Henry IV (28 page)

It was doubtless the confidence he placed in his father's affinity that persuaded Henry to land in Yorkshire.
³⁹
Putting in first at Cromer in
Norfolk (a duchy property) to pick up supplies, then around 30 June at Ravenspur, an abandoned settlement at the mouth of the Humber where a hermit was later permitted to build a chapel to mark the spot, he eventually disembarked at Bridlington or a point close by, hoping presumably to enlist the aid of his favourite saint for his enterprise.
⁴⁰
Among the first to join him were Robert Waterton, steward of Pontefract, bringing with him 200 foresters from Knaresborough, and the Yorkshire knight Sir Peter Bukton, former steward of his household.
⁴¹
The force Henry had brought with him from France consisted of a few dozen persons at most, and although it included experienced soldiers such as Erpingham, Rempston, de Courte and Norbury, it was in no sense an army of invasion. As a banner to rally the discontented, however, it served its purpose admirably. Henry himself, Archbishop Arundel, and the son of his beheaded brother were potent symbols of the warped judgments of Richard's later years. That the Lancastrian affinity would rally to Henry's cause might have been expected, but equally reassuring to Henry must have been the speed with which magnates such as the earls of Northumberland and Westmorland and Lords Willoughby, Greystoke and Roos came out against the king, and the fact that the citizens of York and Hull loaned him money to pay his troops. By the middle of July, the platoon-sized force which had beached at Ravenspur at the end of June had been transformed into an army several thousand strong.
⁴²

Although localized acts of resistance to Richard's regime broke out with remarkable speed,
⁴³
Henry remained wary during the first two weeks after his landing, moving from one duchy castle in Yorkshire to another (Pickering, Knaresborough, Pontefract); only once his level of support
became apparent did he advance more rapidly southwards. At Leicester, around 20 July, he recruited followers from his father's Midland honours and from the retainers of the earl of Warwick.
⁴⁴
So far, he had encountered little resistance,
⁴⁵
but what the keeper of the realm would do was unclear. News of an impending invasion had reached Westminster on 28 June, prompting the duke of York to order the sheriffs to raise troops and join him at Ware (Hertfordshire) as soon as possible.
⁴⁶
As yet, York had little idea where the danger lay – the south coast and the west country both featured in his earliest plans – but by 7 July, when he left London for St Albans, he knew that Henry had landed in Yorkshire. On 12 July he moved to Ware to collect his troops, and by 16 July he had arrived at Oxford, where further contingents joined him.
⁴⁷
At its peak, his army consisted of around 3,000 men, but his position was weak. News of the ‘wondrous events’ in the north filled the land. ‘The eagle is up and has taken his flight’, enthused one poet, and ‘with him he brings the colt of the steed’ (the son of the earl of Arundel); the bush would be cropped (Bussy), the grass mown (Green) and the ‘great bag’ cut down to size (Bagot).
⁴⁸
The author of
Richard the Redeless
characterized Henry alternately as the eagle, the falcon or the greyhound. The poem opened in July at Bristol, where the author was praying in the church of the Trinity when rumours began to circulate that, while Richard ‘warred in the west’, Henry, a man whom ‘all the land loved throughout its length and breadth’, had landed in the east ‘to right his wrong, so that he should later do likewise for [the people]’. ‘Now, Richard the Redeless (ill-advised)’, chided the author, ‘take pity on yourself, you who led your life lawlessly and your people as well’, for Henry ‘has entered into his own’, and ‘covetousness has crushed your crown forever’.
⁴⁹
Sympathy for Henry's cause could also be found among the duke of York's troops, some of whom bluntly informed him that they would not partake in an attack on Henry, while York himself is said to have declared that he had no intention of attacking someone who had come to
ask for the restoration of his rightful inheritance.
⁵⁰
Thus even as his army was mustering, it began to disintegrate, desertions multiplying as the invader approached. Money was not York's problem: he handed out over £2,000 to his captains and promised a good deal more. Yet there were many, as Walsingham put it, who, having accepted payment, ‘set off to find the duke of Lancaster and to fight with him at the wages of King Richard’.
⁵¹
By about 20 July the keeper's position was becoming untenable. Hoping to make contact with Richard's army when it returned from Ireland, he sent his fellow councillors (Bussy, Le Scrope, Green, Bagot and John Russell) to Bristol, while he himself moved northwards via Stow-on-the-Wold to Gloucester and Berkeley, a route designed to effect a meeting with Henry.

Map 3
The revolution of 1399

Meanwhile Henry had arrived at Warwick castle on 24 July to discover that the duke of Surrey had placed a crowned hart of Richard II's livery and a white hind of his own livery atop the castle gate, both of which he demolished – the clearest signal yet that his ambitions extended beyond the restoration of the duchy of Lancaster.
⁵²
Publicly, Henry claimed that he had returned merely to claim his rightful inheritance, a cause which he knew would unite support behind him, and it was later asserted that he had sworn ‘upon the relics of Bridlington’, as well as at Doncaster when he was joined by the Percys, that this was all he would claim.
⁵³
Yet it is hard to believe that it did not cross the minds of those who marched with him in the summer of 1399 that their support was likely to have more thoroughgoing consequences. Left to rule, Richard might bide his time, but ultimately he would seek revenge, as he had in 1397–8; despite claims to the contrary later made by the Percys and others, his deposition was surely seen as the likeliest outcome of a successful military campaign by Henry. More contentious was the question of who would succeed him, to which Henry probably gave answers that were at best ambiguous and more likely mendacious.

Crossing the Severn at Gloucester,
⁵⁴
Henry arrived on Sunday 27 July at Berkeley, where he and York ‘came to an agreement’ in a chapel outside the castle.
⁵⁵
Exactly what this entailed is not recorded, but the outcome is clear: York abandoned his attempt to resist Henry's progress by force. Henry may
have been asked to give certain undertakings in return, but it was probably too late for that by now. A few Ricardian die-hards such as Henry Despenser, bishop of Norwich, were placed under arrest, and on the following day the two dukes moved on to Bristol. Bagot had escaped to Ireland, but Le Scrope, Bussy, Russell and Green were still in the castle. Surrendered by the garrison, they were kept in custody overnight and tried before a military court on the morning of 29 July. Russell was spared, feigning insanity, but Le Scrope, Bussy and Green were convicted and beheaded; had they not been, it was said that the mob would have ‘broken them into little pieces’.
⁵⁶
In Henry's eyes they were guilty specifically of betraying him and his father, for Le Scrope came from a family with a tradition of service to the dukes of Lancaster, while Bussy and Green had both been Gaunt's retainers for nearly two decades, yet all three had been accomplices to the seizure of his inheritance.
⁵⁷
York's role at Bristol was telling: as keeper of the realm, he not only attended the execution of the king's councillors but used his authority to order the surrender of the castle.
⁵⁸
Indeed it was probably on his formal authority that they were tried, although in practice it must have been Henry's decision. From now onwards, Henry increasingly acted as if he were already king of England, even if he continued to preserve the fiction that he was acting in Richard's name. Yet by 2 August, when Henry appointed the earl of Northumberland to be keeper of Carlisle castle and warden of the West March of Scotland, offices manifestly in the gift of the crown, and sealed the appointment with the duchy of Lancaster seal, the line separating his de facto and
de jure
authority must have seemed to many to have faded almost to vanishing point.
⁵⁹

The fact remained, however, that Richard was still at large and, so far as Henry knew, in possession of an army. The king had arrived back from Ireland at Milford Haven (Pembrokeshire) around 24 July. A week later he had reached Carmarthen and made contact with some of the duke of York's officials, who probably told him of the startling transformation in his and Henry's fortunes. Deciding that he could not risk an armed confrontation – for the army which he commanded was but a shadow of the force which he had led to Ireland two months previously, storms and
delays having scattered his fleet to a variety of ports – he made instead for North Wales, whither he had already despatched the earl of Salisbury to raise support and which was sufficiently close to Cheshire to offer the chance of a counter-attack or at least a refuge.
⁶⁰
In the interests of speed, he left his army behind, slipping away with just a dozen followers on the night of 31 July, dressed as a priest according to one account.
⁶¹
When Aumale and Worcester awoke to find him gone, they disbanded the royal household, dismissed the army and made their way to Chester to submit to Henry.
⁶²

Henry's decision to make for Cheshire, Richard's inner citadel, made good sense. Marching along the Anglo-Welsh border during the first week of August, a route parallel to that of the king about sixty miles to the west, he encountered isolated pockets of resistance, but nothing to slow his progress apart from the daily influx of renegades from Richard's Irish army such as Robert Lord Scales, Thomas Lord Bardolf and (once he reached Chester) Aumale, Worcester, and Lords Lovell and Stanley.
⁶³
Yet according to Adam Usk the most welcome recruit to Henry's cause was no earl or peer but a greyhound, credited by the chronicler with an unerring instinct for the mutability of political fortunes. After the death of its first master, the earl of Kent, in 1397, the dog had found its way by instinct to Richard, with whom it remained day and night for two years, but when the king abandoned his army at Carmarthen it promptly deserted him and ‘once again by its own instinct, alone and unaided’, made its way to Shrewsbury, where it ‘crouched obediently before Henry, whom it had never seen before, with a look of the purest pleasure on its face’. Delighted at such a happy augury, Henry allowed it to sleep on his bed, and later, when brought once again
into Richard's presence, it failed to recognize him.
⁶⁴
Also at Shrewsbury, where he spent the nights of 5 and 6 August, Henry received the submission of Chester, conveyed to him by Sir Robert and Sir John Leigh, members of the family which more than any other had been influential in promoting the king's interests there.
⁶⁵
For Richard, this represented the closing of the last window of hope, but it also disappointed some of Henry's own followers, whose hatred for Cheshire and its people had encouraged them to join him in the hope of plundering the county, but who now returned to their homes. In fact they were over-hasty. Despite promising to spare Cheshire, Henry was either unable or unwilling to prevent it being ravaged once his army entered the county on 8 August: crops were wasted, booty seized, chapels stripped of their valuables and exemplary retribution exacted. Three days after his arrival, Perkyn Leigh, a hero to many Cheshiremen and the leading royalist in the city, was summarily beheaded and his head set up on a stake outside the east gate of the town.
⁶⁶
For two weeks Henry's army occupied Chester, destroying houses and looting whatever weapons or provisions they cared to seize. The city chamberlain's account claimed that his men had seized 400 bows, large quantities of arrows, bowstrings, lance-heads, crossbows, baldrics and quarrels from the castle, along with substantial quantities of wine and salt.
⁶⁷

Meanwhile, the king and his small band of devotees had made their way northwards from Carmarthen, keeping close to the coast, and arrived at Conway castle around 6 August, but no army awaited him, only the hundred or so men who had accompanied Salisbury from Ireland.
⁶⁸
‘Downcast and miserable’, Richard had with him the dukes of Exeter and Surrey, the earl
of Gloucester, three bishops including Thomas Merks of Carlisle, and half a dozen or so servants and soldiers including the redoubtable Navarrese esquire Janico Dartasso. In the hope that something short of unconditional surrender might yet be negotiated, Exeter and Surrey were sent to parley with Henry. Exeter advised Richard to confront Henry directly, to offer him his inheritance and remind him of the shame which would fall upon his head should he depose a lawful king. There was apparently still a belief, or at least a hope, that the army left behind at Carmarthen might rejoin them in the north, but within a further day or two a messenger arrived from South Wales to inform the king that his Irish army had disbanded, which plunged Richard into another slough of despond. Believing Conway to be threatened, he decamped, first to Beaumaris on Anglesey, then to Caernarvon, possibly thinking to escape by ship, possibly searching for the safest refuge. The castles were unfurnished and unprovisioned: there was only straw to sleep on and barely enough to eat. Richard, ‘his face often pale’, cursed the day that he had decided to go to Ireland, but if he seriously thought of fleeing overseas, which he probably could have done, something or someone persuaded him not to; by 15 August at the latest, he was back at Conway to await the return of Exeter and Surrey.