Henry IV (39 page)

The picture that emerges from this is of six weeks of hard bargaining followed by ten days at the beginning of March in which compromises were hammered out. So it was too with the issue of ecclesiastical authority. The king's influence over ecclesiastical affairs had grown markedly since the second half of the thirteenth century, but with influence came responsibility. Confronted by the challenge of John Wyclif and his followers since the 1370s to the Church's spiritual authority, it was to the crown that the ecclesiastical hierarchy looked for protection. Simultaneously, however, it was to the crown that would-be reformers looked for encouragement. The parliament and clerical convocation of January–March 1401 marked an important moment in this struggle.
⁴⁶
Adam Usk, who was present, said that ‘the Lollards, assembling in London from every part of the kingdom, intended utterly to destroy the clergy’; this was alarmist, but petitions from the commons relating to alien priories, tithes, appropriations, parochial non-residence and provisors indicate a significant reformist element among the commons.
⁴⁷

Yet parliament also witnessed a powerful assault on the Church's critics. It was customary under Richard II for the opening speeches to include an undertaking on the king's behalf to maintain the Church and its liberties as his progenitors had done, but in 1401 Chief Justice Thirning added to this the words ‘and as has been approved by the holy fathers and doctors of the holy church and by holy scripture’.
⁴⁸
Such self-consciously orthodox language was echoed by the speaker. Savage addressed the assembly on several occasions, once comparing the three estates of the realm to the Trinity, another time likening parliament to the Catholic mass and quoting Thirning's words that it was the Church approved by patriarchs, doctors and scripture that was to be upheld.
⁴⁹
Arundel's opening address to convocation on 29 January also made it clear that its primary task was to discuss heresy, and later that day an imposing royal delegation arrived at St Paul's to assure him that firm measures to eliminate heresy would not fail for lack of royal support.
⁵⁰
Arundel thus knew that he was pushing at an open door, and decided to test the king's and the laity's resolve. One way to do this was to draft a petition outlining measures the clergy wished to see adopted to counter heterodoxy, which was duly done, but another option offered the
chance to make the point more compellingly. Lurking in the archbishop's prison was a chaplain, William Sawtre, who in the spring of 1399 had been tried for heresy and had publicly recanted, but subsequently relapsed. Arundel decided that the moment had come to try him again. Brought before convocation on five occasions during February, Sawtre was interrogated but failed to exculpate himself. On 26 February he was declared incorrigible (primarily on account of his views on the Eucharist), degraded and passed over to the lay powers to be punished as a heretic.
⁵¹
True to his word, the king drafted a writ that same day to the mayor and sheriffs of London empowering them to burn Sawtre, although it was not yet handed over to the city officers, probably to allow time for the interrogation of a more prominent heretic, John Purvey.
⁵²
In the event, Purvey's trial had to be postponed, since Arundel was required in parliament, and on Wednesday 2 March it was decided to go ahead with Sawtre's execution. Defiant to the last, hurling abuse at the archbishop and prophesying the ruin of the kingdom, he was taken to Smithfield and there bound, standing upright, to a post set in a barrel with blazing wood all around, ‘and thus reduced to ashes’.
⁵³
This was enough for Purvey, who by the end of the week had recanted his former beliefs at St Paul's Cross, acknowledging the sacrament of the Eucharist.
⁵⁴

The emphasis on the Eucharist in both these trials justified the decision to resort to what had been widely accepted since the twelfth century as the appropriate penalty for relapsed heretics. The statute passed by parliament eight days after Sawtre's death, based on the petition drafted in convocation, has come to be known as
De Heretico Comburendo
(‘For the Burning of a Heretic’), and is often said to have introduced the death penalty for heresy to England. In fact heretics had been burned in England in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and their fates recorded in thirteenth-century legal treatises as common law precedents, although it was about seventy years since the last occasion.
⁵⁵
Nor did the statute claim to be introducing
the death penalty. Its principal provisions were to restrict as far as possible opportunities for the spread of suspect ideas through Lollard schools, books and conventicles, and to reinforce the powers of the secular authorities to help the Church to eliminate heresy.
⁵⁶
Those who ignored these warnings would be punished by imprisonment and fines; if obdurate, they would be ‘burned in a high place’, which was, as the king's writ of 26 February ordering Sawtre's execution had stated, ‘customary in such cases’. Twenty years earlier, standing trial in Lincoln cathedral, William Swinderby had been saved from the flames only by Gaunt's intervention.
⁵⁷

De Heretico Comburendo
– retrospectively and misleadingly so called – appealed to different people for different reasons. Majority opinion among the commons was reassured that the king was serious about dealing with out-and-out heresy, for to the common law precedents for burning heretics he had added statutory authority. The faith, declared Savage in his closing speech, had been ‘on the point of annihilation by evil doctrine’, but thanks to Henry ‘this doctrine and its sect’ had been destroyed, for which the commons should give thanks to God (
Deo gratias
) thus bringing the
parliament (qua mass) to a conclusion.
⁵⁸
According to Walsingham it was the commons who were behind the statute, but although they did submit a petition requesting that Lollards ‘have such judgment as they deserve’, it was the more specific petition of the clergy which provided the basis for the statute.
⁵⁹
Arundel saw it as a way of confounding those who had converged on London to lobby for reform and of steering marooned souls back towards orthodoxy, while to Henry, Lollardy was a threat to law and order as well as to souls. There is little to indicate that he felt any urgent desire to introduce more salutary forms of punishment for heresy to England; nothing had been said about heresy during his first parliament eighteen months earlier. He did, however, need to clamp down on public disorder, and in this context Sawtre was a particularly apposite victim, for in February 1400 he had been suspected of treason and felony, probably resulting from involvement in the Epiphany Rising.
⁶⁰
The king's support for the statute also helped him to secure his taxes – a point made implicitly by the commons when they granted a tenth and fifteenth on 10 March, and explicitly by convocation when it granted a clerical tenth the next day, even if it was only with ‘dark mutterings’ that the taxes were voted.
⁶¹

Dark mutterings were also heard about the Welsh. Usk, hearing that ‘all sorts of rigorous measures’ were being planned against his countrymen, awoke in great agitation from a dream on the night before parliament was dissolved and, fearing ruin, committed himself to the protection of the Holy Spirit.
⁶²
His apprehension was justified, for despite the stifling of Owain Glyn Dŵr's uprising in September 1400, the principality was seething. Welsh scholars were deserting Oxford and Cambridge to return to their native land, and Welsh labourers had fled homewards to arm themselves. If strong measures were not taken, the commons informed the king, a new rebellion seemed imminent.
⁶³
When John Trevaur, bishop of St Asaph, cautioned against dealing too severely with Glyn Dŵr lest the Welsh rise up, the knights and burgesses are said to have replied that they ‘cared naught for barefooted buffoons (
scurris nudipedibus
)’.
⁶⁴

This was unwise, for Wales around 1400 was a country which neither the English nor the Welsh could quite feel was theirs.
⁶⁵
Sparsely populated and with poor communications, especially in the mountainous north-west, its landmarks to an outsider were the formidable castles and walled towns built by English colonists and maintained under their control. For most of the fourteenth century these settlers had kept the land quiescent, helped by its political fragmentation. The north and west (Pembrokeshire excepted) comprised the principality of Wales, the domain of the English crown, conquered in the late thirteenth century. The south and east, broadly speaking, were divided into about thirty major and a few minor Marcher lordships, nearly all of which by this time were held by the great aristocratic families of England, most notably the Mortimer earls of March, the Fitzalan earls of Arundel and the house of Lancaster. Brecon, Henry's most valuable possession before 1399, was perhaps the greatest of these.
⁶⁶
It was thus English aristocrats, through their stewards, receivers and lesser officials, who ruled Wales and were the major beneficiaries of its fruits, and they ruled it with a strong hand, very largely through Englishmen, and with an eye to extracting as much as they could from it. So too the Church in Wales: of the sixteen bishops appointed to Welsh sees between 1372 and 1400, only John Trevaur was a Welshman. Poor and remote, the Welsh sees were usually seen by English carpetbaggers as stepping-stones to something better across the border.

Bearing the weight of this superstructure was another Wales, a native people united by kinship, custom, a shared culture and history, and an abiding resentment at being made to feel – as the scribe of Hopkin ap Thomas, patron of Welsh poets and adherent of Glyn Dŵr, put it – like exiles in their own land. The barriers dividing English Wales from Welsh Wales were legal, ethnic and historical. Royal and burghal legislation regulating matters such as residency, trade, office-holding and law-worthiness, broadly designed to keep the Welsh in their place, had since the late thirteenth century created a parallel world of allegiances and hierarchies within native Welsh society. The leaders of this community of the excluded were the
uchelwyr
, men descended from the native Welsh princes of former times who were barred by English laws from reaching the highest rungs of the administrative ladder by which their land was governed, but in whose persons rested the aspirations of their people. Owain Glyn Dŵr, Rhys ap Tudor and his brother Gwilym were
uchelwyr
, their lineage, prowess and
hospitality celebrated by the bards, expectations of them shaped by the ubiquitous prophets and poets. Without the cooperation of such men, English rule was unenforceable.

As the fourteenth century drew to a close, political developments in England brought change to Wales. Peace with France during the 1390s deprived Welsh esquires and archers of one of the few means available to them of achieving near equality with their English counterparts. The deaths of the earls of Arundel and March in 1397–8 disrupted long-standing ties of patronage (Glyn Dŵr himself had served in the earl of Arundel's retinue), as did the fall of Richard II, not only in Wales itself but also in the border counties, for Richard had favoured Cheshiremen and retained an abnormally high proportion of the Herefordshire gentry.
⁶⁷
In 1398, he had also retained Gwilym and Rhys ap Tudor as king's esquires. The hunting down of a king in North Wales in the summer of 1399 must also have raised doubts about royal authority, as must the lawlessness in England which followed it. It did not require hindsight to assert that Wales at the outset of the fifteenth century was ready to explode.

Eleven petitions concerning Wales were submitted to the 1401 parliament. Some related to breaches of cross-border security such as cattle-rustling.
⁶⁸
Others were retrospective, such as the request that no Welshman who had taken part in the rebellion be pardoned until he had paid compensation. More insulting, especially to the many Welsh who had remained loyal to the crown, were petitions which reinforced their exclusion from equal status in the legal and economic life of the country. One requested that they be barred from acquiring property or burgess status in English towns in Wales, another that no full-blooded Englishman be convicted in Wales except by the verdict of English justices or burgesses. And when the royal council met at Coldharbour House on the Thames a week after the parliament ended, it issued a supplementary and more stringent set of ordinances.
⁶⁹
As a perpetual reminder of their insubordination, the Welsh were now made to contribute financially towards the English garrisons in their castles; gatherings of Welshmen were prohibited without the permission of their lord's officers; minstrels, bards, rhymers, ‘wasters and other Welsh vagabonds’, often suspected of spreading sedition, were forbidden to take payment for their entertainment; further restrictions were placed
on office-holding by Welshmen; and judicial cooperation between Marcher lords was stepped up to ensure that offenders were caught and punished.

The Marcher lords came in for a good deal of criticism during the parliament, the commons evidently believing that they did not take their duty seriously enough to defend the English from Welsh incursions; they were now enjoined to place their castles in better repair and to see that the law was enforced. Nor did the king escape censure. Henry, said Arnold Savage, had appointed ‘people born in the same country’ to be his officers in Wales, which was contrary to the ordinances of 1295 and likely to result in mischief; he advised the king to search out Edward I's ordinances to see if they required strengthening.
⁷⁰
The result was the Coldharbour meeting on 18 March. Its reconstitution of the legal and ethnic screen dividing English and Welsh was against the grain of history. Through the fourteenth century, as Anglo-Welsh worlds slowly meshed – an almost inevitable process over time, despite attempts to prevent it – the laws separating them had come to be seen as increasingly outdated and, to the Welsh, irksome. Now they were not merely confirmed but extended.
⁷¹
There is no doubting the virulence of anti-Welsh sentiment at Westminster in early 1401, and little to suggest that Henry did not share it.