Henry IV (62 page)

²³
SAC II
, 381–3, 410–11 and n. 583; Ormrod, ‘The Rebellion of Archbishop Scrope’, 168–71; the Canterbury convocation insisted in May that the Church's liberties be confirmed and its goods be exempt from purveyance, but granted an additional sum of two shillings in the pound on normally exempt benefices valued at over five pounds. For the negotiations with the York convocation in June, see above, p. 275.

²⁴
PROME
, viii.281–2; lawyers had been excluded from parliament once before, in 1372. For the nickname, see
SAC II
, 419; for interference in elections, see
CE
, 402;
CR
, 178; and above, pp. 275–6. In fact the number of royal retainers elected in October, sixteen, was actually six fewer than had been elected in January (
HOC
, i.164–5).

²⁵
Walsingham has two accounts of this episode, with differences of emphasis (
SAC II
, 419–25, 795–803).

²⁶
Cheyne was not speaker of the commons, as Walsingham says (the speaker was Sir William Esturmy), nor was he an elected MP; he presumably attended parliament as a privy councillor.

²⁷
It was Richard Young, bishop of Rochester, who threatened the knights with Magna Carta; he was known as ‘Canterbury's Mercury’ because he gave voice to Arundel's thoughts (
SAC II
, 422–3). Walsingham said Arundel was inspired by reading a passage from the life of St Edmund of Abingdon (d.1240). Papal bulls concerning alienations of land by the king and magnates prejudicial to the crown were sent to Coventry to be consulted (
Antient Kalendars
, ii.70). It was also during this parliament that Arundel complained to Henry about some household knights, whom he called Lollards, who turned their backs on the Eucharist; see below, pp. 418–19.

²⁸
SAC II
, 798–9;
PROME
, viii.291–5.

²⁹
RHKA
, 137–8; B. Wolffe,
The Royal Demesne in English History
(London, 1971), 76–86. The 1399 parliament made such a proposal in general terms (
PROME
, viii.49).

³⁰
Only about twenty cases of resumption followed (Wright, ‘Recovery of Royal Finance’, 70), although the idea did not submerge: when John Beaufort was promised £1,000 of land in 1406, they were to be from those
que non sunt parcella corone
(E 403/585, 26 March 1406).

³¹
PROME
, viii.288–90, 294–5. Members of the royal family and holders of coastal or marcher castles were excluded from the grant of one year's profit from royal lands, the assessment of which ran from Easter 1404 to Easter 1405; it was extremely difficult to enforce and seems to have raised very little. The 5 per cent tax on lands over £333, granted by the temporal lords and ladies, yielded just £997 (Jurkowski, Smith and Crook, eds,
Lay Taxes
, 75–6).

³²
Loans to the exchequer and uncashable tallies between April and November 1405 each amounted to around £10,000, as did the debts of the new wardrobe keeper, Richard Kingston, over two years, despite the fact that he received £5,445 from the king's chamber (E 403/585, 27 Oct., 10 Dec.; Steel,
Receipt
, 90–3;
RHKA
, 107–8; BL Harleian MS 319, Kingston's account book from Jan. 1405 to Dec. 1406).

³³
They loaned the exchequer at least £5,500 between June and November 1405: E 403/582, 18 July; E 403/585, 27 Oct., 10 Dec. For Pelham, see J. Roskell,
The Commons in the Parliament of 1422
(Manchester, 1954), 210.

³⁴
John Darell, the treasurer's clerk, brought to Worcester rolls, memoranda and other documents
predicti thesaurarii intime tangentis
, as well as tallies relating to the taxes granted in 1404 (E 403/582, 18 July).

³⁵
Walsingham said that the king's advisers again proposed that the bishops be obliged to hand over their treasure and horses without further ado, but he may have confused this with the September 1403 council; he described the treasure lost in the floods as the king's
thesauro impreciabili et coronis suis
, but the incident is not mentioned in the wardrobe account book (
SAC II
, 462–3).

³⁶
For Henry's itinerary, see BL Harleian Ms 319, fos. 6–38. He spent Christmas, New Year and Easter at Eltham, late April at Windsor, and three spells totalling around four weeks at Hertford castle.

³⁷
There was also a suggestion in December that Henry might go to Bordeaux, but as usual this came to nothing:
Signet Letters
, nos. 514, 523;
POPC
, ii.280;
PROME
, viii.319;
Foedera
, viii.414–15 (Scottish invasion). For rumours in the north, see C 49/48, m. 6, discussed by Walker, ‘Rumour, Sedition and Popular Protest’, 31–2.

³⁸
For the official record, see
PROME
, viii.318–416.

³⁹
Tiptoft was born around 1378, had been in Henry's service since 1397, and may have shared his exile in 1398–9: L. Clark, ‘John Tiptoft’,
ODNB
, 54.832–3; and A. Pollard, ‘The Lancastrian Constitutional Experiment Revisited: Henry IV, Sir John Tiptoft and the Parliament of 1406’,
Parliamentary History
14 (1995), 103–19.

⁴⁰
PROME
, viii.331–4. The agreement with the merchants stipulated that their fleet(s) should be manned by 2,000 fighting men from 1 May to 1 November, and 1,000 men from 1 November to 1 May.

⁴¹
Scotichronicon
, viii.60–3; Walsingham reported that when Henry heard that James was being sent to France to learn French and courtly etiquette, he dissolved into laughter and declared, ‘Well, if gratitude were a Scottish trait, they would have sent this youth to me to be brought up and educated, for I too know the French language’ (
SAC II
, 472–3). Henry Sinclair, earl of Orkney, was captured with him, by men of Great Yarmouth and Cley.

⁴²
SAC II
, 470–1; Davies,
Revolt
, 121–3; eight of a squadron of twenty-eight ships presumably sent to bring the French back from Pembrokeshire were also captured by the English (
SAC II
, 474–5).

⁴³
The English ambassadors remained there from 26 March to 22 May: E 404/22, no. 239; Nordberg,
Les Ducs et la Royauté
, 127;
Foedera
, viii.432–5.

⁴⁴
POPC
, i.290–2.

⁴⁵
John Arderne,
Treatise of Fistula in Ano
, ed. D'Arcy Power, EETS 139 (London, 1910), xii, 74, 130;
Usk
, 247. The principal ingredients of the ‘green ointment of the Twelve Apostles’ were white wax, pine resin, aristolochia, incense, mastic, opoponax, myrrh, galbanum and litharge. Arderne wrote his treatise in 1376 and died soon after, but a post-1413 translator of his work added in the margin ‘With this medicine was King Henry of England cured of the going out of the lure’ (prolapsed rectum).

⁴⁶
BL Harleian Ms 319, fos. 21–6.

⁴⁷
PROME
, viii.335–53.

⁴⁸
PROME
, viii.347;
CE
, 409 (
reges non solebant compotum dare
).

⁴⁹
Foedera
, viii.435.
Monstrelet
(i.126) added that if an Anglo-French marriage were concluded, Henry might agree to allow the prince to succeed him forthwith; Monstrelet's account has a number of errors, however, placing the talks in Paris and naming Francis de Court (called ‘earl of Pembroke’) as chief English ambassador, and an offer by Henry to abdicate is very unlikely. Yet Henry was serious about an Anglo-French marriage for the prince, and in mid-May wrote in support of the idea to Charles VI and his council (E 403/587, 18 May).

⁵⁰
PROME
, viii.341–7, 358–60; if Thomas then died without a son, Prince John would succeed, then Humphrey. The duchy of Lancaster was excluded and would remain heritable by the king's heirs general.

⁵¹
PROME
, viii.411.

⁵²
Bennett, ‘Henry IV, the Royal Succession and the Crisis of 1406q’, 16–17.

⁵³
Usk
, 214–15; Davies,
Revolt
, 123;
Saint-Denys
, 426–32 (but the French chronicler's subsequent report of a great victory for the Percys over the king and Prince John is fantasy).

⁵⁴
Wylie,
Henry the Fourth
, ii.442–9; for Philippa's expenses, see E 101/406/10 and E 101/405/10.

⁵⁵
The tax on unbeneficed clergy was deeply unpopular and raised little, though £1,694 was received from it on 12 July: E 403/587, 18 May, 7 June (orders to speed up collection of customs); E 401/638, 12 and 28 July;
SAC II
, 470–3; Steel,
Receipt
, 94, mentions £12,000 of loans, but there are additional sums on the issue rolls.

⁵⁶
Around £4,500 was passed to Prince Henry for operations in Wales, £4,300 to Prince John and the earl of Westmorland for the Scottish marches, and £2,720 to Prince Thomas for Ireland (E 403/587, 18 May, 6 Aug., 14 Aug.; for household receipts, see BL Harleian MS 319, fo. 2v).

⁵⁷
On 21 April, John the Fearless replaced Louis as captain-general of French forces in Picardy and West Flanders, while Louis became captain-general of Guyenne: Pépin, ‘The French Offensives of 1404–1407’; Schnerb,
Jean Sans Peur
, 194–201; R. Famiglietti,
Royal Intrigue: Crisis at the Court of Charles VI
(New York, 1986), 54–60; Nordberg,
Les Ducs et la Royauté
, 127–51. The Channel Islands were raided in late July (
RHL II
, 115).

⁵⁸
BL Add Ms 30,663, fos. 277–9 (partly reproduced in
Saint-Denys
, iii.428–30): Henry is
ille qui modo regimini Angliae occupat
, who had lost any right to the throne he might have had
ex tam multiplicibus ab eo commissis criminibus
; the letter was given to the earl of Northumberland to take back to Scotland with him.

⁵⁹
Foedera
, viii.451–6 (5 Oct.); E 403/589, 7 Oct., 24 Oct.;
Monstrelet
, i.126, said the reason why Orléans opposed the Henry–Isabella marriage proposal in the spring was because he intended to marry her to his son.

⁶⁰
PROME
, viii.322, 350, 353.

⁶¹
Philip the Bold had regularly extracted between 100,000 and 200,000
livres
a year from the French royal treasury; during 1406 John received no more than 37,000
livres
: Autrand,
Charles VI
, 407–8.

⁶²
BL Add. Charter 58,420;
POPC
, i.292–4;
Foedera
, viii.469–76 (published in England on 10 March 1407). John got no further than Saint-Omer, about 35 kilometres from Calais, in October; here his army mustered, cut down 32,000 oaks to construct siege engines, then disbanded.

⁶³
His agreement to the June act is emphasized a little too insistently (
PROME
, viii.342, 354–61). For a statement of the ‘traditional’ view, see
RHL I
, 20. ‘Two great letters patent’ containing the Succession Act were delivered to the treasury on 20 May 1407, consulted by Henry V in May 1413, and ‘shown’ to Henry VI in June 1453, before being returned to the treasury in October 1454 (
Antient Kalendars
, ii.84).

⁶⁴
PROME
, viii.389, 404–6. Henry may have been diverting their revenues. By mid-October he wished to impress their ships for his planned expedition to Calais; however, the merchants were permitted to receive part of the wool subsidy until 24 Nov. to cover their outlay (
CCR 1405–9
, 156–7).

⁶⁵
POPC
, i.295–6. Thomas Brounfleet, a household administrator for twenty years and formerly Richard II's butler, was chosen as the king's controller (in effect the deputy treasurer of the household).

⁶⁶
PROME
, viii.330, 347.

⁶⁷
SAC II
, 498–9.

⁶⁸
Brown, ‘Commons and Council’, 24–6;
PROME
, viii.323. Prophet had replaced Bubwith as keeper of the privy seal on 4 October 1406, though Bubwith was retained on the council (E 404/22, nos. 159, 273).

⁶⁹
PROME
, viii.366–75;
POPC
, i.296–8 (amendments by the council to an earlier draft); G. Dodd, ‘Patronage, Petitions, and Grace: The Chamberlains' Bills of Henry IV's Reign’, in
The Reign of Henry IV: Rebellion and Survival, 1403–1413
, ed. G. Dodd and D. Biggs (York, 2008), 126–31; Wright, ‘Recovery of Royal Finance’, 71–2.

⁷⁰
RHKA
, 136–7;
PROME
, viii.369–70 (for 17 Dec.); 363–5 (for audit of Pelham's and Furnivall's accounts; war-treasurers would not be appointed again until 1449).

⁷¹
SAC II
, 480–3.

Chapter 20

ARCHBISHOP ARUNDEL AND THE COUNCIL (1407–1409)

For ten months following the dissolution of the Long Parliament Henry was less active in government, perhaps because his health was still recovering but also because the thirty-one articles were strictly enforced. Initially he remained in London, where on 24 January he attended the wedding of the earl of Kent to Lucia Visconti, before retiring to Hertford for most of February and March.
¹
When the great council scheduled by parliament eventually met in London in mid-April, it lasted nine weeks, but although the king attended some of the sessions it was Arundel, Tiptoft, and Bishop Bubwith, the treasurer, who drew up new financial guidelines. One of its first acts, on 20 April, was to send a copy of the thirty-one articles to the exchequer, attaching to it a writ saying they were to be implemented without fail, even if Henry himself were to send them an order to the contrary; that this was sent in the king's name was perhaps rather humiliating. In the following month he was obliged to ask the exchequer to deliver money to his chamber ‘without any kind of difficulty or delay’.
²