Read 1415: Henry V's Year of Glory for Free Online Page B

shown him some copied documents: an indenture between Sir Robert Umphraville and someone – possibly the duke of Albany – and a copy of a letter from Percy to the earl of Cambridge and Lord Clifford. Gray had commented to Cresswell that the king would like neither the indenture nor the letter. But Cresswell had told him that it was God’s will that Henry Percy should come from Scotland with a strong hand in the name of King Richard II, as the earl of Cambridge and Lord Clifford were urging him to do in their letters. Gray seems to have promised nothing; he had yet to make up his mind about the earl of Cambridge, whose plan to exchange Mordach for Lord Percy had been thwarted and whose new plans were even more dangerous. Cambridge was now considering kidnapping one of eighteen important English lords on a list provided by the duke of Albany, any one of whom he would exchange for Lord Percy.
    As he was travelling, an esquire rode up alongside him. It was his cousin, Walter Lucy. They greeted each other and before long their conversation turned to Henry Percy and King Richard II. Lucy asked Gray what had happened about Henry Percy. Gray replied that he did not know, although he added that he had seen ‘an indenture which was not likely to be fulfilled’. Then Lucy told him about the heavy debts that the earl of March had undertaken, and how the earl had borrowed heavily from the earl of Arundel and Lord Scrope, as well as himself, in order to pay back the punitive fine that Henry had levied on him for marrying Anne Stafford. Lucy added that Arundel and Scrope had always been good to the earl of March. Gray was sanguine. It meant nothing, he said, for the earl of March ‘was but a hog’.
    At this point the conversation shifted on to more dangerous ground. Lucy said to Gray that the earl of March ‘should be found a man and challenge his right’, meaning that the earl of March should make a claim for the throne. He added that he understood from the earl of March that Lord Scrope had been to see him of his own free will, and ‘the highest and the haughtiest’ had spoken to the earl also,encouraging him to pursue his claim. Scrope had told him that he had the support of the earl of Arundel too, for they had both been intent on helping the earl of March for the last three years. Scrope had finally presented the earl with three alternative strategies. One was to go to France and return at the head of a mercenary army (as the earl’s ancestor, the first earl of March, had done in 1326). Another was to attack the king at sea. The third was to go into Wales and start a rising against the Lancastrians there.
    The testimonies on which the above account relies are suspect, being delivered by Gray at a later date, in prison. But even so one can see that Lucy was not being wholly honest with him. The earl of Arundel was one of the king’s closest friends; he was not a man to favour the earl of March’s claim to the throne. Nor was Scrope. But both men had lent the earl money. When Lucy told Gray that Arundel and Scrope would support the earl of March’s claim to the throne, he was lying. When Scrope and Arundel had resolved in 1412 that they would help the earl of March’s cause, they had only meant as far as marrying Anne Stafford. Neither man wanted the earl to be king. And Scrope’s recent visit to the earl was rather more sensitive than either the earl himself or his steward, Lucy, realised. Scrope wanted to know more about the plot – not in order to join it but to learn what was afoot. His observation that the earl of March had three strategies open to him was not delivered as conspiratorial advice but an observation: a warning. He later repeated these same strategies – to show the flaws in each of them.
    Nonetheless, Lucy convinced Gray that Lord Scrope and the earl of Arundel would support the cause of the earl of March. He had fooled himself into thinking this, and now he fooled Gray into thinking it too. At this