Henry IV (19 page)

This represented less than 10 per cent of her husband's annual income. Thanks to his father's willingness to fund his travels, Henry discovered on his first return to England in April 1391 that his receiver-general John Leventhorpe had accumulated an unspent surplus of £1,574; by early 1393
this still stood at £1,137.
²¹
Gaunt's generosity apart, Henry's main source of income was, naturally, land. During the early 1390s he normally received £1,800 to £2,000 each year from his estates. Much the most profitable of his possessions was the great Welsh Marcher lordship of Brecon, worth about 60 per cent of this total. He also held a dozen or so manors and seigneurial perquisites, scattered through various English counties.
²²
How fortunate Henry was to enjoy this secure landed income can be seen by comparing his situation with that of the duke of Gloucester. Deprived by Mary's marriage to Henry of half of the Bohun inheritance,
²³
Gloucester was obliged, in order to support his status as the son of a king, to rely on a series of ad hoc grants and annuities from the royal exchequer, payable from the wool customs or the income from alien priories. In theory, he was meant to receive about £2,500 annually, but only about £1,000 of this (mainly his share of the Bohun inheritance) was secured on land; his exchequer assignments, by contrast, were frequently late, sometimes discounted, and almost invariably involved him having to jostle and plead against others with claims on the ever popular royal purse.
²⁴

Not that Henry showed any sympathy for the plight of his erstwhile co-Appellant. Wealth on the scale enjoyed by the House of Lancaster translated into power, and during the early 1390s Henry, despite his absences abroad, vigorously pursued all legal avenues available to him to augment his territorial base. To do so, he retained on his council three sergeants-at law (William Gascoigne, John Markham and John Woderove), two apprentices-at-law (Thomas Hornby and John Conyers), and three attorneys to act for him in the King's Bench, the Common Bench and the Exchequer (Thomas Beston, William Armeston and Richard Gascoigne).
²⁵
Initially much of their time was spent trying to maximize Henry's share of the Bohun inheritance, for although an interim partition had been
agreed with Gloucester in 1385, this had never been ratified, and each man had outstanding claims. The situation was complicated by the longevity of Eleanor and Mary's mother, Countess Joan, who held dower rights in her former husband's estates, which meant that the £931 and £913 per annum of lands initially allocated to Eleanor and Mary respectively each represented not a half but one-third of Earl Humphrey's inheritance.
²⁶
Yet it was between Henry and Gloucester that the real dispute lay. Henry's grievances as set out in 1385 were, first, that Gloucester had failed to hand over muniments relating to Mary's share of the inheritance and, secondly, that Brecon should be given to him in full, including the castle and town of Bronllys and certain lands in neighbouring Pencelli which, he claimed, had been an integral part of the lordship of Brecon since the Conquest but had been retained by Gloucester.
²⁷
In fact, this was to make a complicated situation sound deceptively simple, for the lords of Bronllys and Pencelli had enjoyed a large degree of independence from their overlords of Brecon until as recently as the 1350s.
²⁸
Nevertheless, Gloucester had apparently ignored or perhaps even obstructed a royal order of March 1386 assigning Bronllys and the adjoining Cantref Selyf to Henry.
²⁹

During the fifteen months that he spent in England in 1391–2, Henry despatched a relay of clerks and attorneys to the Tower to search the royal archives for evidence relating to the inheritance. Charters from the reigns of Edward I and II and accounts of long-dead receivers of the lordship of Brecon were copied out, and exemplifications were purchased from the royal chancery and elsewhere. On 17 January 1393, as Henry sailed through the eastern Mediterranean to Jaffa, Gloucester arrived in person in London to rebut his claims. Henry's attorneys immediately sued out a writ of protection for their lord during his absence abroad,
³⁰
but following his return in the summer of 1393 the campaign was renewed. Further writs and pleas, some dating from the thirteenth century, were sought out and copied
pro evidenciam contra Ducem Gloucestrie
. The principal point at issue was still the lands appurtenant to the lordship of Brecon, although there were
a number of other points of disagreement as well.
³¹
Eventually, early in 1395, a compromise was arranged by John Leventhorpe, Henry's attorney, and John Joy, Gloucester's attorney, and sealed by the two lords in London on 20 June of that year. Gloucester handed over the outstanding muniments (a chest was bought in London to store them), and Bronllys, Cantref Selyf and the adjacent lands in Pencelli were reunited with the lordship of Brecon; in return, Henry made over to Gloucester various portions of land in four English counties. Crucially, however, the agreement stipulated that this compromise was to last only as long as both Henry and Gloucester remained alive; once either of them died, it would be null and void.
³²
Each man evidently still felt that he was conceding too much. In the event, although Richard ratified the agreement in July 1396 with only minor adjustments, this stipulation was to serve Henry well, for following the arrest of Gloucester in 1397 it allowed him to reassert his claims to the lands he had reluctantly surrendered two years earlier.
³³

Yet Henry was not content simply to maximize his return from his wife's inheritance. He also set out to recover what he could of the inheritance of Earl Thomas of Lancaster, which involved him and his legal team in two further lawsuits, one with another of his former co-Appellants, the earl of Warwick, over the manors of Warrington (Buckinghamshire) and Long Buckby (Northamptonshire), the other with Elizabeth Nevill over the manors of Sutton and Potton (near Biggleswade in Bedfordshire). In the latter case, it was the death of Elizabeth's husband, John Lord Nevill, in 1388 which presented Henry with his opportunity. Elizabeth was the daughter and heiress of William Lord Latimer (d.1381), through whose family Sutton and Potton had descended since the thirteenth century. In 1315, however, when Thomas of Lancaster's power was at its height, an agreement had been reached that in the event of a failure of heirs in the
male line the manors would fall by remainder to Lancaster, and it was this clause that Henry seized upon in 1391 when he petitioned for a writ of
scire facias
against Elizabeth. Initially this proved successful: on 20 February 1392, following scrutiny of Elizabeth's response, presumably by Henry's lawyers, it was found that there were inconsistencies between the exemplification which she had procured and its original, dating from the reign of Edward I, and on account of her ‘crafty suit’ Richard II's government ordered the manors to be handed over to Henry.
³⁴
Elizabeth countered by bringing an assize of
novel disseisin
against Henry, which came before the justices at Bedford on 25 July 1392, the day after Henry set sail on his second voyage to Prussia. Several members of the Lancastrian legal team attended the hearing, including an apprentice-at-law sent by Gaunt, but it was Henry's receiver-general, John Leventhorpe, who masterminded the suit.
³⁵
Once again, scribes and attorneys were sent to the Tower and elsewhere to copy out documents bearing on the case, some of them dating from the reigns of King John and Henry III. A roll of cloth was given to a certain ‘gentleman of the region’ (
generoso patrie
), presumably to secure his favour, and letters patent of the king addressed to the sheriff of Bedfordshire, William Tyryngton, were seized lest they be tampered with.
³⁶
Careful preparation and Lancastrian muscle duly reaped their reward: Elizabeth's assize was defeated, the manors were made over to Henry, and by December the reeve of Sutton had begun to hand over the profits of his manor to Leventhorpe.
³⁷
Both manors remained in Lancastrian hands throughout the fifteenth century and beyond.

Widows were a notoriously soft target in the Middle Ages, and there is nothing edifying about the sight of Henry waiting until the death of John Nevill – who had been one of Gaunt's most loyal retainers, and whose son Ralph, earl of Westmorland,
³⁸
would be one of the first to throw in his lot with Henry in 1399 – to launch his campaign for the recovery of Sutton and Potton, but this charge at least could not be laid against him in the case
of Warrington and Long Buckby. Originally part of the de Lacy patrimony, these two manors had been forfeited by Thomas of Lancaster in 1322 and held since then by the Basset family.
³⁹
It was the childless death of Ralph Lord Basset of Drayton in May 1390 which supplied Henry with his opening. Although there was some confusion as to who should inherit Basset's lands, both Warrington and Long Buckby soon passed into the earl of Warwick's hands,
⁴⁰
but even before Henry's return to England in April 1391 he had written to the keeper of the rolls of the royal chancery asking him to search for evidence relating to the ownership of Long Buckby.
⁴¹
His claim to Warrington was recognized as early as the winter of 1391–2, although Warwick considered himself to have been unjustly deprived of it.
⁴²
Long Buckby proved a harder nut to crack, for Warwick put up stiff resistance. Eventually Henry brought a writ of
scire facias
against him, and on 16 November 1394 the duke of York, keeper of the realm while the king was in Ireland, ordered the justices to proceed to judgment; the hearing was held at Northampton on 3 December, with Warwick appearing in person to present his evidence.
⁴³
The outcome was a compromise: Warwick retained part of the manor, but Henry did not go away empty-handed, and after he became king continued to claim Long Buckby despite continued resistance from the Beauchamps.
⁴⁴

The cost to Henry of pursuing these claims in the years 1391–5 must have been considerably more than the £410 or so itemized in his accounts.
⁴⁵
Few but the greatest of magnates could have afforded this. In the case of Elizabeth Nevill, Henry's behaviour smacks of predatory lordship, but Gaunt and his son seem to have regarded the defence of what they claimed
as their patrimony – including, whenever possible, the recovery of lands forfeited by Thomas of Lancaster in 1322 – almost as an article of faith. Given the same resources, it is doubtful whether any of their contemporaries would have acted differently: their opponents, at any rate, had little compunction in trying to capitalize on Henry's absences abroad to steal a march on him, but fortunately his father was there to ensure that the army of Lancastrian lawyers was not outflanked.
⁴⁶
Whether it was wise of Gaunt and Henry to revive memories of the great struggle between the crown and the house of Lancaster during the 1310s and 1320s is another matter.
⁴⁷
Richard II would show plainly, once he got the chance, just what he thought of the parliamentary decisions of 1327 and 1330 which overturned the judgment of treason against Thomas. For now, however, Richard was still rebuilding his authority after the trauma of 1387–8, and for now, the house of Lancaster could continue to flaunt its power with impunity.

Just as these tussles were reaching their climax, tragedy struck: on 24 March 1394 John of Gaunt's wife Constanza died, then three months later Mary de Bohun also died, giving birth to her sixth child and second daughter, Philippa, at Peterborough.
⁴⁸
The last time that Henry saw his wife alive was probably when he spent a few days at Peterborough in the spring.
⁴⁹
Since Constanza's funeral had already been planned for 5 July at the Lancastrian mausoleum at the Newark in Leicester, it was decided that Mary would also be buried there on the following day. No record of her funeral expenses has survived, although the large sum of £608 spent on Constanza's funeral might have included Mary's service as well.
⁵⁰
On the other hand, she may have left instructions to be buried without pomp, for her religious inclinations were of that stamp. It is difficult to imagine that Henry did not mourn their unshared future. Although she was no more than twenty-five, and none of her children was aged more than seven at the time of her death, between them she and Henry had already succeeded in instilling in their offspring an inclination towards a reflective mode of
personal religion and a passion for beautiful prayer-books. The fact that three of the Bohun psalters ended up in Germany or Austria and another two in Copenhagen was almost certainly a consequence of the marriages of their two daughters, Blanche and Philippa, to the son of the Holy Roman Emperor and the king of Denmark, respectively: that is to say, they took with them the psalters bequeathed to them by their parents, which suggests that they valued and used them.
⁵¹
As to their sons, John and Humphrey were among the most noted bibliophiles of their age, while the future Henry V's literary sensibility and pietistic devotion are well documented.
⁵²
It would be strange to imagine that their upbringing played no part in the development of these traits. Her children certainly did not forget Mary. Nineteen years after her death, when Henry V came to the throne, one of his first acts was to pay a coppersmith to make an effigy of his mother to be placed over her tomb.
⁵³

¹
SAC II
, 216–18. Within weeks of Henry's return, Mary was pregnant again.

²
DL 28/1/2, fos. 19r–29r. See also Henry's wardrobe accounts: 28/3/3, 28/3/4,
passim
.

³
DL 28/1/3, fos. 5v, 16r, 17v; 28/1/4, fo. 20r; 28/3/4, fo. 33r; 28/1/2, fo. 16v;
CPR 1396–9
, 501, 526.