Henry IV (32 page)

Yet if he could present himself with confidence as heir to the throne in the direct male line, everyone knew that Henry was not the primogenitary heir: that position was occupied by the eight-year-old Edmund, son of Roger, earl of March, who had been killed in battle against the Irish in July 1398. In 1403, when the Percys rebelled, they claimed that Henry had sworn neither to depose Richard nor to claim the throne for himself, but
had then promptly deprived Edmund of his birthright. However, there is no credible evidence that they or anyone else opposed Henry's challenge at the time he made it.
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There were in fact several good reasons to prefer Henry's claim in 1399. Edmund's youth was crucial: England needed unity in the aftermath of Richard's misrule, and the succession of a child was unlikely to achieve this. Also, the majority of English nobles had by this time made settlements of their estates in tail male, thereby excluding female descendants, and in 1376 Edward III had in effect extended this custom to the crown, even if the fact was not widely known. What was certainly well known was that in France the nobility had decided to exclude females and their descendants from the succession, making it arguable that only a descendant through the male line would stand a chance of enforcing the Plantagenet claim to the French throne. Henry did not deploy such arguments in 1399, or at least not in public, but one further argument he did use was that by (allegedly) handing over his signet ring to Henry, Richard had effectively designated him as his successor.
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Since Richard had been asked on at least one occasion to choose between Lancaster and Mortimer, this was a point worth making.
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Henry's claim was, at any rate, sufficient unto the day: each of the lords was asked if he would accept it, and each gave his assent. Henry then rose from his seat to say: ‘My lords spiritual and temporal assembled here, we beg you not simply to speak these words with your mouths if they do not come from your hearts, but to agree to them with your hearts as well as your mouths. Nevertheless, should it happen that some of you do not in your hearts assent to this, that would be no great surprise to me.’

If this sounded slightly defensive, Henry was soon reassured: another loud cry of ‘Yes, yes, yes’ greeted his words, whereupon the archbishops of Canterbury and York led him to the throne and kissed his hands. Kneeling for a moment to pray, he made the sign of the cross on the front and back of the throne, and then, ‘to the great joy of the people’, seated himself on the cloth of gold draped across it. Once the acclamation had subsided, Archbishop Arundel preached a sermon on the theme ‘A man shall rule
over the people’,
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emphasizing Henry's maturity and manliness in contrast to Richard's childish wilfulness, following which Henry gave an undertaking (once again in English) that even though conquest had played a part in his claim to the throne, he would not disinherit anyone apart from ‘those persons that have acted contrary to the good purpose and the common profit of the realm’.
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Fears were thus calmed that other supporters of the deposed king might be treated as Le Scrope, Bussy and Green had been.

The proceedings now drew to a close. The chancellor, treasurer, constable and marshal formally surrendered their symbols of office (seals, mace and baton) and were reappointed as the new king's ministers.
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Parliament was scheduled for Monday 6 October and Henry's coronation one week later, but for the moment it was time to celebrate. It was between three and four o'clock in the afternoon when Henry rose from his throne and, ‘looking at the people with a glad and kindly countenance’, withdrew to the White Hall of the palace of Westminster, where a banquet had been prepared.
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Parliament duly opened on 6 October, but remained in session no longer than it took for Archbishop Arundel to deliver a sermon, for a speaker to be elected, and for triers and receivers of petitions to be appointed, before being adjourned.
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Henry's choice of Monday 13 October (the Translation of Edward the Confessor) for his coronation might have been a way of signalling his appropriation of the saint who had become the talisman of English monarchy, but it was also an auspicious date, for it was a year to the day since he had crossed to France to begin his exile.
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Although suffused with centuries-old religious and political symbolism, the English coronation ceremony was not set in stone, and around its spiritual nucleus there had grown up over the years a panoply of political and social rituals giving expression to notions such as continuity, renovation, reconciliation, orderliness and hierarchy. Henry added several elaborations of his own, the first of which was the dubbing of forty-six new knights who joined the king in
the Tower two days before the coronation, spent the night maintaining a vigil, were ritually bathed as a sign of purification (thus mimicking Henry's own preparations for his coronation, which also entailed an all-night vigil and a purifying bath), and were then knighted during mass on the Sunday morning before accompanying Henry in procession to Westminster later in the day, dressed in identical long green robes and hats trimmed with miniver and embellished with cords and tassels of white silk.
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The existing royal order of knighthood in England, that of the Garter, was restricted by its statutes to twenty-six members and included many who, as Richard's nominees, were politically unreliable. Henry's new knights, by contrast, were mostly staunch Lancastrians and would form a chivalrically bound fraternity of young braves, dedicated by their act of creation to the personal service of the new sovereign.
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As the creation of a king who had won a name for himself on crusade and was the companion of famous knights such as Marshal Boucicaut and Louis of Orléans (both of whom had recently founded orders of knighthood), Henry was expressing the intention to raise the reputation of English knighthood from its currently rather anonymous level. His inspiration may have been the order of
La Banda
(the Sash), created in 1332 by Alfonso XI of Castile when he dubbed 112 knights at his coronation to provide him with a corps of chivalric companions to prosecute the war against the Moors.
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The main event on the afternoon of Sunday 12 October was the procession through London from the Tower to Westminster palace. Despite the rain, Henry rode bare-headed on a white charger, wearing a short doublet of cloth of gold, a blue garter on his left leg, and the badge of the king of France around his neck, a reminder of the Plantagenet claim to the French throne. He was accompanied by over 2,000 lords, ladies, knights, clerks and household servants, all wearing newly made robes, and perhaps three times as many horses.
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The mayor and citizens of London were arrayed in fur-trimmed scarlet liveries and sported their company badges. Those who rode closest to the king such as Thomas Erpingham, who carried Henry's sword, and Thomas Percy, who bore the steward's baton, wore red velvet or silk, and the streets were decked out with gorgeous hangings and punctuated with conduits dispensing free wine.
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Following his vigil and bath, Henry began the day of the coronation by confessing himself and hearing three masses.
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Shortly before nine o'clock the monks of Westminster and other prelates crossed the yard from the abbey to the palace, where they waited outside the royal chamber. Barefoot apart from his sandals, Henry emerged to be first purified by the archbishops of Canterbury and York with holy water and incense, and then conducted by the monks and bishops back to the abbey; four citizens of the Cinque Ports held above him a canopy of blue silk supported by silver rods attached to which were ‘four jingling golden bells’, while the bishop of London carried the holy sacrament and sang the mass.
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On one side of him walked the thirteen-year-old Prince Henry, on the other the earl of Northumberland. Four swords were borne around the king rather than the usual three: Prince Henry carried the Curtana, the coronation sword which Henry himself had borne at Richard's banquet twenty-two years earlier, while the earls of Somerset (John Beaufort) and Warwick (released from exile on the Isle of Man) each bore a sword wrapped in red and bound with golden straps to symbolize twofold mercy. The additional sword, carried by the earl of Northumberland, was the one Henry had
with him at the time of his landing at Ravenspur three months earlier and was known as Lancaster sword.
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Much of the ceremony in the abbey followed established custom. On entering the church, the procession advanced towards an elevated platform covered with crimson cloth set up between the transepts, on top of which was the throne draped in cloth of gold. Henry mounted the steps and sat on the throne. Archbishop Arundel ascended with him before turning to the congregation to ask if they wanted Henry as their king. ‘Yes’ they cried, stretching out their hands towards him as a sign of faith and allegiance.
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Turning back to Henry, Arundel read out the four articles of the coronation oath, which the king swore to uphold.
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The two men then descended from the platform and approached the high altar, where another cloth of gold had been spread over the paving stones, and here, while the congregation sang
Veni Creator Spiritus
, Henry's clothes were stripped from his upper body and he was anointed on his hands, chest, shoulders, upper back, arms and head.
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Unction was the transcendental moment of the coronation, by which the new king was invested with quasi-sacerdotal qualities and raised, as The Lord's Anointed, above other mortals. What is more, it was indelible, as Richard had reminded those who came to the Tower on 1 October to inform him of his deposition – his point being that Henry's enthronement in Westminster Hall the previous day might have made a king of him, but not an anointed king.
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Henry's way of trumping his predecessor was to have himself anointed with a new, miraculous, holy oil. This, it was claimed, had been given to Thomas Becket during his exile in France in the 1160s, when the Blessed Virgin appeared and had handed
him a figurine of a golden eagle enclosing an ampulla which contained the oil with which future kings of England should be crowned; the first king to be crowned with it, she said, would be a champion of the Church, recover the lands held by his forefathers in France, and drive the infidel from the Holy Land. Brought to England in the early fourteenth century, the ampulla was unearthed in the 1390s by Richard while rummaging through some old chests in the Tower; when he read about its miraculous properties, he asked Archbishop Arundel to anoint him with it, but Arundel refused, saying that unction was not a rite that could be repeated. Thus it was that Henry became the first king to be anointed with St Thomas's oil, as a result of which, declared Walsingham, it was believed that he had been chosen by God to accomplish greater deeds than any king before him.
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The French ambassadors to whom Henry proudly showed the ampulla a few weeks after his coronation were struck by his confidence that St Thomas's oil would give him victory over his enemies; it also placed English coronations on a par with those of the French kings, who were traditionally anointed with chrism brought from heaven by an angel at the baptism of King Clovis in 496 and kept ever since in the
Sainte Ampoulle
.
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Unfortunately the effects of Henry's anointment were not all beneficial, for according to Usk the new oil caused his head to be so infected with lice that his hair fell out, so that for months afterwards he was obliged to keep his head covered.
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Unction was followed by crowning. Dressed in his coronation robes ‘like a deacon’, Henry was now invested with the regalia: slippers of red velvet, rebated spurs, sword, bracelets, pallium, the crown itself (placed upon his head by the two archbishops) and the ring taken from Richard in the Tower. According to Froissart, the crown used was St Edward's and was arched in the shape of a cross – in other words, a closed (‘imperial’) rather
than an open crown.
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If he was right, then it must have been made during Richard's reign, for Richard had certainly used an open crown in 1377. That it was his supplanter who benefited from Richard's desire to elevate the symbolism of the coronation ceremony with new oil and a new crown was ironic.
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Wearing his crown, Henry now took the sceptre in his right hand and the coronation staff in his left and was blessed by the archbishop, kissed by each of the bishops, and escorted back up to the throne while the prelates sang
Te Deum Laudamus
; this was followed by the coronation mass and a final blessing, after which the royal party processed back to the Great Hall, his four sons riding ahead of the new king while the Constable and Marshal cleared a way through the throng.
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The day ended with a banquet in the Great Hall, newly rebuilt with its intersecting arch-brace and hammer-beam roof designed by Richard's master-carpenter Hugh Herland. The menu has survived.
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There were three courses, each one accompanied by
soteltees
(delicacies, often spiced). The first included sturgeon, heron, pheasant, boar's head, brawn, capon and other ‘great meats’ and ‘royal viands’; this was followed by venison, crane, bittern and pullet, more brawn
fryez
and ‘great tarts’; finally there was rabbit, egret, curlew, partridge, peewit, quail, eagle, snipe and other small birds, along with apples and
doucettys
(sweetmeats). Henry and the prelates sat at a table on a high platform against the south end of the building. Behind him stood his eldest son and the earl of Northumberland holding their swords, while the earl of Westmorland and Lord Furnivall held the sceptre and staff. Coronation duties had been allocated at the Court of Claims on 4 October: the earl of Arundel acted as butler, the earl of Oxford as ewerer, Lord Grey of Ruthin as naperer, Thomas Erpingham as chamberlain, John Lord Latimer as almoner, William Venour as waferer and Edmund de la Chaumbre as lardiner; William d'Argentan carried the
king's golden goblet and the mayor of London poured his wine. The dukes of Aumale, Surrey and Exeter and the earls of Somerset and Warwick helped to carve and serve the king's food.
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Seating was arranged according to precedent, with the barons of the Cinque Ports and the mayor and aldermen of London occupying tables just below the king's, and further tables reserved for the dukes and earls of the realm and for the newly created knights.
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