Henry IV (6 page)

Henry's heirs were his two daughters, Maud, born in 1341, and Blanche (Henry of Bolingbroke's mother), born in 1347. Both had been married during their father's lifetime: Maud in 1352, to William of Bavaria, count of Hainault, Holland and Zealand, and Blanche in 1359, to John of Gaunt. By primogenitary custom, the inheritance would be divided between them, half of it passing under the effective control of each sister's husband. In April 1362, however, Maud suddenly died, and since she and William had had no children (he had by this time become insane and was confined in the castle of Quesnoy), the whole of Duke Henry's inheritance was, fortuitously for Gaunt, reunited in his hands. Later that same year, in the parliament of November 1362, during which Edward III celebrated his fiftieth birthday, the ducal title which Henry had enjoyed as a lifetime grant was also conferred upon Gaunt, although he had to wait a further fifteen years before receiving the same palatinate powers in Lancashire as his father-in-law. Nevertheless, as the king's son, Gaunt was in a good position to build upon his inheritance. In 1342, when he was two years old, Edward III had granted him the earldom of Richmond, and when, in 1372, he agreed to surrender this to the crown so that it could be used as diplomatic bait for the duke of Brittany, he made sure that he was well compensated: the castles and honours of Tickhill and Knaresborough in Yorkshire and the
castle of High Peak in Derbyshire consolidated his already substantial holdings in those counties, while the castle of Pevensey in Sussex gave him a foothold on the south coast. The castle and honour of Hertford, later one of his and his son's favourite residences, had already been granted to him by Edward III in 1360, following his marriage. Lesser additions followed as Gaunt continued to pursue at law his claim to some of the lands forfeited by Thomas of Lancaster in 1322, with varying degrees of success. Gaunt also had great European ambitions, although neither the French possessions which he claimed through Henry of Grosmont, nor the crown of Castile which he claimed through his second wife Constanza brought him much by way of landed income.
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Nevertheless, by the 1380s, despite the decline in landlords' profits following the Black Death, the gross income from Gaunt's estates in England and Wales was around £12,000,
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surpassing that of even Earl Thomas at the height of his wealth and power. He was the richest man in England after the king; even his elder brother the Black Prince, before his early death in 1376, had never received more than about £10,000 a year from his English and Welsh estates.
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This, then, was the patrimony to which Henry of Bolingbroke was heir: from Dunstanburgh in Northumberland to Pevensey in Sussex, it boasted over twenty castles in England and another half a dozen in Wales. Like the king, the duke of Lancaster could ride from one end of England to the other, passing almost every night under his own roof. Naturally each lord had his favourite residences: for Earl Thomas, it was Pontefract, which he substantially rebuilt and where he spent most of the last five years of his life following his withdrawal from court in 1317.
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For Duke Henry, whose service to the crown necessitated proximity to London, it was Leicester, with its adjacent game-stocked forests, although how often he was able to stay there is difficult to know: he spent as much time abroad as he did in England, either on campaign or on diplomatic embassies. In his last years, he spent less time at Leicester than he did at the Savoy, the awe-inspiring palace erected during the 1350s on the north bank of the Thames between London and Westminster and said to have cost around £35,000, money which he had plundered from the capture of Bergerac in 1345.
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During
the 1360s and 1370s, Gaunt also spent much of his time at the Savoy, but following its destruction at the hands of the rebels in 1381 he did not rebuild it but instead used Hertford castle, some twenty miles north of London, as his pied-à-terre when he needed to be in the capital. Much was spent on improving Hertford, although little of it has survived.
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It was always in the north Midlands, however, that the heartland of the duchy lay. Southern Yorkshire and Lancashire, Derbyshire, Staffordshire, Leicestershire and Lincolnshire – these were the counties where Lancastrian influence penetrated deepest, where it was possible to ride for two or three days without ever leaving ducal land, where Lancastrian castles stood not simply as the trophies of a great but distant power, but clustered thick upon the ground, in some cases almost visible one from another. Tutbury, perched high on its rock of alabaster above the valley of the Dove on the Derbyshire–Staffordshire border, was the nerve centre of a network of properties whose value was measured by much more than their financial worth, including Kenilworth, Higham Ferrers and Leicester to the south, Melbourne in Derbyshire barely ten miles to the east, and Tickhill, High Peak and Newcastle-under-Lyme to the north; none of them was much more than a day's ride from Tutbury. Kenilworth was a second major administrative centre, especially under Earl Thomas when it served as the headquarters of his receiver-general.
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Later in the century it was still one of John of Gaunt's favourite residences: he spent some £250 per annum over twenty years constructing a great hall there, ninety feet (27.43 metres) by forty-five (13.72), still mostly standing.
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Further north lay Pontefract, the focus of the Yorkshire estates and Gaunt's customary base during his northern itinerations, and Lancaster itself, which, although not visited much by fourteenth-century earls or dukes, still housed the headquarters of the duchy administration.
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Yet if mighty castles and untold acres were powerful symbols of lordship, in a sense they were just means to an end. Only human beings could translate soil and stone into the political influence to which their lords aspired, and it was thus to the acquisition and retention of servants and supporters that the resources of the Lancastrian inheritance were principally directed. Earl Thomas maintained a peacetime following of between twenty-five and fifty knights, and the total annual cost of his retinue was
between £1,500 and £2,000, but his
comitiva
was capable of rapid expansion in time of war. The influence which this gave him could be decisive: at the siege of Berwick in 1319, his retinue of some 2,000 men constituted about a fifth of the royal army, so that when he withdrew in a fit of pique, after quarrelling yet again with the king, it proved impossible for Edward II to continue the siege.
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It is more difficult to establish the size of Henry of Grosmont's peacetime retinue, for few of his indentures have survived, but the number of his permanent retainers was certainly smaller than Earl Thomas's, and with good reason, for Duke Henry was a man almost without enemies in England.
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What he did need was the capacity to recruit soldiers to serve abroad with him and a personal retinue sufficiently impressive to cut some ice when he served as the king's ambassador to foreign courts, objectives he was well able to meet.
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With John of Gaunt we are on much firmer ground. His household rolls and registers from the 1370s and 1380s suggest a permanent domestic establishment of between 115 and 130, rising to about 150 by the early 1390s, the annual cost of which varied between £4,200 and £7,100.
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This, however, did not include the cost of the duke's retainers. A list of his knights and esquires retained in 1382 named seven bannerets, seventy knights, and ninety-six esquires, a figure that continued to rise until his death in 1399, by which time it almost certainly passed 200. So too, naturally, did its cost: by the mid-1390s, he was probably spending about £4,000 a year on his retainers. By contemporary standards, these figures are wholly exceptional (as had also been the £1,500–2,000 spent by Earl Thomas on his retainers). Most fourteenth- and fifteenth-century English magnates spent about 10 or, at the most, 20 per cent of their annual income on retaining fees, and their income was much less than Gaunt's, typically between £2,000 and £4,000.
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That the Lancastrian affinity under Gaunt was the largest ever recruited in medieval England says much about his political aspirations, as well as
helping to explain why he had little difficulty in assembling 2,000 or even 3,000 men to accompany him on campaign.
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The only meaningful comparison is with the royal affinity recruited by Richard II during the last decade of his reign, when the king retained 250 or more knights and esquires.
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The size of the Lancastrian affinity, and Richard II's perception of its threat to his authority, were among the chief reasons why the king chose to retain men on such a scale.

What is more difficult to gauge is the extent to which the Lancastrian affinity provided its lord with the political influence he sought. Under Earl Thomas, at least in his later years as he became increasingly isolated in opposition to the king, it was in large part his affinity which allowed him to ignore his growing unpopularity and to continue his opposition, for although Edward II feared the military power of Thomas's retainers, he could not afford to alienate them, because they formed a bulwark against Scottish incursions. Aware of the leverage that this gave him, Thomas rewarded his retainers handsomely and supported them in their private quarrels. In the end, though, he went too far and, rather than risk their lives in what many of them saw as a failing cause, increasing numbers of his retainers deserted him in the run up to Boroughbridge.
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It was an important lesson for his successors, and sixty years later, as John of Gaunt relentlessly expanded his affinity – not merely in size but also in geographical scope, recruiting extensively beyond his northern and Midland heartland – it was these events that were remembered.
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At the same time, Gaunt also found himself attracting the same hostility that Earl Thomas had incurred during his later years. Not that the reasons were the same: Gaunt's unpopularity in the mid-1370s was earned in the cause of
upholding
royal power,
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which was clearly not the case with Earl Thomas. Nevertheless, there were those who suspected that once Edward III was dead Gaunt might attempt to use his retinue to further his personal ambitions, perhaps even to the point of seizing the crown from his ten-year-old nephew Richard. Viewed in this light, the renewed expansion of the Lancastrian affinity was a cause for alarm.

If this expansion was primarily designed to provide Gaunt with manpower in wartime,
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social and political developments during the
fourteenth century meant that it also gave him greater power in the localities than his predecessors, principally through crown office-holding. It was during the 1360s that the Justices of the Peace definitively acquired the dominant role in county peacekeeping that they were to retain well beyond the Middle Ages, including enforcement of the labour laws as well as felony and trespass. It was also during the third quarter of the fourteenth century that local control over the election of sheriffs was finally established, after many decades of trying, while from the 1370s the commons became more assertive in parliament, thereby enhancing the authority of MPs as spokesmen for their shire communities. These were the men – JPs, MPs and sheriffs, drawn from the upper stratum of the gentry – who figured prominently in Gaunt's affinity, men with deep roots in local government through whom it was possible to hitch the authority of the crown to the coat-tails of the house of Lancaster. As Edward III's winning war of the 1340s and 1350s turned into the losing war of the 1370s, England turned in on itself, a king too senile to rule gave way to one too juvenile to rule, and politics at all levels became more divisive. It was against this background that the chronicler Thomas Walsingham described those who wore Gaunt's livery in the mid-1370s as men ‘whose arrogance the world could scarcely support’, thinking that it entitled them to ‘riches before heaven and earth’.
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Influence did not mean domination. Only in perhaps three or four English counties, traditional Lancastrian strongholds such as Derbyshire, Staffordshire and Lancashire, did the number of men retained and the extent of the lands held by the duke translate into ascendancy in the region. Elsewhere, even in counties such as Norfolk or Sussex where he held large estates, he was one lord among many (albeit the greatest), his lordship sought and tolerated only as long as he did not overreach his grasp or upset the equilibrium of local society. Even in the north Midlands, or in Lancashire where he retained one in three of the knights and esquires in the county, he still had to be careful not to favour unduly those who accepted fees and annuities from him, for the county establishment – that indefinable but pervasive free association of regional gentry bound by personal and familial connections, the shared concerns of local government, the knightly lifestyle and a consuming interest in land and lordship – could be just as important in determining political and social affiliations as the obligations of service and loyalty to a great lord.
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Nevertheless, the opportunities and rewards
which a magnate could offer were a powerful inducement. Ten or twenty pounds a year, the level of fee customarily offered by Gaunt to his retainers, was a welcome addition to the income of an esquire with estates worth fifty or a hundred pounds annually, though perhaps more seductive was the local standing enjoyed by a man who served the duke of Lancaster, feasted in his castles and hunted in his chases – a man whose enemies knew that if they wished to pursue a quarrel with him it might not be with him alone. To wear the duke's livery badge, the famous
SS
collar, was the outward and visible sign of this status.

A growing sense of the affinity's history also fostered loyalty and service.
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St Mary Newark in Leicester, refounded and rebuilt as a college by Duke Henry in the 1350s, where he and his father were buried on either side of the high altar, became one focus of Lancastrian devotion. The cult of Earl Thomas, centred on the richly endowed chapel erected outside Pontefract castle to mark the spot where he was executed, was another, although Gaunt himself, knowing that Richard II viewed ‘St Thomas of Lancaster’ as no martyr but a traitor, was careful not to encourage this cult too strongly. Nevertheless, the preservation and repetition in fourteenth-century chronicles of quasi-hagiographical accounts of Earl Thomas's ‘martyrdom’ at the hands of a despotic king helped to promote not just a saintly cult but also a political ideal which tapped into the enduring appeal of the struggle for liberty against tyranny. Especially influential in this respect was the vernacular
Brut
, the most widely read and copied chronicle in late medieval England, which was openly Lancastrian in its sympathies, drawing on Christ's passion for its account of Earl Thomas's execution and continuing to recount his miracles long after his death.
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However poorly these stood up to scrutiny, they served to identify recognizably ‘Lancastrian’ values and to create a helpful popular mythology.