1415: Henry V's Year of Glory (32 page)

Tuesday 21st

Henry met with his council today at Westminster to discuss the instructions to be issued to John Hull and William Chancellor: two esquires whom Henry had chosen to conduct Mordach, earl of Fife, back to Scotland. It was agreed that Mordach should be taken to Newcastle upon Tyne and handed over to the mayor and sheriff of the town with letters from the king instructing them to convey him safely to Warkworth Castle. The two esquires were also to carry similar letters to the sheriff of Northumberland and the constable of Warkworth Castle, letting them know of the arrangements. At Warkworth, Mordach was to be safely guarded until it was clear that Henry Percy was out of Scotland and in Berwick Castle. The esquires were ordered to take royal letters to the constable of Berwick Castle instructing him
to receive Mordach and keep him safely. When the hand-over had been effected, the esquires were to inform Sir Robert Umphraville or Sir John Widdrington or ‘other notable persons who know Henry Percy well’ and once these men were sure that it was indeed Henry Percy who had been delivered, they were to release Mordach to the Scots and to bring Henry Percy swiftly to the king. The hand-over was to take place by 1 July at the latest, and Mordach was not to be permitted to speak to anyone prior to his release.
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A commission was issued to John Hawley, John Clifford and Robert Rodyngton to find out who now had in their possession ‘certain vessels of the king’s enemies laden with wine lately captured by Thomas Carew and other subjects of the king at sea [who] took them to other ports in Devon and Cornwall without Thomas’s permission’. These ships were not those that Robert Rodyngton had taken to Southampton by 26 April but others that Carew had captured. This is made clear by a second commission issued to the same men: to find out who owned the vessels and to conduct them safely ‘to the king’s presence at Southampton’.
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It might have been the wine the king was after – he had recently paid the victualler of Calais £128 for Gascon wine for the royal household – but, given the destination to which these ships were to be taken, it was more probably the vessels themselves.
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Friday 24th

A council minute dated ‘Friday 25 May’
[sic]
notes that four members of the privy council – Henry Beaufort, Thomas Beaufort, the earl of Arundel and the keeper of the privy seal – met at Blackfriars to discuss extorting money from the Italians. Henry’s need for money for his invasion was about to take an ugly turn.

Merchants from Italy might have thought they had nothing to do with the war between Henry and the king of France. It did not concern them. But they had been increasingly drawn into it. Henry’s recent prohibition on foreigners leaving the country was a significant threat to their international trade; so was his requisition of all ships with a carrying capacity of over twenty tuns. A number of Venetian galleys in English ports were commandeered for the purposes of his invasion. But far more threatening was Henry’s demand for cash.

The four privy councillors interviewed six Florentine merchants, four Venetians and two merchants from Lucca. Bishop Beaufort addressed them, and informed them that it was customary for men trading in foreign countries to make grants to the kings so that they could undertake expeditions. He hoped that they would loan the king what they could. If they did not, they would be imprisoned.

This was nothing short of tyranny. But that did not help the Italian merchants whom Beaufort had seized in Henry’s name. When told that they profited greatly from their trade in England, and that they should give up their gold and silver and other jewels to the tune of £1,200 in the case of the Florentine merchants, £1,000 in the case of the Venetians, and £200 in respect of the men of Lucca, they refused. ‘And because they refused to lend such sums to our lord the king, they were committed to the custody of the Fleet Prison’.
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Was there any justification for their seizure and arrest? Taking a view sympathetic to Henry, we may speculate that his thinking was as follows. Since the leading English merchants in London were being leaned on very heavily to loan money for the expedition, for the safeguarding of England’s trading links among other things, there was no reason why other merchants profiting from trade in England should not equally be required to do so. Indeed, the Italians may have been considered to have had an unfair competitive advantage in retaining their capital while the English merchants had to pledge theirs. In addition, we may remark that there was a precedent: Edward III had given orders for all the Italian merchants in England to be arrested in 1337, saving only those of the Bardi and Peruzzi companies, on whom the king was reliant for future borrowing. As Henry V regarded so many aspects of his great-grandfather’s reign as instructive for his own expedition, he may have known about this from the same chronicles that he was using for his military preparations. Although in 1337 the Genoese had been supporting the French in their antagonism of England – providing them with ships and mercenaries – Henry seems not to have been bothered by such details. Thus the king may have wholly believed that what his council was doing in his name was justifiable. But from a more objective standpoint it smacks of the sort of tyranny that Richard II perpetrated in the late 1390s, which Henry’s father had returned to England to stamp out in 1399.

The above business concerning the merchants – like all direct
requests for money – was not conducted by the king in person but on his behalf by powerful men. Henry himself was concerned with the building of a bridge. He appointed Robert Welton, one of the clerks of the exchequer, to be the surveyor for ‘the construction of a bridge to be made by the king’s advice, to take carpenters, smiths and other workmen, artificers and labourers, and timber, iron, hides and other necessaries’.
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Where his new bridge was to be is not clear, but presumably it was a replacement of a dilapidated structure on the king’s highway.

The formal order for the delivery of Mordach, earl of Fife, to John Hull and William Chancellor was drawn up today at the king’s personal command.
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Saturday 25th

Robert Thresk – one of the clerks of the exchequer whom Henry had rewarded in February – had recently submitted a petition to the chamberlain. He wished to have permission to found a chantry of three chaplains to celebrate divine service daily at the altar of St Anne in his church at Thresk in Yorkshire (Thirsk, as it is called now).
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The beneficiaries of these prayers would be Robert Thresk himself and the king – for their good estate in their lifetimes and for their souls and the souls of Robert’s friends and relatives after death. Henry granted the petition.

One other order is extant for today. Stephen Ferrour, the royal farrier, was ordered to take iron and ‘horsenails’, and to enlist blacksmiths for shoeing the king’s horses on his expedition to France.
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Sunday 26th: Trinity Sunday
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Trinity Sunday was, for Henry, one of the most important religious feasts of the year. His devotion to the cult of the Holy Trinity featured in almost every aspect of his life, and the lives of those around him. From the character of his prayers to the decoration in the stained glass windows of royal palaces and chapels, and the salutations in his letters, he was a sincere follower of the three-in-one: God the Father,
God the Son and God the Holy Ghost. Of the twenty or so ships in the royal fleet, three were called
Trinity
and one was the
Holy Ghost
. In 1413, he had travelled to Canterbury Cathedral to see his father entombed in the Trinity Chapel on Trinity Sunday. He may have had a difficult relationship with his father but, in their complete devotion to the Trinity, they were as close as father and son could be.
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For this reason it is all the more surprising to find Henry conducting business as normal on this day. Other important religious feasts noted above saw little or no recorded royal business. In contrast, several matters were attended to today. Only one of them was of a religious character. Henry ordered a charter to be sent to the House of Jesus of Bethlehem at Sheen showing that the priory had been granted the possessions of Ware and other alien priories.
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A letter was sent to the sheriff of Chester on the king’s command, stating that, on the advice of the chancellor, Henry had decided that no general or special assizes were to be held during his absence abroad.
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This was not out of any clemency for those accused of heinous crimes; they were left to languish in their gaols until their moment of justice should come after the campaign was over. Henry’s motive was to free up his men preparing to travel with him by releasing them from any obligation to serve on juries or to have to worry about turning up in court to give evidence.

Henry made preparations for feeding his army. The sheriffs of Kent, Oxfordshire, Wiltshire and Hampshire were ordered each to send two hundred oxen to Southwick, Tichfield, Beaulieu and Southampton respectively by 25 June.
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All four of these writs were authorised by Henry in person – as indeed were the great majority of preparatory writs. Also he heard his chamberlain recite a petition from the royal surgeon, Thomas Morstede, asking for a sum of money sufficient to obtain all the surgical consumables he had been ordered to provide for the duration of the voyage, and for the king to arrange carriage for everything to France. In addition, Morstede asked the king to appoint men to serve at the given wages: one suspects that he anticipated some difficulty persuading surgeons to give up their lucrative, safe London practices in return for 6d per day in a war zone. As one would expect, Henry granted Morstede’s petition in all respects.
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It is worth pausing at this point, on Trinity Sunday, to reflect on how much business was falling personally to the king. When books
about Henry’s reign state that Henry spent most of the first half of 1415 preparing for the forthcoming campaign, they fail to draw attention to the extraordinary level of work that this entailed, and how much of it was dealt with by the king. As we have seen, Henry even involved himself in such matters as the provision of meat for the army when it assembled – even though this was a religious feast day when he might have chosen not to work. We have seen him over and over again personally attending to such matters as the provision of horseshoes and horsenails, or the manufacture of bowstaves. One would have thought that much of this would be delegated. But in 1415 there was no War Office. Matters such as carriage could be delegated, but otherwise each individual aspect of the forthcoming campaign had to be attended to by the king and council. And, with the council largely composed of clergymen or earls absent on royal business, for the most part that meant by Henry himself.

Monday 27th

This morning at the Tower the earl of Fife was released into the custody of John Hull and William Chancellor, in accordance with Henry’s directions of the 21st.
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His long journey back to Scotland had begun.

Elsewhere in the Tower, Henry was presiding over the council meeting held today to delegate various duties. First on the agenda was the duke of Burgundy. Instructions needed to be drawn up for men going to see John the Fearless. What the exact nature of their business was we cannot tell; the instructions themselves are no longer extant. But we know that Henry himself chose the archbishop of Canterbury, Hugh Mortimer, Master Philip Morgan and Master John Hovingham to deal with the matter, adding Lord Scrope ‘when he will arrive’.
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Apart from the archbishop, all of these men had been on the embassy to John the Fearless in June 1414, and Lord Scrope had secretly been back since. The wording of the note referring to Scrope suggests that the men were to sit down to draw up the instructions straightaway. Clearly the secret negotiations with John the Fearless were ongoing.

The next items on the agenda were the crown jewels and the treaty
that Sir John Tiptoft was required to negotiate in Gascony. With regard to the crown jewels, the lords had decided at the April great council that, in return for accepting late payment of wages, they would take jewels as security. Some had already been dispersed, such as the ‘large tabernacle of gilt silver’ recently sent back to Henry’s creditors in Devon. To control the dispersal of such treasures, Henry appointed a committee consisting of his brother John, Henry Beaufort and Richard Courtenay, bishop of Norwich. Another committee – namely his brother Humphrey, Thomas Beaufort, and the keeper of the privy seal – was appointed to draw up precise instructions for Sir John Tiptoft with regard to Gascony.

The various committees indicate that Henry was beginning to delegate more tasks. The chancellor, Henry Beaufort, was given the duty of arraying men for the defence of the realm in each county. Beaufort was also instructed to inform all the archbishops and bishops to enter into their registers ‘the malice of the Lollards’. He was to organise the building of beacons – warning fires, in case of invasion – in each part of the country. To the treasurer of England (Thomas, earl of Arundel) and the controller of the royal household (John Rothenhale) fell the responsibility for obtaining and transporting victuals to Southampton. The treasurer (Arundel) and the admiral of England (Thomas Beaufort) were given the task of paying all the mariners. And these two men were also entrusted with sorting out the terms of an agreement for provisioning Calais and its English-held hinterland.
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