Henry IV (85 page)

As a larger and more amorphous body than the household, the court is less susceptible to definition or quantification. It was the political hub of the realm, a locus of favour, advancement and intrigue. To it came those who sought office or pardon, who hoped to influence policy or lawsuits, or who simply wished to touch greatness or enjoy courtly revels. Usually the court was where the king was, but during the later years of Henry's reign the power centre of the kingdom, and thus arguably ‘the court’, shifted uncertainly between the king and the prince, whose power-base was the council. Already in February 1409 petitioners were beginning to address themselves not to the king and council but to the prince and the council. When the duke of Burgundy's ambassadors came to England seeking support in the summer of 1411, they approached both the prince and the king, separately.
⁴⁹

For most of the reign, however, it was the king who defined the character of his court, and three aspects of Henry's court in particular are worth noting. First, as already noted, it had a reputation for anticlericalism.
⁵⁰
‘There were at that time,’ wrote Walsingham, ‘many knights and esquires, especially in the king's household (
familia
), who, instructed in the errors of the Lollards, had among other things little understanding of the Eucharist and the mass.’
⁵¹
The number of royal familiars who openly questioned Eucharistic doctrine was probably very small, but the assaults on clerical temporalities at the Worcester councils of 1403 and 1405 and the Coventry parliament of 1404 lent credence to the chronicler's fears. Archbishop Arundel deplored the anticlerical bias of royal intimates such as John Cheyne, Robert Waterton, or Thomas Beaufort, who in June 1405 wrested Richard Scrope's archiepiscopal cross from his grasp before sentencing him to death.
⁵²
Part of the problem was that, when Arundel
came to court, he was a rather isolated figure. Richard II had been criticized for being overly dependent on clerical advice, and few bishops attended Henry's court as a matter of routine during the early years of the reign, although several were councillors. The king's half-brother Henry Beaufort was a powerful figure, but it was not in the service of the Church that his talents were employed.
⁵³
The churchman personally closest to the king was Philip Repingdon, but his reformist views may not have inclined him to take a stand against the disendowment party. After 1406, with the promotion of Bowet, Langley and Bubwith to bishoprics, and with Arundel holding the chancellorship for three years from January 1407, clerical influence at Henry's court increased. Not, of course, that it was only churchmen who stood up for the Church: the king's friend John Norbury was commended by Walsingham for his vigorous opposition to the Lollard Disendowment Bill in 1410 – although it is telling that the chronicler believed him to be ‘one in a thousand’.
⁵⁴

The second noteworthy feature of Henry's court was the precedence accorded to the king's family, especially after the downfall of the Percys. Power and high office were now increasingly concentrated in the hands of the king's close relatives and it was made clear in a variety of ways that they constituted almost a separate caste or order at the apex of English society. This did not mean simply the queen and the king's sons; his half-brothers the Beauforts, his brother-in-law Westmorland, and his uncle and cousin, successive dukes of York, also fell within the family circle – although it did not extend further than that.
⁵⁵
Prince Thomas was steward of England, Prince John constable (after 1403), and Westmorland marshal. England's dominions and marches were parcelled out between them; there was a virtual moratorium on promotions within the peerage which might be seen to challenge their pre-eminence; and as the reign progressed more important posts were concentrated in their hands. Prince Henry replaced Erpingham as constable of Dover castle, while Edward of York replaced Rempston as constable of the Tower after the latter drowned in the Thames in November 1406. The king's sons were first to be dubbed Knights of the Bath on the eve of the coronation, first to be nominated to the Order of the
Garter. There were, of course, rivalries within the royal family, but only in the last two years of the reign did they threaten its stability.

Thirdly, Henry's court was a thoroughly masculine place, where manly qualities were valued and few women were to be found. This may have been a reaction to complaints about the number of noble ladies at Richard II's court, but is more likely to have resulted from a combination of preference and circumstances.
⁵⁶
Henry's daughters, Blanche and Philippa, were sent abroad to be married aged ten and twelve, respectively. The only other woman apart from the queen who had comparable influence with the king was his ever-supportive mother-in-law Joan, countess of Hereford, a cultured, strong-willed and widely respected woman, to whom he entrusted the arbitration of a number of noble disputes and the upbringing of the heirs of his political enemies; she did not live at court, however, but in Essex, at Pleshey or Rochford.
⁵⁷
There is nothing to suggest that Henry disliked women: he had affectionate relationships with both his wives as well as his mother-in-law, and treated his stepmother Katherine Swynford with respect and consideration, confirming her jointure from Gaunt, granting her 1,000 marks a year from the honour of Bolingbroke, and according her a fine burial in the Angel Choir of Lincoln cathedral after her death on 10 May 1403.
⁵⁸
However, the years of campaigning, crusading and exile, and the military exigencies of his early years as king, forged strong bonds with his comrades-in-arms and he seems simply to have preferred male company.

The greatest woman at court was, naturally, the queen, who, even if she neither was, nor was expected to be, the mother of a future king, still had many roles to fulfil: companion, intercessor, symbol, diplomatic buffer, financial burden. As duchess of Brittany (and a princess of the French royal blood), Joan of Navarre had at times intervened effectively in great matters.
⁵⁹
As queen of England, she had the good sense to cultivate a degree of
detachment from court politics, especially following the undeclared war with Brittany in 1403–5 and the bruising criticism of her servants in the 1404 and 1406 parliaments. Occasional references to her influence with the king – on behalf of the countess of Oxford in 1404, for scholars at Oxford or Cambridge, or even to secure a brief truce with Brittany in 1407 – demonstrate little beyond conventional queenly intercession, although she did retain men of political influence such as John Norbury and Thomas Chaucer, and the earl of Westmorland thought it worth paying annuities of between £50 and £100 to her secretary, Anthony Ricz, and the esquires of her chamber, John Periaunt and Nicholas Aldrewich.
⁶⁰

Yet if Henry's second marriage was a diplomatic failure, it seems personally to have been a success. One chronicler thought that she and Henry had two stillborn children.
⁶¹
Just two years apart in age, Henry and Joan shared an interest in music and almost certainly a mutual affection. Her arrival, wedding and coronation in early 1403 were celebrated in great style, following which she and Henry retired to Eltham for eight weeks.
⁶²
Her relations with her stepchildren were good and her personal conduct unexceptionable. Henry is known to have fathered one illegitimate child before he married Joan, but there is no hint of infidelity once he was married and he was certainly no libertine.
⁶³
He resented the criticism of her followers
and did what he could to mitigate parliament's strictures against them. He built new apartments for her at Eltham, gave her a tower hard by the great gate of Westminster palace to store her muniments and conduct her business, and in March 1403 granted her a dower of £6,666, nearly 50 per cent more than that of Anne of Bohemia.
⁶⁴
This was hopelessly optimistic, and she also found it hard to secure remittances from her dower lands in Brittany.
⁶⁵
Henry's inability to live up to his promises to Joan burdened his conscience. The will he drew up when he thought he was dying in January 1409 asked that she be endowed from the duchy of Lancaster, and once he recovered he tried to make proper provision for her, but what she received always fell well short of what she was promised.
⁶⁶

Henry's generosity to Joan was symptomatic of a purposefulness, almost wilfulness, in Henry's attitude to the finances of his court and household. Whatever he had, or was thought to have, promised about frugal government in 1399, and despite the chorus of criticism, he was determined that the public face of his monarchy would not suffer by comparison with that of Richard II. Had he and Charles VI arranged a summit, or if the prince had married one of the French king's daughters, Henry would assuredly have made it as splendid an affair as the festivities at Ardres in 1396. This was, after all, a man who had a set of nine matching robes – mantles, tabard, tunics, hat – made from the skins of 12,000 squirrels and eighty ermine.
⁶⁷
As it was, he spent some £40,000 on the arrivals and departures of Queen Isabella, Queen Joan and Princesses Blanche and Philippa, and great but unquantifiable sums on his and Joan's coronations.
⁶⁸
His two most distinguished guests were Emperor Manuel in 1400 and Cardinal Ugguccione in 1408. Henry ordered his retainers to ride to Dover to greet and escort them to him, and no expense was spared to impress them. If
this was the conspicuous consumption that in the eyes of many made the cost of his household ‘excessive and outrageous’, the king probably considered it money well spent. No king – certainly no usurper – could afford to be thought of as a cheapskate.
⁶⁹

Equally to the point, Henry's household servants were close to his heart. Many of them had served him for decades through bad times and good. He tried to prioritize the payment of their fees and annuities and regretted his inability to do so. He remembered them by name in his will, asking that the lowly grooms of his chamber who cared for him night and day through his illness be rewarded, and he remembered them on his deathbed, recalling ‘those who have been dear to me’ and advising his son to ‘cherish their loyalty’.
⁷⁰
It was the steadfastness of such men upon which his kingship was founded, and he knew it.

¹
There was confusion over terminology, with the Privy (continual) Council sometimes described as the Great Council:
Signet Letters
, no. 258;
PROME
, viii.244–5; Brown, ‘Commons and Council’; J. Kirby, ‘Councils and Councillors of Henry IV’,
TRHS
(1964), 35–65; Brown,
Governance
, 30–42.

²
Dodd, ‘Henry IV's Council’, 112;
PROME
, viii.152, 244–5, 338;
POPC
, i.295.

³
Thus a meeting on 8 July 1400 which considered the duchess of Norfolk's claim for dower and an allowance claimed by the bishop of Winchester was attended by eight of the king's justices and sergeants-at-law (C 49/67, no. 24); for the council's judicial work, see
Select Cases before King's Council
, ed. Leadam and Baldwin, Introduction; Brown,
Governance
, 132–4. Dodd identified over 150 petitions submitted to the council between 1399 and 1406 (‘Henry IV's Council’, 96). The 1399 and 1406 parliaments asked that personal actions not involving the king should be tried by common law, not the council (
PROME
, viii.79, 371). See also the letter from the royal clerk James Billingford to the chancellor in June 1400: ‘The king does not intend to seal anything concerning the common law with the seal he has in his own keeping, for which God be praised!’ (
CDS
, v, no. 882).

⁴
Harriss, ‘Budgeting at the Medieval Exchequer’, 179–96.

⁵
E 404 (warrants for issue),
passim; PROME
, viii.230, 279.

⁶
Brown, ‘Commons and Council’, 30; for Young's role as a councillor see Allmand, ‘A Bishop of Bangor’; he replaced Bottlesham at Rochester in 1404.

⁷
It was Prophete who inspired the regularization of council record-keeping from the early 1390s, testimony to the council's growing importance as well as important evidence of its composition and activities: Baldwin,
King's Council
, 388–90; A. Brown,
The Early History of the Clerkship of the Council
(Glasgow, 1969), 8–16. He was replaced as king's secretary by William Pilton, former receiver of the chamber (
CPR 1405–8
, 288).

⁸
See, for example, E 28/7, no. 70: John Doreward sent from the council to Otford to seek Arundel's advice on whether or not the liberties and franchises of Cork should be confirmed (31 Aug. 1400); Arundel received an annual fee of £200 after 1404 for being a member of the council (E 403/591, 2 May).

⁹
E 403/591, 12 June (duke of York).

¹⁰
During the first eighteen months of the reign, a further group of esquires and London merchants were also designated as continual councillors (William Brampton, Richard Whittington, John Shadworth – all Londoners – John Freningham and Thomas Coggeshall), but they either resigned or were dismissed following the 1401 parliament, possibly on grounds of ‘insufficiency’ (Brown, ‘Commons and Council’, 8). The inclusion of merchants on the council was novel, although there is little evidence that they attended regularly; their primary role was probably to help negotiate loans: Baldwin,
King's Council
, 151.

¹¹
Harvey,
Solutions to the Schism
, 106–23, 134–6, 142; R. Swanson, ‘Robert Hallum’,
ODNB
, 24.713–6; C. Fraser, ‘Thomas Langley’,
ODNB
, 32.500–2. Arundel had befriended Salutati while in exile; they exchanged volumes and Arundel confided to him his fear that his library might be dispersed as a result of his exile. Salutati later wrote to express relief at the recovery of Arundel's books, and in his will of 1414 the archbishop made careful provision for their distribution after his death (J. Hughes, ‘Thomas Arundel’,
ODNB
, 2.564–10; Aston,
Thomas Arundel
, 318–19).