Henry IV (102 page)

What is clear is that it was the army of Guyenne that prompted the open letter he wrote from Coventry on 17 June.
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In this, the prince claimed that his father had asked him to accompany him on campaign but had
limited the number of men whom he could bring, a decision which made it impossible for him either to serve him honourably or to ensure his own safety. He had thus asked for permission to consult with his kinsmen and friends with a view to recruiting additional retainers, and this was what had brought him – with the king's knowledge and consent – to Coventry. He had no army with him, nor was he stirring up popular discontent (that is to say, he was not acting as Archbishop Scrope had). Nevertheless, certain ‘children of iniquity, disciples of dissension, supporters of schism, instigators of wrath and originators of strife, who . . . desired, with serpentine cunning, to attack the proper order of the royal succession’ were spreading lies to the effect that the prince, ‘longing for the crown of England with murderous desire’, was raising a rebellion to seize the throne for himself. They were also accusing him of trying to impede the departure of the campaign to Guyenne, thereby creating the impression that civil war was imminent. In fact, the prince protested, nothing was closer to his heart than the recovery of Guyenne and the crown's other rights and inheritances, a cause to which he would devote himself ‘as effectively as power is granted to me to do so’. As for his loyalty to his father, it was ‘as great as filial humility can express’. All this was, he declared, ‘the unfeigned truth of our innermost heart’, and his purpose in setting it down was to ensure that the truth be known.

Although Walsingham said this letter was despatched to ‘almost every part of the realm’, the Latin in which it was composed – learned, obscure, legalistically repetitive, as favoured by the Lancastrian chancery for its
pièces justificatives
– hardly made it appropriate as a popular manifesto, and as the prince made clear two weeks later when he arrived in London to ‘make more manifest’ the truth of what he had written, its intended audience was really the king. On 30 June the prince took up his lodgings with Thomas Langley, bishop of Durham and royal councillor, at St Martin in the Fields. The large and exalted retinue accompanying him (‘much people of lords and gentles’) was not intended as a military threat, but probably to remind his father of the strength of his following in the country.
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A day or two later he came into the king's presence where, according to Walsingham, he asked for one thing only, the punishment of those who had been traducing him. The king ‘seemed to assent’ to this, but told his son that if proceedings were to be brought they should be delayed until parliament next met.
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A more fanciful account of their meeting was preserved a
hundred years later in
The First English Life of Henry V
, apparently based on the recollections of James, earl of Ormond, who was in London at the time, preparing to sail to Guyenne. According to this, the prince sought an interview with his father because whisperers had persuaded the king that he wished to usurp the crown. Thus, ‘disguising himself’ (dressing up) in a blue satin gown pierced by multiple eyelets from each of which hung, by a silk thread, the needle used to make it, and with a
SS
collar on his arm, he came to Westminster with ‘a great company of lords’ and asked to speak to his father in private. When the king had been carried through on his litter to a secret chamber where only three or four others were present, he asked his son what concerned him. Prince Henry began by protesting his undying loyalty and insisting that there was no truth in the rumours that he wished to replace his father; indeed, if there was any person in the world whom the king feared, he would see it as his duty to punish that person, ‘thereby to erase that sore from your heart’. Then, having assured his father that he had prepared himself for this moment by confessing himself and receiving communion, he held out a dagger, saying, ‘I desire you here before your knees to slay me with this dagger, [for] my life is not so desirous to me that I would live one day that I should be to your displeasure, [and] I clearly forgive you my death’. The king, overcome with compassion, wept copiously, cast the dagger away, embraced his son, and assured him that, whatever anyone said to him, he would henceforth trust him absolutely. Thus was Prince Henry restored to his ‘former grace and favour’.
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Whatever the truth of the matter, it is clear that a degree of reconciliation followed this meeting, but the prince can hardly have been satisfied with its outcome.
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No parliament was summoned to try those who had slandered him, and there was no sign of the favouritism being shown to his younger brother being modified. It was this that rankled most with Prince Henry. Hardyng said that when the king had discharged him from the council, he had replaced him with Thomas, whereupon Prince Henry's ‘wrath and wilful head’ led to a quarrel between the brothers which was
only resolved after the king forced his eldest son to submit.
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John Strecche employed biblical analogy to make the point. When he made Thomas duke of Clarence, said Strecche:

He gave him his paternal blessing and in his manner confirmed all his goods to him, and he placed his other lords beneath him, weeping and kissing and declaring, ‘Just as Isaac the patriarch in his old age blessed Jacob his son with fatherly affection, so now I bless you. And I pronounce you the favoured one, and fortunate in war.’ As a result of which great fortune was bestowed on Thomas, a most noble prince and knight.
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The chronicler's meaning was unmistakable. Jacob was the son who had usurped his brother Esau's birthright by duping their blind father Isaac into giving him rather than Esau his paternal blessing: ‘Be lord over thy brethren, and let thy mother's sons bow down to thee.’ When Esau discovered what Jacob had done, he swore vengeance, but Isaac said to him that for the moment he must serve his brother, but that ‘when thou shalt have the dominion, thou shalt break his yoke from off thy neck’.
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Henry was far too practical to contemplate making Thomas his heir, a step which would almost certainly have plunged the fledgling Lancastrian dynasty into civil war. Nevertheless, the summer of 1412 witnessed a dangerous escalation of the rivalry between the king's two eldest sons, and the fact that it was at exactly this time that the financial settlement consequent on the marriage of Thomas and Margaret Beaufort was being worked out provided another bone of contention to add to the prince's resentment at his dismissal from the council, his brother's new-found prominence, and the reversal of his Burgundian policy.
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Yet it is most unlikely that Prince Henry was asking for drastic action to be taken against Thomas; it was the court whisperers at whom his ire was levelled. His objective was to reassert his authority as heir to the throne, which had been severely dented during the past eight months.

By 3 July, when the king moved from Clerkenwell to the bishop of London's palace, the immediate battle of wills was over, but it was the king, not the prince, who had reasserted his authority. Henry may have softened the blow by making some concessions to his son. A detachment under the prince's retainer the earl of Warwick was sent to reinforce Calais soon after this, and on 1 August a writ was issued for the arrest of Prior Butler, deputy lieutenant of Ireland. Prince Henry had long criticized his brother's governance of Ireland and was ever an advocate for Calais.
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But on the issues that really mattered he was overborne. Any hopes he still entertained that the Guyenne campaign might be suspended or diverted were quashed (according to the well-trained Burgundian spy Jean Kernezn, the king persuaded the prince to ‘change his mind’) and arrangements for the army's departure gathered speed.
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On 5 July, to enhance his authority for the campaign, Thomas Beaufort was made earl of Dorset, following which the king moved down the Thames to Rotherhithe where, between 8 and 10 July, a council was held to finalize plans.
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On 9 July, Thomas was made duke of Clarence – again, to enhance his authority and to put him on a par with the French dukes and with his second-in-command, the duke of York. The next week saw the settlement of the outstanding issues between him and Bishop Beaufort over his wife's dowry, which, although it involved compromise on each side, was broadly in Thomas's favour.
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Although Prince Henry remained at St Martin in the Fields until 11 July, he played no part in any of this. He witnessed neither the promotion of Dorset nor that of Clarence, nor the appointment of the latter as the king's lieutenant of Guyenne (of which the prince was, nominally, the duke).
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On the day
he left London, orders for the muster were issued, and Clarence, York, Dorset and their captains set off for Southampton. Delayed by a contrary wind, it was not until 1 August that the fleet of fourteen ships set sail, only to be blown back into harbour three days later. A second attempt was successful, and around 10 August the English army disembarked, auspiciously, at Saint-Vaast-la-Hougue on the Cotentin peninsula of Normandy where, sixty-six years earlier, Edward III had landed his army for the campaign that would climax at the battle of Crécy.
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The despatch of a 4,000-strong army to France within twelve weeks of the Treaty of Bourges was no mean organizational feat, but it was not quick enough. France was already on a war footing, and once Charles VI and Burgundy saw which way the wind was blowing they raised an army and marched due south from Paris to Bourges. Their priority was to bring the Armagnac lords to obedience; after that it was said that they planned to march on Guyenne (thereby confirming Prince Henry's fears). On 11 June they arrived before Bourges, where the duke of Berry was ensconced with the main Armagnac force, and laid siege to the town. After a month during which heat, thirst and dysentery debilitated both camps, the king and Burgundy faced a dilemma: to await the arrival of the English and the likelihood of a pitched battle, or to offer terms which, inescapably, would include pardoning the Armagnac ‘Judases’. By 12 July they had chosen the latter, and the septuagenarian duke of Berry, who had moved residence seven times during the siege to avoid the cannonballs fired from Burgundy's great guns, swiftly accepted. In return for renouncing the Treaty of Bourges, agreeing to cooperate with the king and Burgundy against Clarence, and promising not to make any further alliance with the English, the Armagnac lords were readmitted to the fold and their confiscated lands and titles restored to them.
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If this news did not reach Clarence before he sailed, he would have heard it as soon as he landed, but he chose to ignore it and, having made short work of a substantial French force waiting in the Cotentin to repel him, set off through Normandy towards the Loire.
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Meanwhile, the now united French lords had moved to Auxerre where, on 22 August, at a grand and solemn convocation in the church of
Saint-Germain, presided over by the Dauphin Louis since Charles VI was suffering one of his ‘absences’, assurances of peace and reconciliation were exchanged. Clarence's army, they all agreed, must be removed from France; the problem was how.

The English army, reinforced by six hundred Gascons who had been at Bourges, was by now in Anjou, ravaging the countryside as it went.
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As early as 22 July, the Armagnac lords had written to the English king and his sons explaining that King Charles had been ‘greatly displeased’ at the Treaty of Bourges and had ordered them to repudiate it, as a result of which they would not be able to honour their commitments; they enclosed a copy of Charles's letter, dated the previous day.
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Although this was obviously a blow to Clarence, it did not need to, and did not, deflect him from his purpose. Not all the signatories to the Treaty of Bourges accepted its repudiation: the count of Alençon, who had greeted the English warmly and whose lands they had already begun to restore, absented himself from Auxerre, and it soon became clear that he, Orléans, Armagnac and Albret hoped to reach an accommodation with Clarence which would obviate the ravaging of their southern lordships.
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By 16 September the English had reached Blois, where heralds from the duke of Berry arrived with letters, but since these were addressed to the English king and Prince Henry, Clarence declined to accept them. His self-righteous reply averred disbelief at the idea that Berry would dishonour his word and claimed that had the English king not received such promises from the Armagnacs he would have been minded to ally with the Burgundians. This was probably true, but his confidently expressed expectation that Berry would still come to Blois so as to ‘mind his faith and loyalty’ was bluff.
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What was clear from Clarence's letter was that he had no intention of going home quietly, if at all. His army had been promised payment, and had already shown what it would do to get it. When the French lords protested that they had no money, the citizens of Paris retorted that it was up to those who had invited the English in to pay them to go away. Each day they remained, the catalogue of their atrocities lengthened: burning, looting, killing, kidnapping, destroying towns and churches, they spent two
months inflicting great evils (
grans maulx
) on the lands around the Loire.
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By mid-October the Armagnac lords had bowed to the inevitable and opened negotiations, resulting on 14 November in an agreement at Buzançais (between Bourges and Poitiers) whereby, in return for agreeing to leave the kingdom of France by 1 January, the English would receive 210,000
écus d'or
(£40,000). Whether ‘the kingdom of France’ included Guyenne was a moot point, as elusive in the agreement at Buzançais as in the Treaty of Bourges. Pledges were given in the form either of treasure and jewels, especially by the famously wealthy and discerning duke of Berry, or of hostages, including Orléans's eight-year-old brother John, count of Angoulême, who would spend the next thirty years in England before being released.
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The French king gave the English a safe-conduct to Bordeaux, and the monk of Saint-Denis reported that once they had been promised what they wanted and set off, they ‘behaved on their march more moderately than the French’. They arrived at Bordeaux on 11 December.
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