Henry IV (59 page)

Unfortunately the stop on annuities did little to improve the situation in the household either, despite the fact that expenditure in the great wardrobe dropped from an annual average of £11,100 between 1399 and 1403 to just £2,800 between 1403 and 1406 – the main reason why the overall cost of the household departments fell from £41,700 during the first four years of the reign to £32,300 over the next three years.
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Thus the commons did (through the war-treasurers) succeed in one of their main objectives, which was to squeeze the household's sources of supply, but any expectation that annual expenditure in the wardrobe could be kept to £12,100 (the upper limit, or
certum
, proposed in January 1404) was hopelessly unrealistic. In fact the wardrobe spent almost exactly double this during the following year, so that by January 1405, when wardrobe keeper Thomas More demitted office after four years, he left debts totalling some £12,000, of which £7,000 had been incurred during the previous fifteen months.
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Most of these were purveying debts, the inevitable safety valve for a household starved of ready cash, but a deeply unpopular expedient cited by Archbishop Scrope and others as a prime cause of disaffection with Henry's kingship.
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Thus while 1404 proved to be a year of relief for lay taxpayers, the impact on annuitants and household creditors of the measures adopted in
the January parliament was severe. In addition, Henry found it impossible to fund any sustained military activity. During the five months that Prince Henry spent on the Welsh border between 1 July and 21 November 1404, just £934 was passed to him; the king failed for the first time since 1400 to campaign in Wales in person, and Glyn Dŵr duly enjoyed his most successful year thus far.
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Naval operations, thanks to the conditions attached to the commons' grant, were better supported, but Guyenne and Ireland were more or less left to fend for themselves.
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A letter from the council to the king in early June 1404 revealed the scale of its task. Henry had asked his councillors to send money urgently to the prince, who was on his way to Wales. Their response was to itemize with rueful clarity the crown's obligations.
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First, £900 of loans raised during the January parliament, mainly to pay Welsh garrisons, had not yet been repaid. Secondly, £2,000 of the subsidy granted by parliament had been earmarked to repay a loan from the city of London. Thirdly, members of the council had advanced a total of £533 which would have to be repaid.
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Fourthly, the king had ordered the war-treasurers to send £333 to Prince Thomas to clear his debts, £866 to three London merchants to repay loans, and £200 to the great wardrobe to cover the cost of St George's Day liveries. With their fifth point, the scale of the councillors' problem became grimly apparent. For the promised naval force of 600 men-at-arms, 1,200 archers and forty-two ships, the two admirals were owed £9,546, some of which had been paid, and more, ‘God willing’, would be paid this week, thanks to the archbishop of Canterbury, the chancellor (Henry Beaufort), Hugh Waterton, John Norbury, Thomas Knolles and ‘the good people of London’, all of whom had advanced unspecified sums, but a further
£2,348 would have to be borrowed within the next six weeks. Sixthly, £666 of the subsidy in Norfolk was needed for the expenses of the royal household. Seventhly, Prince John had been promised £4,000 for the keeping of the East March, a part of which had been assigned to him from the subsidy in Yorkshire and Lancashire, but for the rest ‘he can have no payment’. Eighthly, £533 of the £1,000 promised to the earl of Somerset as captain of Calais was still due to him; a further £200 was needed for the repair of ships, and £100 for the expenses of the king's envoys at Calais. In summary, the amount needed simply to cover the most pressing of the crown's commitments was around £20,000, and the councillors had no idea where they might borrow this. Worse still, they had heard reports from several counties that the subsidy granted in January was going to raise less than had been hoped, while the wool and cloth customs were so overburdened with assignments that ‘little of them remains’. And thus, they concluded, they had no idea what to do next but to await the ‘most excellent and wise advice’ of their sovereign lord.

Yet if the council's letter demonstrated the disparity between the crown's revenue and its commitments, embedded in it were pointers to the way forward, notably a detailed analysis of obligations and priorities, and a policy of trying to match specific sources to specific requirements. The latter was not new – the wool customs of Hull and Boston, for example, had been ring-fenced for the payment of the Percys as March wardens in 1401–3, and up to a half of the wool subsidy had been regularly reserved for Calais since 1390 – but its application would become more systematic and provide a greater level of security for vital areas of expenditure during the second half of the reign.
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For the moment, however, it was clear that a breakdown of government credit had occurred, and although Henry's loyal backers in London had not forsaken him,
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in the short term the exchequer was largely reliant on a diminishing circle of the faithful such as Thomas Arundel, Hugh Waterton, John Norbury, Henry Bowet, John
Lovell, the earl of Westmorland, the chancellor (Henry Beaufort) and treasurer (William Lord Roos), many of them privy councillors.
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There was still the option to put pressure on the Church to grant more, especially tempting in 1404 since clerical tenths would come directly to the exchequer rather than to the war-treasurers, but risky in view of the already high incidence of clerical discontent. At the council held at Worcester in September 1403 Henry had rebuked the clerics for ‘enjoying peace at home’ while he criss-crossed the country putting down rebellions, whereupon a pack of royalist knights and esquires suggested that all the bishops present be stripped of their treasure and horses and sent home on foot. Arundel's indignation persuaded the king to call them off on that occasion, but only on condition that the archbishop summon convocation and try to convince his suffragans of the king's necessity. The result, however, was no more than a half tenth along with a few hundred pounds in loans, so in the summer of 1404 the archbishops were once more induced to summon their convocations, and this time each granted a whole tenth, although both imposed conditions.
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Yet clerical tenths would not solve the king's problems: their combined yield was around £16,000, less than half that of one lay fifteenth and tenth, and by August it had become clear that the hand-to-mouth measures of the past six months could be sustained no longer. On 25 August, therefore, at a great council at Lichfield, writs were issued for parliament to meet on 6 October.

The second parliament of 1404 – nicknamed ‘Unlearned’ (
Illiteratum
) because the writs of summons forbade the return of lawyers as MPs – met not at Westminster but at Coventry. The reason why lawyers were excluded was because it was thought that they spent too much of their time on their clients' business and not enough on that of the realm. There were suspicions that Henry had gone further than this and told the sheriffs whom they should return as knights of the shire; true or not, such gossip was
uncomfortable for a king who had levelled precisely the same charge against his predecessor.
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The main topic, inescapably, was finance, for it was clear that different measures were required from those adopted in January. Two proposals were discussed, one targeting the wealth of the Church, the other that of lay landholders. The first came from the parliamentary knights and certain ‘leading men’ of the realm, described by Walsingham as ‘less knowledgeable than heathens’, who proposed that the temporalities of the Church be confiscated for one year.
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Their spokesman was the privy councillor and diplomat John Cheyne, a known critic of the Church who represented a powerful body of opinion, and the upshot was a ‘mighty altercation between clerics and laymen’, with the laity claiming that while they risked their lives and emptied their coffers to defend the realm, the clergy ‘had been sitting at home doing nothing, being no help to the king at all’.
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Once again this provoked a furious response from Arundel, who pointed out (correctly) that the clergy had granted more tenths than the laity had granted fifteenths and tenths, and that they also prayed ceaselessly for the king and the realm. Cheyne professed himself underwhelmed by the latter point, but Arundel was undeterred. Supported by Archbishop Scrope and, significantly, by a number of temporal lords including Edward, duke of York, he reminded the knights that they had recently (in 1401) persuaded the king to confiscate the lands of the alien priories on the grounds that this would increase the crown's revenues, yet in reality it was they, not the king, who had benefited from the seizures. ‘While you grow proud and enrich yourselves on these things,’ Arundel went on, ‘the king is in need and suffers penury, as he did before’; and when a copy of Magna Carta was produced to show that those who threatened the liberties of the Church were liable to excommunication, the plan was dropped.
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In a sense, though, the pressure worked, for ten days after parliament adjourned,
Arundel convened the southern convocation, which voted to grant one-and-a-half tenths, followed two weeks later with a tenth from the northern convocation.

Although Walsingham presented the clash at Coventry in terms of clergy versus laity, he also pointed out that the reason why some of the lay lords supported the bishops was because when, earlier in the parliament, the knights had proposed a resumption of crown lands granted out during the last forty years, a measure which would have seriously affected the incomes of many members of the nobility, the bishops had vigorously opposed the idea.
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The idea of resuming the royal patrimony, the second main proposal discussed, had been gaining ground for several decades and was acquiring quasi-constitutional status: if the king were to take back the lands which had formerly belonged to the crown and use the revenues from them to support his wars and other expenses, rather than granting them to his supporters, then it was possible to envision a future in which he would no longer need to come cap in hand to parliament for taxation.
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Unfortunately, there were too many vested interests involved for this to be a realistic proposition, although Henry did show some interest in the idea, agreeing to resume for one year the profits of royal lands granted out since 1377. He also promised to set up a commission to examine all grants made by him and his predecessors since 1366, and it was probably on this basis that the commons granted taxation, although if that was the case they were to be cruelly disappointed: opposed by the lords and barely encouraged by the king, the commission proved a dead letter and the plan was shelved.
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This was ungrateful of Henry, for the Unlearned Parliament was in the end as open-handed as its predecessor had been tight-fisted. It granted the king two full lay fifteenths and tenths, one to be collected before Christmas, the other during the course of 1405; it extended the wool customs and tunnage and poundage until September 1407; and it repeated the attempt to raise more from the wealthier members of society, first as noted by allowing the king to take one year's profits from royal lands granted out since 1377, and secondly by granting him 5 per cent of the value of all
lands and rents worth more than £333 a year.
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Naturally such generosity came at a price: once again, Henry had to agree to the appointment of war-treasurers, and once again he was told that if within three months he had not raised adequate forces for the defence of the sea, the Scottish and Welsh marches, and Guyenne, then the parliamentary grant would be null and void. Lest there be any misunderstanding, the terms of the grant also included the draconian threat that anyone who tried to cite royal or exchequer authority to use these subsidies to pay for debts already incurred, rather than for ‘the defence of the realm in time to come’, would be guilty of treason.

Nevertheless, the combined total of between £90,000 and £100,000 from the lay and clerical subsidies allowed military operations to resume in the spring of 1405, although the unremitting military commitments, the legacy of debt from the previous year, and the successful operation of the war-treasurers system, which continued to deprive Henry of the freedom to determine his own financial priorities, meant that there was also still much resort to borrowing.
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Yet Henry was learning his lessons: the new war-treasurers appointed in the Coventry parliament were Thomas Lord Furnivall, a privy councillor whom Henry shrewdly appointed as treasurer of the exchequer three weeks after parliament was dissolved, presumably in an attempt to blur the line between his twin responsibilities, and Sir John Pelham, an utterly dependable chamber knight who had shared Henry's exile in 1398–9 and had custody of the Mortimer brothers from 1406 to 1409. Sympathetic to the king's problems, they were prepared at times to advance substantial sums to him.
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Even so, by August 1405, with the north barely subdued and a French army in Wales, Henry felt obliged to call another great council to Worcester.
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Despite the alarm bells so recently
sounded by Scrope's rebellion, it was once again to the clergy that he turned, and once again a bitter row ensued, but on this occasion no clerical tenth was forthcoming. Henry was paying the price for his duplicity, and to make matters worse, on the return from Wales the royal wagon train was caught in a flood which swept away carts, treasure and even, it was said, some of the king's crowns.
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Following the Worcester council of September 1405, Henry spent a month in the Midlands, mainly at Kenilworth, before returning to London. He remained in the vicinity of the capital for the next eight months.
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The country was uneasy, with rumours of an imminent Scottish invasion and continuing disturbances in the north, Breton and Norman pirates circling for prey, and the French expeditionary force wintering in Pembrokeshire. Early in December a parliament was summoned, initially to Northampton, then to Coventry, then to Gloucester (in order to support Prince Henry in Wales), but in February a French fleet was spotted gathering at the mouth of the Thames and it was decided to switch it to Westminster.
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