8
The prince’s last years were marked by a slow, inconsistent but inexorable decline. He was never again involved in military activity although he remained concerned with coastal defences and provision was made for munitioning a number of castles – supplies were purchased in Ireland for Welsh fortifications in 1375.1 He did set sail for Calais with his father in August 1372, following the news that Thouars, the last great English fortress, was under threat, but the elements conspired against them and the fleet never reached France. On returning to England, the prince handed over all his rights in Aquitaine to his father giving a reason, which had always been true, but was now a mere technicality, that revenue was no longer sufficient to meet expenses.2
The prince’s role and level of activity in these last years is not altogether certain and it seems that his condition varied considerably allowing more involvement in national affairs at some times than others. Further, it has been suggested that the prince’s interest in politics at this time was not restricted to domestic matters. Relations with Castile, during both the brief rule of Pedro the Cruel and the early years of the Trastamaran regime had not been cordial following Pedro’s failure to pay the prince after Nájera. However, Pedro did, it seems, have long-term ambitions that one or more of his daughters would marry into the english royal family. That ambition was realised after Pedro’s murder at Montiel in 1369 and ‘the Prince of Wales … probably approved of the transfer to his younger brother of his own aspirations to the Castilian throne’. On 10 February 1372, the prince escorted his brother’s bride to be, Constanza, into London. She was acknowledged as queen of Castile and rode to Gaunt’s palace of the Savoy. Constanza had spent five years in exile in Gascony. Gaunt, through marriage, became pretender to the Castilian throne although he did not claim the lordship of Vizcaya out of deference to his brother’s claims to the Basque country.3
The prince’s final flourish, his last bow, has traditionally been seen as taking place not on the battlefield but in parliament. The Good Parliament of 1376 is one of the final myths of the prince’s life that remains in popular memory. He is said to have formed the bulwark of the defence against the over-reaching political ambitions of his brother, John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster.
The chief reason for the belief in the mutual antagonism of the prince and Gaunt is the account by Thomas Walsingham whose rabid anti-Lancastrian attitudes have coloured subsequent comment. There is no evidence of difficulties between the brothers prior to this. They both fought at Winchelsea and Gaunt lived in the prince’s household in the early 1350s. In 1367, Gaunt supported the Spanish expedition and was so highly praised for his role in the expedition by Chandos Herald, an eyewitness, that it has been suggested that his Life of the Black Prince was written for, or in support of, the Castilian ambitions of the duke of Lancaster. It has also been suggested that Edward resented being replaced by Gaunt in Aquitaine, but again there is nothing to substantiate this and rather than bearing a grudge towards his brother it would seem likely that he handed over the reins of power willingly, although not with relief.
From the reopening of the war in 1369 (although hostilities in Aquitaine had begun in the previous year) until the Good Parliament in 1376 there was almost no English success. The chevauchées of Robert Knolles and John of Gaunt were expensive in men and money and achieved nothing of note. Defeats at sea and attacks on the south coast were testimony to the authority of the Castilian fleet. It has been argued that the new breed of commanders, weaned on tales of Crécy and Poitiers, were not a match for their predecessors who had been responsible for such victories. Certainly many of the great commanders had died in war and of the plague or were, like the king and his eldest son, now old and ill. But circumstances were different also, and if personalities and people can be said to be representative of national success, then Charles V was a far more capable ruler than his father or grandfather. French domestic policy, leading to improved defences, military strategy and the ability to fund such action had created a formidable structure although these realities cut little ice in England. The source of the agitation is uncertain but complaints rained down on the government concerning the management of the war from certain sections of the Commons and these may have been encouraged in ‘another place’.
The Commons was becoming increasingly important as the crown became increasingly dependent on parliament for financial support through taxation. As this developed so too did the interest of magnates in influencing the Commons and elections to it. Among the prince’s retinue were a number of MPs, but there is little to suggest that the prince was following a deliberate policy comparable to that of which Gaunt was accused, namely trying to pack the Commons for certain votes. There were only six claiming the prince’s support in the Good Parliament and this was the highest total apart from sessions in 1358, 1365 and 1369 in which seven members of the retinue sat in the Commons. It is true, although probably coincidental, that those sessions when he was best represented were tax-granting parliaments, but beyond this, membership of the Commons does not seem to have been a major factor in recruitment to the retinue. It may have been the case that the prince’s authority and that of his friends and his father’s adherents was sufficient to influence the Commons as they wished, without the need to secure the support of members of the house.4
The role of the prince was thus, at most vicarious and probably fictitious, the creation of Thomas Walsingham, and an early example of the myth of the prince, the broken knight, still struggling even on his death-bed for the good of his country, urging on his supporters in parliament to stand up to the wicked council and dark intentions of his brother.
But [their] vigour dissolved away immediately after the untimely death of Prince Edward. For after that death the duke [Gaunt] could do whatever he desired and willed… [T]he death of prince Edward filled the knights of the shire with despair. The duke entered the assembly of the knights. He urgently begged them … the knights, and the lords and barons associated with them, [to] deliberate as to who should inherit the kingdom of England after the death of the king and of the prince his son. He begged further that … they would decree a law that a woman should not become heir to the kingdom; for he considered the great age of the king, who was on the threshold of death, and he considered the youth of Prince Richard whom, so it was said, he thought of poisoning if he could not gain the kingdom in any other way.5
Gaunt’s royal ambitions, if not involving murder, do at least require some further consideration. Edward III took steps to clarify the order of succession, which was clouded by the issue of ‘representation’ (that Richard should have precedence over his uncle/s) by making an entail detailing the descent of the Crown. Michael Bennett has pointed out that Richard’s coronation was by no means a foregone conclusion, noting remarks by Chandos Herald and others.6 Interestingly, the problem lay, as it had and did in France, with whether the Crown might be inherited through the female line. It remains possible, although improbable, that Gaunt had deliberate intentions to try and seize the throne on his father’s death. Edward wished to avoid possible strife in the event of an uncertain succession, particularly in the context of the declining English position in France and political opposition at home. It was such opposition that may account for Walsingham’s version of events and it is not unlikely that he was guilty of a deliberate anachronism with regard to Gaunt’s role in the Good Parliament. As the king’s representative, Gaunt saw it necessary to reverse the steps taken in 1376 in the Hillary parliament of 1377. Charges brought by the Commons of mismanagement and corruption had resulted in the impeachment of the chamberlain, William Lord Latimer, the steward, John Lord Neville, a number of merchants, and the king’s mistress, Alice Perrers. Gaunt engineered and oversaw a vindictive and deliberate reversal of the measures taken by the 1376 parliament, targeting those that had been most prominent in the demands for reform.
With the succession secure, any daydreams Gaunt may have had of assuming the throne of England were soon subsumed by his more realistic ambitions in Spain. There is certainly no doubting the appeal of a crown;
To the mentality of a fourteenth-century English magnate … great wealth and power were of secondary significance when set against the prospect his attaining, in is own right, the supreme position in the medieval social order. If he [Gaunt] could not be king of England, it was perfectly natural to a mind such as his that he should wish to be king of Castile.7
The myth of the Black Prince, built on a reputation earned in battle, grew with his death. John of Reading’s eulogy said that he followed wise council, never preferred secular affairs to divine office, that he was honourable, he endowed the church generously and kept his marriage vows.8 It was not a terribly accurate portrayal but nor was it completely fanciful. Certainly in death, and it was a death for which he must have been preparing for some time, some surprising aspects of his character become apparent.
Edward the Black Prince was buried, as he wished, in Canterbury Cathedral but not where he wished. He had requested to be laid in the chapel of ‘Our Lady Undercroft’ (’so that the end of our tomb towards the feet be ten feet distant from the altar’9) but instead is to be found in a much more prominent position and one of even more significance than today, prior as it was to the removal and destruction of Becket’s tomb. In death, the figure of the prince became once more that of the consummate warrior that he had not been for some nine years. That the tomb retained an aura many years after the prince’s death is evident, as Shakespeare has the archbishop of Canterbury say to Henry V:
Look back into your mighty ancestors:
Go, my dread lord, to your great-grandsire’s tomb,
From whom you claim; invoke his warlike spirit,
And your great-uncle’s, Edward the Black Prince,
Who on the French ground play’d a tragedy,
Making defeat on the full power of France,
While his most mighty father on a hill
Stood smiling to behold his lion’s whelp
Forage in blood of French nobility.10
The tomb, Chandos Herald, Froissart and later writers compounded the image of a model prince and of a model knight that remained at least until the beginning of the twentieth century (see the Leeds statue). The prince was extremely particular in his will regarding the disposition of his body. Details of the tomb, its placement and design, the use and display of his arms and mottoes (houmout and ich diene), the passage of the cortege through Canterbury, its black pennons with ostrich feathers; two destriers were to be trapped with his arms, and requests for vigils, masses and divine office were made. Gifts were offered for the altar of the chapel as well as vestments, candlesticks, basins and chamber-hangings and a cross fashioned from the wood of the True Cross.
The prince’s will, as well as the image on the ‘tester’ above his tomb show his dedication to the cult of the Trinity. He bequeathed his soul to God and his saints, most particularly the Trinity and the Virgin. The prince also gave to Canterbury Cathedral an image of the Trinity, and chamber-hangings to be used for hanging in the choir-stalls to serve as a memorial for the prince on the feast of the Trinity and the other principal feasts of the year.
The Trinity was a cult which was by no means new in the fourteenth century although it seems to have regained some momentum at this time. In late Saxon times All Saints and Holy Trinity had become popular dedications: ‘devotion to the Trinity – manifest still in innumerable paintings and sculptures – flourished greatly until and through the reformation…’11 Other Trinity images associated with the prince can be seen on the frontispiece of a Chandos Herald manuscript, a funerary lead badge, and another showing him worshipping the Trinity within the Garter. It is also evident from the document granting the prince custody of Aquitaine and in his foundation of a chantry with two priests to say masses in the cathedral church of the Holy Trinity in Canterbury. The prince had been born within the quindene of Trinity Sunday and died on the feast itself, at three in the afternoon having been prince of Wales for thirty-three years. Joan was 33 when he married her. It is interesting that the guild of the Trinity was the pre-eminent guild of both Coventry, which the prince held, and Lynn where he had considerable interests.12 Whether or not the prince influenced friends and associates in advocating the cult of the Trinity, many examples can be found of retinue members founding institutions and giving patronage to those with links to the Trinity. Miles Stapleton in c.1360 received a licence to found a perpetual chantry in honour of the Holy Trinity in the parochial church of Ingham, Norfolk. John Willoughby d’Eresby, who fought at Crécy and died three years later, founded a Trinity chapel in Spilsby church, Lincolnshire. John Wingfield, the prince’s business manager, by the terms of his will, had a chapel built and similarly dedicated in 1362. Richard FitzAlan, a military companion, long-standing creditor and official in Wales and the border counties, began the building of a Trinity chapel at Arundel and left provision in his will for its completion. In Cheshire the sisters and fraternity of the Blessed Trinity were associated with Adam Wheteley, the mayor and escheator of Chester, in a petition requesting a licence from the prince to acquire and hold certain lands in perpetuity.13
The prince’s will also reveals other aspects of his personal religious beliefs and particular friendships. Grants were made to the house of the Bonhommes at Ashridge and to the chapel of St Nicholas at Wallingford. The former were an unusual order; the monastery or college of the Precious Blood at Ashridge had been founded for seven priests in 1283 by the prince’s great-uncle, Edmund, earl of Cornwall. In 1376, the Black Prince augmented the endowments and the number of priests was increased to 20. He appears to have had little direct contact with this house of the order until this time when he became the ‘second founder’. In 1346, a chantry had been founded in the conventual church for the soul of Bartholomew Burghersh snr., after the appropriation of the church of Ambrosden. The foundation had been built on the prince’s land a short distance from Berkhamsted and endowed with Ashridge park and manor.14
The house at Ashridge was the first of the order but it was not the first house of Bonhommes with which the prince was connected. The order had expanded in the 1350s when two brothers from Ashridge were sent to Edington of which one, John Aylesbury (d. 25 March 1382), received a licence from the bishop of Lincoln in 1358 permitting him to take up office as the first rector. The Ashridge statutes were used at Edington and the unusual azure habit became uniform. However, after the transfer of brethren in 1358 there seems to be little evidence of any real enduring link between the two. There is little agreement as to the actual nature of the observance carried out at the houses. Certainly there was little obviously distinctive, apart from their habit, about them to attract patronage. They followed the Rule of St Augustine, or a very close variant, and normal monastic service was conducted according to the Use of Sarum. Despite the support of William Edington and the Black Prince, they had little or no political influence.15
The foundation at Edington was converted into a house of Bonhommes, not founded as such. It had originally been created as a college of the Blessed Virgin, St Katherine and All Saints by William Edington, bishop of Winchester, in 1351 as one of the last purely regular religious foundations. The conversion into a monastery of the Bonhommes in 1358 probably occurred at the insistence of the Black Prince, and served ‘to free [the] priests from onerous parochial duties’.16 A charter was given by Robert Wyvill, bishop of Salisbury, in March confirming that it was to become a house of ‘fratres de ordine sancti Augustini, Boni Homines vulgariter nuncupati’.17 A number of individuals with other connections to the prince can be found among records of the order as witnesses to charters and the like. It is surprising that with such luminaries as the prince of Wales and the bishop of Winchester as patrons, the order failed to gain a great deal of support. It was handsomely endowed by the prince who sought little material benefit and indeed handed over control over elections to the brethren. Edington Priory is also renowned for its glazing, which was built c.1358–61.18
To return to the prince’s will: to Richard (II), he bequeathed three beds, possibly including one with coverings showing a white hart encircled with the arms of Kent and Wake, and chamberhangings embroidered with the arms of Saladin. To Roger Clarendon, his illegitimate son by Edith Willesford, he also bequeathed a bed, as he did to both Robert Walsham, his confessor, and his companion-in-arms, Alan Cheyne. The political iconography of the bed, especially a bed decorated with heraldic images, with their inherent statement of authority, made the gifts highly significant. The prince also requested that the grants and annuities he had given his knights, esquires and other servants should be confirmed. His executors were to be Gaunt (another indication that there was no ‘bad blood’ between them), Edington, John Harewell, bishop of Bath, William Spridlington, bishop of St Asaph, Robert Walsham, Hugh Seagrave, Alan Stokes and John Fordham. The will was witnessed by John, bishop of Hereford, Lewis Clifford, Nicholas Bonde, Nicholas Sarnesfield, and William Walsham.19
The tomb itself, commissioned by Richard II in the mid-1380s, bears an epitaph at odds with the image and figure of the prince. The epitaph may have been indicative of the prince’s own state of mind and religious concerns. It is certainly indicative of a changing attitude to death in the later fourteenth century and with that the search for a more ‘personal relationship’ with God. It includes the lines;
… Mais je sui ore poevres et cheitifs
Parfond en la terre gis
Ma grande beauté est tut alée,
Ma char est tut gasté …20
After the prince’s death, Richard’s childhood did not last long and little is known about it. Much of it was spent in Joan’s household and in the guardianship of three magistri, chosen for him by the Black Prince, namely Guichard d’Angle, Richard Abberbury and Simon Burley.21
The political turbulence enveloping his father’s household in his early years cannot have affected him greatly, and it is impossible to say if he was aware of the death of his brother, Edward. It is unlikely that he had many memories of Aquitaine and equally improbable that he remembered his father in his pomp. Perhaps this made the comparisons, when he acceded the throne, even more difficult to bear. John Gower in his Vox Clamantis wrote:
It is also your concern, O king, to be your people’s defender in arms. And in order to defend justice with valour, remember your father’s deed as a model for this … France felt the effects of him; and Spain … was fearful of him. Throwing his foes into disorder, he hurled his troops into the midst of his enemies and broke up their course of march like a lion.22
His childhood was brief and his time to prepare for the crown was similarly limited. He clearly had a number of common interests with his father. In the few months in which he was prince of Wales after the death of his father and before the demise of Edward III he made payments to two pipers called Henrico and Petirkyn as well as to numerous heralds and minstrels. From the duke of Lancaster, his uncle, and his grandfather he received presents of horses.23
Richard’s education was in the care of those well versed in chivalric and martial pursuits. In these fields Burley, and particularly d’Angle, had impeccable credentials.24 He had served both the kings of England and France loyally, as Philip of Valois’ seneschal of Saintonge from 1346, at Poitiers, where he was gravely wounded, and in the prince’s service in Aquitaine and at Nájera. In 1372 he was nominated a knight of the Garter and on Richard’s coronation he became earl of Huntingdon.25 It may have been a result of such tutors that the chivalric example was not lost on Richard and he endeavoured to use it for the political advantages it had given his father and grandfather. Unlike them, unfortunately, he lacked the military success by which a king and a knight were judged. The senility of Edward III and the political failures of the Black Prince were forgotten in a haze of military victories. Richard did not have a Poitiers or a Crécy on which to fall back. Indeed, it has been suggested that this had more debilitating consequences and that ‘Richard’s inability to meet the martial standards of his father … was a component of the king’s psychological trauma.’26 However, this is not to suggest that Richard was militarily incapable or certainly a coward, his actions at Mile End in 1381 gives the lie to such an accusation. But it might be argued that Richard’s temperament and disposition and the consequent shape taken by his kingship, the pomp, the ceremony and indeed the chivalry, informed and shaped his conception of monarchy, in a manner which was by no means out of character with the nobility or the style adopted by his father and grandfather; he simply could not substantiate it militarily.
While Richard was burdened by the reputations of his father and grandfather their legacies to him were inversely although similarly problematic. Political instability was bequeathed by Edward III and insufficient institutional support by the Black Prince. In spite of its size and expense during his militarily active life, the prince did not bequeath a sizeable retinue to his son. The actions of Richard, particularly in the late 1380s and 1390s, reveal his lack of political support. There were a number of important individuals who went on to serve the Black Prince’s son, and a significant number of those who sat on the continual councils during Richard’s minority had begun their careers with the young king’s father. The chamber knights in the first six or seven years of Richard’s reign were mainly his father’s former servants. They included Richard Abberbury, Baldwin Bereford, Nicholas Bonde, John and Simon Burley, Lewis Clifford, Peter Courtenay, John del Hay, Nicholas Sarnesfield, Aubrey Vere and Bernard van Zedeles. Among the former servants of Edward III who served as chamber knights to his successor, Nicholas Dagworth, Robert Roos and Richard Stury all had dealings with the Black Prince as did the new men William Beauchamp, John Holland and William Neville. Nine out of nineteen of Richard’s esquires of the chamber also formerly saw service with the Black Prince, namely John Breton, Roger Coghull, Lambert Fermer, Richard Hampton, John Peytevyn, Adam Ramsey, Philip Walweyn Snr, Richard Wiltshire and William Wyncelowe.27 Indeed, it was many of these who were the focus of attack by the Appellants in 1388. Simon Burley suffered execution and a number of others were required to absent themselves from court including Abberbury, Bereford, Dagworth and Vere. Although they were prominent at court, the remnants of the Black Prince’s retinue that went on to serve his son were neither popular nor powerful. It is probably unfair to suggest it, but the failure of the Black Prince may not only have been the loss of Aquitaine but also the failure to establish a secure retinue and a body of support for Richard. As Goodman has said, ‘His [Richard’s] affinity signally failed to provide effective military support against Henry of Lancaster’s invasion in 1399, and few of his former retainers rallied to support the “Epiphany Plot” in 1400, intended to restore him to the throne.’28 The prince cannot be held responsible for events nearly twenty-five years after his death but a retinue, household or affinity needed foundations from which to grow and a core around which it could develop. This was not something available to Richard and it was not something that he could fashion during the years of his minority; the ‘blunt instrument’ of his Cheshire archers and retainers was no more reliable than the mercenary forces recruited by Chandos and the Black Prince for the Spanish campaign.
The young king’s close circle of knights also did not have the same military reputation as those of his father and grandfather. Thomas Walsingham called them knights of Venus rather than Mars, more suited to the bedchamber than the battlefield.
Such men have also been held responsible for the style of Richard’s government and his own elevated conception of his kingship. The Gascon influence may have been important – Guichard d’Angle, Baldwin Raddington, John Devereux and David Craddock had all experienced the regime in Aquitaine, and Simon Burley in particular has been noted in context of his experiences of the Black Prince’s court – and through literary influences such as that of Giles of Rome’s De Regimine Principum. This emphasised a subject’s obligation of obedience, claimed the greatest possible authority for a monarch, stated that all privilege and nobility came from the king and that as the supreme lawgiver he was himself above the law. Certainly both Burley and Michael de la Pole owned copies of Giles’ work. Such concepts also compounded traditions of Roman and civil law more generally. The continuity of personnel may well have had some influence and it may not have been beneficial to a young English monarch thrust prematurely on the throne as their mutual experience was in south-west France and their common frame of reference was far from London.29 However, to emphasise this link does raise questions about the nature of theprince’s court in Bordeaux and/or the ‘despotic’ requirements of service with Richard and behaviour in his presence. If the collapse of the principality of Aquitaine was, if only in part, attributable to the appalling manner in which Edward treated his subjects then it does not seem likely that Burley or anyone else would encourage the young king to follow a pattern of behaviour that had such disastrous consequences. The most regularly cited example and comparison concerns court etiquette and Richard’s demand that subjects should kneel if he so much as glanced at them. It should be noted, however, that this is only evidenced in a single source, as is the Anonimalle Chronicle account of the prince requiring his great magnates to wait for hours on their knees before addressing him.30
Caroline Barron described Richard’s rule as ‘arbitrary, uncustomary and bore heavily on certain individuals’, but noted that this ‘formed the normal small change of English medieval kingship’ and it was unlikely that it was ‘widely resented or so unpopular as seriously to undermine Richard’s government’.31 Similarly, Nigel Saul has suggested that ’in character and style there was probably little to distinguish it [Richard’s court] from the other main courts of the day’.32
One of the most striking and yet elusive images of Richard II is in the Wilton Diptych. It has been interpreted in many ways. ‘At the most eccentric end of the scale is [the] suggestion that [the diptych] was commissioned by Richard’s half-sister as a memorial to their mother, Joan of Kent – that the Virgin Mary is a portrait of Joan and the Christ Child is Edward of Angoulême, Richard’s elder brother who died in infancy, handing over his inheritance to him.’33 Portraits of Edward II, Edward III and the Black Prince have also been suggested as providing the models for the saints presenting Richard to Jesus.34 The combination of secular and religious themes is also extremely significant and has engendered considerable debate. Yet, as Nigel Saul says, ‘It is doubtful if Richard saw anything incongruous in this combination of religious and secular imagery. Throughout his reign he viewed kingship in essentially religious terms [and] [h]e was deeply conscious of [its] theocratic roots.’ Furthermore, ‘The fusion of religious and secular ideas, evident in the symbolism and subject-matter of the Diptych, also found expression in the king’s commitment to the suppression of heresy.’35 This is particularly interesting considering the household in which he was raised and the religious peccadilloes evident therein.
That household, and perhaps the centre of a circle around which those of less-than-orthodox religious attitude gathered was that of the king’s mother. Joan of Kent has tended to be remembered for the intricacies of her marriages or misremembered for her role in the Order of the Garter. Yet, both she and members of her knights and associates played significant political roles in the last years of Edward III’s reign and after his death in 1377. The construction of the household of the Fair Maid, ‘la plus belle et plus amoreuse’ in all the land, after the death of her second (or third) husband after 1376, is not merely a footnote to the career of the Black Prince but a worthy topic in itself. This is because of Joan’s status after 1377, as the king’s mother in the minority years of her son, as a study of the entourage of one of the great dowagers, and for the careers and particular interests of those who comprised her following. With regard to such interests, it is well known that John Wyclif received the support and favour of John of Gaunt, certainly in February 1377 and again, through the intervention of Princess Joan, in March 1378. It has also been asserted that the Lollard knights, identified by the chroniclers Thomas Walsingham and Henry Knighton, formed a ‘court circle’ in the reign of Richard II that was active in parliament and may have received support or at least shared some views with Thomas of Woodstock, who may not have been the only son of Edward III to have harboured such attitudes. It has also been suggested, although with little evidence, that the ‘prince was a man of vaguely puritanical religion’.36 If so, this may have chimed with Joan’s own sympathies. Among the executors of her will were the Lollard knights, John Clanvowe, William Beauchamp, Lewis Clifford, and Richard Stury, although they also included Robert Braybroke and William of Wickham, bishops of London and Winchester respectively.37 Among the other Lollard knights, William Neville served in Richard’s household as prince of Wales and had long been associated with the family. Reginald Hilton may have been in the prince’s service in the diocese of Lichfield and became controller of Richard’s wardrobe. Thomas Latimer had some connections to the prince and served in the 1355 expedition and in Spain, but this may have been in a ‘freelance’ capacity, while John Montague, who maintained the Wyclifite preacher, Nicholas Hereford, in his house at Shenley, was a knight of the prince’s household from 1354 and Richard’s steward from 1381–6.38
However, for these and probably for Joan herself, there was a considerable ‘grey area’ on the margins between orthodoxy and Lollardy. Anti-papalism and what has been described as ‘a certain brand of alehouse anticlericalism’39 were not necessarily indicative of heretical attitudes to transubstantiation or other aspects of Wyclifite belief. Rather they may have been ‘attracted to the pietistic and moralistic attitudes of the early Lollards rather than to their more specifically antisacramental, antihierarchical and pacifist teachings’.40 In any case, the Lollard knights were almost all connected with either the short lived ‘dynasty’ of the prince of Wales: Edward himself, Joan of Kent, and Richard II or John of Gaunt, and they provided financial and political support allowing for the patronage of Wyclifite preachers and the ‘Lollard library’. The extent to which they shared religious attitudes, except in a broad sense is more difficult to determine.41
One who was very much aware of the strains within the church and who wrote a great deal about its representatives was Geoffrey Chaucer. He had fought in the Reims campaign, possibly in the prince’s division, during which he was captured and later ransomed by the king. He was closely associated with Sir John Clanvowe, one of the most interesting of the Wyclifite circle since he was an author and wrote a clear statement of his views in a work entitled The Two Ways.42 The treatise was puritanical certainly, heretical probably, but not necessarily a direct statement of Lollard belief. In this he shared with a number of others, attitudes that were on or a little beyond the boundaries of orthodoxy in some ‘no man’s land’ before Lollardy. Other knights of the group have been identified through the language of their wills although there are clearly problems with such an analysis and many strictly orthodox individuals made wills that might be described as Lollard in tone or character. Similarly, such men as Clanvowe and William Neville indulged in such activities as crusading, and Lewis Clifford was a member of Philippe de Mézières’ Order of the Passion. Thomas Latimer, before Wyclif ‘s ideas became public, acquired a grant from the pope to have a portative altar, a personal confessor and have mass celebrated before daylight. While such attitudes clearly do not sit easily with Lollard antipapalism they do show a search for a means of salvation not entirely within the commonplace structure of the church.43 Latimer joined the prince in Aquitaine and may have seen service in Spain and in the rearguard action after 1369. In June 1385, he was one of a number of knights summoned to be in constant attendance on the king’s mother. The group also included Clifford and Stury although his links to Joan may have been through his wife, Anne, who attended the princess at Richard’s birth and brought news of the event to the prince.44 Latimer was also associated with one Robert Lychlade, who was expelled from Oxford in 1395 for holding heretical opinions. He became, by 1401, rector of Kemerton, Gloucestershire, of which Sir William Beauchamp, the probably Wyclifite knight was patron and in the following year he acted as an executor of the will of Anne Latimer, widow of Thomas Braybroke, a noted Lollard sympathiser. Another of the prince’s close associates, Gerard Braybroke, also had close links to the Lollard circle, but was never named as one himself. An overseer of the same will was Lewis Clifford. Clifford was forced in 1402 to recant his theological errors and offer public penance. Similarly, Richard Stury was ordered to abjure heresy or face execution.45
It was a confused, conflicting and contentious childhood for Richard II. His father, who he only knew as old and ill, was remembered in the collective consciousness and by posterity as young and vigorous and chivalrous and successful. His grandfather, similarly, all but senile was the hero of Crécy, who had dragged England out of the mire of the reign of Edward II and the despotism of Mortimer and Isabella. It is a fascinating aside, and perhaps more than that being indicative of his own conception of his kingship, that Richard was at the forefront of a movement seeking the canonisation of his great-grandfather. His mother’s household revealed the dichotomies of ‘Lollardy’ and chivalry. The ‘hawks’ and ‘doves’ in the court and the country showed conflicting attitudes to the war and later to Richard’s style of rule and eventually the king himself.
The legacy of the Black Prince was, characteristically, ambivalent, opaque, conflicting and, to an extent, self-destructive, and as such it was completely representative of the forces at work in the period that we have chosen to call late medieval. It was a period in England that harkened back to the triumphs of the Angevin Empire and forward via the Wars of the Roses to the Yorkist kings and the authoritarianism of the Tudor monarchs. It was a period of bureaucracy and administration and parliament and high finance that was founded on spectacle and chivalry even when those same qualities were becoming increasingly outmoded, not to say undesirable on the battlefield where the final analysis of success and kingship were made.