by Teresa Cole
Contemporaries they may have been, but there seems little similarity in character between Richard and his cousin Henry Bolingbroke. There is no doubting the young king’s courage. At the age of fourteen he had faced down an angry mob at the time of the Peasant’s Revolt and by his personal leadership averted a likely massacre. As to his wisdom and steadiness of character, however, there are considerable question marks. Indeed, later in his reign his mood swings are recorded as so sudden and extravagant that, if true, he would almost certainly today be diagnosed as bipolar.
Some suggest that his success in dealing with the Peasant’s Revolt may have inflated the king’s opinion of himself, and it is certain that from then on there is a record of discord between himself, his governing council and his parliament. He was growing up, however, and beginning to find the restraints imposed on him irksome, and there was such a mixture of interests and ambitions within the restraining bodies that harmony was always unlikely. The personal badge he chose for himself was a white hart, usually shown with a golden chain around its neck. The chain is said by some to have been insisted on by the king to represent his resentment of these restraints on his freedom of action.
Two particular counsellors had been appointed to guide the king. One, the Earl of Arundel, he is reputed to have detested from the start. The other was Michael de la Pole, son of a wealthy wool merchant and a former retainer of John of Gaunt. He had already given twenty years of loyal service to Edward III, and soon won the young king’s trust and friendship, more especially, perhaps, as he negotiated his marriage in 1382 to Anne of Bohemia. This marriage, unusually for the time, seems to have been an entirely happy one, its only failure being the lack of a child and heir for the king.
By 1386 the tensions between the king and those who sought to control him had resolved into two principle areas. First was the conduct of the war with France. This had been rumbling on intermittently for the king’s entire lifetime, and from time to time drew in other adversaries such as Scotland, Flanders and Castile. Recent campaigns had been expensive and generally disastrous, and the blame for this was laid at the feet of the king’s chief counsellor, de la Pole. The country, the commons and most of the lords wanted to continue the fight with increased vigour, dreaming of another Crécy or Poitiers. The king’s instinct, backed by de la Pole, was for peace. For some time John of Gaunt held a measure of balance between the two parties. He favoured the continuance of the war, but particularly had his eyes on the throne of Castile, at the time an ally of France. His stock with the king fell ever lower, however, until, as a relief to both, an expedition to Castile was sanctioned in 1386, and in July of that year he left the country, not to return for another three years.
The second area of contention between Richard and his parliament was the king’s extravagance and generosity to his friends. Time and again demands were made that the king should ‘live of his own’ (on the profits from his own estates), without taxing the people, and gifts of money, land and titles were condemned. Two particular ‘favourites’ of the king were singled out for criticism. One, Robert de Vere, Earl of Oxford, came from an ancient family and had been a childhood friend of the king. The other was de la Pole, now raised to the title of Earl of Suffolk. No doubt greed, jealousy and envy played their part in this tension, but the king’s own actions did little to help. In the very month the commons were petitioning that he make no further gifts and submit his accounts to a parliamentary commission, he appointed de Vere Marquis of Dublin with powers over all the Irish lands subject to the king’s writ, together with an enormous grant of money for their upkeep.
In the autumn of 1386 these two bones of contention came together with deadly results. Under very real threat of a French invasion, Parliament demanded the dismissal of de la Pole from his office of Chancellor. When Richard refused, a further demand was made that he come in person to Parliament to dismiss him. The instigators of this move were the king’s youngest uncle, Thomas of Woodstock (ironically raised to the title of Duke of Gloucester on the same occasion de la Pole received his peerage), and Richard’s hated counsellor the Earl of Arundel. Both were bitter enemies of de la Pole and jealous of his position with the king. At the same time Gloucester took the opportunity of reminding both the king and Parliament of the steps that had been taken to depose King Edward II barely sixty years before.
Richard agreed to receive a deputation from Parliament, no doubt expecting a selection of knights, lords and burgesses. Instead Gloucester came himself, along with Arundel’s brother Thomas, Bishop of Ely. Again veiled threats were made that there was a precedent for deposing an unsatisfactory king, and in the light of this Richard agreed to remove his friend and Chancellor from office. De la Pole was promptly put on trial before Parliament accused of corruption and subverting the law, and, despite evidence to the contrary, was convicted and imprisoned.
Pressing home their advantage, Parliament next declared that a council should be formed to supervise the king and control his revenue and appointments for a period of one year. Such a council might have brought about much-needed reform in the administration, but since its two chief members were Gloucester and Arundel it was never likely to succeed. In defiance of this Richard immediately released de la Pole from prison, and spent the spring of 1387 touring the Midlands and the north attempting to raise support for himself. He consulted the chief judges of the day, who gave it as their opinion (whether freely or not is another matter) that, among other things, the appointment of the council was an infringement of the royal prerogative of the king, that the king alone had the right to appoint and remove ministers, and that those responsible for the recent attacks on the king and his ancient rights were traitors.
Matters came to a head in November 1387. Richard returned to London accompanied by a group of his close supporters, including de la Pole, de Vere, the Archbishop of York, Chief Justice of the King’s Bench Robert Tresillian and Richard’s former tutor Sir Simon Burley. He had, however, little in the way of armed support.
Gloucester and Arundel had, meanwhile, recruited others to their cause. On 14 November a formal ‘appeal’ or accusation of treason was made against five leading friends of the king, with the demand that they be arrested and put on trial before Parliament. Those making this accusation, the ‘appellant lords’ as they were then called, were Gloucester, Arundel and the Earl of Warwick. A little later they were joined by two younger men, barely into their twenties, Thomas Mowbray, Earl of Nottingham, and Henry Bolingbroke, now titled Earl of Derby.
With little option but to obey, Richard agreed to their demands but fixed the date of the parliament for 3 February 1388, thereby buying some time for the accused. De la Pole fled to the Continent, the archbishop to his diocese, and de Vere, apparently with the king’s blessing, rode to Cheshire, Richard’s most loyal county, to raise an army for the king.
On 20 December, however, hastening southward with some 4,000 men, de Vere found the crossing of the Thames at Radcot Bridge strongly held against him by the forces of Henry Bolingbroke, and while he hesitated Gloucester’s army appeared on his other side. It was a hopeless position and, taking advantage of a foggy winter’s day, de Vere managed to slip away and escape to the Continent, from which he never returned.
Richard, who had retreated to the Tower, was visited there by the Lords Appellant and, again under threat of deposition, was forced to agree to all their demands. The so-called Merciless Parliament met in February, and, despite the absence of all but one of the accused, the Appellants, led by Gloucester, recited an increased list of offences against them. All were then found guilty. The archbishop, as a clergyman, was protected from the death penalty, but the others were condemned and the sentences carried out on Nicholas Bembre, a former mayor of London, and Chief Justice Tresillian, who was found in hiding soon after the trial.
Not content with this, further offenders were purged from the king’s household, including his old tutor Burley, who, to the consternation of many, including Henry Bolingbro
ke, was put to death in May 1388. As a final act, the parliament voted the sum of £20,000 to be divided between the five Lords Appellant in recognition of their good services, and all, both lords and commons, swore a new oath of loyalty to the king.
This might seem an extraordinary act on the part of men who had just done all they could to strip him of power and destroy his friends, but, publicly at least, throughout the whole episode they had been at pains to stress the innocence of the king. It was his friends and counsellors who had led him into error and caused the conflict, so the charges said, and these friends had now paid the price. There was no more talk of deposition. The king was the king still – but the self-appointed council continued to rule in his name.
This episode is the first time we hear of any involvement of Henry Bolingbroke in the politics of the time, and it is hard to estimate how far he sympathised with the originators of the action. He was very young, and for the first time representing the interests of the House of Lancaster without any guidance from his formidable father. We know he protested at the condemnation of Burley, and he may have done on other occasions. Certainly when Gloucester was trailing the idea of deposing the king, we might expect Henry to point out that his father came higher in the line of succession than Gloucester, being some fifteen years his senior. All in all it was an interesting lesson in the possible ways of dealing with an unsatisfactory king, but it may well be that it was with a sense of relief that Henry returned to his young family when it was all over.
The final act came abruptly on 3 May 1389. The story goes that, at a council meeting, Richard suddenly demanded of Gloucester, ‘How old am I?’ When the answer came that he was twenty-three, he then declared that he must, therefore, be old enough to take up his proper role in governing the country. It could have been an explosive moment, but wasn’t. Lessons had been learned all round. When the council quietly resigned their duties, the king chose two elder statesmen who had served his grandfather to be Chancellor and Treasurer, and when, later that year, John of Gaunt returned, richer but crownless, from Spain, the transfer of power was complete.
Thereafter John of Gaunt became the king’s most loyal supporter and the two became closer than they had ever been, particularly when, in 1396, Richard approved Gaunt’s marriage to Katherine Swynford, his long-time mistress. A little later he legitimated the four children of that union, bestowing an earldom on the oldest, John Beaufort.
In the meantime the Lords Appellant had deemed it better to melt away, Warwick to his estates, Arundel to plan a crusade and Henry Bolingbroke and Gloucester to aid the Teutonic knights at the siege of Vilnius in Prussia. Bolingbroke was out of the country for much of the next four years, travelling in Europe and making a slow pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and in that time it seemed that all had been forgiven and forgotten between the king and his rebellious lords.
One small spark shows that this was not so. In 1394 Richard’s beloved wife, Anne, died. Arundel came late to her funeral and, in what might have been a deliberate insult, asked leave of the king to depart before it was over as he had business to attend to. Richard’s fury erupted in violence, striking the earl across the face with the verger’s wand and imprisoning him in the Tower for some weeks. A further clue to the king’s mental state might be that he had the palace at Sheen, where he had lived with his wife, razed to the ground soon after her death.
Nothing more came of this incident save that Arundel and Gloucester began to draw together again. It was to be another few years before Richard showed his hand against his former enemies and before then he had achieved some measure of success and even popularity. Settlements were made with France and Scotland to bring an end to expensive wars, and even in Ireland there was an improvement in relations following a personal expedition by the king.
As part of the settlement with France, Richard had married the French king’s seven-year-old daughter Isabelle. This was not the most appropriate match for a king without an heir. Some romantics have suggested it was because he did not want to replace his newly dead queen, but it is likely that diplomacy played a larger part. Personal feelings very rarely came into such matters. Among those speaking loudest against the marriage, and against many other acts of the king, were Gloucester and Arundel. They were about to experience Richard’s revenge.
These two, together with Warwick and other magnates, found themselves invited to a state banquet. Gloucester and Arundel stayed away, the former pleading illness, but Warwick attended, and after an apparently pleasant evening found himself imprisoned in the Tower. The next day Arundel was persuaded by his brother, now Archbishop of Canterbury, to surrender himself to the king, who, he was assured, meant him no harm. He was immediately imprisoned at Carisbroke Castle on the Isle of Wight, and for his services the archbishop was exiled for life. Gloucester was arrested by the king himself, and, on pleading for mercy, was told he would have just the same amount of mercy as he had shown to Burley. His prison was even further afield, in Calais, with Thomas Mowbray as his gaoler.
The king claimed to have discovered a new plot against himself. No evidence of such a plot has ever been found, and the game is rather given away by the fact that, when it came to a trial, he chose to play the appellants’ own trick against them. Eight young men were found, including the newly legitimated John Beaufort, now Earl of Somerset, to accuse these three of treason – not a new treason but the acts of 1387/88, apparently pardoned long ago.
Gloucester never made it to his trial. A confession of treason was forced from him by Mowbray, and as soon as it was written and delivered to a judge he was murdered. Arundel was tried before Parliament at the end of September 1397. He remained defiant to the end, was found guilty and beheaded – accompanied to the block by an armed guard led by Thomas Mowbray. When his turn came Warwick broke down completely, confessed to everything put to him and escaped with his life. He was first ordered to be exiled on the Isle of Man for life, but later was returned to the Tower.
The new Lords Appellant were all rewarded with titles by the king, Mowbray becoming Duke of Norfolk. Henry Bolingbroke, too, was honoured, acquiring the title Duke of Hereford. His father, as High Steward, had both opened the trial and announced the sentences, and it seemed that the House of Lancaster was now as closely bound to the king as it could be.
Not so. Less than six months had passed before the next act in the drama. In January 1398 Henry Bolingbroke declared before Parliament that Mowbray had made treasonable statements to him and tried to draw him into a conspiracy against the king. The statements amounted to the fact that, as the last remaining Lords Appellant of 1388, they were likely to be the next victims of Richard’s vengeance.
Mowbray immediately denied any wrongdoing. A committee of Parliament was appointed to investigate and to try and produce a settlement of the dispute. When this did not happen, a date was fixed for a trial by battle as was the custom at the time. On 16 September 1398 lists were prepared at Coventry. All was in readiness when abruptly Richard intervened. Instead of a trial he banished Mowbray for life. Bolingbroke, too, was exiled for ten years, though this was later reduced to six.
Why he did this remains a mystery. Some have suspected he didn’t want the issue proved, that he didn’t want to lose either, or possibly that he had determined to lose both. Many of his actions at this time seem eccentric, tyrannical and even against his own best interests.
One notable figure who seems to have made no protest at all was John of Gaunt. Maybe he kept quiet out of indebtedness to the king over his marriage and the legitimation of his children. It is equally possible, though, that he didn’t know his own son’s mind and feared he really might have had thoughts of treachery.
As his father’s fortunes changed, so too did those of young Henry of Monmouth, for the first time drawn into the affairs of his elders. Wherever he might have been before, he was now placed in the king’s household as a hostage for the good behaviour of his family. It was, by all accounts, a very benevolent captivity. Richard tre
ated the boy well, encouraged him in all his endeavours, and spent far more time with him than his father ever had. In return it seems likely that a real affection sprang up between the twelve-year-old and his captor.
In the summer of the same year a crisis had arisen in Ireland. The Irish chiefs, pacified and reconciled by the king’s visit just a few years before, now rose again in revolt. Worse than that, the Earl of March, Richard’s Lord Lieutenant in Ireland and also the nominated heir of the childless king, was killed in battle. A new campaign was needed and preparations began almost at once.
Then in February 1399 John of Gaunt died. Many thought that Henry Bolingbroke would now be pardoned and brought home from his exile in Paris to enter into his inheritance. He had been promised he would not be disinherited and would be allowed to appoint agents to receive and manage any property that might fall due to him. Now, however, it was announced that the letters patent granting these rights had been made ‘by inadvertence and without suitable advice’, that they were null and void, and that consequently all the vast estates of John of Gaunt would fall instead into the hands of the king. Almost as a side issue, Henry’s exile was increased to a lifetime banishment.
Seemingly oblivious to the shockwaves echoing around his nobility at this blatant theft, Richard calmly continued his preparations for the Irish campaign, and at the end of May departed for Ireland. He took with him not only a strong force of men, but also the majority of the English nobility, his treasure, Crown jewels and regalia – so much that strange rumours began to circulate in England that he had no intention of returning. Two absentees from this campaign were the Earl of Northumberland, Henry Percy, and his son, also Henry but named Hotspur by the Scots after the speed with which he charged into battle. They sent word to the king that troubles on the Scottish border prevented them from leaving their northern stronghold, and were allowed to remain at home.
