Henry IV (42 page)

Especially disturbing for the king was the commonality of interests now building up between Glyn Dŵr, the Percys, and followers of the Mortimers. Edmund was not just a major landholder in Wales and the Marches, he was also the uncle of that other Edmund Mortimer, earl of March, now aged ten, whom some believed to have a better title to the throne than Henry, and his renunciation of allegiance to Henry in December 1402 was accompanied by a public exhortation to his supporters (‘unless King Richard is alive’) to place his nephew on the throne. The elder Edmund's sister Elizabeth was married to Hotspur, who was strongly in favour of ransoming him.
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Hotspur had other grievances too: frequently obliged to fund his operations from his own resources, he was becoming alienated from the king's policy in Wales. His unease at the ordinances of March 1401, his parleying with the captors of Conway and the negotiations with Glyn Dŵr in late 1401 all bespeak a belief in conciliation and negotiation
rather than the hard-line approach adopted by the king.
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It must have been with misgivings, therefore, that Hotspur went north in the autumn of 1402 to join his father in resisting a Scottish invasion of Northumberland, leaving the king to take an army once again into Wales. First planned in late June, Henry's campaign was delayed until the beginning of September, by which time the weather had turned. Rain battered the royal army for more than a fortnight, with some English soldiers perishing from the cold.
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A particularly violent storm on the night of 7 September flattened the king's tent and might have killed Henry himself had he not gone to bed in his armour. Some in England believed that the appalling weather had been conjured up by Owain's magicians, others that it was by the evil arts of the Franciscan friars, who, like the Cistercians, were suspected of complicity with the Welsh. What is clear is that Henry's third campaign to Wales within twenty-four months was widely seen as a personal humiliation for the king.
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The Welsh war was a battle against geography, the elements, guerrilla tactics and a hostile native population, and it took Henry a while to learn its lessons. Armies of invasion could wreak damage, seize much-needed resources and exact reprisals, but what was needed against an enemy who simply retreated to the muscular outcrops of the north-west and waited until the English went home was a network of permanent garrisons. From late 1401, probably under the influence of Hotspur and Thomas Percy (the latter having now added the lieutenancy of South Wales to his array of responsibilities), these had begun to be established, but they suffered from chronic shortage of cash and its backwash: indiscipline and desertion.
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Here, too, a change of policy was needed. The king had hoped in 1401–2 that as much as possible of the cost of the war could be borne by the revenues of the principality of Wales – in effect by the prince, its lord, from his own resources – but this was quite impractical, for as the rebellion spread the revenues of the principality dwindled, until by 1403–4 they had virtually vanished.
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This caused tension between the king and his son as
well as between the king and Hotspur. In May 1402, Prince Henry wrote to the council saying that if money to pay his soldiers were not found soon he would be obliged to retreat to England, to his eternal dishonour.
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As the inefficacy of the English response became apparent, so support for Glyn Dŵr continued to grow.

The simultaneous escalation of hostilities on the northern border was to some extent a riposte to Henry's foray into Scotland in August 1400, and to some extent driven by the Percy–Douglas rivalry. The Douglas and Percy families had much in common. Both had augmented their lands and influence spectacularly during the fourteenth century, mainly through the opportunities afforded by a century of near-continuous cross-border warfare, but since the 1370s the advantage had lain with the Scots, making it impossible for the Percys to realize their long-nurtured territorial ambitions north of the border.
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By the time Earl Archibald the Grim died around Christmas 1400, he had achieved a position of dominance in Scotland south of the Forth, his hold over the west march now securely established and his following in East Lothian expanding almost daily following George Dunbar's defection.
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No respite followed his demise. His son and heir, Archibald the fourth earl, already the possessor of a fearsome reputation, soon busied himself with the organization of a programme of cross-border raids. Not all of these met with success, for in Hotspur and Dunbar he was pitted against two of the finest soldiers of their age, although he did manage to chase them back to England when they advanced into Lothian in February 1401.
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Yet if his military domination of the south was not disputed within Scotland, Douglas had not yet secured control of diplomatic policy towards England, which, guided by the dukes of Albany and Rothesay, appeared during the spring and summer of 1401 to be moving in the direction of a settlement with Henry IV.
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Partly by luck and partly by design, events now conspired to remove this restraining hand on Douglas's rough inclinations. In early October 1401,
Rothesay, the heir to the throne and lieutenant of the realm, was arrested near St Andrews (Fife) on the orders of Albany, who was becoming alarmed at his nephew's growing challenge to his authority. Albany and Douglas now struck a deal: in return for supporting Albany's coup, Douglas was to be given a virtually free hand, not only to dismember George Dunbar's earldom in favour of himself and his supporters but also to pursue his own policy towards England. Rothesay disappeared into Falkland castle, where he was almost certainly murdered,
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while Douglas hurried south to Kirk Yetholm in the borders, where the latest round of Anglo-Scottish peace talks opened on 17 October. His aim was to ensure that they did not interfere with his plans, especially now that his designs on Dunbar's earldom had received official sanction, for any lasting agreement with the English would probably have entailed the defector's return to the Scottish fold.

Douglas's fears were not misplaced: the reinstatement of Dunbar was indeed one of the conditions advanced by the English at Kirk Yetholm. The record of this meeting is instructive.
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On the one hand, Henry was still keen to secure formal recognition of his overlordship of Scotland (a matter on which he claimed to have received assurances in August 1400) and once again he had assembled a mass of evidence going back to the mythical Brutus, eponymous first king of Britain, to justify his claim. In return, his envoys offered the Scottish king (who was not present) an annuity or land worth up to £1,000 a year in England.
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On the other hand, Henry was also eager to secure a truce for as long as possible – even, he suggested (on the model of the Anglo-French truce of 1396), for up to thirty years, to be accompanied by one or more marriages between the royal houses of each kingdom. However, this was to be accompanied by guarantees from the Scots that Berwick, Roxburgh and Jedburgh would remain unmolested, that the Scots would not ally with the French, and that George Dunbar would be welcomed back to East Lothian.
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If this proved unacceptable, a truce for one year might be agreed, with the same conditions; otherwise the commissioners should simply agree a two-month
extension to the truce.
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Douglas and the Scottish commissioners ‘utterly refused’ every one of these proposals – a rebuff accompanied, according to the English account, by ‘some very undiplomatic language’. When the English asked whether the Scots would be prepared to submit their differences to arbitration, the bishop of Glasgow asked whether Henry would be equally willing to submit his claim to the kingdom of England to arbitration; whereupon, after three days, the meeting broke up in acrimony. Sweeping up his retainers, Douglas hurried to Dunbar castle to put his stamp on his new lordship by issuing a number of land grants before crossing the Tweed ‘with banner displayed’ – in effect a declaration of war – ravaging Northumberland and burning Bamburgh.
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That each side should blame the other for the renewal of hostilities was to be expected,
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but on the English side a gap was also opening up between the aims of the king and those of the Percys and Dunbar. Henry, preoccupied with disorder in England and Wales, needed a respite from war in the north. Dunbar, on the other hand, needed to maintain the pressure on the Scots if he was going to regain East Lothian, as did Northumberland and Hotspur in pursuit of their own claims north of the border.
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Nor did Douglas need any encouragement, and he now launched a multi-pronged offensive against the Lancastrian regime, apparently with Albany's support. Beginning with the invention of a pseudo-Richard II, this included Franco-Scottish naval cooperation and attempts to assist Welsh and Irish enemies of the English crown, but the main thrust was delivered in a series of raids into the northern English counties.
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June 1402 witnessed at least three Scottish forays into Cumberland and Northumberland, one of which led to the killing of Sir Patrick Hepburn at Nesbit Muir (Roxburghshire) by Dunbar.
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Undeterred, Douglas and Murdoch Stewart (son and heir of the
duke of Albany) assembled some 10,000 men, including thirty French knights and esquires, and in early September crossed the Tweed and set out to harry Northumberland.

Having raided up to the gates of Newcastle without encountering resistance, the Scots turned homewards, but when they reached Wooler, ten miles south of the Tweed, on 14 September, they found their path blocked by an English force under the command of Dunbar and the Percys. Taking up a defensive position on Humbleton Hill overlooking Glendale, the Scots prepared for battle. Hotspur wanted to charge the Scottish formation, but Dunbar persuaded him to hold back until the English archers had had a chance to prove their worth.
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It was sound advice. A hailstorm of arrows pinned the Scots down ‘like fallow deer or penned up mules’ until they ‘bristled like hedgehogs’ with English shafts. The bravery of Sir John Swinton, who led a counter-attack, met only with death. Douglas himself sustained five wounds, including the loss of an eye. In little more than an hour the battle was over and the Scots were in flight, pursued by the jubilant English as far as the Tweed, where many drowned trying to ford the river.
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‘May God be blessed in all things’, exulted Walsingham, ‘who gave us the victory, not through the actions of the nobles and lords, but of the unremarkable poor and serfs, for there was not a single lord, knight or esquire who took any action against the enemy until they had been crushed by the archers.’ With the men-at-arms barely engaged, English losses were minimal.
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Along with Bannockburn (1314), Halidon Hill (1333) and Neville's Cross (1346), Humbleton Hill marked a watershed in Anglo-Scottish warfare. A harvest of around 1,000 prisoners included Douglas, Murdoch Stewart, the earls of Angus, Moray and Orkney, a further eighty or so Scottish knights – ‘the flower of the fighting men of the whole realm of Scotland’ – and several French knights and esquires.
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Douglas would remain a prisoner for seven years, Murdoch for thirteen. The removal at a stroke of so many great men left a political vacuum in Scotland, especially in the south, where not just Douglas but many of the other prisoners held the majority
of their lands. In the longer term, Humbleton made the Scots more wary of raiding into England, but for the moment their thoughts turned mainly to defence, since for the English the prospect now opened up not just of an end to thirty years of attrition but of an undefended Scottish March ripe for exploitation or even annexation.
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The triumphant return of George Dunbar probably seemed to many a foregone conclusion, while the Percys greedily eyed the Douglas patrimony. For King Henry, Humbleton was a welcome relief, although in one sense its timing – coinciding with his own ignominious withdrawal from Wales – left much to be desired. Yet he was determined to wring whatever benefit he could from the victory, and it was to this end that on 20 September, as soon as he was informed of what had happened, he wrote to Hotspur, Northumberland, Dunbar and the other English captains prohibiting the ransoming of their prisoners without his permission.
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Instead, they were to be brought to Westminster, where a parliament had been summoned to meet in a week's time.

¹
J. Bean, ‘Henry Percy, first Earl of Northumberland’,
ODNB
, 43.694–70; A. Brown, ‘Thomas Percy, Earl of Worcester’,
ODNB
, 43.737–9; S. Walker, ‘Sir Henry Percy (Hotspur)’,
ODNB
, 43.702–4.

²
Hotspur and Worcester had been Gaunt's fee'd retainers, while Northumberland and Gaunt, despite a famous quarrel in 1381, subsequently cooperated without obvious difficulty (K. Towson, ‘ “Hearts Warped by Passion”: The Percy-Gaunt Dispute of 1381’,
Fourteenth Century England III
, ed. M. Ormrod (2004), 143–52). Northumberland and Worcester, born in 1341 and 1343, respectively, were the sons of Mary, daughter of Earl Henry of Lancaster (d.1345); Northumberland spent much of his youth in the household of the first duke of Lancaster, Henry of Grosmont (d.1361).

³
No one attended more council meetings or witnessed more charters during the first three years of the reign than Northumberland: Brown, ‘The Commons and the Council’, 30; D. Biggs, ‘Royal Charter Witness Lists for the Reign of Henry IV, 1399–1413’,
EHR
119 (2004), 407–23, at p. 418; Worcester also attended the council regularly when not absent from Westminster.

⁴
Rogers, ‘Political Crisis of 1401’, 91–3, argues that the Percys manipulated the 1401 parliament to augment their powers.