The Last Plantagenet

by Thomas B. Costain

  Failing to secure the person of King Henry at Windsor, the band marched to Colnbrook where they encountered a royal force of some strength. Kent was in command and he is said to have fought for three days with courage and skill in holding the bridge at Maidenhead. When finally put to rout, the leaders realized that there was nothing more to be done. They rode off in mad haste and reached Cirencester. Here they left their men-at-arms behind and entered the town, hoping to pass unrecognized. This was a vain hope. They were seized by the townspeople. Kent, Salisbury, Despenser, and the priest Maudelyn were beheaded during the night.

  Richard’s half brother, John Holland, had remained near London to keep an eye on developments there. When he learned of the collapse of the plot, he tried to cross the Channel, but the ship was driven back by heavy winds and he was captured at Pleshy. Here he fell into the hands of the Countess of Hereford, the mother of the Bohun sisters and, therefore, mother-in-law of the king. This was unfortunate for John Holland because she was a woman of sternest character. Calling in the two sons of the Earl of Arundel, who had been executed on Tower Hill, to witness the deed, she had Holland beheaded without waiting to try him. His head was raised on the end of a pike over Pleshy Castle and there it remained until the king, in deference to the feelings of his sister, had it sent to her for burial with the body.

  This hastily conceived and badly bungled plot cost Richard his life. There had been a strong feeling among Henry’s advisers that there would never be peace in the land as long as the deposed king remained alive, one of the most vehement being the Earl of Warwick, who had been released from imprisonment and was eager to settle his personal score. Henry had resisted all such pressure. On one occasion, soon after the failure of the restoration plot, a conversation was carried on in his hearing in which the danger of letting the ex-king live was strongly stressed. Henry left in the midst of the talk, saying not a word, and went out to feed his falcons. But he had not missed a word. It is also related that once, after the manner of Henry II in crying out to be relieved of the activities of Thomas à Becket, the new king said at the dinner table to those who sat below him, “Have I no faithful friend who will deliver me of one whose life will be my death, and whose death my life?” This outburst, according to the story, led one Sir Piers Exton to recruit a party of eight who rode at once to Pontefract where Richard was being held.

  Whether there is any truth in these anecdotes or not, it is on the official records that among the recommendations laid before the king’s committee on February 9 was one which read: “If Richard, late king, be still living as it is supposed he is, order be taken that he be securely guarded.” The result was the publication of an order by the council that “if he were dead, he should be shown openly to the people that they might know of it.”

  This significant statement was issued on the same day, February 9, 1400.

  CHAPTER XXXI

  The King Who Lost His Life

  1

  THE first weeks in the month of February were cold and blustery, and snow fell in all parts of Yorkshire. This was in itself a good excuse for people to remain at home of nights, but in the town of Pontefract there was another reason for keeping curfew. The eight towers of the castle looked down on the town and in one of them the king (for Richard was still spoken of as a king) was being held. Because of this, armed men kept watch about the castle when darkness fell—heavy, grumbling guards, plodding through the drifts, muffled to the ears in cloaks of wool and holding their torches low for the sake of the warmth. Any citizen who had not gone decently home to bed would be roughly treated if he fell in the way of these surly fellows.

  There was enough contact in secret ways between the garrison and the town to keep the people advised of what went on above them. They knew there was no truth in the rumor that Richard had escaped to Scotland and the equally wild surmise that the prisoner in Pontefract was in reality Richard’s mysterious double, the fair-faced priest, Maude-lyn. No, the deposed king was somewhere in the castle, but so securely and secretly held (as the council at Westminster had ordered) that only his immediate gaolers had ever set eyes on him.

  But the people of Pontefract thought they knew more about this than the guards. Peering out from behind their shutters at night, they could see a light in one of the eight towers. “That’s it!” they would say. “That’s where they have him, the poor, foolish king! May God and all the saints preserve him from worse.”

  They not only spied at night but they listened, in an almost hypnotic fear of something they might hear. All their lives there had been talk of what had happened one night nearly a century before when all about Berkeley Castle on the Severn the air had filled suddenly with a bedlam of wild and almost inhuman sound, the cries of a strong man who was dying in torment. The villagers thereabouts had known then that Edward II, who had been held in humiliating captivity at Berkeley, was being done to death in some obscenely barbarous manner.

  Everyone knew that Richard, for the sake of peace in the realm, would have to be put out of the way. Such at least was the word brought by travelers from down London way. Such also was the opinion held by the castle guards, speaking in whispers and out of the corner of the mouth. All of them, citizens as well as guards, had given their heads a shake of conviction when word came of the bungled attempt of the Hollands to pave the way to restoration. Now something would have to be done. There must be no more attempts at rebellion, no more uneasiness in low as well as high places. Would Richard’s killers be as brutal as the assassins of the second Edward? This conjecture turned the nights at Pontefract into a time of dread suspense.

  It is doubtful if Richard himself could have heard of the ill-timed uprising of his followers. This information would be kept from him on the strictest of orders. If so, he was saved additional fears on that account. But there are always indications of the approach of a tragic finish which a political prisoner can detect, particularly one of high degree who has known only the best of everything. The gaolers become careless and offhanded, even gruffly discourteous. The food is badly cooked and carelessly served. Complaints are brushed aside as though to say, “What boots it if your meat is tainted and the bread moldy when you will soon have no need for food of any kind?”

  To one as sensitive and imaginative as Richard, the waiting must have been hard to endure. The hours of daylight were spent at the barred windows, if indeed the cell had anything better than an archery slit, wondering if a miracle of second thought on the part of the English people would bring an army to set him free. At night he could not fail to think of the shrieks which had escaped from the walls of Berkeley. He would have, perhaps, some brief intervals of optimistic thought when the hope of French intervention or of a Scottish attack would fill his mind; for was it not the bounden duty of kings to come to the rescue of one of their number? Certainly his father, the brave Black Prince, had believed so.

  Even a former king is prevented from indulging in the niceties of toilet when political disaster has robbed him of his freedom. Richard’s thick yellow hair lost its lustrous curl, his double-pointed beard became shaggy and unkempt, his cheeks showed some of the lankness of care. He was like one of the captive lions that the kings of England had always kept in cages in the Tower of London. He had no way of filling in the dismal hours save to pace about his cell and bewail the mistakes which had brought him to this pass. Why had he been so demanding of his full prerogatives? Why had he given his thrice-damned cousin an excuse to break his exile by seizing all the Lancastrian estates? Why had he been so foolhardy as to take his army to Ireland at such a juncture?

  The reason for all these errors lay in his pride. He had been determined to prove that he was not the brainless boy his heavy-fisted uncles had tried to make out. He had desired so deeply to show he had inherited the greatness of his father and grandfather, if not as a warrior, then as a man of intelligence, of superior culture, of the will power to reign strongly and well.

  But all things had gone awry. He had not known how
to use and display the gifts with which he had been born. It must have been that such qualities as he possessed were not suited to kingship.

  On the night of February 14 the wind increased in volume and howled about the eaves of the houses and whistled through bell towers and about the stone buttresses below. If any of the townspeople, after damping out the fires, had gone to stare out through the ill-fitting shutters, they would have caught their breaths in dread. The solitary light no longer shone from that window high up in its tower.

  2

  The next morning the whispered word was carried down to the town that Richard Plantagenet had died the day before.

  For some time thereafter there was a continual stir about the castle. Messengers arrived on smoking steeds, clearly after riding great distances. Mounted men pounded out over the drawbridge, to set off for the south with equal dispatch. Then came men whose apparel and appearance fitted such a crisis—priests, lawyers belike, surgeons, also the most dreaded of men with faces the color of the cerements they made.

  On the third day a carriage with creaking wheels emerged from the castle, surrounded by a heavy guard of mounted men. No one could catch a glimpse of the interior of this vehicle as it progressed through the town, but the people knew what it contained. All that was left of a once gaudy king was being taken away for burial, almost certainly to London where he had been received so enthusiastically as a boy king but had been so violently disliked at the finish.

  The news that seeped down to the town was that Richard had died of starvation. The story was repeated many times and had something about it of a lesson carefully rehearsed. When the deposed king had learned of the bungling adventure of his foolish friends, he had declined to partake of food and drink. “He was for-hungered,” said the servants from the castle. The townspeople were ready to accept this explanation, as were most of the people of England. But a more careful consideration of the circumstances would have led to doubts. In the first place there was the strong probability that the news of the rebellion had been kept from the prisoner. Still harder to explain was the time element. The Holland fiasco came to an end during the night of January 9. It would have taken some time for word of it to reach Richard, many days certainly, assuming that the story was allowed to reach him at all. Starvation is a slow process. When a victim refuses food and is so confined that his physical strength is not drawn upon, he almost certainly will live for weeks.

  Further, there is no mistaking the physical emaciation and the wasted face of the victim of starvation. Was the body which was shown later in London a proof that he had died from such cause?

  Another explanation is that the knight Sir Piers Exton, who as already explained had heard Henry’s plea in London, came to Pontefract with eight others. A compact had been made between them to remove Richard from the new king’s path. They came upon him as he sat at his dinner, all with drawn swords. They stood for a moment in a silent line, staring at him.

  It was at once apparent to Richard that his time had come. He rose silently, shoving the table back to allow room to defend himself. Then he sprang at one of the intruders, wrenching his weapon from him, and began to attack them with great courage and energy. The story, as told in some detail in one of the chronicles of the day, was that Exton sprang up on the chair that Richard had vacated and struck him on the head with a poleax. This brought the uneven struggle to a rapid conclusion.

  This is the explanation that defenders of Richard prefer to accept because it presents him as dying bravely, a true Plantagenet at the finish of his far from happy life. But it must be said that it seems the kind of story so often concocted when the central figure in a tragedy of history comes to a sudden death. It seems, however, more easy to believe that he died by violence than by starvation.

  3

  When word reached London that Richard was dead, a deep silence seemed to settle over the city. His removal from the high office of king had been almost universally desired and it must have been recognized that his death was an inevitable sequel to deposition. But it was still with a sense of shock that the news of his end was received. Perhaps they gave some thought to the intrepid boy king who had ridden out to face the rioting peasants at Smithfield. Perhaps also they considered the record of those years, after the uncles ceased troubling, when so much constructive legislation was put through Parliament. They might even have been inclined to think him the victim, in some degree at least, of adverse circumstances.

  When it became known that the cortege was approaching the city, the apprentices put up the shutters and bolted them, the stocks were covered in the shops, the pens laid down in the countinghouses and the tools in the workrooms, and all of them—men, women, and children—dressed in their best, poured out into the streets.

  The body of Richard had been placed on a litter covered with black cloth under a canopy also of black. The four horses were sable and the four knights pacing beside the bier were in black armor. Froissart reports that the cortege could proceed only at a snail’s pace, so great were the crowds on the streets. When they reached the Chepe, the litter was set down and the coffin opened so the people could see the body of the deposed king. For two hours the viewers passed in silence before the bier. It was estimated that at last 20,000 people took advantage of this opportunity to look on the face of the dead king.

  What they saw must have surprised and mystified them. Richard’s head, sunk down on a black cushion, was uncovered. The body had been embalmed but it was soldered down in lead so that the face only was in view!

  It had been the will of Parliament that the body be shown to the people, and it seems logical that, if Richard had died of starvation, that fact would have been made manifest, to prevent any belief in the possibility of violence. His wasted body would have been openly on display. It was not, therefore, to hide the ravages of want that the frame had been so completely concealed. Could it have been to hide other evidence from the eyes of the beholders, the wounds inflicted by the weapons of assassins?

  The face of Richard was said to have been calm and beautiful in death.

  There were rumors later that it was not the corpse of the deposed king which had been brought to London and which was buried first in the church at King’s Langley. It was whispered about that Maudelyn, who had been executed at Cirencester, had not been buried with the other conspirators. Had his body been kept for this purpose, to convince the people that Richard was dead? Richard, so the story ran, had escaped to Scotland and was awaiting the opportunity to reclaim his crown.

  It was established later that the Scottish rulers gave a small allowance to a man who claimed to be Richard of England and who did not die until 1419. The English government scoffed at the story, claiming the man was an impostor and that he was a certain Thomas Warde of Trumpington. There does not seem to be any good reason not to believe that the “poor, foolish king” came to some violent end at Pontefract and that it was his body which was shown to the people.

  The king who had lost a shoe at his coronation seems to have been fated to suffer one deprivation after another. He lost all his friends, some of them unworthy, at the hands of the Merciless Parliament, he lost his wife, he lost the esteem and confidence of the people by his proud ways, he lost his throne, and, then, finally, his life.

  PART TWO

  THE RED AND THE WHITE

  CHAPTER I

  A Sick King and a Dull Reign

  1

  HISTORY arbitrarily counts the reign of Richard II as the last in the glittering dynasty of the Plantagenets, or, as it is sometimes called, the Angevins. The reason is sound enough. Edward III left so many children that it was hard to keep the lines of descent clear and, when the two main branches became embroiled in the long continued Wars of the Roses, the need for distinctive labels became imperative. And so we have, following the unfortunate Richard II, the Lancastrian kings and the Yorkists. The blood in the veins of Henry IV, who succeeded Richard II, was pure Plantagenet, and the same can be said of Henry V and Hen
ry VI, who continued the Lancastrian line, and of Edward IV and Richard III, who are listed as Yorkist kings. It is only when Henry VII, that highly intelligent and efficient but sly and shabby king, seized the throne that the Plantagenet line came to a definite end. The seventh Henry was the grandson of Owen Tudor, a Welsh knight with whom the French widow of Henry V fell in love after the death of her royal spouse. There is much doubt as to whether the union of the enamored pair was ever sanctified by marriage. As Henry’s mother, moreover, was Margaret Beaufort, a descendant of John of Gaunt and Katharine Swynford (whose children were all born out of wedlock and were made legitimate later), the bend sinister stood out prominently on his genealogical tree and the Plantagenet tincture in his blood was small.

  Richard III, who has been indelibly fixed in the memories of men by the genius of Shakespeare as the hunchback who murdered the princes in the Tower (but whose back was straight and who did not murder the two princes), was the last king who was completely Plantagenet.

  The years from 1400 to 1485, which intervened between the deaths of Richard II and Richard III, were filled with the color and the cruelties of civil war, with stories of deep villainy and vile conspiracy and with some slight imprints of the genius of an emerging civilization. It is a period, however, which is illuminated only in small degree by authentic chronicles and so remains dark with doubts and question marks for historical controversy. There is, in consequence, a fascination about these cloudy years. Certainly no record of the virile dynasty which began with Henry II can be complete without some recounting of the savageries and mysteries of the fifteenth century. In the chapters which follow, an effort will be made to set down the sequence of events in brief form and to place on the canvas in greater length some of the more spectacular episodes and the colorful human figures of the period.