1415: Henry V's Year of Glory (51 page)

None of Lord Scrope’s religious bequests was honoured by Henry. All his money and possessions were taken by the king. In this we can see a money-hungry side to Henry V, also reflected in his extortion of 10,000 marks from the earl of March and his later confiscation of his stepmother’s income on a charge of witchcraft. But it was not just about money: Scrope was not allowed his cherished place in York Minster. Whatever doubts Henry may have had about his loyalty, Scrope was the victim of a vindictive and cruel act, for Henry showed himself disinclined to give him the slightest benefit
of the doubt. In this case – as in that of the claim on the throne of France – Henry was more interested in exercising authority than justice.

Scrope’s sentence was a significant lapse of Henry’s judgment. Were there any mitigating circumstances? Of course: Henry was under huge pressure, he had been delayed and he must have seen the chances of a successful campaign vanishing with the approach of autumn. Money was flowing rapidly out of the treasury, the debts were piling up, and he had nothing to show for them. If he was hasty in proceeding to try the lords as if they were commoners, then he had good reason. But many aspects of this process seem fundamentally unjust. The concoction of the charge of regicide in particular was unjust. The inclusion of both March and Clifford on the panel to condemn Cambridge and Scrope can hardly be seen as fair; they were certainly not disinterested. And we cannot simply dismiss the trial as a miscarriage of justice. It led to a terrible precedent, for the trials of traitors in the court of the steward of England, at the king’s personal command, dates from this event. Many men in later centuries were executed in consequence of Star Chamber trials under the authority of the steward of England, as a result of this angry exercise of power.
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Edward duke of York absented himself from all these proceedings. His brother had specifically stated that he had urged the others not to let him know anything. Cambridge had wanted to protect his brother, and this may be considered a sign of genuine fraternal affection, as well as a failure to think through his plan. Edward was no doubt deeply shocked and saddened by the events. His day was spent otherwise engaged: he was granted a licence allowing him to settle some of his estates on trustees for the completion of the collegiate church at Fotheringay that he had started to build and where he intended to be buried.
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It is fitting that this took place on the day of Cambridge’s execution – Cambridge’s son would one day come to lie in the same church.

Henry’s other deeds after the grim business of the morning included dictating the letter conferring on Richard, Lord Grey, Sir Robert Ogle and the lawyer Richard Holme the necessary authority to treat with the representatives of the duke of Albany for a new truce between England and Scotland.
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He also pardoned one John Prest of Warwickshire for sheltering Sir John Oldcastle. The latter at least shows he retained at least some measure of mercy.

Tuesday 6th

Lord Scrope had hardly been dead twenty-four hours before Henry started distributing his lands as gifts to his supporters. Henry, Lord Fitzhugh, was among the first to benefit, acquiring all of Lord Scrope’s manors, rights, income and possessions within the franchise of Richmond.
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Two of Scrope’s Suffolk manors were parcelled out as grants to the king’s friend Sir John Phelip and his wife Alice.
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He also instructed Robert Clitherowe and David Cawardyn to go to London and seize all the goods in Scrope’s London house and hand them over to the mayor of London for safe keeping.
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It was obviously a day for grant-making and gift-giving. Sir Thomas Chaucer, the king’s butler, who was also heading to France, was pardoned all his debts to the crown; and Robert Orell was granted the forestership of the forest of Snowdon.
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Richard de Vere, earl of Oxford, who was waiting to set sail with his twenty-nine men-at-arms and seventy-nine archers, drew up his will. He wished to be buried with his ancestors in the priory church of Colne, in Essex. He left all his goods and chattels to his wife, Alice, and gave her power to dispose of all the rest of his possessions. It was a very modest will by comparison with some. But he was not alone in not wanting a great fuss or a huge ceremony. Sir Thomas West, who was also about to set out, had written a will a few days earlier in which he requested only that no more than £40 was to be laid out in meat, drink and candles on the day of his funeral, and that £24 be paid to two priests to celebrate divine service each day on behalf of his soul and his ancestors’ souls for two years after his death.
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Wednesday 7th

The day had at last come. But before Henry went down to his flagship and embarked, there were some last minute necessities. One was a pardon for the earl of March ‘for all treasons, murders, rapes of
women, rebellions, insurrections, felonies, conspiracies, trespasses, offences, negligences, extortions, misprisions, ignorances, concealments and deceptions committed by him’.
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No one can have had much doubt that ‘the hog’ (as Gray had called March) or the ‘daw or simpleton’ (as Sir John Mortimer later referred to him) was anything but complicit in the plot to make him king.
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But he had been the one who had informed Henry and that necessitated a reward of some kind. Not to lose his life and lands was an appropriate one.

Another essential item of business was a royal order to all the sheriffs ‘on pain of grievous forfeiture, for particular causes moving the king and council’ to proclaim that men shall keep watch, night by night, until Allhallows (1 November) to protect the towns as well as the shores, and that ‘no man who holds a public inn shall receive or suffer a stranger to stay more than a night and a day without knowledge of the cause of his abode there’. This was in case of rebels as well as French and Scottish spies. Henry added that any man who did not confess his reason was to be arrested; clearly he had been shaken by the earl of Cambridge’s plot and knew that he was taking a huge risk by leaving the country at this juncture with two of his three brothers.
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The duke of Bedford was the sole potential Lancastrian heir left in England. Henry’s third and final precaution before leaving Portchester Castle was a repeat of his earlier order to array the clergy of the diocese of Lincoln against the Lollards during the king’s absence abroad.
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Finally Henry went down to the barge that was to take him out to his flagship, the 540–tun capacity
Trinity Royal
, which was moored between Southampton and Portsmouth. With a crew of three hundred sailors, it was one of the two largest ships in his navy. It had a huge purple sail and the great banner of the Trinity on the main mast, together with streamers a dozen yards long and other smaller flags bearing the arms of St Edward and St George. The top-castle of the mast was decorated with a large gilt-copper crown, a golden leopard was on the prow and on the capstan was a sceptre with fleur-de-lys. As soon as he stepped on board Henry ordered the yard supporting the great sail to be half-raised to indicate his readiness to set out straightaway, and to signal to all the other ships scattered along the coast to start to make their way to the king.

Henry did not set out immediately. He still had to wait for the ships to gather – and this would take some time. It was reported by eyewitnesses that he had 1,500 vessels in his fleet. In addition, more
than 12,000 horses needed to be transported, and in each case the poor animal had to be put into a sling and hoisted on to deck with a crane: this was not a quick or easy task.
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For the next few days the
Trinity Royal
did not move. In that time she became known as the King’s Chamber. Another vessel – perhaps the
Holy Ghost
– was functionally named the King’s Hall.
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On these two ships the 101 men of the royal household attended on the king and the members of his council, coming and going from other smaller ships moored nearby – the King’s Larder, the King’s Kitchen and the King’s Wardrobe.

Thursday 8th

The first day waiting for the ships to assemble was spent seeing to some final pieces of administration. Diplomatic loose ends needed sorting out. An order was sent to Henry Kays, the keeper of the hanaper in chancery, to pay some money in advance to Dr John Hovingham and John Flete, the ambassadors to Brittany (who had been given their instructions on 28 July).
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A similar order was sent for Philip Morgan to be given 100 marks enabling him to return to the Burgundian court of John the Fearless to conduct ‘secret discussions’. Morgan had been part of the committee on 27 May to discuss this mission; his departure had been delayed by his journey to Calais to prorogue the truce. His instructions, which were formally drawn up by the chancellor two days later, empowered him to treat anew with John the Fearless, seeking to establish exactly what help the duke might offer Henry.
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As the earl of Arundel, the treasurer of England, was about to sail with Henry, a new treasurer was needed. Henry appointed his friend Sir John Rothenhale, controller of the royal household, to the post.
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New orders were issued allowing the export of tin. And the paperwork allowing the heads of Lord Scrope and Sir Thomas Gray to be transported to their various places of exhibition needed to be drawn up. We might consider medieval society unsophisticated for beheading men and exposing their rotting heads in public but it was sufficiently sophisticated to require eight separate letters to be written to the sheriffs of eight counties ordering them to permit the passage of the said heads to York and Newcastle, where they were to be impaled on spears.
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Before he set sail Henry made some final grants. To his friend Sir
John Gray, younger brother of the executed Sir Thomas Gray of Heton, Henry granted custody of all the family lands during the youth of Sir Thomas’s heir.
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To William Porter, king’s esquire, Henry gave one of Scrope’s Leicestershire manors. To Lord Fitzhugh he gave Scrope’s inn at Paulswharf, London, in addition to his earlier grant of Scrope’s Richmond franchise. Scrope’s estate had by now become something like a displayed carcass, complete with pecking vultures. But it was a hasty and reckless dismembering of an estate – and another thing that Henry would later come to regret. It emerged in later years that Scrope’s family estates were all legally entailed on his father’s male heirs, so they could not be confiscated by the king at will. Henry had no right to re-distribute them among his friends.
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Sunday 11th

Nearly all the ships that Henry was expecting had assembled in a vast flotilla around him. He ordered the formal custody of England to be given to his brother John, duke of Bedford, the keeper of the realm. With this formal transfer went the right to summon parliaments and councils, to grant licences for the election of bishops and abbots, to restore and take temporalities and to accept fealty.
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John was instructed to summon a parliament immediately, to meet on 21 October to agree further financial support for the campaign. Then, about 3 p.m., with the handing over of the final documents, the last messengers left the
Trinity Royal
and the great purple sail was raised to its full height.

Henry’s voyage was underway. As the ships started to move, a large number of swans settled in the sea and started swimming among the boats. This was seen as a good sign. Less propitious was the smoke that started rising in the sun. Three ships had caught fire. They burnt to the waterline before the fleet left English waters.
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Monday 12th

The figure of 1,500 ships has long been accepted by historians. It was estimated by an eyewitness, and it tallies – more or less – with the 1,600 ships mentioned in some French sources. In addition it is
a reasonable figure if one considers how many men, horses and supplies were on these ships. Recent historical research in this area – particularly that undertaken by Anne Curry – is most significant. For example, the chronicler who stated that there were 1,500 ships also implied that there were more than 12,000 fighting men in the fleet. Professor Curry has demonstrated this was true by checking the financial records for the wages of the army and correlating these with the numbers of men required by indenture. Her findings are as follows:

• twenty-six peers undertook to provide a total of 5,222 men (including themselves);
  
• fifty-seven knights undertook to provide 2,573 men;
  
• lesser captains undertook to provide 1,306 men;
  
• a further thousand archers were drawn from Lancashire and South Wales;
  
• 650 archers and 50 men-at-arms were summoned from Cheshire (but only 247 of them were paid, suggesting that only this smaller number turned up);
  
• the royal household provided in the region of 900 men.
  

Taking the lower figure of 247 Cheshire archers (a safe minimum), this adds up to at least 11,248 men, of whom 2,266 were men-at-arms. In addition there was a number of other support staff, such as cooks, clerks, chaplains and servants for the lords and clerks for the men-at-arms. The account of the earl of Oxford suggests that it was usual for the men-at-arms each to bring their own page with them at their own expense.
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So, although these pages do not figure in the royal accounts (being paid by the men-at-arms), it is safer to presume there were as many pages as men-at-arms – in excess of two thousand. Furthermore, there were all the miners, smiths and carpenters whom Henry had ordered to come on campaign: a total of 560 of them. If each lord and knight had a chaplain and two non-combative servants, we can be certain that the
minimum
number of men with Henry today as he crossed the Channel was more than 14,000 men, not including the mariners. Additional financial records detailing several hundred more fighting men are known to have existed once, being quoted in older historical works. If these are included, then the total number of non-mariners was in the region of 15,000. And, as Professor Curry
points out, the travel allowances of horses were regularly taken up, with some lords taking several dozen beasts. There were more horses in the army than there were fighting men.
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