John Sadler - Hotspur: Sir Henry Percy and the Myth of Chivalry

Hotspur

Sir Henry Percy and the

Myth of Chivalry

Laudace, laudace, toujors laudace (Danton)

John Sadler

Foreword by Ralph Percy,

12th Duke of Northumberland

First published in Great Britain in 2022 by

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Copyright John Sadler 2022

ISBN 9781399003889

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Dedicated to Jasper Sidney Meadows

I was brought up on tales of Hotspurs bravery, heroism, and chivalry without questioning his heady reputation, gained on fields of battle and in corridors of power. Historians, poets, and playwrights have been generous to Harry Percy, imbuing him with legendary charisma and popularity, and Shakespeare has perpetuated this shining reputation for nobility despite Hotspurs many flaws. John Sadler takes a deeper and more critical look at Hotspurs character, and the flow of events that created his legend and ultimately led to disaster. It shows other, less attractive characteristics; petulance, arrogance, bullying, cruelty, and overwhelming ambition, a trait shared with his father, the 1st Earl of Northumberland, that raised the Percies to dizzying heights and precipitated a disastrous fall. This book also seeks to make sense of historical events, questioning previous assertions that were often based on scant knowledge and repeated as gospel over generations. It takes a fresh, forensic look at one of the most fascinating and bloody periods in our history, a history that could have been very different but for the flight of a single, deadly arrow.

Ralph Northumberland

January 2022

Tragedy: branch of drama that treats in a serious and dignified style the sorrowful or terrible events encountered or caused by a heroic individual.

If the Border Marches were the furnace in which the identities of England and of Scotland were forged, Henry Percy, Hotspur (13641403), was the red-hot steel. His life and achievement would be the mirror in which every Christian knight wished to see himself reflected.

In his hometown of Alnwick, not far from the castle, theres a great bronze statue of him. Hes depicted, slightly larger than life size, in full late fourteenth-century armour, sword at the ready, just as youd imagine. If you miss that one, dont worry theres another inside. He looks a bit of an automaton, a fighting machine, rather impersonal, like its all about the armour, nothing special inside. Shakespeare loved Hotspur, the epitome of chivalry, noble, brave, and not very bright. A more revisionist approach is just to see him as a glaring example of magnatial thug, a gentleman bruiser, arrogant, essentially vicious, and self-obsessed. He was a bit of both.

Homeric heroes are currently out of fashion, yet Hotspur would have fitted admirably onto the pages of the Iliad. Had anyone compared him to Achilles, he probably would have been cheered. But my purpose is to try and get inside the visor and see a real man. He did live in a nasty age. He, with his family, contributed substantially to that nastiness and profited handsomely from it. He was a fighter, but pacifists didnt exist then and if they had, wouldnt have lasted awfully long. Being judgemental, as our Transatlantic friends might say, is very much in vogue but exporting the moral attitudes of Islington drawing rooms back into a fourteenth-century frontier Threap (waste-land) is pure self-indulgence. We must judge the man by the standards of his time not ours.

Theres a problem with history. Napoleon observed it was but a fable agreed upon, and many of us who call ourselves historians might, in an unguarded moment, or in drink, be inclined to agree. Wellington somewhat agreed with his enemy, he viewed describing the course of a battle as pointless as describing the sequence of a ball. The Iron Duke, having vanquished Bonaparte, was sniffy about people trying to write the story of his great victory. He urged historians to be wary of eyewitness testimony, which we normally prize so highly, too much vanity, hogwash, and false recollection at play. Wellington would know a thing or two about that as his own dispatches were intended if not to disparage his allies (without whom thered have been no great triumph), then certainly to minimise their role and boost his own.

Hotspur doesnt leave us any dispatches or instructions to future biographers. We have some pieces of official correspondence, and thats it. We have what others said about him, and most had their own agendas but he leaves no single clue as to what was going on in his head at any given time. The bard, brilliant as he is, doesnt help. His portrayal in the history plays is pure Hollywood, he creates a cinematic, two-dimensional figure, put there as a literary device and takes vast liberties with history. Why not, hes a storyteller after all?

But the longer time goes by, the more the stereotype sticks and the further we get from any true glimpse. We see flashes of character in the letters and moments such as the immediate aftermath of Homildon where our hero takes time to wreak personal vengeance on two luckless knights whove offended him and its plain that is what matters, the perceived personal slight and betrayal. This is arbitrary, clearly unlawful, even by the elastic standards of the time and nastily vindictive. It shows hubris with more than a dash of cruelty.

Having said that, times were very cruel and the feid (feud) or vendetta, the mandatory seeking for vengeance, a hallowed border tradition. If we come to judge Hotspur, we must judge him primarily as a borderer, a marcher, raised in a school of endemic violence. He did not create this environment, it was his cultural inheritance, and it was harsh, unforgiving, and relentlessly savage. Yes, he seems to fit the mould perfectly but if he hadnt, hed never have made it out of his teens.

Meanwhile, Alnwick Castle has more recently made much of its fictional hero Harry Potter, having featured in most of the movies as Hogwarts and done very well indeed out of the connection, broomstick training is still immensely popular. When that attraction fades as surely it must and there are no more broomsticks to fly, Hotspur is the evergreen replacement. Tricky, and while Shakespeare has kept him in the literary superhero league, hes never exerted quite the pull of Harry Potter, very few have. Im none too sure what hed have thought of broomstick training as grounding for knighthood either. He probably believed in witches, though.