Bridge. The mob had then burst into the chamber of the King's mother, leaving her in a state of nervous collapse. Her bed had been smashed to pieces and one or two of the intruders, she claimed, had even attempted familiarities with her, although she had not been seriously harmed. After their departure she had been taken by boat to Baynard's Castle on the riverside at Blackfriars,1 where her son subsequently joined her.
The rebels from Essex and Hertfordshire now seem to have been satisfied; at any rate they were to give no further trouble. Wat Tyler and the men of Kent, on the other hand, remained to be reckoned with; and on the following day, Saturday 15 June, after attending mass at Westminster Abbey, the King decided on a further confrontation -this time at Smithfield, then as now the principal cattle market of the capital. It was plain from the outset, however, that the meeting would not be as easy as that at Mile End. For a week now Tyler had enjoyed a position of undisputed authority over his men. Success - and bloodshed - had gone to his head. He approached the King arrogantly, not on foot in the manner of a subject, but on horseback, determined to pick a quarrel. His demands, too, went a good deal further than those made by the men of Essex; they included the confiscation of all Church estates, the abolition of all lordships save that of the King himself and of all bishoprics but one. Conciliatory as always, Richard pretended not to notice his insolence and assured him that all his demands would be met; but this time, perhaps, he gave in a little too readily, arousing Tyler's suspicions and making him more overbearing than ever. As the conversation continued, tempers among the King's followers began to run high; and at last the Mayor of London, Walworth, able to bear it no longer, barked out an order. Immediately a group of his men set upon Tyler and dragged him from his horse; no sooner was he on the ground than one of the attendant squires, Standish by name, cut him down with his broadsword.
Here was a moment of supreme danger. Seeing the fate of their leader, the rebels surged forward. The royal party was outnumbered many times over, and could easily have been massacred. Many of those
1. Baynard's Castle was destroyed by the Great Fire in 1666, except for a single turret which survived until 1720. It was thoroughly excavated in 1972-4, but the findings were of little interest to any but archaeologists.
facing them had longbows, and according to one chronicler the arrows had already started to fly. It was the King once again who saved the situation. Holding up his hand for silence, he addressed the mob in a measured, reasonable tone. What more, he asked, did they want? He was their King - they had no other - and he had granted all their requests. Why did they not now hold their peace? Gradually the tumult died down; in a short time, too, Walworth - who had hurried back to the city for armed assistance - returned with a volunteer force which quickly surrounded the insurgents. Richard, however, was determined to avoid any punitive measures. Tyler's head was substituted for Sudbury's on London Bridge, but all his followers were pardoned.
There was little doubt among the King's men that they owed their lives to his courage and presence of mind. He himself, however, was anxious to reward the leaders for their loyalty. There and then in Clerkenwell Fields, he drew his sword and knighted Walworth and two other faithful Londoners who had remained firmly at his side. Only then did he return to Baynard's Castle, where his anguished mother awaited him.
The Peasants' Revolt had lasted less than a week. It had put an end to the hated poll tax, but apart from that it had achieved nothing - at least so far as those who took part in it were concerned. As peace was restored, so gradually was the King's confidence; he began to regret the readiness with which he had granted the insurgents' demands. When in Essex on 23 June a delegation asked for confirmation of his promises, he is said to have replied cuttingly: 'Villeins ye are and villeins ye shall remain.' On 2 July in Chelmsford he went further still, announcing his formal revocation of the pardons 'lately granted in haste'; and a day or two later he rode in state to St Albans, where he presided over a tribunal at which fifteen of the local ringleaders, including John Ball, were condemned to death.
The treatment of the offenders was not, by the standards of the time, unduly savage. There were no tortures, no forced confessions, no mass reprisals on innocent populations, no condemnations without honest attempts at a fair trial. A surprising number of those implicated received light sentences or were acquitted altogether. On 30 August the King declared an end to all arrests and executions. One fact, however, could not be concealed: he had broken his word. Nowadays we accept that promises made under duress are not legally binding, and it is difficult to see what Richard could have done, at Mile End or at Smithfield, other than he in fact did. In the fourteenth century, however, such arguments had little effect. If the King were to be properly respected and revered by his subjects, it was essential that he should be seen to be a man of good faith. In this Richard had failed, and it was a failure that would not be forgotten. Nor was it mitigated by the support of Parliament which, while confirming the general amnesty the following November, formally ratified the revocation. By the end of the year none the less, it was as if the most serious crisis to be faced by an English King since the Norman Conquest had never occurred at all.
Or almost. Although they may have been only half conscious of it themselves, both sides had been taught a lesson. The landlords, from the high aristocracy down to the humblest of country squires, had been forcibly reminded of how much they relied on those who tilled their soil and tended their livestock. No longer, it was clear, could these men be taken for granted. The peasantry, too, had learnt much. Villeins they might be, and villeins they might technically remain for the better part of another century; but their lot was steadily improving, and as it did so they gradually came to understand the nature of their dissatisfaction and how it might be allayed. United, they possessed formidable power. Their first attempt to exercise that power had been unsuccessful, but only because they had been foolish enough to trust in the good faith of their King. It was a mistake they would not make again.
3
Favourites and Appellants
[1381-1388]
GAUNT. A thousand flatterers sit within thy crown,
Whose compass is no bigger than thy head . . . O, had thy grandsire with a prophet's eye Seen how his son's son should destroy his sons, From forth thy reach he would have laid thy shame, Deposing thee before thou wert possess'd, Which art possess'd now to depose thyself. ..
KING RICHARD II
The events of the summer of 1381 had brought Richard a long way towards manhood; and the process was completed six months later -on 14 January 13 82, a week after his fifteenth birthday - by his marriage to an imperial Princess, Anne of Bohemia. Dynastic marriages had long been one of the principal tools of diplomacy, and this particular one had been strongly encouraged by Pope Urban, who saw in it the first step towards a great European league against his rival Clement; in England, on the other hand, it had met with considerable opposition. Daughter of Charles IV, King of Bohemia and Holy Roman Emperor,1 by his fourth wife Elizabeth of Pomerania, and granddaughter of the blind John of Luxemburg who had fought so courageously if quixotically at Crecy,2 Anne did not immediately find a place in English hearts. If the tomb that she shares with her husband in Westminster Abbey is
The line of Holy Roman Emperor - chief defenders of Christendom in the West - had come down in an unbroken line since Charlemagne.
anything to go by - and tomb effigies normally tend to flatter their subjects rather than the reverse - she was a plain, rather pudding-faced girl whose family, despite its nobility, was by no means as rich as might have been expected and who brought her husband no dowry at all; indeed, before the contract could be signed he had been obliged to offer her brother a loan of £15,000. She was certainly a far cry from her principal rival, the beautiful and dashing Caterina, one of the thirty-eight children of Bernabo Visconti, ruler of Milan, who had offered Richard 'an inestimable quantity of gold' to take his daughter as queen. True, the Bohemian marriage effectiv
ely detached the House of Luxemburg from its old alliance with the Valois of France, while simultaneously bringing Richard, by virtue of his new position as the Emperor's son-in-law, a welcome measure of international prestige; but such considerations cut little ice with Anne's prospective subjects.
Fortunately, Richard loved her: not perhaps at the start - when they were both little more than children and he was dominated by his infinitely stronger mother - but increasingly after Joan's death in 1385; and as time went on Anne herself gained a measure of popularity. Meanwhile her numerous and highly cosmopolitan following revolutionized life at court. The households of Edward III and the Black Prince had been of a pronounced military character, with little formality or protocol; women were expected to know their place. With Richard, all this was changed. The military element disappeared altogether; in its place came a new atmosphere of culture and sophistication, such as had never before been seen in England — an atmosphere of which, we may be sure, both the King's father and grandfather would have mightily disapproved. There was also a strong feminine element - with ladies not only from Austria and Bohemia but from France and Germany, and even occasionally from Hungary and Poland, no longer content with their embroidery but playing on instruments, singing, and dancing to the most fashionable steps imported from the Continent.
With these developments came a fresh interest in two other aspects of the new douceur de vivre: cooking and dress. 'The best and royallest viander of all Christian Kings', Richard presided over what was generally agreed to be the most sumptuous table in Europe. Among the 196
recipes in his court cookery book, The Forme of Cury, which has fortunately come down to us,1 we search in vain for references to the roasted oxen, haunches of venison and shoulders of mutton which represent, in the public imagination, so large and daunting a part of the royal menus. Instead, the meat seems almost invariably to have been reduced to mince or pate, its natural taste obscured by vast quantities of sugar and exotic spices. For the first time, too, much store was set by male sartorial elegance. Previously, except on high ceremonial occasions, dress in England for the King as well as for his subjects had been essentially practical; it is in Richard's reign that we see the birth of fashion, with tailoring developed into an art. Shoulders padded, waists tightly constricted, hose skin-tight, shoes absurdly elongated with pointed toes, hats like turbans: all these were de rigueur for the young men about the court, with the addition in cold weather of the houpelande — a full-length gown with huge sleeves that also fell almost to the ground. Jewellery was everywhere - on belts and collars, sleeves and tunics, worn as badges on the breast or in chains about the neck. In comparison, the women seemed almost drab. As for the King himself, he did not follow the latest fashions; he set them. He is credited, too, with one invention that has survived uninterruptedly to our own day, the handkerchief - 'made', according to his wardrobe account, 'for carrying in his hand to wipe and cleanse his nose.' Another contemporary innovation has also been attributed to him, though whether anyone would nowadays wish to take credit for the invention of the codpiece must remain a matter for speculation.
But Richard was not only a gourmet and a dandy; he was also an intellectual, with a passion for literature. Already by the age of thirteen he was enthusiastically buying books; at the time of his death he is believed to have possessed several dozen volumes of his own - a rare thing in those days, a century before the invention of printing. And he was an active patron of the arts. At his royal banquets, in place of the old minstrels, a new race of court poets — foremost among whom was Geoffrey Chaucer — would declaim their own poems, both in French and English, to the bilingual company; for Richard was almost certainly
1 Presented by Edmund Stafford to Queen Elizabeth I, it later formed part of the Harleian Collection. It was printed for the Society of Antiquaries in 1780. For examples of the recipes — they included minced pheasant, with Greek wine, cinnamon, cloves and ginger - see Gervase Mathew, The Court of Richard II, pp. 23-5.
the first King of England since the Norman Conquest to speak fluent English.
Where he differed most radically from his father and grandfather was in his conception of kingship. For Edward III and the Black Prince a King was above all a warrior, a leader of his armies in battle. When not in the field, his primary duties were those of a statesman and a lawgiver. His crown, and the oil with which he had been anointed, might confer on him a special grace and the right to his subjects' loyalty; but he remained a man like any other, his feet firmly on the ground, approachable to one and all. For Richard, from his earliest years, kings were not as other men. The ceremonial of his coronation — which he never forgot - had convinced him that he was set apart from the rest. He probably knew nothing of the theories prevailing in the Byzantine Empire, where the Emperor was considered the Vice-Gerent of God on earth, standing half-way to heaven, Equal of the Apostles; but he would have wholeheartedly endorsed them. For him, too, the basis of kingship was religious rather than military. Three times, when the need arose, he was to lead his army into battle; yet kings, as he saw them, did not properly belong on the battlefield. Their place was on the throne. He presided from his royal gallery over many a tournament; but he always refused to participate himself, as his father and grandfather had loved to do. The sovereign of England could never risk being publicly unhorsed.
It is perhaps a measure of Richard's vanity that he is the first English King whose true likeness has come down to us — and not with one contemporary portrait, but with two. (Three, if we include the effigy on his tomb.) The earliest is the large panel portrait just inside the west door of Westminster Abbey. Since he is portrayed in what is obviously his early youth, wearing a high gold crown and in full regalia, it may be a coronation portrait, though it is more likely to have been painted some years later. The boy king stares out towards us from the golden ground behind him, his sad and solemn face clean-shaven and framed in thick brown hair, his long, delicate fingers seeming to caress, rather than actually to hold, the orb and sceptre in his hands. His eyes, beneath the high arched eyebrows, are heavy-lidded and tired-looking; but they are also blank and pitiless.
The second picture - the so-called Wilton Diptych, in the National Gallery in London — is itself something very like a jewel. Of its two panels, Richard appears in the one on the left, kneeling in adoration before the Virgin, who stands in the right-hand panel surrounded by a host of blue-robed angels, her child in her arms. His cloak of scarlet is richly embroidered in gold with his emblem of the white hart, which we see again in a badge on his own breast and on those of the angels. Behind him stand two royal saints, Edward the Confessor and Edmund the Martyr, with Stjohn the Baptist. Here, in contrast to the Westminster Abbey portrait, the King's young face is full of animation as he gazes ecstatically at the heavenly pair, his hands — those long, tapering fingers again - extended before him; but the symbolism remains clear. Richard, the King, ranks with the holiest of his predecessors and is vouchsafed a vision of the heavenly glory. Even the angels are proud to bear his badge.
The one virtue immediately noticeable by its absence from both works is that of humility. We should not expect to find it in the Westminster Abbey panel, for this is a state portrait - the earliest, indeed, in the history of English painting - and state portraits are a genre, almost by definition, in which such qualities are rare. In the Wilton Diptych, on the other hand, some suggestion of self-abasement, or at least submissiveness, might not have come amiss; but once again there is no trace. True, Richard is kneeling, but this seems to be little more than a politesse: while the three figures behind him wear expressions of solemnity and awe he looks the Virgin dead in the eye, the suggestion of a smile on his Hps, for all the world as if he were about to engage her in conversation.
Up until Richard's marriage in January 1382 it had seemed that he might eventually make a more than passable king; from that time forward it rapidly became clear that he would be nothing of the kind. Already he was showing signs of a
quite alarming arrogance, self-indulgence and irresponsibility; any attempt to remonstrate with him threw him into a towering rage, provoking streams of insults and abuse that did little to increase the dignity which he was always so anxious to preserve. Thus on the death in December 1381 of Edmund Mortimer, Earl of March, who left as his heir a seven-year-old child, the King ordered his immense estates made over to members of his own household; and this was no isolated instance. Such was his insensate generosity to his favourites that he was obliged to borrow vast sums
from all who would lend. Some of the crown jewels were transferred to Sir Robert Knollys as security for a loan of £2,779; soon afterwards, the crown itself was pledged to the City of London for a further ,£2,000. When Richard Scrope, the Chancellor, attempted to put a brake on these borrowings, Richard dismissed him from office — summarily and quite unconstitutionally, the Chancellorship being a parliamentary appointment rather than a royal one. When Archbishop William Cour-tenay - who had been raised in 1381 to the see of Canterbury — was bold enough to question the King's choice of counsellors, Richard drew his sword and threatened to pierce him through the heart.
Both these incidents clearly indicate the King's greatest weakness of all: his blind devotion to his favourites. Whether or not we are to believe the chronicler Thomas Walsingham's assertions that they were knights 'of Venus rather than Bellona' and that they taught the King effeminate habits, discouraging him from hunting, hawking and other manly sports, there can be no question that they were frivolous, rapacious and empty-headed, leading lives exclusively devoted to pleasure and their own gain. Chief among them at first was Thomas Mowbray, who in 1383 had inherited the earldom of Nottingham. A year older than his master, he seems to have been a pleasant enough young man, though without any particular ability. Richard soon tired of him, and the bonds between them were finally broken in 1385 when Mowbray married the daughter of the King's detested guardian, Richard, Earl of Arundel. He certainly possessed little of the charm of his successor in Richard's affections, Robert de Vere, ninth Earl of Oxford. De Vere was a distant relative of the King, several years his senior, and married to Richard's first cousin Philippa de Coucy, granddaughter of Edward III - a fact which did not prevent him from carrying on a flagrant affair with one of the Queen's Bohemian ladies, Agnes Landskron. This alone should have done much to discredit the allegations of homosexuality between himself and the King that are made by more than one contemporary chronicler; it was plain to all who knew the two men that their tastes did not lie in this particular direction. Nevertheless, Richard's effusive displays of affection and the readiness with which Oxford accepted his presents of money, land and tides would certainly have awoken Gavestonian memories if any of the King's subjects had been old enough to harbour them.
Shakespeare's Kings Page 9