Henry IV

For the second time in the century, an aristocratic rebellion had imprisoned the King. Like Edward II in 1326, also taken captive in Wales, Richard II was kept out of the public gaze and, in secret, persuaded to abdicate. Those who ‘received’ his abdication, including Henry Bolingbroke and Archbishop Arundel, declared that Richard had gone voluntarily, surrendering his signet ring to Bolingbroke as a token of his desire that Bolingbroke succeed him as king. In all probability, there was nothing voluntary about it. Parliament accepted the fait accompli. A charge sheet was hastily prepared against the former King and his tyranny, and on 13 October, a Monday, clearly chosen because it was the greatest day in the liturgical year for the Westminster monks, the feast day of their own saint Edward the Confessor, Bolingbroke was crowned at Westminster as King Henry IV. For his coronation, Archbishop Arundel employed the very oil of St Thomas, first discovered by Edward II, prized by Richard II, and which henceforth was to be used at the coronation of at least three further English kings. Stored in a golden vessel shaped like an eagle, and said to have been given to St Thomas by the Virgin Mary, this substance in theory conferred even greater honour on the kings of England than was conferred on the kings of France by their own holy oil stored at Rheims, brought down from heaven by a mere dove not by an imperial eagle or by Christ’s own mother. The coronation of 1399 was also quite possibly the first occasion when the stone of Scone, confiscated from the Scots a century earlier, was used in the inauguration of an English King. To crown so unlikely a king as Henry IV required every trick in the Westminster dressing-up box.

Richard II, meanwhile, was dispatched to Pontefract castle, within Henry’s own honour of Lancaster. There he died, perhaps stifled like Gloucester, perhaps having starved himself to death. It was surely no coincidence that it had been at Pontefract that Edward II had condemned to death Henry’s own ancestor, the first of the great Lancastrian rebels, Thomas of Lancaster. In 1387, almost at the moment of his joining the Lords Appellant in rebellion against the King, Henry Bolingbroke had named his own second son Thomas, the second figure in family history to bear the name Thomas of Lancaster. In his lifetime, Richard II had requested burial at Westminster. Henry IV ignored this wish and instead had Richard, his cousin, interred at the Dominican friary at King’s Langley. The significance here was also plain enough. It was at King’s Langley that Edward II had buried Piers Gaveston. In death, Richard was to join not his royal ancestors but a hated royal catamite, beheaded for his abuse of power. In an almost equally fitting echo of the past, at much the same time that Richard was buried, Thomas Lord Despenser, a great-grandson of another equally notorious favourite of Edward II, was seized in rebellion at Cardiff, carried off to Bristol and there executed by the mob. Truly, Richard II’s had been a reign haunted by England’s past.

For the English of the fourteenth century to have killed one king (Edward II), might be considered a misfortune. To have killed two began to look like deliberate carelessness. Henry IV might pose as God’s anointed, his coronation timed to coincide with the feast day of the pacific Edward the Confessor. But the Confessor’s feast itself fell on the eve of the anniversary of the Battle of Hastings, 14 October, and Henry IV’s accession itself marked almost as dramatic a debut for the new king as William of Normandy’s victory of 1066. In 1327, Edward III, hustled on to the throne a few years or decades before his time, had at least been the son of the previous king, born in the purple. In 1399, by ending the rule of a dynasty more than two hundred and fifty years old, Henry IV proclaimed himself every bit as much a usurper as William of Normandy three centuries before.

Taking a short-term view, the problems of legitimacy that were to haunt fifteenth-century politics were the outcome of the Lancastrian revolution of 1399, ensuring that after Richard II no king could sleep soundly in his bed. Viewed in the longer term, the accession of Henry IV and his Lancastrian dynasty was itself the product of a slow slide towards violence and usurpation begun as long ago as the 1290s with the gathering pace of warfare on England’s frontiers, the emergence of treason trials against leading subjects in which death was the inevitable sentence, and the incremental way in which revenge and the desire for vengeance were established as driving forces within aristocratic politics.

At the time of his accession, Henry IV’s greatest strengths were his piety and his wealth. In the 1390s, as Earl of Derby, he had twice volunteered to crusade against the pagans of Lithuania. On the second occasion, when the campaign ended prematurely, he had travelled as a pilgrim to Jerusalem, the ultimate goal of all crusaders. As heir to the honour of Lancaster and the lands of John of Gaunt, he already had the prospect of an annual income of at least £12,000. Combined after 1399 with the estates of the crown, this rendered him perhaps the wealthiest man, in terms of his personal fortune, to have ruled England since the Conquest of 1066. This brought further problems, however, since it persuaded the Commons that Henry IV no longer had need of subsidies voted by Parliament. Indeed, it was widely supposed that, before ascending the throne, the new King had proclaimed his intention to live ‘off his own’, without the crippling taxes that for the past fifty years had poisoned relations between crown and taxpayers. If Henry made any such undertaking, then he very soon came to regret it.

From the shadows, both foreign and domestic issues emerged to tarnish Henry’s claims to legitimacy. To the costs of maintaining the affinity of Lancastrian knights and retainers he had inherited from his father were now added those of the royal household. Henry’s personal finances spiralled out of all control. Far worse, as early as January 1400, within only three months of his coronation, a plot emerged to kill the King and his sons and to restore the deposed Richard II. It was in the subsequent reprisals that Lord Despenser was murdered by the Bristol mob. Richard II’s own demise, announced within a few weeks, was another immediate consequence of this threat to the new regime. The King’s knights were put to good use in Scotland, in August 1400, when they were amongst a major force of over 15,000 men sent north in an attempt to persuade King Robert III to recognize Henry’s title as king. For the rest, it was left to the Percys, for the past fifty years or more virtually independent rulers of the northern March, to impose order on the Scots, inflicting a major defeat upon Scots raiding parties at Homildon Hill in September 1402. Meanwhile, as early as September 1400, within only a month of his return from the north, Henry IV was confronted with rebellion in Wales.