of joy and gladness…the long-awaited day of the renewal of peace and of the laws of the land, long exiled by the weakness of an elderly king and the greed of courtiers and servants.
There have been few more inaccurate predictions in English history. Richard II’s coronation in July 1377 was in fact the beginning of the end for the Plantagenet dynasty, and ushered in one hundred years of slaughter at the elite end of society, culminating in the so-called Wars of the Roses after 1455. St Albans itself was to host not just one but two of the greater battles of these wars. There is a sense here of English history feeding upon itself. Several of the kings who ruled England after Edward III bear uncanny resemblances to kings already long dead: Richard II to Edward II, Henry V to Richard I, and Henry VI not just to Henry III but to Edward the Confessor.
Between the death of Edward III in June 1377 and the coronation of his grandson, Richard II, French and Spanish ships sacked the south coast of England, penetrating as far inland as Lewes, within a few miles of the site of the Battle of Hastings, burning Folkestone, Portsmouth, Dartmouth and Plymouth. It was in the midst of these attacks that Richard II was crowned, on 16 July, a Thursday. This was the first time since the hurried coronation of Henry III in 1216 that a King had not been crowned on a Sunday. Perhaps the chaos of the moment forced the government’s hand. Perhaps, as Froissart hints, the coronation was hurried through amidst rumours that, otherwise, John of Gaunt, the King’s uncle, might himself be crowned king. Coronation alone did not stem the crisis. From August into September 1377, the Isle of Wight was occupied by the French, Southampton was attacked and Poole was burned. Attacks upon the Isle of Wight continued into the 1380s, with sackings and the kidnapping of prominent citizens. Gravesend, only a few miles up the Thames from London, was burned by the French in 1380. By 1385, in alliance with the Scots, a French army was threatening to operate south of the Scots border whilst a French fleet proposed to attack England’s southern coast, the first time since the reign of King John, and the dark days after Magna Carta, that England itself was so menaced.
Richard II’s early years were thus overshadowed at first by warfare, then by the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, which revealed the fragility of royal authority. Richard acquitted himself well in the crisis of 1381. He was nonetheless entirely dependent upon a council, in which the servants of his late father, the Black Prince, coexisted uneasily with the great aristocrats and in particular with the king’s uncles, John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster and Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester. Like Edward II before him, Richard II found it impossible to keep his friendships within bounds. Without quite the scandal or passion that had attended Edward II’s relations with Piers Gaveston, by 1384 Richard was so closely attached to Robert de Vere, Earl of Oxford, a young man five years his senior, that whispers began to spread at court. Sodomy was amongst the crimes with which Richard was eventually charged, albeit many years later and perhaps with scant justification. Earl Robert, meanwhile, was the latest in a line of impoverished members of the Vere family, of impeccable lineage, ennobled as long ago as the reign of Stephen, yet lacking the resources to maintain themselves in proper aristocratic state. Richard showered him with favours, including promotion as marquess, subsequently in 1386 as Duke of Ireland, the first time that a ducal title had been bestowed outside the immediate royal family.
Just as with Gaveston after 1307, Vere’s promotion was resented by established figures at court. Vere himself lacked the political sense not to flaunt his good fortune. In particular, he seems to have poisoned the King’s mind against John of Gaunt, raising the suspicion that Gaunt had set his own eyes upon the throne, either for himself or for his son, Henry Bolingbroke. Bolingbroke, at this stage Earl of Derby, was an almost exact contemporary of King Richard, who, in 1381, at the height of the peasant assault on London, whilst the King rode out to confront the rebels at Mile End, had been captured and threatened with death by the mob that invaded the Tower. Henry was saved only by the intervention of a servant whose bravery Richard II would soon have good cause to regret.
Tensions between Gaunt and the King came to a head on King Richard’s first military campaign, in 1385 when he rode north to confront the Scots. Having burned Melrose Abbey and a series of targets between Newcastle and Edinburgh, Richard sought to end his campaign. Gaunt urged him to cross the Firth of Forth into the Highlands. Richard refused. By the time the army returned south, uncle and nephew were barely on speaking terms. A solution was devised. For nearly twenty years, Gaunt had been eager to pursue a claim to the throne of the Castile, acquired by his marriage to a daughter of the late King Pedro. It was with this Castilian claim in mind that treaties had been signed between England and Portugal, a Christian kingdom first established with the assistance of English crusaders in the 1140s, and thereafter a major centre for English trade. The Anglo-Portuguese treaties negotiated in 1373, renewed in 1386, initiated an alliance today still not broken after more than six hundred years.
These treaties ensured that Port wine was to become the favoured drink, and the downfall, of many an English gentleman. They also allowed John of Gaunt to lead an expeditionary force to northern Spain, now backed by the King in Parliament, only too anxious to rid himself of his overbearing uncle. Landing at La Coruña in Galicia, and therefore tracing out, like the Black Prince before him, much of the itinerary later followed by British armies in the wars against Napoleon, Gaunt failed to make good his claim to the Castilian throne, instead surrendering it in exchange for the marriage of his daughter to another of the claimants and a massive cash indemnity. He nonetheless managed conveniently to absent himself from England just as the crisis at the English court reached its climax. Furthermore, the Spanish pension paid to him each year throughout the 1390s added significantly to the resources available to him and his son in England.
In Gaunt’s absence, an aristocratic coalition headed by the Duke of Gloucester and the earls of Arundel and Warwick, emerged to challenge the authority of the King’s friends, targeting in particular Robert de Vere, Simon Burley and Michael de la de Pole, son of the Hull wool merchant whose career we have already encountered, appointed chancellor in 1383 and two years later created Earl of Suffolk. Pole was tarnished not only by his association with shady commercial transactions but through his failure to negotiate any effective peace with France. The French wars, indeed, had descended into tragi-comedy when the boneheaded bishop of Norwich, Henry Despenser, himself a grandson of Edward II’s favourite Hugh Despenser the younger, had been entrusted with a major subsidy from the English Church and command of a ‘crusade’, authorized by the Pope who was at odds with the King of France. Landing at Calais in 1383, Despenser’s ‘crusade’ had attacked Dunkirk and Ypres (names more usually associated with British warfare in the twentieth century), but had then beaten a hasty and humiliating retreat when the French King appeared on the scene.
The bishop had been impeached in Parliament for incompetence. His reputation as a man of God hardly improved when, on the Scots campaign of 1385, he was challenged to armed combat by the bishop of Galloway as a means of resolving the allegiances of England and Scotland within the papal Schism. It was this same bishop Despenser whose prosecution of Lollards, after 1399, was to lead to the burning of the first Lollard martyr, William Sawtre. As if to emphasize the multiplying associations between the reign of Richard II and that of Edward II, Despenser’s infant nephew Thomas, later recognized as Lord Despenser, was married to a cousin of the King. Both the personalities and the issues of the 1320s seemed to haunt the politics of the 1380s.
In 1386, to resist a threat of invasion, Pole demanded an unprecedented subsidy from Parliament, four times the conventional assessment, intended to finance defence. Parliament responded by demanding Pole’s removal from office. Confronted with these demands, the King declared that he would not dismiss so much as a scullion from his kitchen at Parliament’s request. The issue of royal patronage and the King’s ability to choose his own ministers and friends returned, a
s under Edward II, to the very centre-stage of political debate. As if to emphasize the parallels that might be drawn with the past, and as yet another reminder of the degree to which English history had become a self-referential phenomenon, Richard is said to have threatened to seek aid from the French, no doubt thinking of Henry III, in the 1260s, seeking out the assistance of Louis IX in his own disputes over patronage against the English barons led by Simon de Montfort. Reminded by Gloucester and Arundel of the fate of Edward II, Richard once again resorted to past precedent, like Henry III in the 1260s, leading a great ‘gyration’ of England, avoiding Westminster and postponing his response to baronial demands by touring the country in an attempt to drum up support for his cause.
In November 1387, Gloucester, Arundel and the Earl of Warwick, later joined by Henry Bolingbroke and Thomas Mowbray (future Duke of Norfolk), launched a formal indictment of treason against five of the King’s favourites, naming Pole, Vere and the Archbishop of York. The King himself was portrayed as a mere adolescent, victim of the adolescent’s balance of humours which itself rendered him inconstant, lacking the ‘virtue’ (‘virtus’, implying the qualities of a full-grown man or ‘vir’) that was expected of a ruler. Vere, widely regarded as no true ‘vir’, responded by raising troops against these ‘Lords Appellant’. On 20 December, his force was decisively defeated at Radcot Bridge on the Thames in Oxfordshire, site of a castle built for siege operations during the civil war of Stephen’s reign and not twenty miles from Deddington, the site of Piers Gaveston’s arrest in 1312. The Earl of Warwick who engineered Vere’s downfall in 1387 was himself the grandson of the earl who, in 1312, had arranged the arrest and beheading of Gaveston. History cast a long shadow.
Vere fled into exile. Rumours circulated that the King was about to be deposed. Instead, in the so-called Merciless Parliament of 1388, the Lords Appellant arranged the impeachment and execution on charges of treason of eight of the King’s ministers. Vere and Pole were sentenced in their absence. Burley and five others were beheaded despite impassioned appeals for leniency, with the Queen going down on her knees to plead for Burley’s life, just as Richard II’s grandmother, Queen Philippa, had pleaded forty years earlier for clemency towards the burghers of Calais. Richard II neither forgave nor forgot the injury done to Burley, who had carried him on his shoulders as a ten-year-old boy to his coronation in 1377. On the precise spot of Burley’s execution on Tower Hill, the King was later to have his revenge. In the meantime, and as with the earlier history of Edward II, the Appellants failed to put public duty before self-interest, or to agree in anything save their detestation of the executed ministers. Although in theory royal government was now put into commission, the King himself swiftly regained control over the conduct of his affairs.
The fact that revenge had now become the dominant characteristic of Richard’s reign is perhaps surprising. Richard himself was a cultivated and by no means incompetent ruler. His marriage, in 1382, to Anne of Bohemia, daughter of the late Holy Roman Emperor, Charles IV, and sister of the emperor-elect, Wenceslas IV, King of Bohemia, brought him into contact with one of the most splendid courts in Europe. The style of Charles IV’s court at Karlstein, south of Prague, was replicated in Richard’s palaces and can be detected behind the self-image that Richard sought to project through such works of art as his ‘coronation’ portrait at Westminster Abbey, showing him enthroned in full majesty, his eyes staring with dispassionate intensity, like those of an icon of Christ, directly into the viewer’s line of sight.
Besides the usual investment in luxury, embroidery and gilded toys, Richard’s court was perhaps the first to have used, perhaps the first to have invented, pocket handkerchiefs: ‘small pieces (of linen) to be given to the King to carry in his hand to dab and clean his nose’, as his tailor’s bill puts it, lacking any word for so unfamiliar a thing. New innovations in fashion, skin-tight hose, long pointed shoes, folly bells and even the cod-piece, speak of a court where conspicuous consumption and display were encouraged. The Wilton Diptych, the most glorious of his surviving commissions, not only reveals Richard’s devotion to the Virgin Mary, but his employment of symbols: the white hart (or ‘Richart’) badge, worn by each one of the eleven angels in attendance on the Virgin; the gold collar of broomcods (the seed pod of the broom plant) that Richard himself wears, and the broomcods scattered amongst harts across the King’s robe, ultimately derived from the ‘plante de genêt’ or wild broom from which Richard’s own ‘Plantagenet’ dynasty was named, more recently reimported from the court symbolism of Charles VI of France; the eagles and the flowers of rosemary with which the painting is scattered, symbols themselves of Anne of Bohemia and of Richard’s links to the Holy Roman Empire. The technique of the painting is a combination of northern Gothic, laid over chalk on oak panels, but employing pigments bound with a medium of egg, and flesh tones undermodelled in green, themselves borrowed from the most advanced painting of the Italian trecento. This indeed, is one of the greatest works of pre-Renaissance art and a reminder that, under Edward III and Richard, English mercenaries were regularly employed in the wars of Florence and northern Italy. Bishop Despenser of Norwich, before promotion to his English diocese, had fought for the papacy in its wars against the Visconti rulers of Milan, a dynasty into which the second son of King Edward III had himself been married. Simon Burley, victim of the purge of 1388, had owned a copy of Giles of Rome’s treatise on government, in which the King’s duty to rule is presented as a divine obligation, ultimately beyond the constraint of mere earthly law. Machiavelli himself would have been at home in the English court politics of the 1390s.
If the Wilton Diptych directs us to the future, then it is also firmly anchored in the past. Richard himself is shown kneeling in the company of three saints: John the Baptist (to whom Richard and his grandfather, Edward III, displayed particular devotion), St Edmund of Bury and St Edward the Confessor. The Confessor’s shrine at Westminster played a major role in Richard’s life: it was here that he had prayed and made offering before riding out to meet the peasant rebels at Smithfield in 1381, and it was here that he conducted candlelit visits by night for some of his more important diplomatic guests, including the Christian king of Armenia. The monks of Westminster Abbey regarded Richard as their greatest royal patron since Henry III, dedicating to him treatises on the history of the abbey, its rights of sanctuary, its Anglo-Saxon privileges, its crown jewels and regalia, its relics and in particular its relic of the Holy Blood, first granted by Henry III. Richard incorporated the Confessor’s emblem, a cross patonce between five martlets, within his own heraldic coat of arms. It was at Westminster, in the rebuilding of William Rufus’ great hall, that Richard invested the majority of the funds that he devoted to building.
Once again, it is important to notice here the reverence for the past: Westminster Hall was reroofed and refurbished, but it was neither razed nor rebuilt. History was now heritage. The clearest example of Richard’s attachment to history comes through his devotion to the cult of Edward II. Murdered in 1327, Edward had attracted little interest over the next fifty years. Richard II, however, not only commissioned an enquiry into the miracles worked at Edward’s tomb, but twice, in 1390 and again in 1397, sent embassies to the Pope, hoping to obtain official canonization for Edward as a saint. He also requested, equally unsuccessfully, that Archbishop Arundel consecrate him with the oil of St Thomas, supposedly delivered to Thomas Becket by divine intervention, first recorded in the reign of Edward II when Edward himself had sought to be anointed with it.
Like Edward II after 1312, Richard II after 1388 passed his time preparing revenge. The atmosphere at court veered from frosty towards terror. The death of Anne of Bohemia in 1394 was followed by an outpouring of royal grief in which the King is said to have ordered the demolition of his palace at Sheen, only recently built and supplied with such luxuries and innovations as piped hot and cold water with large brass taps, with personal latrines for each bedroom. Nonetheless, the fact that Anne had ne
ver once fallen pregnant left the question of the succession still undecided. It also opened the way for a renewal of negotiations with France.
In 1396, Richard was betrothed to the young daughter of Charles VI, as part of a twenty-eight-year truce negotiated with the French.
Ireland
In the meantime, the King had led a military expedition into Ireland, intended to subdue the rebel and self-styled ‘King of Leinster’, Art (or Arthur, a name not without significance for Englishmen concerned about myths of the once and future king) MacMurrough. Richard thus became the first English king since John in 1210, and the last before James II in the 1680s, to visit his Irish dominions. The date of his crossing, in October 1394, was itself determined by history. October was far too late in the year for proper campaigning. It had nonetheless been in October 1171 that King Henry II, the founder of Richard’s dynasty, had first crossed to Ireland, landing like Richard in 1394, at Waterford. The relative success of his expedition, in which the Irish chieftains were made to swear fealty to Richard, removing their caps, belts and weapons and, on their knees, placing their hands between those of the King, contributed to a rise in Richard’s confidence. On his return to England, he arranged for the reburial of Robert de Vere, who had died and been buried in exile at Louvain four years before, in the Vere family mausoleum in Essex. It might have struck contemporaries that Edward II, in the aftermath of his Scots campaign of 1314, had reburied Piers Gaveston, originally interred at Oxford, in great pomp at the Dominican Priory of King’s Langley in Hertfordshire. Also in 1395, Richard made arrangements for his own burial at Westminster, requesting that his epitaph proudly declare ‘He threw down all who violated the royal prerogative; he destroyed heretics and scattered their friends.’ This great ‘throwing down’ was about to begin.
A Brief History of Britain 1066-1485 Page 45
