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was a strenuous supporter of the Duke of Gloucester.
The county itself was declared by the king in 1398 to have committed
treason by sending its levies in 1387 to join the army of the Lords
Appellant. Thomas Holland, who had succeeded to the earldom of Kent in
1387, lost his life for his share in the rising on Richard’s behalf
made in the January following his deposition.92 It was this
rising that sealed the fate of the wayward young king, whose continued
existence Henry IV then perceived must endanger his own.
Except for their contributions of fighting men and of ships and sailors,
Kent was concerned but little in the disturbances that vexed the earlier
years of the reign of Henry IV;93 but in the latter part of
his life, when disease and weakness made much movement impossible for
him, he visited Canterbury several times. After his death his body,
after lying in state at Westminster, was taken by water to Canterbury as
he specially desired, to be laid to rest in the Chapel of the Trinity,
close to the tomb of his uncle, the Black Prince.
On his return from Agincourt, Henry V came straight to Canterbury to
render thanks for this victory.94 Six months later Canterbury again
entertained a notable visitor in the person of the Emperor Sigismund,
who landed at Dover in May i 416 with a retinue of 700 German and
Bohemian knights, and in August signed at Canterbury a secret treaty
recognizing Henry as lawful king of France.95
Once more, in 1421, it fell to Dover to welcome Henry V, this time with
his French bride, Princess Katherine. An immense concourse gathered to
receive him, and the barons of the Cinque Ports in their enthusiasm
carried the bridal pair ashore through the water.96 In
November 1422 his widowed queen, who with her infant son had gone to
join him in France when he was stricken with mortal sickness, brought
back his dead body to Dover. She was met by the archbishop of Canterbury
and six suffragans, and by slow and solemn stages moved on to
Westminster, funeral services being performed at Canterbury, Ospringe,
Rochester, and Dartford.97
Early in the reign of the infant king Henry VI, Kent is again found
praying for remedy against soldiers quartered in its villages, taking
victuals, etc., under value.98 But though it complained of
the quartering of these soldiers, nowhere was the indignity of the
French disasters more keenly felt than in this county which, through its
ports, had been so especially concerned with the French contest and
where every house along the coast showed some spoil for the wars. Kent
was the great manufacturing district of the day, and it became the
centre of the national resentment against the king’s incapable
government. In January 1450, the Commons petitioned for Suffolk’s
trial and impeachment; but when Henry declared that he should not be
tried, but should be banished from the realm for five years, riots broke
out in this county as well as in London.99
92 Walsingham, op. cit. ii, 244..
93 In the first year of Henry V’s reign, the port of Hythe was
released ‘from its service as one of the Cinque Ports, by reason of
its recent misfortunes by fire; five of its ships being also lost at
sea, with a hundred men, and the town having recently suffered from
pestilence.’ Hist. MSS. Comm. Rep. IV, App. 429.
94 Thomas of Elmham in Mem. Hen. V (Rolls. Ser.),
124.
95 J. Lydgate, Chron. London (Camden Soc.), 229.
96 Walsingham, op. cit. ii, 336; T.
Elmham, op. cit. 296.
97 William of Worcester, Ann. Rer. Angl. (Rolls. Ser.),
454.
98 Rot. Parl. iv, 292, 351.
99 Ramsay, Lancaster and York, ii,
120. On 9 February we hear of a
band of armed rioters near Canterbury, under the lead of one Thomas
Cheyne, a fuller, ‘feyning himself a heremite, cleped Blew Berd.’ J.
Stow, Survey, 387. R. Fabian, Chron. 622. |