Henry IV (87 page)

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POPC
, ii.12–13;
Johannis Lelandi
, vi.301;
Political Poems and Songs
, ii.121.

Chapter 27

THE ROYAL AFFINITY AND PARLIAMENTARY POLITICS

To those upon whom its sun did not shine, it might have seemed that the royal court basked in a micro-climate sheltered from the concerns of provincial life. Not so: its force was both centripetal and centrifugal, and leading figures at court were also leading figures in their localities, actively promoting and recruiting for the regime, enforcing the decrees of king or council, arbitrating or suppressing local disputes and keeping an ear out for whispers of discontent. Erpingham in Norfolk, Pelham in Sussex, Rempston in Nottinghamshire, Grey in Derbyshire, Stanley in Cheshire or Robert Waterton in the West Riding of Yorkshire – to cite the best-known examples – helped to keep the shires loyal and to ensure that England remained Lancastrian.
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There was nothing easy about this, for it was impossible for the king's affinity to represent the interests of all his subjects, and the courtiers and councillors at the heart of it were often hated. William Denton, a monk of Colchester who joined the countess of Oxford's conspiracy in Essex, admitted buying a sword with which to kill ‘Coggeshall, Leget, Doreward and others’, the local bigwigs whom he believed managed the county on the king's behalf. Thomas Coggeshall and John Doreward were royal councillors, Helming Leget an usher of the king's chamber. His fears were not unfounded: when brought to trial in August 1404, he found Coggeshall and Leget sitting in judgment on him.
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Trying to be a king for all his people was especially difficult for a usurper. Richard II had reacted to the political crisis of 1387–8 by retaining around a hundred knights and esquires from up and down the country, most of them prominent members of local gentry society, but during the last two
years of his reign his policy had changed direction, focusing almost exclusively on the north-west, from which he recruited over a hundred knights and esquires as well as 600 or more yeomen and archers, the infamous Cheshire bodyguard whose depredations so damaged the king's reputation.
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On the other hand, his retaining policy between 1389 and 1397 had brought him significant benefits both locally and nationally, and as long as the mistakes of 1397–9 could be avoided this was an approach worth pursuing. Yet Henry's choices were limited, for on becoming king he also inherited from his father a ready-made affinity of knights and esquires whose landed interests were primarily in Yorkshire, Lancashire and the north Midlands, and it was to these men in large part that he owed his throne. The conversion of this Lancastrian affinity into a royal affinity was a work in progress from the start of Henry's reign, and by 1406 the number of king's knights and esquires – excluding those who held positions in the royal household such as the knights and esquires of the chamber – was between 200 and 250, representing perhaps 10 per cent of England's county or upper gentry.
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Many of these were either his or his father's former supporters, but Henry also showed awareness of the need to broaden his support base: of the sixty-five knights whom he retained during his first year on the throne, twenty-six had also been retained by Richard, most of them from the southern half of the country where loyalty to the new dynasty had shallow roots. In part, this was an attempt to assimilate into the Lancastrian polity those who mattered – those, in other words, whom Richard had also deemed to matter, for assembling an affinity was a process best done by working with, rather than against, the grain of the local establishment – but it was also intended to make the royal affinity look less like the Lancastrian affinity. Henry's separation of the duchy of Lancaster from the crown similarly demonstrated the need to differentiate between his public authority as king and his private interests as duke of Lancaster.
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However, this did not prove an easy policy to maintain. The leniency he had shown to the Counter-Appellants – contrary to the advice of many of his supporters – backfired, and unsurprisingly Ricardian loyalists continued to feature prominently among rebels and plotters up to, and including, the Percy revolt of 1403. Increasingly, Henry
found himself driven back to rely on those whom he knew he could trust, which usually meant his pre-1399 partisans.

Although it was most marked in the Lancastrian heartland, the influence of the king's retainers was also disproportionate in many other parts of the country. Indeed there was a sense in which the very concept of a royal affinity, even a broadly based one, sat uneasily with the ideal of the king as leader and defender of the community of the realm, for it created the impression that some were more equal than others. Moreover, whatever may have been his intentions at the start of the reign, Henry made little effort to lower his retainers' profile, as witness his extensive distribution of livery collars.
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By 1404, his attempts to secure compliant sheriffs, MPs and JPs were also becoming more systematic; the fact that this coincided with the most vociferous complaints (not just from Archbishop Scrope) that he had interfered with parliamentary elections and shrieval appointments was not a coincidence.
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Nor was it just knights and esquires retained by the king who were appointed. All sorts of other people – ministers, local officials, tenants, servants, annuitants, or simply well-wishers – had varying degrees of attachment or obligation to his cause, sentiments which fluctuated with time and opportunity; indeed it has proved possible, by aggregating a range of connections between king, court and gentry, to argue that around 50 per cent of sheriffs, 60 per cent or more of JPs, and between 70 and 85 per cent of MPs elected during the first half of Henry's reign had personal incentives of some kind to support Lancastrian kingship.
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Some obviously mattered a great deal more than others: the influence exerted by a small number of dominant and well-connected individuals was crucial in coordinating political support in their localities. Nevertheless, numbers mattered, for Henry's constant need to raise forces during the first half of his reign, often at short notice, gave him frequent occasion to call out his annuitants and retainers en masse.
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They certainly saw a great deal more armed service
in the king's name than Richard II's retainers had done, and the part they played in ensuring Henry's survival was immense – nowhere more so than in Yorkshire, where the king retained twenty-five knights, making him the greatest lord in the county and helping to negate the threat from the Percys.
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The military worth of Henry's retainers was demonstrated from the start of the reign. On 13 November 1399, he retained John Cosyn of Cirencester, a former esquire of the duke of Gloucester, with an annuity of £10 for life; two months later Cosyn returned the favour with interest by leading his townsmen in ‘manfully (
viriliter
)’ capturing and beheading the rebel earls of Kent and Salisbury and Lord Lumley, for which his annuity was immediately increased to 100 marks.
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More often the role of local enforcer was taken by the sheriff, who had the authority to call out the
posse comitatus
, the shire levy; this is what the king's knight Sir Thomas Rokeby of Yorkshire did to intercept Northumberland and Bardolf in 1408.
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However, much of the military service undertaken by Henry's knights and esquires was performed further from home. They served in Scotland, in Wales, on ships and in garrisons, in Calais and Guyenne, at Shrewsbury in 1403 and in the north in 1405. Sir John Luttrell's dash from Somerset to Shrewsbury in response to Henry's summons to help him fight Hotspur was the type of forced march repeated time and again by his retainers and annuitants. The sheriff of Northampton, where the king happened to be when he heard of Glyn Dŵr's uprising in September 1400, raised forty men-at-arms and 600 archers in a few days to follow Henry to Wales. Those who failed to answer summonses were denied their annuities and presumably other favours as well.
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Every man counted, for Henry must have known that some of his retainers, such as Sir Hugh Browe in 1403, Sir John Colville in 1405, or the serial rebel Sir William Clifford, would not remain loyal. In numbers there was safety, or at least hope of it. From the king's point of view, this was unquestionably money well spent.
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The incompatible allegiances of men such as Browe, Colville and Clifford raise the question of Henry's control of his affinity. As the son of a man who had once claimed that every lord was capable of keeping his dependants in check, but whose case history suggested otherwise, Henry
knew that if his retainers were going to support him, he in turn must support them.
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Financially this entailed an outlay of around £30,000 a year on fees and pensions, leading to parliamentary and extra-parliamentary vituperation at the ‘royal knights’ who devoured the king's income so that Henry (as he himself was said to have admitted) ‘had nothing while others grew fatter by the year’.
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Around £8,000–£9,000 of this was met by the duchy of Lancaster, but the corollary was naturally that duchy revenues were unavailable for other needs. Those in receipt of duchy annuities included several of the king's key supporters, and they probably counted themselves lucky, for it was a more reliable source than the exchequer.
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The arrears that accumulated on exchequer annuities, to say nothing of the stops in 1404–5 and 1410–11, had the potential to cause real political damage to the regime, as Henry and Archbishop Arundel were well aware. Yet it was not merely financially that Henry was beholden to those who kept him on the throne. Politically too they obliged him at times to go against his own better judgment. It was ‘those standing around the king’, according to one source, who would brook no pardon for Archbishop Scrope; it was ‘the king's friends’ who insisted that Thomas Percy be executed after the battle of Shrewsbury, despite Henry's wish to spare his life. Individually, such tales may or may not be true, but collectively they add up to a perception of the relationship between the king and his retainers. Whatever his personal views on Church reform, Henry seems to have found it impossible to curb the hard-nosed anticlericalism of some of his supporters, despite the harm it inflicted on the image of his court.
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Even more damaging in the long run was the king's unwillingness or inability to set limits to their control of local administration and justice. The influence and office which the affinity denied to others was a grievance that festered throughout the reign, coming to a head after the onset of Henry's illness in 1408–9. There were times, especially when it really mattered as in July 1403, when Henry's command and control of his retainers was impressive, but at other times it was not clear who was the
lord and who the master, and it required a shift in power at the centre after 1409 to begin to correct the imbalance.
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The king's gentry affinity was thus a double-edged sword: crucial to the survival of his regime, it simultaneously subverted his efforts to place himself above faction. There were times when the same could be said of his relations with townsmen, most obviously and dangerously in the case of York. The mayor of York from 1400 to 1405 was William Frost, a relative newcomer to the city, patronized by Henry for his compliance with royal demands. He secured loans and built a warship for the king, ensured that unpopular taxes were collected, and manipulated elections in favour of his supporters, in return for which he received royal grants. However, in February 1405 Frost was overthrown in a civic power struggle, as a result of which his rivals also seem to have taken against the king, and there ensued a period of turmoil culminating in Archbishop Scrope's revolt three months later. Henry's reaction was uncompromising: suspending York's liberties, he first appointed John Stanley as keeper of the city with Frost as his deputy, and then, from August 1405, Frost as sole keeper. One of his tasks was to do what he could to discourage the spread of Scrope's martyr-cult, which did little to endear him to the citizens. Yet when the city's liberties were restored in June 1406, Frost was re-elected as mayor, if not at the king's bidding then certainly to his liking. A few months later, when his city sergeants were ejected from office for preventing access to Scrope's tomb, the king wrote demanding their reinstatement.
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With around six hundred boroughs in the realm and no permanent crown administration at the local level, it was important for the king to ensure that mayors and other civic officials could be relied upon to do his bidding, but in the case of York his reliance on a narrow and unpopular clique went too far. Fortunately this was not the case with the kingdom's first city. London's pre-eminence among English towns was by this time undisputed: its population by 1400 was around 40,000 and its taxable wealth at least five times greater than its closest rival, Bristol. Richard II had antagonized Londoners, stoking merchant rivalries in the 1380s and suspending
the city's liberties in the 1390s, and they made no effort to save him in 1399. By 1400 the unity of the merchant class had been restored, and Henry went out of his way to placate the citizens, granting them financial privileges and lucrative contracts (especially for cloth and jewellery), including them in spectacular celebrations such as those he laid on for the Emperor Manuel, and making sure that when there was good news to report they were the first to know.
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In return, Londoners acted as a ‘quasi-Bank of England’, advancing close to £60,000 to the exchequer over the reign as a whole, roughly half of it provided by the drapers John Hende and Richard Whittington, each of whom personally loaned an average of just over £1,000 a year. This was more than the combined total of around £10,500 loaned by all the other towns in the realm.
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Hende and Whittington were the most prominent of a small but dominant group of wealthy merchants, also including John Woodcock, Thomas Knolles and Richard Merlawe, whom the king patronized and upon whom he relied to ensure the city's loyalty – as in January 1400, when prompt action by mayor Knolles secured the city against the Epiphany rebels.
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Each of them served as mayor at least once during the reign, and some also rose to prominence in national politics. Two months into his reign, Henry took the novel step of appointing three Londoners, including Whittington, to his council, and in 1404 three past or future mayors of London were appointed by parliament as treasurers of war.
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Mercantile, and specifically London mercantile, interests also influenced the protectionist legislation against aliens, and the preference given to Calais among the crown's spending priorities.
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