by John Gardner
Another of Chaucer’s friends was Sir Lewis Clifford. He was born around 1336 and, like Chaucer, was once taken prisoner by the French (in 1352, when Chaucer was a boy of about twelve). He was apparently attached to the court of the Black Prince and was, like Chaucer, a solid royalist and Lancastrian all his life. By 1389 he began to be mentioned repeatedly as present at meetings of the Privy Council, which means he was one of the trusted advisers in the braintrust of that keen intellectual King Richard. Froissart, mirror of royal opinion, speaks of him with great admiration. Clifford was frequently a diplomat on commissions in which Chaucer had a part. He negotiated truces on various occasions and worked on marriage treaties, notably toward the marriage of Richard II and Isabella, daughter of Charles VI of France. For all his intelligence and courage, he ended badly. Sick and frightened, he at last turned on the beliefs he and Gaunt had defended and gave the witch-hunting Archbishop of Canterbury a list of the tenets of those who had supported Wyclif, along with a list of people who secretly supported him. In his will, dated September 17, 1404, Lewis Clifford describes himself as “God’s traitor” and directs that his “vile carrion” be buried in the furthermost corner of the churchyard of the parish in which he dies, and that no stone or other memorial mark the spot.
What that will really means is not clear, of course. But whether he believed he betrayed God in supporting Wyclif or in turning against him, pressed beyond an old man’s endurance by the new religious and political regime, Clifford’s tragedy is clear enough, and illuminating, like the tragedy of young Thomas Usk. In the late fourteenth century, survivors like Geoffrey Chaucer were remarkable men.
One might go on at length about Chaucer’s friends and fellow poets,13 but the point of these comments is merely this: In his main business, service to the crown, Chaucer was associated with men chiefly notable for chivalry, diplomacy, faith in intellectual inquiry, and what we might now call reactionary politics. They were solidly behind John of Gaunt or, when Gaunt’s ideas and Richard’s conflicted, ready to support (as did Gaunt) the king, and they were solidly against what historians have generally viewed as the liberal House of Commons. They backed Alice Perrers, all rushing to her aid when the Commons condemned her legitimate husband. In the court of Richard II, with its love of pageantry, poetry, and painting, and its absolutist notions of what was right for the crown and right for Commons, they were completely comfortable. For better or worse, they were the fourteenth-century Establishment. They could be critical, even angry—as Chaucer is in one of his poems to King Richard, Lack of Steadfastness—but even in their worst moods they sat like boulders on what history has judged the wrong side. What they desired of their world was law and order, firm and unchallenged monarchy, or, in Dante’s phrase, “The one will that resolves the many”; what they saw all around them, and ardently hated, was instability, debased values, endless struggle, a mad commingling of high and low, not Oneness but Manyness—what Chaucer would describe, in his magnificent elaboration of a poem by Boethius, as a cosmic fornication. In the Golden Age, he says,
Yit was not Jupiter the likerous, [lecherous]
That first was fader of delicacyë, [voluptuousness]
Come in this world; ne Nembrot, desirous
To regne, bad nat maad his tourës bye. [Nimrod (builder of the tower of Babel)]
Allas, allas! now may men wepe and cryë!
For in ourë dayës nis but covetysë,
Doublenesse, and tresoun, and envyë,
Poyson, manslauhtre, and mordre in sondry wysë.
Seven: Life During the Minority of Richard II—the Peasants’ Revolt and Its Aftermath (1377-c. 1385), with More Scurrilous Gossip
CHAUCER WAS APPARENTLY AWAY ON some diplomatic mission when King Edward died—at any rate his name is missing from the list of courtiers given mourning clothes on June 21—and he may have been away again, or still, at the time of the coronation of young Richard. But while he worked abroad, probably still in desperate pursuit of more lasting treaties and of some marriage arrangement through which England might gain at least brief respite from war, and a chance to deal with her troubles at home, the poet must have listened eagerly to any snippet of news from across the Channel. The new king’s policies, and England’s complex problems, would have profound effects on Chaucer’s life and poetry.
When Richard succeeded to the throne, he was a boy of ten. He was the nation’s great hope, as was the boy-king Arthur in popular tales, or the New King Arthur, Edward III, Richard’s grandfather, when he succeeded incompetent, indifferent Edward II; and in sign of their conviction that all would now be well, his people gave him, in the words of the chronicler now generally known as the monk of Evesham, a coronation “celebrated with great ceremony of a sort never seen anywhere before, in the presence of the archbishops, bishops, other prelates of the church, and all the magnates of his realm.”1 The pageantry and high ritual, universally applauded, were closely supervised and partly designed by Richard’s uncle, the Steward of England, John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster, who presided over the Court of Claims and later with his own hands delivered to the Chancery an exact record of the proceedings. It was all part of his high-minded plan to drag the nation back to unity, which is to say, to end the era of dissension and suspicion which Edward’s long and costly wars had helped bring on and of which Gaunt himself was, in rude heads, the principal symbol.
Gaunt had regularly opposed the growing power of Commons, had sought to crush every possible threat to crown influence and had sought to extend that influence wherever possible, for instance by sponsoring speeches and sermons throughout the London area, wherein the learned John Wyclif might advance his arguments against Church control of secular offices. Wyclif was a bespectacled, soft-spoken scholar, a would-be Church reformer whose position on politics was honest enough: he was no toadie to Gaunt or any other man; and Gaunt’s respect for Wyclif in the mid-seventies was not mere political opportunism. Gaunt had thought a good deal on political theory and, though he supported some clerics, was in general convinced that even the appearance of rule from Rome or, worse, from Avignon, in France, where the papacy was at present “captive,” was dangerous. But Gaunt’s open backing of an outspoken Church radical who opposed the sometimes greedy and self-interested rule of English or foreign bishops and proposed, instead, secular rule—rule by men like Gaunt—could not help looking suspicious. In any event, Gaunt’s use of a churchman and of Church pulpits in his own political war against Church power threw the fat in the fire. Priests who disagreed with Wyclif answered him sharply, also from the pulpit, and a battle which might have been fought behind the scenes, as most great political battles are fought, became a people’s battle, with the conservative local priest or bishop in the role of Christian hero, and Wyclif’s apparent puppet master in the role of meddling outsider, even heretic. What Gaunt intended, it was felt, was to steal Church wealth—earthly succor of the sick and poor—to pay the bills of his own Savoy Palace and of his father’s notoriously profligate court.
If the cries of “heresy” hurled at Wyclif (and Gaunt) were at first mostly rhetoric, the staff of the bishop of London soon realized the political usefulness of taking them seriously. Wyclif was vulnerable on numerous counts—for instance, his disapproval of the Eucharist—so that getting him condemned as a heretic should be easy, and his humiliation or even burning, if it came to that, would taint his political opinions and leave them too risky for future zealots to use against Church wealth. Wyclif was therefore accused and brought to trial before the bishop of London. Gaunt, feeling partly responsible for the position in which Wyclif found himself, and recognizing the ecclesiastical trial as at least to a large extent a cynical political move, a mockery of true religion, angrily broke up the hearings.
Invading that trial, asserting power by show of arms where he had none by law, Gaunt of course roused the angry indignation of all Londoners, men who jealously guarded their right to govern, inside London’s walls, with nearly absolute authority. Gaunt�
�s overreaching of his rightful authority did indeed have the look of an attempt to expand government power, if not his own direct power, and nothing in his subsequent pursuit of reconciliation with London did anything much to allay that suspicion. Nevertheless, he did, in his own haughty terms, work for reconciliation.
As Chaucer must have known well, to Londoners and other of his enemies Gaunt seemed far more powerful and dangerous than he was. It had been inevitable that, in 1377, with the Black Prince dead and King Edward dying, Gaunt should be regarded as the real center of government and the man responsible for its mistakes. If he disagreed at times with Alice Perrers and the hated London merchants with whom she worked so closely—victuallers like Brembre, whose power Gaunt sought to check by backing their political and economic enemies the mercers—Gaunt’s loyalty to the king precluded his publicizing his disagreement with Alice and her cronies. If he had doubts about the policies of the new force emerging in government, those former retainers of the Black Prince who would become Richard’s favorite servants and advisers, urging him toward a risky absolutist stance in defiance of the power of the magnates, Gaunt’s loyalty to Richard and to his own late brother kept him from expressing those doubts in public. And so Gaunt led the administration, arguing positions not always his own, haughtily defending even the king’s right to give away millions to his mistress.
The chronicler Walsingham speaks of the ugly rumors in circulation in the days of the Good Parliament of 1376 and afterward, how Gaunt lived in open sin with his daughter’s governess (that much was true), how he’d poisoned the sister of his beloved first wife Blanche for her inheritance and was seeking to poison his nephew Richard, how he was plotting with England’s enemy, France, to get a Papal bull declaring Richard illegitimate, how Gaunt was in fact no prince at all but a Flemish changeling smuggled into the abbey at Ghent in place of the daughter who had been born to Queen Philippa. And the rumors won some credit. Parliament’s explicit recognition of Richard as heir to the throne encouraged the suspicion that Gaunt had personal designs on it—a suspicion useful to those magnates who believed, rightly, that Gaunt’s influence in public affairs might threaten their own private interests or limit their opportunities for self-advancement.
But for all the suspicions to the contrary, nothing could have been farther from John of Gaunt’s mind than raising old Norman or Angevin precedents of setting aside the direct royal heir for an immediate member of the family more competent to rule, that is, someone like himself. He loved his bright-eyed, eager nephew as he’d loved the boy’s father. Gaunt had been to the Black Prince not only a brother but closest friend, and important elements of the plan Gaunt pursued—among others, his reconciliation with the Londoners—originated not with Gaunt himself, who detested the thought, but with the dying older brother and gentle Princess Joan.
In short, from well before the death of King Edward in 1377, Gaunt and those around him—including Geoffrey Chaucer, who would prove himself the boy’s brave and faithful friend—had based their hopes on no one but Richard.
Gaunt and his friends aimed at an ideal close to that of Edward I, a powerful monarchy responsive to the people, buttressed by a faithful and chivalric royal family with vast land holdings, kinship-bound barons, and vassals to support them in their support of the crown. Gaunt was, after all, not only a chivalrous knight but also an art collector and poetry reader; he fully understood the doctrine, especially popular with poets, of “courtesy”—mutual dependence and love up and down the feudal chain, a theme Chaucer would introduce years later into a poem (the Legend of Good Women) to be read at Richard’s court, apparently because by that time Richard needed to be reminded. Gaunt needed no such lessons in courtesy. Like Steward Thomas of Lancaster before him, he took his duty to England seriously; unlike Thomas, he hated the faintest whiff of treason.
The great coronation ceremony for Richard was a part of Gaunt’s plan, then, to bring the nation back to unity and focus all attention and loyalty on the king. In the Bad Parliament of 1377 Gaunt had made Prince Richard formal president of the proceedings, underscoring the legitimacy of his nephew’s heir-apparency, and had engineered the peacemaking general pardon for all civil and criminal offenses, in honor of what was called King Edward’s “jubilee year”—Gaunt’s invention. He worked diligently, as we’ve said, to patch up his quarrel with London, and when the Londoners repeatedly held back from parley with him, suspecting a trap, he forced the issue by a dramatic and highly calculated gesture: with Londoners present at the royal manor of Sheen, where Richard II, his mother, and his uncles were assembled to mourn King Edward, Gaunt fell at the young king’s feet and begged him to take the matter into his own hands and pardon the citizens, as he himself was ready to pardon them. He showed no sign of awareness that he himself should require pardon from the Londoners, and his appeal for the king’s pardon implicitly denied London’s claim to virtual self-rule; but the gesture was effective. The Londoners, before they had time to think, were moved. Once again Gaunt had thrown the spotlight onto Richard, and to enhance his nephew’s prestige still further, Gaunt “accepted” reconciliation through Richard with an old enemy, the bishop of Winchester, one of Wyclif’s opponents. As May McKisack writes, “Walsingham’s comment is just what [Gaunt] would have desired: ’O happy auspice that a boy so young should of his own accord (nullo impellente) show himself so solicitous for peace; that with no one to teach him he should know how to be a peacemaker!’”2
The same purpose is evident in the modifications in the coronation ceremony, probably also designed by Gaunt but perhaps by his friend Archbishop Sudbury. The archbishop’s question to the people, whether they would give their will and consent to the new king, is for the first time placed after the coronation oath, transforming the people’s role to consent and allegiance, obscuring the ancient English notion of election and heightening the real and symbolic power of the crown, source of national coherence. And a novel interpretation is given to the ritual moment when the magnates touch the new king’s crown: the act binds the lords to service and support and to easing the burdens of the royal office. In a nation on fire with the private wars of magnates—a nation traditionally hypersensitive to symbol (as was Gaunt himself, not to mention King Richard)—it was a theatrical touch that could hardly fail to move the assembly to tears of joy and devotion.
And so the symbolic marriage of king and state was performed, and both the groom, “another Absalon,” and the bride, England, seemed beautiful and young. The bankrupt government spared no expense, and neither did merchants or common people. The celebration was so filled with banners and noise and gorgeous dress, to say nothing of carts, tents, horses, jugglers, and bellowing drunks in the surrounding streets, that for the hundreds who got there late there was no place to stand. High hopes were evident everywhere, especially among the “lesser people.” They thought of the king’s splendid father and grandfather, then looked at Richard—handsome, like all Melusine’s children, unquestionably intelligent, as firm, even obstinate, as any Plantagenet that had ever seen daylight, and yet, like Edward III, not unreasonable—and their spirits soared. As one contemporary poet put it,
This stok is of the samë rotë; [stock…root]
An ympë beginnës for to growë,
And yit I hopë schal ben ur botë! [be our salvation]
The poet’s paradox should have been right; Richard did have that salvation-bearing scion-of-Satan “imp” in him, and perhaps somewhere in Europe Geoffrey Chaucer and his diplomat friends, having heard that today was the day of coronation, toasted the faraway ten-year-old king with tears in their eyes, as there were tears in the eyes of their kinsmen at home, believing that now all was well, all was changed. But such optimism could not last.
England’s situation was completely out of control, and even if Richard had been a seasoned warrior, a full-grown prince, for all his intelligence and courage and roaring popularity with the people, he might well have proved a straw in the whirlwind. As a mere child, he
could do little beyond raising a few close friends to earlships—among others his young uncle Thomas of Woodstock, who would later betray him, to earl of Buckingham (afterward duke of Gloucester), and his beloved old tutor and guardian Guichard d’Angle to earl of Huntingdon. All real power lay with his formal counsellors and advisers.
The new king’s first council, created largely in the patriotic and charitable spirit Gaunt had fostered, was a representative, even democratic council designed to block any one individual or clique, including Gaunt’s, from gaining permanent control of policy. None of the king’s uncles—Gaunt, Thomas of Woodstock, and Edmund Langley—had a seat, though they were made jointly responsible for preventing bribery or corruption. The government, and especially John of Gaunt, had dramatized its good faith, and the Commons had accepted it. But if 1377 was no time for tyrants, it was also no time for a fumbling democratic committee—and there was no third choice.
The Anglo-French war of 1369-89 was the most serious military challenge to the English government since the French invasion of 1216, and it was not only to Geoffrey Chaucer, still struggling in vain to win some marriage alliance, that Richard’s first year on the throne seemed a disaster. “In this year,” the monk of Evesham writes,
there was a complete collapse of the peace negotiations.…During this same period, the Scots burnt the town of Roxburgh at the instigation of the earl of Dunbar. As a result lord Henry Percy, the new earl of Northumberland, entered the earl of Dunbar’s land with ten thousand soldiers…burnt the towns subject to Dunbar, and plundered the area for three days.
