Part I
2
Since 1154 England had been ruled by the House of Plantagenet and the succession to the crown had passed fairly peaceably from father to son or brother to brother. The Plantagenet kings, who were reputed by legend to have descended from the Devil, were mostly dynamic men and outstanding leaders, energetic, warlike, courageous, just and wise. They were distinguished by aquiline features, red hair and a ferocious temper truly terrible to behold.
Edward III (1327-77) was the archetypal Plantagenet king – tall, proud, majestic and handsome, with chiselled features and long hair and beard. Born in 1312, he was only fourteen when his father, Edward II, was deposed and murdered, and eighteen when he assumed personal control of the government of England.
In 1328 Edward married Philippa of Hainault, who bore him thirteen children. His occasional infidelities did not affect this happy and successful marriage, which lasted forty years. Edward had inherited the notorious Plantagenet temper, but the Queen exerted a restraining influence on him; in a famous incident in 1347, she successfully interceded with him for the lives of the doomed burghers of Calais, which Edward had captured after a long siege.
Edward lived in great splendour in the royal residences which he enlarged and beautified, and his court was a renowned centre of chivalry. He had a special reverence for St George, the patron saint of England, and did much to promote his cult. In 1348, he founded the Order of the Garter, which was dedicated to the saint.
Above all, Edward desired to win glory by great deeds. In 1338, concerned by French incursions into his duchy of Aquitaine, in which was centred England’s prosperous wine trade, he laid claim to the throne of France, asserting that he was the true heir by virtue of descent from his mother, who was sister of the last Capetian king. However, the Salic Law, which barred women from succeeding or transmitting a claim to the throne, obtained in France, and the French had already crowned Edward’s cousin, Philip of Valois, who was the male heir of the Capets.
Edward’s quartering of the lilies of France with the leopards of England on his coat of arms led to the conflict that later became known as the Hundred Years War because it dragged on intermittently for more than a century. Under Edward’s leadership, the English at first scored several victories: Sluys in 1340, Crécy in 1346 and Poitiers in 1356. These were the first important battles in which the English longbowmen demonstrated their supremacy over the heavily armoured French cavalry. However, the early successes of the English were not sustained, and in 1360 Edward was forced to return some of the lands he had conquered under the terms of the Treaty of Brétigny, which brought the first phase of the war to a close. When Edward died, apart from the duchy of Aquitaine, all that remained of his French territories were five towns and the land around Calais known as the Pale.
Edward III’s reign saw many changes. Parliament, now divided into Lords and Commons, began to meet regularly and to assert its authority through financial controls. Parliament’s principal function at this date was to vote taxation, and in this respect it did not always co-operate with the King’s wishes. In 1345 the law courts became permanently established in London and no longer followed the King’s person on progress around the kingdom. In 1352 treason was defined by statute for the first time. In 1361 the office of Justice of the Peace was created – gentlemen of good standing in their locality were appointed magistrates – and the following year English replaced French as the official language of the law courts. Edward’s reign also witnessed the rise to prosperity of the merchant classes and the beginning of the spread of education among laymen.
The King was a great patron of artists, authors and architects. The origins of the English Perpendicular style in architecture may be traced to his reign. This was also the period of the first great names in English literature: the poets Richard Rolle, Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower and William Langland. The latter’s epic poem Piers Plowman is an indictment of the oppression suffered by the poor after the Black Death, and of Alice Perrers, the rapacious mistress whose sway over Edward in his declining years was notorious.
Edward died in 1377. The face of the wooden effigy carried at his funeral, which is still preserved in Westminster Abbey, is a death mask, and the effects of the stroke which killed the King may be seen in the drawn-down corner of the mouth.
Edward III had thirteen children, including five sons who grew to maturity. He provided for them by marrying them to English heiresses and then creating the first ever English dukedoms for them. Thus he brought into being a race of powerful magnates related by blood to the royal line, whose descendants would ultimately challenge each other for the throne itself.
It is tempting to criticise Edward for bestowing upon his sons so much landed power, but it was then expected of him to provide for his sons to the best of his ability and make sufficient provision to enable his children to maintain establishments and retinues befitting their royal rank. In Edward’s own lifetime the way in which he married his children into the upper echelons of the nobility and thereby secured for them substantial inheritances, while at the same time extending royal influence, was seen as a very successful undertaking. In 1377, the Chancellor spoke at Edward’s last Parliament of the love and trust within the royal family, saying that ‘no Christian king had such sons as the King has had. By him and his sons the realm has been reformed, honoured and enriched as never before.’
The eldest son, Edward of Woodstock, Prince of Wales, was known from the sixteenth century as the ‘Black Prince’. While only sixteen years old, the Prince won his knightly spurs at Crécy, and by his exploits during the next decade earned the reputation of being the finest knight in Christendom. The nickname given him may have been inspired by the colour of his armour or, more probably, the ferocity of his temper. In later years, dogged by ill-health, he tarnished his fame by ordering the notorious massacre of innocent citizens at Limoges. He predeceased his father in 1376, leaving one heir, nine-year-old Richard of Bordeaux, who succeeded his grandfather in 1377 as Richard II. It is one of the ironies of history that the successor of the fertile Edward III should produce no children at all, a circumstance which indirectly brought about the Wars of the Roses half a century later.
Edward III’s second son, Lionel of Antwerp, Duke of Clarence (1338-68), made a highly advantageous marriage to Elizabeth de Burgh, sole heiress of the Anglo-Irish Earl of Ulster and a descendant, through her mother, of King Henry III (1207-72). Elizabeth died in 1363, having produced only one daughter, Philippa of Clarence (1355-81). After his wife’s death, Lionel, in a bid to establish some kind of Italian principality for himself, married Violante Visconti, daughter of the Duke of Milan, but he died in Italy in mysterious circumstances, possibly of poison, only six months afterwards.
Lionel’s marriage to Elizabeth de Burgh brought him an Irish earldom and the ancestral lands of the de Burgh family in Ulster, although Ireland was in such chaos that he was never able to exercise more than nominal control over his inheritance. Nevertheless, this was the beginning of the long association between his family and the land and people of Ireland.
Lionel’s daughter Philippa became the wife of Edmund Mortimer, 3rd Earl of March (1352-81). In 1363, on the death of her mother, Philippa became Countess of Ulster in her own right. The House of York would one day base its claim to the throne on its descent from Edward III through Philippa of Clarence, and certainly by the law of primogeniture, after the Black Prince’s line failed, the crown should have passed to the heirs of his next brother, Lionel. But it did not, and this was one of the crucial issues raised during the Wars of the Roses.
The Mortimers were a family of great barons whose chief sphere of influence was along the Welsh border – the Marches. Their principal seats were Wigmore Castle – now a ruin – and Ludlow Castle. Through marriage, they had absorbed the estates of other Marcher barons, the Lacys and the Genvilles. At the peak of their power, in the late fourteenth century, they were the richest of all the magnates and the most powerful family on the Welsh Marches. They owned extensive estates, not only there, but also in Ireland, Wales, Dorset, Somerset and East Anglia. They extended and improved Ludlow Castle, building a magnificent range of domestic apartments which are considered to be the best surviving examples of the domestic quarters of a late mediaeval aristocrat.
Edmund Mortimer had become 3rd Earl of March at the age of eight on his father’s death; he was also Earl of Ulster in right of his wife. In 1379 he was appointed Lieutenant of Ireland, a post held by several of his descendants. His tour of duty there lasted less than three years, but he achieved a great deal in that time. He drowned whilst crossing a ford in Cork in December 1381, leaving his son Roger (1373-98) as his heir.
Edward III’s third surviving son was John of Gaunt (1340-99), who became Duke of Lancaster by right of his marriage to his distant cousin Blanche, the heiress of the House of Lancaster, which had been founded by Edmund Crouchback, Earl of Lancaster, second son of Henry III, in the thirteenth century. The Duchy of Lancaster was a palatinate, which meant that it was virtually an independent state in which the king’s writ counted for very little.
Gaunt, a tall, lean man of military bearing, was a fabulously wealthy prince. Proud and ambitious, he maintained an impressive establishment organised along the lines of the royal household and staffed by a retinue of 500 persons. He owned vast estates, scattered throughout England and France, thirty castles and numerous manors, and could summon a formidable army of tenants at will. Gaunt’s favourite residences were his London palace of the Savoy, which rivalled Westminster in magnificence but was burned down in the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, and Kenilworth Castle in Warwickshire, a place much beloved by his Lancastrian descendants. It is now a ruin, but Gaunt’s magnificent banqueting hall with its huge windows remains.
He loved ceremony and, like most of his class, held to the laws of chivalry as if they were a second religion. He was a cultivated man who loved books, patronised Chaucer, and enjoyed jousting. Dignified, reserved in manner and guarded in conversation, he was also peaceable, rarely exacting revenge for wrongs done to him and looking after his tenants. He was merciful to the humble and compassionate to villeins, or bondsmen, who wanted their freedom and even to lepers, the outcasts of mediaeval society. When dealing with rebellious peasants after the revolt, he acted with fairness.
Although he fought many campaigns, Gaunt never achieved any significant military success, and thus remained very much in the shadow of his father and elder brother, never enjoying, as they did, the status of public hero. Indeed, by the 1370s he had become very unpopular with the people of England. Edward III was sick and enfeebled, given over to the wiles of his rapacious mistress, Alice Perrers; the Black Prince was wasting away with a crippling disease. England’s victories in the Hundred Years War were long past, while her government, lacking cohesive leadership, blundered from one crisis to another. Gaunt, as the senior active member of the royal house, was blamed for its failings and the loss of some of England’s conquests in France. His wealth and influence were also resented, and after the Black Prince died there were rumours that he meant to seize the throne for himself. Other rumours had it that Gaunt was a Flemish changeling, smuggled into his mother’s bedchamber to replace a stillborn daughter. None of the rumours was true, but when his nephew Richard II succeeded, Gaunt made a great show of loyalty and avoided being identified with any opposition to the minority government. Thereafter he saw his life’s work as maintaining the honour and integrity of the English Crown. He remained faithful to Richard, during whose minority he was virtual ruler of England, but he nevertheless made bitter enemies, especially among the clergy, who attacked him for supporting John Wycliffe, who caused a furore by attacking abuses within the Church. Many magnates suspected him of harbouring designs on the throne, but in fact the only throne Gaunt coveted was that of Castile, which he claimed through its heiress, his second wife Constance, though he failed in his attempt to establish himself as king there.
Until the 1390s, Richard II respected, trusted and relied upon Gaunt. The latter’s status as a politician had so improved by that time that even his avowed enemy, the chronicler Thomas Walsingham, was moved to describe him as a man of worth and loyalty. Chaucer, whose sister-in-law became Gaunt’s third wife, called his patron ‘treatable, right wonder skilful, and reasonable’, while Froissart described him as ‘sage and imaginative’.
According to Chaucer, who dedicated his work The Book of the Duchess to Gaunt’s first wife, Blanche of Lancaster was beautiful, golden-haired, tall and shapely. She could read and write, which was unusual in an age when female literacy was discouraged because it would give women the means to write love letters. But so pure was Blanche’s reputation that she was regarded as a chaste patroness of men of letters. She bore Gaunt eight children, of whom only three grew to maturity: Philippa, who married John I, King of Portugal; Elizabeth, who married John Holland, 1st Duke of Exeter; and Henry of Bolingbroke, Gaunt’s heir. Blanche died during the third outbreak of the Black Death in 1369, and was buried in Old St Paul’s Cathedral.
Gaunt’s second marriage to Constance of Castile was made for political reasons. They had two children, John, who died as a baby, and Katherine, who married Henry III, King of Castile. Constance died in 1394.
On 13 January 1396, at Lincoln Cathedral, Gaunt married for the third time, this time for love. The bride was the lady who had been his mistress for a quarter of a century. Her name was Katherine Swynford, and she was the daughter of a herald of Guienne and the widow of Sir Hugh Swynford, who died fighting the French in 1372. At the time of her marriage to Gaunt she was about forty-six. She is thought to have been the sister of Philippa le Picard, a lady-in-waiting to Edward III’s queen and pantry woman to Blanche,Duchess of Lancaster, and probably also the wife of the poet Geoffrey Chaucer.
Katherine first came to Gaunt’s attention when she was employed as ‘gouvernante’ to his daughters by Blanche. Froissart alleges their affair began the year before Blanche’s death. It was certainly going on when Gaunt married Constance, but did not become notorious until 1378, when, according to Walsingham, the couple began openly living in sin. Three years later the liaison had become common knowledge. Gaunt’s accounts record gifts given to Katherine between 1372 and 1381, but in that year, interpreting his losses during the Peasants’ Revolt as evidence of God’s displeasure, he renounced Katherine, and in 1382 she resigned her post and retired to the estates given her by her lover in Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire.
Katherine bore Gaunt four children, all surnamed Beaufort after a lordship and castle once owned by him in the Champagne region of France, but lost in 1369, before they were born. These children and their descendants were to dominate English politics for the next century and more, and it has been said with truth that the history of the Beauforts is the history of England during that period. Their dates of birth are not recorded, but the eldest, John Beaufort, must have been born in the early 1370s because in 1390 he rode in triumph at the celebrated jousts held before the French court at St Inglevert in France. From John would be descended the Beaufort dukes of Somerset and ultimately the royal House of Tudor. The second son, Henry, was educated in law at Aachen, in Germany, and then at Cambridge and Oxford, before entering the Church, within which he would rise to the rank of cardinal and become one of the most influential men in the kingdom. The third son, Thomas, was too young to be knighted in 1397, when the Beauforts were legitimised, but went on to become Duke of Exeter and play a prominent part in the French wars, while Joan, the only daughter, would marry the powerful Ralph Neville, 1st Earl of Westmorland, and become matriarch of the widespread Neville family.
In 1388, in recognition of the esteem in which she was held by Gaunt, Richard II made Katherine Swynford a Lady of the Garter, and we should perhaps assume that she and Gaunt again became lovers at that time. Hostile chroniclers compared Katherine to Alice Perrers, calling her an adventuress and worse: it was said she had none of Alice’s charm but far more influence. Priests delivered sermons on her vices and the common people spat at her when she appeared in public. But in Gaunt’s magnificent residences, as well as at court, the great deferred to Katherine, and were not too proud to present petitions to her, hoping she would exert her influence on their behalf. After her marriage, she ranked as first lady in the land until Richard II married Isabella of France, though her lowly birth and scandalous past made her the butt of much gossip on the part of the great ladies of the court, who protested that they would not come into any place where she would be present. Froissart says they thought it a ‘great shame that such a duchess should have the pre-eminence before them’. But Katherine continued to behave with a decorum and dignity that would silence them in the end.
Edward III’s fourth surviving son was Edmund of Langley, Duke of York (1341-1402), an ineffectual ditherer of little ability, whose achievements were few, for he lacked the ambition and energy of his brothers. His remains, exhumed during the reign of Queen Victoria, showed him to have been a stocky man of about 5′8″ tall. Although his contemporaries described him as handsome, he had an abnormally sloping forehead and a prominent, thrusting jaw. On his body there was evidence of several wounds, none of them in the back, which suggests that if Edmund was somewhat lacking in brain power, he was no coward in the field. His long military career began when he was eighteen, when he fought the French, but in the years that followed, despite the odd moment of glory, he was dogged by one misfortune after another and was rarely given an independent command.
During the reign of Richard II Edmund was a political lightweight; his views were deferred to because of his rank, but he enjoyed little real influence. The greatest passion in his life was hawking, which he preferred to any political duty. The chronicler John Hardyng described Edmund as a cheerful and well-meaning man who ‘lived without wrong’, but whose abilities did not match the role his birth dictated.
Edmund was staunchly loyal to his brother, Gaunt. In 1372 he married Isabella, the younger sister of Gaunt’s second wife Constance. Her corpse was also examined by Victorian experts, who discovered she was only 4′8″tall and had strange, forked teeth. In life she was said to be beautiful and notorious, with a number of lovers, the most famous being John Holland, later Duke of Exeter. Chaucer satirised their affair in a poem entitled ‘The Complaint of Mars’, while monastic chroniclers referred to Isabella as a ‘soft and lascivious woman, devoted to lust and worldliness’. She loved beautiful things: in her will are listed items of exquisite jewellery, such as a heart set with pearls, and illuminated manuscripts of romances. In later years she became faithful to her husband and turned to religion, dying in 1392 ‘pious and repentant’. Isabella left three children: Edward (born c.1373), his father’s heir; Richard (born c. 1375-6); and Constance, who married Thomas le Despenser, who later became Earl of Gloucester.
Edmund was the founder of the House of York and received his dukedom from Richard II on 6 August 1385. In July, Edmund had helped to command an army on an abortive expedition to Scotland, and had camped at York on the way there. Although he had no special connection with the city, Richard II may have intended the creation to signify his gratitude to York for its recent hospitality and also his intention to make it the capital of England instead of London, where Richard was at that time very unpopular.
The fifth son of Edward III was Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester, whose fifteenth-century descendants were the Dukes of Buckingham.
Richard II’s reign was one of the most disastrous in English history. It laid the foundations for a power struggle that would last well into the next century and lead ultimately to the Wars of the Roses. Richard had been raised to the throne at too early an age. Impressed very young with a strong sense of his unique importance, he came in later life to bear grudges against any who dared criticise him. The praise he earned, at fourteen, for his courageous behaviour during the Peasants’ Revolt convinced him that he was a born leader of men.
He was six feet tall, slim and very fair-skinned, with dark blond hair which he wore at shoulder length. He cut an impressive figure, but he was no soldier and never took part in a joust. Yet he could be brave, and a passionately loyal friend. He was also at times unstable, extravagant, headstrong, suspicious, temperamental, irresponsible, untrustworthy, and cruel. Politically inept, he was often abrupt in conversation, and capable of insulting behaviour, on occasions bawling out his detractors in Parliament. Once, in a violent temper, he tried to take a sword to the Archbishop of Canterbury, and had to be forcibly restrained from doing so.
Richard was a highly cultivated man and a great patron of the arts and literature. He was impressed by French culture and customs, and installed French cooks in his kitchens, something his subjects viewed as fraternising with the enemy, against whom they would have preferred to be scoring military victories. But Richard was no seeker of martial glory and considered that peace with France was preferable to war, a highly unpopular view at that time.
The King had pronounced aesthetic sensibilities and raised the cult and mystique of monarchy to an art form, giving much thought to the ceremony and pageantry attached to it. He dressed ostentatiously – one coat cost 30,000 marks – and was very fastidious: he is credited with inventing the handkerchief – ‘little pieces [of cloth] for the lord King to wipe and clean his nose’. He had exquisite taste and his elegant court reflected his passion for the arts, its fame adding lustre to his crown.
Richard was a great builder and improver of the royal palaces, to the extent of installing bathrooms with hot and cold running water, stained-glass windows, vivid murals depicting heraldic symbols, and colourful floor tiles. He lived in the greatest luxury, and Westminster Hall, which he rebuilt, remains today as testimony to the splendours of his reign.
His household was sumptuous and extravagant. Walsingham describes the courtiers as rapacious and ‘more valiant in bed than in battle’, accusing them of corrupting the young King. Many chroniclers strongly criticised the outlandish fashions of the court, targeting the men’s built-up shoulders and collars, pointed-toed shoes and tight hose that prevented their wearers from kneeling in Church. Long sleeves that swept the floor were reviled as ‘full of slashes and devils’.
In 1384, after an uneasy minority, Richard had assumed personal rule. However, his incompetence in government and his reliance on favourites such as Michael de la Pole, Earl of Suffolk, and Robert de Vere, Earl of Oxford, provoked bitter opposition among his nobles. Richard’s first queen, Anne of Bohemia, exercised some restraint over him during her lifetime, but not enough, and although he loved her deeply, they were childless.
Richard’s infatuation for Robert de Vere was a political disaster. De Vere was a courageous, ambitious and resourceful young man, and as a magnate he had a legitimate role to play in government, but many believed his influence over the King to be pernicious and unnatural and his abilities mediocre. Married to the King’s cousin, Philippa de Coucy, he embarked upon a notorious affair with one of Queen Anne’s Czech ladies, Agnes de Launcekrona, whom he abducted and made his mistress. He then produced fraudulent evidence to secure an annulment of his marriage in order to marry her. As if this were not scandal enough, there were strong indications that his relationship with Richard was of a homosexual nature. Walsingham refers to ‘the depths of King Richard’s affection for this man, whom he cultivated and loved, not without a degree of improper intimacy, or so it was rumoured. It provoked discontent among the other lords and barons, for he was no superior to the rest of them.’ Elsewhere, Walsingham describes the relationship between the King and de Vere as ‘obscene’.
De Vere compounded his offences by continually urging Richard to ignore the advice of his nobles and the decrees of Parliament, and Richard, completely besotted, complied; some said bitterly that if de Vere said black was white, the King would not contradict him. He lavished land, honours and wealth on the favourite, and turned a blind eye to his adultery and the slighting of his royal wife, which aroused the anger of many of Richard’s family.
One nobleman who was particularly dismayed by the King’s behaviour was his cousin Henry of Bolingbroke, Gaunt’s heir, who had hitherto been as loyal to the King as Gaunt himself.
Henry of Bolingbroke had been born in 1367 at Bolingbroke Castle in Lincolnshire. For much of his youth he was styled Earl of Derby, one of Gaunt’s lesser titles. Around 1380-1 he married Mary, co-heiress of Humphrey de Bohun, Earl of Hereford, Essex and Northampton, and a descendant of Henry III. The Bohuns were of ancient Norman stock, one of England’s greatest noble families, and Mary’s sister Eleanor was the wife of Bolingbroke’s uncle, Thomas of Woodstock, later Duke of Gloucester.
Mary, born around 1369-70, had hardly reached puberty by the time of her marriage. She had been reared for the cloister but Gaunt wanted her half of the Bohun inheritance for his son. Unwisely, the young couple were allowed to cohabit immediately, with the result that Mary’s first son died at birth in 1382. Five years later she bore her next child, Henry of Monmouth, and then five others in quick succession: Thomas in 1388, John in 1389, Humphrey in 1390, Blanche in 1392 and Philippa in 1394. Mary did not survive this last birth. Henry’s faithfulness to his wife was commented on throughout the courts of Europe, and he sincerely mourned her death.
Henry of Bolingbroke was of medium height, good looking, strongly built and muscular. Examination of his corpse in 1831 showed his teeth to have been good and his hair to have been a deep russet colour. In life, he had a curling moustache and a short, forked beard. He was a man of great ability, energetic, tenacious, courageous and strong. He had a charismatic personality, being humorous, courteous, even-tempered and somewhat reserved and dignified. However, he could be stubborn and impulsive, and occasionally lacked foresight.
He was well-educated, and proficient in Latin, French and English. For preference, he spoke Norman-French, the traditional language of the English court. A skilful jouster, he loved tournaments and feats of arms, and his reputation as a knight was widespread. He adored music, and a consort of drummers, trumpeters and pipers accompanied him wherever he went, while he himself was a musician of note. Like his father he maintained great state and kept a large retinue.
Bolingbroke was devout and markedly orthodox in his religious views, and his charities were lavish. He went twice on crusade, first in 1390 with the German Order of Teutonic Knights against Lithuanian pagans in Poland, and secondly in 1392 to Jerusalem. He was popular and respected, and thus was a potentially formidable opponent to Richard II.
To counteract the threat posed by de Vere, Bolingbroke allied himself in opposition to the King’s favourites with his uncle, Thomas of Woodstock, Richard FitzAlan, Earl of Arundel, a leading magnate, Thomas Mowbray, Earl of Nottingham, and the Earl of Warwick. Because they were appealing to Richard to restore good government, they called themselves the ‘Lords Appellant’. In 1387, Bolingbroke and his allies scored a victory over de Vere at Radcot Bridge in Oxfordshire, which led to the Earl of Oxford’s enforced banishment. After the battle Richard had no choice but to submit to the demands of the victors, and in 1388, in the ‘Merciless’ Parliament, the Lords Appellant asked for other royal favourites to be executed and de Vere’s property confiscated. After that, it was only a matter of time before Richard, compliant for the present, took his revenge.
In 1389 Richard wrested the reins of government from the Lords Appellant, and for the next eight years ruled England himself, governing fairly wisely and achieving some success in establishing his authority in Ireland. Anne of Bohemia’s death in 1394 removed a moderating influence from the King. Thereafter he refused to listen to advice and began to govern with increasing autocracy.
In 1392 de Vere had died in abject poverty at Louvain, after being savaged during a hunt by a wild boar, but in 1395 the King had his embalmed body brought back to England for burial. Most magnates refused to attend the funeral, and those who did were scandalised to see Richard order the coffin opened so that he could once more see de Vere’s face and kiss his friend’s hand.
In 1396 he signed a 28-year truce with France and sealed it by marrying Isabella, the six-year-old daughter of Charles VI. Both the peace and the marriage were unpopular with the English people, who would have preferred to see England’s claim to France reasserted, but, with the advantage of historical hindsight, we can now appreciate that the truce was a wise move on the part of a king who knew that England’s resources could not support another prolonged war.
At this time, in the face of so much opposition from his other magnates, Richard was anxious to retain Gaunt’s loyalty, and that same year he persuaded Pope Boniface XI to issue a bull confirming Gaunt’s marriage to Katherine Swynford and the legitimacy of the Beauforts. On 9 February 1397, as Gaunt and his family stood in the House of Lords beneath a canopy known as a ‘care cloth’, which was used in a ceremony for the legitimising of those of noble birth, the King issued letters patent and a royal edict declaring the Beauforts to be legitimate under English law, and this was afterwards confirmed by Act of Parliament. Shortly afterwards he created John Beaufort, the eldest, Earl and then Marquess of Somerset and a knight of the Garter, while in 1398 the ageing Bishop of Lincoln was forced out of his diocese so that the King could bestow the bishopric on Henry Beaufort.
The Kirkstall Chronicle says that in 1397 the King emerged like the sun from the clouds, but in fact it was at about this time that he began to display pronounced megalomanic, even psychopathic tendencies. His growing paranoia and detachment from reality, and the obvious concern of his friends, all argue some kind of mental breakdown, and it has been suggested he was perhaps suffering from schizophrenia.
From 1397, Richard was determined to be an absolute monarch and rule without Parliament. That year by fair or foul means he took steps to see that Parliament was packed with enough supporters to vote him sufficient funds to ensure that he never needed to summon it again. He then dismissed it. This heralded his reckless slide into disaster: he now ruled as a tyrant, banishing any magnate who opposed him and declaring that the laws of England were within his own mouth and breast and that the lives and property of his subjects were at his mercy, to be disposed of at his pleasure.
He doctored the Rolls of Parliament so that his enemies could be attainted without judicial process; he gathered a formidable private army to intimidate his enemies and protect himself; he imposed illegal taxes; he failed to keep order at a local level in the realm; he tried unsuccessfully to secure his election as Holy Roman Emperor; he became irascible, unpredictable, and broke countless promises. Petitioners, even the Archbishop of Canterbury, were made to grovel before him on their knees, and he would sit on his throne for hours at a time in silence, with the whole court gathered around him; if his gaze rested upon anyone, that person had to make obeisance to him.
That same year Richard felt strong enough to move against his youngest uncle, Thomas of Woodstock, whom he had never forgiven for Radcot Bridge and the banishment of de Vere. He instructed his cousin Edward, Earl of Rutland, son of the Duke of York, to arrange Gloucester’s murder. Rutland, it was rumoured, sent two servants to the inn where his uncle was lodged in Calais, and here they smothered him beneath a mattress.
Rutland had by this time replaced de Vere in the King’s affections, and he too may have been a homosexual, since his marriage to Philippa de Mohun produced no children. In appearance and character, Rutland took after his Castilian mother: he was intelligent and good looking, but later became very overweight. His chief role was that of courtier, but he was also a cultivated man who wrote a popular treatise on hunting. Richard ‘loved him exceedingly, more than any other man in the kingdom’, according to the French chronicler Jean Creton, and Rutland quickly became the most influential man at court.
Richard was now ready to deal with the other former Lords Appellant. Thomas Mowbray secretly warned Bolingbroke that the King intended to destroy them all, and that his malice was directed chiefly towards the House of Lancaster. Bolingbroke confided this to Gaunt, who nevertheless went at once to the King and repeated what Mowbray had said. Bolingbroke, who was with him, pointed at Mowbray and accused him of speaking treason, which Mowbray hotly denied, flinging the same charge at Bolingbroke. The King decreed that the dispute should be referred to a panel of lords. In April 1398 these lords decided that the issue should be settled ‘according to the laws of chivalry’ – by trial by combat, an ancient European custom whereby God was invited to intervene by granting a victory to the righteous party.
On 16 September, at Coventry, the two Dukes faced each other before a tense crowd in the presence of the King and the whole court. Bolingbroke cut a dashing figure in full armour and mounted on a white destrier caparisoned in blue and green velvet embroidered with antelopes and gold swans, the swan being the Duke’s personal badge. Mowbray was resplendent in crimson velvet.
Just as the combat was about to begin, the King threw down his baton from the dais to call a halt to the proceedings. He then deliberated for two hours while the dukes sat waiting on their restive mounts. Then Richard returned and, without preamble, sentenced both men to exile, Bolingbroke for ten years, Mowbray for life. Walsingham commented that the sentence was based on ‘no legal grounds whatsoever’ and was ‘contrary to justice’, being merely an excuse to rid himself of two former opponents. Nor would the remaining Lords Appellant escape the King’s wrath: Arundel was executed the same year and Warwick was exiled for life.
As soon as the sentence was passed, the King summoned Bolingbroke’s ten-year-old heir, Henry of Monmouth, to court as a hostage for his father’s good behaviour. Bolingbroke sought refuge in Paris, where he was lent a mansion by a French nobleman. Mowbray never saw England again: he went on pilgrimage to Jerusalem, but died of the Black Death on the way home.
The King’s childlessness was a matter of concern to most of his subjects, for Queen Isabella would be unable to produce children for several years. Richard’s heir was Roger Mortimer, 4th Earl of March, grandson of Lionel of Antwerp, Edward III’s second son. In 1398 Roger was twenty-four; like his father, he served the Crown as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, though he could not bring the wild Irish tribal factions under control. In June that year, March made an attempt to impose his authority on the lands to which he held title in Ireland, but was ambushed and killed by the Irish at Kenlis in Leinster. He left a son, Edmund, aged only seven – heir not only to his father’s earldoms, but also to the throne itself.
Richard II and Gaunt were now virtually estranged. Saddened by the exile of his son, Gaunt fell ill. He died in 1399 at Leicester Castle and was buried beside Blanche of Lancaster in St Paul’s Cathedral.*2 Gaunt had loved Katherine Swynford to the end, referring to her in his will as ‘my very dear companion’. She survived him by four years and was buried in Lincoln Cathedral.
Gaunt’s death was fatal to Richard. Despite their differences, Gaunt had been a loyal supporter of the monarchy, and now that he was gone there was nothing to prevent a confrontation between the King and Bolingbroke.
Tidings of his father’s passing reached Bolingbroke in Paris. Although the King’s sentence of exile prevented him from returning to England for another nine years, he was comforted by the knowledge that he was now Duke of Lancaster, premier peer of the realm and enormously wealthy, for the Lancastrian inheritance was by far the richest in England. Prior to his leaving England, the King had assured him that his possessions were safe and had issued letters patent to that effect.
But then came shattering news: Richard had revoked the letters patent and sequestered all Bolingbroke’s lands, distributing them among his own supporters. Worse than that, Bolingbroke’s exile was to be for life. This act of betrayal made Bolingbroke decide to return to England and to deal with the problem of Richard once and for all.
In May 1399 Richard II sailed to Ireland in what was to prove an unsuccessful attempt to defuse the ugly situation that had developed there after March’s death. Prior to his departure he had March’s young son proclaimed heir presumptive, and appointed York regent during his absence. Rutland went with the King to Ireland. Richard was not to know it, but his absence from England would prove crucial.
Bolingbroke landed in Yorkshire around 4 July at Ravenspur, a port that has long since disappeared due to coastal erosion. On disembarking, the Duke knelt down and kissed the soil of his native land. He had come in rebellion against his lawfully crowned and anointed sovereign, although he initially claimed that it was only to safeguard his Lancastrian inheritance and reform the government. Indeed, he acknowledged Richard’s title as king and the right of the Earl of March to succeed him.
At the time of the invasion there was a huge tide of popular feeling against Richard, especially in London, where Bolingbroke was well liked, and York was not the man to rally the few supporters Richard had left. Bolingbroke’s arrival placed York in a dilemma, for he had to choose between loyalty to his royal nephew and loyalty to the son of his best-loved brother, Gaunt. Typically, he remained undecided for three weeks.
As he progressed south Bolingbroke was gratified to find so many people ready to support him. Nobles and commons flocked to his banner and he quickly collected a large army, meeting little resistance anywhere. The princes of the Church offered their support and the Archbishop of Canterbury assured all who joined Bolingbroke of the remission of their sins and ‘a sure place in Paradise’. In Bristol, the Duke found some of Richard’s most hated advisers and summarily ordered their heads cut off, which greatly pleased the citizens.
Bad weather meant that news of Bolingbroke’s invasion took some time to reach the King in Ireland, and as soon as he knew the worst, Richard sailed home, determined to raise an army and meet his cousin in the field. Late in July he landed in South Wales, but was unable to rouse much support; indeed many of his followers were deserting him, including Rutland, who dismissed the King’s remaining soldiers and rode off to join Bolingbroke, whom York had now finally decided to support. Abandoned and panic-stricken, Richard disguised himself as a friar and fled to Conway Castle, where he surrendered to a deputation sent by Bolingbroke. At Lichfield, on the way to London, he tried to escape by climbing out of a tower window, but was caught leaving the garden below. After that he was never alone, being guarded by ten or twelve armed men.
On 2 September Bolingbroke entered London to a tumultuous reception. King Richard, a prisoner in his train, was greeted with jeers and pelted from the rooftops with rubbish, and later that day he was confined in the Tower of London. There was no doubt in anyone’s mind as to who was now ruling England. Nevertheless, Henry had sworn at Conway that Richard should ‘keep his royal power and dominion’.
Throughout September the King made repeated demands to be publicly heard in Parliament. Even the pro-Lancastrian chronicler, Adam of Usk, who saw him in prison at this time, felt compassion and noted ‘the trouble of his mind, hearing him talk on the fate of kings in England’. Doubtless he was haunted by the fate of Edward II, murdered after his deposition in 1327.
Meanwhile, Bolingbroke, forgetting his promise, had appointed a commission to consider who should be king. Many of the magnates were unhappy at the prospect of his taking the throne; several committees of lords, having examined his claim to rule by right of descent, declared it flawed. Yet Adam of Usk says that the magnates found reasons enough for setting Richard aside: ‘perjuries, sacrileges, unnatural crimes, exactions from his subjects, reduction of his people to slavery, cowardice and weakness of rule’. Henry, it seemed, was the only realistic alternative, for the legitimate heir, March, was just a child. Usk claimed that Richard was ‘ready to yield up the crown’, but this was a Lancastrian fiction. Ready or not, ‘for better security it was determined that he should be deposed by the authority of clergy and people, for which purpose they were summoned hastily, in the King’s name, on Michaelmas Day’.
In fact, Richard was by no means willing to give up the throne, and Bolingbroke knew it. His first impulse was to make Richard stand trial by his peers in the high court of Parliament, but there was no precedent for this and, such was the mystique of kingship, it might not produce the desired result. He therefore used every means in his power to force Richard to abdicate, for he was anxious that the removal of his cousin from the throne and his own subsequent accession should have some basis in law. Knowing that his own title was precarious, the official line was to be that Richard’s misgovernment justified his deposition. The laws of succession were best left out of it.
Although Richard at first had had no intention of abdicating, he soon realised he had little choice. For a month, systematic coercion and threats were used to persuade him to co-operate, and at the end of that time, a shattered and broken man, he gave in. According to one of his supporters, a Franciscan friar called Richard Frisby, he agreed to abdicate ‘under compulsion, while in prison, which is not a valid abdication. He would never have resigned had he been at liberty.’
On the morning of 29 September 1399, some of the lords assembled for Parliament, accompanied by a committee of lawyers, waited upon Richard in the Tower. They returned in the afternoon, when the King, with a smiling face, signed an instrument of abdication, in which he requested that he be succeeded by his cousin of Bolingbroke. As a token of goodwill he sent Henry his signet ring.
The next morning, Parliament assembled in Westminster Hall. Richard had asked that he should not come before it ‘in horrible fashion’ as a prisoner, which was agreed to. When he entered the hall, he stood before the empty throne, removed his crown and, placing it on the ground, ‘resigned his right to God’. He then made a short speech expressing his hope that Bolingbroke would be a good lord to him and ensure that he was comfortably provided for. Although thirty-three accusations against him were read aloud, he was not allowed to say anything more, even in his defence.
In the official record of the proceedings, written in the Parliament Roll, Richard is described as looking cheerful as he read out the transcript of his instrument of abdication, but this is at odds with the evidence of Adam of Usk and the chronicler monk of Evesham, who describe his demeanour as anything but happy. Later that day the Bishop of Carlisle protested that Richard should have had a chance to answer the charges against him, but his was a lone voice.
Yet even though it had been summoned in the King’s name, this ‘Parliament’ was not a strictly legal or normal assembly. There was no Speaker, and a crowd of hostile Londoners had been admitted, probably to intimidate the former king.
After Richard had been taken back to the Tower, the assembled lords declared him deposed. His removal from the throne was the catalyst for the dynastic and political instability that characterised the century that followed it. Shortly after, Bolingbroke entered Westminster Hall, preceded by his four sons and the archbishops of Canterbury and York. In the hushed throng Sir Thomas Percy’s voice rang out, ‘Long live Henry of Lancaster, King of England!’ This was the cue for the whole assembly to respond with the words, ‘Yes! Yes! We want Henry to be king, nobody else!’
Bolingbroke acknowledged their acclaim, then placed himself in Gaunt’s former seat, occupying it as Duke of Lancaster. But the two archbishops took him by the hand and led him to the empty throne. Silence fell as he rose to speak, saying, ‘In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, I, Henry of Lancaster, challenge this realm of England and the crown, as I that am descended by right line of the blood coming from the good lord Henry the Third, and through him that right that God of His grace hath sent me with help of my kin and of my friends to recover it, the which was in point to be undone for default of governance and undoing of the good laws.’
After he had finished speaking, he showed the assembly Richard’s signet ring, as proof that the former king had designated him his successor. There was rapturous applause, and both lords and commons enthusiastically acknowledged him as king of England and of France. At the close of proceedings, proclamation was made that Richard had abdicated and that Bolingbroke had succeeded him as King Henry IV. Some voices were publicly raised in protest. They were to be the first of many.