Henry IV (25 page)

By the afternoon of Sunday 15 September the king had arrived at Baginton, the tower-house belonging to William Bagot halfway between Kenilworth and Coventry, where, after dinner that day, Henry came to pay his respects to Richard. At daybreak on the Monday, Mowbray did likewise.
⁷⁴
An enormous crowd had gathered, including a delegation of French lords led by the Count of St Pol and representatives from Scotland and Germany. Henry, as the appellant, arrived at the lists at nine o'clock with six or seven splendidly caparisoned horses,
⁷⁵
and was formally charged to state his purpose. ‘I am Henry of Lancaster, duke of Hereford,’ he replied, ‘and I have come here to do my duty in combat with Thomas Mowbray, duke of Norfolk, a false and disloyal traitor to God, the king, his kingdom and myself.’ Then, raising his shield, which was silver with a red cross like the arms of St George,
⁷⁶
he closed the visor of his helmet, made the sign of the cross, and entered the lists, where he rode straight to a seat decorated with red flowers, dismounted and entered his pavilion. Next to appear was the king, accompanied by lords, ladies and a great host of archers and men-at-arms; once Richard had taken his seat, a herald called upon Mowbray to come forward and do his duty. He too rode to his pavilion and dismounted. The two men's lances were measured by the constable and marshal to ensure that they were the same length, and handed back to them. When everything was ready, the herald ordered the pavilions to be taken down, the seconds were instructed to remove the horses' restraints,
⁷⁷
and Henry and Mowbray were bidden to do their duty.

Henry promptly raised his lance and advanced seven or eight paces, while Mowbray ‘neither moved nor made any attempt to defend himself’. However, before anything else could happen Richard rose from his seat
and cried out that the two men be escorted back to their places.
⁷⁸
Two hours now passed before John Bussy emerged to announce the king's decision. Although he stressed that Henry and Mowbray had both defended their honour, the issue between them was so grave a matter that the king had decided to banish the duke of Hereford from the realm for a period of ten years. This caused uproar, for despite Richard's announcement it was assumed that Henry must have forfeited his honour. Eventually, when the crowd had been quieted, it was announced that Mowbray too would be banished, in his case for life. Richard justified his decision on the grounds that he wished to avoid the dishonour that would befall the loser of the duel, since both men were so closely related to the king, and that he needed to guard against the possibility of quarrels breaking out between them or their followers in future. The more severe sentence on Mowbray he explained by the fact that at the Windsor council on 29 April he had confessed to ‘certain civil points’ (presumably his attempt to ambush Gaunt), that he had failed to support the repeal of the acts of the Merciless Parliament, and that his misgovernance of Calais had placed the security of the town in jeopardy. He was thus ordered by the king to make his way to Germany, Bohemia or Hungary, or to go on pilgrimage to Jerusalem, but not, under pain of treason, to live in any other part of Christendom. No such geographical limits were placed on Henry; he and Mowbray were, however, strictly ordered not to communicate with each other while in exile or to have any contact with Thomas Arundel, the exiled archbishop of Canterbury. Both men were to leave the realm by 20 October.
⁷⁹

The chroniclers did not believe Richard's explanation: some thought he was punishing Henry for opposing him in 1387–8, others that he had simply been waiting for an opportunity to destroy him.
⁸⁰
However, they were writing in the aftermath of the revolution of 1399, which also helps to explain their almost unanimous dislike of Mowbray.
⁸¹
Impetuous and mercurial Mowbray may have been, but he took a more principled stance than Henry in 1397–8, as witness his insistence on the validity of the 1388 appeals, to which he and Henry had both been parties. Moreover, if Henry's
story of their encounter in December 1397 was true, then Mowbray had every right to feel betrayed. Had he not been trying to warn Henry of the danger to his life and his inheritance, to which Henry responded by breaking his confidence and denouncing him as a traitor?
⁸²
Nevertheless, the anger felt by many contemporaries at Henry's treatment was understandable: this was a man, after all, against whom nothing had been proven, and who – if his story is to be believed – had been trying to warn the king about the covert disaffection of a magnate who was apparently on the closest of terms with Richard.
⁸³
The revival of exile as a political punishment for opponents of the crown suggests indecision on Richard's part: fearful of allowing either Henry or Mowbray to be proved right, he chose instead to inflict unmerited but harsh punishment on at least one of them.
⁸⁴

The five weeks allowed to Henry before his departure he spent with his father at Leicester and visiting Eaton Tregoz.
⁸⁵
A major preoccupation was the care of his children, who by now ranged in age from four to twelve. Humphrey, Blanche and Philippa remained at Eaton in the care of Sir Hugh Waterton during Henry's exile.
⁸⁶
The three older boys had begun to be moved around more, their range of contacts expanding as they matured. John spent most of his father's absence in or around London, with his tutor Thomas Rothwell.
⁸⁷
The young Henry, the heir, was retained – or perhaps
detained – at court by the king, and accompanied him on campaign to Ireland in May 1399; although he was apparently well treated by Richard, he must have felt that he was in some sense a hostage for his father's behaviour. The only one to accompany their father into exile was his second son Thomas, said to have been Henry's favourite.
⁸⁸
Richard had done what he could to forestall any challenge by Henry or Mowbray to the judgment given at Coventry, forbidding them under pain of treason even to request the reversal of his decision or to sue for permission to return.
⁸⁹
However, Henry was allowed to appoint attorneys to act on his behalf while abroad and to sue for livery of any inheritance which might fall to him during his exile, an obvious reference to the fact that Gaunt was not expected to live for another ten years. Seventeen named companions also received letters of protection to accompany him into exile: they included stalwarts from his crusading days such as Erpingham, Rempston and Norbury, men who had served him since his childhood such as William Loveney and Thomas Totty, and the constable of Bordeaux and future archbishop of York, Henry Bowet, who was given permission to accompany Henry to ‘Lombardy and elsewhere in those parts’, an indication of Henry's uncertainty about his intentions.
⁹⁰
Gaunt is said to have advised his son either to go to Paris or to visit his sisters in Iberia. He certainly departed in style: he was licensed to travel with up to two hundred servants, £1,000 in cash, and whatever he needed in terms of plate, jewels, horses and other baggage.
⁹¹
He spent his last week in London, confirming grants to his servants and retainers, settling his affairs and borrowing money.
⁹²
On 8 October he appointed attorneys to act in his absence: these included a number of familiar servants – John Leventhorpe, Hugh Waterton, his household treasurer Simon Bache, his steward Peter Bukton, and Mary de Bohun's
former receiver William Burgoyne – along with magnates such as the duke of Aumale, the archbishop of York, the earls of Northumberland, Worcester and Wiltshire and, surprisingly, the earl of Salisbury, a slippery parvenu with a claim to several Lancastrian properties.
⁹³
On 13 October, the feast of the Translation of Edward the Confessor, Henry crossed from Dover to Calais and headed straight for Paris.
⁹⁴

¹
Palmer,
England, France and Christendom
, 171–4.

²
PROME
, vii.305–30.

³
G. Dodd, ‘Richard II and the Transformation of Parliament’, in
The Reign of Richard II
, ed. G. Dodd, 71–84.

⁴
PROME
, viii.313; D. Bueno de Mesquita, ‘The Foreign Policy of Richard II in 1397: Some Italian Letters’,
EHR
1941, 628–37. It was the disastrous defeat of the crusading army at Nicopolis in September 1396, news of which reached Paris on Christmas Eve, that forced the French to change their plans.

⁵
DL 28/1/5, fos. 9r, 21r; 28/3/5, fo. 13v; 28/1/6, fo. 8v. For Franco-Milanese hostility, see
Oeuvres de Froissart
, xv.352. Cf. Tuck, ‘Henry IV and Chivalry’, 62. Francis de Courte, Gian Galeazzo's esquire, had been staying with Henry more or less continuously since 1393: DL 28/1/5, fos. 3r, 10v, 20r; 28/1/6, fo. 24r; 28/1/9, fos. 6r, 21r.

⁶
Bueno de Mesquita, ‘Foreign Policy of Richard II’, 634–7. In March 1398, there was a rumour in Italy that Henry was on the point of marching down to the peninsula with 200 lancers and 500 archers, marrying Gian Galeazzo's cousin Lucia (whom he had met in 1393) and joining the duke in an attack on Florence.

⁷
PROME
, vii. 322–3 (correctly, 6 February). This later became a contentious issue: see below, p. 306.

⁸
All three were appointed triers of petitions (as was Henry), but none of them witnessed the promotions of Beaufort and Thomas Mowbray on 10 February (
PROME
, vii.311).

⁹
Vita
, 137. Gloucester and Arundel were said to be unhappy with the French truce and royal marriage.

¹⁰
PROME
, vii.320–1.

¹¹
On 11 February 1397 he created a jointure entailing his castles and honours of Tickhill, High Peak and Knaresborough, together with other lands, upon himself and Katherine Swynford, the effect of which was to grant her secure possession of them after he died (
CPR 1396–9
, 76).

¹²
John Casemaker was paid 4s 6d to make a strong-box covered with black leather ‘bound in iron, with keys and locks’ to store these documents (DL 28/3/5, fos. 13v, 15r).

¹³
DL 28/1/6, fos. 4Ar, 25v, 30r and v, 37r; DL 28/1/9, fos. 9v, 12r, 15r. Goodman,
John of Gaunt
, 159; Henry was at Hertford with his father on 10 June (Whit Sunday): DL 28/1/9, fo. 15r.

¹⁴
DL 28/1/9, fo. 16r. Thomas Young and John Atherton, clerks of Henry's chapel, and his servants, John Young, John Wilbraham and John Bernard, each received four pence a day for ‘staying with the lord [Henry] in the household of the king from the sixth day of July until the first day of August’.

¹⁵
The French chroniclers said that Henry, together with Gloucester, Arundel, Warwick, Nottingham, Archbishop Arundel, the prior of Westminster abbey and the abbot of St Albans, became involved at around this time in a conspiracy to kill or imprison Richard II, John of Gaunt and Edmund, duke of York, and to put the remaining lords on the royal council to death. The details of this ‘St Albans Plot’ vary, but it originated with the pro-Ricardian author of the
Traïson et Mort
, who said that it was Mowbray who disclosed the plot to the king, leading to the arrest of Gloucester, Arundel and Warwick. For the improbability of the story, see J. Palmer, ‘The Authorship, Date and Historical Value of the French Chronicles on the Lancastrian Revolution’,
BJRL
(1978–9), 145–81, 398–421;
CR
, 7–8;
Traïson et Mort
, 121–7;
Saint-Denys
, ii.477;
Chronographia Regum Francorum
, iii.144.

¹⁶
PROME
, viii.55; the pressure on Warwick had ratcheted up in May when the king ousted him from Gower and ordered him to pay thirteen years' arrears of the profits of the lordship (£5,333) to Mowbray, adjudging that the latter's father had been unjustly deprived of it in 1353: C. Given-Wilson,
The English Nobility in the Late Middle Ages
(London, 1987), 169;
CCR 1396–9
, 123–5.

¹⁷
CR
, 54, 64–5, 71–2.

¹⁸
R. Mott, ‘Richard II and the Crisis of July 1397’, in
Church and Chronicle in the Middle Ages: Essays Presented to John Taylor
, ed. I. Wood and G. A. Loud (London, 1991), 165–77, at p. 172. A royal proclamation of 18 July stressed that Gaunt, Henry and York had consented to the arrest of the three senior Appellants, which, strictly speaking, was probably true:
Foedera
, viii.6–7.

¹⁹
DL 28/1/6, fos. 15v, 20v, 30v. The fact that Henry later sought a charter of pardon from the king for the gathering together (
adunacione
) of men-at-arms and archers at Nottingham should not be taken to imply that he had any intention of resisting Richard, which would have been tantamount to suicide; this pardon was the result of a petition from Gaunt, York and Henry to the king, asking for permission to bring men into the king's presence; it was endorsed with the king's licence, authorizing them to bring the numbers of men specified in his writ of 28 August cited below (SC 8/221/11038).

²⁰
CR
, 73;
CCR 1396–9
, 210.

²¹
CCR 1396–9
, 210;
The Historical Collections of a Citizen of London
, ed. J. Gairdner (Camden Society, New Series, 17, 1876), 96; BL Harleian Ms 3775, fo. 86r. The author of the
CE
(p. 373) described the king ‘riding fearsomely (
terribiliter
) through the middle of London’.

²²
Historical Collections
, 96; called ‘John Rotes Inne in Fleet Street’ in BL Harleian Ms 3775, fo. 86r; DL 28/1/9, fo. 18v. Henry hired three boats with sixteen bargemen for the use of his followers; six of his bargemen had formerly served Gloucester, but now sported gowns of Henry's livery. His six minstrels were at the banquet, as were his two older sons Henry and Thomas, both of whom received gowns for the occasion, while the court painter John Prince had been employed to paint thirteen curlews, thirteen doves and thirteen popinjays ‘in gold, silver and other colours for the entertainment (
convivio
) put on for the king at the time of the parliament’ (DL 28/1/6, fos. 3r–v, 4Ar, 26r–v, 28r, 30r, 36v; DL 28/1/9, fo. 18v).