Henry IV (45 page)

It was the twin issues of insolvency and lawlessness that dominated the proceedings of the parliament that met at Westminster on 30 September 1402. That the commons would be asked to grant taxation was a foregone conclusion, and they duly did so, though not without ‘great difficulty’, nor without concessions from the king. The king's friend Henry Bowet, who had replaced Allerthorpe as treasurer in February 1402, was in turn
removed on 24 October and replaced by Guy Mone, bishop of St David's, making 1402 a year of three treasurers; as in 1401, the commons were showing their preference for a tried and tested minister of Richard II over a Lancastrian protégé.
⁴⁸
There were predictable, though doubtless heartfelt, pleas to the king to restrain his generosity, to pay for his household provisions, to resume more alien priories so that their revenues could be used to pay his debts, and to introduce a more equitable system for prioritizing the payment of annuities according to length of service, a consequence of the over-assignment with which all exchequer creditors had to contend.
⁴⁹
The speaker, Sir Henry Retford, then once again asked the king what had become of Richard II's treasure: the response, according to one chronicler, was that it had been given to the earl of Northumberland ‘and others’; when the commons asked the king whether, ‘since much had been handed over to him but he himself had nothing’, they could question his ministers, Henry refused.
⁵⁰
In the end, however, a fifteenth and tenth was granted, and with convocation also granting one and a half clerical tenths the exchequer could anticipate receiving around £60,000 during the course of the winter.

Prioritization of the question of law and order was signalled from the outset of the session in the sermon delivered by the chancellor, the bishop of Exeter, the theme of which was ‘Great peace have they which love the law’.
⁵¹
Every man must keep the law, he declared, and he who does not must be punished; it was the ‘importunate and insatiable greed and avarice of the common people, as well as of other great men’ which had destroyed Rome. That great men were as guilty of law-breaking as common people was not a fact of which the commons needed to be reminded, for it was principally against noble and gentry gang-masters that the livery laws of 1399 and 1401 had been aimed, prohibiting lords of any degree from giving out livery badges.
⁵²
Yet to hold high-born offenders to account was never easy, so it is not surprising that when an opportunity now arose to bring one notorious offender to justice, it was seized upon. Sir Philip Courtenay,
fifth son of the earl of Devon, was a man who believed in conciliation only once the alternatives had been exhausted, and had for some time been waging a campaign of intimidation against his Devonshire neighbours, including the sheriff, Sir Thomas Pomeroy.
⁵³
Pomeroy was no innocent himself and had employed similar tactics to enforce his claims elsewhere, but on this occasion was probably more sinned against than sinning. Their quarrel centred on the Chudleigh inheritance, for Pomeroy and John Courtenay, Sir Philip's second son, had both married into the family and claimed rights in Joan Chudleigh's dower.
⁵⁴
Waiting until Pomeroy was in Wales with the king, the Courtenays took twenty or so armed accomplices and ejected his family and servants from half a dozen properties in and around Exeter, carrying off the deeds and muniments relating to them so that Pomeroy could not defend himself at law. Nicholas Pontington, a local esquire, was another man whose estates Courtenay coveted: denouncing his father as a bastard (and thus unable to inherit), Courtenay packed the jury empanelled to hear the case and secured a release of the property by going to the house of Pontington's cousin Thomas as he lay on his deathbed. Then, in June 1401, Courtenay led sixty men to the Cistercian abbey of Newenham, near Axminster, imprisoned the abbot for two weeks and abducted two of his monks whom he forced to become his huntsmen, which was contrary to Cistercian rules. His objective was to be recognized as patron of the abbey, and probably to overturn the election of the abbot, who denied his claim to patronage. In the 1402 parliament his victims teamed up, each presenting a petition which was forwarded by the commons to the lords. The problem, as the abbot explained, was that Sir Philip was ‘so powerful in his lordship and in his maintenance in the said county [Devon]’ that the common law was impotent against him. The same could doubtless have been said of many such men in many counties. The abbot might have added that much tended to be forgiven Sir Philip because of his usefulness to the government: he was a former admiral and lieutenant of Ireland, and was now actively engaged in helping to suppress rebellion in Wales. And so it was again: confronted by his victims, Courtenay admitted his crimes and was sent to the Tower, but three weeks later, on the
final day of the parliament, the king agreed at the request of the lords to release him on surety of £1,000. Men of his experience were too valuable to be locked away for long.
⁵⁵

Friars and Welshmen were easier to deal with, provided they could be caught. A further nine anti-Welsh statutes were passed (most of which simply gave statutory authority to the ordinances issued by the council of March 1401), and a statute against Glyn Dŵr's alleged accomplices, the mendicants, set a minimum age of fourteen for entry into the fraternal orders. Although there had long been suspicions that the friars enticed children to join them, what they were really being held to account for was the treason of some of their members earlier in the year. The provincials of the four mendicant orders were brought into parliament and, ‘placing their right hands on their breasts’, swore to uphold the new law.
⁵⁶
At the same time, Archbishop Arundel was given notice that if he could not find a solution to the age-old problem of benefit of clergy – the right of felonious clerics not to suffer corporal or capital punishment – before the next parliament, Henry would do it himself ‘in such a way as shall become evident’.
⁵⁷

Even the one piece of good news, the victory of the Percys at Humbleton Hill, turned sour on the king. On Friday 20 October, three weeks into the session, four Scottish and three French prisoners taken at the battle were led into the White Chamber and paraded before the lords and commons before bowing three times to Henry and ‘most humbly’ begging him to treat them according to the law of arms. Chief among them was Albany's son, Murdoch Stewart, but it was Sir Adam Forrester – the man who had assured Henry in Edinburgh in August 1400 that consideration would be given to his claim to overlordship of Scotland – who acted as their spokesman: if the king wished to avoid the spilling of more Christian blood, he declared, this was an ideal moment to conclude a truce or perhaps even a final peace. This clearly riled Henry – and perhaps not surprisingly, given the hawkishness of Scottish policy during the past year. Forrester, he declared, had ‘by many white lies and subtle promises . . . suddenly caused the king to leave the said land of Scotland’ [in August 1400], and had he known Sir Adam then as well as he did now he would certainly not have withdrawn so hastily. To this Forrester could only
apologize, and once he had done so Henry's tone softened markedly, even to the point of inviting the prisoners to dine with him in the Painted Chamber.
⁵⁸

Too sensitive to be recorded officially was the absence of the earl of Douglas. Bridling at Henry's injunction against ransoming his prisoners, Hotspur had remained in the north and was refusing to hand over his prize captive. Yet he was certainly not absent from the thoughts of those present, or at least not those of Dunbar, who submitted a petition asking Henry whether, ‘if you, or other lords of the realm on your behalf, should conquer all or part of the realm of Scotland, that the said supplicant [Dunbar] can have and enjoy all his castles, lordships and lands which are in the aforesaid realm of Scotland, should you or any other person whatsoever conquer the said castles, lordships and lands, or any of them’.

Henry was quick to reassure him, emphasizing that if he or anyone under his command conquered any of Dunbar's castles or lordships, they would be returned to him ‘to be held of our said lord the king as of his crown’.
⁵⁹
If one implication of this carefully worded petition was that the English were now planning the annexation of southern Scotland, another was that Dunbar wished to ensure that others – and he can only have meant the Percys – would not be given licence to hold on to whatever they might conquer. As in 1399, the king was proclaiming his determination to keep an eye on Percy ambitions.

Despite Hotspur's absence, he and Henry did apparently meet soon after parliament ended, and although Henry assured the Percys that their rights in their prisoners would be respected, the encounter was a stormy one. According to Hardyng, Hotspur accused the king of dishonouring himself by not ransoming Edmund Mortimer, while Henry blamed Hotspur for not seizing Glyn Dŵr when he had had the chance and refusing to hand over Douglas. A more theatrical version of the meeting had Henry calling Hotspur a traitor and threatening him with a dagger, to which Hotspur replied ‘Not here, but on the battlefield’. It is a story redolent with hindsight, but nevertheless indicative of the breakdown in their relationship. Their next meeting would be at the battle of Shrewsbury.
⁶⁰

¹
M. Nordberg,
Les Ducs et la Royauté
(Uppsala, 1964), 171;
Saint-Denys
, iii.9;
POPC
, i.128–9; G. Pepin, ‘The French Offensives of 1404–1407 against Anglo-Gascon Aquitaine’, in
Soldiers, Weapons and Armies in the Fifteenth Century
, ed. A. Curry and A. Bell (Woodbridge, 2011), 1–40, at pp. 2–3.

²
C. Ford, ‘Piracy or Policy: The Crisis in the Channel, 1400–1403’,
TRHS
29 (1979), 63–78;
Saint-Denys
, iii.153. By early July 1402 the French were thought to be about to invade England: E 403/573, 3 and 4 July.

³
T. Lloyd,
England and the German Hanse 1157–1611
(Cambridge, 2002), 111–16.

⁴
H. Bradley, ‘The Datini Factors in London’, in
Trade, Devotion and Governance: Papers in Later Medieval History
, ed. D. Clayton, R. Davies and P. McNiven (Stroud, 1994), 55–79, at p. 63.

⁵
Saint-Denys
, iii.30–4.

⁶
PROME
, viii.102–3.

⁷
C. Given-Wilson, ‘The Quarrels of Old Women: Henry IV, Louis of Orléans, and Anglo-French Chivalric Challenges in the Early Fifteenth Century’, in
The Reign of Henry IV: Rebellion and Survival, 1403–1413
(York, 2008), 28–47.

⁸
Monstrelet
, i.43–66; Given-Wilson, ‘Quarrels of Old Women’, 42–5.

⁹
These letters were dated 26 March and 14 October 1403 (from Louis) and 30 May 1403 (from Henry); Louis's final letter is in BL Add. Ms 30,663, fos. 281–6.

¹⁰
Saint-Denys
, iii.61; Lehoux,
Jean de France
, ii.523, n. 8: ‘He littere verbose et ventose, absque fructu et discretione’.

¹¹
Scotichronicon
, viii.28–9;
RHKA
, 181–2; S. Walker, ‘Rumour, Sedition and Popular Protest in the Reign of Henry IV’,
Past and Present
166 (2000), 31–65; P. Morgan, ‘Henry IV and the Shadow of Richard II’, in
Crown, Government and People in the Fifteenth Century
, ed. R. Archer (Stroud, 1995), 1–32, at pp. 8–10;
Select Cases in the Court of King's Bench VII
, ed. G. Sayles (Selden Society, London, 1971), 126–7, 212–15. Thomas Ward was maintained for nearly two decades at the Scottish court.

¹²
CR
, 52, 244–5; for Creton, see above, p. 133.

¹³
Below for Ireland and Guyenne; Wales should have yielded £12,000–£14,000 a year to the crown, but by 1403 produced practically nothing, whereas the network of garrisons established there, if properly maintained, would have cost at least £13,000 a year: Davies,
Revolt
, 252, 258–9;
POPC
, i.173–4, ii.64–7.

¹⁴
Bean, ‘Henry IV and the Percies’, 222–4;
PROME
, viii.152.

¹⁵
POPC
, i.152; ii.57, 62;
RHL
, i.73, 85.

¹⁶
Steel,
Receipt
, 86–7 (borrowing);
POPC
, i.155–64;
ANLP
, 331;
Usk
, 144–5. Kirby,
Henry IV
, 128, implies that the budgetary calculations in
POPC
, i.154 were presented at this council, but the figures given for Ireland and Guyenne appear to predate the appointments of Thomas of Lancaster in May and Rutland in July.

¹⁷
RHKA
, 94, 116, 271, 278;
POPC
, i.181–2;
CPR 1399–1401
, 445, 475, 489–90, 504, 513, 515, 536. Economies were achieved mainly by establishing tighter exchequer supervision of household accounting procedures, by ring-fencing sources from which the household could draw cash, and by cutting back on courtly extravagance. There may also have been a reduction in the number of household staff, although this still stood at 528 in 1402. Yet the fall in household expenditure was partly offset by the fact that Prince Henry now had his own household which needed to be funded: in 1402–3 the prince's household treasurer, Simon Bache, received £3,025 and spent £2,963 (E 101/404/23).

¹⁸
SAC II
, 314;
PROME
, viii.208, 216; Steel,
Receipt
, 85–7;
RHKA
, 112;
An English Chronicle 1377–1461
, ed. W. Marx (Woodbridge, 2003), 29.

¹⁹
Above, p. 162.

²⁰
Usk
, 88–91.

²¹
POPC
, i.107–13, 118–19; E 404/15, no. 143;
CPR 1399–1401
, 183;
Foedera
, viii.124. The general pardon excluded the county of Chester, and certain individuals to be named by the king. For examples of malicious accusations of involvement, see
Foedera
, viii.168–9, 176, and
CCR 1399–1402
, 137–8.