The Fears of Henry IV: The Life of England's Self-Made King (89 page)

After the battle:

As is evident from a comparison of the above tables, when Henry was fit and well and in a hurry he could cover more than twenty miles in a day. In a similar state of good health, but with less urgency, the distance he covered was less, around fifteen miles per day. Thus, unless he was being carried in a litter or a carriage, the twelve miles per day recorded in the summer of 1406 does not indicate
chronic
ill health, being four-fifths of his usual healthy travelling speed.

Henry’s speed of travel in 1407 has also been described as slow and ‘leisurely’ and has consequently been associated with a pilgrimage.
⁵
For this year it is harder to use the above method, as we have fewer details about Henry’s itinerary. However, it is possible to make a few observations on account of some specific journeys in the summer months:
⁶

The distances in the above table all presume Henry travelled by road, and it needs to be stressed that some of the journeys were probably by water. In fact, Douglas Biggs has suggested that Henry moved mostly by water in 1407.
⁹
With regard to his journey from York (5 September 1407) to Beverley (11 September): he sailed down the River Ouse, pausing at Faxfleet, and up the River Hull to Beverley. Similarly Henry could have travelled by water from Nottingham to Pontefract (via the rivers Trent and Calder), and from Bishopthorpe to Cawood (via the Ouse). However, he did not always move by water. His journey from Nottingham to Pontefract via Newstead and Worksop in the above table must have been by road, and his presence at Kilham indicates that, although he probably sailed from Beverley to Bridlington, he returned to Bishopthorpe by road. Thus it is very interesting that for these short periods at least, his speeds were as high as they had been immediately after the battle of Shrewsbury in 1403. It is possible that he had recovered his health. An alternative explanation is to be inferred from a payment for two metal saddles made for him in this year.
¹⁰
Quite what these were is unclear; they were not the first brass saddles made for him (he had had ‘leather and brass’ saddles made for his own use in 1392), and so were probably not specially designed to cope with his ailment.
¹¹
They may have been some form of litter. Either way, his speeds suggest they helped considerably.

Few periods of sustained travel can be so precisely measured in later years, largely because Henry confined himself to the Thames area. One of the few which can is his return from seeing to the punishments and rewards following Bramham Moor in 1408: he left Pontefract on 30 April and travelled the 52 miles by road to Newstead Priory, arriving on 4 May (10–13 miles per day). Another is his pilgrimage to Leicester in the winter of 1409. He left Berkhamsted on or after 20 November 1409 and was at Stony Stratford (26 miles) and Northampton (another 13 miles) on the 23rd.
¹²
Hence on the 23rd he must have covered at least 13 miles by road, if not more, and kept up a rate of 9–13 miles per day over the previous two or three days. However these are rare examples. There are no indications that Henry travelled by road at a rate in excess of 13 miles per day after September 1407.

On the basis of these figures one may tentatively conclude that Henry was in discomfort when he travelled to East Anglia in 1406, but not chronically unwell. The irreversible collapse of his health – to the point of being an invalid – probably did not occur until some time after the autumn of 1407. This would accord with Adam Usk’s evidence that the disease which killed him could be dated to the early summer of 1408, when he lapsed into a coma for the first time.

APPENDIX SIX

Henry’s Physicians and Surgeons

Henry was often in poor health. We first find him ill with the pox in 1387 at the age of twenty, when the king’s physician, John Middleton (d. 1429) was summoned to assist him.
¹
This was not a permanent employment. The following year he employed Geoffrey Melton, an Oxford physician, to come to Kenilworth to attend his wife.
²
Melton was not retained either. When Henry was ill on the
reyse
in Lithuania, he was given the services of the physician of the Master of the Order of the Teutonic Knights.
³
On the same trip he paid a ‘leech’ in Danzig for staunching a wound, perhaps obtained while jousting.
⁴
It was only after his return from his pilgrimage, in 1393, that Henry began to retain a personal physician, Dr John Malvern (d. 1422) .
⁵
It was presumably under Malvern’s care that medicines were bought for him in 1395, 1397 and 1398. Malvern continued to appear in Henry’s company for the rest of his life but seems not to have followed Henry into exile in 1398.
⁶

Henry took on his late father’s French physician, Master Louis Recoches, when he returned in 1399. From 22 February 1400 to 13 April 1406 Recoches is described as ‘the king’s physician’ in grants to him, receiving the office of the keeper of the Royal Mint in the Tower on 24 January 1404.
⁷
In Henry’s extant wardrobe account book for 1403, Recoches is the only king’s physician mentioned.
⁸
However, in April 1402 there is a reference to one Richard Grisby, ‘king’s physician’, being given a general safe-conduct.
⁹
The safe-conduct suggests that this was a one-off appointment, an impression made all the more likely by the absence of any other reference to Grisby serving the king in a medical capacity.
¹⁰
Nevertheless, this is the first indication that the king was enlisting additional medical help. As mentioned in the text, medicines were bought for him the following year, and there is evidence in a letter written by his surgeon that Henry had been ill before 1404.

Recoches was replaced as ‘the king’s physician’ by David Nigarellis of Lucca before 17 November 1408.
¹¹
On that day Nigarellis received the keepership of the Royal Mint with which Henry had previously paid Recoches. By 2 February 1412 his salary amounted to eighty marks per annum.
¹²
He and his heirs became subjects of the king of England that
same month but Nigarellis himself died very shortly afterwards, at Easter 1412.
¹³
Henry also benefited from the ministrations of two other Italian physicians at the end of his life: Elias de Sabato, a Jewish doctor from Bologna, who was given permission to come to England and practise in December 1410, and Pietro D’Alcobasso, or Alto Bosco, who was in royal service in 1412.
¹⁴

It is interesting that, after his accession, Henry preferred foreign physicians whereas prior to his coronation he had been attended by English medics. Two of the three identified foreigners employed after 1407 were Jews and all three were from Italy. Although we have no names regarding the identity of the ‘physicians’ (plural) who were with him at Windsor in April 1406, thereafter Henry’s attempts to find a medical solution to his problem became more intense. There may be many more physicians as yet unidentified whose names have still to be pulled from the official documents of the period. One historian has gone so far as to suggest that he may have been attended in 1405 by as many as five.
¹⁵

With regard to surgeons, the name of John Bradmore (d. 1412) is pre-eminent. He was connected with the royal household from 1399 and acted as an official surgeon to the king from at least 1402 to at least 1406, if not until the end of his life.
¹⁶
He is most famous for his surgical treatise which details his most notable cases and which is now in the British Library. This is the source for the description of how he managed to save the life of the prince of Wales after the battle of Shrewsbury, by extracting the arrow from his face, when many other physicians had failed to do so. He was also a founder member of the Fraternity of the Trinity in the parish of St Botolph, Aldersgate, and master of the fraternity in 1409, and bequeathed the fraternity its first property.
¹⁷
This gives him a religious link to Henry as well. In 1403 he was one of two surgeons to receive robes in an official capacity (the other being John Justel).
¹⁸

The final medical reference for Henry which is worth noting is one dating to 5 April 1400. On that day Henry gave a generous allowance of sixpence per day to Matthew Flynt, a toothdrawer of London so he would pull the teeth of ‘any poor lieges of the king who may need it in the future, without receiving anything from them’.
¹⁹
One cannot help but feel that this is evidence of Henry himself experiencing toothache in early 1400, and wishing to reward the man who helped him in his plight. That he did so by helping the poor of London at the same time is to his credit.

APPENDIX SEVEN

The Lancastrian Esses Collar

Most readers will have at some point come across a Lancastrian livery collar of esses. Whether an original in a museum, a representation on a church effigy, or a detail in a fifteenth-century painting, it is recognisable as a distinctive chain consisting of interlinked metal esses (letters ‘s’). It was of great significance to the Lancastrians, like the celebration of Maundy Thursday donations (see Appendix One), and thus it has received much attention regarding its origin and significance, including what the esses stand for. However, this attention has not always been based on the best evidence. Nor has every commentator on this arcane subject considered the logical implications of their suggestions. Therefore this appendix has been drawn up to bring together some new evidence and a few commonsense suggestions to illustrate what the ‘esses’ collar meant to Henry, and to refer to an important possibility connected with this interpretation.

The earliest references to livery collars in Henry’s accounts are those for the year 1387–8, distributed to his supporters, Lord Darcy, William Bagot and John Stanley.
¹
On John of Gaunt’s return from Castile in 1389, it is noted that Richard II took John’s livery collar and put it around his own neck. This would place the origin of the Lancastrian livery collar in or before 1386, the year in which John departed for Castile. There is no reason to doubt that this collar was composed of a series of esses: all the representations of Lancastrian collars from this time onwards show a form of esses, and Henry himself was known as ‘the one who wears the S’.
²
Certainly by the early 1390s the collar assumed this esses form, as proved by the many references in Henry’s accounts. As for the earliest possible date for its use, it is highly likely that the Lancastrian collar postdates the first known reference to a livery collar, which is the king of France’s grant to his chamberlain of the right of wearing a livery collar in 1378.
³
This would date the invention of the Lancastrian livery collar to the time of Henry’s youth.