Foundation (History of England Vol 1) (50 page)

His hopes devolved upon his eldest son. Henry of Monmouth, prince of Wales, had been wounded in the skull at the battle of Berwick Field, but this wound did nothing to dampen his martial fervour. He loved battle, and lived for warfare. From the age of fourteen he had served, and succeeded, in various battles and skirmishes against the Welsh insurgents. He joined the king’s council in 1406, on his return from Wales, and at once took a leading part in affairs. He was nineteen years old, and of course gathered about him the younger members of the nobility. One chronicler noted ‘the great recourse of the people unto him, of whom his court was at all times more abundant than the King his father’s’. As such he was seen as the unofficial ‘opposition’ to the
already ageing king and his advisers, inclined to more purposeful and energetic activity both at home and abroad. It was the dynamic of youth against age, hope and optimism against experience and fatigue.

The king himself, beset by illness, steadily withdrew from public affairs. He left his palace at Westminster and retired to the archbishop of Canterbury’s residence at Lambeth; then he moved further out to Windsor. In this period, from the beginning of 1410 to the end of 1411, the prince of Wales successfully administered the kingdom on his father’s behalf. An expeditionary force was sent to assist the duchy of Burgundy against the depredations of the French. At the same time a determined effort was made to resolve the finances of the king. In September 1411 it is reported that the prince approached his father and advised him to abdicate ‘because he could no longer apply himself to the honour and profit of the realm’.

But then Henry IV struck back. He could not permit his royal identity to be put at risk. What else did he have left, after a decade of weary power? While breath lasted in him, he would rule. At the end of the year some of the prince’s supporters were arrested. A parliament was called, in the course of which a motion was proposed that the king should abdicate in favour of his son. It was debated, with all due decorum, but then rejected. It seemed that the prince had been outwitted. The rumour then spread that the prince was contemplating open revolt, thus reawakening fears of civil war. The rumour was quashed. It was then whispered that the prince had confiscated money due to the English garrison at Calais. In the summer of 1412, he came to London to deny this and to defy his enemies; but he brought with him an army or what was called ‘a huge people’.

The prince was also accompanied by his favourite young lords. He was wearing a peculiar costume of blue satin which, according to the translator of his first biography into English, was punctuated by ‘eyelets’ or round holes from each of which a needle was hanging upon a thread of silk. The significance of this dress is not immediately clear.

He strode into Westminster Hall, and told his supporters to remain there while he sought the king. He found him in a chamber
and asked for a private interview; in the presence of four courtiers Henry asked his son ‘to show the effect of his mind’. Whereupon the prince made a long and impassioned speech, at the end of which he went down on his knees and produced a dagger. ‘Father,’ he is reported to have said, ‘I desire you in your honour of God, and for the easing of your heart, here before your knees to slay me with this dagger. My lord and father, my life is not so desirous to me that I would live one day that I should be to your displeasure.’ There was more to the same effect, a peroration that reduced the sick king to tears. Father and son were thus reconciled.

This scene is rendered in the second part of Shakespeare’s
Henry IV
, a play that with its successor
Henry V
has more than any other preserved the image of this age. Whether it is a faithful image is another matter. Nevertheless the pictures of the young Henry carousing with Falstaff and Bardolf, of Justice Shallow and Mistress Quickly, of Pistol and Doll Tearsheet, are now effectively part of English history. It was said that the prince worshipped at the altars both of Venus and of Mars. Since his youth and early maturity were spent in fighting wars in Scotland and in Wales, Mars must have been in the ascendant.

The mutual respect between father and son was not destined to survive for long. Six months after this affecting interview Henry IV, worn out by guilt and illness, died in the Jerusalem Chamber of Westminster Abbey. In his will, drawn up two years before, he had described himself in English as a ‘sinful wretch’, a ‘sinful soul’ and ‘never worthy to be a man’ whose life had been ‘misspent’. These are not the traditional testamentary words and reveal a human being who was suffering a severe sense of spiritual unworthiness. Henry IV was, after all, unique among English kings in having killed one monarch and one archbishop. Yet he had survived, albeit only to the age of forty-six. He had faced down rebellions and conspiracies; there had been attempts made on his life, and efforts to force him to abdicate. But in the end he confounded his enemies. He had instituted a royal dynasty – the house of Lancaster, part of the Plantagenet legacy – that would endure for three generations.

The king’s body was washed, his brain and his bowels were removed; he was then embalmed in a mixture of myrrh, aloes,
laurel flower and saffron. He was wound in strips of waxed linen before being dressed in a long robe. His brown beard was smoothed over the throat, and the crown placed upon his head. The right hand clutched his golden orb, while the left hand touched his sceptre. In this state he was taken down to the cathedral at Canterbury where he was buried and where his tomb can still be seen.

28

Old habits

The world was in a condition of decline and decay; there was no ‘progress’, no ‘evolution’ and no ‘development’. If you needed an image of medieval thought, it would be that of the slow movement of a descending spiral. Everywhere you looked, suffering and violence and corruption held the mastery. That was the state of the earth. The most that could be hoped for was stability and steadiness; the degeneration might therefore be arrested for a moment. The four humours of man must be held in balance; the universe itself was established upon the harmonious union of the four elements, the cold earth for example having an affinity with the cold water. The manifest uncertainties of life, and the anxiety aroused by them, compounded the need for stability.

Order was the first principle, sustaining the great chain of being. That is why so much concern was attested for hierarchy and degree, with all the ‘estates’ of society carefully designated and maintained. Nothing must get out of balance. The past was revered beyond measure. Historical writing was recognized as a set of lessons or moral illustrations. The great writers were those who most closely imitated previous masters. The philosophers of the past were more acute, the architects more subtle and the rulers more eloquent. The medieval delight in ritual and ceremony was in itself a veneration of custom.

Just as medieval law was based upon precedent, so medieval society was governed by habit. Custom was the great law of life. The earliest written records show its importance. In the sixth century Aethelbert, the king of Kent, described his laws as those which had been long accepted and established; this would mean in practice that a large body of oral tradition was passed from generation to generation by the men of Kent. The witan or Anglo-Saxon assembly was to be made up of the wisest men, namely those who ‘knew how all things stood in the land in their forefathers’ days’. An eleventh-century treatise in Anglo-Saxon affirms that the landowner should ‘always know what the ancient tradition of the land is, and what the custom of the people is’. Surely ‘custom’ would go back into prehistoric times? This atavism was the expression of a deeply communal society, whereby the ties binding people together were almost unbreakable.

In the feudal society of the Normans the serf or villein was also known as
consuetudinarius
or
custumarius
, meaning ‘a man of custom’. His rights and duties were upheld by a body of customary law that would not allow outright oppression or enslavement. It would perhaps be better to say that the people of England lived by custom and not by law. Rights and duties were perpetual. No lord, however great, would willingly violate such a tradition. It would be against nature. At an important trial in 1072 the bishop of Chichester, Aethelric, was brought in a cart to expound and explain ‘the old customs of the laws’. So a continuity was maintained even after William the Conqueror’s invasion. It could not be otherwise. It was the essential life of the country. The unanswerable complaint of the labourer or the villager was that ‘we have never been accustomed to do this!’

Another aspect of this historical piety may be mentioned. Any institutional or administrative change, introduced by the king and council, had to be explained as a return to some long-lost tradition. Any innovation that had endured for twenty or thirty years then in turn became part of ancient custom. Nothing was good because it was new. It was good because it was old. It was closer to the golden age of the world. So the existing structure of things had at all costs to be protected. Any piece of legislation was said to be a ‘declaration’ of the existing law, the revelation of something previously
hidden. In the reign of Henry III the barons of the realm announced ‘
Nolumus leges Angliae mutari
’ – ‘we do not wish the laws of England to be changed’. Government itself was established upon habitual forms and institutions. The Black Book or royal household manual of 1478, in the reign of Edward IV, urged the treasurer to seek out ‘good, old, sad [serious], worshipful and profitable rules of the court used before time’.

Custom was therefore immemorial. In the words of the period it was ‘from time out of mind, about which contrary human memory does not exist’. It was expected that the same practice and habitual activity would go on forever until the day of doom. There was no reason to envisage anything else. That final day might in effect be the day when the customary round grew ragged and creaked to a halt. Who could tell?

Customs could be of inexplicable mystery. If the king passed over Shrivenham Bridge, then in Wiltshire, the owner of the land was supposed to bring to him two white domestic cocks with the words ‘Behold, my lord, these two white capons which you shall have another time but not now’. If a whale was stranded on the coast near Chichester, it belonged to the bishop except for the tongue, which was taken to the king; if a whale landed anywhere else along the shores of his diocese, the bishop was permitted to have only the right flipper. There were urban, as well as country, customs. At Kidderminster in Worcestershire, on the day of the election of the bailiff, the town was controlled for one hour by the populace; they spent the time throwing cabbage stalks at one another before pelting the bailiff and his procession with apples. The porters of Billingsgate decreed that any stranger entering their market was obliged to salute a wooden post set up there and pay them sixpence; the man was then adopted by two ‘godparents’ among the porters. If an unmarried man was condemned to death in London, he was pardoned if a woman applied for his release on condition that he married her.

The nation itself represented the nexus of custom with custom, the shifting patterns of habitual activity. This may not be a particularly exciting philosophy of history but it is important to avoid the shibboleth of some fated or providential movement forward.

29

The warrior

Henry of Monmouth came to the throne, as Henry V, with the determination to restore the foundations of the royal finances and to deal with the old enemy of France. He was set to renew ‘bone governaunce’ or good government, with an especial intention to redress injustice and corruption. He had youth and vigour. A French visitor to the court remarked that he resembled a priest rather than a soldier; he was lean, and fair complexioned, with an oval face and short cropped brown hair. Certainly he had the look of an ascetic. On the night of his father’s death he consulted a recluse at Westminster Abbey, to whom he confessed all his sins.