Henry IV (60 page)

Although the Long Parliament of 1406 met on 1 March and was not dissolved until 22 December, it spent less than four months of that time actually sitting. Its deliberations reflect the rapidly developing situation through the year, with priorities changing from one session to the next and decisions made in March or June being reversed in November or December, and only at the very end was a compromise worked out. The issues which concerned it were a mix of the old and the new. Finance, the role of the council and the need to protect English shipping and to prosecute the wars in Wales and Guyenne were by now standard fare, but to these were added the (unexpectedly difficult) question of ratifying the sentences against the lords who had rebelled in 1405 and the settlement of the order of succession to the crown.
³⁸

The first session lasted for five weeks before adjourning on 3 April for Easter. As their Speaker, the commons chose Sir John Tiptoft, a young knight of the king's chamber with impeccable Lancastrian credentials and an abundance of political talent. Despite Henry's apparent enthusiasm for the choice it is difficult, given the language used by Tiptoft, to believe that he acted as a royal stooge, although at times the opinions he expressed were probably less his own than those of the members who had elected him. Indeed it was the king's trust in him which allowed him to be so outspoken.
³⁹
There was, at any rate, a good deal of plain speaking from the start, focused principally on the household, the keeping of the seas, Wales and Guyenne. As usual, Henry wanted taxation, but this the commons would not grant without receiving assurances in return. All that the king was prepared to concede for the moment was that a date be set for the expulsion of some French and Bretons (mainly servants of Queen Joan) thought to be inflating the cost of the royal household. The real issue of the moment, however, was the defence of English shipping, for which it was agreed that the merchants and ship-owners of the realm would receive the proceeds of tunnage and poundage, plus one-quarter of the wool subsidy, for seventeen months from 1 May, in return for which they would fit out a fleet to patrol the seas. Agreeing even this much evidently involved some harsh words, and on the last day of the first session Tiptoft rose to deny a rumour that certain members had spoken about the king ‘other than they should have’, as a result of which Henry bore a ‘heavy heart’ towards the commons. Henry graciously reassured them that he still thought of them as his loyal subjects.
⁴⁰

By the time the second session was due to begin on 26 April events had moved on. On 22 March James, earl of Carrick, the heir to the Scottish throne, was seized by English privateers off Flamborough Head (Yorkshire) on his way to France, and brought to London. Two weeks later his father, Robert III, died, apparently of grief, whereupon the eleven-year-old became King James I of Scotland, but it would be another eighteen years before he was sent back to his kingdom.
⁴¹
Fortune also favoured the English
counter-insurgency in Wales: in January troops were landed on Anglesey, the start of a campaign to slip a noose around Snowdonia and strangle Glyn Dŵr into submission; during the spring, the remaining French troops in Pembrokeshire departed; and on 23 April, St George's Day, a fierce encounter left around 1,000 Welsh rebels dead, including one of Glyn Dŵr's sons.
⁴²
Meanwhile, Bishop Beaufort had been sent to Calais on 26 March to discuss a lasting Anglo-French peace sealed by a royal marriage.
⁴³
It was thus with cautious optimism that the lords and commons reconvened at Westminster, but at this point the king's health collapsed. Early on the morning of 28 April, he wrote from his lodge in Windsor Great Park informing the council that ‘an illness has suddenly affected us in our leg’, causing him such pain that his physicians had advised him not to travel, especially on horseback; nevertheless he hoped to come to London in three or four days. A few hours later he wrote again to say that his condition had worsened and advised the council to proceed without him.
⁴⁴
This may have been the prolapsed rectum of which it was later claimed that he had been cured with a treatment devised by the fourteenth-century physician John of Arderne (Adam Usk also said that Henry suffered from ‘rupture of the internal organs’). Both the condition and the treatment were painful: the remedy advocated by Arderne recommended first bleeding the leg before concocting an ointment called
unguentum apostolorum
, so named because it included twelve principal ingredients. When this was heated and applied to the prolapsed part of the rectum, ‘it schal entre agayn’, whereupon it should be dressed to prevent it protruding once more. If necessary, the procedure could be repeated several times.
⁴⁵
Presumably this was not necessary, or at least not immediately, for Henry left Windsor the next day, travelling by water to Kingston and then on to Westminster, and on 1 May the royal household took up residence at the bishop of Durham's inn at
Dowgate, where it remained until 6 July.
⁴⁶
It took months, however, for the king to recover, and from now on his energy declined.

Parliament thus initially (on 30 April) reconvened without the king, and although he was fit enough to attend sittings on 15, 22 and 24 May, and on 7 and 19 June, at other times he was absent (for example, on 8 and 25 May) and messengers had to be sent back and forth between Westminster and Dowgate.
⁴⁷
Yet few allowances were made for Henry's health. Returning initially to the question of aliens, the commons obliged him to agree to the deportation within three weeks of forty-four named Bretons and Frenchmen. This was followed by a request that the king nominate his councillors in parliament and agree to a bill defining their role, one aim of which was to furnish them with the power to monitor royal grants. Although not intended as criticism of the individuals concerned (since the seventeen councillors whom Henry nominated on 22 May were largely the same men who had served on the council over the previous few years), the bill was designed to reassert the independence of the council from the court and, given the king's health, to establish its powers on a formal basis. Behind such moves, as ever, lay a desire to reduce spending and bring order to crown finances, fundamental to which was the cost of the royal household. The latter, Tiptoft told the king, was ‘full of rascals (
de raskaille
) for the most part’, while his ministers ‘wickedly deceived’ him. When asked whether a parliamentary committee would be permitted to audit the accounts of the war-treasurers appointed at Coventry, Henry replied that ‘kings were not wont to render account’.
⁴⁸
Yet in the end he yielded – the first time that the principle of parliamentary audit of ministerial accounts had been conceded. His reward, if such it was, was the addition of 12d in the pound to tunnage and poundage paid by alien merchants, though only for a year. This would not do a great deal to relieve the exchequer.

By this time Henry Beaufort and his fellow commissioners had returned (on 22 May) from Calais, and in the light of their discussions and of the unpredictability of the king's health an act was passed for the succession of the crown. The main English proposal at Calais was for Prince Henry to marry one of Charles VI's daughters (the ex-queen Isabella seems still to have been the bride of choice).
⁴⁹
Should the king die and the prince marry,
but then himself die before fathering a son, there was thus a possibility that the throne would pass to his (hypothetical) daughter rather than to one of his three adult brothers. Such a risk to the dynasty's recently won throne was not one with which the lords and commons were comfortable, especially since the succession of a Lancastrian princess was bound to reopen the question of the earl of March's claim through a daughter of Edward III. It was therefore decided, in the ‘Act for the Inheritance of the Crown’ passed by parliament on 7 June, to entail the crown in the male line, meaning that Prince Henry's heir, should he fail to produce a son, would be his brother Thomas.
⁵⁰
Doubtless the act was designed to double as retrospective legitimation of Henry's claim through the male line in 1399, although this was not made explicit. The main purpose was to provide a greater degree of security for the future of the dynasty and the peace of the realm, although it would not have escaped notice that unquestionably legitimate kings with unquestionably legitimate heirs had no need for parliamentary legislation on the succession; and within six months it would be reversed.

Ratifying sentences of treason against convicted rebels should have been more straightforward, but when, on the last day of the second session, Henry invited the lords to affirm the guilt of Northumberland, Bardolf, Scrope, Mowbray and their adherents, they proved surprisingly reluctant to do so, preferring instead to offer Northumberland and Bardolf another three weeks to make their submission, and postponing any decision on Scrope and Mowbray.
⁵¹
Wariness about extending the scope of treason and lingering unease at the king's execution of the archbishop probably explains their hesitancy. Those responsible for Scrope's death (which can only have included Henry) were, after all, under sentence of excommunication, even if Archbishop Arundel had as yet declined to publish Pope Innocent's bull.
⁵²
News may also have arrived that Northumberland and Bardolf were by now in Wales, having fled Scotland in the spring after being warned that they were about to be betrayed. After being worsted by Edward Lord Charlton in a skirmish in June 1406 they slipped across the
Channel, where they spent several months failing to drum up support in Paris for an invasion of England.
⁵³

By 6 July, nearly three weeks after the second session ended, Henry was at last fit enough to leave Bishop Langley's hostel, and by the end of the month he was at Walsingham priory – ‘England's Holy Land’ – where he spent two days, presumably praying at the healing shrine of the Virgin, before moving on to Lynn for a week (4–11 August) to bid farewell to his daughter Philippa before she left for Denmark. Her retinue, as befitted a queen-in-waiting, numbered nearly 150, headed by Bishop Henry Bowet and Richard, brother of the duke of York, all clad in green and scarlet livery.
⁵⁴
Such obligatory splendour did not come cheap – at least £4,200, and probably a good deal more, was needed to pay for Philippa's send-off – and even before parliament's adjournment the exchequer had launched a borrowing campaign which, by 28 July, had raised over £16,000 in loans, secured on the tenths granted by York and Canterbury convocations during the summer; in addition, a subsidy of half a mark was granted from normally exempt clergy such as mendicants, chantry priests and stipendiary vicars.
⁵⁵
Yet no sooner was money raised but it was spent: between mid-May and mid-August £11,500 was disbursed to the three elder Lancastrian princes for Wales, Ireland and the Scottish marches, and a further £4,600 to support the royal household's summer itineration.
⁵⁶
That accounted for the clerical tenths.

As summer passed, however, it became increasingly apparent that it was from France that the real threat would come. Having teetered on the brink of civil war in October 1405, Louis of Orléans and John of Burgundy had managed to bury the hatchet for long enough to agree on a twin-pronged offensive in the autumn of 1406, with John besieging Calais and Louis Bordeaux, and by the time Henry returned to London in mid-September
preparations for both were well in hand.
⁵⁷
To accompany these assaults, a letter written by Charles VI on 2 October called upon the English people to rise up against ‘he who now holds the rule of England’ and restore the crown to its ‘true heirs’, promising them such help as he had already given the Welsh – although whether many Englishmen read the letter is doubtful.
⁵⁸
Alarmed, Henry tried to head off the French with another embassy to Paris offering Prince Henry's hand in marriage (though not to Isabella, who on 29 June had married Charles, son of Louis of Orléans), redress for past injuries and security for French, Flemish and Breton fishermen, but it was in vain, and by 20 October the council was impressing ships and summoning royal retainers to join the army which the king proposed to lead ‘to the rescue of Calais’.
⁵⁹
It would be difficult in such circumstances to conduct business as normal, and although the third session of parliament did eventually begin on 18 October, and sat for at least five days, it was probably suspended shortly after this and did not meet again until 18 November.
⁶⁰

By this time the crisis at Calais had passed. As before, it was no royally led expeditionary force but the ungovernable enmity of Burgundy and Orléans which saved the town. Despite their show of amity over the past twelve months, the stranglehold which Louis had established over the French treasury since 1404 was making John the Fearless's position financially untenable, and it was imperative for him to increase his revenues from Anglo-Flemish trade. This, however, meant making a mercantile truce between England and Flanders, a policy towards which Louis was always opposed.
⁶¹
The Burgundians had in fact been conducting negotiations to this end (not always openly) for the past three years, and the impressive army which John mustered to threaten Calais in October 1406 was to
some extent an exercise in pressurizing Henry to accept his terms – although that does not mean that he would not have used his army if he felt that he had a chance of taking the town. Around 11–12 November, however, with winter approaching, he abandoned the siege and returned to Paris, complaining that Louis – who had left for Bordeaux in mid-September – had starved him of the funds needed to complete the task. By the time Louis returned to Paris on 18 February 1407, the Anglo-Flemish mercantile truce had been concluded (30 November) and ratified by Charles VI (15 January 1407).
⁶²