1415: Henry V's Year of Glory (7 page)

Also at the high table would have been several high-ranking churchmen. Picture them, clean-shaven and tonsured (the tops of their
heads shaved), and dressed in their ceremonial robes, seated directly on the king’s right hand. Closest to Henry would have been Henry Chichele, the archbishop of Canterbury, aged about fifty-three. The slightly older bishop of Durham, Thomas Langley, would have been close by. Another priest, Stephen Patrington, deserves particular mention. He was in his mid sixties, and from Yorkshire: a friar who had been head of the Carmelite Order in England from 1399 until his appointment as Henry’s personal confessor on his accession. To say he was delicately positioned – confessor to a warrior king – is an understatement.

Among the hundreds of men seated at the lower tables were lords, knights, esquires, gentlemen, sergeants-at-arms, priests, singers, minstrels, clerks, heralds and many other sorts of men. Most of the officers of the royal household would have been present. Old Sir Thomas Erpingham – the steward and the most senior officer of the royal household – would certainly have been standing with his staff of office somewhere near the king. So would the second most senior officer, Sir Roger Leche, the treasurer of the household (also known as the keeper of the king’s wardrobe). Somewhere in the hall would have been William the king’s fool, and Hugh Mortimer, who had served Henry as both a chamberlain and an ambassador.
³⁷
Thomas Chaucer, the king’s chief butler (and son of the great poet, Geoffrey Chaucer), may have been supervising the wine. The sixty-year-old John Prophet, keeper of the privy seal, would also have been in attendance on the king.

It is with respect to the women who may have been present that we start to encounter a problem. There is very little evidence of Henry having much to do with women at this time in his life. This was certainly due in part to the nature of the court of an unmarried king, and it is undoubtedly a consequence of the sorts of evidence that have survived. But it also seems to be due in part to the king himself. He did not sleep with women, and he seems to have spent little time in their company. He did not tolerate prostitutes in the royal household (unlike some of his forebears).
³⁸
His petite stepmother, Queen Joan, might have been seated near him on the daïs that Christmas, but if so she was there as a guest; she was not a member of the royal household.
³⁹
It is possible that Henry’s aunt, Elizabeth, wife of Sir John Cornwaille, was present. The dowager duchess of York, now married
to Henry’s friend Lord Scrope, might also have been in the hall. But it is difficult to identify many other women who might have been there as guests. Henry was
chivalrous
towards women, but he was not
close
to them. He mentioned more than forty people in his will by name, but only two were women – his grandmother and his stepmother – and the reference to his stepmother, Queen Joan, was more out of duty than affection. He was single, celibate, facially disfigured, somewhat aloof and obsessed with religion, justice and war. In this respect it is interesting to see how determined he was to marry a French princess whom he had never met, and who was still sexually immature, rather than a woman of his own age to whom he was already close. Most of his predecessors had married for love – including his father, grandfather (John of Gaunt) and great-grandfather (Edward III) – but Henry was not so inclined.

*

On the night of 20 March 1413, after his father had breathed his last in the Jerusalem Chamber at Westminster, Henry had left his brother Humphrey and his stepmother, and gone into the abbey alone. Although he was king, the actual first day of his reign would be the following day, in accordance with tradition. He would take no royal actions on the day of his father’s death, other than to issue the traditional order for the ports to be closed, to stop the enemies of England taking advantage of a transition in their government.

In the abbey he walked by candlelight among the silent tombs of his ancestors. Here was the jewel-encrusted shrine of Saint Edward the Confessor, founder of the abbey. There was the tomb of Henry III, the king who had rebuilt the abbey on a lavish scale. Under a plain black slab beside him was his son, Edward I, the most formidable warrior of his age. Opposite Edward I was the tomb of Richard II and his wife, Anne, although at that point Richard’s body was still at Langley and had yet to be placed in the tomb. And next to Richard, surrounded by figures of all twelve of his children, there was the great Edward III, the king who had been prophesied to be a new King Arthur: who had defeated the Scots and French in battle repeatedly, who had reclaimed his French inheritance, and built such magnificent palaces as Queenborough Castle and the royal apartments of
Windsor Castle. He had introduced a considerable programme of new legislation, delivered justice for his people, and created a sense that England was a kingdom of the first importance. Men sang songs about him, and based their stories of King Arthur on him. He had become the very epitome of great kingship.

Henry walked through to the south transept of the abbey church. Here in a cell near St Benet’s chapel, there lived a hermit, called William Alnwick.
⁴⁰
Henry sat down and began talking to him. He remained there all night. The personal qualities of a king, especially the king’s morality, may well have entered the conversation. The duty of a king to prevent conflict among the nobles – the principal exhortation to kings for at least the last century – perhaps also entered the debate. Perhaps Henry’s father had mentioned the same matter to him on his deathbed, having been worried that Henry and his brother Thomas would end up fighting for the crown.
⁴¹
There were certainly nobles who thought that the earl of March should be king. Even at that moment there was a protester, John Whytlock, taking sanctuary in the precincts of that same church. He had raised the old cry ‘King Richard is alive!’ This was tantamount to declaring that the Lancastrians had no right to the throne. Such a declaration on the eve of the new reign was not a good sign.
⁴²

Worse portents were to follow. A blizzard struck as Henry made the traditional procession from the Tower of London to Westminster before his coronation in early April, and the snows continued to fall in some counties for two days, covering men and animals. The chronicler John Strecche declared the heavy hail that day as exceeding anything since the days of the legendary ancient British king, King Lear!
⁴³
The interpretation of some contemporaries was that this reign would be cold and stern. Henry ate nothing through the whole feast that followed his coronation. If that was a penitential fast, it did no good. The summer of 1413 was one of excessive heat and widespread sicknesses. Terrible fires broke out at Norwich, Tewkesbury and Robertsbridge. The autumn saw another destructive hailstorm, and the winter was no better. Three days after Christmas the church of St Giles at Winchelsea was struck by lightning.

The ill portents heralded evil events. Early in January 1414 two men had come to the king with news of a Lollard rising planned by Sir John Oldcastle. He had already been sentenced to death for his heresy,
but had escaped from the Tower of London. Now he was planning to assassinate Henry and his brothers. This was not just treason, it was personal disloyalty – for Oldcastle had fought alongside Henry in Wales. He had been captain of Hay Castle, and attended the siege of Aberystwyth with Henry. He had been a commissioner of the peace in Herefordshire and sheriff of the county. He had even fought with the earl of Arundel in France in 1411, in Henry’s mercenary army. If anyone should have been trustworthy, it was Oldcastle. But on the night of 9–10 January 1414 he gathered a crowd of several hundred of his fellow Lollards at St Giles’ Fields. Henry, having inside information from his two informants, had no difficulty rounding them up. Sixty-nine were accused of treason and condemned to death. Thirty-one were hanged, and a further seven burnt at the stake for heresy.
⁴⁴
Oldcastle himself escaped. It was deeply worrying for Henry that the Lollards gathered there in St Giles’ Fields came from all over southern England, from as far as Bristol in the west and Essex in the east.

Oldcastle’s plot was never likely to succeed, but ironically for that very fact it was symbolically dangerous. It was a sign of desperation. Men like him could hardly change the customs of the Church by carrying out acts of treason against their king. Oldcastle was a peer of the realm – being also Lord Cobham in right of his wife – so he had the king’s ear. If he had harboured a grudge against the king he could have come to see him personally. Instead he had given this influence up in order to stage a coup. When he could have recanted and saved his life, he had declared that ‘the pope is [the] very Antichrist, that is, the head; that the archbishops, bishops and other prelates be his members, and that the friars be his tail’.
⁴⁵
The worrying truth was that Oldcastle and his friends were as committed, sincere and fervent in their heresy as Henry himself was in his religious orthodoxy. If heretics as fervent as this were to be found right across the realm, from Bristol to Essex, then Henry had many potential enemies.

Henry’s reaction to Oldcastle’s plot – burning seven men alive – marked a profound change in his attitude to heresy. In 1410, when John Badby had been sentenced to the flames for his heretical utterances, Henry had tried all he could to persuade him to recant, dragging the fire away and offering him a pension. Badby had refused, preferring to suffer the agony of the flames. In 1414 Henry did not try to save any of the men similarly destined for the stake. Shortly afterwards he
declared in parliament that the intent of Lollardy was not only ‘to adnull and subvert the Christian faith and the law of God’ but also ‘to destroy our sovereign lord the king himself’.
⁴⁶
For an anointed king, who believed he reigned by divine right, heresy and treason were now intertwined, and deviation in matters of faith was synonymous with political rebellion. Those who saw their faith as a justification for treason could expect no mercy.

*

Henry’s problems at Christmas 1414 were far from insignificant. Oldcastle was still on the run. Lollardy was growing in strength. And Glendower was still a free man. Although the Welsh rebel no longer had command over an emergent independent nation, as he had briefly in 1404–5, he still attracted enough support for parliament to describe Wales as ‘a country at war’ in May 1414. There had been no knockout blow. Despite nine years in the field, in person, Henry had failed to secure the land of which he was nominally the prince.

Much the same could be said for Ireland and the Marches of Scotland. Henry had sacked his brother Thomas as King’s Lieutenant of Ireland, and replaced him with Sir John Stanley soon after his accession. This had been a bad move. Whereas Thomas had commanded respect and support, Stanley had been a selfish failure. The English lords in Ireland claimed he had enriched himself through extortion. Unfortunately for him – but fortunately for Henry – Stanley died within six months. The Irish lords established their own interim government under Thomas Cranley, archbishop of Dublin, and sent the treasurer of Ireland back to England to give the king a full report of their calamitous position. A veteran of the Welsh wars, Sir John Talbot of Hallamshire (also known as Lord Furnival), was appointed as the next King’s Lieutenant of Ireland in February 1414. However, he did not actually set sail until November.

As for the Scottish Marches, Henry’s brother, John, had written to him about the state of the north in May 1414. Men loyal to Henry were suffering, John declared, because there had been a ‘lack of good governance’ for many years. Even though the king of the Scots was still a prisoner in the Tower, the Scottish lords had made frequent incursions into their lands. The gates, walls and drawbridges of Berwick, the border
town, were in ruins. No gunpowder or cannon were available for its defence. The finances of the East March were more than £13,000 in arrears. John had had to melt down some of his plate to pay his men. He had also pawned his jewels and borrowed heavily from his friends to try to make ends meet. As with Ireland, this was a situation bordering on desperation, similar to the circumstances that had lost Henry possession of the castles of Harlech and Aberystwyth in 1404.

The situation in Gascony was similar. There were too many enemies and not enough men or supplies to guarantee the safety of the region. The financial situation there was chaotic, with taxes not agreed, let alone paid.
⁴⁷
The only help that Henry’s Gascon subjects had received since his accession was his authorisation of a campaign into the Saintonge area in 1413 under his uncle, Thomas Beaufort. Thomas had captured a number of small places quickly, and did manage to control access to the Charente for a few months, but ultimately he succeeded only in attracting more French troops and cannon to the area. A truce was agreed at the end of January 1414, which was to last until 2 February 1415. After that, war could be expected again. On 15 October 1414 Henry wrote to the Jurade – the mayor and jurats – of Bordeaux apologising for having done so little for them, and promising he would soon send them some artillery and a master gunner. The letter did not arrive for another eight months. Soon he was writing to the Jurade asking them to send
him
siege engines and cannon. His policy towards the defence of Gascony was chaotic – in fact, he seems to have had no policy at all.
⁴⁸

On top of all this, there was the situation in France.

Henry’s alliance with John the Fearless, duke of Burgundy, had proved to be problematic. He had pursued it firmly, believing that it not only represented the best way to destabilise the French kingdom but also justified involving England in the French civil war. However, following the Cabochien revolt in Paris in late April 1413, the Armagnacs had gradually seized the initiative. On 23 August that year John the Fearless had fled from the city.
⁴⁹
It left him in a desperate condition, prepared to enter any agreement to bolster his position, even entertaining the idea of swearing allegiance to Henry as king of France.
⁵⁰
At the same time he had no qualms about agreeing with Henry’s enemies that he would send troops to fight in Scotland against the English. Partly because of this duplicity, Henry’s alliance with Burgundy was unstable. But Charles VI of France was no
more reliable. He refused even to recognise Henry as the rightful king of England, describing him as ‘our adversary of England’. From Henry’s point of view, a more decisive intervention was necessary.