Henry IV (61 page)

The collapse of the Anglo-French marriage talks was one reason why parliament decided in December to annul the Succession Act passed in June and revert to the traditional order of inheritance by heirs general rather than restricting it to heirs male. Whether Prince Henry had fully acquiesced in the June act may be doubted, and with his authority growing following the king's illness he was probably keen to assert the right of
any
of his children to inherit the crown.
⁶³
The second Succession Act was one of a number of compromises agreed during the third session of parliament, although the fact that it lasted for five weeks (18 November to 22 December) indicates that there was much hard bargaining. The king had already decided on his return to London on 14 September to relieve the merchants of the task of safeguarding the sea, which, he claimed, was not working, and thus, from 22 October, to cancel the additional 12d on tunnage and poundage paid by alien merchants since mid-June.
⁶⁴
This may be an indication that alternative sources of revenue were under discussion, but if so further concessions would be required from Henry, principally in relation to conciliar control of expenditure. The nomination of a council of sixteen on 27 November was a step in this direction, but within three weeks it had been superseded by a new and different list of councillors. Whereas the 27 November list still included the knights who
had attended over the previous few years (Hugh Waterton, Arnold Savage, John Cheyne), the council nominated in December was aristocratic in composition, including no one below the peerage apart from (
ex officio
) the steward of the royal household, Sir John Stanley, and the new keeper of the wardrobe, Sir John Tiptoft, appointed on 8 December. Tiptoft's first act as keeper was to persuade the king to agree, once the Christmas festivities were over, to retire to ‘some convenient place’ where, with conciliar advice, a programme would be drawn up to ensure that in future the household was under ‘moderate governance . . . to the pleasure of God and of the people’.
⁶⁵
The most significant change in conciliar personnel, however, was the fact that Prince Henry now began to attend more regularly. The first few months of the parliament had seen the commons urging the prince to hasten to Wales to take command of operations there, but by the autumn there was a growing sense that he was needed at Westminster.
⁶⁶
However, it would be a few years before Prince Henry became dominant, for on 30 January Archbishop Arundel was reluctantly persuaded to replace Thomas Langley as chancellor, and with the prince still much occupied in Wales in 1407–8 it was the archbishop who assumed leadership of the council.
⁶⁷

The reconstituted council was strong throughout on both military and administrative experience, with the duke of York, the earl of Somerset, Richard Lord Grey and Hugh Lord Burnell having played leading parts in the French and Welsh wars, and each of the three current chief ministers (Thomas Langley, Lord Furnivall and John Prophet) chaperoned by his predecessor (Henry Beaufort, William Lord Roos and Bishop Bubwith).
⁶⁸
John Stanley also boasted a wealth of governmental experience; not so Tiptoft, although he would amply repay the faith placed in him. Yet it was not merely its composition but also the power entrusted to it that marked the dawn of a new era in the history of Henry's council. Thirty-one articles, drafted by the lords and presented by the commons, formed the basis of a fundamentally altered relationship between king and council.
⁶⁹
Henry
was now to govern ‘entirely and in all cases’ by the council's advice, and a number of councillors were to remain with him constantly; they were to oversee household finance; no new royal grants which diminished the crown's revenues were to be made; the king was only to hear petitions on Wednesdays and Fridays and members of the council were to be present; if courtiers or others tried to sway his mind, the council was to be consulted before any action was taken; councillors themselves were not to show favour to friends or suitors, and as far as possible were to act honestly and in unison; departmental heads were to initiate enquiries into their offices. All this the new councillors swore in parliament to uphold, although Arundel stressed that only if adequate revenues were granted by the commons would they be able to fulfil their side of the bargain. Henry also swore in parliament to abide by the articles, though only ‘saving his estate and the prerogative of the crown’, and only until the next parliament.

Further concessions on either side cemented the deal: there would be no new war-treasurers, but the accounts of earlier ones would be audited; in allocating royal revenues, priority would be given to annuities – many of the lords and commons being themselves annuitants, for whom the virtual stop on payments over the past two or three years had become a test of loyalty; and Northumberland and Bardolf were duly convicted of treason, although tellingly nothing further was said about Scrope or Mowbray. All this was agreed by 17 December, following which the king was granted one tenth and fifteenth and the wool subsidy was renewed until September 1408.
⁷⁰
At the last minute, a suggestion from the commons that ‘certain lords’ should be personally responsible for repaying the tenth and fifteenth, should it not be spent correctly, threatened to derail the settlement; the king was furious, the lords ‘refused point blank’ to admit such liability, and the commons backed down. Four days before Christmas, at the conclusion of a sitting which dragged on deep into the night, the deal which had taken nearly ten months to broker was struck.
⁷¹

Yet three years of conflict, debate and experimentation had brought no structural reform. Since January 1404, the search for solvency had thrown up proposals for ecclesiastical disendowment, the resumption of crown lands, new forms of taxation, the appointment of war-treasurers and
parliamentary auditors, the suspension of annuities, the imposition of a
certum
on the wardrobe, the expulsion of aliens, the devolution of naval defence to merchants, and an about-turn from extreme niggardliness in March 1404 to uncommon liberality eight months later. By December 1406, almost every one of these experiments had been shelved (although some would be revived), and parliament had returned to the tried and tested route of direct and indirect subsidies, placing its faith in a privy council backed by statutory powers to enforce royal compliance. The answer, it seemed, lay not in new remedies but in making the existing system work, and no one knew more about the existing system than Archbishop Arundel, who now entered upon his third term as chancellor of the realm.

¹
The discharge of John Ikelyngton in Nov. 1402 probably marked the end of substantial windfalls (
PROME
, viii.163). For the Percys paying their forces from their own revenues, see
CDS
, v, no. 915. For a commission to raise loans in October 1403, see
POPC
, ii.72–6 (not 1402). Despite heavy borrowing in the autumn of 1403 the incidence of failed assignments once again rose alarmingly during the winter, amounting to some £15,000 in the Michaelmas term, which saw paltry cash receipts (Steel,
Receipt
, 89–90).

²
Wool exports fell from 16,400 sacks in 1401–2 to 10,200 sacks in 1402–3, the lowest export total for 60 years, and did not recover until 1405–6; cloth exports (less valuable for taxes) fell from 47,000 cloths in 1401–2 to 27,000 cloths in 1402–3: Carus-Wilson and O. Coleman,
England's Export Trade
, 55–6, 122, 138; A. R. Bridbury,
Medieval English Clothmaking: An Economic Survey
(London, 1982), 119.

³
Parliament was first summoned to Coventry on 3 Dec. 1403, but postponed on 24 Nov (
PROME
, viii.221).

⁴
CPR 1401–5
, 236. He attended the great council held at Sutton (Surrey) on 11 Jan., called presumably to prepare a case for taxation to be presented to the parliament. He had also been speaker in January 1401 (above, p. 180).

⁵
PROME
, viii.222–3, 230–1, 239, 242, 279 (the ‘Durham Newsletter’, an independent account of the exchanges between Henry and Savage).

⁶
SAC II
, 394–7. Each holder of a knight's fee was to pay twenty shillings; landholders who did not hold by knight service were to pay one shilling for each twenty shillings per annum they held; those with less than twenty shillings of land but moveable goods valued at twenty pounds would also pay one shilling in the pound.

⁷
The figure of £12,000 was not the expected yield of the tax, but the amount to be handed directly to the king: cf. M. Jurkowski, C. Smith and D. Crook, eds,
Lay Taxes in England and Wales 1188–1688
(Kew, 1998), 74–5. The details were duly omitted from the parliament roll, but preserved by Walsingham and on the subsidy roll: S. Chrimes and A. Brown,
Select Documents of English Constitutional History 1307–1485
(London, 1961), 212–14;
SAC II
, 394–7;
CFR 1399–1405
, 251–4.

⁸
PROME
, viii.226; E 403/579, 17 June. Parliament had failed to specify the process by which the tax was to be levied, so the justices had to be called in to do so (
POPC
, ii.270).

⁹
The war-treasurers were John Hadley, Thomas Knolles, Richard Merlawe (all Londoners) and John Oudeby (
RHKA
, 121–30).

¹⁰
PROME
, viii.105, 107, 210, 240. For the compilation of a ‘great roll’ of royal annuitants in January 1401 for inspection by the king and the barons of the exchequer, see E 403/569, 5 Feb. 1401.

¹¹
PROME
, viii.294;
RHKA
, 129, 136.

¹²
Compare E 403/567, 4 June 1400 and
POPC
, i.121 (service in Scotland),
POPC
, i.185 and E 403/573, 4 July 1402 (service in Wales) and E 403/579, 8 April 1404 (to resist French ‘malice’), all of which summoned both annuitants and retainers, with E 403/589, 24 Oct. 1406 (the rescue of Calais), E 403/591, 1 June 1407 (service in Wales) and E 403/608, 28 Aug. 1411 (for service ‘over the sea’), which referred only to the king's retainers. The distinction between the king's annuitants and his retainers is not clear, and the change probably mainly a matter of presentation. In 1404–5, the payment of annuities became a matter of grace rather than right. When the king's esquire, John Golafre, received his annuity it was made clear that it was because he had accompanied the king to Wales and the north: E 159/182, rot. 3d; cf. G. Harriss,
Cardinal Beaufort
(Oxford, 1988), 13; A. Brown, ‘The Authorization of Letters under the Great Seal’,
BIHR
37 (1964), 125–56.

¹³
RHKA
, 94.

¹⁴
PROME
, viii.240–2: it was agreed in January 1404 that the household's revenues were to be taken from the sheriffs' farms, the petty custom, the profits of the hanaper, escheats, the alien priories, ulnage duties on cloth and the ancient custom on wool (
RHKA
, 108, 129).

¹⁵
RHKA
, 112; above, p. 274.

¹⁶
E 101/404/21, fos. 14–16 (prince's household account). See the prince's letter to Thomas Arundel begging him to intercede with the king to send him funds, as he had nothing with which to pay his soldiers and had had to pawn his plate; and the king's letter to the council, 29 August, saying he ‘cannot at present be honourably accompanied’ to Wales – that is, that he could not afford a retinue to go with him (
ANLP
, no. 296;
POPC
, i.234). When Cardiff was besieged in December, its citizens begged Henry for help, but he ‘neither came nor sent help’, and the town was burned (
CE
, 401).

¹⁷
Of £6,526 disbursed by the war-treasurers in summer 1404, around £4,000 went to the two royal admirals, Thomas Beaufort and Thomas Lord Berkeley (E 403/579, 17 June).

¹⁸
POPC
, i.265–70 (1404, not 1405, for York was in prison in June 1405; Henry was at Nottingham on 31 May in both 1404 and 1405).

¹⁹
£333 from Lord Lovell (assigned to him on the subsidy in Wiltshire), £100 from Henry Bowet, bishop of Bath and Wells, and £100 from Hugh Waterton. This money had been sent to Carmarthen, but it had in addition been necessary to assign £636 from the subsidy in Somerset towards the payment of the South Wales garrisons' wages for June, which was proving a problem since only £200 had been collected in Somerset.

²⁰
CDS
, v, no. 893; E 28/8, no. 69; cf. E. Wright, ‘Henry IV, the Commons and the Recovery of Royal Finance in 1407’, in
Rulers and Ruled in Late Medieval England
, ed. R. Archer and S. Walker (London, 1995), 72; Grummitt, ‘Financial Administration of Calais’, 298; Harriss,
Shaping the Nation
, 64–5. A letter from Richard Aston, lieutenant of Calais, dated 17 August, said the garrison's wages were ‘two entire years and more’ in arrears (
RHL I
, 287).

²¹
It was often to Londoners that Henry turned in a crisis. As he hastened towards Shrewsbury in July 1403 to confront Hotspur, a group of London merchants (John Woodcock, John Walcott, Thomas Knolles, Richard Whittington, John Hende and Richard Merlawe) almost instantaneously raised nearly £1,000 to send to him. Almost exactly the same group of Londoners raised over £3,000 in July 1405 as he raced north to face Northumberland and Bardolf (E 403/576, 20 July, 4 Sept.; E 403/582, 18 July; E 403/585, 9 Nov.).

²²
Steel,
Receipt
, 127, 138. Councillors might also waive their fees and expenses: Richard Clifford, bishop of Worcester and keeper of the privy seal, agreed to accept £50 for conducting Princess Blanche to Cologne, ‘freely and gratuitously’ writing off the remainder of the £111 owed to him (E 403/578, 20 Oct. 1403).