Henry IV (18 page)

³³
Expeditions
, 88, 111.

³⁴
DL 28/3/3/, m. 3;
Vita
, 126–7, said that several miracles had been reported at Thwing's tomb in 1389–90;
Expeditions
, 98, 117.

³⁵
J. Wylie,
History of England under Henry the Fourth
(4 vols, London, 1884–98), iv.8–9. Forty shillings was paid to a physician from Marienburg who came to visit Henry, probably in late February:
Expeditions
, 110.

³⁶
Knighton
, 537;
Westminster Chronicle
, 458;
De Illustribus Henricis
, 111; BL Add. MS 35,295, fo. 262r (chronicle of John Strecche).

³⁷
L. Staley, ‘Gower, Richard II, Henry of Derby and the Business of Making Culture’,
Speculum
75 (2000), 68–96, at pp. 82, 85, 87.

³⁸
Expeditions
, cviii–cix. Wigand von Marburg, the Teutonic Knights' herald, also noted Henry's participation on the
reyse
(ibid.). I am grateful to Dr Jeff Ashcroft for his help with medieval German.

³⁹
C. Fletcher,
Richard II: Manhood, Youth and Politics, 1377–99
(Oxford, 2008).

⁴⁰
For the Smithfield tournament, see
Westminster Chronicle
, 450–1 (although neither Walsingham nor Knighton mentions it); Staley, ‘Gower, Richard II, Henry of Derby’, 87.

⁴¹
The ‘gifts’ section of Henry's account totals almost exactly £400:
Expeditions
, 3–4, 142, 104–15. It is not clear whether the £3,542 from Gaunt recorded in Henry's account included a sum of £133 6s 8d, which his father also gave him on his return (
pro apparatu suo in primo adventu de Prus
): DL 28/1/3, fo. 1r.

⁴²
DL 28/1/3, fos. 2v, 3v, 8r, 11r, 13v–14v, 16v, 17r–v, 18r. This is probably Brambletye near Basildon in Essex, although the name also occurs in Surrey and in East Sussex. His agent was ‘Francis of Milan’, that is, Francis de Courte, later one of his chamber knights. Henry may also have jousted in France, for on 1 January 1392 two French heralds had arrived at Hertford to announce the holding of ‘jousts of peace’, although when and where are not stated: DL 28/1/3, fo. 20v.

⁴³
For what follows see especially DL 28/1/3, fos. 2r–16v (William Loveney's account of Henry's great wardrobe May 1391 to May 1392); also the series of accounts of his receivergeneral, John de Leventhorpe, for the period from 1 May 1391 to 1 February 1395 (DL 28/3/3 and 4). The two goldsmiths who mainly supplied Henry were called Hermann and Louis.

⁴⁴
A separate entry mentions twelve silver-gilt collars costing £3, possibly in addition to these thirty.

⁴⁵
The accounts for this voyage are printed in
Expeditions
, 145–292; see also du Boulay, ‘Henry of Derby's Expeditions’, 165–7. The Prussian chronicler John von Polsige said that some of Henry's retainers killed a local man, Hans von Tergawisch, in Gdansk, and were thus in disgrace; there were also rumours of an altercation with the Knights over the right to display the banner of St George, claimed by both the English and the Prussians as their patron saint, but the fact that Marshal Rabe gave Henry £400 towards his expenses belies the suggestion that he parted on bad terms with the Knights:
Expeditions
, xlix–l, cxi, 149, 167, 273.

⁴⁶
Usk
, 211.

⁴⁷
Richard II wrote letters, probably at Gaunt's instigation, to the Grand-Master of the Hospitallers at Rhodes, the king of France, the duke of Burgundy, the duke of Orléans and the lords of Savoy and Piedmont, asking them for safe-conducts to allow Henry and up to 200 of his retainers to pass through their lands in order to accomplish his ‘pilgrimages and devotions’:
Diplomatic Correspondence
, ed. Perroy, no. 166;
ANLP
, nos. 91–5.

⁴⁸
For his courser, see G. Stretton, ‘Some Aspects of Medieval Travel’,
TRHS
7 (1924), 77–97 at pp. 80–1. He took six minstrels to Prussia, but sent all except Thomas home from Gdansk:
Expeditions
, xcvi, 269.

⁴⁹
G. Parks,
The English Traveller to Italy, I: to 1525
(Rome, 1954), 527–8.

⁵⁰
Expeditions
, 207.

⁵¹
The leopard came with a keeper, Mark, and was carried on land in a cage dragged by two horses; at sea, oils and spices were bought for it and fourteen sheep carried aboard to feed it:
Expeditions
, lxv, 194, 229–32, 240, 245–6, 251, 285–6. For Mary's popinjay, see DL 28/1/3, fos. 5v, 16r, 17v; 28/1/4, fo. 20r; 28/3/4, fo. 33r; 28/1/2, fo. 16v.

⁵²
Expeditions
, 150, 195, 310.

⁵³
Calendar of State Papers Venice I, 1202–1509
, ed. R. Brown (London, 1864), 33–4. This states that the duke of Austria was planning to accompany Henry to the Holy Land, which is doubtless why he sent a knight and an esquire of his with Henry to Venice (
Expeditions
, li, 285), but Duke Albert must have changed his mind.

⁵⁴
De Illustribus Henricis
, 100; Clarence had died in Milan in 1368 shortly after marrying Gian Galeazzo's sister Violanta.

⁵⁵
Expeditions
, liv–lv, 150. John of Gaunt's receiver-general's account itemizes some of these sums; Janico Dartasso was sent to Venice in December 1392 with power to act as Henry's attorney: DL 28/3/2, fos. 12r, 17v, 19v.

⁵⁶
The ‘gifts’ section of his 1392–3 account totalled £648 (
Expeditions
, 290).

⁵⁷
Calendar of State Papers Milan I, 1385–1618
, ed. A. Hinds (London, 1912), 2;
CP
, vii.161–3. For Henry's wedding gift to her, two gold dishes with sun rays engraved inside and outside, see J. Mackman, ‘Hidden Gems in the Records of the Common Pleas: New Evidence on the Legacy of Lucy Visconti’, in
The Fifteenth Century VIII: Rule, Redemption and Representations in Late Medieval England and France
, ed. L. Clark (Woodbridge, 2008), 59–72 at p. 71.

⁵⁸
Robert of Whitby, Gaunt's receiver-general, handed over £2,000 to Richard Kingston at King's Lynn in July 1392 as well as the total of £2,341 via bank transfers already noted:
Expeditions
, lxxxvii, 149–51. In fact, the £2,000 from Gaunt handed over in July 1392 was not a gift pure and simple, but differentiated into two parts, a straightforward gift of 1,000 marks (£666) and an ‘imprest’, or loan, of 2,000 marks (£1,333), to be repaid by Henry to his father, but since it was to be repaid from the receipts of the honours of Bolingbroke and Tutbury, both of which Gaunt now granted to Henry, the effect was not greatly different (DL 28/3/2, fos. 18v, 20r). Marshal Rabe's gift of £400 covered most of the remaining expenses.

⁵⁹
De Illustribus Henricis
, 99–101: due attention is also paid to the numerous great personages by whom Henry was entertained and with whom he mingled. The only evidence of captives in the accounts is a ‘Henry the Turk’ (or ‘Henry the Saracen’), brought back to England, as ‘Henry the Lithuanian’ had been from Prussia.

⁶⁰
John Gower,
Confessio Amantis
, ed. R. Peck (Toronto, 1980), 3, 494–5. He renewed his dedication of the poem to Henry in an
explicit
(ibid., 493). For Gower's allegiance to the House of Lancaster, see N. Saul, ‘John Gower: Prophet or Turncoat?’, in
John Gower, Trilingual Poet. Language, Translation and Tradition
, ed. E. Dutton, with J. Hines and R. F. Yeager (Woodbridge, 2010), 85–97.

Chapter 6

FAMILY AND LANDS (1391–1394)

By the time Henry returned from Jerusalem in June 1393, he and Mary had four sons and a daughter: the future Henry V, born in September 1386 and named after Henry of Grosmont; Thomas, born in the autumn of 1387, named after Earl Thomas; John, born on 20 June 1389, named after Gaunt; Humphrey, born in the autumn of 1390, named after Mary's father; and Blanche, born in the spring of 1392, named after Henry's mother.
¹
The survival of Mary's 1387–8 wardrobe account and a number of her devotional books makes it possible to know considerably more about her than about most aristocratic women of the fourteenth century. In 1387–8 she was based at Kenilworth, but from 1390 onwards Peterborough was her home.
²
Henry spent a good deal of his time at Peterborough in the intervals between his travels and his public engagements, and often sent Mary gifts of cloth or delicacies such as fruit and nuts, oysters, mussels and sprats when he was away.
³
Sometimes she travelled with him,
⁴
but for the most part her social circle comprised other noble women. She remained close to her mother, Joan countess of Hereford, and her sister, Eleanor duchess of Gloucester, exchanging gifts, livery robes and visits with them, as she did with Gaunt's duchess, Constanza, his mistress, Katherine Swynford, and Katherine's daughter, Joan (Beaufort). A particular friend in 1387–8 was Margaret, wife of William Bagot, a confidence conducive to their husbands' relationship.
⁵
Mary certainly did not shut herself off from public affairs: she kept abreast of developments during the Appellant rising, and in September 1388 William Bagot sent her a message with news of the Cambridge parliament. She also received messengers from Gaunt
in Bayonne and his ally the king of Portugal, the husband of her sister-in-law Philippa.
⁶

However, it was her musical, artistic and religious interests that are most likely to have influenced Henry, for Mary came from a family more closely identified with the discerning patronage of art and literature than any other in fourteenth-century England. Humphrey de Bohun, earl of Hereford and Essex (d.1361) – ‘a retiring, priest-dominated bachelor’ – was an early patron of the alliterative revival in English vernacular poetry in the mid-fourteenth century, while his nephew Humphrey (Mary's father) was a patron of Froissart.
⁷
Mary herself paid for a Latin primer to be bound in London, for strings for a harp (
cithara
), and for a ruler with which to line parchment ‘for singing notes to be added’, suggesting that she did not just sing and play but also composed music, as Henry may have done.
⁸
He too owned a harp and bought a ‘pipe called a recorder’ in the same year. They kept ten minstrels in their household and regularly rewarded itinerant pipers, fiddlers, trumpeters, clarioners, nakerers (cymbal-players). A payment to ‘singing clerks’ indicates an interest in polyphony as well as minstrelsy.
⁹

Yet it was as commissioners of high-quality illuminated prayer-books that successive generations of Mary's family are best known.
¹⁰
About a dozen manuscripts – psalters, books of hours and bible leaves – surviving from the second half of the fourteenth century are associated with the Bohuns, usually on the basis of heraldic evidence, although they also conform to a distinctive style of illumination, characterized by their depiction of historical or narrative cycles (generally from the bible), their crowded and small-scale compositions featuring delicate but animated figures with large heads, the proliferation of marginal decoration, much of
it foliate and sinuous but also at times playful and even irreverent, and a profusion of heraldic devices demonstrating the links between the Bohuns and the English royal family. Most, and perhaps all of them, were executed in the manuscript workshop maintained by the family at Pleshey (Essex), overseen initially by the elder Humphrey's illuminator, the Augustinian friar John Teye, and then from the mid-1380s by Teye's pupil, John Hood.
¹¹
After the second Earl Humphrey's death in 1373, the Bohun tradition of commissioning high-quality manuscripts was continued by his widow, Countess Joan, at Rochford (Essex), by his daughter Eleanor and her husband Thomas of Woodstock at Pleshey, and by Mary.
¹²
Two richly illuminated psalters, made on Joan's orders to celebrate Mary's marriage to Henry in 1381, contain linked Bohun and Lancastrian heraldic shields; Mary's has a portrait of her, draped in the arms of England and Bohun, kneeling before the enthroned Virgin and Child, while Henry's included his shield of arms in five places.
¹³
A third psalter showed the tendrils enveloping the Lancaster and Bohun arms touching as if to symbolize Henry and Mary's union, the alliance of two of England's greatest families.
¹⁴

A Book of Hours made for Mary following her marriage indicates the quality of her piety. Its opening folio has a miniature of a praying woman wearing the arms of Bohun and England, while its contents place striking emphasis on the penitential psalms and the saving of sinners.
¹⁵
One of the prayers which she added to another psalter asked God to ‘breathe into my heart that interior sweetness of spirit with which you inspired your child David [and] open, O Lord, the ear of my soul to the voice of your love . . . a comfort in adversity, a counsel in time of doubt, a caution in time of
prosperity and a cure in time of sickness'.
¹⁶
Such sentiments locate Mary within that stream of late fourteenth-century aristocratic piety which emphasized contemplation and self-examination, a movement owing much to the writings of the hermit and mystic Richard Rolle (d.1349). She probably imbibed this from her mother,
¹⁷
but it was a devotional preference which she also shared with members of her husband's family such as Henry's grandfather Henry of Grosmont, who composed the remarkable
Livre de Seyntz Medicines
, a sustained exercise in personal penitence and soul-searching, and his father Gaunt, whose search for a more meaningful form of religious expression had led him to dabble with the Lollards.
¹⁸
Mary's household accounts also suggest that her tastes were modest. Her personal servants were not numerous: a receiver (William Burgoyne), a tailor (William Thornby), three ladies-in-waiting (Agnes Burgoyne, Alice Tinneslowe and Mary Hervy), two esquires (Peter de Melbourne and Robert Hartfeld), and an ever-expanding array of nurses and governesses for her family.
¹⁹
Her wardrobe expenses in 1387–8 amounted to £202, of which £167 was spent on drapery, mercery and furs; by 1390 she was receiving an annual allowance from Henry of £166 for personal items, and there is no evidence that she exceeded this, although her expenses are not itemized.
²⁰