Queens Consort
Page 36
Presumably Froissart did not mean to be comic, but it is typical that Philippa’s first dying thought should be of her debts.
CHAPTER 13
ANNE OF BOHEMIA AND ISABELLE OF FRANCE
‘The Little Queens’
When the Black Prince and his family returned to England in 1371, Joan of Kent still had reason to hope that she would be the next queen of England. The Maid of Kent was in truth more fat than fair these days, and her ailing husband was a decrepit shadow of his former gallant self, but the aura of glamour surrounding the couple persisted in the face of reality. As Princess of Wales, Joan could expect to be the first lady at court now that Philippa was gone, but the Queen’s death had provoked a slump in standards for the most chivalrous of kings and Edward, now ill and often confused, was very publicly in the clutches of his mistress, Alice Perrers. Philippa had turned a blind — and, in the light of her incessant pregnancies, perhaps rather relieved — eye to her husband’s infidelities in the past, but Alice Perrers was different. The relationship had begun in 1364, and two years later Alice was installed as a maid of the Queen’s bedchamber, which suggests that either Philippa sanctioned the liaison, or Edward simply no longer cared about his wife’s dignity. If the hostile St Albans Chronicle is to be believed, the latter would appear to have been the case, as Alice was reported to be the daughter of a tiler and a maidservant, hardly a suitable background for such a prestigious position. More probably she was the daughter of Sir Richard Perrers, a Hertfordshire member of Parliament, but this was still a very modest rank, and it could only have been galling for Joan to find Alice taking very public precedence in Edward’s court. Even more incomprehensible, to a legendary beauty, was the fact that Alice was famously ugly, though even The St Albans Chronicle conceded she was intelligent. The Prince and Princess ofWales were to spend the next six years living in semi-retirement at Kennington and Berkhamsted, largely because of the Prince’s poor health, but conceivably also because Joan was appalled by the degenerate atmosphere that now prevailed at Edward’s once glorious court.
To a far greater extent than Henry II’s ‘Fair Rosamund’, Alice Perrers was the first mistress of an English king to enjoy a semi-official position. She acquired manors in seventeen counties, valuable property in London and the castle of Egremont — and, inevitably, a reputation for being grasping and litigious. In a dispute over St Albans Abbey involving her likely father, Sir Richard, she was accused of threatening the judges, but she was clearly a capable manager, going to law to defend her holdings until her death in 1400 and dealing with such prestigious figures as William of Wykeham and John of Gaunt. The King was sufficiently in love to overturn Philippa’s bequest of jewels and goods to her lady Euphemia de Heselarton and make them over to Alice, and he had no qualms about appearing with her in public, as at a Smithfield tournament in 1374, when she rode next to him in the royal chariot, got up as ‘the Lady of the Sun’. She became a great crony of Philippa’s daughter Isabella, whose husband had by now been mislaid, and together they took the leading female roles in court ceremonial, to general disgust.
Any plans Joan may have had for putting La Perrers in her place suffered a setback when the Black Prince died in 1376. Life had proved a miserable disappointment for the young warrior who had shown such magnificent promise, and although, in his broken state, he may have been an ineffective king, the succession now depended on the vulnerable figure of the nine-year-old Richard of Bordeaux. As Queen Motherin-waiting, Joan could now anticipate a position of considerable power, and this was reflected in the grants made to her after her husband’s death which, along with her own holdings in Kent, provided her with an income nearly equivalent to that of a dowager queen. Almost at once, Joan found herself involved in political controversy. The Black Prince’s death occurred as Parliament was sitting, with John of Gaunt representing the elderly King. Parliament had taken measures to correct the sorry state of national affairs, impeaching several members of the royal household for financial corruption and demanding that Alice Perrers be exiled and her property sequestered. Prominent among the reformers were the Speaker, Peter de la Mare, and the bishop of Winchester, William of Wykeham. There was much anxiety as to the security of the succession, as it was feared that Gaunt might try to take the crown for himself. Those fears were confirmed when Gaunt, on his own authority, declared the 1376 proceedings void and recalled Alice Perrers. De la Mare was imprisoned and the bishop had his revenues confiscated and was forbidden to approach within twenty miles of London.
When Parliament was reconvened in January 1377, riots broke out. Gaunt and the Earl of Northumberland escaped by boat to Joan’s house at Kennington. Joan sent three envoys, including her son’s tutor Sir Simon Burley, to negotiate with the Londoners, but they would be satisfied only by an audience with the King himself. William of Wykeham was not too proud to bargain with an adulteress, and paid Alice Perrers to conspire behind Gaunt’s back for the restoration of his income. Triumphant, she remained at court for the last few months of her lover’s life. Avaricious to the end, when Edward III died at Havering on 21 June 1377, his mistress was accused of pulling the rings from his fingers before his body was cold.
Joan and Richard were at Kingston-on-Thames as Edward lay dying. The Londoners showed their allegiance to his heir Richard by sending a deputation to Kingston before the King expired, signalling their intentions in advance to Gaunt who, if he had ever been minded to try for the crown, now had to accept that this would be impossible. The passing of the man Froissart called the greatest English king since Arthur was overshadowed by the swift preparations for his grandson’s coronation and, on 16 July, Richard was crowned at Westminster. Almost immediately, Joan began to make arrangements for the boy king’s marriage. One of the first offers came from the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles IV, who proposed the hand of his eleven-year-old daughter Anne, but Joan was also considering princesses of France, Navarre and Scotland as well as the daughter of the Visconti Duke ofMilan.
In 1378, the successive elections of two rival popes affected the direction ofEnglish matrimonial policy. Urban VI, at Rome, had the support of the Italian, German and English rulers, while Clement VII, in Avignon, was championed by the French, Scots and Castilians. Urban’s support was geographically disparate, and he planned to consolidate it through an alliance between the King of England and the imperial house. Urban’s envoy, the bishop of Ravenna, Pileo de Prata, visited Charles IV’s son Wenzel (known as the King of Bohemia), in Prague to advise on the advantages of a marriage between Richard and his sister, and Wenzel duly wrote to the King to affirm their holy duty in reuniting Christendom. Richard’s envoys, at that time in Milan discussing the possible betrothal to the Duke’s daughter, were now sent to Prague, but the talks were delayed when they were kidnapped on their return journey and detained abroad until their ransom was paid. Negotiations finally resumed in June 1380, and it was not until January the following year that the English and imperial representatives met. On 2 May, a month after the imperial envoys, under the Duke of Teschen, had been received by John of Gaunt at the Savoy, Richard was able to agree to the treaty for his marriage with Anne of Bohemia.
This ‘little scrap of humanity’, as the Westminster chronicler described her, had spent much of her childhood at the Hradschin Palace in the flourishing city of Prague, which under her father’s rule had been transformed with the building of new districts, the awe-inspiring cathedral of St Vitus and a university. Charles IV, who aspired to emulate Charlemagne and St Louis, was a pious, exceptionally learned man, a traveller and collector of Carolingian art. He was a patron of Petrarch, while his grandfather had promoted the work of Dante. Influenced by the new Italian philosophy of humanism, Charles inaugurated a ‘“new age” in all the domains of social, artistic and literary advance’1 and he was also innovative in his attitude to sovereignty. Anne would have witnessed, and perhaps participated in, a court ceremonial that elevated even acts of everyday business to an almost holy status, ‘sanctifyi
ng’ the embodiments of state power through a cultivated association with religious imagery. Anne lived mainly at the court of her elder brother Wenzel while their father toured his scattered empire, and after Charles’s death in 1379, it was Wenzel with whom the English dealt. In terms of her breeding and extensive cosmopolitan connections, Anne was an ideal bride. Her elder sister Margareta was Queen of Hungary and Poland, her aunt Bona had been Queen of France and her father’s first wife had been a Valois princess. Richard himselfwas to try to emulate the stately ceremonial and sophisticated atmosphere his bride had known at the imperial courts. But she was embarrassingly poor.
Initially, discussion of Anne’s dowry had been diplomatically postponed, but it was soon obvious that Wenzel simply could not afford one. Nevertheless, the marriage was considered sufficiently important for Richard to effectively buy Anne from her brother for ‘loans’ totalling 15,000 pounds. Acquiring Anne was less a matter of healing the rift in Christendom than of detaching the imperial powers from their links with the French, and Richard was prepared to pay dearly for it, yet Anne’s impecuniousness immediately aroused dissent.
She set out from Germany with her retinue in September 1381, chaperoned by her aunt the Duchess of Brabant. They travelled from Ghent to Bruges, where they were greeted by the Count of Flanders, then on to meet the earls of Devon and Salisbury at Gravelines, protected by an impressive company of 500 men-at-arms. Anne’s escort now left her, and she continued on to Calais with the English party, crossing to Dover on 18 December. Her arrival was inauspicious — a storm raised huge waves in the harbour, smashing the ships against one another and destroying the vessel in which the new queen had sailed — but she reached Canterbury safely three days later, accompanied by John of Gaunt, and then moved on to spend Christmas at Leeds Castle before leaving for London in mid-January Already people were complaining that the King would have been better advised to marry the rich Visconti princess. Anne had been obliged to linger at Leeds while money was raised for her ceremonial entry into the capital through loans from the abbot of Westminster, the bishop of Worcester and a grocer turned mayor of London named Nicholas Brembre. After a pageant at Blackheath, Anne and Richard progressed through the city, but the people made their feelings apparent by ripping down the royal arms crossed with the imperial ones that had been hung on a fountain to welcome her.
Anne’s foreign entourage also provoked antagonism. Richard was keen to display his magnanimity, and gave an annuity of 500 pounds to the Duke of Teschen, while two other envoys were granted 250 pounds apiece and numerous other gifts of between five and 200 florins were distributed. To make matters worse, the primates of London and Canterbury argued about which of them should be given precedence at her wedding and coronation, a quarrel resolved by sharing the honours. The bishop of London conducted the wedding on 20 January and the archbishop the coronation two days later. It is testament to Anne’s judgement and a certain sweetness of character that she was eventually able to make herself beloved of the Londoners, but the awkward circumstances of her marriage highlighted an uneasy relationship between the King and his people which would eventually result in desperate conflict.
The previous year, Richard had confronted a rebellion. Conflict between a king and his magnates was nothing new, but the 1381 revolt was revolutionary in that it was orchestrated by the peasants. In the years after the Black Death, agricultural labourers had seen the potential for an improved standard of living, as the scarcity of men made their work more valuable. Their hopes were dashed by a combination of taxation and legislation to return wages to pre-plague levels and resentment soon turned to violence, culminating in a union of peasants from Kent and Essex marching on London. The image of Richard the blond boy-king riding bravely out to calm his rioting subjects is familiar from school textbooks, but his involvement in the Peasants’ Revolt was a source of contemporary disagreement which sheds light on his complex and contradictory character. In the pro-Richard version of events, the King retreated from the Tower, where the rebels were planning to ‘slay all the lords and ladies of great renown’, diverted their attention by agreeing to meet them at Mile End, where he granted freedom from villein status (essentially a prevailing form of slavery whereby men were bound to the land they worked and to those who owned it), confronted the peasant leader, Wat Tyler, at Smithfield and, when a scuffle broke out resulting in Tyler’s death, personally led the peasants away from the danger posed by his bodyguard. The other version has Richard opening the doors to the Tower, making craven concessions at Mile End and behaving with unpleasant duplicity at Smithfield. The granting of manumission and the guiding to safety of the rebels at Smithfield are the points on which the chronicles concur, but was Richard ‘marvellously impelled by cleverness beyond his years and excited bv boldness’ 2 or a snea king coward who permitted the protestors to take liberties with his mother at the Tower and shrilly declared he wished the villeins would be ‘incomparably more debased’?3
Inevitably, hindsight invites comparisons between Richard II and his great-grandfather Edward but, as in Edward’s case, it is imperative to attempt to disentangle the perceptions of his contemporaries from those of a broader history. The variance of chronicle accounts of the Peasants’ Revolt is just one instance of how Richard’s mercurial tendencies were interpreted in different ways from different standpoints. He had his ‘Gaveston’ in Robert de Vere, Earl of Oxford, with whom he was accused of enjoying perverse intimacies and, like Edward II, he was fond oflatenight drinking parties. He also had an exaggerated, doomed sense of his own prerogative and a persistent belief in his right ‘arbitrarily in his own mad counsels to exercise his own personal will obstinately’.4 Following the accusation that he was timid in war, Richard has been presented as an arty rather than a hearty king, his reign a ‘watershed in English art’,5 Christine de Pisan described him as ‘a true Lancelot’, while his personal contribution to the flowering of late fourteenth-century court culture has been questioned. The King was a dedicated setter of fashion, something of a gourmand, even a voluptuary, but he was also profoundly pious and engaged with the pageantry, if not the activity, of chivalry. John Gower saw the Peasants’ Revolt as the germ of Richard’s tyranny and ultimate deposition, a warning from God which he ignored, but it was, and is still, a matter of debate whether he did so through arrogance or weakness, or whether he was simply a martyr to the dishonourable ambition of the coming age.
The man Anne of Bohemia married in 1382 was fair-haired and self-consciously youthful, keeping his face clean-shaven when it was conventional for grown men to wear a beard. He was ‘abrupt and somewhat stammering in his speech, capricious in his manners … prodigal in his gifts, extravagantly splendid in his entertainments and dress … haughty and too much devoted to voluptuousness’.6 If his ideal was what he saw as the re-establishment of the royal prerogative, his daily preoccupation was the manifestation of the royal dignity. Perhaps more than any other northern European king until Louis XIV of France in the seventeenth century, he strove to make a pageant of every moment of his existence. He developed elaborations on court protocol, insisting on more complex ceremonial and new forms of address such as ‘Your Highness’ and ‘Your Majesty’ which had never before been used in England. The peerage was expanded with new ranks in its hierarchy: the title of marquess was introduced in 1385, baronies by patent formalised in 1387 and all of the King’s relations, the royal earls, were elevated to the rank of duke in 1397. Forever in the shadow of his father’s legend, Richard was obsessed with chivalry and an expert manipulator of the propaganda generated by great tournaments, though he did not joust himself but watched from his throne. It was noted that at formal crown-wearings he would remain seated in silent splendour all day long, and those to whom he inclined his royal gaze were expected to fall to their knees. With hindsight, Richard’s emphasis on his own regality seems rather pathetic, pompously empty, but his own age regarded him differently. He certainly provoked criticism, but the size and splendour of his cou
rt also inspired awe.
The Smithfield tournament of 1390 is typical of the kind of chivalric display in which Richard revelled. Attended by his brother-in-law Waleran of Luxembourg, the Count of St Pol and William of Bavaria, it featured the King himself taking out the honours in a new badge, his emblem of the white hart. After the jousts, the company moved to Westminster, where they heard service and midnight Mass and then processed to high Mass with the King and Queen in their crowns. The celebrations continued at Kennington, where Richard presided — crowned — over a banquet, and after that at Windsor, with another feast. At every stage of the festivities, rich colours andjewels, music and rare delicacies combined in a concetto of regality. ‘The sensory overload engendered by the overlapping layers of exquisite creations was part of the magic that distinguished the realm of the great from the drudgery of the rest,’ writes Marina Belozerskaya. ‘Great princely celebrations were also international events, epicentres whence ideas and tastes radiated across Europe.’7