To Richard, however, these cheers carried a note of menace. He had never liked his cousin or trusted him; if he were to win the coming contest, he would be the most popular man in the kingdom. On the other hand - since the outcome of all such contests was generally believed to be divinely ordained - a victory for the Duke of Norfolk would be taken by many as a sign that his charges were justified. It followed that neither should be allowed to win; besides, why should he, the King, who possessed neither the physique nor the temperament necessary to wield a lance, preside over what promised to be a dazzling exhibition of military skill? Without warning, he suddenly flung down his staff — a sign that the contest must stop before it had begun. There
1 According at least to Shakespeare. Holinshed is less certain of the date.
would be no trial of strength; neither of the contestants would be seen to have God on their side:
Let them lay by their helmets and their spears,
And both return back to their chairs again . . .
For that our kingdom's earth should not be soil'd
With that dear blood which it hath fostered;
And for our eyes do hate the dire aspect
Of civil wounds plough'd up with neighbours' sword,
And for we think the eagle-winged pride
Of sky-aspiring and ambitious thoughts,
With rival-hating envy, set on you
To wake our peace, which in our country's cradle
Draws the sweet infant breath of gentle sleep . . .
Therefore we banish you our territories.
Bolingbroke was exiled for ten years; Mowbray for life.
For all those present, the sense of anticlimax must have been almost unbearable; the King's popularity, such as it was, had sustained another devastating blow. From Richard's own point of view, however, his decision was by then the only possible one. As to the discrepancy between the two sentences, the most probable explanation is that he would have sentenced both men to perpetual banishment if he dared to do so, but that Bolingbroke was too popular and too powerful. He may also have spared a thought for John of Gaunt, to whom he owed much. It is worth remembering that only six months later, with Gaunt safely in his grave, the King sentenced his son to banishment yet again - this time for life.
Richard's actions at Coventry suggest, on the whole, a considerable degree of wisdom and moderation; by the beginning of 1399, however, both these qualities seem to have deserted him. In his progresses through the country he was now invariably accompanied by his 400 Cheshire archers, together with considerable numbers of knights and squires retained in specific locations; his taste for pomp and ostentation was becoming ever more uncontrolled, as was his expenditure on buildings, clothes, furniture and luxuries of every kind. Such things could legitimately be paid for only by a successful war; since England had long been at peace, there was but one alternative - to bleed the country white. All those who had been in any way implicated in the events of ten years before were ordered to seek individual pardons before mid-summer; and these pardons did not come cheaply. Moreover the seventeen counties - they included London and more than half the entire population - which were said to have supported the original Appellants were obliged to pay up to £1,000 each to regain the King's favour. At worst it was blackmail; at best, protection money. Meanwhile Richard maintained his old habit of demanding forced loans, both from communities and from individuals. By the time he left on his second expedition to Ireland in May 1399 he owed £6,570 to the people of London, £5,550 to seventy-one other cities and towns, £3,180 to the Church and £1,220 to thirty-six individual commoners. Hostility to him was no longer confined to a few discontented nobles and their followers; the whole country was now ripe for revolution.
On 3 February 1399 John of Gaunt died at the Bishop of Ely's palace in Holborn, in his sixtieth year. He had made, so far as we can tell, no protest at the murder of his brother Gloucester - a fact which Shakespeare considers important enough to warrant a scene to itself (I.ii) — nor at the banishment of his son. There is certainly no documentary justification for his robust yet moving farewell to Bolingbroke (I.iii) after the King had pronounced sentence; as we have seen, he was not even present at the lists. But then Shakespeare's Gaunt - the grand old man of his time, full of years and wisdom, the father of his country whose dying speech on England (II.i.4off.) figured until half a century ago in every school anthology — bears little enough resemblance to the picture we are given by Holinshed, who sees him as just another turbulent and ambitious troublemaker; more powerful, perhaps, because he is the King's senior uncle, but otherwise no better than his fellow nobles. Alternative sources for Shakespeare's character have been suggested: Froissart is one, and an anonymous play, Woodstock, built around Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester, is another. But the arguments are unconvincing. By far the likeliest possibility is that he is the playwright's own creation, the ideal - and dramatically necessary -counterpart to the vapid, feckless King.
For Richard, Gaunt's death spelt the beginning of the end. Despite their many differences, the Duke of Lancaster had done everything in his power to hold the kingdom together and maintain the prestige of the crown; his loss was a bitter blow, not least because it instantly polarized the situation - the King on the one side, Henry Bolingbroke on the other. Not that a reconciliation between them was even now impossible. Had Richard recalled Henry from exile, as many believed he would; had he permitted him to attend the funeral of the father he loved; had he ensured his proper inheritance of the immense estates that were his birthright, then war might yet have been avoided and England spared the second deposition of a monarch in less than a century. Alas, he did none of these things. Far from recalling Henry, he increased his period of banishment to life; and while he allowed several of the minor bequests and provisions of Gaunt's will, he ordered the vast majority of the Lancastrian estates - those which should rightly have devolved upon his cousin - to be divided among his own chief supporters, the Dukes of Exeter, Albemarle and Surrey. To every landowner in the kingdom, the lesson was plain: in Richard's England that most fundamental law, the law of inheritance, could no longer be relied on.
By this time there could no longer be any doubt that the King's mental balance was seriously disturbed. He surrounded himself with soothsayers and charlatans who flattered him shamelessly and prophesied extraordinary achievements. On feast days, we are told, he would sit on a high throne for hours at a time, watching all who passed below him; any man who caught his eye was expected to fall to his knees. When he left the palace, only his Cheshire archers protected him from violence at the hands of his subjects. Then, sometime in the spring of 13 99, there came grave news from Ireland. Some nine months previously the King's Lieutenant there, the Earl of March, had been ambushed and killed; now it was reported that two of the Irish kings, O'Neill and MacMurrough, heedless of their oaths of 1394, had risen in open rebellion, which was spreading rapidly. Immediate action was called for if the country were not to be abandoned altogether. Inevitably, it would be expensive; but a sale of John of Gaunt's movable possessions - his gold, jewels and works of art, to say nothing of the furniture from his many palaces and castles - would pay for it many times over.
So Richard did not hesitate. His first Irish expedition had been a triumph; why should not his second be even more so? His advisers tried to point out that his departure from England at such a time would be an open invitation to his enemies — perhaps to the furious Bolingbroke himself; but he refused to listen. Surrey was appointed Lieutenant in place of March and sent off at once. The hopelessly incompetent Edmund, Duke of York, was once again appointed Keeper of the Realm, supported by the three chief ministers of state - the Chancellor Edmund Stafford, Bishop of Exeter; the Treasurer the Earl of Wiltshire; and Richard Clifford, Bishop of Worcester, Keeper of the Privy Seal - together with the three prominent royalists Sir John Bushey, Sir William Bagot and Sir Henry Green. In the last week in May the King made a hurried pilgrimage to Canterbur
y and held his last Garter feast at Windsor. Then, accompanied by the Dukes of Exeter and Albemarle, the Earls of Worcester and Salisbury and — prudently - the sons of both Bolingbroke and the murdered Gloucester, he himself set sail for Ireland. It was to prove the greatest mistake of his life.
Henry Bolingbroke, now Duke of Lancaster, had spent the previous nine months in Paris, where he had been joined by the young Earl of Arundel - still mourning his executed father - and the latter's uncle, the Archbishop. All three were in close touch with developments across the Channel. Froissart's story that Archbishop Arundel was a secret emissary of the malcontents is palpably untrue - he had been in exile for two years already — but his nephew may well have been entrusted with a message that Bolingbroke should lose no more time. The Duke, in any case, needed little persuading: his resentment now intensified by Richard's disposal of his inheritance and recent intervention to prevent his marriage to a cousin of the French King, he was even more firmly resolved to overthrow him. He was also aware that once he were to raise his standard on English soil he would find no shortage of allies. Towards the end of June, therefore, knowing that Richard was safely in Ireland, he and the Arundels embarked at Boulogne in three small ships and with what Adam of Usk estimates as 'scarce three hundred followers'. After a brief halt at Pevensey, they sailed north and eventually landed at Ravenscar, between Whitby and Scarborough. Here in the Lancastrian heartland he could be certain of a warm welcome; when he reached Doncaster, on or about Sunday 13 July, he was joined by Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, his son Harry Hotspur and their cousin and rival magnate along the Scottish borders, Ralph Nevill, Earl of Westmorland, each of them with a numerous following. From that moment on the Duke of Lancaster was no longer just a nobleman with a grievance; he was the leader of a rebellion. Nevertheless, according to a story later spread by the Percys and nowhere else confirmed, he there and then swore a solemn oath that he had come only to claim his rightful inheritance; he had no designs on the throne, which Richard would continue to occupy for the rest of his life.
Meanwhile the common people, too, flocked to his banner, as well they might - for his easy charm was a far cry from Richard's cold and haughty majesty.
. . . How he did seem to dive into their hearts
With humble and familiar courtesy;
What reverence he did throw away on slaves,
Wooing poor craftsmen with the craft of smiles...
Off goes his bonnet to an oyster-wench;
A brace of draymen bid God speed him well,
And had the tribute of his supple knee,
With 'Thanks, my countrymen, my loving friends' -
As were our England in reversion his,
And he our subjects' next degree in hope.1
Such were their numbers, indeed, and so rapidly did they increase as Bolingbroke continued his march through Derby, Leicester, Kenilworth, Evesham and Gloucester to Berkeley Castle,2 that they proved impossible to feed: the vast majority were sent back to their homes.
The Duke of York, as Keeper of the Realm, was his usual indecisive and ineffectual self. Now fifty-eight, a mild, gentle figure who, according to Holinshed, 'wished that the state of the commonwealth might have been redressed without losse of any man's life', he had certainly given Richard less trouble than either Gaunt or Gloucester, if only because he was incapable of any kind of initiative. The least able of all Edward Ill's sons, at this moment of crisis he seems to have limited his activity to transferring the government from London — the loyalty of whose citizens could never be trusted - to St Albans, mobilizing what troops he could and sending urgent messages to the King to return at once. He and his council then headed westward to meet him, only to find
I.iv.25-28, 31-36.
He did not cross the Cotswolds ('Cotshall) as Shakespeare suggests.
the rebel army bearing down upon them. The Earl of Wiltshire, with Bushey and Green - Sir William Bagot had already fled to Cheshire -made for Bristol to organize resistance there; but York and the rest of his colleagues sought refuge at Berkeley - an inauspicious choice, perhaps, since it was the scene of Edward II's murder in 1327 - where, when the Duke of Lancaster arrived on 27 July, they instantly submitted. (The conversation between Lancaster and York in Il.iii is of course invented.) The two then hurried on together to Bristol, where York was obliged to order the surrender of the castle. Wiltshire - who, somewhat surprisingly, appears nowhere in Shakespeare's play -Bushey and Green were arrested and summarily executed, their heads being sent to adorn the gates of London, York and Bristol respectively.1
Two days before, on the 27th, the King had left Ireland. Despite -or perhaps partly because of — an enormous retinue, he had achieved nothing; the 'rough rug-headed kerns', whose guerrilla tactics had caused havoc among his troops on their march from Waterford through Wicklow to Dublin, had refused either to submit or to meet the army in pitched Battle. At Dublin Richard had offered a reward for the capture of MacMurrough; but there were no takers, and he soon retraced his steps to Waterford, where the news of Lancaster's invasion awaited him. At once he gave orders for departure; unfortunately he listened to the treacherous advice of Albemarle, who had seen clearly enough how things were going and had secretly cast in his lot with Lancaster. Realizing that the longer Richard could be kept out of England the better, he cleverly persuaded the King to split his army, sending Salisbury ahead with an advance guard to raise more troops in North Wales while he himself with the rest of his men took the direct route across the Irish Sea.
It was a disastrous decision. The King landed at Haverfordwest and lost several days in an unsuccessful attempt to find reinforcements in Glamorgan, before jettisoning his by now totally demoralized army with most of his baggage and hastening north towards Chester, which he believed as always to vbe loyal. But he had wasted too much time. Bolingbroke had preceded him; and when Richard met Salisbury at Conway Castle on 11 August it was to learn that the Duke of Lancaster
1. There is no evidence to support Bolingbroke's castigation of Bushey and Green in Ill.i, with its mysterious suggestion that the latter had 'made a divorce' between Richard and Queen Isabelle.
was already in possession of the city, where he had just executed the royal representative. And there was worse news to come: Salisbury's northern army, believing widespread rumours that the King was already dead, had melted away. Gone too were Richard's erstwhile friends Worcester and - though in the play he remains loyal - Albemarle. Even now the situation was not entirely hopeless. There were friendly ships in the harbour, in any one of which he could have slipped away - to Ireland, to his native Bordeaux or even to the court of his father-in-law in Paris. But he no longer knew whom to trust; and when Northumberland and Archbishop Arundel appeared at the gates and requested an audience, he granted it at once.
The terms offered by Henry Bolingbroke seemed reasonable enough. The Lancastrian inheritance was to be restored; Bolingbroke's claim to the hereditary Stewardship of England was to be submitted to a full Parliament, free of royal control; and five unnamed counsellors were to be surrendered for trial. Northumberland - although, significantly, not Arundel - swore on the host that the King should retain his royal dignity and power, and that the Duke of Lancaster would observe the terms as agreed; and Richard voluntarily left Conway with about twenty of his men to meet his cousin before returning, as he thought, by easy stages to London. Alas, he had given his enemies more credit than they deserved. Some six miles from the mouth of the river Conway the coastal path passes over a precipitous headland named Penmaenrhos. Here he fell into an ambush - almost certainly set by Northumberland himself, though the faithless Earl subsequently denied all knowledge of it - and was carried off to Flint Castle, where Henry was waiting. Though still King, he was now a prisoner of the Duke of Lancaster, with no alternative but to do his bidding:
What must the king do now? Must he submit?
The king shall do it. Must he be depos'd?
The king shall, be contented. Must he
lose The name of king?
A God's name, let it go.1
On Henry's orders he signed writs for the summoning of Parliament, to meet at Westminster on 30 September. He was then taken through
1. III.iii.143-6.
Lichfield, Coventry and St Albans to London, where he was put in the Tower to await his conqueror's pleasure.
In the scene at Flint Castle, Shakespeare has Bolingbroke kneel before Richard and protest that he seeks only his inheritance - 'My gracious lord, I come but for mine own.' This was certainly true at the time of his landing in Yorkshire; since then, however, he had come to see that Richard could no longer continue as King. Not only, if he regained his authority, would he unquestionably take his revenge; but in the past two years his rule had been that of a tyrant, showing a degree of cruelty and faithlessness more characteristic of an oriental despot than of a King of England. The country desperately needed a strong, enlightened ruler who would govern responsibly with the advice of the old nobility rather than a bunch of self-seeking favourites. Legally, the heir apparent was Edmund Mortimer, Earl of March, great-great-grandson of Edward III through his son Lionel, Duke of Clarence and Lionel's daughter Philippa; he was, however, just eight years old. The Duke of Lancaster's claim was admittedly only through Lionel's younger brother, John of Gaunt; but his descent from the old King was entirely in the male line, he was a generation older, and his reception as he had made his way across England from Ravenscar to Gloucester had left him in no doubt of the strength of his support. Whenever he may have taken his final decision - and whether or not he had sworn an oath at Doncaster — there seems little doubt that by the time Richard was delivered into his hands his mind was made up.
Shakespeare's Kings Page 14