Henry IV (27 page)

⁹²
Among the sums he borrowed were 100 marks from the abbot of Gloucester, £40 from the archdeacon of Leicester, £100 from the bishop of Durham and 100 marks from Thomas Hardwick, clerk; these were repaid in November 1399 (DL 42/15, fo. 74v).

⁹³
Foedera
, viii.48–50.

⁹⁴
Mowbray made the parallel crossing from Lowestoft to Dordrecht six days later; he never set foot in England again, dying of the plague at Venice on 22 September 1399
(PROME
, vii.425).

Chapter 9

‘A MANIFEST MIRACLE OF GOD’ (1398–1399)

For most of the eight months he spent in Paris, Henry was based at the Hôtel de Clisson, at the heart of the city near the Temple. The welcome he received from King Charles VI and the princes of the blood was generous, and there was even talk of a possible marriage between him and Mary, the widowed daughter of the duke of Berry.
¹
Richard, alarmed, sent the earl of Salisbury to Paris to remind the French king that Henry was a traitor, and when Duke Philip of Burgundy repeated Salisbury's words in Henry's hearing it caused a row between them, although Charles protested that Henry had been treated unfairly.
²
Yet if the French took a dim view of Richard's machinations against Henry, accusing him of secretly coveting the Lancastrian estates, the English king could point out that Henry's failure to disentangle himself from the undergrowth of factionalism which had sprung up around the intermittently insane Charles did little to smooth the path of Anglo-French diplomacy.
³
Whether or not it was Henry's decision to stay at the Hôtel de Clisson, it was a decision with implications: its builder, Olivier de Clisson, one of the towering figures of French politics during the last thirty years of the fourteenth century, was the inveterate foe of England's ally John de Montfort, duke of Brittany; as one of the ‘Marmousets’ who had excluded the royal uncles from power between 1388 and 1392, he was also hated by the dukes of Berry and Burgundy, who toppled him from power following Charles's first attack of madness in
1392.
⁴
This, however, only drove Clisson into the arms of the king's brother Louis, duke of Orléans, with whom he concluded a pact in October 1397 – in reality, a pact against Philip of Burgundy and his clients, who by now dominated the royal council. Philip was the English king's main ally at the French court and the architect on the French side of the twenty-eight-year truce of 1396. Louis of Orléans, by contrast, advocated a more robust cross-Channel policy, drawing into his orbit men such as Clisson who had waged decades of often successful warfare against the English.

Clisson was only rarely in Paris these days, but he and Henry were in contact.
⁵
Around Christmas time, there was a rumour that the two of them, together with Louis of Orléans and John, count of Nevers, were planning an expedition to Avignon and Milan where, with the help of Duke Gian Galeazzo (Louis's father-in-law), they would effect a reconciliation between the Roman and Avignonese popes.
⁶
Henry's friendship with Orléans was also well known: they often supped together, and in late January 1399 Louis entertained Henry and Mary de Berry at his castle of Asnières (Normandy), apparently to encourage their relationship.
⁷
Yet their alleged initiative on the Schism, the most contentious issue in French politics and one of the many which divided Orléans and Burgundy, can hardly have received the blessing of either the French or the English king,
⁸
and it is easy to see why Richard felt constrained to take counter-measures. Salisbury's mission to Paris was one such move; another was Richard's decision in October 1398 to retain a man whose reputation for thuggery outstripped even that of
Clisson. Pierre de Craon, Lord of Ferté-Bernard, had fled France following a bungled attempt to assassinate Clisson in the rue de Saint-Pol, just yards away from the royal palace, in June 1392 and eventually made his way to England where, on 15 October 1398, two days after Henry left Dover to begin his exile, the English king retained him at the extravagant price of £500 a year for life.
⁹
His infamy notwithstanding, Craon still had powerful friends at the French court, and they were not the same men as those whom Orléans or Clisson counted as their friends. In February 1399 Richard sent Craon and the royal under-chamberlain, Sir Stephen Le Scrope, to Paris on ‘secret affairs’, that is, to assess the state of French politics.
¹⁰

If Richard made sure to keep abreast of developments in France, Henry also kept in touch with events in England. He exchanged letters with his father, who continued to offer him advice until, around Christmas, the fifty-eight-year-old Gaunt fell ill.
¹¹
He died on 3 February 1399 at Leicester castle, deeply depressed on account of the uncertainty surrounding his son's future and that of the Lancastrian inheritance.
¹²
His will included the unusual provision that his body should remain unburied for forty days after his death, and thus it was not until 16 March that he was interred next to the high altar in St Paul's cathedral in London beside Henry's mother, Duchess Blanche.
¹³
This was, Henry knew, a pivotal moment both for Richard and for himself: would the king keep his word and let him sue for livery of his father's estates, or would he succumb to the temptation to sequester the Lancastrian inheritance? The answer was not long in coming. A week before the funeral, at a council meeting at King's Langley (Hertfordshire), Richard made the decision to extend Henry's ten-year
exile to a life sentence, and take possession of his father's lands. William Bagot, who was there, promptly sent a messenger to Paris informing Henry of the king's decision and advising him to ‘help himself with manhood’,
¹⁴
so that by the time it was announced publicly on 18 March it is likely that Henry already knew his fate. Richard's pretext was that Henry's request to be permitted to sue for livery of any lands that might fall to him, granted to him in the aftermath of the judgment at Coventry, had been contrary to the terms of that judgment, which had forbidden him to petition for any mitigation of his sentence.
¹⁵
Two days later, on 20 March, Richard also denied Henry the stewardship of England, an office held by the house of Lancaster for over a hundred years.
¹⁶

Thus began the final crisis of Richard's reign. Popular support for his regime had been eroding for some time. Demonstrations of loyalty for victimized magnates – by the Mortimer retainers, for example, who turned out in their thousands to greet the earl of March on his arrival at Shrewsbury, all dressed in his livery, or by the one thousand and more well-wishers who gathered on the quayside at Lowestoft to give Thomas Mowbray a rousing send-off in October 1398, or by Thomas Geldesowe of Witney, one of the leaders of an uprising in the Thames Valley in the spring of 1398, who adopted ‘Thomas, the young earl of Arundel’ as his
nom de guerre
– were matched by local opposition in Warwickshire, Gloucestershire and elsewhere to upstart royal favourites such as Thomas Holand, the newly created duke of Surrey, and Thomas Despenser, now earl of Gloucester.
¹⁷
Shortly
before the aborted duel at Coventry, Richard issued orders to deal severely with any persons found defaming the king or his royal dignity.
¹⁸
His bodyguard of Cheshiremen, the archers and yeomen of the crown who by early 1399 numbered at least 760 and possibly up to 2,000, were especially disliked, not just for their wanton violence but also for their unbefitting intimacy with the king: for every livery badge of the white hart that the king handed out, punned the author of
Richard the Redeless
, he lost ten loyal hearts.
¹⁹
The blank charters which the king demanded from London and the seventeen counties closest to the capital aroused suspicion and dismay: the Londoners, said one citizen, were all ‘indicted as rebels’ by being forced to seal admissions of guilt accompanied by pleas for forgiveness, ‘and no man knew what it meant’. The day after seizing Henry's inheritance, the king issued a general prohibition against letters being sent out of the realm.
²⁰

Richard knew that it was in Paris that the likeliest threat to his kingship lay, and initially he tried to mollify Henry, allowing him to collect his income from Mary de Bohun's lands and promising him £2,000 a year from the treasury.
²¹
When Gaunt died, he sent an esquire to Paris to inform him.
²²
Yet all this was as nothing when set against the blows the king inflicted on him in March 1399. To many, Richard's decision confirmed that it was his purpose all along to bring down the house of Lancaster, thus allowing Henry to present himself as the champion of property rights against a perjured regime.
²³
A contemporary poet excoriated Richard's cronies as ‘gentlemen from the dung (
de stercore
)’ and called on ‘the eagle duke . . . Henry of Lancaster, our light, our glory, our friend’ to return and, together with Christ, save the people and ‘have the villains drawn and
beheaded’ – the villains being Bussy, Bagot, Green and Le Scrope.
²⁴
Henry must have been aware of such sentiments. Letters passed regularly between him and his council in London, and he knew that Richard was planning to go to Ireland, taking with him not only the hated Cheshire bodyguard but also several of his leading supporters among the remodelled upper nobility. His opportunity would come.

A concatenation of events in the early summer strengthened Henry's hand: Thomas, the son and heir of the earl of Arundel, escaped from the custody of the duke of Exeter and fled abroad to join his uncle, the exiled archbishop of Canterbury.
²⁵
After leaving England in October 1397, Archbishop Arundel had initially made his way to Ghent, then to Rome, where he incurred Richard's wrath by asking the pope to restore him to his see, and then, by January 1398, to Florence, where he remained for a year or so before returning north and spending time at Cologne and Utrecht.
²⁶
By early June at the latest, uncle and nephew had moved to Paris to join Henry. This was an act of defiance in itself, for Henry's sentence of exile had forbidden him any contact with the former archbishop. Richard had a healthy respect for Arundel,
²⁷
a man of nimble intellect and sharp tongue: he had berated the king to his face at least twice in the past, and would do so again.
²⁸
Yet it cannot have been an easy moment: the last time Henry and Arundel had met was at the September 1397 parliament, where Henry had helped to secure the conviction for treason of Arundel's brother and Gaunt had pronounced sentence of death on him. Walsingham reckoned that the archbishop's willingness to forgive if not forget must have required supernatural intervention.
²⁹
In the event, Henry and Arundel's reunion in Paris marked the forging of a partnership not merely for a revolution but for a reign.

Events in France also moved in Henry's favour. The dukes of Burgundy and Berry both moved out of the city before the end of May, either to escape an outbreak of plague or in frustration at the behaviour of the duke of Orléans. The latter's influence at the French court was now paramount.
³⁰
On 17 June, by which time news would have reached Paris that Richard had crossed to Ireland, Henry and Orléans drew up a treaty of alliance.
³¹
On the face of it, this infamous (as it became) document appears unexceptionable. It bound Henry and Louis by mutual oaths to support each other's friends, oppose each other's enemies, uphold each other's honour and well-being, and come to each other's help in times of war or unrest, for as long as the Anglo-French truce remained in place. The exclusion of named individuals, including the kings of France and England and the duke of York,
³²
sought to allay any suspicion that it was a treaty directed against any of those persons. Yet suspicion there was, and given the timing that is not surprising. Henry would later claim that he had revealed his plans in full to Orléans, who had approved them and promised aid against Richard, and there were many in France who believed him, for the alliance seemed to guarantee, at the minimum, French connivance at the enterprise he was about to undertake. Orléans's reasoning is less easy to explain, but he probably found his territorial ambitions in southern France thwarted by the Anglo-French truce and hoped to foment trouble for the English king and the duke of Burgundy.
³³
Whether he truly believed that Henry would succeed in overthrowing Richard is another matter, although he must have realized that it was a possibility; while it is unlikely that Henry was actively aided by Orléans or anyone else in France, relations between the French and English courts had already cooled markedly since the heady days of 1396.
³⁴
Nevertheless, Henry covered his tracks: stopping off at Saint-Denis on his way to the coast, he let it be known that he was
planning to travel to Spain. As far as can be gathered, he was allowed to board an English merchantman at Boulogne without any attempt being made to stop him.
³⁵
Within two weeks of sealing his alliance with Orléans he was back in England.

The success of the revolution of 1399 is explicable in part by the absence of the king, his Cheshiremen and his magnates in Ireland, and in part by the element of surprise Henry achieved.
³⁶
It was much more than a personal triumph: it was the vindication of the Lancastrian affinity, of loyalties and affiliations which had been nurtured and tautened for decades and generations to the point where they were able to withstand both the blandishments and the bullying of a king such as Richard. Since taking control of the duchy, Richard had done what he could to break the nexus between the affinity and its lord. Annuities paid by Gaunt to some ninety of his former retainers were not confirmed unless they agreed to ‘stay with the king only’, while the duke's estates were placed in the hands of those whom the king regarded as his most dependable supporters, although it soon became apparent that they had failed to inspire any personal allegiance among their new tenants.
³⁷
The investment which successive earls and dukes had ploughed into the Lancastrian corporation – an ongoing process, for Henry distributed 192 livery collars and 27 crescent badges in the summer of 1399 – now paid its dividend.
³⁸
Richard could neither buy nor command its defection.