On 21 July 1403 Henry IV destroyed the Percy revolt outside Shrewsbury in the first English battle where massed longbowmen shot at each other; Hotspur was killed by an arrow, the sixteen-year-old Prince of Wales took one in the face and lived, and the rebellion ended with its commander.
The Battle of Shrewsbury was fought on 21 July 1403 in open country about three miles north of the town, between Henry IV and the family whose swords had put him on the throne four years earlier. It is the first battle on English soil in which massed English archers shot at each other, and that is what contemporaries remembered about it: the opening exchange was fought at close range by the best bowmen in the kingdom on both sides, and it wrecked both lines before the men-at-arms had closed.
The revolt died with the man who led it. Hotspur was killed by an arrow in the confusion of the melee, and his army quit the field as soon as the news travelled along it. The king’s sixteen-year-old son, the future Henry V, was hit in the face by an arrow that went six inches into the bone and survived the surgery; Hotspur’s uncle Worcester was beheaded two days later, and Hotspur’s own corpse was dug up, salted and propped between two millstones in Shrewsbury market because the country would not believe he was dead.
No family had done more to make Henry IV king. When Henry Bolingbroke landed in 1399 to reclaim the Lancastrian inheritance Richard II had confiscated, Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, and his son Hotspur joined him at Doncaster and marched south with him, and they were paid in offices: Northumberland became Constable of England and Warden of the West March, Hotspur Warden of the East March and justiciar of north Wales, and Worcester Admiral of England. Within three years every one of those offices had become a grievance, because the crown expected the north to be defended and was slow to pay for it.
Three specific injuries turned complaint into revolt. The wardenship wages for holding the Scottish border went unpaid while the king shifted the cost of his 1401 Scottish campaign onto the northern lords. After the Battle of Homildon Hill in September 1402 Henry forbade the Percys to ransom the earls they had captured and had the prisoners brought to him instead — taking the profit of a victory he had not been at. And Edmund Mortimer, Hotspur’s brother-in-law, had been captured by Owain Glyndŵr in June 1402 and left in Welsh hands without a royal penny towards his release. The manifesto the Percys issued charged the king with perjury for taking the crown as well as his lands, with taxing after promising not to, and with Richard II’s death.
Hotspur moved first and fast, which was how he had earned the name. In early July 1403 he rode south from Chester raising the Cheshire archers, joined his uncle Worcester, and made for Shrewsbury, where he expected to meet Glyndŵr’s Welshmen and where the Prince of Wales sat with a small force. The plan depended on three scattered armies converging: Northumberland’s in the north, Glyndŵr’s somewhere to the south-west, and Hotspur’s in between.
Henry IV was at Burton-on-Trent when he learned of the betrayal, and he covered the ground faster than anyone expected — Stafford on 18 July, then thirty-two miles to Shrewsbury on 20 July, reaching the town before the rebels and joining his son inside it. Hotspur, shut out, fell back north-west to Berwick for the night and sent scouts over the Severn looking for the Welsh, who never came and whose whereabouts he never learned. On the morning of 21 July, with the royal army closing and the river at his back, he drew up on a ridge three miles to the north-east across a front of about eight hundred yards, a little north of where Battlefield Church now stands.
The Abbot of Shrewsbury spent several hours carrying terms between the two lines, and when that failed the king ordered the attack. Henry sent his archers forward first and they were shot to pieces: the Cheshire men opposite had been Richard II’s retained bowmen, the most practised in England, and the royal archers fell back under a weight of arrows they could not answer. This is the passage that made the battle notorious. English commanders had spent sixty years using massed archery on French and Scottish armies that had no equivalent, and at Shrewsbury they discovered what it did to troops who did.
Hotspur read the gap and pushed his men-at-arms into it, driving the royal line back several hundred yards. Then he gambled: with the Earl of Douglas and about thirty men he charged straight for the royal standard, meaning to end the battle by killing the king. They cut down Sir Walter Blount, who was carrying the king’s arms, and the chronicles say other men in royal livery died in the same rush — but Dunbar had seen the charge coming and moved Henry out of its path, so the blow fell on an empty space. On the other flank the prince’s division was pushing the rebel right back and working round behind the rebel centre, and the outnumbered rebels began to find themselves enclosed.
The Prince of Wales was hit in the face by an arrow that lodged six inches deep beside his nose, and by every account he refused to leave the field. The wound is the best-documented injury of the medieval English battlefield, because the surgeon who dealt with it wrote it up: John Bradmore designed a threaded probe that could be screwed into the socket of the arrowhead and drawn out with it, cleaned the wound with honey and wine over some weeks, and kept his patient alive. The boy who survived that is the king who commanded at the Battle of Agincourt twelve years later.
Hotspur was killed by an arrow at about the same time, and how it happened nobody could say. Thomas Walsingham wrote only that he was cut down while pushing rashly into the enemy host, and that by whose hand was not known; another tradition has him struck in the face after raising his visor to see. What is certain is the effect: as word of his death moved along the rebel line the whole of it collapsed, and the royal army pursued for three miles. The famous version — Hotspur killed in single combat by Prince Hal — is Shakespeare’s, written nearly two centuries later, and it requires the two men to be the same age when in fact Hotspur was twenty-two years the elder.
Worcester was beheaded on 23 July, and Sir Richard Venables, Sir Richard Vernon and Sir Henry Boynton were hanged, drawn and quartered in Shrewsbury the same day. Hotspur was buried with honours at Whitchurch by his cousin Thomas Neville, Lord Furnivall — and then the rumours began that he was alive, which for a dynasty four years old was a real danger. Henry had the body dug up, salted, and set upright between two millstones in the Shrewsbury market pillory with an armed guard beside it, so that anyone could come and look.
After that it was quartered and distributed: the four quarters to London, Bristol, Newcastle and Chester, the head to York, impaled on Micklegate Bar facing the Percy country. The remains went back to his widow Elizabeth Mortimer in November and were buried in York Minster, and in January 1404 he was attainted and his titles and lands declared forfeit. Northumberland, who had never reached the field, submitted and was spared for the moment; he rebelled twice more and was killed at Bramham Moor in 1408, which ended the Percy challenge for a generation.