Henry IV (21 page)

Yet this was not the end of the matter: in the parliament which met at Westminster in January 1394, the earl of Arundel launched a scathing personal attack on Gaunt and the king, accusing them of over-familiarity (because Richard wore his uncle's livery collar), of stifling debate in the royal council, and of disregarding the rights of the crown by granting
Guyenne to his uncle.
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On the latter point the commons agreed with him, describing it as ‘ludicrous’ for the king of England to do homage and fealty to the French king for Guyenne, whereby the English would ‘pass under the heel of the French king and be kept for the future under the yoke of slavery’. The upshot was that both lords and commons rejected the treaty, a decision applauded by the Westminster chronicler, who declared that if anyone less exalted had proposed such terms, he would have been branded a traitor, ‘but the duke of Lancaster does as he likes, and nobody brands him’ – indeed he had even duped or bribed his brother Gloucester into supporting the plan. The draft treaty, at any rate, was now a dead letter, and by the time Gaunt and Gloucester returned to Leulinghem in late March 1394 to confer once more with the dukes of Berry and Burgundy, hope of a definitive peace treaty had evaporated; instead, the two sides settled on a four-year truce.
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Henry, meanwhile, toured the north-western shires to suppress the continuing disturbances there, and by mid-July the unrest had subsided.
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Yet Guyenne was an itch that Gaunt needed to scratch, and when a revolt broke out in the duchy at the prospect of him holding it even for life, he left England in October 1394 to spend over a year there trying to establish his rule.
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For much of this time Richard was also out of the country: the truce allowed him to turn his attention to Ireland, whither he departed in September 1394 with an army numbering about 7,500 men, including the duke of Gloucester and four earls.
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Henry did not accompany the king to Ireland; with Gaunt away, he remained in England to watch over the interests of the Lancastrian inheritance.
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In fact, with both the king and his uncle out of the country, the winter and spring of 1394–5 proved to be a fallow interlude in English politics, but shortly after Richard's return, at a great council held at Eltham (Kent) in late July 1395, the legality of the
grant of the duchy to Gaunt was once more brought into question when a delegation from the city of Bordeaux asked the king that it be rescinded, citing letters of Edward III promising that the city would be perpetually annexed to the English crown and never alienated to anyone except the heir to the throne. Two Lancastrian knights who were present responded by justifying the grant (on what grounds is not stated), but five doctors of law declared that the king had no option but to revoke the grant, and the lords of the council agreed with them. This left only the duke of Gloucester and Henry to disagree. Gloucester said that it depended on whether the charter to Bordeaux could be found in the royal archives, but that it would in any case be dishonourable for the king to go back on his grant, but few apart from Henry supported him.
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Eventually, angry that people were muttering against them, Gloucester and Henry walked out of the chamber and sat down to a meal in the hall, where they were joined by the duke of York (although whether he agreed with them is not clear). Soon after this Gloucester returned to London,
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but fortunately enough had been done to forestall any decision to revoke the grant, and Richard managed to assuage the fears of the Gascons without depriving Gaunt. However, it had been a close-run thing.
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Gaunt, meanwhile, having restored order in Guyenne with promises to respect the Gascons' privileges, was preparing to return to England. In early October he was expected imminently, but instead tarried a while in Brittany before crossing to Dover shortly after Christmas. Henry hurried down from Hertford to meet him, and father and son were reunited at Canterbury on 1 January 1396. However, when Gaunt stopped off at King's Langley (Hertfordshire) a few days later to pay his respects to Richard, the king greeted him coolly, ‘with due respect, as was proper, but, as some assert, not with affection’.
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It was a sign of things to come. Gaunt was now in his mid-fifties, and the restless ambition and sense of duty that had defined his political career were dwindling. Yet his pre-eminent position in the councils of the king had not been relinquished so much as usurped. The earls of Rutland and Nottingham and the chamberlain of the royal household, William Le Scrope, were now the guiding hands behind English foreign policy. While in Brittany in November, Gaunt had
negotiated a marriage between his nine-year-old grandson (the future Henry V) and Marie, the daughter of the duke of Brittany, and drawn up a bilateral treaty of alliance with the duke; Richard, when he heard of it, was furious with his uncle, and nothing came of it.
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Chastened, Gaunt retired from court and a few weeks later married his mistress of twenty-five years, Katherine Swynford, at Lincoln, before embarking with Henry on a tour of their northern estates.
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The match was greeted with astonishment, the great ladies of the court mortified at the idea of having to cede precedence to a woman of such low birth.
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It was another step in the descent of Gaunt's political influence.

By early 1396, the House of Lancaster was becoming dangerously isolated from the levers of power. During Gaunt's fifteen-month absence, Henry had mostly divided his time between the great Lancastrian strongholds of Tutbury, Pontefract and Leicester and, when he attended parliament or the royal council, London and Hertford,
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but although he did what was required of him to fulfil his public duties, he had not moved any closer to either winning or seeking to win the king's confidence. It is worth remembering that not once during Richard's reign did Henry hold any military command in the royal service, any office in the king's household or administration, or any ambassadorial powers on the king's behalf.
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The patronage he received from the king in terms of lands or wardships was negligible. The contrast in this respect between him and his cousin (also Richard's cousin) Edward earl of Rutland, the son of the duke of York, is telling.
Some seven years younger than Henry, Rutland during the 1390s acted as constable of England, admiral of England, constable of the Tower of London, constable of Dover castle and warden of the Cinque Ports, and keeper of the king's forests south of the Trent. By way of reward, he was granted the castle and lordship of Oakham (Rutland), the lordship of the Isle of Wight along with Carisbrooke castle, and a clutch of lucrative wardships.
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Henry's brother-in-law (and Richard's half-brother) John Holand, earl of Huntingdon, was similarly lavishly rewarded with offices, lands and other favours in the 1390s, during which he was chamberlain of England. The chamberlain of the household from 1393–9, William Le Scrope, and Henry's former co-Appellant Thomas Mowbray, captain of the town and castle of Calais, also received much from the king during these years.
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Henry's measured degree of distance from the royal court might be explicable in personal terms, by Richard's mistrust of his cousin, Henry's reluctance to involve himself too deeply in politics while his father was still alive, or Gaunt's desire to protect his heir from the potential consequences of his opposition to the king in 1387–8. Yet the problem went deeper than this, for by now an element of open rivalry between the crown and the house of Lancaster had begun to manifest itself, a rivalry all too reminiscent of the decade-long struggle between Edward II and Earl Thomas which had so nearly led to the extinction of the Lancastrian inheritance seventy years earlier, and which in certain respects had its roots in that earlier conflict. At the local level, Richard still nurtured a desire to clip his uncle's wings in the north-west, a region with which, as earl of Chester, he tried to develop a special relationship.
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De Vere's attempt to boost royal support there in 1387 may have backfired, but during the 1390s Richard made a more determined effort to assert his authority, as a result of which both king and duke expanded their affinities in Cheshire and Lancashire significantly, apparently, though not overtly, in competition with each other.
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The visible manifestation of this arms race was the livery badge. In the winter of 1389–90, to please his uncle, Richard had sported a
Lancastrian collar, but within a few months he began distributing his own badge of the white hart, not just as a way of augmenting his following among the gentry in the aftermath of the crisis of 1386–9, but also to try to counter the appeal of the
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collars distributed by Gaunt and his son, which had acquired something of the cachet of a chivalric order. Both sides were criticized for the gang culture which livery badges induced: to the commons they were a source of sufficient unease to require legislation,
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while chroniclers and poets anthropomorphized them as the medieval antecedents of animated cartoon warriors battling it out for control of the kingdom. Richard's white hart badges, wrote one poet, ‘swarmed so thick throughout the length and breadth of his land’ that he came to believe in the infallibility of his power, and if ‘the good greyhound’ had stood idly by there would have been no stopping him. The greyhound was Henry, ‘because of his livery of linked collars of greyhounds’, according to Usk; the Dieulacres chronicler's image of a pack of hounds driving ‘that hated beast the white hart’ from the land appealed to a society addicted to the chase.
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Livery badges might only be symbols, but their connotations reverberated. So too did the implications of Richard's attempts to secure the canonization of Edward II. He had been pressing for this since the early 1380s, and in 1395 a book of Edward's miracles, compiled at Richard's request, was despatched to Rome to speed up the process. Even his bid to make a saint of his great-grandfather had something of the character of a duel with the House of Lancaster, since for much of the fourteenth century it was not Edward II but Thomas of Lancaster who had seemed more likely to be canonized, and ‘Saint’ Thomas's cult had a good deal more popular support than ‘Saint’ Edward's. Indeed it was probably Richard's enthusiasm for Edward's cult which sparked the late fourteenth-century revival of Thomas's cult, with Walsingham declaring that in 1390 ‘Saint Thomas of Lancaster was canonized’. In fact, Thomas never was canonized, although he continued to be popularly venerated into the early
sixteenth century, while the cult of Edward II barely outlived Richard's deposition.
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In the 1390s, however, there was a real danger that this competition for divine favour might escalate, for Richard regarded his great-grandfather's deposition as the great stain on the history of the English crown and was determined to rehabilitate Edward's reputation. The idea that Earl Thomas, a rank traitor in his eyes, should remain forever vindicated, let alone canonized, while Edward and his loyal supporters remained eternally damned, was anathema to Richard, and if Edward were to be canonized it would not be inconceivable, indeed it might well be seen as logical, for Richard to declare the acts accompanying his deposition, including the judgments of 1327, to be annulled.

These rival cults thus had the potential to dig deep into the bedrock of noble power, which was always land; and if it came to a trial of strength between the crown and the house of Lancaster, it was always likely to be land that lay at the heart of the matter. Disputes over land might fall into abeyance for generations or even centuries in the Middle Ages, but rarely were they forgotten entirely, with each turn of fortune's wheel liable to bring renewed claims from those whose ancestors had lost out, and renewed insecurity for those who had benefited from their misfortune. It must have been with trepidation, therefore, that Gaunt and Henry viewed the rise to royal favour in the mid-1390s of a number of young men whose forefathers had once held estates now possessed by the house of Lancaster – men such as Thomas Despenser, the great-great-grandson of the infamous Hugh Despenser the Younger who had profited so hugely, if briefly, from the forfeiture of Earl Thomas, or John de Montague, the nephew and heir of that William earl of Salisbury who, in the 1360s, had been pressurized into acknowledging Gaunt's claim to a number of properties in Wiltshire.
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The greatest danger, however, came from the crown itself, for it was Edward II who had been the principal beneficiary of Earl Thomas's forfeiture until its restoration to his brother in 1327.
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That the reversal of the 1327 judgment, leading in all probability to the reclamation by Richard of the Lancastrian estates, would require a political upheaval of seismic proportions was self-evident, and Richard would have to believe himself to
be strong enough to contain the resulting fall-out. The problem was that his grip on power was tightening almost by the month. This is what made the accelerating rivalry between crown and duchy and the decline of Lancastrian influence so dangerous.

In addition to this there was the matter of the succession to the throne, a question made doubly urgent by the death of Richard's queen, Anne of Bohemia, on 7 June 1394. Twelve years of childless marriage meant that the succession had been working its way up the political agenda for some time now. Some believed that should the king fail to have issue, the throne would devolve by hereditary right to Roger Mortimer (b.1374) or, in the event of his death, upon his younger brother Edmund (b.1376).
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The Mortimer brothers were the sons of Edmund, earl of March (d.1381), who had married Philippa, the daughter of Lionel, duke of Clarence. They were thus descended from the second son of Edward III, albeit through a female line, whereas Gaunt was the third son of Edward III. It was even asserted later that Richard had declared in the parliament of 1386 that Roger was his heir, although there is no mention of this in the official records.
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In January 1394, however, Gaunt is alleged to have petitioned that Henry be acknowledged as Richard's heir, at which Roger Mortimer protested, claiming seniority. Gaunt's response was to cite the so-called Crouchback Legend, which had it that Edmund, first earl of Lancaster, rather than Edward I, had in reality been the elder son of Henry III, but that he had been passed over for the crown on account of his crooked back, although its reversion had been vested in his heirs (the house of Lancaster). Roger replied, quite correctly, that this was simply false, and the king ordered them to drop the matter.
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That Gaunt used the Crouchback Legend to assert the Lancastrian claim – as Henry would later do – is beyond doubt, and he was even said to have forged a chronicle
to try to prove his point, although it needs to be remembered that all these accounts were written after 1399 and thus influenced by Henry's usurpation.
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They are, however, independent of each other, and the likelihood is that a discussion of the succession did take place at the time of the 1394 parliament, probably in the context of the Anglo-French negotiations. After all, the fundamental objection of the Gascons to Gaunt's appointment as duke of Guyenne was that they did not want to accept anyone as their duke ‘unless he be the king or the king's heir’. One obvious solution to this problem was that either Gaunt or his son be recognized as Richard's heir – which, given Edward III's entail of 1376, they may well have regarded themselves as entitled to in any case in the event of Richard dying childless.
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Yet if this self-evidently appealed to Gaunt, it was hardly likely to have been Richard's way of solving the Gascons' problem. In fact, the king had no wish to air the question of the succession, and he would not have thanked Gaunt for raising it, although he must have known perfectly well that others were discussing the possibility of the crown passing to the house of Lancaster. After all, unless Richard had a child, Gaunt and then Henry were his next heirs in the direct male line, and this was a kingdom in which the majority of great estates had been entailed upon male heirs during the course of the fourteenth century, as indeed the crown had been in 1376.
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Yet Richard did not want Henry to succeed him, as he made clear a few years later.
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Here, then, was another issue threatening to open a fissure, not just between the crown and the house of Lancaster but also between the house of Lancaster and other members of the royal family.