Henry V as Warlord Read online

  The English army marched up through Kilkenny and Wicklow to Dublin, losing many men. The Irish attacked their camps every night. During Henry’s first campaign he must surely have agreed with Froissart that Ireland was a bad country in which to fight because of its dense forests, lakes and bogs. No doubt he marvelled at the wild-haired, long-moustached Irish chieftains, who went about half naked under yellow mantles. They rode ponies barefoot, using primitive saddles of padded cloth, and howled at their men in a strange, guttural language. While an important chief might employ as many as a hundred gallowglass mercenaries, who dismounted to fight on foot with huge axes (like the Lochaber axes of the Scots Highlanders), most of his men would be kern who carried only dirks and bundles of javelins. If no match for conventional troops, they were dreaded for more than their war whoops as they were skilled at ambushes and sudden attacks. (Even though they did not rip out and eat human hearts, as Froissart believed, they undoubtedly cut off heads for trophies.) Provisions ran out and Richard’s men were starving when they reached Dublin. Art MacMurrogh demanded an unconditional peace, infuriating the king who set out on another wild-goose chase after him through bogs and forests until he found himself back at Waterford.

  We know something of this inglorious campaign from a poem by a Frenchman in the royal service, Jean Creton. He tells us that Richard summoned the Duke of Lancaster’s son whom he dubbed knight saying, ‘My fair young cousin, henceforth be gallant and bold, for unless you conquer you will have little name for valour.’

  Alarming news, delayed by bad weather, then reached the king. Bolingbroke had landed in England and was claiming the duchy of Lancaster. Richard wanted to return at once but the Duke of York’s son, the Earl of Rutland, persuaded him to wait and concentrate his troops while sending the Earl of Salisbury to raise another army in Wales. The chronicler Thomas Otterbourne reports that the king told his young cousin, ‘Henry, my boy, see what thy father hath done to me!’ He added, ‘through these unhappy doings thou wilt perchance lose thine inheritance.’ Henry answered that he was not to blame for his father’s actions. When Richard left for England Henry, with Humphrey of Gloucester, was confined at Trim Castle in County Meath.

  The king had made himself thoroughly unpopular with all classes by his attempts to increase the power of the Crown. In all save a few regions everyone was alarmed by his arbitrary government, and by his murder of Gloucester and Arundel and the seizure of the duchy of Lancaster. He had quarrelled so bitterly with the people of London that he thought seriously of moving his capital to York. He had some supporters and to begin with not even his enemies contemplated deposing the realm’s crowned and anointed monarch. But he had ruined himself by leaving England in the Duke of York’s inept hands and by taking his henchmen with him.

  Bolingbroke had landed at Ravenspur in Yorkshire on 4 July, kissing the earth, accompanied by Archbishop Arundel and the young Earl of Arundel. He was met by former officers of Gaunt’s household with armed retainers, and quickly joined by his brother-in-law the Earl of Westmorland and the Earl of Northumberland – northern England’s two most powerful men. Magnates from all over the country rallied to him. On 27 July the Duke of York came over, bringing many men. Next day Bolingbroke entered Bristol and Richard’s most unpopular councillors – including his treasurer William Scrope, Earl of Wiltshire – were arrested there and immediately beheaded. The king only left Ireland that day and by the time he landed in South Wales his supporters had melted away. He fled to Conwy Castle, from where he was lured out by Northumberland who pretended he would keep his throne if he restored the duchy of Lancaster to Bolingbroke. As soon as he had left the castle Richard was ambushed and taken to Bolingbroke at Flint on 19 August. He was then brought to London, where he was greeted by a jeering mob who threw rubbish on him from the rooftops, and imprisoned in the Tower. Within fifty days Henry Bolingbroke had conquered both king and kingdom.

  Bolingbroke was in effective control of the entire country. Originally he had merely hoped to recover his duchy. It is likely that when things began to go well he thought of making himself regent for Richard or for the heir presumptive, the young Earl of March and Ulster. He now decided to take the throne. On 29 September the king was bullied into abdicating. The following day an assembly of the Lords Spiritual and Temporal and of the Commons met in Westminster Hall in the presence of Henry Bolingbroke, who sat in the seat Gaunt had occupied as Duke of Lancaster. Articles of accusation against Richard were read, after which he was declared deposed. Bolingbroke then rose and, making the sign of the Cross, claimed the throne – in English: ‘I that am descended by right line of the Blood coming from the good lord King Henry III.’ Adam of Usk tells us a commission of lawyers and clerics had rejected the tale of Edmund Crouchback having been Henry III’s first born son, but notwithstanding, Bolingbroke clung to the claim while also insisting that the kingdom was on the point of being destroyed by bad government and that he was the only man who could bring back law and order. No mention was made of the Earl of March. Archbishop Arundel then led Bolingbroke by the hand to the royal throne whereupon the assembly acclaimed him as King of England and France.

  Henry IV, as he was now known, associated his sons in his usurpation by insisting on their right to succeed him. He had already sent a ship to bring his heir back from Ireland. After what seems to have been a stormy voyage – young Humphrey of Gloucester died from its effects – he landed at Chester and rode to London. Here on Sunday 12 October at the Tower he was knighted for a second time by his father together with his brothers and forty-five squires. At the coronation the next day he carried the sword ‘Curtana’. On 15 October at Westminster, with the assent of parliament, he was given the titles once borne by Edward III’s son, the Black Prince, being created Prince of Wales, Duke of Cornwall and Earl of Chester. He knelt before his father who placed a gold coronet studded with pearls on his head, a ring on his finger and a golden rod in his hand, after which the Duke of York led him by the hand to a lower throne next to the king’s where he sat as heir apparent. A week later he was created Duke of Aquitaine, Parliament petitioning that since he was of tender years he might not go there just yet. Finally, on 10 November he was created Duke of Lancaster.

  As for Richard II, he was kept in ‘safe and secret ward’. On 28 October, disguised as a forester, he was removed discreetly from the Tower by boat and taken to Leeds Castle in Kent, then to Pontefract in Yorkshire. The unpitying Adam of Usk informs us that, ‘The lord Richard, late king, after his deposition was carried away on the Thames in the silence of dark midnight, weeping and loudly lamenting he had ever been born.’ The little Earl of March was also kept in safe and secret ward.

  There were evil omens during the coronation. When he had been annointed Henry’s head was found to be swarming with lice. Then, at the offertory, he dropped a gold noble which rolled away out of sight.5

  After the coronation King Henry and his sons banqueted in public at Westminster Hall as was customary. He wore his crown and the princes their coronets. Halfway through the banquet the royal champion Sir Thomas Dymock – whose function was to defend the king’s right to the crown in personal combat – rode into the hall in full armour, his golden-hilted sword sheathed in black; a herald proclaimed four times a challenge to anyone who denied that Henry was not rightful King of England. Henry IV said loudly, ‘If need be, Sir Thomas, I will in mine own person ease thee of this office.’ It was an open admission of the new Lancastrian dynasty’s insecurity.

  II

  Prince Henry and Prince Owain

  ‘… all this clamour of king Richard’

  Henry IV

  ‘Trembling even at the name of Mortimer’

  Shakespeare, King Henry IV

  Although he had won the crown of England, Henry IV was in a most unenviable position. His usurpation had weakened the monarchy dangerously while he faced many of the same problems as his predecessor. Moreover for the first six years of his reign he was on the verge of bankruptcy.


  The customs on wool, the king’s principal source of revenue, fell as low as £20,000 during 1402–7 compared with £46,000 during Richard II’s reign. Henry’s income averaged less than £90,000 a year – Richard’s had averaged £116,000 – and he needed at least £140,000 even in peacetime. He could not pay the lavish rewards which he had promised during the march from Ravenspur, let alone redeem his pledge to cut taxes. He did nothing to improve the situation, merely borrowing from magnates, merchants or prelates with the result that the Crown’s debts nearly became unmanageable.

  Henry took away the dukedoms Richard had given his favourites – the Earls of Salisbury, Kent, Huntingdon and Rutland – but otherwise left them alone, hoping to play them off against other magnates. However in December 1399, at the invitation of the abbot, the earls met secretly with other supporters of Richard at Westminster Abbey whose monks were strongly for the ex-king. Among the conspirators was a former chaplain of Richard’s household, one Maudelyn, who bore a remarkable likeness to him. Henry was keeping the twelve days of Christmas at Windsor, which were to end with a tournament on the day of the Epiphany (6 January). The conspirators agreed to meet at Kingston-on-Thames on 4 January with a small armed force and ride by night to Windsor. Here other plotters who had got in on the pretext of having come for the jousting would overpower the guards and open the gates to them, whereupon Henry and his sons were to be killed out of hand. The earls would then proclaim Richard restored to his throne, and Maudelyn would impersonate him until he had been rescued from Pontefract.

  Rutland, famed for unreliability and double dealing, had misgivings. He told his father the Duke of York who informed the king, almost at the last moment. Henry and his sons with only two attendants galloped to London, which the king knew to be loyal to him. Within two days he had raised an army of 20,000 men, mainly Londoners. When the earls and their troops, who had successfully seized Windsor a mere twelve hours after Henry’s flight and proclaimed Richard, learnt that the king was advancing with a large army they retreated westward. After some skirmishing their troops deserted and they were lynched. Henry rode back to London in triumph having had sent before him their salted heads in baskets like fish being taken to market for display on London Bridge. The Te Deum was sung at St Paul’s, Archbishop Arundel giving thanks to the Virgin Mary for ‘rescuing the most Christian king from the fangs of wolves and the jaws of wild beasts, who had prepared above their backs a gallows mixed with gall and hated us with a bitter hate’.1

  Richard’s friends had signed his death warrant. Henry IV could not be safe while he was still alive. The ex-king was certainly dead by 17 February. Adam of Usk says that death came to him miserably as ‘he lay in chains in the castle of Pontefract tormented by Sir [Thomas] Swynford with starving fare’.2 A French source says that in his agony Richard ripped the flesh from his arms and hands and ate it. Other English sources claim implausibly that he starved himself to death. There is little doubt that he was murdered, either starved or smothered, probably in January 1400 within a few days of his friends’ own deaths. His body lay at St Paul’s for two days with only the face exposed – so that everyone could recognize it – and the rest of his corpse cased in lead, before being buried in the priory of the Black Friars at King’s Langley in Herefordshire. Yet rumours he had escaped persisted well into the next reign. Many thought he was in Scotland where the Scots kept a madman with a resemblance to him – the ‘maumet of Scotland’ – in custody until 1419.

  In August 1400 Henry IV led a futile expedition into Scotland to force the King of Scots to pay homage. The Prince of Wales had command of seventeen men-at-arms and ninety-nine archers. As soon as they returned, unsuccessful, news came of trouble in Wales. Richard II’s predilection for the North Welsh had made him more popular throughout the little country than any previous English monarch and the new régime was heartily disliked; not only was it foreign, it was not even legal. For some time there had been a dispute over land between Henry’s good friend Lord Grey of Ruthin, an aggressive marcher lord, and Owain Glyn Dŵr of Glyndyfrdwy – the richest native landowner in Wales. Aged about forty, Owain was no mere hill chieftain but a cultivated nobleman who spoke French and English, and had read law at the Inns of Court in London. Through his father he was the representative of the old ruling princes of Powys Fadog, through his mother he was descended from the southern princes of Deheubarth. On 16 September 1400 Owain proclaimed himself Prince of Wales and sacked Ruthin, slaying and burning through the marches into Shropshire before being driven off and taking refuge in the hills.

  Early in October the king and Prince Henry led a punitive expedition into Wales which lasted barely more than a week. The thirteen-year-old prince was left at Chester to govern his principality with a council headed by the Earl of Northumberland’s son, Henry Percy, known as Harry Hotspur (whom Adam of Usk calls the flower and glory of the chivalry of Christendom), in real charge. No one yet realized just how serious the situation was in Wales. Welsh labourers, and even Welsh undergraduates from Oxford, were going home to fight for Owain, all bringing bows and swords.

  Presumably the prince kept Christmas with his father in London. Here he would have seen the most exotic guest ever to spend the feast with the Plantagenets. The Emperor Manuel II Palaeologus of Constantinople had come to beg for help against the Turks, who threatened his pitiful remnant of an empire. He and his suite stayed with King Henry in his palace at Eltham just outside London, being entertained by jousts and games. Adam of Usk tells us; ‘This emperor always walked with his men, dressed alike and in one colour, namely white, in long robes cut like tabards.’ Adam was deeply moved to see a Roman emperor driven by unbelievers to try to find aid against them from the west. ‘What dost thou, ancient glory of Rome?’3 The future Henry V’s desire to go on crusade against the Turks may well have dated from his meeting with Manuel. His father could do nothing for the emperor, apart from giving him £2,000.

  England had another problem besides the Welsh – heretics. John Wyclif’s doctrines had begun to attract followers. As well as teaching the primacy of scripture and predestination, Wyclif, an Oxford don, had denied transubstantiation, the sacraments, and the authority of pope and cardinals. Archbishop Arundel persuaded the king to take action. In January 1401 Parliament passed the statute De Heretico Comburendo; henceforth bishops could hand stubborn heretics to the secular authorities for ‘the burning death’. The first burning at the stake of a Lollard (the name given to Wyclif’s disciples) took place in March.

  In February 1401 the House of Commons warned that full-scale war threatened in Wales. Bards were spreading tales that Owain’s coming had been foretold by Merlin. On Good Friday the Welsh seized Conwy Castle. When Hotspur and Prince Henry retook it at the end of May, nine Welshmen were immediately executed as traitors. They were hanged until half-dead, then castrated and disembowelled, their offal being burnt in front of them, before they were beheaded and quartered – presumably the boy prince was a spectator. We know from Adam of Usk that when King Henry led a punitive expedition into North Wales in October the prince witnessed similar butchery at Llandovery. Llywelyn ap Gruffydd Fychan of Caio was executed for deliberately guiding the English the wrong way. Adam also records how during this expedition ‘the English invaded those parts [Powys] with a strong power, and utterly laying them waste and ravaging them with fire, famine and sword, left them a desert, not even sparing children or churches, nor the monastery of Strata Florida, wherein the king himself was being lodged, and the church of which and its choir, even up to the high altar, they used as a stable, and pillaged even the patens; and they carried away into England more than a thousand children of both sexes to be their servants’. Little was achieved and Prince Henry had the humiliation of having his horses and tents captured by Glyn Dŵr’s men. Father and son withdrew at the end of the month.

  On 2 November 1401 Owain Glyn Dŵr unfurled his banner of a golden dragon on a white field, before the walls of Caernarfon. He was accompanied by a great host of Wel
sh, but the garrison and townsmen sallied forth and drove them off. He nonetheless kept complete control of all the country round about. At the beginning of 1402 he burnt Ruthin and in April took prisoner his old enemy, Lord Grey. By now Owain was sending letters to the King of Scots and to the Wild Irish chieftains, asking them for help against the tyranny of their mortal foes, the Saxons.

  The King tried to bolster up his position by impressive dynastic alliances with other royal families. In April 1402 he himself married Joan of Navarre, the widow of Duke John IV of Brittany and sister of King Charles III of Navarre. In July his daughter Blanche married Louis of Bavaria, the son of Rupert, Duke of Bavaria, who had just become King of the Romans. Negotiations were begun for the marriage of Henry’s youngest daughter to the young King Eric of Denmark and Sweden, though the wedding did not take place until 1406.

  In August 1402 the Scots crossed the border in strength but were routed by the Percies at Homildon Hill. Five earls were captured. In view of his own dismal military record such a victory was an embarrassment to King Henry. He gave orders that the prisoners must on no account be allowed to ransom themselves, depriving the Percies – to whom he owed the then vast sum of £10,000 – of a valuable windfall. They had thought him ungrateful enough before, after all they had done to help him win the crown. Hotspur refused to hand over the most important prisoner, the Earl of Douglas. Henry further angered them by his abandonment of Edmund Mortimer, Hotspur’s brother-in-law. In the previous June, Mortimer, an important magnate in the Welsh marches, had been defeated at Pilleth near Knighton by Rhys Gethin, one of Glyn Dŵr’s right-hand men, with the loss of 1,100 men. He was taken prisoner and sent back to Owain’s lair in the mountains of Snowdonia. The King was far from displeased since it meant that the uncle of Richard II’s heir was safely out of the way. (Sir Edmund’s own claim to the throne was better than Henry’s.) He forebade any attempt to ransom him. When Hotspur proposed doing so, the king shouted ‘Traitor!’, hit him and half-drew his dagger. There was a reconciliation of a sort – for the time being.