Henry IV (109 page)

¹⁷
Castor,
King, Crown and Duchy
, 40–9, 305–12; R. Storey, ‘The North of England’, in
Fifteenth-Century England 1399–1509
, ed. S. Chrimes, C. Ross and R. A. Griffiths (Manchester, 1972), 129–44, at p. 138.

EPILOGUE

THE PLACE OF THE REIGN OF HENRY IV IN ENGLISH HISTORIOGRAPHY

Over the centuries since Henry IV's death, debate about the longer-term significance of his reign has focused broadly on two questions: first, the belief that the revolution of 1399 was the root cause of civil strife in the fifteenth century, especially the Wars of the Roses; second, the extent to which Henry's usurpation, justified as it was by the necessity to oust a tyrannical king, succeeded in introducing a less autocratic (or more ‘constitutional’) form of government to England.

Central to the first question is the enormous influence of Shakespeare's History plays. Although perhaps not originally conceived as such,
¹
Shakespeare's eight
Histories
, spanning the period from Richard II to Richard III, embodied what was seen during the sixteenth century as the orthodox overview of fifteenth-century history, namely, that the Wars of the Roses had their origin in the deposition of Richard II and were not healed until Henry VII ascended the throne in 1485 and, a few months later, married Elizabeth of York, thereby uniting the houses of York and Lancaster and restoring political harmony – a view encapsulated in the title of Edward Hall's
The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Famelies of Lancastre and Yorke, beeyng long in Continual Discension for the Croun of this Noble Realme
(1548). In its neatest formulation, this ‘Tudor Myth’ assigned exactly a hundred years to this age of blood and political deformity, beginning with the battle of Radcot Bridge (1387), at which ‘Henry of Lancaster’ first took up arms against his sovereign, and ending with the battle of Stoke (1487), which scotched the last significant Yorkist threat to Henry VII's throne.
²
This overarching framework naturally allowed for differences of emphasis: whereas Yorkist-leaning historians laid the blame squarely on the shoulders of Henry IV's act of opportunism in 1399 and saw him and
his successors as the ‘three wrong kings’, Lancastrian sympathizers were more concerned to show that even if Richard II's deposition was a personal tragedy, his continuance in office would have led to national tragedy. The Tudors, whose claim to the throne came through the Lancastrian line (via the Beauforts), particularly stressed their own role in healing the schism.

These tensions are reflected in Shakespeare's
Richard II
. Broadly speaking, the first half of the play portrays Richard as a whimsical autocrat who brings ruin upon himself, but once the king is captured (Act 3, Scene 3), the emphasis shifts towards showing how difficult are the choices facing a ruler and how dangerous will be the consequences of usurpation. ‘The blood of English shall manure the ground’, warns the bishop of Carlisle, ‘And future ages groan for this foul act . . . And in this seat of peace tumultuous wars/Shall kin with kin and kind with kind confound.’
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The doubts thus raised, and the brutal act of regicide with which the play ends, evoke growing sympathy for the fallen king. The second half of
Richard II
thus prefigures
Henry IV Parts I and II
, in which the dreadful consequences of usurpation constitute the principal theme, exemplified not just by the wearying sequence of rebellions and conspiracies Henry faces, but also the riotous disobedience of his eldest son, God's punishment for his (and England's) original sin. As in
Julius Caesar
, the deeply problematical question of the morality of rebellion lies at the heart of the plays – not so much the personal morality of ‘Bullingbrook’ (although that is certainly not ignored) as the political circumstances, if any, that might justify the violent overthrow of an anointed ruler, tyrannical or not. This was a question with powerful contemporary resonance in the 1590s. Elizabeth I's famous ‘I am Richard II. Know ye not that?’ was not simply a rhetorical conceit. John Hayward's history of
The First Part of the Life and Raigne of King Henrie the IIII
(1599) was suppressed by the Privy Council and the author imprisoned for three years for ‘making this time seem like that of Richard II’ and daring to imply ‘that it might be lawful for the subject to depose the king’. The early stage productions and editions of Shakespeare's
Richard II
wisely omitted the deposition scene in Act Four, which first appeared in the 1608 Quarto edition.
⁴
Despite the fact that Shakespeare was reworking a theme that, through Polydore Vergil, Edward
Hall and Raphael Holinshed, had characterized a century of Tudor historiography, it still required circumspection.

The enduring popularity of Shakespeare's work, reaching a new peak in this quatercentenary of his death, has meant that audiences have continued, and continue to this day, to be influenced by his version of the Tudor Myth and, to a lesser or greater degree, to ingest the view of the revolution of 1399 as the catalyst to a century of conflict.
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Needless to say, the morality of rebellion remains as problematical as ever, but few historians of late medieval England nowadays subscribe to the view that the Wars of the Roses originated in the revolution of 1399, seeing them rather as the consequence of the manifold failures of Henry VI's kingship in the 1440s and 1450s. Yet there was no doubting the perceived relevance of the Tudor Myth in the seventeenth century. Both the Civil War of the 1640s and the Glorious Revolution of 1688 provided the occasion for new histories of the Wars of the Roses, pointing out their relevance to contemporary issues and carrying the story back to the reign of Richard II.
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The Reformation and the prominence of religious dissension through the seventeenth century added fuel to the debate. As the king during whose reign the burning of heretics was believed to have been introduced, Henry IV was also denounced for having nipped in the bud England's early inclination towards Protestantism, with the civil strife of the fifteenth century seen by some Protestant polemicists as divine punishment for his impunity. Even John Foxe understood that to present Richard II as an advocate of Wyclifism was stretching the point, but that did not stop him from pointing out that Richard was ‘no great disfavourer’ of Wyclifites, ‘neither was he so cruel against them as others that came after him’, by which he meant principally Henry IV, who was ‘altogether bent to hold with the pope's prelacy . . . the first of all English kings that began the unmerciful burning of Christ's saints for standing against the pope’, as a result of which his reign was ‘full of trouble, of blood and misery’.
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The heretic-burning Thomas Arundel naturally also excited the wrath of Foxe and other reformers, inducing Archbishop Cranmer who ordered the destruction of his predecessor's chantry chapel in Canterbury cathedral. Not until the
nineteenth century did Arundel's reputation begin to recover (as witness the sympathetic Lambeth Palace portrait), although it still bears the scars of centuries of vilification.

From the mid-seventeenth century, as English monarchy began to acquire a more constitutional feel, interest in the reigns of Richard II and Henry IV shifted accordingly. In the view of some parliamentarians of the 1640s, it was the establishment of the parliamentary committee of 1398, undermining as it did the legitimate role of parliament, which revealed the true measure of Richard's autocracy. What, though, did Henry IV do to restore ‘constitutional’ rule? Despite growing interest in the origins of the constitution, not until Bishop Stubbs propounded his thesis of ‘Lancastrian Constitutionalism’ in the second half of the nineteenth century was a fully formulated answer to this question put forward. Stubbs saw constitutionalism largely in terms of the relationship between crown and parliament. The Lancastrian epoch (1399–1461), he declared, saw ‘the trial and failure of a great constitutional experiment, a premature testing of the strength of the parliamentary system’, which demonstrated ‘an instinctive looking towards a greater destiny’. Henry IV came to power as the advocate of constitutional monarchy and ‘ruled his kingdom with aid of a council such as he had tried to force on Richard II, and yielded to his parliaments all the power, place and privilege that had been claimed for them by the great houses which he represented’. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the parliament of 1406, which ‘seems almost to stand for an exponent of the most advanced principles of medieval constitutional life in England’. Here was a king who ‘acted on the principles which he had professed as a subject’, and as a result managed to ‘withstand and overcome any amount of domestic difficulty’. Stubbs conceded that this did not make him a strong king: indeed, he went on, it may have been the very ‘weakness of central power’ during his reign that created the conditions for constitutional rule. Yet, whatever his failings, Henry could not be accused of hypocrisy, and his son and grandson followed his example: the house of Lancaster ‘reigned constitutionally’, but fell ‘by lack of governance’. The Yorkists, on the other hand, reigned unconstitutionally, ‘stronger but not sounder’ than the Lancastrians, demeaning parliament, levying arbitrary taxation, maintaining armed forces and perverting the law with their ‘judicial cruelties’. Whereas the Lancastrians had acted on ‘the hereditary traditions of the baronage’, the Yorkists acted on ‘the hereditary traditions of the crown’; and although the Yorkists failed to destroy the constitution,
‘the nation needed rest and renewal, discipline and reformation, before it could enter into the enjoyment of its birthright’.
⁸

This classic exposition of ‘Whig history’ – the overarching view of England's story as a stately progression towards limited monarchy and parliamentary democracy – was in tune with its age, a time of parliamentary reform and imperial self-confidence, and although Lancastrian Constitutionalism was declared moribund well before the mid-twentieth century, it has taken a long time to die, not least because of its influence on the higher education curriculum. Yet its weaknesses are all too apparent. Leaving aside the problems associated with notions such as the ‘hereditary traditions’ of crown or baronage, Whig or constitutional history placed far too much emphasis on the relationship between crown and parliament and on the role of the commons in parliament. Parliaments were only in session about 10 per cent of the time during the late Middle Ages, and if there is no disputing their importance or the expanding role of the commons, they were still many centuries away from incorporating the day-to-day realities of English political life. To be fair, Stubbs was explicitly writing a
constitutional
, not a political, history, but he mistook parliament's constitutional authority for political power and showed little evidence of understanding the massive gulf between fifteenth-century and nineteenth-century political society.
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Doggedly checking off the milestones on his pre-planned route, he seems barely to have noticed the surrounding scenery.

It is the attempt to sketch in this scenery during the last half-century and more that has replaced the Whig interpretation of English history. Broadly speaking, this has taken three directions: first, biographical or prosopographical studies of individuals or groups as a way of understanding the motivation of key political actors and of seeing political history from below and within as well as from above; second, regional studies designed to elucidate the workings of local political society and the two-way relationship between government and the localities; third, closer study of political ideas and language in order to reveal the common framework of assumptions that underlie political action. At the heart of this lies not only the desire to understand political mentalities but also the recognition that the late medieval polity was increasingly inclusive and multi-layered. To return to a point made in the Introduction, the expansion of government in the
late Middle Ages was bound to open up more fault-lines: the more questions the king asked of his subjects, the more demands he made of them, the more of them at more levels he drew into the governmental process, then the more they would become politicized and the more occasions there would be for negotiation, disagreement or resistance. Rather than mistaking this for evidence of the breakdown of effective government, it should rather be seen as ‘a price to be paid for the development of a cohesive and generally successful political order’.
¹⁰

Like most books, this one is a product of its age and reflects the influence of modern historiography. The interpretations of K. B. McFarlane and his pupil and successor G. L. Harriss underlie much of the recent historiography of late medieval England and continue to influence most of the work on the political history of the period, mine included. Modern scholars working specifically on Henry IV's reign whose work I have found especially useful include A. L. Brown (on government), Simon Walker (on political society and rebellion), Gwilym Dodd (on parliament and the council), Jenni Nuttall (on political language and propaganda), Rees Davies (on the Welsh revolt), Peter Crooks (on Ireland and empires), Guilhem Pepin (on Guyenne), Helen Castor (on the Lancastrian affinity), Christian Liddy (on towns), Peter McNiven (on heresy), Margaret Harvey (on the Schism) and Jeremy Catto (on religiosity).
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Yet engagement with modern historiography should not entail wholesale rejection of earlier views of the significance of Henry IV's reign. Although the Tudor Myth has long been discarded, the ‘abiding moral and political uncertainties created by Henry IV's act of perjured usurpation’ and refracted through Shakespeare's
Histories
continued to resonate through his reign and beyond, and the question of whether it was his governance that made people question his title or vice versa admits of no easy answer.
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Moreover, whatever terminology one chooses to employ – constitutional, consensual, contractual – it is hard to avoid the sense that Henry's kingship was qualitatively different from Richard II's. In part this was a question of character, in part of policy, in part of circumstances; the difference manifested itself in the king's relationship with his nobles, with his affinity, with gentry, townsmen and civil servants, as well as in the language of parliaments and contemporary
literature. Credit for this has not always been given where it is due. The conspiracy of approval enveloping Henry V has been slow to recognize the solidity of his father's legacy, a historiographical distortion extended almost by default to the unwarranted assumption that the prince was responsible for most of the good things that happened during the later years of the reign. In some cases this was true, but in most it was not. On the scale of the possible for a usurper, Henry IV's achievement ranked high. Unlike his son, he is not remembered as a great king, but it is not impossible to imagine that, given different circumstances, he could have been.