Henry IV (79 page)

The most compelling evidence for the musical development of the chapel royal at this time is to be found in the Old Hall Manuscript, a collection of mainly three-voice mass movements and motets by several leading composers of the late fourteenth century and early years of the fifteenth century. Most of these are prefaced by the composers' names, and two of them (a
Gloria
and a
Sanctus
) are ascribed to ‘Roy Henry’. The manuscript was probably first compiled around 1417–20 for the chapel of Prince Thomas, by then duke of Clarence, after whose death in 1421 it passed into Henry V's chapel and further ‘layers’ were added. Whether ‘Roy Henry’ was Henry IV or Henry V has been much debated, although current opinion favours the latter.
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However, while there is some evidence for Henry V's musical ability, there is a good deal more for his father's, not least Strecche's comment.
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Henry IV is also the first king known to have paid one of his chaplains, John Bugby, to teach grammar to the boys (choristers) of his chapel. According to the mid-fifteenth-century
Liber Regie Capelle
, there were meant to be separate masters for song and grammar, but instruction in singing and grammar were so closely linked, the latter being a prerequisite for the former, that Bugby's appointment may indicate a more serious turn in the chapel's musical aspirations.
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However, even if Henry IV was not the composer of these pieces, the patronage of musicians by his sons, the brilliance of their chapels and the adventurous musical programmes adopted there and at institutions such as St George's College, Windsor, are testimony to their upbringing in an
ambience that was at the forefront of contemporary musical innovation. A serious interest in serious music became a Lancastrian family habit. With their encouragement, the English chapel royal became famed for its virtuosity, and by the mid-century was admired throughout Europe for the quality of its chant.
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The evidence for Henry's literary and educational interests is less equivocal. As well as appointing the first known grammar master in the chapel royal, he was also the first English king known to have appointed a keeper of the king's books, for which two desks were built in the king's new study at Eltham.
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When there was time, he took the opportunity to read more widely, as at Bardney abbey in 1406. A list of the king's books which ended up in the hands of a London stationer a few years after his death can only represent a fraction of his collection, but affords clues to his literary tastes.
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His historical works consisted of Higden's
Polychronicon
and a volume of
Smale Cronykles
. A ‘book called Gower’ was probably either a copy of the
Confessio Amantis
, which the poet had dedicated to him, or the volume of praise poems Gower is known to have presented to the king.
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The remaining books were religious works: two psalters, one glossed in Greek (although Henry is most unlikely to have known any Greek); a
Catholicon
, a popular Latin grammar and dictionary; a copy of Gregory the Great's
Moralia in Job
, one of the most widely read exegetical works of moral instruction; and two bibles, one in Latin and one in English.
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Although Henry could read Latin, his ownership of an English bible implies a desire for a more accessible text to allow him to arrive at his own understanding of the Scriptures. Like the
Moralia in Job
, it brings to mind Capgrave's comment that Henry enjoyed discussing ethical questions, and
his ownership of a silver bookmark suggests that his books did not simply gather dust on the shelves of his desk.
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The values of between £5 and £10 given for these volumes indicate that they were illuminated, but they cannot have compared with the luxury manuscripts bought or commissioned by Henry. Two in particular stand out. On his way to the Holy Land in 1393, probably at Venice, he acquired a three-volume antiphonary illuminated in the prestigious Bartolo workshop in Siena which he presented to the Franciscans of Mount Syon at Jerusalem, where it can still be seen.
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Equally, if not more splendid, was Henry's Great Bible (
Magna Biblia
), illuminated by Herman Scheere and still in the British Library. At 2 ft × 8 in (63 × 43 centimetres), with 350 folios and 166 illuminated initials, it is the largest English bible to have survived from the Middle Ages and may have been intended for readings in the chapel royal.
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It has several illuminations of St Jerome in his study, showing desks perhaps similar to those built for Henry at Eltham. His son recognized the beauty and value of the volume: in his last will of June 1421, Henry V directed that although it was currently deposited with the nuns of Syon (Middlesex), it was to be returned after his death to the possession of his as yet unborn son. Such sentiments lend support to the argument that it was Henry IV and Henry V, rather than the traditional Edward IV, who were the real founders of the royal library in England.
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Nor was the care Henry had taken with his sons' education before 1399 allowed to lapse, for shortly after he came to the throne he granted an annuity of ten marks to John Wodehouse to teach grammar to Princes Thomas and John. Monstrelet said that all the king's sons were ‘well educated in knowledge’ (
bien adrecez en science
).
¹⁶

One chronicler, writing much later, believed Henry also to have been a great builder, but in truth his architectural legacy was inferior to most of his predecessors and successors.
¹⁷
Richard II spent about £900 a year on
building works, Henry IV £700, and Henry V £1,400, although the figures for Henry IV and V do not include sums spent on the duchy of Lancaster houses and castles, which were not placed under the control of sheriffs and thus separately funded. Henry IV's most important new projects were the gatehouse of Lancaster castle and the rebuilding of Eltham palace. The Lancaster gatehouse was begun in 1399 and not completed until late in Henry V's reign. Paid for by the duchy at the rate of 200 marks a year, it had two imposing octagonal towers surmounted by projecting battlements topped off by twin towers with machicolations.
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In an age known for its greater emphasis on comfort and less on defensibility, the architect at Lancaster was clearly under orders not to compromise. Above the central archway was a niche with a statue of John of Gaunt flanked by shields with the arms of the king and the prince of Wales – a monument to dynastic power in the north.

Eltham may have had a moat, a drawbridge, and a ‘great wall’ (over which the duke of York was alleged to have planned to climb at Christmas 1404), but it was not a castle. It was Henry's favourite retreat, where he brought his new queen for eight weeks in 1403 and where he usually spent Christmas.
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Barely had he become king when he set in train the building of a grand new suite of royal apartments to the west of the chapel. In addition to the usual service areas (kitchen, buttery, pantry, scalding-house, larder, saucery, and a latrine adjoining the moat), this included a new royal chamber, 38 ft by 18 ft (11.5 × 5.5 metres), parlour, 51 ft by 13 ft (15.5 × 4 metres) oratory and study, all constructed of timber with wainscoted ceilings, bay windows, stone fireplaces and connecting spiral staircases (
wyndyngstaires
). Next to the king's chamber there was also a ‘secret chamber’, divided by a partition wall (
entreclose
). The windows in his chamber were glazed with crowns, shields, collars, flowers, birds, beasts and babewyns alongside the customary
Souvenez vous de moi
, the arms of St George, and figures of St George, the Trinity and the Salutation of the Virgin.

The king's new study, a place for seclusion and contemplation, had less Lancastrian and more sacred imagery; its seven-light window was filled with the figures of St John the Baptist, St George, Becket, the Trinity, St John the Evangelist and (in the middle, occupying two windows) the Salutation of the Virgin. These were Henry's favourite devotional images: among the New Year gifts he distributed in 1402 were a golden tabernacle of the Trinity garnished with pearls and a sapphire, another with images of the Coronation and Salutation of the Virgin, and a golden tablet of St George on a tower.
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His study had a ‘great desk’ on two levels ‘to keep the king's books inside’, another, smaller desk, and two benches in which books were probably kept as well. He may also have kept his chessboard here.
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Nearby were separate chambers for the king's confessor and the keeper of his jewels. In 1403, work began on a complementary suite of rooms for Queen Joan, two storeys high and 35 ft (10.668 metres) wide, including a parlour and two withdrawing chambers, one on each floor, with bay windows. By the time this was completed in 1407, at least £1,100 had been spent at Eltham under the supervision of the king's master carpenter, a post held from 1399 to 1404 by Hugh Herland, the man responsible for the hammer-beam roof of Westminster great hall, and thereafter by Thomas Tuttemond.
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Yet although the new royal apartments at Eltham reveal something of the way Henry spent his leisure, it was also a place for work. Elsewhere in the palace there were individual chambers for officers and friends whose advice the king most frequently sought: John Beaufort (chamberlain), Thomas Erpingham (under-chamberlain), the treasurer of England, the steward, treasurer and controller of the household, John Norbury and Mary Hervy, governess to Henry's younger children. The amenities at Eltham were certainly conducive to relaxation – it had a ‘great garden’ with vines, a park in which jousts were held to entertain the Byzantine emperor at Christmas 1400, a bath-house and a dancing chamber (
camera tripudiancium
) built by Richard II – but no king could escape the cares of ruling for long.
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Government records show just how burdensome those cares were. On average, Henry responded to around fifty or sixty petitions a week. Most of
these were requests for grace or favour: lands, offices, benefices, custodies, pardons for crime, requests for forfeited goods or allowances of timber, venison, even rabbits.
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More time-consuming financial and judicial decisions would be siphoned off to the council or the justices, but Henry dealt with matters concerning the royal grace in person.
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Naturally he did not do so unaided. Before petitioners were admitted to the king's chamber, they would already have had to convince the chamberlain or his deputies that theirs was a deserving cause. The quality of the advice the king received mattered greatly, not just from his chamberlains and councillors but also from intercessors. The mediation of intercessors was crucial, and intercession a routine and accepted method of securing royal favour, seen not so much as undue influence (although it could become that) as another way for the king to take counsel.
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The royal chamber was a crowded arena at times when the king was hearing petitions. It was ‘for the quiet and tranquillity of our royal person’ that Henry announced in November 1402 that in future he would only deal with petitions on Wednesdays and Fridays, to leave more time for ‘our other honest occupations’.
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Of these, there were many. Between October 1404 and August 1405, Henry ordered the issue of some 1,500 letters under the great seal and many hundreds more under the privy seal and signet, as well as dealing with 2,500 or so petitions. This was in addition to presiding for six weeks at the parliament of October 1404, holding at least three great councils, conducting negotiations with foreign powers, preparing an expedition to Wales in the spring, spending most of June and July in the north dealing with the risings of Scrope and Northumberland, then returning in August to confront the French expeditionary force in the Welsh marches. This was an age of overwhelmingly personal kingship.

Nevertheless, Henry managed to maintain an aura of accessibility, a welcome contrast to the ‘kingship of distance’ cultivated by his predecessor.
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Negotiations between the king and speakers in parliament were strongly worded and often exasperating, but they
were
negotiations in a way that the toxic exchanges of Richard's parliaments were not. This ‘conversationality’ was also one of the characteristics of the poetry circulating amongst the clerks and lawyers who worked in the Westminster offices or the royal household, which was political and critical without being menacing.
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Whether or not it is literally true that Richard II used to sit on his throne after dinner ‘talking to no one but watching everyone’, obliging those who caught his eye to bend the knee, it suggests a kingly style far removed from that of Henry IV and Henry V, who preferred after dinner to have a cushion placed on the sideboard in the royal chamber, against which they ‘would lean for the space of an hour or more to receive bills and complaints from whomsoever would come’.
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Accessibility was one facet of the regal image which Henry projected. John Strecche also claimed of the king that: ‘all the people of his realm were so moved by the sight of him that in many towns his face – a sweet sight to his friends, a fearsome one to his enemies – was painted and fashioned in prominent places so that people could always gaze at him and observe his countenance and features’.
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The only surviving contemporary statue of the king stands above the east window of Battlefield chapel, Shrewsbury, which does not seem to be the prominent position envisaged by Strecche; nor is Henry known to have commissioned any portrait paintings of himself, unlike Richard II.
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It may be that what the chronicler meant was that it was the king's supporters who erected images of him, as Henry did for his father at Lancaster, but if so his testimony is uncorroborated. Yet it would be unwise simply to dismiss
it. Propagation of royal imagery focusing on the personal representation of the monarch became more common at this time, and Henry was at the forefront of the trend.
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