Henry IV (80 page)

It is in this context that the proliferation of the king's collars and other badges, and the controversy they aroused, needs to be seen. Legislation to restrict the distribution of livery badges had been under discussion for over twenty years. Cheap to manufacture and easy to distribute, badges were powerful symbols of allegiance and hence, in the right circumstances, of factionalism. The first significant attempt to control their distribution was the 1390 ordinance, but the abuse of power by Richard II and the Counter-Appellants in 1397–9 led to much stricter regulations being introduced in the 1399 Statute of Liveries. This prohibited their distribution by lords, and limited the king's distribution of them to members of his household or life retainers of the rank of esquire or above, who, moreover, were only permitted to wear them in the king's presence.
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In the parliament of 1401, Arnold Savage had tried to go further than this and abolish all livery badges, including the king's. Henry managed to resist this demand, however, and the resulting statute permitted him and Prince Henry to go on distributing badges to their followers of the rank of esquire or above. Yet such special pleading on behalf of the Lancastrian affinity clearly caused unease, and Henry also had to promise not to distribute his lesser livery of the crescent and star to men below the rank of esquire.
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Henry showed little sensitivity to these concerns. England after 1399 was flooded with
SS
collars, the dozens proudly displayed on the tomb effigies of lords, knights and esquires affording one indication of their ubiquity, the 192 collars handed out by Henry during his 1399 campaign another.
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The 200 or so senior members of the king's household, the 250 knights and esquires whom he retained, and many of the peers would have received collars, as did others not formally retained by Henry or employed in his household such as the poet John Gower and Robert Waterton's wife Cecily.
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In total, the number of persons permitted to wear them could well have
reached a thousand. The
SS
collar also decorated the initial letter of a royal charter to the town of Gloucester in 1399, the civic sword given to the mayor of Dublin in 1402, and the signet used by both Henry IV and Henry V, although not the new great seal made in late 1406, heraldic badges being considered inappropriate for instruments of state.
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Items of plate and jewellery distributed by the king were commonly engraved with other Lancastrian motifs such as eagles, swans, greyhounds and even red roses, but it was the
SS
collar that was the hallmark of the dynasty.
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Henry seems to have thought that his collars conferred membership of something akin to a chivalric order – in 1400 he gave a ten marks' annuity and a collar to one of his esquires ‘so that he may maintain the said order’ – and at times disregarded the undertakings he had given. In 1406, for example, he gave a collar to one of his sergeants-at-arms ‘notwithstanding the statute [of 1399]’, and he continued to have crescents made and presumably therefore distributed.
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The
SS
collar also became an emblem of English monarchy abroad: eight were sent to his sister Philippa in Portugal in 1401, another six to the Bohemian court in 1405.
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Many of the collars noted in exchequer accounts were made for the king's use, some of them very ornate and costly: for his wedding in 1403, he paid the London goldsmith Christopher Tyldesley £385 to fashion a gold collar engraved with the motto
Soveignez
and adorned with the letters S and X in enamel, nine large pearls, twelve large diamonds, eight rubies and eight sapphires. A similarly elaborate collar for Queen Joan cost £333.
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The collars which the king gave to most of his supporters were far simpler, usually costing between six and eight shillings, although some were said to be worth as much as twenty pounds.
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Badges aroused strong feelings on both sides. John Gower thought of his collar as a gift from heaven, a mark of loyalty and nobility,
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but to others, ever since Gaunt began distributing them in the 1370s, they had been seen
as inimical to peace and unity. Richard II's purpose in donning his uncle's livery in 1394 may have been to signal the restoration of political harmony, but its effect was quite the opposite, inducing the earl of Arundel to complain about the king's partisanship.
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At times of tension, badges were seized or hastily discarded. At Bayonne during the revolt of 1400, people wearing Henry's collars were arrested; when the rebel earl of Kent arrived at Sonning (Berkshire) en route for Cirencester in January 1400, he snatched the collars from the necks and the crescents from the arms of those guarding Queen Isabella and cast them away, declaring that they would never be worn in England again.
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Kent would be dead within a week, but
SS
collars remained ubiquitous both in England and abroad through the first half of the fifteenth century. With time, they doubtless came to be identified with English as much as Lancastrian kingship, but when Edward IV ascended the throne in 1461 they were put away, replaced by Yorkist suns and roses. The
SS
collar never quite seems to have transcended its perception as the badge of a faction.

If the
SS
collar was the chief visual medium used for propagandizing the dynasty, Henry presented his persona as essentially chivalric and martial. Hence the dubbing of forty-six Knights of the Bath on the eve of the coronation. However, it did not escape Froissart's notice that although it was Knights of the Bath who accompanied him to Westminster abbey, the insignia which he himself chose to wear was that of the Garter.
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Founded by that model of chivalric kingship, Edward III, the Garter provided a ready-made opportunity for the king to demonstrate his commitment to martial ideals. Initially this was problematic, for most of the Knights of the Garter in 1399 were Richard II's nominees and unsympathetic to the usurper, perhaps even considering it their duty to overthrow him. In the event, the attrition rate amongst them during the first six years of the reign was so high – four perished during the Epiphany Rising, another four at the battle of Shrewsbury, and a further ten died of various causes – that by 1405 it had proved possible to reconstitute the Order almost entirely (one reason, perhaps, why the putative ‘order’ of the Bath failed to flourish).
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Most of Henry's replacements were unexceptionable. They began with
the king's four sons before alternating between scions of aristocratic houses (Arundel, Warwick, Stafford, Westmorland and Kent), loyal followers with unimpeachable military reputations (Thomas Beaufort, Rempston, Erpingham, Stanley, and Lords Willoughby, Roos, Lovell and Grey) and the kings of Castile, Portugal and Denmark.
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Nevertheless, the combined effect was to turn England's premier knightly fraternity into an extension of the Lancastrian affinity, for the first criterion for election was always loyalty. This is unsurprising, for the cohesion of the fraternity was severely tested by the Epiphany Rising and the battle of Shrewsbury (all three Percys were Garter knights). By 1405, however, unity had been restored, and henceforth, although political reliability continued to determine election, military reputation carried more weight: Lords Burnell, Charlton, Talbot and FitzHugh had all played key roles in Wales or the north, while Robert Umfraville and John Cornwall were two of the most renowned warriors of their day.
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This elision between dynasty and fraternity is symbolized by Henry's presentation in 1401 to the college of St George at Windsor of a set of blue vestments including an orphery decorated with the life of Thomas of Lancaster. He also set in motion the institutionalization of the order that was to gather pace in his son's reign.
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In 1400, he had the Windsor Tables compiled, a list of members to be displayed in the chapter house. It is possible that the first surviving statutes of the Garter were drawn up in 1402, though more likely that they date from 1415.
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It must at any rate have been at Henry IV's prompting that in 1399 Canterbury convocation asked that the feast of St George, ‘the spiritual patron of all English soldiers’, be celebrated as a national feast day.
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By the latter half of the reign the fame of the company was spreading. The catalyst for the eight-a-side tourney between England and Hainault in 1409 was a letter to the king from Jean de Werchin, seneschal of Hainault, the most famous jouster of his age, asking to be allowed to issue a collective challenge to the Garter knights. Henry interpreted this as a request to take on all twenty-six and
politely suggested that Werchin restrict himself to one, Sir John Cornwall, who would act as the Order's champion (the first time that the Garter was referred to as an order). In the same year the Veronese knight Pandolf Malatesta challenged the earl of Warwick (KG since 1403) to uphold the honour of the Garter in personal combat.
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All this was, to be sure, good courtly entertainment, but the fall in the number of Ladies of the Garter during Henry's reign, just ten as opposed to thirty-six under Richard II, was also symptomatic of the renewal of the order's original ideals, which had to some extent been diluted during the last quarter of the fourteenth century.
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Henry's reign also witnessed the growth of an
esprit de corps
among the Garter knights. In December 1408 messengers were sent out to summon them to London, for what purpose is not stated, but it can hardly have been for the annual St George's day feast.
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Two Garter Knights, Lords Willoughby and Roos, jointly founded a guild of the fraternity of St George at Boston.
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In 1409, the members clubbed together to pay for repairs at St George's Chapel.
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Most of them must also have contributed to the building of the Hospitaller castle at Bodrum (Turkey), begun in 1404, for of the twenty-two shields of arms of English benefactors encircling that of the king on the north wall of the castle, seventeen belonged to Garter knights.
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Henry encouraged this spirit of solidarity by attending the festivities at Windsor every year except 1408, when he was in the north clearing up after Northumberland's final rebellion, and by committing large sums to maintain the annual celebrations: in 1411 it was estimated that St George's day would cost £972. Hoccleve's two ballads written in 1414 to ‘the most noble King Henry V and the most honourable company of the Garter’ reflected the order's reversion under his father to the ideals of Edward III. The policy behind this was not opaque: the growing fame of the Order shone a light on Henry's reputation and reinforced the chivalric values of the aristocracy in general and the Lancastrian affinity in particular, as it continued to do under Henry V, who appointed the first registrar of the Order in 1414 and the first Garter King of Arms three years later.
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Some, perhaps, thought that the Order and its patron saint were becoming
too closely associated with the regime. It is striking that the earl of March, despite reaching his majority in 1412, was never elected, despite (or rather because of) his proximity to the royal family. It is also striking that Archbishop Scrope's 1405 manifesto appealed to St George as the ‘special protector and advocate of the kingdom of England’ – not just of the king, but also of those who sought to reform the king's government, and who perhaps looked askance at the Lancastrianization of England's national saint.
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Rarely did Henry miss an opportunity to remind his subjects of his reputation as a warrior – part of the reason, perhaps, why he continued to proclaim his intention to campaign at home and abroad even after he fell sick. In the autumn of 1405 he was said to be preparing to go to Guyenne, in 1406 to Calais, in 1407 to Wales; in 1408 he led his retainers to Yorkshire to intercept Northumberland and Bardolf, although by the time he got there the revolt was over. In 1411 he was still hoping to lead an army to Calais, in 1412 to Bordeaux.
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In fact the last time the king took the field was during his 1405 Welsh expedition, but he was reminding his people that he still saw it as his duty to uphold the martial values of English kingship. So, too, the great Christian ideal of crusading. In 1410 he told a Prussian envoy that if he could make peace with France he would like nothing more than to go to Prussia again, and in the meantime would not stop any of his subjects from going. Even as death loomed, he had not abandoned hope of returning to the Holy Land, as foretold at the time of his anointing with Becket's oil.
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Despite the crusader disaster at the battle of Nicopolis in 1396, there was reason for optimism among Christians at this time. Timur's victory over the Ottoman Sultan Bayezid at Ankara (July 1402) raised the hope that he might be persuaded to join an anti-Muslim alliance, and when the great conqueror followed this up by despatching the Dominican friar John Greenlaw to the west to propose an extension of trading contacts, western rulers responded enthusiastically. Greenlaw had travelled widely in Asia Minor and in October 1400 Pope Boniface had appointed him archbishop of Sultania (Azerbaijan).
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The French welcomed him, Enrique of Castile sent an embassy to Timur's court, and
Henry gave Greenlaw letters for his friends in the region to try to stir up anti-Muslim sentiment.
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To the emperor of Abyssinia Henry expressed his joy at the rumour that he planned to recover the Holy Sepulchre from the enemies of the faith, adding that he too had visited Jerusalem and very much hoped to return. Similar letters were sent to the emperors of Trebizond and Constantinople and the king of Georgia. Henry wrote to Timur himself and his son, Miran Shah, thanking them for their support for Christians in the east and congratulating them on the defeat of Bayezid. Greenlaw also carried letters for Michael Steno, doge of Venice, and King Janus of Cyprus, both of whom were friendly towards Henry and would be instrumental in any crusading enterprise.
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