Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester: A Biography

by Kenneth Hotham Vickers

War had now become a mere matter of days. After a brief visit to London, Henry went down to Southampton, whither probably Gloucester had gone direct from the negotiations at Winchester, and the last preparations for the expedition against France were being completed, when the young Earl of March waited on the King, and laid before him the details of a conspiracy against the House of Lancaster.[58] The Earl of Cambridge—a worthless brother of the Duke of York—Henry Lord Scrope, and Sir Thomas Grey of Heton were the authors of the plot, and their plan was to proclaim an impostor who pretended to be Richard II., and was then in Scotland, or in default of him the Earl of March himself.[59] At the time of the discovery the scheme had not been fully developed, as it was not intended that the matter should come to a head till Henry was safely employed in France; indeed the only reason that definite action had been taken, in so far as the Earl of March had been approached, was to prevent the latter from accompanying the army.[60] There were, however, traces that the conspiracy was spreading, and rumours were afloat that the Lollards were going to seize the opportunity of internal disturbances to strike a blow for their religion.[61] The King was not slow to act on the information given him. On July 21 he issued a commission to inquire into the matter, and on August 2 a jury was empanelled, which indicted the three conspirators for plotting against the King and his three brothers, the Dukes of Clarence, Bedford, and Gloucester.[62] Cambridge and Grey confessed their guilt, and threw themselves on the King’s mercy, but Scrope denied any traitorous intent. Grey as a commoner was executed at once, but the two lords were reserved for the trial of their peers. Clarence was commissioned to summon a jury of peers for this purpose, and among those who were called to take part in the trial were the Duke of York—the brother of one of the accused—and Gloucester—one of those against whom the conspiracy was aimed.[63] The accused were condemned to death, and executed the same day outside the North Gate of Southampton,[64] but the whole procedure was so irregular that it was considered necessary to legalise it in the next Parliament.[65]

1415] THE FRENCH WAR

The danger was past, but there was a lesson and a warning to be gathered from the plot, though it passed unheeded. Humphrey, now on the threshold of his public career, was brought face to face with an event which might have taught him much, but which he failed to understand. This first Yorkist conspiracy stood in the way, as did the prophets of old, and foretold destruction and disaster to dynasty and kingdom if this iniquitous and foolish French war were really undertaken. It showed that there was a party in England which was opposed to the Lancastrian House, and it pointed unmistakably to the time when civil war would drive out the reigning dynasty. That Henry could have foreseen all the results of his mistaken policy is impossible, but no ruler with the slightest claim to be considered a statesman would have set up the false idea of foreign conquest as an antidote to dissensions at home. This policy was no remedy; it postponed the struggle only to enhance its bitterness and to aggravate its disastrous results. Henry was blind to the signs which had appeared on the political horizon to herald the coming storm, but this very inability to gauge the significance of events has made him the idol of successive generations of his countrymen, who care not for his policy and its results, but appreciate only the dramatic setting of his life. It was just this dramatic quality of the French wars which appealed to Henry’s youngest brother. In an age when the artistic side of life was totally ignored by Englishmen, he was beginning to breathe the atmosphere of new ideas, which rendered him susceptible to the charm of large conceptions and dramatic episodes. He was at once attracted by the brilliant aspect of this French policy with its splendid dreams of territorial aggrandisement. But while Henry adopted the French war as a policy, Humphrey saw in it not so much a policy as an idea, an idea which he worshipped to the day of his death. Thus in estimating Gloucester’s later actions we must remember whence they took their origin, and we must not forget his training in the policy of his eldest brother. Both were blind to the folly of attacking France, but while the King was to die before the results of his actions appeared, Humphrey was to live on till the fields were ripe for harvest, and to die only on the eve of that day when the harvest was gathered in. Thus from the Southampton conspiracy he might have learnt the dangers which the French war would foster, he might have learnt the lesson that a united aim and common action were necessary for the prosperity of the House of Lancaster, but he was deaf to the teaching of the incident. To understand Gloucester’s life-history, therefore, we must carefully consider the early years of his active life, the training he received in the wars of Henry V., and the attractiveness to a man of his temperament of the false ideals taught him by his famous brother.

1415] GLOUCESTER’s RETINUE

The discovery of the Southampton plot only delayed Henry so long as was necessary to punish the offenders, and on August 7 he left the castle of Porchester, where he had been staying, and embarked on board his ship The Trinity. His preparations were now complete, and by Sunday the 11th, all the vessels he had called together for the transhipment of the army had arrived, to the number of at least fifteen hundred sail.[66] Never before had so large or so strong a fleet ridden in Southampton Water,[67] and yet they were barely sufficient for the men they had to carry, for the army consisted of some two thousand men-at-arms and six thousand mounted and unmounted archers, though the accounts of the numbers vary considerably.[68] We can only approximately estimate the proportion which Gloucester’s retinue bore to the whole; his indenture has not survived, but we have evidence from other sources. When making his indentures, or contracts for service, with the leading noblemen of the kingdom, Henry had paid them in advance for the first quarter, and had deposited jewels with them for the second quarter.[69] To his youngest brother there were pledged two purses of gold ‘garnished with jewels’ valued at £2000 each,[70] and from this one authority calculates that he was intended to serve with a hundred and twenty-nine lances and six hundred archers.[71] However, in the unpublished collections for Rymer’s Fœderathe retinue is estimated at two hundred men-at-arms and six hundred horse archers,[72] which seems to be more proportionate to the money paid to Humphrey. If we take the wages of a man-at-arms to be one shilling a day and that of an archer sixpence, the sum-total with allowances for higher payments to bannerets and knights, and to the Duke himself, comes to something approaching £3000. The surplus of £1000 might be accounted for by the fact that in some cases wages might be on a higher scale; indeed by 1437 a horse archer was often in receipt of eightpence a day.[73] Moreover, it may be that in view of the fact that the army was not to be permitted to plunder the country through which it might pass, a wider margin than usual was allowed to those who contracted for men. Edward III. in his wars had liberally compensated for losses in the campaign, even to the length of paying for horses lost in action, and it may be that Henry V. made allowance for this in his contracts. There seems therefore to be ample evidence that the indenture of jewels speaks to a retinue which numbered approximately two hundred lances and six hundred archers, thus preserving the ratio between the two kinds of soldiers usual at the time, though later in the French wars the lances became a still smaller percentage of the sum-total of fighting men. Conflicting evidence to this is found in a muster of Humphrey’s men held at Mikilmarch near Romsey on July 16, where only six hundred and sixty-eight names appear on the register,[74] but as on that day several captains had only one or two men serving under them, and two had none at all, it is very probable that their numbers were not the same as when they sailed almost a month later. Still further reason for accepting the larger number as accurate is given by the record we have of Gloucester’s retinue at Agincourt. Here he was at the head of a hundred and forty-two lances and four hundred and six archers,[75] and this alone would refute the estimate of a hundred and twenty-nine lances and six hundred archers. Moreover, it is recorded that at Harfleur he lost two hundred and thirty-six men,[76] though some of these were valets and garçons who did not rank as combatants, but were the grooms of the men-at-arms and the attendants of the baggage horses. According to these figures his original retinue must have numbered about seven hundred and fifty men, and so we may reckon that he sailed from Southampton with close on eight hundred fighting men, that is roughly the two hundred lances and six hundred archers of the Rymer collections.

It was on Tuesday, August 13, that the ships bearing the English army entered the mouth of the Seine and cast anchor near the ‘Chef de Caux,’ about three miles from the town of Harfleur.[77] Caux was a little fortress strengthened by nature and the arts of war,[78] and besides this outpost Harfleur had a protection against the advancing English in a series of dikes and earthworks thrown diagonally across the line of approach.[79] Scouts, however, reported that these lines were totally unguarded, whether from lack of men or from the Constable d’Albret’s contempt of the enemy.[80] With the danger attending a landing of his troops thus removed, Henry disembarked on the vigil of the Assumption together with his two brothers, falling on his knees as he reached the dry land and praying to God to uphold his cause. His men were encamped on some rising ground, and edicts for the government of the army were issued, chief amongst which were strong prohibitions against the molestation of non-combatants and clergy, and against the spoliation of churches.[81]

1415] BEGINNING OF THE CAMPAIGN

Humphrey had now fairly embarked on his first campaign. Ignorant of war, and unused even to military methods and the life of the field, we shall not meet with him very frequently in the operations of this year. He was learning the lessons not only of war, but of all public life and deportment, for as the youngest son of Henry IV. he had been kept in greater seclusion than his brothers. Clarence, though only three years his senior, had had experience in the management of men and in the conduct of affairs as lieutenant of the King both in Ireland and in Aquitaine, but Humphrey was new to all this, and the campaign is useful to us, not so much as the scene of his activity, but as the school in which he learnt the soldier’s trade. It was a hard school too, for the English needed stout hearts; they were embarking on an expedition which might take them far from their base, and this, too, at a time of year when military operations would be made difficult by the wintry weather.

For four days Henry remained inactive, resting his troops and bringing up the heavy guns and siege apparatus from the ships. Then, having kept the feast of the Assumption in due form, he advanced towards Harfleur on August 17.[82] The Duke of Clarence commanded the van, while Michael de la Pole, Earl of Suffolk, led the rear;[83] Gloucester was presumably with the King and the main body of the army. Though a small town, Harfleur was well fortified, and had been recently provisioned. It stood a little back from the estuary of the Seine, with the river Lazarde running through its midst, and possessed good strong walls with three gates, one on the western side, where the English army first appeared, and two on the east.[84] The English were at first unable to blockade the town entirely, as they could not at once reach the eastern side, owing to the damming of the river, which had consequently spread into a large lake round the northern wall. The delay caused by this inundation enabled the Sire de Gaucourt to enter Harfleur with reinforcements, and so to prevent any further help from reaching the garrison Clarence was despatched on the night of August 18 with orders to march round the floods, and invest the eastern side of the town. On the way he met and defeated still further reinforcements and munitions of war on their way to Harfleur, and by the next day he had entirely shut in that part of the walls for which he was responsible.[85] On the sea side the English ships came to the mouth of the harbour, which was strongly protected by two towers on either side of the entrance, and by a chain drawn across from tower to tower. However, all attempts made by the garrison to drive off these ships were fruitless, while the floods to the north were patrolled by English boats,[86] so that by these means all communication with the city by water was cut off, and, with the King’s division enclosing the western walls, the blockade was complete.

1415] SIEGE OF HARFLEUR