Henry IV (1399–1413)

Despite the profound instability the Lancastrian revolution caused, in the first twenty years of the new dynasty Parliament reached a peak of influence to which it would not return for another 200 years. The rightful heir was the Earl of March, grandson of the childless Richard II’s senior uncle Lionel of Clarence, who was Edward III’s third son. The usurper Henry IV therefore had particular need of the Lords’ and Commons’ support–so the meeting of Parliament became an annual event. Ever since Magna Carta the tradition had grown up that the power of the king was limited by the need to confer with the King’s Council. Now consultation became more important than ever.

A key part of that Parliament was the House of Commons. For more than 150 years lawyers, well-to-do townsmen, merchants and small landowners had been responsible through the Commons for raising the king’s taxes in the shires. Although the aristocracy with their vast estates and private armies continued to be the crown’s advisers, the Commons’ control of taxation left the kings of England no option but to listen to the middle classes’ petitions. Uniquely in Europe, by the early fifteenth century it was firmly established that the Commons as well as the nobility or the king were the initiators of new laws. By the beginning of Henry V’s reign in 1413 it had become the accepted custom that when the House of Commons sent a bill for the royal signature the king might throw it out but he could not change its form to suit himself. English freedoms versus continental royal absolutism became a matter of pride for educated Englishmen.

Since the Commons consisted of both the country gentry and the commercial classes, there was never in England the sense of separate castes that prevailed abroad. Instead common interests bound together the small landowner or country gentry and the merchant. The English class system always surprised foreign observers by its flexibility, with people moving swiftly up and down the scale through marriage and successful careers. In particular, the merchant’s daughter had become an instrument for increasing the family fortune, as the merchant class benefited from expanding trade, improved education and better health and as the population and the economy at last recovered from the effects of the Black Death. The men who ran the wool trade took over the building of richly decorated parish churches from the lords of the manor–these may be seen in the ‘wool churches’ of East Anglia, of which the finest examples are at Long Melford, Sudbury and Lavenham.

The wealthier merchants were also putting up large townhouses, often of brick–a material not used since the Romans. The architecture became domestic rather than defensive–the castle was dying out as a rich man’s home. The broad windows in such castles as were built in this period, for example at Herstmonceux in Sussex, indicate that the crenellations above them were added purely for decoration.

As these fortunes were being made from England’s growing share of international trade, which was increasingly regulated by treaty, towns and cities became much more sophisticated and complex organisms. Incorporated by royal consent or charter into legal entities, they had their own governments, with powers to make their own laws and hold their own elections, which the king had to respect. Wealth created a more defined class system in towns, which became more oligarchical–controlled exclusively by well-to-do tradesmen, especially clothiers, who elected one another. Trade became standardized too. The craft organizations–the guilds–had powers to perform spot checks on merchants’ and craftsmen’s premises to make sure that standards were being complied with.

But the guilds’ powers were not just regulatory. Along with the town corporations, they were patrons of a new standard of English urban civilization. They provided charitable functions for the poor, and city grammar schools for their own children. They arranged the processions and music which were so constant an accompaniment to fifteenth-century life. Everybody, whatever their circumstances, knew the Bible stories thanks to the celebrated guild plays, of which the best known are those at York, performed on large wagons moving around the city. In the City of London the immense wealth of the Fishmongers’, the Goldsmiths’ and above all the Mercers’ or clothiers’ guilds were made dramatically visible in the magnificent halls that still stand today; the guilds continue to manage fortunes in real estate accrued over the centuries, enabling them to carry out generous charitable work. Like their magnate equivalents, the heads of guilds were allowed to wear their own uniforms or livery. No less than the individual merchants, the guilds were responsible for a further transformation in church architecture in the erection of chantry chapels, tacked on to the main body of churches to house the many guild altars. This led to an increase in the numbers of church personnel, as altar priests were specially engaged just to chant masses all day long to ease the afterlife of the souls of departed members.

As more and more sons of clothiers, merchants and shopkeepers such as butchers and bakers benefited from education, scriveners or copiers were kept busy writing out books for their burgeoning audience–until close English trade links with the Burgundian Netherlands brought a printer named William Caxton to England with a printing press with movable type. When he imported one of the presses in 1474, invented by the German Johan Gutenberg, middle-class literacy took off as never before, and the homes of small tradesmen soon contained as many books as those of the upper classes.

Despite all these progressive tendencies, another strong current in fifteenth-century England was the return of feudalism, or the rule of barons, thanks to the weakness of the crown. The Lancastrian kings’ reliance on Parliament increased the powers of the Lords, bringing bloody inter-generational factionalism and the sort of anarchy not seen since Stephen. Traditionally the two places where feudalism remained almost unadulterated were the border lands guarding England from Wales and Scotland, where independent armies and a palatinate system had prevailed since the early Norman kings. It was from the border lords that the first challenge to the new regime came.

As the name suggests the power base of the Lancastrian dynasty was in the north-west, where Henry IV owned huge swathes of Lancashire and Yorkshire. Indeed Henry of Lancaster had secured the throne with the aid of his fellow northern magnates, above all the soldiers of the Percys of Northumberland. It was the Percys’ loyalty during the uneasy early days of the new regime that had kept the Scots out of England–but Henry IV had not rewarded them as they considered their due. Full of pride in their family–as the old saying went there was only one king in Northumberland and that was not the king of England–they were soon nursing a grievance. In particular, they had not become the key advisers in the King’s Council they had been led to believe they would. Thus, when a Welsh rebellion broke out within a year of Henry’s accession, a desire for revenge and kinship links persuaded the Percys to join it.

In 1400 a new Welsh war for independence was touched off by a quarrel over land resolved in the English law courts in favour of the English marcher baron Lord Grey of Ruthin and against the Welsh landowner Owen Glendower. Glendower’s calibre as a general and the disaffection the Welsh felt for their overlords were a potent combination, and Glendower became so confident that he summoned a Welsh Parliament, acknowledged the French pope at Avignon instead of Rome and made a legal treaty allying himself as Prince of Wales to the French king Charles VI, father-in law of the deposed Richard II. When a French troopship arrived at Carmarthen Bay and the Earl of Northumberland’s son Harry Percy, who had been sent to Wales to put down the rebellion, started intriguing with the conspirators the Welsh revolt became an attempt to overthrow the new dynasty. By 1403 its leaders were aiming not only for an independent Wales but to reinstate the rightful heir to the throne of England, the Earl of March. Chief among the disaffected nobles was the marcher lord Sir Edmund Mortimer. Himself descended from Edward III through his grandfather Lionel of Clarence, he linked the Percys and Glendower to the Earl of March: he was respectively Harry Percy’s brother-in-law, Owen Glendower’s son-in-law, and uncle to the Earl of March.

In July 1403 at the Battle of Shrewsbury on the Welsh borders Henry IV intercepted the Percy armies led by Hotspur (as the Scots had admiringly named Harry Percy) on their way to join up with the Welsh under Glendower. Hotspur was killed by his former pupil, Henry IV’s son Henry of Monmouth, the future Henry V. The immediate threat of a general rising was temporarily beaten off, though Glendower escaped. But in 1405 a new rebellion broke out, this time led by Hotspur’s father the Earl of Northumberland. Since the Archbishop of York, Richard Scrope, the second most important churchman in England after the Archbishop of Canterbury, was one of the northern leaders it had to be crushed with the utmost severity. To considerable disquiet Scrope was executed, even though as a churchman he was not subject to secular law.

By the deaths of Richard II and Archbishop Scrope, Henry IV had shown he was quite capable of ruthless acts to safeguard his dynasty, but it was at great mental cost. Henry of Lancaster was not the natural material of which usurpers are made, being of a melancholy and religious disposition, and he never attempted to root out the Clarence Plantagenet line by killing March. He was said to have been struck with leprosy in 1407 at the moment that Archbishop Scrope was executed. By all accounts the rapid decline which ended with his death at the age of forty-six began with a nervous breakdown that year.

As the king became steadily more incoherent and unaware of his surroundings, power devolved to his close family circle. His son, the future Henry V, with the help of his half-uncles, the ambitious Beaufort sons of John of Gaunt, began to take control of the King’s Council, undermining the influence of Henry IV’s chief adviser, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Arundel. In 1413 the king’s health finally gave out and he died in the Jerusalem Chamber of the Palace of Westminster–thus fulfilling an old prophecy that he would die in the Holy Land.