Henry IV (8 page)

Hopeful of having ensured the integrity of his inheritance, Buckingham shipped his troops to Calais and, on 24 July 1380, set out with his army on a campaign from which he would not return for nine months.
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No sooner had he done so than Gaunt made his move. Three days after his brother's crossing, he secured a royal grant of Mary's marriage, ‘for marrying her to his son Henry’,
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and shortly after this induced her mother, Joan countess of Hereford, to spirit her away from Pleshey and take her to Arundel, where the young couple were rapidly betrothed.
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They were married on 5 February 1381 in a service held at Countess Joan's manor of Rochford (Essex).
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The connivance of the king and council, who would have been aware of the blow this inflicted on Buckingham, is a measure of the financial and political leverage Gaunt exercised in Richard II's minority government. Gaunt attended and presented Mary with a ruby, as well as paying for the festivities; Henry's sisters, Philippa and Elizabeth, each gave their new sister-in-law a goblet and ewer. The king and Edmund earl of
Cambridge (Gaunt's younger, and Buckingham's older, brother) may also have been there, for ten royal minstrels and four of Cambridge's minstrels received gratuities from Gaunt for enlivening the proceedings.
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There was nothing hasty or clandestine about the wedding.

Buckingham, meanwhile, was still in France, preparing to withdraw from a frustrating and embarrassing campaign.
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When he realized that his brothers had colluded against him in the loss of half of his inheritance, ‘he became melancholy, and never after loved the duke of Lancaster as he had done hitherto’.
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In addition to the personal slight, there was also the question of how the details of the Bohun partition would be worked out, an issue which it took fifteen years to resolve, and although Henry and Buckingham would soon demonstrate that they were capable of concerted political action, theirs was a relationship which henceforward seems always to have been tinged by a degree of personal rivalry.

His wedding excepted, there is one other day during the first half of 1381 when Henry's whereabouts are known with certainty. This was Friday 14 June, a day of mortal danger for the young heir to the Lancastrian inheritance, for it was the second of three days during which gangs of rebels from Kent, Essex and London ran amok in the streets of the capital on a scale never seen before and rarely since: the climactic moment of the Peasants' Revolt. Henry was in the Tower of London that Friday morning, along with his cousin the king, Richard's mother Princess Joan, the chancellor and treasurer of England (Simon Sudbury and Robert Hales), and a number of other lords, knights and clerks.
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Sudbury and Hales had already been singled out by the rebels as objects of special hatred to them; so too had John of Gaunt. The rebels demanded the heads of all three of them, accusing them of treachery to the young king. Fortunately for Gaunt, he was in Scotland at the time, but that was little consolation to those associated with him, some of whom were summarily despatched by the rebels.
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Early in the morning of 14 June, the fourteen-year-old king left the Tower with some of his advisers, having arranged to meet the rebel leaders at Mile End, outside the city walls. His reasons for doing so are fairly clear – to
negotiate an end to the violence, to draw the rebels away from the city, and to give those in the Tower who were at risk a chance to escape – but his plan misfired. Sudbury and Hales attempted to flee, but were spotted and forced to retreat; when, around mid-morning, groups of rebels broke into the Tower and began searching it for ‘traitors’, they were located in the chapel of St John, dragged out to Tower Hill, and immediately beheaded. William Appleton, a Franciscan friar who was also Gaunt's physician, suffered the same fate.
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Whether Henry was identified but spared on account of his age, or smuggled out of the Tower, or managed to hide from the rebels, is not known, but escape he did, and shortly after he had become king, when a certain John Ferrour rebelled against him, he was granted a pardon by Henry because he had ‘wonderfully and gloriously’ (
mirabiliter et gloriose
) saved the king's life in the Tower of London nearly twenty years earlier. Ferrour is usually said to have come from Southwark, but there is no record (until 1400) of either Gaunt or his son rewarding him for saving Henry's life.
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By the evening of the following day, Saturday 15 June, the revolt in London had been brought under control and the process of suppression began. In the neighbouring counties, however, especially in Essex, Norfolk and Suffolk, the violence barely abated, so that during the last two weeks of June detachments of nobles and gentry were sent out to restore order. Among them was Henry – the first occasion on which he had been involved in military, or at least punitive, action – although there is no indication as to where he went.
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From October 1381 until September 1382, however, the survival of his first household account makes it possible to trace his activities on a regular, sometimes daily, basis. It also tells us much about the lifestyle of a young nobleman during the later fourteenth century and about the tastes and interests Henry was beginning to develop.

For an earl, albeit a young one, Henry's domestic establishment appears modest. His income for the year totalled £426, his expenses only a little over half that sum, £237.
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Between ten and twelve horses were stabled in his household, and he had eighteen servants, the most important of whom were Sir William de Mountendre, his ‘master’; his receiver Hugh Waterton,
whose family stood as high as any in Gaunt's confidence; and his chaplain, Hugh Herle. These three had formed the nucleus of Henry's household for at least the past five years.
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In addition to his boyhood companion Thomas Swynford, Henry also had two esquires (‘Arnald and Wynsell’) and three clerks to expedite his affairs (William Loveney, John Waterton, and ‘Ralph the clerk’). The below stairs component of the household comprised a wardrober (John Dyndon) and his page (Henry), a valet of the chamber (Thomas Totty), a sergeant (Thomas Page), a servant of the kitchen (John Blakedon), a purveyor (William) and three men to care for the horses: John Gysely, keeper of the palfreys, and two sumptermen, Richard and John.

Henry's expenditure fell broadly into two categories: what was needed to keep his household functioning on a daily basis (wages of servants, care of the horses, expenses of messengers, etc.) and what he spent on maintaining the noble lifestyle (clothes, jewels, leisure, gifts, and so forth). About £60 was spent during the course of the year on clothes, textiles, furs and shoes, bought mostly from regular suppliers in London.
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A further £26 was paid to goldsmiths, some of it for new purchases, some for the repair or refashioning of existing items. For the jousts which followed the wedding of Richard II and Anne of Bohemia in late January, Henry bought 1,000 sequins of gilded copper; a month earlier he had spent £3 on twenty-nine gilded rings from Paris which he distributed as New Year gifts. By contrast, just two rings of gilded silver bought as clasps for a falconer's bag cost over £1.
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Falconry gloves, hounds for the hunt, gratuities to his father's minstrels for providing entertainment on New Year's Day and a modest four shillings in total for gaming (
ludendum ad tabulas
) all bear witness to his enthusiastic embrace of the noble lifestyle.
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Also to be expected, although perhaps not in one so young, is the evidence for Henry's jousting, the preferred entertainment of the court as well as vital military training. He took part in at least three jousts during the year: at Smithfield during the festivities following the royal wedding in January, at Windsor during the Garter Day
celebrations, and at Hertford castle on 1 May.
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Henry also had a bow which had belonged to his mother, for which he bought arrows and bird-bolts.
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All this suggests an active early interest in martial pursuits; Henry would later acquire something of a reputation for jousting.

Almsgiving and gift exchange accounted for less than £20 of Henry's expenditure in 1381–2. He distributed a regular penny a day to paupers and more when travelling, on feast days, or to mark anniversaries such as those of his grandfathers, Henry of Grosmont and King Edward III. He dried the feet of fifteen paupers on his fifteenth birthday, and on Good Friday gave a penny each to twenty-five indigents at the gate of Hertford castle.
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Apart from traditional gift-giving occasions such as New Year's Day,
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he also gave occasional gifts such as wine to his sister Philippa and a horse to the earl of Nottingham.
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Yet Henry received considerably more in gifts than he disbursed, mainly from his father and Duchess Constanza,
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on whom he was still financially dependent, because his earldom of Derby was a courtesy title. Most of his income came either from the annual sum of 250 marks which Gaunt had been assigning to him for the past few years, or from the issues of the manors of Soham (Cambridgeshire), Daventry (Northamptonshire) and Passenham (Buckinghamshire), which Gaunt had made over to him, and which yielded a combined total of £192.
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His reliance on his father is also reflected in his itinerary.
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Although he visited Pontefract independently in October 1381 while Gaunt was engaged in political matters in the south-east, Henry spent the winter and spring almost constantly with his father, either in the Midlands or at various Lancastrian residences around London, where they attended a succession of court events together.
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Christmas was spent at
Leicester, Easter at Hertford. During the summer, Gaunt and Henry toured the Midlands and northern estates of the duchy. June, July and August saw them at Kenilworth, Higham Ferrers and Tutbury, with visits to Beverley in late June and Lincoln in early July; most of September was spent at York and Pontefract, before Gaunt's return to London for the third parliamentary session of the year, which opened on 6 October. The fact that his account fails to include any expenditure on food and drink indicates that Henry and his servants still boarded and lodged in his father's household, of which, in effect, they formed a sub-unit – not so much a separate household as a separate chamber within the ducal household. Nor was Mary de Bohun mentioned in the account: aged eleven, she was still living at Rochford with her mother, Countess Joan, to whom Gaunt granted 100 marks a year for her maintenance.
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Henry did visit Rochford once, on 18 April 1382, shortly after the birth of a son to his sister-in-law, the countess of Buckingham.
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He and Mary also doubtless met at court events such as Richard II and Anne's wedding in January 1382, but not until she reached her majority in December 1384 did they begin to cohabit.

Henry's account also provides evidence of his involvement in two controversies. First, it confirms his presence with his father at Lincoln on 11 July 1382, the day judgment was passed by Bishop Buckingham in the cathedral chapter house on the notorious Lollard preacher William Swinderby.
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Swinderby had been preaching in and around Leicester for several years. Gaunt had initially supported him, granting him an allowance and a hermitage in the woods near Leicester abbey (of which he was the patron); according to the Leicester abbey chronicler Henry Knighton, ‘the pious duke of Lancaster always liked to give assistance to the Lollards, for, on account of their appearance and the allure of their sermons, he believed them to be God's saints’ – although the chronicler added that ‘like many others, he was deceived in this’.
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Gaunt had certainly acquired such a reputation during the 1370s, not least because of his defence of the
controversial Oxford theologian John Wyclif,
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but by the summer of 1382 his help for men such as Wyclif and Swinderby was becoming an embarrassment. The contentious nature of Wyclif's views, especially concerning the Eucharist, had led to his forced withdrawal from Oxford in the autumn of 1381, and at church councils in London in May and June 1382 several of his opinions were condemned as erroneous or heretical, and a more vigorous process was begun to hunt down and silence his disciples. This was what brought Swinderby to trial.

Among Swinderby's supporters was Philip Repingdon, a canon at Leicester abbey who had studied at Oxford, where he fell under Wyclif's spell. It was probably Repingdon who, with Gaunt's at least tacit support, helped to establish in Leicester the first identifiable Lollard cell outside Oxford University.
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When Swinderby, following his days as a hermit, expressed an interest in a more coenobitic lifestyle, the canons of Leicester, ‘believing him to be the lord's anointed’, granted him a chamber in the abbey church along with food and a pension.
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Swinderby's views were generally more anticlerical than heretical: among the characteristically Lollard themes of his sermons was the idea that tithes were pure alms and could be withheld from an errant priest; that excommunication was a matter for God rather than for the Church; that preaching should not be constrained by episcopal prohibition; that temporal possessions undermined the true work of the Church; and (more riskily) that a priest in mortal sin could not perform the Eucharistic miracle.
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Nevertheless, the anticlericalism of the 1381 rebels, who some believed to have been inspired by Wyclif, led to an association in the minds of the authorities between anticlericalism, heresy and sedition, and Swinderby was swept up in the net. He was first ordered to stop preaching and appear before Bishop Buckingham's officials on 5 March 1382. This reprimand was ineffective (Swinderby simply ‘made his pulpit’ between two millstones in the street and continued to preach from there),
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and on 12 May further investigations were ordered. It was as a result of these that he appeared in Lincoln cathedral on 11 July, where, before an audience including Gaunt, Henry and other notables, he vigorously proclaimed his innocence. However, barely had he begun to purge himself when a number of friars and priests shouted out for him
to be burned and began collecting wood for the pyre, declaring his guilt to be notorious.
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It was Gaunt who persuaded the bishop to commute the sentence; instead, Swinderby was ordered to recant his views publicly and banned from preaching without licence, but although he moved away from Leicester he did not give up preaching, and nine years later he was again brought to trial for heresy, although once again he escaped with his life.
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