Iron, Fire and Ice

by Ed West

  Even early in his reign the boy-king acted with impunity, and unwisely. He disobeyed his grandfather’s will by taking land Edward had earmarked for three monasteries and giving to his friend Simon Burley. He rejected the bride chosen for him, one of the fantastically wealthy Duke of Milan’s many daughters, and instead married Anne of Bohemia, the sister of the German Emperor, Wenzel the Drunkard (he liked a drink).

  At the end of 1381, Roger Mortimer, the Earl of March, died during a scuffle with rebel chiefs in Ireland, continuing a family tradition of dying young and violently. Mortimer was the great-grandson of his namesake hanged at Tyburn, but Edward III had restored the family to the land soon after and his grandson had fought so well for the king that he had become a Knight of the Garter. Indeed, Roger Mortimer had married King Edward’s granddaughter, so his two young children were heirs apparent to the crown. The king, rather than placing their land in safe trust, as was expected, gave it to his cronies—Burley, Robert de Vere, and Michael de la Pole.

  Richard’s chancellor, Lord Scrope, refused to play a part in such a theft, and the magnates forced the king to create a committee to run the Mortimer property instead, led by two of the most outspoken critics of the king’s land grab: Thomas de Beauchamp, the Earl of Warwick, whose mother was a Mortimer; and the king’s uncle Thomas of Woodstock, also related to the late Roger Mortimer’s children. As with every aspect of the conflict that followed, people’s loyalties were defined by their blood relationship. These two men would form the nucleus of the opposition to the king.

  When Parliament met at Salisbury in November 1384, there was great anger among the leading men of the realm. Another of the king’s critics, Richard Fitzalan, the Earl of Arundel, launched an attack on his behavior. Arundel was the grandson of Henry of Lancaster, and so through his mother was a kinsman of Richard’s cousin Henry of Derby, known as Bolingbroke in Shakespeare’s plays. Fitzalan was also the Admiral of the West and an ally of Thomas of Woodstock, both men opposed to the peace with France which Richard had pursued.

  In Parliament, the king listened and after a pause exploded in a rage, stunning the ensembled noblemen as he threatened Arundel. Attempts by churchmen to reconcile the king and his enemies at Salisbury failed when rumor spread of a plot on the monarch’s life, with his uncle John of Gaunt being behind it. Hearing allegations made against Gaunt, the burly, violent Thomas of Woodstock threatened anyone, even the king himself, who might harm his brother.

  And indeed, Richard had in fact planned his uncle Gaunt’s murder. Since the death of the old monarch, Gaunt had been in effect the ruler of the kingdom, and it was common when boy-kings ascended the throne for an uncle to take charge (just as Tyrion rules for Joffrey, and Charles’s uncles in France). Yet Richard, still just seventeen, could not abide his father’s brother, and increasingly felt threatened by him.

  In February 1385, a meeting of the king’s council descended into open shouting between Richard and his uncles Gaunt and Woodstock. That same night de Vere and another of the king’s companions, the Earl of Mowbray, tried to have Gaunt arrested, but the royal uncle, watchful and paranoid, had slipped away. Ten days later, after a private row with his nephew, in which he told him to rule justly like a king, Gaunt escaped into the night, and onto his own territory in the north-west.

  At the next meeting of the council, William Courtenay, the Archbishop of Canterbury, criticized Richard’s rule and the unlawful murder of enemies, and the king flew into a temper. Courtenay came from the most powerful family in the south-west, who held the earldom of Devon, and was not without allies. The meeting broke up in acrimony, with Woodstock trying to calm both sides. A reconciliation meeting on a barge on the Thames ended with the king lunging at the shaken archbishop, the hysterical monarch held back by his uncle Woodstock.

  Medieval Europe was hostile to new men, the Littlefingers of this world, who inevitably had to be ruthless to get so far, and so there was disgust when in November 1385 Richard made parliament promote Michael de la Pole to Earl of Suffolk. De la Pole’s father was a wool merchant and to his aristocratic detractors his low-born ancestry made him contemptible, and yet the following year Richard raised de Vere again to Duke of Ireland, without asking his leading lords.

  In 1385 opportunity arose for the king when Gaunt sailed to Spain, having married Constance, daughter of the murdered King Pedro the Cruel, claiming the throne on behalf of his wife. Instead Richard fell into conflict with Gaunt’s younger brother Thomas of Woodstock, two men who could not have been less suited, tempramentally. Whereas Richard was a complex bundle of neurosis and psychological complexes, his uncle was straightforward and popular, but also quick-tempered and indiscreet. The following year parliament rejected de la Pole’s request for more money for the crown, and instead impeached him and put him in jail. Within weeks the king simply ignored them by having him freed.

  Richard’s list of opponents grew longer; in 1384, Thomas Mowbray, Earl of Norfolk and one of the king’s allies, had married Elizabeth Fitzalan, the daughter of Arundel. A descendant of Edward I, Mowbray had fought in Scotland and held the title of Warden of the East March and, after his father had been killed on his way to the Holy Land, had become a ward of the king. Now he came under Arundel’s sphere of influence.

  Then in 1387 Richard turned on his enemies, Woodstock, Arundel, and Warwick, as well as two others, Scrope and Cobham. He forced Parliament to declare restrictions on royal power illegal and made magistrates agree to the arrest of “traitors” in Parliament. When a magistrate objected to this blatantly illegal act, de Vere punched him in the face. And so Woodstock went to his seat of Gloucester in the south-west to raise men, while Warwick headed for his in the midlands; Arundel now strengthened his defences, as did Mowbray. The other leading lord, Henry of Derby, wavered, seeking his father Gaunt’s advice from Spain by letter, some 1,300 miles away from Lancashire.

  In real life there were no crows to deliver messages over long distances, although homing pigeons had been used since the ancient Persians and both Greeks and Romans employed them. King Sargon of Akkadia, modern-day Iraq, was known to use pigeons in the twenty-third century BC, ordering that all messengers carry a bird and if they were caught to release it so that the secret would not be captured and the pigeon would fly back to the king. During the crusades, Richard the Lionheart’s men captured a pigeon on its way to a besieged Muslim town telling them an army would arrive in three days; a forged message was put in place telling them no help would come, and they surrendered. However, their use was still more common in the Middle East at this time and would not become so widespread in the west until the nineteenth century. Although King’s Landing is five hundred leagues from Winterfell—1,500 miles or the distance between Boston and Miami—the longest recorded flight for a trained pigeon, by the US Army Signal Corps, was an astonishing 2,300 miles.3

  In November 1387, the three rebels, Woodstock, Arundel, and Warwick, swore an oath to each other, so becoming the Lords Appellant, and calling for the impeachment of five men, among them de la Pole and de Vere.

  On the 17th of that month Richard sat with his court in Westminster Hall, waiting for the Appellants to come. Finally, the three lords, dressed in full armor, turned up to greet the king; they linked arms, reiterating their demands. He agreed to them . . . and then promptly went back on his word. Instead he sent de la Pole to Paris to seek help from the King of France, but the hapless earl was recognized in Calais and arrested. The favorite was sent back to King Richard, who allowed him to escape the country.

  And now the Appellants had grown from three to five, with Mowbray and Derby joining the rebellion. Gaunt’s son was potentially the most dangerous enemy the king could have had, ahead of Woodstock in the succession and the first fully-grown man in line. Henry was the same age as Richard and from the age of nine had been sent to live with him, although they were never close, and were opposites in temperament. Derby was obsessed with jousting and war, considered among the best tournament fighters in Euro
pe, and had been on crusade. He was also tremendously wealthy, even without his father’s vast fortune, being married to the Duke of Hereford’s younger daughter Mary de Bohun, making him brother-in-law to his uncle Thomas. Through his mother he also controlled Lancaster, a county palatinate possessing semi-independent powers.

  De Vere had raised five thousand men in Cheshire, a county that had always been loyal to the sovereign, from where the monarch traditionally recruited soldiers for battle with the Welsh. The Cheshiremen, led by the brutal captain of Chester castle, Thomas Molyneux, followed de Vere toward London, but the Appellants had cut them off; instead the king’s ally was forced to head for the river Thames through the Cotswolds, also known as the Vale of Evesham and one of the richest parts of the realm, its wealth founded in wool production.

  And when the Cheshire men arrived in the town of Stowe, they found themselves surrounded by the armies of the five lords. Soon de Vere’s men were trapped as Woodstock emerged from behind them, with Lancaster’s army to his right. De Vere tried to rally his troops but, realizing that their nerve was about to waver, he fled, and slowly but with growing momentum the Cheshiremen began to run, too. Fighting to the last was Molyneux, who was caught by an old enemy, Thomas Mortimer, the illegitimate son of Roger. Mortimer, unlike most bastards, had been raised in his father’s household and treated almost like a true-born son, and had come to work for his great-uncle, Woodstock. Molyneaux pleaded for his life, but Mortimer took off his opponent’s helmet so he could stick a dagger into his eye.

  The common soldiers from Cheshire surrendered, and after being stripped of their possessions they were allowed to go home. De Vere had made a remarkable escape through the mist—at one point an archer fired and almost killed him but he managed to find a bridge and ditch his expensive armor underneath. From there he rode back on his horse along the Thames toward London, bringing the disastrous news to his king.

  And it was disastrous.

  On New Year’s Day 1388, the arrests of Richard’s favorites began, along with their chamberlains, treasures, stewards, clerks, and sergeants-at-law. With the king helpless against his enemies, the Appellants and their men went through the Palace of Westminster, rounding up the servants of the five most wanted men and stripping their possessions, finding de Vere’s bedroom at Westminster filled with treasures from his time at the heart of power.

  Yet the Appellants were disunited about how to proceed. Whatever the king’s faults, he was still king; Warwick, Mowbray, and Derby never considered removing the monarch, but Woodstock was tempted to grab the throne himself. Arundel supported him, but Mowbray and Derby, his senior in succession terms, opposed the idea, and so for now Richard survived.

  But with the king powerless to prevent them, their revenge was brutal. De Vere, de la Pole and two others who had left the country were convicted in absentia of treason and sentenced to death. Now came the turn of Sir Simon Burley. He had done more than anyone to spread corruption in the court, but he was also popular, and Mowbray and Bolingbroke spoke in his defense, but were voted down, and even when Richard asked his uncle Edmund of York to plea for Burley’s life the leading opponents could not be persuaded. After three months of the Merciless Parliament, all of Richard’s friends had been dragged to their deaths or exiled. The king was totally alone.

  De la Pole died in Paris in 1389; another favorite, Alexander Neville, expired in Louvain in Flanders three years later. Robert de Vere had also made it to Flanders, where in 1392 he was killed by a boar, a not uncommon form of death and one that finishes off Robert Baratheon, too. Boar-hunting, usually done with an alaunt, a now extinct breed of hound thought to be the ancestor of the bulldog, was dangerous. Gaston de la Foix wrote of boars in Livre de la Chasse that “I have seen them kill good knights, squires and servants,” while Richard’s nephew Edward of Norwich in his book The Master of Game observed: “The boar slayeth a man with one stroke, as with a knife. Some have seen him slit a man from knee up to breast and slay him all stark dead with one stroke.”

  In May 1389, Richard declared himself old enough to rule and announced that the past was put behind him; inside he was burning with hatred and planning his revenge. The paranoid king could trust only three people now—his Holland brothers and another old friend, John Montague. He became more tyrannical and eccentric, sitting in silence on his throne for hours on end, his crown upon his head, each person in the room forced to bend their knee whenever he looked their way. He spent lavishly, giving out largesse to supporters, and entertained hopes of becoming German emperor.

  His wife Queen Anne died in 1394 and when Arundel arrived late at Westminster Abbey for her requiem, Richard seized a cane and hit him over the head, the earl falling down injured. As people looked on in horror, Richard repeatedly beat him until blood ran down the gutter, and he may have killed him were he not in church. Afterward Arundel spent several weeks in the Tower and was fined £40,000.

  The moment now come, in July 1397 Arundel was invited to a dinner with the king, and unaware of what was happening, was arrested and sentenced to death. In September the king sent armed retainers to Pleshey Castle in Essex, home of Thomas of Woodstock, where he was awoken and arrested too. Parliament was called and surrounded by the king’s three hundred Cheshire archers, their bows pulled back and aimed at the nervous members. John of Gaunt, now returned from Spain, was forced to take part in a show trial where Arundel was sentenced to death, while Warwick escaped execution after pathetic pleading, and was instead sent to the Isle of Man to live in poverty. When the time came to pass sentence on Woodstock it was announced that the royal uncle was already dead, of natural causes, although the king had certainly had him strangled with a towel.4 Even his enemies’ children were disinherited, their land distributed to Richard’s supporters, and the king threatened that he would pardon everyone but fifty “unknown individuals.”

  In a letter to the count of Holland in the winter of 1397-1398, Richard justified his behavior in increasingly hysterical terms, stating that the children of traitors must be “forever shut off from reaching the height of any dignity or privilege, that posterity may learn what it is to offend the royal majesty, established at howsoever tender years.” concluding “For he is a child of death who offends the king.”5 Then in March 1398 the heir to the throne, the young Roger Mortimer, was killed in Ireland aged just twenty-four—no one was in Richard’s way now.

  The Appellants who had opposed Burleigh’s execution had been left out of his vengeance; at this point, however, these two men fell out. Mowbray had told Henry of Derby of a rumor he heard of a royally-approved plot to murder them for their previous rebellion: “We are about to be undone” he warned him. Derby, unnerved, had told his father, who then informed the king—and the two men accused each other of lying.

  And so to resolve the dispute, Richard ordered that they settle it by the laws of chivalry—a joust.

  24

  A SONG OF HEROIC DEEDS

  I don’t fight in tournaments because when I fight a man for real, I don’t want him to know what I can do.

  —NED STARK

  The large-scale cavalry perfected by the Normans was difficult and took a great deal of coordination, skill, and courage—and most of all practice. So in the tenth century, there arose “tourneys” or tournaments, huge sporting events where knights could hone their skill in battle.

  The popular idea of tournaments, and the kind we see in Westeros where the Knight of the Flowers fights the Mountain, is the late medieval version of the fifteenth century. By this point the sport was dressed up with romance and chivalry, with women in attendance giving out prizes (as well as the possibility of sexual rewards). However, earlier tourneys were far less decorous, and they were also extremely dangerous, scarcely less so than battle. Also called behourd in French, these events had originated in northern France, naturally the same place where horse-breeding and cavalry was most advanced, the first recorded tournament held near Tournai in 1095; the local lord, Count Henry III o
f Louvain, was killed in that event.

  There were essentially two types of fights, the one-on-one joust and the melee. The joust came from the twelfth century game of pas d’armes—passage of arms—in which a knight would stand on a bridge or narrow pass and challenge anyone to pass him, assuming they were of the same rank. The melee in constrast often involved as many as a hundred knights on each side, attempting to take the opponent’s base and capture them. Tournament meant literally “to whirl around,” and that was often what happened as a knight was dragged from his horse and thrown onto the ground. Before a melee the knights had to decide whether they would fight a l’outrance, to the death, which meant using sharp weapons, or a plaisance, with restricted weapons, which was merely to score points. The battleaxe was not permitted in any tournaments.

  One factor driving this sport was the peace movement of the eleventh century. The Church instituted something called the Truce of God, pressuring rival lords to agree not to attack each other for four days a week; it also decreed that violence was not permitted near a church, and so villages began to grow around these holy buildings. The religious authorities also ruled that certain people—clerics, women, and others—were exempt and were not to be harmed. Tournaments, therefore, partly developed as sort of toleration zones for violence, and although brutal, they were an accepted feature of life among the aristocracy; Henry III tried to ban them but only because he feared they would promote conspiracies.

  Tournaments were staged regularly—there was at least one every fortnight somewhere in western Europe—and would attract huge numbers of entrants, there being an almost limitless supply of hungry, violent young knights. (In Westeros hedge knights are poor men not affiliated to any particular house, and in real life there were gradations of men-at-arms, from lowly bannerets to batchelors to knights.)