Henry IV (70 page)

It was not the king's intention that this obligation should fall on the exchequer; merchant communities were responsible for the attacks, and royal officers were directed to levy contributions from them, a task neither popular nor easy. Merchants from Scarborough had to be threatened with imprisonment to persuade them to hand over the 400 marks at which they were assessed, and a new dispute between Boston and Bergen, the Hanseatic hub in Norway, threatened another breakdown in relations and led to the detention of nine Norwegians at Boston, although following undertakings from the Norwegians their men were released in the spring of 1412.
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Nevertheless, the fact that agreement had been reached in 1407–9 was impressive considering the complexity of the matters under discussion, and Henry continued to do what he could to secure restitution of the Hansards' goods and ships and to uphold their privileges in England. The Pirate War had severely tested this relationship, but goodwill, diplomatic commitment and extrinsic pressure eventually settled a standoff that it was in the interest of neither government to prolong.

The number of Germans who resided continuously in London was around thirty, roughly half the size of the Italian – or ‘Lombard’ – community in the capital.
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A hundred years earlier, the Italians had enjoyed great economic power in England, controlling much of the wool trade and acting as bankers to the crown and aristocracy, but with the crash of the major Italian banks in the mid-fourteenth century and the decline of wool exports their influence was much diminished. Even so, they were still both prominent and unpopular: their share of the import market to London was around 30 per cent in the early fifteenth century, and they were second only to the Hansa as exporters of English cloth, in return for which they imported spices, delicacies and fine textiles from the eastern Mediterranean – one of the reasons for their unpopularity, for such luxuries were the preserve of the
rich and seen by some as superfluous.
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Moreover, as recently as the 1380s some 90 per cent of loans to the crown from aliens (£45,800) had come from Italians.
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Most of this was advanced by Genoese and Florentine merchants, but from the mid-1390s Anglo-Genoese relations deteriorated. In 1395, encouraged by Philip of Burgundy, Genoa moved its north European staple from Southampton to Bruges; in the following year, the city fell under French domination (Henry's old friend Marshal Boucicault became governor in 1401), and during the Pirate War Genoese carracks and galleys were suspected of aiding the French.
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Yet there were still Genoese merchants in England, who could be tapped for loans,
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and in 1405 a Genoese ambassador visited. Perhaps as a result of this, in April 1407 the Genoese were granted the right to sail to England, unload, pick up new cargoes, cross to Flanders and then return to England to unload and reload before sailing back to the Mediterranean, a valuable privilege given the jealousy with which English merchants guarded the cross-Channel trade.
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Soon after this, however, Anglo-Genoese relations turned sour. In June 1407 a royal sergeant-at-arms was sent to Southampton, the Genoese port of choice, to stop any carrack or galley from Genoa leaving without special licence, and in early 1412 orders were issued not to allow any person to send money or goods out of the country if they were for the use or profit of any Genoese. Behind this lay the complaint of a powerful group of London merchants, who claimed they had been deceived into sailing into Genoa only to find their ships and goods – valued by them at £24,000 – seized. Despite remonstrations from Henry, the Genoese prevaricated, and a month before his death the king gave the Londoners letters of reprisal against any Genoese merchandise they could find up to a limit of £10,000. By this time, they were ‘the king's enemies of Genoa’.
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Genoese irritation stemmed not merely from the fact that the Londoners were trying to break into the Mediterranean market; they also resented the favours shown by the king to their rivals, the Venetians and Florentines. Henry encouraged Venetian commerce, writing to the Doge four days
after his accession to assure him that his subjects would be treated ‘like our own lieges’ in England, and two months later sent £1,000 to Venice to cover the debts left by Thomas Mowbray, who had died there. In 1407, the Venetian Senate noted that the English king was ‘most friendly’ towards them and voted to allocate two hundred ducats to buy presents for him and Queen Joan.
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Two years later the Venetians received a licence to bring their ‘Flanders Galleys’ to compete with the Genoese in the lucrative cross-Channel traffic, although their access to this was only permitted for a year at a time and at the special request of the Doge. Nevertheless, during the last few years of Henry's reign it was renewed annually, although probably not freely, for in October 1409 Venetian merchants paid 2,000 marks to the exchequer as a ‘concord’ for having evaded customs in the past; the simultaneous receipt of their licence was probably not coincidental.
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The Venetian presence in London increased markedly during the first third of the fifteenth century.

One role in which the Venetians showed little interest was that of bankers. This niche was occupied by the Florentines, as it had been during the first half of the fourteenth century, although on a much reduced scale. The leading Florentine firm in London comprised the Albertini family, who had been exiled from Florence in 1401 but reacted by setting up profitable businesses in France, Spain and England as well as in several Italian towns. They had acted as Henry's bankers in 1393 and Archbishop Arundel's during his exile in Florence in 1398. However, it was not by lending to kings that they made their money, as the Frescobaldi, Bardi and Peruzzi had done in earlier times, but by acting as agents for Englishmen wishing to transfer money abroad, in particular clerics who needed to make payments to Rome.
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The commons criticized this traffic, regarding the resulting outflow of specie as scarcely less injurious to the realm than the removal of the profits made by foreign merchants, but as long as England remained a Catholic country Englishmen would continue to seek
papal provisions, go on pilgrimage and engage in litigation at the papal court.
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In 1409, following the Council of Pisa, it was Filippo Alberti who, along with Richard Whittington, was responsible for collecting nearly £1,000 for the payment of Peter's Pence and procurations to the newly elected Pope Alexander V.
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Henry's favourable treatment of the Venetians and Florentines reflected the changing balance of power in Italy: Florence's conquest of Pisa in 1406 and Venice's defeat of Genoa in the War of Chioggia (1378–81) helped to shape the political map of Italy in the fifteenth century, with Venice, Florence and Milan emerging as the great territorial powers in the northern half of the peninsula. Personal contacts – the favourable impression Henry had created at Venice in 1392–3; his and Arundel's prior dealings with the Albertini – strengthened these political bonds, although none of this could mask the decline in Italian influence in England as either bankers or traders since the first half of the fourteenth century.
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Iberian merchants also suffered during the Pirate War, although Henry's personal contacts once again helped to limit the fallout, for his sister Philippa was married to João I, king of Portugal (1385–1433), and his half-sister Catherine to Enrique II, king of Castile (1390–1406). Diplomacy with Castile needed to circumvent the Franco-Castilian alliance of 1369 (primarily an anti-English compact) as well as the Schism, for Castile, like France, adhered to the Avignon papacy. Nevertheless, an exchange of embassies in 1400 augured well, and by July 1402 Enrique was addressing Henry as his ‘dear and beloved brother, the king of England’.
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Relations with England's ally Portugal were more straightforward, though not entirely so, since for the Portuguese to welcome Henry's usurpation with too much enthusiasm would have risked antagonizing France and Castile.
Yet welcome it they did, and Queen Philippa, to a greater extent than her half-sister, took seriously her role as a bridge between her native and adopted kingdoms.
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Her husband, the victor of Aljubarrotta, was a forceful and cultured monarch whose friendship Henry cultivated, nominating him in 1400 as the first foreign king to become a Knight of the Garter. By 1403 João was prepared to risk French wrath by recognizing his brother-in-law as king, not just of England but of France as well.
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Three years later Enrique of Castile also became a Knight of the Garter. By this time goodwill was sorely needed, for between 1401 and 1403 the Castilians counted around fifty incidents in which their ships or cargoes had been seized by the English.
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Portugal suffered much less from the Pirate War, although at times English customs officials seized Portuguese goods on the pretext that João had outstanding debts to the English crown dating back to the 1380s.
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The latter was true, although Henry did not press him for these, and was quick both to forbid such seizures and to help secure restitution of ships and cargoes, as he did with Castilian ships; it was perhaps in recognition of his efforts, as well as to remove any pretext for seizures, that in December 1403 Enrique and João offered to include England in the ten-year truce which they had recently concluded.
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Henry accepted the offer with alacrity. Not surprisingly, this did not please the French. In the spring of 1404, envoys from Paris reminded Enrique of his treaty obligations and requested ships and men to attack English fleets and ports, but, according to the monk of Saint-Denis, the Castilian king was persuaded by his wife to limit the extent of his aid; in the following year he allowed the adventurer Don Pero Niño to man three galleys to assist the French, but the main Castilian fleet sent north appears to have been under orders simply to trade, despite Niño's attempts to persuade the admiral
otherwise.
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Undaunted, Niño teamed up with the Orléanist Charles de Savoisy, with whom he spent the summer and autumn raiding the English coast, taking particular pleasure in firing Poole (Dorset), the home of that scourge of French and Castilian shipping, Henry Pay. Yet when the Castilian–Portuguese truce was renewed in December 1405, England was still included.
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The later years of Henry's reign were a fruitful time in Anglo-Iberian relations. João did his best to promote good relations with his ‘most beloved and most esteemed brother and friend’ the English king, and English merchants were welcomed in Lisbon. Philippa's influence was crucial, and it is with justification that she is sometimes seen as instrumental in forging the Anglo-Portuguese alliance which has endured continuously for more than six centuries.
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In Castile, meanwhile, the death of King Enrique in December 1406 left his infant son Juan as his heir, and for the next decade Queen Catherine and the late king's brother Fernando of Antequera exercised joint regency in the kingdom. Under their influence relations with England continued to improve, and when the Franco-Castilian treaty was renegotiated in 1408 the French, no longer in a position to dictate terms following Louis of Orléans's assassination, recognized Castile's right to make truces for up to a year with the English. Pilgrim traffic to Santiago de Compostella grew, as did trade and friendly intercourse between the two countries, characteristic of which was Henry's suggestion to his sister in 1411 that they exchange sixty letters of safe-conduct to be used by those wishing to visit each other's countries.
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At one point Catherine also offered herself as a mediator between England and France. This did not happen, nor did the lasting peace sought by both sides, but the truce was renewed without difficulty on an annual basis and further complaints by merchants on each side were dealt with in a cordial fashion.
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In 1412, Fernando also became king of Aragon. Henry had had few dealings with the Aragonese – a sign in itself of good Anglo-Castilian relations – but Fernando's record of
cooperation allowed Henry V to open a diplomatic dialogue with him almost as soon as he came to the throne.
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Yet the more tangible benefit accruing to Henry V from his father's Iberian policy was the slackening of ties between France and Castile which, despite occasional rumours of hostile intent, played little part in the renewed Anglo-French conflict after 1415.

No single factor accounted for the fluctuations in trade patterns during Henry's reign. Taxation policy, money supply, the state of the foreign markets, industrial growth and decline, weather and disease all played their part. Even so, it is hard not to be struck by the correlation between slump and boom and war and truce. Taxable exports fell by 50 per cent in 1402–3, from an annual average of 15,000 sacks of wool and 43,000 cloths during the first three years of the reign to 10,000 and 27,000, respectively. This was the time when the Pirate War was at its most intense. Two years later exports were still sluggish (12,000 sacks of wool and 22,000 cloths), but in 1405–6, when the Pirate War more or less ended, the numbers rose sharply, to 16,500 and 37,000, respectively. The following year saw another slump, but between 1407 and 1409 recovery resumed, reaching 17,000 sacks of wool in 1408–9 and 36,000 cloths in 1409–10.
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This was the period which saw the most productive efforts to agree political and mercantile truces, and England's shipping and ports were more secure, as was the revenue accruing to the exchequer. Including tunnage and poundage, the revenue differential between years such as 1402–3 or 1404–5 and 1405–6 or 1408–9 was around £20,000 – between £60,000 and £70,000 in the good years, £40,000 or £50,000 in the bad.
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Peace meant more money to spend and fewer wars to spend it on; the easing of hostilities and financial recovery were mutually supportive during the middle years of the reign, each feeding off the other.