Henry IV (90 page)

⁴⁸
During the first six years of the reign the following great councils have been identified, but there were certainly others: Feb. 1400, Aug. 1401, May 1403, Dec. 1403, Jan. 1405, March 1405 (all at Westminster); Oct. 1400, Oct. 1401, Sept. 1402, Sept. 1403, Sept. 1405 (all at Worcester); March 1401 (Coldharbour, London); Jan. 1404 (Sutton); Aug. 1404 (Lichfield); April 1405 (St Albans); 1404–5, month uncertain (Leicester); Jan. 1402 (in or near London); Maxstoke (date unknown, but see
Signet Letters
, no. 293). See also Brown,
Governance
, 174–5; A. Goodman, ‘Richard II's Councils’, in
Richard II: The Art of Kingship
, ed. J. Gillespie and A. Goodman (Oxford, 1999), 59–82.

⁴⁹
Lay Taxes
, 77;
Giles
, 26;
Usk
, 142–4.

⁵⁰
POPC
, i.102–6.

⁵¹
E 403/576, 25 May; E 403/578, 7 and 10 Dec.;
POPC
, ii.81–3.

⁵²
For the Lambeth great council of 1411, see below, pp. 473–4.

⁵³
Doreward (Essex); Savage (Kent); Tiptoft (Cambridge); Esturmy (Wiltshire); Chaucer (Oxford); the exception was Henry Retford (Lincolnshire), speaker in 1402.

Chapter 28

NOBLES, REBELS AND TRAITORS

Henry's reliance on his family and affinity was to some extent a consequence of the dearth of active and reliable allies among the aristocracy during the early years of his reign – which also helps to explain why, especially after the Epiphany rising, he entrusted so much power to the Percys.
¹
When they in turn proved unreliable, it was the Beauforts and their brother-in-law Westmorland, all four of whom the king routinely referred to as his brothers, who took their place.
²
John, the eldest of the Beaufort brothers and the king's chivalric companion in his youth, held the powerful post of royal chamberlain from the beginning of the reign and in 1401 was made captain of the town of Calais, although he rarely went there in person; he also acted as the king's chief emissary, taking Queen Isabella to France in 1401, escorting Princess Blanche to Germany in 1402, and conducting Joan of Navarre to England in 1403. Until his death in 1410 he was the lay magnate closest to the king. Bishop Henry Beaufort's acquisition of the chancellorship in March 1403 enhanced the family's influence; he too was entrusted with some of the most sensitive diplomatic missions of the reign, especially to France; wealthy and worldly, he could be relied upon not to place the needs of the Church above those of the state. Thomas, the youngest brother, was a soldier and a courtier with a puritanical streak who served for long periods as admiral and under Prince Henry in Wales, and was later held up as an exemplar of chivalric
noblesse
; later in the reign he would act as captain of Calais castle and for two years as chancellor, the first layman to do so for a quarter of a century. Their sister Joan was married to Westmorland, a regular councillor before Shrewsbury and thenceforward the agent of royal power in the north. From mid-1403 until early 1407 it was
the Beauforts above all who held sway in Henry's councils, yet unlike the Percys they never acquired a regional power-base they could call their own. Henry Beaufort may have held the richest see in England, but it was not his ‘country’, while John and Thomas remained largely dependent on crown service, office, annuities, limited term grants and wardships for their income.
³
Henry IV was not a man to trip on the same stone twice.

Nor did the king show any desire to replenish the ranks of the aristocracy. Reacting to the scorn that had greeted the
duketti
bonanza of 1397 and unwilling to jeopardize his family's exclusivity, Henry bestowed only three great titles in the course of his reign: his eldest son became prince of Wales in 1399, his second son duke of Clarence in July 1412, and his half-brother Thomas Beaufort earl of Dorset in the same month.
⁴
When it was suggested in the 1402 parliament that John Beaufort resume the marquisate he had forfeited in 1399, he was persuaded to decline it, at the king's urging if not command.
⁵
Bearing in mind that four dukes, a marquis and an earl were taken down a rank in the first parliament of the reign, Henry thus demoted twice as many great nobles as he promoted.
⁶
In part this was because the number of peers of baronial rank who were politically active was small (although many more were militarily active). The most important of them was Richard Lord Grey of Codnor, whose family had been summoned to parliament since 1299 and whose ubiquitous service as councillor, admiral, diplomat, commander in Wales and under-chamberlain of the royal household for the last nine years of the reign might well have won an earldom from a less cautious king. He was, in effect, the king's replacement for the earl of Worcester.
⁷
William Roos, William Willoughby, John Lovell and Thomas Berkeley all served on the council during the first half of the
reign and undertook important military or diplomatic tasks, while Thomas Nevill Lord Furnivall replaced Roos as treasurer for two years before his death in 1407.
⁸
After 1406 Hugh Lord Burnell, who had campaigned repeatedly with Prince Henry in Wales, also joined the council, swept along with the tide that brought the earls of Arundel and Warwick and other retainers of the prince to Westminster.

Below the level of the baronage Henry also liked to keep men hungry, one result of which was that the first quarter of the fifteenth century witnessed the steepest decline in the number of parliamentary peers of any twenty-five-year period during the later Middle Ages, from 102 to 73.
⁹
The only case of a new summons to parliament which arguably involved discretion on the king's part was that of John Tuchet, whose first summons in January 1404 was as much a reward for his service at the battle of Shrewsbury and in Wales as a matter of pedigree.
¹⁰
Under Edward III or Richard II, men such as Thomas Erpingham, John Stanley and perhaps others would probably have been elevated to the peerage, but despite Erpingham's public commendations in the parliaments of 1404 and 1406, expressly designed to elicit royal generosity, Henry was unmoved.
¹¹
Such self-restraint belies the notion that Henry's experience as a great lord under Richard II led him to adopt a more indulgent approach to the nobility.
¹²
The liberality for which the king was sometimes held to account by the commons was not exercised in favour of his nobles. What he demanded from them was loyalty and service; what he offered them was the security of tenure denied to him by Richard II – provided they remained loyal.

For traitors, however, the penalties were dire and becoming direr. The convictions of 1387–8 and 1397–8 occasioned deep unease about the use of treason for political purposes – not merely the process of Appeal, which effectively denied a defendant the ability to defend himself, but also the degradation of great families and their dependants and the feuds and property disputes which ensued. Henry's summary execution of Le Scrope, Bussy and Green at Bristol in July 1399 did nothing to calm these fears, for although (not yet being king) he did not bring treason charges against them, he nevertheless declared their property forfeit by right of conquest, since they were ‘destroyers of King Richard and of all his realm’.
¹³
On what precedent, if any, he based his claim to forfeiture by conquest is not clear. No wonder he had to give assurances at his enthronement that he had no intention of seizing further property through conquest, or that the 1399 parliament was wary, for Henry was after all one of the men behind the first parliamentary Appeal of Treason in 1388. Before the session ended he was also obliged to give undertakings that Appeals would never be introduced to parliament again, that he would keep to the definition of treason set down in the 1352 Statute, and that in matters concerning treason he would act ‘in a quite different manner’ from Richard II. However, two further requests, that the heirs of convicted traitors of ‘ancient ancestry’ should be allowed their inheritances both in fee simple and in tail, and that the widows of lords convicted of treason be permitted to sue for dower, merely elicited the response that the existing laws should be observed.
¹⁴

Three months later, confronted by manifest treason in the shape of the Epiphany Rising, Henry tempered his justice with a little mercy, as he had promised to do at his coronation, but not a lot. Since the leaders of the rising – the earls of Huntingdon, Kent and Salisbury, and Lords Despenser and Lumley – had conveniently been lynched, the proceedings at Oxford
castle on 11–12 January concerned the lesser conspirators.
¹⁵
Tried before the steward and marshal of the royal household, about two-thirds of the ninety accused were pardoned, although some were sent to prison for a time. Of the principal culprits, twenty-seven were sentenced to be drawn, hanged and quartered, but only four suffered this fate, the others being simply decapitated to spare them the agonies of a traitor's death.
¹⁶
When parliament next met, in January 1401, the lynching of the five lords was confirmed as treason even though they had not been sentenced by due process of law, but only the lands they held in fee simple were forfeited, nothing being said about entailed or enfeoffed lands – that is to say, lands in which others also had rights, either through conditional inheritance grants (entails) or post-mortem trusts (enfeoffments to use).
¹⁷
Five years later, however, a statute was enrolled which extended this judgment to include lands which they had enfeoffed to their own use, whether to themselves or to others. This was identical to the sentence imposed on Northumberland and Bardolf in the same parliament (1406). If what the king intended was clarification of their sentence, there is no record of it being discussed in parliament, and it is not clear on what authority Henry amplified the judgment of 1401.
¹⁸
This may be why on 28 May 1408, by which time Salisbury's son Thomas was twenty and working his passage towards redemption, the king issued an exemplification of the parliamentary judgment of 1401 confirming that his forfeiture had applied only to lands held in fee simple. This had never been enrolled as a statute.
¹⁹

Albeit that it was not described as such, parliament's decision to condemn the five rebel lords in 1401 was an act of attainder, although the recording of the names of twenty-five lords ‘who were present at the said declaration’ implies some hesitancy about the procedure.
²⁰
Attainder was not new, but it now acquired a sharper edge in conjunction with the novel
idea of corruption of the blood between those convicted of treason and both their ancestors and their heirs.
²¹
Henry's reign saw this notion of corruption of traitors' blood become more explicit. Paradoxically, there is no direct evidence that sentences including corruption of the blood were passed at this time; references to it are found only in the petitions for pardon from its implications and the responses to them, suggesting that this ‘legal doctrine’ may have grown up as a precaution on the part of petitioners rather than by judicial decree.
²²
When Thomas Haxey petitioned in 1399 for reversal of the sentence of treason passed on him by Richard II, despite the fact that he had already been pardoned, Henry's response was that he should be ‘restored to his name and fame’ so that his heirs could inherit from him, since the 1397 judgment had ‘interrupted’ the blood between him and his heirs and forebears.
²³
Within another decade, ‘interruption’ had become ‘corruption’, more emphatic though probably not different in legal effect. Thus Ralph Lumley's son John petitioned the 1411 parliament that he might be restored to ‘the name and ability’ of being the son and heir of his father and his other ancestors, ‘notwithstanding that the blood between the said Ralph and the said supplicant [John] was corrupted’. Almost identical wording was used by Ralph Hastings when he petitioned the 1410 parliament for restoration of the lands forfeited by his brother Richard in 1405, and by Ralph, son of Sir Henry Green, in 1411, even though Green's father had not been attainted of treason in 1399.
²⁴
William Lasyngby, a Yorkshire lawyer implicated in the 1405 rising, was that rarity, a traitor who survived. Convicted before Chief Justice Gascoigne but for some reason not executed, he was pardoned his treason in February 1408 at the request of Prince Henry, but still had to petition the 1411 parliament for restoration of his and his descendants' name and ability to sue for return of his forfeited possessions, since his
attainder had corrupted the blood between him and his heirs and between them and ‘all their ancestors’. Ironically, Lasyngby was one of the judges in the treason trials of the Southampton conspirators in 1415.
²⁵

It may be that these petitions, with their emphasis on the ability of a traitor's descendants to inherit from
any
of their ancestors, were designed to cover all eventualities in a world of increasingly complicated tenurial arrangements.
²⁶
The road to recovery was certainly becoming longer, more complex, and more dependent on royal grace, as exemplified by Thomas Montague's struggle to be treated as his father's heir. Although recognized as earl of Salisbury when he came of age in 1409, he was only restored to the entailed lands his father had held at his death. In 1414 he petitioned for the judgment of 1401 to be overturned, but this was refused; only in 1421, by which time he had been an earl for twelve years and proved his worth to Henry V, was he actually acknowledged as ‘heir in blood’ to his father and granted inheritance of his lands by right, rather than as an act of grace – the crucial distinction both for him and for his own heirs. Even now, however, Henry V kept the lands held at the time of his forfeiture by Salisbury's father, either jointly or individually to his own use, or which others had held to his use, in fee simple.
²⁷
It is similarly worth noting that when Hotspur's son was allowed the title of earl of Northumberland in 1416 he was not
restored
to his grandfather's earldom but created
de novo.
The judgments of 1403–6 against his father and grandfather were thus upheld and the family's rehabilitation presented as an act of grace.
²⁸