At the opening of the fifteenth century France’s relations with England were governed by the treaty of Paris. The treaty had been concluded in March 1396 after long and difficult negotiations and sealed in October of that year by Richard II’s meeting with Charles VI outside Calais and his marriage to the King’s seven-year-old daughter Isabelle. But, in spite of the imposing ceremonial which marked the occasion, it resolved nothing. It simply preserved the status quo by imposing a truce on the belligerents and their allies for a period of twenty-eight years from the expiry of the current truce in 1398 until September 1426. The status quo was extremely unfavourable to England. It was the result of three decades of English defeats, reflecting the considerable disparity of wealth and power between the two states. The English dynasty’s domains in France, which for a brief moment in the 1360s had covered more than a third of the kingdom, had been reduced to two small enclaves: the massively fortified town of Calais in the north and the cities of Bordeaux and Bayonne in the south-west together with their immediate hinterland and a thin coastal strip extending from the Gironde to the Pyrenees. The treaty effectively acknowledged the loss of almost all of Edward III’s conquests in France for at least a generation. In theory the twenty-eight years for which it was supposed to last would allow time for the negotiation of a permanent settlement. But, having for practical purposes secured their war aims and brought an end to the war, the French government saw no reason to make concessions. The project of a permanent settlement was tacitly abandoned.

These expectations were rudely shaken by the deposition of Richard II in 1399. No one had been more dismayed by this event than Philip Duke of Burgundy. Philip had been the main architect of the peace and Richard II had been its strongest advocate in England. Richard’s disappearance also dissolved the marriage alliance which had been the main guarantee of its permanence. It was widely believed in Paris that the English had deposed their king because they objected to the settlement of 1396. Writing to his brother, the Duke of Berry described the news as a declaration of war. The new ruler of England owed his throne to popular sentiment, he said, and the English ‘like nothing better than war’. This was a complete misunderstanding both of English attitudes to the peace and of the reasons for Richard II’s unpopularity. But it was a misunderstanding that was widely shared. The concerns of Charles VI’s ministers were fed by the reports of French refugees returning from England over the following weeks with exaggerated accounts of anti-French sentiment across the Channel. There was in addition an ideological dimension. The political community in France was outraged by the whole notion of deposing a crowned monarch, something which had never been seriously contemplated even at the lowest point of their mad King’s fortunes. ‘O detestabile monstrum,’ cried the official chronicler of Saint-Denis. The Duke of Burgundy, a man of authoritarian instincts with a profound sense of the dignity of a king’s office, felt this as strongly as anyone. He was also the last statesman to cling to the ancient, perhaps outdated, notion that the English and French royal families belonged to a single cousinhood. The deposition of Richard II was all the more shocking to a man who felt bound by ties of kinship to both the victim and the perpetrator. Such evidence as there is suggests that Charles VI shared this view in his periods of lucidity. In a letter signed with his own hand the King declared that Richard had been his son-in-law and that his fate had made him ‘as angry as any man could be … and as every prince or honourable man should be’. Tendentious accounts in verse and prose of Richard’s last months circulated widely in France, feeding a generalised hostility to England and its people which found its way into the final pages of Froissart’s chronicle and the verses of Eustache Deschamps and Christine de Pisan.1

The news of Richard’s deposition reached France in about the middle of October 1399. The court was at Rouen, sheltering from the plague then decimating the population of Paris. On the 22nd the full council met in the presence of the King. It was decided to send a diplomatic mission urgently to England to find out what was going on. It was led by Pierre Fresnel Bishop of Meaux, a man with nearly twenty years’ experience of diplomatic missions in England and Scotland. In the meantime the councillors feared the worst. The garrisons were reinforced in the Pas de Calais and on the Gascon march. Watch duty was reimposed for the first time in years in Normandy and Picardy and everywhere south of the Loire. Shortly, the first signs appeared of a more aggressive response. According to reports reaching England, a fleet was put together in the French Channel ports in the winter of 1399–1400. Attempts were made to agree a coordinated response with the Scots. A prominent Gascon nobleman, the lord of Albret, was sent to foment opposition to Henry IV in the south-west. ‘No reasonable man, high or low, could be indifferent to events so perverse, so detestable, such a terrible example to others,’ he was instructed to say; ‘nothing so shocking can be found in any of our ancient histories.’ Pierre Fresnel and his colleagues arrived at Westminster at the end of October 1399. They found, perhaps to their surprise, that they were received with extravagant courtesy. Four days of festivities were proclaimed in their honour. Henry IV showed every sign of wanting to remain on good terms with France and both parties declared their intention in principle of confirming the peace of 1396. Arrangements were made to deal with the matter at a conference to be convened at Calais early in the following year. The views of the French ambassadors are not recorded. But it must have been obvious to them that Henry IV was preoccupied with securing his throne and had neither the means nor the ambition for aggressive enterprises against France.2

Henry IV had been proclaimed King of England amid general popular rejoicing but he owed his crown mainly to armed force and to the clients, allies and retainers of his family. For wider support he depended on the anger provoked by the tyranny of Richard II’s last years. In the nature of things its impact faded as the new King confronted the dilemmas of power and old grievances were overlaid by fresher ones directed against Henry himself. Henry’s coup had been too recent, too violent, too shocking to the sensibilities of a conservative society in which legitimacy and law were the foundations of political authority. The official narrative was that Richard had abdicated. But no one imagined that he had done so voluntarily. Strictly speaking the new King was not even the next in line to the throne. The eight-year-old Earl of March, who was descended from Edward III’s second son, Lionel Duke of Clarence, would have had a better claim if he had been in a position to assert it. All of this meant that Henry IV could never press his authority too far. He was beholden to too many people. Their support was often opportunistic and fragile. Some had originally joined his cause to help him recover the duchy of Lancaster and to right the wrongs of Richard II without ever intending to make him king. Others, even among those who had cheered with the rest in October 1399, had deserted Richard II impulsively, without conviction, in the panic-stricken attempt to save their fortunes and their skins as the political world about them fell apart. Among the wider public there was a tendency, born ‘in taverns and at other popular gatherings’ and encouraged by radical preachers and rabble-rousers, to view his accession as in some way conditional, the outcome of a deal with the English people which bound him to abandon the more abrasive instruments of government deployed by Richard II, including taxation.3 What was overtly declared in taverns and crowds was implicit in much of the resistance which Henry encountered in Parliament throughout his reign. The sacral kingship of the previous reign, supported by an essentially autocratic ideology and by rituals borrowed from the court of France, was dead.

The new reign was to be dominated by constant warfare on the northern march, nationalist movements in Wales and Ireland and persistent conspiracies and rebellions in England. Although opposition to Henry IV never commanded general support among the English political community, some of it tapped into rich veins of popular radicalism. The Lollards, a loose sect inspired by followers of the Oxford theologian John Wyclif, whose few consistent traits included a root-and-branch rejection of the authority and the riches of the Church, achieved their greatest spread and influence in Henry’s reign. They found adherents not only in their traditional constituency among the crafts of the towns but, until persecution drove them underground, among the gentry and the knightly class, some of them men who were close to the court. Wider discontents were reflected in a growing nostalgia for an ill-remembered past. Movements to reinstate Richard II, or the various impostors claiming to be Richard II, attracted significant popular support which was easily manipulated by powerful sectional interests. Within two months of Henry’s accession a large group of Ricardian diehards, including four earls and at least one bishop, all outwardly reconciled to the new regime, were plotting Richard’s restoration in the back streets of London and the abbot’s...