The Fears of Henry IV: The Life of England's Self-Made King (5 page)

Henry watched from the walls of the Tower of London. Had he any understanding of what was going on, he would have seen that it was the result of extreme discontent arising from ruthless law enforcement and overtaxation. He could see his father’s palace burning and would have heard the explosions as the barrels of gunpowder ignited. Much of Fleet Street was alight. So too was the priory at Clerkenwell, the prisons, the houses of John Butterwick and Simon Hosteler and many other men associated with the regime. Here the shop of a chandler was ablaze, there the shop of a blacksmith.
³
In the streets, men were murdered wherever they met an enemy. The Londoners began to cull their own. A number of houses around the Temple were set on fire, many more to the south of the river, at Southwark. Roger Legget, a royal tax collector, was found and dragged, kicking and shouting, to Cheapside where his head was cut off. Then his house in Clerkenwell was set alight.

Henry would have heard the screams of terror nearby as the citizens took the opportunity to purge themselves of foreigners. Thirty-five Flemish people who had fled to sanctuary in the church of St Martin in Vintry were pulled out of the building, one by one, and dragged across the churchyard to a single block, where they were decapitated, the heads and bodies lying on the ground as the next terrified victim was dragged out of the church. The financier Sir Richard Lyons was sought out and killed.
⁴
Lombards were pulled from their houses and murdered by the dozen. More than one hundred and fifty Flemings lost their lives. A whorehouse run by Flemish prostitutes was set on fire. Thirteen Flemings were pulled out of the church of the Austin friars and beheaded in the street outside by the drunken rabble, as the burning sun began to set on the burning city.
⁵

That night the young king gathered his advisers in the Tower. They
had a few hundred men-at-arms with them.
⁶
Some of the nobles tried to persuade Richard to fight his way out, in a full-scale charge. Others suggested that he should talk to the rebels and draw them away from the city. Henry was there; perhaps he was able to listen as his young cousin accepted the advice of those who suggested another meeting. The next day Richard would ride out from the Tower with the men-at-arms, his half-brothers, his mother and the mayor of London, and talk to the rebels at Mile End.

On the morning of Friday 14 June Richard and his men departed from the Tower, leaving Henry and a few others there with nothing but the stone walls and a few guards to protect them. Most of the lords went with Richard and the mayor. Henry was left with all the men whose heads were sought by the rabble: Archbishop Sudbury, Hales and various other royal enforcers, such as John Legge. They did not know about the jostling of the king’s men by the crowds on the way to Mile End. Only when the king’s mother returned, escorted back by some men-at-arms when the jeering crowds became too much for her, did they learn about the hostile mood out to the east of the city. Henry would have waited, perhaps looking out for signs of messengers hurrying back. None appeared. Hours passed. Then a mass of armed rebels came running, hungry for blood. In his discussions at Mile End, the king had told the peasants to go through the realm and bring all traitors to justice, wherever they were. Those inside the Tower had effectively been condemned to death.

What Richard had actually said, of course, was that the rebels should go away, or, specifically, ‘go through the realm and bring all traitors to him safely, and he would deal with them as the law required’.
⁷
The rebels’ view was that they did not need to go ‘through the realm’ but only as far as the Tower. They were the law, and judgement was theirs; there was no need for a trial. Armed with longbows and staves, it was not long before the gates to the Tower had been forced and they were going from room to room, looking for their victims. Some went into the king’s chamber and lay down on his bed, laughing. The king’s mother, renowned thirty years earlier as the most beautiful woman in the land, in whose presence the greatest knights at King Edward III’s court had jousted, now found herself roughly kissed and manhandled by the peasants.
⁸
The few guards remaining were powerless to defend their masters as hundreds of commoners pulled their beards or made faces at them. The archbishop and Prior Hales could do nothing but go down on their knees and pray in the chapel. Henry himself could only watch and wait.

The archbishop could expect no mercy. He had prevented Richard from disembarking at Greenwich to meet the rebels the previous day. On the
list of men to die, his name appeared second, just below that of Henry’s father, the duke. He knelt and prayed in the chapel of St John in the White Tower. Those who were with him had already heard one Mass; now they listened to another. They could hear footsteps running through the keep. The archbishop chanted prayer after prayer, the seven psalms and the litany. As he said the words ‘all saints, pray for us’, the rebels burst in. In scenes which must have been truly terrifying for everyone present, the archbishop was seized and dragged out by his arms and hood along the passages of the castle, across the bailey and out to the yelling masses on Tower Hill, where they set up a makeshift block. It was said that they took eight blows to cut off his head. They took Hales too, dragging him away to a similar bloody execution. The Lancaster family physician, William Appleton, was likewise hacked to death for no other reason than that he had served Henry’s father. Four others were singled out and butchered.

Then the mob turned to the Lancastrian heir, Henry. If at that moment John Ferrour, one of the remaining guards, had not boldly come between the mob and Henry, and spoken up for him, and persuaded them to let him go, Henry’s fourteen-year-old head would have been stuck on a spear on London Bridge, alongside those of the archbishop of Canterbury, Sir Robert Hales and William Appleton.
⁹
As it was, Ferrour persuaded the crowd, and Henry lived. Many years later, he would repay the debt and save Ferrour’s life in return.

*

There is no doubt that seeing the Peasants’ Revolt at first hand and coming within an inch of death had the most profound effect on Henry. It affected his thinking about the current reign and conditioned his own policies in later years. But it also leads us to ask one very important question. At that moment, when Richard left him in the Tower, practically unguarded, did Henry blame the young king? And did he forgive him? One chronicle – written by an eyewitness – states that the king told those he left behind to take a boat from the water gate and flee for their lives. But when the archbishop attempted to do this he was spotted by ‘a wicked woman’, and had to rush back into the Tower.
¹⁰
With so many longbows at the ready on the river banks, there was no escape on the water. So it could be said that Richard deserted those in the Tower. In fact it could be said that he did this twice, for when he returned from Mile End he did not go back to the Tower but went to the great wardrobe (one of the offices of his household), situated near Blackfriars.
¹¹
Even if we give him the benefit of the doubt, Richard was guilty of one major error of judgement. By apparently giving in to the rebels, and encouraging them to go off and seek
traitors, he placed those in the Tower in very great danger. We may understand what Richard was trying to achieve, but to look at matters from Henry’s point of view, having seen the archbishop of Canterbury dragged out and beheaded, would that have been good enough?

The reason why this question is so important is that it is impossible to begin to understand Henry’s life without seeing it in relation to that of his cousin, the king. In 1399 Henry took action to dethrone Richard. In so doing he risked not only his own life but the status of his children and the lives of many of his followers and the political stability of the entire realm. No one takes such a decision lightly. But this was not the first time that Henry and Richard had faced each other in anger. Carefully examining Henry’s life before 1399 we find a number of instances when Henry and Richard were either weighing one another up or in outright hostility to one another. If we really want to understand why Henry acted the way he did in 1399, and especially in relation to Richard, we need to look far beyond the evidence of that year and understand how these two men saw each other and co-existed, right from the very start of their lives.

Henry and Richard were born rivals. For a start, they were almost exactly the same age. Richard was born at Bordeaux, in Gascony, on 6 January 1367; Henry was born at Bolingbroke, in Lincolnshire, just three months later.
¹²
Although they would not have met until they were five or six, they were regarded as a pair, on account of their both being the king’s grandchildren and the same age. Moreover, they were the
only
two royal children of this age; the next eldest, Roger Mortimer, was seven years younger. They would therefore have seen each other as having very similar royal identities. Each threatened the uniqueness of the other’s royal status.

There was a historical dimension to their rivalry too. They were the heirs of King Edward’s two most favoured sons, Henry the son of John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster, and Richard the son of Edward, the Black Prince, the heir apparent. In addition, they were the heirs of the two most important dynasties in England. More than a hundred years earlier, King Henry III had had two sons. The elder had been crowned Edward I. The younger, Edmund, had been endowed with a massive inheritance in the north of England, centred on Lancaster, which gave rise to his title of earl of Lancaster. In time, Edward I’s throne passed to his eldest son, Edward II, and the Lancastrian inheritance passed to Thomas of Lancaster, Edmund’s eldest son. The resultant rivalry between these two royal cousins – Edward II and Thomas of Lancaster – developed in intensity, to the point of war. Lancaster’s incessant attempts to intervene in royal affairs meant he was anathema to the king, and Edward II’s bitter hatred for Lancaster following his part in the murder of his best friend, Piers Gaveston,
never diminished. That rivalry came to an end at the battle of Boroughbridge in 1322, when Lancaster was captured and beheaded in public, and all his estates were confiscated. After such an outrage the dead earl’s younger brother, Henry of Lancaster, had no choice but to join with the arch-rebel Roger, Lord Mortimer of Wigmore, and the queen, who invaded the kingdom in 1326 to put an end to Edward II’s tyranny. Together they removed the king from power and, in January 1327, forced parliament to sanction the king’s deposition. Edward II then abdicated. That Richard II was the great-grandson and heir of the disgraced king, and Henry the great-grandson and heir of the Henry of Lancaster who had forced him to abdicate, gave a context of ancestral hostility to their relationship of which neither boy could have been ignorant and which neither of them could have totally ignored.

To modern readers coming anew to the story of these two boys, it is easy to forget how characters in the past were so keenly aware of their history. We look back at their lives searching for the seeds of later events, ‘our’ history. But of course we find the culmination of much earlier developments too. Each boy would have known the above-mentioned stories of rivalry, war, humiliation, execution and deposition. Every chronicle available would have described the deeds of their ancestors. Their intimacy with history was not like that of scholars, aware of the finer points of detail; it was a sense that these chronicles had meaning for them personally. These were not just fanciful tales about knights in days of yore. Edward II had ruled badly and had lost his kingdom. Edward III had ruled well and defeated all his enemies in battle. If you wanted to know how to be a good king, a good knight or a good earl, and if you wanted to know how to avoid failure, you needed to understand the lessons of the past.
¹³

And then there were the prophecies. Most people think of prophetic utterances as the stuff of the Old Testament, Nostradamus, or the oracles of the ancient world. In fourteenth-century England prophetic stories were politically relevant, widely circulated and taken very seriously, even by those who did not believe in them. The reason for this is simple: if you happened to be mentioned in one of these prophecies, how you conducted yourself might be interpreted according to your anticipated fate. For example, if you were prophesied to be a great warrior, then acting like one would undoubtedly strengthen the confidence and resolve of your forces. Conversely, a king prophesied to be politically divisive had to tread very carefully in case those whom he disappointed should start claiming or believing that the prophecy was coming true. Therefore it is particularly relevant that the most popular prophecy of the fourteenth century – the Prophecy of the Six Kings – predicted civil war in the next reign.

The Prophecy of the Six Kings was supposedly Merlin’s response to King Arthur’s question about the ultimate fate of the kingdom. It likened the six kings to follow King John to six beasts. Henry III was portrayed as a lamb, Edward I as a dragon, Edward II as a goat and Edward III as a boar. These emblems and the provenance of the story might seem a very shaky background for any belief system, but it was widely accepted as a framework for God’s plan for the English monarchy. It also has to be said that the most recent part had spectacularly come true. The prophecy had originally been written down at the time of Edward III’s birth, and various versions written before 1330 reveal it in its near-original form.
¹⁴
Edward III was characterised as a boar: the animal which had represented King Arthur himself. He would be renowned for his ‘holiness, fierceness and nobility’ while at the same time being ‘humble, like the lamb’. This was a strange combination of qualities, and one which probably no one could have reasonably expected the infant Edward of Windsor to fulfil. So it was extraordinary that he did.
¹⁵
‘Spain would tremble’, the prophecy said, and at Winchelsea in 1350 Edward defeated the Spanish fleet. This boar would ‘sharpen his teeth on the gates of Paris’: Edward’s forays into France indeed brought him to the suburbs of the French capital. Ultimately he ‘would regain all the lands which his ancestors had held, and more’. For Edward this meant nothing less than reconquering the entire Angevin empire, including more than a third of France. Yet this too came to pass: the territory of the empire was ceded to him in 1360, at the Treaty of Brétigny. At the same time he was humble and pious. That such a remarkable and popular prophecy could be fulfilled in its self-contradicting entirety was astonishing. It also made people look at the continuation of the prophecy with some foreboding.