Henry IV. and his queen, Joan of Navarre: from their tomb in Canterbury Cathedral.
2. Death of Richard II. 1400.—A few weeks after the suppression of this conspiracy it was rumoured that Richard had died in prison at Pontefract. According to Henry's account of the matter he had voluntarily starved himself to death. Few, however, doubted that he had been put to death by Henry's orders. To prove the untruth of this story, Henry had the body brought to St. Paul's, where he showed to the people only the face of the corpse, as if this could be any evidence whatever. After Richard's death, if hereditary succession had been regarded, the person having a claim to the crown in preference to Henry was the young Edmund Mortimer, Earl of March, the descendant of Lionel, Duke of Clarence (see p. [287]). Henry therefore took care to keep the boy under custody during the whole of his reign.
Royal arms as borne by Henry IV. after about 1408, and by successive sovereigns down to 1603.
3. Henry IV. and the Church.—Besides seeking the support of the commonalty, Henry sought the support of the Church. Since the rise of the friars at the beginning of the thirteenth century (see p. [191]) the Church had produced no new orders of monks or friars. In the thirteenth and fourteenth she produced the schoolmen, a succession of great thinkers who systematised her moral and religious teaching. Imagining that she had no more to learn, she now attempted to strengthen herself by persecuting those who disbelieved her teaching, and after the suppression of the revolt of the peasants, made common cause with the landlords, who feared pecuniary loss from the emancipation of the villeins. This conservative alliance against social and religious change was the more easily made because many of the bishops were now members of noble families, instead of springing, as had usually been the case in the better days of the mediæval Church, from poor or middle-class parentage. In the reign of Richard II. a Courtenay, a kinsman of the Earl of Devonshire, had become first Bishop of London (see p. [263]), and then Archbishop of Canterbury. He was succeeded in his archbishopric by an Arundel, brother of the Earl of Arundel who had been executed by Richard, and Archbishop Arundel was in the days of Henry IV. the spokesman of the clergy.