A charolais bull on the southeast of the Isle of Wight near Sandown, looking back towards the Solent and Portsmouth behind. When the French came to the Isle of Wight just before Christmas 1403, they landed a thousand men and began rustling cattle until the islanders drove them away. Their return in the New Year evidently did not enjoy much more success.
THE Frenchmen about the same time came before the Isle of Wight with a great navy,* and sent certain of their men to the shore, to demand in name of King Richard,* and of his wife queen Isabel, a tribute or special subsidy in money, of the inhabitants of that Isle; who answered, that King Richard was dead, and queen Isabel sometime his wife had been sent home to her parents and country, without condition of any dowry or tribute:* wherefore, they answered reasonable, that none they would give: but if the Frenchmen had desire to fight, they willed them to come on land, and there should be none to resist them; and after they were on land, they promised to give them respite for six hours space to refresh themselves, and that time being once expired, they should not fail to have battle. When the Frenchmen heard of this stout answer made by the Islandmen, they had no lust to approach near to the land, but returned without further attempt.
* Northern Europe in Henry IV’s time (r. 1399-1413) was blighted by a turmoil of lawlessness and piracy, some of it radiating from Brittany and Burgundy but much of it from England. Henry was powerless to intervene: his cousin Richard II had demoralised the realm, and Wales was on the brink of revolt. There were tit-for-tat raids across the Channel, at Plymouth and Brest, at Calais and Poole. So bad was it on the Baltic shores that the Hanseatic League put an embargo on English trade.
* In 1399, the deeply unpopular King Richard II was deposed by his cousin Henry Bolingbroke, who declared himself King Henry IV. Richard was imprisoned, and quietly murdered in February the following year.
* Richard II’s second wife, Queen Isabella of Valois (1389-1409), daughter of King Charles VI of France, was only ten when she was widowed, having been married (as a matter of politics) to the twenty-nine-year-old Richard in 1396 just before her seventh birthday. Henry sent her back home to France where in 1406 she married Charles, son and heir of Louis I, Duke of Orléans. Whether these French seamen had any right to demand this money, and whether any of it would have reached Isabella had they received it, Holinshed does not say.
* Shortly after the French fleet came to the Isle of Wight, Isabella’s uncle Louis I, Duke of Orleans, younger brother of King Charles VI, issued Henry with a challenge to single combat: see A War of Words. In the testy exchange of letters that followed, the duke renewed the complaint on behalf of his niece. “How could you suffer my much redoubted lady the queen of England” he asked “to return so desolate to this country after the death of her lord, despoiled, by your rigour and cruelty, of her dower, which you detain from her, and likewise the portion she carried hence on her marriage?” Henry replied that when it came to money and jewels, Isabella had been given upon her departure “much more than she brought hither”, which did not exactly answer the question of her dowry. “We wish to God” added the English king, aware of Louis’s unsavoury reputation among women “that you may never have acted with greater rigour, unkindness, or cruelty, towards any lady or damsel than we have done to her, and we believe it would be the better for you.”
Précis
Early in 1404, French captains brought a flotilla of ships to the Isle of Wight and demanded compensation for the distress of Queen Isabella, sent home to France after her husband Richard II was deposed by Henry IV. The islanders refused, but when they invited the French to step ashore and fight if they pleased the flotilla melted away. (58 / 60 words)
