The Fears of Henry IV: The Life of England's Self-Made King (33 page)

John of Gaunt died on 3 February 1399, surviving just long enough to force the delay of his funeral by a couple of days, to Saturday 15 March.
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Henry did not attend the ceremony.
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By then he had received a message from William Bagot informing him that ‘the king was his sworn enemy, and that Henry must help himself by force’.
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Receiving this sort of information is unlikely to have tempted Henry to return to England to attend his father’s funeral, in the king’s presence. Froissart notes that Richard wrote an account of John’s death ‘with a sort of joy’ and that, when he sent a messenger to announce it to the French court, the messenger did not let Henry know the news.
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The entire French royal family joined with Henry in attending a Mass to pray for his father’s soul. They pitied him, but they could hardly have comforted him. Their real interests lay in supporting Richard, the rightful king, whose queen was the daughter of the king of France. Justice had to take second place to political expediency. Thus, although we have no written record of Henry’s feelings at that moment in March 1399 when he received news from Bagot, we can have little doubt that he was torn between emotions: grief for his father and anger at the way Richard had treated him, together with a sense of frustration at being stuck in Paris.

He had lost everything because of Richard. He had been kept back from having a prominent position as an international diplomat, which he could have reasonably expected. He had been prevented from winning as much fame in arms as he could have achieved. He had had to put up with plots against him and his father, constant worry, and seeing his uncle murdered and his friends summarily executed. He had been banished from
his estates and separated from his father and children. And yet he had been wholly loyal to the king for ten years. What did he have to show for such loyalty? A ducal coronet and ten years in exile. It was a poor return for a man who was so highly educated, well-travelled, pious and militarily skilled.

And therein lies the explanation of 1399, one of the most momentous years in English history. Richard personally hated Henry. According to a French contemporary, he felt ‘an implacable hatred’ for him.
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According to an English contemporary, he ‘vehemently hated’ him.
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Reflecting on their lives from their first meeting, it is obvious that their characters were totally conflicting: Henry was so dutiful, almost ploddingly obedient to his father, Richard so mercurial. Henry was so logical and self-disciplined, Richard so flighty. Henry was so physically confident, Richard so insecure, needing to cocoon himself within his royal self-righteousness. But beyond these reflections, we have to suspect that the very root of Richard’s active hatred (as opposed to passive dislike) was his own fear. He was afraid of Henry as the hero of the joust. He was afraid of his confidence, his affable nature, his logical mind and his strength. And he was afraid of his royalty, and the prophecies concerning the two of them. To impress his fellow men, and to get their obedience, Richard had to terrorise and cheat, to push himself forward and demand obedience. Henry was quite the opposite. It had been that way ever since they were children.

Thus it was a long-lasting hatred which brought the crisis to a head now. On 18 March 1399, twenty-eight years after he had first come to England, Richard sat on the throne, glowering at his subjects, and ordering them to address him in no other fashion but as ‘your majesty’, terrifying those around him, and demanding that his close friends be addressed as ‘magnificent’ and that the duke of Aumale should be referred to as his ‘brother’.
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At the same time, Henry sat in his chamber in a borrowed house in Paris, having been unable even to attend his father’s funeral. And as they sat in their respective states – one haughty, the other reduced to waiting modestly on a foreign king – Richard announced that Henry’s pardons were all revoked. The entire Lancastrian inheritance was confiscated. Everything Henry possessed was forfeit. And Henry himself was to be regarded as a traitor, and banished from England for the rest of his life.

NINE

The Virtue of Necessity

All places that the eye of heaven visits

Are to a wise man ports and happy havens.

Teach thy necessity to reason thus;

There is no virtue like necessity.

Richard II,
Act 1, Scene 3

This biography began by referring to the character portraits of Henry IV and Richard II with which we are most familiar, namely those conveyed by Shakespeare’s plays. It has to be said that Shakespeare sympathises more with Richard, portraying him as unable to come to terms with the fragility of his power and the failure of his identity as a king. Shakespeare’s Henry – or, more accurately, his
Henrys –
are never in need of our sympathy, even when (as duke or king) they are politically weak. Rather it is Harry Hotspur with whom Shakespeare sympathises in
Henry IV Part One:
a rebellious but doomed subject. In
Henry IV Part Two
it is the prince. In
Henry V,
the king becomes the object of Shakespeare’s sympathy because of the weight of responsibility he has to bear. Shakespeare focused on the key problems facing his historical characters to create a sense of sympathy for them. In other words, he explores them through the struggles they faced, and we have come to see Richard as one such struggling man: a victim of his rebellious subjects’ oppression, worthy of our sympathy.

In ignoring Henry at this point in time, Shakespeare missed a great opportunity. Had he construed the beginning of this series of four history plays differently, and written
Richard II
from Henry’s point of view, as a preliminary ‘Henry IV Part One’ (of three parts), we would see Henry and Richard in a very different light. Henry would be the wronged man, the ‘struggling man’, and Richard a detestable tyrant. The four plays would then have had a dynastic unity, charting the rise of Lancastrian fortunes from their nadir of 1399 to culminate in the victory at Agincourt, the climactic point of the fourth and final play of the sequence,
Henry V.
Such a progression would have truly glorified the Lancastrians. It would also have been closer to the truth.

Consider Henry’s thoughts in the long nights of March 1399. He had
been robbed of everything. Knights, tradesmen and clerks in England could rely on the king’s protection and some level of justice, but not Henry. What could he do about it? Nothing. His enemy was above the law. But nor could he accept his disinheritance. He knew well that to live under a sentence of perpetual banishment and forfeiture – however unjust – was an admission of guilt. He could not journey around the courts of Europe for the rest of his life, saying how wronged he had been, if he meant to do nothing about it. His personal capital would be worthless. He would lose the one thing he had left, his dignity.

Yet what should he do? Invade England? Presuming he could raise an army – which in itself was open to doubt – what could he hope to achieve? If he was successful, and forced Richard to restore his Lancastrian inheritance, Richard would only hate him more intensely. One day the king would seek revenge, just as Edward II had done against Thomas of Lancaster. Few would dare to fight against the royal banner if the king was in command. As we picture Henry in the long nights of March 1399, in the Hôtel de Clisson, we must picture a man in this plight. He knew that he
had
to dethrone Richard. He had no choice; it was either an end to Richard’s rule or an end to everything Henry held dear: his royalty, family dignity, status and self-respect. But the means at his disposal were negligible. Assassination was out of the question; the risks were too great, and in any case it would simply confirm Henry as a traitor, no better than the murderer Richard himself. So he had no choice but to try and provoke a revolution, and for that there was no guarantee of success.

The English were not particularly given over to revolution. Only once since the Conquest had anyone dethroned a king of England. In 1327 Roger Mortimer had overseen the parliamentary deposition and enforced abdication of Edward II. But Mortimer, political genius though he was, had been unable to do more than put Edward II’s legitimate heir on the throne. If Henry was successful in provoking a revolution, would he be accepted as Richard’s heir? Richard had always refused publicly to accept him as such, despite the agreement they may have reached in the Tower at the end of 1387. Indeed, Richard had for several years now given preference to his last surviving uncle, Edmund of Langley, duke of York, with the idea that his son Edward, duke of Aumale (Richard’s adopted brother), would eventually succeed.
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Herein lies another aspect of Henry’s plight. Even though he had been brought up to believe that he would be the heir of a childless King Richard, he could not produce Edward III’s entail, let alone enforce it. As Richard had never acknowledged that such a document existed, and had probably
destroyed the original, the potency of Edward III’s wishes was hugely lessened. Moreover, King Edward’s intentions now had to be set against King Richard’s. When Richard drew up his will on 17 April 1399, he did not name his successor but indicated whom it should be (his uncle, the duke of York) in a separate settlement of his own.
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In addition, Richard tried to impose a condition on his successor: that he should uphold the sentences of the 1397–8 parliament and the later meetings of the commissioners, including the decision by which Henry was declared a traitor and banished forever. Richard did not just demote Henry in the order of succession, he removed his right even to have a place in it.

Here, then, was a wonderful opportunity for Shakespeare to champion the cause of an oppressed man. Rather than the ‘king unking’d’ we would have had the banished heir fighting for his right. Instead of the downfall of an autocratic king we would have had the victory of natural justice. What great speeches Shakespeare could have made of that! But Shakespeare refrained from taking Henry’s side. He ignored him in his plight. Even though it would have given the four plays a better structural unity, been more accurate and allowed him to contrast the champion of justice against the tyrant, he could not do so. The reason becomes clear when we realise the enormity of the task facing Henry in March 1399. To dethrone an anointed king he had to destroy part of the very fabric of society. Fundamental ideas of loyalty, service and divine right would have to be overturned if Richard were to be disempowered. It could be done – Roger Mortimer had done it – but it could only be done by setting the will of the people against the laws of God and the kingdom. Had Shakespeare written such a play, championing a man who was prepared to do such things, it would have been banned immediately, and the author would have been arrested. Even as it was,
Richard II
caused great uneasiness, often being played without the deposition scene, and being performed on the eve of attempted rebellions (such as that of the earl of Essex). If that play had been written from the point of view of the ‘traitor’ defeating the legitimate government of the realm, it could not have been performed in England until the mid-seventeenth century, as it would have been a justification of armed rebellion against a divinely anointed monarch. In 1599 the publication of John Hayward’s prose history of Henry’s life and reign resulted in the author being thrown in the Tower and the burning of all the unsold copies.
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Thus the task now facing Henry was something which people could not even
write
about two hundred years later. What Henry himself was thinking in those long nights in the Hôtel de Clisson was such a fundamental break with the world in which he lived, it was almost beyond his comprehension. It was only through reflecting on those resolute leaders he had met in his long travels, such as Vitold of
Lithuania and Gian Galeazzo Visconti of Milan, and the example of Roger Mortimer, seventy years before, that he had any grasp of what was needed to accomplish such a task.

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Henry was fortunate in one respect. His adversary was not only personally insecure and politically unreliable, he was a poor strategist. Nor was he willing to take advice from others. At the same time as he banished Henry for life and revoked his pardons – a decision which outraged and further alienated Henry’s many supporters across the country – he summoned a prestigious army with which to invade Ireland and bring the rebellious Irish lord Art McMurrough to heel. In so doing he created his own two-front war. On the one hand he took a number of his most loyal fighting men to Ireland, and on the other he left England angry and sympathetic to Henry, whom he had now given no option but to return and start a revolution.

Richard did take some precautions. He drew up a set of ‘blank charters’ for London and the sixteen counties which he had decided to remove from the provisions of the general pardon.
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Representatives of these places were required to set their seals to these blanks charters, so if Richard required more money, or wanted to punish or threaten these counties, all he had to do was to fill in the details of what he decided they should give him. Another precaution was to take hostages from families whose lords might rise against him. Henry’s own son and heir, Henry of Monmouth (now aged twelve), and seventeen-year-old Humphrey, son of the late Thomas of Woodstock, were taken into Richard’s household. There was a blanket prohibition on sending letters abroad unless they had first been vetted by the privy council.
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Despite this last precaution, it is still likely that Henry and members of his household were fed information from those remaining in England. Moreover, because Richard’s Irish plans had been in progress from before the death of John, there can be little doubt that Henry knew at the time of his disinheritance that Richard was about to leave the country. Richard’s precautions were thus too slight to pose any significant disincentive to Henry, who could see his opportunity.