Henry IV (22 page)

This was still a fissure, however, not a rupture. If Richard were to produce an heir, much of the tension would be taken out of English politics, and it was partly to this end that the king's foreign policy was directed in 1395–6. Gaunt and Henry played virtually no part in this, indeed Henry, still
dreaming of foreign fields, was sorely tempted by an offer from William, count of Ostrevant, to join him on a campaign in Friesland (or Frisia), the rebellious and inaccessible northernmost region of his father the count of Holland's domains, but both Gaunt and the king advised him not to go.
³⁸
Gaunt may have thought it irresponsible of Henry to wish to be off seeking fame abroad when his own powers were on the wane, and although it had no discernible effect on their relationship, this is the first and only hint of a disagreement between father and son. They spent the spring of 1396 in Yorkshire together, doubtless attending to Duchy business.
³⁹

By this time, the king's foreign policy had borne fruit. On 3 March 1396, a twenty-eight-year truce with France was concluded, including an agreement that the English king would marry Charles VI's daughter, Isabella, at a grand ceremony to be held in the autumn.
⁴⁰
In August, Gaunt and the king crossed to Calais for a meeting with Duke Philip of Burgundy to finalize the arrangements.
⁴¹
Henry did not accompany them, but he and his eldest son, now ten, both attended the summit between Richard II and Charles VI at Ardres, eight miles south of Calais, in late October,
⁴²
a courtly extravaganza comparable to the Field of the Cloth of Gold of June 1520, not simply because of its extraordinary cost but also because it was held on the same site. Four days of talks between the two monarchs culminated in the little Isabella, now almost seven years old, being handed over to her twenty-nine-year-old husband on 30 October, and five days later they were married at the church of St Nicholas at Calais. This union apart, the diplomatic achievements of the summit were not impressive: an agreement to try to bring an end to the Papal Schism and some vague promises to try to resolve Anglo-French disputes without resort to arms and to continue the search for a final peace between the two kingdoms. Richard also promised to aid his new father-in-law against all men in future – an
undertaking which Charles may have interpreted more literally than the English king intended. Equally important for Richard was the opportunity the summit afforded him to project an image of kingship in keeping with his conception of his office. The gifts which he and Charles exchanged, the banquets they hosted for each other, their gorgeous apparel and enormous, richly caparisoned retinues excited the amazement of contemporaries and must have set the English exchequer back by a minimum of £10,000 and quite possibly a lot more.
⁴³
Gaunt and Henry played a full part in the proceedings: together with the duke of Gloucester and the earls of Rutland, Nottingham and Northumberland, they escorted the French king to Richard's pavilion on the opening day of the summit, all six of them decked out in full-length suits of red velvet with a white heraldic bend of the livery of the former Queen Anne.
⁴⁴
By 15 November, however, Henry was back at Dover, and on 22 November he reached London. He and Gaunt spent Christmas at Hertford and paid a brief visit to Tutbury early in 1397 before returning to Westminster for the opening of the parliament, the first for two years, which had been summoned for 22 January.
⁴⁵

¹
The two simultaneous grants suggest some give and take between Gaunt and Richard:
PROME
, vii.143–5;
CChR 1341–1417
, 318.

²
Saul,
Richard II
, 213–14.

³
SAC I
, 940–3; Goodman,
John of Gaunt
, 195–7. Many Englishmen were equally critical: a council held at Stamford in May 1392 denounced as ‘absurd’ the idea that Guyenne be lost to the crown ‘for the benefit of a single person [Gaunt]’:
Westminster Chronicle
, 490–1.

⁴
As some had accused him of doing in Iberia. The importance of the draft treaty of 1393 was emphasized by Palmer,
England, France and Christendom
, chapters 2, 8 and 9, but others have questioned its status as a draft treaty, suggesting that it was simply a set of over-ambitious proposals which had little chance of being ratified: see Saul,
Richard II
, 213–24, and C. Phillpotts, ‘John of Gaunt and English Policy towards France’,
Journal of Medieval History
xvi (1990), 363–86.

⁵
SAC I
, 944–5. There were also local grievances: J. Bellamy, ‘The Northern Rebellions in the Later Years of Richard II’,
BJRL
47 (1964–5), 254–74; Morgan,
War and Society
, 193–7, notes the gradual build-up of discontent in Cheshire since 1389–90, centring on the collection of a £2,000 subsidy as well as the threat to the livelihoods of the county's military community.

⁶
Some of the rebels were also opponents of Lancastrian dominance in the north: Walker,
Lancastrian Affinity
, 171–4. Henry was at Pontefract on 26 August 1393: DL 28/3/4, fo. 20v.

⁷
Gaunt was reputedly angry with Arundel for standing idly by in his castle of Holt (Clwyd) during the summer instead of helping to suppress the rising in the north-west:
SAC I
, 956. There were also suspicions that the king made little effort to arrest the ringleaders:
PROME
, vii.258–9, 264–6.

⁸
Westminster Chronicle
, 518–19.

⁹
Thomas Talbot gave himself up in May, confessed in Henry's presence to ‘manifest high treason’, and was committed to the Tower of London. Gaunt was deeply displeased by Richard's later decision to pardon him (he had been retained for life by the king in 1392):
CCR 1392–6
, 294;
CPR 1391–6
, 433; Bellamy, ‘The Northern Rebellions’, 260, 268.

¹⁰
Palmer,
England, France and Christendom
, 152–65.

¹¹
Saul,
Richard II
, 277–84.

¹²
He accompanied his father to Plymouth in mid-October to bid him farewell, and took the opportunity to visit the putative tomb of King Arthur and Guinevere in Glastonbury abbey. He was back in London by 6 November at the latest: DL 28/3/4, fos. 32v–34r;
CPR 1396–9
, 542.

¹³
For Froissart's account of the meeting, see
Oeuvres de Froissart
, xv.147–82; for the minutes, see J. Baldwin,
The King's Council in England during the Middle Ages
(Oxford, 1913), 135–7, 504–5.

¹⁴
On 23 July. The council continued until 26 July, when both Henry and the king returned to London (Saul,
Richard II
, 473; DL 28/1/5, fo. 28r; C 53/165).

¹⁵
Palmer,
England, France and Christendom
, 162–3.

¹⁶
SAC II
, 38–9.

¹⁷
M. Jones,
Ducal Brittany 1364–1399
(Oxford, 1970), 132–6, and
Recueil des Actes de Jean IV, Duc de Bretagne
, ed. M. Jones (2 vols, Paris, 1983), ii, nos. 1033–6. The treaty was dated 25 November 1395, and three days later a separate letter of obligation was drawn up whereby Henry of Bolingbroke was to receive 30,000 francs in return for the hand of his son. In fact, Marie married Jean, count of Perche, in July 1396, by which time Richard II had already written to Charles VI suggesting that the young Henry might be betrothed instead to the French king's youngest daughter, Michelle, but this never happened either (
Diplomatic Correspondence
, ed. Perroy, no. 229A and p. 253).

¹⁸
Goodman,
John of Gaunt
, 156.

¹⁹
Annales
, 188;
Oeuvres de Froissart
, xv.238–9.

²⁰
The charters Henry witnessed in 1395 were dated 26 July at Eltham, 11 and 26 Sept. at Westminster and 22 Sept. at Windsor; he occasionally sought a royal pardon for a follower, as on 12 June (
CPR 1391–6
, 577). He attended parliament in Jan.–Feb. 1395 and was at Tutbury for several weeks in the spring and again in August before journeying on to Pontefract; he visited Leicester for the anniversary of Mary de Bohun's death in late June and was at Hertford or in London from October to December:
PROME
, vii.287, 304; DL 28/3/4, fos. 32v–34r. Details of his movements in 1395 are taken from his great wardrobe account, DL 28/1/5 and charter witness lists (C 53/165).

²¹
Except in 1383, when he was sixteen and simply accompanying his father: see above, p. 40.

²²
Jean Creton said that ‘the king put more trust in him [Rutland] than any of his friends’:
CR
, 138;
RHKA
, 166–7; R. Horrox, ‘Edward of Langley, Second Duke of York’,
ODNB
, 17.801–3.

²³
Saul,
Richard II
, 226–7.

²⁴
Cf. T. Thornton, ‘Cheshire: The Inner Citadel of Richard II's Kingdom?’, in
The Reign of Richard II
, ed. G. Dodd (Stroud, 2000), 85–96.

²⁵
See Walker,
Lancastrian Affinity
, 174–81, for Richard's ‘assault upon his uncle's lordship’ in the north-west at this time, rejecting the idea of cohabitation between the two affinities in the 1390s.

²⁶
Walker,
Lancastrian Affinity
, 94–6;
RHKA
, 238–43; Saul,
Richard II
, 200–1, 263–4, 440; D. Fletcher, ‘The Lancastrian Collar of Esses. Its Origins and Transformations down the Centuries’, in
The Age of Richard
II, ed. J. Gillespie (Stroud, 1997), 191–204.

²⁷
‘Then were those royal badges both of the hart and of the crown hidden away, so that some said that the esquires of the duke of Lancaster, wearing their collars, had been preordained by a prophecy to subdue like greyhounds in this year the pride of that hated beast the white hart’:
The Deposition of Richard II
, ed. T. Wright (Camden Society, Old Series, 1838), 8–12;
Usk
, 52;
CR
, 155; and see P. Strohm, ‘The Literature of Livery’, in P. Strohm,
Hochon's Arrow: The Social Imagination of Fourteenth-Century Texts
(Princeton, 1992), 179–83. Henry's gift to Queen Isabella on her arrival in England in 1396 was a necklace with a golden greyhound set with a ruby and a pearl (
Traïson et Mort
, 110).

²⁸
SAC I
, 896; for these competing cults see C. Given-Wilson, ‘Richard II, Edward II, and the Lancastrian Inheritance’,
EHR
109 (1994), 553–71; the two cults sprang up in the 1320s (to some extent as rivals from the start) but had waned since the mid-century. The immediate cause of Walsingham's remark was the death in 1389 of the young earl of Pembroke, whose ancestor Aymer de Valence had sat in judgment on Thomas of Lancaster in 1322.

²⁹
Somerville,
Duchy of Lancaster
, i.35–6.

³⁰
Given-Wilson, ‘Richard II, Edward II, and the Lancastrian Inheritance’,
passim
.

³¹
Westminster Chronicle
, 194.

³²
So said the authors of the
Brut
(ii.341) and the
CE
(iii.361). One of them clearly copied from the other, or else they used a common source; the latter is perhaps most likely. The
Brut
says that Richard made Roger his heir apparent (
heyre parant
), but this cannot be correct, for this would have implied that he would take precedence, even if Richard and Anne produced a son. For the re-dating of this episode to the parliament of 1386 rather than 1385, and the argument that it was linked to talk of Richard's deposition and that Richard was reminding parliament that if he were dethroned they would get a twelve-year-old in his place, see I. Mortimer, ‘Richard II and the Succession to the Crown’,
History
(2007), 320–36.

³³
CE
, iii.369–70. The nineteen-year-old Roger succeeded to his earldom of March and was granted livery of his lands during the January 1394 parliament (on 25 February), which might have occasioned a debate about the succession:
CP
, viii.448–9. He had not been formally summoned to this parliament, but he witnessed his first charter on 13 March, a week after it ended (C 53/164).

³⁴
Hardyng and Usk both corroborate the use of the Crouchback Legend, the first by Gaunt ‘in order to supply his son Henry with a title to the crown’, the second by Henry:
CR
, 195–7;
Usk
, 64–7.

³⁵
SAC I
, 962–3; Palmer,
England, France and Christendom
, 152–9; Bennett, ‘Edward III's Entail’. In
CE
(369–70), the chronicler's account of Gaunt's claim in the January 1394 parliament comes between a discussion of Gaunt's thwarted ambitions in France and his appointment as duke of Aquitaine; although the chronology of this chronicle is often confused, the context is suggestive.

³⁶
Bennett, ‘Edward III's Entail; C. Given-Wilson, ‘Legitimation, Designation and Succession to the Throne in Fourteenth-Century England’, in
Building Legitimacy. Political Discourses and Forms of Legitimacy in Medieval Societies
, ed. I. Alfonso, H. Kennedy and J. Escalona (Leiden, 2004), 89–105.

³⁷
CR
, 202.

³⁸
The invitation is further evidence of Henry's reputation abroad: ‘If you can persuade your cousin the earl of Derby to join your company’, Count William was told, ‘your expedition will be more worthy and your enterprise more renowned.’ According to Froissart, ‘everyone knew that [Henry] would willingly have gone, if the king had not prevented him at the request of the duke of Lancaster’ (
Oeuvres de Froissart
, xv.228–9, 269–71). For this episode see also Tuck, ‘Henry IV and Chivalry’, 67.