Henry IV (50 page)

Anglo-French relations had not been improved by Henry's decision during the winter of 1401–2 to open negotiations for the hand of Joan, duchess of Brittany, the widow of Duke John IV (d.1399).
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There were obvious strategic reasons to recommend an Anglo-Breton alliance, and equally obvious reasons for the French government to oppose it. Civil war in Brittany had crucially undermined the French crown between the 1340s and the 1370s, and the prospect of reviving the influence which Edward III had put to such good effect there was tempting. Moreover, Henry and Joan had met on several occasions and seem to have got on well. Joan certainly wrote warmly to Henry in February 1400, and she did not hesitate before accepting his proposal, despite knowing that the French royal family and a fair proportion of the Breton nobility would oppose it. Thus on 2 April 1402, after hasty and secretive negotiations, she and Henry were married
by proxy.
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When news of the match reached Paris the reaction was swift, and by October Duke Philip of Burgundy was in Nantes, where he imposed a settlement on Joan: she was allowed to take her two daughters to England with her, but her sons, including her thirteen-year-old heir, were removed to Paris, and Philip himself assumed the regency of the duchy until the boy came of age. The episode is instructive: Burgundy remained opposed until his death to Orléans's undermining of the Anglo-French truce, but he would not tolerate any attempt by Henry to weaken French authority in what the Valois regarded as their sphere of influence.
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Burgundy's intervention in Brittany irritated Orléans, who shared his rival's desire to negate Henry's influence there but had hoped to install Olivier de Clisson as the young duke's guardian.
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Elsewhere, too, their antipathy helped to smooth the course of Henry's diplomacy. This was certainly the case in Germany following the deposition in August 1400 of the Holy Roman Emperor Wenzel (Richard II's brother-in-law) in favour of Rupert of Wittelsbach, the Elector-Palatine. Orléans supported Wenzel's efforts to regain his crown, hoping to exploit the imbroglio in the Empire to realize his ambitions in the Rhineland and the Low Countries; Burgundy, though more even-handed, inclined towards Rupert.
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Thus when Rupert, who craved international recognition as much as Henry did, wrote to the English king in January 1401 proposing a marriage between his son Louis and Henry's daughter Blanche, it was seized upon with alacrity, and on 14 February it was agreed that the marriage would take place the following year.
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The only obstacle was the £5,333 required for the first instalment of Blanche's dowry, for which Henry resorted to the almost obsolete expedient of a feudal aid,
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but eventually the money was collected and in June 1402, magnificently escorted, the ten-year-old Blanche departed for Cologne. Henry never saw his eldest daughter again: she died of a fever in
May 1409, aged seventeen.
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Her marriage had, however, helped to counter the machinations of Louis of Orléans, for despite his domestic problems Rupert proved a faithful ally, writing to Henry to reassure him that although Orléans had tried to recruit followers in Germany for an expedition against England, he had forbidden his vassals from taking part in it. Henry, for his part, sought a full treaty of alliance with Rupert, although this never materialized.
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Henry's search for a suitable match for his younger daughter, Philippa, also benefited from irresolution in France. Margaret, queen dowager and regent of Denmark, Norway and Sweden, had initially sought the hand of a French princess for her son and heir, Eric, but she was rebuffed, and late in 1402 agreement was reached on a marriage between Eric and Philippa.
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With the kings of Castile and Portugal married to two of Henry's sisters, there was thus a respectable level of diplomatic support in Europe to set against Franco-Scottish hostility.
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The French had failed to leave the English king isolated.

Yet hopes of peaceful coexistence with France seemed doomed to failure. By the summer of 1403, Burgundy's influence on French policy was weakening, perhaps on account of his failing health, perhaps because of the unquenchable ambition of Orléans. Duke Louis's hostility towards England, and towards Henry in particular, stemmed from three factors: first, his high conception of France's place in Europe and his sense of personal responsibility for its destiny during the tragedy of his brother's reign; secondly, his competition with Burgundy for control of the resources of the French monarchy in order to prevent them being used to fund the ambitions of a dynasty which he believed, rightly or wrongly, not to have the interests of the French state at heart; thirdly, that Henry, his friend and ally in 1398–9, had duped him, or at any rate that he needed to give that impression, for Louis was much criticized in France for his part in
facilitating Richard II's downfall. There was thus an element of posturing in his defiance of Henry, although there was no doubting the threat it posed to the maintenance of the truce. From the summer of 1403, what had previously been a war of words and fleets metamorphosed into a war of conquest in Guyenne and a campaign of brutal coastal raids in the north.
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Each side blamed the other for starting it. The French royal chronicler said that shortly after the truce was ratified on 27 June the English raided Brittany, to which the Bretons responded in mid-August by attacking Plymouth, Jersey and Guernsey. The raid on Plymouth was led by Guillaume de Chastel, the hero of Montendre, and resulted in the looting and burning of the town and the seizure of several ships. Walsingham said that it was the Breton raid that came first, sparking English retaliation led by William Wilford, the mayor of Exeter, who assembled a fleet from Bristol, Plymouth and Dartmouth and systematically ravaged the Breton coastline, destroying forty ships and capturing the same number; Brittany, claimed the chronicler, was left ‘in a state of mourning’.
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Orléans's growing influence was also seen in the decision in November 1403 by Waleran, count of St-Pol, to challenge Henry openly. Back in 1380, while staying in England, St-Pol had married Richard II's half-sister, Maud Holand, and had developed a close relationship with the deposed king. Like Louis of Orléans, he believed his family's honour to have been impugned by Richard's deposition, and on 9 November 1403, a month after the third and last of Orléans's missives to Henry, he too sent the English king a letter of defiance. The imputations were predictable (usurper, regicide), but the threat of hostile action more urgent: he planned, so he said, to devote his energies to the task of avenging Richard in any way that he could, by land or sea, although he was careful to emphasize that his quarrel with Henry was a personal one and that his letter did not constitute an official rupture of the Anglo-French truce.
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Since Waleran was a vassal of Burgundy, he needed to tread carefully, for Duke Philip was increasingly concerned at the drift to war, and during the summer of 1403 had sought permission from Charles VI to negotiate a separate
commercial agreement with the English on behalf of his Flemish subjects.
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By this time, however, St-Pol was more inclined to look to Orléans for leadership, and soon cast caution to the winds. In December 1403, he led 1,600 men on a raid on the Isle of Wight, although he was soon forced to retire, ‘covered with ignominy’ according to the Saint-Denis chronicler, and in February 1404 the Calais garrison took revenge by devastating the count's lands in Picardy.
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Two months later Duke Philip died, following which St-Pol concluded an alliance with Orléans in return for an annuity of 6,000
livres tournois
.
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Little now stood in the way of Duke Louis and those who shared his instincts. The real French target in the north was Calais, and soon after Philip of Burgundy's death the French council decided to besiege the town. Nothing came of this, in part because Henry's sister Catherine, the Castilian queen, persuaded her husband not to give the French the naval assistance they requested to blockade the town, but England's bridgehead in France was chronically vulnerable and before long the French would try again.
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In the meantime, seeking alternative ways to strike at Henry, the French council made contact with Glyn Dŵr, who on 15 May 1404 had written to Charles VI proposing a treaty of alliance. Composed in formal Latin and diplomatic protocol – ‘Owain, by the grace of God Prince of Wales, to all those who shall see these our letters, greetings’ – his letter informed the French king that he was sending as his special nuncios Master Griffith Young, doctor of laws, ‘our chancellor’, and his kinsman, John Hanmer, to conclude a permanent or temporary Franco-Welsh alliance.
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The French were delighted: feted as plenipotentiaries, Young and Hanmer were given a gilded helmet, breastplate and sword to present to their
master and promised help in the shape of an expeditionary force. Within two months a pact had been drawn up announcing that, united and bound in true friendship, the king of France and the prince of the Welsh would do their utmost to destroy Henry of Lancaster, his adherents and supporters. Before departing Young and Hanmer compiled a memorandum of the best harbours, most practicable routes and most fertile regions in Wales.

Thus far, French attempts to strike at the English had met with little success. Following St-Pol's humiliation on the Isle of Wight, the year 1404 saw attacks on Portland, Dartmouth, Falmouth, Southampton, the Isle of Wight and even Hornsea on Humberside, some by Flemish or Normans but most by Bretons, envied by many of their compatriots as the only ones permitted to break the truce. More often than not these ended badly.
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The Norman raid on Portland left many of them drowned or captive, and when Guillaume de Chastel attacked Dartmouth in April he was killed and several of his captains taken prisoner. The attempt to coordinate hostilities with the Welsh was another fiasco. True to his promise to Owain, Charles VI authorized the count of La Marche to raise a force of 1,000 men-at-arms and crossbowmen to take to Pembrokeshire, and by mid-August sixty vessels had been assembled at Brest (Brittany), but La Marche, detained in Paris by (it was alleged) a love affair, did not reach Brest until mid-November, by which time it was too risky to round Land's End. Instead, he made for Falmouth (Cornwall), where he was driven off by the local levies, several of his men drowning as they retreated. The princes of the lily were furious, accusing the count of ‘forgetting that he was the issue of royal blood’ and sullying French honour. English retaliation was swift, with privateers and freebooters from the Channel ports infesting the coasts of Normandy, Brittany, Picardy and Flanders ‘like a swarm of insects’. The indomitable Henry Pay, having narrowly escaped execution at the hands of a crew from Normandy, sailed up the Seine almost as far as Paris, seizing several ships on his way home.
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Even the monk of Saint-Denis conceded that the English usually had the better of these exchanges. French mercenaries continued to find their way to Wales to fight the English, but Glyn Dŵr would have to wait a little longer for his promised expeditionary force.
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Yet as matters stood it hardly seemed as if Owain needed outside help, for 1404 marked the high-water mark of the Welsh revolt. In the north, isolated coastal garrisons clung on in the face of unremitting pressure, their plight typified by a letter from Reynald Baildon, keeper of Conway, to his superiors at Chester on 10 January: the rebels, he wrote, were planning to cross to Anglesey to seize all the men and cattle there and take them to Snowdonia; the French were once more besieging Caernarfon castle, ‘since it is now more feeble than when they last attacked it’; the constable of Harlech had been kidnapped and taken to Glyn Dŵr, raising doubts about his loyalty, and many of his soldiers were dead or sick with the plague while others had tried to flee but been killed by rebels. A second letter written by the deputy constable of Caernarfon a few days later and delivered ‘through a woman, since he had no man who dared to come’, added that Glyn Dŵr and the French had now brought siege engines and scaling ladders up to the castle, which was defended by a garrison of just twenty-eight men, eleven others having been killed.
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Remarkably, Caernarfon held out, though not so Harlech or Aberystwyth, both of which had fallen to the Welsh by the end of the year, and this time (unlike Conway in 1401), they had no intention of bargaining away what they had won in return for pardons – a measure of Glyn Dŵr's burgeoning confidence.

It was also during 1404 that Owain held his first parliament (at Machynlleth in Powys), and that the first Welsh bishop, John Trevaur of St Asaph, defected to his cause, followed a few months later by Lewis Byford, recently provided to the see of Bangor. No longer could Owain simply be dismissed as a guerrilla leader: he was beginning to look like a true prince of the Welsh people.
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In central and south Wales too, 1404 was a grim year for the English of Wales. Kidwelly was captured and looted in August; Cardiff and Coety were eventually relieved, but only after prolonged sieges and costly expeditions. Rebel incursions into the English border counties also intensified, with Shropshire particularly hard hit. One indication of the economic destruction caused by these raids is the level of exemption from taxation granted by the crown between 1404 and 1407, which in Shropshire averaged more than 25 per cent and in Herefordshire around 10 per cent.
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In August 1404, Henry permitted the people of Shropshire
to make a local truce with the rebels for three months; humiliating as it was, he probably had little option. From Wales itself, needless to say, the revenues of both the crown and the marcher lords could scarcely be collected at all: a letter from the constable and receiver of Bromfield and Yale to their lord, the earl of Arundel, described the lordship as ‘void and desolate of tenantry for the most part’ and men from Cheshire were planning to loot and waste it. The king, they added, had ‘cried havoc throughout Wales’, a pardonable exaggeration.
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Yet by early 1405 English hegemony in Wales hung by a thread.