The Fears of Henry IV: The Life of England's Self-Made King (66 page)

On the last day of the parliament, 19 December, Henry reinforced his position. He directed the chancellor to remind parliament about the article limiting his power enacted in the previous parliament. Thomas Chaucer asked Henry to explain his intentions concerning this. ‘To which our lord the king replied by saying that he wished to have and preserve his liberties and prerogatives in all respects, as wholly as any of his noble progenitors had done.’
¹⁷
Chaucer voiced the approbation of the commons, and Henry politely thanked them. The article limiting his power was annulled.

Perhaps the most telling sign of Henry’s return to power was a petition submitted immediately afterwards. Addressed ‘to our most dread and most sovereign lord king’ it stated that ‘a great rumour has arisen among your people that you harbour in your heart ill-will towards various of your lieges who have come and are present by your summons at this your present parliament’. It begged him ‘to declare it as your noble intention in this present parliament that you think, maintain and consider all the estates … to be your faithful and loyal lieges and subjects, and regard them as people who have been, are, and will always be your faithful lieges and humble subjects’.
¹⁸
Henry, of course, agreed, and ordered a general pardon to be granted as soon as parliament ended for all crimes, even treason, committed before that date.
¹⁹
The commons assented to a modest land tax, a statute was agreed regarding the devaluation of the currency and parliament was dissolved. The following day Thomas Beaufort and Henry Scrope were sacked as chancellor and treasurer, and the king’s resumption of power was complete.

Henry’s seizure of authority in 1411 was extraordinary by any reckoning. For a man who had been so regularly attacked in parliament, how on earth did he so easily resume power? Considering the popularity and success of the prince, how come he so easily gave it up? And as for the ambitious bishop, Henry Beaufort, why did he acquiesce so completely?

The answer has to lie within a combination of the character and the condition of the king himself. It must have been apparent to all those concerned that Henry would never give up the throne. In the 1411 parliament, if not before, he made his determination to remain king absolutely clear. The parliament roll suggests no hard bargaining over this matter, and it is likely that in fact there were few objections; the magnates had already been silenced. What kept them quiet was the physical condition of the king. Henry may even have given the impression of having only a few more weeks to live. Also there remained the unassailable fact that Henry was an anointed king. That had not saved Richard but Henry was a different calibre of man. To depose him would be far harder than it had been to depose Richard. Henry was no longer seen as a failing king; the rebels were all defeated. Glendower was a vanquished fugitive, the Scottish king was an English prisoner, the French were fighting a civil war in the power vacuum created by their own king’s sickness, and England was more secure than it had been at any time since the reign of King Edward III. Besides, Henry still had his stable of strong Lancastrian supporters in the commons: men like the faithful Sir Robert Waterton, Thomas Erpingham and John Norbury. Thus, ironically, in Henry’s very physical weakness lay a new, indomitable strength. It was easier by far for
the prince and the Beauforts to bide their time than challenge this man whose determination to remain king proceeded not just from his mind but his heart and soul.

*

On 23 December 1411, Henry handed over the seal of the exchequer to his new treasurer, Sir John Pelham. After Christmas at Eltham, he persuaded Archbishop Arundel to accept the great seal of the realm as chancellor for a fifth and final time. His new council – appointed that same month – consisted of these two officers and his faithful keeper of the privy seal, John Prophet, and four others. Apart from two bishops who had served the prince, Thomas Langley of Durham and Nicholas Bubwith of Bath and Wells, all the old councillors were passed over. Instead he appointed Archbishop Bowet of York, who had proved unswervingly loyal, along with Lord Roos.
²⁰
It was an even smaller council than that with which the prince had governed. Henry had learned something from his son’s short administration.

Henry’s resumption of power, of course, implied taking responsibility for war policy, and that was by no means an easy matter. His inclination to support the Armagnacs in the French civil war, though described by one modern historian as ‘backing the wrong horse’, was entirely understandable at the time.
²¹
His Gascon subjects were in alliance with the Armagnacs, and so to support Burgundy against them would have been to risk war between his English and his Gascon subjects. Similarly his relations with Aragon, Navarre and Brittany would have been strained by English intervention on the Burgundian side in the war.
²²
His choice may also have been governed by the way the Burgundians had treated him, for they still refused to acknowledge him as king of England. Their pride may have been no worse than his own but, in this instance, they were the ones who needed help.

Matters were complicated, however, as a consequence of the prince’s eagerness to entertain Burgundian ambassadors in 1411. Henry had been equally eager to make sure that it was the prince, and not he himself, who was associated with such approaches, but that had not prevented an Anglo-Burgundian alliance. An English expedition had set out in September 1411, commanded by the earl of Arundel, to supply the duke of Burgundy with an English military force of eight hundred men-at-arms and two thousand archers. In November, at St-Cloud, near Paris, the Anglo-Burgundian army won a significant victory over the Armagnacs. It was clear to all parties that the English archers were a major asset. In February 1412 both sides sent representatives to try and forge closer links with England.

For Henry, the maximum political gain lay in exploiting these divisions in France. The best way to achieve this was through supporting those who opposed the French king and the duke of Burgundy. Henry remained convinced therefore that he should be supporting the Armagnacs. However, the prince’s negotiations for the hand in marriage of Anne of Burgundy had progressed too far to be ignored.
²³
The Armagnacs knew this, and started a bidding war for English help. As rebels to their king, their cause was the more desperate, and so they offered more. They acknowledged Henry as king of England and promised him eventual sovereignty of all of Aquitaine, as well as suitable marriages with girls of the royal blood. Although the Burgundian negotiators had arrived first, in Henry’s eyes there was simply no contest.

Henry went down to Canterbury soon after the Armagnac envoys arrived. He heard how they had been intercepted on leaving France by agents of the duke of Burgundy, and had had their bags searched. Letters from the Armagnac lords recognising Henry as king of England had been confiscated. The duke of Burgundy himself hypocritically accused the Armagnac lords of treason for consorting with the king of England, and quietly recalled his own unsuccessful ambassadors from Westminster. The Armagnac negotiators were aware that their lords wanted an English alliance quickly, and on 6 April they concluded one. Fired up, Henry once again declared his intention of leading a force to Gascony in person, but the sad reality was that, just at this point, when it would have been politically feasible for him to lead an overseas expedition, his body was incapable of the task. According to Walsingham, he could not even walk without pain, let alone ride a horse.
²⁴
Henry maintained his resolve for a few days – on 18 April he gave orders to enlist mariners for his forthcoming expedition – but soon afterwards he came to accept that he would never lead an army again.

Throughout this period he was attended by members of the council. Interestingly the prince was also with him, together with other key members of the previous council. A charter granted by the king in person was witnessed at Canterbury on 30 March by the prince, Henry Beaufort, the duke of York, and the earls of Arundel and Warwick, as well as members of the new council.
²⁵
Henry seems to have been making an effort to remain on favourable terms with those he had sacked the previous December. He even went so far as to reward some of them for their service, including the earls mentioned above.
²⁶
All these men presumably accompanied Henry back to Windsor for the Garter celebrations on 23 April, for they were all still with him to witness royal charters at Westminster on 12 May and 1 June.
²⁷
Thus the prince and Henry Beaufort
- the architects of the pro-Burgundian alliance – were with Henry when he agreed to help the Armagnacs.

This shift of English policy, from the Burgundians to their enemies, confused many contemporaries in England as well as France. It also threatened to humiliate the prince and Henry Beaufort. It meant that they had opened negotiations with the king’s enemies: men who were about to invade Gascony.
²⁸
In this light, it would have been inappropriate to entrust command of the English army to the prince, and it is likely that Henry only considered giving his eldest son a role while he (the king) was intending to command the expedition in person.
²⁹
When this proved impossible, the king decided to give overall command to his second son, Thomas. The appointment doubled the tension in the royal family, for not only had the prince been passed over, he was not on good terms with Thomas. Nor was Henry Beaufort. They were infuriated even further when Henry reinforced Thomas’s position by conferring on him the title which Edward III had given to his second son: duke of Clarence. Perhaps to calm their anxieties, Henry also named Thomas Beaufort as a co-leader of the expedition, and promised to create him earl of Dorset. But if by this he hoped to sweeten their mood, he failed. Neither the prince nor Henry Beaufort was at Rotherhithe to see the king gird Thomas Beaufort with the belt of an earl.
³⁰

The prince and Henry Beaufort angrily left court shortly after 1 June. By then Henry had summoned all the council to him, including the archbishop of York and the earl of Westmorland.
³¹
But it was too late to hold things together. At Coventry on 17 June the prince issued a public letter, which was – and still is – astonishing for its fulminations against those who advised the king, and, by implication, against the king himself. In his letter the prince drew attention to the king’s plans to go to Gascony and claimed that Henry had named the prince as one of the leaders. The prince explained that he had subsequently declined to go because he had been offered so few men. Instead, he went on to say, he had withdrawn from court and travelled to Coventry to raise stronger forces but then:

Some sons of iniquity, nurselings of dissent, schism fomenters, sowers of anger and agents of discord … desiring with a serpentine cunning to upset the ordered succession to [the] throne … wickedly suggested to my most revered father and lord … that I was affected with a bloody desire for the crown of England, that I was planning an unbelievably horrible crime and would rise up against my own father at the head of a popular outbreak of violence, and that in this way I would seize his
sceptre and other royal insignia on the grounds that my father and liege lord was living a life to which he had no proper title and which relied on tyrannical persuasion.
³²

What is astounding about this letter is that the prince felt bound to repeat such accusations. He would not have taken arms publicly against his own father; it would have been greatly to his dishonour and the destruction of his future authority. So the fact that he felt it necessary publicly to refute such allegations proves that men of consequence were publicly saying such things, and it follows that the prince must have behaved in such a way that these things were believable. Similarly, in the second half of the letter the prince defends himself against the accusation of trying to disrupt the expedition to Gascony. Again, the necessity to defend himself reveals that others were accusing him of exactly this, so he can have done nothing or very little to promote the king’s expedition, and his refusal to serve must be interpreted in this light. Indeed, the fact that Henry forced all his sons to swear an oath to observe the terms of the agreement with the Armagnacs on 20 May strongly suggests that one of them – the prince – was threatening to lay aside the treaty and disregard his father’s policy altogether.

For these reasons, the months of May and June 1412 mark the nadir in the relationship between Henry and his eldest son. The near-collapse had been due to a number of factors: rivalry between the prince and Thomas, rivalry between Henry Beaufort and Archbishop Arundel, differing views on France, and perhaps the prince’s own youthful lasciviousness.
³³
It was also partly due to their similar dispositions. Neither man was likely to admit he was wrong; neither was likely to back down. Both men were spiritual – both faithful believers in the Trinity – and both were royal soldiers through and through. Both were conservative, intelligent, well-educated, determined and eloquent. They were both committed to the principle of serving the realm. But Henry was still the king, and he felt it was his son’s duty to be as loyal to him as he had been to his father. This is an important point in understanding the relationship between father and son. The prince was not just younger – and thus healthier and more ambitious – than his father; his upbringing was different from his father’s in that he had grown up with the expectation of exercising power. Henry’s upbringing had been one of duty throughout, of service and loyalty to the Crown. Thus, although his obedience to his own father may have given Henry an idea of how a son should behave, he could hardly expect the prince to do likewise. The prince’s very ambition was evidence of Henry’s
success in transforming his family from a ducal one into the royal one.