Chapter 6 - Chivalry, Homosociality and the English Nation

Summary

I return now to where this study began, with treason amongst the men of England's political elite. The offenders were prosecuted in venues including parliament, the Court of Chivalry and King's Bench, and their cases trace significant changes in the treatment of treason across the first two decades of Lancastrian rule. Indictments and trial records drew on shared cultural expectations of true manhood to construct treason as a crime of personal betrayal, aimed at the king and the masculine social body of his patrilineage. In these cases, ‘true manhood’ took on a distinctly chivalric disposition as both prosecution and defence appealed to values of knighthood and ‘good lordship’, and to homosocial bonds secured by sworn oaths. Men named as traitors justified their resistance on the grounds that oath-keeping and ‘trothe’ were fundamental to legitimate kingship, so that a king who broke his sworn word fatally undermined his manly honour and his right to rule. From the prosecution perspective, the king and his judicial officials were guided by the conviction that close bonds between men were inherently corruptible, and that traitors were guilty of ‘oaths of confederacy’ and ‘false covine’ against the king. Yet this traditional chivalric model of treason was being gradually subsumed by broader constructions of treason as an attack on the public authority of the English nation-state. This constitutional shift was signalled through the legal rhetoric of indictments and new statutes, and it was made incarnate in the spectacle of the traitor's execution.

THE PERCYS: FROM RESISTANCE TO REBELLION

Henry Percy, the earl of Northumberland, his son Sir Henry ‘Hotspur’ Percy, and the earl's brother Thomas Percy, earl of Worcester, had been Henry IV's most powerful allies when he invaded England in 1399, and their military and political support played no small part in helping him secure the throne. By the middle of 1403, the relationship had soured and a rising led by Hotspur and Worcester ended in their deaths at the battle of Shrewsbury on 21 July. Northumberland was able to secure a pardon in early 1404, but he rebelled again in 1405 alongside Lord Bardolf. After they fled into exile, Northumberland and Bardolf were convicted as traitors during the 1406 parliament. They returned to England for a final battle in 1408, where they were killed.