Henry IV (14 page)

The royalist revanche of May 1389 was intended to draw a line under the crisis which had engulfed English politics since October 1386. The Appellant coalition had fractured long before this, in fact it barely outlasted the Appeal of Treason; even by the time the second session of the Merciless Parliament began in April 1388, Henry and Mowbray had probably decided, in common with many of their fellow peers, that they wanted no further part in the increasingly grisly spectacle which was unfolding, and eighteen months later the breach was complete. At a council meeting at Clarendon on 13 September 1389, it was reported that Gloucester, Arundel and Warwick (none of whom was present) were anxious to re-establish friendship and concord with the king and council and to abolish the suspicion and mistrust existing between them.
⁵⁰
Henry was by now a member of that council, as was Mowbray, and both were present at the meeting – a telling indication of the distance that now yawned between them and their former colleagues-in-arms. Two months later Henry was still with the king at Westminster,
⁵¹
but by now he knew that his days in the political spotlight were coming to an end: on 19 November 1389, after three years and four months abroad, John of Gaunt landed at Plymouth, declaring his intention to restore peace and harmony between the king and the nobles.
⁵²
Henry was free to step back into his father's shadow – or to embark on new ventures.

¹
Above, p. 38.

²
John Gower, in his
Chronica Tripertita
, ascribed the entire 1387–8 crisis solely to the three senior Appellants, barely mentioning Henry and Mowbray:
The Major Latin Works of John Gower
, ed. and trans. E. W. Stockton (Seattle, 1962), 290–8.

³
Cf.
Knighton
, 420: they ‘sent to every part of the realm to assemble their people’; also
Historia Mirabilis Parliamenti
, 8: ‘they raised up the people, each one from his own region’.

⁴
When the Appellants divided their forces before Radcot Bridge, the retinues of Arundel and Henry were deployed separately, while those of Gloucester, Warwick and Nottingham combined to form a third ‘division’.

⁵
Bagot collected £200 on behalf of Henry at Kenilworth castle on 10 December 1387; at Daventry on 15–16 December, cloth was bought to make
signa
(badges) for Henry's retainers to wear: DL 28/1/2, fos. 1r, 4v, 13v, 14v, 16r–v, 17v. For Bagot, see L. Clark, ‘Sir William Bagot’,
ODNB
, 3.242–4, who suggests Bagot may have persuaded Henry and Mowbray to join the older appellants. For Bagot's close involvement with Henry and Gloucester over the division of the Bohun inheritance in early 1388, see DL 41/248, and the petition from Sir John Lestrange preserved as BL Add. Charter 14713. Lestrange and Lord Lovell both claimed the goods and chattels of Sir Nicholas Willy, forfeited for felony, worth about £240. Lestrange claimed to have petitioned Gaunt before his departure for Spain, but ‘now in his absence’ Lovell had seized them by fraud and with violence. He handed one copy of his bill to Gaunt's council and a second to Bagot for him to give to Henry – an interesting sidelight on Henry's involvement in Duchy affairs during his father's absence. Henry's wife, Mary, was evidently friendly with Bagot's wife, Margaret, to whom she gave a brocade, and in September 1388 one of Bagot's sergeants, John, brought Mary news of the Cambridge parliament. Bagot himself received a gown and a silver livery collar
ad modum de suagg
(a swage) from Henry in 1387 (DL 28/1/2, fos. 21r, 29v).

⁶
For these events see J. Myres, ‘The Campaign of Radcot Bridge in December 1387’,
EHR
, 42 (1927), 20–33; R. Davies, ‘Some Notes from the Register of Henry de Wakefield, Bishop of Worcester, on the Political Crisis of 1386–88’,
EHR
86 (1971), 547–58; Morgan,
War and Society
, 188–90.

⁷
Knighton
, 420–3. He probably forded the Thames at Bablock Hythe rather than Radcot itself.

⁸
He died at Louvain in Brabant five years later.

⁹
Westminster Chronicle
, 268.

¹⁰
According to
Knighton
, 422–5, about 800 of them drowned in the boggy meadows around the Thames, but few others were killed; those who had not already fled were stripped of their arms and sent back to their homes.

¹¹
For
Domini de Campo
see
De Illustribus Henricis
, 98. Adam Usk, a student at the time, witnessed their entry to Oxford: Warwick and Derby led the vanguard of the army, Gloucester the centre, and Arundel and Nottingham the rearguard (
Usk
, 12–13). Henry bought eighteen masks (
visers
) and gowns ‘for the disguising (
degysing
) on the feast of the Lord's birth’: DL 28/1/2, fo. 14r. The Appellant army probably spent the night of the 22nd or 23rd at Notley Abbey, between Oxford and St Albans. Henry's wife, Mary, kept in close touch with him during the campaign, sending her messenger Richard Willey from Kenilworth to Notley, Northampton, Daventry, and Chipping Norton for news (ibid., fo. 26r).

¹²
SAC I
, 844.

¹³
Knighton
, 426;
SAC I
, 846, says that Richard kept Henry behind ‘as a token of love’ (
in pignus amoris
). The chroniclers give different dates for this meeting. Saul,
Richard II
, 189, dates it to 30 December.

¹⁴
Clarke and Galbraith, ‘The Deposition of Richard II’, 157. The chronicler of Whalley abbey (Lancashire) said that Richard was
discoronatus
for three days by Gloucester, Arundel and Warwick (he does not mention Henry and Mowbray) and that the people (
communibus
) wanted Gloucester to become king, but Henry said that since he came from the senior line (elder brother) he should be king. The evidence for Richard's deposition is supported by Gloucester's confession in 1397, and the fact that no royal writs were sealed from 29 to 31 December (ibid., 159–60;
CR
, 81).

¹⁵
Westminster Chronicle
, 230–1;
SAC I
, 850;
Knighton
, 426–8. Their lists do not tally exactly, but it is reasonably clear that the knights arrested were Thomas Trivet, Simon Burley, John Beauchamp of Holt, James Berners, John Salisbury, Nicholas Dagworth and William Elmham, and the clerks were Nicholas Slake, Richard Medford, Richard Clifford and John Lincoln; John Blake was also arrested.

¹⁶
The lower levels of the king's household had already been purged on 31 December:
Westminster Chronicle
, 228–33.

¹⁷
Historia Mirabilis Parliamenti
, 14;
Westminster Chronicle
, 232–4.

¹⁸
Historia Mirabilis Parliamenti
, 14; for the ‘
parliamentum sine misericordia’
, see
Knighton
, 414.

¹⁹
Knighton
, 426;
Westminster Chronicle
, 310.

²⁰
Each of the other four lords gave Henry a gold and henna brocade and a long gilded gown of his livery, and Henry reciprocated by giving a blue and gold brocade of his own livery to each of them ‘for the parliament’: DL 28/1/2, fos. 5r, 11v, 12r. Gloucester also gave Henry two brocades of his livery for the Radcot Bridge campaign. Some of the heraldic images in a richly illuminated psalter and book of hours, BL Egerton MS 3277, may have been commissioned in part ‘as a moral justification for the Appellants' cause’: L. Dennison, ‘British Library, Egerton MS 3277: a Fourteenth-Century Psalter-Hours and the Question of Bohun Family Ownership’, in
Family and Dynasty in Late Medieval England: Harlaxton Medieval Studies IX
(Donnington, 2003), 122–55, at p. 149.

²¹
For example, when they came into the king's presence on both 17 November and 28 December, they prostrated themselves three times before being bidden by Richard to rise:
Westminster Chronicle
, 212, 226.

²²
Westminster Chronicle
, 234;
PROME
, vii.64;
Historia Mirabilis Parliamenti
, 14–15.

²³
It is also very well documented. For the chronology, sources and text of the roll, see
PROME
, vii.55–120. Cf. also Saul,
Richard II
, 191–6; Tuck,
Richard II and the English Nobility
, 121–7; Goodman,
Loyal Conspiracy
, 41–8.

²⁴
The Questions to the Judges had stated that it was against the king's regality to use impeachment in parliament without the king's consent, to which the use of the process of Appeal was a riposte.

²⁵
The best accounts of Brembre's trial are in
Westminster Chronicle
, 280–3, 308–13.

²⁶
Historia Mirabilis Parliamenti
, 17–18.

²⁷
Westminster Chronicle
, 310–17;
Historia Mirabilis Parliamenti
, 18. As the noose was placed around his neck, the son of Brembre's arch-rival John of Northampton stepped forward to ask him whether he believed he had treated his father fairly. Some claimed that he admitted his vindictiveness towards Northampton, others that he refused to confess to any wrongdoing. Gloucester had clashed with Brembre before, at the parliament of 1378, while Gaunt's support for Northampton in the politics of the city may well have inclined Henry against him as well: P. Nightingale,
A Medieval Mercantile Community: The Grocers' Company and the Politics and Trade of London 1000–1485
(New Haven and London, 1995), 257;
CPR 1385–9
, 158–9.

²⁸
The
Westminster Chronicle
, 314, says that it took thirty strokes of the sword (
mucronis
) to sever Usk's head; he is better known as the author of the
Testament of Love
.

²⁹
At Richard's coronation, Burley carried the young king on his shoulders; for the next decade he served as Richard's under-chamberlain and was well rewarded. He was deeply unpopular in Kent, where he held extensive lands (illegally, some thought) and was accused of abusing his position as Constable of Dover castle and Warden of the Cinque Ports. One of the charges against him in 1388 was that he had tried to raise 1,000 men from the Cinque Ports with whom to challenge the Appellants in November 1387: C. Given-Wilson, ‘Richard II and the Higher Nobility’, in
Richard II: The Art of Kingship
, ed. A. Goodman and J. Gillespie (Oxford, 1999), 107–28, at pp. 117–18.

³⁰
Westminster Chronicle
, 328–9.

³¹
SAC I
, 852–3;
Historia Mirabilis Parliamenti
, 21;
Westminster Chronicle
, 330–1. The queen went down on her knees to Gloucester and Arundel to beg for Burley's life, but to no avail; he had brought her over from Bohemia at the time of her marriage.

³²
See below, p. 105. In 1392, John of Gaunt contributed £10 to the cost of Burley's tomb (DL 28/3/2, fo. 18v).

³³
According to the
Westminster Chronicle
, 283, no less than 305 gauntlets were flung down as wagers of Brembre's guilt at one point during his trial.
Knighton
, 443–51, preserves a petition from the commons sometimes seen as directed against the Appellants rather than the royal favourites (J. Palmer,
England, France and Christendom 1377–1399
(London, 1972), 136–7, 237–8), but this is difficult to accept: even if it was submitted during the second session and showed some impatience at the length of the parliament, Knighton states clearly that it was directed at the king's advisers, and it raised issues which had been of concern for several years before 1388.
HOC
, i.185–91, analyses the political connections of the knights and burgesses and their ‘compliant endorsement’ of the attack on the court party.

³⁴
See, for example,
Knighton
, 407, 427;
CE
, 364–5;
Westminster Chronicle
, 217, 307 (the pardon sought by the Londoners at the end of the parliament);
SAC I
, 844–5, says that while the ‘poor’ of London supported the Appellants, the wealthier citizens were more fearful; they were certainly divided over Brembre's fate. See also C. Oliver, ‘A Political Pamphleteer in Late Medieval England: Thomas Fovent, Geoffrey Chaucer, Thomas Usk, and the Merciless Parliament of 1388’,
New Medieval Literatures VI
, ed. D. Lawton, R.Copeland and W. Scase (Oxford, 2003), 167–98; and M. Giancarlo,
Parliament and Literature in Late Medieval England
(Cambridge, 2007), especially 164–9.

³⁵
For letters and proclamations, see
Knighton
, 411; Goodman,
Loyal Conspiracy
, 41;
SAC I
, 842–3, talks of the ‘great delight among the common people’ at Radcot Bridge;
Westminster Chronicle
, 211, and
Knighton
, 421, note the numbers of gentry and lesser men who supported the Appellants.

³⁶
J. Maddicott, ‘Law and Lordship: Royal Justices as Retainers in Thirteenth and Fourteenth Century England’,
Past and Present Supplement
4 (Oxford, 1978), 59–68.

³⁷
For Brembre, see Nightingale,
A Medieval Mercantile Community
, 228–317.

³⁸
See J. Watts, ‘The Pressure of the Public on Later Medieval Politics’, in
The Fifteenth Century IV: Political Culture in Late Medieval Britain
, ed. L. Clark and C. Carpenter (Woodbridge, 2004), 159–80; and Watts,
The Making of Polities
.

³⁹
PROME
, vii.72–8, 81–2. The commons also granted the Appellants £20,000 for ‘saving the king and kingdom’ – that is, to pay their retainers for the Radcot Bridge campaign:
PROME
, vii.67;
CPR 1385–9
, 456. For the schedule of the oath sent to the sheriff of Sussex, dated 4 June 1388, see C 49/96; 170 Sussex men (thirty-five clerics, ninety-five gentry and forty burgesses) swore it. On 31 May, Richard invited the lords and commons to his manor of Kennington for a banquet to celebrate the dissolution of parliament.