In 1413, at the outset of the reign of Henry V, John Oldcastle, Lord Cobham, found himself caught between two allegiances that the great men of his day deemed irreconcilable. He was a knight, a nobleman, and a familiar of the king; he was likewise reputed to harbor the Lollards—those preachers and believers whom the Church condemned. In George Borrow’s narrative, the affair opened with a clerical assembly summoned to London by Thomas Arundel, Archbishop of Canterbury. The charges touched not merely upon matters of opinion: Oldcastle stood accused of sheltering preachers across several dioceses and furnishing them with armed bands, in defiance of ecclesiastical decrees. Thus did a spiritual dispute present itself, from the very first, as a challenge to public order.
The grievances concerned the Mass, penances, pilgrimages, images, and the authority of religious institutions. Certain prelates urged immediate action, demanding that Oldcastle be pursued outright as a heretic. Others deemed it uncircumspect to strike openly at a man of such high birth and one so favoured by his sovereign. They preferred to lay the matter before Henry. This detour imposed a delicate task upon the monarch: to shield a former companion without appearing to disavow his bishops, and to preserve the realm’s tranquility without transforming a religious proceeding into a factional clash at court.
Henry summoned Cobham and counselled him to submit to the Church. According to Borrow, he granted him time to reflect, letting it be understood that he desired to reclaim him to unity rather than surrender him to immediate severity. This counsel was at once an act of royal favor and a final offer of compromise. Oldcastle did not accept it. He defended his convictions, maintaining that he owed an account to God rather than to judges whom he did not recognize as arbiters of his faith. Thenceforth, his intimacy with the king could no longer shield him: it served only to render his refusal the more conspicuous.
At Leeds Castle, where Cobham then resided, the first officer dispatched to serve him with a summons penetrated no further than the threshold: by what right dared he enter the house of a nobleman without his leave? The officer departed with his citation in hand. Arundel thereupon changed his messenger. John Buller, an usher of the king’s privy chamber, presented himself in the sovereign’s name and was admitted. The narrative relates that he assured Cobham that Henry wished to see him obey the citation. Cobham refused once more, suspecting the clergy of usurping the king’s name to compel his appearance.
The archbishop abandoned all private overtures. Thenceforward, the citation was to be displayed for all to see: the letters were affixed to the great doors of Rochester Cathedral. Cobham’s adherents tore them down. They were replaced; they vanished again. Thus, even before doctrinal matters were reached, the proceedings collided with barred gates and torn parchments. The man whom the bishops sought to interrogate still commanded retainers who turned away their bailiffs and partisans who effaced their warrants. He was, nevertheless, to be apprehended and brought before the tribunal. He could no longer answer it merely by dismissing its emissaries.
The archbishop called upon him to recant his declarations and make his peace with the Church. Oldcastle would not yield. He declared himself prepared to die rather than belie his conscience. Upon Oldcastle’s final refusal to abandon his tenets, Arundel pronounced definitive sentence: he was condemned as a heretic and committed to the secular arm, “that they might put him to death,” to adopt Borrow’s rendering. The king, however, had previously granted a respite for deliberation, causing Cobham to be held under guard in the Tower; the narrative notes that he remained there some time after his condemnation before effecting his escape.
He spent some four years in Wales, according to Borrow. London could no longer reach him with its summonses. Yet to his name was henceforth joined another accusation, one that was to bar his return quite as irrevocably as his religious condemnation.
The government subsequently linked Cobham to a projected insurrection. Borrow recounts that an assembly of men gathered at St. Giles’s Fields, near London, and that the incident was accounted a rebellion against the king. The chapter supplies no independent proof as to what belonged to Cobham’s own designs and what was imputed to him by the authorities. It nevertheless presents the insurrection as the event by which the accusation of treason superseded that of heresy. The fugitive, who had defied the spiritual court and broken from his prison, had now become an enemy of the Crown.
His apprehension was deferred until later, in the Welsh march of Powis. Sir John Grey, Lord of Powis by right of marriage, raised men upon learning that Cobham was harbored within his lordship. Borrow relates that the fugitive offered a desperate resistance and was wounded before being subdued. The detail is not without moment: the man whom the court had first sought to reclaim by persuasion was conveyed to London under guard, upon a horse-litter, following an armed affray. He returned not as a peer summoned to answer for his beliefs, but as a captive whose flight and resistance were woven into the indictment of state treason.
Parliament was then assembled in London, and the authorities resolved not to dissolve it until Cobham had been heard. Brought before the Duke of Bedford, regent in the king’s absence, he heard the bill charging him with the insurrection and divers other treasons. Instead of pleading as the court expected, he spoke of the mercy of God, maintaining that vengeance belonged unto the Lord. The judge interrupted him, requiring a direct answer. Cobham thereupon declared that he recognized no judges in that assembly, inasmuch as Richard II, whom he accounted his rightful sovereign, was yet alive and dwelling in Scotland.
This answer proved decisive: Bedford and the peers construed it as an absolute refusal to acknowledge Henry V. Borrow records that Cobham was sentenced to be drawn, hanged, and burned, and that he was executed at St. Giles on the 14th of December, 1417. The compiler draws from Walsingham his reported last words to Sir Thomas Erpingham: that if he should rise again the third day, Sir Thomas should procure that his disciples might retain their faith unmolested. These are words transmitted by a chronicler, not a direct window into the condemned man’s heart. An iron chain was passed about his middle, and the gallows were consumed in the fire along with him. Those who had once torn down the citations from the gates of Rochester had succeeded in destroying the parchment. They could not prevent the law from seizing the man.