CHAPTER TWO
On 20 March 1413 Henry IV died at Westminster Abbey in the Jerusalem Chamber, thereby fulfilling (in the tenuous way of most medieval prophecies) the prediction that he would die “in the Holy Land.” The dazzling young hero, renowned for his personal prowess as a crusader and jouster and for his lavish patronage of the arts, died a broken man, unlamented and unrespected, at the age of only forty-six. He had kept his stolen crown by a combination of luck, ruthlessness and success in battle. He had even succeeded in passing it on to his son. In almost every other respect he had failed. He left the government heavily in debt, the royal council and the wider nobility riven with faction and intrigue, the country plagued by violent disorder and the Church under threat at home from heresy and abroad from schism. In the circumstances, it was probably fortunate that Clarence was still in Aquitaine and powerless to take advantage of the situation to hinder his brother’s accession.1
Henry V was determined that his reign would mark a sea-change in the fortunes of the English monarchy. Although he had not been born to be king, he had, quite literally, received a textbook training for his future role. Books of advice on this subject, known as mirrors for princes, had a long tradition dating back to classical times, and an English version, written by Thomas Hoccleve, a clerk of the privy seal (one of the departments of state) and part-time poet, had been dedicated to Henry himself when he was prince of Wales.2 Christine de Pizan, an Italian-born French poet and author of books on chivalry, had written a similar work for the dauphin Louis, in which she recommended that moral virtues as well as practical skills should be taught, stressing above all the importance of acquiring discipline, humanistic learning and early experience in the workings of government.3 In all these things the new king excelled.
Henry V had been brought up to be literate and numerate to an unusual degree, probably because he was the son and grandson of two great patrons of literature, chivalry and learning. John of Gaunt was famously an early patron of the court poet Geoffrey Chaucer (who became his brother-in-law), a patronage that was continued by Henry IV. After Chaucer’s death, Henry IV offered his position to Christine de Pizan, no doubt hoping that as she was a widow and her only child, her sixteen-year-old son, was effectively a hostage in his household, she could be persuaded to agree. If so, he completely misjudged this redoubtable woman, who had once replied to criticism “that it was inappropriate for a woman to be learned, as it was so rare . . . that it was even less fitting for a man to be ignorant, as it was so common.” De Pizan had no intention of becoming the English court poet but “feigned acquiescence in order to obtain my son’s return . . . after laborious manoeuvres on my part and the expedition of some of my works, my son received permission to come home so he could accompany me on a journey I have yet to make.”4 Not surprisingly, she later became one of the bitterest and most vocal critics of Henry V and the English invasions of France.
The new king was the eldest of Henry IV’s six surviving children by his first wife, Mary de Bohun, daughter and co-heiress of Humphrey, earl of Hereford. He was born at his father’s castle at Monmouth, in Wales, but because no one expected the boy to become king of England, his date of birth was not formally recorded. The likeliest date, given in a horoscope cast for him later in life, was 16 September 1386.5 From an early age, Henry was able to read and write fluently in English, French and Latin, and like his two youngest brothers, John, duke of Bedford, and Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, both noted bibliophiles, he built up a considerable, if conventional, personal library of classical, historical and theological texts. His taste sometimes ran in a lighter vein, for he is known to have commissioned copies of books on hunting and his personal copy of Chaucer’s poem Troylus and Cryseyde still survives.6 He also “delighted in songe and musicall Instruments.” Perhaps because of his Welsh upbringing, he had a particular affinity for the harp, which he learnt to play in childhood; years later, his harp would accompany him on campaign, as did his band of minstrels and the musicians of his chapel. He even composed music: a complex setting of part of the liturgy, the Gloria, for three voices by “Roy Henry” is attributed to him.7
In addition to his artistic and literary pursuits, Henry had received a solid grounding in the art of war. Every chivalric treatise had always placed great emphasis on the importance of learning to bear arms from the earliest age; Henry possessed a sword at the age of twelve, and his own son, Henry VI, would be given eight before he reached the age of ten, “some greater and some smaller, for to learn the king to play in his tender age.”8 Hunting in all its forms was strongly recommended by chivalric writers as the perfect preparation for military life. The typical argument was put forward in the first half of the fourteenth century by Alfonso XI, who found time between ruling his kingdom of Castile and fighting the Moors to write a book about the sport.
For a knight should always engage in anything to do with arms and chivalry, and if he cannot do so in war, he should do so in activities which resemble war. And the chase is most similar to war, for these reasons: war demands expense, met without complaint; one must be well horsed and well armed; one must be vigorous, and do without sleep, suffer lack of good food and drink, rise early, sometimes have a poor bed, undergo cold and heat, and conceal one’s fear.9
Different types of hunting required different skills, all relevant to warfare, including knowledge of the quarry’s habits, handling a pack of hounds, complete control of an often-frightened horse and the use of various weapons, including spears and swords to perform the kill. In England, uniquely, deer were also hunted on foot with bow and arrow. This was particularly significant because deer hunting was exclusively an aristocratic sport. On the continent, archery was looked down upon as the preserve of townsmen and the lower ranks of society, but every English nobleman, including the king himself, had to be capable of handling a longbow and crossbow, and skill in the art was highly prized. “I know little of hunting with the bow,” remarked Gaston Phoebus, count of Foix, in southernmost France, who wrote the standard hunting treatise of the late fourteenth century: “if you want to know more, you had best go to England, where it is a way of life.”10 The consequences of this English obsession were to be felt at Agincourt.
If hunting introduced young men to some of the physical and mental skills required for a military career, mock combat honed and perfected them. Three hundred years and more since the introduction of the massed charge with couched lance, this form of fighting was still relevant to the battlefield and therefore had to be practised in jousts and tournaments. An international tourneying circuit had existed since at least the twelfth century and young Englishmen eager to make a name for themselves regularly travelled to France, Spain, Portugal and, to a lesser extent, Germany and Italy, to take part in these games. The English borders with France and Scotland were fertile ground for those seeking adventures of this kind because they provided a natural meeting place for knights from enemy nations.11
Although there is no record of Henry V participating in a public joust or tournament, he must have learnt to fight in such combats, which were organised and supervised by professional heralds and judged by older, more experienced knights; together they enforced a strict set of rules designed to prevent death or serious injury. The joust would have taught him to handle his lance in individual encounters on horseback; the less highly regulated tournament went a stage further, involving groups of combatants on horseback, often beginning with a massed charge with the couched lance, which then gave way to the real business of sword fighting, thereby more closely emulating the experience of genuine battle. He would also have been familiar with a relatively new development, the feat of arms, in which two opponents fought several types of course: a set on horseback with the lance, followed by a set each with the sword, the axe and the dagger, all fought on foot. This training was crucial since it had become accepted practice that the knights and esquires should dismount for battle and stand with the archers, “and always a great number of gentlemen did so in order that the common soldiers might be reassured and fight better.” Philippe de Commynes, who made this comment at the turn of the sixteenth century, also observed that it was Henry V and the English who had introduced this particular tactic to France.12 He was wrong, but it is significant that this was his perception.
The reason why Henry V, unlike his father, does not appear to have taken part in any public forms of mock combat is that he was too busy with the real thing. According to contemporary chivalric treatises, this was actually more praiseworthy. Geoffroi de Charny, for example, who carried the battle standard of France, the oriflamme, at Crécy and died in its defence, wrote in his Book of Chivalry that it was honourable to joust, even more honourable to tourney, but most honourable of all to fight in war.13 It was not pursuit of honour that led Henry to begin his professional military career before he reached the age of fourteen: it was necessity. His father’s usurpation of the crown was repeatedly challenged by armed revolt and for at least the first six years of his reign the kingdom was in a state of constant unrest and even open war. Henry’s role in these events was mapped out for him at his father’s coronation in October 1399. Even though he had only celebrated his thirteenth birthday a month previously, he was one of the young men chosen for the customary honour of being knighted on the eve of the coronation. Knighthoods conferred on such occasions were highly prized because they occurred so rarely and because they were accompanied by unusual pageantry and religious ritual. The ceremony took place in the Tower of London, where each candidate took a symbolic bath to wash away his sins, was dressed in white robes to signify purity and a red cloak to represent his willingness to shed his blood, and then spent the night in a vigil of prayer watching over his arms in the chapel. The next day, having heard mass, the candidate’s sword (double-edged to represent justice and loyalty) was girded about his waist, and his gold spurs, symbolising that he would be as swift to obey God’s commandments as his pricked charger, were fastened to his heels. Finally, he received from the new king the collée, a light tap with the hand or sword, which was the last blow he was ever to receive without returning it.14
Having been admitted to the order of knighthood, as befitted his new princely status, Henry had also borne one of the four swords of state at his father’s coronation: significantly, he chose, or was chosen, to carry the sword representing justice. A few weeks later Parliament officially decreed that he should be known as “Prince of Wales, duke of Aquitaine, Lancaster and Cornwall, earl of Chester, and heir apparent to the kingdom of England.”15 These were not simply empty titles: even at this early age, Henry was expected to share the burden of his father’s crown and take personal responsibility for the security and administration of his own domains. When he sought aid to recover Conwy Castle in north Wales from rebel hands, for instance, his father informed him in no uncertain terms that the castle had fallen through the negligence of one of the prince’s officers and it was the prince’s responsibility to recover it.
Henry’s right to two of his most important titles was soon to be challenged. In September 1400 Owain Glyn Dw?246-136?r, lord of Glyndyfrdwy in north Wales, declared himself prince of Wales and began a rebellion that would not be quelled until 1409. In 1402, the dauphin was proclaimed duke of Guienne (the French name for Aquitaine) and his uncle, Louis d’Orléans, launched an aggressive campaign of conquest in the duchy.16 Though the threat to Aquitaine was as great as that to Wales, the problems of the rebellious principality had to take precedence since they were literally closer to home.
Medieval Wales was a country united by language but physically divided in two. The Normans, demonstrating yet again their remarkable capacity for private enterprise, aggression and colonisation, had extended their conquest of England into south Wales by the early years of the twelfth century, but their cavalry tactics were inappropriate for the mountainous north. This part of the country therefore retained its independence and its distinctive Celtic customs until the end of the thirteenth century. Edward I’s conquest of north Wales was as ruthless and efficient as that of the Normans in the south: the native Welsh were expelled to make way for the building of castles and new towns, which were colonised by English settlers, and all public offices were put into English hands. As late as 1402, in response to petitions from the House of Commons, Henry IV’s Parliament was still enacting racially discriminatory legislation that prohibited Welshmen from holding office in Wales or from acting as deputies and even from purchasing lands or properties within English boroughs in Wales.17
Owain Glyn Dw?246-136?r’s revolt began as a private property dispute between himself and his Anglo-Welsh neighbour Reginald Gray, lord of Ruthin, but it swiftly escalated into a national rebellion because it tapped into both anti-English sentiment in Wales and hostility to the new Lancastrian monarchy in England. Perhaps the most dangerous point came in 1403 when the greatest and most powerful family in the north of England, the Percys, joined forces with Glyn Dw?246-136?r. The Percys had been among Henry IV’s closest allies and had played a major role in helping him to the throne. Henry Percy, earl of Northumberland, had been rewarded with the posts of constable of England and warden of the west march of Scotland; his son, the Harry “Hotspur” later made famous by Shakespeare, had been made warden of the east march and justiciar (chief minister) of north Wales; and Henry’s brother Thomas Percy, earl of Worcester, became admiral of England, steward of the royal household, king’s lieutenant in south Wales and governor to the prince of Wales. This formidable alliance now determined to depose Henry IV and replace him with the twelve-year-old Edmund Mortimer, earl of March. (Mortimer’s claim to the English throne was better than Henry IV’s, since he was descended from an elder son of Edward III; the Mortimers had twice been recognised formally by the childless Richard II as his heirs, but when Richard was deposed in 1399, the earl was a child of eight whose rights were as easily swept aside as those of the young French princesses in 1316 and 1321.)18
The alliance between the Percys and Glyn Dw?246-136?r gave Prince Henry his first experience of what was a relatively rare event, even in medieval times: a full-scale pitched battle. It was to be a salutary experience. A force of some four thousand rebels, led by Hotspur, took up a defensive position on a ridge three miles outside the town of Shrewsbury; the king and his son marched out of the town with an army some five thousand strong. Last-minute negotiations having failed to avert conflict, the battle began about midday on 21 July 1403 with a hail of arrows from the veteran bowmen of the prince’s own county of Cheshire. Unfortunately for him, they had taken the rebel side and he was on the receiving end. As the royal army struggled up the slope, the Welsh and Cheshire archers drew “so fast that . . . the sun which at that time was bright and clear then lost its brightness so thick were the arrows” and Henry’s men fell “as fast as leaves fall in autumn after the hoar-frost.” An arrow struck the sixteen-year-old prince full in the face but he refused to withdraw, fearing the effect it would have on his men. Instead he led the fierce hand-to-hand fighting that continued till nightfall, by which time Hotspur was dead, his uncle Thomas, earl of Worcester, was a prisoner and the Percy rebellion was over.19
Henry had survived his first major battle but his powers of endurance were to be tested further. A way had to be found of extracting the arrow that had entered his face on the left side of his nose. The shaft was successfully removed but the arrowhead remained embedded six inches deep in the bone at the back of his skull. Various “wise leeches” or doctors were consulted and advised “drinks and other cures,” all of which failed. In the end it was the king’s surgeon, a convicted (but pardoned) coiner of false money, John Bradmore, who saved the prince and the day. He devised a small pair of hollow tongs the width of the arrowhead with a screw-like thread at the end of each arm and a separate screw mechanism running through the centre. The wound had to be enlarged and deepened before the tongs could be inserted and this was done by means of a series of increasingly large and long probes made from “the pith of old elder, well dried and well stitched in purified linen cloth . . . [and] infused with rose honey.” When Bradmore judged that he had reached the bottom of the wound, he introduced the tongs at the same angle as the arrow had entered, placed the screw in the centre and manoeuvred the instrument into the socket of the arrowhead. “Then, by moving it to and fro, little by little (with the help of God) I extracted the arrowhead.” He cleansed the wound by washing it out with white wine and placed into it new probes made of wads of flax soaked in a cleansing ointment, which he had prepared from an unlikely combination of bread sops, barley, honey and turpentine oil. These he replaced every two days with shorter wads until, on the twentieth day, he was able to announce with justified pride that “the wound was perfectly well cleansed.” A final application of “dark ointment” to regenerate the flesh completed the process.20
The pain the prince must have suffered in the course of this lengthy operation is unimaginable: basic anaesthesia, based on plasters of opium, henbane, laudanum or hemlock, was understood and practised in medieval times but it was unpredictable and inefficient. It says something for Henry’s constitution that he survived the operation and avoided septicaemia afterwards. A wound of such magnitude in such a prominent place would surely have scarred the prince for life, but no mention of any blemish of this kind is made by contemporaries, though it is possibly the reason why Henry’s only surviving portrait shows him in profile, rather than in the three-quarter-face position favoured by all other medieval English kings.21
If nothing else, the battle of Shrewsbury must have taught Henry the value of archers and surgeons; both would be deployed in numbers at Agincourt. Nevertheless, Shrewsbury was an exceptional event, and for most of the best part of a decade that Henry spent campaigning in Wales, he was preoccupied with the far more mundane and tedious business of besieging castles, routing out rebels and, worst of all, ensuring that his men were paid and supplied. Letters written to his father at this time reveal that the prince had become a competent, if battle-hardened, veteran, who thought nothing of burning and laying waste rebel-held territory, pausing only to comment, without irony, that it was “a fine and populous country.” When a rebel chieftain was captured and offered to raise five hundred pounds within a fortnight for his ransom, Henry casually informed his father that “we couldn’t accept it, so we killed him.” The authentic voice of the pious victor of Agincourt also rings out in his announcement of a defeat inflicted by his household on a superior force of rebels: “it is proof that Victory does not depend on a multitude of people but, as was well demonstrated in that place, on the power of God.”22
In the longer term, victory required not only military success but also the establishment of peace. Here, too, the prince showed his mettle, building up around him a tightly knit group of tried and trusted councillors, retainers and servants, most of whom were to serve him for the rest of his life. Foremost among these were two young soldier-aristocrats who had much in common with the young prince and became his loyal retainers. Thomas Fitzalan, earl of Arundel, was five years older, Richard Beauchamp, earl of Warwick, four: both, like Henry himself, were sons of the so-called Appellant earls, who had challenged Richard II’s autocratic style of government and reaped a bitter harvest in consequence. Arundel’s father had been executed, Warwick’s sentenced to life imprisonment, Henry’s exiled: all had had their estates forfeited by Richard II and, after his deposition, restored by Henry IV. Arundel and Warwick had distinguished military lineages, their ancestors having fought with Henry’s at Crécy and Poitiers, and both were knighted with Prince Henry on the eve of Henry IV’s coronation. As they each owned extensive estates in Wales, they were involved in the military campaigns against Owain Glyn Dw?246-136?r from the start, and Warwick, who distinguished himself at the battle of Shrewsbury, was rewarded by being made a Knight of the Garter at the age of twenty-one. Arundel, as we have seen, was entrusted with the leadership of the expedition to France in aid of the duke of Burgundy in 1411; Warwick accompanied him and both men were present at the battle of St Cloud. The two earls would play important roles in the Agincourt campaign but, by an ironic twist of fate, would both be deprived of the opportunity to take part in the greatest military victory of Henry’s reign.23
Aristocrats like Arundel, Warwick and Edward, duke of York, who all had landowning interests in Wales and on its borders, were Henry’s natural allies, but he did not neglect the lesser men, the knights and esquires from Herefordshire and Shropshire, who also had an interest in pacifying their troublesome neighbour. His appointments to key offices in Wales were usually made from this highly experienced group of soldiers-cum-administrators, whose local knowledge was invaluable, but he was also prepared to promote Welshmen who had proved their worth and loyalty, despite parliamentary enactments to the contrary. Royal finances in Wales were restored by two equally judicious appointments which reflect the prince’s willingness to draw on expertise wherever he found it. John Merbury, who would recruit twenty men-at-arms and five hundred archers from south Wales for the Agincourt campaign, was a self-made Herefordshire esquire who had a history of long and loyal service to both John of Gaunt and Henry IV. Thomas Walton, on the other hand, was a clergyman, a young Cambridge graduate and honorary canon of St John’s at Chester, whom Henry plucked from obscurity.24 Talent, rather than status or connections, was the key to advancement in Henry’s administration.
Victory also depended on money, but this was in short supply. Henry IV seems to have had little grasp of financial affairs and, despite having promised to avoid the profligacy that had made Richard II so unpopular, he could not afford to “live of his own,” especially when he had to reward his supporters and suppress rebellion out of his personal income. This meant that he had to go cap in hand to an increasingly irritated Parliament to seek taxes and subsidies, which did nothing to improve either his popularity or his credibility as a reformist monarch. His reluctance, or inability, to commit enough money to the Welsh wars was one of the principal reasons why they dragged on for so long.
Prince Henry’s campaigns in Wales were constantly hampered by shortage of funds. Repeated requests for more men, supplies and money were never met in full, and the prince and his officers complained incessantly that their forces were on the brink of mutiny or desertion because their wages had not been paid. In 1403 Henry pawned his own stock of “little jewels” to aid the besieged castles of Harlech and Aberystwyth and in 1405 Lord Grey of Codnor was so short of money to pay his soldiers’ wages that he had to pawn his own armour. Edward, duke of York, the prince’s justiciar of south Wales, tried to raise funds to pay his men at Carmarthen by obtaining loans, but was refused by everyone he approached because they had not yet been repaid earlier loans made to the crown; to keep his men in place he had to promise them on his word “as a true gentleman” that, if no other means could be found to pay them, he would put the revenues from his Yorkshire estates at their disposal. At times the prince was even reduced to threatening that he would have to abandon the country to the rebels: “without man-power we cannot do more than any other man of lesser estate,” he warned his father.25
The lessons of this hand-to-mouth existence were obvious and Henry was swift to learn them. In complete contrast to his father, financial prudence, economy and strategic planning were to be his watchwords. As early as 1403 he embarked on a series of measures to increase his revenues from his duchy of Cornwall and earldom of Chester, increasing rents, taking back under his own management lands that had been rented out and substantially reducing the number of annuities he paid from local revenues. The gradual reconquest of his lands in Wales also made a steady and increasing contribution to his purse, so that after 1409 he could look to an annual income of some eighteen hundred pounds from south Wales and thirteen hundred from north Wales, compared to a paltry five hundred pounds from each when he first received the principality.26
Such financial wisdom could not help but endear the prince to the same parliaments that groaned over his father’s mismanagement of money. Parliament was under no obligation to grant the monarch any taxation, except in exceptional cases for the defence of the realm. In practice, it was the decision of the House of Commons whether to grant taxation or not; it also decided at what level taxation should be set. As Henry V’s reign would show, its members were not always reluctant to do so and they could be generous. What they expected in return was value for money or, as they termed it, “good governance.” In this respect, Henry IV repeatedly drew down their ire by assigning money they had voted for the defence of Calais or Aquitaine or the war in Wales to other ends, such as the payment of annuities for his supporters. To an unprecedented degree, the Commons was outspoken in its criticism, insisting that taxes should be spent on the purpose for which they had been granted, demanding that the king should reduce the size and reform the character of his household and requiring oversight of his appointments to his council. Henry IV’s response to this hectoring was counterproductive: he promised compliance and did nothing, thereby adding untrustworthiness to the list of grievances against him. The Commons reacted by attaching increasingly stringent conditions to its grants, not only bypassing the royal exchequer by appointing special treasurers for war, but also insisting that their accounts should be audited and presented for parliamentary approval.27
The genuine fear that the monarchy would go bankrupt was not without basis, as we have seen from the extraordinary measures to which Prince Henry and his officers in Wales had been obliged to resort to finance the war there. Nor was royal insolvency without precedent. In 1340 the strains of financing the war against France had bankrupted Edward III and ruined the two Florentine banking houses on whose loans he defaulted.28 In granting Henry IV a subsidy in 1406, Parliament inflicted its severest humiliation yet on the king, the appointment of a council with powers to oversee royal government and control its expenditure. It is a telling indication of the high opinion in which Prince Henry was already held that he was appointed to its head. A year later the council had done its job so effectively that the Commons passed a vote of thanks to the prince for his service in Wales, where the end of the rebellion was in sight, and, more pragmatically, granted a further half-subsidy.29
As Henry’s presence in Wales became less necessary, he was able to devote more time to the council and acquire that early experience in the workings of government which Christine de Pizan had recommended. Despite the fact that the appointment of the council had been forced upon the king by Parliament, it was composed almost entirely of his friends. It included at least two men who had shared his exile: Thomas Arundel, the archbishop of Canterbury, who had crowned him king and was now chancellor of England; and Sir John Tiptoft, one of his household knights, who had served as a Member of Parliament for Huntingdonshire since 1402 and speaker of the House of Commons in 1405-6, who became treasurer of England. The new council also included the king’s closest family, upon whom he had relied heavily when his own sons were too young to take an active role in politics. These were his three half-brothers—John Beaufort, earl of Somerset; Thomas Beaufort, earl of Dorset; and Henry Beaufort, bishop of Winchester—and their cousin and retainer Thomas Chaucer, the son of the poet, who was speaker of the House of Commons in the parliaments of 1407, 1410 and 1411. (The Beauforts, together with their sister Joan, who was married to Ralph Neville, earl of Westmorland, were the illegitimate children of John of Gaunt and his mistress Catherine Swynford, whom Gaunt belatedly married in 1396. Their offspring were then legitimised by the papacy and by a royal patent approved in Parliament, though they were formally excluded from succession to the throne.30)
Apart from Archbishop Arundel, with whom Prince Henry seems to have quarrelled irrevocably, probably over their differing attitudes towards France, and John Beaufort, earl of Somerset, who died in 1410, all these men were to remain trusted advisors of the future king. The Beauforts’ influence, in particular, was extremely important in helping to shape Henry’s priorities and his role as both prince and king. John and Thomas Beaufort were active soldiers and veterans of the Welsh campaigns; perhaps more importantly, both men served as admiral of England and captain of Calais, roles which made them passionate advocates for the defence of the seas and for the protection of English trading interests with Flanders. This alone was sufficient to recommend them to the House of Commons, where there was a powerful merchant lobby, but their success in performing their duties also earned them parliamentary approval. Their brother Henry Beaufort was an extraordinary man whose wealth, power and influence were matched only by his ambition, energy and ability, enabling him to straddle the secular and ecclesiastical worlds with equal success. At the age of twenty-two he had been elected chancellor of Oxford University, a year later he obtained his first bishopric (which did not stop him fathering a bastard on Archbishop Arundel’s widowed sister) and in 1409, when he was still only thirty-two, he was appointed a cardinal a latere by the schismatic pope in Rome, Gregory XII. An assiduous attender of royal council meetings, he served his first stint as chancellor of England in 1402-5 and paved the way to his future role as moneylender-in-chief to the crown with a loan of two thousand marks for the defence of the seas and Calais. The identification of the Beauforts with the concerns of the House of Commons gave them both an ear and a voice in the lower house, but because they never lost the confidence of the king they were able to act as intermediaries between the two. The more receptive prince gained proportionately, being fully informed on opinions within the Commons and also acquiring friends and advocates there.31
Through his close association on the council with the Beauforts and the two speakers of the House of Commons, Tiptoft and Chaucer, Prince Henry managed to achieve the amicable working relationship with Parliament which had eluded his father (and, indeed, Richard II). He had effectively demonstrated his capacity to rule wisely, particularly during the two years when he had enjoyed complete control of the council. In that period he had re-established the royal finances by a mixture of retrenchment, prioritised and targeted expenditure and careful audit work. The security of the kingdom had been enhanced by the suppression of the Welsh revolt and by strengthening the key garrisons in that principality, at Calais and in the northern marches with men, ordnance and supplies. The alliance with the duke of Burgundy, which had resulted in Thomas, earl of Arundel’s expedition into France, had demonstrated that he appreciated the value of English trading interests in Flanders. On a different level, but almost as important as these practical proofs of Prince Henry’s abilities, was his determination to dissociate himself publicly from the “fair words and broken promises”32 that had characterised his father’s dealings with Parliament and to establish a reputation for himself as a man who did not give his word lightly but, when he did, took pride in keeping it.
When Henry IV died after years of chronic illness, in March 1413, his eldest son and heir was twenty-six years old. He had served a long and hard apprenticeship for kingship, but along the way he had gained invaluable experience as soldier, diplomat and politician. He was now at the peak of his powers. In the circumstances, it was not surprising that his accession was widely anticipated as the dawning of a new hope and a brighter future.