Henry V as Warlord (31 page)

When Parliament met in May the Commons complained, politely but resentfully, of poverty and distress among the king’s subjects and probably – though there is no definite evidence – refused the permanent taxation which was the sole hope of reducing the steadily growing deficit in the royal budget, a deficit which increased alarmingly each year. They would only grant a subsidy of a fifteenth, less than ever before. With even more reluctance the clergy granted a tenth.

The conclusion is inescapable that the English had seen the Treaty of Troyes as a danger signal; with reason they expected countless new campaigns for which Henry would demand ever increasing sums of money. They based their resistance to any further demands of this sort on the treaty’s constitutional implications; in their view the war was now one between the French monarchy, in the person of the ‘Heir of France’, and his father-in-law’s rebellious subjects, and Englishmen could not be expected to pay for it. However much he may have disliked it privately, the king was too shrewd a politician to oppose such an argument head-on, and he had clearly anticipated it, to judge from his response. He had asked for no fresh taxation in the Parliament of December 1420, nor did he now – 1421 was the first year of his reign when no new taxes were collected. He would have to make good the shortfall by private borrowing on a nationwide scale, as he had already begun to do. Henry refused another Commons request (inspired by the Treaty of Troyes, and the fear that the monarch would be abroad for long periods) that parliamentary petitions might be answered by the king’s lieutenant at home in England; he would continue to consider them personally, even on campaign, as hitherto – when he had time to do so. For all the enthusiasm of their welcome, and their pride at humiliating the hereditary enemy, the English were definitely beginning to tire of their hero king always being overseas – creating a dual monarchy, with France as an equal, had considerably less appeal than a war of straightforward plunder. However, no one dared to criticize publicly Henry’s foreign ambitions.

The seriousness of the king’s financial problems can best be understood by appreciating that when he died the government would have to face a deficit of £30,000, together with debts of £20,000. This was against a total annual revenue of just over £56,000, inadequate for the crown’s expenses in peacetime, let alone in wartime. He had only been able to pay for his campaigns by living hopelessly above his means without any thought of a reckoning.

Henry seized every possible opportunity of raising money. He even exploited the popular belief in magic, at the expense of his own family. Everyone believed in wizards and witches. We know from John Lydgate’s
Troy Book
(written between 1412 and 1420) that a witch could tell the future by astrology, though usually employing necromancy or calling up demons to do so, and change the weather, raising up storms of lightning, hail and snow, of cold and ice. (Just as Owain was reputed to have done.) She could even turn old men into young ones, besides being able to do more unpleasant things.

On 25 September 1419 the Archbishop of Canterbury wrote to his bishops to inform them that the king desired their prayers for protection against the supernatural machinations of necromancers who were trying to destroy him. (Necromancers were magicians who brought dead bodies to life, to work evil spells for them.) There was nothing much out of the ordinary about this request. What was truly startling, however, was the arrest of Joan, the queen dowager, four days later on such a charge. According to the parliament rolls her confessor, Friar Randolf, a Franciscan of Shrewsbury, had accused her ‘of compassing the death and destruction of our lord the king in the most treasonable and horrible manner that could be devised’. The
Chronicles of London
are more explicit; she had attempted ‘by sorcery and necromancy for to have destroyed the king’. Friar Randolf was arrested in Guernsey and brought to Henry’s field headquarters at Mantes, where the king interrogated him personally before ordering that he be taken to London and imprisoned in the Tower. Two other members of the queen dowager’s household were also arrested, a groom called Roger Colles and a maid named Peronell Brocart – nothing is known of their subsequent fate.

Admittedly Joan of Navarre’s father, King Charles the Bad of Navarre, had had an unfortunate (and possibly justified) reputation for sorcery, as many people must have remembered. It was also true that her son by her first marriage was Duke John of Brittany, who disliked the English; that another of her sons, Artus de Richemont, had been captured at Agincourt after being so hideously wounded in the face that he looked like a frog and was still languishing in captivity in England. (Oddly enough, in later years there were to be rumours that Richemont practised sorcery.) Yet Joan had always been on the best of terms with Henry and indeed with all her other stepchildren ever since she had married their father in 1402. Good-looking, elegant and amiable, she seems to have been generally liked. There was no apparent motive for her trying to kill the king. In the event she was never brought to trial, while the friar who had accused her stayed in the Tower until he was killed there in a fight with a mad priest. (Save for a brief episode after Henry’s death when he was extricated for a short period by his literary patron the Duke of Gloucester.) Nevertheless Joan, who had been deprived of all her possessions and revenues four days after her actual arrest, remained a prisoner for nearly three years. What was so curious about her captivity, which was mainly at Leeds Castle in Kent, was that it was so very comfortable. She had nineteen grooms and seven pages and was provided with every luxury, entertaining the Duke of Gloucester and the Archbishop of Canterbury who both came and dined with her; Bishop Beaufort stayed with her as her guest for several days, as did Lord Camoys.

The late A. R. Myers’ explanation of this extraordinary episode is almost certainly the correct one, and demonstrates just how ruthless Henry V could be, even towards the most harmless members of his own family. The plot can only have existed in the mind of Friar Randolf, presumably crazy and recognized as such by the king. But the queen dowager was entitled to a dowry of over £6,000 a year, a very heavy expense for a government whose total regular income was little more than £56,000; during her imprisonment she never cost more to keep than £1,000 in any one year. An increase in revenue of £5,000 per annum would have been of crucial importance to a ruler who was only just staying afloat financially. It also explains why Joan was never brought to trial; if she had been, she would have been acquitted, thus depriving the government of her dowry. On his deathbed Henry ordered her release and the restoration of her possessions and income ‘lest it should be a charge unto Our conscience’, a tacit admission that the whole affair had been trumped up. For the rest of her life until her death in 1437 she was treated with the utmost respect and consideration. Clearly, few people had believed in the story that she was a royal witch.

One aspect which Myers ignores is that Joan’s son was the Duke of Brittany. John V had not seen her for many years, and was in any case a man with little family feeling. Nevertheless it would be extremely embarrassing for the duke if his mother was proved publicly to be a witch – he was not to know there was no case – and on at least one occasion he demanded to know what was being done with her. John was flirting with the dauphinists – later he would briefly desert his alliance with the English – and Henry would have had no scruples about using this particular threat against him.

Another relative was even more profitable. Few English prelates, not even Cardinal Wolsey, have been as blatantly avaricious as the king’s uncle, Bishop Henry Beaufort. In 1417 he had resigned the chancellorship of England and gone to Constance where a council of the Church was seeking to end the schism. When a new pope, Martin V, was at last elected, he curried favour with him. Martin hoped to extinguish the Statute of Provisors, which did not allow papal nominations to English benefices; he therefore appointed Beaufort papal legate in England and offered him a cardinal’s hat. In 1419 Beaufort was warned by his angry nephew, who confiscated the bull naming him legate, that he had infringed the Statute of Provisors and risked losing all his goods and being degraded from his see. Most unwisely, Beaufort tried to obtain a fresh bull. Henry, through the bishop’s cousin and confidant, Thomas Chaucer, who was secretly in the king’s pay, informed him that he was facing ruin in earnest. The example of Joan of Navarre had not been wasted. Beaufort became so terrified that in 1421 he lent his nephew over £17,000, increasing his loans to him to the enormous sum of £38,000.

An estimate submitted to Henry in May 1421 showed him that he was operating on the brink of financial disaster, as he must have guessed in any case. He was obsessed with money. We know from an undated letter that, despite all his difficulties, he had at one period during his reign reserves kept at Harfleur of £30,000 in gold coin, £2,000 in silver coin and blocks of silver weighing half a ton.
⁸
He was not above checking figures himself. Early in 1421 he examined the accounts of a former Keeper of the Great Wardrobe, a man who had been dead for four years, accounts which in any case would have automatically been audited by the treasury sooner or later, and indicated items which he wished to be queried. It was not that he was in any way a miser. It was simply that he was determined to find the resources to pay for his conquest of France – resources which only existed in his imagination.
⁹

His desperation at this date is understandable. Parliament had refused to grant more money at a moment when still more bad news was coming out of France. Dauphinist morale had soared after Baugé while that of the English sank correspondingly. The latter no longer seemed invincible, as they had ever since 1415, a consideration of vital importance for scanty forces occupying a vast area of territory and defending very long frontiers.

Salisbury, the new King’s Lieutenant, assembled fresh troops, sent out scouts to locate the various uncoordinated dauphinist forces about to march into Normandy and attacked each separately in turn, causing the dauphin to abandon the siege of Alençon and any idea of invading Normandy. The earl then raided deep into Anjou, afterwards reporting to Henry that ‘we broughten Hom the farest and grettest Prey of Bestes’ – meaning that whole herds of horses, cattle, sheep and pigs had been seized from the wretched peasants – and that he and his men were rested and ready to strike again.
¹⁰
Even so, Salisbury had been very lucky that the enemy, who vastly outnumbered his little army, had not joined forces to invade Normandy. Instead they turned west and laid siege to Chartres.

Yet the dauphin’s change of direction was alarming enough. For he took Montmirail and menaced Paris. The capital was now more or less blockaded by his skirmishers, whom Parisians were threatening to admit in the way they had Burgundians in the past. The Duke of Exeter and his tiny garrison were cut off. Fortunately for the English the dauphin was badly advised and did not concentrate his troops. As it was, Henry was on the verge of losing Paris.

In addition there was trouble in Picardy. Here Jacques d’Harcourt (whose county of Tancarville in Normandy had been confiscated by Henry and given to the late Sir John Grey) was attacking isolated English and Burgundian strongholds with some success. It is likely that his activities seriously alarmed both the burgesses of Calais and Duke Philip. In the king’s words, Picardy needed ‘better governance’.

Somehow, in the midst of all these urgent preparations for war, King Henry found time to turn his pious attention to the Benedictines, whom he decided were in dire need of reform. He may have had political motives, or at least been influenced to some extent by memories of the monks’ former political sympathies. The community of Westminster had included some strong and vociferous supporters of Richard II and those of Shrewsbury and Wenlock had connived at Sir John Oldcastle’s escape despite his heresy – almost certainly out of distaste for the Lancastrian usurpation. The ‘old English black monks’ could be undeniably aggressive; a monk archdeacon of Westminster was reputed to wear full armour on occasion. Men who did not accept that God had inspired the House of Lancaster’s seizure of the throne of England must surely have unsound spiritual as well as political values. Yet his interference in their affairs, in almost Tudor style, probably stemmed even more from his determination to assert the royal will in every area of ecclesiastical life. A complaint by ‘certain false brethren’ that the Benedictines had slackened in the observance of their rule met with a most sympathetic hearing from the king. He consulted the prior of Mount Grace Priory in Yorkshire, Dan Robert Layton, (himself a former black monk) as to what to do; the Carthusians, ‘never reformed because never deformed’, were the most respected religious brotherhood of the age on account of their austerity and genuine sanctity, though as hermits they were scarcely best suited to advise monks who lived a communal life.
¹¹

On 5 May 1421 the king addressed a special assembly of nearly 400 Benedictines in the chapterhouse at Westminster, exhorting them to mend their ways. He reminded them how generous his ancestors had been to them, how this generosity was inspired by a desire for their prayers, but how such prayers could continue to be effective only if the brethren returned to a proper observance of their rule. He read out Prior Layton’s criticisms and suggestions. A committee was appointed by the monks to report on the problems. In the event Henry soon returned to France and the black monks neatly shelved the matter. Had the king lived another decade they might well have had to implement draconian proposals.

Henry had never intended to leave France for very long and preparations for a new expeditionary force had been in hand from the moment he returned to England. It consisted of a mere 900 men-at-arms and 3,300 archers, which was all the king could afford, though it was supported by a mass of supernumeraries such as gunners, sappers and engineers. The expedition assembled at Dover and was ready to embark at the end of May, a fine feat of logistics. Henry’s decision to sail to Calais instead of Harfleur – the nearest bridgehead into endangered Normandy – has been criticized but is understandable. The threat to Picardy was too grave to ignore and it was essential to reassure Duke Philip and the Burgundians. Moreover the voyage from Dover to Calais took only a few hours if tides were properly calculated, as opposed to perhaps several days sailing from Southampton to Harfleur.