Henry IV (86 page)

¹²
The Master of Game
, ed. W. and F. Baillie-Grohman (New York, 1904); York was master of Henry IV's hounds. For Tiptoft, see
HOC
, iv.620–8.

¹³
Pur les grandz labours et travail queux il ad euz et sustenuz entour lescripture des actes du conseil en temps passez
(E 403/571, 28 Oct. 1401; cf. also E 403/578, 6 March 1404; E 403/589, 13 Dec. 1406; E 403/591, 12 June 1407). For Frye (clerk of the council, 1399–1421) and Prophet, see Brown,
The Early History of the Clerkship of the Council
, 4–35.

¹⁴
BL Add. MS 24,062 (Hoccleve's formulary); BL Harleian MS 431 (Prophet's letter-book).

¹⁵
DL 28/4/1, fo. 31v (duchy annuitants, in duplicate, May 1400); E 403/569, 5 Feb. 1401 (exchequer annuitants); E 403/576, 20 July 1403 (clerks assigned
ad componendum certos rotulos de renencionibus regni Anglie . . . ad quantum dicti renensiones se extendent
, for consideration by king and council).

¹⁶
Somerville,
Duchy of Lancaster
, i.157–60.

¹⁷
PROME
, viii.372; C. Smith, ‘A Conflict of Interest? Chancery Clerks in Private Service’,
People, Politics and Community in the Later Middle Ages
, ed. J. Rosenthal and C. Richmond (Gloucester, 1987), 176–91. During the 1390s at least a quarter of the forty-eight chancery clerks had close connections with Gaunt.

¹⁸
J. Alban and C. Allmand, ‘Spies and Spying in the Fourteenth Century’, in
War, Literature and Politics in the Late Middle Ages
, ed. C. Allmand (Liverpool, 1976), 73–101, at p. 87.

¹⁹
The usual formulation was ‘to discover the intentions and plans of the enemies of the king in France and to inform the king and council of their plans’, often including ‘with all possible haste’. Those sent were usually obscure (often merely ‘a certain messenger’), but might include merchants such as the London goldsmith John Bridd. For examples, see E 403/565, 4 Feb. 1400; E 403/571, 14 March 1402 (Bridd); E 403/585, 27 Feb. 1406; E 403/587, 26 June 1406; E 403/591, 23 June 1407. See also Ford, ‘Piracy or Policy’, 72; Sumption,
Divided Houses
, 289–91, 579–81; D. Crook, ‘The Confession of a Spy, 1380’,
BIHR
62 (1989), 346–50.

²⁰
Davies,
Revolt
, 164, 223.

²¹
Usk
, xxv–xxxii, 238–9.

²²
For allegations of spying and an order to Italians to correspond with their countrymen intelligibly, not by ‘ciphers or other obscure figures’, see
POPC
, i.182, 288.

²³
SAC II
, 534–5.

²⁴
SAC II
, 464–7; R. Griffiths, ‘Some Secret Supporters of Owain Glyndŵr?’,
BIHR
37 (1964), 77–100.

²⁵
Leadam and Baldwin,
Select Cases in the King's Council
, xxxiv–xxxviii (quote).

²⁶
Forrest,
The Detection of Heresy
, 35–47; H. Richardson, ‘Heresy and Lay Power in the Reign of Richard II’,
EHR
51 (1936), 1–28.

²⁷
E 403/565, 4 Feb. 1400 (spy sent to Cheshire and Lancashire); E 403/578, 10 Dec. 1403 (Hugh Malpas sent to spy on Hotspur in July).

²⁸
C 49/48, no. 6; Walker, ‘Rumour, Sedition and Popular Protest’, 31–2.

²⁹
E 403/582, 18 July 1405;
SAC II
, 380–1.

³⁰
POPC
, i.288.

³¹
KB 9/186, no. 47 (2).

³²
Baldwin,
King's Council
, 523–5;
RHL
, ii.303–8.

³³
C. Given-Wilson, ‘Service, Serfdom and English Labour Legislation, 1350–1500’, in
Concepts and Patterns of Service in the Later Middle Ages
, ed. A. Curry and E. Matthew (Woodbridge, 2000), 21–37.

³⁴
Forrest,
Detection of Heresy
, 233 (quote).

³⁵
As the king's personal seal, the signet had special authority: in 1405 the chancellor, treasurer, and privy seal keeper wrote to Henry advising him to send letters under his signet to the bishops to persuade them to exact a tax from stipendiary chaplains, since ‘we are quite certain that the bishops, stipendiary chaplains and others will be more willing to accomplish your royal wishes in this matter than they would be by letters under the great or privy seal’ (
POPC
, ii.100). However, the signet was never accepted by the exchequer (
Signet Letters
, 3).

³⁶
RHKA
, 278. In 1405–6 Queen Joan's household was included. Wardrobe books only survive from 1402–3 and 1405–6, but the decline in expenditure after 1406 and the dismissal of aliens in the 1406 parliament make it likely that numbers were pruned.

³⁷
‘Relaxing’ included gaming, which cost Henry at least £400 in 1405–6 (BL Harleian MS 319, fo. 41v).

³⁸
Dodd, ‘Patronage, Petitions and Grace’, 107; Harriss,
Shaping the Nation
, 76.

³⁹
SAC II
, 462. The king's chamber (
camera Regis
) had two separate, though related, meanings: (i) the king's private apartments; (ii) the king's privy purse. Two accounts of the receiver of the king's jewels survive (E 101/404/18 and 22), but no overall chamber accounts.

⁴⁰
A windfall almost certainly paid to the chamber was a ‘new carrack’ belonging to Peter Oliver of Barcelona, captured by seven English balingers and other vessels, the hulk and rigging of which were valued at 4,000 marks and the master's goods at 1,500 crowns; he was said to have given these to the king ‘as a gift’ (E 28/23, no. 15;
Antient Kalendars
, ii.74).

⁴¹
Rogers, ‘Royal Household’, 371, 670;
RHKA
, 90–2.

⁴²
When Henry spent a night at Bardney abbey (Lincolnshire) in August 1406, Philip Repingdon rode across from Lincoln and William Lord Willoughby from Eresby (Lincolnshire) to speak with him (
Johannis Lelandi
, vi.301). For household itineration, see G. Harriss, ‘Court of the Lancastrian Kings’, 15–18.

⁴³
Thomas Tutbury (1399–1401) left debts of
c.
£10,300; Thomas More (1401–5)
c.
£12,000; Richard Kingston (1405–6)
c.
£10,700; Tiptoft (1406–8) paid off some of these, but Thomas Brounfleet (1408–13) left debts of at least £10,000 (
RHKA
, 108–9). For the payment of the king's debts after his death, see below, p. 522.

⁴⁴
RHKA
, 60, 69–70.

⁴⁵
The assizes held by the clerk of the market of the household to requisition supplies continued to be resented: in 1403 it was said that the weights and measures he used were meant to have been burned in Richard II's reign (KB 9/186/47 (3); cf.
RHKA
, 48–53).

⁴⁶
RHKA
, 63;
CPR 1405–8
, 6.

⁴⁷
CFR 1399–1405
, 310.

⁴⁸
RHKA
, 190–5.

⁴⁹
E 28/23, no. 24 (from the earl of Westmorland); below, pp. 493–4.

⁵⁰
Above, pp. 377–8.

⁵¹
SAC II
, 798 (and see pp. 424–6, 590); McNiven,
Heresy and Politics
, 72–8.

⁵²
SAC II
, 448–57, 480; the fact that Arundel's own nephew, the young Earl Thomas of Arundel, also sat in judgment on Scrope must also have distressed him. For Cheyne in 1399 and 1404, see above p. 288. In November 1406 at Charing Cross, Robert Waterton demonstrated his contempt for the orthodox preacher Richard Alkerton by offering him a curry-comb, implying that he merely wished to curry favour with prelates; he was master of the king's horses, hence presumably the curry-comb. A royal knight who ‘had never loved the Church’ told Henry in 1402 that the rumours that Richard was alive would not abate unless the friars were eliminated (
CE
, 392, 407;
SAC II
, 591).

⁵³
Harriss,
Cardinal Beaufort
, 395–6 (‘He had no concern for the defence of the Church's liberties’).

⁵⁴
Walsingham also commended the duke of York for his pro-clerical stance in 1404 (
SAC II
, 420, 590). The king was godfather to Norbury's son, called Henry, and to John Beaufort's son, also called Henry.

⁵⁵
See, for example, the way they were styled as ‘our dearest brother’, ‘our dearest kinsman’, etc. in the charter witness lists: Biggs, ‘Witness Lists’, 414–15.

⁵⁶
For ladies at Richard's court, see above p. 100; Richard created thirty-six Ladies of the Garter, Henry created ten, nearly all closely related either to himself or to another Garter knight (Collins,
Order of the Garter
, 79–83, 301–3).

⁵⁷
She had custody of Richard de Vere, heir to the earldom of Oxford, and John Mowbray, heir to the earldom of Nottingham, after his brother's execution in 1405; in July 1410 she loaned 500 marks ‘in exoneration of’ all the taxpayers of Essex (E 403/580, 3 Feb. 1405; E 403/602, 2 Dec. 1409;
POPC
, i.348;
CPR 1408–13
, 216, 220; for arbitration, see
CCR 1409–13
, 305, 395; Sandler, ‘The Bohun Women and Manuscript Patronage’, 282–3).

⁵⁸
DL 29/728/11990, m. 2; A. Goodman,
Katherine Swynford
(Lincoln Cathedral Publications, 1994); Henry also granted her four tuns of wine a year in Nov. 1399 (
CPR 1399–1401
, 58, 408). She lived at Lincoln from 1399.

⁵⁹
In 1391, heavily pregnant and carrying her children in her arms, she burst into Duke John's bedchamber one night and threw herself to her knees to beg him to release the royal ambassadors whom he had imprisoned in a fit of temper. She also tried to mediate between him and his mortal foe Olivier de Clisson (
Saint-Denys
, i.724–7).

⁶⁰
C. Ross, ‘The Yorkshire Baronage, 1399–1435’ (unpublished DPhil thesis, University of Oxford, 1950), 410. These annuities might have been connected with Westmorland's tenure of the honour of Richmond, which was claimed by successive dukes of Brittany. Periaunt was Master of Joan's Horses and his wife Joanna was one of the queen's six ladies-in-waiting, as was Aldrewich's wife Constance (E 101/405/22, fo. 31). The Periaunts were Bretons, but granted letters of denization in 1411–12. Norbury and Chaucer were both esquires of the queen as well as king's servants (
CPR 1408–13
, 144, 283, 298, 368, 460). Ricz was Welsh-born (Rhys) but domiciled in Brittany; he acted as proxy for Joan for her marriage to Henry at Eltham in April 1402 (M. Jones, ‘Joan of Navarre’,
ODNB
, 30.139–41;
Foedera
, viii.339).

⁶¹
Kingsford,
English Historical Literature
, 282, from a ‘Northern Chronicle’.

⁶²
Among Joan's annuitants was the celebrated composer John Dunstaple, whose music was included in the Old Hall Manuscript (BL Add. MS 57, 950). A. Crawford, ‘The King's Burden?: The Consequences of Royal Marriage in Fifteenth-Century England’, in
Patronage, the Crown and the Provinces in Later Medieval England
, ed. R. Griffiths (Gloucester, 1981), 33–56, says (p. 35) that the wedding and coronation cost £1,500, but including the embassy to collect her from Brittany it was a lot more than that (for expenses connected with her journey, see E 403/573, 15 July 1402; E 403/574, 19–30 Oct., 22 Feb.). The marriage feast, for which the menu survives, was as lavish as that at the king's coronation (BL Harleian MS 279, fos. 45–6).

⁶³
Henry's illegitimate son, Edmund Leborde, stated in January 1412 that he was in his eleventh year and was the son of an unmarried man and an unmarried woman. He was thus conceived in 1400 or 1401. He was described as ‘son of King Henry, scholar, of the diocese of London’, when granted a papal dispensation to proceed to holy orders and receive benefices of any kind once he reached lawful age. The dispensation was granted in consideration of the king's devotion to the pope (John XXIII) and the Roman Church; it is not known what happened to Leborde (
CPL 1404–15
, 314).

⁶⁴
RHKA
, 31;
CPR 1401–5
, 473; E 28/14, no. 234 (Eltham chamber); Strohm,
England's Empty Throne
, 153–72.

⁶⁵
The exchequer issue rolls record many attempts to pay sums to her, and Crawford, ‘The King's Burden’, 42–3, lists several additions to her dower between 1403 and 1408, which, however, still left it well short of £6,666. She was obliged to surrender her rights in Brittany in Nov. 1404; the earl of Kent's attack on Brehat in 1408 was an attempt to force the islanders to contribute to her dower (
Giles
, 54).

⁶⁶
Nicholls,
Collection of Wills
, 204.

⁶⁷
E. Veale,
The English Fur Trade in the Later Middle Ages
(2nd edn, London, 2003), 20.

⁶⁸
For expenses connected with Isabella, Blanche and Queen Joan, see
POPC
, i.136, 154 (Isabella); E 403/573, 8 May, and E 403/574, 27–30 Oct. (Joan); E 403/573, 15 and 21 July, 26 Sept. (9,500 marks handed over for Blanche's voyage to Germany, but this was far from the total cost). For Blanche's marriage, the ancient royal prerogative to levy a feudal aid for the king's daughter was revived.

⁶⁹
The king would have been gratified to see the eulogy of him which Emperor Manuel sent to a friend in 1401: the king of ‘Britain the Great’, he said, ‘overflows with many merits and is bedecked with all kinds of virtues. . . . With his might he astonishes all, and with his sagacity he wins himself friends. . . . And he appears very pleasant in his conversations, gladdening us in all ways and honouring us as much as possible and loving us no less. And, while he has gone to excess in all his negotiations, he seems even to blush a little, supposing himself, alone of all, to fall short of what is needed, so magnanimous is this man’ (Barker,
Manuel II Palaeologus
, 178–80); cf. J. Lutkin, ‘Luxury and Display in Gold and Silver at the Court of Henry IV’, in
Fifteenth-Century England IX
, ed. L. Clark (Woodbridge, 2010), 155–78.