Henry IV (83 page)

⁷⁰
Above, p. 203;
PROME
, viii.102; Given-Wilson, ‘Quarrels of Old Women’, 37–42;
Giles
, 60. Jousts were held several times a year, mostly at Smithfield: E 101/404/18, mm. 1–2; E 403/571, 22 Nov. 1401, 1 March 1402; E 403/573, 4 April 1402; E 403/591, 1 June 1407; E 403/605, 3 June 1410; E 403/606, 23 March 1411.

⁷¹
Giles
, 43;
Brut
, ii.369–70;
Great Chronicle of London
, 87;
SAC II
, 478–9; Given-Wilson, ‘Quarrels of Old Women’, 37–9. The king paid the expenses of Werchin (‘the original Don Quijote’) and his companions (E 404/24, nos. 533, 538). He also rewarded English knights who went abroad to perform feats of arms, such as John Cornwall in 1409 and Walter Hungerford in 1406 (E 404/24, no. 487;
Foedera
, viii.436).

⁷²
E 403/571, 1 March 1402; E 403/573, 4 April 1402;
Brut
, ii.368–9; Pepin, ‘The French Offensives of 1404–1407’, 33;
CGR 1407–9
, no. 25;
Chronicle of London, 1089–1483
, 90.

⁷³
Usk
, 176.

⁷⁴
See, for example, DL 29/728/11987; SC6/1157/4; DL 28/4/1, fos. 6r, 19r; E 403/564, 6 November; DL 28/1/10, fo. 32v. Richard's administration referred to these events quite differently: see, for example, the chamberlain of Chester's account cited above, p. 133.

⁷⁵
J. Scattergood,
Politics and Poetry in the Fifteenth Century
(New York, 1972), 115–16;
Chronicles of London
, 56, 61.

⁷⁶
Nuttall,
Creation of Lancastrian Kingship
, 126; M. Rubin,
Charity and Community in Medieval Cambridge
(Cambridge, 1986), 68–71.

⁷⁷
Foedera
, viii.313.

⁷⁸
See the comments of Clarke and Galbraith, ‘Deposition of Richard II’, 137.

⁷⁹
Mum and the Sothsegger
, ed. M. Day and R. Steele (EETS, London, 1936). Helen Barr,
The Piers Plowman Tradition
(London, 1993), 23, proposed a date of ‘shortly after 1409’ for the poem, but early 1405 seems more likely, as its original editors suggested. It certainly dates from Henry IV's reign and was written after 1402, since it refers to the friars hanged at Tyburn and to the king's decision in 1402 to hear petitions twice a week (ll. 120, 420, 1672;
Foedera
, viii. 282). The reference to licensed and unlicensed preachers (ll. 408–14) is more likely to refer to the 1401 Lollard Statute than Arundel's
Constitutions
of 1407–9 (
PROME
, viii.123). There are resonances with the parliament of October 1404, which discussed the resumption of crown lands and granted generous taxes, thereby helping to restore solvency to the royal household, but the passage exhorting prelates to counsel the king carries no reference to the fate of Archbishop Scrope in 1405.

⁸⁰
Mum and the Sothsegger
, ll. 143–70.

⁸¹
BL Add. MS 35,295, fo. 262r; Hoccleve also emphasized the need for truth-tellers (
Regement of Princes
, 70); E 404/15, no. 115 (£20 annuity to Henry Scogan ‘our esquire’, 4 Dec. 1399). There is no evidence for the tradition that Scogan tutored the king's sons (cf. D. Gray, ‘Scogan, Henry’,
ODNB
, 49.313–14).

⁸²
Nuttall,
Creation of Lancastrian Kingship
, 58–66, 109–22; Scattergood,
Politics and Poetry
, 19–32; G. Dodd, ‘Changing Perspectives: Parliament, Poetry and the “Civil Service” under Richard II and Henry IV’,
Parliamentary History
25 (2006), 299–322.

⁸³
Above (manifestos), pp. 223 and 274.

⁸⁴
For example, that in 1401 the people began to grumble against purveyance, or the quip that his decision to tax stipendiary vicars and friars for the first time in 1405 made Henry the first king to have got so many priests to pray for him:
Usk
, 160–1;
SAC II
, 314, 470;
CE
, 389;
Mum and the Sothsegger
, ll. 1343–5.

⁸⁵
Foedera
, viii.185, 255;
PROME
, viii.211, 362;
SAC II
, 454–6; Raine,
Historians of the Church of York
, iii.291–4;
Signet Letters
, nos. 941, 944. In 1401 a soothsayer, John Kyme, was brought before the council (
Select Cases in Council
, ed. Leadam and Baldwin, xxxiv); the order to the bishop of Lincoln (Repingdon) on 2 January 1406 to search out and imprison soothsayers, magicians and necromancers and, if necessary, bring them before the king was probably more for religious than for political reasons (
Foedera
, viii.427–8;
POPC
, i.288).

⁸⁶
An example is the investigation into the abduction of the Mortimer boys (
SAC II
, 430–3).

⁸⁷
Usk
, 122–3;
SAC II
, 380;
CE
, 397.

⁸⁸
Usk
, 89;
SAC II
, 402–5.

⁸⁹
The seal was probably used for the first time on 16 Nov. 1406. The change from France Ancient to France Modern, perhaps prompted by the hope that Prince Henry might marry a Valois princess, reduced the number of fleurs-de-lys to three: J. Cherry, ‘Some Lancastrian Seals’, in
The Lancastrian Court
, ed. Stratford, 19–28, at pp. 20–2; M. Heenan, ‘The French Quartering in the Arms of Henry IV’,
The Coat of Arms
10 (1968–9), 215–21; Bennett, ‘The Royal Succession’, in
Rebellion and Survival
, 25; I am grateful to Dr Adrian Ailes for his comments on Henry's seals.

Chapter 26

COUNCIL, COURT AND HOUSEHOLD

Next after the king in the chain of command, the immediate instruments for the implementation of the royal will, came the council and the household, the latter also serving as the hub around which coalesced the king's court. Although it did not lack political authority, the king's continual or Privy Council was more an executive than a strictly political body.
¹
It met almost daily in the Star Chamber at Westminster, usually without the king, although at times of pressure or crisis Henry might summon it to join him elsewhere. When asked to nominate his councillors in parliament, as in 1404 and twice in 1406, Henry gave between seventeen and twenty-two names, but this represented more a pool from which a quorum might be drawn than a list of regular attendees, and in practice business was often transacted by the king's three chief officers – the chancellor (who presided), treasurer, and keeper of the privy seal – often sitting with no more than three or four others; when the king was present, however, numbers could rise to a dozen or even above twenty.
²

The council's remit was extensive: it heard petitions, advised the king on appointments, military commands and security, debated diplomatic initiatives, helped to plan campaigns, acted as the principal conduit for information between Henry and the Westminster offices, and had the legal power to subpoena witnesses, informants or suspects (heretics, spies, rumour-mongers), to take bonds and oaths and to impose fines or imprisonment, though not corporal or capital penalties. Sensitive cases, some involving the exercise of equitable jurisdiction, were sometimes referred to it, for which the king's legal officers would attend, although its relationship to the
common law was carefully monitored.
³
Its principal responsibility, however, was finance: it negotiated loans (and individual councillors were themselves regular lenders), determined priorities, juggled assignments on local revenues and drew up working budgets.
⁴
At parliament's request, it was also meant to approve royal grants, leases, wages and expenses: the frequent addition to Henry's grants of the clause ‘with the assent of the council’ was one way in which he sought to guard against criticism of his generosity.
⁵

With the exception of some changes following the 1403 rebellion, the composition of the council was fairly stable through the first seven years of the reign. The three chief officers apart, the bishops who attended most frequently were lawyers such as Richard Young of Bangor and (until they both died in 1404) John Bottlesham of Rochester and John Trefnant of Hereford.
⁶
More influential than any of these was the dean of Hereford, John Prophet, who had served as clerk of the council under Richard II until dismissed in 1395, was reappointed in 1399, became Henry's secretary in 1402, and then keeper of the privy seal from 1406 to 1415.
⁷
Archbishop Arundel was also present at a number of meetings during the first year of the reign and was frequently consulted ad hoc during the following three years, but only attended regularly after he was nominated as a councillor in the January 1404 parliament.
⁸
Of the lay magnates, those most commonly present prior to Shrewsbury were the earls of Northumberland, Westmorland, Worcester and Somerset, but after the fall
of the Percys, Westmorland spent more time in the north and Richard Grey, John Lovell, Thomas Berkeley and William Willoughby, all peers, joined Somerset as the senior lay councillors. Following his release from prison in late 1405 the duke of York also began attending, while the successive appointments as treasurer of William Lord Roos (1403–4) and Thomas Lord Furnivall, brother of the earl of Westmorland (1404–7), also gave the council a more secular profile.
⁹

It was among the lesser lay members of the council that the greatest degree of continuity was to be found between 1399 and 1406. Henry relied heavily from the start of his reign on knights and esquires such as John Norbury, John Cheyne, Hugh Waterton, John Doreward and John Curson, and in time they were joined by others: Arnold Savage from late 1402, John Pelham and John Stanley from 1404.
¹⁰
The influence of this knightly bloc was probably resented by some, and they in turn would not have forgotten the fate of Bussy, Green and Le Scrope in 1399. Yet Henry's councillors were more independent-minded than Richard's – as witness Savage's forthright criticisms when speaker of the commons. It was only in late 1406, when Prince Henry began to flex his muscles, that these knights and esquires – the king's men rather than the prince's – were relieved of their duties. The council over which Arundel presided in 1407–9 was more aristocratic though less unified, especially towards the end when the financial strain began to tell and the king's two eldest sons were vying to exert influence.

Given Henry's financial and other problems, it is not surprising that successive parliaments exhorted him to choose his councillors wisely and nominate them publicly. The first criterion for membership was naturally loyalty, but the king also valued men of intellectual calibre. Richard Young, bishop of Bangor and then Rochester, diplomat and member of the council from 1399 to 1405, was a lawyer of international stature who had acted as an intermediary between the pope and the emperor and was the author of several works on the Schism. Archbishop Arundel was a bibliophile whose library at his death was valued at £550, and a friend of the
great humanist chancellor of Florence, Coluccio Salutati. Nicholas Bubwith, by turn king's secretary, privy seal keeper and treasurer, and his friend Robert Hallum co-sponsored a Latin translation of Dante's
Divine Comedy
. Thomas Langley, bishop of Durham, privy seal keeper, chancellor and another bibliophile, reorganized the administration of his palatinate and founded a chantry in Durham cathedral to teach grammar and song to poor children.
¹¹
Nor was it only the king's clerical councillors who left literary remains. Edward, duke of York, passed his time in detention in 1405 by writing
Master of Game
, a translation with additions of the hunting treatise,
Livre de la Chasse
, written by Gaston Phoebus, count of Foix (d.1391), which he dedicated to Prince Henry. John Tiptoft compiled a commonplace book into which he inserted ‘Tiptoft's Chronicle’; his son, who became earl of Worcester, was a noted humanist scholar.
¹²

As well as intellectual breadth, what these men brought to government was a prudent formalism. The council laid stress on good record-keeping – to some extent, perhaps, a response to external pressure, but also the preferred approach of men of a scholarly disposition. John Prophet had kept a journal while clerk of the council in 1392–3, and his example was influential, for in October 1401 his successor, Robert Frye, received forty marks for his ‘great labours and work’ in writing out the acts of the council in past times.
¹³
How far back ‘past times’ stretched is difficult to know, but this may represent an effort to collect and rationalize the records of the council with a view to maintaining them more systematically. Council records are quite full for the first seven years of Henry's reign, and the compilation of formularies by privy seal clerks such as Prophet and Hoccleve implies a methodical approach.
¹⁴
The council liked lists – lists of duchy annuitants, of exchequer annuitants, of ‘the revenues of the kingdom
of England’.
¹⁵
Meanwhile, in 1402 John Leventhorpe began touring the country gathering archives for his ‘great project’, the Cowcher Books of the duchy of Lancaster, the massive and indispensable work of reference for the duchy council, which also had rooms at Westminster.
¹⁶
Paradoxically, much of the evidence for greater attention to record-keeping comes from the early, financially most difficult, years of the reign, but out of this experimentation grew the systematic budgeting, more measured allocation of resources and stricter control of assignments that characterized the period of recovery after 1406.

The exhortations to Henry to choose his councillors carefully were intended not so much as criticism of either the personnel or the work of the council as an attempt to emphasize its public accountability and independence from the court. Under pressure from the commons to spend taxes on the purposes for which they had been voted, it was not easy for councillors to resist the simultaneous pressure of a king and court whose demands were many and urgent and whose priorities were often different. The lack of a clear distinction between Henry's councillors and his counsellors – those who travelled with the royal household or accompanied him on campaign, and from whom he habitually took informal advice – was part of the problem. Men such as Henry's half-brother and childhood companion John Beaufort, or his under-chamberlain and then household steward Sir Thomas Erpingham, to say nothing of Cheyne, Norbury, Waterton and other intimates of the king, personified a certain ambivalence in the operation of governance: dividing their time between meetings of the council and attendance on the king, they must constantly have found themselves pulled in different directions. Yet the cry of ‘evil counsellors’ was not much raised during Henry's reign, and there was no question of impeaching or dismissing from court those who resigned in 1401 or 1406. Most of them remained close to the king and continued to undertake important roles. Nevertheless, it was not just the commons who wished to see the council maintain a distance from curial interference which they considered appropriate to its fiscal remit, and that is why there was emphasis on its public accountability. Conflicts of interest were a recurrent concern: many of the clerks of the chancery were also fee'd or employed by members of the nobility during the early years of the reign, but the
commons put a stop to this in 1406 by prohibiting them from serving on anyone else's council ‘in opposition to the king’.
¹⁷