The Plantagenets (75 page)

The verdicts, however, were the same whether the accused were present or not. Archbishop Neville, the duke of Ireland, the earl of Suffolk and Sir Robert Tresilian were all found guilty of treason in their absence. The duke, earl and judge were sentenced to be drawn through London and hanged as traitors and enemies of the king at Tyburn. The archbishop was eventually sentenced to exile. All four men were to be disinherited. Brembre, who was present, was condemned to death.

And more drama followed. Archbishop Neville, de Vere and Suffolk had all managed to escape overseas, but Tresilian had not. Six days after he was formally condemned in parliament, a strange figure was spotted spying on the proceedings at Westminster from a nearby rooftop.

The house was raided, and inside, cowering under a table, was Sir Robert, the hanging judge and scourge of the rebels of 1381. He was dressed in beggar’s rags and was wearing a thick false beard. His distinctive voice betrayed him. Cries went up of ‘We have him!’ and Tresilian was dragged from his hiding place to parliament, leaving his wife swooning behind him, and screaming himself for the sanctuary of Westminster. But sanctuary was denied him. Tresilian was dragged in short order on a hurdle to Tyburn and forced up to the gallows platform, whinnying in terror. When his clothes were cut off, it revealed that he had covered his body in protective charms. There was a dark irony in a judge relying on superstitious trinkets to ward off the noose. Tresilian was hanged naked; in the end he was put out of his misery when his throat was slit.

But the Appellants were not finished there. After they had done with Brembre and Tresilian, and condemned the other three appellees
in absentia
, parliament launched a bloody purge of Richard’s household. Proceedings began against many more of those who surrounded the king and were deemed to have led him astray. By May, Richard’s beloved tutor Sir Simon Burley, as well as his household knights Sir John Beauchamp, Sir John Salisbury and James Berners, had all been tried and sentenced to a traitor’s death. The judges who had advised Richard that the ordinances of the Wonderful Parliament were treasonous were now themselves also sentenced to die; only at the end of the parliament were they spared and sent off to live in exile in Ireland.

It was as traumatic an experience as almost any Plantagenet king had faced. Richard sat through nearly four months of state trials, and saw his friends and allies hauled off one by one to be hanged, disembowelled and beheaded. He begged desperately for the life of Burley, as did the queen, who went down on her knees to the three leading Appellants. Indeed, they were supported by several more moderate earls, including Edmund Langley, duke of York, and even the two lesser Appellants, Derby and Nottingham. But at the Merciless Parliament, there was no escaping death and destruction. Richard, at twenty years old, had seen enough humiliation to last a lifetime.

The Reinvention of Kingship

For a king who had fallen upon such dire times during the first ten years of his reign, the five or six years that followed the upheavals of the Merciless Parliament were remarkably peaceful for Richard II. Many of his trusted but divisive friends had either been exiled or killed by the Appellants. Yet once the purging was over, England settled back into a state of curious peace. The Appellants had achieved everything they set out to do. Richard had been brought to heel. There was not much left to fight for, on either side.

Routed as he had been in 1388, there was evidence that Richard had taken on board some of the lessons of the time. He appeared, outwardly at least, to be willing to try harder. On 3 May 1389 he made a dramatic scene at a meeting of his great council. Sitting himself before the members he interrupted a session of council by asking all those assembled how old he was. They replied, accurately, that he was now twenty-two. Richard then launched into a speech whose tone was reported by several chroniclers. According to Henry Knighton, he said:

‘It happens I have spent some years under your counsel and rule, and I give great thanks to God and then to you because you have governed and sustained both my person and my inheritance … Now however, by God’s care, we have attained the age of our majority, and are indeed already in our twenty-second year. Therefore we desire and will the freedom to rule … and to have our kingdom … to choose and appoint to those posts our officers and ministers, and so freely remove those who are now in office …’

According to Thomas Walsingham, Richard then commanded the archbishop of York, Thomas Arundel, to resign the chancellor’s seal. ‘The king collected it in a fold of his dress, and suddenly rose and went out; and after a short while he came back and sat down again, and gave the seal to William Wykeham, bishop of Winchester, although he was very reluctant to take it. And he created nine other officials … using in all things his own judgement and authority. The duke of Gloucester and the earl of Warwick … he removed from his council …’

This could have been a disaster. But it was not. As a new decade dawned, so Richard set about governing with a good deal more responsibility than he had before. He asserted his right to choose both his councillors and those who gave him more informal advice, but he also accepted that he was bound to listen to the advice of experienced men like Wykeham, who had been his grandfather’s chief minister during the 1360s.

He was aided by the return from Castile of John of Gaunt, with whom he was reconciled, and who now became a staunch supporter of the regime. Gaunt allayed tensions between Richard and the former Appellants, threw lavish hunting parties for the king and queen, and took to walking arm in arm with the king whenever he could. The king proclaimed his gratitude towards his eldest uncle outwardly by wearing Gaunt’s livery collar: two interlinked S-shapes. In 1390 he granted him palatinate powers in the duchy of Lancaster, which would be entailed on his male heirs. Furthermore, the king awarded Gaunt the duchy of Aquitaine for life. (This was a significant break with Plantagenet tradition: Aquitaine had been the inheritance of the king’s eldest son and heir since the thirteenth century. Its altered status gave Gaunt a vested interest in finding peace with France.)

Gaunt rejoined the council in March 1390, and an agreement was drawn up, such that all decisions having financial implications had to be approved by all three of the king’s uncles. Richard apparently accepted this, and a new state of consensus was reached, in which the king and political community began to work together once again. As they did so, the royal finances recovered to a state of good health.
Royal revenue rose by 36 per cent between 1389 and 1396. Parliament ceased to be a battleground between king, lords and commons, and reverted to its proper function as a forum for royal government.

As politics settled down, what came to the fore during the early 1390s was the magnificence of the Ricardian court. The Edwardian court had celebrated chivalry, love and war; Richard’s court celebrated the magnificence and splendour of the anointed king. New and grandiloquent forms of address were popularized. Whereas in the past English kings had been addressed as ‘My lord’, now titles such as ‘Your Highness’ and ‘Your Majesty’ were introduced for the first time, in mimicry of the styles fashionable in France. Written addresses show even more pompous, theatrical versions, such as ‘most high and puissant prince’ and ‘your high royal majesty’. The hostile Walsingham called these ‘not human, but divine honours’ and ‘strange and flattering words hardly suitable for mere mortals’.

Beneath this high-flown reverence for kingship flourished a gilded patronage of the arts, which produced some of the most exquisite and brilliant work of the period. Richard’s court became a centre for literary and artistic ideas, and some of the great writers of the age worked under the royal watch. Richard’s interest in letters was transient, and he did not commission much literature himself; nevertheless his court was at the heart of the invention of England’s native tongue as a language of high literature. John Gower, the great London scholar, was one of the few who were engaged. It was at Richard’s personal request that he wrote his
Confessio Amantis
– a huge, complex love poem of more than 30,000 lines which Gower claimed he wrote after meeting Richard on a barge in 1386.

The
Confessio
was written in English, and published in its first version in 1390, with a dedication to the king and Geoffrey Chaucer, whose
Canterbury Tales
was also written during his period of association with Richard’s court. The French chronicler Froissart visited the English court and presented Richard with a collection of French poems, Sir John Clanvowe wrote elegant lyrics, and Edward, duke of Albemarle, Richard’s cousin, translated a famous French hunting textbook into English. Even a soldierly courtier like Sir John Montagu
was praised abroad, by none other than Christine de Pisan, for his appreciation of literature and his own skill as a poet.

The king spent more generously on patronizing artists and architects. Under Henry Yevele, the ageing master-builder of the fourteenth century, many stunning buildings were erected. By the 1390s Yevele was an old man in his seventies. He had been most productive under Edward III, but in 1393 he embarked on his most famous work for Richard: the reconstruction of Westminster Hall, with raised walls, a huge hammer-beam ceiling and ceremonial, cathedral-like entrance. Around the internal string course ran a series of white harts, while thirteen statues were commissioned of the kings from Edward the Confessor to Richard himself, emphasizing the continuity of English kingship into the Plantagenet era.

Slightly later, Richard took receipt of the Wilton Diptych – a haunting and beautiful piece of iconographical painting depicting the king presented to the Virgin and Child by three saints: Edward the Confessor, the Saxon child-king St Edmund, and John the Baptist. The obsession with the Confessor in particular ran as strong in Richard as it did in that other great saintly enthusiast Henry III. Whereas warrior kings such as Edward I and Edward III favoured legendary soldiers such as King Arthur and St George, Richard – like Henry – saw himself as a prince of glorious peace – a quality for which the Confessor was praised by the chroniclers. In 1395 the king altered the royal arms, quartering the fleur-de-lis and lions passant guardant with the arms of the Confessor, and it is no coincidence that he appears so prominently on the Wilton Diptych.

The diptych is full of cryptic symbolism: references to Richard’s ancient Anglo-French lineage are intertwined with unmistakable tokens of his literal belief in his anointed divinity. The very angels surrounding the Virgin wear the badge of the White Hart – as though they are personally retained to protect the king. On the reverse of the diptych there is a painting of the king’s White Hart, reclining with a chained crown around its neck.

Yet under the cover of this celebratory, magnificent outward reinvention of kingship, there were signs that Richard himself – calmer
and apparently more reasonable as he appeared – was not quite a king transformed. For during the early 1390s he was actively recasting his rule in a far more authoritarian, personal style than had been seen before. Kingship was not about the crown and its representation of public authority: it was about Richard himself.

Politically, this was expressed through a quiet continuance of his policy of retaining. Knights and esquires across the counties of England began to receive the king’s White Hart livery. Many of them were men who already served in the royal administration. The king, it seemed, never trusted the machinery of his public authority. He had to tie people to him personally, visually and ceremonially as their private lord.

On great public occasions there was a spiteful edge to Richard’s ceremony. When he fell out with the citizens of London in 1392 over the provision of a loan, reconciliation with him demanded pageantry on the scale of a full coronation. King Richard and Queen Anne processed through the streets in splendour, while the city guilds stood to obsequious attention. They were lavished with gifts: boys dressed as angels awarded them golden crowns; a gold table was presented to them at the Temple; a great service of thanksgiving was held at Westminster Abbey, which included a procession to the shrine of the Confessor. Even months after, the Londoners were still sending gifts professing their great favour to the king: at Epiphany 1393 Richard received a camel, and the queen a pelican.

This sort of genuflection was in one sense part of kingship. But the most successful Plantagenets – Henry II, Richard I and Edward III – had tended to be those who would mix roughly with their subjects, rather than setting themselves totally aloof. Henry II had abjured the regality of kingship in favour of riding in a makeshift camp and making light with all who came before him. Edward III fought incognito against his own knights at tournaments and emphasized the role of the commons in governance. Even King John – a markedly inglorious king – had sat as a judge in cases involving the meanest wretches in his realm. Richard, however, having been thwarted politically as a young man, seemed determined during the
1390s to amplify his singularity and superiority through court spectacle.

By the middle of the decade, there was something decidedly pathological about the king’s desire to dominate. Always a fragile, suspicious soul, by the middle of the decade his grasp on sanity was slipping. On 7 June 1394 Queen Anne died at Sheen. She was twenty-seven. She had been Richard’s constant companion for years, and he loved her. Distraught with grief, he ordered that the palace where she died – which he had spent vast amounts on renovating as their home – should be ripped down. Then he swore a melodramatic oath, declaring that for a year he would not set foot inside any building, save a church, in which he had spent time with his late wife. His concern for ceremonial was so intense that he delayed her funeral for two months so that the right sort of wax torches could be brought over from Flanders. But this was more than just grief. Anne’s death seemed to trigger a return to the violent petulance of his youth. Richard summoned all his magnates to London for the funeral on 29 July. The earl of Arundel arrived late, and when he came before the king, Richard hit him so hard in the face that he fell to the ground, bleeding.