Henry IV (107 page)

²³
The tombs were: Edmund Crouchback, Edward I, Henry III, Eleanor of Castile, Philippa of Hainault, Edward III, Richard II with Anne of Bohemia, and King Sebert of the East Saxons, placed there in 1307: P. Binski,
Westminster Abbey and the Plantagenets
(New Haven, 1995), 123, 147, 195.

²⁴
Wilson, ‘The Tomb of Henry IV’, 181–90. The placing of John Beaufort's tomb in Canterbury in 1410 suggests that the precise location of Henry's tomb had already been chosen, for Beaufort was originally placed at the foot of what would be the king's tomb before being moved around 1440 to the Holand Chapel. Henry's will opens with the words ‘In the name of God, father and son and Holy Ghost, three persons and one God’; for his devotion to the Trinity, see above, p. 381.

²⁵
SAC I
, 32–3 (Black Prince);
Signet Letters,
nos. 717, 736 (quotes).

²⁶
Fabric Rolls of York Minster
, ed. J. Raine (Surtees Society 35, 1858), 192. This version of the funeral
ordo
dates from 1360–70: C. Given-Wilson, ‘The Exequies of Edward III and the Royal Funeral Ceremony in Late Medieval England,
EHR
124 (2009), 257–82.

²⁷
Brut
, ii.372 (but the barge went to Gravesend, not Faversham; Wylie,
Henry the Fourth
, iv.111–13).

²⁸
DL 28/4/8, fo. 11v (500 marks for the
sepulturam
of Henry); Wylie,
Henry the Fifth
, i.2; E 403/612, 20 May;
CPR 1413–16
, 64;
Foedera
, ix.14.

²⁹
This was not the burial, although it may have been thought of as Henry's ‘public’ funeral (it is referred to as Henry's
anniversarium
or
exequiarum
: E 403/612, 20 May, 27 June).

³⁰
Wylie,
Henry the Fifth
, i.47–8.

³¹
This was painted by Thomas Gloucester of London, the king's painter. In addition to the 120 torches
ad ardendum circa herceam,
it had many more candles and other adornments (
una cum toto lumino de cera et toto alio apparatu ad dictam herceam pertinentem
) (E 403/612, 20 May;
CPR 1413–16
, 64;
Foedera
, ix.14).

³²
xc vexillorum cum toto estuffamento pro eisdem de armis omnium regum Christianorum et alium procerum diversorum regnorum mundi
(E 403/612, 20 May; E 403/614, 15 Nov.).

³³
pro uno capite de auro ad formam capitis hominis ornato perlis et lapidibus preciosis per ipsum dominum regem ad tumbam sancti Thome Cantuariensis in propria persona oblato
(E 403/612, 4 July); my thanks to Julian Luxford for his comments on this. The banquet cost £98 (Wylie,
Henry the Fifth
, i.47).

³⁴
This began with Henry V borrowing from Canterbury the banners which had been hung at his father's funeral to re-use them for Richard's reburial. More torches, banners and gytons and a hearse were ordered, ‘new work’ undertaken at Westminster, and the remarkable sum of 1,000 marks (not 100, as in
Issues
, ed. Devon) was distributed to paupers along the route taken by Richard's corpse from Langley to Westminster. Walsingham said Henry V ‘declared that he ought to show as much veneration for Richard as he would to his very own father’; he had visited Langley at the start of his reign (E 403/613, 4 May; E 403/614, 8 Nov., 11 Dec., 27 Jan., 19 Feb.;
Issues
, ed. Devon, 325–32;
SAC II
, 634–7).

³⁵
C. Wilson, ‘The Medieval Monuments’, in
A History of Canterbury Cathedral
, ed. P. Collinson, N. Ramsay and M. Sparks (Oxford, 1995), 451–510, at pp. 498–506; Wilson, ‘The Tomb of Henry IV’, 181–90. M. Duffy,
The Royal Tombs of Medieval England
(Stroud, 2003), suggested that Henry V was more likely to have commissioned his father's tomb, but there is no reference to this in any royal record, whereas references in royal records to Edward III's, Richard II's and Henry V's tombs are numerous.

³⁶
Wilson, ‘The Medieval Monuments’, 502, calls it ‘pudgy, ill-looking’; Duffy,
Royal Tombs
, 202. Joan's effigy was added after her death in 1437.

³⁷
Wilson, ‘The Tomb of Henry IV’, 190.

³⁸
E 404/29, no. 3;
PROME
, ix.9–10;
CPR 1413–16
, 54. The king's real debts were much higher than this; those of his household alone have been estimated at £31,000, although some of these may have been discounted. Arundel had been appointed by the dead king as one of the supervisors of his will, along with the then prince; once the executors renounced execution of the will, it devolved upon the archbishop as diocesan ordinary.

³⁹
CPR 1422–9
, 188–9 (by which time the debt was said to be £17,333, but still only £4,000 received from Henry V); Wylie,
Henry the Fifth
, i.27, thought Henry V to have been ‘immensely the gainer’ from the renunciation by Henry IV's executors, and although it was probably not as bad as it looked (that is, £16,666 worth of goods for a mere £4,000), the transaction was clearly done at the new king's behest. He doubtless intended to pay off his father's debts, but preferably not during his lifetime (Roskell,
Commons in the Parliament of 1422
, 113–20).

⁴⁰
Wilson, ‘The Medieval Monuments’, 503;
CPR 1413–16
, 51; Raine,
Fabric Rolls of York Minster
, 274.

⁴¹
From 1415, however, as the king's needs grew, Joan lost some of her lands, such as Hertford castle (replaced only with King's Langley manor), alien priories taken into the king's hands in 1414, and lands restored to the earl of Northumberland in 1415 (Somerville,
Duchy of Lancaster
, i.175;
CPR 1413–16
, 164–7, 351).

⁴²
A. Myers, ‘The Captivity of a Royal Witch: The Household Accounts of Queen Joan of Navarre, 1419–1421’, in
Crown, Household and Parliament in Fifteenth-Century England
, ed. C. Clough (London, 1985), 93–134; Jones, ‘Joan of Navarre’,
ODNB
, 30.139–41.

⁴³
Kempe, ‘Some Account of the Jerusalem Chamber in the Abbey of Westminster’, to which is appended ‘An Examination of the Tomb of King Henry IV’ by the Rev. J. Spry.

⁴⁴
Given-Wilson, ‘Exequies of Edward III’. Henry V made arrangements for an elaborate and expensive funeral and chantry monument (Duffy,
Royal Tombs
, 207–15).

CONCLUSION

It may well be true that ‘Henry Bolingbroke would have been a happier man if, like his father John of Gaunt, he had lived and died as duke of Lancaster’, but that was not a luxury Richard II was prepared to allow him.
¹
Insecure and vindictive, Richard had come to the conclusion by the mid-1390s that the house of Lancaster presented a challenge to the fullness of his kingship, a threat magnified in the king's mind by the lack of personal empathy between him and Henry, and the history of conflict between him and both Gaunt and his son during the 1380s. Nor, it must be said, had Gaunt and Henry gone out of their way to allay the king's fears. The immensity of Lancastrian power, built up over a century, solidified by social and political developments during the second half of the fourteenth century and thrust to the forefront of national politics by the lack of active kingship in the 1370s and 1380s, was not something they tried to hide. Richard initially responded by constructing an affinity of his own and a court party from which Gaunt and Henry were excluded, but when in 1398–9 the opportunity arose to disassemble the Lancastrian edifice, he could not resist it.

The revolution of 1399 brought the best out of Henry. Purposeful and ruthless – as he had to be – he initially secured the throne almost without opposition, but soon discovered that the kingship of a usurper was qualitatively different from that of a legitimate monarch. Even with kings as manifestly unsuitable as Edward II or Richard II, it took ten or fifteen years for baronial exasperation to turn to talk of deposition and twenty for the threats to be realized; Henry was on the throne for just three months before the first attempt to unseat him. The soldierly qualities for which he was renowned, allied to a quiet strength of character which before 1399 had been subordinated to that of his father, now served him well. Yet early misjudgements cost him dear. By 1403, the power he had entrusted to the Percys, combined with the evaporation of the hopes attending Richard's
removal, brought him to the brink of disaster. Popular revulsion at the death of Archbishop Scrope – Henry's second great mistake – marked the nadir of his reign and his reputation.

His response was both practical and tactical. He elevated his family to a position of unchallenged dominance in the realm, a process entailing close management of the nobility, implacability towards traitors and relentless propagation of his dynasty and its destiny. The deeper state he created made extensive use of spies and informers. He militarized the royal household and surrounded himself with a protective shield of retainers. Yet armour-plated kingship came at a price. There was resentment throughout the reign at the public power enjoyed by the king's retainers, and a sense that Henry was as much the prisoner as the master of his affinity. Only during the last few years of the reign did Prince Henry begin to rein them in.

In the shires and boroughs this power was mediated through the offices of sheriff, mayor and justice of the peace; at Westminster, it manifested itself in the composition of the Privy Council and parliament. Under the twin pressures of financial insolvency and royal incapacity, the role of the council was formalized, reflected in its better record-keeping and responsibility for financial planning as well as its enhanced role in matters such as security and law enforcement. Under Prince Henry in 1410–11, it became an alternative locus of power in the realm, but with active kingship its role was more administrative than political. Parliament, in contrast, was by definition a political body. The rumbustious atmosphere of many of Henry's parliaments was to some extent deceptive, for although they were argumentative they were not threatening to the king. The habitual mood was of querulous disappointment. Yet the atmosphere also betokened a genuinely competitive forum for interest groups: it meant that proceedings focused on the best means to achieve the ‘good and abundant governance’ desired by the commons rather than the collision of factions, and it helped the government to avoid the charge of cronyism. The fact that many of the commons were closely – and their speakers very closely – connected to the king could well have lent plausibility to such a charge, but in reality it was often the king's most committed supporters who were his fiercest parliamentary critics.

This criticism focused on the question of solvency, the essence of good and abundant governance. The fact that the joint efforts of king, council and parliament only briefly came close to achieving it (in 1407–9) is attributable to several factors: the high cost of protecting England's shipping and ports, defending its marches and dominions and suppressing rebellions; the simultaneous collapse of revenues from those dominions, so that
colonies or outposts which had once produced a profit or at least enjoyed a degree of self-sufficiency were now a constant drain on resources; the decline by around 20 per cent during the first quarter of the fifteenth century in the exchequer's income from indirect taxation; and the increase by roughly the same percentage in the domestic charges of government – household, affinity and administration – charges which the king viewed as politically imperative but which also reflected the extravagance of a youth who had never known insufficiency. Yet fiscal innovation was unwelcome in late medieval England: the experimentation of 1404–6 proved barren, the reversion to traditional methods after 1407 more productive.
²
Despite this, the government's credit never quite ran out, although as time went by it found itself increasingly reliant for loans on a narrowing circle of Londoners, ministers, councillors and other committed supporters, whose influence on policy grew accordingly.

Henry's overriding foreign policy consideration was always France, his aims reasonably consistent. He wanted a lasting peace, preferably sealed by the marriage of Prince Henry to a French princess; failing that, he wanted to preserve the truce for as long as possible; the minimum requirement was to retain Guyenne and Calais, because a usurper who mislaid his empire would struggle for credibility. The fact that Henry was able to pursue broadly the same foreign policy towards France as Richard II had done without incurring the same opprobrium is explicable in part by the fact that it took a man untainted with the whiff of Francophilia to pursue a credible policy of peace with the national enemy. In the event, the barrage of hostility from Louis of Orléans and his acolytes soon led to the collapse of meaningful peace talks, while the slide towards civil war in France after 1407 made the outcome of negotiations increasingly unpredictable. It did, however, eventually allow Henry to take the initiative, and in so doing to reveal what lay closest to his heart – the retention of Guyenne, to which he had a recent Lancastrian, as well as a long-standing royal, claim. Yet in general the steadily deflating rhetoric of Henry's diplomacy is a measure of the puncturing of his ambition: the extravagant language of overlordship which so irritated the Scots during the first three years of the reign all but vanished thereafter, and although he continued to style himself ‘king of France’ (as did his successors until the nineteenth century) this was irrelevant to the real diplomacy of the reign.

The connections between the Welsh revolt, the upsurge of resistance in Ireland, and the hostility of the Scottish magnates (until checked at Humbleton Hill) are not easy to pinpoint, but what they obviously shared was ambivalence towards the imperial pretensions of a king whose authority was challenged even in his homeland. The Mortimer following, even the Mortimer name, probably lent an air of legitimacy to the king's opponents in Ireland; they certainly did in Wales. Here and on the northern marches landed and military power had become concentrated in fewer and greater hands during the fourteenth century, and when trust was lost, as with the Percys in 1402–3, the consequences were correspondingly greater.
³
Yet the defeat of the Percys only created another dilemma: how to govern (or defend) the north without them? It was a problem replicated elsewhere. The dominions Henry inherited in 1399 constituted a ramshackle and unruly empire, governed by separate laws, customs and languages and ruled under a miscellany of titles – lord of Ireland, duke of Guyenne, or even, in the case of the Channel Islands, duke of Normandy.
⁴
In practice, the king's hold on them was dependent on the support of enough people in each whose interests were served by upholding and exploiting the privileges and powers the crown could offer them: the Butlers in Ireland, the gated communities of Wales, the Gascon lords who feared French domination, the townsmen of Calais, Dublin and Bordeaux whose prosperity depended on commerce with the mother country.
⁵
That the offices, annuities and grants which secured their compliance tended with time to become hereditary meant that the distinction between public and private authority in England's dominions became blurred, and although Henry held on to his empire there was a growing sense that English rule was exercised in the conditional tense. Clarence's 1412–13 campaign achieved its goal in the medium term, but within another forty years Guyenne would be lost, English administration would be reduced to a ‘lytell cornere’ of Ireland, and, against a background of collapsing marcher revenues, a native Welsh squirearchy was increasingly usurping the lands and offices of its former masters.
⁶