by John Gardner
On March 9, 1396, Richard achieved his twenty-eight-year truce with France and the marriage alliance which served as its symbol and support. The pale, pretty child-queen Isabella was formally delivered to him at Calais in October, with the spectacular pageantry that was Richard’s special art. It seemed the greatest achievement to date of Richard’s policy, and those who were there were struck by Richard’s obvious—indeed, extraordinary—delight in his tiny queen; but the achievement would prove to be in fact the beginning of serious troubles. The treaty’s first draft had contained a clause pledging the French royal house to support King Richard “against all manner of people who owe him any obedience and to aid and sustain him with all their power against any of his subjects.” This ominous-sounding clause, dropped later, was probably intended to refer to English Gascony or, possibly, to rebellions of English peasants, but it filled the English aristocracy with uneasiness. And there were other problems. Richard’s marriage to a child raised succession doubts, and his seemingly fantastic hope of winning the crown as Holy Roman Emperor—a hope he was actively pursuing at this time—stirred up doubts, or strengthened doubts, of the king’s mental balance. Weird rumors began to circulate. It was said that when the body of his former favorite, Robert de Vere, was returned to England, the king had ordered that the coffin be opened and “had gazed long and earnestly upon the face of the embalmed corpse, clasping the jewel-laden fingers.”2 King Richard’s disturbed behavior in the late nineties gave color to such stories. He began to talk as if obsessed, in public and private, about his murdered forbear, Edward II, whom he had come to see—as a matter of policy, but also as a matter of intense personal emotion—as a martyred saint. He had for years been imitating what he considered Edward’s style: the favoritism, the extravagant gifts, the piety, the pageantry, the hawking, the lordly disdain of parliamentary interference with his personal affairs. It was a ploy which his enemies were glad to use against him. His intelligent and frequently explained pacifist policy became laziness and ineptitude like Edward’s. Richard’s love of the arts, his marriage to a sexually unthreatening child, his use of the new French handkerchief, became to hostile rumormongers proofs that, like Edward II, he was homosexual. Richard scorned the rumors, insisted on what he saw as the legitimate parallels, and bullied his way on. It was a dangerous idea, and the king was too much the conscious artist not to be fully aware himself of the possible conclusions of the course of imitation he’d set himself: either he would justify absolutism, reversing history’s judgment of Edward II and changing the end of Edward’s life story in his own life story, or Edward’s tragedy must happen twice. He played the strange game courageously, perhaps partly because only toward the end did he come to the full realization that he could lose.
Richard was still in firm control in 1397, when the Commons complained about the extravagance of his court and, with typical arrogance, the king not only forced them to abject apology but demanded and got from the Lords a resolution that exciting the Commons or anyone else to reform of the royal household was treasonable. His success in bullying parliament led him further, to carefully designed attack and the ultimate destruction of the whole work of Gloucester’s Merciless Parliament of 1388. Gloucester inevitably began moving now toward his sometime friend, sometime enemy, the thoroughly unreconstructed earl of Arundel. He made furious attacks on the king’s French policy and quietly split with his moderate older brother, Gaunt. Rumors reached Richard that Gloucester was hatching a plot to kill him—the rumors were almost certainly true—and, brooding on the fate of Edward II, Richard decided to strike.
He managed the thing with his usual flair. He issued invitations to a splendid banquet. Gloucester pleaded illness; Arundel stayed home in his fortified castle at Reigate. Old Warwick, who accepted, was received with great cordiality, taken by the hand and royally comforted, and only after the typically Ricardian magnificent dinner clapped in irons and conducted to the Tower. A little later the king took Arundel by treachery, exactly as his enemies would later take Richard. (Like the earlier battle of Edward II and his barons, it was all to be a chess game of mirror moves.) Richard swore a solemn oath before Arundel’s brother, the archbishop, that Arundel would suffer no bodily harm if he agreed to come to Richard; when Arundel appeared, the king seized him and locked him up in Carisbrooke Castle. Then he went after Gloucester. With a small army of household troops, Londoners and friends, he rode to Pleshey by night, and when Gloucester, like the king’s son he was, came to meet him, in procession with the clerks and priests of his newly founded collegiate church, Richard told him that since Gloucester had refused to heed his invitation he’d come down here to fetch him. With dignity, Gloucester asked for mercy, that quality Geoffrey Chaucer had always insisted “renneth soone in gentil herte.” The king replied that Gloucester would be shown just so much mercy as Gloucester himself had shown Sir Simon Burley.
When parliament met, September 17, 1397, it was publicly proclaimed that the three lords were being held on a charge of treason. Soon afterward Arundel’s brother Thomas, archbishop of Canterbury, was added to the list. It was a strange parliament for an enlightened place like England. Armed men were everywhere, since the king had invited magnates friendly to himself to bring their armed retinues for his protection, and he’d ordered out his own retainers and yeomen, including the famous Cheshire archers. Westminster Hall was not available, so the estates gathered in a temporary building in the palace yard. Inside it a throne of unusual height had been erected, with space on each side for the appellants and the accused, and space in front for the estates. The archbishop of Canterbury was impeached for his part in the proceedings of 1386-88, found guilty “by notoriety,” and sentenced to forfeiture of his temporalities and to perpetual banishment. Then Gaunt, as Steward of England, began the crown’s appeal against the three magnates.
He informed Arundel of the charges against him and added, according to one chronicler, “Since parliament has accused you, you deserve according to your own idea of law to be condemned without answer.” Arundel’s attempts at self-defense were overwhelmed when, in imitation of the action of the Gloucester parliament in its condemnation of Nicholas Brembre, the present appellants threw their gauntlets at Arundel’s feet. By command of the king, the lords temporal, and the spokesman for the clergy, Lancaster declared him guilty of treason and pronounced the usual sentence, which the king immediately mitigated by substituting the ax for hanging, drawing, and quartering. Arundel was escorted by the king’s Cheshire archers to Tower Hill, and there, in the presence of the two Hollands and his own son-in-law, the earl of Nottingham, beheaded.
Gloucester’s case, from the king’s point of view, was a touchy one. He had always had support in parliament and was famous for his ability to swing men’s opinions; moreover, though he was certainly guilty, in Gaunt’s mind, of treason, he was Gaunt’s beloved younger brother. The odds that parliament would convict him were high, but perhaps not as high as the king might have wished; and the king’s purpose, which was partly, of course, personal revenge for the lawless murder of his closest friends in 1388, but also partly, and just basically, an impersonal, visibly legal demonstration of the power of the crown (power Gloucester more than anyone else in 1388 had sought to diminish), would be a purpose unfulfilled if Gloucester escaped conviction. Thus it was that when Gloucester was ordered to appear, word came that he was dead already. He was probably murdered, conceivably without Richard’s knowledge, perhaps by his former ally Nottingham, now a staunch member of the royalist party. In eccentric but technically legal proceedings he was posthumously convicted of treason and condemned to forfeiture of his estates.
Then old Warwick was brought in. He offered no defense, but, according to the chronicler Adam of Usk, “like a wretched old woman, he made confession of all contained [in the appeal], wailing and weeping and whining that he had done all, traitor that he was, submitting himself in all things to the king’s grace.” He was sentenced to the full penalty of treason, which th
e king commuted to perpetual banishment on the Isle of Man. According to Walsingham, Warwick’s confession was dearer to King Richard than all the lands of Arundel and Gloucester.
Within the next few months the king managed, again with great show of legality, to rid himself of lesser enemies by banishing them and, in some cases, seizing their property, which he redistributed among his supporters or attached to the crown. Among others of his lesser former enemies, he found it necessary to deal with the duke of Norfolk and Gaunt’s son, Henry, who was by now duke of Hereford and a famous naval hero, a handsome young man nearly as popular with ordinary Englishmen as Richard’s father the Black Prince had been. It was, for Richard, a difficult situation. Henry, on his father’s advice, had repeated to parliament a conversation between Norfolk and himself, in which Norfolk had urged him to strike at the king, telling him that Richard was out to take revenge on them as he’d taken revenge on Arundel and the rest. Norfolk insisted that the treasonous suggestion came from Henry.
Richard hesitated, racking his wits for a reasonable and politically safe solution. He formed a committee to study the matter and work for a compromise, but both Hereford and Norfolk were stubborn, each insisting that the other was a traitor and a liar. Richard ordered a judicial battle between them, then realized that that was no good either, since if Norfolk won, the victory might be construed as giving credit to his charges against the king, and if Henry won, the victory would give further honor to a magnate popular with the people and potentially threatening to Richard. And so as soon as the two arrived for battle, Richard, almost certainly on Gaunt’s advice, abruptly canceled the combat and banished Gaunt’s son for ten years, Norfolk for life. Richard had of course merely postponed his ugly problem.
Nevertheless, it seemed that at least for the moment the king had won his fight for power, had done it legally, reinforcing traditional Anglo-Saxon respect for rule by law, and had done it, considering the temper of the times, with remarkable moderation. If he’d been able to use that power well, English history might have followed a very different course. But while Richard was a better man than most historians have allowed, fate was against him.
Though a remarkable number of kings and Popes of the fourteenth century were clinically madmen, it is probably not true, as I’ve said, that Richard was one, though he was certainly disturbed. Walsingham is a hostile chronicler, but we may perhaps believe of a man like Richard—an idealist and political visionary, hypersensitive aesthetic, violently emotional, secretive, treacherous when necessary, but also deeply religious—that his sleep was broken by Arundel’s ghost, so that he was afraid to go to bed without a guard of Cheshire archers, though not, as Walsingham claims, three hundred of them; most people in the Middle Ages seem to have believed, at least tentatively, in ghosts. And it is probably true, though no evidence of insanity, that for fear that the people might venerate Arundel as a martyr, just as Thomas of Lancaster had been venerated in the time of Edward II, Richard had Arundel’s tomb removed.
But Richard’s streak of paranoia was probably no more than fear of real enemies and betrayal-prone friends—like his beloved cousin the duke of Aumerele, who would later trick him into dawdling in Ireland, giving Henry time to snuff out resistance to the revolution. As for his alleged megalomania, Richard made magnificence one strong element of his policy. As Professor Jones has shown, Richard’s absolutist theory, like that of Henry VIII (or that of Pedro the Cruel), required that the king be held a virtual god. The peace of the kingdom depended on the king’s absolute control of the magnates with their huge private armies. That in turn required that the king have the greatest court and army in the land, and that his person be respected as holy, even magical—hence Richard’s emphasis on symbolism, pageantry, ceremony; his elevated throne; his claim to have rediscovered a sacred relic in Canterbury with which he could cure illness. It was policy, not megalomania, that led him to attach his crown firmly to religious awe and to the power of the arts. But having said all that, we may as well admit that he did have some inclination toward megalomania.
But whether one calls it policy or madness, it is a fact that Richard’s seeming megalomania kept pace with his seeming gloomy paranoia. Having established that it was treason to demand reform of the royal household, he increased his retinue to vast proportions, spent more than any earlier English king on pomp and pageantry—tournaments, masques, banquets, and new construction of palaces, castles, and other crown works, including Westminster Abbey. According to Adam Usk, King Richard would on feast days sit on a lofty throne from dinner time to vespers, speaking to no one but watching his courtiers like an eagle. Anyone who caught his eye was to genuflect at once. And Walsingham tells of the king’s dependence on soothsayers and other psychics who told him (and, through him, the people) that he would one day be the greatest of all princes in the world. It’s disconcerting, to say the least, to imagine Geoffrey Chaucer giving readings at such a court, the proud, glaring king on his high throne, friars and soothsayers in obsequious attendance. What was the king’s reaction, or the reaction of the audience, to the poet’s humorous, glancing attacks on psychic mumbo jumbo or the chicanery of astrologers—in the Franklin’s Tale, for instance:
He hym remembred that, upon a day,
At Orliens in studie a book he say [saw]
Of magyk natureel, which his felawë,
That was that tyme a bacheler of lawë,
Al were he ther to lerne another craft,
Haddë prively upon his desk ylaft; [left]
Which book spak muchel of the operaciouns
Touchyngë the eighte and twenty mansiouns
That longen to the moone, and swich folyë
As in ourë dayës is nat worth a flyë,—
For hooly chirches feith in ourë bilevë
Ne suffreth noon illusioun us to grevë.
How personally did the king take the forthright criticism, in the Clerk’s Tale, of the fictitious young marquis who thinks of nothing but hunting and hawking (always a major complaint against Richard) and refuses to worry about engendering an heir, to his people’s great sorrow and distress?
Now, in the late nineties, Richard’s arrogance was all but intolerable as, despite growing opposition, he sought to make himself the absolute law of England. He called Geoffrey Chaucer out of retirement to travel throughout the land, probably to muster support for Richard, and Richard himself began to move through England with his army, terrorizing his enemies to prove to them his strength. Soon the Cheshire guard was no paranoic precaution: he had come to be hated.
On February 3, 1399, Richard lost the protection of John of Gaunt. The catastrophe was not merely that with Gaunt’s death, at fifty-eight, Richard had lost his chief supporter and apologist. Gaunt’s holdings in rents and lands were enormous, and added to those of his son and heir, the king’s old enemy, Henry Bolingbroke, duke of Hereford, they would outweigh the power of the crown. Given Richard’s theory of monarchy, the problem was flatly unsolvable. In desperation he changed Bolingbroke’s banishment to life and blocked his inheritance of his father’s lands, but kept the Lancaster holdings intact for Henry or his heir to sue for later. It was the most moderate course available. Henry returned to England with an invasion force, and headed toward his ancestral castle Pontefract, where huge numbers of the common people joined him, along with the greatest magnates of the north.
Richard, away in Ireland, as convinced as ever of his divine authority, may well have felt confident even now. He had spoken so long and so emphatically of his absolute rights and protection by heaven, he had prayed so ardently, like Edward II before him, and he had so often witnessed his own saintly ability to cure the sick (or so he and others of his time were persuaded), that he may well have felt himself invulnerable, as Shakespeare would later picture him, and may have said something in substance not much different from the words Shakespeare gives him in his famous speech to Bolingbroke’s supporter the earl of Northumberland:
If we be not [king], show
us the hand of God
That hath dismiss’d us from our stewardship;
For well we know, no hand of blood and bone
Can grip the sacred handle of our sceptre
Unless he do profane, steal, or usurp.
And though you think that all, as you have done,
Have torn their souls by turning them from us,
And we are barren and bereft of friends,
Yet know, my master, God omnipotent,
Is mustering in his clouds on our behalf
Armies of pestilence; and they shall strike
Your children yet unborn and unbegot,
That lift your vassal hands against my head
And threat the glory of my precious crown.
Tell Bolingbroke—for yon methinks he stands—
That every stride he makes upon my land
Is dangerous treason: he is come to open
The purple testament of bleeding war;
But ere the crown he looks for live in peace,
Ten thousand bloody crowns of mothers’ sons
Shall ill become the flower of England’s face,
Change the complexion of her maid-pale peace
To scarlet indignation, and bedew
Her pastures’ grass with faithful English blood.
But Bolingbroke did indeed stride on, God averted His eyes, and Richard, cut off, betrayed by friends, was soon beaten.
In the official legend concocted by Henry, the king “with cheerful countenance” volunteered to resign and expressed a desire that Henry succeed him. He was, according to that legend, a creature of “incalculable moods”—as indeed he was. It was said that he alternately wept and joked while his kingdom slipped from his fingers. In fact, it was his overconfidence rather than vacillation or weakness that destroyed him. When the earl of Northumberland swore on the Host that the king’s majesty and power should not be disturbed if he went inland to treat with the rebels, the king believed him and said, pale with rage, “Some of them I will flay alive.”3 (He had earlier threatened to put Henry to death in such a manner that it would be talked about even in Turkey.) Richard met Henry at Flint and learned he was the rebel army’s prisoner. From there he was taken to London, where Henry was applauded as a conquering hero and Richard was hooted through the streets as he was hauled to the Tower. Soon afterward, inevitably, since a jailed king means ceaseless plotting and bloodshed, he was put to death in the dungeons of Pontefract Castle.