Henry V inherited the same insecurities his father had faced. Many regarded the House of Lancaster as a usurping dynasty and looked upon March as the rightful king; some even believed Richard II was still alive. However, in fourteen years of Lancastrian rule, people had generally grown used to the new dynasty and it had gained a
considerable degree of acceptance, something that the new King was able to reinforce.
Henry V was fortunate in that he possessed all the attributes required of a successful mediaeval ruler. He was deeply pious in an unquestionably orthodox way, spending hours at prayer each day and making many pilgrimages to the shrines of saints. One of his ambitions was to wrest Jerusalem back from the Turks. He was severe with heretics and virtually stamped out Lollardy.
He was also a brilliant general, a courageous leader who took a personal interest in his men and in the routine practicalities of warfare, but who was also a stern disciplinarian prepared summarily to execute anyone who disobeyed him. His contemporaries saw him as the embodiment of the ‘parfait, gentil knight’ described by Chaucer, a Christian hero-king to whose name legends swiftly attached themselves. He embodied as such all the ideals of chivalry, and his magnificent reputation made a powerful impression on his contemporaries, and indeed on English history. Not for nothing was he called the flower of Christian chivalry.
He had ‘a great will to keep justice, wherefore the poor folk loved him above all others, for he was careful to protect them from the violence and wrong that most of the nobles had done them’. To the poor, he was approachable and generous: his justice was strictly impartial, meted out to friend and foe, high and low alike. He was not a merciful king and his enemies feared his vengeance, which made his conquests easier since his reputation rode before him.
Henry V was a born leader who ascended the throne with astonishing confidence, determined to provide England with ‘good governance’. Dedicated to his task, he proved an adept administrator and a superb politician, believing that the prosperity of the realm depended on the integrity and orthodoxy of its ruler and that any threat to the monarchy was a threat to a divinely ordered society. Even his enemies praised him as a wise ruler. He was careful in his spending, avoided borrowing money, and planned well ahead, all of which resulted in a significant recovery of the royal finances. Henry closely supervised the royal administrators who worked under him, and sacked any corrupt officials.
He made consistent efforts to win the support and co-operation of his magnates. His aggressive war policy united them behind him and also brought England to the forefront of European politics. The resultant concord between the King and his nobility made for a greater degree of success in his enterprises. He replaced Arundel as chancellor with Henry Beaufort, Bishop of Winchester, his ‘oldest uncle and closest councillor’, but relations between them were not
always smooth. In 1417 the ambitious Beaufort accepted a cardinal’s hat and the office of papal legate from the Pope without first bothering to obtain Henry’s permission, as law and custom demanded. The King was furious and made him surrender both hat and appointment, which put paid to Beaufort’s ambition to occupy a position centre-stage in the European Church.
Shakespeare would later portray Henry V as the vindicator of the House of Lancaster, whose deeds and reputation removed the taint of usurpation that adhered to his dynasty. Certainly, England had not been so well governed since the time of Edward III.
Henry embarked upon a general policy of conciliation. As soon as he became king he demonstrated his confidence as a ruler by releasing the Earl of March, now twenty-one, from house arrest, and he also restored Hotspur’s son to the earldom of Northumberland. On the day before his coronation, Henry made March and his brother Roger Mortimer Knights of the Bath in a ceremony at the Tower of London. Clearly he did not regard March as a rival; nor did he acknowledge his superior claim to the throne, for he named his own brother Thomas, Duke of Clarence, as heir presumptive to the crown. March was a political unknown, unlikely to command significant support from the magnates, and a stranger to the populace at large, even if there were still those in high places who felt that he was rightful King of England and had been shabbily treated. Henry V took steps to rectify this: he made the Earl a member of his household and admitted him to his inner circle of advisers.
Fortunately for Henry, March was not particularly ambitious. His early experiences had perhaps crushed his self-confidence, and he lacked the qualities required of a king. He was a pleasant man, friendly and kind, entirely lacking the dynamism that drove Henry V. He found it hard to trust anyone, and went in fear of his awesome sovereign.
March was also, however, an impulsive and headstrong young man. Shortly after his release he secretly married his cousin, Anne Stafford, a great-granddaughter of Edward III, without first obtaining the requisite permission from the King. Henry was extremely displeased and fined the Earl £6666.13s.4d. (£6666.67). It has been conjectured that the forfeiture of such a vast sum made March resentful towards his sovereign, but since there is no record of his ever having paid the fine, it may well be that the King, knowing March’s loyalty was crucial, exercised his prerogative of mercy, having shown his cousin how easily he could ruin him.
March lived in great splendour in his London residence, Baynard’s Castle, on the banks of the Thames. His personal accounts survive
and show him to have been an inveterate gambler. In the winter of 1413–14 he lost £157 at cards, backgammon, dice and cock-fighting. He kept a mistress called Alice at a house in Poplar, east of London, and spent large sums on her. He also frequented taverns and was not averse to the company of low-born folk.
By 1415, March had gained a degree of fame, and Jean Fusoris, who visited the English court from France that year, reported that many people would have preferred him to Henry for their king. However, their opinions were shortly to undergo a rapid change.
Not two months after Henry’s accession a poster had been nailed to the door of Westminster Abbey proclaiming that Richard II was still alive in Scotland. The monks of Westminster Abbey had continued to support those who wished to restore Richard, even to the extent of backing an earlier Lollard conspiracy against Henry IV, which was suppressed with shocking brutality: seven proven culprits were roasted in chains over a slow-burning fire and another twenty-four were hanged.
In 1413, therefore, Henry V arranged for the body of Richard II to be moved from Langley to Westminster Abbey by night in a ceremony conducted with great pomp. The reinterment took place by the light of 120 torches in the presence of the King and many mourners, who watched as the coffin was laid to rest in the tomb occupied by Anne of Bohemia. Henry had not ordered Richard’s reburial as an act of atonement, but to emphasise to the public that he was really dead. Nevertheless, claims by rebels that he was still alive were made twice in 1417 and even as late as 1419. Only then was the ludicrous pretence of the deposed king’s survival finally abandoned.
Having established himself firmly on the throne and taken steps to neutralise potential enemies, Henry V turned his attention to the fulfilment of an ambition he had cherished since he was Prince of Wales: the prosecution of his ancestral claim to the kingdom of France and the conquest of that kingdom. In this enterprise, Henry firmly believed that God was on his side, that his cause was just, and that he was undertaking a sacred duty. He also knew that the accomplishment of his desire would immeasurably strengthen his position and thereby ensure the future of his dynasty. By unifying his people, high and low, in such a cause, he would channel their energies and interests into a profitable enterprise and so avert any threat of rebellion.
The magnates, and the people at large, greeted Henry’s declared war policy with enthusiasm, as did Parliament, which did not hesitate to vote funds for an invasion force. This seemed the ideal
moment to strike: the mad King Charles VI reigned in France and the country was divided by the aristocratic quarrels of the Burgundian and Armagnac factions.
Henry, blinded by zeal for his cause, cannot have imagined the enormity of the task he was about to undertake, nor did he foresee that England’s resources would never be sufficient to carry his plans through to their conclusion. It did not occur to anyone that the successful prosecution of Henry’s war policy depended on him alone.
One day, in the summer of 1415, as preparations for war were advancing steadily, Sir Thomas Grey of Heton was summoned to attend the Earl of Cambridge at Conisburgh Castle in Yorkshire. Grey held an important position on the King’s Council and was constable of the castles of Bamburgh and Norham in his native Northumberland. He was connected by marriage to the Nevilles and the Percies, and was a prominent and respected figure in the north, having distinguished himself also in a military capacity. His son was betrothed to Isabella, the four-year-old daughter of the Earl of Cambridge.
Cambridge was the King’s cousin, the younger son of Edmund, Duke of York, by Isabella of Castile. He had been born at Conisburgh in c. 1375–6, and the twelfth-century stronghold, improved by his father, became his principal seat. Richard was named after his godfather, Richard II, and during the reign of Henry IV he had supported at least one impersonator of the late king. Some time after June 1408, when a dispensation was granted, he had married his distant cousin, Anne Mortimer, March’s sister, who had been born in 1390 and spent her childhood at Wigmore Castle on the Welsh border. Anne’s second child, born on 21 September 1411, was a son named Richard, who would grow up to be one of the central protagonists in the Wars of the Roses. Sadly, Anne died during or soon after his birth, and was buried beside her father-in-law in King’s Langley Church. After her death Richard married Matilda, sister of John Clifford, Hotspur’s brother-in-law, but there were no children of this union.
In May 1414, in Parliament, Henry V had confirmed York, Richard’s elder brother, in his dukedom. At the same time, York had surrendered his father’s earldom of Cambridge to the King, who bestowed it on Richard, who was indentured to supply Henry, on request, with two knights, fifty-seven esquires and 160 mounted archers. The new Earl of Cambridge was not a wealthy man and had not the resources to support his new status. Normally, the monarch
granted some endowment when he raised a man to the peerage, but Henry V had omitted to do so in Cambridge’s case. His title was an empty conceit and, being an ambitious man, he resented the fact.
The business that Cambridge wished to discuss with Grey at Conisburgh was treason: the assassination of Henry V and his brothers and the proclamation of Richard II – in the person of the Mummet in Scotland – as rightful king. If the Mummet proved to be an impostor then March would be raised to the throne. Cambridge was the most important of the plotters, but it is unlikely that he was the prime mover in the conspiracy. That honour probably belonged to Henry, 3rd Lord Scrope of Masham, a clever, gifted and attractive man who, like the other conspirators, the King should have been able to trust implicitly. Scrope was forty-two, well-born, well-connected and rich. Archbishop Scrope had been his kinsman but he had not been involved in his rebellion. He was a serious and pious man, given to reading mystical religious works, and owned eighty-three manuscripts, a sizeable library for the time. His private chapel was his pride and joy, and was stocked with ninety copes.
Scrope had been close to Henry V for some years, and on occasion they even shared a bed, a practice having no homosexual overtones in those days, when it was regarded as a sign of especial royal favour. Scrope had been Treasurer of England under Henry IV and was Treasurer of the Household to Henry V; Titus Livius called him ‘an ornament of chivalry’. Scrope’s second wife, Joan Holland, was the widow of Cambridge’s father, York. There were thus strong family ties between the conspirators, and these proved greater than their loyalty to the Crown.
Why Scrope should have plotted to kill the King remains a mystery. Most of his contemporaries believed he had been offered financial inducements – some said as much as one million pounds, though this must have been an exaggeration – by the French government, who were anxious to prevent the English from invading France. The timing of the plot argues this, and the bribes could have been offered during a recent visit by French envoys to the court at Winchester. Scrope later denied being the instigator, as did Cambridge; both claimed they had been persuaded to join the conspiracy by the others.
The Earl of Northumberland was also involved, and it was probably he who suggested that Cambridge enlist the support of Grey. At Conisburgh, the Earl took Grey into his confidence and told him the details of the plot. Grey enthusiastically committed himself to joining the conspirators, and he and Cambridge rode south to meet the others. Cambridge had most to gain if the outcome
was successful: his son Richard was March’s heir, and March had so far remained childless. The Earl cherished dreams of his son wearing a crown.
As soon as Cambridge and Grey reached Southampton, Grey sought out Scrope, and several meetings of the conspirators took place. At this late stage, March was brought into the plot. It seems that the others persuaded his chaplain to urge him to claim the throne because it was his by rightful inheritance. March also owed Scrope large sums of money, and this may have been the price of his involvement, but he was a lukewarm conspirator, fearful of what would happen if the conspiracy failed, and not privy to all its details.
The conspirators were now meeting at March’s manor of Cranbury, near Winchester, and at a house at the Itchen Ferry, beneath the walls of Southampton. Various suggestions as to how to kill the King were considered, such as setting fire to the invasion fleet, but most were rejected. Eventually a plan was formulated: Northumberland would raise the north, while March would raise his standard in the New Forest and advance into Wales, where he would be proclaimed king and Henry V branded a usurper. The Scots and Welsh would be asked to support the rebellion, and even the legendary Glendower would be called out of retirement if he could be found. The notorious Lollard rebel, Sir John Oldcastle, then in hiding on the Welsh Marches, would help to raise the West Country, and the King would be assassinated on 1 August, after which March would be crowned as King Edmund I. It was a masterplan involving every contentious element in Britain, one of the most dangerous conspiracies of the late Middle Ages, and it had a very good chance of success.