Henry IV (63 page)

Yet Henry's confidence in his archbishop meant that he was content for the moment to leave day-to-day government in his hands. The number of surviving signet letters of the king fell from an average of over a hundred a year between 1399 and 1406 to about fifteen a year thereafter. Once the council was over, in mid-June he set off for the Midlands and Yorkshire, passing through Leicester, Nottingham and York to the shrine of John of Bridlington, presumably to pray for his health, while Prince Henry returned to Wales to besiege Aberystwyth. Adrift and becalmed, the king nevertheless hoped that his campaigning days were not over. Early in the year he was planning to go to France, and in May and again in
September he declared his intention to march against Glyn Dŵr in person, but no royal campaign materialized, though whether this was because he was denied money or because his health prevented him is not clear.
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Nevertheless, Henry continued to keep a close eye on mercantile disputes and negotiations with the French and the Scots, and to impose his will on both the archbishop and the pope in the matter of episcopal appointments,
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and before long he began to chafe at the restrictions imposed upon him. When the thirty-one articles had been drawn up, it was agreed that they would remain operative only until the end of the next parliament; by late August, Henry had decided that parliament should meet at Gloucester on 20 October.

The Gloucester parliament proved a good deal more obliging than its predecessor. The commons chose as their speaker the butler of the household, Thomas Chaucer, son of Geoffrey – the first of five occasions that he held the office – but when Chaucer began by criticizing the council which had governed for the previous ten months he was put firmly in his place by Arundel's vigorous defence of both its policies and its integrity, for which, he added, it had received scant gratitude. Between them, the king and the archbishop also secured a grant of one-and-a-half fifteenths and tenths, although not without an ‘altercation’ when Chaucer objected to the fact that the sum requested had been presented to the commons as a fait accompli following negotiations between the king's ministers and the lords. Although the king had to agree that this was not the way things were usually done – that is to say, that the right to determine the level of taxation belonged to the commons, the role of the lords being limited to assent – the sum granted was what the government requested.
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However, probably the most important outcome of the parliament from the king's point of view was the dismissal (with royal gratitude) of the council established in December 1406 and the jettisoning of the thirty-one articles. Not that Arundel was dismissed; with Henry's blessing, he retained the chancellorship for two more years, having evidently overcome his reluctance to do so. The difference was that the king was now free to exercise his prerogative.

There were also signs that his strength was returning. When told in early February that Northumberland and Bardolf were back in England and raising another insurrection, he immediately made plans to challenge
them. In fact the rapid response of his Yorkshire retainers deprived him of the chance to lead an army in the field. Led by the sheriff, Thomas Rokeby, they blocked the path of the rebel army at Grimbald Bridge near Knaresborough, forcing the earl to make a detour via Tadcaster, where on 19 February his force was encircled by loyalists. A brief fight ensued on Bramham Moor, a few miles to the west of the town, in which Northumberland was killed and Bardolf so severely wounded that he died soon after. Their heads were brought to the king at Stony Stratford and that of Northumberland, ‘with its fine head of white hair’, impaled on a lance and sent south to be placed on London Bridge.
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Henry went north anyway to supervise the mopping-up operation, despite it being one of the harshest winters in living memory. Leaving London at the beginning of March, he spent twelve days at Wheel Hall, a few miles south of York, sentencing or pardoning rebels, and then three weeks, including Easter, at Pontefract. By the end of May he was back at the Tower of London, whence he travelled upriver to stay with Archbishop Arundel at Mortlake. Here, towards the end of June 1408, he suddenly collapsed.

It was immediately apparent that what the king had suffered was a good deal more serious than what had afflicted him two years earlier; for a while he was even thought to have died.
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Henry's illness defies precise diagnosis, but it is safe to say that it was not the leprosy claimed by those contemporaries, French and Scottish as well as English, who believed that the king was being punished for the death of Archbishop Scrope. On the other hand, his symptoms evidently did include a disfiguring skin disease, variously reported as a burning sensation, as ‘great pustules’ on his face and hands, or by Adam Usk as ‘festering of the flesh [and] dehydration of the eyes’.
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He had suffered from the pox aged twenty, and his skin probably became more prone to rashes, or perhaps psoriatic, as he grew older. Yet this cannot have been the whole story. He remained at Mortlake for nearly a month, only resuming work in mid-July, and for the rest of his life his health remained precarious. He now travelled more by water and often preferred the seclusion of friends’ houses to royal residences.
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In September
he engaged an Italian physician, David Nigarellis of Lucca, but although he was fit enough to preside over debates about the Schism in July and October, by early December it was thought prudent to recall Princes Henry and Thomas to Westminster.
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In mid-January 1409 the king suffered a relapse and believed himself to be dying: on 21 January he made a will regretting his ‘misspent life’ and four days later issued a general pardon to those who had rebelled against him. The grooms of his chamber who now cared for him, ‘sleeping around the king's bed at night’, featured prominently in his will. By this time he had been moved to Greenwich, whence he wrote on 1 March to the duke of Berry saying he had been seriously ill for six weeks.
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By mid-March the crisis had passed, but despite Henry's protestation to Arundel on 31 March that he was no longer ill, in fact his health was from now on a constant concern.
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Clearly this was something more disabling than a skin condition: perhaps a circulatory problem which weakened his heart, perhaps a chronic intestinal condition following his prolapsed rectum. His collapses were not strokes, for his brain seems to have been unaffected and his resolve to govern insofar as he could was undimmed. He was later reported to have told his son on his deathbed that his illness had made his mind stronger and more devout.
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That is quite plausible, but it inevitably placed strains on England's polity.

In such a crisis, those who expected, and were expected, to assume the burden of rule were the great lords of the realm, but as events in France demonstrated this was never straightforward. In Henry's case, however,
there were compensating factors. First, unlike Charles VI, he remained sane at all times and capable of ruling much of the time; secondly, he had a large family; thirdly, the tight group of advisers on whom he relied had always been small and they were accustomed to working together, although naturally there were rivalries and individuals' influence fluctuated. For instance, once Arundel assumed control of the administration, that of the Beauforts certainly diminished. John Beaufort also suffered bouts of ill health from 1407 onwards, while his younger brothers were not fully trusted by the archbishop, who did not look kindly upon either the worldly and ecclesiastically uninterested Henry Beaufort or the conspicuous role his brother Thomas had played in Richard Scrope's trial. When John Beaufort, perhaps afflicted by illness, requested in February 1407 that the act legitimating him and his siblings ten years earlier be confirmed, it was probably at Arundel's prompting that its wording was altered to exclude any possibility that they might in future claim the crown. To be sure, such a possibility seemed remote at the time, for the king's sons and arguably several others stood between them and the throne, but this only made their exclusion seem gratuitous.
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There was no public falling-out with Arundel, and John and Henry Beaufort remained on the council through 1407 and beyond, but they were not the dominant force they had been or would again be.

In their place it was the king's sons who now came to the fore. Fortunately – though not fortuitously – by the time Henry became seriously ill his three elder sons all had several years' experience of military command and the financial responsibilities that came with it. As children, he had taken care to educate them, giving them personal tutors and ensuring they were schooled in Latin and music as well as leadership and swordplay; once he became king he tried to make time to spend with them.
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Barely had they reached adolescence when great responsibilities were thrust upon them. Henry became prince of Wales at the age of thirteen, Thomas lieutenant of Ireland and John warden of the East March at fourteen. Their role as
imperial viceroys was a way of testing their suitability for kingship as well as underlining the primacy of the king's family, just as the increasing use of phrases such as ‘our dearest brother' or ‘our most beloved son’ during the second half of the reign underlined its unity.
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After 1406, especially after 1408, Henry's kingship gradually shaded into Lancastrian family government.

Yet although he groomed his sons for power, Henry did not indulge them, a point that did not pass unnoticed. In 1407, and again in 1410, the commons reminded the king that none of his younger sons had been granted the titles and lands that befitted their status and asked him to rectify the situation, but he was in no hurry to do so. Financial considerations doubtless played a part in this; as he told the commons in 1410, he would promote and endow his younger sons ‘as soon as it could well be done’.
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But there was also method in the king's meanness: he wanted to keep his sons hungry, and he wished to reserve for himself the option of using their marriages for diplomatic advantage.
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He also knew better than most that their characters and capabilities were very different: the impolitic and restless Thomas was said to make hard war on those who crossed him, but was a great promoter of those loyal to him; John was dutiful and upright, a man of good habits and a worker for peace; Humphrey was ‘most learned’.
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Yet it was Prince Henry, the heir to the throne, who was naturally the focus of attention. The 1406 parliament marked the prince's entry into politics, and from now on he was frequently listed as a member of the council and a witness to royal charters.
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However, it was only from the winter of 1408–9 that his mission in Wales allowed him to devote the
majority of his time to English affairs; until then it was Archbishop Arundel who continued to drive the policy agenda at Westminster.

Nor was there any doubt about what Arundel placed at the top of that agenda; the outstanding achievement of his administration was the restoration of solvency to crown finance. Insofar as this was done, it was principally by orthodox means such as restricting expenditure, improving cash flow to the exchequer, establishing priorities and appointing competent officers subject to conciliar supervision. The experiments of 1404–6 were mostly jettisoned. In certain respects Arundel was fortunate, for improved security in the Channel and the North Sea led to a surge in wool exports, to 13,000 sacks in 1406–7, 15,000 in 1407–8, and 17,000 (the highest total of the reign) in 1408–9.
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Yet the policy also bore its maker's hallmark, for Arundel's instincts were conservative and he had made it clear during his terms as chancellor in the 1380s and 1390s that his understanding of the idea of reform was not innovation but a return to first principles.
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This began straight after Christmas 1406 with a moratorium on payments from the exchequer. The first two months of 1407 witnessed no issues of either cash or assignments, despite the fact that the exchequer was open on eight days between 19 January and 4 March. Meanwhile, the proceeds of the lay subsidy granted in December were allowed to accumulate, and by 23 April, when the last substantial payment arrived, more than £30,000 had been amassed.
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The moratorium on assignments meant that this was almost entirely in cash, a deliberate policy of channelling revenues through the exchequer rather than allowing them to be anticipated at source through the issue of tallies. The collection and disbursement of revenues was to be controlled from the centre, thereby enabling effective planning and prioritized allocations. The sum of £40,025 received in cash at the exchequer during the Michaelmas 1406–7 term – nearly all of it in February and March – was twice as much as it had received in cash in any term of the reign hitherto.
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It was soon needed, for around Christmas time a crisis developed at Calais when the garrison, despairing of being paid, seized the wool in the
town's warehouses in the hope of selling it to recoup their arrears. Finding the £18,000 a year which the garrison cost in time of war was never easy, but following the dismissal of the war-treasurers in the 1406 parliament the system of reserving a portion of the wool subsidy for Calais more or less broke down, and by 1407 the town's treasurer, Robert Thorley, was £30,000 in arrears.
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The government's initial reaction was to offer the mutineers just £5,000 in assignments, but in early March a more realistic agreement was drafted, perhaps as a consequence of a new threat to the town (real or imagined) from Burgundy.
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The London merchant and former war-treasurer Richard Merlawe became treasurer of Calais, the stapler merchants upon whom its prosperity depended were given a greater say in running its finances, reservations on the wool subsidy were renewed, and in April the great council arranged for £19,500 to be sent across the Channel during the next two months.
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This calmed the situation, although it added fuel to the debate over the long-term funding of the garrison, a question that later proved divisive.