Great Tales from English History, Book 2

by Robert Lacey

  Richard came to believe that he was ordained of God. He had himself painted like Christ in Majesty, a golden icon glowing on his throne — the earliest surviving portrait that we have of any English king. When the King of Armenia came to the capital, Richard ordered that Westminster Abbey be opened in the middle of the night and proudly showed his visitor his crown, his sceptre and the other symbols of regality by the flicker of candlelight.

  But Richard’s public grandeur was a mask for insecurity. The King suffered from a stammer, and by the time he was fully grown, at nearly six feet tall, his fits of anger could be terrifying. Cheeks flushed, and shaking his yellow Plantagenet hair, on one occasion Richard drew his sword on a noble who dared to cross him, and struck another across the cheek. When Parliament was critical of his advisers, he declared that he‘would not even dismiss a scullion’ from his kitchens at their request. When Parliament was compliant, he proclaimed proudly that he had no need of Lords or Commons, since the laws of England were‘in his mouth or his breast’.

  Richard’s dream was to rule without having to answer to anyone, and to that end he made peace with France, calling a truce in the series of draining conflicts that we know as the Hundred Years War. No fighting meant no extra taxes, calculated Richard — and that meant he might never have to call Parliament again.

  Some modern historians have frowned on Richard II’s ambition to rule without Parliament. They condemn his attempts to interrupt the traditional story of England’s march towards democracy — only six Parliaments met during his reign of twenty-two years. But it is by no means certain that Richard’s subjects saw this as regrettable. On the contrary. The summoning of Parliament was invariably followed by the appearance of tax assessors in the towns and villages. So there was much to be said for a king who left his people in peace and who managed to‘live of his own’ — without levying taxes.

  Richard’s gilded, image-dazzled style, however, won him few friends. He made no pretence to love the common man, and it was his attempt to live of his own’ that brought about his downfall. When John of Gaunt died in 1399, aged fifty-eight, Richard could not resist the temptation to seize his uncle’s lands. Gaunt’s Duchy of Lancaster estates were the largest single landholding in England, and his son Henry Bolingbroke had recently been sent into exile, banished for ten years following a dispute with another nobleman.

  Bolingbroke, named after the Lincolnshire castle where he was born in 1366, was the same age as Richard. The two cousins had grown up at court together, sharing the frightening experience of being inside the Tower of London at one stage of the Peasants’ Revolt as the angry rebels had flocked outside the walls, yelling and hurling abuse. Some rioters who broke through managed to capture Henry, and he had been lucky to escape the fate of the Archbishop of Canterbury, who was dragged outside to be beaten, then beheaded.

  Henry was not one jot less pious than his royal cousin. In 1390, aged twenty-four, he had been on crusade to fight alongside Germany’s Teutonic Knights as they took Christianity to Lithuania, and in 1392 he travelled on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. A tough character, the leading jouster of his generation, he was not the sort to surrender his family inheritance without a fight. Land was sacred to a medieval baron, and many magnates supported Bolingbroke’s quarrel with the King. No one’s estates were safe if the great Duchy of Lancaster could be seized at the royal whim.

  When Richard decided to go campaigning against Irish rebels in the summer of 1399, his cousin grabbed his chance. Bolingbroke had spent his nine-month exile in France. Now he landed in Yorkshire, to be welcomed by the Earl of Northumberland and his son Henry‘Hotspur’, the great warriors of the north. Henry had won control of most of central and eastern England, and was in a position to claim much more than his family’s estate. Richard returned from Ireland to find himself facing a coup.

  ’Now I can see the end of my days coming,’ the King mournfully declared as he stood on the ramparts of Flint Castle in north Wales early in August 1399, watching the advance of his cousin’s army along the coast.

  Captured, escorted to London and imprisoned in the Tower, Richard resisted three attempts to make him renounce in Henry’s favour, until he was finally worn down — though he refused to hand the crown directly to his supplanter. Instead, he defiantly placed the gold circlet on God’s earth, symbolically resigning his sovereignty to his Maker.

  Sent north to the gloomy fortress of Pontefract in Yorkshire, Richard survived only a few months. A Christmas rising by his supporters made him too dangerous to keep alive. According to Shakespeare’s play Richard II the deposed monarch met his end heroically in a scuffle in which he killed two of his would-be assassins before being himself struck down. But the truth was less theatrical. The official story was that Richard went on hunger strike, so that the opening that led to his stomach gradually contracted. His supporters maintained that the gaolers deliberately deprived him of food. Either way, the thirty-three-year-old ex-monarch starved to death. According to one account, in his hunger he gnawed desperately at his own arm.

  Of comfort no man speak…

  Let us sit upon the ground

  And tell sad stories of the death of kings!

  Writing two hundred years later, Shakespeare drew a simple moral from the tale of Richard II. Richard may have been a flawed character, but the deposition of an anointed monarch upset the ordained order of things. The playwright knew what would happen next — the generations of conflict between the families of Richard and Henry that have come to be known as the‘Wars of the Roses’,

  ’TURN AGAIN, DICK WHITTINGTON!’

  1399

  AS HENRY IV TOOK CONTROL OF HIS NEW kingdom at the end of 1399, he pointedly promised that, unlike his wilful predecessor, he would rule with the guidance of‘wise and discreet’ persons. Richard II had been criticised for shunning the advice of his counsellors. He was nicknamed‘Richard the Redeless’ — the‘uncounselled’. So Henry made sure that the advisers he summoned to his early council were a sober mixture of bishops and barons.

  Then on 8 December that year the new King sent for a different sort of expert — a merchant and businessman, the first ever to sit on the Royal Council. Sir Richard Whittington was a cloth trader and moneylender from the City of London, who had served as Mayor of the City and who would, in fact, be elected Mayor no less than three times.

  ’Oh yes he did! Oh no he didn’t!’ Every Christmas the adventures of Dick Whittington still inspire pantomime audiences in theatres and church halls around the country. We see Whittington, usually played by a pretty girl in tights, striding off from Gloucestershire to seek his fortune in London, only to leave soon afterwards, dispirited to discover that the streets are not paved with gold. But sitting down to rest with his cat, the only friend he has managed to make on his travels, Dick hears the bells of London pealing out behind him.

  ’Turn again, Dick Whittington,’ they seem to be calling,‘thrice Lord Mayor of London!’

  Reinvigorated, Dick returns to the city, where he gets a job in the house of Alderman Fitzwarren and falls in love with Fitzwarren’s beautiful daughter, Alice. Disaster strikes when Dick is falsely accused of stealing a valuable necklace. So, deciding he had better make himself scarce, he and his cat stow away on one of the alderman’s ships trading silks and satins with the Barbary Coast. There Puss wins favour with the local sultan by ridding his palace of rats, and Dick is rewarded with sackfuls of gold and jewels, which he bears home in triumph — more than enough to replace the necklace, which, it turns out, had been stolen by Puss’s mortal enemy, King Rat. Alice and Dick are married, and Dick goes on to fulfil the bells’ prophecy, becoming thrice Lord Mayor of London.

  Much of this is true. Young Richard Whittington, a third son with no chance of an inheritance, did leave the village of Pauntley in Gloucestershire sometime in the 1360s to seek his fortune in London. And there he was indeed apprenticed to one Sir Hugh Fitzwarren, a mercer who dealt in precious cloth, some of it imported from the land of
the Berbers, the Barbary Coast of North Africa. Dick became a mercer himself (the word derives from the Latin merx, or wares, the same root that gives us‘merchant’). He supplied sumptuous cloth to both Richard II and Henry IV, providing two of Henry’s daughters with cloth of gold for their wedding trousseaus. He also became a friendly bank manager to the royal family, extending generous overdrafts whenever they were strapped for cash. In the decades around 1400 Dick Whittington made no less than fifty-three loans to Richard and Henry, and also to Henry’s son Henry V. He routinely took royal jewels as security, and on one occasion lost a necklace, whose value he had to repay.

  Dick was elected mayor of London in 1397,1406 and 1419. With the populist flair that a mayor needs to go down in history, he campaigned against watered beer, greedy brewers who overcharged, and the destruction of old walls and monuments. There was a‘green’ touch to his removal from the Thames of illegal‘fish weirs’, the standing traps of basketwork or netting that threatened fish stocks when their apertures were too small and trapped even the tiniest tiddlers.

  Less kind to the river, perhaps, was the money that he left in his will for the building of‘Whittington’s Longhouse’. This monster public lavatory contained 128 seats, half for men and half for women, in two very long rows with no partitions and no privacy. It overhung a gully near modern Cannon Street that was flushed by the tide. Dying childless in 1423, Dick spread his vast fortune across a generous range of London almshouses, hospitals and charities.

  The trouble is the cat. There is not the slightest evidence that Dick Whittington ever owned any pets, let alone a skilled ratter who might have won the favour of the Sultan of Barbary. Puss does not enter the story for another two hundred years, and was probably introduced into the plot by mummers in early pantomimes.

  ’To Southwark Fair,’ wrote Samuel Pepys in his diary for 21 September 1668.‘Very dirty, and there saw the puppet show of Whittington which was pretty to see.’

  Stories of clever cats are found in the earliest Egyptian and Hindu myths; Portuguese, Spanish and Italian fables tell of men whose fortunes are made by their cats. Puss in Boots, a rival pantomime, also celebrates the exploits of a trickster cat that magically enriches his impoverished master.

  Experts call this a’migratory myth’. Blending the cosy notion of a furry, four-legged partner with the story of the advancement of hard-nosed Richard Whittington, England’s biggest moneylender, took the edge off people’s envy at the rise of the merchant class in the years after the Black Death — these new magnates who mattered in the reign of King Money. And when it comes to our own day, Dick’s tale of luck and ambition provides a timeless stereotype for the pop stars and celebrities who play him in panto: the classless, self-made wannabes who leave their life in the sticks and reinvent themselves in the big city.

  HENRY IV AND HIS EXTRA-VIRGIN OIL

  1399

  WHEN PARLIAMENT FIRST WELCOMED Henry IV as king in September 1399 with cries of‘Yes, Yes, Yes’, he told them to shout it again. The first round of yeses had not been loud enough for him. At that moment the deposed Richard II, just a mile or so down-river in the Tower of London, was still alive. The new King quite understood, he told the company who assembled that day in Westminster, that some of them might have reservations.

  This may have been a joke on Henry IV’s part — he had a self-deprecating sense of humour. But the fact that he had usurped the throne was to be the theme of his reign. For his coronation in October, he introduced a new‘imperial’ style of crown consisting of a circlet surmounted by arches that English kings and queens have worn ever since. He commissioned a book to emphasise the significance of England’s coronation regalia — and he had himself anointed with an especially potent and prestigious oil that Richard II had located in his increasing obsession with majesty. The Virgin Mary herself, it was said, had given it to St Thomas Becket.

  The fancy oil delivered its own verdict on the usurper — an infestation of headlice that afflicted Henry for months. He spent the first half of his reign fighting off challenges, particularly from the fractious Percy family of Northumberland who plotted against him in the north and were behind no less than three dangerous rebellions. In Wales the English King had to contend with the defiance of the charismatic Owain Glyndwr, who kept the red dragon fluttering from castles and misty Celtic mountain-tops.

  Henry defeated his enemies in a run of brisk campaigns that confirmed his prowess as a military leader. But he was not able to enjoy his triumphs. In 1406, at the age of forty, the stocky and heavy-jowled monarch was struck down by a mystery illness that made it difficult for him to travel or to communicate verbally.

  Modern doctors think that Henry must have suffered a series of strokes. For the rest of his reign he was disabled in both mind and body, though he went to great lengths to conceal his infirmity. Letters went out to the local sheriffs ordering the arrest of those who spread rumours of his sickness, while his bishops received letters requesting prayers to be said for his physical recovery. Depressed and speaking of himself as a sinful wretch’, Henry came to believe that his salvation rested in a repeat of his youthful pilgrimage to Jerusalem.

  One cause of his melancholy was the conflicts that arose with his eldest son, Henry of Monmouth. A brave and forceful warrior who fought alongside his father against the Percys and took charge of the campaign against Owain Glyndwr,’Prince Hal’ was not the dissolute hell-raiser portrayed by Shakespeare. But he was an impatient critic of the ailing King. In 1410 he elbowed aside Henry’s advisers to take control of the Royal Council for a spell — it seems possible he was even pushing his father to abdicate.

  In 1413 the old King collapsed while at prayer in Westminster Abbey. Carried to the abbot’s quarters and placed on a straw mattress beside the fire, he fell into a deep sleep, with his crown placed, as was the medieval custom, on the pillow beside him. Thinking he had breathed his last, his attendants covered his face with a linen cloth, while the Prince of Wales picked up the crown and left the room.

  Suddenly the King woke. As he sat up, the cloth fell from his face, and he demanded to know what had happened to the crown. Summoned to his father’s bedside, the prince did not beat about the bush.

  ’Sir,’ he said,’to mine and all men’s judgement, you seemed dead in this world. So I, as your next heir apparent, took that as mine own.’

  ’What right could you have to the crown,’ retorted Henry wryly,‘when I have none?’

  Richard’s usurper never lost his sense of guilt — nor his sense of humour. Looking round the room, the King asked where he was, and was told that he had been brought to the Jerusalem Chamber.

  ’Praise be to God,’ he said,for it was foretold me long ago that I would die in Jerusalem.’

  WE HAPPY FEW -THE BATTLE OF AZINCOURT

  1415

  THE NEW KING HENRY V WAS A TWENTY-five-year-old in a hurry. He had been impatient with his disabled father, and he was impatient with just about everyone else. Watching a Lollard blacksmith suffering the recently introduced penalty of being burned at the stake, he had the man dragged out of the flames, then invited him to recant. When the blacksmith refused, the prince thrust him back on to the pyre.

  Henry saw himself as God’s soldier, and he had a soldier’s haircut to match: shaved back and sides with a dark-brown pudding-basin of hair perched on top. This pallid young warrior, with his large, fiercely bright, almond-shaped eyes, brought intense religious conviction to England’s long-running quarrel with France.

  ’My hope is in God,’ he declared as he stood with his troops in the pouring rain on the night of Thursday 24 October, 1415. If my cause is just I shall prevail, whatever the size of my following.’

  He was addressing his small, damp and beleaguered army outside the village of Agincourt in northern France. Here the English had been disconcerted to find their route back to Calais blocked by an immensely larger French army. Modern estimates put the English at 6000, facing as many as 20,000 or even 25,000. Henry’
s cause looked hopeless. A large number of his men were suffering from dysentery, the bloody diarrhoea that was a major hazard of pre-penicillin warfare. The French were so confident that night that they threw dice, wagering on the rich ransoms they would be extorting for the English nobility they would capture next day.

  In contrast to the rowdy chatter and singing around the French campfires, there was silence in the English ranks, where Henry walked among his intimidated little army, doing his best to raise their morale.

  ’He made fine speeches everywhere,’ wrote Jehan de Wavrin, a French knight who fought in the battle and collected eyewitness accounts of how Henry set about encouraging his men:

  They should remember [the King said] that they were born of the realm of England where they had been brought up, and where their fathers, mothers, wives, and children were living; wherefore it became them to exert themselves that they might return thitherwith great joy and approval… And further he told them and explained how the French were boasting that they would cut off three fingers of the right hand of all the archers that should be taken prisoners, to the end that neither man nor horse should ever again be killed with their arrows.

  Archers made up nearly four thousand of the English force — double the number of men-at-arms — and the English archers were crucial to what happened next day.

  The French had chosen the ground on which they wished to fight — an open field, bordered by thick woods. But as their knights advanced in their heavy armour, the effect of the woods was to funnel them into the English bowmen’s line of fire. The torrential rain the night before had turned the ground into mud, so the French slithered and stumbled, falling in their dozens beneath the fusillades of arrows. The white-feathered quills littered the battlefield, protruding from the bodies of both horses and men. It looked as if snow had fallen, according to one observer.