Henry Despenser, bishop of Norwich, is generally thought of as one of the most celebrated losers of the Hundred Years War. Ostensibly launching a crusade in 1383 against the heretical followers of the ‘anti-pope’, Clement VII (pope in Avignon), on behalf of the ‘true’ pope, Urban VI (pope in Rome), he is vilified for leading his forces instead against the supporters of Urban in the southern Low Countries, along the coast of Flanders and at Ypres. There he met a quick defeat, first at the hands of the besieged Yprois and then by running away from the opportunity of fighting the Franco–Burgundian armies led by Philip the Bold, duke of Burgundy. Norman Housley calls his military actions ‘humiliating’; to May McKisack the crusade was ‘deplorable’, ‘a total failure’; while to George M. Wrong, ‘the crusade settled nothing; no burdens were lightened by it and many were heavier’. This is not to mention the fact that the bishop himself, in defending his actions on the crusade before a tribunal judging his impeachment was unwilling to accept any of the blame for the defeat, dismissing his failure simply with the notion that the Ghentenaars had made him do it: that he bore no responsibility in the matter.

The purpose of this article is not to revise Despenser’s reputation. He was not a good military leader, nor was he tried unjustly. He had not converted a single heretic; he had not punished the French; he had not succeeded in opening the recently closed markets of Flanders to English wool; and, more importantly, he had abused indulgences, had misused funds, and had profited from his willingness to retreat back across the Channel from France without doing battle with Philip the Good, all of the things for which he was put on trial for impeachment. On the other hand, Bishop Henry Despenser has been misjudged by those historians who have dismissed his ‘Ghentenaars made me do it’ trial rationalisation. The following words, the preliminary ideas of a thesis to be worked out in a more lengthy work on the bishop of Norwich’s crusade, take the position that the Ghentenaars really did make Despenser do it, that his actions in Flanders were not at his direction, but at the command of the rebel leadership in Ghent, those seeking sovereignty from the French and Burgundians.