The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England

by Dan Jones

  But the Appellants were not finished there. After they had done with Brembre and Tresilian, and condemned the other three appellees in absentia, parliament launched a bloody purge of Richard’s household. Proceedings began against many more of those who surrounded the king and were deemed to have led him astray. By May, Richard’s beloved tutor Sir Simon Burley, as well as his household knights Sir John Beauchamp, Sir John Salisbury and James Berners, had all been tried and sentenced to a traitor’s death. The judges who had advised Richard that the ordinances of the Wonderful Parliament were treasonous were now themselves also sentenced to die; only at the end of the parliament were they spared and sent off to live in exile in Ireland.

  It was as traumatic an experience as almost any Plantagenet king had faced. Richard sat through nearly four months of state trials, and saw his friends and allies hauled off one by one to be hanged, disembowelled and beheaded. He begged desperately for the life of Burley, as did the queen, who went down on her knees to the three leading Appellants. Indeed, they were supported by several more moderate earls, including Edmund Langley, duke of York, and even the two lesser Appellants, Derby and Nottingham. But at the Merciless Parliament, there was no escaping death and destruction. Richard, at twenty years old, had seen enough humiliation to last a lifetime.

  The Reinvention of Kingship

  For a king who had fallen upon such dire times during the first ten years of his reign, the five or six years that followed the upheavals of the Merciless Parliament were remarkably peaceful for Richard II. Many of his trusted but divisive friends had either been exiled or killed by the Appellants. Yet once the purging was over, England settled back into a state of curious peace. The Appellants had achieved everything they set out to do. Richard had been brought to heel. There was not much left to fight for, on either side.

  Routed as he had been in 1388, there was evidence that Richard had taken on board some of the lessons of the time. He appeared, outwardly at least, to be willing to try harder. On 3 May 1389 he made a dramatic scene at a meeting of his great council. Sitting himself before the members he interrupted a session of council by asking all those assembled how old he was. They replied, accurately, that he was now twenty-two. Richard then launched into a speech whose tone was reported by several chroniclers. According to Henry Knighton, he said:

  ‘It happens I have spent some years under your counsel and rule, and I give great thanks to God and then to you because you have governed and sustained both my person and my inheritance … Now however, by God’s care, we have attained the age of our majority, and are indeed already in our twenty-second year. Therefore we desire and will the freedom to rule … and to have our kingdom … to choose and appoint to those posts our officers and ministers, and so freely remove those who are now in office …’

  According to Thomas Walsingham, Richard then commanded the archbishop of York, Thomas Arundel, to resign the chancellor’s seal. ‘The king collected it in a fold of his dress, and suddenly rose and went out; and after a short while he came back and sat down again, and gave the seal to William Wykeham, bishop of Winchester, although he was very reluctant to take it. And he created nine other officials … using in all things his own judgement and authority. The duke of Gloucester and the earl of Warwick … he removed from his council …’

  This could have been a disaster. But it was not. As a new decade dawned, so Richard set about governing with a good deal more responsibility than he had before. He asserted his right to choose both his councillors and those who gave him more informal advice, but he also accepted that he was bound to listen to the advice of experienced men like Wykeham, who had been his grandfather’s chief minister during the 1360s.

  He was aided by the return from Castile of John of Gaunt, with whom he was reconciled, and who now became a staunch supporter of the regime. Gaunt allayed tensions between Richard and the former Appellants, threw lavish hunting parties for the king and queen, and took to walking arm in arm with the king whenever he could. The king proclaimed his gratitude towards his eldest uncle outwardly by wearing Gaunt’s livery collar: two interlinked S-shapes. In 1390 he granted him palatinate powers in the duchy of Lancaster, which would be entailed on his male heirs. Furthermore, the king awarded Gaunt the duchy of Aquitaine for life. (This was a significant break with Plantagenet tradition: Aquitaine had been the inheritance of the king’s eldest son and heir since the thirteenth century. Its altered status gave Gaunt a vested interest in finding peace with France.)

  Gaunt rejoined the council in March 1390, and an agreement was drawn up, such that all decisions having financial implications had to be approved by all three of the king’s uncles. Richard apparently accepted this, and a new state of consensus was reached, in which the king and political community began to work together once again. As they did so, the royal finances recovered to a state of good health. Royal revenue rose by 36 per cent between 1389 and 1396. Parliament ceased to be a battleground between king, lords and commons, and reverted to its proper function as a forum for royal government.

  As politics settled down, what came to the fore during the early 1390s was the magnificence of the Ricardian court. The Edwardian court had celebrated chivalry, love and war; Richard’s court celebrated the magnificence and splendour of the anointed king. New and grandiloquent forms of address were popularized. Whereas in the past English kings had been addressed as ‘My lord’, now titles such as ‘Your Highness’ and ‘Your Majesty’ were introduced for the first time, in mimicry of the styles fashionable in France. Written addresses show even more pompous, theatrical versions, such as ‘most high and puissant prince’ and ‘your high royal majesty’. The hostile Walsingham called these ‘not human, but divine honours’ and ‘strange and flattering words hardly suitable for mere mortals’.

  Beneath this high-flown reverence for kingship flourished a gilded patronage of the arts, which produced some of the most exquisite and brilliant work of the period. Richard’s court became a centre for literary and artistic ideas, and some of the great writers of the age worked under the royal watch. Richard’s interest in letters was transient, and he did not commission much literature himself; nevertheless his court was at the heart of the invention of England’s native tongue as a language of high literature. John Gower, the great London scholar, was one of the few who were engaged. It was at Richard’s personal request that he wrote his Confessio Amantis – a huge, complex love poem of more than 30,000 lines which Gower claimed he wrote after meeting Richard on a barge in 1386.

  The Confessio was written in English, and published in its first version in 1390, with a dedication to the king and Geoffrey Chaucer, whose Canterbury Tales was also written during his period of association with Richard’s court. The French chronicler Froissart visited the English court and presented Richard with a collection of French poems, Sir John Clanvowe wrote elegant lyrics, and Edward, duke of Albemarle, Richard’s cousin, translated a famous French hunting textbook into English. Even a soldierly courtier like Sir John Montagu was praised abroad, by none other than Christine de Pisan, for his appreciation of literature and his own skill as a poet.

  The king spent more generously on patronizing artists and architects. Under Henry Yevele, the ageing master-builder of the fourteenth century, many stunning buildings were erected. By the 1390s Yevele was an old man in his seventies. He had been most productive under Edward III, but in 1393 he embarked on his most famous work for Richard: the reconstruction of Westminster Hall, with raised walls, a huge hammer-beam ceiling and ceremonial, cathedral-like entrance. Around the internal string course ran a series of white harts, while thirteen statues were commissioned of the kings from Edward the Confessor to Richard himself, emphasizing the continuity of English kingship into the Plantagenet era.

  Slightly later, Richard took receipt of the Wilton Diptych – a haunting and beautiful piece of iconographical painting depicting the king presented to the Virgin and Child by three saints: Edward the Confessor, the Saxon child-king St Edmund,
and John the Baptist. The obsession with the Confessor in particular ran as strong in Richard as it did in that other great saintly enthusiast Henry III. Whereas warrior kings such as Edward I and Edward III favoured legendary soldiers such as King Arthur and St George, Richard – like Henry – saw himself as a prince of glorious peace – a quality for which the Confessor was praised by the chroniclers. In 1395 the king altered the royal arms, quartering the fleur-de-lis and lions passant guardant with the arms of the Confessor, and it is no coincidence that he appears so prominently on the Wilton Diptych.

  The diptych is full of cryptic symbolism: references to Richard’s ancient Anglo-French lineage are intertwined with unmistakable tokens of his literal belief in his anointed divinity. The very angels surrounding the Virgin wear the badge of the White Hart – as though they are personally retained to protect the king. On the reverse of the diptych there is a painting of the king’s White Hart, reclining with a chained crown around its neck.

  Yet under the cover of this celebratory, magnificent outward reinvention of kingship, there were signs that Richard himself – calmer and apparently more reasonable as he appeared – was not quite a king transformed. For during the early 1390s he was actively recasting his rule in a far more authoritarian, personal style than had been seen before. Kingship was not about the crown and its representation of public authority: it was about Richard himself.

  Politically, this was expressed through a quiet continuance of his policy of retaining. Knights and esquires across the counties of England began to receive the king’s White Hart livery. Many of them were men who already served in the royal administration. The king, it seemed, never trusted the machinery of his public authority. He had to tie people to him personally, visually and ceremonially as their private lord.

  On great public occasions there was a spiteful edge to Richard’s ceremony. When he fell out with the citizens of London in 1392 over the provision of a loan, reconciliation with him demanded pageantry on the scale of a full coronation. King Richard and Queen Anne processed through the streets in splendour, while the city guilds stood to obsequious attention. They were lavished with gifts: boys dressed as angels awarded them golden crowns; a gold table was presented to them at the Temple; a great service of thanksgiving was held at Westminster Abbey, which included a procession to the shrine of the Confessor. Even months after, the Londoners were still sending gifts professing their great favour to the king: at Epiphany 1393 Richard received a camel, and the queen a pelican.

  This sort of genuflection was in one sense part of kingship. But the most successful Plantagenets – Henry II, Richard I and Edward III – had tended to be those who would mix roughly with their subjects, rather than setting themselves totally aloof. Henry II had abjured the regality of kingship in favour of riding in a makeshift camp and making light with all who came before him. Edward III fought incognito against his own knights at tournaments and emphasized the role of the commons in governance. Even King John – a markedly inglorious king – had sat as a judge in cases involving the meanest wretches in his realm. Richard, however, having been thwarted politically as a young man, seemed determined during the 1390s to amplify his singularity and superiority through court spectacle.

  By the middle of the decade, there was something decidedly pathological about the king’s desire to dominate. Always a fragile, suspicious soul, by the middle of the decade his grasp on sanity was slipping. On 7 June 1394 Queen Anne died at Sheen. She was twenty-seven. She had been Richard’s constant companion for years, and he loved her. Distraught with grief, he ordered that the palace where she died – which he had spent vast amounts on renovating as their home – should be ripped down. Then he swore a melodramatic oath, declaring that for a year he would not set foot inside any building, save a church, in which he had spent time with his late wife. His concern for ceremonial was so intense that he delayed her funeral for two months so that the right sort of wax torches could be brought over from Flanders. But this was more than just grief. Anne’s death seemed to trigger a return to the violent petulance of his youth. Richard summoned all his magnates to London for the funeral on 29 July. The earl of Arundel arrived late, and when he came before the king, Richard hit him so hard in the face that he fell to the ground, bleeding.

  And this was not the only funeral at which the king’s behaviour seemed odd. Robert de Vere died in exile in France in 1392, after being wounded by a wild boar. His embalmed body was eventually brought back to England in November 1395. Many of the English magnates refused to attend this reinterment. Those who did watched as the king ordered his friend’s coffin to be opened, so that he might place gold rings on de Vere’s cold dead fingers and gaze on his face – three years expired – one last time.

  After Anne’s death and de Vere’s burial, Richard grew more and more obsessed with Edward II. He encouraged Gloucester Abbey, where Edward was buried, to commemorate the murdered king every year; and in 1395 he petitioned the pope to have his great-grandfather canonized. The same year, he commissioned a strange epitaph for his own tomb at Westminster, which read: ‘He threw down all who violated the royal prerogative; he destroyed heretics and scattered their friends.’ This might have been read as a reference to Richard’s vigilance against the Lollards – Christian reformers who followed the teachings of John Wyclif – but there was something potentially sinister about it, too.

  Taken in their totality, and from a distance, it is clear that, although he was apparently reasonable and restrained during the 1390s, Richard II was never very far away from slipping back into the chaos of his youth. Like the ancestor he wished to canonize, he never truly achieved any understanding of the nature of successful kingship, which lay in balancing his public authority and the needs of the kingdom with his private wishes, friends and tastes. His very reverence and pity for Edward II – a king who had brought nothing but disunity, violence, corruption and bloodshed to his realm – spoke volumes about his understanding of a king’s true duty. The fact that he felt so insecure that he needed to retain his own public servants to enjoin obedience spoke of a deep-seated paranoia which had been with him from the earliest age.

  But there was another motivating instinct in Richard’s personality, which would dominate the final years of the fourteenth century more than any other, and which sat very uneasily with the king’s self-perception as a man of peace on a par with Edward the Confessor. That was his unquenchable thirst for revenge.

  Richard Revenged

  After the savage turmoil that racked the first decade of his reign, Richard spent much of the following decade restoring some small degree of confidence in his rule. Indeed, for the first part of the 1390s it seemed that the king was recovering a measure of stability and self-possession. Government ran smoothly in partnership between king and council. Parliament did not attempt to purge the executive or humiliate the king. Royal revenues increased. In 1394 Richard led a seven-month expedition to Ireland, taking numerous young nobles and 7,000 men, to achieve what he called in a letter ‘the punishment of our rebels there and to establish good government and just rule over our faithful lieges’. The venture was highly successful. Richard achieved more in Ireland – in the short term at least – than any king since Henry II.

  Furthermore, his long-intended peace with France was achieved. In March 1396 a twenty-eight-year truce had been concluded, along with a marriage agreement by which the English king was to wed Charles VI’s seven-year-old daughter Isabella with a handsome dowry of 800,000 francs. When the bride was handed over in late October 1396, Richard and Charles met in Ardres, not far from Calais, to celebrate their agreement in a field densely populated with ornate tents, brimming with jewels and gifts: golden model ships, horses with silver saddles and pearl collars. The two kings posed as the saviours of Christendom, since with England and France no longer at war, a single pope might now be elected. There was talk of a new crusade, against the Turks. It seemed to Thomas Walsingham that England was finally ‘basking in peace and the h
ope was for an entirely prosperous future on account of the magnificence of the king’.

  Then, on 6 January 1397, Richard turned thirty. It was a significant age: the final milestone in his long journey to manhood. At long last, the king had arrived.

  Or had he? Amid all the apparent achievements of 1394–7, there had been a few ominous signs that Richard, even at the height of his success, remained deep down an acutely troubled king: hypersensitive, painfully insecure and prone to outbursts of violence and bloody rage whenever he felt threatened.

  One of the first signs that he felt threatened came during the peace negotiations with France. The king wanted, in drafts of the pact, to bind Charles VI to provide military aid against the people of England if he felt it was necessary. This did not make the final agreement, but it was disturbing nonetheless. Richard had screamed at Arundel and Gloucester in 1386 that he would invite a French invasion of his own realm. Here was an indication that the thought had never really left him.

  More obvious signs of discontent came in a parliament held in January 1397. It met in the aftermath of the truce with France, when it was made clear to the king that there were those who did not share his joy at the new dispensation. There were mutterings, emanating chiefly from Gloucester, that – as Froissart put it – ‘the people of this country want war. They can’t live decently without it. Peace is no good to them.’ Others complained that a seven-year-old queen was of no use to a thirty-year-old king who had not yet produced an heir; and there was disgruntlement over the epic scale of the celebrations at Ardres, which may have cost as much as £15,000 – the budget of a decent-sized military invasion. When Richard had asked parliament for money to aid the French king in an expedition to Milan he was coldly rebuffed, becoming agitated and addressing parliament to defend the policy ‘with his own mouth’. When a petition, ostensibly written by ‘Thomas Haxey, clerk’, was put before him, complaining about royal officials, the poor state of the Scottish border, his continuing habit of private retaining in the shires and the ‘great and excessive’ cost of the king’s household, Richard flew into a rage and had Haxey arrested and sentenced to a traitor’s death. (The sentence was later rescinded on account of Haxey’s clerical status.)