Shakespeare's Kings

by John Julius Norwich

  It certainly had no effect on his expenditure. Apart from his normal extravagances, Richard was now spending vast sums on the remodelling of Westminster Hall, first built as a banqueting hall by the Conqueror's son William Rufus almost exactly three centuries before. With a length of 240 feet and 70 feet across, it was already by far the largest Norman hall in England, and probably in Europe; but it had been badly damaged by fire in 1291, and though restored under Edward II it had never regained its former splendour till Richard took it in hand in 1394. Architecturally speaking, the moment could hardly have been more propitious. The King had as his master mason one of the greatest of medieval architects, Henry Yevele, who had recently completed the nave of Westminster Abbey; with Yevele was a carpenter of genius, Hugh Herland. Together, over a period of seven years, these two men produced a new Hall which, though no longer or broader than William's, was higher and infinitely more magnificent. Its chief glory was - and is - Herland's timber roof, 92 feet above the floor, the earliest large hammerbeam roof in England with the widest unsupported span; surely the finest anywhere. The Hall soon became the centre of administrative life, the setting for council meetings and often for parliaments themselves; it was to house the law courts until 1882. Here, without any question, was Richard's greatest gift to his country: for Westminster Hall alone he deserves our lasting gratitude.

  When the parliament rose, Gloucester and Arundel - who may well have been behind Haxey's petition - made little effort to conceal their disgust. They were concerned, too, at the rapid rise to power and influence of the King's new favourite, Edward Earl of Rutland; and they were irritated, to say the least, both by Richard's continued efforts to secure the canonization of Edward II and by his shameless intriguing for the crown of the Holy Roman Empire. In February they provoked a fresh outburst of royal wrath by deliberately ignoring his summons to a Council; soon afterwards, at a royal banquet held at Westminster in early July, Gloucester complained of the concessions being made to the French, including the surrender to them of Brest and Cherbourg three months before.1 Whether he and Arundel, and perhaps Warwick - of whose doings over the past decade we know comparatively little, but who now returns to a position of some prominence - were actively plotting against the King, we shall never know. It seems unlikely; but rumours of a conspiracy soon spread, and Richard was not prepared to take any chances. He had had enough of his uncle and his friends; he would suffer them no more.

  It was somehow typical of Richard's character that he should have invited his enemies to a banquet — which Thomas Walsingham was to compare with the one given by Herod at which Salome danced for the head of John the Baptist. Gloucester pleaded ill-health; Arundel also declined. Of the three, only Warwick accepted, and was initially given a warm welcome by the King; only when the feasting was over was he seized and led away to the Tower. A few weeks later Arundel was also captured — once again by trickery, Richard having sworn a solemn oath to his brother the Archbishop that he should suffer no bodily harm. He was confined to Carisbrooke Castle until such time as his fate should be decided. There remained only Gloucester. This time the King was resolved on a show of strength. With a numerous retinue which included his half-brothers Thomas and John Holland — now Earls of Kent and Huntingdon respectively - the Earls of Rudand and Nottingham and a sizeable contingent of his own household troops, he rode down by night to his uncle's castle at Pleshey in Essex; since Gloucester had refused his earlier invitation, he explained, he had no alternative but to come himself to fetch him. Taken totally by surprise, the Duke could only beg for mercy; Richard replied that he should have all the mercy that he had shown to Sir Simon Burley, for whose life the Queen had knelt in vain before him nine years before. Gloucester was dispatched in close custody to Calais to await his fate - which was not to be long in coming.

  Judgement was passed at the next parliament - the last of the reign — which met on 17 September 1397. The charges were essentially those

  The two ports had in fact been pledged to the English in April 1378 for the duration of the war, in return for some £20,000. With the war's end and the conclusion of the twenty-eight-year truce there was no justification for retaining them.

  of treason - committed nine years before, at the time of the Merciless Parliament, when the three accused had been themselves the accusers; and the procedure followed was much the same. This time the appeal was laid by eight lords, including Richard's half-brothers Kent and Huntingdon and his cousins the Earls of Rutland and Somerset.1 Westminster Hall being under restoration, a temporary pavilion had been erected in the palace yard, open at the sides and with an immense throne on a high platform. A somewhat more sinister note was struck at the opening session by the presence of the King's personal bodyguard of some four hundred Cheshire archers, specially recruited for the occasion.

  The first surprise after the proceedings had begun was the appearance of a fourth defendant: Arundel's brother Thomas, who had been promoted from the Archbishopric of York to that of Canterbury in the previous year. In such circumstances it was surprising that he should now have been impeached on the grounds of his complicity in the events of 1386-8; the reason was almost certainly that he had refused the King's command to appoint a lay proctor to speak for the clergy -an important preliminary, since churchmen were barred by their cloth from all legal processes which might result in bloodshed. He was given no opportunity to defend himself against the charges, and on 25 September was sentenced to the confiscation of his possessions and perpetual banishment.

  The eight Appellants then appeared, wearing robes of red silk bordered in white and embroidered with gold. Bowing low before the King, they requested that the three accused should now be summoned before the assembly one by one, to answer the charges laid against them. First came the Earl of Arundel, whose indictment was read out to him by John of Gaunt in his capacity as High Steward of England. Indignantly, the Earl pleaded that he had already received two pardons from the King; Gaunt pointed out that these had both been formally revoked, and the two were still arguing over their validity when the Speaker, Sir John Bushey,2 interrupted and demanded Arundel's

  Thomas Holland had been created Earl of Kent in 1380, his brother John, Earl of Huntingdon in 1388; Rutland was the son of the King's uncle Edmund, Duke of York, Somerset the recently legitimized son of John of Gaunt.

  He is sometimes known as Sir John Bussy. I prefer Shakespeare's version of the name.

  immediate condemnation, at which the Appellants all flung down their gloves. The trial was over. Gaunt pronounced the customary sentence of the gallows, for which the King immediately substituted the more honourable one of the block. Arundel was led off to Tower Hill where, in the presence of Kent, Somerset and his own son-in-law Nottingham, his head was severed from his shoulders.

  Parliament now turned its attention to Gloucester, but was informed that the Duke was already dead. Significantly, the precise circumstances of his death were not discussed; few of those present can have been in any doubt that he had been murdered at Calais by the King's command. It remained important, however, that he should be formally branded a traitor, to allow the confiscation of his property; so he too was found guilty of treason — had he not appeared fully armed at Haringey in 1387? - his estates being forfeited to the Crown. There remained only Warwick. 'Like a wretched old woman,' writes Adam of Usk scornfully, 'he made confession of all, wailing and weeping and whining, traitor that he was, and submitting himself in all things to the King's grace.' He too was condemned to the scaffold; but — possibly because he gave useful incriminating evidence against Gloucester - Richard commuted his sentence to one of perpetual banishment on the Isle of Man.1

  With his enemies now safely eliminated, the King could properly reward those who had remained loyal. No less than five received dukedoms: to Bolingbroke - despite his previous record - went that of Hereford; to Mowbray, Norfolk; to John Holland, Exeter; to Thomas Holland, Surrey; to Rutland, Albemarle - or, as Shakespeare calls him, Aumerle. For t
he Crown Richard annexed the county of Cheshire,2 together with some of the former Arundel property next to it in the Welsh marches. All this was approved by the Parliament, which on 30 September took a solemn oath to uphold all its acts in perpetuity. It was then adjourned till 27 January 1398, when, the King announced,

  He was in fact soon afterwards brought back to England and imprisoned in the Tower, where he remained until he was freed by Henry IV.

  The special position of Cheshire goes back to Domesday, when the county seems first to have acquired palatine status together with certain special privileges. It was there that the Black Prince had been accustomed to raise the majority of his troops; and Richard, as we have seen, had already attempted to do the same in 1387 as well as on the present occasion.

  it would meet at Shrewsbury, a city conveniently close to the Cheshire border.

  He would have been better advised to dissolve it altogether. He had achieved his primary object where his enemies were concerned, at the cost of far less bloodshed than had been seen in 1388; and although his treatment of Arundel had caused something of an outcry, there had been curiously little reaction to the death of Gloucester. Had he been content to leave the matter there, he might yet have succeeded in holding the kingdom together. But his revenge was not yet complete, and it was his determination to carry it through to the end that was to prove his undoing. We can discount Walsingham's stories of his being tormented by the ghost of Arundel, whose body he is said to have had exhumed lest the Earl be venerated as a martyr; in such a case he is hardly likely to have agreed to a four-month adjournment. Richard was not afraid; he was, on the contrary, over-confident—and dangerously vindictive.

  The Shrewsbury session did not take long. It began with a formal request, by seven of the former eight Appellants, for the repeal of all the acts and judgements of the Merciless Parliament, 'done without authority and against the will and liberty of the King and the right of his Crown*. The earldom of Suffolk was then restored to the de la Pole family, and fresh oaths were sworn on the lines of those taken at Westminster the previous September to maintain the acts of the present Parliament, with any future attempts to reverse them being considered acts of treason. Trouble came only on the third day of the session. It had already been noted that one of the Appellants, Thomas Mowbray, now Duke of Norfolk, was absent; and on 30 January Henry Bolingbroke, Duke of Hereford, reported to the full assembly, at the King's command, a recent conversation with him during which, as Holinshed puts it, he had uttered 'certaine words . . . sounding highlie to the King's dishonor'. Since Mowbray left no account of the affair we are forced to rely on the parliamentary record of Henry's version, according to which, as the two were riding together from Brentford to London the month before, Mowbray remarked that they were both about to be undone because of what had happened at Radcot Bridge; and when Bolingbroke pointed out that they had both been pardoned, he assured him that, pardon or no pardon, the King intended to deal with the two of them just as he had dealt with the others. He went on to tell Henry that there was a plot, hatched by a group of lords close to the King, to kill them both at Windsor after the Parliament, together with Henry's father, John of Gaunt, the Dukes of Exeter and Albemarle and the Marquess of Dorset. They must consequently either concoct a counterplot or flee the country while there was still time.

  Richard's vindictiveness was well known, and apart from the inclusion in the list of the King's half-brother Exeter, there is nothing inherently improbable in the idea of such a plot. Whether it was true or not, however, the story was clearly damaging to Mowbray, particularly since he was not present to defend himself; and still more was it harmful to Richard, who seems to have ordered Bolingbroke to speak out only to put an end to the rumours which had been circulating for some time. He certainly had no desire to have the scandal investigated on the spot; instead, he proposed the appointment of a special committee of eighteen to look into the whole affair. Then, on 31 January, the day after Bolingbroke's testimony, he dissolved the Parliament.

  The Triumph of Bolingbroke

  [1398-1400]

  RICH.

  You may my glories and my state depose, But not my griefs; still am I King of those.

  KING RICHARD II

  After two preliminary meetings at Oswestry and Bristol, the special committee reassembled on 29 April 1398 at Windsor Castle. Now, for the first time, the two Dukes appeared face to face before the King; and it is at this point that Shakespeare raises the curtain on The Tragedie of King Richard the Second, which was entered in the Stationers' Register on 29 August 1597, though he seems to have finished it late in 1595. His version of the confrontation is derived in all its essentials from Holinshed's Chronicles,1 though he understandably takes a few small liberties. 'Old John of Gaunt, time-honoured Lancaster' - he was at the time fifty-eight - is unlikely to have been present; had he been, Holinshed would certainly have mentioned him. According to Holinshed, too, both Bolingbroke and Mowbray had unnamed knights to speak for them - though Mowbray soon took over his own defence, during which he freely admitted a past attempt on the life of Gaunt, long since confessed and pardoned. It is fascinating to compare the bald statements in Holinshed with what Shakespeare makes of them — giving them colour, life and vigour. A single example must suffice; the Chronicles report the knight who speaks for Bolingbroke:

  Here is Henry of Lancaster . . . who saith, and I for him likewise say, that

  1. Raphael Holinshed's Historie of England, which forms part of his Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland, constitutes the first authoritative continuous account in English of the whole of English history to date. The Chronicles were first published in 1577; Shakespeare, however, used John Hooker's revised and updated edition of 1587.

  Thomas Mowbraie duke of Norfolke is a false and disloiall traitor to you and your roiall maiestie, and to your whole realme . . . and likewise that Pie] hath received eight thousand nobles to pay the souldiers that keepe your towne of Calis, which he hath not doone as he ought: and furthermore [he] hath beene the occasion of all the treason that hath been contrived in your realme for the space of these eighteene yeares, and by his false suggestions and malicious counsell, he hath caused to die and to be murdered your right deere uncle, the duke of Glocester, sonne to king Edward. Moreover the duke of Hereford saith, and I for him, that he will prove this with his bodie against the bodie of the said duke of Norfolke within lists.

  Here now is Shakespeare's translation:

  Look what I speak, my life shall prove it true:

  That Mowbray hath receiv'd eight thousand nobles

  In name of lendings for your Highness' soldiers,

  The which he hath detain'd for lewd imployments,

  Like a false traitor, and injurious villain;

  Besides I say, and will in battle prove,

  Or here, or elsewhere to the furthest verge

  That ever was survey'd by English eye,

  That all the treasons for these eighteen years

  Complotted and contrived in this land

  Fetch from false Mowbray their first head and spring;

  Further I say, and further will maintain

  Upon his bad life to make all this good,

  That he did plot the Duke of Gloucester's death,

  Suggest his soon-believing adversaries,

  And consequently, like a traitor coward,

  Sluic'd out his innocent soul through streams of blood,1

  Which blood, like sacrificing Abel's, cries

  Even from the tongueless caverns of the earth

  To me for justice and rough chastisement; And, by the glorious worth of my descent, This arm shall do it, or this life be spent.

  i. According to Holinshed, Gloucester was smothered with towels in a feather bed. Beheading was the normal form of execution for those of exalted rank, but Gloucester, who had been neither tried nor condemned, was murdered rather than executed. The murder, whatever the method, took place at Calais in September 1397, almost certainl
y with the King's full knowledge and - despite his denial in I.i.133 -under Mowbray's supervision.

  Since the two disputants maintained their hostility and refused all the King's attempts at reconciliation, it was agreed that the quarrel should be settled in the traditional manner, by armed contest; and the encounter was fixed for St Lambert's Day,1 17 September, at Coventry. Word spread quickly; the public imagination was caught by the prospect of two dukes - one of them the King's own cousin - meeting each other in single combat and fighting quite possibly to the death, and noblemen and knights from all over England arrived at the little town with their ladies for what was clearly to be the social event of the year. When the great day came, one great magnate only was noticeable by his absence: John of Gaunt. After the Shrewsbury Parliament he had retired from public life, probably because the activities of his son were causing him increasing concern. (Though Froissart suggests that he fell ill only around Christmas, he may also have been already stricken by the disease that was to kill him five months later.) At any rate he never saw his son ride out to Gosford Green 'mounted on a white courser, barded with green and blue velvet, embroidered sumptuously with swans and antelopes'; nor did he hear the deafening cheers that greeted his appearance - considerably louder, we are told, than those accorded to Mowbray shortly afterwards.