The Demon's Brood Read online

  When unable to attend council meetings, his place was taken by his friend Archbishop Arundel. However, at the end of 1409 the archbishop was ousted as chancellor, and Prince Henry dominated the council, assisted by his Beaufort cousins, including the formidable Bishop Beaufort of Winchester, who replaced Arundel. The prince and his circle ran the country until late 1411. Responding to an appeal for help against the Armagnacs, they sent a small expedition to France to help the Burgundians.

  Deposition?

  Henry’s health improved. When Bishop Beaufort or the prince suggested he relinquish the throne, he called a parliament for November 1411 and sent six knights of the prince’s household to the Tower, announcing he would have no ‘novelties’ – a coded reference to abdication. Before the end of the year, Arundel was reinstated as chancellor, while the prince’s place on the council was taken by his brother Thomas. To frighten him, Henry warned the prince that after his death Thomas might dispute the succession.30

  Early in 1412 Armagnac agents arrived in London and, for military assistance against the Burgundians, offered Henry Aquitaine ‘just as his ancestors had held it’. When he heard, he stood up excitedly. ‘Don’t you see how God almighty is looking after us?’, he told Arundel, rubbing his hands. ‘This is wonderful, the day we’ve been longing for! Let’s go to France and get back all our ancient lands.’31 He wanted to lead an army in person. Knowing a man so frail could not possibly take the field, his subjects nonetheless admired his pluck. But Prince Henry opposed any alliance with the Armagnacs. He was justified when they and the Burgundians were reconciled, and a small force under Thomas secured nothing except huge bribes to go home.

  When Prince Henry arrived in London with an army of retainers, he protested at his exclusion from the council. Withdrawing to Coventry, he issued an open letter on 17 June. First, he made a lame excuse for not leading the expedition to France, claiming the king had given him too few troops. Then he denounced ‘certain children of iniquity, agents of dissension, fomenters of dissension, architects of disagreement, sowers of anger and instigators of strife’, who ‘with serpentine cunning are hoping to alter the succession [to the throne] . . . and suggest we are bloodthirstily longing for the crown of England and planning a violent, abominable crime by rising up against our father’. God alone knew the sheer depth of his devotion to his parent, how much he loved him, how nobody could possibly be more loyal. This extraordinary document circulated throughout the kingdom.32

  It looks as if the prince thought he might be set aside in favour of Thomas. At the end of the month he again went to Westminster, kneeling before the king in his private chamber, insisting he had never intended to seize the crown. Then he drew his dagger, giving it to his father whom he asked to kill him. In tears, Henry threw the knife away and embraced his son. A fortnight later, however, the king created Thomas Duke of Clarence as a warning to the prince. At the same time Henry made Thomas Lieutenant of Gascony and gave him command of a new expedition to France.

  In September Prince Henry complained to his father that he had been falsely accused of embezzling the Calais garrison’s wages, and demanded that his accusers should face trial. The king agreed, on condition that the trial was by parliament. Nothing more was heard of the matter.

  A parliament had been called for early in 1413, but on 21 February Henry fainted while praying at Edward the Confessor’s shrine in Westminster Abbey and was put to bed in the abbot’s lodging at the west end of the abbey. Regaining consciousness, he asked where he was and, informed he was in the abbey’s Jerusalem Chamber, replied, ‘I know I shall die in this chamber, according to the prophecy told of me, that I should die in the Holy Land.’33

  Henry remained there until his death on 20 March. His confessor John Till asked him to show repentance for killing Richard II and Archbishop Scrope, and for usurping the throne, but he answered that he had received papal absolution, while his sons ‘would not permit the throne to go out of our lineage’.34 After the customary funeral ceremonies that went on for two months, he was interred in the Trinity chapel at Canterbury Cathedral, as near to Becket’s shrine as possible.

  Retrospect

  Neglected by Shakespeare, even if he named two plays after him, Henry IV occupies little space in the national myth. Nor does modern research bear out Stubbs’s anachronistic view of him as our first constitutional monarch. Yet he was far from ineffective. Despite a questionable title and a crippling lack of money, not only did he finally tame the Welsh, but he saved England from partition. He also established his branch of the Plantagenet dynasty so firmly on the throne that it was strong enough to revive the Hundred Years War.

  11

  The ‘Gleaming King’ – Henry V

  I am the scourge of God

  The First English Life of King Henry the Fifth1

  The gleaming king

  On the afternoon of 19 January 1419 Henry V entered Rouen, which he had been besieging since July. Gloomy faced as usual, in black from head to foot, riding a black charger with black trappings that swept the ground, he was accompanied by a single squire who carried a lance with a fox’s brush fastened to the tip – one of the king’s badges. Through streets lined by living skeletons, littered with dead or dying men and women, he rode to the cathedral to hear Mass in thanksgiving.

  The hero of Agincourt, Henry V is ‘the gleaming king’ in our national myth (Winston Churchill). Stubbs saw him almost as the French see Joan of Arc, calling him ‘one of the greatest and purest characters in English history’.2 Twentieth-century English historians agreed. ‘Take him all round and he was, I think, the greatest man that ever ruled England’ was Bruce McFarlane’s opinion.3

  Even so, if Bolingbroke had been Macbeth, then Henry of Monmouth was Macbeth’s son and no less of a usurper. His claim to the throne of France was based on Edward III’s claim through a female line, but if a female line descent took precedence over a junior male line descent, then by the same logic Edmund, Earl of March was Edward III’s heir and rightful King of England. Henry’s solution lay in reviving the Hundred Years War, as trial by combat. As he saw it, success in battle would prove that God acknowledged his title.

  Henry was born in September 1386 on the Welsh border, in the gatehouse of Monmouth Castle. When Richard II banished Bolingbroke, he took charge of the boy whom he knighted on his Irish campaign. Henry developed a deep loyalty to his father’s enemy, briefly rejoining him during the coup of 1399 and later reinterring his remains at Westminster. In no way Shakespeare’s dissipated Prince Hal, as a very young man he was a highly effective commander-in-chief in Wales, whose siege-craft, accompanied by artificially induced famine and systematic terror, followed by conciliation, finally broke Owain. After the end of the Welsh war in 1409, his participation in the government of England was so enthusiastic that, as has been seen, he contemplated replacing his father on the throne.

  Henry took an active part in persecuting Lollards. At Smithfield in 1410 he superintended the burning of a Worcestershire tailor, John Badby, who had declared that a toad or a spider were worth more than the Host because they were living things. Tied in a barrel, the tailor screamed horribly when the fire reached him, and the prince ordered the faggots to be removed, offering him a pension if he would recant. When Badby refused, Henry had him replaced in the flaming barrel. The prince’s future confessor, Friar Thomas Netter, said he saw a black spider trying to enter the dying man’s mouth, so big that several people were needed to beat it off. Even so, the parliament of 1410 still contained a group of knights who were secret Lollards.

  He was crowned at Westminster on Passion Sunday (9 April) by Archbishop Arundel, a blizzard blowing outside that some believed to be an ill omen. A chronicler across the Channel was told that many in the abbey thought the Earl of March should have been crowned instead and there would be civil war.4 During the anointing the king looked gloomy, while he ate and drank nothing during the banquet – it was said he did not eat for three days. It may have been bad digestion, but
some suspected it might be conscience. However, nobody was prepared to raise March’s standard, least of all the earl himself.

  Henry quickly rid himself of any misgivings. His brother John, Duke of Bedford, became his second in command, another formidable if very different personality, a big, hook-nosed, young man with an unusually gracious manner. Clarence, now heir to the throne, proved impeccably loyal, as did Gloucester. His Beaufort uncles were useful, too, the Earl of Dorset capable of dealing with any military emergency. However, Thomas Dorset’s immensely rich younger brother Bishop Henry Beaufort – Henry’s former tutor – was a domineering figure, who needed careful handling. Luckily, he was devoted to his nephew.

  The king appointed Bishop Beaufort as chancellor, Arundel conveniently suffering a stroke. The Earl of Arundel was made treasurer. Self-confidence showed in his reburying Richard II at Westminster Abbey and restoring the sons of the earls involved in the Epiphany Plot of 1400 – Huntingdon, Oxford and Salisbury – to their family estates. His rival, the Earl of March, now twenty-one, was released after being confined since 1399 and given back the Mortimer lands in England, Wales and Ireland. He was even allowed to marry a cousin who was also a descendant of Edward II since he was no danger, an amiable mediocrity with a weakness for gambling. Nevertheless, Henry saddled Edmund with a marriage fine so big that it forced him to mortgage several of his estates, ‘an abuse of the crown’s feudal rights without parallel since the reign of King John’.5

  Early dangers

  In September 1413 Sir John Oldcastle, who had served under Henry in the Welsh wars, was arrested for heresy. Having insisted that the Host was only bread and bishops were tools of the Devil, he was sentenced to death and imprisoned in the Tower. Escaping, he plotted with fellow Lollards to kill the king and his brothers at Eltham on Twelfth Night, after a Lollard army assembled in St Giles’s Fields and took over London.

  ‘Along the footpaths and highways and at crossroads, you could see crowds of men hurrying to the meeting place, from every county in the kingdom, recruited by the promise of big rewards’, writes Walsingham. ‘If the king had not acted so shrewdly that night, up to 50,000 servants and apprentices, with some of their masters, would have risen.’6 Walsingham’s reaction shows the fear aroused. In reality, only 300 Lollards went to St Giles’s Fields, and they were nearly all killed or captured by royal troops. Seventy were condemned to death within two days, but Oldcastle escaped to lurk on the Welsh border. Parliament passed savage new measures to ensure the Lollards would never again be a threat.

  From the moment Henry became king, he prepared for war with France, stockpiling munitions. The army he assembled consisted partly of men who enlisted and were paid wages by him, partly of indentured men raised by magnates. Before invading, he tried to divide the Burgundians and Armagnacs, but lost patience when an Armagnac ambassador, Archbishop Guillaume Boisratier, told him he did not even have a right to the crown of England, which belonged to Richard II’s heirs. Declaring war in July 1415, he called on God to witness how Charles VI refused to do him ‘justice’. The invasion fleet assembled at Southampton.

  On 1 August the Earl of March reported a plot. Its leader was his brother-in-law, Richard of Conisburgh, Earl of Cambridge, who was supported by Lord Scrope and Sir Thomas Grey of Heaton. They planned to take March into Wales, proclaim him king and issue a proclamation denouncing ‘Henry of Lancaster, usurper’. Northumberland’s outlawed heir would raise the North, while Owain’s followers rose in Wales and Sir John Oldcastle’s on the Welsh border. The king reacted swiftly, arresting, trying and executing the three ringleaders, claiming untruthfully that they had been bribed by the French.

  The Southampton plotters’ motives are obscure. They had a low opinion of the capabilities of March, whom Grey called ‘but a hog’ and would have been a mere figurehead had he become king.7 That all three were in financial straits can only be part of the reason – if penniless, the Earl of Cambridge was heir to his childless brother, the enormously rich Duke of York. Scrope, whom Henry had considered a close friend, may have joined to avenge his uncle, the martyred archbishop. The most likely explanation, however, is that all three genuinely believed the king was a usurper.

  Had they succeeded, they would have found supporters. The French astrologer Jean Fusoris, who accompanied Archbishop Boisratier’s embassy, heard that many Englishmen would have preferred the Earl of March. The next year a canon of Wells Cathedral, John Bruton, was charged with telling one of his tenants that, like his father before him, the king possessed no right to the throne. Scrope and his accomplices had been right, said the canon, adding that he was ready to give £6,000 to help depose Henry V.

  The man

  Bruce McFarlane considered Henry V ‘a paragon and a hero, a Bayard and a Solomon in one . . . a faithful exponent of the chivalric ideal’.8 This has not been every historian’s opinion, however. In the 1960s E. F. Jacob thought the traditional picture owed too much to biased Tudor historiography, and that in the last analysis Henry was an adventurer and not a statesman.9

  The popular image of Henry is the National Gallery portrait (a sixteenth-century copy) of a prim young man with a high-coloured, clean-shaven face, long nose, full-lipped mouth and hazel eyes beneath brown hair cut in pudding basin style. This was how he appeared on coming to the throne – Jean Fusoris, who met him in 1415, says he looked more like a bishop than a warrior. But a miniature of St George in the Bedford Book of Hours, painted a few years later and modelled on the king, shows him with a small forked beard like that worn by Richard II. His effigy on a stone screen at York Minster from about 1425 also shows a forked beard, with thick, elaborately curled hair over a handsome if frowning face. He was lean and slightly built, and all sources agree that he was very good-looking, with a terrifying presence.

  Henry had a first-class mind, iron self-control and inflexible determination. His administration cannot be faulted nor his statecraft. Militarily, he demonstrated that he was a superb strategist and tactician, an inspiring leader on the battlefield. A man who never rejoiced even when he won a battle, he was without either optimism or pessimism. ‘The fortunes of war tend to vary’, he told troops who had been defeated. ‘If you want to make sure of winning, keep your courage at exactly the same level, regardless of what happens.’10

  ‘From the death of the king his father until the marriage of himself, he never had knowledge carnally of woman.’11 He saw his queen Catherine of Valois as a tool for becoming King of France rather than a wife. ‘I shall honour and love my brothers above all men, as long as they be to me true, faithful and obedient’, he had told his father. ‘But any of them fortune to conspire or rebel against me, I assure you I shall as soon execute justice upon any one of them as I shall upon the worst and most simple person.’12 In early years, he had friends, although not in his later. However, he gave lavish rewards to men who served him well on the battlefield, such as the Earl of Salisbury.

  An athlete when a boy, a runner and jumper, as an adult Henry had no taste for hunting or hawking, although he enjoyed watching wrestlers and mummers. Like his father, he took pleasure in songs and musical instruments, spending large sums on choirs and singing men, even composing motets himself. He was fond of reading, constantly adding to his library, which included histories of the Crusades, treatises on hunting, books of devotion, some Seneca and Cicero, the works of Gregory the Great and contemporary productions such as Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, Lydgate’s Life of Our Lady and Hoccleve’s De Regimine Principum – the last two dedicated to him. While he spoke, read and wrote French and Latin, his preferred language was English. He was the first king since the Conquest to use it for business, in terse letters and directives. Some experts see his letters on the progress of the war in France as the beginning of Standard English.

  On the night his father died, Henry ‘called to him a virtuous monk of holy conversation to whom he confessed himself of all his offences’.13 Almost immediately, he founded two monasteries for austere orders
, one next to the palace he rebuilt at Sheen that was for the Carthusians – where nobody was allowed to interrupt him when he was hearing Mass. Like his father, he was always visiting shrines, developing a devotion to St John of Bridlington, a Yorkshireman who had supposedly cast out evil spirits, walked on water and changed water into wine. His choice of the Carmelite friar Thomas Netter as confessor reflected his orthodoxy. Netter was a famous scourge of heretics, who when Henry came to the throne preached a sermon at St Paul’s accusing him of laxity in persecuting them. Understandably, Lollards called Henry ‘the prince of priests’.

  Sometimes the king’s religion degenerated into superstition, as when he ordered the prosecution of all sorcerers. No English monarch was more terrified of warlocks and necromancers.

  First expedition to France

  On 13 August 1415 the English armada entered the Seine estuary. Within days Henry’s troops were besieging the port of Harfleur, isolating it with stockades so that no one could get in or out, while his ships blockaded the harbour. Harfleur had strong walls and deep moats, however, and a determined commander, Raoul de Gaucourt, who had brought in 300 experienced men-at-arms.

  Battering rams could not be used so the king employed artillery, as he had learned to do in Wales. Although his primitive cannon needed to be trundled within range on huge wooden platforms and took several minutes to load and fire, their stone cannon balls, which were as big as millstones, demolished masonry and burst like shrapnel. Whole sections of the town walls came crashing down, even buildings in the centre, while fires were started by flaming arrows or cannon balls wrapped in flaming tow. Eventually enough damage was done for the English to push siege towers across the moats, capturing the barbican that defended the main gate. Starving, with no hope of relief, the defenders surrendered on 22 September.