Henry IV (48 page)

the pith of old elder, well dried and well stitched in purified linen cloth the length of the wound. These probes were infused with rose honey. And after that I made larger and longer probes . . . until I had the width and depth of the wound as I wished it. . . . [Then] I prepared anew some little tongs, small and hollow, with the width of an arrow. A screw ran through the middle of the tongs. . . . I put these tongs in at an angle in the same way as the arrow had first entered, then placed the screw in the centre and finally the tongs entered the socket of the arrowhead. Then, by moving it to and fro, little by little, with the help of God, I extracted the arrowhead.
⁴⁵

To stop his patient going into spasm, Bradmore massaged the prince's neck every morning with a muscle relaxant and placed a hot plaster on it to soothe him. With the arrowhead removed, he used a syringe to cleanse the wound with white wine before inserting wads of flax soaked in a purifying solution of white bread, barley flour, honey and turpentine oil. Every two days he shortened the wads, and within twenty days the wound had healed and a ‘dark ointment’ was applied to regenerate the flesh. Given the depth of the wound, the prince's courage in remaining on the field and
leading a counter-attack was as remarkable as was Bradmore's ingenuity in curing him.

Upon the outcome of the battle of Shrewsbury turned the future not just of Henry IV's reign but of the Lancastrian dynasty. Had the king been captured, he would assuredly have been either executed as a traitor or quietly done away with in some dismal dungeon, his brief ‘interregnum’ as a usurper vilified under the new order, his family and principal supporters driven into exile or worse, while the crown reverted to its ‘rightful’ line under the earl of March, subject to the overweening direction of the Percys. Henry's fate, in other words, would have been that of Richard II, his place in history that of Richard III. Yet there was little joy to be had from victory. When shown Hotspur's body, the king is said to have wept, although he had no compunction in displaying the corpse seated upright between two millstones at Shrewsbury for a few days, so that there could be no doubts as to his death, before having it taken down and quartered, the head impaled at York atop one of the city gates.
⁴⁶
Worcester also wept when he saw his nephew's body; Henry wanted to spare Worcester's life, but the king's followers were so incensed by his treachery (he was a Knight of the Garter, as was Hotspur) that he was quickly tried and executed in Shrewsbury, along with two prominent Cheshire rebels, Richard Venables, baron of Kinderton, and Sir Richard Vernon, baron of Shipbrook, an example to the restive county.
⁴⁷

These executions took place on the morning of Monday 23 July, following which the king left Shrewsbury; there was still the earl of Northumberland to be dealt with. The previous day, Henry had written to Westmorland, Robert Waterton and other loyal northern lords, ordering them to suppress the army of ‘traitors’ the earl had assembled in Yorkshire.
⁴⁸
By 4 August the king had reached Pontefract, gathering men and money as he went, issuing threats against those who persisted in maligning him, and attempting to prohibit the plundering of Percy properties.
⁴⁹
Meanwhile
Northumberland, hearing that Westmorland was moving against him, backed away to Newcastle, where he was coolly received, then after a few days to his northern stronghold of Warkworth.
⁵⁰
Here he was brought an invitation from the king: if he would come in peace, without his retainers, and submit himself to Henry's mercy, his life would be spared. The interview took place on 11 August at York, where the pale, severed head of his son now crowned the city's gate. To what extent the earl shared Hotspur's and Worcester's guilt was unclear. Hardyng believed that he did, claiming that their manifesto was presented to the king by all three Percys.
⁵¹
This would mean (if it is authentic) that the manifesto had been drawn up in the north and brought south by Hotspur, which might help to explain the movements of the earl of Douglas, who was in Edinburgh on 10 July yet fought with Hotspur and Worcester at Shrewsbury eleven days later.
⁵²
If Douglas had been paroled by Hotspur to enable him to fight against Henry – presumably in return either for a measure of freedom or for concessions in relation to his earldom – the rebellion must have been a less hasty affair and Northumberland's involvement more likely. However, Walsingham thought it possible that Northumberland was moving southwards to promote peace between Hotspur and the king, and when he appeared before parliament in February 1404 to account for his actions the commons also gave him the benefit of the doubt.
⁵³
That the earl knew of his son's resentment towards the king is certain; how much he knew of Hotspur's plans is less certain, but it is possible that his advance southwards was part of a strategy for him to challenge the king directly while Hotspur dealt with Prince Henry. Glyn Dŵr was wreaking havoc in Wales and the king had little more than his household troops with him. It was a plan that could well have succeeded, and it nearly did.

Although the king almost certainly believed Northumberland to be guilty of misprision, if not treason, there was nothing easy about the decision to be made, for he can hardly have viewed with equanimity the prospect of a power vacuum in the north. However, he was not in forgiving mood. Also at York was the ascetic and prophet William Norham, who had once been imprisoned by Richard II for his indiscretions; he now repeated
his mistake, and Henry had him beheaded.
⁵⁴
When Northumberland arrived, he was treated as guilty until proved innocent, despite disclaiming any foreknowledge of Hotspur's rebellion.
⁵⁵
Addressed but briefly by Henry, he was taken into custody and sent to Baginton (Warwickshire) to await trial in parliament; his lands were placed under the administration of William Heron, Lord Say, steward of the royal household; and he was made to seal orders to his retainers to hand over his castles in the north, some of which they were still holding in his name.
⁵⁶
The subsequent attempts to eject them confirmed the king's fears: for more than a year after Shrewsbury, a group of knights and esquires, some of them renegades from Shrewsbury, others with a lifelong attachment to the Percys, continued to gather in Northumberland, ‘the crescent [badge] on their sleeves’, refusing to surrender their castles to Henry's commissioners.
⁵⁷
Their leader was Sir William Clifford, testimony to whose temerity survives in a memorandum of the conditions which he demanded in return for surrendering Berwick: namely, that he and his garrison would receive back payment since Hotspur's death and a full pardon, and that Hotspur's ten-year-old son, now heir to his grandfather's earldom, should be promised all of his father's inheritance once he came of age, and in the meantime should remain in Clifford's guardianship.
⁵⁸
At its heart lay a desire for the continuation of Percy hegemony in the north.

Nor was it just his own retainers who continued to offer comfort to Northumberland. When parliament met in January 1404 the speaker, Arnold Savage (by now also a royal councillor), petitioned for the earl to be brought into parliament, granted a charter of pardon and restored to all his lands, even hinting that upon the king's mercy depended the grant of a subsidy by the commons. To bargain thus on behalf of a man widely
suspected by the king and his followers of treason was audacious, yet the support which Northumberland received from both the lords and the commons indicates genuine uncertainty as to the degree of his collusion in his son's rebellion. Like the king, they too must have feared a collapse of authority in the north. In the event, Northumberland was found guilty (by the lords) not of treason but of the much less heinous charge of contravening the Statute of Liveries, the fine for which was promptly pardoned. Thanking ‘my friends the commons’, he renewed his oath of allegiance on 8 February and was restored to his inherited lands, though not to those which he had been granted since 1399, nor to the constableship of England, nor to the wardenship of either of the Marches.
⁵⁹
It was a compromise which, in the end, probably suited the king: although not destroyed, the earl had been put on notice. Yet there was no doubting his humiliation, and the erosion of his influence in Anglo-Scottish affairs, the springboard for his family's power for over a hundred years, was confirmed in July 1404 when he was obliged to surrender his family's claim to Jedburgh and Berwick. A month later, he handed over three of his grandchildren as hostages for his good behaviour.
⁶⁰
Despite Henry's show of clemency, he had not left the sexagenarian earl with many options.

It is easy to accept the Dieulacres chronicler's comment that the general pardon proclaimed by Henry shortly after the battle was granted more out of fear than love.
⁶¹
If the king and his son had avoided disaster at Shrewsbury, it had been a chastening experience for both of them. Deserted by his governor and second-in-command, Prince Henry had come (probably literally) within an inch of losing his life. For the king, one of the lessons of the revolt was how many people in England (to say nothing of the Welsh and the Scots) had come to believe that he deserved the same fate as his predecessor. On the other hand, the rapid response to his summons for help must have given him encouragement. There were plenty of men prepared to fight for, as well as against, him, and indeed to die for him, such as Sir John Luttrell, a life retainer of the king whom he had created a Knight of the Bath in 1399, who received Henry's summons at his manor of East Quantoxhead (Somerset), hastily dictated a will declaring that he was ‘going with all possible speed to join his most dread
lord the king . . . to resist the malice of the false traitor Sir Henry Percy’, and never returned.
⁶²
If the king might argue that the outcome of the battle demonstrated divine favour for his cause and his dynasty, what it also demonstrated was that it was still upon the Lancastrian affinity that his survival depended.

¹
For the king's second marriage, see below, pp. 234–5; M. Jones, ‘Joan of Navarre, Queen of England’,
ODNB
, 30.139–41; Kirby,
Henry IV
, 150. For Joan's escort from Brittany, see E 403/574, 27 and 30 October 1401; for £23 worth of cloth used to pave Winchester cathedral for the wedding, E 101/404/21, fo. 40v; BL Harley MS 279, fos. 45–6, reproduces the menu at the wedding banquet. The coronation was followed by jousts at which Richard Beauchamp, the twenty-one-year-old earl of Warwick, acted as Joan's champion.

²
Foedera
, viii.289–90. The grant, dated 2 March at Westminster, excluded Galloway and Annandale, Roxburgh and any other lands previously granted to the Neville family.

³
CPR 1401–5
, 213.

⁴
Stones,
Anglo-Scottish Relations
, 342–5; Bean, ‘The Percies and their Estates in Scotland’, 91–9.

⁵
See, for example,
CDS
, iv, no. 281 (1379).

⁶
CPR 1396–9
, 223 (19 October 1397); A. L. Brown, ‘Thomas Percy, Earl of Worcester’,
ODNB
, 43.737–9. However, Northumberland did not transfer the captaincy of Berwick castle to his brother.

⁷
Giles
, 33. See also the comment of Dunbar's wife shortly after the battle of Shrewsbury, that people ‘bear us great enmity for the death of Sir Henry Percy’ (
RHL I
, 301).

⁸
E 403/571, 1 March; E 403/574, 9 Dec.; Bean, ‘Henry Percy, First Earl of Northumberland’,
ODNB
43.694–702.

⁹
Scotichronicon
, viii.49–53, said he was confident of rapidly conquering southern Scotland.

¹⁰
SAC II
, 356–7;
POPC
, i.203–4; Boardman,
Early Stewart Kings
, 270–1.

¹¹
Davies,
Revolt
, 111–13.

¹²
E 101/404/24 (roll of the prince's household), fo. 1, records his receipt of £2,666 on 12 June. Payments of over £7,000 to the prince are recorded on the exchequer issue rolls, but these included several failed assignments (E 403/574 and 576, 22 Feb., 26 March, 12 June).

¹³
Davies,
Revolt
, 112;
Original Letters
, i.11–12.

¹⁴
Original Letters
, 14–20.

¹⁵
Clarke and Galbraith, ‘Deposition of Richard II’ (
Dieulacres Chronicle
), 177–8; Hotspur spent the night of 9 July with Petronilla Clerk of Chester, who later lost her property for harbouring him: E. J. Priestley,
The Battle of Shrewsbury 1403
(Shrewsbury, 1979), 8.

¹⁶
Above, p. 133. Morgan,
War and Society
, 212–18. Yet Cheshire was by no means solidly for the revolt; Sir John Stanley, for example, former lieutenant of Ireland, fought for the royalist side at Shrewsbury.

¹⁷
SAC II
, 359;
CE
, 396;
CPR 1401–5
, 391, records the forfeiture of William Lloyd, a Denbigh esquire said to have acted as a messenger between Hotspur and Glyn Dŵr; he fought and died with Hotspur at Shrewsbury; Hotspur may also have tried to raise Anglesey against the king: R. Griffiths,
Conquerors and Conquered in Medieval Wales
(Stroud, 1994), 126.

¹⁸
P. McNiven, ‘The Scottish Policy of the Percies and the Strategy of the Rebellion of 1403’,
BJRL
62 (1969–70), 498–530, at pp. 518–20. It may have been the military check suffered by Owain's followers on 11–12 July, when Baron Carew intercepted and slaughtered about 700 of them, that persuaded him to change his plans (
Original Letters
, i.21–2). It was also said that while at Carmarthen (5–6 July) Owain sent for Hopkin ap Thomas, a ‘Master of Brut’ (scholar of prophecy), to ask him to predict his future; Hopkin told him that he was shortly going to be captured, between Carmarthen and Gower, under a black banner. Given Owain's predilection for prophecy, this might have induced him to change his plans (although Shrewsbury was obviously not between Carmarthen and Gower).