Henry IV (93 page)

Only at the battle of Shrewsbury, where both sides deployed the massed formations of dismounted men-at-arms and archers favoured by English commanders for the previous seventy years, is it possible to get some idea of Henry's battle tactics, but his overall military strategy is a little clearer. He would not have deluded himself that the Scots or Welsh would risk a pitched battle against his more numerous and better-equipped armies,
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and his campaigns were in part psychological exercises, demonstrating his commitment to the preservation of his dominions and marches, his willingness to hazard his person and his reputation in war, his refusal to abandon those who remained loyal to him and his leadership of his nation in war, as well as to deprive the rebels of equipment and provisions. The military benefits of his 1400 campaign to Scotland are harder to discern, although his thinking was reasonably clear: he hoped to reverse the Scottish recovery of the past thirty years, to capitalize on the defection of George Dunbar, and to impose his authority on a kingdom which thumbed its nose at his claim to overlordship. His refusal to allow his army to plunder and waste the Scottish border counties was a strategic decision born of
high hopes, but not until the much bloodier affair at Humbleton Hill did they begin to be realized.

Generally speaking, plunder and waste were standard fare in the fighting of the time, but Henry's approach to warfare was not hidebound. One thing his son would have learned much about from him was the guns which he put to such good use at the siege of Harfleur in 1415.
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Kings of England had acquired cannons from relatively early in the fourteenth century, but Henry IV had a more developed interest in artillery, perhaps as a result of seeing it in action at Vilnius. The king's guns were kept in the privy wardrobe at the Tower, where an inventory from the first year of Henry's reign listed thirty-nine cannons, twenty-three cannon-trunks, over a thousand cannonballs and large quantities of gunpowder, saltpetre and tampions. The men responsible for buying, making and maintaining them were the king's artillerer, William Byker, and his (mainly German) gunners, Antonio Herman, Walter Cook, and John and Gerard Sprong.
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By February 1405, when Henry Somer replaced John Norbury as keeper of the privy wardrobe, the number of cannons kept at the Tower had fallen to twenty-three, many having been dispersed to where they were needed – Wales, Yorkshire, Guyenne, the Channel coast, and elsewhere.
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That summer was especially busy, with Wales and the north both regularly needing to have cannons, cannonballs and gunpowder sent to replenish stocks.
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After 1407, responsibility for the king's cannonry was transferred to the royal chamber, under the care of Gerard Sprong, and more artillery stores were set up around the country: Pontefract was one such repository, and by 1411 Henry had built a new tower with gunloops at Southampton in which to mount the guns needed to defend the harbour approaches.
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Whether campaigning in Scotland, Wales, or the north, the king always took his cannons with him, and their impact was considerable. They
certainly helped to secure the surrender of Aberystwyth and Harlech in 1408–9, despite the fact that one of them, the two-ton
Messenger
, blew up when fired at Aberystwyth.
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They were also instrumental in reducing the northern castles in 1405: shortly after the taking of Berwick, Prince John wrote to his father to say that urgent repairs were needed to its walls, two-thirds of which were ruinous partly as a result of the bombardment inflicted on them by Henry's artillery a few months earlier. The king's own account stated that by the ‘good and powerful firing of his cannons, and their great and marvellous blows, the walls of the said castle [Berwick] were battered and broken’.
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His exultant letter to the council in July 1405 explaining that just seven shots from one of his cannons had brought about the surrender of Warkworth doubtless exaggerated its impact on the outcome of the siege, but his pride in them is unmistakable and evident from early in the reign.
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In 1402, 10,000 lbs of copper costing £135 were bought at Dinant in the Low Countries to make guns for the king, one of which was nicknamed
The King's Daughter
. Henry was even said to have invented a new ‘great cannon’ himself, the materials for which cost £25.
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He also had a ‘great gun (
magna gunna
)’, said to weigh four-and-a-half tons, which in June 1411 he sent to Spain, perhaps indicative of the sophistication of English cannons at the time.
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The ship on which it was sent also carried two ‘small guns for a ship’ made by John Ferkyn – an early reference to the specialized manufacture of shipboard cannons.
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The vital role of naval warfare during Henry's reign – not just in the Channel and the North Sea, but also in supplying beleaguered English castles in Wales – also stimulated the king's interest in ships. The great majority of vessels in the crown's pay during the late Middle Ages were requisitioned merchantmen, and although Edward III had owned around forty ships in the 1370s they rarely saw military use and were mostly sold off early in Richard II's reign. By 1399 there were just four ships belonging to
the crown: the
Trinité de la Tour, Gracedieu, Nicholas
, and
George
.
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Faced with the need to protect English shipping and ports, Henry initially sought to revive the royal fleet, and on 10 January 1401 ordered towns up and down the country to construct thirty-six balingers and eighteen barges, shallow-draft vessels suitable for coastal and estuarine operations; however, a few weeks later the commissions were repealed because they had been issued without parliamentary assent and contrary to precedent.
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Thus during the Pirate War the king once again relied heavily on ships owned and skippered by privateers. The combined operations of these early years between the admirals of the northern and southern fleets, who were royally appointed and in charge of operations, and the merchant-privateers who owned, manned and sailed the ships but took their pay and orders from the king's officers, was in effect a public–private partnership for the safeguard of the sea. Henry's admirals were men close to him – Worcester, Rempston, Grey, Thomas Berkeley, Thomas Beaufort – but it was their systematic cooperation with the likes of John Hauley, Henry Pay, Mark Mixto, Richard Spicer and John Brandon that gave naval policy its teeth and claws.
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However, this did not mean that the king's ships were redundant, and once the Pirate War subsided and the indiscipline of some of the privateers began to make them more of a liability than an asset, Henry's desire to revive a royal fleet reasserted itself. His own ships did play a small part in the war, but were more often used to transport members of the royal family.
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For his personal use on the Thames, Henry had a gold and scarlet barge with a white collared leopard carved on the prow. He also had a ‘large ship’, presumably a cog or a carrack, which he sent to Brittany to collect Queen Joan in 1403;
Le Holygost de la Tour
, in which he despatched his daughter Philippa to Denmark in 1406; and the
Trinité de la Tour
, which carried the earl of Rutland to Guyenne in September 1401. At least six of Henry's ships were named
de la Tour – La Katerine, La Godegrace
(or
Gracedieu
), the
Holygost, Trinité, Sirena
(Siren), and one simply called
La Tour
– for when not in use they were usually berthed on the Thames at Ratcliffe below the
Tower, although this was in no real sense a royal dockyard.
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After 1409 Henry began to acquire more ships, some purchased, some built for him, some as gifts, some as prizes such as his Mediterranean ‘great galley’ the
Jesus Maria
and a Genoese carrack known simply as
Le Carake
. The appointment in 1408–9 of Thomas Beaufort as admiral of England, Ireland, Guyenne and Picardy – in effect the first Lord High Admiral – also signalled a revival of momentum in naval affairs,
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and by 1411 responsibility for the king's ships had been entrusted to Helming Leget, usher of the king's chamber, thus bringing them (like the royal cannons) within the king's purview. The construction of the Catchcold tower at Southampton in 1410–11 presaged the use of its harbour as a royal dock.
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During the last two years of the reign this process of acquisition began to resemble a policy, encouraged presumably by the prospect of renewed intervention in France. In September 1411 Henry wrote to his sister, the queen of Castile, to ask her if she would sell him her ship the
Santa Maria
, currently lying in San Sebastian harbour, which he had set his heart on (
multum affectat habere
).
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At the same time, in preparation for his putative voyage to Guyenne, four of his ships were ordered to be got ready:
Le Bernard, Le Cristofre
, an unnamed barge, and a carrack, probably
Le Carake
.
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Although Henry never went to Guyenne, he continued to acquire vessels: in the summer of 1412 he bought the
Thomas
for £266 from Thomas Fauconer, a London mercer, and before his death he had also acquired the
Cog Johan
and at least six other ships. Three of these may have been the galleys for the construction of which William Loveney, who replaced Leget as keeper in March 1412, was ordered in October to cut down 800 oaks at
Eltham.
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This re-establishment of a royal fleet was carried forward by Henry V, who needed to secure the Channel to pursue his ambitions in northern France.
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By 1419 there were thirty-six royal ships, some of them very big such as the
Jesus
, which was around 1,000 tons. The
Gracedieu
, at 1,400 tons was one of the largest ships sailing in northern European waters,
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and was also the last ship to be built for an English king for nearly fifty years. In his will, Henry V asked that some of his ships be sold to pay his debts, and in fact all but six were soon disposed of, for a total of around £1,000; his four ‘great ships’ lingered on for a few years but were abandoned in the 1430s.
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The reversion to the custom of impressing merchantmen did not mark the failure of this early Lancastrian experiment in royal fleet building so much as the suspension of active royal interest in it.

The end of war, as the theorists never tired of repeating, was peace, and throughout his reign Henry IV was continuously engaged in diplomacy. On average, he despatched or received about eight embassies a year, of which over a third were to, or from, France, although between 1402 and 1405 peace talks with the French broke down and meetings were restricted to discussing infractions of the truce.
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After 1406, however, a ‘perpetual peace’ was once again on the agenda, often in tandem with proposals for Prince Henry's marriage to a Valois princess. A further 25 per cent of embassies met with the Scots and around 10 per cent with the Flemish, although this under-represents the level of Anglo-Flemish diplomacy, which, in one form or another, was almost continuous between 1402 and 1407. Negotiations with Denmark and the Empire were intense in 1401–2 but fell away once the marriages of Blanche and Philippa had been agreed, but with the Hansa, Castile and Portugal they continued intermittently
throughout the reign. Communication with the Papacy was continuous, but mainly conducted by correspondence; in 1406–8, however, with the ending of the Schism in sight, Henry sent John Cheyne and Henry Chichele on a formal embassy to the Curia. Emissaries were also sent to Donald, Lord of the Isles, the duke of Guelders and Sigismund, king of Hungary.

Diplomacy was time-consuming, expensive and frustrating. Months might be spent far from home negotiating a provisional agreement, only for ambassadors to find by the time they returned that circumstances had rendered it obsolete. Cheyne and Chichele arrived in Rome in the winter of 1406–7 to discover that Pope Innocent had died and had to await new instructions; it was while French ambassadors were attending the parliament at Gloucester in November 1407 that news arrived of Orléans's assassination, obliging them to conclude a hasty truce before returning to Paris to assess the situation. Sometimes foreign envoys had to wait for weeks or even months for an audience, as Jean Hangest did at Windsor in the autumn of 1400, or to seek the king in some distant part of the realm where business had taken him, as in the spring of 1408 when a French delegation had to follow Henry to Yorkshire, whither he had gone in the aftermath of Northumberland's last rising.
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For the most part, however, visiting embassies stayed in or around London, sometimes at one of the royal residences but more often at one of the capital's inns or religious houses.
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When meetings ended quickly, it was usually a sign of failure: it took just three days at Kirk Yetholm in 1401 for the Scots to make it clear that there was no basis for agreement. However, if the will existed on both sides to reach a settlement, months or even years might be spent talking around obstacles, drafting agreements, reporting back and receiving new instructions. William Esturmy and John Kington spent over a year at Marienburg in 1404–5, while Nicholas Rishton spent the best part of several years at Calais negotiating the mercantile truce with Flanders.

The skill required for such work is self-evident. Henry's most versatile diplomats were Richard Young, bishop of Bangor, and then Rochester, who headed missions to Denmark, Scotland and the Empire as well as negotiating with France, Flanders and the Papacy; and John Cheyne, who accompanied Young to Germany in 1401 to negotiate Princess Blanche's
marriage, but was mainly employed on embassies to Paris and Rome. Both men were also privy councillors.
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Most diplomats were more specialized, steadily building contacts and learning how things worked. When prospects for peace with France seemed bright, as in 1406 and 1409, Henry Beaufort lent weight to the English delegations to Paris, but those more commonly appointed for Anglo-French talks included Cheyne, Chichele, Sir Hugh Mortimer and John Catterick, treasurer of Lincoln; the latter two, both close to Prince Henry, were there in part to represent his interests.
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Anglo-Flemish talks, which were held mainly at Calais, were usually in the hands of the lawyer Nicholas Rishton and a group of knights, Richard Aston, John Croft, Hugh Lutterell and Thomas Swynburn, while after the fall of the Percys Anglo-Scottish talks were generally conducted by Westmorland, Prince John, Robert Umfraville and Richard Holme, canon of York and king's secretary. Sir William Esturmy and John Kington, canon of Lincoln, were entrusted for years with negotiating with the Empire and the Hansa, although Henry also made good use of a number of German knights with imperial contacts and varying degrees of attachment to the English court. Some of these had served Richard II or Anne of Bohemia in a similar capacity, but this did not prevent them offering their services to Henry after 1399. Especially useful were Roger Siglem, the brothers John and Arnold Pallas, and Hartung van Klux, who between them fostered an atmosphere of goodwill between England and the Empire.
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