Henry IV (106 page)

His burial apart, the most pressing charge laid by Henry IV on his executors was the payment of his debts, especially those of his household, but this arrangement was soon overturned. On 15 May 1413, the opening day of parliament, by which time his debts had been calculated at £16,666, his executors (Henry Bowet, Thomas Langley, John Pelham, Robert Waterton and John Leventhorpe) renounced execution of his will on the grounds that his goods were insufficient to cover his debts, and agreed instead that the goods be given to Henry V, who in return would pay £16,666 over four years to the executors, under the supervision of Archbishop Arundel.
³⁸
This money would then be used by the executors to pay the debts. This was done on Henry V's initiative, and it was he who benefited from the arrangement. However, Arundel's death in February 1414 removed the one person who might have held the new king to his word, and in fact by the time Henry V died nine years later he had passed no more than £4,000 in total to the executors. As a result, a new committee had to be appointed in the parliament of 1422 to oversee the work, although the fact that Henry V had also left debts of around £14,000 complicated the process. Nevertheless, with an administration more sympathetic to royal creditors, it proved possible to clear Henry IV's account by 1429 and largely to clear Henry V's by 1432.
³⁹

A further charge laid upon Henry's executors was the endowment of a perpetual chantry for two priests to pray for his soul in Canterbury
cathedral. Since Henry V had made it clear that his father's pious bequests were only to be funded once his debts had been paid, this chantry was never endowed, even though the chapel to house it was constructed around 1440. Instead, it was left to others such as the faithful Bowet to endow chantries for Henry IV.
⁴⁰
Henry had also asked that Queen Joan be endowed from the revenues of the duchy of Lancaster. Given the difficulties already experienced in making up her dower, it is not surprising that no new assignment of duchy lands was made to her, although she did continue to receive revenues at a respectable level from both the duchy and the crown.
⁴¹
Before 1413, Henry V's relationship with his stepmother had been good, and for the next six years it remained so, but in September 1419 he suddenly ordered her arrest on suspicion of planning his death by means of witchcraft, and all her lands and possessions were seized. Although her imprisonment was far from harsh, she remained under arrest for nearly three years, during which time she was supported by a grant of between 1,000 and 1,500 marks a year from the exchequer, leaving the king with a net profit of over £5,000 a year from her dower lands. Charges were never brought against her, and it is clear that the accusation of witchcraft was simply an excuse for Henry V to apply the proceeds of her lands to his wars. Shortly before his death he shamefacedly ordered her release, and she spent the remaining fifteen years of her life wealthy and unmolested.
⁴²
Henry V learned many things from his father, but filial duty was not one of them.

Four centuries later, in curious circumstances, the face of Henry IV was glimpsed one last time. In his
History of the Martyr Richard Scrope,
written a few years after Henry's death, a supporter of the archbishop called Clement Maydestone wrote a passionate attack on the king into which he incorporated a morality tale he claimed had been told to his father, Thomas Maydestone, by a man who came to dine at Hounslow priory in April 1413. The unnamed visitor said that he had accompanied the king's coffin on its journey down the Thames from Westminster, but that when the barge was between Barking and Gravesend a violent storm blew up, so he and two
other men opened the coffin, cast the body into the river – it being considered bad luck to have a corpse on board – then resealed the lid and continued on their way, the storm having subsided as soon as the body hit the water; thus, he said, the coffin buried in Canterbury cathedral was empty. That anyone should admit to so heinous a deed when the dead king's son was on the throne was, of course, preposterous. Nevertheless, on 21 August 1832, to get to the truth of the matter, the dean of Canterbury permitted a group of clerics and other interested parties, including George Austin, the cathedral's surveyor, and the Reverend John Spry, one of its prebendaries, to examine Henry's tomb.
⁴³
After removing the marble pavement, they found the coffin lid, ‘of very rude form and construction’, about a third of the length of which projected beyond the monument to the west. On top of this, directly below the monument, was a leaden shroud presumed to hold the remains of Queen Joan, which they left untouched. Unable to remove the coffin lid because most of it was under the monument, they decided to saw through it, and once a piece had been removed they found the chest to be stuffed with hay-bands, on top of which was ‘a very rude small cross, formed by merely tying two twigs together’, which fell to pieces when handled. Packed amongst the hay-bands was Henry's leaden shroud, ‘moulded in some degree to the shape of a human figure’, which it was clear had never been disturbed. This too they sawed through, removing ‘an oval piece of the lead about seven inches long and four inches over at the widest part’, which in turn revealed a leather wrapper which, they soon discovered, was wound five times around the king's body. According to the Reverend Spry, the leather was:

firm in its texture, very moist, of a deep brown colour and earthy smell. These wrappers were cut through and lifted off; when, to the astonishment of all present, the face of the deceased king was seen in complete preservation. The nose elevated, the cartilage even remaining, though, on the admission of the air, it sunk rapidly away, and had entirely disappeared before the examination was finished. The skin of the chin was entire, of the consistence and thickness of the upper leather of a shoe, brown and moist; the beard thick and matted, and of a deep russet colour. The jaws were perfect, and all the teeth in them, except one fore tooth, which had probably been lost during the king's life. The opening of the lead was not large enough to expose the whole of the features,
and we did not examine the eyes or forehead. But the surveyor stated that when he introduced his finger under the wrappers to remove them, he distinctly felt the orbits of the eyes prominent in their sockets. The flesh upon the nose was moist, clammy, and of the same brown colour as every other part of the face. Having thus ascertained that the body of the king was actually deposited in the tomb, and that it had never been disturbed, the wrappers were laid again upon the face, the lead drawn back over them, the lid of the coffin put on, the rubbish filled in, and the marble replaced immediately.

If the presence of the body gives the lie to Maydestone's improbable tale, the fact that only a small section of the lead and not much of the coffin lid were cut away leaves other questions unanswered. Henry's state of preservation makes it clear that his corpse was embalmed, and the elevated nose cartilage dispels the rumours of leprosy, but the rough-hewn coffin, ‘rude’ little cross of twigs and lowly hay-bands seem a far cry from what was expected, indeed prescribed, for a king. The fact that no regalia are mentioned does not mean that they were not there, but the impression remains that Henry was rather hastily, and perhaps not very grandly, buried. On the other hand, he may not have wished to be buried with great pomp. He was, he said in his will, a ‘sinful wretch’, with a ‘sinful soul, the which had never been worthy to be man but through [God's] mercy and His grace; which life I have misspent’. Unlike some of his contemporaries, he did not use his will explicitly to reject funereal pomp, but nor did he make provision for candles, mourners, funeral robes and suchlike, as Edward III and Richard II had done and as Henry V would do.
⁴⁴
Archbishop Arundel, however, another ‘most miserable and most unworthy sinner’, had asked for the most lowly burial for his ‘foetid and putrid cadaver’, and it was at his discretion that Henry was buried. If anyone knew the king's true wishes, it was he.

¹
BL Add. Ms 35, 295, fo. 264v;
SAC II
, 608–9;
Usk
, 242–3. Henry's physician from 1408, David Nigarellis, died in 1412; the king was attended in his last years by Thomas Morstead, surgeon, Elias de Sabato of Bologna, and Peter de Alcobaça from Portugal (
CPR 1408–13
, 233, 363, 391–2, 410; Mortimer,
Fears
, 382–3).

²
See Itinerary (Appendix). Prince Thomas was at Canterbury on 4 April (
CIRCLE PR 1411–12
, no. 23).

³
CPR 1408–13
, 476 (
tribus galeis de novo faciendo ad opus nostrum
: C 66/387, m. 13d);
Brut
, ii.372 (copied by
Polychronicon
, viii.547 and many later sources), said that in his last year the king made great galleys, hoping to sail to Jerusalem; Strecche said he announced this plan to the February 1413 parliament (below, p. 515). However, it would have been more usual to travel overland to Venice and sail from there.

⁴
For the 1411 tax, see above, p. 496; household expenditure rose from an annual average of £17,110 in 1410–11 to £19,707 during the last eighteen months of the reign (
RHKA
, 272).

⁵
C. Kingsford,
Chronicles of London
(Oxford, 1905), 78, 91–2, 299;
PROME
, x.312.

⁶
Chronicle of London 1089–1483
, 95;
POPC
, ii.34–40;
CCR 1409–13
, 366. The king said Thorley was not to ‘meddle’ with any receipts or payments until further notice. Reginald Curteis, former victualler of Calais, secured a pardon in November (
CPR 1408–13
, 454).

⁷
CCR 1409–13
, 367, 373–4; when the order was repeated later, it was said that the king planned to use the money ‘for the advantage of the realm’ (ibid., 387). The prince reasserted the three-quarters reservation with payments to Thorley of £15,000 during the last three weeks of his father's life (E 403/610, 1, 17 and 20 March).

⁸
POPC
, ii.35;
CCR 1409–13
, 401. The treasurer of Ireland, William Allington, was in England in the autumn (
CIRCLE PR 1412–13
, no. 12).

⁹
CCR 1409–13
, 406;
CPR 1413–16
, 38.

¹⁰
SAC II
, 619.

¹¹
I am grateful to Linda Clark (
History of Parliament
) for these references, of which I was unaware at the time of editing
PROME
, viii.514. The draft speaker's protestation is printed in
Parliamentary Texts of the Later Middle Ages
, ed. N. Pronay and J. Taylor (Oxford, 1980), 197–201. Internal evidence indicated that it must date from 1413, 1447, 1487 or 1504, although 1447 was soon ruled out. The editors suggested 1504, but it is much more likely to be 1413, for the text survived in a commonplace book belonging to John Whittocksmead, a burgess from Somerset who sat in twelve parliaments between 1427 and 1472, whose father and grandfather had been elected on several occasions between 1361 and 1410, and who died in 1482–3 (Linda Clark, ‘Whittocksmead, John’, forthcoming in the
History of Parliament 1422–1461
). The protestation is one of the earliest examples of the recording of parliamentary business in English, along with the first surviving commons' bill in English in 1414. The responses to the speaker were given in Latin by the chancellor (Arundel), presumably because the king was ill. The protestation is more verbose and deferential than the usual formula recorded on the rolls, consisting of two parts: (i) a request on account of his unworthiness for a different person to be elected, which was refused; (ii) acceptance of the office and a request to enjoy the same privileges as former speakers, including royal favour and the support of his fellow members, to which the chancellor responded that this should be enrolled in the usual manner. For the ordinance on clothmaking, see
The First General Entry Book of the City of Salisbury 1387–1452
, ed. D. Carr (Wiltshire Record Society 54, Trowbridge, 2001), no. 118.

¹²
BL Add. MSS 35, 295, fo. 264v–265r.

¹³
PROME
, ix.18.

¹⁴
Codling, ‘Henry IV and Personal Piety’, 27;
CPR 1408–13
, 452.

¹⁵
Capgrave,
Chronicle of England
, 302–3 (written around 1460).

¹⁶
De Illustribus Henricis
, 110–11;
Political Poems and Songs
, ii.120–2 (‘Letter of King Henry IV to His Son’).

¹⁷
First English Life
, 13–15.

¹⁸
Usk
, 242–3;
De Illustribus Henricis
, 111; BL Add. MSS 35, 295, fos. 26v–265r (
corpus suum ex nimia tunc infirmitate decoctum et tabefactum, consumptis carnibus et cutis . . . omnia alia interiora sui corporis visum fuerant patefacta . . . eius membra ligata et involuta
).

¹⁹
Polychronicon
, viii.547;
Brut
, ii.372;
CE
, 421. Elmham called it the Bethlehem chamber (
Political Poems and Songs
, ii.122) but all other sources call it Jerusalem, presumably because of its wall-paintings. The chamber is at the west end of the abbey, 36 x 18 ft, and had a fireplace in the east wall: A. J. Kempe, ‘Some Account of the Jerusalem Chamber in the Abbey of Westminster’,
Archaeologia
26 (1836), 432–45. It now contains two busts, of Henry IV and Henry V, with the inscriptions: ‘Here died King Henry IV’, and ‘Here Henry V became king’.

²⁰
Above, Introduction, p. 1, for a different version of the king's last words.

²¹
Following his account of Henry's death, Strecche included a long passage on Archbishop Scrope and his miracles (BL Add. MSS 35,295, fo. 265r).

²²
Henry's first will appointed Prince Henry as his sole executor, but after his death his executors were said to be Archbishop Bowet, Bishop Langley, John Pelham, Robert Waterton and John Leventhorpe, with Prince Henry and Archbishop Arundel as supervisors (Nichols,
Collection of Wills
, 203–7;
CPR 1413–16
, 54).