Agincourt (11 page)

Murdoch was handed over to Henry IV, but Percy had refused to surrender his other most valuable captive, the earl of Douglas. When Percy himself had raised the standard of revolt against Henry IV in 1403, he made an alliance with the Scots and Douglas fought on his side at the battle of Shrewsbury, where he was again captured and joined Murdoch as the king’s prisoner. Though negotiations for Douglas’s ransom continued fitfully for a number of years, he did not obtain his freedom until 1409, and then it was only by the shameful expedient of breaking his parole, “contrary to knightly honour,” and refusing to return to his English prison. (Having sworn to serve Henry IV and his sons for the rest of his life, he promptly broke this oath also.) The more honourable, if perhaps more foolish, Murdoch remained a prisoner in England for the rest of Henry IV’s reign.
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When the second Percy rebellion failed in 1405, Hotspur’s father, the earl of Northumberland, fled to Scotland with his eleven-year-old grandson Henry Percy. The boy was sent to St Andrews to be brought up with James Stewart, the son and heir of the king of Scotland, who was the same age. At the beginning of 1406, the dying king, fearing that his son’s life was all that stood between the duke of Albany and the Scottish throne, decided to send James to France. The boy was hidden on board the
Maryenknyght
, a merchant ship from Danzig carrying wool and hides, and sailed from North Berwick. Unfortunately for him and for Scotland, the
Maryenknyght
was captured off the Yorkshire coast by Norfolk pirates, and the heir to the throne of Scotland joined the heir of the duke of Albany and the earl of Douglas in an English prison. He was to remain there for the next eighteen years.
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Henry IV now held all the cards.

Robert III died within a few days of his son’s capture and although the captive James was recognised as king by the council-general of Scotland, his uncle, the duke of Albany, was appointed governor of the kingdom and set about converting it into his personal fiefdom. In his negotiations with England, Albany’s aim was to obtain the release of his own son, Murdoch, earl of Fife, and leave James in captivity, though he could not do this too overtly for fear of alienating those loyal to the new king. A five-year truce was finally agreed in May 1412 and preparations were put in train for the release of James and Murdoch the following spring. All these arrangements were stalled by the death of Henry IV in March 1413.
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During the last few weeks of Henry IV’s life, bills had been circulating in London alleging that Richard II, the king whom Henry had deposed and murdered, was still alive and would return from Scotland to reclaim his throne. Immediately after his coronation, Henry V ordered the arrest of the chief conspirators, including the man who had put his name to the bills, John Whitelock, a former yeoman of Richard II’s household, and Sir Andrew Hake, a Scottish knight, who had been involved in a plot against Henry IV in 1399.
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The conspirators had taken sanctuary in Westminster Abbey—an additional insult to Henry V, whose coronation took place in the Abbey church while they were there. Sanctuary was supposed to be inviolable,
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affording the protection of the Church for forty days to anyone seeking refuge, and the sanctuary at Westminster was the holiest of holies. (It was a moot point whether the Whitelock conspirators could be forcibly removed or not, but there were more subtle ways of obtaining the desired result: in an earlier, similar case one malefactor was arrested when he left the sanctuary of St Mary Somerset in London to use a privy a hundred yards away.
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In June 1413, and within days of a second set of Whitelock’s bills appearing on church doors in London, the conspirators were arrested and found themselves in the Tower. Much to Henry V’s fury, Whitelock escaped before he could be sent for trial and was never recaptured. Hake and another of the conspirators were set free on terms which suggest that they turned king’s evidence and were perhaps to be employed as double agents. The only real casualty of the whole affair was the unfortunate prison warden who had helped Whitelock escape: he was drawn, hanged and quartered as a traitor, and his head was posted on one of the Tower gates as a warning to the rest of the prison staff that dereliction of duty would not be tolerated.
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The Whitelock affair, like Oldcastle’s revolt, had been nipped in the bud by Henry V’s prompt and decisive actions, but it confirmed the dangers of allowing people to believe that Richard II might still be alive. Before the end of the year, therefore, Henry had arranged that Richard’s body, which had been interred in the Priory church of the Black Friars at King’s Langley, should be reburied in Westminster Abbey. It had been Richard’s own wish that he should be buried in the tomb he had erected in the choir of the Abbey for himself and Anne of Bohemia, his beloved queen who had pre-deceased him. Now Henry arranged that the body, placed in a new coffin on a bier draped with black velvet, should be carried the twenty miles from Langley to Westminster. With characteristic parsimony, he borrowed the banners he had had made for his own father’s funeral at Canterbury Cathedral for the procession, but otherwise the obsequies were performed as lavishly as Richard himself had laid down in his will. The corpse was escorted by a crowd of bishops, abbots, knights and esquires, and received at the Abbey by Henry himself, who ordered that four tapers should burn continually at the tomb and that there should be a weekly dirge, requiem mass and distribution of money to the poor in Richard’s name. This ceremonial reburial, carried out with all due honour and splendour, was widely applauded as an act of personal piety on the part of the new king, in which he had tried to make amends for his father’s usurpation and murder of Richard II.
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This was undoubtedly true. It was also just as true that the very public display of the king’s corpse, over the course of the several days that it took for the funeral procession to wend its way to Westminster, was calculated to prove, once and for all, that Richard II was dead. His ghost would not be laid so easily, but it was already beginning to sleep more quietly.

The Whitelock affair underlined the importance of coming to some sort of terms with the Scots as swiftly as possible. On the very first day of his reign, Henry had sent King James and Murdoch, earl of Fife, to the Tower of London, where they were to remain in secure custody for the best part of the next two years. On the same day, Henry’s brother John, duke of Bedford, and Ralph Neville, earl of Westmorland, were confirmed in their offices as wardens of the Scottish marches and a programme of reinforcing and repairing the northern border castles was put in place. These aggressive tactics persuaded the governor of Scotland, the duke of Albany, that it was in his best interests to renew the truces between the two countries in the summer of 1413, and in February 1414 the Scots were also included in the general truce between England, France and their allies, which was to last for a year.
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Making a truce and keeping it were two different things. It was virtually impossible to rein in the unruly marcher lords who existed in a constant state of warfare with their neighbours on the other side of the border. The twice-perjured earl of Douglas was the main culprit on the Scottish side, raiding and burning English towns almost at will.
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Henry V realised that the most effective way of preventing this was to restore the defence of the northern marches to their traditional keeper, a Percy earl of Northumberland, so long as the loyalty of that earl was beyond doubt. Given the recent history of the Percy clan, this was a bold initiative and an extremely risky one. There were simply no guarantees that Hotspur’s heir would be any more loyal than his father or grandfather. What is more, the restoration of the Percys was likely to alienate their ancient rivals in the north, the Nevilles, whose loyalty to the Lancastrian kings had been unswerving.

Henry’s solution to these problems was complicated and ingenious. In November 1414 he sanctioned a petition in Parliament that would allow Percy to sue for his restoration to the title and estates of the earldom of Northumberland, which had been forfeited by his grandfather on his conviction for treason. Negotiations were then put in place for Percy to be exchanged for Murdoch, earl of Fife. (Neither Albany nor Henry V had any wish to exchange him for King James, whose return to Scotland would certainly end Albany’s rule as governor and might end the factional struggles that had divided and weakened the realm.) As Murdoch had been captured in war, his release was also dependent on the payment of a ransom, for which Henry demanded ten thousand pounds. This amount was not to be paid by the Scots directly but by Percy, giving the king a financial hold over him which might be perceived as a bond for his good behaviour. Henry also arranged (with Percy’s consent) that Percy should marry Eleanor Despenser, the widowed daughter of Ralph Neville, earl of Westmorland, and Joan Beaufort, Henry’s own half-aunt.
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The marriage was prestigious enough to satisfy Percy’s honour and had the added advantage of compensating the Nevilles. Most important of all, it laid the foundations for a lasting peace between the two rival families, which could only benefit the short- and long-term stability and security of the northern marches.

But for once, Henry’s carefully laid plans miscarried. Murdoch was released from the Tower in May 1415 into the custody of two esquires, who were entrusted with escorting him to the northern borders. As they travelled through Yorkshire, they were attacked by an armed band led by an outlawed Lollard knight from Easington in Craven, Sir Thomas Talbot, and Murdoch was “feloniously abducted.” Almost as unlikely as the abduction itself was its resolution. After spending a week in captivity, Murdoch was miraculously rescued by another Craven esquire, Ralph Pudsey, whom a grateful Henry rewarded with an annuity of twenty-five pounds for life. He was then handed over to the earl of Westmorland for safekeeping but the moment had passed and the delayed exchange did not take place until some nine months later.
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The timing of this whole episode could not have been worse. The failure to hand over Murdoch provoked outrage in Scotland and played straight into the hands of the French, who already had ambassadors in Perth trying to persuade the duke of Albany to attack England. At the moment Henry most needed peace in the northern marches, the Scots were literally on the war path. On 22 July 1415 a large Scottish force crossed the border into Northumberland and after a fiercely fought battle at Yeavering was heavily defeated by Sir Robert Umfraville, the constable of Warkworth Castle. Another force, led by the earl of Douglas, succeeded in penetrating as far as Westmorland and burnt the market town of Penrith before turning back. A retaliatory raid by the English from the western marches targeted and burnt the Scottish town of Dumfries. Only a few days before he set sail for France, Henry dispatched three experienced negotiators to secure a renewal of the truces and ordered all the local militias to be alert and ready to march against the Scots at his brother’s command, “as the king has particular information that those enemies and their adherents are purposing shortly with no small power to invade the realm by divers coasts . . . to do therein what mischief they may.” Nevertheless, he was sufficiently confident about the Scottish situation not to delay his voyage. His judgement was justified, for there was no serious incident during his absence from the realm, and what trouble did occur was confined to the Scottish marches, where local troops contained and dealt with it. But Murdoch and Percy would have to wait for their release until he had finished his business in France.
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Henry V had spent so long planning his expedition in such meticulous detail and had tried to anticipate every eventuality so carefully that the crisis which befell him just before he set sail must have shaken him to the core. On 31 July 1415, the day before a general embarkation was due to take place at Southampton, Edmund Mortimer, the young earl of March, came to the king and confessed that there was a plot afoot to depose Henry and put March himself on the throne. The main conspirator was Richard, earl of Cambridge, the younger brother of Edward, duke of York, and a cousin of the king’s own father. Accused with him was a knight from Northumberland, Sir Thomas Grey of Heton, and a clutch of other northern knights, including Sir Robert Umfraville, Sir John Widdrington, John, Lord Clifford and, most shockingly of all, one of Henry’s trusted advisors, Henry, Lord Scrope. The aim, as Cambridge later confessed, was to take the earl of March to Wales and there proclaim him king. While an uprising was being fostered in Wales with the aid of the fugitive rebel leader Owain Glyn Dw?246-136?r, the Scots were to invade northern England, bringing with them both Henry Percy and the “Mommet,” a Richard II impersonator, who were to be exchanged for Murdoch, earl of Fife. The Scots were to be assisted in their invasion by Umfraville and Widdrington, who had charge of several strategically important border castles and their garrisons, and the return of Percy would persuade the north to rise in rebellion. The rest of England would fall to the combined forces of the conspirators and the Lollards, who would rally once again to their outlawed leader, Sir John Oldcastle. Attacked on all sides, “Harry of Lancaster,” the “usurper of Yngland,” would thus be swept away and replaced by the legitimate heir to the throne.
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It would be easy to dismiss the entire plot as the work of fantasists. Could anyone seriously believe that it might be possible to bring all these disparate elements together to form a cohesive and invincible army? Did anyone really think that the twenty-three-year-old earl of March, whom one of his fellow conspirators contemptuously referred to as nothing “but a hogge,” would make a better king than Henry V? What had the Scots (or, for that matter, Percy and Murdoch) to gain from treating with the rebels rather than the king? The common view among historians appears to be that there was never any chance that Cambridge’s “hare-brained scheme” would come to fruition.
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Nevertheless, unlikely though it may seem, there are several indications to suggest that the web of conspiracy had indeed spread along the lines Cambridge had envisaged.
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