The Last Plantagenet

by Thomas B. Costain

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  In earlier days it had been the custom to have Parliament meet at any place which suited the king. Edward I, the originator of so many common-sense regulations, decided this was wrong and that Westminster should be made the permanent parliamentary home. There were the best of reasons for this. A great nobleman never traveled without a long train of knights, men-at-arms, and servants, sometimes running into the hundreds. This was equally true of bishops, who felt the need of advisers, deans, almoners, and clerks of all degree; so many, in fact, that an ecclesiastical party would sometimes be a half mile long, some riding in litters, some on donkeys, some plodding along painfully on foot. Everyone shared the discomfort of a parliamentary meeting in the provinces, particularly the landholders of the neighborhood, who were expected to entertain distinguished visitors. Even the townspeople suffered, for the great lords would billet their retainers with them and then neglect to pay the bills.

  It is not on record that the bishops and barons received any payment as members of the House, but the compensation set for mere knights was four shillings a day and for plain citizens two shillings. This was not enough to pay the expenses incurred. Through five successive reigns the sheriffs of Lancashire petitioned to be exempt from sending members because there were no cities or boroughs which could afford the cost. One Sir John Strange, who sat for Dunwich, asked that he be given a cade and a half barrel of herrings instead of money, figuring he would be ahead on that basis.

  This being the situation, it is hard to find a reason for calling a meeting of Parliament in Salisbury in April 1384. Salisbury was an established town of consequence, with its own beautiful cathedral and the right to be represented by two members, but it was sheer pandemonium when my lords the bishops and my lords the barons and all their horses and all their men descended upon it.

  It was in this bedlam that a dramatic episode occurred. A Carthusian friar, unknown to anyone although it was reported that he came from Ireland, publicly charged the Duke of Lancaster with plotting the deposition and death of the king. Just when or where he made this statement, or the details of the conspiracy, history does not say. It was not made before the House, for certainly he would not have been allowed to enter there. Probably the mad friar (for he must have known that a painful death would be his sole reward) managed to worm his way into the headquarters of the king to divulge his information. The story came to Richard’s ears, but his uncle had no difficulty in convincing him that the charge was baseless.

  The solid market town of Salisbury, which had been converted into a veritable madhouse by this time, became the scene of noisy demonstrations. The popular dislike of the great Duke of Lancaster had been subsiding, but even the accusation of an unidentified friar was enough to set everyone against him again.

  The friar was not sent to prison. Perhaps the gaols had been thrown open to accommodate visitors, for every building in town which boasted a roof was crowded from cellar to garret. Instead he was put into the charge of Sir John Holland, the king’s half brother, who would later be made the Duke of Exeter. It was said that this was done on John of Gaunt’s suggestion. A worse choice could not have been made, for this son of the queen mother by her first marriage was proud, cruel, and treacherous. The upshot was that on the night before the date fixed for the enquiry Holland coolly reported that the accuser had been killed. It developed that the order for the murder had come from Holland himself.

  The crowded streets of the old town seethed with excitement and conjecture. Had the Duke of Lancaster connived with Holland to get rid of the witness against him? Or had the king and his party arranged the killing so that the duke would have no chance to refute the charge and thus be left under a cloud?

  Thomas of Woodstock, as might have been expected, took the latter view. Although he and his brother John had continued on bad terms, he came storming into the king’s chamber and declared that the whole thing was a conspiracy. The king, he cried, had abetted it.

  “I will kill anyone,” he declaimed with many oaths, his face black with rage, “who brings such charges against my brother. I will kill anyone. No matter whom!”

  This could only be construed as a direct threat to the king, and as such was treason. But Richard, whose temper was sharp in most circumstances, and who was surrounded by advisers who confirmed him in an unshakable belief in kingly infallibility, had not yet been able to outgrow a fear of this browbeating uncle. The threat of violence to the royal person went unpunished.

  John of Gaunt had, in the meantime, departed for his stronghold in Yorkshire, the castle of Pontefract. In some chronicles his exit is laid to a fear that his nephew would charge him with conspiracy but more likely he had sensed the rebirth of popular hatred and thought it wise to allow time for the storm to blow over. It is hard to believe him guilty. The only hint of complicity on his part is found in his preference for friars as his spiritual advisers. But that some at least of these wandering adherents to the faiths of St. Francis remained true to the strictest Franciscan rules was a proper reason for the duke’s leaning to them. In any event could he be weak enough to conceive of a treasonable design which an obscure friar would be in a position to reveal?

  The situation remained tense, for Thomas of Woodstock continued to voice threats against the king and those about him. The Commons, after a month of deliberation at Salisbury, made grants which were inadequate for the waging of determined war, contending that no more was needed in view of the truce with France which had still a year to run. The policy of the members could be perfectly defined by a phrase which would come into popular use nearly seven centuries later—too little and too late.

  The ailing queen mother, who had reached the stage where she wanted nothing so much as the chance to coddle her aching bones in the comfort of her regal apartments, decided she must do something to aid her son in his difficulties. The first move, clearly, was to cure the differences, if any existed, between the young king and his uncle of Lancaster. Scarcely capable of placing a foot to the ground, she set out for Pontefract, using in all probability the cumbersome and jolting vehicle in which she had encountered those rough fellows, the men of Wat the Tyler. The mighty and forbidding castle (pronounced Pumfret), which covered eight acres of ground and had the same number of tall towers, lay roughly 180 miles north of London. It would take probably three weeks for the invalid to cover that much ground in her lumbering wagon but she accepted the ordeal cheerfully and willingly. In due course she arrived and proceeded to use her best endeavors to divine what was in John of Gaunt’s mind and to bring him to a mood of complete reconciliation. In this she succeeded. The proud duke, who all his life had felt a consuming desire to sit on a throne and wear a crown of gold but had lacked the grim will to bring it about, was now accepting the inevitable. Even if the youthful king were removed, the choice would not fall on him. The English people would be willing to fight for the legal succession of the heirs of Lionel, the amiable and handsome six-foot-seven second son of Edward III or, failing that, they would prefer the belligerent Thomas to the suspect John. The only chance left was his nebulous claim to the throne of Castile. Constance, his Spanish second wife, who was living in a degree of confinement which suggested some impairment of her reason, was his sole excuse for this design. She had only one more year to live and nothing would come of his Castilian pretensions, but Richard’s mother encouraged him, no doubt, by promises of support.

  From that time on, although there were continuous whispers of plotting, the great duke seems to have stood on Richard’s side, appreciating the difficulties under which that proud, not too gifted, and somewhat neurotic young ruler labored. But the same was not true of the younger uncle. This blustering member of the family, to whom the appellation of the Bully of Woodstock may fairly be ascribed, grew more and more antagonistic to Richard and even more willing to put difficulties in his path and to voice loud and sweeping criticism of everything he did.

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  This seems a good point to pause and propo
und questions with reference to the once great Plantagenets. Why did they all seem so impotent at this crisis in national affairs? Why was there so much opposition to Richard, who was still a boy and hardly likely to possess yet the force and character to be a strong king?

  Perhaps the second proposition should be considered first. The fault with Richard, the chief fault as his kinsmen saw him, was his love of peace. He never acknowledged it openly but there is no mistaking the fact that he shrank from the whole issue of conflict. Possessing the pride, the passion, the revengeful traits of his forebears, he was still at this time a rather gentle and indolent boy who preferred to listen to his minstrels and to dip into those suspect instruments of weakness called books than to fight in tournaments and lead armies against the French. To one of his uncles, at least, he was a highly undesirable graft on the once vigorous and brilliantly leafed family tree. How could the war prosper and men be in a position to enjoy their real purpose in life, which was to leap into a saddle and exchange blows with everyone in sight, while the control of the nation lay in such slight and ineffective hands? Thomas of Woodstock, for one, saw only one solution to this problem. Get rid of him!

  And now for the first query. It must seem to observers of the scene that the brilliant family had for the space of one generation, at least, fallen into a decline. The men were still tall and handsome and the women were winsome and lovable in the fair-haired Plantagenet way, but where was the spark, the will to accomplish, the gift of success? No longer was there a real trace of the conquering, firm governing instinct of Henry II. The desire to lead armies to war and to fight furiously with sword and mace on foreign strands and on burning deserts, which animated Richard of the Lion Heart: what had happened to that inheritance, questionable though it seems? Where was the splendid spirit of another warrior king, Edward I, who saw the need to establish decent order in law and procedure in the semi-feudal country he was called upon to rule? Where was the lavish and tinsel greatness of the successful Edward III?

  The deterioration (which had broken out with several previous members of the family: the cruel John, the weak gadfly Henry III, and the sad oaf Edward II) had set in with the numerous brood that Queen Philippa brought into the world. Edward the Black Prince was the only one to measure up to the highest Plantagenet standards and yet there was as much to deplore as to admire in that hero of fixed ideas, who vitiated English strength in France to fight for a cruel, degenerate king of Castile in defense of the most rigid conception of monarchial rule, but who, because of the magnificent courage of his death, has remained a shining figure in English history. He lacked, certainly, the wisdom to make a strong and admirable king of England. Then there was John of Gaunt, suave, handsome, cultured, with great ambition, but lacking in the resolution that was the first of the great Plantagenet traits and thus is condemned to a rather shabby role in history. Two of the other sons, the amiable giant Lionel, who died early, and the mediocre Edmund of Langley, had little share of the family fineness. Finally, there was the insensitive, overbearing Thomas of Woodstock, who always appears on the pages of history in moments of black rage, in loud declamation, in selfish maneuvers.

  In none of them is it possible to detect the kingly qualities of the family. Not a single spark of genius for government or war could have been struck from the Plantagenets of this generation.

  Richard, who would have been happy in warm Bordeaux where he was born, was sadly miscast as King of England. His role, unfortunately for him, was to be that of target for this mediocre group who stormed and conspired around him and were as incapable as he of preserving the imperial heritage which had come down to them.

  The Plantagenets would have a resurgence of greatness later—in Henry V, in that handsome and capable soldier Edward IV (until he became fat and unkempt and more interested in his amours than in the toil of kingship), and finally in the traces of grandeur which can be found in the much maligned Richard III.

  CHAPTER XVI

  The Daring Grocer

  DURING this summer which saw the reconciliation between the king and John of Gaunt, and very little else to the credit of anyone in particular, there died a man who deserves more attention in the annals of the day than he is usually accorded. First as an alderman and then as lord mayor of London, John Philipot had played a prominent and courageous part in public affairs. Unlike William Walworth, who also played a courageous part, there are no circumstances to be glossed over in his career.

  When the Grocers Company of London was formed in 1345 by the union of the spicerers and pepperers, Philipot was a charter member. He soon became wealthy and was returned by London as a member of Parliament. In that capacity he stood out against the efforts of the Lancastrian party to gain control and he was spokesman for the deputation which waited on the very old and ill Edward III to explain the riots in London against Duke John and his followers.

  His first great exploit was in 1377, shortly after the accession of Richard to the throne. The initiative in the Hundred Years War had been taken over by the enemy across the Channel. The French ships of war were ravaging the English coast. A party of men-at-arms landed and captured the Isle of Wight. Things came to a serious juncture when a Scot named Mercer, in command of a fleet of French, Scottish, and Spanish ships, sailed boldly into Scarborough and captured all the English vessels there.

  Philipot waited for the heads of the nation to act. Nothing was done. A strange apathy seemed to have settled on the nation. When it became certain that there would be no official action, John Philipot decided to take things into his own hands. At his personal expense he assembled some English ships of war with the necessary supplies and equipment, recruited a thousand men, and set out in pursuit of the marauding squadron.

  He was spectacularly successful, overtaking Mercer and giving him a sound drubbing. As a result, he recovered all the English ships and captured fifteen Spanish vessels as well. This was the kind of boldness and enterprise which had marked the earlier stages of the war with France and had won so many great victories. The nation responded with wild enthusiasm to the exploit of the bold grocer.

  But this enthusiasm was not felt in the higher reaches of the social structure. Most of the barons said openly that Philipot, a commoner and a civilian, had no right to act thus on his own responsibility. The Earl of Stafford took it on himself to confront the amateur admiral and complain of his conduct.

  “My lord earl,” answered the alderman, “if the nobles of England had not left the country open to invasion, it would not have been necessary for me to interfere.”

  King Richard had been delighted with Philipot’s success and so had to bear a share of the disapproval of the baronage. He was openly referred to as the “King of London.”

  The city responded by electing Philipot lord mayor for the years 1378 and 1379. In that important office he proceeded to break precedent by many progressive steps. The stench of London streets was proverbial and Philipot had them thoroughly cleaned. Levying a special tax of five pence on each house, he raised enough to dredge and cleanse the city ditch which had always been the recipient of household filth. Another measure he undertook was the erection of two high stone towers on opposite banks of the Thames below London Bridge, which enabled the city to suspend a chain across the river when there was danger of invasion. The patriotic Philipot paid the cost of one tower out of his own pocket.

  He was with the king during the Peasants’ Revolt and was one of four citizens knighted at Clerkenwell Fields after the killing of Wat Tyler. Granted the right of coat armor, he was given a pension of forty pounds a year for his loyalty and zeal. There were still plenty of dissentients, however. When John of Northampton became mayor he deposed Philipot from his place as an alderman. It was supposed that this action was part of a campaign to lessen the influence of the trade guilds but it seems more likely the result of personal animus.

  And now this highly admirable citizen came to the end of his days in his house in Langbourne Ward. His will, which was a ge
nerous one, left some lands in the city to be held in perpetual trust for the relief of any thirteen poor people to be designated by the board. London gave the name of Philpot Lane to the street on which his house had stood.

  It seems unfortunate that no balladeer saw fit to immortalize him in a legend as unforgettable as that in which a poor apprentice named Dick Whittington, running away from his master, heard in the sound of Bow bells the words,

  Turn again, Whittington,

  Lord Mayor of London.

  The real Richard Whittington, who was a mercer and acquired great wealth, was a young member of the aldermanic board in the days of Sir John Philipot.

  CHAPTER XVII

  The King’s Favorite

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  ROBERT de Vere, Earl of Oxford, was fifteen years old when Richard became king. He was not a Piers Gaveston, a Robert Carr, nor a George Villiers, to mention a few of the young men who won royal favor by their charm. He seems to have been lacking in that quality, a rather plain stripling, without any particular degree of talent, ambitious without the qualities or the energy to warrant his pretensions, selfish, unreliable, and grasping. But the ten-year-old Richard seems to have picked him as a friend from the beginning.

  It is said that Sir Simon Burley had a hand in the role that de Vere assumed, having been generously treated by the youthful earl in the matter of a Hereford manor. But a preference on Burley’s part would not suffice to explain the favor that the king proceeded to display. De Vere was given the custody of royal castles and the profitable wardship of heirs. He was given properties and hereditary offices and was made a member of the privy council against parliamentary advice. He became a member of the Garter, ahead of scores of candidates with much better claims.