The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England

by Dan Jones

  As Sudbury brought his speech to a close, there was a great clamour from the commons. They asked ‘with one voice that it might please [the king] to grant to Richard the name and honour of Prince of Wales’, just as his father had held it. They were answered that such was the king’s prerogative alone. But Richard, like the men around him, knew that he would be raised to all the titles and honours that befitted his new station before very much time had elapsed.

  Almost a year later to the day, Edward III died: alone but for a priest, stupefied by a series of strokes, barely able to speak. Thomas Walsingham wrote that Alice Perrers took the rings from his fingers before she left him for the last time. One of his last public appearances was before a deputation of Londoners, who came to Sheen and found him trussed up in cloth of gold and physically pinned into his chair in order to hold him upright. The king slipped finally out of consciousness on 21 June 1377, following a reign of just over fifty years. He was sixty-four years old. He had outlived almost all of his companions, and all of his successes.

  The old king was laid to rest on Sunday 5 July, in one of the most lavish funerals ever held in England. The procession lasted three days and cost thousands of pounds. Almost the whole of London and Westminster was draped in black cloth and lit by thousands of solemn torchbearers, dressed all in black. Archbishop Sudbury presided as the dead king’s body, draped in red samite emblazoned with a white cross, was placed inside a coffin and interred in Westminster Abbey next to his wife, Queen Philippa. During the interment, a knight entered the abbey church and presented a sword and shield as an offering. At Windsor, another ceremonial sword was placed above the royal stall in St George’s Chapel. Then the fortunes of England and the Plantagenet family were catapulted into the hands of his grandson and a generation of children who had known only the world of the 1370s: a time of devastation, corruption and decay. The whole country looked to Richard.

  His coronation took place on Thursday 16 July. The crowds who had come to London for the solemnities of the royal funeral now watched as the city blossomed: a throbbing hub of brightness and hope. As Adam Houghton, bishop of St David’s, said in an address to parliament in 1377: Richard had been sent to England by God, just as Christ had been sent to earth to redeem the people. The streets of the capital were so packed that during the royal procession from the Tower to Westminster on the evening before the coronation John of Gaunt had to cut his way through the throng with his sword. In Cheapside – the main east–west thoroughfare through the city – a conduit flowed with wine for three days: a dark purple river that led up to a large mock castle at the western end of the street. In the turrets of the castle sat little girls of Richard’s own age, dressed all in white as if to represent the sense of rebirth and repurification that came with the accession of the first new king for half a century.

  Richard, at the heart of the procession, soaked up the adulation of the masses. Next to him rode his tutor and father-figure Sir Simon Burley, the loyal soldier and servant to Richard’s father in Aquitaine, who served at Najera and had assisted the Black Prince in the sack of Limoges. He had therefore been around Richard all his life, and had certainly been closely involved in the young king’s upbringing for several years before the coronation. He would have prepared the prince for the expectation and the ceremonial process of his coronation. But he could not have prepared him for the sheer noise and excitement with which the people clamoured in the street.

  The ceremony with which Richard was crowned and anointed in the abbey on that busy Thursday afternoon would live with him all his life. At ten years old he stood before all the people of his realm and swore his solemn oath to uphold the laws and customs of his ancestors, protect the Church, do justice to all and uphold the laws that his people had ‘justly and reasonably’ chosen. Then he was presented to the whole abbey for their acclamation. This was a reversal of the usual process, by which the people would cheer in advance of the oath-swearing. It was arranged to make the clear point that this was a king who acceded by the right of his family to rule, and not by the election of the masses.

  After the cheers had subsided, Richard was anointed in holy chrism, concealed from the eyes of the congregation by a golden cloth. Oil touched his bare skin at the hands, chest, shoulders and head, sanctifying and separating him from all other men. He was handed the sceptre, sword and ring of kingship before being crowned by Archbishop Sudbury and the earl of March. It was an awe-inspiring experience for a young boy to go through. And it planted in Richard’s mind the certain knowledge that he was a king by right of God. He was carried out of the abbey raised aloft on Sir Simon Burley’s shoulders. There was such a commotion around him that one of his shoes fell off.

  This was characteristic of the experiences of Richard’s early years. On public occasion after public occasion he was cheered and honoured as a Christlike saviour of a troubled people. There were repeated calls from the kingdom’s great men for obedience to the new king: the day after the coronation, Bishop Brinton of Rochester gave a sermon demanding that everyone obey Richard for the safety of the whole kingdom. In his household he was constantly cast in his father’s image – surrounded by his old companions and exhorted to become the king that the Black Prince had never been allowed to be.

  And yet there was another side to the politics of kingship. Cheerful as the realm was to have a new king, they also had immediate and desperate requirements of him. England was in acute peril. And the summer that welcomed Richard’s coronation was also plagued by an escalating crisis of security. As the chronicler known as the monk of Evesham wrote:

  In this year … there was a complete collapse of peace negotiations [with France]; for the French refused to keep the peace unless an agreement highly favourable to themselves could be reached … During this same period, the Scots burnt the town of Roxburgh … Afterwards, the French landed in the Isle of Wight on 21 August: when they had looted and set fire to several places, they took a thousand marks as ransom for the island. Then they returned to the sea and sailed along the English coastline continuously until Michaelmas. They burnt many places and killed … all the people they could find … It is believed that at this time more evils were perpetrated than had been caused by enemy attacks on England during the previous forty years. [During a battle with French pirates at Lewes] one Frenchman was captured … who, on the point of death … declared, ‘If the English had made the duke of Lancaster their king, they would not now be invaded by Frenchmen as they are.’

  What could a boy king do against this?

  The answer was very little. England required an arrangement to govern itself while their saviour grew up from a child into a fully-formed king. The natural precedent to follow would have been from the reign of Henry III, when William Marshal had been appointed to a formal regency. But the only candidate for such a post in 1377 was – as the monk of Evesham implied – John of Gaunt. Although he had been reconciled with the commons in parliament after the storms of 1376, there was still a great deal of suspicion of Gaunt’s motives and his abilities. In February 1377 he had intervened at the trial in London of his protégé the radical scholar John Wyclif. Gaunt’s heavy-handed behaviour had prompted riots in the capital. His capacity to vex and frighten made him an unpromising candidate for an official role in the new government.

  Instead, England settled on a fudge. From his coronation onwards, Richard was held to be ruling as a king in his own right. A pretence of competence was established. A series of continual councils of twelve great men was appointed to advise him, but writs and charters were given under Richard’s seal. Government was carried out in his name, but power was exercised from his household. The men closest to him were former retainers and servants of the Black Prince, such as Burley, Sir Guichard d’Angle, who had been raised to the earldom of Huntingdon after the coronation, and Aubrey de Vere. It was by no means a perfect arrangement, but necessity dictated. The south coast was in danger, and in France and Aquitaine there were severe threats to the two most im
portant English coastal outposts: Calais and Bordeaux.

  To defend the realm, and those dwindling parcels of Plantagenet lands on the Continent, it was imperative that government begin to function fast. One pressing need was to find enough money to fight back against the French in the Channel and on the Continent. Raising taxation from the whole country was vital. Unfortunately, it was also the route to one of the most extraordinary outbursts of violence and popular rage that England would ever experience.

  England in Uproar

  The Great Revolt – or the Peasants’ Revolt, as it is more commonly called by historians – was England’s first great popular rebellion. It began as a series of village rebellions in Essex and Kent during late May and early June 1381. As royal tax inspectors and judges moved around the counties, inspecting low returns from a poll tax that had been levied in parliament in November 1380 and was collected during the following spring, they were met with coordinated resistance and violence. Royal officials were murdered and the sheriffs of Essex and Kent were snatched in kidnap raids.

  As the rebellion built momentum, bands of mounted rebels gathered and began to tour the major towns of Kent, looting and burning official records in Maidstone, Rochester and Canterbury. They were drawn from the ordinary folk of the villages, and led by the ‘better sort’ of yeomen – parish priests, village constables and well-off farmers. They targeted lawyers, royal servants and particularly odious local landowners. But they also acted with restraint and some political sense: an order was issued, according to one chronicler, ‘that no one who dwelt near the sea for the space of 12 leagues should come with them, but keep the coasts of the sea from enemies’.

  By mid-June, the Kent rebels had a leader: Wat Tyler. It was rumoured later that he had served in the French wars, but of his biography we know almost nothing. He was aided by John Ball – a renegade Yorkshire priest who had been imprisoned on numerous occasions by Archbishop Sudbury for preaching heretical and seditious sermons outside churches on Sundays. Ball used catchy rhymes and popular slogans to spread a vision of a classless society in which lordship was abolished and land and goods were held in common. His most famous couplet was ‘When Adam delved and Eve span, who then was the gentleman?’

  As the Kent and Essex rebels sacked their counties, they were also in touch with groups of disaffected Londoners. The city of London had been riven by faction and feuds for much of the 1370s. There were multiple hatreds between rival merchant groups and guilds, between native merchants and foreign traders, between supporters and opponents of John Wyclif, and more generally between the apprentice classes and their rich masters. At the invitation of the Londoners, on 11 June the Kent and Essex rebels set out for the capital. The Kent rebels approached via Greenwich and Blackheath; the Essex rebels made their way via Mile End.

  During all this, Richard II was at Westminster, surrounded by his household advisers, several earls and merchants, and a number of his family members, including his mother Joan, his half-brothers Thomas and John Holland and his cousin, John of Gaunt’s young son Henry Bolingbroke. During the early stages of the rebellion the king’s advisers sent men-at-arms into the shires to attempt to bully the rebels into submission. They were chased away and some of them were killed. Belatedly, the government realized the scale of what it faced. Archbishop Sudbury panicked and resigned his position as chancellor, giving back the great seal. The royal party moved to the Tower of London for their own safety. They sent word to the rebels to meet them. On Wednesday 12 June the Kent rebels reached Blackheath, where they camped overnight. At one point on that evening Richard sailed for a conference with his people at Rotherhithe; but his advisers panicked when they saw the size of the crowds on the riverbank and the party turned back.

  This infuriated Tyler and his men, who claimed to rise in loyalty to their king and to purge his court of evil counsellors. ‘The commons had a watchword among themselves in English,’ wrote the Anonimalle chronicler. ‘[It was,] “with whom hold you?” and the response was, “With king Richard and the true commons,” and those who could not or would not so answer were beheaded …’ Denied their moment to parley with their adored monarch, the rebels flew into a rage and burned Southwark that evening. The next day, Thursday 13 June, they convinced sympathizers in London to lower the drawbridge at London Bridge. They piled, howling with delight, into the city, parading through it and out down the Strand – the moneyed suburb that lay between London and Westminster, which was dotted with palaces and mansions. The finest of all was the Savoy, which was John of Gaunt’s magnificent London residence. The rebels piled over the walls, set fire to the outbuildings and set about destroying the palace. Rebels ran through the building, smashing everything they could, and dragging fine possessions out to a bonfire in the street. The palace was destroyed with barrels of gunpowder found in the cellars.

  The same day the Temple was ransacked by Londoners; piles of legal records burned in the street. Prisons were sprung across the city, while notorious crooks who had been living at liberty were hunted down and beheaded by kangaroo courts. Flames licked the evening sky as a day of targeted rioting ended in debauchery and drunkenness, with pillaged wine barrels rolled into the street and broken open.

  On the first night that the rebels came to London, Richard, aged just fourteen, stood dolefully on a turret in the Tower and gazed down at the ragtag army of his subjects who had camped out on the fields below the fortress walls. As London burned, he and his advisers were effectively terrified prisoners in the Tower. Although there had been similar risings in Europe during the second half of the fourteenth century – the Jacquerie in France in 1358 is the worst example – the king’s advisers had still been caught quite by surprise at the ferocity with which the ordinary people of London and the south-east had risen. And the rioting was spreading. There was disorder as far afield as York and Somerset, with some of the worst taking place in Cambridgeshire, Hertfordshire, Suffolk and Norfolk. England, which had only four years ago risen almost as one to acclaim its new king, seemed now to be descending into a godless anarchy.

  What had driven the ordinary people of England to such paroxysms of rage? On one level, it was very easy to say. Three poll taxes had been levied between 1377 and 1381 – a revolutionary experiment in taxing the wealth of communities who had never been taxed directly before. At first the taxes had provoked disgruntlement, but this swiftly turned to outright fury as commissioners appointed to investigate widespread evasion were accused of heavy-handed tactics.

  But the poll taxes tapped a deeper root of resentment that had been building in England’s towns and villages since the middle of the century. As great swathes of men and women were killed by the Black Death and the subsequent plague epidemics of the 1360s, the entire structure of medieval society had begun to creak and change. Labour, once abundant in an overpopulated realm, became scarce and expensive. To combat the threat to landowners, Edward III’s government had passed restrictive labour legislation, setting limits to wages and punishing anyone who took or received more than the legal day-rate for anything from mowing fields and reaping crops to mending roofs and shoeing horses.

  These laws were enforced by local legal commissioners, many of whom were drawn from the same ranks of wealthy county gentry who benefited from the labour laws. They punished the better-off peasants who paid their neighbours to work, as well as the workers whom they convicted of taking illegal wages. There was abundant work for lawyers and Crown officials in ensuring that county elites retained their privileged position. Men who served on labour commissions would often also serve as sheriffs, MPs and justices of the peace. There was a real sense that a whole, corrupt, political class was oppressing ordinary Englishmen. Serfdom was dying out as an institution in the late fourteenth century, but it seemed to many of those who rebelled in 1381 that it was giving way to a new and equally oppressive system, by which lawyers and justices kept the rural poor in just as deep a misery as they had suffered when they were bonded to the land.

&n
bsp; Poll taxes that hit the poor hardest; labour legislation that prevented them from earning a reasonable wage; a miserably failing war, in which Essex and Kent men saw at close hand the dangers of French pirate fleets patrolling the Channel; general fear that the young king who was supposed to be England’s saviour was being corrupted by evildoers in his household: this was all sufficient in 1381 to kindle a rebellion that shook England to its foundations. Quite how much of the root causes of the rebellion Richard comprehended as he stood in the Tower of London and watched England burn we cannot know. He did, however, feel himself spurred into action: as a king, and a Plantagenet king, at that.

  The dispersal of the Peasants’ Revolt showed that in Richard, a pale-faced boy of fourteen, there was a streak of great personal courage and an appetite for leadership. It also scarred him for the rest of his life.

  The events were almost impossibly dramatic. On the morning of Friday 14 June, Richard convinced a large deputation of rebels to leave London and go to the fields of Mile End, where he promised he would meet them to discuss their demands. Once they did so, a royal procession made its way through the still-tumultuous city to a conference. Richard rode out accompanied by his Holland half-brothers, his young uncle Thomas of Woodstock, now earl of Buckingham, the earls of Warwick and Oxford, William Walworth, mayor of London, the veteran soldier Sir Robert Knolles and various others. His mother, Joan of Kent, rode behind them in a whirligig. All around them sounded shouts and cries from agitated rebels and townsmen; but the royal party pushed steadily on to Mile End. Behind them in the Tower they left Archbishop Sudbury, Treasurer Hales and several royal servants whom they were aware the rebels wished to kill. The plan was to use the royal absence as a diversion, and allow the particularly marked men a window to escape by river.