Crown & Country: A History of England Through the Monarchy (39 page)

If this story were true, it was the perfect solution for Henry. So Henry referred the story to a specially convened panel of historians and constitutional experts. The panel was supposed to meet in secret. But then as now constitutional experts are a garrulous lot and one of the panel, Adam of Usk, recorded their deliberations in his
Chronicle
. Like all good historians, the panel went back to the sources, as Adam reports. Unfortunately for Henry these unanimously confirmed that Edward was indeed the eldest son:
Edwardus primogenitus regis Henrici
. The Crouchback story was indeed too good to be true. Henry would have to think again.

Richard, for his part, put up a brief struggle. But, faced with the threat of force, he abdicated his throne – to God.

For the first time since the Conquest the continuity of the succession had to be deliberately broken. Only one body could do that: Parliament.

Henry moved quickly and a parliament was summoned to meet at Westminster Hall. The hall had been splendidly rebuilt by Richard as a monument to his own glory. But now it was to witness his final humiliation. First, the terms of the king’s abdication were read out. Then followed a long list of the charges against him. Finally, he was declared dethroned and deposed and his subjects absolved of their allegiance. All this had taken place in Richard’s absence, and the royal throne under its great canopy of cloth of gold had remained empty.

But now Henry, in a theatrical gesture worthy of Richard himself, stepped forward to claim the vacant throne. He spoke simply and forcibly and in English. He descended, he said, of the true royal blood of the good King Henry III. Thanks to the help of God and his friends he had been able to reclaim that right and, in so doing, he had saved the realm from ruin by the bad government of his predecessor, Richard.

Put like that, Henry’s claim sounds logical and convincing. But in fact it was a mere ragbag. For in reality he had only had a single compelling claim – he was the man of the hour.

In twelve weeks Henry Bolingbroke had transformed himself from landless exile into Henry IV, king of England. But to prove that he was more than a usurper, he needed God’s blessing as well as Parliament’s.

This was arranged, too. And at his coronation Henry was anointed with an opportunely discovered vial of oil reputedly given to Thomas Becket by the Virgin Mary. Divine oil would surely wash away the sins of the past. But Henry IV was about to commit the greatest sin of all.

Richard II may have been deposed by law before Parliament but he was still an anointed monarch. And so long as Richard lived Henry would have no security. So Henry decided to kill the former king – but secretly and without leaving marks on the body – by leaving Richard to starve slowly to death in Pontefract Castle.

Edward II, of course, had been murdered even more nastily. But none of the blame attached to his successor Edward III. In 1399, however, a king had indeed murdered a king. The taboo was broken. What was to stop others doing the same to Henry or his descendants? In 1400, only a year after his coronation, the Welsh rose up against English rule.

But the greatest threat to the Lancastrians came from within England and from the family who had been Henry’s strongest supporters. The Percys, whose head was the earl of Northumberland, were the most powerful family in the north of England, with vast estates, strong castles and a multitude of armed followers. They had been the first to back Henry when he invaded England in 1399. And it was their support that had carried him to victory. But having made Henry king, why should the Percys stop there? Especially as Henry refused to behave as an obedient puppet. Perhaps they could do even better by backing another claimant? Perhaps a Percy could become king himself ?

Henry recognized the threat and did his best to conciliate them. But in 1403 he learned that Hotspur – the son and heir to the earl of Northumberland – had joined the Welsh rebels and was invading England.

Hotspur rode south to join up with the Welsh. On 21 July 1403 the joint army arrived just outside Shrewsbury. From here Hotspur sent a defiant message to Henry challenging his right to the throne. Henry too was eager for a fight to the finish. The sides were evenly matched and the battle raged from midday to nightfall. The hardest fighting was around the king and Hotspur. In the end it was a personal battle between the two men.

Henry was victorious. About sixteen thousand men were killed in the battle; Hotspur’s body was taken to Shrewsbury, where, as the corpse of a traitor, it was quartered. But the low-ranking slain on both sides were buried on the spot in a mass grave. In commemoration the site was renamed ‘Battlefield’ and a church, complete with an armed statue of Henry IV, was built as a monument to his victory. But this victory brought Henry no security. For no sooner had he cut down one enemy than another arose. Moreover, the king himself, doggedly though he fought, harboured private doubts. And if Henry doubted, why should anyone else believe in the Lancastrian title?

Henry IV’s last years were a sad contrast to the promise of 1399. Gone was the vigorous youth who had won a country to his cause. Instead, he aged rapidly and developed a disfiguring skin disease: perhaps leprosy, perhaps a psychosomatic acute dermatitis. Whatever the diagnosis, to many contemporaries the disease seemed proof of God’s displeasure with the usurper king.

In March 1413, Henry came to Westminster with the hand of death already on him. On the 20th, while praying at the Confessor’s tomb, he had a seizure and was brought to the Jerusalem Chamber in the abbot’s lodgings. The crown was placed beside his pillow; he seemed to cease breathing and his face was covered. Thinking like everybody else that his father was already dead, his son and heir, Prince Henry, took the crown. Suddenly the old king roused himself and demanded of Henry by what right he took the crown since he himself had none to it. Coolly Henry replied: ‘As you have kept it by the sword, so I will keep it whilst I have life.’ It is a good story and, as an insight into the prince’s character, it is shrewd. For whatever doubts Henry IV may have harboured about his right to the throne, Henry V had none at all.

IV

Prince Henry might not have been born to be king. But no heir to the throne had served a more distinguished apprenticeship. He was created prince of Wales immediately after his father’s accession, and, though he was only in his early teens, he quickly became his right-hand man and the pillar of the Lancastrian cause. He fought bravely against Hotspur at the battle of Shrewsbury and he led the English to victory in the ensuing hard-fought campaign against the Welsh. But mere military glory was not enough for Prince Henry. He wanted the reality of power as well. His father was disfigured, diseased and hopelessly tainted by his usurpation. Henry, in contrast, was the great white hope for his father’s enemies as well as for his friends.

Henry V’s first task was to unite the fractured realm his father had bequeathed him. He was firm in laying down the law and seeing it obeyed, and he stabilized the coinage. On several occasions he travelled through the country to foster loyalty to the crown. Above all he rooted out faction. As the son of a usurper, Henry knew from personal experience the importance of letting bygones be bygones. So Henry pardoned his father’s enemies and Richard’s supporters. He even restored the Percys.

By and large the policy paid off and Henry’s former bitter enemies became his loyal lieutenants. Only one thing remained. Henry’s smartest move was to make his peace with the unquiet ghost of Richard II. Henry IV had accorded Richard the dignity of a public funeral but he had refused to bury him in Westminster Abbey. The result was that Richard’s memory continued to plague his successor. Miracles took place at his modest tomb; his name was constantly invoked to justify rebellion and many refused to believe he was dead at all. So when Henry V became king he moved to tackle the problem with his characteristic decisiveness. In December 1413, only eight months after his own coronation, Richard’s body was brought to the Abbey in a magnificent procession and reburied among his fellow kings, in the tomb that Richard had commissioned for himself. The stain of 1399 was wiped out and Henry was able to benefit from the usurpation without incurring the stigma or the bad conscience of his father.

Having settled domestic politics, Henry was able to turn his attention to the project that would dominate his reign: the war of conquest with France.

The reign of the peace-loving Richard II had shown that the English war monarchy of the Edwards was ungovernable in peace. Better that the English nobles should fight the French than each other – or the king. But Henry’s claim to France was also, for this intensely religious man, an article of faith.

For Henry, the war was essentially about justice for his ancestral claims. Through his ancestor, Henry II, he had a claim to the whole of the Angevin empire, to Normandy, Anjou and Aquitaine, while from his other ancestress, Isabella of France, queen of Edward II, he claimed the throne of France itself. Only let these claims be conceded, Henry announced, and there would be no war.

From the French point of view this was an outrageous demand and they refused. Denied his legitimate claim, Henry decided his conscience was clear: the French had refused peace with justice so the god of battles must decide. Henry also presented his case effectively in England; won support for his policies and brought the might of the nation behind the campaign. Most importantly, he was a systematic planner and his French expedition, like all his great projects, was carefully prepared in advance.

Henry set sail for France on 11 August 1415. His first campaign is the stuff of legend. ‘For Harry, England and Saint George’. This was the battle-cry that Shakespeare gave the English soldiers on the field at Agincourt. Here Henry showed himself everything that an English king should be: resolute, heroic and a born leader of men. The English soldiers were in retreat, exhausted and far outnumbered by the French – by three to one – but fired up by loyalty to their king and country, they won an astounding victory.

It seemed proof positive that Henry V was God’s chosen king. It was also proof that his war policy would work. Within two years he was back. This time his aim was conquest. The English army swept through Normandy, systematically besieging and capturing the greatest cities: Caen, Falaise and Rouen. But the key to France was Paris.

By 1420, Paris was in his grasp. But, rather than risk reuniting the French by attacking the capital, Henry, who was a subtle politician as well as a dashing general, decided to exploit the profound divisions within the French court. He made apparently enormous concessions: he would no longer claim western France as heir of Henry II. The present king of France could even keep his titles.

The ploy worked. By a treaty signed at Troyes on 21 May 1420, Henry seemed to have won the prize that had eluded even Edward III and the Black Prince. He was recognized as the legitimate heir to the then king of France, Charles VI, and, a few days later, in Troyes Cathedral, he married Charles’s daughter Catherine. Henry, in other words, was seeking to apply in France the same model of traditional kingship which had served him so well in England. He would rule France not as a conqueror but as a legitimate king, and he would rule it in the French way according to French customs.

England had not known such victories. The status of the monarchy soared, as this piece of doggerel expresses:

And he is king excellent
And unto none other obedient
That liveth here in earth – by right
But only unto God almight[y]
*
Within his own, Emperor
And also king and conqueror.

King, conqueror, emperor: these exalted titles were given living expression when Henry wore a closed arched crown. This style of crown signified imperial status. As an emperor Henry had no superior on earth, not even the pope.

On 1 December 1420 Henry entered Paris in triumph as heir and regent of France. He was warmly received and the French
parlement
ratified the Treaty of Troyes. It wasn’t so simple, however. Many French nobles had understandable reservations about acknowledging an Englishman as king of France. Henry renewed hostilities to force the French resistance to accept the Treaty of Troyes. It was a hard slog of campaigning in northern France alleviated only by the knowledge that his wife Catherine had given birth to a son and heir.

But suddenly, at the age of thirty-five and in the middle of yet another campaign, Henry caught dysentery and died.

In only nine years Henry V had reunited England and taken France. And he had done it all as a consciously English king: speaking and writing English even for official documents. For the first time since the Conquest, England was a nation-state once more.

Henry was laid to rest in Westminster Abbey in a magnificent funerary chapel. The king’s image was covered in silver gilt while among the rich sculptures were two coronation scenes representing Henry’s two kingdoms of England and France. And in both he is shown with the imperial crown. But what really impresses is the sheer scale of the chapel and its magnificent location, directly at the east end of the Abbey. Here, everything seems to say, is the apogee of the medieval English monarchy and the monument to the perfect medieval king. The institution could scarcely go any higher. Could it even survive at its present high-water mark? Everything would depend on Henry’s son, the nine-month-old infant, who in his cradle was heir of England and France.

V

With Henry’s death on 31 August 1422 his son became king of England as Henry VI. If this were not enough, two months later his French grandfather also died and he was named king of France. Once again England had an infant king. But this time there was no serious rival nor any suggestion that an adult, perhaps an uncle, should be preferred in his place. This was a remarkable state of affairs, given that the dynasty had come to the throne through an act of usurpation less than a quarter of a century before. But the triumphs of Henry V blotted out the shame of his father, Henry IV, and extended a protecting hand over his son.