In July 1403 came the crisis of King Henry’s reign; while Glendower burst into South Wales, and overran the whole countryside as far as Cardiff and Carmarthen, the Percies raised their banner in the North. The old earl Insurrection in the north and west. set himself to subdue Yorkshire; his son Hotspur and the earl of Douglas marched south and opened communication with the Welsh. All Cheshire, a district always faithful to the name of Richard II., rose in their favour, and they were joined by Hotspur’s uncle, the earl of Worcester. They then advanced towards Shrewsbury, where they hoped that Glendower might meet them. But long ere the Welsh could appear, King Henry was on the spot; he brought the rebels to action at Hately Field, just outside the gates of Defeat of the rebels at Shrewsbury. Shrewsbury, and inflicted on them a complete defeat, in which his young son Henry of Monmouth first won his reputation as a fighting man. Hotspur was slain, Worcester taken and beheaded, Douglas desperately wounded (July 23, 1403). On receiving this disastrous news the earl of Northumberland sued for pardon; the king was unwise enough to grant it, merely punishing him by fining him and taking all his castles out of his hands.
By winning the battle of Shrewsbury Henry IV. had saved his crown, but his troubles were yet far from an end. The long-expected breach with France had at last come to pass; the duke of Orleans, without any declaration of War with France renewed. war, had entered Guienne, while a French fleet attacked the south-west of England, and burnt Plymouth. Even more menacing to the king’s prosperity was the news that another squadron had appeared off the coast of Wales, and landed stores and succours for Glendower, who had now conquered the whole principality save a few isolated fortresses. The drain of money to meet this combination of foreign war and domestic rebellion was more than the king’s exchequer could meet. He was driven into unconstitutional ways of raising money, which recalled all the misdoings of his predecessor. Hence came a series of rancorous quarrels with his Parliament assumes control of the finances. parliaments, which grew more disloyal and clamorous at every new session. The cry was raised that the taxes were heavy not because of the French or Welsh wars, but because Henry lavished his money on favourites and unworthy dependents. He was forced to bow before the storm, though the charge had small foundation: the greater part of his household was dismissed, and the war-taxes were paid not to his treasurer but to a financial committee appointed by parliament.
It was not till 1405 that the worst of Henry’s troubles came to an end. This year saw the last of the convulsions that threatened to overturn him,—a rising in the North headed by the old earl of Northumberland, by Richard Rising of 1405 in the North. Scrope, archbishop of York, and by Thomas Mowbray the earl marshal. It might have proved even more dangerous than the rebellion of 1403, if Henry’s unscrupulous general Ralph, earl of Westmorland, had not lured Scrope and Mowbray to a conference, and then arrested them under circumstances of the vilest treachery. He handed them over to the king, who beheaded them both outside the gate of York, without any proper trial before their peers. Northumberland thereupon fled to Scotland without further fighting. He remained in exile till January 1408, when he made a final attempt to raise rebellion in the North, and was defeated and slain at the battle of Bramham Moor.
Long before this last-named fight Henry’s fortunes had begun to mend. Glendower was at last checked by the untiring energy of the king’s eldest son, Henry of Monmouth, who had been given charge of the Welsh war. Even when Suppression of the Welsh rising. French aid was sent him, the rebel chief proved unable to maintain his grip on South Wales. He was beaten out of it in 1406, and Aberystwyth Castle, where his garrison made a desperate defence for two years, became the southern limit of his dominions. In the end of 1408 Prince Henry captured this place, and six weeks later Harlech, the greatest stronghold of the rebels, where Sir Edmund Mortimer, Owen’s son-in-law and most trusted captain, held out till he died of starvation. From this time onwards the Welsh rebellion gradually died down, till Owen relapsed into the position from which he had started, that of a guerrilla chief maintaining a predatory warfare in the mountains. From 1409 onward he ceased to be a public danger to the realm, yet so great was his cunning and activity that he was never caught, and died still maintaining a hopeless rebellion so late as 1416.
The French war died down about the same time that the Welsh rebellion became insignificant. Louis of Orleans, the head of the French war party, was murdered by his cousin John, duke of Burgundy, in November 1407, and after End of the French and Scottish wars. his death the French turned from the struggle with England to indulge in furious civil wars. Calais, Bordeaux and Bayonne still remained safe under the English banner. The Scottish war had ended even earlier. Prince James, the heir of Robert III., had been captured at sea in 1406. The duke of Albany, who became regent when Robert died, had no wish to see his nephew return, and concluded a corrupt agreement with the king of England, by which he undertook to keep Scotland out of the strife, if Henry would prevent the rightful heir from returning to claim his own.[3] Hence Albany and his son ruled at Edinburgh for seventeen years, while James was detained in an honourable captivity at Windsor.
From 1408 till his death in 1413 Henry was freed from all the dangers which had beset his earlier years. But he got small enjoyment from the crown which no longer tottered on his brow. Soon after his execution of Archbishop Illness of the king. Faction in the court. Scrope he had been smitten with a painful disorder, which his enemies declared to be the punishment inflicted on him by heaven for the prelate’s death. It grew gradually worse, and developed into what his contemporaries called leprosy—a loathsome skin disease accompanied by bouts of fever, which sometimes kept him bedridden for months at a time. From 1409 onwards he became a mere invalid, only able to assert himself in rare intervals of convalescence. The domestic politics of the realm during his last five years were nothing more than a struggle between two court factions who desired to use his name. The one was headed by his son Henry, prince of Wales, and his half-brothers John, Henry and Thomas Beaufort, the base-born but legitimized children of John of Gaunt. The other was under the direction of Archbishop Arundel, the king’s earliest ally, who had already twice served him as chancellor, and had the whole church party at his back. Arundel was backed by Thomas duke of Clarence, the king’s second son, who was an enemy of the Beauforts, and not on the best terms with his own elder brother, the prince of Wales. The fluctuating influence of each party with the king was marked by the passing of the chancellorship from Arundel to Henry Beaufort and back again during the five years of Henry’s illness. The rivalry between them was purely personal; both were prepared to go on with the “Lancastrian experiment,” the attempt to govern the realm in a constitutional fashion by an alliance between the king and the parliament; both were eager persecutors of the Lollards; both were eager to make profit for England by interfering in the civil wars of the Orleanists and Burgundians which were now devastating France.
The prince of Wales, it is clear, gave much umbrage to his father by his eagerness to direct the policy of the crown ere yet it had fallen to him by inheritance. The king suspected, and with good reason, that his son wished Prince Hal. him to abdicate, and resented the idea. It seems that a plot with such an object was actually on foot, and that the younger Henry gave it up in a moment of better feeling, when he realized the evil impression that the unfilial act would make upon the nation. At this time the prince gave small promise of developing into the model monarch that he afterwards became. There was no doubt of his military ability, which had been fully demonstrated in the long Welsh wars, but he is reputed to have shown himself arrogant, contentious and over-given to loose-living. There were many, Archbishop Arundel among them, who looked forward with apprehension to his accession to the throne.
The two parties in the council of Henry IV. were agreed that it would be profitable to intervene in the wars of France, but they differed as to the side which offered the most advantages. Hence came action which seemed inconsistent, English expedition to France. if not immoral; in 1411, under the prince’s influence, an English contingent joined the Burgundians and helped them to raise the siege of Paris. In 1412, by Arundel’s advice, a second army under the duke of Clarence crossed the Channel to co-operate with the Orleanists. But the French factions, wise for once, made peace at the time of Clarence’s expedition, and paid him 210,000 gold crowns to leave the country! The only result of the two expeditions was to give the English soldiery a poor opinion of French military capacity, and a notion that money was easily to be got from the distracted realm beyond the narrow seas.
On the 20th of March 1413, King Henry’s long illness at last reached a fatal issue, and his eldest son ascended the throne. The new king had everything in his favour; his father had borne the odium of usurpation and fought down Accession of Henry V. the forces of anarchy. The memory of Richard II. had been forgotten; the young earl of March had grown up into the most harmless and unenterprising of men, and the nation seemed satisfied with the new dynasty, whose first sovereign had shown himself, under much provocation, the most moderate and accommodating of constitutional monarchs.
Henry V. on his accession bade farewell to the faults of his youth. He seems to have felt a genuine regret for the unfilial conduct which had vexed his father’s last years, and showed a careful determination to turn over a new leaf and give his enemies no scope for criticism. From the first he showed a sober and grave bearing; he reconciled himself to all his enemies, His character. gave up his youthful follies, and became a model king according to the ideas of his day. There is no doubt that he had a strong sense of moral responsibility, and that he was sincerely pious. But his piety inspired him to redouble the persecution of the unfortunate Lollards, whom his father had harried only in an intermittent fashion; and his sense of moral responsibility did not prevent him from taking the utmost advantage of the civil wars of his unhappy neighbours of France.