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 of Wales were to spend the next five 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 semiofficial 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 Mother-in-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 of Milan.

In 1378, the successive elections of two rival popes affected the direction of English 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, ‘sanctifying’ 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 himself was 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 by boldness’,² or a sneaking 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 of late-night 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’.⁴Following 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 yet 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 court 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 and jewels, 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

On the surface, at least, then, Anne’s new life was one of elegance and luxury. Londoners may have grumbled at her lack of a dowry, but she was greeted in the capital with novel displays of magnificence, including a pageant featuring a gilded castle made by the city goldsmiths. Chaucer remarked on the new glass windows installed in royal residences, and though many of Richard’s building projects, such as the reconstruction of the Great Hall at Westminster or the thirteen statues of English kings commemorating their descent from Edward the Confessor (an inheritance on which William the Conqueror had insisted all along), were emphatically grandiose, they also had a private character, motivated by increasingly sophisticated notions of comfort and privacy. At Eltham, Richard installed a bath house, a painted chamber, a ballroom and a garden for the Queen. Another was made for her at King’s Langley, while at Sheen he chose the island of La Neyt in the Thames for the royal lodging, which featured a bathroom with 2,000 coloured tiles and private lavatories. Chaucer’s directions in the prologue to ‘The Legend of Good Women’ suggest that Eltham and Sheen were Anne’s preferred residences, and she perhaps linked these smaller palaces with the meditative seclusion he glorifies in his poem.

At Eltham, Richard constructed a spicery and two sauceries to serve another of his enthusiasms, eating. In this as everything else, Richard was determined to appear a perfect king, and the prologue to The Forme of Cury, his recipe book, describes him as ‘the royallest viander’ in Christendom. The book contains 196 recipes, divided into first courses, main courses and puddings, and shows that court food was heavily spiced with ginger, cloves and cardamom, and similar in flavour to modern Arabic food, with meats cooked in sugar, spices and fruits. Richard, who is credited with inventing the handkerchief for his personal use, did not go in for coarse great lumps of meat. Spoons were used, and there are recipes for pâtés, galantines and stews, hare with almonds, oysters with rice and ginger and fruits baked with honey and wine. Spices were a tremendous luxury, and their prodigal use may have had as much to do with status as with preservation or flavour.

Richard was passionate, too, about fine clothes, and set the fashion for all the men at court. Clothes were more than a form of indulgence, they were an essential part of the image of royal power: ‘A king who was poorly attired or accoutred would sooner or later forfeit the allegiance of his subjects, as Henry VI was to find in the next century.’⁸ Courtiers were obliged to emulate the King if they wished to get ahead, a challenge encountered in the poem ‘Richard the Redeless’, which describes a man who wears the whole of his wealth on his back. New trends included the codpiece, worn over tight hose, embroidered doublets with padded shoulders and the ‘houpelande’, a long, coloured robe with a high neck, often set with jewels, which replaced the more functional cloak. Such fashions were designed to display the male physique to perfection, emphasising long legs, a slim waist and powerful shoulders; others were more frivolous, including the ‘shoon in long pikes’ that Anne’s Bohemian entourage was credited with introducing: shoes so long and pointed they had to be supported with chained garters wrapped round the knee and attached to the toes. Women wore fitted gowns that flowed at the hem, with beautiful collars sewn into the neck of their houpelandes. Anne owned at least two such collars bearing her emblems, an ostrich feather and a branch of rosemary, and ornamented with pearls.

Anne’s jewellery is also of interest in that it in all likelihood connects her with Chaucer, the most celebrated poet of the age. The ‘F’ version to the prologue of ‘The Legend of Good Women’ begins with the poet asleep in a garden, dreaming of the God of Love and a queen, Alcestis, who reproaches the poet with his previous work, ‘Troilus and Criseyde’. Alcestis claims that ‘Troilus’ is unjust to women and to love, since its subject is inconstancy, and commands him to write a history of faithful women which shall be delivered to the (real) Queen at Eltham or Sheen:

Thou shalt, where thou livest, year by year

The most part of thy time spend

In making of a glorious legend

Of good women, maidens and wives,

That were true in loving all their lives.

It seems obvious to identify the God and Queen of Love with Richard and Anne - the god, like the King, has golden hair - but the comparison has been disputed. It has been suggested that Alcestis may have been intended as a compliment to Joan of Kent but, leaving aside the fact that the Fair Maid was dead when the poem was written, the inventory of the royal jewels in 1499 presents new evidence that Alcestis is a tribute to Anne of Bohemia. The inventory features a crown enamelled in red and blue with white enamel flowers, red and blue gems and pearls. Its origins are uncertain, and the workmanship may be French, but the crown was used as part of the dowry of Henry IV’s daughter Blanche of Lancaster on her marriage to Ludwig of Bavaria in 1401, and it has been associated with collars that were certainly Anne’s. The detail of the white flower is the key. Isabelle de Valois, Richard’s second wife, was presented with two crowns after her marriage in 1396, one of which was decorated with jewels, pearls and white daisies. During the negotiations for the marriage, Isabelle was referred to as ‘our young marguerite, our precious stone, our beautiful white pearl’.⁹ Pearls and daisies were potent iconographic symbols of purity and innocence, highly appropriate for a young bride. Given the uncertainty as to when the crown was acquired and its provenance, it is possible to posit that it was made for Isabelle, but this would be to neglect its similarity to the crown in the poem. Alcestis is described as wearing

A fret of gold next her hair

And upon that a white crown she bear

With flowers small, and I shall not lie

For all the world, right as a daisy

Crowned is with white leaves light

So were the flowers of her crown white.

The image is extended so that the Queen of Love’s whole body appears as a daisy, in a green dress with ‘the white ’wered crown’ on her head. The ‘F’ version of the prologue was written in Anne’s lifetime, and Chaucer, who spent a long period as a servant of the court, would have had the opportunity to see her wearing such a crown. The daisies in the crown suggest that he did, strengthening the case for Anne as the model for Alcestis (and potentially an involvement with the commissioning of the poem), and indicating that the crown given to Queen Isabelle was passed on from Anne’s possessions.

Anne imported more to England than shoes and jewels. Her literary activities place her within the tradition of culturally innovative queens. The extent and influences of Richard’s artistic patronage is still a matter of dispute, as has been noted, but there is no doubt that his reign encompassed one of the most important periods in English literature, a blossoming in which Anne played a small but significant part.

She is credited with introducing Bohemian craftsmanship in the field of manuscript illustration, specifically with regard to the Liber Regalis, the manual for royal coronations produced at Westminster in 1383 whose illuminations have been identified as Bohemian work. Bohemian influence has also been proposed in the Great Missal of Westminster (1384) and the Carmelite Missal made for the London Whitefriars in 1393. Anne’s badge, an ostrich crowned and chained (ironically, far more appropriate to her husband), appears in the margin, and the work of the second master of the Missal, one of three artists who worked on it, is very similar to that of the Liber Regalis illuminator. The extent of Bohemian influence on English art in general is, again, a matter of debate, but even if the Liber Regalis represents an exception, it is an extremely significant one.

Vernacular literature, especially religious literature, had been strongly linked with English queens since Matilda of Scotland commissioned the French version of ‘The Voyage of St Brendan’ for her ladies’ enjoyment. Anne’s father, the Emperor, had been an active patron of religious works in Czech and German. By the fourteenth century, queens’ traditional patronage of literature can be linked with another important dynamic of queenship, that of Marianism. Increasingly, the Virgin was depicted by artists as a keen reader, even leafing through a book on the back of the donkey as she flees with Joseph and Jesus to Egypt. The first such image appears in the eleventh century, and they were common by the fourteenth. Symbolically, the literacy of the mother of God celebrated her wisdom and her fitness to receive in her body the Word made flesh, and it is notable that a rise in the numbers of women book-owners through the period corresponds with the growth of portrayals of the Virgin reading, both a model for and a reflection of daily life. In a fourteenth-century annunciation painting, the Bohemian Master of Vissi Brod shows Mary seated at a table with two books before her.

Anne came from a part of Europe where the law specifically linked women with the transmission of culture, ‘especially lay religious culture’.¹⁰ In the early thirteenth century, a collection of Saxon customary laws was produced with reference to the ‘Sachsenspiegel’, an area of land stretching from Magdeburg, the first capital of the Holy Roman Empire, into modern Russia. ‘The Way of the Saxons’ sets out which objects are to be inherited by women, including geese, linens, kitchen utensils - and books, particularly those concerned with religious practices. As Anne had been educated in a place where women’s role in trans-generational religious inheritance was official and vernacular religious texts had the support of the highest lay authority, Charles IV, and at a time when women’s reading was increasingly associated with the Virgin, a powerful symbol for queens, it is unsurprising to find that she brought with her to England the New Testament in Latin, Czech and German, and that translations of the Gospels were made for her in English, perhaps as an aid to her education in the language. Her commitment to pious reading was celebrated at her funeral, as was her desire to overcome her foreignness ‘so great a lady and also an alien would so lowlily study in virtuous books’, praised Archbishop Arundel.

Yet Anne’s English gospels also involved her in a theological controversy that contained some of the seeds of the Protestant Reformation. John Wycliffe, the Oxford theologian, promoted and translated the Bible in the vernacular, and his project is connected (though not to be conflated) with Lollardism, the movement that called for reform of the Church and emphasised the authority of faith rather than the worldly hierarchies of Rome. Accessible translations of the Bible were considered heretical by many, but not by Anne. When Wycliffe petitioned in favour of his translation in 1383, he observed: ‘It is lawful for the noble Queen of England the sister of the Emperor to have the Gospel written in three languages . . . and it would savour of the pride of Lucifer to call her a heretic for such a reason as this! And since the Germans wish in this matter reasonably to defend their own tongue, so ought the English to defend theirs.’¹¹ The Lollards seized on Archbishop Arundel’s commendation of Anne’s possession of the English texts in a tract published in 1407. It is not absurd to claim that this royal example endorsed a movement which was to come to its revolutionary fruition in the time of the next Queen Anne.

The connection between piety and literature also had a deeply personal significance for Anne of Bohemia. Soon after her arrival in 1382, she sought papal permission for greater solemnity in the celebration of the feast day of her namesake St Anne, the mother of the Virgin. In the early fifth century, St Jerome had highlighted the important role of mothers in teaching their daughters to read. ‘Have a set of letters made for her . . . and tell her their names . . . let her every day repeat to you a portion of the Scriptures as her fixed task.’ Reading the scriptures, Jerome explained, was the best way to prevent girls from wasting their time in idle pursuits, or succumbing to the vanities of the flesh. Alongside the growing tendency to portray the Virgin reading, the fourteenth century popularised depictions of St Anne teaching her daughter. Anne of Bohemia’s veneration of the saint could be associated with her own longing to bear a child, as St Anne and her husband Joachim had waited twenty years before being so blessed. Anne’s petition to the Pope at the time of her marriage could possibly suggest that she felt an affinity with St Anne, believing she would wait a long time for a child because her marriage was not consummated.

This is speculation. There is absolutely no evidence that Richard and Anne did not enjoy a normal sex life and only some reason to suspect the opposite. In his lifetime, Richard was accused of homosexuality. He identified with his great-grandfather Edward II, and the same analogy was made politically at the end of his reign when Adam Usk’s chronicle accuses him of ‘perjuries, sacrileges, sodomitical acts, the reduction of his people to servitude, lack of reason and incapacity to rule’ (the italics are this author’s), though, as in the case of Edward, this does not necessarily mean he committed homosexual acts - sodomy was a politicised perversity, used as grounds for unfitness. Richard liked the company of women, in fact the cost of the retinues of his female courtiers was a source of complaint, but he also enjoyed passionate friendships with men, particularly Robert de Vere, Earl of Oxford. Such friendships, again, do not necessarily indicate homosexuality (indeed, De Vere proved himself inconveniently straight). However, a persistent accusation levelled against Richard was that he was childlike. Obviously, he had come to the throne as a child, but such observations dogged him to the end of his reign, and he may have encouraged them in cultivating infantile appearance. If it is dabbling in psycho-history to theorise that Richard preferred loving, romanticised friendship to mature sex, it is notable that in his second wife, a six-year-old girl, he consciously chose a bride with whom he could not hope to have sexual relations for some years. Given that his relationship with Anne was childless, the need for an heir by 1396 was imperative, yet he chose to ignore it. Possibly Richard was infertile, which might account for the fact that, as far as is known, he had no illegitimate children, but there is some evidence that he was committed to chastity. In the hauntingly exquisite Wilton Diptych, the double-panelled painting that is one of the artistic glories of his reign, Richard’s arms are impaled with those of Edward the Confessor, suggesting that, like the saint, he had rejected sex for a spiritual marriage with his country. This, and the marriage with Isabelle de Valois, may have been connected with his grief for Anne, as the diptych was made in 1395, a year after her death, but it is certainly possible that his first marriage was also electively chaste.

There is another reason to suspect that Richard had little hope of a child from his marriage to Anne. By 1385, the Scots were causing trouble again. Their allies, the French, were menacing English ships in the Channel and the northern marches were subject to yet more raids. That summer, at York, Richard called out the final feudal force ever to be summoned in England. It was one of the greatest armies ever seen in the country, and the last to include fighting priests. Edinburgh was taken, but little else was achieved beyond the siege of Stirling Castle and the destruction of a few religious houses. The campaign did quell unrest on the border for three years but, despite Froissart’s sycophantic assurances that Richard had achieved more than the Black Prince or Edward III, it was neither an answer to Edward II’s dismal rout at Bannockburn nor a challenge to Edward I’s conquests in the north. In a gesture that attracted comparisons with Edward II’s promotion of Piers Gaveston, Richard elevated Robert de Vere to Marquess of Dublin on his return, but more significantly, in terms of his marriage and the future of England, he named eleven-year-old Roger Mortimer as his heir.

Queen Anne was nineteen in 1385. She and Richard had been married just three years. Why would Richard make such a pessimistic statement so publicly? The rumours of John of Gaunt’s ambitions for the throne had not abated in the decade since Richard’s coronation. As Edward III lay dying at Havering, he had naturally been troubled by the question of the succession. If his grandson were to die, which branch of the royal family would have the better claim? Should the English crown pass through the heirs general, in which case the succession would belong to Philippa, the daughter of Edward III’s second son, Lionel, Duke of Clarence, or through the heirs male, in which case it would go to Gaunt as the third son? Philippa Plantagenet had married Edmund Mortimer, Earl of March and, in 1385, Richard declared his support for the heirs general argument by naming Philippa’s son Roger. The transmission of a claim via a woman was one Edward himself had endorsed; it had been the foundation for his bid for the French crown through his mother Isabella, and a reversion to the Salic law of heirs male as practised in France would effectively undermine the English position in the Hundred Years War. However, at the end of 1376, Edward attested a letter patent entailing the crown in the male line, with only a remainder to the heirs general. According to this document, the house of Lancaster, not Mortimer, stood to inherit if Richard had no children.

Richard’s statement naming Mortimer may have been a stalling tactic. As well as promoting his friend De Vere, Richard raised his two other royal uncles, Edmund of Langley and Thomas of Woodstock, to the dukedoms of York and Gloucester, a move that diluted the preeminence of Gaunt as the only royal duke. Gaunt was still unpopular, and Richard needed to curb his aspirations. This may also have been the motivation for his support of Gaunt’s attempt on the throne of Castile. Walsingham asserted that John had petitioned Parliament for a confirmation of the entail to heirs male, but this did not prevent him from claiming the throne of Castile in right of his second wife, Constance. Richard acknowledged this claim on his return from Scotland and in March 1386 placed him at his own right hand and declared he should be addressed as King. Gaunt departed to fight for his Spanish kingdom that July, remaining abroad three years. Richard had therefore done what he could to neutralise a potential Lancastrian threat, and in this context his naming of Mortimer can be seen as part of a tactical pattern. Yet why was he seemingly so certain he would not have children himself? In January 1394, when Anne was still living, Richard permitted his close friend Thomas Mowbray to use the crest of a crowned leopard, a badge traditionally reserved for the eldest son of the king. The use in the grant of the pluperfect tense ‘si quem procreassemus’ ‘if we had begotten the same’¹² has been highlighted as evidence that Richard accepted his childless condition. Officially, the subject was taboo - ‘Who is it that dares to suggest that the King will have no issue?’ asked Parliament the same year - but it is possible that Richard himself knew that he would not. By 1394, it could of course have become apparent that Anne was unable to bear a child, but no such diagnosis could have been conclusive in 1385. So it is plausible that Richard and Anne did not consummate their marriage, and that Anne, like her namesake saint, continued to hope for a miracle.

Richard’s Scottish expedition had not been a total failure, but the mood in Parliament was hostile. The King had promoted another friend, Michael de la Pole, to the earldom of Suffolk, and Pole and De Vere were given the posts of chancellor and chamberlain. The Scots war had been an attempt on Richard’s part to assert his majority, now that he was eighteen, and it was natural that he should seek to create a circle of loyal magnates from among his peers, but he was criticised for ignoring the advice of the older magnates. The royal finances were overstretched, and the cost of the campaign, as well as the truce with France that had made it possible, was also unpopular. Robert de Vere had caused a scandal by having an affair with one of the Queen’s Bohemian ladies, Agnes Launcecrona, and was trying to repudiate his wife. Richard’s sanctioning of this relationship was perceived as a great insult by his uncles, as De Vere was married to their niece Philippa de Coucy, the daughter of Edward III and Philippa of Hainault’s eldest girl, Isabella. Adultery was one thing, but such an affront to a woman of royal blood was shocking, and it fuelled more general criticisms that Queen Anne’s household had introduced suspicious foreign ‘abuses’. Money, favouritism and the whiff of sex scandals were all creating dissent between the King and his magnates, but Richard refused to accept any correction.

The obduracy of the lords in their demands for financial reform gathered force throughout the following year. When Parliament met in October 1386, the lords demanded that the chancellor, the new Earl of Suffolk, be removed, a motion that was carried despite Richard’s furious objections. Suffolk was impeached and imprisoned at Windsor and Richard, outraged, left London, first for his county of Cheshire and then on a prolonged tour of the provinces. Anne accompanied him, and they were together for the initiation of Richard Scrope to the see of Lichfield in June. Richard was planning to strike at the lords and in August he summoned his chief justice, Robert Tresilian, to Nottingham, where he inquired into the legal status of Parliament’s actions. In 1352, Edward III’s Treason Act had set out five counts on which treason could be defined, which did not include challenge to the royal prerogative, but Richard was keen that the judicial advice should favour the cause of the crown, and though Tresilian did not claim that the lords’ actions were treasonous, in a neat bit of casuistry, he did assert that Richard had the right to execute as traitors those who had hindered that prerogative.

After Richard had flounced off on progress, a council of fourteen lords had been convened to administer the realm in the King’s name. When Richard returned to London in November 1387 he summoned its leaders, his uncle Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester, Richard FitzAlan, the Earl of Arundel and Thomas Beauchamp, the Earl of Warwick. They attended him at Westminster on 17 November, with a small but threatening company of 300 men-at-arms, and charged De Vere, Suffolk, Tresilian, Archbishop Neville of York and the obliging Nicholas Brembre with treason. Their collective name, the Lords Appellant, derives from their offer to prove their charge by the trial of ‘appeal’,or accusation, in single combat. The situation was already too grave for such chivalrous posturing. Henry of Bolingbroke, the eldest son of John of Gaunt, and Thomas Mowbray, Richard’s former friend, joined the Appellants, and Robert de Vere was raising troops in Oxfordshire. On 20 December, he was defeated by a force captained by Bolingbroke at Radcot Bridge. De Vere escaped by swimming his horse over the river and fled to Louvain, and Richard and Anne were placed under house arrest in the Tower.

For several days, it was claimed later, the Lords Appellant had considered deposing the King, but when Parliament resumed in February, Richard took his place on his throne. However, the Merciless Parliament’ was not inclined to be lenient to those who, the Lords Appellant alleged, had seduced’ the King into bringing the country to the brink of war. Tresilian was dragged out of his hiding place in Westminster Sanctuary and executed, as was Brembre. Queen Anne interceded on her knees for Sir Simon Burley, who had been her husband’s tutor and a close member of her late mother-in-law’s circle, but her pleas succeeded only in sparing Burley the full agony of a traitor’s death. Three other knights of Richard’s chamber did endure being hung, drawn and quartered. Although Richard renewed his coronation oath and received the homage of his magnates, there had been a perceptible shift in the balance of power in England. The Lords Appellant had made it clear that Parliament, and not the king, was sovereign. Richard never forgave them.

Thomas Mowbray was restored to favour in May, but Richard refused to countenance a reconciliation with Gloucester and Arundel until the return of John of Gaunt in 1389. The Castilian challenge had failed, and though Richard had been pleased to have his uncle out of the way, Gaunt’s presence now bolstered the shaken and divided royal family. In the summer of 1390 Anne and Richard paid a long visit to him at Leicester Castle, and they were all together again at Eltham for Christmas. Richard appeared to have stabilised his government, or at least stage-managed the appearance of stability. On the last day of the 1391 Parliamentary session, the Rolls record that the King was formally petitioned by the commons to be ‘as free in his regality, liberty and royal dignity in his time as his noble progenitors, formerly kings of England, were in their time, notwithstanding any statute or ordinance made before this time to the contrary, and especially in the time of Edward II’. The reference to Edward II makes the petition’s authorship clear.

If all was respectful concord between the magnates, the citizens of London were not quite so particular about the King’s dignity. The year 1391 was a hard one for the city, struck by plague and serious food shortages due to a poor harvest. By November, a curfew had been imposed, and the next month Richard forbade public assemblies as a threat to the peace. London was alive with seditious rumour: that the King was incapable of government, that the King was planning to renege on his promises of reform and recall De Vere. In Fleet Street, a crowd rioted for bread, and the alarmed court heard of armed gangs on the loose. Richard had no reason to favour the Londoners. They had done nothing to help him against the Lords Appellant, and the city had recently refused two royal requests for loans. In May 1392, Richard relocated the court of common pleas to York, and after a ten-day visit there with Anne, went on progress in the Midlands. The mayor, aldermen and sheriffs of London, along with twenty-four citizens, were summoned to appear on pain of death before the King at Nottingham on 25 June. Richard dismissed and imprisoned the mayor and two sheriffs, appointed his own warden and set up a committee to investigate abuses. London’s liberties were revoked and a collective fine of 100,000 pounds imposed. According to Walsingham, Queen Anne had attempted to soften Richard’s heart towards the Londoners, on her knees, at Westminster, Windsor and Nottingham. Practically, such gestures were useless, but Anne took part in the ceremony for the formal submission of London, a hugely elaborate performance in which the intercession of the Queen featured as the climax.

On 21 August, Richard and Anne crossed London Bridge from Southwark to receive the keys of the city from the mayor, the first time such a ceremony was performed. They processed via St Paul’s to Westminster through streets decorated with gold cloth andcrimson banners, pausing at Cheapside to receive two gold crowns and two golden cups from a boy and girl who hovered precariously on pulleys above a castle set in painted clouds. The Londoners presented gifts of horses and holy images of St Anne and the Trinity, and two altarpieces featuring scenes from the crucifixion. When Anne had made her first entry into London before her wedding, she had been given a charter begging her intercession on behalf of the city, ‘just as our other lady Queens who preceded Your most Excellent Highness, may it be pleasing to your most clement and pre-eminent nobility to mediate with our Lord the King in such wise with gracious words and deeds’. Now, prior to entering Westminster Hall, where the banquet was arranged, Anne proclaimed that she would do her duty for the city. Having changed her dress, she knelt before her enthroned husband and begged him to restore the city’s liberties, emphasising that no king, not even Arthur himself, had been so loved and honoured by his people. Richard then returned the city keys and its ceremonial sword.

If the practical authority of English queens can be said to have declined since the twelfth century, then intercession had undergone a concomitant diminution in status. Where the Anglo-Norman queens had shared and participated in their husbands’ governments, the conciliar role of the consort since then had been reduced to one of supplication. The way intercession had lost its meaning through ritualisation, becoming a staged means of permitting a king to act in a ‘feminised’ manner - to change his mind or show mercy - without compromising his masculinity, has been traced here through Isabella of France’s intercession for the banishment of the Despensers in 1321 and Philippa of Hainault’s pleas for the citizens of Calais in 1347. The failure of Anne’s intercession for Simon Burley shows that as a device it now had no spontaneous power, but merely modified the perception of a decision that had already been taken. Intercession had always been predicated on weakness, the idea of the queen as subversive, in that she was challenging the king’s judgement, contained by the queen as vulnerable petitioner. In London in 1392, her special intercessory status as the intimate of the king’s bed was made erotically explicit. Queens’ sexual relationships with their husbands had frequently been presented as threatening, but the description of the 1392 ceremony in the Concordia indicates that Anne’s (presumed) intimacy with Richard was used as an allegory for the submission of the city itself. The Concordia casts Richard as a bridegroom come to take possession of his wife, giving, as one critic has remarked, ‘a whole new meaning to the phrase ‘royal entry’.¹³ The body of the kneeling queen becomes a conduit for the city’s ‘eroticised abjection’, Richard’s possession of her person a symbol of his possession of his city. The scripted success of Anne’s submission earned her the presumably unironic compliment of ‘virgo mediatrix’, inviting comparison with the Virgin in her representation as Maria mediatrix.

Anne’s Christmas gift from the grateful Londoners was a pelican, again a symbol of self-sacrificing femininity, as the bird will feed its young with blood from its own breast. Richard got a camel. In spring, Gaunt and Gloucester left to discuss terms for extending the French truce, though the English continued to despise the idea of peace with their old enemy. When the extension was achieved in June, there were outbreaks of violence in Yorkshire and Cheshire, where fighting the French was practically the local industry. That summer, Anne and Richard stayed at Sheen, and the next year made pilgrimage to Canterbury, where they received the news of the death of Anne’s mother, the Empress Elizabeth. A requiem was sung for the Empress at St Paul’ s, and in July the King and Queen heard another for Joan of Kent at Corfe. In August Richard staged a joint crown-wearing at Salisbury, then he and Anne set off for Beaulieu Abbey, followed by Titchfield, where the abbot entertained them to a fine supper featuring twelve dressed pike. They were together at Westminster for the opening of Parliament in 1394, when Richard made his sad grant of arms to Thomas Mowbray.

Anne had spent much of her marriage travelling at her husband’s side. They were rarely separated, and whatever their private relationship may have been, Richard loved her. She died at Sheen on 7 June 1394, aged just twenty-seven, and Richard ordered that the palace to which he had devoted so much attention be ripped down. He vowed that for a year he would enter no building except a church in which he had spent time with the Queen. Anne’s funeral was delayed for two months while Richard prepared in characteristically grand style, ordering a hundred wax torches from Flanders. On 3 August, her body was carried from Sheen to St Paul’s and then to Westminster Abbey. Determined that the ceremony should be fully attended, Richard had summoned the magnates to London for 29 July, but Richard FitzAlan, the Earl of Arundel, still managed to arrive late and the overwrought King hit him so hard that he fell bleeding to the ground.

Anne’s childlessness excluded her from participating in one of the key dynamics of queenship, but by the end of her life she had attracted affection and respect. Richard’s court was one of the glories of the age, and Anne had an influential role in the continuation of the presentation of English royal magnificence that had begun with the efforts of Edward III. Her epitaph, produced for Henry V’s reburial of King Richard, remembered her as a merciful intercessor whose intervention had resolved disputes. Like Adeliza of Louvain, she had sublimated her lack of children into a maternal concern for the poor, and was celebrated for her charity and her kindness to the sick and the widowed. Most poignantly, Anne of Bohemia’s epitaph particularly recalled her care for pregnant women.

Soon after Anne’s death, Richard departed for a seven-month campaign in Ireland, but the search for a new queen had already begun. As early as August 1394 embassies were sent to the King of Scots, the Duke of Bavaria and the King of Aragon. Keen to prevent a Spanish alliance, and to continue the peace between France and England, Charles VI sent envoys to Ireland to propose his own daughter, six-year-old Isabelle, in May 1395. In an attempt to encourage Richard, Charles commissioned a long treatise from Philippe de Mezières, a distinguished writer now living in retirement in the Celestine convent in Paris, which discussed the advantages of the match. De Mezières chose to emphasise the consequences of an earlier royal marriage, that of Isabella of France and Edward II, which had been intended to bring peace between the two nations but had instead resulted in the onset of the Hundred Years War: ‘Call to mind, and sadly, the marriage, then thought a fortunate one, of the mother of the valiant King Edward, your much loved ancestor, from which you are descended, and of the deadly and penetrating thorns resulting from that union, which have been active in such a way that the beautiful lilies from which you spring have been horribly trampled underfoot.’¹⁴ A marriage to a second Isabelle, De Mezières asserted, would heal what marriage to the first had wounded. His treatise indulges in some confusingly mystic language - ‘the rich diamond through the holy sacrament of marriage should become son to the shining carbuncle and so shut the mouths of all those who ask for the five-footed sheep’ - but sought to offer some homespun wisdom on the main problem with the match, namely the bride’s age. Richard had no heir, and legally could not hope to consummate his marriage for six years, and it could take still longer for Isabelle to be ready to bear a child. But women, declared De Mezières, were, like horses, all the better for being broken young, and Richard would have the satisfaction of a wife who had been educated to his tastes.

The allusion to Isabelle’s education is a discreet reference to her unfortunate domestic circumstances. Better, De Mezières suggests, that a bride should be removed from her parents before habits which may prove displeasing to her husband can become ingrained. Isabelle’s mother, Isabeau of Bavaria, was notorious for her debauched lifestyle and undiscriminating love life and had received warnings about the neglect of her regal and maternal duties from everyone from the Pope to the celebrated scholar Christine de Pisan. Isabeau and Charles had married in 1385, and the French Queen’s arrival in Paris had set a new standard for royal pageantry, but the success of their relationship, which produced twelve children, was compromised when, in 1392, the King went mad, and the periodic fits of insanity he suffered for the rest of his life overshadowed the marriage. One of the first consequences was the assumption of the regency by Charles’s uncle, Philip of Burgundy, which led to dissent between the crown and the duchy that would influence English policy in the next century. More immediately, it had a personal impact on the French royal children.

Isabeau of Bavaria might not have been a perfect mother, but a glance at the ‘facts’ of her life reveals that, as in the case of Eleanor of Aquitaine, many of them are legends, if not downright fabrications. Since much of the criticism levelled by French accounts is politically motivated, it is not surprising that these are particularly hostile. Although Isabeau was extravagant and unwise in her choice of allies, her accounts belie accusations that she was a neglectful mother.¹⁵ Purchases of books, toys and clothes for her children, as well as the commissioning of memorial Masses for those who died show that she was at least as involved with their upbringing as other women of her rank, but this has not stopped her detractors from claiming that, caught between their mother’s frivolity and their father’s bouts of madness, the royal children lived a ramshackle, abandoned life in conditions of squalor that scandalised witnesses. It was said that it was only thanks to the pity of their servants that the sons and daughters of France managed not to die of starvation. While there is no evidence for such extreme allegations, the atmosphere in which Isabelle was raised might well have been an unpleasant and confusing one.

Charles’s madness often caused him to shrink from his wife and children in confusion and fear, and he frequently did not recognise them. He could be violent, smashing and burning furniture, tearing his clothes, and such rages were severe enough for it to be considered unsafe for the Queen to sleep with him. A mistress was procured for the King, perhaps as some sort of therapeutic measure, but this led to accusations that the Queen of France was pimping for her husband. When he was sane, Charles was a handsome, intelligent man, but when the fits came over him, ‘It was a great pity to see him, as his body was all eaten away with dirt and ordure’.¹⁶ The French court was condemned for immorality and drunkenness, and Isabeau’s reputation was not helped by dreadful incidents such as the 1393 ‘Bal des Sauvages’, a party in ‘primitive’ costumes which went horribly wrong, resulting in the death by fire of five of the King’s friends. Charles himself was saved only by a quick-thinking duchess who threw her dress over him to stifle the flames. Yet Isabeau did try to help her husband. During his first illness, she promised she would dedicate the child she was then carrying to God if He would spare the King, and Isabelle’s sister Marie duly became a nun at Poissy at the age of six. Isabeau also organised holy processions in Paris and in 1409 sent her children to pray for their father’s recovery at Mont St Michel. A combination of the frenzied hedonism of the court, her mother’s anxious piety and a father who was by turns gentle and terrifying could not have formed a very stable background for a little girl, even a privileged princess of France. Perhaps this explains Isabelle’s own rather sad enthusiasm to leave home to be married, as, according to Froissart, she expressed her gladness at the prospect: ‘For I am told that then I shall be a great lady.’

Isabelle’s age may well have accorded with Richard’s own inclinations towards chastity which, if they did not precede Anne’s death, were affirmed by the crossing of his arms with those of the Confessor in the Wilton Diptych and the announcement of the King’s assumption of the new arms on 13 October, the feast of the saint. A sexless marriage fitted into the splendid vision carefully conjured by De Mezières, of Richard as a new Arthur and Charles as Charlemagne, uniting not only European Christendom but the kingdoms of the east in ‘royal and imperial splendour’.In Monmouth’s History of Britain, Arthur is said to have begun his reign with a campaign in Ireland, where Richard received Charles’s proposal, and the combination of the Irish expedition and the French marriage played seductively into a grandiose projection of Richard as the king who would finally lead England to the new Jerusalem. The Verses of Gildas, a prophecy written in Edward II’s reign, describes the ‘king now ruling as being married to a princess of France. After a serious crisis, the king would conquer Ireland and Scotland, settle the Gascon question and restore unity to England. France, Spain and North Africa would fall to his might, he would recover the Holy Land and accept an imperial crown from the Pope. De Mezières’ use of Edward II’s story, and his casting of Richard as the conquering redeemer of the past through his alliance with Isabelle, could be seen as corroborating the Gildas prophecy. An alliance with Isabelle would chastely connect Richard not only with the heroes of Arthurian romance, but with the crusaders: the Grail could be glimpsed only by the pure, while the attainment of the Holy City had been linked with sexual abstinence (or not) since Eleanor of Aquitaine had been maligned for subverting Louis VII’s hopes for Jerusalem. The distinction between the private and the public man could never be clear for any medieval king, and in Richard’s case it is quite characteristic that what may have begun as an idiosyncrasy, or a personal religious commitment, had to be transformed into transcendental destiny.

Of course, it was also a matter of money. This time, Richard would not be accused of taking a pauper bride. In July, he sent his own envoys to Charles to demand two million gold francs as Isabelle’s dowry, though they were permitted to allow the French to haggle them down to one million if necessary, with an initial payment of 400,000 and the balance to be paid annually over three years. Eventually the English settled for 800,000 with a 300,000 down payment. If the match were to be broken off, Charles would be liable for a three-million-franc forfeit, and he was to bear the expense of bringing his daughter to Calais for the wedding. Should Isabelle die before she was thirteen, Richard was to marry a relative, possibly one of her sisters Mary or Michelle, and retain 400,000 francs of the dowry. If Richard died before Isabelle was twelve she would receive 500,000 francs, as well as her dower settlement of £6,666 13s 4d per year. Some provision was made for the fact that Isabelle was below the canonical age of consent: if she refused the marriage when she was twelve the dowry was forfeit, and if Richard rejected her he would return it with 800,000 francs’ compensation. Any jewels Isabelle was given could also return with her to France in the event of Richard’s death.

Thus, on 9 March 1396, a twenty-eight-year truce was sealed between England and France. One clause of the marriage settlement has attracted particular interest: the assurance of French military assistance for Richard against his own subjects if necessary. Given that many English magnates, notably Gloucester, objected to the French peace, this clause has been seen as indicative of Richard’s future plans, but in fact it was dropped when the first payment of 300,000 francs was accepted. A proxy marriage was conducted at the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris three days later, with the Earl of Nottingham substituting for the King, and Isabelle prettily made her first formal intercession as Queen of England, a plea for an imprisoned debtor named Peter de Craon.

In October, Isabelle and her father left Paris with a retinue that included the dukes of Berry, Bourbon and Orleans and the counts of Harcourt and Sancerre. On 26 October Richard and Charles met at Ardres, where Charles wore a green gown whose decorationcommemorated Richard’s first wife Anne, a respectful gesture of family solidarity echoed in the livery of Richard’s companions. On 30 October, Isabelle rode to meet her husband in a blue gown and a jewelled crown, curtsied to Richard, who kissed her, and was formally handed into his care by her father. Froissart recorded that when Charles expressed his disappointment that Isabelle was too young to become his wife in the full sense, Richard declared that the love he valued best was that of the King of France, and of his people, ‘for we shall now be so strongly united that no king in Christendom can in any way harm us’.

The meeting between the kings of England and France was Richard’s first international embassy, and neither party was prepared to concede anything to the other when it came to display. The courtiers were housed in a city of tents, with ornate pavilions for the monarchs, between which ran an ever more competitive exchange of extravagant gifts, featuring a gold cup and basin, a gilt ship carved with tigresses and set with mirrors, a pearl collar, a crystal bottle encrusted with jewels, a buckle worth 500 marks and a horse with a silver saddle. Charles was judged to have come out on top in the present-giving, but Richard bested him in the fashion stakes, for the French King wore the same red velvet each day, while Richard’s array of outfits included a red velvet robe with a gold collar, another of red and white velvet and one of blue with gold ornaments. For the wedding itself, in the church of St Nicholas on All Saints Day, Isabelle was carried to Calais in a cloth-of-gold litter. The whole business cost Richard between 10,000 and 15,000 pounds, but it was considered an essential investment in royal prestige.

After hearing Mass together on 3 November, Richard and Isabelle sailed for England. Despite a fair wind, the curse of the English queens’ arrival fell on Isabelle, and some of the ships were wrecked. From Dover, the couple travelled through Rochester and Canterbury to Eltham, where they rested before the Queen’s entry into London. At Calais, Isabelle had been given into the care of the duchesses of Gloucester and Lancaster, and it was between their households that she could expect to spend the rest of her married childhood. Eleanor de Bohun, the thirty-six-year-old Duchess of Gloucester, was the elder sister of Mary de Bohun, the wife of John of Gaunt’s son Henry Bolingbroke. The Duchess of Lancaster, Bolingbroke’s stepmother, Katherine Swynford, had married Gaunt in January 1396. She was notorious for having been Gaunt’s mistress before, during and after his second marriage to Constance of Castile, and for having four children by him. Katherine was of Hainault descent, her father Paen de Rouet having served as a herald under Edward III, and her sister Philippa had attended Edward’s Queen before her marriage to the poet Geoffrey Chaucer. Katherine’s first husband, Sir Hugh Swynford, was a member of Gaunt’s household, and after the death of Gaunt’s first wife, Blanche of Lancaster in 1369 (commemorated by Chaucer in his Book of the Duchess), Katherine had acted as governess to Blanche’s daughters. Her relationship with Gaunt was an open secret, but the marriage, and Richard’s subsequent legit-imisation of his Beaufort cousins, was a scandal. However, Gaunt was the premier English magnate and there could be no question of excluding his wife from her proper role. In Eleanor, Isabelle might have found a more maternal figure, and a playmate in her daughter, another Isabelle, aged ten. Queen Isabelle was given her own French governess, Margaret de Courcy, who received an annuity of a hundred pounds on New Year’s Day 1397.

Isabelle arrived in London for her coronation on 3 January that year, spending the night in the Tower. Her formal entry into the city the preceding November had been spoiled by a great crush on the bridge between Southwark and Kennington, where the eager crowds swarmed so tightly that several people were killed, but the coronation, conducted according to the Liber Regalis, went smoothly. On 4 January Isabelle rode in procession along Cheapside with twenty ladies leading twenty knights in red gowns emblazoned with the King’s badge of the white hart to meet Richard at Westminster. She was crowned the next day, and two weeks of tournaments were held in celebration, although, as in Anne of Bohemia’s case, there were mutterings about the expense. It seemed cruel to make a little girl the focus of political conflict which had been fomenting for a decade, but the unpopularity of the peace with France was reflected in a certain discourtesy in Isabelle’s reception. Markedly, neither Warwick nor Arundel presented the Queen with New Year gifts, and Isabelle’s new uncle, the Duke of Gloucester, made plain his objections to the truce in Parliament, which convened on 22 January.

It would be unreasonable to expect Isabelle to have made any mark at the beginning of her queenship, and within three years circumstance deprived her of the opportunity for ever. The chronicler Adam of Usk was convinced that Richard had married Isabelle only as a means of obtaining French support for a long-planned revenge on his enemies Gloucester, Arundel and Warwick. Froissart reports a conversation between the King and the Count of St Pol in the summer of 1396, as arrangements for the wedding were being finalised, in which Richard expressed his fear that Gloucester’s hatred of the peace would provoke him and his allies to another rebellion. St Pol’s advice was to bribe and flatter Gloucester into acquiescence until the marriage had taken place, after which Richard could depend on the help of the King of France to ‘crush all your enemies or rebellious subjects’.If Richard believed that his second marriage was to inaugurate a form of Arthurian apotheosis, he certainly needed to silence his opponents first, but neither Isabelle nor his actions of 1397 can be entirely explained by his personal animus against the Lords Appellant.

The January Parliament revived the criticisms of the King of a decade before. A bill presented by one Thomas Haxey outlined four areas of grievance: the length of office of sheriffs, Richard’s failure to secure the Scottish border, the distribution of badges of office or affinity by the King and the excessive cost of the royal household. Richard particularly objected to the final point, which he saw as touching on his ‘regality’, and Haxey was arraigned as a traitor. Yet he was given no stricter punishment than house arrest. Many writers¹⁷ have seen Haxey’s bill as a ruse instigated by Richard to establish a fresh mandate for the defence of his ‘regality’ in preparation for his next move, a theory substantiated by Richard’s recall of the exiled judges who had ruled in his favour in 1387. The King also seemed to be courting the support of his powerful uncle, as on 6 February he legitimised Gaunt’s Beaufort bastards and made the eldest, John, Earl of Somerset. When he left with Isabelle for a pilgrimage to Canterbury at the end of the month he was accompanied by Gaunt and his son Henry Bolingbroke, who also joined the court at Windsor in February. The Haxey bill, the recall of the judges and the cultivation of Gaunt fit a pattern of Richard’s increasing frustration at opposition to his prerogative. There were rumours at court of plots against him, and Walsingham focuses on a sharp remark made in relation to the King’s ambition to be elected Holy Roman Emperor. An embassy from Cologne had given him hope of achieving this, and he sent envoys of his own to sound out the electors, one of whom dissented with the suggestion that Richard was hardly fit to be emperor since he was incapable of controlling his own subjects. It is notable that Richard resumed his wooing of the imperial electors less than two weeks after the July coup.

On 10 July, Richard invited Warwick, Gloucester and Arundel to dinner. Only Warwick accepted, and after they had dined together with apparent cordiality, Richard had him arrested and sent to the Tower. Men were then sent to detain Arundel while Richard himself rode to Pleshy for his uncle Gloucester. On 13 July the King sent out proclamations announcing the arrests and forbidding any assembly as treasonous. He was careful to stress that the three men had been detained not for past offences but on the evidence of a new plot dating back to the previous summer. Parliament was summoned to judge the Appellants in September, and Walsingham describes how Richard spent the summer gathering supporters as though for a war. On 17 September the King opened Parliament surrounded by 1,000 Cheshire archers and 500 men-at-arms. By that time, Gloucester had been murdered on his orders in prison in Calais. A confession was read out in which he admitted his guilt in the events of 1386-7, though inconveniently it contained no new evidence and the date had to be left off as Gloucester had apparently written it after his death in August. Arundel was tried and beheaded as a traitor on 21 September, defiant to the last, while Warwick made such a convincing show of contrition that his life was spared and he was condemned only to imprisonment and the forfeit of his goods.

Having dealt with his enemies, Richard now cemented his control with vast land grants of their properties to those who had supported him and promoted five new dukedoms, including his cousin Henry Bolingbroke to Hereford. On the second day of theParliament, it had been ‘ordained that anyone who should in future be convicted of violating, usurping or undermining the King’s regality should be adjudged a false traitor and should be sentenced to suffer appropriate penalty for treason’.¹⁸ After high Mass on 30 September, Richard sat enthroned in his crown as the lay lords swore to observe the rulings of the Parliament and to adhere to them in perpetuity, condemning any who sought to repeal or annul them as traitors. It is not certain that little Queen Isabelle attended the banquet and ball that followed at Westminster Palace. The prize for best dancer and singer was won by the new Duchess of Exeter.

Isabelle and her husband were, however, together for Christmas at Lichfield. On 24 January they moved to the abbey of Lilleshall, where they received the Chamberlain of France, Viscount Perellos, who had visited the Queen two months earlier at Woodstock. Isabelle may have enjoyed Perellos’s adventurous tales of his Irish Christmas at the court of the ‘wild’ King O’Neill. They then moved on to Shrewsbury for the opening of Parliament on 29 January. The next day Richard chose to examine a curious piece of business: the accusations of his cousin Henry Bolingbroke against his friend Thomas Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk. In his early thirties in 1398, Bolingbroke was the fourth child and only living son of John of Gaunt by his first wife Blanche of Lancaster. He had been admitted to the order of the Garter by Edward III alongside his cousin Richard in 1377 and their relationship had always been an odd mixture of loyalty and mistrust. Henry had been pardoned for his membership of the Appellants in 1387,but he had tactfully elected to spend the period between 1388 and 1391 on an extended martial grand tour, which included fighting with the Teutonic knights (a sort of early Foreign Legion) in Lithuania, tournaments in France, a pilgrimage to Jerusalem and visits to Prague, Vienna, Venice, Milan and Savoy. His return to London with a leopard, a gift from his distant Lusignan cousin the King of Cyprus, had caused a great stir.

As Gaunt’s heir, Henry was one of the most significant magnates in the land, a position that had been augmented by his marriage in 1381 to Eleanor de Bohun’s sister Mary, co-heiress to the wealth of the Earl of Hereford. Mary had given him seven children, ofwhom four sons and two daughters were living, before her death in 1394. Henry had acted as his father’s deputy in the Duchy of Lancaster while Gaunt was in Aquitaine in 1394, and his political rehabilitation after Radcot Bridge was signalled by his place on Richard’s regency council during the King’s first Irish expedition after the loss of Anne of Bohemia. It was as a loyal subject, then, that Henry approached Richard at the house of the bishop of Lichfield on 22 January 1398 to report a conversation between himself and Norfolk, in which the latter claimed that Richard intended them to suffer the same fate as Gloucester, Warwick and Arundel, the other Lords Appellant. Henry observed that they had been pardoned, but Norfolk claimed there was a plot against the house of Lancaster and that he did not trust the King’s word. Bolingbroke claimed that Norfolk had been trying to trick him into sedition and into joining a counter-plot against Richard.

At Shrewsbury, Henry’s accusation was formalised. Mowbray was removed from his office as the marshal of England and the case was eventually heard at Windsor on 28 April. In the intervening months, Richard’s increasingly tyrannical behaviour was making itself felt throughout the country. A priest was arrested for preaching against him at Shrewsbury and there were armed uprisings in Oxfordshire and Berkshire. Despite his proud assertion to the envoys of the Byzantine Emperor in April that ‘when we could no longer endure their rebellion and wantonness, we collected the might of our prowess and stretched forth our arm against them our enemies and at length, by the aid of God’s grace, we have trodden on the necks of the proud and the haughty’,¹⁹ Richard was growing increasingly paranoid. He sent out proclamations demanding that traitors be rounded up, he pursued the unfortunate retainers of the Lords Appellant, he forbade the sending of letters abroad and demanded that incoming foreign mail to magnates be intercepted. His main fear was the resentment provoked by his financial policies. In contravention of Magna Carta, Richard had introduced a fine known as ‘la pleasaunce’ through which the King’s goodwill, or ‘pleasure’, could be purchased. Supporters of the Appellants had to buy their safety. By Easter 1398 over 20,000 pounds had been raised through la pleasaunce, through forced ‘loans’, across seventeen counties. As his subjects suffered, Richard’s court grew ever more deliriously magnificent: ‘Though he abounded in riches beyond all his predecessors [he] nonetheless continued to busy himself amassing money, caring not at all by what title he could acquire it from the hands of his subjects.’²⁰

In the quarrel between Norfolk and Bolingbroke, Richard saw the opportunity to help himself to even more wealth. At Windsor, it was decided that the dispute should be settled in the old-fashioned way by single combat. On 16 September, at Coventry, Henry appeared in green velvet decorated with gold antelopes and swans on a white charger. His opponent faced him in crimson with silver lions. With characteristic dramatic timing, Richard waited until the men had actually started riding towards one another before calling a halt to the duel and, after two hours’ deliberation, sentenced both men to exile. Rather than having one Appellant left standing, he had decided to get rid of them both and appropriate their lands for his own use After John of Gaunt died in February 1399, Richard also took possession of his estates in council at Westminster, and parcelled up the Mowbray inheritance on the death of Edward I’s granddaughter Margaret, Duchess of Norfolk.

Isabelle, of course, had no part to play in any of this. The majority of her time was spent at Eltham, where she continued her education with her governess, Lady de Courcy. In the spring of 1399, Richard visited her at Windsor before his departure for his second Irish campaign. The mood of the country could be gauged by the sparsity of the crowds that turned out for the splendid tournament he had arranged to celebrate St George’s Day. Richard had made his will, though without nominating a successor. He played with Isabelle in the gardens at Windsor, holding her hand and picking her up to kiss her. He promised that she should join him soon in Ireland. What Isabelle did not know was that her husband had already planned for Lady de Courcy, whose extravagance was unpopular, to be commanded to pay her debts and leave for France. For all his petting, Richard did not give a thought to his nine-year-old wife’s loneliness and isolation. He did not keep his promise to send for her from Ireland. In fact, she never saw the King again.

Richard set sail for Ireland at the end of May. By July, Henry Bolingbroke, now Duke of Lancaster, was back in England. During his French exile Henry had acquired the clandestine backing of Charles VI’s brother the Duke of Orléans (which the Duke later vehemently denied), and had been sounding out the disaffected English magnates. In the north, the men of his Lancastrian affinities began to mobilise. On 4 July, Henry landed with no more than a hundred men at Ravenspur on the Humber estuary. Five days later he was at Knaresborough, moving on to Pontefract for a muster of Lancastrian troops. At Doncaster he was joined by Henry Percy, heir to the Earl of Northumberland, the ‘Harry Hotspur’ of Shakespearean fame, with 30,000 men. By the time Henry reached Warwick on 24 July, his supporters were so numerous that he was obliged to send some of them home. Adam of Usk estimated that 100,000 had turned out for Lancaster. Richard’s uncle, Edmund, Duke of York, was Keeper of the Realm during the King’s absence in Ireland. He chose swiftly between his nephews. On 27 July York and Lancaster met with a certain dramatic irony at Berkeley, where the Duke assured Henry that he had no wish to fight against him.

The King had managed to reach the coast at Milford Haven on 24 July. With a small company, he rode for Chester, where the Earl of Salisbury was waiting with an army, but by the time he arrived at Conway, his men were already deserting, helping themselves to the royal baggage as they left. Disgruntlement was so widespread that, according to one story, even the King’s greyhound defected and joined Henry at Shrewsbury. On 9 August, Henry was at Chester, his troops having laid waste to Richard’s most loyal county. The Earl of Northumberland was sent to bring Richard in. The King decided on a mad plan to meet Henry, escape and raise an army in Wales, but Northumberland took him to Flint Castle, strongly garrisoned with Lancastrian soldiers. Mindful of Richard’s passion for elegant dining, Henry courteously allowed him to finish his supper before entering the castle to arrest him, though his understanding of his cousin’s character was also evident in the refined little cruelty of not permitting Richard to change his clothes on the journey south.

As a precedent for the second deposition of an English king in a century, Henry had only the innovations of Isabella of France to look to. In a propaganda campaign of ‘bogus genealogy, false prophecy, anti-Ricardian fabrication and novel ceremonial’,²¹ the process by which Henry Bolingbroke turned himself into Henry IV shared its latter two characteristics with Isabella’s routing of Edward II. Using Isabella’s strategy of serving writs in the King’s name, he summoned the estates of the realm on 19 August 1399. After convening a meeting of ecclesiastics to debate the succession, he announced his claim on 30 September. Officially, Richard, like Edward, abdicated willingly, though The Hardyng Chronicle reports that, according to the Earl of Northumberland, ‘Henry made King Richard under duress of prison in the Tower of London in fear of his life to make a resignation of his right to him.’ After hearing thirty-three ‘Articles of Deposition’, Parliament declared that there was ‘abundant reason for proceeding to deposition for the greater security and tranquillity of the realm and the good of the kingdom’. ‘Richard of Bordeaux’, as he was henceforth known, was sentenced to imprisonment.

On 13 October, Henry IV was crowned at Westminster. He was anointed with the sacred chrism, believed to have been given to St Thomas à Becket when the Virgin appeared to him, and which had been used for the coronation of Edward II. Richard had been relieved of the oil, which he had removed in its golden eagle vessel from the Tower prior to his departure for Ireland, perhaps planning a recrowning on his return. All his life, Richard had consciously identified himself with Edward II. It was therefore appropriate that after Henry had him murdered at Pontefract Castle, probably in February 1400, he was laid to rest not with his beloved Anne, as he had requested, but in the chapel at King’s Langley built by Edward for his favourite, Piers Gaveston.

Queen Isabelle had been waiting at Sonning in Berkshire for news of her husband, whom she was not permitted to see. During the rebellion, the house had been stormed and her attendants’ badges ripped off. In December, she received a visit from the earls of Kent and Salisbury, who reassured her that Richard was free and the imposter hiding in the Tower. Their conspiracy failed. Even as they proclaimed to the men of the west that Richard was in the field, he may already have been dead. Richard had been sent to Pontefract at the end of October, and in early February he was officially still alive, though by this time Henry’s council were discussing what to do with his body if the ‘rumours’ of his death proved to be true. Isabelle’s fear, confusion and sense of isolation can only be imagined. Henry attended Richard’s requiem at St Paul’s, but it is not certain that Isabelle was allowed to see the body.

The Queen was now a diplomatic problem. According to the original agreement, the French argued, her dowry, the last instalment of which had been paid in 1399, ought to be returned, as she was not technically a queen dowager and had not in any case reached the age of canonical consent. Stalling, Henry sent to Paris to open discussions for a new marriage with his eldest son, now Prince of Wales, who was eventually to marry Isabelle’s younger sister Catherine. The English simply had no money to repay the dowry, but they could not risk their already delicate position in France. In a treaty signed at Leulinghem in May 1401, Henry agreed that Isabelle would be repatriated with her jewels and property, though in fact he never did give back the dowry. In 1406, Isabelle was married to her first cousin Charles, Count of Angoulême, who became Duke of Orléans when his father was murdered by the Duke of Burgundy in 1407. Shortly afterwards she died giving birth to her daughter, Jeanne. Perhaps the most that can be said of Isabelle is that, like so many of Richard’s grandiose gestures, her symbolic value was huge. But as a means of retaining and governing a kingdom, she had been virtually pointless.