HENRY IV.
1399-1413.
[Sidenote: =Position and title of Henry.=]
Henry of Bolingbroke had small comfort all his days on the throne which
he had usurped. He was only the king of a faction, the nominee of the
party which had once supported the Lords Appellant; if one half of
the baronage was friendly to him for that reason, the other half was
always estranged from him. It might almost be said that the "Wars of
the Roses," the strife of the two great factions who adhered the one to
the house of Lancaster and the other to the house of March, began on
Henry's accession.
Richard's deposition had been the work, not of the whole nation, but
of Henry's friends, the Percies of Northumberland, the Nevilles of
Westmoreland, the Arundels--son and brother to the Arundel whom Richard
had beheaded in 1397--and the Staffords[24] who represented the line of
Thomas, Duke of Gloucester. The Parliament had acquiesced in Henry's
usurpation rather because it had been discontented with Richard's
arbitrary rule, than because it had any very great liking for his
cousin. Perhaps the more far-sighted of its members had concluded that
the accession of a king whose only title rested on election would be
favourable to the development of constitutional liberties, since Henry
would--at least for a time--be very much dependent on the good-will of
the body which had chosen him, and which might some day choose another
ruler if he proved unpliable.
[Sidenote: =Rebellion of the Hollands.=]
Before Henry had been two months on the throne, civil war had
broken out. The insurgents were Richard's kinsmen and favourites.
The two Hollands--Earls of Kent and Huntingdon, who were Richard's
half-brothers--conspired with Montacute, Earl of Salisbury, and Lord
Despenser, who had been his trusted friends. They plotted to seize King
Henry, as he lay at Windsor keeping the festivities of Christmas, to
slay or imprison him, and to release their old master from Pontefract
Castle. Unfortunately for themselves, they took into their counsels
Edward Earl of Rutland, the son of the old Duke of York. The cowardly
prince, finding that he was suspected, informed the king of the plot
before the conspirators were ready. Henry escaped from Windsor, and
called his friends together at London. The rebel earls set out in
various directions to endeavour to raise their retainers, but they were
all overtaken. Kent and Salisbury fell into their enemies' hands at
Cirencester, Huntingdon was caught in Essex, Despenser at Bristol. All
were beheaded without any delay or form of trial. Henry's grim reply to
this insurrection was the production of the dead body of King Richard,
which was brought from Pontefract to London, and publicly displayed to
prove his death. Nevertheless, many men refused to credit his decease,
and for years after there were some who maintained that the body
exposed in St. Paul's was not that of the late king, but that of his
chaplain, who bore an extraordinary personal resemblance to him. They
believed, or tried to believe, that Richard had escaped and was alive
in Scotland. Trading on this notion, an impostor presented himself at
the Scotch court, and was long entertained there as the true King of
England by the simple Robert III.
[Sidenote: =Rebellion in Wales.--Owen Glendower.=]
Hardly was the rebellion of the Hollands put down before a second
civil war arose. The Welsh had always been devoted to King Richard,
and had taken his deposition very ill. In 1400, a gentleman named
Owen-ap-Griffith, of Glendower, who had been one of Richard's squires,
put himself at the head of a rising in North Wales. Owen was of the
old princely blood of the house of Llewellyn, and proclaimed himself
Prince of North Wales under the suzerainty of his master Richard, whom
he declared to be still alive in Scotland. He was a guerilla captain
of marked ability, and completely baffled the efforts that King Henry
made to put him down. He swept all over North Wales, captured many
of its castles, and extended his sway over the whole countryside. To
the day of his death Owen maintained himself in independence, ravaging
the English border when he was left alone, and retiring into the
recesses of Snowdon when a great force took the field against him. His
incursions penetrated as far as Worcester and Shrewsbury, and no man
west of the Severn was safe from his plundering bands.
[Sidenote: =England harassed by Scotland and France.=]
As if the Welsh trouble was not enough to keep King Henry employed,
other wars broke out around him. The Scots under the Earl of Douglas
crossed the border to harry Northumberland, and Lewis of Orleans, the
uncle of Richard's queen Isabella, began to stir up the French court to
attack England, and encouraged many descents of Norman privateers on
the coasts of the Channel.
[Sidenote: =Henry and the Parliament.--Persecution of the Lollards.=]
Henry's only resource was to keep the nation in good temper by a
rigorous and punctual obedience to all the petitions and requests of
his Parliament. Accordingly, he showed himself the most constitutional
of sovereigns, and both now and for many years to come made himself
the dutiful servant of the Commons. He also did his best to enlist
the favour of Churchmen on his side by a cruel persecution of the
Lollards. The disciples of Wicliffe had always favoured King Richard,
who had shown them complete tolerance, and Henry felt that he was not
estranging any of his own partisans when he handed over the Lollards
to the mercy of the harsh and fanatical Archbishop Arundel.[25] It was
under this prelate's guidance that the king assented to the infamous
statute _De Heretico Comburendo_ (1401), which condemned all convicted
schismatics to the stake and fire. The first victim burnt was William
Sawtree, a London clergyman, and others followed him at intervals all
through Henry's reign.
[Sidenote: =Battle of Homildon Hill.=]
The Scotch war came to a head in 1402, at the battle of Homildon Hill.
There Murdoch of Albany, the son of the Scotch regent, was completely
defeated by Percy of Northumberland and his son Harry Percy, whom the
Borderers nicknamed Hotspur for his speed and energy. But the victory
of Homildon was fated to do England more harm than any defeat, since
it was to cause a renewal of the civil war. The Percies had taken
many prisoners, including Murdoch himself, and three other Scots
Earls, Douglas, Moray, and Orkney. From the ransoms of these peers
they trusted to get great profit; but King Henry, who was at his
wits' end to scrape money together without troubling Parliament, took
the prisoners out of the Percies' hands and claimed the ransoms for
himself. This mortally offended Northumberland, a proud and greedy
chief, who had been Henry's main support at the time of his usurpation,
and thought that in return the king ought to refuse nothing to him.
[Sidenote: =Rebellion of the Percies.=]
In sheer lawless wrath at the king's refusal to hear him,
Northumberland resolved to dethrone Henry. He secretly concerted
measures with Owen Glendower for a joint attack on the king, and
released his captive, the Earl of Douglas, who in return brought him a
band of Scottish auxiliaries. By Owen's counsel, aid was sought from
France also, and it was settled that the young Earl of March should be
proclaimed king, if Richard II. proved to be really dead.
[Sidenote: =Battle of Shrewsbury.--Death of Hotspur.=]
In July, 1403, the Percies rose, and were joined by their kinsman the
Earl of Worcester, and many more. Hotspur rapidly led his army towards
Shrewsbury, where Glendower had promised to join him with a Welsh
host. But King Henry was too quick for his foes; he threw himself
between them, and caught the young Percy before the Welsh came up. The
desperately fought battle of Shrewsbury (July 23, 1403) ended in the
victory of the royal host. Hotspur was slain by an arrow, while Douglas
and Worcester were taken, and the latter executed for treason. It was
at this field that the king's eldest son, Henry of Monmouth, destined
in later years to be the conqueror of France, first looked upon the
face of war.
[Sidenote: =Second Rebellion.--Execution of Scrope.=]
The Earl of Northumberland, who had not been present at Shrewsbury, but
had kept at home in the north, was allowed to make his peace with the
king on the payment of a great fine. But Henry was wrong in thinking
that the crafty and resentful old earl was no longer dangerous. Though
his brave son was dead, Percy stirred up a second rebellion two years
later, by the aid of Mowbray, Earl of Nottingham, son of Henry's old
opponent in the lists of Coventry,[26] and of Scrope, Archbishop of
York, brother of that Scrope, Earl of Wilts, whom the Lancastrians had
hung in 1399. But Neville, Earl of Westmoreland, who commanded for
the king in the North, induced Scrope and Mowbray to lay down their
arms and come to a conference, and there he seized them as traitors.
They were at once put on trial, not before their peers as they claimed,
but before two of the king's justices, who condemned them to death.
Scrope's execution sent a thrill of horror throughout England, for no
archbishop had ever before been slain by a king, save Thomas Becket,
and many men counted him a martyr even as Becket. So Henry lost as much
love of the clergy by this act as he had gained by his assent to the
statute _De Heretico Comburendo_.
Northumberland escaped to Scotland in 1405, and lurked there for two
years; but in 1407 he crossed the Tweed, raised his vassals, and made a
dash for York. But he was intercepted at Bramham Moor, and there slain,
fighting hard in spite of his seventy years.
After this King Henry was no more vexed with civil war in England, but
his Welsh troubles showed no sign of ending. Owen Glendower eluded
Henry, Prince of Wales, and all the other leaders who came against him,
with complete success, and the English armies suffered so severely from
storms among the Welsh hills that they swore that Owen was a magician
and had conjured the elements against them.
[Sidenote: =Henry's submission to Parliament .--The Beauforts.=]
It was the constant drain of money for this interminable war that
kept the king in strict submission to his Parliament, so that he was
obliged to allow them to audit all his accounts, and even to dismiss
his servants when they thought that he kept too large and wasteful a
household. Henry much disliked this control, but he always bowed before
it. His health was failing, though he was still in middle age, and
bodily weakness seems to have bent his will. From 1409 to 1412 he was
so feeble that the government was really carried on by his son, the
Prince of Wales, and his half-brothers, the Beauforts, Henry, Bishop of
Winchester, and Thomas, the Chancellor. Of the Beaufort clan we shall
hear much in the future; they were the sons of John of Gaunt's old
age. After the death of his wife, Constance of Castile, a lady named
Katharine Swinford became his mistress and bore him several sons. He
afterwards married her, and the children were legitimatized by Act of
Parliament. Of these the eldest was now Earl of Somerset, and the
youngest Bishop of Winchester.
[Sidenote: =Detention of Prince James of Scotland.=]
It was fortunate for England in these years, when the realm was
ruled by a bedridden king and a very young Prince of Wales, that her
neighbours to north and south had fallen on evil days. Neither Scot nor
Frenchman was dangerous at this time. The Scots were bridled by the
fact that the heir of the kingdom was in Henry's hands. For it chanced
that King Robert III. was sending his son James to France, and that
the ship was taken by an English privateer. "Why did they not send him
straight to me?" said King Henry; "I could have taught him French as
well as any man at Paris." So Prince James was kept at Windsor as a
hostage for the good behaviour of Scotland. His jealous uncle Albany,
the regent of that kingdom, did not want him released, and was quite
content to leave him in Henry's power and keep the peace.
[Sidenote: =Civil War in France.--Armagnacs and Burgundians.=]
The cause of the quiescence of France was very different. King Charles
VI. had become insane, and no longer ruled. A desperate civil war had
been raging there ever since the king's brother, the Duke of Orleans,
had been murdered by his cousin, the Duke of Burgundy, in 1407. The
partisans of the murdered duke, who were called the Armagnacs from
their leader, Bernard, Count of Armagnac, were always endeavouring
to revenge his death on Burgundy. They mustered most of the feudal
nobility of France in their ranks, while their opponent was supported
by the burghers of Paris and many of the towns of the north. John of
Burgundy was lord of Flanders as well as of his own duchy, and was well
able to hold his own even though his French partisans were outnumbered
by the Armagnacs. Both factions sought the help of England, and King
Henry was able to play a double game, and to negociate with each
of them on the terms that he should be given back some of the lost
districts of Aquitaine in return for his aid. In the end he closed with
the offers of the Armagnacs, and sent over a small army to Normandy
under his second son, Thomas, Duke of Clarence. Clarence accomplished
little, but the fact that his troops were able to march across France
to Bordeaux with little hindrance taught the English that the French
were too helpless and divided to be formidable (1412). The lesson was
taken to heart, as we shall see in the next reign.
[Sidenote: =Prince Henry of Monmouth.=]
While King Henry lay slowly dying of leprosy, his son, the Prince of
Wales, was gaining the experience which was to serve him so well a
few years later. Henry of Monmouth was a warrior from his youth up;
at the age of fifteen he had been present at Shrewsbury field, and in
the succeeding years he toiled in the hard school of the Welsh wars,
leading expedition after expedition against Glyndower. The legendary
tales which speak of him as a debauched and idle youth, who consorted
with disreputable favourites, such as Shakespeare's famous "Sir John
Falstaff," are entirely worthless. Of all these fables the only one
that seems to have any foundation is that which tells how Henry was
suspected by his father of over-great ambition and of aiming at the
crown. It appears that the prince's supporters, the two Beauforts,
suggested to King Henry that he should abdicate, and pass on the
sceptre to his son. The king was much angered at the proposal, turned
the Beauforts out of office, and was for a time estranged from the
Prince of Wales. This was the reason why he sent Clarence rather than
his elder brother to conduct the war in France. He even removed Prince
Henry from his position as head of the royal council. But this outburst
of anger was the king's last flash of energy. He died of his lingering
disease on March 20, 1413.
FOOTNOTES:
[24] Thomas of Gloucester's only daughter had married Edmund, Earl of
Stafford.
[25] Brother of the Arundel whom Richard II. beheaded.
[26] See p. 210.