Henry V as Warlord (7 page)

Scrope soon informed the Council that running the country would not be easy. In consequence of perennial deficits the Crown’s debts were huge. He estimated that the basic deficit for the year ahead was going to be over £16,000, without allowing for salaries. The prince had to extract more money from the Commons. After much decorous if heated wrangling he succeeded in convincing them that his priority really was ‘good governance’ and they granted it.

He must have personally approved the Council’s decision to devalue the currency, providing extra revenue. At this date there was an endemic bullion crisis in Europe, a shortage of silver as well as gold. In 1410 the noble (the principal gold coin in circulation) was reduced in weight by twelve grains and the silver penny by three, other denominations being adjusted proportionately. The reform’s effectiveness was demonstrated by the English coinage keeping these weights for over half a century. However, it can scarcely have been a popular measure.

The Commons were extremely nervous about the safety of the fortress and port of Calais, which since 1347 had been England’s military and commercial bridgehead in northern France, dominated by English settlers. In 1410 Prince Henry appointed himself Captain of Calais. He found the garrison’s pay chronically in arrears, the government owing over £9,000, and the men mutinous. Significantly, he nonetheless had estimates drawn up for the cost of maintaining Calais in time of war.

Henry showed both subtlety and rock-like self-confidence in his treatment of the man who was potentially the most dangerous in the realm, the Earl of March. So fearful had the king been of the very existence of Richard II’s rightful heir that he always kept him in custody. Instead the prince freed the seventeen-year-old earl, attaching him to his own household in much the same way that he himself had once been attached to Richard II’s – his father was too ill to demur. This ostensibly conciliatory approach, very carefully calculated, was to appear in Henry’s dealings with other magnates when he ascended the throne.

By now the Duke of Burgundy was in full control of Paris where the lesser bourgeoisie and the academics, together with the mob, were his firm supporters. (His opponents were the wealthy bourgeois and high officials, together with the retainers and clients of the other princes of the Blood.) Duke John persuaded the Sorbonne to condemn posthumously the late Louis of Orleans as a tyrant, so that he could obtain a pardon from the king on the grounds that the assassination had been tyrannicide and not murder and that he was therefore guiltless. He endeared himself to the Parisians by lavishing gifts on the guilds (in particular that of the butchers who became his most bloodthirsty henchmen), by reducing taxes imposed by Armagnacs, and by executing several tax collectors. It was known that the Count of Armagnac was plotting to evict him from the capital at the point of the sword. Duke John now offered the hand of his daughter to Henry, together with four Flemish ports and future help in conquering Normandy, in return for immediate military assistance. In October 1411 the Earl of Arundel led 800 men-at-arms and 2,000 archers down from Calais to Paris, fighting side by side with the Burgundians to help them drive the blockading Armagnacs from their strong points at the bridge of St Cloud and St Denis. Such intervention did not please everyone in England.

It pleased even fewer people in France. Apart from the Duke of Burgundy, the French did not welcome the reappearance of the English in their midst. Crécy, Poitiers and the many raids during which ‘the ancient enemy’ from over the Channel had killed, raped, looted and burnt and which had ceased only a quarter of a century before, were not forgotten. Moreover Arundel was a peculiarly aggressive and unpleasant figure. In his
Chronique de Charles VI
Jean Juvénal des Ursins, Bishop and Count of Beauvais, tells us that the English were so much disliked that it was difficult for them to find billets at Paris; decades later, in a letter of 1440, he cited with some bitterness the earl’s expedition as the beginning of France’s anarchy and devastation.
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It was probably during this year of 1411 that one of King Charles’s secretaries, Jean de Montreuil, wrote in his address
A tout la chevalerie de France:

When I see that they [the English] want to do nothing save lay waste and destroy this realm, from whom may God preserve it, and how they wage war to the death on all their neighbours, I hold them in such abomination and hatred that I love those who hate them and hate those who love them.
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Prince Henry’s policies differed from his father’s in many ways. He was opposed by what some historians have called a ‘king’s party’ – which may well have been how contemporaries saw it. The opposition included not only old Archbishop Arundel and the king’s brother-in-law, the Earl of Westmorland (despite his Beaufort loyalties), but Henry’s younger brother, Thomas of Lancaster. Prince Thomas had quarrelled with the Beauforts over the inheritance of his wife, their brother’s widow. A year younger than Henry, the future Duke of Clarence had been the king’s Lieutenant in Ireland. Very much a soldier, with a passion for heraldry and a bastard son whom he cherished, he was a hot-tempered opponent. During conscious moments the king feared that the brothers might fall out after his death – he warned Henry, ‘I fear that he, through his high mind, will make some high enterprise against thee.’

In November 1411 Henry IV recovered, dismissing Beaufort and reappointing Arundel as chancellor. Prince Thomas took his brother’s place on the Council. The Prince of Wales and his friends had infuriated the king by suggesting that he might consider abdication.

There were further negotiations with the Burgundians and Armagnacs. Prince Henry realized that the former had most to offer. But in March 1412 the Armagnacs offered Aquitaine as it had been at its greatest extent under the Black Prince. In August Prince Thomas – recently created Duke of Clarence – together with his cousin, the Duke of York, led an expeditionary force of 800 men-at-arms and 300 archers across the Channel to aid the Armagnacs. Landing in Normandy they marched down to Blois, killing, burning and looting. At Blois, however, they were informed that the Armagnacs had given in to the Burgundians and that their ‘help’ was no longer required – not even by the Duke of Burgundy. ‘The Duke of Clarence and the English did innumerable evils, as many as any enemies could do, and said they would not leave the realm until they had received satisfaction and been paid their wages,’ Jean Juvénal records. They extorted heavy compensation, amounting to £35,000 in all, of which a third was in jewellery. Clarence obtained 40,000 gold crowns and a jewelled cross worth 15,000 crowns; the Duke of York 5,000 crowns and a cross valued at 40,000 crowns. Lesser magnates shared in the booty, receiving similar pay-offs though on a smaller scale. They then marched down to Bordeaux, killing, burning and looting as before, and also kidnapping children whenever they could for sale as servants in England. Their exploits and their plunder aroused interest and admiration at home. Yet Prince Henry had been strongly opposed to the expedition because it meant abandoning the Burgundians, whose alliance he considered of far more strategic value than anything which the Armagnacs could offer.

The prince’s opposition did not please his father, who suspected he was planning to depose him. He may have contemplated rebellion but he was far too sensible to give way to the temptation. Nevertheless he was deprived of any share in government for the rest of the reign. In June 1412 he came to London with a whole host of supporters to put his views, after which he went on a sort of progress through England. The king feared he was plotting a
coup d’état
. At Coventry on 17 June the prince publicly proclaimed his innocence of any such intention, announcing that he was assembling troops purely to help his father conquer Aquitaine. He then came down to London accompanied by his men. There was a formal reconciliation between Henry IV and his heir, which satisfied neither. In September, after being accused of stealing the Calais garrison’s pay, he again came to London with a large armed following. He went straight to his father, unaccompanied, and after a tearful exchange they were reconciled for a second time.
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Henry IV had reason to fear for his crown. He had deposed Richard with the promise that he would save the country from inept government but by now he was incapacitated. Despite inadequate revenue and widespread disorder the prince was justifiably confident that he could make the system work and give the country better administration and fairer justice.

Henry of Monmouth’s precocious years of soldiering and politics had not prevented him from enjoying himself like other young men. Too many chroniclers speak of his dissipation for the traditional stories of a wild youth to be dismissed out of hand. The otherwise hagiographic
Gesta
admits that, ‘Passing the bounds of modesty, he was the fervent soldier of Venus as well as of Mars; youthlike he was fired by her torches.’
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The
First English Life
says ‘he exercised meanly the feats of Venus’ – using ‘meanly’ in the sense of ‘moderately’.
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Yet there is no record of any bastards. It may be relevant that his three brothers were curiously infertile in their marriages, only Thomas, the Duke of Clarence, begetting even a natural child.

Prince Henry is supposed to have had other amusements, including the odd pastime of disguising himself and then beating up and robbing his own household officials though there is no mention of this before the sixteenth century. He certainly spent a good deal of time in London where he had a great town house, once the Black Prince’s – Coldharbour, near London Bridge, next to the church of All Hallows the Less. We know that his brothers, Thomas and Humphrey, were involved in a midnight brawl at a tavern in Eastcheap where they were drinking on 23 June 1410 and the uproar was such that the mayor and sheriffs had to be called to restore order; Thomas was involved in a similar disturbance the following year. Yet there is no evidence that Henry was ever Falstaff’s ‘good shallow young fellow’. And whatever vicious friends the prince may have had, Falstaff was not among them. (The real-life Falstaff, Sir John Fastolf, was a hardbitten and very professional soldier with no time for frivolity.) He may have enjoyed the company of Sir John Oldcastle, who on one occasion arranged a wrestling match for him, but Sir John was scarcely famed for vice. Nevertheless, so distinguished a historian as McFarlane accepts the tales of his wildness, commenting that when he became king the ‘lawless and high-spirited youth became, as it were overnight, a bigot and a disciplinarian’.
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One may ask from where did Shakespeare derive his portrait of Henry. It has long been known that his principal source was Holinshed’s
Chronicles
, which in turn was largely based on Edward Hall’s
Union of the two noble and illustre families of Lancaster and York
of 1548 and, through a copy in the possession of John Stow the antiquary, on a translation of Tito Livio’s official biography of 1437. (This translation, which includes details supplied by the family of the Earl of Ormonde who was with Henry in France, is
The First English Life
.) Shakespeare accepted much of the traditional portrait of a hero king yet his genius was too penetrating not to discern the megalomania and cruelty at which he hints once or twice.

Henry’s seal as Prince of Wales

There is evidence that Henry was a bigot even as Prince of Wales. Although it dates only from the sixteenth century it derives from an authentic Lollard tradition. We know from Foxe’s
Booke of Martyrs
that the prince played an active role in suppressing heresy. In 1409 he personally superintended the burning of a Lollard tailor, John Badby, who had denied transubstantiation, saying that the consecrated Host was worse than a toad or a spider. When Bad by began to scream, Henry had him pulled half-dead out of the flaming barrel in which he was being burnt and offered him a pension if he would recant. The man refused whereupon the prince had him put back in the barrel.
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King Henry IV died on 20 March 1413 in a room known as the ‘Jerusalem Chamber’ in the abbot’s lodging at Westminster. The chronicler John Capgrave tells us that the royal confessor John Tille begged Henry to repent of his killing Archbishop Scrope and of his usurping the throne. The king answered that he had been absolved by the pope of the archbishop’s murder, but that his son would never let him undo the usurpation. Even Tito Livio says that a few months before he died Henry IV admitted to his son ‘I sore repent me that ever I charged myself with the crown of this realm’. Enguerrand de Monstrelet relates how as the king lay on his deathbed the prince removed the crown from a table beside him but that he rallied and called for it. The dying man then asked his son what right he thought he had to it, since he himself had none. Prince Henry replied, ‘As you have kept it by the sword, so will I keep it while my life lasts.’