by Simon Schama
Which is, of course, only to say that Richard II was very much an early Renaissance prince in the European mode: someone who prized civility and the patronage of the arts as much as feats of arms and the hunt. And none of his courtly or mystical self-indulgences, nor even his notorious mood-swings between lordly euphoria and manic depression, would have mattered – at least not fatally – had he managed to conduct policy with any kind of sensitivity as to what it took to keep a supportive coalition together. Personal access to the king, even for the most senior nobles, now had to be directed through the gatekeepers, whom the magnates detested as jumped-up parvenus. Still more seriously, Richard’s determination to pursue peace, rather than war, with France seemed to be a unilateral liquidation of the great Plantagenet joint-stock enterprise of conquest, which had so enriched the great dynasts. Had Richard managed to compensate both his military reputation and his nobles by a brilliant campaign in Scotland in 1385 all might still have been well. But unable to lure the Scots to battle in the classic Edwardian style and sensibly reluctant to pursue them north of the Firth of Forth (given the problems with logistics), Richard was reduced to meaningless marches and burnings without ever bringing the war to a decisive resolution.
The smarting sense that someone had to be made accountable for these expensive failures brought together in parliament sections of the political community that normally would have disliked each other much more heartily than any of them disliked the king. At their core were the great magnates of the realm – the Duke of Gloucester, the king’s uncle, and the Earls of Warwick and Arundel. They called themselves the ‘Lords Appellant’, but their ‘appeal’ was a euphemism for the prosecution of men they believed had made Richard deaf to their own counsel – especially to renew the war with France. Their animosity was shared by younger nobles like Gaunt’s son Henry Bolingbroke. Creating so broad a coalition of the exasperated was, on Richard’s part, quite an achievement, and in the autumn of 1387 he reaped the consequences of his obtuseness. Faced with the demand by both houses of parliament that he remove his most unpopular councillors – among them de Vere, de la Pole and the Chief Justice, Robert Tresilian – Richard’s reply was that he would not dismiss so much as a scullion at their request. Very well, was the response, in a tone calculated to remind the king that he was still a minor, a ‘Council of Government’ would now rule, and the three highest officers in the land would be appointed by parliament until the king came to his senses. It was a replay of the mid-thirteenth-century conflict between Henry III and the ‘community of the realm’, but this time there would be no great civil war. Bolstered by his lawyers’ advice that the parliamentary attempts to dictate his choice of councillors infringed his royal prerogatives, Richard attempted to arrest his major adversary, the Earl of Arundel. Instead of cowing the opposition, it solidified it, and Richard’s small royalist army under de Vere disintegrated on contact with the much bigger body of troops put together by the lords. Defenceless, Richard was back where he had been in the crisis of 1381 – in the Tower of London, a virtual captive. The ‘Merciless Parliament’ that followed rubbed salt in the wounds of his hurting pride by dealing brutally with his friends and councillors. Accused of ‘abusing the king’s youth’ and turning him against those who should have been his wise councillors, de Vere and de la Pole managed to escape before they could be taken, but Burley was tried and executed, despite a plea for mercy by Queen Anne on her knees before the Lords Appellant.
This was the second great ordeal of Richard’s reign, and in many ways it was much more damaging to the king than the Peasants’ Revolt. In 1381 he had emerged from the crisis with his authority enhanced. The coup of 1387, on the other hand, was a crushing humiliation. So when Richard, to whom so much had happened, so fast, declared his own majority in 1389, the question he had to be asking himself was: what kind of king could he be? And the answer he came up with would, in the end, ruin him.
Between 1389 and 1397 Richard evidently decided to lead a double-life. To the power-brokers in parliament, especially his uncle John of Gaunt, he promised to be a good boy, to behave, to listen to the sage counsel offered by his elders and betters and to be prudent where he bestowed his patronage. In 1390 a three-day tournament held at Smithfield to mark his coming of age (with stands built by the royal clerk of works Geoffrey Chaucer) was designed as an allegory of harmony. The lances and maces of the competing knights were blunted à la plaisance to signify an entertainment. But to students of signs and symbols, there were already signs of the other Richard, the Richard whose obsession with his own divine appointment would feed on itself. For the first time, the king’s own team of knights appeared in identical livery, all sporting badges with his newly chosen personal device, the white hart. Against them were foreign knights arrayed in a multitude of liveries. But these team badges were something new. Richard’s ‘affinity’ looked for all the world like a miniature private army.
The white hart reappears, significantly crowned and chained, in a mural in Westminster Abbey, as if the king still felt restive about his constraints. Inwardly, though, there was nothing at all inhibited about Richard’s vision of his kingship as the lieutenancy of God, an intercessor and protector of his realm, a saviour in a plague-smitten world of the fallen. English kings could, after all, be saints, and in the Wilton Diptych Richard appears in the company of two of them – St Edmund, the martyr-king of East Anglia, and Edward the Confessor – as well as St John the Baptist. He is directly addressing the choir of angels and the Virgin Mary as a donor. And what he is giving the Virgin, as her dowry no less, is Britannia – the ‘island set in the silver sea’, just visible in the banner. With this special relationship between Richard and the Virgin securely established, the king and the kingdom need fear no harm.
The realm was not in Richard’s gift, however. When Shakespeare put the famous hymn to insularity in the mouth of the dying John of Gaunt, it was to emphasize the God-given autonomy of the island kingdom. It was the land that was sceptred and blessed, not the person of the monarch. But any notion of the sovereign identity of the nation separate from his person would have been incomprehensible, if not heretical, to Richard. What he wanted was reverence, making it clear for the first time in the history of English kingship that he should rather like to be known as ‘majesty’ and ‘highness’. The first self-conscious designer of a royal identity, Richard understood as none of his predecessors had done that ceremony was not just the dressing of royalty; it was at the heart of its mystery and the secret of its power to make men obey. For long periods between vespers and dinner, he sat alone in silence, wearing his crown. Anyone whose eyes met the royal gaze was required directly to cast them down in respect and bend the knee. After Queen Anne, his ‘little scrap of flesh’, died in 1394, Richard became even more rigid in his ceremonial pieties. A great portrait panel of the king, unique hitherto in English history, exactly expressed this autocratic solitude: the formidable, unsmiling god-king, his purple-blue tunic decorated with monogrammed Rs, stared down at the lowly subjects. No wonder Richard found time for ‘geomancy’ and commissioned a book on it, part alchemy, part philosophy, part science. He wanted, apparently, to be England’s magus.
In 1397 the barrier between fantasy and reality broke down in an extraordinary storm of revenge. The pretext was an aristocratic ‘plot’ that Richard claimed to be nipping in the bud. He was thirty years old and childless, and in those circumstances the ambitious did indeed begin to mutter deviously in the shadows. But the necks that Richard was after were old and scrawny – Arundel, Warwick and Gloucester were all political back numbers. The real power in the land belonged as ever to John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, and his son Henry Bolingbroke, Earl of Derby. Occasionally Richard let fly with tantrums of royal displeasure, such as when he gave Arundel a bloody face with the back of his hand when he failed to show up to Queen Anne’s funeral, but the witch-hunt of 1397 was more than a tantrum. Warwick and Arundel were arrested, and Richard descended in person, together with a
small army, on the Duke of Gloucester’s castle to take the old man into custody. Before the trials began the Bishop of Exeter preached a sermon on the scripture ‘there shall be one king over them all’, and during its proceedings Lancaster, Richard and his Speaker of the Commons, Sir Richard Bushy, interrogated Arundel, who bravely refused to concede any wrong-doing yet undercut his own case by taking refuge in an earlier pardon granted by the king. Richard now decided that the pardon had been revoked. Arundel was executed. Warwick was exiled to the Isle of Man, and when a messenger was sent to Gloucester’s cell in Calais, he was discovered dead in suspicious circumstances, almost certainly suffocated in his feather bed on Richard’s orders.
The old scores had been settled, and one would imagine that Richard would manage to contain his sense of triumph, if only in the interests of political survival. But now that Richard II discovered that people seemed to be rather frightened by him, he also discovered that he rather liked it. When John of Gaunt took to his sick bed, the remaining restraints on Richard’s delusions of omnipotence disappeared and the autocrat of his imagination became the real thing. He took to eating, sleeping and travelling surrounded by his own praetorian guard, like a Roman emperor. The lieutenancy of Cheshire was turned into his personal satrap, and the Welsh castles close by were fortified under his own command. Feeling militarily strong, he began to lay hands on the sheriffs of the counties, in violation of the principles established after the civil war of the thirteenth century that drew their personnel from the community of the shire. Anyone now suspected of less than absolute loyalty to Richard was purged and replaced by a dependable hack. At court, too, the king cultivated a new circle of yes-men, ready to pander to his sense of imperial infallibility. And this was, in any case, a period when treatises like Dante’s De Monarchia (‘On Monarchy’; c. 1313) were making the case for the authority of a single, absolute prince, answerable directly to God. Doubtless there was no shortage of scholars willing to give Richard the gist of the argument, and doubtless he recognized himself in their encomia.
But philosophy would be unable to protect Richard from one of the swiftest, steepest falls in English history: from autocracy to abdication in less than two years. The brutal disposal of the Lords Appellant had left all those not inside the charmed circle of Richard’s immediate entourage understandably jittery. There had been no warning when he had struck against Arundel. Who knew when he might lash out next and against whom? John of Gaunt and his son, Bolingbroke, were acutely aware that as long as Richard remained childless they were, presumptively, next in line to the throne, and that was both an opportunity and an enormous danger. Their worst fears were realized after a bizarre episode involving mutual accusations of treason levelled by Thomas Mowbray, the Earl Marshal and Duke of Norfolk (Richard’s childhood friend), and Henry Bolingbroke. The issue was to be settled by combat in the lists at Gosford, near Coventry, and, with the antagonists commissioning special suits of armour for the occasion, expectations for the extraordinary, Arthurian spectacle were sky-high. They plummeted when, just before the riders prepared for the gallop, Richard rose from his seat shouting ‘Hold!’ as he did so. As the royal judge and arbiter, he was perfectly within his rights to halt the proceedings and perhaps he was suddenly aware that, whatever the outcome, he would be the loser. Should Mowbray win, the whispered accusations that he had helped the king dispose of the Duke of Gloucester would suddenly become shouted accusations. Should Bolingbroke win, his status as king-in-waiting might be even more intolerable. But the penalties Richard imposed satisfied no one and outraged many. Mowbray was banished for life, but Bolingbroke, judged innocent, was nonetheless given ten years in exile. At the time of his banishment there seems to have been no thought in Richard’s mind of dispossessing Bolingbroke. For years, Gaunt had been an ally, not an enemy. And old as he was, Richard assumed he would be around for some time to back the king’s interests. In the winter of 1398–9, however, Gaunt became gravely ill and he died in early February. With his passing the immense fortune of the House of Lancaster became the property not of a friend, but an ex-Appellant, a rival, an adversary. Doing nothing about this was dangerous. Doing something about this proved fatal. Richard changed Bolingbroke’s sentence to banishment for life, and parcelled out his inheritance to loyal supporters of the Crown. He held out the remote prospect that one day Bolingbroke or his son Henry might recover their lands. But in the furore no one noticed this small concession.
Laying hands on an inheritance – especially the greatest in the country – was seen by many of the great magnates as a direct violation of the coronation oath. If Richard could do this to Bolingbroke, they must have thought, he could do it to anyone. He needed to be stopped. Deaf to these ominous murmurs, Richard took the opportunity of what he must have thought was the acme of his power to lead an expedition to Ireland in May 1399. The plan was to bring the Irish princes, who were led by the intelligent and elusive king of Leinster, Art MacMurrough (Art Caomhanach Mac Murchadha), into line as vassals. The timing was dreadful; the execution worse. The king took just enough troops to leave him defenceless at home and not enough to intimidate the Irish. So by the time that Richard returned from another miserably inconclusive campaign, Bolingbroke, now Duke of Lancaster, had already landed at Ravenspur in Yorkshire to claim his inheritance with an army thoughtfully provided by the king of France. In a matter of weeks Henry had command of most of southern and eastern England.
Even now, had Richard been determined to play to his strengths and hold out in the near-impregnable Welsh castles together with his fighting force of Cheshire archers and foot soldiers, he might have had some chance to rally resistance. But Shakespeare’s haunting portrait of a man whose inner resolve crumbled is strikingly close to the mark. Richard seemed one step ahead in pessimism. When he got the bad news that many of his most trusted allies had defected to Bolingbroke, his reaction was not to dig in his heels and make a stand, but to flee across country at night, disguised as a priest, bewailing his misfortunes and, as usual, blaming everyone else.
Initially, it wasn’t at all a foregone conclusion that he would be forced off the throne. Henry III and his son Edward had survived their crisis by making tactical concessions while building themselves a royalist army. When the Earl of Northumberland came to Richard at Conwy as Bolingbroke’s emissary, the demands were simply that Lancaster have his rightful inheritance returned and that Richard repeat the concessions of 1387 and remove a list of undesirables. At some point during his uncontested march through England Bolingbroke’s ambitions changed, however. Given the experience of the Appellants, he could hardly be sure that if Richard did make concessions they would not be followed, some day, by sudden, savage acts of retribution. There was also the matter of the king’s newly arranged child bride, Isabella, who might yet produce an heir for him. So when nudged further by the lords and bishops, who wanted a pragmatic, rather than an erratic, mystically self-absorbed king, a king who would understand that it had been men, rather than God, who had put the crown on his head, Henry allowed himself to be steered towards the throne.
At this point, Shakespeare has Richard paralyzed by fatalism, declaring, as he sees Bolingbroke’s army approach Flint Castle: ‘Now I can see my end.’ But this resignation was, in fact, a convenient piece of Lancastrian-Tudor propaganda, neatly disposing of the embarrassment of a deposition by claiming that Richard resigned the throne rather than having it snatched from his desperate grip. Only when the throne was vacant, Lancastrian propaganda histories insisted, did Bolingbroke very decently agree to volunteer his services. What actually happened was a month of painful negotiations, with Richard a prisoner in the Tower of London. Three times he was asked if he would abdicate and three times he refused, before he finally bowed to the inevitable and became plain ‘Sir Richard of Bordeaux’.
As for the reasons given for the change in regime, Henry was extremely nervous about listing categories of misconduct, which might compromise the future authority of the Crown and be used
against himself and his heirs. So he fell back instead on obscure arguments about genealogy, arguing that the crown rightfully belonged to him as a descendant of Henry Ill’s son, Edmund Crouchback, who, it was absurdly alleged, had actually been the oldest of the brothers and who had been illegitimately set aside in favour of Edward I on account of his physical deformity! Even Henry and his immediate backers realized this was too far-fetched to win general assent, so when Richard’s ‘Renunciation’ was read to parliament on 30 September 1399, the deposition was said to be based on ‘vengeful sentences given against the lords’. When parliament was asked to approve Henry Bolingbroke, Earl of Hereford and Duke of Lancaster, as king, cries of ‘yes, yes, yes,’ echoed around the chamber. But not loudly enough apparently, for Bolingbroke himself asked for another hearty round of acclaim.
This surprising insecurity nagged away at Henry IV, just as Shakespeare depicted him: an insomniac, deeply troubled by a bad conscience. The man who had been made king as a result of discontent at Richard’s imperial pretensions immediately appropriated them for himself. Richard had been interested in imperial crowns (and commissioned a special book on the regalia of England), but it was Henry IV who was the first to have the closed imperial-style crown (still in use) set on his head. As if to advertise his impeccable Plantagenet pedigree, Henry chose the saint’s day of their favourite patron, Edward the Confessor, for his coronation. And assuming you couldn’t have too much of a good thing, Henry had himself anointed with the oil said to have been given to Becket by the Virgin, Richard’s own, but apparently not dependable, protectress.