Henry IV (30 page)

²³
Richard never got the chance to reveal his plans for the Lancastrian patrimony. In the short term, Gaunt's vast estates were parcelled out between the king's favourites among the higher nobility – the dukes of Aumale, Surrey and Exeter and the earls of Wiltshire and Salisbury – but the door was left open for the young Henry to enter into his inheritance in due course: A. Dunn,
The Politics of Magnate Power
(Oxford, 2003), 168–77. In April, Henry sent his esquire, Esmond Bugge, to Windsor to try to persuade the king to relent (DL 28/4/1, fo. 6r;
CR
, 97).

²⁴
Political Poems and Songs
, i.366–8 (‘On the Expected Arrival of the Duke of Lancaster’).

²⁵
CPR 1396–9
, 214; Thomas was 17 and had been mistreated in Exeter's household, especially by ‘John Schevele’ (Sir Thomas Shelley), who made him perform menial tasks. He escaped with the help of a London mercer, William Scott, and joined the archbishop in Cologne or Utrecht:
Historical Collections
, 101;
CR
, 116.

²⁶
Diplomatic Correspondence
, ed. Perroy, 238, 240; D. Carlton,
The Deposition of Richard II
(Toronto, 2007), 75–86; A. Brown, ‘The Latin Letters in MS. All Souls 182’,
EHR
87 (1972), 565–73. Arundel thought Florence ‘an earthly paradise’ and struck up a friendship with the Florentine chancellor and humanist Coluccio Salutati.

²⁷
Note John Bussy's comments on Arundel's ingenuity and cunning (
SAC II
, 80).

²⁸
Knighton
, 354–60;
CR
, 68;
CE
, iii.382.

²⁹
According to Walsingham, on the night that Gaunt died, his penitent spirit appeared in a vision to Arundel while he was at Utrecht and begged forgiveness for the injustices which he had inflicted upon the archbishop and his kinsfolk; Arundel, moved by such contrition, promised the spirit to pray to God for his soul (
SAC II
, 122–3).

³⁰
Burgundy was in the Low Countries from May until August. Berry, having quarrelled violently with Orléans, retired to his castle of Bicêtre; Charles VI, apparently, ‘could no longer refuse anything that the duke of Orléans requested’ (Lehoux,
Jean de France
, ii.414–18).

³¹
CR
, 109–14.

³²
As Henry must have known, York had been appointed keeper of England during Richard's absence in Ireland.

³³
Saul,
Richard II
, 406–7, where it is argued that English diplomacy in Italy also hindered his ambitions.

³⁴
Orléans may have acted in a fit of pique, for it was at just this time that some twenty domestic servants of the young Queen Isabella, including her governess, Margaret de Courcy, and her secretary, arrived in Paris, having been deported from England on Richard's orders; this aroused great anger in France and infuriated Orléans, who had a particular affection for his niece. They were given £465 for removal expenses (
CR
, 110: E 403/562, 10 June).

³⁵
CR
, 25–31, 111, 116–17. One French source said that Charles VI permitted him to leave the realm because he said he was going to England to discuss ‘matters concerning peace’ with Richard II (
Chronographia Regum Francorum
, iii.169). He was carried to England by Thomas Gyles of Dover, who was rewarded with the office of bailiff of Rye for life (
HOC
, iii.258;
CPR 1399–1401
, 35).
Saint-Denys
, ii.706, said that Burgundy heard about unusual maritime traffic around Boulogne and tried to discover what was going on, but Henry avoided detection.

³⁶
E 403/562, 13 May, 12 July: £2,639 for the war wages of 120 men-at-arms and 900 archers from Cheshire going to Ireland with the king (
CCR 1396–9
, 489–90; D. Biggs,
Three Armies in Britain
(Leiden, 2006), 65–80).

³⁷
RHKA
, 216, 310 (these 90 included 36 of Gaunt's knights and esquires); Dunn,
Politics of Magnate Power
, 171–2, who suggests that some of Gaunt's ministers may have been transferring duchy revenues surreptitiously to Paris via Lucchese merchants; Walker,
Lancastrian Affinity
, 177, 231.

³⁸
DL 28/4/1, fo. 15v; these livery badges cost £83.

³⁹
Walsingham said he initially sailed up and down the coastline to test the defences, and a small party of men under John Pelham was landed at Pevensey in Sussex (a duchy castle), where they were still being besieged by a royalist force three weeks later: S. Walker, ‘Letters to the Dukes of Lancaster in 1381 and 1399’,
EHR
106 (1991), 68–79.

⁴⁰
CPR 1399–1401
, 209; DL 42/15, fo. 69v; Biggs,
Three Armies
, 105–9;
CR
, 133; the hermit was Matthew Danthorpe.

⁴¹
Usk
, 52–3;
Chronica Monasterii de Melsa
, ed. E. Bond (3 vols, RS, London, 1866–8), iii.298–9. Some of Henry's retainers may have had advance notice of his intentions: John Davy, a Lancastrian servant, hastened from London to Dover ‘on hearing of the lord's arrival at the end of [June]’, presumably the landing of Pelham and his men at Pevensey (DL 28/4/1, fos. 7v, 15r).

⁴²
Claims that up to 200,000 men joined him are implausible: for the size of Henry's force see
CR
, 35, 126, 252–3 (to the list on pp. 252–3 should be added the names of John Langford and William Bromfield): (DL 29/728/11987, m. 10, and E 403/564, 28 November). Henry's second son Thomas, aged twelve, was also with him. The 51 men who received around £5,000 of wages for joining him were only the captains of companies, some of whom brought scores and even hundreds of men. For the loans from York and Hull, totalling £433, see
CPR 1399–1401
, 354.

⁴³
So at least it was later claimed by, for example, the garrisons of Dunstanburgh and Kenilworth, who claimed to have held them in Henry's name from 1 and 2 July; partisans of the earl of Warwick claimed to have seized Warwick castle on 4 July (DL 29/728/11987, mm. 5, 10; DL 42/15, fo. 71r; Mott, ‘Richard II and the Crisis of 1397’, 176).

⁴⁴
Biggs,
Three Armies
, 189–94.

⁴⁵
Although he had some trouble gaining entry to Knaresborough castle (
CR
, 133).

⁴⁶
E. H. Pearce,
William de Colchester, Abbot of Westminster
(London, 1915), 76–7; E 101/42/12;
CR
, 111.

⁴⁷
CR
, 247–51; Biggs,
Three Armies
, 139–40.

⁴⁸
Political Poems and Songs
, ed. T. Wright (2 vols, RS, London, 1859–61), i.363–6 (‘On King Richard's Ministers’). Such anthropomorphic livery imagery would have been instantly recognizable: one of the Arundel livery badges was a horse. Likewise, Gloucester was the swan, the earl of Warwick the bear-keeper, and so forth.

⁴⁹
Political Poems and Songs
, i.368–417. Although begun in early July, the poem was not completed until several months later, for Henry had assumed the rule of the kingdom, although Richard is referred to as still alive.

⁵⁰
CR
, 118, 127 (Walsingham was at St Albans and in a good position to know).

⁵¹
CR
, 118–19, 247.

⁵²
CR
, 135–6.

⁵³
CR
, 192–3; he was said to have sworn similar oaths at Knaresborough and at Chester (J. Sherborne, ‘Perjury and the Lancastrian Revolution of 1399’,
Welsh History Review
(1988), 217–41).

⁵⁴
Henry was at Gloucester on 25 July (DL 28/4/1, fo. 2r).

⁵⁵
‘because the duke of York did not have the strength to resist him’ (
CR
, 127).

⁵⁶
Ibid., 120, 128. They were not convicted of treason, but of misleading Richard II, and their possessions were seized by Henry ‘through conquest’: see below, p. 442.

⁵⁷
Walker,
Lancastrian Affinity
, 266, 270.

⁵⁸
CR
, 120.

⁵⁹
E 404/15/46. On 31 July, as duke of Lancaster and steward of England, Henry also granted John Norbury all the lands in England of John Ludwyk – a grant in the king's gift (BL Add. Charter 5829).

⁶⁰
D. Johnston, ‘Richard II's Departure from Ireland, July 1399’,
EHR
98 (1983), 785–805.

⁶¹
CR
, 139.

⁶²
CR
, 122, 129, 141. On their way home, the royalist soldiers were harried and despoiled by the Welsh; if they tried to attack Henry's strongholds in Wales and the March, they would have found them well defended. The gates, moat, walls and drawbridge of Brecon castle had been strengthened; the keeper of Kidwelly castle had brought in oil and rocks to hurl at any who might be rash enough to try to assault it, and Hay-on-Wye castle was also reinforced; a detachment of horsemen was sent from Cantref Selyf to Gloucester ‘to defend their lord against his enemies’ (DL 29/548/9240; SC 6/1157/4, mm. 3–4; Davies,
Lords and Lordship
, 84–5).

⁶³
The intrepid Adam Usk claimed to have persuaded the people of Usk not to harry Henry's army, and to have persuaded Henry to set free and promote Thomas Prestbury, a monk of Shrewsbury whom Richard had imprisoned in Ludlow castle for subversive preaching. Usk provides a vivid day-by-day account of Henry's route-march, noting that he and his followers ‘partook liberally’ of the wine which they found stored along the way. It was Eleanor Holand, Richard's niece and lady of Usk, who tried to organize resistance there (
Usk
, 52–6;
CR
, 128–9).

⁶⁴
Usk
, 86–7. A story that so perfectly personified (or at least caninified) the English people's transfer of allegiance from one ruler to another might be dismissed had not Froissart also heard it, although he heightened the drama of the greyhound's defection by placing it at the moment of Richard's capture (Froissart,
Chronicles
, ed. G. Brereton (Harmondsworth, 1968), 453).

⁶⁵
CR
, 128–9.

⁶⁶
When Usk went to Coddington chapel on the morning of 9 August, hoping to say mass, ‘I found nothing there except doors and chests broken open, and everything carried off’
(Usk
, 56–8;
CR
, 153–4; Clarke and Galbraith, ‘The Deposition of Richard II’, 163–4).

⁶⁷
SC 6/774/10, mm. 2d, 3d (items were also taken from Flint and Rhuddlan). The garrison was paid to defend Chester from 3 July to 5 August, ‘on which day the aforesaid castle was, under certain conditions, delivered and handed over to the said duke [Henry]’.

⁶⁸
For the last two weeks of Richard's freedom, we are largely dependent on the ‘Metrical Chronicle’ of Jean Creton, a
valet-de-chambre
at the French court who came to England in the spring of 1399 to join the king's expedition to Ireland. When news came of Henry's landing, Creton was sent back to North Wales with the earl of Salisbury and was with the king when he surrendered. For extracts from Creton's chronicle, see
CR
, 137–52; the whole text is translated in ‘Metrical History of the Deposition of Richard the Second’, ed. J. Webb,
Archaeologia
(1823).

⁶⁹
‘Metrical History’, 121: Creton said that Exeter spoke ‘quite boldly’ to Henry ‘for he had married his sister’, but Creton was not there (Exeter's wife was Elizabeth, Henry's elder sister).

⁷⁰
For the treasure at Holt, see below, p. 175. Walsingham said Richard also went to Holt at this time, presumably to recover his treasure, but it seems unlikely that the king could have reached the castle and Creton does not mention it (
SAC II
, 154–5). Part of Henry's thinking was doubtless to prevent the treasure there from being looted by others under cover of the disturbances; some £20,000 of the Despensers' and Baldock's personal wealth was looted during the revolution of 1326–7, and took twenty years to recover (M. Ormrod,
Edward III
(New Haven, 2011), 47).

⁷¹
The archbishop may or may not have gone to Conway: see Sherborne, ‘Perjury and the Lancastrian Revolution’, and Saul,
Richard II
, 413–16, who thought that he was not there but that ‘a role was created for the prelate in the later narratives to lend a measure of legitimacy to the proceedings’.

⁷²
CR
, 169–70.

⁷³
The five councillors to be submitted for trial were the dukes of Exeter and Surrey, the earl of Salisbury, the bishop of Carlisle, and the clerk Richard Maudeleyn.

⁷⁴
CR
, 38–9, 194–5.

⁷⁵
CR
, 146–8.

⁷⁶
What follows is mainly from Creton's account (
CR
, 147–51).

⁷⁷
CE
, iii.382; the author thought Henry was already in the castle, and only when he cried ‘Enough!’ did Arundel relent.

⁷⁸
Creton and his companion took the opportunity to present themselves to Henry at the gate, explaining that they had been sent by the king of France to accompany Richard to Ireland. Henry replied in French, ‘My young men, do not fear, nor be alarmed at anything you might see. Keep close to me and I will answer for your lives.’

⁷⁹
‘the very words that they exchanged, no more and no less, for I heard them and understood them perfectly well’ (
CR
, 149–51).

⁸⁰
SAC II
, 156, 234.

Chapter 10

THE MAKING OF A KING (1399)

There were many, not all of them supporters of Henry, who believed that the triumph of the house of Lancaster in the summer of 1399 had been foretold, whether by Merlin, by John of Bridlington, or even by Bede. Froissart claimed to have been told as much thirty years previously; Adam Usk could not decide whether Henry was the eaglet prophesied by Merlin to overthrow the White King, or the greyhound prophesied by Bridlington to subdue the hart; even the Ricardian author of the Dieulacres Chronicle reported rumours that Henry's victory had been preordained.
¹
Creton was more sceptical: on the ride from Flint to Chester, he fell in with an elderly knight in Henry's retinue who told him that both Merlin and Bede had prophesied Richard's fall ‘in the parts of the north, in a triangular place’, and that Conway was that place; although Creton agreed that Conway was triangular, he thought the English far too credulous of prophecies, phantoms and witchcraft, a characteristic which he believed to indicate ‘a great want of faith’.
²
He was right, though, to say that the English put great store by prophecies, and it was particularly at times of crisis or upheaval that people recalled them. Prophecies not only explained events, they justified them, and the events people were witnessing required justification. Whether or not Henry himself circulated prophecies in the summer of 1399 to justify his hounding of the king, he would certainly do so soon.
³