Then Parliament declared the abdication of King Richard the Second and the accession of King Henry the Fourth.
And what meanwhile of the hermit of Ravenserespourne? Had Henry forgotten him? On the last day of September Henry was proclaimed King, on the first day of October he signed at Westminster a royal license making known that:
Of our special grace we have pardoned and remitted to the said Matthew all manner of trespasses and mistakes committed by him in this matter....
And moreover, of our more abundant grace, we have given and granted to the said Matthew the aforesaid place, to hold to his successors, the hermits of the aforesaid place, together with the chapel aforesaid, when it shall be built and finished, and also the wreck of the sea, and waifs, and all other profits and commodities contingent to the sands for two leagues round the same place, for ever.
The landing of King Henry IV. at Ravenser Spurn was commemorated by the erection of a cross at the place of landing. Was it a grateful Matthew Danthorpe who erected it? Very possibly. At any rate it was erected within fourteen years of Henry’s landing. Many years afterwards it was removed to Kilnsea; later still it was removed to Burton Constable, and finally to Hedon, where it stands to-day in the garden of Holyrood House.
The reign of Henry IV. was followed by that of his son and that of his grandson. Then came in 1471 one of the most curious parallels in history that it is possible to imagine. The ‘Wars of the Roses’ had been discomforting the land for sixteen years. Henry VI. had been deposed in 1461, and Edward IV. had been elected in his place. But in 1470 Henry had once more been placed upon the throne and Edward had fled to Holland. A year later the latter returned, and landed on the same spot where Henry Bolingbroke had landed seventy-two years earlier.
The parallel, however, does not end with his landing. As Henry of Lancaster proclaimed that he had come merely to claim his ancestral lands, so Edward of York proclaimed that he had returned for this same purpose only. As a Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, was the chief supporter of Henry of Lancaster, so a Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, came to the support of Edward of York. And as Henry of Lancaster was fated to depose and put to death King Richard II., so Edward of York was fated to overthrow and cause to be murdered King Henry VI.
It had been Edward’s intention to land on the coast of Norfolk. But finding a landing there impossible because of the guard kept by the Earls of Warwick and Oxford, he had headed his four large and fourteen small ships for the mouth of the Humber. The following is part of the account of his landing given by Ralph Holinshed, a chronicler living in the reign of Queen Elizabeth:—
The same night following, a great storme of winds and weather rose, sore troubling the seas, and continued till the fourteenth day of that moneth being thursday, on the which day with greater danger, by reason of the tempestuous rage and torment of the troubled seas, he arriued at the head of Humber, where the other ships were scattered from him, each one seuered from other; so that of necessitie they were driuen to land in sunder where they best might, for doubt to be cast awaie in that perillous tempest. The king with the lord Hastings his chamberleine, and other to the number of fiue hundred men being in one ship, landed within Humber on Holdernesse side, at a place called Rauenspurgh, euen in the same place where Henrie erle of Derbie, after called king Henrie the fourth landed, when he came to depriue king Richard the second of the crowne, and to vsurpe it to himselfe.