Henry V as Warlord Page 6

  There is evidence that Henry was a bigot even as Prince of Wales. Although it dates only from the sixteenth century it derives from an authentic Lollard tradition. We know from Foxe’s Booke of Martyrs that the prince played an active role in suppressing heresy. In 1409 he personally superintended the burning of a Lollard tailor, John Badby, who had denied transubstantiation, saying that the consecrated Host was worse than a toad or a spider. When Bad by began to scream, Henry had him pulled half-dead out of the flaming barrel in which he was being burnt and offered him a pension if he would recant. The man refused whereupon the prince had him put back in the barrel.9

  King Henry IV died on 20 March 1413 in a room known as the ‘Jerusalem Chamber’ in the abbot’s lodging at Westminster. The chronicler John Capgrave tells us that the royal confessor John Tille begged Henry to repent of his killing Archbishop Scrope and of his usurping the throne. The king answered that he had been absolved by the pope of the archbishop’s murder, but that his son would never let him undo the usurpation. Even Tito Livio says that a few months before he died Henry IV admitted to his son ‘I sore repent me that ever I charged myself with the crown of this realm’. Enguerrand de Monstrelet relates how as the king lay on his deathbed the prince removed the crown from a table beside him but that he rallied and called for it. The dying man then asked his son what right he thought he had to it, since he himself had none. Prince Henry replied, ‘As you have kept it by the sword, so will I keep it while my life lasts.’

  IV

  ‘No Lordship’

  ‘… you have no lordship, not even to the kingdom of England, which belongs to the true heirs of the late king Richard.’

  Archbishop Boisratier to Henry V

  ‘John [Oldcastle] purposed to have slain the king and his lords at Eltham, that is to say, on Twelfth Night in the evening.’

  A Chronicle of London

  Henry V was such a successful king that it is hard to appreciate how at the start of his reign he was far from secure. Two months after his accession a poster nailed to the door of Westminster Abbey claimed that Richard II was alive in Scotland. It had been written by John Whitelock, a yeoman who had taken sanctuary in the abbey with three accomplices after spreading the story all over London. Richard II may have been safely dead but the Earl of March was unquestionably still alive and no longer a minor. Apart from its own household men, few people at this time felt a natural loyalty to the House of Lancaster.

  He took no chances with Gruffydd ap Owain (Glyn Dŵr’s son), Murdoch, Earl of Fife (the Regent of Scotland’s son) and James, King of Scots. One of his first acts as king was to recommit these three to the custody of the Constable of the Tower of London. Although lodged comfortably enough at Windsor and Kenilworth as well as the Tower – then a royal palace besides being a fortress and often a scene of court life – it is clear they were under constant surveillance. Gruffydd was to disappear into obscurity while Murdoch was ransomed by his father for the vast sum of £16,000. The King of Scots was not so lucky. He had already been a prisoner for seven years, since the age of eleven. He had no hope of release so long as Henry lived, even though the English might go through the motions of negotiating, and was not freed until 1423, a year after the king’s death, having by then spent eighteen years as a prisoner of the English. Later he wrote poignantly how much he had envied birds and beasts, fishes of the sea, in their freedom during his ‘deadly life full of pain and penance’ and that he had been ‘despairing of all joy and remedy’. When he did return to Scotland he proved a ruler of outstanding ability – and a strong Scotland was the last thing Henry wanted. The Scots were already traditional allies of the French in their ‘auld alliance’ and he was determined to use every means in his power to prevent them from going to the assistance of his prey across the Channel. He had no qualms about inflicting ‘pain and penance’ on King James.

  Henry was crowned on Passion Sunday (9 April) by Archbishop Arundel, in the midst of a blizzard. ‘On the same day,’ records Adam of Usk, ‘an exceeding fierce and unwonted storm fell upon the hill country of the realm, and smothered men and beasts and homesteads, and drowned out the valleys and the marshes in marvellous wise, with losses and perils to men beyond measure.’ An eyewitness of the coronation told the Monk of St Denis that a large number of those present in the abbey thought that March should have been crowned instead, and that civil war seemed likely.1 It was noticed that during the ceremony the king seemed oddly gloomy and that he ate nothing at the coronation banquet. It was rumoured that he did not eat for three days afterwards.2 The inference is that he had an uneasy conscience, as someone who in his heart admitted to himself that he was an usurper.

  These rumours are of vital importance for any understanding of Henry V’s psychology and of his basic motives, of what really drove him. He must have been only too well aware that if March did not have supporters who were prepared to rise for him in armed revolt, and that if there was not much popular interest in the earl himself, there were nonetheless many who acknowledged privately that a glaring injustice had been done in depriving the rightful heir to the throne of his inheritance. During Richard II’s reign the March claim to the succession had been recognized publicly not once but twice by Parliament, as vested in the person of the earl and, previously, of his father. And recognition by Parliament had played a key part in the House of Lancaster’s usurpation. If ever Henry betrayed any hint of uneasiness, of self-questioning, it was now, during his coronation – and perhaps also on his deathbed. His insecurity has not received sufficient attention from historians.

  Nevertheless from the very beginning of his reign Henry displayed extraordinary self-confidence in governing and at once began to apply the policy of carefully calculated conciliation which he had developed in Wales. The Earls of Huntingdon, Oxford and Salisbury – sons of the conspirators of 1400 – had their family estates restored, while steps were taken to persuade Hotspur’s son to come home from Scotland and inherit his grandfather Northumberland’s earldom. Lord Mowbray, brother of the rebel magnate who had perished with Archbishop Scrope in 1405, was invested as hereditary Earl Marshal of England, and permission was given to make votive offerings at the archbishop’s shrine in York Minster. The brother and heir of the slippery Duke of York was created Earl of Cambridge. Richard II’s body was brought from its obscure resting place and re-interred in the magnificent tomb he had had made for himself at Westminster Abbey. The gesture stressed that, whatever strange tales might come out of Scotland, Richard was dead.

  Archbishop Arundel was replaced as chancellor by Bishop Beaufort. The old archbishop’s nephew, the Earl of Arundel, became treasurer. Contrary to the late king’s fears there was no trouble from the Duke of Clarence – now the heir to the throne – though to some extent the new monarch cut him down to size by creating their two younger brothers, John and Humphrey, Dukes of Bedford and of Gloucester.

  By all accounts Henry V was already impressive at twenty-five – tall, well built and handsome. If the painting in the National Portrait Gallery (a sixteenth-century copy) is a true likeness, he had a florid, clean-shaven face with a high forehead, a long and commanding nose, full red lips, hazel eyes and auburn hair cut in a pudding basin crop – the fashionable military haircut of the day. This may well have been how he looked before ceaseless campaigning aged him prematurely and before he grew his beard. The contemporary sources also agree that he was unusually fit and muscular, wearing his armour ‘like a light cloak’ and, allegedly, able to run down a deer. However, according to the French astrologer Jean Fusoris, who was presented to him in the summer of 1415, despite a lordly manner and noble bearing he looked more like a prelate than a soldier. Complex, if dynamic and vital, reserved and secretive, icily cold, with complete self-control, he was someone very difficult to know and understand. He said little and listened much. He both wrote and spoke Latin as well as French and English, and had probably acquired some knowledge of Welsh: He possessed a large library to which he was always adding, rea
ding avidly; his books included histories of the Crusades, treatises on hunting, devotional treatises and such contemporary works as Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, Lydgate’s Life of Our Lady and Hoccleve’s De Regimine Principum – the last two dedicated to him as the patron of both authors. According to Tito Livio, ‘he delighted in songs and musical instruments.’3

  Henry was almost obsessively conventional and orthodox. ‘Every age has its own mentality’, if Jung is to be believed, and the king’s seems to have been wholly in tune with that of the first half of the fifteenth century. There was nothing eccentric about him save for his dynamism. He appears to have subscribed wholeheartedly to the fashionable cult of pessimism. ‘At the close of the Middle Ages, a sombre melancholy weighs on people’s souls,’ says Johan Huizinga. ‘All that we know of the moral state of the nobles points to a sentimental need of enrobing their souls with the garb of woe.’ Huizinga emphasises that ‘all aristocratic life in the latter Middle Ages is a wholesale attempt to act the vision of a dream’, explaining that ‘the passionate and violent soul of the age, always vacillating between tearful piety and frigid cruelty … could not dispense with the severest rules and the strictest formalism’. Such attitudes were displayed by the king throughout his reign. When he lay dying and claimed that, had he lived, he would have gone on to recapture Jerusalem he was not indulging in a personal flight of fancy but doing no more than express a duty acknowledged by every contemporary western monarch.4 On every formal occasion he made use of the language and forms of chivalry, enlisting symbolism to enhance their dignity. Commenting on his death the dauphinist Jean Juvénal des Ursins, who was often hostile towards him, noted that Henry dispensed the same justice to poor folk as to great. The king’s justice for humble people (to whom he and his campaigns had brought so much misery) derived from a chivalrous belief, at that time much in vogue, that it was a knight’s duty to protect the weak. This, rather than all the wearisome exhortations in Lydgate’s and Hoccleve’s doggerel, also reinforced his genuine conviction that a ruler must provide ‘good governaunce’. But when all is said and done, Henry must remain as much of an enigma to historians as he was to contemporaries. The most one can say with confidence about him is that friends and foes admired and feared him, and that they did not love him. The sole qualities with which the chroniclers credit him are military skill, strict and indeed harsh justice, and ostentatious piety.5

  His religious experience seems to have been conventional in the extreme. He possessed the fashionable respect for Carthusian monks, though he did not share Lord Scrope’s taste for mystical literature. He was constantly going on pilgrimage to the shrines of wonder-working saints and had the ‘mechanistic’ religion of his period to a very uncomplicated degree. He heard several Masses a day, recited the psalms of the little office, and made a point of not allowing himself to be interrupted when at prayer. As soon as his father died and he was king, the First Life informs us that Henry:

  called to him a virtuous monk of holy conversation, to whom he confessed himself of all his offences, trespasses and insolencies of times past. And in all things at that time he reformed and amended his life and manners. So after the decease of his father was never no youth nor wildness that might have any place in him, but all his acts were suddenly changed into gravity and discretion.6

  The same admiring source also says that ‘from the death of the Kinge his Father until the marriage of himself he neuer had knowledge carnally of weomen’.

  Indeed what struck observers most about Henry was his piety. Chroniclers are unanimous in agreeing that he had some sort of religious conversion on ascending the throne, as a result of which he dismissed his former boon companions. Some historians (like Edouard Perroy) may consider him a hypocrite yet his God was clearly very real to him. Nevertheless his beliefs must seem very strange and alien, even to the most traditionally minded twentieth-century Catholic. He had a fervent devotion for the undeniably eccentric St John of Bridlington – the canonization was purely local – a wonder-working Yorkshire holy man who had died as recently as 1379 and possessed a reputation for curing physical deformities besides casting out evil spirits; he was also said to have walked on the water. Henry’s spiritual life had some faintly sinister undertones, what the late E. F. Jacob terms ‘his dark superstitious vein’.7 No doubt the king was normal enough in refusing to let even the greatest in the land interrupt him when he was hearing Mass, in his constant visits to shrines, and in consulting hermits. Yet he also had a strong and well-attested belief in demons and in witchcraft.

  It may be that Henry’s dark side was evident in his choice of confessors. He apparently favoured a combination of distinguished intellect and fanatical orthodoxy. John of Gaunt had begun a Lancastrian tradition of taking Carmelite friars instead of Dominicans as confessors and ambassadors, roles which they performed for the House of Lancaster for over a century. The first spiritual adviser whom the king appointed after his accession was the learned provincial of the ‘white friars’, Steven Patrington, who had been one of Wyclif’s original opponents at Oxford. However, he was seldom available after 1415 when he was made Bishop of St David’s.

  Patrington was succeeded as Henry’s confessor by the next Carmelite provincial, Thomas Netter, who in some ways seems to have stepped from the pages of a Gothick novel. Netter (sometimes called Walden, from having been born at Saffron Walden) was obsessed by hatred of Lollardy; his own order called him ‘the hammer of heretics’, ‘the swiftest fire that ever smote the trunk of heresy’. He had co-operated with Friar Patrington in writing Fasciculi zizaniorum Magistri Joannis Wyclif, in its day considered to be a mighty work of refutation, and he later produced a mammoth compilation which defended the Catholic faith against proto-Protestant heresies. Almost as soon as the king had ascended the throne Friar Netter preached a sermon at Paul’s Cross accusing him of being lukewarm in persecuting Lollardy. Perhaps revealingly, his rebuke inspired the reverse of resentment. Shortly after, Henry announced that he was raising the standard of the church, as heir of ‘Duke Moses, who slew the Egyptian that he might deliver Israel’, since it was well known that certain priests were profaning the word of God, sowing discord with the pestilential seed of Lollardy. He quickly came to esteem Friar Netter.

  This earlier, English, Torquemada had been at Badby’s trial and burning in 1410. He claimed that he had seen a spider running across the heretic’s face as he burnt, trying to get into his mouth, a creature so large and horrible that several men were needed to beat it off.8 That the king had such confidence in Netter tells us a good deal about him.

  Henry’s piety was given concrete expression in the two monasteries which he founded during the very first year of his reign. Both were for orders much in fashion at the time. The Carthusians, for whom he endowed a charterhouse at Sheen near London, were respected far and wide for their holiness, cherished for the power of their prayers to save men from the consequences of sin. They were much more active and outward-looking than modern Carthusians, having a profound and widespread influence on popular devotion. They took retreatants into their charterhouses and gave spiritual council to the serious laity. The Bridgettine monastery of Syon at Twickenham nearby (later removed to Brentford), which he began building in the same year, was for an order of women and men founded by St Bridget, Queen of Sweden, less than a quarter of a century before. The king also contemplated establishing a house of Celestines, an order of monks with a strict interpretation of the rule of St Benedict, at Sheen, but they had too many French associations and he reluctantly abandoned the scheme.9

  His piety was certainly far too conventional for the Lollards who, if the tradition recorded by Foxe is to be credited, referred bitterly to him as ‘the prince of priests’. The Lollards or ‘Bible Men’ insisted that true religion could only be learnt from the Scriptures. (Which was why, alone in Western Europe, England had in 1408 banned translations of the bible.) They considered that among priests the pope was anti-Christ and that bishops, canons, monks and f
riars all transgressed the Ten Commandments. The friars in particular were children of Cain, according to Wyclif (the Lollards’ founder); apostates and idolaters who practised murder, robbery and seduction. The Carmelites – the order to which Patrington and Netter belonged – were said to bear a strong resemblance to the fourth of the beasts of Daniel in the Apocalypse, with its iron teeth and claws and ten horns. All organized bodies within the Church were contrary to Christ’s teaching, the principal duty of a priest being to preach the Gospel. Lollard beliefs were summed up in the Twelve Conclusions which had been nailed to the door of St Paul’s in 1395. These rejected transubstantiation, auricular confession, praying to the saints, pilgrimages, indulgences, celibacy (which, they claimed, led to unnatural lust and child murder), and the wealth of the Church. In addition the Conclusions attacked the goldsmiths’ and armourers’ trades as luxurious and sinful. Such opinions contained the seeds of social as well as religious revolution, which might just conceivably have plunged England into the same bloody millenarian wars which convulsed Bohemia. One of the reasons for the sect’s failure was its inability to attract followers from among the ruling class save for a handful of knights and small landowners, most of whom were anti-clericals rather than religious reformers.10 There were exceptions, however.

  The leader of these ‘cursid caitifs, heires of dirknesse’, was Sir John Oldcastle, from Herefordshire, who had done good service during the Welsh wars. The Gesta says of him that ‘slaughtering and pillaging the Welsh secured his promotion to knighthood’. He was a valued friend of the king, even if he had gone on Clarence’s expedition to France. During the Parliament of 1410 he had led a group of like-minded anti-clerical knights of the shire, most of whom had served with him against Glyn Dŵr; a modern historian has compared them to ‘Cromwellian Ironsides’. Nevertheless, however violent John Oldcastle’s career may have been, he possessed a considerable intellect, and corresponded with the Bohemian heresiarch Huss. Suddenly, in March 1413, just after the king’s accession to the throne, Archbishop Arundel informed Henry that a heretical book found in London, in the shop of a limner (illuminator) in Paternoster Row, belonged to Sir John. The King did not realize how serious his trusted friend was in his curious views – he had just sent twenty-six wrestlers to amuse Henry at Windsor – and tried to persuade so useful a servant to deny them. Oldcastle prevaricated, ignoring a citation to appear before Arundel. Eventually the king had him arrested and sent to the Tower in chains. During his trial Sir John insisted that the Host remained plain bread at the consecration and that there was no need for auricular confession, finally shouting at the tribunal that pope, prelates and friars ‘will drag you down to hell’. He was excommunicated and sent back to the Tower. He escaped shortly after, with the help of fellow Lollards, in October 1413.