Henry Chichele - Royal Service

Royal Service

This year Chichele's brother Robert was senior sheriff of London. On 7 May 1404, Pope Boniface IX provided him to a prebend at Lincoln, notwithstanding he already held prebends at Salisbury, Lichfield, St Martins-le-Grand and Abergwyly, and the living of Brington. On 9 January 1405 he found time to attend a court at Higham Ferrers and be admitted to a burgage there. In July 1405 Chicheley began a diplomatic career by a mission to the new Roman Pope Innocent VII, who was professing his desire to end the schism in the papacy by resignation, if his French rival at Avignon would do likewise. Next year, on 5 October 1406, he was sent with Sir John Cheyne to Paris to arrange a lasting peace and the marriage of Prince Henry with the French princess Marie, which was frustrated by her becoming a nun at Poissy next year.

In 1406 renewed efforts were made to stop the schism, and Chichele was one of the envoys sent to the new Pope Gregory XII. Here he utilized his opportunities. On 31 August 1407 Guy Mone (he is always so spelt and not Mohun, and was probably from one of the Hampshire Meons; there was a John Mone of Havant admitted a Winchester scholar in 1397), bishop of St David's, died, and on 12 October 1407 Chichele was by the pope provided to the bishopric of St David's. Another bull the same day gave him the right to hold all his benefices with the bishopric. He was consecrated on 17 June 1408.

At Siena in July 1408 he and Sir John Cheyne, as English envoys, were received by Gregory XII with special honor, and Bishop Repingdon of Lincoln, ex-Wycliffite, was one of the new batch of cardinals created on 18 September 1408, most of Gregory's cardinals having deserted him. These, together with Benedict's revolting cardinals, summoned a general council at Pisa. In November 1408 Chichele was back at Westminster, when Henry IV received the cardinal archbishop of Bordeaux and determined to support the cardinals at Pisa against both popes. In January 1409 Chichele was named with Bishop Hallam of Salisbury and the prior of Canterbury to represent the Southern Convocation at the council, which opened on 25 March 1409, arriving on 24 April. Obedience was withdrawn from both the existing popes, and on 26 June a new pope elected instead of them.

Chichele and the other envoys were received on their return as saviours of the world; though the result was summed up by a contemporary as trischism instead of schism, and the Church as giving three husbands instead of two. Chichele now became the subject of a leading case, the court of kings bench deciding, after arguments reheard in three successive terms, that he could not hold his previous benefices with the bishopric, and that, spite of the maxim Papa potest omnia, a papal bull could not supersede the law of the land (Year-book ii. H. iv. 37, 59, 79). Accordingly he had to resign livings and canonries wholesale (28 April 1410). As, however, he had obtained a bull (20 August 1409) enabling him to appoint his successors to the vacated preferments, including his nephew William, though still an undergraduate and not in orders, to the chancellorship of Salisbury, and a prebend at Lichfield, he did not go empty away. In May 1410 he went again on an embassy to France; on 11 September 1411 he headed a mission to discuss Henry V's marriage with a daughter of the duke of Burgundy; and he was again there in November.

In the interval Chichele found time to visit his diocese for the first time and be enthroned at St Davids on 11 May 1411. He was with the English force under the earl of Arundel which accompanied the duke of Burgundy to Paris in October 1411 and there defeated the Armagnacs, an exploit which revealed to England the weakness of the French. On 30 November 1411 Chichele, with two other bishops and three earls and the prince of Wales, knelt to the king to receive public thanks for their administration. That he was in high favor with Henry V is shown by his being sent with the earl of Warwick to France in July 1413 to conclude peace. Immediately after the death of Archbishop Arundel he was nominated by the king to the archbishopric, elected on 4 March, translated by papal bull on 28 April, and received the pall without going to Rome for it on 24 July.

These dates are important as they help to save Chichele from the charge, versified by Shakespeare (Henry V. act 1. sc. 2) from Hall's Chronicle, of having tempted Henry V into the conquest of France for the sake of diverting parliament from the disendowment of the Church. There is no contemporary authority for the charge, which seems to appear first in Redman's rhetorical history of Henry V, written in 1540 with an eye to the political situation at that time, As a matter of fact, the parliament at Leicester, in which the speeches were supposed to have been made, began on 30 April 1414 before Chichele was archbishop. The rolls of parliament show that he was not present in the parliament at all. Moreover parliament was so far from pressing disendowment that on the petition of the House of Commons it passed a savage act against the heresies commonly called Lollardry which aimed at the destruction of the king and all temporal estates, making Lollards felons and ordering every justice of the peace to hunt down their schools, conventicles, congregations and confederacies.