Sir Henry Percy(1364–1403)

Henry Percy was born at Alnwick Castle in Northumberland on the twentieth of May 1364, eldest son of Henry Percy, 1st Earl of Northumberland, and Margaret Neville. He was raised at the Percy stronghold of Alnwick, the great fortress that commanded the eastern Anglo-Scottish border, and through his teens served at his father's side on the Border campaigns that were the central work of the late-fourteenth-century Percy interest. He acquired in his youth the cognomen Hotspur from his impetuous courage and the rapidity of his charges in the Border affrays, the byname under which he has been universally remembered ever since.

He fought through the 1380s against the great Scottish Border lords, was made Warden of the East March in 1384 at twenty in succession to his father, served as a knight in the great army of Richard II that marched into Scotland in 1385 (the campaign that burnt Edinburgh and Melrose), and through the 1390s was the central English commander on the Scottish frontier. In August 1388 he fought the most-celebrated single Border engagement of the fourteenth century at Otterburn in Redesdale against James, 2nd Earl of Douglas; he was captured in the action that killed Douglas and was ransomed at three thousand marks, the largest single Border ransom of the period. The Otterburn engagement passed into the ballad tradition of both sides of the Border as Chevy Chase, the most-recited single ballad of the late-medieval Anglo-Scottish frontier.

He served in the wars of Richard II in Ireland (1394) and at Calais, was made Justiciar of North Wales (1399) and Justiciar of Chester, and on the deposition of Richard II in 1399 sided with Henry Bolingbroke (his cousin by marriage) in the Lancastrian usurpation that put Henry IV on the throne. He commanded the English army that defeated the Scots at the Battle of Homildon Hill on the fourteenth of September 1402, the decisive Border victory of the period, and took captive the Earl of Douglas and three further Scottish earls.

He rose in revolt against Henry IV in 1403 with his uncle the Earl of Worcester and his Welsh ally Owain Glyndŵr, marched south from the Border country to join Glyndŵr's army in the Welsh Marches, and met the royal army under Henry IV outside Shrewsbury on the twenty-first of July 1403. The Battle of Shrewsbury was the first major English battle in which the longbow was used by both sides; Hotspur led the Percy household cavalry in the central charge of the day, was struck in the face by an arrow when he lifted his visor for breath, and was killed on the field in his thirty-ninth year. His body was buried at Whitchurch in Shropshire and was disinterred by royal order the following week, decapitated, and the head displayed on the Micklegate at York and the four quarters at London, Bristol, Chester and Newcastle. The Percys recovered the title and the Alnwick estate within a generation; the Earldom (and from 1766 the Dukedom) of Northumberland has descended in the male line continuously since. Shakespeare's Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2 (1597 and 1598), put Hotspur into the central canon of English literature as the embodiment of chivalric honour. The Percy name in modern English memory carries the weight of Hotspur of Alnwick and the field at Shrewsbury.