July 2005

Parish History Episode 51
The Triple Indenture
In 1399, as we saw last month, a conspiracy of noblemen, led by Henry Bolingbroke, Earl of Lancaster, had rebelled against King Richard II, and the King had been captured by Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, who later transferred his captive into the custody of Bolingbroke. While great lords were doing as they pleased in various parts of the realm, Bolingbroke steadily took control of the royal regalia and estates. He
attempted to persuade Richard to abdicate, but the King refused, so Bolingbroke had him killed, and then assumed the Throne himself. Most of the other great lords acquiesced in this measure, but Henry Percy stood aside, while Wales suddenly erupted into rebellion. A Welsh landowner,
Owen Glendower, had allied himself with the conspirators, and had taken advantage of the situation to take over most of the royal symbols of power in Wales, including several fine castles.

Bolingbroke, or King Henry IV as he now became, began to realise that he did not control all of Richard's kingdom. He sent an expedition to Wales, to bring Glendower to heel, but it was defeated, and Glendower found himself in control of all Wales, and in possession of several valuable English prisoners, including Edmund Mortimer, the son of King Henry's uncle, the
Duke of Clarence (who had been killed campaigning in Ireland). As Clarence had been the second son of King Edward III, while Bolingbroke's father, John of Gaunt, had been that monarch's third son, it would seem that, Richard II having been set aside, indeed murdered, Mortimer had a better claim to the English Throne than had the usurper Bolingbroke, who now styled himself Henry IV.

Glendower now set about consolidating his position as King of Wales. He began to embark on schemes which seemed rather pretentious for so small a country. He signed a treaty with the King of France, for mutual defence against any possibility of English aggression, and then he ordered the Welsh bishops to renounce their allegiance to the Archbishop of Canterbury and to the Pope of Rome, and to place themselves,
like the Scottish bishops, under the obedience of the Pope of Avignon. He also decreed that the Welsh Church would take Cornwall into its jurisdiction, and then sent troops out to seize control of the English border counties, thus advancing his frontiers to the Severn and beyond.

Having behaved in such an extraordinarily insolent manner (as it seemed to the English), Glendower now decided to dethrone Henry IV. He had come to the conclusion that the source of much instability in the British Isles was the immoderate size of the Kingdom of England in relation to the other British kingdoms. His solution therefore was to arrange for a partition
of England!

He began by sending a message to Henry Percy, the Earl of Northumberland, who was still sulking up in the North, regretting that he had ever handed over his prisoner, King Richard, to Bolingbroke. Percy felt that, if he had only hung on to the former king, and had persuaded Richard to abdicate in his favour, then he, not Bolingbroke, might be England's new king! Glendower suggested that he and Percy should
get together, and plan how to get rid of Bolingbroke.

Percy sent his eldest son, known as Harry Hotspur, to Wales, to treat with Glendower. Hotspur had won his nickname as a hot-blooded Border warrior, always getting into fights with the Scots (or at any rate with the Douglasses, the greatest family on the Scottish side of the Border). Hotspur had proved, perhaps, a not very intelligent leader - at the Battle of Otterburn, fought against the Earl of Douglas, his generalship seems to have transformed an almost certain victory into a bloody defeat. But what he lacked in wisdom, he made up for in courage. He was always seeking excuses for campaigns, and offering battle when he rode out, and flinging himself into the thick of any fighting. He was however rather more cautious if the battle was being fought anywhere near Berwick-upon-Tweed.

It seems that, years earlier, when he had been a youth, he had had his fortune told, at Alnwick Fair, by a Wise Woman, a soothsayer. She had foretold that he would be a great warrior, but that he would eventually die in battle just outside Berwick. Accepting her words as Very Truth, he therefore tried to avoid Berwick when on campaign.

Now, however, he was riding South, bound for Wales, accompanied by hundreds of knights and archers, to meet, as his father's emissary, with Owen Glendower. He met up with his host at Bangor, and found that Glendower was accompanied by his prisoner, Mortimer. At a house in the cathedral close, these three men drew up and signed the Triple Indenture, a plan to divide England & Wales into three kingdoms. Glendower wished to rule over all Wales, together with the English Marches from Cheshire
to the Forest of Dean. He offered the rest of England, North of the Humber and the Trent, to Hotspur's father. That would have recreated the Kingdom of Northumbria, as it had been six hundred years before. The remainder of England was offered to Edmund Mortimer - her legitimate prince, now that King Richard was dead.

Mortimer seems to have been taken aback at the audacity of Glendower's plans. But Hotspur had the nerve to ask, on his father's behalf, for more. He insisted on advancing the Southern border of the proposed kingdom to the Warwickshire Avon, the Welland and the Yare, thus giving Northumbria rule over almost all the Midlands, and Norfolk as well! Glendower airily agreed to Hotspur's demands, and Mortimer accepted them with ill grace. Why did Hotspur demand so much? Such an inflated kingdom could hardly have been described as Northumbria.

Shakespeare, in his play "King Henry IV, Part I", tries to offer some logical reasons for such claims. He represents Hotspur demanding more territory because of the lack of good agricultural land in the North. There speaks a Southerner, or at least a Midlander, imagining that the only countryside in the North of England is uninhabitable moorland! The other reason
Shakespeare gives is even weirder. He makes Hotspur claim that he needs both banks of theTrent at Burton, so as to have control of the
breweries. But probably the real Hotspur was happy with Newcastle Brown Ale, and recked nought of Burton-upon-Trent.

But, anyway, the Indenture was signed, and all that now needed to be done was to get rid of the man in possession, King Henry IV. Needless to say, Henry had not been idle, while those three Pretenders had been discussing the Partition of England. He was mustering troops. He got ready to ride North himself to deal with Henry Percy, while the King's son, "Bluff Prince Hal", the later Henry V, marched at the head of an army in the direction of Wales.

Glendower rode out from Bangor to meet the invader. He was accompanied by a small army of Welshmen, Hotspur's Northumbrians, Mortimer and some troops raised from English prisonersof-war, and by some crossbowmen and pikemen lent to him by the King of France. They crossed the old English border, and entered Shropshire, where Glendower recruited some local men, telling them that they were now subjects of the
Welsh Crown.

The two armies met outside the walls of Shrewsbury. Here, in 1403, Prince Henry, later to be the victor at Agincourt, won his first great battle. Glendower split up his forces too much, the Welsh, the English (under Hotspur), and the French, with whom Mortimer fought, acting more like three allied armies rather than as three divisions of one army. Hotspur, as usual seeking the place of glory, offered to stand and meet the Lancastrian centre, while the Welsh and French tried to attack Prince Henry's flanks. He then assembled his men, and told them, "I will make my headquarters in that village. If Prince Hal charges, I will meet him hand to hand just there." Wishing to be a bit more precise, he turned to one of the local levies whom Glendower had just recruited, and asked, "What is the name of that village ?" "Berwick, Sir", the man replied.

Harry Hotspur's face fell. He recalled the words of the soothsayer at Alnwick Fair. He drew down the visor of his helmet, to hide the loss of colour in his face. He rode down to the village, to carry out the task he had assigned himself. An hour or two later, Prince Henry rode forward, leading the advance. Perhaps Hotspur lost his nerve. The soothsayer's words seemed to have become a self-fulfilling prophecy. At any rate, he was killed, together with five thousand other men, Welsh, English and French.

Glendower escaped to Wales. For the moment, Prince Henry did not pursue. He rode Northwards, to join his father in the campaign against Hotspur's father. Old Henry Percy tried to make terms with the Lancastrian king and prince, but it was to no avail. In 1405 he had to flee across the Border, to seek protection at the Court of his old enemy, the King of Scotland. Some of his friends and allies were to pay the price of his ambition.

King Henry hunted down all those whom he regarded as traitors, anyone who appeared to have been involved in assisting Percy in his bid to make himself King. Several traitors were hung, one of them being the Archbishop of York, Richard Scroop, who had been planning a coronation for Henry Percy.

In 1170 an archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket, had been killed in a murder apparently instigated by King Henry II, and all Europe had been outraged. Now, in 1405, an Archbishop of York was hung by the order of
Henry IV, a usurping monarch who had himself murdered the rightful king (Richard II), and nobody seemed to take any notice. So strong had monarchs become in the last two centuries, and so weak did the Church appear, under a divided Papacy.

Eventually, in 1408, Henry Percy did return to England, with clandestine Scottish help. He rode South, as far as Bramham Moor in Yorkshire, and
there he was defeated and killed. Thus ended the last attempt to recreate an independent Northumbria.

The war still dragged on in Wales. Castle after castle fell to the English, and Glendower was reduced to conducting guerrilla warfare. The last skirmish in which he was definitely involved took place in 1412, and he may have been killed then, or shortly thereafter. But irregular fighting continued, under various Welsh commanders, who claimed to be acting on behalf of Glendower, who was said to be recuperating in a cave somewhere up around Mount Snowdon.

Fighting was still going on when Henry IV died in 1413, and his son, now Henry V, called the Welsh campaigns off, and left the final subjugation of Wales to local English lords who had been granted title to lands in Wales.
The new king wanted all the men he could get for an invasion of France that he was planning, and so he brought all the royal forces out of Wales. He then landed in France in 1415, in a campaign which culminated in the victory at Agincourt. The campaigns of the first decade of the Fifteenth Century, fought in Wales and the Marches, and in Northern England, are
remembered very differently in Wales and in Northumbria.

To the Welsh, it was a glorious episode, Glendower was an undefeated hero, and a sense of Welsh nationhood was reborn, and is with us even now. Hotspur is remembered only as a brave but stupid firebrand, and is hardly seen as an emblem of any Northumbrian revival. The only football team named after him is in Tottenham, far away in the South.

In recent years we have seen a Welsh Assembly - the first to meet, since Owen Glendower summoned a parliament to meet at Machynlleth - elected after a referendum. The equivalent referendum in Northumbria led to a
decided rejection of any idea of a separate identity for the North-East of England.

Dick Toy

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