Henry IV (38 page)

Another factor raising expectations was the belief that Richard had amassed great wealth during the later years of his reign and that his hoard had fallen into Henry's hands. There was some truth in this. There was, for example, the £43,964 which Richard had stored at Holt castle, at least some of which Henry had seized in August 1399; part of this was used on the spot to pay his army while the remainder was probably drawn upon periodically as a source of ready cash over the next three years, for not until November 1402 was John Ikelyngton, the clerk entrusted by Richard with safeguarding it, acquitted of the full sum. As the spoil of conquest it
would presumably have passed through the king's chamber, for which few accounts survive.
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There was also the latest instalment of Queen Isabella's dowry that Henry had been so reluctant to return to Charles VI; the £14,664 paid into the exchequer in French crowns on 10 December 1399 doubtless came from this.
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Exhorted by parliament to recover whatever he could of Richard's cash, jewels and moveable goods, Henry certainly made an effort to do so, but how much of this found its way to the exchequer is not clear. Like kings before him, Henry had a keen appreciation of his right to retain windfalls for his personal use.
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Yet if he could justifiably claim to be acting according to the mores of his predecessors, that was probably not perceived to be good enough for a king who had so stridently criticized the financial policies of his predecessor, and successive parliaments continued to question him about Richard's ‘missing money’.
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These windfalls went a long way towards helping Henry to navigate his first year, for his only other major source of real (as opposed to borrowed) income was the wool customs, which brought in some £40,000. Apart from this the exchequer fed off scraps, such as the ornaments of Richard's chapel royal, abandoned by him at Haverfordwest in July 1399, or the forfeited goods of Le Scrope, Bussy, Green, and the rebel earls of January 1400, which yielded a little over £2,000.
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By the autumn of 1400 there were signs of imminent financial collapse. Fictitious loans (assignments of revenue by tallies which turned out to be uncashable) totalled over £25,000 between Easter 1400 and Easter 1401.
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In February 1400 Henry had secured an aid from the great council ‘in order to avoid the summoning of any parliament’,
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yet between April and July relays of sergeants-at-arms
were despatched to monasteries, prelates and laymen seeking loans.
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As a result, the exchequer borrowed more than £20,000 during the year, the most generous individual lender being Richard (Dick) Whittington, the London mercer and both former and future mayor of the city.
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It was probably to facilitate borrowing from the city that Whittington and two of his fellow Londoners, John Shadworth and William Brampton, were retained as members of the king's council on 1 November 1399.
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Yet even extensive borrowing could not bridge the gulf between income and expenditure. The cost to Henry of his campaign to regain the throne, plus the liabilities of one sort or another which he inherited from Richard, amounted to at least £35,000 and probably a good deal more.
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A memorandum drawn up early in 1401 estimated that Calais and its ring of protective bastions cost £13,333 a year, Ireland £5,333, and Guyenne, ‘in the event that men are sent there’, £10,000.
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Scotland was not mentioned, but the wardenships of the northern marches held by Northumberland and Hotspur cost at least £15,000 a year; nor was a figure given for the cost of defending English ports and shipping, although this too absorbed several thousand pounds a year.
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All in all, around £50,000 a year, and at times a good deal
more, was required to service England's ongoing military commitments, and this at a time of nominal truce with France, which for much of the fourteenth century had formed the principal item of military expenditure.

Domestic expenditure consisted principally of the royal household, the running costs of the administration, and crown annuities. The annuities bill had risen during the latter part of the fourteenth century as it became more common for the king to retain knights and esquires for service in peace and war. For Henry, who felt bound to continue retaining those who had served his father and himself before 1399 but equally could not afford to cut off those whom Richard had retained, annuities were financially embarrassing but politically necessary: as the council reminded him in February 1400, the security of his throne depended upon it.
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During the first seven months of his reign he retained more than a hundred knights and esquires with annuities ranging in value between £20 and £100, although much larger annuities were paid to some members of the aristocracy.
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Recruitment continued thereafter, and by late 1400 the recurrent annuities bill assigned from crown revenues was reckoned by the council to amount to £24,000, in addition to the £8,000 or more assigned on the duchy lands.
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The parliament of 1399 had pleaded with the new king to restrain his generosity when making grants, but it was not easy to do so.
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In the royal household, it should have been easier to make economies. During the last four years of his reign, Richard had spent an average of £53,200 on his wardrobe, great wardrobe and chamber, the three principal spending departments of the household (compared with £22,000 during his first fifteen years). This was mainly due to the king indulging his penchant for luxury and display and the inflated size of the household, whose permanent staff grew from 396 in 1383–4 to 598 in 1395–6.
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Here, surely, was an opportunity for Henry to demonstrate his commitment to a thriftier form of rule, but he failed to do so. The first year of the reign saw massively increased expenditure in the great wardrobe (£17,717) and overall spending in the three main household departments which, at
around £53,000, almost exactly matched Richard's later years. By March 1401 the household treasurer, Thomas Tutbury, had run up debts of £10,300, and his failure to make prompt payment for provisions purveyed for the household was becoming a scandal.
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The exceptional costs of the great wardrobe in 1399–1400 could be explained as a new king refurbishing his court,
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but Henry's unwillingness or inability to rein in his household spending was widely perceived to betoken corruption, incompetence, or an inexcusable failure of the will to implement reform. When he spent £460 on jewellery and silver plate for himself and Prince Henry on the same day that he sent messengers around the country begging loans from any who might be persuaded to lend, it is perhaps not hard to see why the commons in the parliament of January 1401 were perplexed.
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When the Byzantine emperor Manuel II arrived at Dover on 11 December 1400 for a state visit which would last nearly two months, it was thus not an unalloyed blessing, although a blessing it was, for here was a potentate – an emperor, no less – only too happy to acknowledge the English king's regality and sprinkle some imperial stardust on his court. With his empire crumbling around him and Constantinople blockaded by the Turks, Manuel was on a tour of Western European rulers trying to persuade them to contribute men or money to a crusade to save Byzantium.
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Everywhere he went – Venice, Milan, Paris – he was feted as befitted his status and given promises of aid, and Henry could scarcely do less. King and emperor spent Christmas together at Eltham, where Henry organized splendid entertainments for his guest, including a great mumming put on by the aldermen of London, before loading him with gifts at his departure.
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In return, Manuel presented Henry with a literally priceless piece of the seamless tunic woven by Christ's mother for her son with her own hands, which delighted the king.
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An effusive letter from Manuel also described Henry (‘the king of
Britain the Great’) as willing to provide men-at-arms, archers, money and ships for a crusade, but if Henry really made such promises – and he doubtless wanted to help Manuel, for crusading was close to his heart – the reality was different.
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The cost of entertaining him and his fifty-strong household for two months was a heavy burden, and in the end the emperor departed with no more than the £2,000 Richard II had promised to his envoy some years earlier but never paid. In exchange, Henry kept for himself the money donated to the crusade in collecting-boxes set up in churches around England, the sum of which probably exceeded £2,000 even if gathering it in was no easy matter.
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By the time Manuel left in early February, the parliament postponed from the autumn had been in session for two weeks or more. That the commons would be asked for taxation was clear from the start; equally clear was that they would not sell their assent cheaply. Uppermost in the minds of those who gathered at Westminster on 20 January 1401 were three issues: the financial competence of the government, the authority of the Church and the condition of Wales. The commons' speaker, Sir Arnold Savage of Kent, was ideally suited to the task: upright and forthright, praised for his resistance to the king's financial demands, he was (unlike John Cheyne in 1399) a man to whom not a hint of Lollard contamination attached itself.
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Keen not to be rushed into making decisions, he requested from the start that the commons be given answers to their petitions before deciding how much taxation to grant (an idea later enshrined in the call for redress of grievances before grant of supply). This was unacceptable to Henry, and he told the commons so,
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but by the time parliament ended on 10 March the king had been obliged to give ground, most notably in relation to his choice of councillors and ministers. Those whom Henry had appointed in September 1399 to run his household were men who had served his father or himself, but had little experience of royal government and its network of interdepartmental routines: Thomas Tutbury (keeper of the wardrobe and household treasurer), the esquire Robert Litton (financial controller of the royal household) and Sir Thomas Rempston (steward of the royal household). All three were, at the insistence of the
commons, replaced during the first nine days of March, as was the chancellor, John Scarle, former chancellor of the Palatinate of Lancaster.
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Those who replaced them were former ministers of Richard II: Thomas More, Thomas Brounfleet and the earl of Worcester (Thomas Percy) became treasurer, controller and steward of the household, respectively, while Edmund Stafford, bishop of Exeter, resumed the chancellorship which he had held from 1396 to 1399. Three months later, Henry's friend John Norbury was replaced as treasurer by Laurence Allerthorpe, an exchequer baron of twenty-five years' standing. The only one of the chief officers of state to retain office was Richard Clifford, keeper of the privy seal, who had been appointed in 1397.
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Henry's ministers were not replaced because of their political sympathies. Rempston and Norbury remained close to the king and continued to serve as privy councillors, as did John Scarle for the remaining two years of his life.
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Nor was political affiliation the salient factor in the choice of their replacements. What the commons wanted was financial experience and proven competence.
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Nevertheless, the enforced reshuffle of March 1401 was bound to be seen as a public questioning of the king's judgement, as was a bill drawn up during the last week of the parliament asking that members of the commons be present when the king named his councillors and that those appointed should not be replaced before the next parliament.
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Several of those who attended council meetings in 1399 and 1400 were Lancastrian knights and esquires whose qualifications for the task were not
fully evident.
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This was not a wholesale attack on the council, but neither was it a ringing endorsement of the king's choices.

There was also a wider context for these concerns, one that may well have troubled some of the lords more than the commons: the ‘Lancastrianization’ of the English polity. The royal household was staffed almost entirely by former servants of Henry or his father.
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Most of the sheriffs and justices of the peace appointed during the early years of the reign were known supporters of the new regime, as were many of the knights elected to the parliament.
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In a sense this illustrated the strength of Henry's position, for although there was plenty of hard bargaining in 1401, it was conducted within recognized parameters and between men most of whom were fundamentally on the same side. The aim of the commons was not to undermine Henry's rule or make it more difficult for him to govern, let alone to replace the Lancastrian dynasty, but to work out ways to help him to govern better and thus restore to the regime the popularity it had forfeited since the early months of the reign.
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Henry tolerated their criticism, a sign that he did not regard it as a threat to his rule. On the other hand, the Lancastrianization of the English polity was also evidence of Henry's failure during the first eighteen months of the reign to rise above the factionalism which had swept him to power. The fact that he had militarized his household early in 1400, retained over 200 knights and esquires during the first fifteen months of the reign, continued to distribute Lancastrian livery badges to his followers, and had insisted on his right to recruit an affinity on a scale that dwarfed any other in the realm – all this laid him open to the charge of acting more like a usurper than a king.
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It was a narrow circle of men upon whom Henry had relied thus far, a habit which he would find hard to break.