1415: Henry V's Year of Glory (37 page)

From the point of view of the French, the situation looked even worse, for it was rumoured there too that Henry’s ally, King João of Portugal and his three sons (Henry’s first cousins) had gathered 225 ships in Lisbon and Oporto, and were intending to help the English. The Portuguese were as keen to conceal their intended destination as the English were to conceal theirs; it was to their advantage if the Moors believed that they were sailing to join the king of England. But the French could only have blanched at the thought.

Henry himself gave instructions to Richard Beauchamp, earl of Warwick and captain of Calais, to proclaim that all the hired soldiers then in the town of Calais should remain there for the time being at the king’s expense, not leaving except with special permission.
³⁵
Calais was to prove of critical importance to his plan – it was his one safe harbour in Northern France.

To help the royal finances, Henry’s uncle Henry Beaufort made the largest personal loan of the year, depositing 2,945 marks (£1,963 6s 8d) with the treasurer. It is not recorded what security he asked for in return, if any.
³⁶

*

Jan Hus was forced to stand before the prelates of Constance in the refectory of the Franciscan friary for the third and final time. Now there were no personal attacks on his views about transubstantiation. Nor was there discussion of whether he had said heretical things – a
list of thirty-nine errors had been abstracted from his works. The only question now was whether he would repent and recant.

Of the thirty-nine articles read today, twenty-six were from his book
About the Church
. It is not difficult to see why members of the council were so perturbed. The first offending article echoed Wycliffe’s concept of one universal Church to which only those predestined for salvation had membership. This did not necessarily include the pope or the cardinals. The fifth read ‘no position of dignity, or human election, or any outward sign makes one a member of the Holy Catholic Church’. As all the cardinals, archbishops, bishops and abbots there had all been in some way raised by ‘human election’ this was insulting. That Hus had said this in the context of Judas not being a member of the Church did not make any difference; he had dared to cast aspersions on their religious status. The ninth article insisted that St Peter was not and never had been the head of the Church – with the implication that the pope, as St Peter’s successor, was not head of the Church either. Hus, of course, insisted that Christ was always the head of the Church. The tenth article stated that if the pope followed the Devil, then he was not the vicar of Christ but the vicar of the Devil. The twelfth stated that the pope took his pre-eminence from the power of the Roman emperors, and the thirteenth and fourteenth questioned whether popes had any right to be called head of the Church. As appointing a new head of the Church was one of the council’s main tasks, Hus could expect no flexibility or tolerance on these issues. The seventeenth article extended these questions about the holiness of office holders to the cardinals themselves, stating they were not the successors of Christ’s disciples unless they lived after the manner of the apostles. The nineteenth article exhorted secular lords to compel priests to live saintly lives. The twentieth – arguably the most threatening – seemed to equate all ecclesiastical authority with the power of men, stripping it of spiritual justification altogether. The twenty-third stated that priests living in accordance with Christ’s laws, with a knowledge of scripture and a desire to edify the people, should continue to preach even if they be excommunicated. The twenty-sixth argued that no interdict could be brought upon a kingdom or nation by any authority, as Christ had never done such a thing.
³⁷

No one wanted to argue the merits of any of these statements; they were far more safely treated with contempt. So was their author.
The prelates did not ask Hus any questions but took the opportunity to express their anger. The subject shifted rapidly from things he had written to the thing he was, a heretic, and whether he would change. Would he abjure the articles laid against him? How could he abjure them, he said, when many of them had been quoted out of context? To abjure was to renounce a formerly held error. But he did not acknowledge that any error had been proved against him.

Once again it was the emperor who brought the meeting to its decisive point.

Listen Jan Hus! As I told you yesterday, I still say to you and cannot keep repeating to you; you are old enough; you could well understand if you wished. You have now heard that the lords here have proposed two ways forward: either you surrender yourself in all things to the grace of the council, and the sooner the better, and revoke all the errors in your books … Or, if you wish to defend them stubbornly, the council will surely proceed against you according to its laws.

Once again Hus insisted he had come freely to the council to be instructed in any error. And once again he was accused of being stubborn, and speaking captiously, and refusing to accept the authority of the council. It could not go on. The shadow of heresy increasingly darkened the refectory; there was no more mocking, no more laughter. The prelates increasingly fell silent as they realised what the outcome of the trial would be.

Hus was once more led away by the bishop of Riga. As he walked past the armed guards, Lord John of Chlum stepped forward to grasp Hus’s hand, consoling him. As Peter of Mladoňovice noted, ‘Hus was very glad that Lord John was not ashamed and did not hesitate to greet him – already rejected, despised and regarded as a heretic by almost all’.
³⁸

The last word fell to the emperor. Sigismund delivered a devastating speech that, although it was spoken in Constance, would be heard across Christendom.

Most reverend fathers! You have heard that just one of the many things that are in Hus’s books, and which he has confessed to writing and which have been proved against him, would be sufficient to condemn him. Therefore if he will not recant his errors and abjure, and teach the contrary, let him be burned, or deal with him according to your laws … And send these articles here condemned to my brother in Bohemia and alas! to Poland and to other lands where he already has his secret disciples and his many supporters, and say that any people who hold these beliefs will be punished by the bishops and prelates in those lands, and so uproot the branches as well as the root. And let the council write to kings and princes that they show favour to their prelates who in this sacred council have diligently laboured to extirpate these heretics … Also make an end of others of his secret disciples and supporters … and especially with him, him – Jerome!
³⁹

Sunday 9th

In Souci castle, Henri de la Tour was confronted with the safe conducts his prisoners had been carrying. They had been granted by the king of France. De la Tour also heard today that the duke of Bar was furious at the treatment of the bishops, and was determined to hang the perpetrators and level the castle where they were being held. De la Tour accordingly separated out the wealthiest of his captives and took them with him, leaving the majority of poorer men there with his wife, who was ill with puerperal fever. Benedict Gentien and twenty of his companions were ‘thrust into a dungeon, horribly deep and small, with little light and bad air, filthy and foul’. As he commented, ‘Two men could scarcely stay alive there for two days – what then of twenty? I was lashed with a rope whip like a thief.’
⁴⁰

*

Another hostage situation was developing, in the north of England. For the last two weeks Mordach Stewart, earl of Fife, had been travelling in the company of his custodians, John Hull and William Chancellor. Their detailed instructions had been to deliver their prisoner to the sheriff of Newcastle, and then to ride on to Berwick to arrange the actual handover with Henry Percy. But today as they passed Kippax, near Leeds in West Yorkshire, they were set upon by
Henry Talbot of Easington-in-Craven.
⁴¹
Henry Talbot was a kinsman of Sir Thomas Talbot, an outlawed Lollard knight – and a determined opponent of Henry V.

What was the purpose of this? It is difficult to be absolutely certain because the only direct evidence we have is later and comes from men on trial for their lives. Certainly Mordach was not kidnapped at Kippax for his own benefit – this was not a Scottish rescue. Given Talbot’s connections, it is possible that disaffected supporters of Wycliffe were willing to play their part in disrupting Henry’s plans to invade France. But there were other disaffected men in England who wanted to see the king’s plans disrupted. They had been biding their time for such an opportunity as this. As events later in the month revealed, there is a good chance that the person who was behind Henry Talbot’s actions was actually a member of the royal family.

Tuesday 11th

The duke of Bar had been serious when he had declared that he wanted to hang the men who had seized the bishops of Carcassonne and Evreux. Yesterday his men had started to besiege Souci. By the evening the captain was so fearful he had fled. Today the remaining defenders surrendered the castle and submitted to the duke’s mercy. The duke himself liberated Master Gentien and all the other prisoners. Soldiers were sent out in all directions to scour the forest in search of the missing bishops and their captor.

As good as his word, he then stripped the castle of its valuables and gave orders for the whole place to be destroyed. One only hopes he spared a thought for the lady of the castle, suffering from her post-childbirth illness.

*

Loans were beginning to come in steadily. The bailiffs of Canterbury were given a letter allowing them 100 marks from the customs duties of the city in return for a loan; and the executors of Simon Tonge, having also lent the king 100 marks, were given assurances that they would be repaid after Midsummer’s Day (24 June).
⁴²
Note the very short
repayment period – just two weeks. Sometimes the treasurer took money in and repaid it within a matter of days. Perhaps it was considered more efficient to consolidate sums owing. Whatever the explanation, the treasury was working hard to maintain the cash flow. As fast as money came in, it was going out again. Thomas Chaucer, the king’s butler, was assigned £310 today for wine and reimbursement of his trips abroad.
⁴³

The king had previously issued a proclamation pardoning all those who had long-standing debts to the crown at the start of his reign. He made a number of exceptions to this pardon: anyone still living was a key one; only debts inherited from dead forebears were to be pardoned. If the debtor had died since the coronation, then this too would be an exception, and other exceptions included those who had accounted for their debt at the exchequer or who had jointly entered into bonds with others … The whole system was so complicated that no one could easily tell if they had been pardoned or not. The intent of the pardon – to encourage a feeling of goodwill for the king – was totally lost in the ensuing confusion. So Henry sent a writ to all the sheriffs in England to proclaim that all royal debts owing as of 21 March 1413 (the first day of his reign) would be pardoned, and that people who wished to have charters to that effect should apply to the exchequer before Michaelmas (29 September).
⁴⁴

Wednesday 12th

For a certain sum of money paid in advance, men and sometimes women could obtain a corrody: a place within a monastic precinct where they would be fed and sheltered for the rest of their lives. In some cases the corrodian was given this position as a gift of the monastery and, in a few cases, the king might direct that a place be made available for one of his ageing servants. Today Henry sent a letter to the abbot of Selby ordering him to note that one of his corrodians, John Gregory, wished to sell his place to a Lancastrian supporter, John Totty, and the king was content that this should happen.
⁴⁵
No doubt the abbot of Selby was less happy; the place had been for John Gregory’s life; if it carried on going to new people, the monastery would be keeping a supposedly aged retainer not for one or two years but for decades.

Two other personal pieces of Henry’s business were dated today.
He confirmed on his friend Sir John Phelip the manor of Grovebury, alias Leighton Buzzard.
⁴⁶
And he assigned the revenues of the towns of Great Stanmore, Little Stanmore, Edgware and Kingsbury to pay the salary of his new keeper of the privy seal, John Wakeryng.
⁴⁷

Thursday 13th

Although Henry had lifted the monopoly on supplying food and ale to Calais, one Peter Pret, master of a ship with wine and victuals for the English castle of Merk in the Calais hinterland, had come to the attention of the mayor of Faversham. As Faversham had been one of the towns that Henry had expressly allowed on 21 April to supply Calais, the mayor decided he was within his rights to impound the ship, as its goods and wine had been purchased in London, which was to the detriment of his town’s trade. Henry must have been exasperated. Here he was, trying to arrange a war – and a provincial merchant was trying to hinder him, mistakenly believing that the monopoly had been extended to Faversham for the benefit of the town. Needless to say, Henry gave an order to de-arrest the ship immediately.
⁴⁸

Self-interested mayors were a relatively small problem; the finances of the kingdom were far more significant. Even if he pawned all his disposable relics, chalices and church plate, as well as his jewels and treasure, he would not have enough money to meet his liabilities over the next year. It was not just the costs of the expedition that were going to bankrupt him, it was the cost of paying for the defence of the realm in his absence. A projection of the income and expenditure for the year from 24 June was drawn up by the exchequer, and made for uncomfortable reading: