Shakespeare's Kings

by John Julius Norwich

  In feet, Pope Urban was not recognized by the Scots, so the Archbishop never took up his appointment. He ended his days as a humble parish priest in Louvain, where he died in 1392. Five years later he was declared innocent of all the charges preferred against him.

  One of them was that he had plotted to change the name of London to Troynovant.

  to state categorically that Sir Nicholas deserved to die - but by now they had lost patience and condemned him anyway. On 20 February he followed Sir Robert to the scaffold.

  Now it was the turn of the lesser victims. Sir John Salisbury, one of the knights of the chamber who was believed to have been the chief intermediary in negotiations with the King of France, was hanged as a traitor; other knights, including Sir James Berners, Sir John Beauchamp and Sir Simon Burley - for whose life the Queen went down on her knees before Gloucester - were accorded only the privilege of being beheaded rather than hanged. Most of the remaining offenders were released under surety, and Parliament then settled down to the more mundane tasks of keeping the royal household under strict control, turning away any further undesirable adherents and sending most of the Queen's compatriots back to Bohemia. Finally, at a ceremony held on 3 June in Westminster Abbey, Lords and Commons together renewed their oaths of allegiance and the King gave a solemn promise: in the future, he would be good.

  Richard had been brought to heel, as he deserved to be; but the cost had been great indeed. In all but name, his power and authority had been usurped by a group of ambitious noblemen, able and willing to manipulate a weak parliament in their own interests. That parliament has gone down in history as the 'Merciless' Parliament; in fact, as the story of Sir Nicholas Brembre makes all too clear, it was the Appellants who were merciless. The parliament simply did as it was told. Nor was the fate of Brembre the only stain on its reputation. Of those executed, or sentenced to execution in their absence, some — though not all -may well have been greedy, self-seeking or irresponsible; but none were traitors, none were criminals, none deserved death. Nor did any of them stand a proper trial. Legal statutes were distorted or ignored altogether, opinions were deliberately misinterpreted as facts, proper judicial procedures were sidestepped.

  These were dangerous precedents; and those who set them must surely bear more than a little of the responsibility for the dark deeds and civil strife which cast a steadily lengthening shadow over the next hundred years of English history. On the other hand, they were not themselves revolutionaries; they might terrify Richard with threats of dethronement, but they never forgot that he was the lawful King, and they knew only too well that any attempt to replace him would create infinitely more problems than it would solve. That is why, however brutal their treatment of his friends, they were careful to spare, so far as they could, the reputation of the King himself. Never did they publicly humiliate him, as they could so easily have done; on the contrary, they were at pains to stress his youth and inexperience. He was not himself guilty of wrong-doing; he had simply been led astray. Now that those who had tried so hard to corrupt him had been removed from the scene, there was no reason why he should not make a fresh start.

  The King's Revenge

  [1388-1398]

  DUCH. But Thomas, my dear lord, my life, my Gloucester, One vial full of Edward's sacred blood, One flourishing branch of his most royal root, Is crack'd, and all the precious liquor spilt, Is hack'd down, and his summer leaves all faded, By envy's hand, and murder's bloody axe.

  KING RICHARD II

  It was not altogether surprising that, for well over a year after the dissolution of the Merciless Parliament, Richard should have maintained an uncharacteristically low profile. His innocence had been proclaimed; but he had been badly frightened and had been taught, it was hoped, a sharp lesson. He conscientiously performed the duties expected of him; presided over another parliament held at Cambridge in the autumn; made no protest when Gloucester, Arundel and their friends took over the direction of the government; and allowed himself only one furious and understandable outburst, when it was reported to him that the Scots under James, Earl of Douglas, had once again crossed the border and on 5 August 1388 at Otterburn - or Chevy Chase - between Jedburgh and Newcastle, had virtually destroyed an English army, taking prisoner Henry Percy (Shakespeare's Harry Hotspur), its commander. Of personal initiative he showed no sign - until, on 3 May 1389, he quietly and unprovocatively informed the Council that, since he was now fully of age with the mistakes of his youth far behind him, he intended henceforth to rule as a monarch should, and as his grandfather had ruled before him.

  It says much for the improvement in the domestic situation during the previous year that this announcement occasioned little concern to those who heard it. Richard was by now four months past his twenty-second birthday; he could not be kept on a leading-rein for ever. No objections were raised. Arundel made preparations to go crusading in Palestine, while Derby and Gloucester preferred the company of the Teutonic Knights in Prussia. Warwick retired to his estates. Meanwhile the sheriffs throughout the land were instructed to make public proclamations to the effect that the King had now personally assumed responsibility for government, while emphasizing that this would be administered as before through his Council, the leading members of which were now William of Wykeham, Bishop of Winchester, as Chancellor; Thomas Brantingham, Bishop of Exeter, as Treasurer; and Edmund Stafford, Chancellor of Oxford University and Dean of York, who was now appointed Keeper of the Privy Seal.

  But Richard had not altogether regained his self-confidence; he needed further support of the kind which could come only from his own family, and his thoughts inevitably turned towards his uncle, John of Gaunt. Gaunt's Spanish campaign had been only a modified success. He had succeeded in marrying off his elder daughter Philippa to King John I of Portugal and his younger, Catherine - now Catalina - to the future King Henry III of Castile, from whom he had received an indemnity of £100,000 and an annual pension of £6,000 in token of his renunciation of his claims to that kingdom; but he had achieved no throne for himself, and no permanent peace between Castile and Aragon on the one hand and England on the other. In 1387 he had left Spain for Gascony, where he was doubdess kept fully informed of the disturbing developments at home; but his eldest son's identification with the Appellants had persuaded him - probably rightly - to remain abroad until the crisis was over. Even then he might well have elected to stay in France, had he not received an urgent appeal from his nephew to return. He landed in England in November 13 89, and was welcomed with open arms. All past differences were forgotten: henceforth John stood at the King's right hand.

  Richard was now steadily strengthening his own position; one fear, however, continued to disturb him. He could not forget the veiled threat made to him by his uncle three years before, the reminder of the deposition of his great-grandfather Edward II and the warning that he himself might suffer a similar fate. In the autumn of 1390 we find him at Gloucester, where Edward was buried, arranging for perpetual devotions at his shrine and seeking confirmation of the miracles that were said to have taken place there - a necessary preliminary before submitting to the Pope a request for his canonization. A year later he extracted from Parliament a guarantee that he would be 'as free in his regality, liberty and royal dignity as any of his noble progenitors . . . notwithstanding any former statute or ordinance to the contrary, notably in the time of King Edward the Second who lies at Gloucester . . . and that if any statute was made in the time of the said King Edward, in derogation of the liberty and franchise of the Crown, it should be annulled.'

  The ghost of his great-grandfather had been laid at last. Perhaps, in retrospect, it might have been better had it continued to haunt him.

  In this penultimate chapter of Richard's reign, England was generally considered by most of its inhabitants to be at peace. True, the war in France rumbled on; but it made little impact across the Channel, and John of Gaunt had crossed over to Calais for yet another round of negotiations to bring it to an end. The
Scots were quiet. But peace, in the fourteenth century, was relative. In 1392 there were ugly scenes in London, the city having refused to grant the King one of its periodic loans. If, as the chroniclers claim, it had simultaneously granted a large one to a Lombard merchant, Richard would have had good reason to be angry; at all events he reacted with all his old impulsiveness, forcibly removing the mayor and sheriffs from office and transferring the courts and administration to York. Finally the Londoners were obliged to give in, making the King a free gift of £10,000 as the price of reconciliation. This they celebrated with a grand procession through the city; but they never entirely forgave him. When, a few years later, he would stand in need of their support, that support would not be forthcoming.

  There were other disturbances in the north, beginning in 1393 in Cheshire. These seem to have been primarily directed against the Duke of Gloucester, who had thought better of his crusade in Prussia and had now rejoined Richard's Council. Gloucester's erstwhile colleague Arundel, in his nearby castle of Holt on the river Dee, was well placed to restore order but made no attempt to do so; nor did he lift a finger when another rising took place a few weeks later in Yorkshire. John of Gaunt, the principal object of the insurgents' wrath, went so far as to accuse Arundel of actively encouraging them and ultimately extracted a grudging apology; but Arundel had grown bitter and cantankerous, and was rapidly losing the goodwill of all his former friends.

  Matters came to a head at the beginning of June 1394, with the sudden and unexpected death of the Queen at the age of twenty-seven. The heartbroken King, having ordered the immediate demolition of that part of the Palace of Sheen in which she had died, made plans for an impressive funeral at Westminster Abbey at which Arundel, having failed altogether to take part in the procession from the lying-in-state, appeared late and simultaneously requested permission to leave early. Richard, furious at what he believed, probably rightly, to be a deliberate insult, seized a rod from one of the vergers and struck him to the ground. After some weeks in the Tower, Arundel was arraigned before his sovereign at Lambeth Palace and obliged to take an oath for his subsequent good behaviour on a surety of £40,000.

  Most of the summer of 1394 Richard spent in mourning for his wife; then, towards the end of September, he left for Ireland. The visit was, he knew, long overdue. In 1368 and again in 1380, all those English lords possessing estates in Ireland had been ordered either to return to them or to make proper provision for their defence; but the order had proved unenforceable and with every year that passed the administration had become more chaotic, with the local Irish kings and chieftains penetrating deeper and deeper into the lands of the English absentees. In 1379 Edmund Mortimer, third Earl of March, had been appointed Lieutenant and had done much to retrieve the situation in Ulster; but in 1381 he was drowned crossing a ford in County Cork, and his immense estates had passed to his seven-year-old son Roger. In the following year, with the situation growing increasingly desperate, Richard had appointed his uncle Gloucester as Lieutenant, but had subsequently changed his mind for reasons unexplained; and it was by now clear not only that he must go himself, but that he must do so at once. If his visit were to be any longer postponed, all Ireland - and its revenues - would be lost. Gloucester accompanied him, together with the young Earl of March, now twenty, the Earls of Rutland, Huntingdon and Nottingham - now completely reconciled - and a number of lesser lords. His uncle Edmund, Duke of York - Rutland's father - remained behind as Keeper of the Realm; John of Gaunt returned to Gascony and Aquitaine.

  The English army landed at Waterford on 2 October 1394; but apart from the occasional small skirmish with Irish tribesmen, neither then nor later was there any serious fighting. That, as everybody knew by now, was not Richard's way. He marched by easy stages to Dublin Castle, where he settled down with his counsellors to restore law and order and re-establish his rule - essentially by confirming the chieftains in their lands in return for oaths of allegiance, granting them where necessary full legal recognition. All four Irish kings came to Dublin, where they were received with honour and granted English knighthoods, and where they cheerfully performed the acts of homage required of them. They may have been somewhat less pleased when the King insisted that they should be taught English table manners and should abandon their traditional kilts in favour of more seemly linen drawers; but they doubtless consoled themselves with the reflection that he would not be in Ireland long and that they would soon be able to revert to their old habits.

  Richard in fact delayed his departure till i May 1395, when he and his army sailed from Waterford, leaving the Earl of March to maintain control. His Irish visit had been more successful than he or any of his advisers could have hoped, and had immeasurably increased his prestige. Not only was he popular with the people; among the nobility too, opposition had melted away. Such was his new-found confidence that he decided, typically, to risk an extraordinary gesture of defiance that would, he must have known, arouse the intense indignation of all those around him. His bosom friend Robert de Vere, in exile since the end of 1387, had been killed five years later, boar-hunting near Louvain; Richard now ordered his body brought back to England for reburial in the de Vere family vault at Earls Colne in Essex. In the course of the ceremony of reconsecration he suddenly ordered the coffin opened and gazed down on the embalmed body, clasping the dead man's hands, the fingers still heavy with jewels, and adding a further ring of his own.

  Few if any of the great nobles were present at this embarrassing ceremony; most of them - one suspects rather to the King's irritation — chose to ignore it altogether. John of Gaunt, however, although he had always detested de Vere, remained rocklike in his nephew's support, his recent disappointments in Spain forgotten in the satisfaction of having finally concluded, in May 1394, a four-year truce with France. He was also much exhilarated by the demise, two months before, of his Spanish wife Constance of Castile. The two had never been close, and her death freed him to marry - with the King's willing permission - his long-time mistress Katherine Swynford, as well as to legitimize their four children.1 These last arrangements were predictably unwelcome to John's heir Henry Bolingbroke, now Earl of Derby; but the death of Henry's own wife, Mary Bohun, in July prevented him from making any active protest.

  Before long, too, plans for a still more important marriage were in the air: that of Richard himself to Isabelle, daughter of Charles VI of France.

  The advantages of a French marriage were clear. The war had now continued for almost sixty years; something must be done to bring it to an end. A permanent peace was out of the question while the English remained in Calais, the surrender of which neither Richard nor his advisers were prepared to contemplate for a moment; but a royal marriage could be expected to hold the situation for a long time to come, and the French needed little persuasion to extend the earlier four-year truce to a period of no less than twenty-eight years from the signature of the final agreement on 9 March 1396. On that occasion Richard himself travelled to Paris, where Charles VI entertained him to a ceremonial banquet and he was married by proxy to Isabelle. There was, to be sure, one drawback to the match - a drawback of which Shakespeare may have been ignorant or, more probably, which he chose to overlook: while the groom was now twenty-nine, his bride was just seven. But Richard was still deeply affected by the death of his beloved Anne, and he may well have been grateful that the Princess's youth allowed him a few more years to mend his broken heart. Meanwhile he grew genuinely fond of the little girl, who received a magnificent welcome when she arrived at Calais in October; and there is no reason to suppose that the marriage would not have turned out an extremely happy one - and probably solved the problem of the succession into the bargain - had it been given the chance to do so.

  Politically, however, there were disadvantages. One was that the French were not only England's traditional enemies; they were also schismatics. It was now nearly twenty years since Pope Gregory XI had

  1. John Beaufort, the eldest, became Earl of Somerse
t; Henry, Dean of Wells and then Cardinal Bishop of Winchester; Thomas, Duke of Exeter. Joan married Ralph Nevill, Earl of Westmorland. Tradition - but, alas, only tradition - holds that Kather-ine's elder sister Philippa was the wife of the poet Geoffrey Chaucer.

  ended the seventy-year exile of the papacy and returned to Rome; but a succession of antipopes continued, with the full support of the French King, to contest the title from Avignon, and any alliance with France would be sure to have unpleasant consequences on Richard's relations with Gregory's second successor, Boniface IX. An even graver cause for concern from the parliamentary point of view was a clause in the treaty in which the French royal house promised 'to aid and sustain [Richard] against all manner of persons who owe him any obedience, and also to aid and sustain him with all their power against any of his subjects'. There was nothing necessarily sinister in this; it could easily have been prompted by the ever-present danger of another peasants' revolt. On the other hand, Richard could equally well have had Gloucester and Arundel in mind, and the very idea of an English King summoning a French army to champion him against his own subjects was enough to make the marriage a good deal more unpopular than it might otherwise have been. It was scarcely surprising, in the circumstances, that those two noblemen in particular - and especially Gloucester, who had always detested the French - were loud in its condemnation; only the enthusiastic endorsement of John of Gaunt enabled Richard to ride out the storm and, in January 1397, to have Isabelle crowned Queen.

  In the same month Parliament met at Westminster, the first that had sat for two years. While not actively hostile to the King, it had no intention of being intimidated. At its very first session it firmly refused any financial backing for Richard's plan — the result of a rash promise to his father-in-law Charles VI - to send an army in support of the Duke of Burgundy against Gian Galeazzo Visconti of Milan. Next, on 1 February, a petition was presented in the name of one Thomas Haxey - a formerly mysterious figure whom we now know not to have been a Member of Parliament at all, but a clerk to the Court of Common Pleas and proctor to the Abbot of Selby. Its first three clauses were unexceptionable; the fourth and last, however, was an outspoken protest against the excessive cost of the royal court owing to the presence of so many bishops, fashionable ladies and their retinues. Richard would have done well to ignore it; instead he flew into one of his ever more frequent furies and appealed to the Lords, who obediently declared it to be treason for anyone to excite the Commons to reform anything affecting the person, government or regality of a King, and on 7 February condemned Haxey, by a shameless piece of retroactive legislation, to a traitor's death. The unfortunate man was in fact reprieved only three months later and received a full pardon, but the damage was done: all the doubts and uncertainties of the previous decade had been reopened, while the readiness of the Lords to oblige the King had dangerously increased his self-confidence.