A history of England

Richard's deposition had been the work, not of the whole nation, but of Henry's friends, the Percies of Northumberland, the Nevilles of Westmoreland, the Arundels—son and brother to the Arundel whom Richard had beheaded in 1397—and the Staffords [24] who represented the line of Thomas, Duke of Gloucester. The Parliament had acquiesced in Henry's usurpation rather because it had been discontented with Richard's arbitrary rule, than because it had any very great liking for his cousin. Perhaps the more far-sighted of its members had concluded that the accession of a king whose only title rested on election would be favourable to the development of constitutional liberties, since Henry would—at least for a time—be very much dependent on the good-will of the body which had chosen him, and which might some day choose another ruler if he proved unpliable.

Before Henry had been two months on the throne, civil war had broken out. The insurgents were Richard's kinsmen and favourites. The two Hollands—Earls of Kent and Huntingdon, who were Richard's half-brothers—conspired with Montacute, Earl of Salisbury, and Lord Despenser, who had been his trusted friends. They plotted to seize King Henry, as he lay at Windsor keeping the festivities of Christmas, to slay or imprison him, and to release their old master from Pontefract Castle. Unfortunately for themselves, they took into their counsels Edward Earl of Rutland, the son of the old Duke of York. The cowardly prince, finding that he was suspected, informed the king of the plot before the conspirators were ready. Henry escaped from Windsor, and called his friends together at London. The rebel earls set out in various directions to endeavour to raise their retainers, but they were all overtaken. Kent and Salisbury fell into their enemies' hands at Cirencester, Huntingdon was caught in Essex, Despenser at Bristol. All were beheaded without any delay or form of trial. Henry's grim reply to this insurrection was the production of the dead body of King Richard, which was brought from Pontefract to London, and publicly displayed to prove his death. Nevertheless, many men refused to credit his decease, and for years after there were some who maintained that the body exposed in St. Paul's was not that of the late king, but that of his chaplain, who bore an extraordinary personal resemblance to him. They believed, or tried to believe, that Richard had escaped and was alive in Scotland. Trading on this notion, an impostor presented himself at the Scotch court, and was long entertained there as the true King of England by the simple Robert III.

Hardly was the rebellion of the Hollands put down before a second civil war arose. The Welsh had always been devoted to King Richard, and had taken his deposition very ill. In 1400, a gentleman named Owen-ap-Griffith, of Glendower, who had been one of Richard's squires, put himself at the head of a rising in North Wales. Owen was of the old princely blood of the house of Llewellyn, and proclaimed himself Prince of North Wales under the suzerainty of his master Richard, whom he declared to be still alive in Scotland. He was a guerilla captain of marked ability, and completely baffled the efforts that King Henry made to put him down. He swept all over North Wales, captured many of its castles, and extended his sway over the whole countryside. To the day of his death Owen maintained himself in independence, ravaging the English border when he was left alone, and retiring into the recesses of Snowdon when a great force took the field against him. His incursions penetrated as far as Worcester and Shrewsbury, and no man west of the Severn was safe from his plundering bands.

As if the Welsh trouble was not enough to keep King Henry employed, other wars broke out around him. The Scots under the Earl of Douglas crossed the border to harry Northumberland, and Lewis of Orleans, the uncle of Richard's queen Isabella, began to stir up the French court to attack England, and encouraged many descents of Norman privateers on the coasts of the Channel.

Henry's only resource was to keep the nation in good temper by a rigorous and punctual obedience to all the petitions and requests of his Parliament. Accordingly, he showed himself the most constitutional of sovereigns, and both now and for many years to come made himself the dutiful servant of the Commons. He also did his best to enlist the favour of Churchmen on his side by a cruel persecution of the Lollards. The disciples of Wicliffe had always favoured King Richard, who had shown them complete tolerance, and Henry felt that he was not estranging any of his own partisans when he handed over the Lollards to the mercy of the harsh and fanatical Archbishop Arundel. [25] It was under this prelate's guidance that the king assented to the infamous statute De Heretico Comburendo (1401), which condemned all convicted schismatics to the stake and fire. The first victim burnt was William Sawtree, a London clergyman, and others followed him at intervals all through Henry's reign.

The Scotch war came to a head in 1402, at the battle of Homildon Hill. There Murdoch of Albany, the son of the Scotch regent, was completely defeated by Percy of Northumberland and his son Harry Percy, whom the Borderers nicknamed Hotspur for his speed and energy. But the victory of Homildon was fated to do England more harm than any defeat, since it was to cause a renewal of the civil war. The Percies had taken many prisoners, including Murdoch himself, and three other Scots Earls, Douglas, Moray, and Orkney. From the ransoms of these peers they trusted to get great profit; but King Henry, who was at his wits' end to scrape money together without troubling Parliament, took the prisoners out of the Percies' hands and claimed the ransoms for himself. This mortally offended Northumberland, a proud and greedy chief, who had been Henry's main support at the time of his usurpation, and thought that in return the king ought to refuse nothing to him.

In sheer lawless wrath at the king's refusal to hear him, Northumberland resolved to dethrone Henry. He secretly concerted measures with Owen Glendower for a joint attack on the king, and released his captive, the Earl of Douglas, who in return brought him a band of Scottish auxiliaries. By Owen's counsel, aid was sought from France also, and it was settled that the young Earl of March should be proclaimed king, if Richard II. proved to be really dead.

In July, 1403, the Percies rose, and were joined by their kinsman the Earl of Worcester, and many more. Hotspur rapidly led his army towards Shrewsbury, where Glendower had promised to join him with a Welsh host. But King Henry was too quick for his foes; he threw himself between them, and caught the young Percy before the Welsh came up. The desperately fought battle of Shrewsbury (July 23, 1403) ended in the victory of the royal host. Hotspur was slain by an arrow, while Douglas and Worcester were taken, and the latter executed for treason. It was at this field that the king's eldest son, Henry of Monmouth, destined in later years to be the conqueror of France, first looked upon the face of war.

The Earl of Northumberland, who had not been present at Shrewsbury, but had kept at home in the north, was allowed to make his peace with the king on the payment of a great fine. But Henry was wrong in thinking that the crafty and resentful old earl was no longer dangerous. Though his brave son was dead, Percy stirred up a second rebellion two years later, by the aid of Mowbray, Earl of Nottingham, son of Henry's old opponent in the lists of Coventry, [26] and of Scrope, Archbishop of York, brother of that Scrope, Earl of Wilts, whom the Lancastrians had hung in 1399. But Neville, Earl of Westmoreland, who commanded for the king in the North, induced Scrope and Mowbray to lay down their arms and come to a conference, and there he seized them as traitors. They were at once put on trial, not before their peers as they claimed, but before two of the king's justices, who condemned them to death. Scrope's execution sent a thrill of horror throughout England, for no archbishop had ever before been slain by a king, save Thomas Becket, and many men counted him a martyr even as Becket. So Henry lost as much love of the clergy by this act as he had gained by his assent to the statute De Heretico Comburendo.

Northumberland escaped to Scotland in 1405, and lurked there for two years; but in 1407 he crossed the Tweed, raised his vassals, and made a dash for York. But he was intercepted at Bramham Moor, and there slain, fighting hard in spite of his seventy years.

After this King Henry was no more vexed with civil war in England, but his Welsh troubles showed no sign of ending. Owen Glendower eluded Henry, Prince of Wales, and all the other leaders who came against him, with complete success, and the English armies suffered so severely from storms among the Welsh hills that they swore that Owen was a magician and had conjured the elements against them.

It was the constant drain of money for this interminable war that kept the king in strict submission to his Parliament, so that he was obliged to allow them to audit all his accounts, and even to dismiss his servants when they thought that he kept too large and wasteful a household. Henry much disliked this control, but he always bowed before it. His health was failing, though he was still in middle age, and bodily weakness seems to have bent his will. From 1409 to 1412 he was so feeble that the government was really carried on by his son, the Prince of Wales, and his half-brothers, the Beauforts, Henry, Bishop of Winchester, and Thomas, the Chancellor. Of the Beaufort clan we shall hear much in the future; they were the sons of John of Gaunt's old age. After the death of his wife, Constance of Castile, a lady named Katharine Swinford became his mistress and bore him several sons. He afterwards married her, and the children were legitimatized by Act of Parliament. Of these the eldest was now Earl of Somerset, and the youngest Bishop of Winchester.

It was fortunate for England in these years, when the realm was ruled by a bedridden king and a very young Prince of Wales, that her neighbours to north and south had fallen on evil days. Neither Scot nor Frenchman was dangerous at this time. The Scots were bridled by the fact that the heir of the kingdom was in Henry's hands. For it chanced that King Robert III. was sending his son James to France, and that the ship was taken by an English privateer. "Why did they not send him straight to me?" said King Henry; "I could have taught him French as well as any man at Paris." So Prince James was kept at Windsor as a hostage for the good behaviour of Scotland. His jealous uncle Albany, the regent of that kingdom, did not want him released, and was quite content to leave him in Henry's power and keep the peace.

The cause of the quiescence of France was very different. King Charles VI. had become insane, and no longer ruled. A desperate civil war had been raging there ever since the king's brother, the Duke of Orleans, had been murdered by his cousin, the Duke of Burgundy, in 1407. The partisans of the murdered duke, who were called the Armagnacs from their leader, Bernard, Count of Armagnac, were always endeavouring to revenge his death on Burgundy. They mustered most of the feudal nobility of France in their ranks, while their opponent was supported by the burghers of Paris and many of the towns of the north. John of Burgundy was lord of Flanders as well as of his own duchy, and was well able to hold his own even though his French partisans were outnumbered by the Armagnacs. Both factions sought the help of England, and King Henry was able to play a double game, and to negociate with each of them on the terms that he should be given back some of the lost districts of Aquitaine in return for his aid. In the end he closed with the offers of the Armagnacs, and sent over a small army to Normandy under his second son, Thomas, Duke of Clarence. Clarence accomplished little, but the fact that his troops were able to march across France to Bordeaux with little hindrance taught the English that the French were too helpless and divided to be formidable (1412). The lesson was taken to heart, as we shall see in the next reign.

While King Henry lay slowly dying of leprosy, his son, the Prince of Wales, was gaining the experience which was to serve him so well a few years later. Henry of Monmouth was a warrior from his youth up; at the age of fifteen he had been present at Shrewsbury field, and in the succeeding years he toiled in the hard school of the Welsh wars, leading expedition after expedition against Glyndower. The legendary tales which speak of him as a debauched and idle youth, who consorted with disreputable favourites, such as Shakespeare's famous "Sir John Falstaff," are entirely worthless. Of all these fables the only one that seems to have any foundation is that which tells how Henry was suspected by his father of over-great ambition and of aiming at the crown. It appears that the prince's supporters, the two Beauforts, suggested to King Henry that he should abdicate, and pass on the sceptre to his son. The king was much angered at the proposal, turned the Beauforts out of office, and was for a time estranged from the Prince of Wales. This was the reason why he sent Clarence rather than his elder brother to conduct the war in France. He even removed Prince Henry from his position as head of the royal council. But this outburst of anger was the king's last flash of energy. He died of his lingering disease on March 20, 1413.