Henry IV (81 page)

Henry's response to Timur was in line with that of other Western European monarchs who, especially since Nicopolis, viewed the Ottomans as a real threat to Christianity and anyone who opposed them as a potential ally. In fact Timur was also a Muslim, although more tolerant than some towards Christian merchants and pilgrims, but he died in 1405 and before long the Ottomans renewed their relentless expansion. Nevertheless, Henry continued to offer moral support to crusading orders as far as circumstances permitted and was remembered after his death as a king who fought not just for England but for Christendom.
⁶⁷
It was ‘for love of our Saviour's cross’, said Strecche, that he had warred in faraway places against unbelievers, thereby earning much praise. John Capgrave expressed similar sentiments forty years later.
⁶⁸

Patronage of duels and tournaments was another way for Henry to keep his chivalric credentials in the public eye. Within a few months of his accession he had arranged for Janico Dartasso and Sir John Cornwall to enter the lists against two followers of Louis of Orléans who had come to England hoping to uphold French national honour but were soundly beaten at
York.
⁶⁹
The vitriol accompanying the French challenges of 1401–3 and the English humiliation at Montendre in May 1402 persuaded the king to refrain from further combats, but by 1406 they had resumed, and continued until the end of the reign.
⁷⁰
Especially notable, not least because they led to resounding English triumphs, were the visit in 1406 of the dashing young Alexander, the Scottish earl of Mar, to joust at Smithfield with the equally dashing young Edmund, earl of Kent, and the week-long eight-a-side combat between England and Hainault in 1409, also at Smithfield, at which the Hainaulters were led by Jean de Werchin but still lost to the English, captained by John Beaufort, by a score of seven to one.
⁷¹

Despite being couched in the language of chivalric brotherhood, there was a sharp jingoistic edge to these challenges. Some combats, however, had a more deadly purpose. Early in 1402 the Hampshire knight Percival Sonday was accused by Yevan ap Griffith Lloyd of treason, and the king ordered that a duel be held at Smithfield; Sonday won and Henry granted him an annuity of forty marks, while his accuser was put to death. Four years later, again accused of treason, Sonday had to fight another duel against the esquire John Walsh; once again he was the victor, while Walsh was immediately drawn to Tyburn and hanged. On 12 August 1407 two citizens of Bordeaux, one of whom had accused the other of incitement to treason, entered the lists at Nottingham in the king's presence, but on this occasion, after they had fought for a while on both horse and foot, the king called a halt, declaring both combatants to have done their duty and discharging them.
⁷²
This was always a king's prerogative, but exercised by Henry in a more chivalric way than Richard had done nine years earlier at
Coventry. To preside over jousts – a fusion of self-help, regal authority and divine justice – was, in Adam Usk's view, one of the trappings of regality.
⁷³

If Henry's martial reputation was one of his most exploitable assets, his greatest liability was his questionable assumption of the throne. Even before he became king, chancery and exchequer clerks were being drilled in the art of damage limitation. Documents issued by the administration did not use words such as ‘invasion’ or ‘expedition’ to refer to the events of 1398–9. Henry's summer campaign was his ‘first arrival’ (
adventus
) or ‘recent landing’ (
applicatio
); the minimal resistance he encountered was ‘the malice (
malitia
) of King Richard and other enemies of the lord’. Nor was the term ‘exile’ used to describe his time in Paris, since it would imply that he had returned unlawfully; rather, he was said to have undertaken a ‘certain journey’ (
quodam viagio
) or ‘crossing to foreign parts’ (
transitum versus partes transmarinos
), while his inherited duchy lands were not those which had been confiscated, but those he had held ‘before his coronation’ (
ante coronacionem suam
). This avoidance of terminology which implied force or illegality on Henry's part was maintained with striking consistency by the new government.
⁷⁴

Lancastrian propaganda has long been recognized as both mendacious and effective. To expect it to have been anything other than mendacious would be naïve. It is the business of governments to dissemble; the propaganda of governments is the white noise of history. Yet if the euphemisms and subterfuges employed by Henry to justify his actions did not differ in their essentials from those of his predecessors or successors, the methodical way in which they were carried through was impressive. The thirty-three articles condemning Richard and the text of Henry's claim to the throne, spoken and written in English, reached a wide audience, reproduced in whole or in part by chroniclers summoned to witness the high drama enacted at Westminster in September 1399, and echoed in the work of Chaucer, Gower and popular versifiers. Copies of the
Record and Process
, or something like it, were also sent abroad.
⁷⁵
Government policies were widely proclaimed and given a disingenuous gloss. The unpopular decision to suspend annuities in 1404 was read out in more than a hundred places up and down the realm, and explained not in terms of insolvency (the real
reason) but by the need to distinguish between the deserving and the undeserving, a construction designed to appeal to annuitants who used the same arguments to differentiate those who should be compelled to work, the able-bodied, from those who could not.
⁷⁶
Omission might also be propagandist, as with the studied avoidance in government documents of any discussion of the Mortimer claim: Hotspur was accused of allying with the Welsh and Scots, of ‘calling us Henry of Lancaster and saying that Richard II is still alive’, but no mention was made in government records of his call to put the earl of March on the throne.
⁷⁷

Yet if some historians chose to go on believing Henry's propaganda for half a millennium or more, it does not follow that his contemporaries did likewise.
⁷⁸
Hope, expectation and frustration, ever the handmaids of political change, meant that the language of reform and renewal escaped the control of its propagators and was taken up by friend and foe alike as the standard by which to judge the new regime's performance. Time and again the king's words came back to him in shades of meaning, sometimes querulous or reproachful, sometimes simply baffled. Accusations of Henry's extravagance, wilfulness and wastefulness, of succumbing to the blandishments of flatterers and ignoring inconvenient truths, even of tyranny – the substance of his charges against Richard – surfaced early in the new reign in the petitions of the parliamentary commons, the poetry of advice and complaint, and the manifestos of his enemies. The framing device used by the author of
Mum and the Sothsegger
, a poem probably written in 1405, was that of the narrator's search for someone bold enough to tell the king of the grievances of his people, because no truth-teller (
sothsegger
) could be found in the royal household, where all were in thrall to
Mum
, the personification of weak-willed sycophancy.
⁷⁹
When Henry ‘first came to land’, his subjects felt free to complain to him, but now those who did so risked
imprisonment or worse, while the parliamentary commons feared the consequences of speaking out.
⁸⁰
Only in a dream did the narrator find comfort, in the form of an old beekeeper who assured him that ultimately truth would prevail. The poem was by no means inimical to Henry but rather an exercise in loyal criticism larded with complaints about the ills of society and the traditional failings of its orders and estates: monks, friars, bishops, nobles, knights, townsmen and labourers. Yet the central message, that the king lacked someone to tell him the truth, was unmistakable.

Even the supportive John Strecche admitted that Henry ‘lost the greater part of the love of his people’, because he failed to keep the promises made at his accession. Poets such as the privy seal clerk Thomas Hoccleve and the king's esquire Henry Scogan reflect this loss of trust.
⁸¹
Hoccleve's plea for the reinstatement of his annuity was not simply a personal matter; the leitmotiv of monetary fraud running through the
Regement of Princes
(
c
.1411) also served as a commentary on the government's financial incompetence. Scogan's
Moral Balade
, which was addressed to the king's sons or possibly to the royal household more generally, warned against the dangers of a life of luxury and frivolity. These authors were not outsiders, certainly not enemies of Lancastrian kingship; it was the servants and supporters of the regime who constituted their audience.
⁸²
Yet, needless to say, Henry's enemies also ensured that the language of deceit and mismanagement rebounded on him. The manifestos attributed to the Percys in 1403 and Archbishop Scrope in 1405 echo the
Record and Process
in their talk of harsh taxation, parliamentary manipulation, wasteful government and corrupt counsel.
⁸³
Popular verses in praise of Hotspur and Edmund Mortimer have not survived, nor unsurprisingly has the ‘bag’ of ‘privy prose . . . ballad-wise’ referred to in
Mum and the Sothsegger
as bursting with popular opinions on the king's vices and virtues, although echoes of them are to be found in chroniclers’ comments.
⁸⁴
Popular report, marching with prophecy and dissolving
into rumour, had the potential to inflict real damage on the king, as with the gathering belief that Richard was alive, the Chinese whispers about his undertakings regarding taxation, the martyr-cult focused on Richard Scrope's tomb, or the alleged link between Henry's ‘leprosy’ and the archbishop's death. The suppression in 1401–2 of Welsh minstrelsy (described improbably as ‘the cause of the insurrection and rebellion in Wales’) and the vain attempts to deny access to Scrope's tomb in York Minster were largely ineffective.
⁸⁵
Nor was it only among the poor that rumour ran riot: there was, and still is, no certainty as to who was complicit in each of the plots and risings of 1400 to 1405, but the roll-call of those obliged to deny their involvement is testimony to the web of speculation.
⁸⁶

Nothing indicates the king's failure to suppress dissent better than his response: the hanging of the friars in 1402, the clampdown on ‘vagabonds’ spreading rumours, the beheading of the hermit and prophet William Norham at York in 1403.
⁸⁷
Henry had a keen sense of the power of spectacle to create shock and awe, and some of his
coups de théâtre
were jarringly memorable, such as the piecemeal dismemberment of William Clerk at the Tower in 1401, William Serle's stations of the cross from Yorkshire to London in the summer of 1404, the parcelling out of traitors' heads between a dozen or more north-eastern boroughs in the summer of 1405, or the beheading of Archbishop Scrope outside the walls of his city before an audience of prostrate and semi-naked citizenry. Political theatre conveyed a myriad of messages. The bonfire of Richard's blank charters at the London Guildhall in November 1399 was designed to signal the end of government by tyranny. Relatively minor triumphs were celebrated almost like a second Crécy or Poitiers. Following the Epiphany Rising, a parade was led through the city streets to St Paul's by Archbishop Arundel chanting the
Te Deum
in thanksgiving for the sparing of the king's life; the defeat of a Breton raiding party at Dartmouth in April 1404 occasioned another procession, again accompanied by the
Te Deum
, this time to the Confessor's shrine at Westminster, where the king delivered a sermon to
offer the victory to God.
⁸⁸
The new great seal cast in late 1406 was iconographically the finest of the late Middle Ages in England, an intricate, yet integrated, perpendicular reticulation of the patron saints of English monarchy (Michael, George, Edward the Confessor and Edmund the Martyr), which also incorporated the change from France Ancient to France Modern and Prince Henry's arms as prince of Wales, duke of Cornwall and earl of Chester, a fusion of national and dynastic destiny.
⁸⁹
Visibility was one of the salient features of Henry's kingship. By turns feared and revered, he ensured that royal power could never be ignored.

¹
BL Add. MS 35,295, fo. 262r. The Henry IV section of Strecche's chronicle has not been printed; the Latin reads as follows:
Hic rex Henricus forme fuerat elegantus, viribus fortis, miles strenuus, in armis acer, in omni actu tirocinii sagax et circumspectus, in bello semper fortunatus, in factis felix et victor ubique gloriosus, in musica micans et mirabiliter litteraturis et maxime in morali
.

²
By 1408–9 Henry had only four minstrels (E 101/405/22, fo. 32); for singing clerks see DL 28/1/3, fo. 3v (1392); DL 28/4/1, fos. 13v–14r (1397–8). For Mary de Bohun's and Joan of Navarre's interest in music, see above, p. 78, and below, p. 421.

³
By 1402 there were eighteen chaplains in the king's chapel, more than enough for polyphonic pieces. Henry's statutes for Fotheringhay college in 1410–11 stipulated that there should be twelve chaplains, eight clerks and thirteen choristers and that a skilled instructor should be chosen to train them: F. Harrison,
Music in Medieval Britain
(London, 1958), 22, 27. Some of the best polyphonic pieces of this period can now be heard on
Music for Henry V and the House of Lancaster by the Binchois Consort
, director Andrew Kirkman, with text by Philip Weller (CD, Hyperion Records, 2011); I am grateful to Susan Boynton, Andrew Kirkman and Philip Weller for their help with this section. For numbers of chaplains, see R. Bowers, ‘The Music and Musical Establishment of St George's Chapel in the Fifteenth Century’, in
St George's Chapel Windsor in the Late Middle Ages
, ed. C. Richmond and E. Scarff (Windsor, 2001), 171–212, at pp. 177–83. In the 1390s Gaunt was employing the French composer Henry Pycard: J. Caldwell,
The Oxford History of English Music I
(Oxford, 1991), 119.