henry wrote to him demanding that he come to York and make his submission.

There were several gates to the city of York, and over one of them the head of Hotspur was placed. Perhaps Northumberland was made to enter the city by that same gate, and to look up and see the face of his dead son, drained of blood and with sunken eyes. Even if he did not, the symbolism of having to make his obeisance to Henry in the same city must have been crushing. Henry had promised in his letter that he would spare the earl’s life, but with betrayal on this scale there was absolutely no hope of any real reconciliation.

In order to save his life, the earl subjected himself utterly. He denied
any knowledge of the rising and pretended that his son had acted without consulting him. Henry heard these pleadings and told the earl he would be allowed to address parliament. He took him to Pontefract and made him seal documents directing his officers to surrender all the castles held for him. When that task was done, he ordered all the knights and esquires in the county of Northumberland to swear an oath of loyalty to him: a forerunner of the general oaths of loyalty and allegiance which were to become so regular a feature of political control in the wake of rebellions in Tudor and Stuart times. The earl himself was despatched to Baginton, near Coventry, to wait for the next parliament. As a final precaution, Henry executed a hermit for threatening him with his false prophecies.
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Only then could he feel he had neutralised the rebellion.