A Great and Glorious Adventure (33 page)

The uneducated and the untravelled in any age are superstitious and religious fundamentalism thrives among the ignorant, but whether the great men of the realm similarly believed in the reality
of a personal god and heaven and hell is more difficult to answer. They certainly said they did, and the number of chantries founded, benefices subsidized and donations to religious orders made by
the nobility would seem to indicate that they did, as would the number of recorded death-bed statements of belief – although many donations and declarations may have been made in the hope of
a favourable mention in the history books. While we might question whether some aspects of religious belief were more than skin-deep, at least among the wealthy and the educated, there is no
doubting the power and influence of the church. Although it no longer had a monopoly of education – and there was an increasing demand for men who could read, write and do sums for the civil
service of an increasingly complex government administration – the church had a finger in most royal and state pies. Archbishops were chancellors, bishops could lead armies, local government
in the shires often went with religious appointments, and the church was one of the great landowners of the realm as well as being fabulously wealthy. Unlike in our present day, when the origin of
most British bishops is lower middle class, bishops then were members of great families and would have had standing and influence in the church or out of it. Much international diplomacy was
carried out by clerics, while the pope, whether in Avignon or Rome, had huge transnational influence.

It was, of course, in the interests of the church to maintain the status quo, and in the interests of the secular power – the king – to keep the support of the spiritual arm, hence
the fear of heresy and the
enthusiasm shown in its suppression.
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Clearly, some esoteric arguments contrary to accepted
teachings could be tolerated, and much energy was expended on arguing about how many angels could dance on the head of a pin,
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or about the relative
poverty of Jesus Christ, but anything that struck at the church’s power and influence had to be stamped on hard.

Ever since the first outbreak of the plague, strange cults and odd beliefs had been springing up, and one of the most prevalent English heresies of the time was Lollardy, which claimed to follow
the teachings of John Wyclif, an academic born around 1330. Wyclif questioned the authority of the pope, produced a written English translation of the Bible, and objected to the doctrine of
transubstantiation. Opposing the pope was something that many Englishmen and not a few English clergy would have had sympathy with, but translating the Bible into the vernacular was a different
matter altogether. If the common people could read the Bible for themselves, then not only would priests – who were there to interpret, in all senses, the Latin of the Bible – be out of
a job, but also people would see the inconsistencies inherent in the scriptures and perhaps question their whole validity. The doctrine of transubstantiation, meanwhile, taught that the bread and
wine consumed in the mass turned into the actual flesh and blood of Christ once the supplicant had eaten them. While the validity of this could be debated and rests on faith rather than medical
science, it was widely believed then and is still believed, or at least taught, by some Christian churches today.
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Wyclif said that the change into
flesh and blood was symbolic, not actual, and in doing so he was questioning a basic tenet of the church’s teaching. Eventually, he was condemned by the pope, but he
survived to die in his bed in 1384, partly through the protection of John of Gaunt and partly through reluctance on the part of the University of Oxford to admit that its doctors
could be disciplined by the church.

The Lollards – so called from the mumbling sound of their prayers – went a little further than Wyclif might have wished. They opposed the pope’s practice of taxing the English
clergy – and here they simply echoed the views of most Englishmen including Edward III – and they railed against corruption in the church and against the authority of the pope. Had they
stopped there, they might have got away with it, but, when they extended their manifesto to declaring the pope the anti-Christ, calling for the abolition of the hierarchy of the church and, from
around 1380, sending unlicensed preachers around the countryside with their English Bibles to spread their views, they became a direct threat to the established order and were declared heretics.
Wyclif himself would not have supported the Peasants’ Revolt, but many of his followers did; and, although most would have done so anyway, whether Lollards or not, they were now seen as
seditious as well as heretical.

Up to this point, heresy was not a civil crime but a clerical one, to be tried in clerical courts which could impose fines but not the death penalty or imprisonment. In 1401, however, Archbishop
Arundel persuaded the recently crowned Henry IV to make heresy a secular crime, which meant that a man found guilty by a clerical court could be handed over to the civil power and executed –
by the rather unpleasant method of burning. Only two Lollards were actually burned during Henry IV’s reign – it was only obdurate heresy that got a person burned: recantation brought a
pardon, and many accused did recant at the last moment, sensible fellows that they were. One of these executions, of one John Badby, who was due to be burned to death in a barrel if contemporary
artists are to be believed, was attended by Henry of Monmouth when Prince of Wales. The fire was lit, the victim began to scream. Henry ordered the fire to be put out and the man taken out of the
barrel, and offered him a pardon and a pension for life if he would recant. The man refused, so Henry ordered him back in the barrel and the fire to be relit. The obdurate heretic duly burned to
death.

While all kings expressed support for the church, even if they might be opposed to some of its practitioners from time to time, all the contemporary
accounts of Henry V
stress his religious piety as king. Partly this may be sycophantic, but, as Henry’s faith is mentioned more frequently than that of his predecessors or successors, we may assume that it
played a significant part in his thinking. At this distance, it is impossible to tell whether his frequent insistence that he was under the protection of God was what he genuinely believed, or mere
propaganda to reinforce his claims and encourage a population and army which did believe, but throughout his reign Henry remained a strong supporter of religious orthodoxy – indeed, to some
he was a religious fanatic. Fanatics do not, however, command a mass following, at least not in England, and on balance it is likely that, while Henry was certainly a believer, he was an astute
enough politician to realize the importance of not alienating so powerful a bastion of the establishment as the church.

Otherwise, Henry of Monmouth was described as being tall, slim and well muscled, with hazel eyes and thick brown hair; in character he was said to be single-minded – and, if he was to
pursue the English claims in France, he would have to be. Unusually for the time, he had no mistresses as king, although there is no suggestion that his sexual proclivities were anything but
normal. Henry V was crowned at Westminster on Passion Sunday, 9 April 1413, and the day marked by an unseasonal fall of heavy snow, seen by many as an omen, but of what no one was quite sure.
Henry’s first task was to assure Parliament and the magnates that he intended to govern justly and to heal divisions. While he brought some of his own followers into government –
chiefly Thomas Fitzalan, Thomas Beauchamp, the earl of Warwick, and as chancellor his half-uncle, Bishop Beaufort, the son of John of Gaunt out of his third wife and ex-mistress, Katherine Swynford
– he retained many of his father’s officials, although he did dismiss the Chief Justice of the King’s Bench, Sir William Gascoigne.
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In seeking to heal old sores, he released the earl of March, the Ricardian candidate for the throne, from house arrest and had Richard II’s body exhumed from King’s Langley and
reburied with much reverence, pomp and ceremony in the tomb that Richard himself had commissioned in Westminster Abbey.

Almost immediately, however, the new king became embroiled with the Lollard heresy in the shape of Sir John Oldcastle and his followers. Oldcastle, who was thirty-five in 1413, had been a loyal
crown servant and was an experienced soldier who had served in the Scottish wars, in France with the English army sent to aid the duke of Burgundy in 1411, and against the Welsh rebels under Henry
V when he was Prince of Wales. He had been summoned to Parliament as a knight of the shires and had served as sheriff of Herefordshire. It is probable that Oldcastle had long held unorthodox views
– Herefordshire was notorious for religious radicalism – but it was only after the accession of Henry V that Archbishop Arundel felt able to challenge him openly, and Oldcastle was the
first eminent layman to be tried for the Lollard heresy.
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Condemned out of his own mouth when he launched into a tirade against the pope and his
prelates, he was handed over to the civil authority which, at the behest of the king, who had no wish to see an old friend brought low, sent him to the Tower to give him an opportunity to recant.
He then escaped, went on the run and attempted to organize a revolt with the aim of kidnapping the king. It was hardly a revolt; indeed, far from being a serious attempt to overthrow the existing
secular and religious establishment, it was more the desperate reaction of a man who sought revenge for the way he had been treated. The active participants – no more than a few hundred
– were asked to rendezvous at St Giles’s Fields, outside London, on the night of 9/10 January 1414 in preparation for a march on London and the arrest of the king. However, the plot was
betrayed to the authorities and, when the rebels arrived, they ran into an ambush. Oldcastle escaped, but most of his followers were rounded up. Over forty were executed and another seven, who were
Lollards, were burned as heretics. Although his revolt died in the St Giles’s Fields trap, despite several offers of pardon Oldcastle would not give himself up, and while a number of those
who sheltered him were punished, and in at least one case executed, he himself would not be captured until
November 1417, after which he was executed by burning on 15
December of that year. It was the last serious internal threat to Henry V, who, having restored order within the kingdom, pacified Wales and defused doubts over the legitimacy of the Lancastrian
succession, could now devote all his considerable energies to restoring English rights in France.

King Henry V. This is generally said to be the most lifelike portrait of the king, but as it was painted at least 150 years after his death it could only be so
if the artist had access to earlier portraits now lost.

King at twenty-five, slaughterer of the French nobility at twenty-seven, regent and acknowledged heir to the throne of France at thirty-two and dead at thirty-four: if Henry V
had lived, the history of Europe might have been very different. There cannot be many Englishmen, even today, who do not feel a frisson of pride when they think of Henry V; he shaped English
history and what he did and who he was affects Anglo-French relations to this day. He was a king who deliberately fostered a feeling of Englishness, the first to write his letters in English and to
prefer conversing in that language rather than in Norman French; a natural and charismatic leader who, if he did not invent English nationalism, certainly encouraged it and, along with it, a pride
in nation and in race. While he was a master of propaganda and knew how to use the tricks of oratory, his repeated declaration that his chief concern was for the well-being and good governance of
his realm and its people was genuinely meant. Of course, despite his oft-noted piety, he was not always a paragon of Christian virtue. He could be cruel and inflexible, ruthless, brutal, devious,
short-tempered, frequently unreasonable and always convinced that he was under the personal protection of God, but nice men do not win wars and withal Henry V must rank as one of our great kings,
if not our greatest.

Well before he became king, Henry was determined to revive the English claims in France and to pursue them. Once he was king, embassies were sent to France and French embassies came to England.
Initially, he asked only for recognition of Aquitaine as English in full sovereignty, but, as each request was turned down, the demands became stronger: everything
agreed by
the Treaty of Brétigny in 1360 was added, then the payment of the rest of Jean II’s ransom, then the duchy of Normandy, until by March 1415, in the requirements placed before the
dauphin, Henry was stipulating the return of all the French lands lost by King John 200 years before, the hand of one of Charles VI’s daughters in marriage and the revival of the English
claim to the French throne. Throughout, Henry emphasized that he only wanted what was his by right, but no French government, of whatever hue, could possibly agree to a restoration of King
John’s Angevin empire. Although negotiations were allowed to drag on, Henry had already realized by the spring of 1414 that the French were merely playing for time and had no intention of
even coming to an acceptable compromise. It is probable that, whatever the French might have offered, Henry would have wanted more: he had long since determined that he would take an army to France
and the negotiations can only have been window-dressing.