Also for firewood, charcoal, turf and sedge, five pounds thirteen shillings.
Also, for the hire of horses, and for hay and oats, and for straw for the beds, as well as for litter for the horses; and for horse shoeing, twelve pounds fifteen shillings and sevenpence.
And for expenses incurred in riding on horseback to Cambridge and back; and for carriage of wine and all harness thither and back, seven pounds sixteen shillings and eightpence.
Also, two pipes of red wine taken thither from London, and for other wine bought at Cambridge, nine pounds two shillings. Also, for clothes for them and their servants, arrayed in like suit, twenty-two pounds and fifteen shillings.
Also, expenditure at Cambridge throughout the time of the Parliament on bread, ale, flesh-meat, fish, candles, sauce, the laundry man, and in gifts to minstrels of the King and of other lords, together with divers other outlays made, twenty-three pounds, five shillings and ninepence.
There may be those interested in the 2009 debate on MPs’ expenses who may think there is little new under the Parliamentary sun and that mid-fourteenth century Members of Parliament had modest needs. Certainly, English society during the second half of the fourteenth century was unlikely to be aware of the costs and expenses of those who did not really represent them. It was true also that English society then appeared exhausted and concerned only with the constant drudge of survival in an island where the effects of the Black Death lingered.
The Church, never much of a comfort to ordinary people, only an accuser, was hardly an example to follow. Schism and corruption had the Pope now established in Avignon and seen as anti-English, or at least pro-French. From 1305 to 1378, seven popes (Clement V, John XXII, Benedict XII, Clement VI, Innocent VI, Urban V and Gregory XI) sat at Avignon. Each of them was French.22 The leaders of the church lived as princes. It was the Oxford theologian, John Wyclif, who emerged as the man who led the renewal of Christianity. Wyclif committed the unthinkable: the translation of the Bible into English in 1382.
England had changed step. The old order was changing throughout the land including the disappearance of its heroes. The Black Prince, the heir to the throne, died, a sad, broken figure in 1376, no longer the dashing prince in black armour. The King, an increasingly unheroic figure in his widowhood and approaching dotage, took up with Alice Perrers, a former lady-in-waiting to Queen Philippa, a political intriguer and, some say, a person who took the very rings from her husband’s dying fingers.
In 1377 Edward III had been King for more than fifty years. In his time he was an adventurer, unscrupulous and vain. He was certainly dissipated, and maybe his pre-senile dementia was the price he paid. Yet he honoured the chivalrous and warrior hopes of his country. He built a military reputation for England and he balanced Church and Parliament, often not very well, but he corrupted neither. Fourteenth-century English men and women liked him. His first wife, Philippa, was devoted to him. His sons did not intrigue against him and John of Gaunt, still in his thirties, had taken on many of the regal responsibilities, often with a deviousness that is kindly called politics. Edward III died, at sixty-five years old, a lonely figure but seemingly his people of England mourned his passing.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
1377–99
Richard II (1367–1400) came to the throne in 1377. He was just ten years old, and the eleventh King of England since William the Conqueror, almost 300 years earlier. Richard wasn’t supposed to be King at all. The Black Prince, Edward III’s eldest son, should have been King, but he died the year before his father and Richard was the Black Prince’s eldest son. And so it was Richard who swore that he would solemnly preserve the laws and customs conceded by ancient and devout kings before him. It was John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, and the King’s uncle, who carried the ceremonial sword, Curtana, at the coronation. As a symbol, Curtana, was, and has remained, all-important in the coronation procession. It is a blunted sword, the sword of mercy. Therefore the bearer of Curtana also carried the authority of the King’s highest prerogative: mercy. The importance was not lost on those gathered at the coronation.
It was John of Gaunt who became Steward of England and ran the Regency for the boy-king. But John of Gaunt was unpopular with the businessmen of the City of London, the hierarchy of the clergy and the Commoners of Parliament. He led the anti-clerical party in England. Fundamentally, he was trying to re-establish the authority of the Crown and the Royal Family. In 1371, six years before Edward III’s death, John of Gaunt managed the removal of both the Chancellor and the Treasurer: the charge was maladministration. Their replacements were less efficient and even more corrupt. Five years later, Parliament – known as the Good Parliament of 1376 – attacked the government and, in particular, Gaunt’s cronies. But Gaunt had another Parliament called, fixed it by packing it with his supporters and reversed all the decisions of the Good Parliament. John of Gaunt was able to use Parliament for his own purposes because, in the fourteenth century, Parliaments were councils, meetings that were called only by the monarch, usually to get money.
The England of the late 1370s and early 1380s was leaderless, overtaxed and at war, and not very successfully so. A dull war that celebrates nothing has few compensations for those at home and brings opportunity to protest that dues and poll taxes are unfair. The poll tax had been levied 150 years earlier. It comes from the medieval word ‘polle’ or head. The fourteenth-century poll tax had traumatic effects. People avoided paying for every member of the family and when the returns showed that less had been collected than anticipated, household assessments were made: a sort of fourteenth-century means test. Furthermore, since 1351, the Statute of Labourers had frozen wages to pre-Black Death rates. This Statute and the new poll tax were the root causes of what is now the Peasants’ Revolt which occurred in 1381 when the common men marched through Essex and Kent and by the Medway towns, pausing only to burn records and fine houses, seize the castle at Rochester and release the imprisoned John Ball and Wat Tyler. From both banks of the Thames the revolters converged on the City of London on 13 June 1381 and waited for the fourteen-year-old King Richard to hear their grievance.
Richard called everyone together at Smithfield, or Smooth-field, as it was. And by St Bartholomew’s, a house of Church canons, he stopped. In front of him on the east side were the people, the Commoners, led by Wat Tyler (also, Tyghler). This had not been a peaceful protest. They had burned down John of Gaunt’s manor house (the Savoy) by the Thames, captured the Tower of London and executed the Archbishop of Canterbury, Simon of Sudbury, and the Treasurer, Sir Robert Hales. The Mayor, William Walworth, called the watch-commanders of the City of London’s twenty-four wards and instructed them to tell everyone to arm themselves and rush to the King’s side at Smithfield. It is said that Wat Tyler strutted. He approached the king in a haughty fashion, but told the King that if he agreed their demands then he would have 40,000 more friends among the Commoners than afore. Richard is said to have agreed that the Commoners would get their demands but that Tyler had to take his people back to their counties.
At this stage, it is also said that a courtier described Tyler as a liar and thief and that Tyler drew his dagger. Walworth pounced and had Tyler arrested. Tyler struck the Mayor with his dagger, but Walworth wore good armour, drew his cutlass and cut Tyler about the neck and head. An attendant leapt towards Tyler and stabbed at him. In front of the Commoners, Tyler fell from his pony mortally wounded and calling on the people to come to his aid and revenge. They did not. He was taken to the poor hospital but the Mayor had him dragged out and beheaded him. The head was topped on a pikestaff and shown to the people, who supposedly fell like men discomforted crying to the King for mercy. The King cancelled the promised reforms and so the Peasants’ Revolt failed to achieve its objectives; although it did kill, for the moment, the poll tax. But the uprisings of 1381 showed just how much the people had lost confidence in those who governed them. Kingship, along with Tyler, lay cold.
At the same time the influence o
f a new aristocracy – one that had been developing for at least a generation – was growing. A handful of families, all connected by blood with the throne – Lancaster, York, Gloucester, Cornwall and Clarence – were beginning to make their mark. Yet it was still the King’s court and his royal judges who restored order when the feudal classes lost their nerve and, by 1389, the King was in his early twenties and, at last, had begun to rule for himself.
The revolt of the aristocracy came about after John of Gaunt had left England to pursue his claim to the kingdom of Castile, a claim he thought himself entitled to through his second wife, Constance of Castile, the heiress daughter of Pedro the Cruel. He left his son, Henry Bolingbroke, in charge of his English estates, which he had inherited when his first wife, Blanche of Lancaster, died. Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester, the youngest and most ambitious brother of the absent John of Gaunt, joined forces with the young Henry Bolingbroke, John de Mowbray, Earl of Nottingham, and the Earls of Arundel and Warwick, and marched on London. They called themselves the Lords Appellant and accused Richard’s closest advisers, particular his Chancellor Michael de la Pole, of treason.
Another of those accused, Robert de Vere, Duke of Ireland, raised an army in Cheshire and marched to the King’s rescue. They didn’t get very far. Just before Christmas Day, 1387, troops led by Gloucester and Bolingbroke scattered them at Radcot Bridge in Oxfordshire. The Lords Appellant were in command and, in February 1388, they summoned what became known as the Merciless Parliament. It was a good name. Little mercy was shown to five of Richard’s friends: Sir Robert Tresilian, the chief justice of the King’s Bench, and the Lord Mayor of London, Sir Nicholas Brember, were hanged, drawn and quartered. The other three escaped to the Continent. Then came the lull none had expected. During it, Richard contemplated ways for revenge. The barons had to be very careful. By and large, Richard was popular. Richard, still a young man, remember, called his barons and magnates together. He questioned them about his authority. He wanted to know if they accepted that at the age of twenty-two he should not have the same rights of determination of any other man in his realm – to reach his majority at twenty-one. The barons, apparently unnerved, agreed that Richard had equal rights and more than any in his kingdom. Richard had heard the words for which he had hoped. He declared that it was time for him to throw off his tutors and appoint his own advisers. Richard was now King in his own land and for the next eight years, England was well and quietly governed.
John of Gaunt returned from Castile and perhaps his still-great presence reduced the influence of the Lords Appellant. In 1394, John of Gaunt went to Ireland. The English domain, known as the Pale, was yet again under threat. The 1366 Statute of Kilkenny forbade English settlers to inter-marry or adopt Irish customs or language. But the English authority ran only around Dublin, including Meath, Louth and Kilkenny. Certainly by the sixteenth century, this area was commonly known as the Pale, as was the English area around Calais. Hence anything outside the domain was ‘beyond the Pale’. For all his weaknesses, Richard saw that the difficulties of Ireland had as much to do with the English administration as with the eccentric and sometimes barbarous behaviour of the Irish themselves. He also saw Ireland as a source of support.
In the same year, 1394, Richard’s wife, Anne of Bohemia, died. Two years later he married Isabella, the seven-year-old daughter of the French King, Charles VI. This political marriage sealed a thirty-year truce with France and a secret clause meant that, should Richard be opposed at home, France would come to his aid. Richard II needed little help at this point. He searched for revenge. In January 1397, the King sensed the blood of Gloucester and Arundel. The latter, and others that Richard regarded as his henchmen, were executed. Gloucester was taken under guard, ostensibly into exile at Calais. But there he was murdered. Richard assaulted the opposing aristocracy and the constitutional process that had supported its rampage. Parliament was frightened of him and stripped away the great constitutional rights of the thirteenth century.
And then, it seems, Richard lost his reason. John of Gaunt died in February 1399 and instead of allowing Henry Bolingbroke to inherit his father’s vast estates by proxy, Richard took them over. Totally oblivious to the probable consequences, Richard then set off on an expedition to Ireland, leaving his kingdom unguarded. Henry of Lancaster (as now Bolingbroke was) saw this foolhardiness and landed in Yorkshire to claim his father’s estate. He had the sure support of the northern barons including the formidable Northumberland. It took valuable time for Richard to hear of Henry Lancaster’s landing and the support he had gained. By the time Richard arrived back from Ireland, he must have known what a hopeless task he had to regain his authority. He had little choice but to submit to Henry. He returned to his capital as a prisoner.
Many still mourn Richard II as a romantic figure, but it was the job of the King to stand between oppression and the people. Between 1389 and 1397 Richard protected his people well, but later he hounded them for revenge and corrupted the role of Parliament. He usurped the judiciary and he acted in the belief that the very lives of his people were subject to his every whim. That was not kingship. That was tyranny.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
1399–1454
By the end of the fourteenth century, the Plantagenets had ruled England for almost 250 years. There had been eight kings, beginning with Henry II and ending, in 1399, with Richard II. But now the dynasty, although still Plantagenet, was to splinter: first the House of Lancaster, then the House of York, each of which could trace its line to the original Plantagenet monarch, Henry II. For the next sixty or so years, England was ruled by the House of Lancaster, the three Henrys, beginning with Richard’s successor Henry Bolingbroke, who was to be Henry IV and would rule for fourteen years. In that time Owen Glyndŵr began the war for Welsh independence and defeated the English at Pilleth and then mysteriously disappeared; the King crushed a rebellion led by Richard Scrope, the Archbishop of York, and then had him executed; the first James became King of the Scots; and the first Lollard religious reformer was martyred by burning at Smithfield.
From the first day of his reign, Henry IV had to accommodate his supporters. After all, to attempt to overthrow a king is high treason. To fail is death. Therefore, his backers demanded their rewards and Henry needed their continuing support. It was by no means an easy succession for the House of Lancaster and its complications clouded the reigns of all three Lancastrian Kings. Also, when Henry came to the throne Richard II was not dead, he was merely in prison.
Richard II was a prisoner in Pontefract Castle and as the general bitterness towards him began to wilt, the weakness of Henry’s government became more obvious. In January 1400 some of the nobles tried to rise in favour of the imprisoned Richard. They failed, but as long as Richard remained alive the greater chance there was of him becoming a rallying figure. It is generally said that he was starved to death, but one contemporary writer believed that Henry sent one of his knights, Sir Peter Exton, to kill Richard. But even then it was necessary to display Richard’s body at St Paul’s Cathedral to convince the people that he was really dead.
Henry was now faced with demands from the Church to restrain the excesses of the Lollards. The Lollards, who got their name from a medieval Dutch word meaning ‘mutter’, as in praying, were religious reformers and followers of the late John Wyclif. They did not believe in transubstantiation and they believed the clergy indulged in excesses. John Wyclif had translated the Bible into English; he believed that everyone who wanted to read the Testaments should be able so to do. The simplest way to deal with the Lollards, said the Church, was officially to declare them heretics. And so, in 1401, a Statute of enormous significance was published, written to deal with what its draughtsmen called ‘the innovations and excesses of the Lollards’. The Statute De Heretico Comburendo made it legal in England to take anyone convicted of heresy and burn him, or her, at the stake:
If any person refuses to abjure heresy so that according to the holy canons he ou
ght to be handed over to the secular court, the sheriff shall receive the said persons, all of them, after such sentence has been promulgated, and cause them to be burned in a high place, so that such punishment may strike with fear the minds of others23 and by this no such wicked doctrine and heretical and erroneous opinions shall be sustained or in any way suffered.
In 1401 the burning began. It would seem that Henry IV supported the Statute only partly because of his religious orthodoxy; the greater pressure was political. Henry’s debts of loyalty were still being paid.
Henry also faced war with both Scotland and Wales. The Scots had renewed their alliance with France and, led by the Earl of Douglas, had destroyed the English force and captured young Hotspur, Henry Percy, the son of the First Earl of Northumberland. Henry IV advanced north as far as Edinburgh and then had to return south. The Welsh were on the move. The Chronicle of Adam of Usk, of autumn 1401, tells the story.
Owen Glyndŵr, all north Wales and Cardigan and Powis siding with him, sorely harried with fire and sword the English who dwelt in those parts, and their towns. Wherefore, the English invading those parts with a strong power, and utterly laying them waste and ravaging them with fire, famine and sword, left them a desert, not even sparing children or churches, and they carried away into England more than 1000 small children of both sexes to be their servants. Yet the same Owen did no small hurt to the English, slaying many of them and carrying off the arms, horses, and the tents of the King’s eldest son, the Prince of Wales, which he bore away for his own use to the mountain fastness of Snowdon.
This Sceptred Isle Page 19
