The Last Plantagenet

by Thomas B. Costain

  In spite of these advances, the possession of a feather bed still meant that someone in the family had been to the wars in France. Tapestries and rugs were prizes from the Crusades.

  A chamber on the first floor called the Solar had begun to take the place of the Great Hall in smaller manor houses and in the town residences of affluent citizens. The Solar seems to have served either one of two purposes. With the nobility it could be used as a reception room, but in the smaller houses it was a community bedchamber. This was a step in the direction of comfort and would lead in time to revolutionary changes.

  The last full meal of the day began at four o’clock, but none of the trappings of the ceremonial dinner, served at 10 to 11 A.M., were missing. There would be the procession first from the kitchens, led by the manciple or perhaps the sergeant of the ewery, followed by pipers blasting away on their instruments and then by the cooks and scullions proudly holding up the main dishes of the repast. As soon as the last gravy-soaked trencher of bread had been scraped off the board and the final bone had been tossed among the rushes, to be scrambled for by the dogs, there would be cries of “A hall! A hall!,” the signal to clear the floor. This would bring a rush of servants from all directions to dismantle the trestles and pile them up along the walls, thus making room for the jugglers, tumblers, and wrestlers who provided most of the entertainment, although an occasional goliard might be given the floor to send the company into belly-shaking laughter with bawdy songs about strumpets and cuckolds. Sometimes there was dancing, particularly the sword dance which had survived from Anglo-Saxon days, or balancing on a tightrope to the mad rattle of kettledrums.

  This had been the usual thing, even in the glamorous days of the conqueror Edward, but changes were coming in with Richard and his mother. The food was much more varied and appetizing. There was every conceivable spice and herb. Roses and violets were stewed and served as vegetables. An herb called Robert was actually a garden geranium. There was something very special called an alexander, or horse parsley which was eaten in sticks like celery. A sharp French concoction called verjuice was used in place of lemon juice and there were, perhaps needless to state, a great many new French sauces. No longer did the host try to deceive his guests by putting powdered darnel or passerose into the white wine to turn it red; the most costly of red wines from the South were always served: malvoisie, malmsey, cypress, and muscadel. Even the water used for hand-washing after any course had to be boiled with sage, camomile, and lemon peel.

  Perhaps the innovation which suited English palates the least was in the dishes called entremets, the sweets. They were very artistic and gay, piled high in a dish with a base for the most part of jellies or fresh fruits in season, and served with light sweet wines. Now the English people liked pastry, served in the form of pies and tarts. They liked it so much that in Great Eastchepe, where the bakers clustered, every second shop seemed to be given over to the baking of pies. First there were the deepdish kinds: pork, beef, kidney, cony (rabbit), venison, chicken, goose, fish, eels, made in the shape of coffyns with crust done to a rich, juicy brown. These contained the merest hint of vegetables—these luscious, crumbling pies—perhaps a carrot or two or a slice of young turnip. And, ah, the great spoonfuls of gravy, with just a bit of suet! In season, of course, there would be open-faced tarts, called flans—cherry, plum, costard apple. These were so rich that the apprentices had only to hold up a fresh tray to bring trade on the run. Beggars, too poor to buy, clustered in Eastchepe to content themselves with snuffling the rich odors.

  In other words, Englishmen liked pastry which “stuck to the ribs” and considered the fancy French concoctions as no more satisfying than a soft south wind blowing down the throat.

  Most of the conversation was conducted in French and the entertainment offered after the meal was largely music, conducted by Richard’s head minstrel, one John Camuys, a native of Bordeaux. There would be singing, of course, mostly love ballads and rondels. The young king was passionately addicted to music and had already composed a few things of his own which the people of the court professed to find inspired. Sir Simon Burley had encouraged Richard to read and he had become avidly attached to French romances. At Shene there were scores of them, and the zealous Froissart kept sending over more. The conversation, in consequence, was lively and good, led by the young king and his mother with the unlettered nobility trailing silently and glumly far in the rear.

  There was at this time an institution called the Board of the Green Cloth, consisting of the Lord Steward and his staff. This Board had control of the household purse and was responsible for the purchase of all supplies. It had full authority over the household staff, with the exception of the masters of the horse and the king’s own particular squires, of whom there were no fewer than forty. The innovations made by the young king kept the Board of the Green Cloth very busy indeed.

  3

  Fear of the end of the world hung heavy over the people of medieval days. It was coming to pass soon. Its imminence was preached from every pulpit and all the expected signs were being detected in earth and sky and in the course of human events. Would it come today? Tomorrow? At haying time? When the black mulberries turned? Or would it wait until the next year when the freshness of spring wrapped the earth in beautiful colors?

  The Black Death had been the first sure sign, for was it not the Lord’s punishment for the wicked among men before the establishment of His domain? The clergy railed at men and women for vanity in dress when it was so clear that the Hand of divine retribution lay on the land.

  And yet a period of extreme extravagance and absurdity in styles began with the ending of the Black Death. The chaperon with its sensible combination of cape and cap went out. The cote-hardie with its rather plain horizontal stripes ceased to be popular. Ladies’ skirts became very full, almost bouffant, with deep fur bands and facing hems of different materials and colors. The feminine neck was often exposed, but to make up for this the sleeves covered the hands and fancy capes protruded from shoulders like the wings of angels. The plastron, used in male armor, was adapted in sideless surcoats of sufficiently stout material to permit of as many as a dozen golden buttons down the front, sometimes with precious stones mounted in them. Fair ladies wore their hair long, but kept it coiled up under something resembling a caul and which was called a dorelet. The dorelet was not as absurd as the high hennin which came in early in the following century, but it permitted all manner of tall hairdressing and trailing bands. It robbed the poor women, trying so hard to keep up with their foppish husbands, of much of their natural beauty and charm.

  What lovely woman did to herself was nothing compared to the eccentricities of male attire. Consider one of the illustrated manuscripts still in existence which gives a picture of the young king. His robe is of blue, lined with ermine, and his legs are encased with a trimness which led at this time to the coining of the word “tights.” Richard’s tights were parti-colored in a diamond-shaped pattern of maroon and pink. His shoes were so long and pointed that the toes curled up and had to be banded to his knees. To climb a stair he had two courses open; he could remove his shoes or go up backward. It was necessary to keep his arms folded in order to save his sleeves from trailing on the ground. A very odd-looking figure he cuts, without a doubt; quite as absurd as the Tudor courtier of a later century with his neck ruff like the cart wheel of a fairy coach and his sleeves puffed up like colored clouds.

  Richard was a victim of his times. He felt a compulsion to follow the French styles and it was not his fault that the designers at the French court happened to be so completely deficient in good taste as to verge on the idiotic. He had some good ideas of his own. He invented the handkerchief, certainly a most useful article in a climate so conducive to colds in the head. If it had not gone through several stages in naming, beginning with hankercher, and had been called simply a richard, he would have been much surer of his place in human remembrance than by grace of his part in history.

  When hi
s first wife arrived in England, she brought a number of innovations, including the sidesaddle for ladies, but this will be dealt with at greater length later.

  Everything was loaded lavishly with jewels. Once Richard raised the sum of £5000 in the city of London and gave some of his personal belongings as security. Among the items listed were hoods embroidered with diamonds, sapphires, rubies, and balasses (a variety of ruby spinel); beaver hats literally shining with pearls; a coat of cloth of gold, encrusted with golden balls; a doublet of tarse silk with every inch of its five-foot spread of sleeve like a jib boom heavily encrusted with pearls; rings with every kind of precious stone, some even inscribed with the magic names of The Three Kings, a protection from sudden death. It was whispered about that he had paid as much as 30,000 marks for one robe so heavily bedizened that it weighed almost as much as “white armor,” the term used for steel.

  This extravagance was not confined to the nobility. The rich merchants of London liked to swank in handsome attire. The wives of wealthy kempsters, lavenders, ganters, plumers, and stockfish (for modern terms, read wool combers, laundrymen, glovemakers, feather merchants, and dealers in dried fish) were not permitted by law to ape their betters but they did not hesitate to line their cloaks with ermine or vare. Their plump bodies were seldom subjected to the touch of anything but the finest linens or silks. A fig for the sumptuary laws! Styles in the provinces might be fifty years behind the times but in proud and prosperous London they seldom lagged as much as a season. They did not criticize Richard in London for his eccentricities of dress; they strove to keep up with him.

  The size of the royal household did rouse the ire of the citizens who paid the taxes. Should the king have so many guests that hundreds of cooks were needed in the royal kitchens? Was it necessary for him, a mere boy, to have councilors, constables, stewards, chaplains, almoners, pursuivants, scriveners, trumpeters, mimics, prothonotaries, pages, yeomen of this and that, grooms of many varieties and duties? Should carvers who served only one kind of dish be considered artists and paid as such? Did he need forty squires about him at all times, to wait on him hand and foot? And must each squire have two horses and two servants of his own?

  The citizens of lusty London and the haughty landed gentry were not pleased to know about the bathing habits of the young king. Must he (good St. Francis forfend!) wash himself every day? The ritual followed caused much grumbling among men who believed in a piece of soap in a firm hand. First the king would be stripped to his fair white skin and seated on sponges in front of a fire. Then he would be enclosed in a narrow space about which clean sheets had been draped and hot water would be poured over him which had been boiled first in all manner of herbs. At the finish the young king would be sprinkled with rose water and popped into his bed by two squires of the bedchamber.

  These were French ways. And had not the English beaten the French in every battle they had fought?

  4

  The men and women that a king gathers about him (and most often it is the women rather than the men) do much to create the opinions that his subjects form of him. Richard had not been fortunate in this respect. Parliament had appointed a council to govern the realm while the king remained a minor, but certain changes had come about rather quickly. The queen mother had been a predominant influence and the boy had early proven himself the possessor of a will of his own. Some changes in the personnel of the council had resulted and a small inner circle had become the advisers on whom the adolescent ruler relied.

  First there was Sir Simon Burley, for whom Richard had conceived a strong affection from the very first. Burley had proven himself stout of heart in the French wars and had been a special favorite of the Black Prince. He was a gentle knight and a man of some culture, but willing, and even eager, to improve his social and financial position. A younger son in a Herefordshire family, he had no estates and the slimmest of prospects generally. In fact, when he was first introduced at court by an uncle, his income was said to have been no more than twenty marks a year! When Richard became king he moved quickly to save his genial and sympathetic tutor from such penury. Burley was appointed governor of Windsor Castle and master of the king’s falcons, as well as constable of Guildford and Wigmore. The duties which thus devolved on Burley kept him continuously in and out of court. He saw more of the king certainly than any of the council, even the chancellor and the archbishop. Richard gave him generous grants of land and a house in London on Thames Street, which was close to the royal residence of Baynard’s Castle. As a result, from a meager inheritance his income grew to one of 30,000 marks.

  He does not seem to have injected himself into the problems of the chancellery, but anything having to do with the royal falcons would always engage the royal attention in preference to problems of state. The king seems to have listened to Burley on points of foreign policy, as witness the fact that the personal side of the negotiations for the king’s marriage had been entrusted to him. They had been so well handled that Burley remained a member of the closest triumvirate at court, made up of the king, the queen, and himself.

  There must have been a haughtiness about his manner which those less close to the king resented. An open feud developed between him and the Earl of Arundel. The latter was admiral of the fleet in the west and he had, in the years between 1377 and 1386, achieved nothing but defeat and loss. The year 1378 had been a particularly bad one for the proud Arundel. First he attacked the French port of Harfleur and was driven off. In joint command with the Earl of Salisbury he was beaten in a naval battle with the Spanish. Arundel became the target of popular abuse and Burley seems to have been particularly outspoken in his criticism of the sluggish handling of the naval operations. The proud and overbearing Arundel was to become one of the leading figures in the tragic circumstances of Richard’s reign, and so will be dealt with at considerable length later. It is not necessary at this point to say more than one thing further about him. He never forgave Burley.

  The difficulties which Richard encountered early were largely due to his friendship for a young member of the upper baronage. Robert de Vere, Earl of Oxford, was hereditary great chamberlain of England. The Veres, or Veers as it was sometimes spelled, traced their history back to the Conquest and to Aubrey de Vere, who had been given all the estates of a great Saxon thane named Wulfwine. Coming down in such steady succession, the de Veres had added to their holdings by strategic marriages, notably the union of the third earl with the heiress of the Bolebec family, which brought into their hands huge stretches of land in Buckinghamshire. Accordingly young Robert, ninth in a line which ultimately extended itself to twenty (no wonder the term Vere de Vere was coined to signify the very ultimate in blue-bloodedness), was not only born with a gold spoon in his mouth but, figuratively speaking, a heap of honors and titles piled up around his pillow.

  Richard, eight years his junior, seems to have conceived a close liking for him from the beginning. Efforts to prove a relationship between them on the order of Edward II’s infatuation for Piers Gaveston progressed no further than an unsupported rumor, and it may surely be dismissed on the strength of Richard’s subsequent conduct. It was more likely the affection that a boy can have for one a few years his senior, although it is hard to understand why he decided to make the young Earl of Oxford his friend and model. Robert de Vere was not handsome, talented, or brave. Later he was to prove himself of weak and unreliable character. Nevertheless, Richard liked him enough to heap honors on him. It may have been that at this early age, de Vere had an open eye for the main chance. He had been married when sixteen years old to Philippa, daughter of Princess Isabella and Enguerrand de Coucy and was therefore a cousin-in-law of the king. He proceeded to ingratiate himself with Sir Simon Burley, realizing in all probability that Burley held the largest share of Richard’s affection. He conveyed one of his manors in Herefordshire to the still impecunious knight. Much of the enmity that Burley drew down on himself was due to a general belief that he was pulling strings behind the scenes i
n favor of de Vere.

  This may have been true, but the facts seem to indicate that de Vere had no need of his help. Richard had doubled the yearly allowance paid from the estates to the young earl (who was a ward of the Crown) as soon as he became king. He then proceeded to shower honors on him. The custody of the town and castle of Colchester was handed to him, the castle and lordship of Queenborough, and the warships of several rich estates. A ward acting as a guardian must have been something new in the annals of favoritism. Quite as unusual, and even more aggravating to the older barons, was the selection of this brash and grasping youth as a member of the privy council and of the Order of the Garter.

  De Vere was with Richard in the Tower when the peasants took possession of London, but he does not seem to have distinguished himself in any way, except that he did not run away as the half brothers of the king had done.

  It is hard to understand why a third member of the king’s immediate entourage, Michael de la Pole, was also selected for popular disfavor. Pole was the son of Sir William de la Pole, the shrewd wool merchant of Hull who became the first great English merchant prince. The father had been so rich, in fact, that at various times he made loans amounting in all to a total of £76,180 to that most unsatisfactory of debtors, Edward III. The victorious Edward had dined once in the Great Hall of Pole’s house on the High Street of Hull and had listened with absorbed interest to the talk of that able man of business. In the end, of course, Pole had been sent to prison for no legally tenable offense, but he had left a sufficient estate to start his son William off on a firm financial footing.