The Plantagenets (76 page)

And this was not the only funeral at which the king’s behaviour seemed odd. Robert de Vere died in exile in France in 1392, after being wounded by a wild boar. His embalmed body was eventually brought back to England in November 1395. Many of the English magnates refused to attend this reinterment. Those who did watched as the king ordered his friend’s coffin to be opened, so that he might place gold rings on de Vere’s cold dead fingers and gaze on his face – three years expired – one last time.

After Anne’s death and de Vere’s burial, Richard grew more and more obsessed with Edward II. He encouraged Gloucester Abbey, where Edward was buried, to commemorate the murdered king every year; and in 1395 he petitioned the pope to have his great-grandfather canonized. The same year, he commissioned a strange epitaph for his own tomb at Westminster, which read: ‘He threw down all who violated the royal prerogative; he destroyed heretics and scattered
their friends.’ This might have been read as a reference to Richard’s vigilance against the Lollards – Christian reformers who followed the teachings of John Wyclif – but there was something potentially sinister about it, too.

Taken in their totality, and from a distance, it is clear that, although he was apparently reasonable and restrained during the 1390s, Richard II was never very far away from slipping back into the chaos of his youth. Like the ancestor he wished to canonize, he never truly achieved any understanding of the nature of successful kingship, which lay in balancing his public authority and the needs of the kingdom with his private wishes, friends and tastes. His very reverence and pity for Edward II – a king who had brought nothing but disunity, violence, corruption and bloodshed to his realm – spoke volumes about his understanding of a king’s true duty. The fact that he felt so insecure that he needed to retain his own public servants to enjoin obedience spoke of a deep-seated paranoia which had been with him from the earliest age.

But there was another motivating instinct in Richard’s personality, which would dominate the final years of the fourteenth century more than any other, and which sat very uneasily with the king’s self-perception as a man of peace on a par with Edward the Confessor. That was his unquenchable thirst for revenge.

Richard Revenged

After the savage turmoil that racked the first decade of his reign, Richard spent much of the following decade restoring some small degree of confidence in his rule. Indeed, for the first part of the 1390s it seemed that the king was recovering a measure of stability and self-possession. Government ran smoothly in partnership between king and council. Parliament did not attempt to purge the executive or humiliate the king. Royal revenues increased. In 1394 Richard led a seven-month expedition to Ireland, taking numerous young nobles and 7,000 men, to achieve what he called in a letter ‘the punishment of our rebels there and to establish good government and just rule over our faithful lieges’. The venture was highly successful. Richard achieved more in Ireland – in the short term at least – than any king since Henry II.

Furthermore, his long-intended peace with France was achieved. In March 1396 a twenty-eight-year truce had been concluded, along with a marriage agreement by which the English king was to wed Charles VI’s seven-year-old daughter Isabella with a handsome dowry of 800,000 francs. When the bride was handed over in late October 1396, Richard and Charles met in Ardres, not far from Calais, to celebrate their agreement in a field densely populated with ornate tents, brimming with jewels and gifts: golden model ships, horses with silver saddles and pearl collars. The two kings posed as the saviours of Christendom, since with England and France no longer at war, a single pope might now be elected. There was talk of a new crusade, against the Turks. It seemed to Thomas Walsingham that
England was finally ‘basking in peace and the hope was for an entirely prosperous future on account of the magnificence of the king’.

Then, on 6 January 1397, Richard turned thirty. It was a significant age: the final milestone in his long journey to manhood. At long last, the king had arrived.

Or had he? Amid all the apparent achievements of 1394–7, there had been a few ominous signs that Richard, even at the height of his success, remained deep down an acutely troubled king: hypersensitive, painfully insecure and prone to outbursts of violence and bloody rage whenever he felt threatened.

One of the first signs that he felt threatened came during the peace negotiations with France. The king wanted, in drafts of the pact, to bind Charles VI to provide military aid against the people of England if he felt it was necessary. This did not make the final agreement, but it was disturbing nonetheless. Richard had screamed at Arundel and Gloucester in 1386 that he would invite a French invasion of his own realm. Here was an indication that the thought had never really left him.

More obvious signs of discontent came in a parliament held in January 1397. It met in the aftermath of the truce with France, when it was made clear to the king that there were those who did not share his joy at the new dispensation. There were mutterings, emanating chiefly from Gloucester, that – as Froissart put it – ‘the people of this country want war. They can’t live decently without it. Peace is no good to them.’ Others complained that a seven-year-old queen was of no use to a thirty-year-old king who had not yet produced an heir; and there was disgruntlement over the epic scale of the celebrations at Ardres, which may have cost as much as £15,000 – the budget of a decent-sized military invasion. When Richard had asked parliament for money to aid the French king in an expedition to Milan he was coldly rebuffed, becoming agitated and addressing parliament to defend the policy ‘with his own mouth’. When a petition, ostensibly written by ‘Thomas Haxey, clerk’, was put before him, complaining about royal officials, the poor state of the Scottish border, his continuing habit of private retaining in the shires and the ‘great and excessive’
cost of the king’s household, Richard flew into a rage and had Haxey arrested and sentenced to a traitor’s death. (The sentence was later rescinded on account of Haxey’s clerical status.)

All of these signs suggested that in early 1397 the king, who later in the same parliament would describe himself as ‘entire emperor of his realm of England’, was feeling a growing indignation about having his imperial magnificence traduced. Nothing irked Richard so much as to suffer outspoken criticism during his periodic moments of glory. Never was he so dangerous as when backed into a corner.

By July 1397, the most senior three of the Appellants who had opposed the king a decade previously once more found their relations with the king very tense. Gloucester had positioned himself as the leading noble critic of the French truce, and was generally to be found holed up in his castle at Pleshey, conceiving (according to Froissart) ‘such a hatred for the King that he could find nothing to say in his favour’. Warwick, meanwhile, had been thoroughly isolated from politics for some years, and Richard had ensured that two high-profile legal disputes had been turned against him. Arundel had long been isolated, following numerous quarrels with the king and with John of Gaunt. He had begun to skip council meetings as his disapproval of the king mounted. In retrospect, it should have come as little surprise to all of them when Richard launched a sudden, violent attack on enemies against whom he had borne a grudge for a quarter of his life.

An arrest party set out for Pleshey castle after dinner on 10 July 1397 with Richard at their head. They rode hard through the dead of night, well-armed men whose White Hart liveries identified them as his faithful retainers. They were on a singular, very important mission: to take the king’s uncle, the duke of Gloucester, into custody.

Behind them in London they left the earl of Warwick imprisoned in the Tower. He had been Richard’s dinner guest, and at the end of a convivial feast, the king had risen, ordered the earl arrested and had him thrown into prison. Now it was the duke’s turn.

By daybreak they had arrived before the high stone walls of the fortress. They were prepared for a confrontation, but it quickly emerged that the duke had only a skeleton staff with him. The king’s
men far outnumbered Gloucester’s, and it was therefore with ease that they marched into the fortress. Richard greeted Gloucester as ‘fair uncle’. Then he had him arrested and taken away under armed guard to a ship that would transport him to a prison in Calais.

This was the culmination of a coup carried out with all the speed and efficiency of Edward III’s arrest of Roger Mortimer in 1330. Within the space of twenty-four hours – and with no prior warning – Richard arrested all three of the senior Appellants of 1386. Gloucester and Warwick were taken by the king in person. Arundel was persuaded by his brother, the archbishop of Canterbury, to turn himself in, and Richard had him sent to the Isle of Wight. Thunderbolts had struck. The Appellants had been abruptly and bewilderingly punished. And the kingdom was, in the words of Thomas Walsingham, ‘suddenly and unexpectedly thrown into confusion’. For the next two years, England trembled under the tyranny of Richard II.

Richard’s sudden revenge on the Appellants – which marked the beginning of his tyranny – was a matter of great confusion. In the aftermath of the coup, a series of royal proclamations explained that the three lords had been arrested for ‘offences against the king’s majesty’, but denied that these were offences relating to 1386. Few believed that this was true.

Naturally, all manner of theories abounded. The chroniclers of the time recorded their own suspicions. The French author of
Chronicque de la Traison et Mort de Richart Deux roy Dengleterre
heard that there had been an Appellant conspiracy against Richard, John of Gaunt and the duke of York. Thomas Walsingham heard that Richard believed he was about to be elected as Holy Roman Emperor, but that the electors wished to be convinced he could discipline his own subjects before granting him dominion over hundreds of thousands more. Others like the chronicler Adam of Usk simply disbelieved the king’s proclamations and wrote that Richard harboured a long-held grudge against his former enemies, and had merely been biding his time for the previous decade until he was politically ready to revenge himself.

Whatever his motivations, it was remarkable how quickly Richard simply brushed his enemies aside. After their arrests on 10 July 1397,
it took just three months for the king to rid himself entirely of his old foes. By the end of the September 1397 parliament, Warwick, Gloucester and Arundel had simply vanished.

When parliament opened on 17 September 1397 it was both packed with Ricardian loyalists and held under military guard. As Westminster Hall was being refurbished, the meeting was held in a large, open-sided wooden structure. The commons and lords filed in under the glare of 300 of Richard’s Cheshire archers. Inside, they found the king sitting high upon a throne, from which, according to the monk of Evesham, he could ‘deliver his judgements’ and preside with ‘greater solemnity than any king of the realm ever had before’.

When the chancellor, Bishop Stafford of Exeter, stood up to give the opening sermon, he told the assembly of the new doctrine of royal government. He took as his theme Ezekiel 37:22: ‘There shall be one king over them all.’ It was an ominous beginning. As he warmed to his subject, Bishop Stafford announced to the assembly that ‘if the king were to be powerful enough to govern, he must be in full possession of his regalities, prerogatives and rights’. Then a general pardon was issued, from which it was announced that fifty people were excluded, ‘whom it would please the king to name’. But Richard did not name them. Instead, he invited anyone who felt they had anything to apologize for to seek the royal pardon in person. In the year that followed, 500 individuals would apply for and receive the royal pardon. Richard was forcing his enemies to step forward and name themselves. Those who were pardoned had to pay heavily for it.

Next, and despite his previous denials that Gloucester, Arundel and Warwick had been arrested for decade-old offences, Richard turned his mind to 1386. A month before parliament opened, he had mirrored the events of that year by approving a new appeal of treason against his three enemies lodged by seven noblemen (Richard’s Holland nephew and half-brother, the earls Kent and Huntingdon, and the earls of Somerset, Nottingham, Salisbury, along with Thomas, Lord Despenser, and Sir William Scrope). Most of these men later claimed to have acted under duress. But their appeal was used to full
effect. Led by a hand-picked speaker, Sir John Bushy, whom Walsingham described as supplicating to Richard ‘as if praying to him’, the packed, intimidated parliament repealed the act establishing the council, and also the pardons extended to Gloucester, Arundel and Warwick in the aftermath of the Merciless Parliament. Several days later, Archbishop Arundel of Canterbury (the earl’s brother) was removed from his post and sentenced to exile.

During all of this, John of Gaunt presided over parliament as lord high steward. It was a cruel role for the ageing duke to play, but he had Lancastrian interests to think of. He was in poor health and since an absence in his duchy of Aquitaine between 1394 and 1396 he had been sidelined in politics. Now he relied on Richard’s favour to protect his eldest son, the former Appellant Henry Bolingbroke, as well as to legitimize the bastard children he had fathered by his longstanding mistress and eventual third wife, Katherine Swynford. Gaunt did his duty. On Friday 21 September he stood by the king as the earl of Arundel was brought before parliament for trial, wearing a robe with a scarlet hood. He was formally accused of treason for his actions in 1386, while the new appellants danced around and shouted abuse at him. ‘Your pardon is revoked, traitor,’ Gaunt told his old enemy the earl, before pronouncing him guilty of treason and sentencing him to death. ‘Where are the faithful commons?’ demanded Arundel, looking bitterly around him. Then he told Speaker Bushy: ‘I know all about you and your crew, and how you got here.’ It did him no good. He was led out of parliament and beheaded with a sword on Tower Hill. His head came off with one stroke of the sword, and the torso stood on its own for as long as it took to recite the Lord’s prayer.