by Dan Jones
By the time parliament met in October 1386, the mood of the country was mutinous. The list of grievances was long. English foreign policy was in the doldrums. Royal finances were parlous. John of Gaunt had left the country in high dudgeon, having been deeply unsettled by the snub given to his advice during the Scottish campaign and also by rumours of plots by the chamber knights to assassinate him. Across the Channel, Charles VI was said to be raising a forest of masts at Sluys: the largest invasion armada ever aimed at England. Advice aimed at the king’s correction, which had been given to a parliament directly following the failed Scottish invasion, had been utterly ignored. An unusual memo to the king included an ominous suggestion that Richard should ‘attach to himself persons of estate, of probity and of honour, and to associate with them and eschew the company of others; for if he does this, great good and honour will come to him, and he will win the hearts and love of his people. But if he does the opposite, then the contrary will happen, to the great danger of himself and his realm, which God forbid.’ The king’s response to this is not recorded. But the official parliament rolls record his response to similar requests made while the parliament was sitting. It is laconic but telling: ‘The king will do as he chooses.’
Instead, what precious little taxation had been granted was now utterly wasted, while the impoverished king had seen fit to raise up his friend de Vere once more to the position of duke of Ireland. This gave him plenary powers, and a rank that put de Vere fully on a par with Richard’s royal uncles: de Vere became the first duke not of the royal blood. (Henry Grosmont, the first duke of Lancaster, had at least been Edward III’s cousin.) Comparisons to Gaveston’s award of the royal earldom of Cornwall were hard to ignore.
It was clear to everyone who attended what would be known as the Wonderful Parliament in October 1386 that the country had a crisis of leadership.
The attack came as soon as parliament opened. As soon as the earl of Suffolk stood before the assembled masses to open the parliament and announce the king’s plans to lead an invasion to France, the commons erupted in complaint. They levelled their ire directly at Suffolk, blaming him as figurehead for all the inept advisers around the king and demanding that he be removed from his position and impeached on numerous charges of incompetence and negligence. They refused to go any further with parliamentary business until this was done.
Now emerged the king’s true colours. Richard was a married man who had led his country on campaign. Outraged by the commons’ impertinent demands, he refused to come to Westminster, sending a message from his manor at Eltham saying that he would not dismiss so much as a scullion-boy from his kitchen on parliament’s say-so.
In an attempt at mediation, his uncle Thomas, duke of Gloucester, and Thomas Arundel, bishop of Ely, were sent to Eltham to negotiate face to face. They found the king in shrill and belligerent mood. When they tried to reason with him, he berated them. The chronicler Henry Knighton recorded their conversation, in which they said to Richard that if a king refused to come to parliament ‘by his own irresponsible resolution’ then parliament could dissolve itself after forty days.
This drove Richard into a rage. It was clear that his uncle and the bishop had touched a streak of deep paranoia within him, developed no doubt through the experiences of his youth. ‘We have long been aware that our people and commons intend to resist and to rise against us,’ he shouted at them. ‘And in the face of that threat, it seems best to us to turn to our cousin [the king] of France, and seek his support and aid against our enemies, and better to submit ourselves to him than to our own subjects.’
With an invasion fleet less than 100 miles away, Gloucester and Arundel exclaimed in a state of disbelief: ‘The king of France is your chiefest enemy, and your kingdom’s greatest foe.’ They reasoned with Richard, pleading that he should ‘think how your grandfather, King Edward III, and also your father Prince Edward, in his name, sweated and laboured all their lives in heat and cold, in tireless endeavour to conquer the kingdom of France … remember too how … peoples too unnumbered withstood in that war death and the danger of death, and how the commons of this realm have poured out ungrudgingly their goods and possessions and uncounted treasure to sustain the war.’
They must have felt surreal just saying these words to a king of England. But they had to say them all the same, and more besides, before they could calm the king down and have him agree to come to parliament. It was finally only a veiled reference to Edward II’s deposition (‘your people … have an ancient law which not long since, lamentably, had to be invoked …’) that shook the king out of his fit of pique and forced him to accept that his government had to be reformed.
Cowed, Richard eventually came to Westminster. And there he had to watch in ignominy as the Wonderful Parliament expelled de la Pole and the treasurer Sir John Fordham from their posts, and set up a commission to hold office for a year. It was to audit the royal finances, take control of the exchequer and exercise authority to use the great and privy seals. In effect, it took government totally out of Richard II’s hands. The king, now nineteen years old, was reduced once again to a state of boyhood, his kingship as good as revoked. It was almost more than his proud young heart could bear.
Treason and Trauma
Just over a year after the Wonderful Parliament concluded its business, on 20 December 1387, Robert de Vere, the duke of Ireland, moved cautiously through the winter fog, heading for Radcot Bridge, near Chipping Norton in Oxfordshire. He had with him several thousand men recruited in and around the king’s earldom of Chester. The countryside he moved through was thick with his enemies. Danger lurked, quite literally, around every corner.
He was riding hard south-east to meet the king in London. The Plantagenet Crown faced yet another crisis, with Richard once more at the mercy of his subjects, who were rising in revolt against his rule, and in particular against de Vere’s influence. The duke knew that he was riding against time. The combined armies of some of the most powerful noblemen in England had been sent out to capture him. Enemy companies fanned out across England, occupying not just the villages of the Cotswolds through which he now picked his way, but the whole of the Midlands; everywhere west of Northampton was seething with hostile forces. It would not be long before they arrived.
Far from being repaired in the aftermath of the Wonderful Parliament of October 1386, relations between the king and his leading subjects had completely broken down. De Vere was heading for London in the knowledge that very soon England would erupt into violence.
How could things have sunk any further? The answer lay largely with Richard. His response to the reforming council imposed upon him at the end of that parliament had been both petulant and severe. Humiliated and aggrieved, the king had spent the first few months that followed the Wonderful Parliament brooding in his hunting lodges of the Thames valley. Full of resentment and anger at the way he had been treated, in February 1387 he had left London defiantly to undertake what one chronicler called his ‘gyration’: a tour of his realm in which he could avoid the inspections and interferences of the council, and assess just what support he had in the country at large.
The tour had lasted nine months, travelling from Beverley to Shrewsbury, and concentrating for the most part on the north and north-west Midlands, close to Richard’s royal principality of Chester. He had taken with him his friends de Vere and de la Pole, and as they travelled, Richard began to formulate a plan to reassert his authority once the council’s term expired. He noted that the way in which his magnates now mobilized support was through systems of retaining personnel, in which supporters were effectively salaried for their loyalty: in exchange for regular cash payments they wore their lord’s distinctive badge and often a uniform, protected his interests and fought for him if required.
As earl of Chester, thought Richard, he could do something similar. He could create a permanent power base of retained men, whom he might have no cause to fear, with no concern that they would turn on him, and no
dread of the public chastisement that his supposedly natural supporters – the lords and commons of his royal realm – had heaped on his shoulders. A plan had formed. Richard would effectively set out to build himself up as a private magnate as well as a king.
During the summer of 1387 Richard had also begun to explore legal means by which he could reverse the work of the Wonderful Parliament. Twice during August he had gathered together in secret the leading judges of the realm, headed by Sir Robert Tresilian, putting before them questions concerning the ordinances by which he was bound. The verdict – which had been browbeaten out of several of the judges with threats of death – was that ‘the statute, ordinance and commission made in the last parliament’ was ‘derogatory to the regality and prerogative of our said lord the king’. Moreover – and here it is easy to discern Richard’s deceptively forceful hand – when the judges ‘were asked what punishment they deserved who compelled or forced the king to the making of the said statute, ordinance, and commission … they replied unanimously that they were deserving of punishment as traitors’.
This was a fateful reply. The spectre of treason had haunted politics during Edward II’s reign: it was the destructive, irredeemable charge that had brought about the deaths of Piers Gaveston and Thomas of Lancaster; Edmund earl of Kent and Roger Mortimer earl of March. In an effort to prevent such bloody misery from ever again afflicting England, Edward III had passed the Statute of Treason in 1352, which limited the definition of the crime to attacks or plots on the lives of king, queen, and their eldest son, rape of the king’s eldest daughter, murder of the chancellor, treasurer or chief justices, or making war against the king in his kingdom.
Now Richard was blowing the definition of treason wide open once again. A traitor was no longer someone who made violent attacks on the king, his family and his most senior officials. It could be anyone who attempted to reform the realm in parliament, or regulate the royal household. The judges agreed that all those who had constrained the king in 1386 were traitors. Traitors too were any who ignored a royal command to dissolve parliament; any who impeached a royal minister; and all those who had the bare nerve to remind Richard of the fate of his great-grandfather Edward II.
The opinions of the judges were terrifying in their implications. All, according to judicial advice, now merited death. When Richard had returned to London in November 1387, it was clear from everything that he had achieved on his gyration that there were now only two likely outcomes of the summer’s activity: a judicial bloodbath, or civil war.
And civil war was what de Vere was preparing for as he hurried south through Oxfordshire. He himself was the casus belli. During the king’s gyration a new opposition had gathered: one whose specific aim was to turf out de Vere and all those like him from the king’s company, for ever. They were known as the Lords Appellant, for on 14 November the earls of Gloucester, Arundel and Warwick had made a formal approach to the king, ‘appealing’ (or formally indicting) those around the king whom they thought guilty of treachery.
The list of the accused contained five names: Alexander Neville, archbishop of York; Michael de la Pole, earl of Suffolk; Robert Tresilian, chief justice; Nicholas Brembre, a merchant, former mayor of London and loyal hero of the Peasants’ Revolt; and de Vere himself, the duke of Ireland.
The king, furious at the presumption of the lords, had attempted to raise troops. But he failed. The county sheriffs would not recruit men for the king because they said all the commons supported the Appellants. The Londoners, to whom Richard appealed directly, refused to rise in his name. De Vere’s Cheshire army was the only hope.
Thus, as he marched his force through the damp, wintry countryside, de Vere knew whom he was looking out for. Gloucester, Warwick and Arundel were loose, and they had picked up two useful allies: John of Gaunt’s son Henry, earl of Derby and Thomas Mowbray, earl of Nottingham. Between them, these five made a formidable team, and they had supporters among many leading Londoners and knights and gentry across England. Their armies now spread like fingers around the Cotswolds, preparing to wrap themselves tightly around de Vere.
On the morning of 20 December, de Vere had his first encounters with Appellant troops. He fought a small skirmish against the duke of Gloucester’s supporters somewhere near Bourton-on-the-Hill. In a confused battle, numerous of the Chester men deserted. Later that day, probably at Burford, another skirmish took place, against the earl of Arundel’s men. De Vere’s lieutenant, Sir Thomas Molyneaux, was killed. It was therefore in some desperation that the duke pushed his men on towards the river and Radcot Bridge, where he was hoping, according to Henry Knighton, that ‘if he had been able to cross the bridge it would have kept him safe from his enemies’. Fighting his way south of the Thames, he calculated, was the only way to make it safely to Richard in London.
But he was out of luck. As he led his men towards the pointed stone arches of the twelfth-century bridge, de Vere found that he had been beaten to his mark. At either side of the crossing stood armed men and archers wearing the livery of Henry earl of Derby. Turning, he saw Derby himself coming up from his rear, with a large body of soldiers. De Vere was trapped. There was no choice but to give battle.
Yet the men de Vere commanded had other ideas. As trumpets blasted and the royal standard was hurriedly unfurled, there was a general mumbling among the troops that fighting was uneven and unwise. ‘They were too few in comparison with the enemy,’ wrote Henry Knighton, ‘nor dared they affront so many of the lords and nobles of the whole realm.’
De Vere panicked. If he was captured, there was no telling what his fate might be. A cycle of violence had begun, and it was unlikely that he would merely be exiled from the king’s presence. He had to save his skin. He charged his men towards the bridge in an attempted rushed crossing. But when they came up to the bridge, they found that barriers had been erected and the road was broken in three places. It would be impossible for more than one horse to cross at a time. ‘We have been fooled,’ cried the duke, and changing horses, he attempted to flee alone down the riverbank.
But looming in front of him, the fugitive spied even worse. As Derby approached him from behind, Gloucester himself was coming up ahead. De Vere had only one option left. He gambled on his life. ‘Spurring his horse, [he] cast off his gauntlets and his sword, and plunged into the Thames,’ wrote Knighton. ‘And thus [he] escaped with wonderful daring.’
As de Vere fled, eventually for France, his men promptly surrendered.
Richard spent a sombre Christmas in Windsor. On 30 December he met the five triumphant Appellants at the Tower of London. They marched in with 500 heavily armed men, closing the gates behind them. The meeting was stormy. The Appellants castigated Richard for his behaviour. They produced damning correspondence between the king and de Vere. They accused him of wanting to use the king of France against his own subjects. They demanded that the five men they had appealed be brought to justice, and that the king’s household should be purged.
When Richard proved truculent, they threatened to depose him, suggesting to him that they had already chosen his successor. (One chronicler, indeed, suggested that they told Richard he had been deposed already, and that only a debate between Gloucester and Derby over which of them should inherit the throne prevented them from enacting the deposition.)
Parliament opened at Westminster on 3 February. Lords and commons gathered together in the White Hall at Westminster, which was richly painted with a series of scenes from the life of Edward I. The king took his seat before the assembled estates and prepared to hear the worst. Then, according to the chronicler Thomas Favent, ‘the most noble five appellants … with a numerous throng, entered the hall together, arm in arm, wearing cloth of gold, and after staring at the king bent the knee to him in salutation. There was a mass of people filling the hall, even to the corners …’
The days and months that followed consisted of detailed legal arguments against the accused servants of the Crown. Somewhat embarrassingly, four of t
he five accused had absconded, and were tried in their absence. Only Nicholas Brembre, the former mayor, was present, and his trial began a fortnight after parliament opened.
The verdicts, however, were the same whether the accused were present or not. Archbishop Neville, the duke of Ireland, the earl of Suffolk and Sir Robert Tresilian were all found guilty of treason in their absence. The duke, earl and judge were sentenced to be drawn through London and hanged as traitors and enemies of the king at Tyburn. The archbishop was eventually sentenced to exile. All four men were to be disinherited. Brembre, who was present, was condemned to death.
And more drama followed. Archbishop Neville, de Vere and Suffolk had all managed to escape overseas, but Tresilian had not. Six days after he was formally condemned in parliament, a strange figure was spotted spying on the proceedings at Westminster from a nearby rooftop.
The house was raided, and inside, cowering under a table, was Sir Robert, the hanging judge and scourge of the rebels of 1381. He was dressed in beggar’s rags and was wearing a thick false beard. His distinctive voice betrayed him. Cries went up of ‘We have him!’ and Tresilian was dragged from his hiding place to parliament, leaving his wife swooning behind him, and screaming himself for the sanctuary of Westminster. But sanctuary was denied him. Tresilian was dragged in short order on a hurdle to Tyburn and forced up to the gallows platform, whinnying in terror. When his clothes were cut off, it revealed that he had covered his body in protective charms. There was a dark irony in a judge relying on superstitious trinkets to ward off the noose. Tresilian was hanged naked; in the end he was put out of his misery when his throat was slit.
