1415: Henry V's Year of Glory (17 page)

It is among the payments for the king’s ships that we find the most astonishing detail. William Soper was today paid for painting swans and antelopes and various coats of arms on the king’s great ship, the
Holy Ghost
at Southampton. He was also paid for painting a royal motto on this ship:
une sanz pluis
(one and no more). The fact that the motto was in French is significant – most royal mottoes had been in English since the 1340s, the one notable exception being the motto of the Order of the Garter. So this particular motto may have been directed at the French. However, the source is significant, for it almost certainly comes from a medieval French version of Homer’s
Iliad
(which Henry would only have heard in French). The arrogance of the message is quite breathtaking: ‘
d’avoir plusieurs seigneurs aucun bien je n’y vois / qu’un sans plus soit le maistre et qu’un seul soit le roi
(‘As for having several lords, I see no good therein / let one and no more be the master, and that one alone be the king’). It is difficult to read this as anything other than Henry’s determination to exercise complete authority – over France as well as England, and over his religious subjects as well as his secular ones.
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Thursday 21st

In Constance John XXIII met the emperor and presented a new form of words whereby he proposed to resign. He added a clause requiring Sigismund to take arms against his rival popes if they refused to resign. As Fillastre noted, ‘while the first declaration had been unsatisfactory, this second one was still more unsatisfactory’.
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John had misunderstood why his first offer had been unacceptable. In terms of the unity of Christendom, he had no special rights or privileges over the other
two popes. Pressure began to build against him, as it was suspected that he was trying to squirm out of his promise.

*

In Paris, another tournament was due to take place. A band of Portuguese knights had arrived in the city and challenged any Frenchmen who dared fight them to a joust of war. This contest would be a fight with steel lances and sharpened swords, axes and knives.

Jousts of war were relatively rare events, and so this one was bound to draw a huge crowd. As Portugal was an ally of England – Queen Philippa of Portugal being Henry V’s aunt – it was decided that Thomas Beaufort, her half-brother, should lead three Portuguese knights out into the lists. With much pageantry and fanfares of trumpets, the seigneur d’Alenton, Sir Jean Cousaille and his brother Sir Peter Cousaille followed Thomas Beaufort and the other English lords into the rue St Antoine. Beaufort was the admiral of England, so it was deemed fitting that his opposite number, Clignet de Brabant, admiral of France, should lead out the three French knights. Then followed the various proclamations and oaths, determining the identity of the knights, and ensuring that they did not use concealed weapons or necromancy in their struggle. Thomas Beaufort and the English lords withdrew to the stands to watch the fight.
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The ensuing battle was hard. Eventually the Portuguese yielded, and begged for mercy – much to the indignation and embarrassment of Thomas Beaufort and the other English lords, which they made no effort to hide. The French were delighted, and their champions were given an honourable escort through the streets of Paris.

Friday 22nd

How do you keep a king prisoner? How do you ensure he remains a prisoner when you leave the country, taking most of the fighting men with you? Henry’s solution to this was to follow his father’s example and use the safest prison in the kingdom, Pevensey Castle, in Sussex. It was far more secure than the Tower of London, from which people did escape from time to time. King James of Scotland had now been
in prison for nearly nine years, and Henry had every intention of keeping him in custody – at least until he could negotiate his return to Scotland on favourable terms. It was also vitally important that he keep James alive, for only a living king of Scotland could act as a check on the authority of the Scottish regent, the duke of Albany.

King James was quietly transferred from the Tower of London to Pevensey Castle, which had been guarded for many years by the redoubtable Sir John Pelham. If James strayed from his tower chamber, he was still confined within the enormously strong walls of the castle and the moat. Even if he were to escape from the castle he would find himself within the outer ward – the vast encircling walls which had been built by the Romans and which were still kept in a good state of repair. And if he managed to climb over those outer walls, he faced miles of marshland. The castle even had an
oubliette
– an underground dungeon which could not be accessed except by a trapdoor. There was no point in James even thinking of trying to escape. More importantly, there was no easy way for his fellow Scotsmen to spring him from this castle, one of the furthest from Scotland.

To be doubly sure, Henry allocated £700 today to be paid to Sir John Pelham, to guard his captive safely.
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*

Having given orders for the payment in respect of the king of Scotland, Henry took a barge up the River Thames. Here he had decided to found three new monasteries, two on the north side of the river, in the royal manor of Isleworth, and one on the opposite bank, at Sheen. Why, we might ask? Especially at this juncture, within a month of his council declaring that he did not have enough money to safeguard the realm? And even more so when Henry was closing down many monasteries – the alien priories – and sequestering their lands. Why did he not simply keep three of those priories open and save on the building costs?

There are two possible explanations, and perhaps both are correct. One is that Henry was seeking to do something which his father had failed to do. It is said that, because Henry IV had judicially murdered an archbishop, Richard Scrope, in 1405, Pope Gregory XII had enjoined upon him in 1408 the task of building three new monasteries.
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Henry IV had not built one, let alone three; and even if he had been willing
to make such foundations he could not have afforded to endow them. Henry V was keen to remedy all his father’s failings. If this was indeed the reason why Henry now founded these monasteries, it was the fourth instance of him making good what his father had left undone. He had reburied Richard II in his proper grave in Westminster Abbey; he had commissioned a bronze effigy of his mother to be placed on her tomb; and he had renewed the building of the Lancastrian church in Leicester. If Pope Gregory really had instructed Henry IV to found three monasteries, then this work may certainly be seen in this light.

The other explanation for these foundations lies in their specific character. Each of the three was to follow the rule of one of the most respected and austere monastic orders. Today, for example, he had come to lay the foundation stone of one of the new monasteries on the north side of the river, which was to be a house of Bridgettine nuns – followers of the rule of St Bridget, ‘a lover of peace and tranquillity’.
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What Henry was about to do in France amounted to the very opposite of peace and tranquillity, so these foundations may well have represented a form of atonement for his forthcoming invasion – a reconciliation with God – in much the same way he was reconciling himself with rebel families through the restitution of their estates. In these monasteries, as with everything else, Henry was putting his own standing with God first.

Presumably Henry chose a day when the weather was not too inclement for his trip up the river. When he reached what is now known as the Old Deer Park, near Richmond, he would have seen the building site of Sheen Manor, which was one year into its five-year rebuilding programme. The hall, chapel and chambers were being constructed around a great square courtyard. Men were busying themselves about the scaffolding and carts, following the directions of the royal master mason, Stephen Lote. Stone for the building was being brought in from all parts of the kingdom – from Yorkshire, Devon, Kent, Surrey and Oxfordshire – and timber was arriving on wagons from Surrey. Bricks had been imported from Calais. Salvaged stone and timber from a royal house, Byfleet, which Henry had recently had demolished, were piled up and ready to be used in the new buildings.
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Carved swans and antelopes were being prepared, to adorn the buildings when finished.

The monastery which Henry planned to build here was to be a Charterhouse, for Carthusian monks.
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The Order had been founded
in France in the tenth century and had spread to England in the late twelfth; but its strictness had deterred many Englishmen from joining it until the late fourteenth century. After the Black Death, very few monasteries were founded in England at all, apart from those whose rules were very strict and devout. Carthusians, who lived independently in cells arranged around the cloister of their monasteries, and who were not allowed to speak except for meetings in the chapter house, were one of the strictest orders of all. They had seen a spate of foundations – at London in 1371, Kingston upon Hull in 1377, Coventry in 1381, Axholme in 1397 and Mount Grace in 1398. Henry’s Charterhouse at Sheen was thus one of the most fashionably severe examples of religious patronage which he could set – a mark of respectable austerity.

On the other side of the river, the north side, where his barge docked today, he planned the two other monasteries. One was for Celestine monks, an order of vegetarian hermits founded by Pope Celestine V who followed the Rule of St Benedict very closely. No Celestine houses had yet been founded in England. The idea had come from Bishop Courtenay, who had visited several Celestine monasteries in France the previous year and had returned to England with three French Celestine monks to make a start on the foundation.
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The third monastery Henry planned was the one already mentioned for which he had come to lay the foundation stone. Henry had no way of knowing that St Bridget had just been canonised at Constance for a second time. His association with the saint rather came from his sister, Philippa, queen of Sweden, Norway and Denmark. In 1406 several of Henry’s friends had accompanied her on her journey to meet her husband, King Eric, and thus had come into contact with the Bridgettines at Vadstena, St Bridget’s original foundation. Among the wedding party were Lord Fitzhugh and Sir Walter Hungerford (both currently at Constance) and Henry Lord Scrope. The devout Lord Fitzhugh in particular recommended the contemplative and peaceful Bridgettines. Henry’s sister, Queen Philippa (who was a regular visitor to Vadstena), also sent word about St Bridget’s foundation. That Henry was genuinely fervent about St Bridget’s order is clear in that he managed to acquire a relic of St Bridget herself in a gold cross. He decided he would copy Vadstena on the north bank of the Thames. There would be thirteen monks
(corresponding to the number of apostles, including St Peter), sixty nuns under the charge of an abbess, as well as four deacons, four lay brothers and four lay sisters. There would be separate chapels beneath the same roof where the monks and nuns could pray together, the nuns’ chapel built on the floor above the monks’ one. The name of the abbey – a point on which Henry was most particular – was to be ‘the Monastery of St Saviour and St Bridget of Syon’.
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The foundation stone was laid on ground within the king’s rabbit warren in the manor of Isleworth, in the parish of Twickenham. The space he measured out was marked with boundary stones. From the northern stone to a more southerly one it measured 646 yards, along the edge of Twickenham field; from this second stone to a stone by the river Thames 320 yards; from this stone to another back along the river bank 340 yards and from this stone back to the northern marker 327 yards – in all just over thirty acres. The riverside location made it somewhat damp, however. So Henry ordered a ditch to be dug, to drain the ground more effectively. Somewhat surprisingly, the buildings were built mostly of brick: Henry brought brickmakers over from Holland especially.
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English readers automatically associate monasteries with stone ruins; but on the banks of the Thames there once stood a brick monastery, where prayers were said and Masses sung for the benefit of the souls of Henry V and Lord Fitzhugh.

*

In Paris, John the Fearless’s proctors had finally agreed to the king’s terms. Although John was at that moment some way from Paris – at Rouvres – he and all his supporters were pardoned by the king ‘out of reverence for God, wishing to prefer mercy to rigorous justice’. Still the five hundred exceptions remained, mostly Parisians who had been caught up in the Cabochien revolt in 1413. These men were not to be allowed closer than ‘four or five leagues’ from the city; otherwise there would be a free pardon for all, and no prosecutions for loyalty to John. All castles were to be restored, and all parties were to swear to uphold the Peace of Arras, whether Burgundian or Armagnac.
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In the eyes of the English, it was a second public humiliation in as many days. A third awaited them. That same day the diplomatic representatives of Owen Glendower received a gift of £100 from the French king. They had been there since late the previous year, negotiating with the French how best to proceed together against the English.
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Not long afterwards one of the English ambassadors, Sir William Bourchier, set out to return to England, to inform Henry of how his intentionally doomed embassy was being received. No doubt Henry’s fierce pride was dented. But in reality, this public disrespect was exactly what he wanted.

Sunday 24th

A proclamation went out today to the sheriffs of London and all the sheriffs of coastal counties and county towns – from Newcastle upon Tyne and Yorkshire on the east coast, all the way round the south-eastern coast to Devon, Cornwall and Bristol – reiterating that an inviolable truce was in force between England and the Spanish kingdom of Castile and Léon. That the proclamation went out only to maritime counties suggests it was a pre-emptive announcement to any piratically minded master of an English ship who may have been waiting for the old year-long truce, agreed in February 1414, to run out. Henry’s ambassador, Dr Jean Bordiu, archdeacon of Médoc, had now returned from the court of Castile with news that the truce had been prolonged for another year, to last until February 1416, at a formal meeting at Fuenterrabia on 27 November 1414.