Many people suspected that England, her wool trade increasingly crippled by taxes and her wine trade by privateers, was losing the Hundred Years War. Her Flemish and Breton allies abandoned her. The French constantly raided the south coast, burning seaports, and in 1386 the English grew terrified when Charles VI assembled an invasion armada – luckily dispersed by bad weather. Some magnates decided the country needed stronger government.
Gaunt, who on the whole had been a moderating influence, left England in 1386 to pursue his dream of a Spanish throne. Richard was so delighted to see the back of his uncle that he gave him a golden crown. His departure left a vacuum, filled by another uncle, the Duke of Gloucester, who became the king’s unrelenting enemy. That autumn, the parliament, already upset by invasion scares, grew panic-stricken at a ridiculous rumour that Richard was plotting to murder all the knights of the shire. Supported by a politically minded prelate, Bishop Thomas Arundel of Ely, Gloucester seized the opportunity to attack the chancellor.
‘Your people have an ancient law which, unfortunately, had to be invoked not so long ago’, they warned Richard – meaning Edward II. Should a monarch ‘rashly do just what he wants, then, with the people of the realm’s assent and approval it is lawful to pull him down off his throne and put some near kinsman in his place.’ (Gloucester meant himself.) They insisted on the dismissal of Suffolk, who was replaced by Bishop Arundel, the royal council being taken over by Gloucester and the Earl of Arundel – the bishop’s brother.11 Their policies were war with France and evicting Richard’s cronies.
The foremost crony was Robert de Vere, Earl of Essex, brought up as a ward in the royal household, who had become the king’s inseparable companion – allegations of homosexuality circulated, belied by Oxford’s womanizing. Despite his ancient title, he had been very poor until Richard made him Marquess of Dublin (the first English marquess) and the next year Duke of Ireland. What upset Gloucester and his allies was de Vere’s monopoly of royal favour: they compared him to an otter in a pond, ‘grabbing all the fish it can find’.12
Another crony, if not so close, was Thomas Mowbray, Earl of Nottingham, three years older than the king, who had also begun his career as a royal ward. Others included knights of the household, men from the middling gentry, for some of whom Richard displayed real affection. When Sir James Berners, a chamber knight, was blinded by lightning during a visit to Ely Cathedral in 1383, the king asked its monks to pray for him to their patroness St Etheldreda, which they did so fervently that his sight came back the next morning.13
The Appellants revolt
A commission was set up to reform the royal household – to purge the cronies. Richard reacted by announcing in August 1387 that he would rule in his own name, with five advisers. These were the Duke of Ireland, Chief Justice Tressilian, Archbishop Neville of York, a former lord mayor of London, Sir Nicholas Brembre, and his old tutor, Sir Simon Burley. Gathering troops, they forced a panel of judges to declare the commission unlawful.
Gloucester, with the Earls of Arundel, Warwick and Derby (Gaunt’s son, otherwise known as Bolingbroke), assembled an army and were joined by Nottingham, who was jealous of the Duke of Ireland. Known as the ‘Appellants’, they enjoyed considerable popularity since they promised strong measures against French invasion. In December, trying to intercept them, Ireland was routed by Bolingbroke at Radcot Bridge in Oxfordshire and fled to France. Arm in arm, the five ‘lords appellant’ confronted a tearful king in the Tower of London’s chapel, insisting on the dismissal of the ‘traitors’. For a few days he no longer reigned. Gloucester wanted to take the throne, but Bolingbroke, who was senior to the duke in line of succession, would not let him, and Richard survived.
In February 1388 the ‘Merciless Parliament’ sent Tressilian, Brembre, Burley and other household members to the block, despite Queen Anne pleading for Burley on her knees. But the new regime under Gloucester and the Arundels lasted barely more than a year. It achieved nothing in France as Gaunt, who had come back from Castile (without a crown) and was now Lieutenant of Gascony, refused to help while the Scots defeated the Percys at Otterburn in August 1388, terrifying the north country. Further demands for subsidies to pay for the war across the Channel angered the Commons, who felt they had paid enough already. Ignoring Gloucester’s fury, the council opened negotiations for peace.
Richard regains control
Richard suddenly seized control in May 1389, ordering Bishop Arundel to return the great seal and sending letters to the sheriffs. ‘We have reached the age of our majority, already in our twenty-second year,’ he proclaimed. ‘Accordingly, we wish and desire to rule and govern our person and inheritance . . . choosing and appointing our officers and ministers.’14 The king did not show any desire for revenge, pretending his wife had persuaded him to forgive the appellants. Gloucester and Lord Arundel were invited to rejoin the council, while he let Bishop Arundel become Archbishop of York.
At council meetings Richard needed self-control to tolerate the behaviour of Gloucester, who disagreed with whatever was decided. Made Lieutenant of Ireland to keep him out of the way, he refused to go there. In his view, the Irish were ‘a nasty, beggarly people with a perfectly beastly country which is quite uninhabitable – even if we conquered all of it within a year, they’d take the whole lot back from us inside another’.15
For a time Richard governed with restraint, helped by Gaunt, who approved of his policy towards France, a truce being signed in June 1389. Cherbourg was sold to the French in 1393, Brest three years later. Richard also hoped to settle Gascony on Gaunt and his heirs as an independent duchy, making him Duke of Guyenne in 1390. But the Gascons, who had bad memories of the Black Prince at Bordeaux, rose in revolt, so the king abandoned the plan.
When Queen Anne died of the plague at Sheen in the summer of 1394, Richard refused to go into any room where she had been, ordering the palace’s demolition. The epitaph he composed for her tomb in Westminster Abbey contains a reference to her skill at settling disputes, which hints at how much he had depended on her for support and advice:
Strife she assuaged, all swelling feuds appeased.16
She had been the one person the king really trusted. There was an unpleasant scene at her requiem. The Earl of Arundel, scarcely Richard’s favourite subject, arrived late at Westminster Abbey after missing the procession from St Paul’s and begged to be excused – there were private matters that required his attention. Seizing a cane, the king hit the earl so hard on the head that he fell down, his blood running over the pavement, and only refrained from killing him because they were in a church. Arundel spent several weeks in the Tower before being bound over for good behaviour in the huge sum of £40,000.
That autumn, the king led an expedition to Ireland. Landing at Waterford in October 1394 with 7,000 men, he defeated a group of south-eastern Gaelic chieftains, whereupon every lord in the country, Gaelic or Anglo-Irish, pretended to submit. After announcing futile measures to ‘civilize’ the natives (who were to learn English and wear English clothes) he left in March the following year, having achieved nothing.
At home there were religious troubles. In 1378 a group of cardinals had repudiated Urban II, returning to Avignon where they elected a rival pope – beginning the ‘Great Schism’. England and the Empire recognized Rome; France and Scotland looked to Avignon. In 1395 the late Dr Wycliffe’s disciples posted ‘Twelve Conclusions’ on the doors of Westminster Hall. Among them were Scripture’s superiority to tradition, that the Host was simply bread and any man could act as a priest, that monasticism and prayers for the dead were nonsense, and that the Church must not own property. Several courtiers were Lollards, including the Earl of Salisbury and a number of knights, but secretly since the king detested heresy.
Richard kept on good terms with Gaunt. When in January 1396 the duke took as his third wife Katherine Swynford, who had been his children’s governess, Richard arranged for their bastard offspring (the Beauforts) to be legitimized by parliament. Beca
use Katherine was of comparatively humble birth, the marriage outraged great ladies, who said Lancaster had disgraced himself by marrying a concubine. His brothers of York and Gloucester grumbled, too, although York – a lightweight interested only in pleasure – soon accepted it. Gaunt gave the appearance of being grateful, but had his eye on his son’s succession to the throne. He was rumoured to have commissioned a forged chronicle, placing copies in important monastery libraries. This claimed that Edmund Crouchback, the ancestor of his first wife, Blanche of Lancaster, and supposedly Edward I’s younger son, had really been the eldest but was set aside because of his deformity.
The Duke of Gloucester and the opposition
In contrast, Gloucester openly criticized his nephew and wanted to depose him. A Blimp-like figure, the duke was compulsively indiscreet. Cursing the king’s failure to fight ‘those rare boasting Frenchmen . . . his backside has grown too fat, he’s only interested in eating and drinking’, he predicted that ‘Matters can’t go on like this. He’s saddled merchants with such impossibly big taxes that they’re facing ruin, and nobody knows where the money goes. But I can tell you for a fact that he’s spending too much, on silly, useless things, while his subjects foot the bills. There’s going to be serious trouble all over the country – people are starting to grumble, saying they won’t put up with the situation for much longer.’17
The duke wanted Richard to be replaced by the Earl of March, who was heir presumptive. (March’s mother was the heiress of the Duke of Clarence, Edward III’s second son.) Meeting the earl in secret, Gloucester told him he had been appointed to see that England got a new king – Richard must spend the rest of his life in prison. Terrified, March said he would think about the idea, and was very relieved to escape to Ireland as lieutenant.
In October 1396 Richard married Charles VI’s seven-year-old daughter Isabel, part of his plan to end the Hundred Years War during which, in his view, too many brave men had been killed and too many crimes committed – an opinion shared by few Englishmen. He went to Calais for the wedding, an earlier Field of Cloth of Gold. While the marriage was happy enough in its way, Richard treating the little queen as a daughter, it was resented by his subjects, and not only from xenophobia. Charles persuaded him to try and force English churchmen to submit to the pontiff at Avignon who was favoured by the French. ‘Our king has become a Frenchman – he wants to destroy and dishonour us, but he won’t succeed!’ was the reaction of many clergy.18
Laymen as well as clergy were unsettled. Some London merchants asked Gloucester if Calais would be surrendered because of Richard’s marriage. ‘Highly likely’, he answered mischievously. ‘The French won’t care if he has all their king’s daughters, so long as they can keep hold of Calais.’ He advised them to ask Richard. ‘You speak up and don’t be shy!’ added the duke. ‘There’s something shabby going on.’ If they came back and let him know what the king had said, he would tell them how to deal with his foolish nephew.19
Richard was aware of Gloucester’s ravings. So were Lancaster and York, who begged him to be patient with their brother. While admitting that he was the most difficult man in England, they insisted he was harmless – everybody knew Gloucester was off his head. For the moment, they succeeded in calming the king’s fear of him. Luckily, Richard was more worried about the Londoners, of whom he had grown so frightened that he began to think of moving the capital to York.
Tyranny
Increasingly detached from reality, Richard spent whole days in silence amid his courtiers, seated on his throne with his crown on his head, from dinner (at 9.00 am) until dusk. Those who caught his eye had to kneel while he was addressed as ‘Majesty’, a new style. He even dreamed of replacing his late wife’s half-brother Wenzel the Drunkard as Holy Roman Emperor.
Suddenly the king decided that Gloucester, the Arundels and the Earl of Warwick were planning a coup. In July 1397 he arrived unexpectedly at Gloucester’s castle of Pleshey, in Essex, making the duke go back with him to London on a pretext of needing his advice. Nottingham, whom Richard threatened with death if he did not help, then took Gloucester under arrest to Calais, where he was smothered in a feather bed despite begging for mercy ‘as meekly as a man may’. It was announced that he had died from an apoplexy.
The next move against the Appellants was to ‘appeal them of treason’, with calculated irony. At Westminster in September 1397, parliament was ringed by royal archers, who at one point bent their bows and drew their arrows back to their ears, terrifying everybody – as Richard had forbidden on pain of death anyone attending to bear arms apart from his own retinue, so neither peers nor MPs were able to defend themselves. A show-trial took place.
‘The pardon is revoked by the king, by the lords and by us, the faithful commons’, announced Sir John Bussy, referring to the pardon in 1389. The Earl of Arundel groaned, ‘Where be those faithful commons?’ Even his former ally Bolingbroke accused him of proposing Richard’s arrest in 1388, remaining unshaken when Arundel retorted that he was lying through his teeth. ‘Ye are all liars, I am no traitor’, protested the earl, but he was found guilty and beheaded on Tower Hill.20 Warwick, another Appellant, was sentenced to life imprisonment on the Isle of Man after grovelling for mercy, while everything he possessed was confiscated, reducing his wife to beggary. Thomas Arundel was deprived of his see of Canterbury and sent into perpetual banishment.
The king rewarded those who had made his revenge possible. There were five new dukedoms, Bolingbroke becoming Duke of Hereford and Nottingham Duke of Norfolk, while Lancaster’s son by Katherine Swynford, John Beaufort, was created Marquess of Dorset. There was some amusement at their elevation, Walsingham recording that people called them ‘dukelings’. (When the crunch came, however, Richard would find he could rely on only three magnates – his half-brother John Holland, Duke of Exeter, his nephew Thomas Holland, Duke of Surrey and John Montague, Earl of Salisbury.)
In January 1398 another parliament at Shrewsbury posthumously pardoned the king’s disgraced chancellor, Michael de la Pole, besides granting Richard the customs on wool for life. Later his enemies charged him with packing the Commons by nominating knights of the shire for the sheriffs to return: modern research shows that a large proportion of the 27 sheriffs who took office at the end of 1397 had links with the royal household, while most of the others were retainers of magnates trusted by Richard. They knew they had been selected to bring government under the Crown’s control.
‘Not even the greatest in England dared question anything done by the king’, recalls Froissart. ‘He kept a paid retinue of 2,000 archers who guarded him day and night, because he did not entirely trust his uncles, let alone the earl of Arundel’s kindred.’21 These were the Cheshire men, who wore his livery of the White Hart. A chronicler credits them with telling him, ‘Dickon, sleep secure while we wake and dread nought while we live.’22 Adam of Usk says they were ‘wholly malevolent, roaming round uncontrolled and doing whatever they wanted, molesting, beating up and robbing’.23
Richard believed he was Christ’s vicar on earth, above the law, and that his subjects were in duty bound to obey him implicitly, an idea developed by Giles of Rome in the previous century. (A copy of Giles’s De Regimini Principum had been owned by the king’s tutor Simon Burley.) Writing to the Emperor of Byzantium, Manuel Paleologus, in 1398, Richard expressed outrage at the rebelliousness of England’s magnates, whom he swore to crush.24 By then he was making sheriffs take new oaths that promised stricter obedience to him, forcing his lords to swear to uphold the recent parliament’s acts to the letter. Behind this lay a conviction that he alone could make the laws, that the lives and goods of every man, woman and child in England belonged to him. He thought he was restoring the Crown’s authority, incapable of seeing that he was destroying its very foundations.
Richard’s views did not make him feel any more secure. At St Albans Walsingham heard a rumour that the king’s slumbers were so disturbed by Arundel’s ghost that he had the earl’s body d
ug up at night and buried further away from the Tower. There were signs of a growing loss of self-control. When Lady Warwick came to plead for her husband, Richard brandished a sword, yelling that he would have killed her had she been a man – scarcely the behaviour of someone who prided himself on his dignity.
Just before the Shrewsbury parliament, Norfolk told Bolingbroke (Hereford) that the king would never forgive Radcot Bridge and meant to destroy them as he had the other Appellants. When Bolingbroke said they had been granted pardons, Norfolk replied that Richard’s word could not be trusted even if he swore on God’s body – the Host. This was Bolingbroke’s version, but it might have been the other way round: perhaps Bolingbroke warned Norfolk of Richard’s unreliability and then, fearing he might be reported, slandered him to the king.25
Whatever the truth, at the end of February 1398, in the king’s presence, Norfolk told Bolingbroke he was a liar, after which a court of chivalry ordered a trial by combat at Coventry in September. When the two dukes appeared on the tournament field for what promised to be the most dramatic duel in English history, Richard stopped it, not daring to risk the prestige Bolingbroke would gain should he win. He banished Bolingbroke for life and Norfolk for ten years, although both were allowed to transfer large sums of money abroad. Norfolk, once the king’s boon companion, died at Venice shortly after. However, Bolingbroke received such a warm welcome from the French court on installing himself in the Hôtel de Clisson at Paris that it drew a formal protest from Richard’s envoys.
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