Henry IV (95 page)

⁴²
Phillpotts, ‘Fate of the Truce’, 73–5, 80; Pepin, ‘English Offensives’, 39–40; Vale,
English Gascony
, 175–9, 218.

⁴³
An aim strongly supported by Hoccleve (
Regement of Princes
, 194–5).

⁴⁴
As have historians of his reign: Keen, ‘Diplomacy’, in
Henry V
, ed. Harriss, 181–99, deals exclusively with Anglo-French relations; see also Allmand,
Henry V
, xiii and n. 4.

Part Five

THE PENDULUM YEARS 1409–1413

Chapter 30

THE PRINCE'S ADMINISTRATION (1409–1411)

The parliament of 1406 had marked Prince Henry's entry into politics; that of January 1410 marked his assumption of power. From the spring of 1409, his responsibilities grew apace: constable of Dover castle and warden of the Cinque Ports, guardian to the Mortimer brothers, captain of the town of Calais.
¹
Having been betrayed in 1403 by his mentor (Hotspur) and his governor (Worcester), he, like his father, had learned to rely more on his family. The Beaufort brothers now returned to prominence: Henry Beaufort took charge of negotiations with France, while Thomas became chancellor, admiral of England and its dominions, and captain of Calais castle.
²
This did not mean that all those upon whom the king and Archbishop Arundel had relied were jettisoned: Richard Grey retained the trust of all parties until the end of the reign, as did Westmorland, though he remained mainly in the north, patrolling the Scottish marches with Prince John. Yet there was no doubt about the direction in which the pendulum of power had swung.

Tension at court and within the council had been building through 1409, aggravated by the king's illness and renewed financial uncertainty. When Prince Thomas's fee as lieutenant of Ireland was reduced to £4,666 in March 1408, it was made contingent on his going to Dublin and remaining there.
³
Thomas, however, was reluctant to see too much power pass into his
elder brother's hands while their father still lived, and after arriving back in England in March 1409 showed no desire to return to Ireland, a graveyard of chivalric ambitions. Nor, however, did he wish to relinquish his fee – indeed, in May 1409 he secured £7,666 due to him for his lieutenancy.
⁴
Prince Henry, exasperated at this dissipation of much-needed resources, suggested in August with the backing of the council that the post be given to Sir John Stanley and that his brother be required to remove his retainers from court so that they would cease to be a burden on the royal household. Although Thomas resisted this, the commons in January 1410 also made it clear that they thought he should take his responsibilities more seriously. Unabashed, he continued to complain about non-payment of his fee, but never went to Ireland again.
⁵
The autumn of 1409 also saw the eruption of a dispute between the young earl of Arundel, the prince's foremost retainer, and his uncle the archbishop, over hunting and fishing rights on their adjoining lands in Sussex. Such a relatively minor affair should not have been allowed to escalate, but the archbishop would not have forgotten his nephew's role in the condemnation of Richard Scrope and the matter was eventually brought before the king at Holborn and submitted to arbitration by the two chief justices. Although contained, the dispute was symptomatic of the growing assertiveness of Prince Henry and his allies, and the declining authority of the king and the archbishop.
⁶

The unusual hiatus between the dismissals of Tiptoft and Arundel, on 11 and 21 December 1409, respectively, and the appointment of replacements, was a sign of indecision at best and more likely of disagreement between the king and the prince over their successors. It was the prince who prevailed.
⁷
Henry Lord Le Scrope, regarded at this time by Prince Henry as a reliable supporter, became treasurer on 6 January 1410, but not until 31 January, four days after parliament had met, was Thomas Beaufort handed the great seal. His brother the bishop, who had made the opening speech, was in many ways the obvious candidate, but was perhaps too much the exemplar of Caesarean prelacy to which this assembly objected. Thomas
was a compromise appointment, acceptable to both king and prince, though less so to Archbishop Arundel.
⁸
Yet the prince did not have it all his own way. As the taxpayers of England would discover when he came to the throne, he had few inhibitions about asking them to open their purses, and he now began boldly, perhaps too boldly, by asking the commons for a lay and a clerical subsidy to be levied each year without the need for parliamentary consent on each occasion.
⁹
This was rejected, but its effect was to revive the debate about a long-term solution to the crown's fiscal dilemma. Emboldened by Arundel's dismissal from the chancery, and perhaps hopeful of a sympathetic hearing from the new lay chancellor, a group of MPs now put forward the root-and-branch Disendowment Bill, which would have entailed the largest transfer of landed resources in England between the Conquest and the Dissolution of the Monasteries.
¹⁰
This, in turn, led to the burning of John Badby, with whom died the hopes of the disendowment party, but if radical financial remedies were to be discounted there was little option but to return to traditional ones, which in this case meant the grant by the commons of one-and-a-half lay subsidies to be raised at the rate of half a subsidy (
c.
£18,500) a year until November 1412.
¹¹

The clearest indication of the prince's ascendancy is found in the complexion of the reshuffled council: the new chancellor and treasurer, Bishop Beaufort, the earls of Arundel and Warwick, Hugh Lord Burnell, Edward Lord Charlton and the future primate Henry Chichele, bishop of St David's, were all men whom he counted as his supporters.
¹²
In addition to Chichele and Beaufort, the council's clerical ballast was supplied by Bishops Langley and Bubwith and privy seal keeper John Prophet, not the sort of men who ran the country but the sort who made it run. This was the prince's council, and it was he who, following its appointment, informed the parliament of its willingness to serve provided the commons made
adequate provision for it to do so. Shepherded by Speaker Thomas Chaucer, a man with close connections to both the prince and the Beauforts, parliament confirmed the steady leak of authority from king and archbishop to the prince which had characterized the past year, and to set the seal on this transfer of power a restriction was once again placed on the king's freedom to make grants and probably on other facets of his prerogative.
¹³

For nearly two years after the January 1410 parliament the prince's council retained effective control of the administration.
¹⁴
The king played little part in day-to-day government, although messengers continued to pass between him and the prince on matters concerning the realm, and he continued to respond to petitions and despatch letters to his ministers concerning family matters such as Queen Joan's dower, as well as retaining a selective interest in questions of patronage, judicial and other appointments, religious indiscipline and foreign policy.
¹⁵
Between July 1410 and February 1411 he spent six months in the Midlands, mainly at Woodstock, Leicester and Groby, breaking with habit by spending the Christmas season not at Eltham but at Kenilworth, where he stayed for nearly two months. Following a brief visit to Gloucester in May 1411, he remained almost continuously close to London, venturing no further than Windsor and Canterbury, which he visited twice in 1412.
¹⁶
Afflicted not just by physical
decline but also by personal tragedy – the death of his childhood friend John Beaufort in 1410 and, devastatingly, of his daughter Blanche, news of which reached him from Germany in the autumn of 1409 – he spent more time with Archbishop Arundel, their friendship ripening with age.
¹⁷
Prince Thomas also spent a good deal of time with his father; neither he, nor the king, nor the archbishop attended the council in 1410–11, and although Henry appeared at least briefly at the great council at Lambeth in March 1411, a month later he seems to have suffered a relapse. On 16 April he asked the archbishops and bishops to pray urgently for himself, his sons and the kingdom, since he was mindful of the great benefits which the Lord had conferred upon him since he assumed the throne and did not wish to seem ungrateful to God for saving him from the many perils to which he had been exposed. His emotional pardons three weeks later to two minor criminals reiterated these sentiments, and were redolent with intimations of mortality.
¹⁸
He recovered, however, and, never tiring of chivalric entertainment, presided over jousts at Smithfield and elsewhere during the summer and still hoped to lead campaigns abroad.
¹⁹

The relaxation of the king's grip was matched by a corresponding intensification of the rivalry between his two elder sons. Ireland was one bone of contention between Prince Henry and Prince Thomas, and France would become another, but familial matters also divided them.
²⁰
The death of John Beaufort on 16 March 1410 not only deprived the king of his closest friend among the lay nobility, it also threatened to create a rift between the Beauforts and the crown, for within five months of John's death his widow, Margaret Holand, had contracted to marry Prince Thomas. Whether the king supported the match is not clear – an indication of his shadowy role in 1410–11. Prince Henry initially supported it, presumably seeing it as a way to endow his brother without depleting the crown, for Margaret was a
wealthy woman.
²¹
Bishop Beaufort, however, whom John had named as his sole executor, strongly opposed it, especially since, along with his proposed bride, Thomas also claimed control of her estates, custody of her heirs, and a sum in cash reputed to amount to £10,000, payable by the bishop. The danger in such an arrangement was that, if Thomas and Margaret had children, much of the Beaufort inheritance would in due course pass out of the family's hands (in fact they did not). The bishop thus tried to obstruct the marriage, but only managed to delay it for two years, until May 1412. However, he did eventually persuade Prince Henry to support his efforts to retain the Beaufort gold, which in turn led to an altercation between the two princes which required mediation by the lords.
²²

As indicated by the opening exchanges in the January 1410 parliament, the first concern of the prince's administration was finance. The financial policy pursued by Arundel and Tiptoft in 1407–9 had been based on clear, but conservative, principles: the restriction of grants, a reduction in household spending, the issue of a high proportion of cash rather than assignments, the avoidance of over-commitment of resources, the reservation of half the wool subsidy for Calais, and the honouring of the king's obligations to his annuitants, all of this worked out during budgetary reviews held early each year. The mercantile and political truces of these years also meant that wool exports surged, with 15,000 sacks exported in 1407–8 and over 17,000 (the highest total of the reign) in 1408–9, leading in the latter year to a total yield to the exchequer from customs and subsidies of around £65,000–£70,000. Moreover, the November 1407 parliament had granted three half-tenths and fifteenths to be collected within fourteen months, and convocation one-and-a-half clerical tenths. In 1410–11 economic circumstances were much less favourable. Cash flow to the exchequer was already drying up in the second half of 1409, while wool exports slumped to around 14,000 sacks in 1409–10 and just 11,500 (the second lowest total of the reign) in 1410–11, reducing the exchequer's income from the customs in the latter year to around £45,000. A difficult prospect for the council was made harder by parliament's decision to give £13,333, spread over three years, directly to the king ‘to do with and dispose as you wish’. In return,
Henry once again promised not to make any new grants until his debts had been paid.
²³

An increase in revenue was thus imperative, and this is what prompted the prince, backed by a new chancellor and treasurer who shared his more robust approach to the maximization of revenue, to ask parliament and convocation for guaranteed direct subsidies each year. In fact, what the commons granted was considerably less than in 1407, for the collection of the three half-fifteenths and tenths they voted was to be spread over two-and-a-half years, with the first not due until November 1410. Other than that, they offered little but complaint: the customs service, they declared, was rife with corruption and evasion and needed to be overhauled. The prince and Henry Le Scrope had already decided, in January, to cancel all existing assignments, change the customs collectors and their seals, and institute a review of payments, but although this secured a few months' respite it also produced a number of uncashable tallies for major creditors such as Prince John and Prince Thomas, and a scramble for new assignments.
²⁴
Le Scrope duly launched a review of customs fraud in the summer of 1410, and orders were issued that ‘no one be spared’ by the collectors of the lay subsidy, but there was little he could do about the collapse of wool exports. An enquiry was also set up into the king's rights in a number of counties, but its results are unclear.
²⁵
Fortunately, Canterbury convocation granted one-and-a-half clerical tenths and York convocation one.

When parliament ended and the council met in early June for its planning review of the year, its hands were already tied.
²⁶
Parliament had agreed that the proportion of the wool subsidy to be reserved for Calais, of which the prince had become captain on 18 March following John Beaufort's death, would be raised to three-quarters and a total of around £21,500 would be given to the king's household. This left a host of claimants and very little with which to satisfy them. Among them was Prince Thomas, who claimed to be owed £12,205 for Ireland and £1,600 for his captaincy of Guines castle. He was eventually given just £5,016 to cover old debts and
informed that the rest might be forthcoming ‘should he perform the covenants agreed in his indentures’ – that is, return to Ireland.
²⁷
Prince John and the earl of Westmorland were regarded as more deserving cases and were eventually allocated £9,230, although half of this was assigned on the upcoming lay subsidy.
²⁸
In addition, it was reckoned that £6,241 was needed to pay a fleet to patrol the seas, £2,550 to send a force to Guyenne along with £2,666 as a sweetener for the long-suffering Gascon lords, and £4,515 for Wales. This left an overall deficit of around £14,000, so it was decided to allocate assignments on the first instalment of the lay subsidy, but once this had been done it transpired that even this source, not due until November, was already overcommitted by £2,309, and the subsequent tranche would not be due until November 1411.
²⁹
Loans were needed, and on 14 June commissioners were appointed county by county, letters being sent under the great seal to ‘lords and other great persons’ and under the prince's signet to abbots, priors, knights and esquires; by late July £8,000 had been brought into the exchequer, but the total sum borrowed was certainly higher.
³⁰
Several of the councillors were among the lenders, and they collectively guaranteed repayment of other loans under their personal seals.
³¹