The Fears of Henry IV: The Life of England's Self-Made King by Ian Mortimer Read Free Book Online

two metal saddles made for him in this year. 10 Quite what these were is unclear; they were not the first brass saddles made for him (he had had ‘leather and brass’ saddles made for his own use in 1392), and so were probably not specially designed to cope with his ailment. 11 They may have been some form of litter. Either way, his speeds suggest they helped considerably.
    Few periods of sustained travel can be so precisely measured in later years, largely because Henry confined himself to the Thames area. One of the few which can is his return from seeing to the punishments and rewards following Bramham Moor in 1408: he left Pontefract on 30 April and travelled the 52 miles by road to Newstead Priory, arriving on 4 May (10–13 miles per day). Another is his pilgrimage to Leicester in the winter of 1409. He left Berkhamsted on or after 20 November 1409 and was at Stony Stratford (26 miles) and Northampton (another 13 miles) on the 23rd. 12 Hence on the 23rd he must have covered at least 13 miles by road, if not more, and kept up a rate of 9–13 miles per day over the previous two or three days. However these are rare examples. There are no indications that Henry travelled by road at a rate in excess of 13 miles per day after September 1407.
    On the basis of these figures one may tentatively conclude that Henry was in discomfort when he travelled to East Anglia in 1406, but not chronically unwell. The irreversible collapse of his health – to the point of being an invalid – probably did not occur until some time after the autumn of 1407. This would accord with Adam Usk’s evidence that the disease which killed him could be dated to the early summer of 1408, when he lapsed into a coma for the first time.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
     
    I am very grateful, as ever, to my agent, Jim Gill, and my editors at Jonathan Cape, namely Will Sulkin and Jörg Hensgen. I am also very grateful to the organisers of the 2006 symposium on Henry IV’s reign at the University of Nottingham, particularly Dr Gwilym Dodd, for inviting me to participate. I would like to thank all the scholars who took part; their advice and suggestions have proved exceedingly valuable. In addition, I would like to thank Dr Dodd himself for reading through the typescript and making several valuable observations and suggestions. I would like also to thank Susannah Davis, Zak Reddan and Mary Fawcett for accommodating me on research trips to London. Thank you also to Zak for his National Portrait Gallery research. Staff at the library of the University of Exeter proved very helpful, as did staff at the British Library and the National Archives. I am very grateful in particular to Dr Adrian Ailes for his comments on Henry’s seals. Also to Dr John Banham, who, when told I was unable to obtain a colour image of Ralph Neville and Joan Beaufort, drove to Staindrop Church and took the photograph included here. I gratefully acknowledge a grant from the K Blundell Trust, administered by the Society of Authors, towards writing this book. Last but most of all, I am profoundly indebted to my wife, Sophie, who put up with me working all hours of the day (and many of the night) on this book, and then had to listen to me complaining about the fact. She also took the lioness’s share of looking after our three young research ‘assistants’, Alexander, Elizabeth and Oliver. This is a book in which she too can take pride.
    Necessitas non habet legem
    (‘Necessity has no law’ or ‘Necessity is above the law’: a maxim quoted in French by the chronicler Jean Creton on the arrest of Richard II, and which Henry himself wrote in Latin on a letter in 1403)

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY AND LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
     
    Works which are abbreviated in the notes are here given under both the abbreviation and the editor’s or author’s name. All places of publication are London unless otherwise stated.
     
    Adam Usk: Chris Given-Wilson (ed.), The Chronicle of Adam Usk (Oxford, 1997)
    J. Alexander