Henry IV (77 page)

Arundel continued to follow up suspicions of heterodoxy for as long as he remained primate, be it at Oxford in 1411 or at Cooling castle (Kent) in 1412–13, where he had already, before Henry IV's death, begun to close in on England's most infamous Lollard, Sir John Oldcastle.
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It may be that Arundel took Lollardy too seriously, that his determination to extirpate heresy in its various manifestations pushed those who would not abandon their principles into a corner from which Oldcastle's revolt in January 1414 came to seem like the only means of escape.
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He did, however, succeed from 1407 onwards – at court, at Oxford, in parliament – in wresting back the initiative from the hecklers and sceptics who had so discomfited the ecclesiastical hierarchy during the first half of Henry's reign. For good or ill, he also turned the English Church – through definition, public recantation, the supervision of education and the beginnings of literary censorship – into a more efficient instrument for the enforcement of ecclesiastical discipline. Yet Arundel did not wish simply to silence the reformists. He also wanted to provide conscientious Christians with an alternative: hence the promulgation (in English) of Love's
Mirror
. When the eccentric visionary
Margery Kempe visited him at Lambeth, they had a long interview in his garden, where he spoke to her ‘full benignly and meekly’, approved her unorthodox manner of living, and granted her requests to choose her own confessor and (most unusually) to receive communion once a week; she left him ‘comforted and strengthened in her soul’.
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Arundel's will, in which he described himself as a ‘miserable and unworthy sinner’, a ‘useless and tepid minister’, and asked that his ‘fetid, putrid cadaver’ be accorded only the plainest of burials, reveals penitence and humility, and suggests that his personal approach to salvation may not always have sat easily with the public pronouncements incumbent on a primate.
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He knew as well as many of his critics that the Church needed to live up to the standards it set, and that the simple orthodoxy/heterodoxy polarity was really an establishment construct, even if the language he used at times tended to pare the debate to its essentials. His public emphasis on the sacraments was not simply opportunistic, but was consistent with his view of the unifying force of the Catholic mass, with its focus on contemplation of Christ's Passion and the intercessory role of the clergy.

According to Walsingham, Henry rejected the 1410 Disendowment Bill like a ‘catholic and orthodox prince’, but it was the more spirited opposition of John Norbury (‘one man in a thousand . . . who loved the Church with all his heart’) that he chose to emphasize. In fact, as the chronicler knew, the king was not always quick to reject calls for disendowment. At Coventry in 1404, Archbishop Arundel, suspecting that Henry sympathized with the plans of John Cheyne and his fellows, had warned him of the fate that awaited kings who despoiled the Church. Henry's reply was reassuring, but by no means unambiguous, and in the end it was the support of a group of temporal lords that scotched the proposals. It may be that Henry found calls for clerical disendowment quite useful: in 1403, 1404 and 1405 they enabled him to put sufficient pressure on convocation to grant clerical tenths.
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Nor was anyone punished for urging the seizure of the Church's temporalities, not even in 1410, despite the fact that the parliament of 1406 had declared it to be an imprisonable offence.
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The openness of the debate over ecclesiastical reform during Henry's reign is striking, and behind it lay the belief that reformists could look to the king for support. Some suspected worse: Richard II was reported to have said that if Henry ever became king, ‘he would want to destroy the whole of God's holy Church’. Henry flatly denied this (in the 1399 parliament), though he added – significantly – that he hoped to see men chosen as rulers of churches (
rectores ecclesiarum
) who were more worthy of their office than those appointed in his predecessors' times.
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Three years later the Franciscan Roger Frisby repeated the allegation to his face: ‘You never loved the church,’ he told the king. ‘You disparaged it greatly before you became king, and now you are destroying it.’
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As the son of John of Gaunt, Henry's orthodoxy might well be open to question, but to be accused of wanting to destroy the Church usually in fact meant wanting to reform it, a desire Henry expressed on more than one occasion.
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Henry was not, of course, a Lollard, but he almost certainly shared some of their aspirations. Familial influences – not just his father's, but also his first wife Mary's and perhaps his grandfather Henry of Grosmont's – had fostered a questioning attitude to the Church's teaching, and his choice of friends was unlikely to allay the fears of fundamentalists. Men such as John Cheyne and Robert Waterton were well known for their outspokenness on the question of clerical transgressions, yet both remained members of the king's inner circle throughout the reign, as did Philip Repingdon.

An Oxford theologian and early follower of Wyclif, the austere and morally rigorous Repingdon had been obliged to recant his errors during Archbishop Courtenay's purge of academic Lollardy in 1382, since when he had trodden the orthodox path to become abbot of Leicester, a house patronized by the dukes of Lancaster, in 1393. There is no doubting his intimacy with Henry: one contemporary described him as ‘the king's very special clerk (
clericus specialissimus regis
)’.
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In May 1400, Henry helped to arrange his appointment as chancellor of Oxford University, a move which coincided with the revival there of the debates over clerical disendowment and vernacular translation of the
scriptures.
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In 1404 he became the king's confessor and in 1405 bishop of Lincoln, but, despite his outwardly orthodox stance, Repingdon's
Sermones Dominicales
suggest that he continued to hold views about the Church's shortcomings which more conservative defenders of the faith would have found uncomfortable. Although an active investigator of heterodoxy, he was not a persecutor of heretics; he maintained links with known and suspected Lollards, criticized the worldliness and immorality of the clergy, expressed misgivings about the Church's holding of temporalities, and laid great stress on the alleviation of poverty and the necessity for almsgiving. In other words, he shared the social and religious outlook of the reformers, but chose to work towards reform from within the Church rather than outside it.
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When told in 1415 to exhume Wyclif's body, he ignored the order. Yet ultimately he seems to have found the contradictions in his position difficult to sustain. In 1419 he retired, thus becoming the first English bishop known to have voluntarily resigned his see. He died five years later, asking that his body be buried naked in a sack in open ground near to his former cathedral, ‘there to be food for worms’; that his death be announced by no one but the town crier of Lincoln; and that every farthing of his worldly goods be distributed to the poor.
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Contempt for the mortal body, the rejection of funereal pomp, and an emphasis on philanthropy and penitence were characteristic of Lollard wills, though by no means restricted to them. Henry IV's will employed similar, though less emphatic, language: he was, he declared, a ‘sinful wretch’ with a ‘sinful soul’, and begged God's mercy for his misspent life and his people's pardon for his treatment of them.
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The resonances between the testamentary language used by the king, his archbishop, and his confessor denote a willingness to push at the boundaries of orthodoxy.

Henry admired and patronized religious orders with an eremitical and meditative tradition such as the Carthusians and the Carmelites. Of the fourteen religious houses to which he donated wine in 1405–6, five were Carthusian. His first two confessors, Hugh Herle and Robert Mascall,
were Carmelite friars, as all of Gaunt's had been. Five of the fifteen men known to have preached before the king during the year 1402–3 were Carmelites, another six Dominicans.
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At the outset of his reign, Henry showed himself well disposed towards the friars, and although the conspiracies of 1402 and a long-running dispute within the order tested his patience with the Franciscans, he continued to favour the Dominicans (his last confessor, John Tille, was a Dominican).
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His interest in monasteries, however, was limited, something which was not expected of kings. Richard II and his courtier-nobility had founded a number of Carthusian houses, while Henry V would provide a sumptuous riposte to the idea of disendowment by founding two religious houses (one Carthusian, one Bridgettine) during his first year as king, and later taking a personal interest in the reform of the Benedictine order.
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Henry IV was not anti-monastic – although he might not have balked at the thought of a degree of monastic disendowment, especially of the older and richer orders – but the foundations with which he actively associated himself were colleges such as the Knolles Almshouse of the Holy Trinity at Pontefract and the college of the Blessed Virgin and All Saints at Fotheringhay (Northants).
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In both cases he assumed the role of founder from the original patron – Pontefract from Sir Robert Knolles, Fotheringhay from Edmund, duke of York – but in each case he took his role seriously.
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Henry was involved by 1403 at the
latest in the endowment of Pontefract college, but his decision in 1411 to act as founder of Fotheringhay and to convert it into a hive of prayer for his and his family's souls was dictated by the brushes with death of his later years, as was the case with the chantry he endowed at St Paul's in December 1408 for the souls of his father and mother and the chantry of St Mary Magdalene, built in 1409–10 on the field of the battle of Shrewsbury. Although Henry had made a vow some years earlier to found a chantry for the souls of those who had died in the battle, and although a little chapel with two chaplains had already been established there for three years, it was the king's illness at the beginning of 1409 which stirred him to action.
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Lack of resources may have held him back earlier in the reign, but in fact the cuckoo foundations of his later years cost him little.

There was nothing unconventional about Henry's preference for colleges: many more colleges than monasteries were founded by late medieval nobles. They were cheaper to endow, more flexible institutions whose statutes (or ‘rule’) could be written by the founder and dedicated more exclusively to intercession for his family, and less cut off from the world outside the cloister.
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On the other hand, the virtues of seclusion, contemplation and asceticism – in other words, being
more
removed from the world – also appealed to many, Henry included: Carthusians and Carmelites apart, he supported several recluses, including Matthew Danthorpe, who founded a chapel at Ravenspur on the spot where Henry landed in 1399, the anchoress Margaret Pensax, and unnamed hermits at Lancaster, Deptford, Bamburgh and Westminster; in 1408 he licensed the excavation from the cliff below Knaresborough of a wayside cave-chapel to Our Lady of the Crag.
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According to Capgrave, his last words of advice to Prince Henry were to take good and modest men of religion to his heart, especially those who had lived a solitary life of study and prayer.
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Conventional piety is not easy to define: individual tastes embraced contrasts, not to say contradictions. Henry certainly had no objections to relics, pilgrimages, shrines or images. When the Byzantine emperor presented him with a piece of the seamless robe of Christ woven by the
Virgin, he was delighted, and presented half of it to Westminster abbey and the other half to Arundel, who set it in a silver-gilt reliquary, along with a spine from the crown of thorns and a few drops of Becket's blood, and offered it to the high altar of Canterbury cathedral.
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The king was also instrumental in securing the canonization of John of Bridlington; he visited the shrines at Walsingham and at Canterbury on several occasions, and was the only late medieval English king to have set foot in the Holy Land.
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His religious observance could not be faulted. When he arrived for a night's stay at Bardney abbey (Lincolnshire) on Saturday 21 August 1406, he knelt and kissed the crucifix, was asperged by the abbot and led to the high altar, heard a hymn and an oration, and kissed the holy relics before retiring; next morning he rose at six, came down to the chapel of St Mary, heard two masses, then followed the procession through the cloister to the choir, where he attended high mass – ‘remaining until the end’, as the scribe noted – before going to his chamber to dine.
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He owned the largest illuminated Bible made in medieval England, and may have composed religious music.
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He took an interest in the worthiness of individual religious and, like his uncle the Black Prince, had a particular devotion to the Trinity, the giver of wisdom, understanding and knowledge.
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It was his open-mindedness, however – born of a desire to arrive at his own way of understanding – that made his religiosity more than simply conventional, and which explains why he counted Philip Repingdon among his closest friends; why he owned a copy of the Bible in English; why he tried to prevent academic freedom from becoming a casualty of heretical inquisition at Oxford; why he took advantage of his stay at Bardney to peruse the volumes in the monastic library; why Capgrave had met learned men who told him of Henry's interest in ethical questions and theological disputation; and why he was reluctant to close his ears to those who dared to aspire to the creation of a better Church in England.
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The king and his archbishop both had to compromise at times, but Arundel gave more ground than Henry. Yet despite his demotion and exile in 1397–9, the English episcopacy did not question Arundel's leadership. The need for secular support in healing the Schism and defeating heresy made compromise inescapable, as did the vulnerability of the Lancastrian regime during its early years, for Arundel was committed to Henry's kingship. As a result, the English Church was increasingly elided with the English state.
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Similar processes were under way elsewhere, and it was a transformation extending over centuries rather than decades, but Henry IV's reign marked a significant moment in its realization. Nevertheless, Arundel would surely have reckoned that at least he and Henry had prevented England from going down the same road as Hussite Bohemia – which, in 1399, was by no means a foregone conclusion.