Henry IV (88 page)

London was not only the kingdom's capital but also its busiest port: a third of English wool and a half of English cloth were exported through it, 40 per cent of the country's wine imported and 50 per cent of all tunnage and poundage paid there.
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Ports required constant vigilance: it was here that ships were impressed, fleets assembled and the customs that contributed more than half of all crown revenue collected. Smugglers had to be
thwarted, corrupt officials brought to book, and collectors regularly summoned to the exchequer to present their accounts and hand over their takings.
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Spies, aliens and seditious rumours had to be prevented from entering or leaving the realm; at moments of heightened activity or danger, one of the government's first acts was usually to order every port to be closed.
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All this made it important to cultivate civic leaders, and in several of the major ports Henry did so. Newcastle was effectively controlled during the first half of the reign by the plutocrat Roger Thornton, ‘the Dick Whittington of Tyneside’, coal and lead merchant and mayor for five of the first six years of the reign, who is said to have spent 1,000 marks of his own money defending the city against Northumberland's troops in 1405. Henry favoured the town, pardoning its ‘loyal and faithful lieges’ their ancient debts and raising it to county status, and Thornton's son, Giles, secured a place in the royal household.
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In Bristol, a strategic port of muster and supply for Wales, Ireland and Guyenne, Henry turned to powerful and wealthy ship-owners such as John Stevens, mayor of the town and staple in 1402–3.
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Dartmouth (Devon), which provided more ships for the crown during the fourteenth century than any other English port, faced a crisis of loyalty in January 1400 when partisans of John Holand, former duke of Exeter, tried to persuade the townsmen to join the Epiphany rising, but the revolt was nipped in the bud. Henry's most active supporter there was John Hauley, whose thirty-year career as merchant, privateer and fourteen times mayor of the town led to his retention as a king's esquire with an annuity of forty marks and a clutch of lucrative
wardships and other grants.
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Local leaders such as Hauley and Stevens were enormously useful to Henry, and in return he bolstered their authority. At Lynn (Norfolk), the king intervened first to defend the more powerful (
potentiores
) burgesses from the bullying of Bishop Despenser and then in 1405–6 to uphold their authority against the challenge of the middling and lesser (
mediocres et inferiores
) townsmen. Henry's most useful agent in Lynn was the shipowner and merchant John Brandon, who in 1400 captured the Scottish admiral and was regularly employed by the king to hound Frisian and Scottish pirates in the North Sea. Between 1385 and his death in 1414 he served the town as MP, chamberlain, controller of customs and subsidies and mayor of the town and staple, and the king as a diplomat to the Baltic. He was certainly one of the
potentior
burgesses of Lynn, and probably the
potentissimus
.
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Henry had good reason to be well disposed towards townsmen. From the moment of his return to England, even before Richard was deposed, they gave him enthusiastic support in the form of loans and offers of homage, and the speed with which the citizens, not just of London but also of Bristol and Cirencester, acted in January 1400 was crucial in suppressing the Epiphany rising.
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The refusal of the burgesses of Shrewsbury to admit, or even provision, Hotspur's army in July 1403, and of those of Newcastle to admit his father's forces, was similarly instrumental in foiling the Percy rebellion and, despite strong pressure from Northumberland, the mayors of Newcastle and Berwick would not betray the king in 1405.
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Their reward was royal support for their local authority. Henry's penchant for patronizing small groups of elite merchants was to some extent a consequence of the increasing concentration of power within a narrowing circle of wealthy, and often interrelated, merchant families in England's late
medieval towns, but it also accelerated that process. It meant too that these mercantile elites were increasingly integrated into the framework of royal government and became more directly accountable to the crown.
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Naval policy, for example, acquired something of the nature of a joint-stock enterprise between king, parliament and the major ports, with the safeguard of the sea becoming from the 1370s a subject of intense parliamentary debate and one on which the views of the burgesses carried weight.
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This reached its height during the Pirate War, culminating in the parliamentary decision in April 1406 that the merchants themselves would raise and man a fleet to protect their trading interests. Although both individuals and ports undoubtedly suffered economic loss and commercial disruption, the alternative, to leave English shipping defenceless, was unthinkable and, despite the fact that it required considerable financial outlay, England's merchants – especially the wealthier sort, who traded internationally – favoured a strong naval policy.

Loans too brought towns, and especially their leading citizens, into a closer relationship with the crown, for repayment was often made through assignments on the customs which they collected, resulting in increased control by the wealthier merchants of customs collection, often through the machinery of the staple.
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The reward for lending came through the enhanced civic power of the principal lenders and a variety of corporate favours. Norwich, for example, which loaned an average of £90 a year to Henry, including one sum of 1,000 marks soon after his accession, was encouraged by the king to request a new charter, and in 1404 became only the fifth town in the kingdom (after London, Bristol, York and Newcastle) to be granted county status.
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This entailed the election by towns of their own sheriffs and JPs, who answered not just to the town but also to the king, thus involving leading townsmen in royal, as well as civic, governance. Yet the road to Norwich's charter was a bumpy one, indicative of the competing demands on citizens' loyalties, for Bishop Despenser, fearful of losing his hold over his cathedral city and furious that it had taken the side of his great local rival Thomas Erpingham in a bitter dispute between the
two men, opposed the grant. Braving their bishop's wrath, the citizens assiduously cultivated Erpingham, paying him a fee of £40 a year and sending gifts of wine, capons and swans to his wife, as well as maintaining his quarrels. Norwich's victory was his victory too, an object lesson in the influence enjoyed by leading courtiers in towns as well as in the shires.
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English kings always held the whip hand in their dealings with townsmen: the latter's universally acknowledged social inferiority encouraged and justified such behaviour. Nor did English kings fear civic militias as their continental counterparts did: there was no English equivalent in the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries to the Flemish townsmen's stunning victory against the army of Philip IV at the battle of Courtrai in 1302, or the prolonged armed resistance to their rulers of the citizens of Ghent or Liège, let alone the political autonomy of Florence, Venice or Milan.
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Yet English kings generally respected borough liberties and did not wilfully interfere in civic affairs. Henry's tendency to rely on small groups of leading citizens certainly ruffled some feathers, but as long as those whom he favoured continued to maintain order, arrange loans, provide ships and mariners to protect overseas trade, provision his armies when required, keep their walls in good repair and deny succour to his enemies, he had little interest in how his patronage affected local rivalries or democratic procedures. Nevertheless, the effect of such a policy was to accelerate the process whereby the merchant oligarchies of England's towns acquired a greater say in national government, which meant that it became necessary to listen to their views. Although even the wealthiest and most powerful merchants could not hope to shape political events in the way that nobles or leading members of the gentry could, they increasingly helped to shape the outcomes of those events.

If it was at court, in the council, and in the counties and towns that the day-to-day politics of the kingdom were conducted, it was in parliament that lords, knights and burgesses came together to sanction or debate policy in a formal setting.
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Numerically, the largest group in parliament was the burgesses, about 170 of whom usually represented the kingdom's boroughs. Strength in numbers was deceptive, however, for their collective
voice was weak compared to that of the knights, let alone the lords. It was certainly the lords and knights who were responsible for the plain speaking that characterized many of Henry's parliaments. For the most part, the outspokenness of speakers such as Savage, Tiptoft or Chaucer focused on the government's financial record, but it was not easy to confine these conversations to fiscal matters and at times there was a reproachful edge to the debate, with each side accusing the other of saying things behind its back. Hence Henry's oft-repeated request for the commons to put their complaints in writing.
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On the other hand, it was made clear time and again that they had no desire to remove the king. Henry's parliaments, it is worth remembering, were thoroughly Lancastrian in composition: half or more of the knights of the shire had connections (some very close) with the king and court, and although the debates were at times disconcertingly hard-hitting, they lacked the bitter edge of collective fear and personal loathing which had characterized several of the parliaments of Richard's reign. Criticism was offered in the expectation that it would be listened to, not slapped down with threats of arrest or treason. That it came largely from the commons helps to explain this. The lords as individuals doubtless had plenty of advice to offer Henry, both in and out of parliament, and there were rivalries and tensions between some of them, but with the exception of the 1399 parliament, a hangover from the previous reign, they did not bring their feuds into parliament; indeed, they give the impression, even before the battle of Shrewsbury and certainly afterwards, of being unusually united in their support for the crown.

It was this unity of purpose among lords and commons which accounted for the candid nature of parliamentary exchanges, just as it was the closeness to the king of Savage, Esturmy, Tiptoft and Chaucer which gave them the confidence to speak the commons' mind. If they fought Henry all the way, he knew that ultimately they wanted him to succeed, and he knew also that although they would exert whatever pressure they could to bring solvency to the exchequer, they probably would grant him taxation eventually. Their frequent commendations of leading figures such as Erpingham and Norbury, their concern for the promotion of the king's children, and their desire to see the succession to the throne securely established, all indicate their underlying commitment to the Lancastrian dynasty.
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Their reaction to government insolvency certainly involved the imposition of
unwelcome restrictions on the king's prerogative, but, faced with the king's illness, their response was not to undermine but rather to shore up the regime. Frustrating as it was for Henry to be made to wait so long for taxation, the temper even of the 1406 parliament was quite different from those of, say, 1385–8 or 1394–7. No magnate faction seized the chance to try to bring down the king or his chief supporters. This was not treasonable opposition in alliance with, or manipulated by, disaffected magnates, but constructive criticism allied to a workable programme of reform.
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Naturally the commons needed to be wary of the reaction of their constituents to what they agreed or granted: hence the declaration in 1407 that any member of the commons who wished could take away with him and ‘make known in his country’ a copy of Henry's promise not to demand further direct taxation for three years. Yet with a king who had emphasized from the start of his reign the legitimate role of parliament to engage in meaningful political dialogue with him they knew they were on safe ground.
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There was something of the feel of a ‘Lancastrian party conference’ to Henry's parliaments, and it is the prerogative of party conferences to hold their leaders to account.
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In addition to ten parliaments, the king also summoned thirty or forty great councils. These were generally attended by up to fifty magnates, prelates, ministers and other advisers of the king, although occasionally they were much larger: to that held at Westminster in mid-August 1401, some 300 people were summoned, mostly knights and esquires selected county by county.
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The most common venues were Westminster and (until the suppression of the Welsh revolt) Worcester.
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Their business was often financial, especially raising loans, but they also provided opportunities for focused discussion of major issues of governance, war and diplomacy: that of August 1401, for example, debated the king's plans with regard to
Scotland and Wales, while two months later at Worcester, one of the questions considered was whether the king should conduct the war against Glyn Dŵr in person or commit it to deputies.
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At times, great councils were used to prepare or complete the work of parliaments: thus the parliament which met on 14 January 1404 at Westminster was preceded by a council at Sutton on 11 January, presumably in an attempt to devise a programme to recommend to the commons, while the parliament which ended on 10 March 1401 was followed a week later by the great council at Coldharbour which, among other things, reviewed and stiffened the anti-Welsh legislation. At other times they were held specifically in order to avoid a parliament, such as that of February 1400 which offered the king loans and military service ‘in order to avoid the summoning of a parliament’ and the imposition of taxation on ‘the common people’.
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They were also a useful way of affirming support for policy initiatives, as in July 1408 when a great council considered whether to send a delegation to the Council of Pisa. Unlike parliaments, which required forty days for the holding of elections, great councils could be summoned at short notice: for those held at Westminster on 28 May and 11 December 1403, summonses were sent out less than a week beforehand.
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