Henry IV (105 page)

It was now a year since parliament had met, and on 1 December writs were issued for a meeting at Westminster on 3 February 1413, although whether the king would live to see it was uncertain.
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Shortly before Christmas he again fell gravely ill, although he recovered in time to celebrate the festive season at his accustomed retreat, Eltham, ‘with as much joy as he could summon’.
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He spent the next month moving – or being moved – between Greenwich, Mortlake and Lambeth before returning to Westminster early in February. Here he spent the last six weeks of his life, rousing himself one last time to address his subjects. Although no official roll survives of the proceedings of the February 1413 parliament, it certainly met: a draft of the speaker's protestation was preserved, and the burgesses elected for Salisbury brought back an ordinance passed there concerning clothmaking.
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Henry did not attend the opening session – it was Arundel, as chancellor, who accepted the speaker's protestation – but according to Strecche the king did later appear ‘publicly before all the people’ to explain that, God willing, it
was his intention ‘to restore the Holy Cross to the hands of Christians’, in order to accomplish which he asked for aid to be made available to him; ‘having said which, he immediately exacted for his proposed expedition a tenth from the clergy and a fifteenth from the people in parliament, and withdrew’.
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Three months later, in Henry V's first parliament, the knights and burgesses elected in February claimed to have remained at Westminster at their own cost until it was dissolved following the king's death, and asked the new king to grant payment of their expenses. A record of the parliament's proceedings would certainly have been kept, but once Henry IV died its acts, including the taxes granted, were nullified.
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Various accounts were preserved of conversations at Henry's deathbed, focusing on two themes: a homily from the king to the prince, and a request from his confessor, John Tille, to repent of his misdeeds. Tille, a Dominican friar, had been Henry's confessor since 1411.
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According to Capgrave's English chronicle, certain lords who were present asked him to induce the king to repent for three things in particular: the death of Richard II, the death of Archbishop Scrope, and his ‘wrong title’ (usurpation) of the crown. For the first two, replied Henry, he had written to the pope and received absolution; as for the third, there was no remedy to be had, ‘for my children will not suffer that the regality go out of our lineage’.
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The dying king's advice to his son found its way into a number of sources, some written within a decade of Henry's death, others much later. Common sentiments were expressed, but with variations. Capgrave and Elmham made the king emphasize the transience of all earthly things, the need to love and fear God, and to be strong in adversity and modest in victory.
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Capgrave added that he advised the prince to take a wise confessor who was not afraid to offer him salutary warnings (in the manner of Tille, or of Repingdon), that he should especially value holy men who had led a solitary life of prayer, and that he should eschew idleness and dedicate himself to God and his realm. Strecche endorsed much of this, adding an exhortation from the king to the prince to act righteously in his judgements and love his brothers. The last point was taken up and expanded a century later in the
First English Life,
which had the king say that he feared that after his
death ‘some discord’ might arise between Princes Henry and Thomas, for they were both ‘of so great stomach and courage’. The prince replied that he would love and honour his brothers above all men so long as they remained true to him, but if they conspired or rebelled against him, ‘I assure you that I shall as soon execute justice upon any one of them as upon the worst and most simplest person within your realm’. The king was ‘marvellously rejoiced in his mind’ to hear this and launched into a peroration on the virtues of swift and impartial justice, fear of God and the love of his people as the keys to a tranquil and glorious reign.
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Several of these accounts end with the king bestowing his paternal blessing on the prince.

The sickness that had wasted Henry's body had now run its course. He was, said Capgrave, ‘all sinews and bones’; Usk described him as ‘cruelly tormented with festering of the flesh, dehydration of the eyes and rupture of the internal organs’. Strecche went further, describing the king's body as ‘completely shrunken and wasted by disease . . . his flesh and skin eaten away [and] all his innards laid open and visible . . . apart from those which had been wrapped and bandaged’.
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Such putrefaction might have been caused by the skin disease which had afflicted him for years, or by circulatory problems (such as blocked arteries) cutting off the blood supply to parts of his body. Death finally released him on 20 March, after he collapsed in Westminster abbey, having gone there to make an offering at the shrine of Edward the Confessor. Comatose, he was laid on a pallet and carried to the high and spacious Jerusalem chamber in the abbot's lodging, where he was placed in front of the fire.
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Presently he revived and asked his chamberlain where he was; when told that the chamber was called Jerusalem he declared that his time had come, that it had been prophesied that he would die in Jerusalem, and that now he would yield himself up to God. Strecche reported his last words as, ‘ “Now I hope to see God in the land of the living, and under His most gentle mercy I await my death.” ’ And thus ‘King Henry gave up his life to the Saviour’.
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Although the many stories surrounding Henry's last days and death grew in the telling, they carried within them elements of truth and reflect contemporary perceptions. That his confessor should have attended his master's deathbed was to be expected, and whether or not Tille advised Henry to beg God's forgiveness for his usurpation and the deaths of Scrope and Richard II, it was such matters that contemporaries thought ought to have been on the dying king's mind.
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If there is a familiar ring to the advice he offered his son, there is no doubting Prince Henry's presence at Westminster during the final weeks of his father's life, and it is easy to imagine that they conversed on a number of occasions. The concerns raised in the king's speeches resonate not just with traditional advice literature such as mirrors for princes, but also with the concerns of the moment such as the disagreements between his sons. That Henry died in a chamber called Jerusalem is beyond doubt; that he actually planned to travel to Jerusalem is not, but the intention, or at least hope of doing so, was real enough, and the association between the Holy Land and the king's last days was a reminder of what to many continued to mark him out as a truly Christian king: his years of pilgrimage and crusading.

In the will he dictated on 21 January 1409, Henry had asked to be buried in Canterbury cathedral, ‘after the discretion of my cousin the archbishop of Canterbury’, and although this must have been superseded by a second will the king evidently did not change his mind about his place of burial.
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A number of considerations influenced his choice of Canterbury over Westminster, not least the fact that space was running out in St Edward's chapel, where seven royal tombs already formed a horseshoe around the Confessor's shrine, and an eighth – that of Richard II and Anne of Bohemia – had stood empty and reproachful for fifteen years.
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Henry might have usurped Richard's throne, but he could hardly usurp his grave, whereas to have himself buried in a less conspicuous place than the king he had deposed might have seemed impolitic. Yet these problems were not insuperable
– Henry V later found a convenient spot for his tomb just east of the shrine – and there must also have been positive reasons to prefer Canterbury, notably the lure of burial next to the shrine of Thomas Becket, a more prestigious, if less royal, saint than the Confessor. That it was Becket's oil that had anointed Henry as king and that his tomb would be within the Trinity chapel, mirroring his lifelong Trinitarian devotion, were probably decisive.
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Henry's tomb on the north side of Becket's shrine would also complement that of the Black Prince, England's lost warrior king and another devotee of the Trinity, on the south side; moreover, he would be surrendering his soul to the care of his friend Archbishop Arundel, whose ‘true son’ and ‘child in God’ he had declared himself to be.
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Details of the king's interment are lacking, although the insertion of the current
ordo
for the burial of English kings,
De Exequiis Regalibus
, into the register of Archbishop Bowet, one of Henry's executors, suggests that an attempt was made to follow the usual procedure.
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According to this, the corpse was washed, rubbed down with balsam and spices and then embalmed, which meant replacing the brain, viscera, heart and other internal organs with oils and ointments to prevent putrefaction. Once embalmed, the
ordo
prescribed that it should be clothed in a tunic stretching to the heels, then a royal mantle. The beard was to be carefully arranged on the chest, the head and face covered with a silken handkerchief, a crown or diadem placed on the head, the hands covered with gloves decorated with orphreys, and a gold ring placed on the middle finger of the right hand. A gilded orb was then to be placed in the right hand, into which a golden rod surmounted by a cross was inserted, with the cross lying on the dead king's chest, while the left hand held a gilded sceptre extending upwards as far as the left ear. Finally, the shins and feet were to be covered with silken stockings and slippers.

In Henry's case, it was later discovered that his body had been wrapped five times round in leather and sealed in a leaden shroud before being placed in an elm-wood coffin so large that it had to be packed with
hay-bands to prevent it shifting; since this shroud was moulded to human shape, the regalia (assuming they were included) must have been placed beside it in the oversized coffin. The cortege then proceeded by barge, accompanied by a torchlight procession which included the new king, his brothers, and other lords and prelates, down the Thames to Gravesend and overland from there to Canterbury, where it was buried next to Becket's shrine.
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All this was probably done by the end of March, certainly before Henry V's coronation on 9 April, and was paid for by the transfer of a relatively modest 500 marks from the duchy of Lancaster to Thomas Brounfleet, treasurer of the dead king's household.
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Once Henry V's first parliament had met (15 May to 9 June) and Clarence had returned from Guyenne, a memorial service was held in Canterbury cathedral – appropriately, on Trinity Sunday (18 June).
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Henry V and his brothers arrived in Canterbury on 16 June, and on the following day the king hosted a banquet.
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A great iron
herce
(candle-frame) costing £200 and constructed by Simon Prentout, wax-chandler of London, was erected between the choir and the high altar, around which burned ten dozen torches.
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These
herces
could reach as high as the vault, and were also known in France as
chapelles ardentes
. Henry's was draped with forty pennons (
gytons
), other hangings (
valances
) painted with images, and encircled by barriers covered with black cloth, within which the chief mourners stood or knelt. The pennons and hangings were provided by Henry IV's painters, Thomas Kent and Thomas Wright, who also made ninety banners ‘with all their stuff’ on which were painted ‘the arms of all the Christian kings and other great men of the various kingdoms of the world’, each of which cost half a mark.
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For a pilgrim, warrior and crusader of international renown, the connotations were unmistakable.

Henry V's personal contribution to the memorial service on 18 June was a gilded head, probably a reliquary, studded with pearls and precious stones, which cost him £160 and which he offered at Becket's tomb. That evening he gave a banquet to mark the feast of the Trinity, but these were his last acts beyond the obligatory minimum to honour the memory of the father to whom he owed his throne.
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Indeed Henry V spent considerably more money on the reburial of Richard II in Westminster abbey in December 1413 than he did on his father's exequies, a point not lost on contemporaries.
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It was not he but Queen Joan who commissioned the monument to her and her husband erected over Henry's grave a decade or so after his burial.
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Their alabaster effigies were probably made in the workshop of Thomas Prentys and Robert Sutton at Chellaston (Derbyshire). The tester above them carefully integrated their heraldry, one shield of each of their arms and, in the middle, a third impaling their arms, set against repeating lines of Henry's motto,
Soverayne,
and Joan's,
A Temperance
, alternating with badges of Henry's crowned eagles and Joan's ermines (Joan's first husband, John IV of Brittany, had founded the order of the ermine in 1381). Each of the shields was encircled by a
SS
collar ‘fastened’ by an eagle in flight. The tomb chest had alabaster angels also holding arms of England and Navarre. Gazing up at the tester, side by side with their heads on pillows supported by angels, were placed the figures of the king and queen in their robes of state, she wearing a prominent
SS
collar. His figure is considerably larger than hers, a naturalistic detail confirmed by the respective sizes of their leaden shrouds. Henry's face – stern and pudgy – also seems naturalistic, and is the closest thing we have to a likeness of the king, possibly based on
a death mask.
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The panels at either end depict the martyrdom of Becket and the Coronation of the Virgin by the Trinity. It was doubtless the fact that Henry was buried in the cathedral that also led to the incorporation into the late fifteenth-century stained glass of the north-west transept of an image of St Thomas holding a small phial, the oil with which he and his successors were anointed.
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