Henry IV (44 page)

The Scots, too, sought ways to undermine Henry, and during the winter of 1401–2 began to disseminate a rumour that Richard II, having escaped from Pontefract, had been recognized while working as a kitchen-boy for Donald, Lord of the Isles, by a woman who had met him in Ireland. With
the earl of Douglas now in the ascendant, this was too good an opportunity to miss, and the impostor – whose real name was Thomas Ward of Trumpington, and who was sometimes called the Mammet (puppet) – soon found himself brought before King Robert. Also at the Scottish court at this time was William Serle, an esquire of Richard's chamber who had fled north in 1399, forged the royal signet, and begun sending letters into England proclaiming the imminent return of the former king.
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By April 1402 the rumour had reached the ears of Charles VI of France, who despatched Jean Creton (Richard's companion in North Wales in August 1399) to discover the truth of it, but although Creton soon satisfied himself that the Mammet was a fraud, this did little to dampen what was becoming an improbably successful propaganda war.
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‘Richard’ was sighted at Berwick, in Wales and even at Westminster, belief in his continued existence nourished by a seditious undercurrent of prophecy and hearsay which, by the summer of 1402, was no longer the preserve merely of the dispossessed and the marginalized.

The seedbed in which these stories took root was growing disillusion with Henry's rule during the first three years of his reign, not simply as a reaction to his inability to cope with England's enemies, but also to government insolvency and the prevalence of disorder. Naturally, these problems were linked. It was resistance to English rule in Wales, Ireland and Guyenne which, from 1401 onwards, obliged the king to make much more generous financial provision for their governance, while simultaneously reducing almost to vanishing point the crown's income from its dominions; the Pirate War reduced customs revenues by disrupting trade, but necessitated much increased expenditure on the defence of the sea;
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the fees due to the Percys for keeping the Scottish marches during the first three years of the reign amounted to some £40,000, but Scottish devastation and the need to provide manpower for border defence meant that the three northern counties had to be exempted from paying taxes.
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Nor was there any relief from the demands
of annuitants, for domestic unrest militated against any reduction in the size of the royal retinue. Signs of strain soon appeared. Failed assignments totalled some £34,000 between April 1401 and September 1402; hectoring letters to the council bemoaned the inability of the king's lieutenants and officials to carry out the tasks entrusted to them owing to lack of funds.
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Between May and July 1402, more than £16,000 was borrowed by the exchequer, much of it loaned by Londoners, to whom royal plate and crown jewels were handed over as security. Yet when Henry wrote to the treasurer, Laurence Allerthorpe, in July 1401 enclosing a list of some 300 lords, knights and esquires to be summoned to a great council, Allerthorpe replied that he did not have enough money to pay the messengers charged with bearing the summonses.
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The one hopeful development was the fall in expenditure on the royal household from the altogether excessive £53,000 which it had cost during the first year of the reign, but even this was to some extent deceptive, for it was achieved in part by increased abuse of purveyance.
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‘Around this time,’ wrote Walsingham, ‘grumbling broke out among the people against the king, mainly because he received provisions but paid nothing for them’; the 1402 parliament agreed, claiming that there was ‘great clamour throughout the realm’ at the household's failure to pay its debts.
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Such concern was sharpened by fear of a repetition of the mob violence which had accompanied the 1381 revolt. The revolution itself saw widespread looting, barely brought under control before the lynching of the rebel earls at Cirencester, Pleshey and Bristol in January 1400.
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Although necessary in the circumstances, declared Adam Usk, this ‘fury of the common people (
plebeiorum
)’ was ‘contrary to the natural order’ and ‘might at some future time embolden them to rise up against the lords’.
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The
council which met in early February thought likewise: while rewarding the men of Cirencester for their loyalty, it forbade people to take the law into their own hands and threatened exemplary punishment (even the penalties for treason) for those who disobeyed. Sheriffs and justices of the peace were ordered to suppress unlawful gatherings, and in order to discourage malicious accusations of involvement in the rising a general pardon was proclaimed for crimes committed before 2 February.
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Yet further violence soon followed. In April 1400 an outbreak of fighting between gangs of London apprentice-boys caused numerous deaths, prompting the king's intervention with the city authorities.
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Frome, the nodal point for the Somerset cloth industry, had been restless since the summer of 1399, when the townspeople took advantage of the confusion to imprison the king's ministers and destroy the town's guildhall. The chief justice of the King's Bench, Walter Clopton, was sent to quell the riots, but not until November 1400 did the citizens sue for pardon.
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Here and at Bristol, which also saw disturbances, anger focused especially on the cloth tax the king was believed to have rescinded.
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It was while attempting to collect this that the unfortunate Thomas Newton was hacked to death in the marketplace at Norton St Philip (Somerset) ‘with more than a hundred mortal wounds’, prompting the king to visit the town in person, although on this occasion he opted for leniency.
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South Wales also saw attacks on royal officials, possibly linked to the new outbreak of revolt in the north; at Usk, in April 1401, the burgesses broke into the town gaol to release a prisoner, while a month later at Abergavenny the sheriff of Hereford, Sir William Lucy, was lynched just as he was about to hang three robbers, and the lord, Sir William Beauchamp, briefly besieged in his castle.
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Around London and in the West Midlands, bands of highwaymen were terrorizing travellers and threatening royal officials.
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A gang led by one John Garbour broke into the precinct of
Ramsey abbey and killed one of the monks and several of the abbot's servants.
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An epidemic of plague and widespread harvest failure in the autumn of 1400 exacerbated the sense of insecurity, while 1402 saw a catastrophic fall in wool production owing to flooding and disease.
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Early in May 1401 the collapse of order persuaded Philip Repingdon – abbot of Leicester, close friend and future confessor of the king – to send Henry a stark admonition about his failure to uphold the law. The great hopes he had raised in 1399, wrote Repingdon, were quite dashed: law and justice were exiles from the kingdom, while murder, robbery, persecution of the poor and outrages of all kinds abounded, so that the will of the tyrant had replaced the rule of law. As a punishment, God had permitted the common people to usurp the natural authority of their superiors and become ‘senseless and uncontrollable like wild beasts’, and if the king failed to curb this insubordination, a more terrible and comprehensive divine vengeance would shortly follow, similar to that which had befallen Richard II. Quoting copiously from the bible, Repingdon apologized for his bluntness but reminded the king that it was better to be told the truth by a loyal friend than ‘betrayed with flattering kisses like the traitor Judas’, which (he implied) was what other courtiers did. It was a letter that a king might expect to receive from his confessor – his ‘conscience’ – but that does not make the sentiments Repingdon expressed less authentic.
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The appointment two weeks later of powerful new commissions of the peace suggests that Henry took the advice to heart, but silencing the ‘lies, so light of foot, they leap to the skies’, was harder.
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The brutal execution of William Clerk, a scribe from Cheshire who was sentenced in the Court of Chivalry to have his tongue cut out for speaking ill of the king, his hand severed for committing his thoughts to parchment, and his head cut off because he was unable to prove his allegations, was one way to tackle the problem, but aroused indignation at the extension of the court's jurisdiction.
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A flurry of rumours, prophecies and portents around this time reflected the pervasive sense of foreboding.
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The appearance of the devil at Danbury (Essex), of an evil spirit and an apocalyptic thunderstorm at Hertford, and of the
cometam terribilem
which evoked so much speculation as it blazed across the European sky during the spring of 1402 all indicated that the times were out of joint.
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Even the weather was seen as evidence of God's displeasure with Henry: since he had come to the throne, according to the wife of a tailor from Baldock (Hertfordshire), there had been barely seven days of seasonable weather, the moral of which was that the earl of March was the rightful king of England, Owain the rightful prince of Wales (and Cornwall), and Henry himself a changeling. The pope, she declared, supported the claims of both March and Glyn Dŵr.
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The power of supernatural ‘signs’ to shape actions should not be underestimated: Henry's own confidence in the miraculous qualities of Becket's oil did nothing to discourage belief in the validity of prognostication.

By the spring of 1402, popular and political discontent had found a common focus in the belief that Richard II was still alive in Scotland and awaiting the opportunity to return and claim his rightful inheritance. On 9 May, Henry told the authorities in the northern counties to try to stop the story filtering southwards, but just two days later commissions were issued to all the English sheriffs ordering the suppression of alehouse gossip to the effect that Henry had not kept the promises he made at his coronation.
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Yet far from subsiding, the rumours now reached a crescendo: Richard, it was believed, would time his reappearance in England for the feast of the Nativity of St John the Baptist (24 June), whereupon Henry would flee across the Channel and marry the duchess of Brittany, a voyage for which he was already believed to be preparing.
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As with so many rumours there was a kernel of truth to this, for Henry was indeed planning to marry Joan, dowager duchess of Brittany, but needless to say Richard failed to make his appearance at midsummer.
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The grid along which these stories travelled comprised mainly Franciscan and Dominican friars, whose itinerant lifestyle and confessional rapport with both rich and poor provided them with the opportunities to disseminate them. Why they wished to do so is less clear, although one Franciscan from Aylesbury (Buckinghamshire), when interrogated by Henry, maintained that his order had enjoyed the special favour of King Richard.
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In fact, during the first two years of his reign Henry had shown considerable goodwill to the friars, taking them under his protection, prohibiting slander against them, and granting alms to a number of friaries.
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Nevertheless, by the spring of 1402 friars from many parts of England – Winchester, Cambridge, Norfolk, Nottingham, Stamford, Leicester, Northampton – were alleged not only to be claiming that Richard was alive but raising money to be sent to Glyn Dŵr and plotting to kill the king.
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At least eleven of them, mainly Franciscans from Leicester, were arrested at the beginning of June, among them their warden, Roger Frisby, whom the king interviewed before his trial. Frisby, a master of theology and casuistry, stated that Richard's return was foretold in the Bridlington Prophecy.
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‘Do you say that Richard is alive?’ asked the king. ‘I do not say that he is alive,’ replied Frisby, ‘but I say that if he is, he is the rightful king of England.’ When Henry pointed out that Richard had abdicated, Frisby responded that he had not been at liberty at the time and thus his abdication was not lawful, which made Henry a usurper. ‘I did not usurp the crown, I was properly elected,’ rejoined Henry. ‘That election means nothing if the rightful incumbent is alive,’ retorted Frisby, ‘and if he is dead, then you killed him, and if you killed him you lose any title or right you have to the kingdom.’ ‘That is a lie. Be gone!’ concluded Henry. A few days later, Frisby and his fellows were drawn from the Tower to Tyburn and there hanged and beheaded, along with various others caught up in the web of speculation, including Walter of Baldock, former prior of the Augustinian house at Launde (Leicestershire), and Sir Roger Clarendon, a renegade bastard of the Black Prince (and thus half-brother to Richard II), along with two of his servants.
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In total, the Ricardian fever of April/May 1402
claimed around twenty victims before Henry had it proclaimed on 18 June that the ringleaders had been dealt with and that he did not intend to proceed against those who had heard or repeated their stories without seditious intent.
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The bushfire of rumours clearly unnerved the king. The burgeoning belief in the possibility of Richard's restoration was an indication of the failure of the Lancastrian regime to secure the popular legitimacy it craved. The friars' exhortations were not accompanied by any political programme. What they offered was simply an alternative version of legitimate government, one which evidently still commanded loyalist sympathies.
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The original jury before which Frisby and his fellows appeared, composed of citizens of London and Holborn, refused to serve, so new jurors had to be brought in from Islington and Highgate, and even they later apologized in tears to the Franciscans, insisting that had they not returned guilty verdicts they would have lost their own lives.
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It was not just armed insurrection that Henry had to fear: passive resistance, rumour and gossip could also make his kingdom ungovernable. Popular unrest, stirred up by the revolution of 1399, the defiance of local interest groups, the bad harvests and the high price of grain, was increasingly sidling up to high politics to present a threat the government could not ignore. The amnesty proclaimed by Henry on 18 June sounded more edgy than authoritative. Nor did it quell the rumours, which before long found expression in the mouths of men far more influential than friars, men such as Edmund Mortimer and Hotspur, and echoes of which would continue to reverberate not just until the end of Henry's reign but into his son's as well.
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