IV
‘… you have no lordship, not even to the kingdom of England, which belongs to the true heirs of the late king Richard.’
Archbishop Boisratier to Henry V
‘John [Oldcastle] purposed to have slain the king and his lords at Eltham, that is to say, on Twelfth Night in the evening.’
A Chronicle of London
Henry V was such a successful king that it is hard to appreciate how at the start of his reign he was far from secure. Two months after his accession a poster nailed to the door of Westminster Abbey claimed that Richard II was alive in Scotland. It had been written by John Whitelock, a yeoman who had taken sanctuary in the abbey with three accomplices after spreading the story all over London. Richard II may have been safely dead but the Earl of March was unquestionably still alive and no longer a minor. Apart from its own household men, few people at this time felt a natural loyalty to the House of Lancaster.
He took no chances with Gruffydd ap Owain (Glyn Dŵr’s son), Murdoch, Earl of Fife (the Regent of Scotland’s son) and James, King of Scots. One of his first acts as king was to recommit these three to the custody of the Constable of the Tower of London. Although lodged comfortably enough at Windsor and Kenilworth as well as the Tower – then a royal palace besides being a fortress and often a scene of court life – it is clear they were under constant surveillance. Gruffydd was to disappear into obscurity while Murdoch was ransomed by his father for the vast sum of £16,000. The King of Scots was not so lucky. He had already been a prisoner for seven years, since the age of eleven. He had no hope of release so long as Henry lived, even though the English might go through the motions of negotiating, and was not freed until 1423, a year after the king’s death, having by then spent eighteen years as a prisoner of the English. Later he wrote poignantly how much he had envied birds and beasts, fishes of the sea, in their freedom during his ‘deadly life full of pain and penance’ and that he had been ‘despairing of all joy and remedy’. When he did return to Scotland he proved a ruler of outstanding ability – and a strong Scotland was the last thing Henry wanted. The Scots were already traditional allies of the French in their ‘auld alliance’ and he was determined to use every means in his power to prevent them from going to the assistance of his prey across the Channel. He had no qualms about inflicting ‘pain and penance’ on King James.
Henry was crowned on Passion Sunday (9 April) by Archbishop Arundel, in the midst of a blizzard. ‘On the same day,’ records Adam of Usk, ‘an exceeding fierce and unwonted storm fell upon the hill country of the realm, and smothered men and beasts and homesteads, and drowned out the valleys and the marshes in marvellous wise, with losses and perils to men beyond measure.’ An eyewitness of the coronation told the Monk of St Denis that a large number of those present in the abbey thought that March should have been crowned instead, and that civil war seemed likely.1 It was noticed that during the ceremony the king seemed oddly gloomy and that he ate nothing at the coronation banquet. It was rumoured that he did not eat for three days afterwards.2 The inference is that he had an uneasy conscience, as someone who in his heart admitted to himself that he was an usurper.
These rumours are of vital importance for any understanding of Henry V’s psychology and of his basic motives, of what really drove him. He must have been only too well aware that if March did not have supporters who were prepared to rise for him in armed revolt, and that if there was not much popular interest in the earl himself, there were nonetheless many who acknowledged privately that a glaring injustice had been done in depriving the rightful heir to the throne of his inheritance. During Richard II’s reign the March claim to the succession had been recognized publicly not once but twice by Parliament, as vested in the person of the earl and, previously, of his father. And recognition by Parliament had played a key part in the House of Lancaster’s usurpation. If ever Henry betrayed any hint of uneasiness, of self-questioning, it was now, during his coronation – and perhaps also on his deathbed. His insecurity has not received sufficient attention from historians.
Nevertheless from the very beginning of his reign Henry displayed extraordinary self-confidence in governing and at once began to apply the policy of carefully calculated conciliation which he had developed in Wales. The Earls of Huntingdon, Oxford and Salisbury – sons of the conspirators of 1400 – had their family estates restored, while steps were taken to persuade Hotspur’s son to come home from Scotland and inherit his grandfather Northumberland’s earldom. Lord Mowbray, brother of the rebel magnate who had perished with Archbishop Scrope in 1405, was invested as hereditary Earl Marshal of England, and permission was given to make votive offerings at the archbishop’s shrine in York Minster. The brother and heir of the slippery Duke of York was created Earl of Cambridge. Richard II’s body was brought from its obscure resting place and re-interred in the magnificent tomb he had had made for himself at Westminster Abbey. The gesture stressed that, whatever strange tales might come out of Scotland, Richard was dead.
Archbishop Arundel was replaced as chancellor by Bishop Beaufort. The old archbishop’s nephew, the Earl of Arundel, became treasurer. Contrary to the late king’s fears there was no trouble from the Duke of Clarence – now the heir to the throne – though to some extent the new monarch cut him down to size by creating their two younger brothers, John and Humphrey, Dukes of Bedford and of Gloucester.
By all accounts Henry V was already impressive at twenty-five – tall, well built and handsome. If the painting in the National Portrait Gallery (a sixteenth-century copy) is a true likeness, he had a florid, clean-shaven face with a high forehead, a long and commanding nose, full red lips, hazel eyes and auburn hair cut in a pudding basin crop – the fashionable military haircut of the day. This may well have been how he looked before ceaseless campaigning aged him prematurely and before he grew his beard. The contemporary sources also agree that he was unusually fit and muscular, wearing his armour ‘like a light cloak’ and, allegedly, able to run down a deer. However, according to the French astrologer Jean Fusoris, who was presented to him in the summer of 1415, despite a lordly manner and noble bearing he looked more like a prelate than a soldier. Complex, if dynamic and vital, reserved and secretive, icily cold, with complete self-control, he was someone very difficult to know and understand. He said little and listened much. He both wrote and spoke Latin as well as French and English, and had probably acquired some knowledge of Welsh: He possessed a large library to which he was always adding, reading avidly; his books included histories of the Crusades, treatises on hunting, devotional treatises and such contemporary works as Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, Lydgate’s Life of Our Lady and Hoccleve’s De Regimine Principum – the last two dedicated to him as the patron of both authors. According to Tito Livio, ‘he delighted in songs and musical instruments.’3
Henry was almost obsessively conventional and orthodox. ‘Every age has its own mentality’, if Jung is to be believed, and the king’s seems to have been wholly in tune with that of the first half of the fifteenth century. There was nothing eccentric about him save for his dynamism. He appears to have subscribed wholeheartedly to the fashionable cult of pessimism. ‘At the close of the Middle Ages, a sombre melancholy weighs on people’s souls,’ says Johan Huizinga. ‘All that we know of the moral state of the nobles points to a sentimental need of enrobing their souls with the garb of woe.’ Huizinga emphasises that ‘all aristocratic life in the latter Middle Ages is a wholesale attempt to act the vision of a dream’, explaining that ‘the passionate and violent soul of the age, always vacillating between tearful piety and frigid cruelty … could not dispense with the severest rules and the strictest formalism’. Such attitudes were displayed by the king throughout his reign. When he lay dying and claimed that, had he lived, he would have gone on to recapture Jerusalem he was not indulging in a personal flight of fancy but doing no more than express a duty acknowledged by every contemporary western monarch.4 On every formal occasion he made use of the language and forms of chivalry, enlisting symbolism to enhance their dignity. Commenting on his death the dauphinist Jean Juvénal des Ursins, who was often hostile towards him, noted that Henry dispensed the same justice to poor folk as to great. The king’s justice for humble people (to whom he and his campaigns had brought so much misery) derived from a chivalrous belief, at that time much in vogue, that it was a knight’s duty to protect the weak. This, rather than all the wearisome exhortations in Lydgate’s and Hoccleve’s doggerel, also reinforced his genuine conviction that a ruler must provide ‘good governaunce’. But when all is said and done, Henry must remain as much of an enigma to historians as he was to contemporaries. The most one can say with confidence about him is that friends and foes admired and feared him, and that they did not love him. The sole qualities with which the chroniclers credit him are military skill, strict and indeed harsh justice, and ostentatious piety.5
His religious experience seems to have been conventional in the extreme. He possessed the fashionable respect for Carthusian monks, though he did not share Lord Scrope’s taste for mystical literature. He was constantly going on pilgrimage to the shrines of wonder-working saints and had the ‘mechanistic’ religion of his period to a very uncomplicated degree. He heard several Masses a day, recited the psalms of the little office, and made a point of not allowing himself to be interrupted when at prayer. As soon as his father died and he was king, the First Life informs us that Henry:
called to him a virtuous monk of holy conversation, to whom he confessed himself of all his offences, trespasses and insolencies of times past. And in all things at that time he reformed and amended his life and manners. So after the decease of his father was never no youth nor wildness that might have any place in him, but all his acts were suddenly changed into gravity and discretion.6
The same admiring source also says that ‘from the death of the Kinge his Father until the marriage of himself he neuer had knowledge carnally of weomen’.
Indeed what struck observers most about Henry was his piety. Chroniclers are unanimous in agreeing that he had some sort of religious conversion on ascending the throne, as a result of which he dismissed his former boon companions. Some historians (like Edouard Perroy) may consider him a hypocrite yet his God was clearly very real to him. Nevertheless his beliefs must seem very strange and alien, even to the most traditionally minded twentieth-century Catholic. He had a fervent devotion for the undeniably eccentric St John of Bridlington – the canonization was purely local – a wonder-working Yorkshire holy man who had died as recently as 1379 and possessed a reputation for curing physical deformities besides casting out evil spirits; he was also said to have walked on the water. Henry’s spiritual life had some faintly sinister undertones, what the late E. F. Jacob terms ‘his dark superstitious vein’.7 No doubt the king was normal enough in refusing to let even the greatest in the land interrupt him when he was hearing Mass, in his constant visits to shrines, and in consulting hermits. Yet he also had a strong and well-attested belief in demons and in witchcraft.
It may be that Henry’s dark side was evident in his choice of confessors. He apparently favoured a combination of distinguished intellect and fanatical orthodoxy. John of Gaunt had begun a Lancastrian tradition of taking Carmelite friars instead of Dominicans as confessors and ambassadors, roles which they performed for the House of Lancaster for over a century. The first spiritual adviser whom the king appointed after his accession was the learned provincial of the ‘white friars’, Steven Patrington, who had been one of Wyclif’s original opponents at Oxford. However, he was seldom available after 1415 when he was made Bishop of St David’s.
Patrington was succeeded as Henry’s confessor by the next Carmelite provincial, Thomas Netter, who in some ways seems to have stepped from the pages of a Gothick novel. Netter (sometimes called Walden, from having been born at Saffron Walden) was obsessed by hatred of Lollardy; his own order called him ‘the hammer of heretics’, ‘the swiftest fire that ever smote the trunk of heresy’. He had co-operated with Friar Patrington in writing Fasciculi zizaniorum Magistri Joannis Wyclif, in its day considered to be a mighty work of refutation, and he later produced a mammoth compilation which defended the Catholic faith against proto-Protestant heresies. Almost as soon as the king had ascended the throne Friar Netter preached a sermon at Paul’s Cross accusing him of being lukewarm in persecuting Lollardy. Perhaps revealingly, his rebuke inspired the reverse of resentment. Shortly after, Henry announced that he was raising the standard of the church, as heir of ‘Duke Moses, who slew the Egyptian that he might deliver Israel’, since it was well known that certain priests were profaning the word of God, sowing discord with the pestilential seed of Lollardy. He quickly came to esteem Friar Netter.
This earlier, English, Torquemada had been at Badby’s trial and burning in 1410. He claimed that he had seen a spider running across the heretic’s face as he burnt, trying to get into his mouth, a creature so large and horrible that several men were needed to beat it off.8 That the king had such confidence in Netter tells us a good deal about him.
Henry’s piety was given concrete expression in the two monasteries which he founded during the very first year of his reign. Both were for orders much in fashion at the time. The Carthusians, for whom he endowed a charterhouse at Sheen near London, were respected far and wide for their holiness, cherished for the power of their prayers to save men from the consequences of sin. They were much more active and outward-looking than modern Carthusians, having a profound and widespread influence on popular devotion. They took retreatants into their charterhouses and gave spiritual council to the serious laity. The Bridgettine monastery of Syon at Twickenham nearby (later removed to Brentford), which he began building in the same year, was for an order of women and men founded by St Bridget, Queen of Sweden, less than a quarter of a century before. The king also contemplated establishing a house of Celestines, an order of monks with a strict interpretation of the rule of St Benedict, at Sheen, but they had too many French associations and he reluctantly abandoned the scheme.9
His piety was certainly far too conventional for the Lollards who, if the tradition recorded by Foxe is to be credited, referred bitterly to him as ‘the prince of priests’. The Lollards or ‘Bible Men’ insisted that true religion could only be learnt from the Scriptures. (Which was why, alone in Western Europe, England had in 1408 banned translations of the bible.) They considered that among priests the pope was anti-Christ and that bishops, canons, monks and friars all transgressed the Ten Commandments. The friars in particular were children of Cain, according to Wyclif (the Lollards’ founder); apostates and idolaters who practised murder, robbery and seduction. The Carmelites – the order to which Patrington and Netter belonged – were said to bear a strong resemblance to the fourth of the beasts of Daniel in the Apocalypse, with its iron teeth and claws and ten horns. All organized bodies within the Church were contrary to Christ’s teaching, the principal duty of a priest being to preach the Gospel. Lollard beliefs were summed up in theTwelve Conclusions which had been nailed to the door of St Paul’s in 1395. These rejected transubstantiation, auricular confession, praying to the saints, pilgrimages, indulgences, celibacy (which, they claimed, led to unnatural lust and child murder), and the wealth of the Church. In addition the Conclusions attacked the goldsmiths’ and armourers’ trades as luxurious and sinful. Such opinions contained the seeds of social as well as religious revolution, which might just conceivably have plunged England into the same bloody millenarian wars which convulsed Bohemia. One of the reasons for the sect’s failure was its inability to attract followers from among the ruling class save for a handful of knights and small landowners, most of whom were anti-clericals rather than religious reformers.10 There were exceptions, however.
The leader of these ‘cursid caitifs, heires of dirknesse’, was Sir John Oldcastle, from Herefordshire, who had done good service during the Welsh wars. The Gesta says of him that ‘slaughtering and pillaging the Welsh secured his promotion to knighthood’. He was a valued friend of the king, even if he had gone on Clarence’s expedition to France. During the Parliament of 1410 he had led a group of like-minded anti-clerical knights of the shire, most of whom had served with him against Glyn Dŵr; a modern historian has compared them to ‘Cromwellian Ironsides’. Nevertheless, however violent John Oldcastle’s career may have been, he possessed a considerable intellect, and corresponded with the Bohemian heresiarch Huss. Suddenly, in March 1413, just after the king’s accession to the throne, Archbishop Arundel informed Henry that a heretical book found in London, in the shop of a limner (illuminator) in Paternoster Row, belonged to Sir John. The King did not realize how serious his trusted friend was in his curious views – he had just sent twenty-six wrestlers to amuse Henry at Windsor – and tried to persuade so useful a servant to deny them. Oldcastle prevaricated, ignoring a citation to appear before Arundel. Eventually the king had him arrested and sent to the Tower in chains. During his trial Sir John insisted that the Host remained plain bread at the consecration and that there was no need for auricular confession, finally shouting at the tribunal that pope, prelates and friars ‘will drag you down to hell’. He was excommunicated and sent back to the Tower. He escaped shortly after, with the help of fellow Lollards, in October 1413.
Oldcastle went underground at safe-houses in London to organize a Lollard rising. Posters stuck on church doors claimed that ‘100,000 men’ were ready to fight for the new opinions. In almost every English county his agents summoned the people to rise, as the artisans and labourers had done in the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. The Lollard programme attracted considerable support, as much because of economic misery as from religious feeling. Sir John was to be regent, while the king, nobility and clergy were to be placed under restraint, and the abbeys dissolved and their riches shared out. Many Lollards anticipated the Taborites of Bohemia in dreaming of a new Jerusalem. Oldcastle and his friends – Sir Roger Acton, Sir Thomas Talbot, Sir Thomas Cheyne – were more than mere anti-clericals who wished to purify the Church.11
Sir John modelled his coup d’état on that of Richard II’s would-be restorers in 1400. He planned to smuggle armed Lollards disguised as mummers into Eltham Palace where Henry was keeping Christmas and seize him and his brothers on Twelfth Night (6 January) 1414. Some sources say he meant to kill them. The second stage would be the arrival of a Lollard army in London; men from all over England were to assemble at Fickett’s Field, just outside Temple Bar in St Giles Fields, on Wednesday 10 January. However, one Thomas Burton (later rewarded with 100 shillings as a ‘king’s spy’) kept Henry fully informed throughout. At 10 o’clock on the evening of Twelfth Night the mayor and his men-at-arms raided a carpenter’s shop at the Sign of the Axe near Bishopsgate. They found the carpenter and seven other Lollards dressed as mummers, among them a squire of Oldcastle’s, about to set off for Eltham. Despite the failure of the plot’s first stage Sir John did not call off the assembly at Fickett’s Field of – in the words of the Gesta – ‘this same raven of treachery with those of his crows who, as arranged, were to flock to him from almost every part of England’.12 The King was waiting for them with his troops. As they arrived in the grey hours before dawn they were arrested. For all the boasts of ‘100,000 men’ only 300 came to the field, of whom eighty were captured – the rest, including Oldcastle, fled into the gloom. Three days later, on 13 January, seven of the prisoners who were proven Lollards suffered the ‘burning death’ – fires lit beneath them as they hung in chains from gibbets. During the next fortnight another twenty-five were hanged in batches; four new pairs of gallows, popularly named ‘The Lollers’ Gallows’, were erected in St Giles Fields for the purpose. Henry felt more secure by the end of January and the remaining prisoners were eventually freed on payment of heavy fines. Sir Roger Acton, Oldcastle’s principal lieutenant, was among those executed, who ‘for the space of a month was swinging on the gibbet’ records Adam of Usk. However, the chief organizer of this pitiful little conspiracy was not caught until 1417. Writing at the end of 1416 the author of the Gesta says that Sir John ‘lurked in holes and corners out of the sight of men, and indeed still does, like another Cain, a vagabond and a fugitive on the face of the earth’.13
Strangely enough Oldcastle had been smuggled out of London by the Archdeacon of Westminster and was later sheltered by the Abbot of Shrewsbury and the Prior of Wenlock – all three Benedictine monks. The monastic community at Westminster had long been known for stubborn fidelity to King Richard and it seems hostility to the Lancastrian usurpers was still so strong that orthodox Catholics were ready to ally with heretics against the regime. It is also known that when he was on the run Sir John was in contact with Glyn Dŵr’s son, Maredudd, who had not yet submitted to Henry V and continued to roam the Welsh hills.
During the Parliament which met at Leicester in April 1414 a savage statute was enacted against Lollards. Every secular official, including mayors, was required to take an oath to root out heresy in his district, being empowered to arrest, question and imprison suspects. Even if those accused were acquitted, they were to be kept under observation for years afterwards. There were more burnings, such as that of the London furrier John Claydon in 1415. The Lollards were broken and driven underground.
As Jeremy Catto has written, ‘from the Leicester Parliament of 1414 until the triumph of toleration in the eighteenth century, religion was established and enforced by public authority, and dissentient voices were subjected to the rigour of statutory felony. By contrast, before 1400 religion was outside the competence of the secular power.’14 In clerical matters the king was in many respects the precursor of Henry VIII, and began to institutionalize the concept of a national church. In part his attitude stemmed from formalist piety, in part from dislike of any challenge to his authority. Over a century before the title was actually used Henry V would act as though he were ‘supreme governor of the church of England’.15
The new king proved no less effective in secular matters. One of his most impressive achievements was his swift restoration of law and order. Throughout his father’s reign, despite the promises of ‘good governance’ of 1399, England had been convulsed by banditry and rioting, cowed by bribery and intimidation. Henry V’s policy was a characteristic blend of neatly gauged conciliation and merciless punishment. His campaign against disorder began at the Leicester Parliament; in the words of Chancellor Beaufort it was ‘for the chastisement and punishment of the rioters, murderers and malefactors who more than ever abound in many parts of the kingdom’. This was followed by a frenzy of judicial activity. Since murder and robbery had been particularly prevalent in the north west Midlands, the Court of King’s Bench sat at Lichfield and Shrewsbury for over a month, issuing 1600 summons. There were commissions of inquiry in Derbyshire, Devon, Nottinghamshire, Yorkshire, and in North and South Wales. These were regions where treasons, felonies and trespasses had been especially widespread. By the autumn of 1414, King’s Bench had a huge backlog of cases. The king, who watched the court closely and sometimes intervened, cleared the backlog by declaring a general pardon extending even to murderers and rapists – charters of pardon were purchased by nearly 5,000 persons. Fines were used in other cases in preference to prison sentences, with the hint that military service was a sure way of regaining royal favour. Henry read personally all petitions addressed to him, a practice which he continued when campaigning abroad. His success is shown by the fact that disorder did not return during his reign, not even in the long periods when he was away in France.16
His priority was plainly law and order, not the punishment of crime. This has to be seen in the context of his preparations for war and need to recruit an army. Under strict discipline criminals can make excellent fighting men, as their aggressive instincts are directed at enemies abroad and away from the population at home. It has been estimated that as many as twelve per cent of Edward III’s troops were outlaws serving in hope of a pardon and although no similar analysis exists for his great-grandson’s soldiers the percentage was no doubt very similar.
Henry was only able to achieve as much as he did during the fifteen months before his invasion fleet sailed for France because he had an unusually gifted team of administrators, men with whom he had worked in 1409–12. These included all the key members of his council; Bishop Beaufort (Chancellor), the Earl of Arundel (Treasurer) and John Prophet (Privy Seal), together with Langley, Bishop of Durham, and Chichele, Bishop of St David’s, who have been described, not inaptly, as ministers without portfolio.17 They attended the rather larger meetings of the Royal Household which was soon widened to admit the Dukes of Bedford and Gloucester, the Earl of March, Lord Fitzhugh, Sir Thomas Erpingham, and Richard Courtenay, Bishop of Norwich. Council and Household both met regularly for discussions whose minutes sometimes read like those of any modern board meeting. On Sunday 27 May 1415, for example, the Council met to nominate individuals for specific duties and specialized committees: Chichele, Lord Scrope, Sir John Mortimer and two clerical diplomats were to brief envoys to the Duke of Burgundy; Bedford and Bishop Beaufort were to consider the redemption of pawned crown jewels; Bishop Beaufort was to pressure the bishops to take more steps against Lollards; other committees were nominated to deal with such matters as policy for the seneschal of Guyenne, appointing commissions of array in every county, supplies for the invasion fleet and sailors’ pay. The council could be ruthless enough, especially where money was concerned; on the previous Friday it had summoned ten Italian merchants before it, ordering them to furnish a war loan of £2,000 – when this was refused the Italians were promptly sent under guard to the Fleet prison.
The king tried to enlist the sympathy of all Europe by stressing his moderation. He declared that he was ready to forego his own claim to the throne of France if the French would give him Aquitaine as it had been in 1360, after the Treaty of Brétigny. His envoys travelled everywhere, putting their master’s case and complaining of French injustice towards him. Meanwhile, inexorably, he made his preparations for war. He was too busy to be on his guard against danger at home.
In some quarters the new dynasty was still resented. As late as the summer of 1415, when Henry was on the point of launching his invasion of France, another extremely serious anti-Lancastrian plot very nearly succeeded. On 1 August the Earl of March came suddenly to Porchester Castle from where the king was directing the embarkation. He demanded an audience and revealed that his brother-in-law, the Earl of Cambridge, had tried to enlist him in a plot to overthrow Henry. He was to be denounced in a proclamation as ‘Henry of Lancaster, usurper of England’. As Cambridge later explained in a confession, ‘I purposed to have had the aforesaid earl [of March] into the land of Wales without your consent, to confer upon the earl the sovereignty of this land if that man whom they call King Richard had not been alive, as I know very well he is not.’ (This was in reference to the pseudo-Richard in Scotland.)18 Henry Percy, Hotspur’s son, not yet restored to his grandfather’s earldom, was to cross the border into England with a Scots army and raise the North, while a Davy Howell was to hand over the royal castles in Wales, where Owain’s old followers were waiting to rise. Howell, a distinguished commander, seems to have known nothing of the plot. In addition Sir John Oldcastle and his Lollards would raise the Welsh border and the West Country. It was the old alliance of Percy, Mortimer and Glyn Dŵr.
There had been long discussions between March, Lord Clifford – who refused to be drawn into the conspiracy – and the two other ring-leaders, Sir Thomas Grey and Lord Scrope at the Itchen ferry, under the very walls of Southampton, and also at supper parties at March’s manor of Cranbury near Winchester. A plan to fire the invasion fleet was rejected. Finally it had been decided to assassinate King Henry on the very day that March had his audience.
Henry struck at once. Cambridge, Scrope and Grey were arrested without delay and a jury was impanelled the same day. The following day they were found guilty and a commission presided over by Clarence sentenced them to death. Grey was executed at once but, as was their right as lords, Cambridge and Scrope demanded to be tried by their peers. Many of these were at Southampton waiting to go over to France and twenty soon met, under Clarence’s presidency, confirming the sentences. Henry commuted these to beheading, the privilege of lords, though he had Scrope dragged ignominiously on a hurdle through the streets of Southampton – no doubt to be pelted with filth and stones – to the place of execution outside the north gate, where ‘their heads were smit off’.
The plot has not been taken seriously enough by historians (even if Wylie calls it a ‘really formidable shock’), because it failed. Yet the conspirators included a member of the royal family, a magnate who was a former Treasurer of the Household, and a redoubtable and extremely influential soldier. Cambridge and Scrope were genuine powers in the land, both Knights of the Garter, with many friends, allies and clients. Walsingham says that the tender-hearted king wept at their fate. He is more likely to have shed tears because of their denial of his right to the throne.
Richard of Coninsburgh, Earl of Cambridge, was the younger brother of that arch-intriguer, the Duke of York, who was, however, not implicated in the plot. As well as being March’s brother-in-law, Cambridge had been Richard II’s godson. No doubt Henry thought he had secured his loyalty by creating him an earl. His daughter was married to the eldest son of Sir Thomas Grey of Heton Castle (and of the Towers of Wark-on-Tyne and Nesbit) in Northumberland, constable of Bamborough and Norham Castles in the same county – both key strongholds. Grey was also a son-in-law of the Earl of Westmorland while his wife’s brother-in-law was the Earl of Northumberland. He was therefore very well connected and very much respected throughout the North Country. The Gestaadmits that he was ‘a knight famous and noble if only he had not been dishonoured by this stain of treason’.19
It was the defection of Scrope which shook Henry, the enmity of someone so brilliant, who had been one of his closest friends. Presumably he would have endorsed Friar Capgrave’s verdict; ‘Sober was the man in word and cheer and under that hypocrisy had he a full venomous heart.’ Indeed the attempted coup has earned Lord Scrope the contempt of history. Shakespeare makes Henry rebuke him with an extremely plausible speech:
Ingrateful, savage and inhuman creature!
Thou, that didst bear the key of all my counsels,
That knewst the very bottom of my soul
Yet Scrope’s real motives have never been identified. The contemporary rumour that he had been bought by the French for ‘a million of gold’ was without foundation. He himself said that the conspirators had invited him to join them because he was the nephew of the murdered archbishop, which seems the most likely explanation; his piety verged on mysticism, and he cannot have been unmoved by the cult of ‘St Richard’ at York Minster. The person who knew Henry best, outside his family, was not prepared to have him as his king.
The ‘Southampton Plot’ was inept and ill conceived. The devout Lord Scrope could never have brought himself to join forces with the Lollard heretics, whom he detested, and at one point he appears to have tried to talk his fellow plotters out of going ahead with it. Nonetheless Henry had only been saved at the last moment because March lost his nerve. If Cambridge’s confession is to be believed, the earl’s chaplain had urged him ‘to claim what he called his right’ and his household had been convinced that he meant to do so. March undoubtedly feared that the king intended to ‘undo’ him, and had recently been shattered by Henry forcing him to pay 10,000 marks (nearly £7,000) as a marriage fine to ensure he remained subservient and did not meddle in politics. During the final French attempt to avoid war the astrologer Jean Fusoris, who accompanied the embassy to England, heard that many people would have preferred March to be their king. But he possessed either too little ambition or too little self-confidence. He seems to have been an unusually amiable and kindly young man, moderately gifted, with a healthy sense of self-preservation. He was understandably reserved and somewhat suspicious, and above all very much in awe of the cousin who had stolen his crown. Investigating his personal accounts McFarlane discovered that he had a weakness for gambling – losing £157 between the autumn of 1413 and the spring of 1414 at cards, tables, raffles and dice, and betting on cockfighting. ‘There are also some suspiciously large payments to a certain Alice at Poplar and some other signs of a fondness for low as well as high company.’20
Later March served Henry well enough during the campaigns in France, though he was to fall under suspicion at least once again. He died childless in 1425 when his claims passed to his sister, the Countess of Cambridge (the widow of the earl who had perished in the Southampton Plot). Her son Richard, Duke of York, was to claim the throne in 1460 – on being asked why he had not done so before, he replied, ‘Though right for a time rest and be put to silence, yet it rotteth not nor shall it perish.’
Henry V believed that there was only one way to end ‘all this clamour of King Richard’, as his father put it. He had to prove to the world that God’s blessing was on the new dynasty. The sole method of doing so was trial by battle.