In August 1415, three conspirators were executed for their role in the Southampton Plot, an attempt to usurp Henry V. Although two of the plotter’s motives were clear, Dr Simon Payling of our 1461-1504 section explores how Henry, Lord Scrope of Marsham’s intentions are harder to ascertain…

The ‘Southampton Plot’, uncovered in the very final stages of Henry V’s preparations for the invasion of France in 1415, is one of the most puzzling episodes of his famous reign. Three men were accused of treason – the King’s cousin Richard, earl of Cambridge, Sir Thomas Gray of Heaton in Wark (Northumberland); and Henry, Lord Scrope of Masham -and all were executed. Yet while the involvement of Cambridge and Gray can be explained by identifiable political and personal motives, and their guilt is proven, the case against Scrope is far harder to sustain.  

Almost all that is known of the plot comes from the conspirators’ letters of confession and exculpation, written after they had been betrayed by Edmund Mortimer, earl of March, whose claim to the throne they had sought to make real.  Although these letters are only partially legible, with vital details lost, certain facts are clear.  Cambridge was the instigator, and, in so far as any motives can accurately discerned, the plotter with the clearest ones.  His promotion to the earldom of Cambridge in 1414, a recognition of his place in the royal family, came with neither landed endowment nor political role, and he had reason to resent this financial and political marginalisation.  His kinship with March may have seemed a path to better prospects. He had married March’s sister, Anne, who died shortly after giving birth to their son, the future Richard, duke of York, in 1411. March’s accession would have brought him in from the cold.

Cambridge first revealed his treasonable intent to the northern knight, Sir Thomas Gray. On 17 June 1415 Gray, returning home after indenting to serve (rather ironically given what was to come) on the forthcoming expedition to France, stopped to visit Cambridge at the castle of Conisbrough (Yorkshire). The two men were very well known to each other – Gray’s young son, another Thomas, had been betrothed a few years before to Cambridge’s daughter, Isabel – and Cambridge was ready to confide in him.  He told him that he planned to raise rebellion in the north by securing the release of the young Percy heir, who had been in exile in Scotland since the death of his father at the battle of Shrewsbury in 1403, adding, seemingly quite falsely, that several senior members of the Percy retinue had undertaken to support such a rebellion.

Gray, encumbered by debt and with his local standing diminished by the rise of the Nevilles, did not dismiss the scheme as the folly it clearly was. He remained equally uncritical when the plan shifted from a northern uprising to a Welsh one. March was to be taken to Wales and crowned as King with, in a further irony, a Spanish crown that Henry V had pawned to Cambridge as security for the payment of his wages for the forthcoming campaign.

If the motives of Cambridge and Gray are at least intelligible, the alleged involvement of Henry, Lord Scrope, presents far greater difficulties. On the face of it, he was an improbable conspirator. He was a figure of considerably greater standing than either of his alleged co-conspirators.  He had fought for Henry IV against the Percys at the battle of Shrewsbury, and, in 1410, he had been created a knight of the Garter.  The height of his career was a brief term in the great office of treasurer in 1410-11 and thereafter he took a diplomatic role.  In 1414 he was involved in negotiating the crucial alliance with the Burgundians.  It is hard to see why he should have risked life and reputation in a hopelessly implausible plot to bring down the Lancastrian house he had served with distinction.

Indeed, on the available evidence, there must be considerable doubt about his treasonable intent.  Like Gray, he had a kinship relationship with Cambridge – his wife, Joan Holland, was Cambridge’s stepmother – but this was too remote a connexion to have much meaning, and historians have struggled to discern any reasonable motive.  Pugh. the most recent historian of the plot, suggests that he had loaned considerable sums to the earl of March, who had been heavily fined by Henry V for an unlicensed marriage, and feared the financial loss should the plot fail and lead to March’s forfeiture. Yet this loan was not large enough seriously to threaten his finances: it may have amounted to no more than about 650 marks and his annual income was as much as £1,800. In any event, any financial loss was far outweighed by the danger he faced by entering a treasonable conspiracy, particularly one that had no real hope of success.  The other suggested motive was revenge for the execution of his uncle, Richard Scrope, archbishop of York, in 1405. Gray certainly believed that that execution would dispose Scrope to favour the plot, yet that resentment, if such it was, had not led him to withdraw his service for the Crown.  Another possibility is that he profoundly disagreed with the King’s plans to invade France, but rebellion seems to be an improbably excessive reaction to such a disagreement.

This absence of an obvious motive is compounded by two further considerations. First, Scrope was not on good terms with Gray, with whom he was in dispute over his wife’s rights in the Northumberland liberty of Tynedale. This lends significance to the divergence between the surviving confessions: while Cambridge’s letter largely exonerates Scrope, Gray’s places him at the centre of the plot. Secondly, Scrope’s own defence is plausible. He claimed that his apparent engagement with the conspirators was intended to gather intelligence so that the plot could be betrayed once it was fully formed. Given how inchoate and ill-defined the conspiracy still was when Mortimer exposed it, this defence cannot be entirely discounted. If true, Scrope was fatally unlucky that Mortimer acted first, and, conversely, Mortimer was fortunate that Scrope did not.

In arguing for Scrope’s innocence, one must acknowledge the incompleteness of the evidence.  Further, given how peripheral he appears, on the surviving evidence, to have been to the plot, it is striking that he attracts the greatest condemnation from the contemporary chroniclers. According to the Gesta Henrici Quinti, he was ‘the more culpable an enemy because the more intimate a friend’. The well-informed monastic chronicler, Thomas Walsingham, also emphasises Scrope’s position of especial trust in the King’s eyes and accuses him of conspiring with the French. His account also implies that there were allegations circulating against Scrope beyond the charges on which he was convicted, including that he had attempted to poison the King.  He also makes the interesting claim that Henry condemned Scrope with regret: when Scrope confessed to him ‘I have sinned’, he went away ‘weeping and sighing’.

Whatever Scrope’s real involvement in the plot, few contemporaries were willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.  As with the other plotters, the King showed him no mercy. He was beheaded outside the Northgate (now Bargate) of Southampton on 5 August, and his severed head sent to be displayed on one of the gates of the city of York.  The King’s ruthless reaction probably arose from the plot’s timing.  However inept it was, it threatened to undermine his great project. That consideration weakened Scrope’s plea that he was simply gathering information so that the plotters could be more fully betrayed.  Given the urgency of the moment, the King must reasonably have felt that Scrope was bound to reveal what he knew immediately, and that his failure to do so indicated complicity. Yet political logic does not necessarily equate to justice. It is hard not to feel that Scrope did not deserve his fate, not least because others peripherally involved in the plot, like March’s servant, Sir Walter Lucy, escaped entirely unscathed. 

Further reading

T.B. Pugh, Henry V and the Southampton Plot (Southampton, 1988)

Ian Mortimer, 1415: Henry V’s Year of Glory (2009)