Henry IV (36 page)

News had also reached Henry of the disaffection of George Dunbar, earl of the Scottish March, whose daughter Elizabeth had been betrothed to the duke of Rothesay in 1395, but then jilted in favour of Douglas's daughter Mary, leaving him feeling ‘gretly wrangit’. Dunbar was one of the finest
soldiers of his age, until now an implacable enemy of the English who more than any other had been responsible for the Scottish recovery of the 1370s and 1380s.
⁴²
As the holder of much of East Lothian, his defection to the English cause would open up the prospect of recovering lands the English had claimed since the 1330s. On 2 December 1399, Henry sent Dunbar a gift of £100, an opening gambit which within two months had him negotiating to switch to the English allegiance.
⁴³
This was a coup for Henry, not just symbolically in that a great Scottish magnate publicly acknowledged his legitimacy as king of England, but also in terms of the experience Dunbar brought to English campaigning in the north. With Dunbar's secession, the tone of Scottish diplomacy softened. A placatory letter of Robert III to ‘our dear cousin of England’ dated 14 March proposed urgent talks to confirm the truce.
⁴⁴
Henry, however, continued to exploit divisions north of the border. Donald, lord of the Isles, and his brother John, still smarting from the campaign which Albany and Rothesay had mounted against them in the late summer of 1398, were invited to England to speak with Henry's envoys. On 4 June, summonses were sent out to retainers of the crown and the duchy of Lancaster to join the king at York ready to cross the border.
⁴⁵
By this time the Scots knew that Henry was in earnest. Despite a frustrating delay of several weeks while provisions were assembled, by 25 July the English king was at Newcastle, where Dunbar swore within a month to withdraw his allegiance from ‘Robert that pretends himself king of Scotland’, and on 7 August Henry resuscitated the ghost of the mythical, but still resonant, Brutus, ‘first king of Albion’ to demand that King Robert and the Scottish magnates come to Edinburgh to perform homage to him. A week later he crossed the border at the head of an army of some 13,000 men.
⁴⁶

Henry's Scottish campaign offered him a chance to demonstrate greater commitment than Richard to the integrity of his realm and the plight of
his northern subjects, to seal the defection of Dunbar, and to show that he was serious about restoring at least part of south-eastern Scotland to English allegiance. To lead his nation in war must have been an attractive prospect to a king who had already intimated his desire to polish up the chivalric lustre of a tarnished English crown. There may also have been fears, perhaps shared by the king himself, that the Percys were becoming a little too presumptuous and usurping royal jurisdiction in the northern counties.
⁴⁷
Yet there were also broader considerations. The political configuration of the British Isles was not set in stone, and English imperialism, which a hundred years earlier had seemed as if it might define the future shape of Britain, continued to exercise a hold on the nation's imagination.
⁴⁸
The emphasis which Henry placed upon his own Scottish ancestry, as well as upon the claims to ancient English overlordship of which Edward I had made so much during the 1290s, suggest that, whether or not he truly believed that he could unite Britain under his kingship, Henry was not insensible to the possibilities which history presented.
⁴⁹
This also helps to explain why, in contrast to the devastation wreaked by Richard II's army in 1385, Henry earned plaudits from the Scottish chroniclers for the restraint shown by his soldiers on their march through Berwickshire and Lothian.
⁵⁰
This was Dunbar's ‘country’, and if his defection was to bear fruit his tenants needed incentives to follow his lead.

To judge by the course of the campaign, its symbolic significance mattered as much to Henry as any prospect of short-term political gain. Despite its size and cost, the English army spent just two weeks in Scotland, basing itself at Leith to maintain contact with the sizeable fleet which had also been mobilized.
⁵¹
No serious attempt was made to dislodge the duke of Rothesay from Edinburgh castle, and unsurprisingly he declined a second invitation to perform homage to Henry.
⁵²
Henry did, however, secure an undertaking
from the Scottish leadership, via Sir Adam Forrester, a knight of the duke of Albany, that consideration would be given to his claim to overlordship. Later, he would claim to have been deceived by Forrester into leaving Edinburgh sooner than he would have,
⁵³
yet if Henry really did hope to have his overlordship recognized by the Scots (and he continued to press the point), a more prolonged and destructive campaign was unlikely to achieve that end. By 29 August, at any rate, the English were back in England, where popular opinion was distinctly unimpressed by the king's foray.
⁵⁴
Far from establishing English lordship in south-eastern Scotland, the defection of Dunbar had aggravated tensions. Cross-border raiding intensified, with a retaliatory Scottish force driven back from Reidswire (near Carter Bar) just one month later, while the deadly feud between Dunbar and the Douglases regularly spilled over into the northern English counties.
⁵⁵
Meanwhile, Henry had to raise the money for his soldiers' wages, but scarcely had writs been issued for a parliament to meet at York in late October (suggesting that Henry planned to remain in the north, presumably to monitor the situation on the border), when news arrived of an uprising in Wales.
⁵⁶

There was little at this stage to indicate that the revolt of Owain Glyn Dŵr, a descendant of the princes of Powys and Deheubarth, would be one of the defining events of Henry's reign. The immediate cause of Glyn Dŵr's disaffection was said to be the withholding by his neighbour, the Marcher Lord Reginald Grey of Ruthin, of a writ summoning him to perform military service in Scotland, the last straw in a bitter personal rivalry that had been simmering for some time.
⁵⁷
Violence erupted on 16 September when a group of Owain's kinsmen and friends gathered at his manor of Glyndyfrdwy near Llangollen in north-east Wales and proclaimed him prince of Wales. For the next nine days, about 300 of his followers attacked and burned
Ruthin and another half a dozen towns in east Wales, but on 24 September they were routed at Welshpool by Hugh Lord Burnell with a force raised in the English border counties, so that by the time Henry arrived at Shrewsbury two days later Owain was already a fugitive.
⁵⁸
Nevertheless, since there had been a simultaneous, presumably coordinated, uprising in Anglesey under the brothers Rhys and Gwilym ap Tudor, Henry postponed parliament and, like Edward I more than a century earlier, marched his army along the north coast of Wales as far as Caernarfon before returning via Welshpool to Shrewsbury on 15 October. At least nine rebels were executed and garrisons installed in Caernarfon, Harlech, Criccieth and Beaumaris.
⁵⁹
Henry could not be accused of failing to take the revolt seriously, but he was also careful not to overreact. A pardon was offered to any rebel who submitted to the king, and many did so, including one of Glyn Dŵr's sons.
⁶⁰
Owain himself spent the winter on the run, ‘hiding away on cliffs and in caverns with no more than seven followers’.
⁶¹
It seemed as if the rebellion was over, and Henry could be forgiven if, after a brief council meeting at Worcester on 18 October, he set off back towards London believing that it had been, quite literally, a nine days' wonder.
⁶²

Waiting for the king in London was Jean de Hangest, lord of Hugueville, ambassador of the French king, on a mission to secure the repatriation of Queen Isabella, preferably accompanied by her jewels and 200,000 francs (£33,333) of the dowry paid to Richard II following their marriage in 1396. With the truce confirmed, Isabella's fate had become the fulcrum upon which Anglo-French diplomacy turned. A meeting of the council in the spring had advised Henry that he was obliged to return Isabella and her jewels to France ‘unless it should prove possible to obtain remission (
faire mitigacion
) by means of marriage or otherwise’, but the question of the 200,000 francs was deferred.
⁶³
Realistically, Henry could not afford to repay the money. Meanwhile, Charles VI was determined that his daughter would marry neither Prince Henry nor any of the Lancastrian usurper's other
sons. Months of ambassadorial talks at Calais while Henry campaigned in Scotland yielded a promise from the English to return Isabella before 2 February 1401, but the financial impasse prompted a different approach. Following his capture at Poitiers in 1356, King John II of France had agreed to pay Edward III a ransom of £500,000, only about 60 per cent of which had been paid. If Isabella's dowry could be offset against this much larger sum, Henry could claim some justification for withholding it. The French quite reasonably argued that outstanding claims from John's ransom had been superseded by subsequent agreements, notably the truce of 1396, when it had not been mentioned. Nevertheless, a list of questions was drawn up and distributed to lawyers at Oxford and elsewhere in England for their opinions. That Henry would get the response he sought was virtually a foregone conclusion: legal justification was required primarily in order to put pressure on the French king to grant him an acquittance for the 200,000 francs, so that once Isabella was back in Paris Henry's evasion would not be used as a pretext to reopen the war.
⁶⁴

Experienced negotiator as he was, Hangest's diplomatic skills were tested to the limit in October 1400. Forbidden by Charles VI to address Henry as king of England, he was nevertheless expected not only to secure the return of Isabella and her dowry, but also to try to see the young queen in person.
⁶⁵
A difficult task was made harder when his fellow ambassador, Charles VI's secretary Pierre de Blanchet, fell ill and died in London on 19 October. Nevertheless, Hangest managed, with the help of Thomas Percy, earl of Worcester, to secure a brief interview with Isabella at Havering-atte-Bower (Essex) at which she assured him that she would not enter into any contract of marriage in England. Hangest was then summoned to Windsor to meet Henry. Their first discussion on 26 October was not a success. Although he addressed Henry as ‘sovereign of England’, the ambassador emphasized that he did so in a personal capacity; when Henry then asked him for his diplomatic credentials, he replied that he had none – none at any rate that referred to Henry as king. At this point Henry dismissed him, but after consulting his councillors he agreed to meet him again the next day, and again on 28 October, an indication of his eagerness to maintain the Anglo-French truce. Indeed he even entertained Hangest to dinner on 27 and 28 October. However, his formal response,
communicated through the earl of Worcester, would have been less pleasing to French ears. He would restore Isabella with her jewels, he declared, but not the 200,000 francs; in return he expected Charles VI to hand over a waiver for the money before his daughter was repatriated. This was his final offer, and in early November Hangest crossed back to France.

The matter of Isabella's return continued to subvert hopes of Anglo-French rapprochement for another eight months. She eventually left England on 31 July 1401, escorted from Calais to Leulinghem by the earl of Worcester, and there was handed over, together with her jewels but without her dowry, to Waleran, Count of St-Pol, who conducted her back to Paris to be reunited with her father.
⁶⁶
Five years earlier, as a six-year-old bride, she had stood amid dazzling pomp on the same spot, the personification of a hoped-for new era of Anglo-French concord. Now, ‘dressed in black and scowling with deep hatred at King Henry’,
⁶⁷
she seemed to presage the onset of a new war, for despite the almost funereal splendour accompanying her return no one doubted that the fate of the twenty-eight-year truce – sealed with a marriage so rudely ruptured, ratified by two kings neither of whom recognized the other, disowned by allies with whose interests it conflicted, and openly challenged by some of the most powerful men in Paris – hung in the balance.
⁶⁸
Meanwhile, in Scotland, the revival of English claims to overlordship and Henry's invasion in August 1400, intended as the showpiece of his first year on the throne, had infuriated the Scots, while the defection of Dunbar allowed the belligerent new earl of Douglas to achieve an unparalleled degree of domination of southern Scotland. In short, Henry had antagonized both the French and the Scots, and he would pay the price.

¹
HOC
, i.209–18. Although Henry kept with him many of the troops who had marched with him between July and September, there is nothing to suggest that they were needed.

²
For the resignation of the initial choice as speaker, John Cheyne (also Gloucester's retainer), see below. pp. 366–7.

³
PROME
, viii.87–9; A London chronicler said he was strangled ‘with two towels made in snare wise and put about his neck’:
A Chronicle of London from 1089 to 1483
, ed. N. Nicolas and E. Tyrell (London, 1827), 82.

⁴
Chronicles of London
, 54–5;
CR
, 207–8.

⁵
Usk saw ‘the quarter of his body which included the right hand’ placed on a stake near London bridge; his head was sent to Calais, the scene of his crime (
Usk
, 78;
CR
, 221).

⁶
There may well have been some debate about this before a decision was made (
SAC II
, 818–25).

⁷
SAC II
, 264–5.

⁸
For the Statute of Liveries, see below. pp. 393–6.

⁹
Salisbury was the only Counter-Appellant who had not been given a new title in September 1397, which afforded less justification for demoting him. Aumale had also accepted FitzWalter's challenge, but the king had declared that he wished to hear the evidence of the duke of Norfolk (Mowbray) before deciding what to do; in fact, Mowbray had died at Venice on 22 September, and the dispute between Aumale and FitzWalter was shelved until the parliament of 1401 when they were (at least nominally) reconciled (
PROME
, viii.110;
Great Chronicle of London
, 80–1).