Henry IV of England

Henry was born in 1367 at Bolingbroke Castle in Lincolnshire, the seat that gave him his lifelong byname, Henry Bolingbroke. His father was John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster and third surviving son of King Edward III, which made Henry a grandson of a reigning king and heir to the largest private inheritance in England. His mother, Blanche of Lancaster, died when he was a small child, and the vast Lancastrian estates she brought to the marriage would one day pass to him ^[1].

He grew up alongside his cousin Richard, son of the Black Prince, who was almost exactly his age. Both boys were admitted to the Order of the Garter in 1377, the year Richard became king as Richard II. The parallel lives of the two cousins, one crowned at ten, the other raised as the greatest magnate's heir, set up the rivalry that later defined both their fates ^[2].

Henry received the education expected of a high aristocrat: training in arms, letters, and estate management. Contemporaries later noted his interest in music and books, and he is among the earliest English kings known to have been comfortably literate in English as well as French and Latin ^[1].

In 1387 Henry joined the group of magnates known as the Lords Appellant, who took up arms against Richard II's court favourites. He fought at the skirmish of Radcot Bridge in December of that year, where the royal favourite Robert de Vere was routed, and he took part in the Merciless Parliament of 1388 that condemned several of the king's closest allies ^[3]. Richard never forgot the humiliation, though for a decade he outwardly reconciled with his cousin.

During the early 1390s Henry built an international reputation as a crusader and traveller. He campaigned with the Teutonic Knights in Lithuania in 1390 and again in 1392, then journeyed on to Prague, Vienna, Venice, and Jerusalem, one of the few English kings ever to have visited the Holy Land before taking the throne ^[1]. These expeditions won him prestige across Europe and a network of contacts that later proved useful.

The reckoning with Richard came in 1398. After a bitter quarrel with Thomas Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk, Henry was due to settle the dispute by trial of combat at Coventry. At the last moment Richard halted the duel and banished both men, Henry for ten years. When John of Gaunt died in February 1399, Richard converted the sentence to banishment for life and confiscated the entire Lancastrian inheritance ^[2]. The seizure alarmed every landholder in England: if the greatest inheritance in the realm could be taken by royal whim, no property was safe.

Henry landed at Ravenspur on the Yorkshire coast around the end of June 1399 while Richard was campaigning in Ireland. He announced that he had come only to recover his rightful duchy, and northern lords, led by Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, flocked to him. Support for the absent king collapsed with startling speed ^[3].

Richard returned from Ireland to find his cause lost. He surrendered at Conwy Castle in Wales in August 1399 and was escorted to the Tower of London. On 30 September an assembly at Westminster accepted Richard's resignation of the crown, and Henry claimed the throne, citing his descent from Henry III and the failures of Richard's government. He was crowned at Westminster Abbey on 13 October 1399 as Henry IV, the first king of the House of Lancaster ^[2].

The deposed Richard was moved to Pontefract Castle, where he died in February 1400, most likely by starvation, shortly after a plot by his supporters to restore him had been crushed. Whether the death was ordered or merely permitted, it removed the most dangerous rallying point for opposition, but it also fixed a stain of usurpation and regicide on the new dynasty that chroniclers and later writers, Shakespeare among them, never let fade ^[4]. Anyone asking who was Henry IV of England confronts this central paradox: a king with a plausible grievance and broad initial support whose title never stopped being questioned.

Almost every year of the reign brought armed challenge. In September 1400 the Welsh gentleman Owain Glyndwr proclaimed himself Prince of Wales, igniting a national revolt that spread across Wales and defied repeated royal expeditions for the better part of a decade ^[5]. English garrisons were pinned down, taxation for the war strained Parliament's patience, and the rebellion only ebbed after 1408 as royal forces under the Prince of Wales, the future Henry V, gradually recovered the castles.

The Percy family, who had done more than anyone to put Henry on the throne, turned against him over unpaid debts, ransoms, and thwarted ambition. In July 1403 Henry Percy the younger, called Hotspur, raised an army and joined forces heading toward Wales. The king intercepted him at the Battle of Shrewsbury on 21 July 1403, a savage engagement in which Hotspur was killed and the sixteen-year-old Prince Henry was wounded in the face by an arrow yet stayed in the fight ^[3]. Shrewsbury was the only pitched battle Henry IV fought as king, and victory there probably saved his crown.

Trouble did not end at Shrewsbury. In 1405 Archbishop Richard Scrope of York joined a northern rising; after its collapse Henry had the archbishop executed, an act almost without precedent that shocked the Church and, in popular telling, brought divine punishment upon the king. Northumberland himself rebelled again and was finally killed at Bramham Moor in 1408, ending the last serious armed threat of the reign ^[2].

Henry married twice. His first wife, Mary de Bohun, co-heiress of the earldom of Hereford, married him around 1380 or 1381 and bore him six surviving children before dying in 1394, well before he became king. Their four sons, Henry, Thomas, John, and Humphrey, all played major roles in the Lancastrian wars of the next generation, and their two daughters, Blanche and Philippa, married into the ruling houses of the Palatinate and Denmark ^[1].

In 1403 the king married Joan of Navarre, widow of Duke John IV of Brittany. The marriage produced no children, and Joan later endured accusations of witchcraft under her stepson's rule, though in Henry's lifetime the couple appear to have lived on good terms. Henry was noted for personal piety, for his patronage of musicians, and for a household in which books circulated freely ^[1].

From about 1405 the king's health broke down. Chroniclers described a disfiguring skin affliction that contemporaries called leprosy, along with seizures or collapses that left him incapacitated for weeks. Modern historians debate the diagnosis, with suggestions ranging from severe eczema or psoriasis to cardiovascular disease, but the political effect is not in doubt: an ailing king, an impatient adult heir, and a council increasingly run by others ^[6].

The final phase of the reign was dominated by finance and by friction with the Prince of Wales. Parliament repeatedly pressed the king over household expenditure, and the Long Parliament of 1406 imposed unusually detailed conditions on royal government before granting taxation ^[3]. Henry's chancellor and confidant Thomas Arundel, Archbishop of Canterbury, anchored one court faction, while the prince and his allies among the Beauforts dominated the council between 1410 and 1411 and pursued their own line in French policy.

A stroke of luck strengthened England's hand in the north. In 1406 the young heir to the Scottish throne, the future James I of Scotland, was captured at sea while sailing to France. Henry kept him as an honoured hostage, and James remained in English custody for eighteen years, giving the Lancastrian government lasting leverage over Scotland ^[2].

By late 1412 the king was gravely ill. He collapsed while praying at the shrine of Edward the Confessor in Westminster Abbey and was carried to the abbot's lodging, to a room known as the Jerusalem Chamber. A prophecy had reportedly said he would die in Jerusalem; he died in that chamber at Westminster on 20 March 1413, aged about forty-five. He was buried not at Westminster but in Canterbury Cathedral, near the shrine of Thomas Becket, and his son succeeded peacefully as Henry V ^[4].

Any fair account of Henry IV of England achievements must begin with survival. He took a crown by force, faced revolt in Wales, the north, and at court, endured years of debilitating sickness, and still delivered an undisputed succession. The smooth accession of Henry V in 1413, followed by the triumphs of Agincourt, rested on the hard, unglamorous consolidation of the father's reign ^[2]. He also left institutional marks: his reign saw Parliament assert unprecedented scrutiny of royal finance, and the statute De heretico comburendo of 1401 introduced burning as the penalty for heresy in England, aimed at the Lollard movement, a grim landmark in English religious history ^[3].

The usurpation of 1399 cast the longest shadow. By setting aside an anointed king, Henry created the precedent that later Yorkist claimants would turn against his own house, and many historians trace the dynastic instability of the Wars of the Roses back to that autumn ^[5]. Shakespeare's two Henry IV plays fixed the popular image of a guilt-worn, sleepless monarch watching his heir carouse with Falstaff; the plays are drama rather than record, yet they made this reign one of the most familiar in English literature ^[4].

Among the memorable Henry IV of England facts: he was the first English king since the Norman Conquest whose mother tongue was English rather than French, he delivered his coronation speech in English, and he had travelled to Jerusalem, Prussia, and much of Europe before ever wearing the crown. Readers of any Henry IV of England biography meet a ruler who was neither a conquering hero nor a failed king, but a resilient politician who kept a stolen crown by grinding persistence ^[1].