Henry IV (46 page)

²²
Usk
, 94–6;
SAC II
, 301;
Foedera
, viii.139.

²³
CPR 1399–1401
, 267; E 28/8, no. 19; Walker, ‘Rumour, Sedition and Popular Protest’, 49–50.

²⁴
E 403/569, 27 March;
CPR 1399–1401
, 315; Wylie,
Henry the Fourth
, i.198;
PROME
, viii.58, and
Vita
, 163 (relaxation of the cloth subsidy in 1399);
PROME
, viii.104–5, for Bristol and Frome as centres of unrest.

²⁵
Usk
, 128–31;
CPR 1399–1401
, 516–17, 520–1.

²⁶
Usk
, 132–3.

²⁷
CPR 1399–1401
, 413, 418, 552; Wylie,
Henry the Fourth
, i.191–8;
Crime, Law and Society in the Later Middle Ages
, ed. A. Musson with E. Powell (Manchester, 2009), 92–4, 147–8.

²⁸
KB 9/186, no. 76 (and no. 78 for a similar ‘insurrection’ against Muchelney abbey in Somerset).

²⁹
Great Chronicle of London
, 84;
Usk
, 98; Bradley, ‘The Datini Factors in London’, 60–1.

³⁰
Usk
, 136–43. Repingdon was certainly Henry's confessor three years later, and may well have been acting in that capacity already; P. Strohm,
England's Empty Throne 1399–422
(London, 1998), 174–8, emphasizes the deference displayed in his letter, despite its overtly admonitory subject-matter.

³¹
For the commissions, see
CPR 1399–1401
, 556–67, and Rogers, ‘Political Crisis of 1401’, 90; for the quote,
Mum and the Sothsegger
, 67–8.

³²
Usk,
122–3. Cf. the commission to Northumberland, the constable and thus president of the Court of Chivalry, to hear cases touching the ‘estate, fame and condition of the king's person and the dignity of the crown’ on 4 February 1401; Clerk was executed eleven days later (
CPR 1399–1401
, 458). For concern about the Court of Chivalry in the parliament then meeting, see
PROME,
viii.143.

³³
Given-Wilson,
Chronicles
, 29–32.

³⁴
SAC II
, 317, 321–5;
Usk
, 116, 154–6;
CE
, 389. The comet of 1402 was Halley's comet.

³⁵
Select Cases in King's Bench VII
, ed. Sayles, 123–4. The tailor's wife is not named, but John Sparrowhawk of Cardiff, who repeated the rumours publicly, was condemned to a traitor's death in April 1402. The accusation of being a changeling, the son of a butcher from Ghent, was originally made against Gaunt himself (
SAC I
, 60).

³⁶
Foedera
, viii.255, 261–2;
CPR 1401–5
, 126: ‘gatherings in taverns and other congregations of the people’ were to be monitored.

³⁷
Select Cases in King's Bench VII
, ed. Sayles, 126–8;
CPR 1401–5
, 99–100.

³⁸
For Henry's marriage to Joan, see below, pp. 234–5.

³⁹
CE
, 390.

⁴⁰
Although the Franciscans of Llanfaes (Anglesey) had been driven out or executed for supporting Glyn Dŵr in September 1400, Henry took the view that this had more to do with their Welshness than their fraternal profession:
Foedera
, viii.189;
CPR 1399
–1401, 65, 199, 289, 418 (Llanfaes), 485;
CE
, 388–9; E 403/571, 21 November, 15 December (50 marks a year to the Oxford Franciscans, £20 a year to the London Dominicans).

⁴¹
Wylie,
Henry the Fourth
, i.269–79.

⁴²
CE
, 391–2.

⁴³
C. Given-Wilson, ‘Sir Roger Clarendon’,
ODNB
, 11.770.

⁴⁴
Foedera
, viii.262.

⁴⁵
Walker, ‘Rumour, Sedition and Popular Protest’, 46. Another friar, when asked by Henry, ‘And what would you do with me if you triumphed over me?’, replied, ‘I would make you duke of Lancaster’.

⁴⁶
CE
, 393–4.

⁴⁷
For Edmund Mortimer, see above, p. 195 Rumours that Richard was alive were last heard in 1417: P. McNiven, ‘Rebellion, Sedition and the Legend of Richard II's Survival in the Reigns of Henry IV and Henry V’,
BJRL
76 (1994), 93–117; Walker, ‘Rumour, Sedition and Popular Protest’, 41–2.

⁴⁸
Vita
, 175;
PROME
, viii.175–6 (154–220 for the full proceedings); E 403/574, 24 Oct. The wool customs and tunnage and poundage were also renewed for three years. Mone had served as treasurer in 1398.

⁴⁹
PROME
, viii.171, 188, 208, 210, 216; Henry agreed that older annuities should be paid before more recent ones, but that assignments for the household should be paid before either.

⁵⁰
CE
, 395.

⁵¹
Psalm 119: 165;
PROME
, viii.158.

⁵²
RHKA
, 236–43; N. Saul, ‘The Commons and the Abolition of Badges’,
Parliamentary History
9 (1990), 302–15.

⁵³
HOC
, ii.670–3 (‘his predilection for violence and thuggery was extreme even by medieval standards’). Philip's father, Edward, earl of Devon, was accused of intimidatory violence against Sir William Esturmy in 1392:
Select Cases before the King's Council 1243–1482
, ed. I. Leadam and J. Baldwin (Selden Society, London, 1918), 77–81.

⁵⁴
HOC
, iv.109–10; E 28/23, no. 68. Pomeroy was knighted on the 1400 Scottish campaign and given lands in Devon for his service (
CPR 1399–1401
, 390;
CPR 1401–5
, 44). He was sheriff of Devon in 1401–2, but removed after six months in office.

⁵⁵
PROME
, viii.165–70, 176.

⁵⁶
PROME
, viii.156–7, 195–6, 208–11; Davies,
Revolt
, 285. Anti-Welsh sentiment was high, with reports of men alleged to be Welsh killed around Oxford and in the border counties (SC 1/43/61).

⁵⁷
PROME
, viii.177–9. See below for benefit of clergy, pp. 348–52.

⁵⁸
PROME
, viii.162–3.

⁵⁹
PROME
, viii.174–5. For the commons' support for Dunbar, see
SAC II
, 338.

⁶⁰
Hardyng
, 360–1;
CE
, 396;
English Chronicle
, 33. For discussion, see R. Ambuhl,
Prisoners of War in the Hundred Years War: Ransom Culture in the Late Middle Ages
(Cambridge, 2013), 58–61. The fact that Hotspur sent Henry a horse (
cursorem
) as a gift at this time suggests that their relationship had not yet broken down completely (E 101/404/21, fo. 49r).

Chapter 15

FROM HUMBLETON HILL TO HATELEY FIELD (1403)

For the next few months, the disagreement with Hotspur over his prisoner remained in abeyance. Following the dissolution of parliament on 25 November, Henry spent Christmas and New Year at Windsor before setting off in mid-January 1403 to greet his new queen, Joan of Navarre, the widow of the duke of Brittany. They were married on 7 February in Winchester cathedral, and on 26 February Joan was crowned as queen of England at Westminster abbey.
¹
Barely had the celebrations finished before Henry was back at work. Among those who attended the coronation was the earl of Northumberland, who four days later received a grant from Henry, the scope of which matched the Scottish pretensions of Edward I or Edward III in its audacity. For his victory at Humbleton Hill and other ‘great labours’ in Scotland, Northumberland was given the earldom of Douglas in its entirety, including Eskdale, Liddesdale, Lauderdale, Selkirk, Ettrick Forest and Teviotdale, all of which were simultaneously annexed to the English crown. Northumberland was thus to hold everything currently held either by the earl of Douglas or by his mother.
²
Neither of them, it can safely be assumed, had been consulted; nor had the Scottish king. A week after this, on 9 March, Henry set up a commission to decide all outstanding claims relating to the prisoners taken at Humbleton Hill. Northumberland and Hotspur were not appointed to this, on the grounds that ‘they cannot act honestly on account of their own interests’. This may well have piqued them, although the earl of Westmorland was also
excluded, apparently at his own request. It indicates at any rate that the matter was far from resolved.
³

The grant had a twofold objective: to seize the initiative by reasserting long-standing English territorial claims north of the Tweed–Solway line, and to mollify Northumberland at a time when relations with the Percys were becoming strained. His family had long nurtured ambitions to extend its territorial power north of the border. Northumberland's grandfather (Henry Lord Percy, d.1352) was one of only three English magnates whose rights to their Scottish lands were recognized by Robert Bruce in 1328, a concession which Percy surrendered to Edward III six years later in return for the castle and forest of Jedburgh, 500 marks a year from the customs of Berwick-upon-Tweed, and the keeping of Berwick castle.
⁴
Jedburgh yielded little to the Percys during the fourteenth century (save to provide another cause of dispute with the Douglases), but they continued to claim their 500 marks annuity from the Berwick customs.
⁵
The transfer by Northumberland of his rights in Jedburgh and of this annuity to his brother Thomas in October 1397, just three weeks after the latter became earl of Worcester, gave another Percy a stake in the politics of the Scottish border, which as a younger son he had hitherto lacked, but the grant of the Douglas earldom in March 1403 raised Percy – and by extension English – ambitions in the southern uplands to a different level.
⁶
With Earl Archibald a prisoner in England and George Dunbar acknowledging the lordship of the English crown, Henry IV now had the chance to impose a degree of control over the border region such as Edward III had briefly achieved seventy years earlier. That the prospect of such a radical reordering of territorial interests in the region should generate rivalries is hardly surprising. Dunbar clearly felt uneasy about the potential impact of Percy expansion on his own earldom (which bordered Lauderdale); one chronicler even thought that he desired Hotspur's death ‘so that he could more easily reign in Northumbria’.
⁷
Meanwhile, the transfer in March 1402 of Roxburgh castle from Hotspur's hands to those of Westmorland (with the
strikingly generous fee of 4,000 marks a year) added fuel to a rivalry which until now had largely been contained.
⁸

There was little to be gained by waiting, and in April 1403 Hotspur crossed the border into Teviotdale and laid siege to Cocklaw Tower near Hawick.
⁹
The garrison proved hard to dislodge, however, and after a few weeks he agreed with the captain, John de Grymslaw, to suspend the assault, but that if a Scottish force did not arrive to relieve Cocklaw before 1 August it would be surrendered. News of Hotspur's compact reached London in early June, by which time the duke of Albany, with his and the realm's honour at stake, was already making plans to raise a relief force. On the English side, said Walsingham, there was scarcely a magnate, not even the king, who did not wish to take part in what promised to be a grand chivalric encounter.
¹⁰

For the moment, though, Henry had much else to occupy him, especially Owain Glyn Dŵr, whose followers were harrying English garrisons throughout Wales.
¹¹
For the past two years, Henry had relied principally on the Percys to coordinate the English military response, with Hotspur serving as lieutenant in North Wales and Worcester in South Wales, but on 1 April 1403 Prince Henry, now sixteen, took up office as royal lieutenant throughout Wales with an annual fee of £8,108, sufficient to maintain a force of 500 men-at-arms and 2,500 archers.
¹²
April and May saw him achieve some military successes: forces were sent to relieve Harlech and Aberystwyth, and Glyn Dŵr's estates at Sycharth and Glyndyfrdwy were laid waste, but by the time the prince returned to his headquarters at Shrewsbury in mid-May, Owain was already gathering a new force said to be 8,240 men strong. At the beginning of July, he marched triumphantly down the Tywi valley, precipitating the collapse of English administration in the region.
¹³
Dryslwyn, Newcastle Emlyn, and even Carmarthen fell to his men, and Dinefwr, Kidwelly, Llandovery and Brecon were besieged. On 5 July, John Skidmore wrote from Carreg Cennen saying that ‘all of Carmarthenshire, Cydweli, Carnwyllian and Iscennen yesterday swore themselves to Owain’. Three days later Richard Kingston wrote to the
king from Hereford telling him that if he did not come to Wales at once the whole country would be lost, adding ominously that ‘people talk very unfavourably’; he advised Henry to march day and night to get there, ‘for if you come yourself with haste, everything else will follow from that’.
¹⁴

It was not the king who was making his way towards Wales, however, but Hotspur. Leaving affairs in the north in his father's hands, he came south ‘with a small following, feigning peace’ during the first week of July, but having arrived at Chester (of which he was still justiciar) on Monday 9 July, he set about proclaiming that Richard II was still alive and that all those who wished to overthrow King Henry should make their way to Sandiway, a dozen miles east of Chester, where the former king would be arriving, along with the earl of Northumberland and a large army, on 17 July.
¹⁵
A ‘multitude of fools of both sexes’ – the Dieulacres chronicler's words – duly made their way to Sandiway, but once again Richard failed to appear and instead they found themselves conscripted (some, but by no means all, unwillingly) into an insurrectionary army. For Hotspur to recruit the bulk of his forces in Cheshire made good sense. The favoured status the county had enjoyed under Richard II had not been forgotten; nor had the pillaging of Henry's troops in August 1399.
¹⁶
Cheshiremen, especially Cheshire archers, also enjoyed a high military reputation. Hotspur's next move, which was to march his army, now several thousand strong, southwards along the Welsh border to Shrewsbury, also made good sense. His aim was to confront what he believed to be the only significant royalist force in the Midlands, the 3,000 or so men with Prince Henry, and to overwhelm it before the king had a chance to react.