Henry IV (10 page)

⁵¹
Registrum Johannis Trefnant 1389–1404
, ed. W. W. Capes (Canterbury and York Society 20, 1916), 238–9;
Knighton
, 312–14; K. McFarlane,
John Wycliffe and the Beginnings of English Nonconformity
(Oxford, 1953), 122–5.

⁵²
Registrum Johannis Trefnant
, 231–78, for the full account of his trial in 1391.

⁵³
S. Forde, ‘Repyndon, Philip’,
ODNB
, 46.503–5.

⁵⁴
Henry initially sent only his servant Thomas Page and his purveyor William to Passenham (in March and April). All the information concerning this episode is to be found in DL 28/1/1, fos. 8r–9r. For ‘the battle of Passenham’ see K. McFarlane,
Lancastrian Kings and Lollard Knights
(Oxford, 1972), 19–20.

⁵⁵
The Latin is unambiguous: Waterton and Loveney were sent to the king
per preceptum domini mei Lancastrie
because
suggestio non vera facta fuit domino nostro regi
.

Chapter 3

THE MAKING OF A DISSIDENT (1382–1387)

The Passenham dispute was the prelude to Henry's rapid estrangement after 1382 from Richard II's court. Between 1379 and 1381 he had continued to receive winter and summer livery robes from the king, but from 1383 onwards he received no gifts apart from the annual Garter robes which were his entitlement. Richard's household account for the period from September 1383 to September 1384 does not mention Henry once. Those who now clustered around the young king, who had his ear and were the beneficiaries of his generosity, were men such as Robert de Vere, earl of Oxford, Thomas Mowbray, earl of Nottingham, his tutor Sir Simon Burley, and his confessor, the Dominican friar Thomas Rushook.
¹
Nor does Henry's name occur with any frequency in the chancery letters for these years. Rarely did he petition the king,
²
and hardly ever was he the recipient of royal favour or associated with Richard in acts of government.

Henry's alienation from the court paralleled the simultaneous collapse of John of Gaunt's relationship with his royal nephew. Gaunt was a proud man who resented being sidelined from the central role in English politics he had enjoyed since the death of his brother the Black Prince in 1376, while Richard was impatient to shake off his uncle's leading reins and to govern in concert with advisers of his own choosing. Military and diplomatic policy was a particular bone of contention.
³
Despite the failure of the 1381 expedition to Portugal led by his brother Edmund, earl of Cambridge, Gaunt still hoped to vindicate his claim to the Castilian throne, and in the parliament of November 1381 he argued that England's (as well as his own) resources should be directed to that end.
⁴
Others, however,
saw this proposal for what to some extent it was: a strategy for the personal aggrandizement of the duke of Lancaster which would do little to solve England's real problems. Rebuffed and his pride dented, Gaunt accepted defeat for the moment, but continued to press his case, and for the next two or three years the debate over ‘the way of Spain’ or ‘the way of Flanders’ was the major fault-line in English foreign policy. In the parliament of February 1383, which sanctioned the despatch of a ‘crusade’ to Flanders commanded by Henry Despenser, bishop of Norwich, rather than a Lancastrian campaign in Castile, Gaunt was so irritated that he stormed out in disgust.
⁵

By 1384–5, the relationship between Gaunt and Richard was so strained that each suspected the other of conspiring to assassinate him. During the Salisbury parliament of April 1384, a mischief-making Carmelite friar called John Latimer was invited to celebrate mass in the king's presence and used the opportunity to launch a tirade against Gaunt (who was not present), accusing him of plotting against the king's life. Richard ordered his uncleto be put to death without further investigation, although he was soon dissuaded from such folly and in the event Gaunt exonerated himself with ease, while Latimer was tortured to death by a group of royalist knights in an unsuccessful attempt to make him divulge his informants.
⁶
Yet Richard's distrust of his uncle was now plain to all, and incidents multiplied. In August 1384, when Gaunt's protégé John of Northampton, a draper who had been mayor of London between 1381 and 1383, was brought before the king to answer charges laid against him by his enemies in the city, he expressed the opinion that Richard ought not to pass judgment on him in Gaunt's absence; Richard retorted that he was quite competent to sit in judgment on him and on the duke of Lancaster as well.
⁷
In the following year the tension between them reached breaking-point. At a council meeting at Westminster in early February 1385, Gaunt proposed that Richard should personally lead an English army to France. Although his two brothers supported Gaunt's proposal, the king and his friends were against it, leading to another scene when all three royal uncles walked out. Gaunt declared that he would offer the king no assistance if he would not go to France, while Richard and his friends accused the duke of disloyalty, ‘and so’, stated the Westminster chronicler, they ‘busied themselves about removing him by
underhand means’.
⁸
In other words, they planned to have Gaunt assassinated, apparently with the king's approval. The duke got wind of the plot on 14 February and fled to Pontefract castle, which he prepared for a siege, but ten days later he was back and, protected by a breastplate and accompanied by an armed guard, strode into the king's manor-house at Sheen and upbraided Richard for the company he kept and the shame which he brought upon himself and the kingdom. Richard was emollient and promised reform, but Gaunt was in no mood to be soothed. Since his life was not safe at court, he declared, he would absent himself, and withdrew to Hertford castle. It was left to Richard's mother, Princess Joan, to effect a reconciliation between them, with Gaunt agreeing to forgive those who had plotted his death three weeks earlier, identified as Thomas Mowbray, earl of Nottingham, Robert de Vere, earl of Oxford, and William Montague, earl of Salisbury.

If Gaunt was still inclined to treat his eighteen-year-old nephew as a child, there were times when Richard acted the part. A week later, after a disagreement with William Courtenay, archbishop of Canterbury, at a council meeting, he happened to encounter Courtenay again while being rowed down the Thames, whereupon he drew his sword and had to be restrained from running the archbishop through on the spot.
⁹
Ten months later, on 25 January 1386, he punched the earl of Arundel hard enough to knock him down.
¹⁰
Even if those who riled him were far from blameless – and Arundel was no saint – Richard's propensity for violence was unnerving, and it is not surprising that within months his reconciliation with Gaunt collapsed. On the campaign to Scotland in August 1385, Richard's first military command, he and Gaunt quarrelled yet again when, having reached Edinburgh, Gaunt advised Richard to set off in pursuit of the Scottish army, but the king, apparently believing his uncle's advice to be disloyal if not treacherous, decided to burn the city and return to England.
¹¹
By 20 August the English army had arrived back at Newcastle,
having achieved next to nothing; Richard returned to Westminster, while Gaunt and Henry spent the next two months in Yorkshire and Lancashire.

By now it must have been apparent that the two most powerful men in England found it difficult to work together, and the fear was that, as with Edward II and Thomas of Lancaster seventy years earlier, their mutual distrust might well be leading the realm towards civil war. It was thus fortunate that at the very moment when Richard and Gaunt were quarrelling over strategy in Edinburgh, events at the other end of Europe were conspiring to make Gaunt's claim to the Castilian throne a viable option. The battle of Aljubarrota, fought on 14 August 1385, was a decisive victory for João of Avis, the new Portuguese king, over his great rival Juan of Trastámara, king of Castile,
¹²
and the weakening of Trastamaran power gave Gaunt his chance. In the parliament of 20 October 1385 (the first parliament to which Henry was summoned) the duke once again requested financial support for an expedition to Spain, and this time king, lords and commons were happy to acquiesce.
¹³
Whether they truly believed that the Castilian crown could be won is debatable; uppermost in the minds of some, perhaps, was the thought that it would be better if Gaunt left England for a while.
¹⁴
An Anglo-Portuguese alliance was thus drawn up, the Roman Pope Urban VI lent his support, and by Christmas 1385 preparations were under way for the duke's
voyage d'Espaigne
. From early April 1386 Gaunt and Henry were at Plymouth,
¹⁵
and at the end of June a
Portuguese fleet arrived to bring the English army over to Iberia.
¹⁶
On 8 July, while father and son were dining on board Gaunt's ship, a favourable breeze sprang up and the decision was made to sail. Henry returned ashore, and as night fell the fleet slipped out of Plymouth Sound and the duke embarked on a venture that would not see him return to England for three-and-a-half years.
¹⁷

One consequence of the collapse of the relationship between Gaunt and Richard was that from 1382 onwards few of the duke's retainers continued to hold office in the royal household and administration, as several of them had done during the first four or five years of the reign.
¹⁸
The Lancastrian affinity was closing in on itself and Henry followed suit, staying almost continuously in his father's company.
¹⁹
His first experience of diplomacy, an Anglo-French conference at Leulinghem in November 1383, and his first military venture, the Scottish campaign of August 1385, were both gained while serving in his father's retinue.
²⁰
Henry was also taking on more personal responsibilities. In December 1384, since Mary de Bohun was now fourteen, she and Henry were granted livery of her share of the Bohun inheritance and began to cohabit: their first child, the future Henry V, was born in September 1386, two months after Gaunt left for Iberia.
²¹
Henry's household expanded accordingly: by 1385 he had a treasurer and steward of his lands, and by 1387 he and Mary had separate
chambers and wardrobes.
²²
His father's departure imposed additional responsibilities. Froissart said that before leaving Gaunt appointed Henry as ‘lieutenant of all that he had in England’.
²³
No longer could he shelter under his father's wing.

If there were hopes that Gaunt's absence would cool the political temperature, it took less than three months for them to be confounded. The Wonderful Parliament which met at Westminster on 1 October 1386 brought to a head the tensions of the mid-1380s and sparked a political crisis which consumed England for two years and more, and it was a crisis in which Henry played a leading role. Fears of invasion during the summer exacerbated the already febrile atmosphere. At Sluys in Flanders, one of the largest French fleets of the Middle Ages had been assembling since June for an assault upon England, and in mid-September the English government issued a general summons for troops: Henry responded by assembling 47 knights, 203 esquires and 300 archers who remained close to London throughout October.
²⁴
In the event, bad weather prevented the French fleet from sailing,
²⁵
but the panic which gripped the south-east of England during these months – exacerbated by rumours that Richard and his unpopular chancellor, Michael de la Pole, were planning to cede Calais and other lands to the French to secure the peace which they had been seeking for the past few years – set the tone for what followed, and when de la Pole opened the parliament by announcing that the government required four fifteenths and tenths (around £150,000) in taxation to meet its obligations, he was greeted with calls for his dismissal and impeachment.
²⁶
Richard retired to his manor of Eltham (Kent), where he remained for several days if not weeks, refusing to bow to the commons' demands until they agreed to grant a tax. Eventually a deputation, led by the king's uncle Thomas (Buckingham, now also duke of Gloucester) and Thomas Arundel, bishop of Ely, arrived to advise the king to return to parliament and accede to the
commons' requests; they mentioned the possibility of deposition should he refuse to do so.
²⁷
Chastened, Richard agreed to come back to Westminster, where he was obliged to agree to the dismissal and impeachment of de la Pole. Convicted of peculation and incompetence, the former chancellor was sentenced to imprisonment at the king's mercy, though in fact he spent little time in custody. It was also agreed in parliament that a commission of fourteen lords would be appointed to hold power for one year, beginning on 19 November 1386, with a mandate to effect root and branch reform in all departments of the royal administration, including the king's household. Thus by the time parliament was dissolved on 28 November the nineteen-year-old king had effectively been deprived of executive authority, more or less as if he were still a minor. Power now resided with the Commission of Government, as it was called.

While parliament remained in session, Richard put on a show of compliance, but once it became clear that the Commissioners were in earnest he adopted a policy of non-cooperation.
²⁸
In the second week of February 1387, following an angry meeting of the council at Westminster, he decamped to the Midlands, taking his household with him to evade the Commissioners' scrutiny. Apart from a brief visit to the south-east around the time of the Garter celebrations in late April and early May, Richard and his household remained in the Midlands for the next eight months, while the Commissioners governed the country from Westminster. As the latter's popularity waxed, especially following the earl of Arundel's capture of a Franco-Flemish wine fleet in March, that of Richard and his friends waned.
²⁹
The real butt of popular hatred was Robert de Vere, now duke of Ireland, who in the summer of 1387 compounded his sins by divorcing his wife Philippa, the granddaughter of King Edward III, and abducting one of Queen Anne's Bohemian ladies-in-waiting, Agnes Landskron, whom he married at Chester, probably in mid-July when the king was also there. This insult to the royal family infuriated the king's uncles, especially the duke of Gloucester.
³⁰