Henry IV (35 page)

The revanche – the ‘Epiphany Rising’, a plot to assassinate the new king and his sons and restore Richard to the throne – probably came sooner
than expected, but there was nothing unexpected about the revanchists. The chief lay conspirators were the earls of Kent and Huntingdon (demoted from the dukedoms of Surrey and Exeter, respectively); Thomas Despenser (demoted from earl of Gloucester); William Montague, earl of Salisbury; two of Richard's chamber knights, Thomas Blount and Benedict Cely; and the obscure but obviously disaffected Ralph Lord Lumley and his son Thomas. Several of the former king's clerks were also implicated, including Thomas Merks and Henry Despenser, the bishops of Carlisle and Norwich; William Colchester, abbot of Westminster; Roger Walden, the intruder appointed by Richard II to the see of Canterbury during Thomas Arundel's exile; and two of Richard's household clerks, Richard Maudeleyn and William Ferriby. As for the earl of Rutland (Aumale), no one seemed very sure what role if any he played in the rising; he may initially have joined the conspiracy but later betrayed it, he may have played a double game from the start, or perhaps it was only his detractors (of whom he had many) who claimed that he was involved. The prominent part he played in suppressing the rising indicates that Henry gave him the benefit of the doubt. The sixth Counter-Appellant, Henry's half-brother and childhood companion John Beaufort, was certainly not involved; despite being deprived of his marquisate for failing to stand up to Richard's machinations in 1398–9, he had made his peace with Henry and was now fully committed to the new regime. He too took a leading role in the suppression.
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Henry, who was recovering from food poisoning, had spent Christmas at Windsor with a smaller than usual household and was planning to round off the seasonal celebrations with a day of masques and jousts on 6 January, the Epiphany. It was under cover of these festivities that the rebels, who had been conspiring together since mid-December, planned to strike, but before the day arrived they were betrayed, possibly by a London prostitute, whose clients included both a loose-tongued conspirator and an esquire of the royal household, possibly by the earl of Rutland, or possibly simply through carelessness.
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At any rate, by the time the rebel lords met as arranged at Kingston-upon-Thames (Surrey) on Sunday 4 January, the
king knew of the plot and was hurrying back to London, summoning his retainers as he went.
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Thomas Knolles, mayor of London, raised the citizens, while Henry sent a message to Archbishop Arundel, warning him just in time (‘as we were approaching Kingston’) of the danger.
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Arundel, who had also been marked out for execution, retired to Reigate castle. The rebels, realizing they had been unmasked, nevertheless rode to Windsor where once more they vainly proclaimed Richard II king, then to Sonning (Berkshire) where Richard's child-queen Isabella's household was lodged. Kent, Salisbury and Lumley then rode westwards, perhaps trying to reach Shrewsbury or Cheshire, perhaps to flee abroad. By the evening of 6 January they had reached Cirencester. The townspeople, alerted to their intentions, arrested them, locked them in the abbey, and summoned Thomas Lord Berkeley to conduct them to the king, but this proved unnecessary: two days later, when they tried to flee – apparently by starting a fire in order to cover their escape – all three were dragged out into the marketplace and beheaded. Meanwhile Huntingdon had made his way into Essex hoping to flee by boat to the continent; found hiding in a mill at Prittlewell, he was taken to Pleshey castle and handed over to Joan countess of Hereford, Henry's mother-in-law. Accounts differ as to whether she hastened him to his execution or the popular clamour obliged her to hand him over to the mob, but the upshot was that he was beheaded outside the castle gate by ‘plebs and mechanics’ on the very spot where, two-and-a-half years earlier, the duke of Gloucester had been arrested by Richard II.
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Thomas Despenser also tried to flee abroad from his castle of Cardiff, but he was betrayed by the captain of the ship he chartered and taken instead to Bristol, where once again lynch law prevailed: he was beheaded in the marketplace on 13 January.
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Meanwhile the king had set off with a mixed force of retainers and Londoners in pursuit of the ringleaders, but by the time he reached Oxford on 11 January he was able to despatch letters to the sheriffs telling them the danger was over.
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Most of the remaining suspects were brought here, and at Oxford castle on 12 January Henry presided over their trials. The charge, inescapably, was treason. Some ninety men stood accused, most of whom were quickly pardoned since they were menials press-ganged into joining
the rising, although twenty-seven were convicted and adjudged to a traitor's death. Most of these were simply beheaded since, as Henry put it: ‘the sight of so many people being put to such a death would be quite horrid, and the sound of it most odious, and lest they should, on account of the great pains they would suffer, deny God their Creator or fail to keep their Creator properly in mind at the going forth of their souls’.
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The most fortunate rebel was John Ferrour, who was pardoned and released because he had saved Henry's life in the Tower at the time of the 1381 Revolt. Four of the ringleaders, however – the knights Thomas Blount and Benedict Cely and the esquires John Walsh and William Baldwin – suffered the full penalty of drawing, hanging, beheading and quartering. Adam Usk, who had an eye for such details, recalled seeing their bodies being carried to London ‘chopped up like the carcasses of beasts killed in the chase, partly in sacks and partly on poles slung across pairs of men's shoulders, where they were later salted to preserve them [for display]’.
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Rumours of the rising had also spread north, sparking disturbances in Derbyshire and Cheshire among opponents of the Lancastrian regime, but these subsided once news arrived from Cirencester and Oxford.
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By 15 January Henry was back in London where, on the following day, Archbishop Arundel led a procession through the city chanting the
Te Deum
in thanksgiving for the king's deliverance.
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Maudeleyn and Ferriby were caught and executed three weeks later, but the higher-ranking churchmen escaped with their lives, even if the bishop of Carlisle was initially condemned to death.
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There remained one possible conspirator. According to one account, Richard II confessed that the rebels had been acting on a plan devised by him at Conway castle.
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Although it is far from impossible that schemes of a general nature were discussed during those desperate August days in North Wales, it is difficult to believe that Richard, closely guarded at Pontefract castle, could have been involved in any detailed planning.
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What was clear, however, was that as long as he remained alive, he was an incentive to treason, and in this sense the rising was the catalyst for his
death. The minute of a great council meeting held on 8–9 February recorded cagily that if he were still alive, ‘as it is supposed that he is’, he should be securely guarded, but that if he were dead this should be demonstrated to the people. By 17 February it was known that he was dead and an esquire was sent to bring his corpse from Pontefract to London.
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The date often given for his death is 14 February. It was not a violent death: when his body was examined in the nineteenth century, no wounds were found on it.
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The chroniclers stated either that Richard was so despondent at the failure of the rising and the death of his friends that he starved himself to death, or that his gaolers starved him to death. The former is possible, but the latter is a good deal more likely, as is the supposition that they were acting on Henry's orders. For the moment, however, the fact of Richard's death was more important than the manner of it, which is why Henry had his body brought down to London slowly and publicly exhibited at the major towns en route, ‘or at least that part of the body from which his face could be recognized, that is, from the forehead to the throat’, as Walsingham, who saw the corpse at St Albans, explained. Two days of exequies attended by Henry were observed at St Paul's on 6–7 March before the body was taken to King's Langley (Hertfordshire) ‘at dead of night’ for burial.
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Not everyone was convinced: rumours surfaced periodically for nearly twenty years that Richard was still alive, although how many people truly believed them is not clear. More damaging initially was that, already a usurper, Henry was now also a regicide, a taunt which his enemies lost no time in seizing upon.

And enemies he had: many of them, as the rising had demonstrated. As far as committed Ricardians were concerned, Henry's policy of reconciliation had not worked. Whether it would be more effective in persuading others remained to be seen, but the February great council decided not to take any chances. ‘In this new world’, it advised the king, he should retain ‘a certain number of the more sufficient men of good fame’ in each county, appoint them to the commissions of the peace and entrust them with ‘saving the estate of the king’ in their localities. He should also ensure that
his servants were well armed and select a number of ‘sufficient armed esquires and archers’ from each county and keep them near him so that they could guard him night and day.
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The royal household and affinity were to be both expanded and militarized; the new regime's grip on the kingdom was to be tightened.

The threat to Henry's throne came not just from England, a point which the king was quick to stress: the ports were closed during the Epiphany Rising and the rebels accused of plotting to bring Charles VI of France into the realm.
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Convenient as this was, it was not simply propaganda, for Anglo-French relations during the first few months of Henry's reign were unpredictable. It was, after all, Charles's son-in-law whom Henry had deposed, thereby humiliating his ten-year-old daughter, and to make matters worse he now appeared unwilling to return either Isabella or her dowry to Paris. This was not an attempt to provoke the French – in fact it was linked to Henry's desire for an Anglo-French peace – but it gave the French royal family a personal stake in the fallout from Richard's deposition and a focus for their animosity towards the English usurper. Men such as Waleran, count of St-Pol, the widower of Richard II's half-sister, and the king's brother Louis of Orléans (Isabella's uncle) felt a sense of familial betrayal which made them honour-bound to take action.
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It was under St-Pol's command that a French invasion fleet was said to be gathering at Harfleur in late January 1400, and two weeks later the great council expressed the view that war with France seemed more likely than either peace or the confirmation of the 1396 truce. In fact, the French king had issued an undertaking on 29 January to respect the truce, although this did not stop him detaining an English herald in Paris, declining to grant Henry's ambassadors an interview, or continuing to address him as ‘he who calls himself king of England’.
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Henry for his part had welcomed Charles's ambassadors to his court in October 1399 and wrote on 29 November to ‘our dearest kinsman of France’, proposing a marriage
alliance between the prince of Wales and one of Charles's daughters.
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Since Richard II was still alive at this point, he could hardly have been referring to Isabella, but once Richard had been buried Charles VI became fearful that she would be forcibly remarried to one of Henry's sons, something he was determined to avoid. Nevertheless, the predominant mood in Paris – heavily influenced by Philip, duke of Burgundy, whose rich county of Flanders depended on English wool exports for its cloth industry – was of reluctance to embark on another round of open warfare. It was at Henry himself rather than at England that French threats were targeted, accompanied by a propaganda war against the ‘infamous traitor’ designed to blacken his reputation at the courts of Europe.

One way to counter French propaganda was to cultivate good relations with other European powers, and here a number of factors worked in Henry's favour. The reputation he had gained as crusader and pilgrim in the early 1390s, the personal contacts he had made then, and the belief that he had been unjustly treated in 1398–9 were all cards that might be played to advantage; four sons and two daughters also represented a healthy hand with which to bid in the international marriage market. One priority was reassuring England's major trading partners. Four days after taking the throne, Henry wrote to the Doge of Venice assuring him that Venetians would always be treated ‘like our own lieges’ in England; the privileges of other foreign merchants were also confirmed.
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Envoys were despatched to Rome, France, Hungary, Germany, Spain, Ireland and elsewhere to explain the ‘horrible causes’ for Richard II's deposition – presumably a catalogue of his misdeeds – and, whether on account of this or for pragmatic reasons, hostility throughout much of Europe was muted.
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In Scandinavia, the Italian peninsula, the Holy Roman Empire and Iberia (where one of Henry's sisters was queen of Castile, another queen of Portugal) rulers rapidly accepted the usurpation as a fait accompli, and negotiated with the new English king much as they had done with his predecessors.
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However, this was not the case in Scotland, France's long-standing ally: England's confusion was Scotland's opportunity. Since the 1370s, cross-border warfare had been driven mainly by Scottish aggression, resulting in
the recovery of substantial areas of land north of the Tweed–Solway line, the English response to which had generally been reactive and ineffective.
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The chance to capitalize on political upheaval south of the border was thus tempting, although it was not the Scottish king who decided policy. Robert III, who had ruled in name since 1390, was ill and ageing, and had been effectively sidelined at a general council held at Perth in January 1399. In his place, his twenty-year-old son David, duke of Rothesay, was appointed lieutenant of the realm for three years, but to exercise power Rothesay had to feed the ambitions of his uncle Robert, duke of Albany, and of Archibald the Grim, third earl of Douglas, who controlled much of the north and south of the kingdom, respectively.
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It was this shifting, but for the moment stable, triumvirate which was responsible for the more aggressive policy towards England which marked the early months of Henry's reign.
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Letters in King Robert's name addressed Henry as ‘duke of Lancaster, earl of Derby and steward of England’, Wark castle in Northumberland was raided in mid-October (possibly on the day of Henry's coronation, something of a Scottish tradition), and fears of a Scottish invasion were rife at Westminster, leading to calls for a punitive expedition by the king.
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The earl of Northumberland and his son Hotspur, wardens of the west and east marches, respectively, also favoured a campaign, for they had ambitions north of the border, although whether they wanted the king to come north in person is questionable. Henry assured parliament on 10 November 1399 that his plan to invade Scotland, approved that day, had not been conceived at the instigation of the northern magnates but was born of his own desire to defend his realm from the ‘great wickedness and rebellion of the Scots’, but his defensive tone hinted at unease about Percy influence on his decision.
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