Great Tales from English History, Book 2 (3 page)

Henry was not one jot less pious than his royal cousin. In 1390, aged twenty-four, he had been on crusade to fight alongside
Germany’s Teutonic Knights as they took Christianity to Lithuania, and in 1392 he travelled on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem.
A tough character, the leading jouster of his generation, he was not the sort to surrender his family inheritance without
a fight. Land was sacred to a medieval baron, and many magnates supported Bolingbroke’s quarrel with the King. No one’s estates
were safe if the great Duchy of Lancaster could be seized at the royal whim.

When Richard decided to go campaigning against Irish rebels in the summer of 1399, his cousin grabbed his chance. Bolingbroke
had spent his nine-month exile in France. Now he landed in Yorkshire, to be welcomed by the Earl of Northumberland and his
son Henry‘Hotspur’, the great warriors of the north. Henry had won control of most of central and eastern England, and was
in a position to claim much more than his family’s estate. Richard returned from Ireland to find himself facing a coup.

’Now I can see the end of my days coming,’ the King mournfully declared as he stood on the ramparts of Flint Castle in north
Wales early in August 1399, watching the advance of his cousin’s army along the coast.

Captured, escorted to London and imprisoned in the Tower, Richard resisted three attempts to make him renounce
in Henry’s favour, until he was finally worn down — though he refused to hand the crown directly to his supplanter. Instead,
he defiantly placed the gold circlet on God’s earth, symbolically resigning his sovereignty to his Maker.

Sent north to the gloomy fortress of Pontefract in Yorkshire, Richard survived only a few months. A Christmas rising by his
supporters made him too dangerous to keep alive. According to Shakespeare’s play
Richard II
the deposed monarch met his end heroically in a scuffle in which he killed two of his would-be assassins before being himself
struck down. But the truth was less theatrical. The official story was that Richard went on hunger strike, so that the opening
that led to his stomach gradually contracted. His supporters maintained that the gaolers deliberately deprived him of food.
Either way, the thirty-three-year-old ex-monarch starved to death. According to one account, in his hunger he gnawed desperately
at his own arm.

Of comfort no man speak…

Let us sit upon the ground

And tell sad stories of the death of kings!

Writing two hundred years later, Shakespeare drew a simple moral from the tale of Richard II. Richard may have been a flawed
character, but the deposition of an anointed monarch upset the ordained order of things. The playwright knew what would happen
next — the generations of conflict between the families of Richard and Henry that have come to be known as the‘Wars of the
Roses’,

A
S HENRY IV TOOK CONTROL OF HIS NEW
kingdom at the end of 1399, he pointedly promised that, unlike his wilful predecessor, he would rule with the guidance of‘wise
and discreet’ persons. Richard II had been criticised for shunning the advice of his counsellors. He was nicknamed‘Richard
the Redeless’ — the‘uncounselled’. So Henry made sure that the advisers he summoned to his early council were a sober mixture
of bishops and barons.

Then on 8 December that year the new King sent for a different sort of expert — a merchant and businessman, the first ever
to sit on the Royal Council. Sir Richard Whittington was a cloth trader and moneylender from the City of
London, who had served as Mayor of the City and who would, in fact, be elected Mayor no less than three times.

’Oh yes he did! Oh no he didn’t!’ Every Christmas the adventures of Dick Whittington still inspire pantomime audiences in
theatres and church halls around the country. We see Whittington, usually played by a pretty girl in tights, striding off
from Gloucestershire to seek his fortune in London, only to leave soon afterwards, dispirited to discover that the streets
are not paved with gold. But sitting down to rest with his cat, the only friend he has managed to make on his travels, Dick
hears the bells of London pealing out behind him.

’Turn again, Dick Whittington,’ they seem to be calling,‘thrice Lord Mayor of London!’

Reinvigorated, Dick returns to the city, where he gets a job in the house of Alderman Fitzwarren and falls in love with Fitzwarren’s
beautiful daughter, Alice. Disaster strikes when Dick is falsely accused of stealing a valuable necklace. So, deciding he
had better make himself scarce, he and his cat stow away on one of the alderman’s ships trading silks and satins with the
Barbary Coast. There Puss wins favour with the local sultan by ridding his palace of rats, and Dick is rewarded with sackfuls
of gold and jewels, which he bears home in triumph — more than enough to replace the necklace, which, it turns out, had been
stolen by Puss’s mortal enemy, King Rat. Alice and Dick are married, and Dick goes on to fulfil the bells’ prophecy, becoming
thrice Lord Mayor of London.

Much of this is true. Young Richard Whittington, a third son with no chance of an inheritance, did leave the village of
Pauntley in Gloucestershire sometime in the 1360s to seek his fortune in London. And there he was indeed apprenticed to one
Sir Hugh Fitzwarren, a mercer who dealt in precious cloth, some of it imported from the land of the Berbers, the Barbary Coast
of North Africa. Dick became a mercer himself (the word derives from the Latin
merx,
or wares, the same root that gives us‘merchant’). He supplied sumptuous cloth to both Richard II and Henry IV, providing two
of Henry’s daughters with cloth of gold for their wedding trousseaus. He also became a friendly bank manager to the royal
family, extending generous overdrafts whenever they were strapped for cash. In the decades around 1400 Dick Whittington made
no less than fifty-three loans to Richard and Henry, and also to Henry’s son Henry V. He routinely took royal jewels as security,
and on one occasion lost a necklace, whose value he had to repay.

Dick was elected mayor of London in 1397,1406 and 1419. With the populist flair that a mayor needs to go down in history,
he campaigned against watered beer, greedy brewers who overcharged, and the destruction of old walls and monuments. There
was a‘green’ touch to his removal from the Thames of illegal‘fish weirs’, the standing traps of basketwork or netting that
threatened fish stocks when their apertures were too small and trapped even the tiniest tiddlers.

Less kind to the river, perhaps, was the money that he left in his will for the building of‘Whittington’s Longhouse’. This
monster public lavatory contained 128 seats, half for men and half for women, in two very long rows with no partitions and
no privacy. It overhung a gully near modern
Cannon Street that was flushed by the tide. Dying childless in 1423, Dick spread his vast fortune across a generous range
of London almshouses, hospitals and charities.

The trouble is the cat. There is not the slightest evidence that Dick Whittington ever owned any pets, let alone a skilled
ratter who might have won the favour of the Sultan of Barbary. Puss does not enter the story for another two hundred years,
and was probably introduced into the plot by mummers in early pantomimes.

’To Southwark Fair,’ wrote Samuel Pepys in his diary for 21 September 1668.‘Very dirty, and there saw the puppet show of Whittington
which was pretty to see.’

Stories of clever cats are found in the earliest Egyptian and Hindu myths; Portuguese, Spanish and Italian fables tell of
men whose fortunes are made by their cats.
Puss in Boots,
a rival pantomime, also celebrates the exploits of a trickster cat that magically enriches his impoverished master.

Experts call this a’migratory myth’. Blending the cosy notion of a furry, four-legged partner with the story of the advancement
of hard-nosed Richard Whittington, England’s biggest moneylender, took the edge off people’s envy at the rise of the merchant
class in the years after the Black Death — these new magnates who mattered in the reign of King Money. And when it comes to
our own day, Dick’s tale of luck and ambition provides a timeless stereotype for the pop stars and celebrities who play him
in panto: the classless, self-made wannabes who leave their life in the sticks and reinvent themselves in the big city.

W
HEN PARLIAMENT FIRST WELCOMED
Henry IV as king in September 1399 with cries of‘Yes, Yes, Yes’, he told them to shout it again. The first round of yeses
had not been loud enough for him. At that moment the deposed Richard
II,
just a mile or so down-river in the Tower of London, was still alive. The new King quite understood, he told the company who
assembled that day in Westminster, that some of them might have reservations.

This may have been a joke on Henry IV’s part — he had a self-deprecating sense of humour. But the fact that he had usurped
the throne was to be the theme of his reign. For his coronation in October, he introduced a new‘imperial’ style
of crown consisting of a circlet surmounted by arches that English kings and queens have worn ever since. He commissioned
a book to emphasise the significance of England’s coronation regalia — and he had himself anointed with an especially potent
and prestigious oil that Richard II had located in his increasing obsession with majesty. The Virgin Mary herself, it was
said, had given it to St Thomas Becket.

The fancy oil delivered its own verdict on the usurper — an infestation of headlice that afflicted Henry for months. He spent
the first half of his reign fighting off challenges, particularly from the fractious Percy family of Northumberland who plotted
against him in the north and were behind no less than three dangerous rebellions. In Wales the English King had to contend
with the defiance of the charismatic Owain Glyndwr, who kept the red dragon fluttering from castles and misty Celtic mountain-tops.

Henry defeated his enemies in a run of brisk campaigns that confirmed his prowess as a military leader. But he was not able
to enjoy his triumphs. In 1406, at the age of forty, the stocky and heavy-jowled monarch was struck down by a mystery illness
that made it difficult for him to travel or to communicate verbally.

Modern doctors think that Henry must have suffered a series of strokes. For the rest of his reign he was disabled in both
mind and body, though he went to great lengths to conceal his infirmity. Letters went out to the local sheriffs ordering the
arrest of those who spread rumours of his sickness, while his bishops received letters requesting prayers to be said for his
physical recovery. Depressed and speaking of
himself as a sinful wretch’, Henry came to believe that his salvation rested in a repeat of his youthful pilgrimage to Jerusalem.

One cause of his melancholy was the conflicts that arose with his eldest son, Henry of Monmouth. A brave and forceful warrior
who fought alongside his father against the Percys and took charge of the campaign against Owain Glyndwr,’Prince Hal’ was
not the dissolute hell-raiser portrayed by Shakespeare. But he was an impatient critic of the ailing King. In 1410 he elbowed
aside Henry’s advisers to take control of the Royal Council for a spell — it seems possible he was even pushing his father
to abdicate.

In 1413 the old King collapsed while at prayer in Westminster Abbey. Carried to the abbot’s quarters and placed on a straw
mattress beside the fire, he fell into a deep sleep, with his crown placed, as was the medieval custom, on the pillow beside
him. Thinking he had breathed his last, his attendants covered his face with a linen cloth, while the Prince of Wales picked
up the crown and left the room.

Suddenly the King woke. As he sat up, the cloth fell from his face, and he demanded to know what had happened to the crown.
Summoned to his father’s bedside, the prince did not beat about the bush.