The Fears of Henry IV: The Life of England's Self-Made King (58 page)

The public were similarly shocked. Killing an archbishop deeply damaged the king’s popularity. Whether justifiable or not, it was evidence of a disregard for holy office which was simply un-Christian. Unsurprisingly, it was not long before men were reporting miracles at the tomb of Archbishop Scrope. Those disposed to give Henry the benefit of the doubt could only say that he had snapped under pressure, that his temper had momentarily given way. Even his supporters would probably have said that he had committed a grave mistake. Any rebels who wished to use a dead man’s name for a rallying cry against the king now had an alternative to ‘King Richard is alive’. They could cry with far greater conviction ‘Archbishop Scrope is dead’. He was a second Thomas Becket, murdered by the king for daring to question royal policy. This last aspect – the martyrdom of Archbishop Scrope as a spokesman against royal tyranny – would have been the most worrying aspect of the whole episode in the eyes of Henry’s secular supporters.

But what about Henry himself? What was going through his mind in
the early hours of 8 June 1405? Herein lies an opportunity to view him at his most exposed: reacting violently, under great pressure. And the more we concentrate on him at that moment, the more it appears that there is a character here who is determined – desperate, yes, but acting in full awareness of what he was doing. This is the crucial point: Henry refused the advice of the men he most trusted. In addition, he planned the killing before the sentence was delivered, as can be seen in the way he fobbed off Archbishop Arundel. He clearly believed that he knew better than anyone else – better than the lawyers and the prelates – what was good for him and England. It shows incredible self-confidence after at least eight attempts to dethrone or kill him and uncounted numbers of protests against his rule, both in and outside parliament. Any normal person by this stage would have wanted to take a back seat and let others take the responsibility, but not Henry. He went all the way, and killed an archbishop, at the very moment it was guaranteed to make him exceedingly unpopular.

For this reason we may be sure that, contrary to what many people thought at the time, the killing of Archbishop Scrope was not a mistake. This is not to say it was the right thing to do, just that Henry knew the likely consequences and did what he personally felt was right. The bitterness he felt towards Scrope set the context, especially his anger at the timing of the revolt to coincide with his great Welsh campaign. But the real reason why Scrope’s execution stunned people was because of his religious high office, not Henry’s antipathy. Henry had no respect for high office, be it religious or secular. Richard II had been a divinely anointed king and that had not saved him. Besides, it was a kingly thing to do, to execute a traitor who occupied high office. Peasants might
murder
an archbishop, as they had done during the Peasants’ Revolt, but only kings could authorise an archbishop’s execution. The killing of Archbishop Scrope thus sent a political message throughout the kingdom. No matter who you were, whether archbishop or earl, you could be killed in order to preserve order.

The man who had come to the throne vowing to be merciful had been forced once again to display ruthless force, to demonstrate to his people that they could not presume upon his mercy. Ever since the Epiphany Rising, Henry had been learning this lesson. It would appear that he now fully understood how naïve this promise had been. The experience of government had changed him. His promise to rule with the advice of the great men of the realm had similarly turned sour: any leader who felt ignored could accuse him of breaking his word. Henry seems now to have decided that what England needed was not a compromised, listening,
merciful king who consulted his advisers on every important matter of state, but a man of spiritual confidence and political determination. He would not be taken for granted any more. From now on, when necessary, he would rule with an iron fist.

SIXTEEN

Smooth Comforts False

They bring smooth comforts false, worse than true wrongs.

Henry IV Part Two,
Act 1, Scene 1

On 8 June 1405, the day of Archbishop Scrope’s execution, Henry rode into York. Having conducted his business – arranging for the administration of the diocese and granting several pardons – he set out for the north. Notwithstanding that a summer storm was brewing, he wanted to attack the earl of Northumberland’s castles as soon as possible. The wind turned to a gale, the rain grew heavier, and Henry directed his companions to seek shelter at the nearby manor of Green Hammerton. Later that night, as he slept at the manor, Henry started screaming. ‘Traitors! Traitors!’ he yelled, ‘you have thrown fire over me!’ When his servants reached him they found him complaining that his skin was burning. They gave him wine and tried to soothe his fears that this was yet another assassination attempt, but with little success. He was clearly ill. According to one account, his face was covered in red pustules.

For those who were with him, the king’s sickness was shocking. For the rest of the country, coming on the very day of the archbishop’s execution, it could be nothing other than an act of divine vengeance. Within a short while it was being reported that God had smitten him with leprosy.
¹
The use of the emotive biblical word is anti-Lancastrian propaganda; the rumourmongers may as well have said that Henry had the ‘elderlich skin of a goat’ which the last of the prophesied six kings, the moldewarp, was supposed to have. Henry did not have leprosy (not as we understand it, anyway), as proved by an examination of his corpse in the nineteenth century.
²
But only in this respect was his illness a fiction. Having been taken to more suitable accommodation at Ripon, he spent a full week convalescing. Shortly afterwards he wrote to the council reassuring them of his good health, and thanking God for it.
³

This brings us to perhaps the knottiest problem in the life of Henry IV: how ill was he, and did he ever recover? Did his illnesses have significant consequences for his mental state? Was he able to travel? At what point did people start to look more to his successor as the key to future
preferment? All these questions suddenly become relevant. And they all require a degree of precision in their answering. Edward III, for instance, had probably been physically weak and ‘ill’ for at least ten years before he died in 1377, but he continued to transact a significant level of royal business until the mid-1370s and even attempted to lead an expedition to France in 1372.
⁴
As we shall see, even when Henry was undoubtedly ill, he still declared that he would lead armies against his enemies. It is thus one of those areas of biography in which we cannot ‘err on the side of caution’ for no side is safer than another. The dangers of overstating the effects of Henry’s illness are every bit as great as those of ignoring them.

The traditional way of approaching the illness of a historical individual is to act as a sort of bedside consultant across the centuries, and try to determine what was wrong with him. The idea is that by identifying the illness, we may understand what was happening to the sufferer. However, as medical historians are quick to point out, this is nigh on impossible in the case of a medieval king. All we have to go on are a few symptoms reported by chroniclers who probably never met Henry at all, let alone met him at the time of his suffering. Henry himself never publicly gave out any details about his health; it was not becoming for a king to reveal his weaknesses.
⁵
But lack of knowledge of the symptoms is just the tip of the problem. We do not know what diseases were suffered in the early fifteenth century which are not suffered now. Some diseases (Sweating Sickness, for example) have come and gone since Henry’s time. Similarly, it is not possible to assume that all modern diseases which fit the pattern of Henry’s illness were around in fifteenth-century England. Nor can we assume that the same diseases were suffered in the same way; for example, plague in 1348 and syphilis in 1500 manifested themselves very differently from the equivalent diseases in later centuries. Even if we could say that Henry suffered from a specific illness, there is the problem that we do not know which complications attended his suffering. He could have had a skin disease and heart disease at the same time, and then suffered a stroke or heart attack, or both consecutively. Alternatively, the cause of his suffering might have been a hereditary weakness, such as the inability to produce an enzyme, leading to the gradual degradation of the body. In short, acting as Henry’s bedside consultant is a parlour game for medical antiquaries.

The starting point for considering Henry’s medical condition historically has to be his health before this: how well he was before this new ailment struck. To this question we might reply that Henry had fought at Shrewsbury two years earlier and been very active both before and after the battle, and so we should presume he was in good health at least at that time. However, it has to be added that there are signs that he was
never a well man, in the sense of being in good health for long periods of time. From as early as 1387, when he and two of his servants contracted ‘the pox’ (meaning a skin disease of some sort), he was troubled by skin problems. He had been ill on the
reyse
at Königsberg in 1391, and had purchased medicines in 1395, 1397 (a plaster for his back) and 1398.
⁶
These payments, like the pox, might indicate skin complaints long before 1405. According to Adam Usk, shortly after his coronation his hair fell out, supposedly a result of lice.
⁷
Two images of Henry from the Great Cowcher of the duchy of Lancaster, made about 1402, show him with a full head of hair and a forked beard, but his portrait effigy at Canterbury, probably made from a death mask, shows him as completely bald; only the forked beard remains. Thus Usk (who was in exile at the time) might be right in stating that he lost his hair, although his timing is probably awry and a skin disease is a more likely cause than lice. In 1403 his surgeon purchased medicines for him, and admitted to the Holy Roman Emperor the following year that Henry had been ill.
⁸
About the same time Henry was employing an extra surgeon. In Henry’s accounts we read of so many glass urinals that it would appear that he regularly sent samples of his urine to his physician, for inspection as to colour and consistency, from which his general state of health could be determined (according to medieval ideas of medicine). In this light it is particularly interesting that he commissioned a treatise on uroscopy – the examination of urine by physicians – to be written.
⁹
When we add the purchase of the bezoar stone to protect against poison and the repair of astrolabes to work out the positions of the stars for determining when to let blood and take medicines, what emerges is a picture of a man who was not only regularly ill but fearful of ill health. He even seems to have had problems with his teeth.
¹⁰
This morbidity allows us to say with conviction that Henry paid particular attention to his physical condition, and was aware of the implications of being seen to be ill. It also means that he was used to coping with sickness. So when he was afflicted suddenly at Green Hammerton, it was not just a minor irritation which caused him to suspend his journey north and spend a week recovering at Ripon.

To go beyond this we need to concentrate not on the king’s incapacity, but on his health. This paradox may most easily be explained by referring to Henry’s mental state. Henry took part in at least fifty jousting competitions before he became king. If he rode just ten strokes in each tournament, that still amounts to at least five hundred occasions when, in full armour and mounted on a war horse, he charged straight into another object of a similar weight (the man, armour and horse combined weighing more than half a ton), with all the pressure of the charge focused on the
point of the lance, at a closing speed of more than forty miles per hour. The strain on the body, including the brain, of such an impact would have been considerable, way in excess of the being-hit-by-a-twenty-pound-hammer effect which modern boxers experience. It is therefore reasonable to wonder whether he suffered from the condition which affects some boxers in retirement, known as ‘punch-drunk’. Alternatively, it has been suggested that during the storm on 8 June 1405, Henry had a stroke, for one account of his illness says he fell suddenly ill, having felt a blow during the storm.
¹¹
However, if we look at the extant examples of his handwriting, we can see that his pen control in 1409 was almost as good as it had been in 1403.
¹²
Hence we may be confident that Henry’s sickness was not a brain condition resulting from his years of martial practice, nor was it a stroke which affected the writing-hand side of his body. In the summer of 1406 he was able to ride eighteen miles in a day and is described walking around the cloisters of Bardney Abbey, and these at a time when he seems to have been particularly determined to find a religious cure for his suffering. So we may rule out the idea that he suffered a severe stroke or apoplexy. His handwriting suggests that he retained his mental faculties even after the very severe attacks which left him apparently dead in 1408 and 1409. Until the last year of his life, his mind remained sharp, as is clear in his behaviour in later parliaments, especially that of 1411, and his other activities (for example, personally designing a large cannon in 1408). Therefore, whatever he was struck with in June 1405, his mind was not affected. It is unlikely that he ever fully recovered from his skin affliction, and his eventual baldness is probably to be connected with this ailment, but he remained sane. The more profound consequences of his illness would only became apparent the following year.