In the summer of 1403 his erstwhile allies, the Percy family, rebelled against his rule. They joined a Welsh prince, Owen Glendower, who had formally defied the English king. Henry Percy, the earl of Northumberland, and his son, Hotspur, had been charged with the defence of the north against Scottish raiders. They had hoped by their early support of Henry’s invasion to enjoy the spoils of victory. To their surprise and alarm, however, they found themselves obliged to maintain the defences of their northern lands without any proportionate help from Henry. It had been rumoured in the parliament house that the Percy family had been granted £60,000 from the king. They denied this, claiming that they had received only £20,000. Where had the money gone?
Hotspur had come to Westminster, at the end of 1402, and demanded more money in the presence of the king. The result was a bitter confrontation. One chronicler asserts that the king punched Hotspur in the face, while another reports that he drew a dagger upon him. Whatever the truth of the matter, their alliance was broken. The Percys had another grievance against the king, in theory more serious but in practice a convenient excuse for their rebellion. They accused the king of betraying his oath. He had promised them, on first landing in Yorkshire, that he had no designs on the throne. This was in later weeks found to be a palpable fiction. But from the beginning they must have been at least aware of the possibility of Richard’s overthrow.
In the summer of 1403 Hotspur gathered an army at Chester, and proclaimed that King Richard was still alive. This was the familiar rallying cry for all those who opposed the king. Owen Glendower was poised to move from Wales, and Henry Percy was mustering his forces in the north. The king moved rapidly and expeditiously. He sent an army to Shrewsbury, the town where the rebels were supposed to muster. When Hotspur arrived there, he found the gates shut against him. While he paused outside the town, the king’s army advanced. The opposing forces met at Berwick Field, 2 miles (3 kilometres) outside Shrewsbury. Hotspur had with him 1,000 archers, and he placed them on top of a ridge from which they would be able to see the king’s men approaching. Henry had taken the precaution of asking two of his prominent supporters to wear his livery, since he knew well enough that he was the real target of Hotspur; if three Henries were on the field, it might prove confusing.
The king’s men advanced up the slope, and were met by thousands of arrows shot from the longbows of the Cheshire men. The sky grew dark, and the carnage began. The king’s men fell, according to one chronicler, ‘as fast as autumn leaves fall in autumn after the hoar frost’. On the death of one of the king’s commanders, the earl of Stafford, the vanguard of the royal army gave way and began to flee. Henry now had to act promptly to prevent a rout and bloody defeat. So he gave orders for the main body of the army to advance, and he threw himself into the action.
‘There was such slaughter’, one chronicler wrote, ‘that the like had not been seen in England for a long time.’ The royal soldiers seemed to prevail, and Hotspur staked everything on a charge against the king. Henry fell back, so that Hotspur and his followers were lost in the general mêlée. When they faltered, they were cut down. Hotspur was among the dead. The king’s son, Henry, received a wound to his skull. Yet he lived. He was one of the victors to celebrate the king’s triumph. It seemed that Henry IV had truly been anointed by God.
Two years after the battle of Berwick Field, however, another insurrection emerged in the north. The archbishop of York, Richard Scrope, rose up against royal government and issued a manifesto or list of grievances to the effect that Henry was demanding too much taxation; the burden upon his subjects, secular and clerical, had become insupportable.
It was not a successful rebellion, and within a few days the forces of the archbishop forsook him or were taken into custody. The earl of Northumberland, having survived his son’s defeat outside Shrewsbury, was again implicated in the uprising and fled to Scotland. Scrope himself was captured and beheaded, part of Henry’s crude and brutal attempt to beat off all opposition. Yet the murder of an archbishop was, in the context of the time, an act of blasphemy; it invited comparisons with the murder of Thomas Becket in the thirteenth century. Henry IV avoided much of the public obloquy that fell upon Henry II, but his private character was more severely affected. To the insecurity of his throne was added the impurity of sacrilege.
