Successful Tripartite Indenture?

[OwenM]

Is there any way the plans for England and Wales to be divided up between Glyndwr, the Percys, and the Mortimers could have come off even temporarily?

 

[heraclius]

The viability of the full Indenture proposal - Mortimer as king of a truncated England, Glyndwr ruling all Wales plus the Severn valley East through the W Midlands to the R Trent, and the Earl of Northumberland ruling Northern England - is unlikely. The borders of England had been well established for centuries by this point (1405), with the Tweed and the Solway as the Anglo-Scots border since the c11th, and other lords and minor landowners of northern England would hardly have accepted the Earl of Northumberland (head of the Percy family, principal landowners of Northumberland) as either an independent ruler or as a semi-autonomous regional deputy for his nominal king, Edmund Mortimer. Powerful and legally autonomous 'county palatines' did exist in the region, eg the county of Durham (as held by its Bishop) or at times the Dukedom of Lancaster within Lancashire, but a massive regional body much larger than this, including all of the North, was not feasible. Not least,the Percies had many powerful local noble rivals, headed by the large Neville family of Westmoreland, and the earl of Northumberland (aged around 60) had lost his family's best general and his own heir, his son Harry 'Hotspur' Percy, plus his own brother the earl of Worcester, and many troops in the family's defeat by King Henry IV at Shrewsbury in 1403. The Percy part of the agreement would have collapsed even if Edmund Mortimer had been put on the throne in London, and neither Edmund (a teenager, b 1391, not an experienced commander) nor the cautious regent of Scotland, the elderly Duke of Albany, could have helped them out much. The same inability to defeat a hostile body of local landowners with the few resources available applies to the Severn valley and W Midlands being handed over to Glyndwr - whose smallish army was good at guerilla war and skirmishes in the Welsh hills but had a poor record of success in open battle against experienced English troops.

The 'Triple Alliance' had a few thousand French mercenaries to hand in 1405-6, sent across to SW Wales by their backer King Charles VI of France, and in real life they joined one foray by Glyndwr and his army across the border via Herefordshire as far as the outskirts of Worcester without fighting any English army. The campaign trickled out and they went home later, and the undefeated army of Henry IV's eldest son Prince Henry (later Henry V) , which was holding onto part of SE Wales and the central and northern borderlands with most of the regions' castles, resumed the offensive. Glyndwr's army was duly pushed back and lost its hold on towns and castles. Given Prince Henry's military strength and capability, defeating him with the resources available was unlikely except if a far larger French force or more English defectors had been available - and Charles VI was cautious and subject to sporadic mental illness when his govt was paralysed by rival factions. But if Edmund Mortimer and his brother had been able to escape custody by Henry IV at Windsor Castle successfully in Feb 1405 - they were chased across England by royalists on horseback and caught near Cheltenham - they would have been leading the rebels in person which could have brought more recruits despite their youth and lack of military experience.

Equally, if Henry IV's sudden outbreak of serious ill health that summer (a surprise given that he was only 38 or 39) had occurred a few months earlier or been long-term, not a temporary interruption to his campaigns, his army would have been paralysed as he faced the escaped Mortimer brothers. Alternatively, given that his collapse occurred just after he had arrested and executed the archbishop of York for joining a pro-Percy revolt , if he had died or been incapacitated long-term this would have seemed to be divine judgement on him - and led to desertions? Had he been dead or an invalid and the Mortimers been at large with a stronger French force, the chances of the rebels defeating Prince Henry would have been much better.
Edmund could have ended up as king in that situation, possibly by buying off a defeated Pr Henry with his father's dukedom of Lancaster, but handing over more land to Glyndwr or setting up the Percies as autonomous governors seems unlikely as it would only cause more rebellions later.

 

[OwenM]

But if Edmund Mortimer and his brother had been able to escape custody by Henry IV at Windsor Castle successfully in Feb 1405 - they were chased across England by royalists on horseback and caught near Cheltenham - they would have been leading the rebels in person which could have brought more recruits despite their youth and lack of military experience.

Equally, if Henry IV's sudden outbreak of serious ill health that summer (a surprise given that he was only 38 or 39) had occurred a few months earlier or been long-term, not a temporary interruption to his campaigns, his army would have been paralysed as he faced the escaped Mortimer brothers. Alternatively, given that his collapse occurred just after he had arrested and executed the archbishop of York for joining a pro-Percy revolt , if he had died or been incapacitated long-term this would have seemed to be divine judgement on him - and led to desertions? Had he been dead or an invalid and the Mortimers been at large with a stronger French force, the chances of the rebels defeating Prince Henry would have been much better.
Edmund could have ended up as king in that situation, possibly by buying off a defeated Pr Henry with his father's dukedom of Lancaster, but handing over more land to Glyndwr or setting up the Percies as autonomous governors seems unlikely as it would only cause more rebellions later.

So if both of those happen and we get Edmund as King, even if it's not the Tripartite Indenture in its full theoretical form, would we still get an even earlier and greater weakening of central royal authority in England than the OTL 1400s?

 

[heraclius]

Assuming a successful seizure of the crown by Edmund in 1405 or 1406 aided by Glyndwr, Northumberland and the French, the royal authority would have been weaker than it had been under the adult and militarily experienced Henry IV or his aggressively centralist predecessor Richard II (deposed by H in 1399). Both were able to keep power , Richard temporarily and Henry permanently, by a mixture of creating a dependant faction of allied nobles with military entourages to back them up plus a mixture of military superiority over their vassals and sporadic executions. The trick was not to do too many of the latter or the rest of the nobles would be alienated and would plot a coup to protect themselves from a similar fate - as happened to Richard II. Edmund would have been too young and inexperienced to reassert royal power for some years, and had not been trained to war in his mid-teens in a brutal and fast-moving regional (Welsh) war as Henry IV's son Prince Henry was at the same age - if Pr Henry had still been alive and been accepted in a truce as one of his senior nobles to buy him off H would have overshadowed Edmund. The ageing Northumberland and assorted senior nobles with extensive lands who had fought for Henry IV, led by his half-brothers the Beauforts (if the latter had not been killed or fled) would also have had more armed men and money at their call than the precarious new king who would have had to tread carefully.

Edmund would have been in no worse a position as a 'puppet' of an ex-rebel faction than another young new king set up by invasion and the removal of his predecessor, ie Edward III (r 1327-77), his ancestor and Henry IV's grandfather, was in 1327-30 - and he had acceded aged 14. In that case, England was also having a border region ravaged and being forced to accept the independence of a 'rebel' neighbour - Robert Bruce in Scotland. Edward reversed this situation by removing his unwelcome regency, which was led by his mother Isabella and her lover Roger Mortimer (Edmund's direct male line ancestor), and executing the latter - and he went on to a successful reign and reassertion of royal power. Edmund could do this too if he was sufficiently vigorous and lucky and chose able assistants, but what we know of his character seems to show that he was at best a moderately competent administrator (as lord lieutenant of Ireland in the early 1420s) and not much of a general. He was also a 'ditherer' with dubious political ability, as he joined in a rash conspiracy against Henry V in 1415 that depended on a lot of luck, timing, and an unlikely mixture of royal murder and a military mutiny/ rally of dissident gentry on schedule to succeed, then lost his nerve and backed out of it, informing the King. This suggests he was not a natural leader or as shrewd as Henry IV or Henry V, and so he would more likely have stayed as the poorly-advised and weak leader of an uneasy coalition of squabbling factions - or even lost control of the latter and seen England slip into civil war, as Edward II and Henry VI did. This would have been avoided had he relied on competent and loyal associates, eg Prince Henry or the latter's brothers if they were still alive and not in exile - if the latter one of them could have overthrown him later.
Edmund died of the plague in Ireland in 1425 and had no children ; his wife Anne Stafford had two by her next husband, the Duke of Exeter, so was he infertile? If so, his death would have ended the rule of the House of Mortimer; his heir was his sister Anne who had married the late Earl Richard of Cambridge, son of Henry IV's uncle Duke Edmund of York. R was executed for the 1415 plot against Henry V, which he had lured Edmund into. Anne's son Duke Richard of York (1411-60), father of the Yorkist kings Edward IV and Richard III, would have succeeded as King so there would be an earlier Yorkist dynasty.

I touch on these matters of a Mortimer coup and regime plus Richard II and Henry IV in my 'Alternative History of Britain: The Hundred Years War' pub by Pen and Sword in 2013 if you can find a copy; I do not know if they still have it in stock.