The Battle of Shrewsbury, 1403

In 1399 Henry of Bolingbroke, Duke of Lancaster, returned from exile, ostensibly to recover his vast family estates, which had been summarly confiscated by King Richard II. However, the venture quickly became a far greater matter, because Richard's support melted away, he was captured by Henry's forces at Flint in north Wales and compelled to abdicate the throne to Henry. The coup was not bloodless: the Earl of Wiltshire and others of Richard's supporters were summarly executed, and a few months later a plot to restore Richard led to the execution of the Earls of Kent, Salisbury and Huntingdon. It was then announced that Richard had died in captivity at Potefract castle, apparently of starvation.
   Nothing like this had ever happened before in English history. Edward II had been deposed and killed in 1327, but he had been succeeded by his teenage son. Richard was childless, but it was very doubtful whether this left Henry of Bolingbroke as the heir. He based his claim as being the son of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, a younger son of King Edward III; but in terms of strict heredity this left him behind the Mortimer family, descendants of Lionel, Duke of Clarence, Edward's second son. Richard had recognized the Mortimers as his preferred heirs. As it happened, Roger Mortimer, the head of the family, had been killed a few years earlier, leaving only an infant son. In 1400 the Welsh leader Owain Glyndwr led a great revolt, and two years later Edmund Mortimer, Roger's brother, was captured by the rebels but then married Glyndwr's daughter!

   Henry's coup had been backed by the powerful Percy family, led by the Earl of Northumberland, his brother the Earl of Worcester, and Northumberland's son Henry, immortalised by Shakespeare as "Harry Hotspur". Thanks to Shakespeare we tend to think of King Henry as an old man and Hotspur as an impetuous youth. In point of fact Henry IV was only 33 at the time of his coup and Hotspur was actually slighly older, whereas Henry's son, the Prince of Wales and the future Henry V, was only 12, and still no more than 15 when Shakespeare portrays him carousing with Falstaff.

   Why the Percies now turned against King Henry is not clear. They may have felt they had been inadequately rewarded for their support of Henry's coup, especially as the King appeared to be favouring their great rivals in the North; the Nevilles of Westmorland. They may even felt some guilt at their betrayal of Richard. Hotspur perhaps had his own agenda, because he was married to Edmund Mortimer's sister, so his children had a claim to the throne. Matters came to a head after the battle of Homildon Hill in 1402.
   The Scottish border was a wild and lawless region, with constant low-level warfare that ranged from cattle-raids to full-scale invasions. The Percies were the main power on the English side along the eastern border (where the saying was that "there was no king but Percy"), and facing them was the great Scottish family of Douglas. Back in 1388 at Otterburn, Hotspur had faced a Scots  force under Sir James Douglas and been taken prisoner. Now at Homildon he defeated a major Scottish invasion and took a number of important prisoners, including Archibald, Earl of Douglas. Nobles as important as this were held in honourable captivity until a suitably large sum could be extracted for ransom.
   King Henry now demanded that the captives be handed over to him, as was technically his right as sovereign. But Hotspur insisted on keeping Douglas, with the helpful suggestion that any ransom money should be used to free Edmund Mortimer - but that of course was the last thing Henry wanted! As far as the Percies were concerned, the Douglas affair was the last straw.

   In early July 1403 Hotspur raised the standard of rebellion; and with him was Earl Douglas, now a close friend.  They marched south, picking up support in Cheshire, where King Richard had been popular, and plainly intended to seize Shrewsbury, which would be a valuable base to link with Glyndwr's forces in Wales. Northumberland was believed to be following a few days behind with reinforcements. 
   Henry Prince of Wales commanded in Shrewsbury, but the guardian of the teenage Prince was Hotspur's uncle, the Earl of Worcester, who marched out with much of the town's garrison to join the rebellion. Hotspur knew the Prince well, and had acted as his mentor in a campaign that recaptured Conwy from Glyndwr. The Prince greatly admired Hotspur as a valiant knight, but now they were enemies.
  The depleted Shrewsbury garrison looked doomed, but then in the nick of time the balance was transformed, because the King, moving at unexpected speed, brought his army to Shrewsbury first. Furthermore, there was no sign of Glyndwr, and Northumberland's promised reinforcements had not appeared. Hotspur was thus outnumbered and unable to attack the town, withdrawing a short distance to the north. He took up a position on a slight south-facing slope, probably just west of the present A49 that runs from Shrewsbury to Whitchurch. There were attempts at a peaceful solution, but Hotspur and Worcester felt they could no longer trust any of King Henry's promises, and battle was joined on  July 21st.

   The battle would have started with the archers on both sides. Hotspur's Cheshire archers, who had the advatage of the slope, were more effective than their royal counterparts, but with Hotspur outnumbered, he knew his only real chance of victory was to kill the King. There was violent hand-to-hand fighting, the royal standard was felled and some knights who wore the King's livery as decoys were killed, but Hotspur had penetrated too far into the enemy lines, and was himself slain. The surviving soldiers of his army melted away as night fell. 
   It was a very bloody battle. The numbers killed is not known: one chronicler gives the number of dead as 16,000, which seems a gross exaggeration. It may only have been a tenth of this, but of course many of the wounded would later have succumbed to their injuries. The dead were buried in a mass grave.
   It is not known how Hotspur died. According to Shakespeare, the Prince of Wales killed him in personal combat, which is unlikely since the Prince was struck in the face with an arrow and seriously wounded earlier in the battle. Shakespeare rather brushes this aside, but in fact the arrow-head remained embedded in the Prince's skull near the nose for some time before it could be surgically extracted.

   Shakespeare has the Prince deliver a ringing speech in praise of the dead Hotspur, but this too is rather at odds with what really happened. The Earl of Worcester was beheaded after a brief hearing, and his head struck on a spike on London Bridge. Knights who had fought for the rebels were also beheaded, but the Cheshire archers were too valuable a commodity to be slaughtered in this way. Hotspur's body was taken away and buried nearby at Whitchurch, but the King then ordered it to be dug up and exhibited in Shrewsbury, before being beheaded and quartered and the parts put on display in different parts of the kingdom. He could not risk any rumours that Hotspur was still alive! Earl Douglas, as a Scotsman, could of course not be condemned as a traitor: instead his fighting valour was praised and he was held in honourable captivity for the time being. But back in Scotland he was mocked as a warrior who always lost his battles!

This was far from being the end of King Henry's troubles. He never managed to crush Glyndwr, who captured Harlech and Aberystwyth in 1404 and even called a Welsh Parliament at Machynlleth, where he was crowned Prince of Wales. The Earl of Northumberland, whose tardiness in support of his son suggested he did not really approve of the rebellion, was initially pardoned; but early in 1405 he, Glyndwr and Edmund Mortimer signed a pact to divide the kingdom between them. Another rebellion was defeated, and its leaders executed, including the Earl Marshal, Thomas de Mowbray, and even Richard Scrope, the Archbishop of York. The execution of a senior cleric greatly shocked contemporaries, and the illness which afflicted Henry in later years was widely seen as punishment for this sacrilege. The Earl of Northumberland was finally killed in 1408, and a few years later Glyndwr mysteriously vanished from the scene.
    Henry IV was thus never secure on the throne, and the unprecedented slaughter of the great nobility that marked his reign set up hatreds that resurfaced in the Wars of the Roses a generation later.

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Earl Douglas strikes down King Henry's standard-bearer. Sir Walter Blount attempts to intervene, while the King is urged to retreat to safety. On the ground, Lord Stafford lies dead. This is one of Graham Turner's splendidly dramatic illustrations in "Shrewsbury 1403"; a detailed account of the campaign by Dickon Whitewood (Osprey Books).

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The site of the battle is now commemorated with the Battlefield Church and the Battlefield Enterprise Centre. It is believed that the battle itself was fought a little way to the south of the church, on a front about three miles long. A pit containing a mass grave has been discovered.

The church is unfortunately not normally open to the public, 

but a key can sometimes be obtained from a small museum at the nearby farm shop. The church was built to hear masses for the souls of the knights killed there. It has a model of the battlefield and the coats of arms of some of the participants, as well as a 14th century Pieta of the Virgin Mary and the dead Christ.

 The museum features a model of how Prince Henry might have appeared with the arrow in his face. Imagine how different English history would have been if he had been killed!  

The campaign is the subject of a historical novel by Edith Pargeter (who also writes as Ellis Peters): "A Bloody Field by Shrewsbury"