For the rest of Edward III’s reign the French showed that they had learned their lesson. Under Charles V and his superb Breton commander Bertrand de Guesclin, they refused to meet the English in pitched battle and instead allowed them to wear out their strength in fruitless local campaigns–which just added to the bad feeling against the English. The Black Prince returned to England to die and was replaced by his younger brother, Edward III’s fourth surviving son John of Gaunt (for Ghent, where he was born), Duke of Lancaster.
But the trail of ruin John of Gaunt left as he marched in 1373 from Calais on the north-east coast down to Bordeaux in the south-west achieved nothing. It also killed half his soldiers, who succumbed to hunger and exposure. When the French seized control of the Channel with the help of the Castilian navy and prevented reinforcements reaching the English troops, the war petered out. By the time of Edward III’s death in 1377 the achievements of the great battles of the earlier part of his reign had been completely undone. For all the excitement of war, other than Calais the English possessions were less now than they had been under Isabella and Mortimer, consisting only of the few coastal towns of Bayonne, Bordeaux, Brest and Cherbourg.
From the early 1370s on, Edward III declined into premature senility. The country was ruled meanwhile by the squabbling factions in the King’s Council–the supporters of John of Gaunt versus those of his elder brother, the dying Black Prince. Just as the main participants in the triumph of England were dead or decaying, the country itself was in crisis. Ever since the Black Death had killed a third of the population in the year 1348–9, chaos had prevailed at all levels of life. A series of droughts and poor harvests had reduced food supplies in England and Europe to dangerously low levels in any case, and even before the plague much of the European population had been suffering from malnutrition. So they were less able to resist the deadly disease, which began with black boils erupting from under the skin in the groin and armpits. In almost all cases it ended with death a few hours later.
But 1348–9 was not the end of the plague in England. In 1362 it returned, as it did in France and elsewhere, and again in 1369. The figures speak for themselves. Before the Black Death the English population is generally estimated to have been about five and half million. By the end of the fourteenth century there were two million fewer. The optimism which had accompanied the material prosperity of the years before 1348 was replaced by an anger and discontent that could not be assuaged by religion and would soon give rise to the Peasants’ Revolt. The flow of international trade which had been so profitable for everyone had already been faltering under the impact of the war. Now it fell to a trickle.
The natural order of centuries was overthrown when serfs and landowners were carried off so fast and in such numbers that there was no one left to remember the feudal arrangements, which had often been maintained by oral tradition. Attitudes to authority were changed too, as the English became less naturally deferential. When the response to the plague of wealthy bishops and barons was to shut themselves up in their castles or leave for the continent, they lost the instinctive respect of the locals. Even the parish priests no longer commanded much automatic obedience, though their behaviour during the Black Death had been exemplary. They had persistently nursed their highly contagious flocks after their families abandoned them, with the result that the death rate among priests was higher than among ordinary folk.
Such is the perversity of human nature that in an age before scientific medicine this was taken as a sign that priests were no holier than other men. Not only had they not been spared from what was commonly considered to be God’s vengeance on a wicked race but they were being singled out by him. By the late fourteenth century their self-sacrifice had produced a great shortage of priests to serve in parishes. Very few were left to preach against the dark pessimism and obsession with death seen in the paintings and poetry of the time.
Moreover, for some time in this country there had been a growing anti-clerical sentiment. Ever since 1309 when a French pope removed the Papal Court or Curia to Avignon in southern France, all the popes elected had been French, so that for the next sixty years until 1378 the papacy had come to be seen by the English government as an appendage of their enemy the French king. At Edward III’s behest the Statute of Provisors and the Statute of Praemunire asserted English independence from the pope over Church appointments and banned appeals to foreign courts. In 1366 Parliament itself demanded the revocation of King John’s agreement to be the pope’s vassal and put an end to the annual tax sent to Avignon instead of Rome.
In this feverish religious vacuum and unsettled atmosphere the stress on personal responsibility of a new group of preachers named the Lollards offered an attractive new direction for the disillusioned. The Lollards were followers of a radical Oxford theologian named John Wyclif, whose teachings anticipated many elements of the Reformation. Wyclif believed that the ultimate source of religious authority was not the priesthood but the Bible. With his regular denunciations of the clergy, he also provided a convenient weapon for John of Gaunt in the continued struggle for control of the King’s Council.
Thanks to his first marriage to the hugely wealthy northern heiress Blanche of Lancaster, John of Gaunt was now the greatest magnate in the country. He was anyway a swaggering figure with a private life of such epic dimensions that it aroused the antagonism of the English bishops, who formed part of the Black Prince’s faction. Gaunt was therefore leader of the anti-clerical party. Using as intellectual justification Wyclif’s theory that priests should not be involved in politics, Gaunt got Alice Perrers, Edward III’s mistress, to dismiss most of the bishops who, following the long standing English custom, filled the government offices. William of Wykeham, Bishop of Winchester, and the rest of the clerical party were now at daggers drawn with John of Gaunt’s party.
In fact the real corruption at court, the bribes in return for favours, monopolies and offices, was the work of John of Gaunt and his accomplices–Alice Perrers, a London merchant named Richard Lyons, and Lord Latimer. Although he could control most of the government appointments, Gaunt could not control what was now known as the Commons, the elected members from the boroughs and shires, who from the 1330s were congregating apart from the Lords. And the Commons was hard to handle because it was there that the Black Prince’s supporters were especially strong. At last in 1376 the bishops and Commons together in what became known as the Good Parliament publicly attacked the court party of John of Gaunt. The Commons then elected what they called a Speaker (the first instance of this title being used), and the man they chose, Sir Peter de la Mare, launched the first case of impeachment in English history, against Gaunt’s leading accomplices. De la Mare himself acted as prosecuting counsel for the Commons, while the House of Lords took the part of judges–this remained the standard method of conducting a political trial until the eighteenth century. The Lords found Latimer and Lyons guilty of bribery and corruption, and Alice Perrers, who was also held to be guilty, was ordered to be removed from the king’s palace as an evil influence. Just before sentence was pronounced, the Commons’ greatest protector the Black Prince died. John of Gaunt was thus able to use his now completely unopposed influence in the country to call a new parliament, and abolished the acts passed by the Good Parliament.
Edward III finally expired on Midsummer’s Day 1377. For a long time his own glorious summer had been a fading memory. As he was breathing his last, ungrateful courtiers ran from the palace to attend to the new powerbrokers in the land. Even Alice Perrers, who had been such a feature of the great Edwardian tournaments where she had appeared as the Lady of the Sun, deserted him–though not neglecting to pull the rings off his fingers first. The man who had been the greatest prince of the Europe of his day and England’s most popular king for two centuries would have died alone had not a priest happened to be passing. He gave the old king the last rites before his soul departed.
Richard II (1377–1399)
Richard II (or Rich
ard of Bordeaux as he was known, after the town where he was born) was ten years old when, as the eldest son of the Black Prince, he succeeded to the throne. A contemporary painting shows a slender boy-king with pale yellow hair, but these appealing images should not blind us to the fact that once Richard grew up it became clear that he had inherited the violent and imperious nature of his father. Unlike his grandfather Edward III, he had no sense of the importance of carrying the nation with him, of ruling with the help of Parliament. Nevertheless at the first great crisis of his reign, the Peasants’ Revolt, though he was only fourteen years old he showed courage and presence of mind.
Little had changed with the accession of a new king. The country was still ruled, through the council, by Richard’s uncle John of Gaunt, the Duke of Lancaster, and the government remained deeply unpopular. The truce with France came to an end and was not renewed, and English trade, English shipping and English coastal towns began to suffer from French raids. There was even a possibility that the French might invade, though this threat disappeared in 1380 when Charles V was succeeded by another boy-king Charles VI. Then in 1381 a very widespread popular rising broke out as a protest against the new poll tax. This is known as the Peasants’ Revolt. The government had demanded that every male, rich or poor, over the age of fifteen should pay the same tax per head (or per poll). At this grotesquely unfair request the underlying frustrations of small farmers and labourers who still fell within the category of villein came to a head. For forty years the gradual breakdown of respect for authority had spread a sense of the outworn nature of traditional institutions. The socially conservative Church was further undermined by the confusion created by the papal schism of 1378, as there were now two popes in Christendom–one at Rome and one at Avignon.
Furthermore Wyclif had now broken with John of Gaunt. Instead he and his followers the Lollards or ‘babblers’ had turned to taking their message to the people in the countryside, and their russet-coloured robes were becoming a familiar sight in villages all over England. At the same time, one of these Lollards made the first translation of the Bible into English, for Wyclif believed that everyone should be allowed to read the Holy Scriptures and make up their opinion about their meaning.
His philosophic conclusion that ‘dominion’ was to be found in all good people regardless of whether they were priests had revolutionary implications. Although there were few Lollards among the peasants themselves, Wyclif’s emphasis on each man’s worth seeped into the current climate.
In 1381 all these discontents came together in a march on London led by a master craftsman named Wat Tyler (or Wat the roofer). Tyler was at the head of a large number of marchers setting off from Kent, a county which since the Jutes had a reputation for more democratic traditions. Though there was no villeinage in Kent they demanded an end to villeinage for all Englishmen and refused to pay the poll tax. At the same time revolts broke out all over the country. In Essex a travelling priest named John Ball had been preaching on the theme of his well-known rhyme:
When Adam delved, and Eve span
Who was then the gentleman?
In the south the uprisings had a particularly anti-clerical tinge, as most of the participants were serfs from the properties of great abbeys and monasteries. The majority were armed with the agricultural tools they had been using in the fields when word started to spread about the march to London–billhooks for pulling fruit off trees, shears and axes. The uprisings seem to have been quite spontaneous without any political organization behind them. They were nevertheless extremely dangerous. The rebels swarmed across London on either side of the river, setting fire to Southwark and convincing the city guards stationed at the Tower that they were no match for such numbers. They then murdered the Archbishop of Canterbury and the chancellor, and burned John of Gaunt’s Thames-side Savoy Palace to the ground.
In the midst of the mayhem the boy-king Richard was the only member of the government to keep his head. While his ministers dithered, with great courage Richard agreed to meet the rebels and listen to their grievances. At Mile End he promised charters of liberty to abolish serfdom if the crowds would disperse. Then, accompanied by the lord mayor of London William Walworth and only sixty horsemen, he rode out to Smithfield to deal with Wat Tyler and the 2,000 Kentish men he had brought with him. With Richard was his popular mother Joan, the Fair Maid of Kent, whose association with their own county he may have felt would make the rebels readier to listen to him.
After some time talking face to face about the people’s complaints Wat Tyler laid a hand on the king’s bridle. He had a dagger in his other hand, though he seems to have had no intention of using it. But at a time when much of the city was on fire and two members of the government lay dead, Walworth the lord mayor may be forgiven for thinking that Tyler was about to murder the king. At any rate he reacted by plunging his sword into the rebel leader. At this the Kentish folk surged forward and seemed about to seize Richard, while those with bows trained their arrows on him. But Richard’s own courage saved the day. Spurring his horse he galloped up to Tyler’s followers crying ‘Come with me and I will be your captain. Wat Tyler was a traitor.’
Uncertain how to proceed, since Tyler’s oratory had been instrumental in getting them to London, the protesters followed Richard’s slender figure into what were then the fields of Islington. But they were surrounded by a thousand soldiers hurriedly gathered by Walworth, and many sank to their knees to beg the king’s pardon. By nightfall every single one of London’s unwelcome visitors had left the city walls and was heading home convinced by the king’s apparently sympathetic manner that serfdom would be abolished.
Eventually a general pardon would be issued to all those who took part in the Peasants’ Revolt as part of the celebrations to mark Richard II’s marriage in 1382 to the pious Anne of Bohemia, sister of King Wenceslaus. But in the short term the rebels were punished and their wishes ignored. John Ball was executed at St Albans, home of that first British martyr, while the charters abolishing serfdom were never issued because they had been obtained under duress. Although it took another hundred years for villeinage to die out entirely, in practice many lords gave the villeins their freedom and commuted their service to a money payment. The continued shortage of labour meant it was either that or having a very uncooperative workforce.
But Richard II never regained the esteem he won in 1381. John of Gaunt’s absence from the council pursuing the throne of Castile by right of his wife Constance should have meant a fresh start for the country. But Gaunt and his cronies were soon replaced by equally venial men who were Richard’s favourites, the most important being Robert de Vere, Earl of Oxford, whom Richard made Duke of Ireland, and the chancellor Michael de la Pole, a merchant who became Earl of Suffolk.
Richard and the new court party were just as careless of the law and parliament as John of Gaunt had been. Like his father the Black Prince the king had a taste for luxury and a splendid court. To finance it, sudden and illegal taxes were demanded without reference to Parliament. Under Edward III’s youngest son Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester, a parliamentary party began to rally against the court. In 1386 the trouble came to a head when Parliament asked Richard to dismiss Chancellor de la Pole for corruption. The king replied that he would not dismiss the meanest scullion in his kitchen just to please Parliament. In response Parliament impeached the chancellor and appointed eleven lords ordainers to rule the country, as had been done in Edward II’s time.
Richard II was made of sterner stuff than his great-grandfather. Having persuaded the courts to proclaim the Lords Ordainer illegal because they interfered with the royal prerogative, he declared war on the parliamentary party. But in February 1388 at the Battle of Radcot Bridge in Oxfordshire his army was scattered and he himself was forced back to London. At the Parliament known as the Merciless Parliament, five lords including Richard’s uncle the Duke of Gloucester and his first cousin, John of Gaunt’s son Henry of Lancaster, accused the royal favourites o
f treason. These lords appellant as they were known, because they launched the Appeal of Treason, then executed many of the king’s favourites.
The lords appellant now ruled the country through the council. But the fluidity and the personal nature of relationships at court meant that within the year Richard was asserting himself again, and once he had gained the support of the respectable old clerical party he was ruling on his own. Stability was cemented by the return from Spain of his uncle John of Gaunt, whose influence smoothed the way for less antagonistic politics, and before long two of the five lords appellant–Gaunt’s son Henry of Lancaster and Thomas Mowbray, Earl of Nottingham–came round to the court party. Abroad too there was peace for almost thirty years, after Richard’s marriage in 1396 to the daughter of the French king Charles VI–following the death of his wife Anne of Bohemia–led to a truce between the two countries.
But the king’s sorrow at the death of his wife Anne touched off the most violent and uncontrollable elements in his rather unstable character. He razed to the ground the palace where he had lived with Anne, and when the Earl of Arundel–one of the lords appellant–arrived late for the queen’s funeral, the outraged king publicly struck him in the face.
But Richard II was a subtler character than he appeared. For almost ten years after the Merciless Parliament he bided his time, secretly calculating how to have his revenge on the lords appellant. The year after Anne of Bohemia’s death, he suddenly arrested three of them–his uncle Gloucester, Arundel and the Earl of Warwick. Surrounded by 4,000 soldiers of the king’s personal bodyguard, the Cheshire Archers, Parliament had no choice but to bow to his wishes and condemned the three for treason. In a display of summary justice, Arundel was tried, convicted and beheaded on the same day, while Gloucester was murdered in Calais prison. Warwick escaped death only by the payment of massive fines.
The Story of Britain Page 26