Henry IV (23 page)

³⁹
They witnessed royal charters when the king visited York in late March: C 53/165 (29 March and 1 April); Saul,
Richard II
, 473.

⁴⁰
The earls of Rutland and Nottingham served as proxies to plight Richard's troth in Paris, the latter placing the ring on Isabella's finger and occupying the seat normally reserved for the groom (
Saint-Denys
, ii.363–5, 413–15).

⁴¹
Henry witnessed a charter at Westminster in late July (C 53/165), but apart from this not much is known about his movements during the summer of 1396.

⁴²
For the young Henry's presence at Ardres, see DL 28/3/5, fo. 14r.

⁴³
Saul,
Richard II
, 229–34; Palmer,
England, France and Christendom
, 176–7;
Saint-Denys
, ii.451–67; J. Stratford,
Richard II and the English Royal Treasure
(Woodbridge, 2012), 57–64.

⁴⁴
SAC II
, 38–51. Despite Froissart's assertion to the contrary, Henry's kitchen journal (DL 28/1/9) makes it clear that he went to Calais; the duke of York remained in England as keeper of the realm (
Oeuvres de Froissart
, xv.298;
Foedera
, vii.841). Henry's household was based at Guines, just west of Ardres, for his two weeks in France. Gaunt paid £200 for accommodation at Calais on 16 October, but probably moved closer to Ardres once the summit began (DL 28/1/9, fo. 4v; DL 28/3/5, fo. 12r).

⁴⁵
CCR 1396–9
, 73; DL 28/1/9, fos. 2v, 5r, 6v, 7r–v.

Chapter 8

RICHARD RESURGENT (1397–1398)

The early 1390s had seen the house of Lancaster at the height of its power. Rich, renowned and resented, it threw its weight around a realm whose king was still feeling his way back from the humiliations inflicted on him in 1387–8. By the beginning of 1397 it had lost some of its swagger. Gaunt's credibility at home and abroad was irretrievably damaged by the Cheshire and Gascon risings, while his and Henry's inclination towards parallel rather than integrated development with the crown was viewed with increasing suspicion at a court now dominated by a new constellation of royal favourites. The conclusion of the Anglo-French negotiations marked another step-change in Richard II's kingship: freed for the foreseeable future from the prospect of war with France, he could focus on domestic politics. He also reaped significant financial benefit from the marriage – a dowry of 800,000 francs (£133,333) of which 300,000 francs were handed over on the day of the wedding.
¹
Politically and financially, therefore, the truce put Richard in a stronger position vis-à-vis his subjects, and it must have been with trepidation that those who had formerly crossed him gathered at Westminster in mid-January.

Although only revealed in its fullness from July 1397 onwards, and even then merely by stages, the clenched resentment of a decade is clearly detectable in Richard's actions from the time of the January 1397 parliament onwards. The mainsprings of the king's policy were twofold: the desire to avenge himself on his foes, and the achievement of that unchallenged authority within his realm which he had always regarded as his due but which had hitherto been denied him. When the commons submitted a bill criticizing the cost of the royal household and the ‘multitude of bishops and ladies with their followers’ who hung about the court, Richard demanded to know the identity of the individual responsible for introducing it. The unfortunate culprit, the clerk Thomas Haxey, was condemned to death as a traitor and only pardoned following a grovelling
apology from the house.
²
Richard was making it clear that he was not going to countenance a return to the parliamentary politics of the 1380s, with the government constantly on the back foot fending off criticisms of royal extravagance and favouritism. Parliament was cowed, petitioning closely controlled.
³
Yet the king did not have everything his own way. When he unveiled a plan to accompany his new father-in-law Charles VI on a military expedition against Gian Galeazzo Visconti, the duke of Milan, it met with no favour from the commons, and it was only the arrival of news that the French had decided not to proceed with the expedition which permitted Richard to climb down without losing face.
⁴
Henry would have been relieved: Gian Galeazzo was a friend with whom he continued to maintain regular contact through messengers, shared servants, and gift-exchange.
⁵
Nor, on the French side, did Charles VI's brother, Louis duke of Orléans, support the proposal, since he was married to Valentina, Gian Galeazzo's daughter. Their attachment to the Visconti cause was one of the factors that drew Henry and Louis together in the late 1390s.
⁶

One of the last acts of the January 1397 parliament was the legitimation of Henry's half-siblings, the four Beaufort children of John of Gaunt by Katherine Swynford. Gaunt had already secured a papal decree legitimizing them in the eyes of the Church, but their secular legitimation on 6 February was necessary to enable them to inherit lands, titles and offices in England ‘as if born in wedlock’.
⁷
Henry witnessed both this ceremony and the promotion to an earldom four days later of John Beaufort, indicating that he remained at Westminster until the dissolution of parliament on 12 February. However, the duke of Gloucester and the earls of Arundel and
Warwick left early,
⁸
and Gloucester and Arundel then infuriated the king by refusing to attend a council meeting, claiming that they were ill.
⁹
The rekindled tension between the king and the three senior Appellants also manifested itself in the decision to deprive Warwick of his manor of Bishopston on the Gower peninsula (Glamorgan), for his allegedly illegal occupation of which he was obliged to make a public apology to the king and fined for contempt. What was disturbing about this, and about Richard's decision to allow the earl of Salisbury to challenge the earl of March's right to the great Marcher lordship of Denbigh (Clwyd), was that the king was indicating his willingness to re-examine land claims dating back to the early years of the fourteenth century.
¹⁰
There was no suggestion for the moment that this process would involve the Lancastrian inheritance, but it was probably not coincidental that Gaunt chose this moment to draw up the first of a series of dispositions aimed at ensuring the safe passage of his lands to those for whom he intended them following his death.
¹¹
He also secured a new charter from the king confirming his rights within the Duchy of Lancaster and elsewhere in England.
¹²

Henry spent the spring of 1397 jousting at Windsor (in early March), with his father at Tutbury (for Easter), and visiting his daughters, now five and two, at Eaton Tregoz in Herefordshire, where they were being cared for by Hugh Waterton, before returning to London in mid-May.
¹³
Then, on 6 July 1397, he and six of his servants took up residence in the king's household.
¹⁴
By now Richard, never a man to forget where he had buried the hatchet, had made up his mind.
¹⁵
Warwick, having accepted an invitation
to dine with the king, was arrested on 10 July at the bishop of Exeter's house outside Temple Bar and sent to Tintagel (Cornwall).
¹⁶
Arundel was persuaded by his brother to surrender himself, the king having sworn to Archbishop Arundel that no harm would befall the earl; he was sent to Carisbrooke castle on the Isle of Wight. To apprehend Gloucester, Richard gathered a force of men-at-arms and rode through the night to Pleshey castle, seizing the duke at dawn, despite the lamentations of Duchess Eleanor (Henry's sister-in-law). Gloucester was taken to Dover and thence to Calais.
¹⁷
It was at least fifteen years since Henry had lodged in Richard's household, and there can only have been one reason why he did so now: because he was complicit, willingly or unwillingly, in the king's attack on the three senior Appellants. So too, doubtless, was his father: on the same day that Henry moved into Richard's household, the king confirmed Gaunt's tenure of the Duchy of Aquitaine.
¹⁸
The true extent of their complicity is unclear, and if Henry and Gaunt wanted to save themselves from a similar fate they arguably had little option but to feign support for Richard; it may also be significant that at times they were permitted a degree of detachment from the ensuing process. Yet there is no suggestion that Henry protested at what was being done, at times quite the contrary.

Parliament was summoned to Westminster on 17 September, and in early August the king and his supporters gathered at Nottingham castle to draw up the charges, which, mimicking the procedure used in 1387–8, were presented in the form of an Appeal of Treason. The essence of the accusations was that the three lords had traitorously usurped royal authority in 1386–8 and acted to the prejudice of the king's regality. Those who
formally presented the Appeal to the king – the ‘Counter-Appellants’ – were the earls of Rutland, Kent, Huntingdon, Salisbury, Nottingham and Somerset, William Le Scrope and Thomas Despenser. The inclusion of Thomas Mowbray, an Appellant in 1387–8, indicates that this was not the reason why Henry did not join the Counter-Appeal; nor was it because he was Gloucester's nephew, for so too was Rutland. Perhaps the king did not regard Henry as reliable enough, or perhaps Henry asked to be excused, or even refused to present the Appeal. Either way, it made it imperative for him to cooperate with the king in other ways, and he was present at Nottingham in early August, lodging with his household at Dale abbey, seven miles west of the city.
¹⁹
Henry, Gaunt and the duke of York were also licensed to bring their retinues to parliament ‘for the comfort of the king’: 300 men-at-arms and 600 archers for Gaunt, 200 and 400, respectively, for Henry, and 100 and 200 for York. This was a small army, and suggests that Richard felt that he had nothing to fear from them, although naturally the Counter-Appellants brought their retinues as well, and the king also summoned 2,000 of his Cheshire archers to serve as his bodyguard.
²⁰
London in September was a city under occupation.

Following the Nottingham council, which deferred the Appeal of Treason to parliament, Henry spent time at Leicester and Kenilworth before returning to London early in September. Richard had ordered his retainers to join him early on the morning of Saturday 15 September at Kingston-upon-Thames (Surrey) to ride with him on a ‘great justice’ to Westminster palace – a symbolic reclaiming of his capital.
²¹
Henry had hired a house in Fleet Street, and on the evening of Sunday 16 September, the eve of the parliament, he held a banquet there which the king attended.
²²
For the opening of parliament the following morning, Monday
17 September, a marquee had been erected in Westminster palace yard, around which were ranged hundreds of the king's Cheshire archers. The speaker of the commons was Sir John Bussy, who had served both Gaunt and Henry for a decade or more but was now bound fast to the king; no one can have been in doubt about the agenda.
²³
The Commission of Government of 1386 was revoked and declared to have been treasonable, and the charges against Gloucester, Arundel and Warwick read out. Arundel was brought to trial first, on Friday 21 September, and immediately claimed the benefit of two royal pardons granted to him in 1388 and 1394. John of Gaunt, presiding as steward of England, told him, ‘That pardon is revoked, traitor!’ ‘Never was I a traitor,’ rejoined Arundel, ‘and to be sure, when it comes to treason, you are in greater need of a pardon than I am.’ When Bussy informed him that it was the king, the lords ‘and us, the faithful commons’ who had revoked his pardons, Arundel retorted that the faithful commons, his supporters, were not present, only ‘you and your crew, who have always been false’.
²⁴
Yet it was Henry who provided the most damning piece of evidence against his former ally, asking him:

‘Did you not say to me at Huntingdon, where we initially gathered in rebellion, that before doing anything else it would be best to seize the king?’ ‘You, earl of Derby, you are lying through your teeth’, replied [Arundel]. ‘I never considered any action against our lord the king except what was in his interests and to his honour.’ Then the king himself said to him, ‘Did you not say to me in the bath-house behind the white hall, at the time of your parliament, that there were a number of reasons why my knight Sir Simon Burley deserved to die? To which I replied that I could see no reason why he should die – but even so you and your fellows treacherously put him to death.’
²⁵

This was safe ground for Henry. The seizure of the king and the death of Burley were precisely the issues that had divided him and Mowbray from the other Appellants ten years earlier, and Richard knew this. Turning to Gaunt, the king ordered him to pass sentence: Arundel was adjudged a traitor and
condemned to death, with the forfeiture of all his lands and possessions. He was beheaded that afternoon on Tower Hill, where Burley had died.

Two days later, on Sunday 23 September, it was Gaunt's turn to host a banquet at the bishop of Durham's house in London,
²⁶
then on the Monday Thomas Arundel, the archbishop of Canterbury, was also convicted of treason, deprived of his see and exiled for life, on the grounds that he had supported the 1386 Commission.
²⁷
The real drama, however, was yet to come. Around mid-August, rumours had begun to circulate that the duke of Gloucester had died. In fact the king had ordered Mowbray to have him killed at Calais, but Mowbray hesitated, fearful of committing so dreadful a crime, and it was not until three weeks later, on the night of 8 September, that Gloucester was murdered, suffocated or strangled in a back room of the Princes Inn at Calais.
²⁸
However, his death was not yet public knowledge, and for the moment Richard and Mowbray colluded in a public charade to mask their crime. When formally requested by the king to produce Gloucester for trial, Mowbray announced that he was unable to do so, since ‘I held this duke in my custody in the lord king's prison in the town of Calais, and there, in that same prison, he died’.
²⁹
Within a few months of the parliament, the suspicions aroused by Gloucester's death would begin to tear great cracks in the fabric of Richard's new political order, but for the moment it remained only to pass posthumous sentence of treason on the king's uncle and to declare his lands and possessions forfeit to the crown.
³⁰
Four days later, on 28 September, the earl of Warwick was also put on trial, and although his confession of the treasons imputed to him was widely derided, it did save his life: ‘moved to pity’, the king commuted his death sentence to life imprisonment on the Isle of Man.
³¹
Two years later, in Henry's first parliament, when Warwick, ‘blushing with shame’, denied having ever publicly admitted his treason, Henry told him to be quiet since everyone knew he had.
³²
Neither as earl of Derby nor as
king of England did Henry shed many tears over the fate of his former co-Appellants.