Henry IV (69 page)

⁵¹
Foedera
, viii.586, 589, 593, 601. On 7 Feb. 1410 the king ordered ships to be prepared to defend Calais since the duke of Burgundy was about to attack it (E 28/23, no. 26). A story circulating in England was that he had promised to drive the English out of the town in return for his pardon for Orléans's murder:
SAC II
, 536.

⁵²
PROME
, viii.454, 465;
Saint-Denys
, iv.313;
Monstrelet
, ii.33. English defences in Picardy were reviewed and a new tower above the gate at Calais constructed (E 403/605, 23 June, 31 July). The seneschal of Bordeaux and 400 men going as reinforcements to Guyenne were captured by men from Harfleur (
Saint-Denys
, iv.313).

⁵³
Monstrelet
, ii.54–61; Lehoux,
Jean de France
, iii.163.

⁵⁴
Famiglietti,
Royal Intrigue
, 88–90.

⁵⁵
Saint-Denys
, iv.313;
SAC II
, 592–3;
CE
, 417–18, said the French put one of the conspirators to a ‘bitter death’.

⁵⁶
Foedera
, viii.637, 641–8.

Chapter 22

ALIENS, MERCHANTS AND ENGLISHNESS

It was not only with England's neighbours that tension eased during the middle years of the reign. Relations with its trading partners – Germans, Italians, Castilians – had also suffered, partly from the collateral damage of the Pirate War, partly from the upsurge of anti-alien sentiment in fifteenth-century England.
¹
Anti-alien feeling was broadly directed at three categories of foreigner: first and most persistently, alien merchants who came to trade, some of whom formed semi-permanent communities, predominantly in London; secondly, foreigners attached to the royal court; thirdly, foreign religious serving the dependent cells of continental monasteries, the so-called ‘alien’ priories. Except in respect to the Welsh and Irish, whose inferiority few Englishmen cared to doubt, Henry did not encourage xenophobia. It undermined commerce and thus revenues, and complicated foreign relations. On the other hand, he benefited from the widespread feeling that Richard II had been too eager to please the French and to allow foreign merchants into the London retail trade.
²
Henry could certainly not be accused of Francophilia, however, and although he welcomed foreigners to his court, he presented himself from the start as first and foremost an English king, using the English language to claim the throne and reversing the legend on the great seal from
Rex Francie et Anglie,
as it had read since Edward III claimed the crown of France in 1340, to
Rex Anglie et Francie
.
³
At the heart of his government lay an English affinity and an unequivocally English monarchy (Henry V was the first English king since 1066 to have four English grandparents). The unashamedly jingoistic martial combats
over which the king presided also heightened nationalistic feeling, as did the enmity from across the Channel and the Welsh rebellion.

There was pressure on the king from the start of the reign to curb foreign privileges. The English staplers and Londoners won a number of concessions in the 1399 parliament, and although Henry insisted that ‘friendly’ aliens should not be disadvantaged, some Italian merchants considered relocating from London to other ports.
⁴
That they decided to stay was certainly not due to any moderation of anti-alien sentiment. Suspected not just of enjoying preferential mercantile dispensations but also of spying, piracy, religious irregularity, treasonable conspiracy and even sexual deviance, foreigners were subjected to increasingly strict supervision, both as to where and how they spent their money and where they were permitted to reside.
⁵
In the 1402 parliament it was enacted that what they earned from imports should not be removed from the kingdom but spent on English exports; eighteen months later a statute was passed requiring all visiting merchants to lodge in English households so that their activities could be monitored by hosts. ‘Those who want to oppose this petition’, declared its proponents, ‘know nothing of the frauds, artifices and deceptions of the alien merchants, through whom the common profit of the realm is destroyed and ruined’; the intention was not to expel all aliens, but to keep specie within the realm, ‘to the perpetual benefit of the treasury of this realm of England’.
⁶
Yet if they did not want to expel all aliens, they certainly wished to be rid of some of them: supporters of the ‘antipope’ (the Avignon papacy) were to depart forthwith, as were all aliens in the households of the king or queen apart from a few named exceptions; Scotsmen who declined to swear an oath of allegiance to Henry were also to leave, and all Welshmen were to be kept away from the king's person. The January 1404 parliament also passed a statute expelling almost all French monks from their dependent priories in England.
⁷

By this time, with Breton raiding and piracy at its height, attention had come to focus on the court, with Queen Joan falling under particular scrutiny, and although Henry did his best to mitigate the effect of the 1404 statute for his queen, the virulently anti-alien parliament which met two years later, much influenced by the London mercantile lobby, maintained the pressure. In March, during the first session, the king was asked to remove all Frenchmen and Bretons from the realm. He replied that this would be done as soon as possible, but on 8 May he was required to name a date for their expulsion, which he duly did, first 15 May and then, to allow them time to pay their debts, 24 May. He did, however, exempt any aliens who were lieges of the English crown (Gascons, for example, or those who had sworn allegiance) and it was agreed that certain aliens who were prepared to pay a fine to remain should be allowed to do so; by mid-August more than a hundred such licences had been issued.
⁸
The commons remained wary, however, and when parliament reconvened in October they insisted that this concession should not extend to those named on a schedule of forty-four persons (mostly Bretons in the queen's service) submitted to the steward of the king's household. The thirty-one articles of December further stipulated that any aliens who were still in England contrary to the ordinance must pay a fine by Easter 1407, or suffer imprisonment and forfeiture of all their goods and chattels.
⁹

Despite the king's reputation for generosity to foreigners, those who were attached to his, rather than to the queen's, household attracted little hostility, partly because they were seen as transient (even if in some cases they were not), partly because they were more obviously useful as well as less conspicuous at a court where so many visiting dignitaries were to be found.
¹⁰
Around twenty of the king's retained knights were foreigners, and at least
one party of ambassadors was usually in attendance.
¹¹
Knights errant such as Jean de Werchin or the earl of Mar hungered to joust against the best that England could offer, preferably in the king's presence, while Bertolf van der E'me from the Low Countries went one better and engaged in sword play with the king himself, getting his thumb nicked in the process. High status prisoners of war such as the king of Scotland and the earl of Douglas, or impecunious exiles such as Archambaud, count of Périgord, George Dunbar, and William, bishop of Tournai, often accompanied the king, sometimes even to the battlefield.
¹²
Some foreigners such as the Navarrese esquire Janico Dartasso and the Bohemian knights Roger Siglem, Arnold Pallas and Nicholas Hauberk had served Richard II for many years, but slipped effortlessly into Henry's service and proved loyal and useful – Dartasso in Ireland, Hauberk as a chamber knight, Siglem and Pallas as ambassadors to the empire.
¹³
Others were valued for their special skills, such as Richard Garner of Piedmont who managed the recoinage of 1411–12, the German gunners who designed and maintained Henry's artillery, or his French, Italian or Portuguese physicians. Two foreigners were especially favoured by the king: the Milanese Francis de Courte, whom Henry knighted and granted letters of denization, and who by 1402 had become a royal chamber knight; and Hartung von Klux from Silesia, whom he had met in 1392–3 and knighted on the Scottish campaign in 1400, and whose active diplomatic career in Henry's service culminated in 1411 with an embassy to Sigismund of Hungary. Five years later, along with Sigismund, von Klux would be elected to the Order of the Garter, but soon after this he returned to Germany where he pursued a fruitful career in the imperial service until his death in 1445.
¹⁴
It would have been difficult for the commons or anyone else to gainsay the usefulness to the king of such men.

There was, moreover, one alien community that was consistently exempted from the parliamentary acts of expulsion of Henry's reign, and from the additional subsidies sometimes imposed on foreign merchants: the Germans or Hansards.
¹⁵
Anglo-Hanseatic trade was at its peak around this time, and generally speaking English kings protected the Hansards; the goods they brought from the Baltic – Rhenish wine, beeswax, beer, furs and skins, timber, amber, copper and iron, grain and much else – were valued, as were their role in the cloth trade (which accounted for 90 per cent of what they exported) and the loans they provided. However, there were times when native pressure was hard to resist, for English merchants resented the privileges granted to the Hansa by Edward III, while Hanseatic merchants resented English attempts to increase their share of Baltic trade.
¹⁶
The late 1380s had witnessed the seizure of several ships and the threat of a Hanseatic embargo, but since then relations had calmed. Henry made no attempt at his accession to restrict Hansa privileges, although he did appease the English merchants by reissuing a list of the conditions upon which they had been granted, which included undertakings that English merchants in Prussia would receive similar privileges and that only ‘authentic’ German merchants – those with letters of accreditation from Hansa towns – be allowed to enjoy them. Hanseatic representatives were also told to come before the king to answer complaints from their English counterparts.
¹⁷
Unfortunately the Pirate War soon led to an alarming increase in the number of such cases: sixteen Hanseatic cogs suspected of carrying French or Scottish goods were captured, robbed or destroyed in 1402, a further twenty in 1403, and inevitably there were reprisals against English shipping. In June 1403 Henry wrote to Conrad von Jungingen, Grand-Master of the Teutonic Knights, to invite his ambassadors to England to negotiate a settlement.
¹⁸

Despite the almost competitively polite tone of the correspondence between Henry and Conrad, who had crusaded together in Livonia in the early 1390s, the resulting talks were a struggle. An agreement of October 1403 promised a review of claims and protection until Easter 1404 for
merchants on each side, as long as they did not engage in unlicensed trading ventures. However, a spate of outrages in 1404 (a further twenty-two Hanseatic ships captured or robbed) led to the expulsion of English merchants from Prussia by the autumn; there was even talk of a general north European boycott of English trade, though this made little progress.
¹⁹
It was thus decided at the October 1404 parliament to send as ambassadors to Marienburg Sir William Esturmy, an expert in northern European diplomacy, the chancery clerk John Kington and the Londoner and former privy councillor William Brampton.
²⁰
They managed to get the ban on English merchants lifted from October 1405, although it was made clear that this was dependent on a satisfactory agreement being reached, but settling the numerous compensation claims took longer.
²¹
The English claimed 4,535 nobles (£1,512) for Prussian attacks on English shipping; the Prussians countered with a claim of 5,120 nobles for English attacks. This, however, was far from the full extent of Hanseatic grievances. One of the problems in negotiating with the Hansa was that although the towns leagued together when solidarity might further their interests, each also had its own agenda, and before returning the English ambassadors undertook a tour of the Baltic to discover what other claims were being pursued. The Livonians, now subject to the Grand-Master, claimed 8,027 nobles, the merchants of Hamburg 1,117, Bremen 4,414, Stralsund 7,416, Lübeck 8,690, and so forth. Some of the alleged attacks had taken place twenty or more years earlier and there was much room for debate about precise sums, the compensation payable for killings on each side, and those who were responsible. The English not only disputed the sums but also asserted that reciprocal seizures by the men of Stralsund and Greifswald easily covered their losses and that merchants from Rostock and Wismar still had English goods to the value of 32,800 nobles in their possession.

Against this background of claims, counter-claims and sanctions, a settlement was eventually drafted at a meeting held at The Hague (Holland) in August 1407. The English commissioners agreed to pay 8,957 nobles to the Prussians, 22,096 to the Livonians, and 1,372 to the merchants of
Hamburg, making a total of around £10,800 sterling; during the next year Henry and Ulrich von Jungingen (the new Grand-Master, his brother having died) exchanged letters agreeing the terms.
²²
The money was to be paid in six instalments of £1,772 between November 1409 and Easter 1412; English claims for compensation were reduced to just £255 (766 nobles).
²³
Naturally matters did not end there. Not all claims had been settled, and it was suggested that, as chancellor, Archbishop Arundel might be asked to consider those still outstanding.
²⁴
Moreover, although the Grand-Master and his Livonian subjects were content with the treaty, the northern Hanseatic towns opposed it, for they stood to gain very little. To some extent, therefore, the English succeeded by playing off different powers within the fragile League against each other, but Henry had also been lucky in his timing, for the Prussians and Livonians were facing the military might of Poland-Lithuania and looking to appease potential allies. Little did it avail them. Disaster struck on 15 July 1410, when Ulrich von Jungingen was killed and hundreds of the Teutonic Order's knights were either slaughtered or captured by a Polish-Lithuanian army at the battle of Grűnwald (or Tannenberg). Reactions to this in England were mixed. Walsingham had little sympathy, pointing out that those against whom the knights waged war were themselves Christians. Henry, however, mindful no doubt of his warm reception in Prussia twenty years earlier, wrote to the pope to ask him to use his influence to mitigate the crippling financial penalties imposed by the Polish king who, he alleged, had employed ‘Saracens’ in his army, which made Henry wary of continuing his payments to the Order in case the money fell into the hands of infidels.
²⁵
This sounds disingenuous, although thus far Henry had done his best to comply with the treaty, handing over the first two instalments of £1,772 each on 3 December 1409 and 1 March 1410.
²⁶
Moreover, payments did not cease, although they slowed: the council noted in March 1411 that £1,772 was
needed for ‘the men of Prussia’, and in February 1412 a further £666 was released. Thus by the time Henry died nearly half the debt had been cleared, but there were no further payments after 1413.
²⁷