Henry IV (96 page)

Yet loans were only a stopgap. More radical was the council's order to the sheriffs and customs collectors on 4 August to stop paying annuities until Michaelmas, when they were to appear at the exchequer for further instructions. Ostensibly this was to allow the council time to conduct a review of annuitants on the basis of merit, but it also bore the stamp of Prince Henry's belief that annuities, wherever sourced, must be pruned. He had already cut back annuities from his lands in Cornwall and Chester, and once he became king he would institute a review of annuitants of both the duchy of Lancaster and the crown, leading to cuts by the end of his
reign of some £12,000 a year.
³²
His decision in the summer of 1410 marked a sharp swerve in policy. Archbishop Arundel, wary of the seepage of political goodwill, had prioritized annuities; not so the prince, and in fact the stop on annuities continued through the winter, reinforced by further writs. At the great council which met at Lambeth in March 1411 – the next financial review – it was noted that there was simply no money with which to pay them. The king declared that, if revenue could be increased, he would like his ‘loyal and good servants’ to have their payments reinstated, and in May a slight relaxation of the stop was announced: annuitants could now be paid from the sheriffs' ordinary revenues (the
corpus comitatus
), though not from any other source; in particular, ‘not a penny’ was to be paid from any form of taxation, feudal casualties, or the profits of alien priories. This concession was the result of a petition to the king – from whom is not stated, although it would not have lacked support. Thomas Hoccleve, whose annuity as a privy seal clerk had dried up over the winter, appealed in verse to Prince Henry to have his ‘smal lyflode’ restored. The gloomy poet protested too much: by early July 1411 he was being paid once more, and in February 1412 he received his back payment for the Michaelmas 1410–11 term.
³³
He certainly fared a good deal better than many: by the end of the reign, even a man as influential as Henry Lord FizHugh was 750 marks in arrears on a 100-mark annuity.
³⁴

The stop on annuities in the winter of 1410–11 was unpopular, as was the council's attempt in November to distrain to knighthood all those with more than £40 of land, which was met with indifference by the sheriffs charged with enforcing it and by July 1411 had yielded just £888.
³⁵
Since the proceeds of the half lay subsidy due in November 1410 had all been assigned in the summer, they provided no relief. To its credit, the prince's council did not significantly overcommit resources, for fictitious loans dwindled to around £3,000 during the year following the 1410 parliament.
³⁶
Yet when the Lambeth council met in March 1411, with both king
and prince present, the various schedules of income and expenditure presented to it made far from happy reading.
³⁷
With the wool customs predicted to yield only around £30,000 in 1410–11, three-quarters of which was earmarked for Calais, only £7,500 was left for military commitments elsewhere, yet by the council's estimation a minimum of £2,666 was needed for Ireland, £8,250 for Guyenne (including the keeping of Fronsac castle) and £8,700 for the Scottish march; and thus, computed the treasurer, ‘there is a deficit of £12,125’, even before any consideration had been given to paying off earlier debts or funding embassies.
³⁸
A second schedule estimated that the clerical tenth, tunnage and poundage, and the ordinary revenues of the crown would yield a further £18,366, but that the royal household alone would consume £15,280 of this by Michaelmas 1411, while administrative expenses, repairs to royal castles and palaces, the Garter celebrations and other recurrent charges would require a further £7,000.
³⁹
This brought the total deficit to just over £16,000 – and note, the treasurer added, that nothing had been allowed for annuities or for the debts of the household, which were ‘very large’. The king, while expressing the wish that payment of annuities be resumed, nevertheless ruled out any reduction in funding for his household or other ‘ordinary and necessary charges’. The only cut announced was that no force would be sent to Guyenne, although £2,666 would be sent to the barons there as a reward; this entailed a saving of about £5,000. In fact, further cuts were soon imposed. The allocation for Ireland was trimmed and the Scottish march wardens' rates of pay slashed, while neither Wales nor the defence of the sea received any funding – or at least not until William Longe, taking advantage of an unpoliced Channel, came close enough to shipwrecking the Anglo-Burgundian truce to induce Prince Henry to give admiral Thomas Beaufort £1,000 to hunt him down.
⁴⁰
The prince's laudable attempt to match expenditure to income meant that England's defence arrangements were becoming threadbare.

The prince's financial policy in 1410–11 was thus markedly different from that of Arundel and Tiptoft in 1407–9, most obviously in the unpopular attempts to increase revenues, the freeze on annuity payments, and the prioritization of Calais. The fact that three-quarters of the wool subsidy, the crown's largest recurrent source of revenue, was committed in advance was an understandable reaction to the mutiny of 1407, and presumably to the short-lived decision in November 1409 to cut the town's allocation from a half to a quarter, but it might have seemed to some to be an overreaction. Given that the decision – which was not on the commons' initiative, but on that of the government – coincided with the prince's appointment as captain of Calais, it might also have been seen as self-serving.
⁴¹
In the summer of 1412, when the prince no longer controlled the council, it was said that he was being slandered in Calais because he had failed to distribute all of what he had received to the garrison.
⁴²
This was a time of tension between the prince of Wales, the king and Prince Thomas, and the accusations over the financing of Calais need to be seen in that context; nevertheless, at a time of falling revenues and painful spending cuts, it was perhaps unwise to declare such a large portion of the exchequer's annual revenue to be
hors de combat
as far as other claimants were concerned.

In one respect, however, the prince's financial policy was more conservative than that of Arundel and Tiptoft: this was the question of the coinage. Bullion supply had caused problems for decades, not just in England; much of Europe experienced a bullion famine during the later fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, breeding competition between mints.
⁴³
The parliaments of 1379 and 1381 had considered debasing the gold and silver coins produced at the London and Calais mints, but it was feared that this would lead to unsound currency, and instead various acts were passed over the next twenty-five years attempting to increase the proportion of foreign merchants' import earnings spent on English goods, thereby keeping more specie in the realm.
⁴⁴
The effect of these was limited, and it was clear that the English coinage remained undervalued by comparison with French or Flemish coins, both of which were debased during the second half of the fourteenth century. Debasement in Flanders, England's chief trading partner, was especially
damaging, since the better prices offered at Burgundian mints drew more and more bullion away from England; during the 1380s Flemish gold coinage was debased by over 50 per cent.
⁴⁵
The Calais mint closed for lack of business in 1404, and activity at the London mint steadily decreased, its annual output falling from around £18,000 in gold coins and £940 in silver coins in the 1390s to £6,481 in gold and £195 in silver coins between 1403 and 1408. In 1407–8 production fell to £2,170 in gold and just £8 in silver.
⁴⁶

By 1409 there had been no recoinage in England for over half a century, but the liquidity crisis, which was at its most acute in that year, persuaded the government that something had to be done.
⁴⁷
The man asked to do it was the Piedmontese Richard Garner, who had traded in England for many years and on 22 February 1409 was made Master of the Mint at the Tower of London and keeper of the bullion exchange in Lombard Street (the main source of gold for the Mint).
⁴⁸
As usual, his contract was recorded in an indenture, but in this case, unusually, it was not enrolled; nor did he submit any accounts for the first three years that he held the office, the only gap in a series that runs from the late thirteenth to the mid-fifteenth century. Almost certainly, this was because his contract specified that he would implement weight (though not alloy) reductions in the coins he minted: the gold noble would be reduced from 120 grams to 112.5 grams and the silver penny from 18 grams to 16.1 grams, with corresponding reductions for other coins. No parliamentary sanction had been obtained for this decision, although by custom it should have been. In other words, it was a secret contract. However, it does not seem to have been implemented, perhaps because it was deemed too risky, more likely because of a difference of opinion in the council.
⁴⁹

Garner's indenture was naturally made with the king, but given the state of Henry's health in February 1409 it seems unlikely that it was on his initiative.
⁵⁰
It was agreed by the council, so presumably the chancellor and treasurer (Arundel and Tiptoft) approved it, but it seems that Prince Henry, whose influence was growing almost daily at this time, was against it. At any rate, there was no attempt to implement it during the prince's ascendancy, and although the coinage was among the items minuted at the council's planning meeting in July 1410, it was not until November 1411, when the prince's council was dismissed, that further action was taken.
⁵¹
This time an ordinance was passed with parliamentary authority (though not based on a common petition), and it sanctioned an even larger weight reduction than that proposed in February 1409. By now, with a further Burgundian debasement taking effect in 1409–10, the pressure for a defensive recoinage in England must have been irresistible.
⁵²
The gold noble was accordingly reduced to 108 grams and the silver penny to 15 grams. It was the need to bring the value of English coinage into line with international bullion prices, and thus to remedy ‘the great scarcity of money at present in the realm’ that prompted the ordinance, and with the price that the London mint could offer for bullion now once again competitive, the effect was electric. In the year from December 1411 to December 1412 the London mint produced gold coins to the value of £149,871 and silver coins worth £2,911; in the following year the respective figures were £138,822 and £5,463.
⁵³
An added benefit was that whereas between 1399 and 1408 the mint had run at a loss, in 1411–13 it made a profit in seigniorage of over £1,500 a year.
⁵⁴
Yet despite its success, recoinage was still regarded by many with suspicion: the new weights were only agreed for a two-year trial period, and after Henry IV's death Garner had to flee to sanctuary at Westminster abbey, lost his post, and forfeited his possessions – although his weight reductions were retained and remained essentially unchanged until the 1460s.
⁵⁵
Between November 1412 and September 1417 the mint produced over £450,000 of gold coins, £33,500 of silver coins, and a profit
of around £770 a year.
⁵⁶
This was the money with which the victor of Agincourt paid his soldiers. Despite the initial reluctance, shared by many apart from Prince Henry, to embark on a policy traditionally tainted with the whiff of unsound money, the recoinage of 1411 was a resounding success, though not for the man who had masterminded it.

¹
Foedera
, viii.628;
CPR 1408–13
, 57, 202. The prince witnessed two-thirds of royal charters after Sept. 1409; already in Feb. 1409 the earl of Westmorland addressed a petition to ‘my lord the prince and the lords of the council’ (E 28/23, no. 24).

²
E 403/599, 23 May, 16 July; E 403/602, 22 Nov.;
Foedera
, viii. 585–7, 597. Thomas Beaufort also remained close to the king until the end of the reign and was ‘by the king's mandate . . . attendant about his person’ (
CPR 1408–13,
227; Harriss, ‘Thomas Beaufort’,
ODNB
, 4.643–4).

³
BL Cotton Titus B. xi: indenture between the king and Prince Thomas noting that Thomas's fee had been reduced to £6,000 a year in March 1406; this indenture, dated 8 March 1408, was for three years from 1 May; he was also promised £9,000 still owed to him from the previous indenture, but it was endorsed to the effect that if he did not go to Ireland and remain there he would be obliged to repay the money. The council which set these terms was headed by Prince Henry and the indenture drawn up ‘at the relation of’ Archbishop Arundel.

⁴
E 403/599, 20 May (he had also received £4,266 of arrears in Nov. 1408: E 403/596, 28 Nov.).

⁵
POPC
, i.319–20, 339; Harriss,
Cardinal Beaufort
, 49; McNiven,
Heresy and Politics
, 151–2. Prince Henry was reluctant to pass money to Thomas, who had to get his father to write begging letters ‘from our heart’ to the council to give him ‘as much as you can’ (E 404/26, no. 210; E 404/27, no. 153).

⁶
CCR 1409–13
, 59, 183–5. The award of the justices favoured the archbishop, though with some compromise on each side. Cf.
POPC
, ii.117, a letter from the earl to the archbishop dating from 1406, 1407 or 1411.

⁷
McFarlane,
Lancastrian Kings
, 107–8.

⁸
Foedera,
viii.616; Harriss,
Cardinal Beaufort,
49–51; while chancellor, he received 800 marks a year ‘beyond the common fees and wages of the office’ (
CPR 1408–13
, 219).

⁹
SAC II
, 590. Walsingham said the annual subsidies were the king's proposal, but given his comments to the parliament, the prince is a more likely candidate; he would make a similar request, when king, to the parliament of May 1421 (Harriss,
Shaping the Nation,
503; Harriss,
Henry V
, 150–1).