Henry IV (58 page)

²¹
PROME
, viii.407–8.

²²
Calendar of the Register of Richard Scrope, Archbishop of York 1398–1405
, ed. R. Swanson (Borthwick Texts and Calendars, 2 vols, 1981, 1985), ii–iii, 19–22 (the grant of a tenth by the northern convocation in June 1404 was made conditional on receipt of letters from the king promising a cessation of royal commissions prejudicial to Church liberties, and immunity from the subsidy granted at the last parliament; only after these letters were received was collection of the tenth authorized); M. Ormrod, ‘The Rebellion of Archbishop Scrope and the Tradition of Opposition to Royal Taxation’, in
The Reign of Henry IV: Rebellion and Survival, 1403–1413
, ed. G. Dodd and D. Biggs (York, 2008), 162–79, at pp. 172–3.

²³
Giles
, 44.

²⁴
For these events, see
SAC II
, 440–59, and
CE
, 405–8;
PROME
, viii.407–13 (indictments).

²⁵
POPC
, i.264–5;
Foedera
, viii.398;
Signet Letters
, no. 376. An alternative version of Walsingham's chronicle stated that Henry had a brief conversation with Scrope at Pontefract (
SAC II
, 807–11).

²⁶
SAC II
, 451;
Usk
, 203, added that they took off their trousers and prostrated themselves naked on the ground, ‘almost as if it were another judgment day’; Strecche said they were ‘naked, in rags, prostrating themselves like humble beggars’ (BL Add. MS 35,295, fo. 263v).

²⁷
Wylie,
Henry the Fourth
, ii.233–6; for the commission, see
CPR 1405–8
, 65;
SAC II
, 453, 809, named Sir Thomas Beaufort, the king's half-brother, and the earl of Arundel as the prime movers in the trial, whereas
Giles
, 45, named William Fulthorpe and Sir Ralph Eure.

²⁸
BL Add. MS 35, 295, fo. 263v;
Usk
, 202.

²⁹
For hagiographical accounts of Scrope's last moments, see
Giles
, 46–7, and S. K. Wright,
Martyrium Ricardi Archiepiscopi
(Catholic University of America, 1997:
http://english.cua.edu/faculty/wright/latmaidston.cfm
).

³⁰
CPR 1405–8
, 67–79;
SAC II
, 457; Wylie,
Henry the Fourth
, ii.245. For pardons issued, see A. Dunn, ‘Henry IV and the Politics of Resistance’, in
Fifteenth-Century England III
, ed. L. Clark (Woodbridge, 2003), 5–23, at pp. 19–22, and
Signet Letters
, no. 381. The total fine paid by the citizens of York was over £500: £200 was taken by the royal household as a contribution to its expenses (BL Harleian Ms 319, f. 5v).

³¹
SAC II
, 457, says Henry's army was 37,000 strong, surely an exaggeration; for shipping, see
CPR 1405–8
, 74. In June 1404, Henry had brought his cannons as far as Pontefract, but Northumberland and Clifford submitted before they were used; he may have left them there, just in case: E 403/579, 17 June (1404). Westmorland suggested in late 1403 that cannon be brought north to subdue the Percy strongholds (
POPC
, i.210).

³²
Not least because, on 11 June, Northumberland had sought help from the French and Scots; and he only agreed to release Robert Waterton if his brother, John, replaced him as a hostage (
PROME
, viii.409–13).

³³
POPC
, i.275.

³⁴
CE
, 408;
SAC II
, 460–3;
Duo Rerum Anglicanum Scriptores Veteres viz Thomas Otterbourne et Johannis Whethamstede
, ed. T. Hearne (2 vols, Oxford, 1732), 257 (Otterbourne mainly copied Walsingham's account, but added Greystoke's name). The will of Boynton's father, Sir Thomas, dated 28 July 1402, hints at his impetuosity: he was forbidden to sell or disparage (
calumniare
) any of the principal items at Acclam and ordered upon his father's blessing to make a reasonable settlement for his mother Margaret's dower (Borthwick Institute,
Facsimiles of York Wills 1389–1514
, iii, fo. 97v).

³⁵
Clifford had already agreed to surrender Alnwick once Berwick fell (A. King, ‘Sir William Clifford: Rebellion and Reward’, in
The Fifteenth-Century IX. English and Continental Perspectives
, ed. L. Clark (Woodbridge, 2010), 150–1.

³⁶
CPR 1405–8
, 68–74. But not Scrope's head, which had been allowed honourable burial, along with his body, in York Minster.

³⁷
PROME
, viii.409.

³⁸
See Henry's letter of 28 May, above, p. 268. For what follows,
PROME
, viii.411–13; S. Walker, ‘The Yorkshire Risings of 1405: Texts and Contexts’, in
Establishment
, 161–84, at pp. 164–6.

³⁹
Initially, the lords asked for more time to consider the question, but then appear to have dropped it. The commons raised the question again towards the end of the 1406 session, but Scrope and Mowbray were never convicted of treason in parliament.

⁴⁰
Simon Walker (‘The Yorkshire Risings’, 168) thought differently, arguing that Walsingham's earlier account suggested that the four leaders had raised ‘
an
army’ (his italics), but the Latin is
congregassent exercitus
– the plural, not the singular
exercitum
– which makes the implication of the sentence quite different. It is thus Walsingham's second, rather than his first, account which goes further in implying (though rather hesitantly) a connection between the risings (
Historia Anglicana
, ii.269;
SAC II
, 448–9;
Annales
, 407).

⁴¹
Walker, ‘The Yorkshire Risings’, 168–71;
Hardyng
, 362–3;
CE
, 405–8;
Giles
, 42–7; Kingsford,
English Historical Literature
, 282–3 (Appendix II: ‘A Northern Chronicle’).

⁴²
For the Percy (and other) connections of executed rebels, such as Plumpton, Persay, Colville, Fauconberg, Lamplugh, Hastings and FitzRandolph, see P. McNiven, ‘The Betrayal of Archbishop Scrope’,
BJRL
54 (1971), 173–213, at pp. 176, 190–1, and Walker, ‘The Yorkshire Risings’, 180.

⁴³
CE
, 405; J. Raine,
Historians of the Church of York and its Archbishops
(3 vols, RS, London, 1879–94), iii.288;
Giles
, 43–4.

⁴⁴
Although his hold on his Richmondshire heartland remained solid throughout the disturbances: M. Devine, ‘The Dog that Did Not Bark: Richmondshire and the 1405 Rebellion’, in
Richard Scrope: Archbishop, Rebel, Martyr
, ed. P. J. Goldberg (Donington, 2007), 45–63.

⁴⁵
SAC II
, 440–1; H. Summerson, ‘Thomas Bardolf, Fifth Baron Bardolf’,
ODNB
. 3.791–2.
Giles
, 42, claimed that Bardolf had been involved in treasonable activities earlier in Henry's reign.

⁴⁶
POPC
, ii.104; R. Archer, ‘Thomas Mowbray, Second Earl of Nottingham’,
ODNB
. 39.595–6, comments that Henry had not treated Mowbray ungenerously, but that he was ‘a headstrong youth with unrealistic expectations’.

⁴⁷
SAC II
, 442–5;
CE
, 405–6.

⁴⁸
See also the hexameter inscribed on the wall of the monks' choir at St Albans abbey, which dates from around this time: ‘Christe Dei splendor, supplico tibi, destrue Gleendor’ (
Original Letters
, i.43).

⁴⁹
Walker, ‘The Yorkshire Risings’, 171–5;
Historians of the Church of York
, ed. Raine ii.292–311, 428–33; iii.288–91; Wright,
Martyrium Ricardi Archiepiscopi
. These include the accusation that Henry had committed perjury in 1399; that sheriffs had not been freely elected; and that Henry had put to death a number of notable lords such as the earls of Huntingdon, Gloucester and Salisbury, Hotspur, Worcester and Sir Roger Clarendon.

⁵⁰
Ormrod, ‘The Rebellion of Archbishop Scrope’, 162–79; Walker, ‘The Yorkshire Risings’, 183;
Signet Letters
, no. 328;
Register of Richard Scrope
, ii.993.

⁵¹
Walker, ‘The Yorkshire Risings’, 177–9; C. D. Liddy, ‘William Frost, the City of York and Scrope's Rebellion of 1405’, in Goldbergh, ed.,
Richard Scrope
, 64–85.

⁵²
PROME
, viii.281–2.

⁵³
Liddy, ‘William Frost’, 77–82; and see below, p. 429.

⁵⁴
SAC II
, 470–1; Wylie,
Henry the Fourth
, ii.346; M. Bennett, ‘Henry IV, the Royal Succession and the Crisis of 1406’, in
The Reign of Henry IV: Rebellion and Survival, 1403–1413
, ed. G. Dodd and D. Biggs (York, 2008), 16–27.

Part Three

RECOVERY AND REFORM 1404–1410

Chapter 19

THE SEARCH FOR SOLVENCY (1404–1406)

By early 1404, it was clear that more systematic ways of addressing the crown's financial problems had to be found. Thus far, it had survived – just – by supplementing unpopular taxation with equally unpopular loans, padded out by windfalls, forfeitures, and the forbearance of those who used their private resources to pay their soldiers' wages, but patience was becoming exhausted, the exchequer's and household's debts were spinning out of control, annuities were not being paid, and as the theatres of war and rebellion fanned out, obligations continued to mount.
¹
On top of this, piracy and a succession of wet summers had by 1403 caused English wool and cloth exports, the revenues from which constituted the exchequer's primary source of recurrent taxation, to shrink from an annual average of £39,000 in 1399–1402 to just £26,000.
²
Yet the parliament which met on 14 January 1404 at Westminster was determined that if the king was to be granted taxation he would have to agree to structural reform.
³
There were a number of ways in which this might be achieved: if household expenditure could not be reduced, then the household could be starved of cash; new and more acceptable forms of taxation could be devised; restrictions could be imposed on royal grants and annuities; greater efforts could be made to assign specific revenue streams to specific areas of expenditure, thus ensuring prioritization according to needs (although needs might be
perceived differently); the king could also be encouraged to maximize his ordinary revenues, for example the yield from crown lands. One way or another, each of these expedients was tried, but the results were not encouraging.

As their speaker, the commons chose the straight-talking Arnold Savage, but although he was now a privy councillor and can hardly have been unaware of the crown's predicament, he went straight on to the attack.
⁴
The king, he declared, made ‘undue and unwise’ grants; the royal household was badly managed and overstaffed; ministers could not be trusted with taxes; purveyance was continuously abused. When Henry asked him why the commons were so ‘ill-disposed and discontented’ with him, Savage replied that it was no wonder, considering the burdens he placed on his people; if reform was not implemented, ‘we do not see how your realm will be well governed’. At this point the king retired to Windsor for a few days, where he pardoned the earl of Northumberland – for Savage had even had the audacity to hint that unless the earl was restored the commons might not make any kind of grant.
⁵
In the end they did make a grant, but not of a fifteenth and tenth: the ‘new and extraordinary (
novam et exquisitam
)’ tax they sanctioned was a nominal 5 per cent levy on landed or moveable income.
⁶
Behind this lay a desire to shift the burden of taxation from the poor to the king's wealthier subjects, but the reluctance with which it was agreed makes it clear that it was not motivated by any spirit of philanthropic self-sacrifice, rather on account of fear of the popular backlash likely to follow the grant of another lay subsidy. The commons insisted that no mention of the tax be made on the parliament roll and that all records relating to its collection be destroyed, so that it could not be used as a precedent. How much they thought it would yield is not clear: £12,000 of the proceeds were to be given to the king to clear his debts, with the remainder being paid not into the exchequer but to four war-treasurers who would be responsible for ensuring that it was spent entirely on defence rather than being diverted by the king and his ministers to other purposes. If by 15
May the king had not raised an ‘army on the sea’ to defend the realm, the entire grant would be null and void.
⁷

What soon became apparent was that the cost of this naval force alone, estimated at £9,546, was likely to exceed the entire proceeds of the tax. Shrouded in confusion from the start, its lack of transparency was a powerful inducement to evasion and it appears to have yielded no more than about £9,000, of which at least £6,526 went directly to the war-treasurers.
⁸
The appointment as war-treasurers of three London citizens and a chamberlain of the exchequer was most unwelcome to the king. An expedient last tried in the 1380s, it had the effect of depriving the crown of the flexibility to distribute income as it wished, which was in fact precisely what it was designed to do, thereby ensuring that taxes voted for war were spent on war.
⁹
In practice, however, it threatened even the routine obligations of government, including annuities. Payment of the £20,000 and more of exchequer annuities promised by Henry or his predecessors was a running sore. Parliament had stipulated in 1401 that customs revenue should not be used for this purpose and that new annuitants must declare the value of grants they already held from the crown. In 1402 the over-assignment of shrieval revenues led to Henry agreeing that those whose grants bore the earliest dates should be preferred over those with more recent grants, but that precedence should be given to paying the debts of the royal household. Now, however, the king declared that although certain ordinary sources of revenue should be reserved for the household, those who held annuities assigned on them should nevertheless be paid in full.
¹⁰
This was unrealistic. In fact, crown revenues came under such pressure in 1404 that by July the king had to put a complete stop on the payment of exchequer annuities, an embarrassment acknowledged in the October parliament when it was agreed to suspend them retrospectively for a year
from Easter 1404.
¹¹
This was a decision fraught with political danger. Henry had relied on the unpaid service of his annuitants to suppress rebellions and campaign in Wales and Scotland during the early years of the reign, but the longer annuities remained unpaid the fewer were likely to respond. After 1404, Henry's military summonses ceased to refer to his annuitants and referred only to his retainers or retinue, a presentational strategy shifting the emphasis from financial obligation to loyalty.
¹²