Henry IV (108 page)

Conflict resolution displayed similar tendencies, with international truces routinely supplemented by local agreements, which in practice stood
the best chance of securing a respite from war. Individuals and communities desperate to save their homes, families and livestock resorted constantly to private compacts with their tormentors, frequently accompanied by protection money. In theory, treaties with rebels or enemies of the English crown – terrorists in modern parlance – were treasonable; in practice the king usually had little option but to sanction them, acknowledging his inability to protect his subjects from the ‘hard war’ inflicted on them.
⁷
Characteristic of such agreements was the double marriage contract in April 1410 between the children of Janico Dartasso and John (Eòin) Mór, younger brother of Donald, Lord of the Isles. From an English point of view, its aim was to bring peace to Ulster, for Mór had pursued his interests there with vigour and stood in need of a royal pardon, which Henry granted him at the same time as he licensed the marriages.
⁸
Yet this compact between a footloose Navarrese adventurer, who through service and marriage had acquired a stake in Irish political life, and the brother of a Highland chieftain who barely noticed the Scottish king's authority except to flout it – a private treaty born of an attempt to solve a public problem – was far from untypical of some of what passed for international diplomacy in this age of dysfunctional kingship. Henry simply lacked the resources to govern his empire effectively. More than £70,000 was passed from the exchequer to Prince Henry between 1401 and 1413 to suppress the Welsh revolt, and at least an equivalent sum lost in seigneurial revenues as a result of the disorder.
⁹
Yet the commons were not always sympathetic to the king's problems. Reluctant to grant taxation for what they construed as rebellion, they argued that the way to deal with ‘barefooted buffoons [the Welsh]’ or ‘wild Irishmen’ was for the lords who held estates there to remain in their castles and defend them. When the king told the parliament of January 1404 that, as well as having to safeguard Calais and the seas, he was effectively at war in Wales, in Scotland, in Ireland and in Guyenne, they replied, ‘These things do not trouble England much.’
¹⁰
Their England could be a little place.

There was a certain irony in this, for one of the consequences of the accession of a duke of Lancaster was that England became a more
geographically integrated nation. When Richard II journeyed to the north of his kingdom, it had something of the feel of a state visit; when Henry did so, it was more like a homecoming. Northern knights now outnumbered southern ones in the royal affinity, while northern magnates and prelates – the Percys, Westmorland, Langley, Roos, Bowet – enjoyed great influence at Westminster.
¹¹
Not that integration was necessarily welcome: the rising associated with the name of Archbishop Scrope suggests that the ‘problem of the north’ went a good deal deeper than Percy disaffection. Yet equally noteworthy is the lack of a corresponding ‘problem of the south’ during the reign of the first Lancastrian king, at least after January 1400. The decapitation of several great southern magnate affinities during the Epiphany rising probably had something to do with this, but so did Henry's efforts to build relationships with Londoners and former followers of Richard II in the southern shires.
¹²

Henry's personality was, on the whole, well suited to kingship. He kept his friends close and his enemies afraid. Steely and watchful, not to say sly, he also had an easy charm and a wry wit that gave him an aura of accessibility and helped him to work through diplomatic problems, although at times obstinacy clouded his judgement. His refusal to talk to Glyn Dŵr in 1401–2 cost him dear. On the other hand, his championing of chivalric values allowed him to make close friendships with like-minded knights and nobles, and his militant piety won him many plaudits. A dutiful son and a faithful and attentive husband, he drew strength and comfort from his family. He had an erratic compassion – for women, for paupers – which sat rather incongruously with his savagery towards traitors, but stemmed in part from a religiosity based on something deeper than contractual obligation.
¹³
There were, as he knew, sins he had committed that only God could forgive. Cultured, educated and sceptical, he encouraged the English Church to take its pastoral role seriously, promoted men of learning to his council, took more than a passing interest in guns, music and theological
disputation, and fathered a royal family which was one of the most cultivated in English history.

Of the king's friends, the one who did most to ensure his survival was Archbishop Arundel, an outstanding public servant whom Henry came to think of as a spiritual father-figure.
¹⁴
Throughout the reign, this political alliance that grew into a wary but sincere friendship was at the heart of England's affairs. As primate, Arundel stamped his authority on the English Church from the moment of his restoration, but his experience of secular government also gave him an understanding of the needs of the crown, and there were doubtless some members of his flock who saw his commitment to Henry's kingship as the alliance of the shepherd and the wolf.
¹⁵
Yet his situation was a difficult one, for without the king's support he stood little chance of defeating Lollardy or healing the Schism – and royal support came at a price. Driven by instinct, as well as by a vocal reformist group at court and in parliament, Henry played on the fears of the ecclesiastical hierarchy to bring the English Church under closer secular control and, through parliament, to introduce a limited measure of reform. Arundel in turn played on the king's fear of radical-inspired sedition and took his stand on fundamentalist Christian doctrine, a tactic that occasionally served him well. More often, however, he was forced to give ground. Privately, he and Henry were probably not that far apart in their devotional preferences, and they could take equal credit for the fact that, despite what each saw as undue provocation, the public alliance of Church and crown held fast. The crushing of Oldcastle's revolt in January 1414 sealed that alliance, a fitting culmination to Arundel's primacy, which ended with his death a month later.

Henry's most significant achievement was the restoration of the consensual style of politics practised by Edward III, but overborne by Richard II. Such an assertion is naturally subject to caveats, the most obvious being that consent was generally sought within restricted circles – though certainly not as restricted as during the 1390s. The difference was palpable. No longer was parliament the plaything of royal or magnate faction, veering giddily between servile acquiescence and violent antipathy to the king and his supporters. Whatever reverses and frustrations Henry suffered in
parliament, he did not threaten or intimidate the commons; he held his nerve and acknowledged the limitations of royal power. From the time that he first came out in opposition to Richard II, he demonstrated a consistency of character and principle, born of a belief in government by consent. That did not mean that he surrendered his prerogative; he insisted from the start of his reign that the rights and powers he inherited from Richard II were diminished not a jot, and it was upon this assumption that he and his successors acted. It is not just the kingship of Henry IV but also that of Henry V, Edward IV, Henry VII and Henry VIII which gives the lie to the idea that the deposition of 1399 – not, after all, the first royal deposition in medieval England – led to a lasting curtailment of monarchical power in England.

Henry IV's great misfortune was to become sick just at the moment when he appeared to have won his dynasty a measure of security. Despite the imprecision of contemporary descriptions, there is enough correlation between them to indicate that Henry suffered from more than one medical condition. The skin disease – perhaps psoriasis – mentioned in 1387–8, 1399 and 1405 probably grew more acute as he aged, and the
graunde accesse
he suffered in 1406 is likely to have been a prolapsed rectum. His collapse in the summer of 1408 was probably a coronary thrombosis, resulting in blocked arteries and steadily increasing problems with blood circulation, leading eventually to necrotic ulcers which, by the last year of his life, seem to have turned gangrenous (the ‘festering’ or ‘putrefaction’ mentioned by Usk and Strecche). During the last months, perhaps years, of his life, Henry must have endured great pain, retaining his regnal power until the end only through a ferocious effort of will. Yet what followed the onset of his illness vindicated his rule. That there were rivalries and policy disagreements was inevitable, but they were contained (unlike in France), and in general the collective willingness of the extended Lancastrian clan to place the preservation of royal authority above personal interests was impressive. This was the moment that witnessed the coalescence of that familial system of government – revolving around the prince and future king, his brothers, his uncles Henry and Thomas Beaufort, Westmorland, and adopted sons such as Chichele, Erpingham, Tiptoft and Langley – which for the next twenty-five years, through Henry IV's illness, Henry V's absences, and Henry VI's minority, worked to ensure the survival of the Lancastrian dynasty into the second half of the fifteenth century.
¹⁶

Henry V's stunning victories in France cemented and strengthened this coalition, and although its cohesion was tested by the enmity of Humphrey of Gloucester and Henry Beaufort, and depleted by natural wastage through the 1420s – Clarence died in 1421, the king in 1422, Westmorland in 1425, Thomas Beaufort in 1426, Erpingham in 1428 – broadly speaking, it held until the death of Bedford (Prince John) in 1435 and the coming of age of Henry VI a year later. What followed destroyed it: the rise of a court party centred on the duke of Suffolk, financial collapse, humiliation abroad and above all the ineptitude of Henry VI. By the time the last of Henry IV's sons, Humphrey, died or was murdered in 1447, he had come, almost unthinkably, to be seen as an enemy, even a traitor, to the Lancastrian regime. Meanwhile the special relationship between the dynasty and its original heartland had been allowed to atrophy, and by the time the Wars of the Roses began at St Albans in 1455, the descendants of men who had fought and died for Henry IV and Henry V were as likely to be followers of the duke of York.
¹⁷
By the spring of 1461, two centuries after its foundation, the house of Lancaster had lost its duchy, its affinity and its crown.

¹
Pugh,
Southampton Plot
, 26 (quote).

²
Harriss,
Shaping the Nation,
59–61; M. Ormrod, ‘England in the Middle Ages’, in
The Rise of the Fiscal State in Europe, c.1200–1815
, ed. R. Bonney (Oxford, 1999), 42.

³
M. Brown,
Disunited Kingdoms: People and Politics in the British Isles 1280–1460
(Edinburgh, 2013), 237–47.

⁴
Ruddick, ‘English Identity and Political Language’; Griffiths, ‘The English Realm and Dominions’.

⁵
Davies,
Revolt
, 221–2; Vale,
English Gascony
, 53;
New History of Ireland II
, ed. Cosgrove, 534–5; Frame, ‘Lordship Beyond the Pale’, 5–18.

⁶
Harriss,
Shaping the Nation
, 517–27; Scattergood,
Politics and Poetry
, 38 (quote).

⁷
See his pardon to the tenants of Whittington (Shropshire) in 1408 (
CPR 1408–13
, 30; cf. Davies,
Revolt
, 234–6).

⁸
For these negotiations, see
CPR 1408–13
, 183, 190; Walker, ‘Janico Dartasso’, 44; S. Kingston,
Ulster and the Isles in the Fifteenth Century
(Dublin, 2004), 43–4, 51–2, 60, 166, 190; Wylie,
Henry the Fourth
, iii.164–8;
CDS,
iv.145;
Foedera
, viii.527.

⁹
The real cost was higher still (Davies,
Revolt
, 259–61).

¹⁰
CE
, 399 (
Isti non inquietant multum Angliam
). For the commons' unwillingness to fund the Welsh war, see
PROME
, viii.423, 427, 459–60. Cf.
Brut
, ii.357 (‘wild Irishmen’).

¹¹
RHKA
, 227–33.

¹²
It was a southern chronicler who claimed that, despite constantly raising taxes, the king was always greatly loved (
amantissimus
) by his people (Kingsford,
English Historical Literature
, 277).

¹³
For example, he granted two pence a day to Isabella Taylor of London, who had seven children but had gone blind and could not support her family (E 403/571, 17 Oct. 1401; E 404/27, no. 387); two rabbits a week to the ‘poor oratrice’ Maude Merlond to feed herself, when she asked for one (E 28/9, no. 73); and six pence a day to Matthew Flint, ‘toothdrawer’, to enable him to practise his art for ‘any poor lieges of the king who may need it in the future without receiving anything from them’ (
CPR 1399–1401
, 255).

¹⁴
Cf. ‘yowre true frend and chyld in God’, ‘your trewe sone Henrye’ (
Signet Letters,
nos. 717, 736). Arundel was fourteen years older than Henry.

¹⁵
See, for example, the letter of Arundel to Henry of 7 Dec. 1404 apologizing for the fact that the convocation just ended had failed to sanction the king's demand for a subsidy from stipendiary chaplains, swearing that he had done his best to secure this despite unanimous opposition, recommending to the king that the diocesans should put pressure on the chaplains directly, and offering to expedite this if king and council were in agreement (BL Cleopatra Ms E ii 252 (265).)

¹⁶
J. Catto, ‘The King's Servants’, in
Henry V: The Practice of Kingship
, ed. G. Harriss (Oxford, 1987), 75–95, at pp. 81–2.