Henry of Monmouth came to the throne, as Henry V, with the determination to restore the foundations of the royal finances and to deal with the old enemy of France. He was set to renew ‘bone governaunce’ or good government, with an especial intention to redress injustice and corruption. He had youth and vigour. A French visitor to the court remarked that he resembled a priest rather than a soldier; he was lean, and fair complexioned, with an oval face and short cropped brown hair. Certainly he had the look of an ascetic. On the night of his father’s death he consulted a recluse at Westminster Abbey, to whom he confessed all his sins.
He was crowned on Passion Sunday, 9 April 1413, a day of hail and snow. The weather was said to presage a reign of cold severity. There can be no doubt that Henry V was driven by a sense of divine right as well as of duty. All was changed. He abandoned his youthful pursuits and almost overnight, according to the chroniclers, became a grave and serious king. He acquired a reputation for piety and for the solemn observance of ceremonies; until his marriage, seven years later, he remained chaste. He established several monastic foundations of an ascetic nature, where the daily exhalation of prayer was meant to support the Lancastrian dynasty. His devotion also had an aesthetic cast. The annalist, John Stowe, recorded that ‘he delighted in songs, metres and musical instruments; insomuch that in his chapel, among his private prayers, he used our Lord’s prayer, certain psalms of David, with diverse hymns and canticles’. When he went to war in France, he took with him organists and singers.
He spoke English naturally, unlike his father, and in that respect set the standard for the written records of the country. He was something of a martinet, peremptory and commanding. One of his letters to an ambassador, Sir John Tiptoft, opens succinctly with ‘Tiptoft, I charge you by the faith that you owe me …’ ‘Tiptoft’, that brief salutation, is of the essence. ‘A king’, Thomas Hoccleve wrote, ‘from mochil speche him refreyne.’ He was clipped and precise. He was also an efficient administrator, who looked to the details of his policies; he demanded much in taxation from his kingdom, but he never squandered money unwisely. He maintained cordial relations with the most important nobles, and worked well with the parliament house. He proved that, with firm oversight, medieval governance was not inherently unstable or incoherent.
The test of his religious commitment came a few months after his coronation, when he was obliged to confront the forces of heresy. The activity of the Lollards has been examined in earlier pages, but it reached a point of crisis in the early months of 1413. During the king’s first parliament a proclamation was pinned to the doors of the London churches stating that, if the brethren were to face persecution and outlawry, 100,000 men would rise up to protect them. In the consequent state of alarm and insecurity one of the king’s own friends, Sir John Oldcastle, was accused of harbouring and promoting heretics. It is a matter of some irony, therefore, that the original name of Falstaff in Shakespeare’s play of Henry V, written almost 200 years after the events related, was Oldcastle. Shakespeare had portrayed him as Henry’s boon companion in the years of the alehouse and the brothel.
The proclamations fixed to the church doors were traced back to this now earnest man. One of his chaplains was preaching Lollardy, and Oldcastle himself had been caught in possession of certain heretical tracts. The king tried to argue with him, and to persuade him to recant, but he refused to do so. He was taken to the Tower in the autumn of 1413 and, at his subsequent trial, repeated the Lollard disregard for confession and the doctrine of transubstantiation. He was judged to be a heretic and passed over to the secular arm for burning. The king intervened once more and granted him forty days for the further searching of his conscience, but in this period Oldcastle managed to escape from his confinement.
He spent two months in hiding, somewhere in the purlieus of London, during which period he conceived a plot to kill the king and his brothers before leading a general insurrection of Lollards. Messages were secretly conveyed to the brethren, asking them to meet at St Giles’s Fields just outside the city. But the secret was revealed to someone in authority. On the evening of 9 January 1414, the king moved with his forces to the fields. As the Lollards marched towards the city, they were dispersed and consigned to Newgate Prison. Thirty-eight of them were drawn on hurdles from Newgate and hanged in the fields, on gallows newly built for that purpose.
