The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England

by Dan Jones

  The plan failed. At Mile End, Richard granted the rebels everything they asked. He commanded that charters be distributed guaranteeing that there would be no return to serfdom, and that labour would be free, and that every man could rent land for a maximum of 4 pence per acre. He also naïvely agreed that Tyler and his men could be free to hunt down all the traitors they desired, and bring them to him for judgement.

  This sealed Sudbury and Hales’s deaths. Having failed to escape from the Tower, they were dragged out and murdered when the mob broke in. Their heads were put up on poles and paraded around London before being stuck up on London Bridge, where for several days they perched above the entrance to the city, Sudbury’s red bishop’s mitre nailed crudely onto his skull. Eight others died in the same way, including John of Gaunt’s personal physician and John Legge, a member of Richard II’s personal bodyguard. Gaunt’s son Henry of Bolingbroke, who was also in the Tower, only escaped capture and death at the rebels’ hands when a resourceful soldier hid him in a cupboard. The sound made by the mob, wrote the chronicler Thomas Walsingham, was not ‘like the clamour normally produced by men, but of a sort which enormously exceeded all human noise and which could only be compared to the wailings of the inhabitants of hell’.

  After the fall of the Tower, London descended into chaos. On Cheapside, where just a few years ago the street had run with wine, now a wooden chopping block was set up, and the ground was soaked with congealing blood of men and women murdered. In St-Martin’s-in-the-Vintry, the bodies of more than 100 Flemish traders were piled lifeless in the streets. They had been dragged from sanctuary in a church and murdered by a mob. All around there was a general orgy of murder, looting and rapine. Targeted disorder became general rioting. ‘This went on throughout the day and the following night, with hideous cries and horrible tumult,’ wrote the Anonimalle chronicler.

  By Saturday it was clear that drastic measures were required. The holiest part of the Plantagenet mausoleum, St Edward the Confessor’s shrine at Westminster Abbey, had already been violated, when a group of rebels dragged out the disreputable warden of the Marshalsea prison from his hiding place there, and took him as a prisoner to Cheapside, where he was beheaded. A rumour had started that Wat Tyler and John Ball intended to burn the whole of London down, capture the king and make him the figurehead of their new order in which there would be no lordship but theirs.

  The king and his shrunken pool of advisers, by now taking refuge at the Wardrobe in Blackfriars – a well-stocked arms store – concocted another, last, desperate plan. As charters of manumission continued to be pumped out by scribes at Chancery, word was sent to the rebels in London that the king would meet them again at the tournament fields beyond the city at Smithfield.

  Richard steeled himself for the most dangerous moment in his young life with prayer at the Confessor’s shrine where, hours earlier, rebel hands had pawed at another victim. When he arrived at Smithfield, in mid-afternoon, he had Walworth, the mayor of London, close by his side. Walworth and Knolles had put word out to the loyal men of the city that they would be required at some point soon. A battle was anticipated.

  Richard came face to face with Wat Tyler in one of the most bizarre meetings in Plantagenet history. The rebel leader appears to have been drunk on success after a weekend of lordship over all of London, and by extension the realm. He surprised Richard by shaking him roughly by the hand and telling him to ‘be of good comfort and joyful, for within the next fortnight you shall have 40,000 more of the commons than you have now, and we shall be good companions’.

  These were startling words to a boy who had been anointed as king by an archbishop now dead at the command of this ruffian. But Richard kept his composure. According to the chronicle sources, he conducted negotiations with Tyler in person. ‘The king asked him what were the points he wanted,’ recalled the Anonimalle chronicler. ‘And then Wat … asked that there should be no law but the law of Winchester [a demand for a return to central policing as it had operated under Edward I, rather than by local gentry sitting as JPs, as developed under Edward III], and that there should be henceforth no outlawry … and no lord should have any lordship … and that the only lordship should be that of the king; and that the goods of the Holy Church should … be divided among the parishioners; and no bishop in England save one … and he demanded that there should be no more bondmen in England, no serfdom or villeinage, but that all should be free and of one condition.’

  It was an extraordinary set of demands: a manifesto so revolutionary that it verged on madness. But Richard, attempting to appease Tyler as he had done at Mile End, again agreed ‘that [Tyler] should have all that could be fairly granted, saving to himself the regality of the Crown. And then he commanded him to go back home without further delay. And all this time that the king was speaking, no lord nor any other of his council dared nor wished to give any answer to the commons in any place except the king himself.’ It was Richard, showing composure well beyond his years, who led the negotiations.

  But this time, unlike Mile End, there was an endgame in place. When Tyler demanded a flagon of water and spat rudely at the king’s feet, it prompted one of the royal party to insult the rebel leader. A fight broke out, and in the melee, William Walworth drew his dagger and thrust it deep into Tyler’s side, mortally wounding him. Then the mayor left the scene to rouse the city militia under Knolles.

  Now came Richard’s crowning moment. Although Tyler’s army was arrayed on the other side of Smithfield from the negotiations, it was clear to them that something had gone badly wrong. After Walworth stabbed him, Tyler had mounted his little horse and rode back towards his men, crying treachery. As he fell to the ground before them, half-dead, they realized that they had been tricked. ‘They began to bend their bows and shoot,’ wrote the chronicler. Richard, realizing that something had to be done, shocked his own party by spurring his horse and riding straight out to the rebels, declaring that he was their captain and their leader, and that they should follow him.

  It was a moment of astonishing courage and quick thinking, worthy of Edward III, the Black Prince, or any of Richard’s most illustrious forebears. The rebels bowed to their king, literally overwhelmed by his majesty. As he distracted them, the city militia began to arrive. They surrounded the rebels at Smithfield and herded them out of London with minimal bloodshed. The day was saved, and to a very large degree it was the fourteen-year-old Richard who had saved it. Revolution had been averted, if only for a while.

  Return to Crisis

  The king’s stand against his rebellious subjects at Smithfield was as fine a moment of kingship as anything that had been demonstrated by his ancestors. Richard at fourteen had shown the mettle of a king.

  He also showed that he could summon the wrath of a king. He was prominent in the bloody judicial retribution that was exacted against rebels following the revolt. His famous words on tearing up charters of manumission in front of rebels who came to him pleading for restitution were: ‘Villeins you are, and villeins you will remain; in permanent bondage, not as it was before, but incomparably harsher … While by God’s grace we rule over this kingdom, we shall strive … to keep you in subjugation, to such a degree that the suffering of your servitude may serve as an example to posterity!’ It was cruel – vindictive, even – but decisive, too. All in all, his actions during the crisis of 1381 boded well for the fourteen-year-old.

  They showed also that he was coming towards an age where more of the reality of government – as opposed to the pretence – could emanate from him. The continual councils that had been a feature of the first years of his reign had ceased after three years, and now government was carried out directly from the king’s household. From May 1381 onwards, the records show a noticeable rise in royal orders coming from the king himself – or at least, with his personal approval, expressed by the signet.

  Indeed, Richard’s manhood began in 1381. At fourteen he was now able to marry, and he did so with no delay. His bride was Anne
of Bohemia, the sister of Wenceslas IV, king of Bohemia and the emperor-elect. To Richard and his advisers it seemed like a very propitious marriage. Anne’s sister was queen of Hungary and Poland, while her aunt, Bona, had been queen of France. An imperial alliance smacked of the earliest Plantagenet days, when the Empress Matilda had founded the great dynasty. And, just as important, it cemented England’s place on one side of the fault line which had developed across Europe in 1378, when two popes were elected and the papacy lapsed into schism. Like the German and Italian rulers, England followed the Roman pope, Urban VI. Thus the Bohemian alliance made sense, as France, Scotland and Castile fell in behind Clement VI at Avignon.

  But if the marriage seemed prestigious and pragmatic, it was also a financial burden on the overstretched treasury. Richard’s new brother-in-law, King Wenceslas, was broke. Had Richard married an Italian princess, there might have been the opportunity of a substantial dowry. But instead of profiting from his marriage, Richard found that he was expected to loan Wenceslas £15,000 to seal the alliance. It was poor business indeed, and when Anne was married and crowned in London in January 1382, Londoners expressed their disapproval of the alliance by tearing down a sheet bearing the royal arms crossed with the imperial arms, which decorated a fountain in the city.

  Nevertheless, when the fourteen-year-old Anne arrived in England in December 1381 it was the start of a loving relationship, in which the king would prove truly devoted to his new wife. They were a strange, fragile couple. The Westminster chronicler described Anne as ‘a little scrap of humanity’. Richard was blond and radiantly boyish, with slightly protruding eyes and the long, mournful face that was so characteristic of the later Plantagenets. He did not grow a beard, and despite an emerging propensity for violent tantrums when he felt his royal dignity was under threat, he had a shy, stammering manner of speaking.

  Nevertheless, around these two wispy teenagers a smart and extravagant royal court began to congregate. Even as a young man, Richard was developing a taste for the finery of kingship. He adopted his grandfather and father’s taste for pageant and courtly spectacle, although he was never to share their enthusiasm for riding in tournaments or throwing himself directly into the melee of battle. His would be far more of a visual, aesthetic kingship, in which public manifestations of divine kingship and elaborate forms of ritual came to the fore. At Eltham, King’s Langley and Sheen, the royal palaces were reworked with beautiful private bathrooms and ballrooms, with sophisticated kitchens and spiceries serving the very latest in rich, delicate and heavily spiced food. Richard, Anne and their courtiers followed the very latest in fashion: the men in tight hose and codpieces, with jewelled, high-collared robes and expensive doublets; the women wearing fitted gowns, exquisite jewellery and shoes so long and pointed that they had to be supported by garters joining them to the knees. The court was designed to radiate just as much magnificence as Edward III’s had done – and it ran up debts with just as much alacrity.

  As the household developed its own style, it slowly began to change in personnel, too. Old companions such as Sir Simon Burley remained close to the king, but there was also a drift away from some of the older servants of the Black Prince towards a younger crowd of chamber knights: men like John Beauchamp, James Berners and John Salisbury. At the heart of day-to-day government was Michael de la Pole, a former servant of the Black Prince, who was in his early fifties and had initially been placed in the household at parliament’s request. De la Pole’s father had been a wealthy merchant and a key financier to Edward III, and he found great favour with Richard, too. But the real darling of Richard’s court was Robert de Vere, the young earl of Oxford. De Vere was only five years older than Richard, and his closeness to the king aroused some of the same suspicions and grievances that had accompanied the rise of another royal favourite: Piers Gaveston. Some years after de Vere’s death, the scathing chronicler Thomas Walsingham would accuse him of having used black magic to manipulate Richard, and implied that there had been a homosexual relationship between the pair.

  That is unlikely. But what was clear was that Richard, like every young king, intended to have his own men. This meant a creeping isolation for the older heads, and particularly for the king’s uncles: John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster; Edmund Langley, earl of Cambridge; and Thomas of Woodstock, earl of Buckingham. The older magnates found that Richard and his circle frequently treated them with disdain bordering on hostility. Grants of land and castles to favoured knights cut across the established lords’ local power structures. Meanwhile, Richard’s personal immaturity and petulance alienated several of his most senior noblemen. When the earl of Arundel criticized the king’s rule in the Salisbury parliament of 1384, Richard turned white with anger and, according to the Westminster chronicle, told Arundel that if ‘it is supposed to be my fault that there is misgovernment in the kingdom, you lie through your teeth! You can go to the Devil!’ On another occasion, a year later, he had a furious argument with Archbishop Courtenay of Canterbury. When Courtenay upbraided him for the poor conduct of government, Richard drew his sword and tried to attack the archbishop. He was only prevented from doing so by his uncle Buckingham.

  These were obviously unbecoming actions for a king, and his irresponsibility in rewarding his friends for doing very little grated in many parts of the realm. But as had been proved by generations of Plantagenets, the political community would tolerate the king’s friends, so long as they did not seem to be damaging England on the battlefield or using their position to seize other magnates’ property.

  In the first case, however, Richard was unfortunate. The war was turning unstoppably towards the French during the 1380s, and as the court flourished with new men and splendid pageantry, so the position across the Channel collapsed.

  To call English prospects dim during the early 1380s would be an understatement. Compared with the heyday of Edward III, they were downright embarrassing. Only Calais and a thin coastal strip of Gascony remained in English hands. The Channel was plagued by French and Castilian ships, while what passed for the English navy rotted. Trading was so perilous that wool revenues hit rock bottom, and there were schemes under consideration by Londoners to build a giant chain bridge across the Thames to protect the city from burning raids. The death of Charles V in 1380 and accession of his son Charles VI lulled French aggression briefly, but there still remained an enormous appetite to kick the English out of the Continent. Without a king like Edward III, committed to war and with a vision of how to achieve victory and unite the realm behind the effort, the English war machine splintered into disarray.

  Differing strategies emerged. For John of Gaunt, the future was Castile. He had married Pedro the Cruel’s daughter Constance of Castile in 1372. (His brother Edmund Langley married the younger daughter Isabella at the same time.) When Pedro died in 1379, Gaunt formally claimed the throne for himself. Thereafter, he believed in ‘the way of Portugal’ – English conquest through Iberia. He had support from his brothers, but it was essentially a private, dynastic focus that drew Gaunt ever further from the centre of politics in the 1380s and did not help the national interest one shred.

  For most Englishmen, the path of warfare lay in Flanders. It was closer to home, and the fortunes of the trading cities of north-west Europe also had real significance for the English wool trade. Moreover, the county of Flanders was under direct threat from Charles VI’s uncle, the duke of Burgundy, who aimed to conquer the rich trading cities one by one. In 1383 the warlike Bishop Despenser of Norwich – who had played a major role in putting down the 1381 revolt in East Anglia – launched a ‘crusade’ to Flanders, by which he aimed to use papal licence to protect the territories from falling to the duke.

  Alas, despite ample funding and parliamentary approval, the mission was badly equipped and returned to England a dismal failure. By 1385, Flanders had fallen. It seemed increasingly clear that the best route out of France for the time being would be by way of peace. The dream of rebuilding the ancient Planta
genet empire – let alone of uniting the French and English crowns – was over.

  In 1385 Richard was eighteen. He was no pacifist, but he was highly unenthusiastic about the idea of launching another offensive in France, fruitless and expensive as it would be. Although all three of his uncles – Gaunt, Buckingham and Cambridge – urged him to commit to more fighting, Richard was inclined to listen to those such as Chancellor de la Pole, who counselled caution. Even had he wanted to fight, it was most unlikely that parliament, skittish in the aftermath of the Great Revolt, would grant the necessary taxation to do so across the Channel. Therefore in summer 1385 he led an expedition to oust French garrisons from Scotland. It was a pragmatic option. The king could lead the nobility, satisfy those who searched for the warrior within him, and bolster a little military confidence without running up too heavy a bill.

  What followed was a fiasco. Richard marched north with an army including almost the entire nobility, all the English bannerets and around 14,000 men. When they reached the Scottish border, he marked the occasion by raising Edmund Langley from earl of Cambridge to duke of York, and Thomas of Woodstock from earl of Buckingham to duke of Gloucester. He also raised de la Pole to the earldom of Suffolk and his friend de Vere to the wholly unprecedented position of marquis of Dublin. In a stroke, de Vere outranked all the other English earls, and stood virtually on a par with the royal dukes. ‘Just as the sky is rendered clear and bright by the stars, so dignity makes not only kingdoms but kingly diadems shine with its light,’ Richard would later argue to parliament.

  But the bolstered prestige did little for Richard’s military prospects. As his army advanced, so the Scots declined to give battle. They retreated into the hills, wasting the countryside as they went. It was the same tactic that had reduced Edward III to tears of frustration in 1328. The Scots dodged the English advance, slipped south and burned Carlisle. The English reached Edinburgh in mid-August, found that they were starving and had no one to fight, and fell back to Westminster within three weeks. It was a feeble expedition, which achieved nothing.