The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England

by Dan Jones

  All of these signs suggested that in early 1397 the king, who later in the same parliament would describe himself as ‘entire emperor of his realm of England’, was feeling a growing indignation about having his imperial magnificence traduced. Nothing irked Richard so much as to suffer outspoken criticism during his periodic moments of glory. Never was he so dangerous as when backed into a corner.

  By July 1397, the most senior three of the Appellants who had opposed the king a decade previously once more found their relations with the king very tense. Gloucester had positioned himself as the leading noble critic of the French truce, and was generally to be found holed up in his castle at Pleshey, conceiving (according to Froissart) ‘such a hatred for the King that he could find nothing to say in his favour’. Warwick, meanwhile, had been thoroughly isolated from politics for some years, and Richard had ensured that two high-profile legal disputes had been turned against him. Arundel had long been isolated, following numerous quarrels with the king and with John of Gaunt. He had begun to skip council meetings as his disapproval of the king mounted. In retrospect, it should have come as little surprise to all of them when Richard launched a sudden, violent attack on enemies against whom he had borne a grudge for a quarter of his life.

  An arrest party set out for Pleshey castle after dinner on 10 July 1397 with Richard at their head. They rode hard through the dead of night, well-armed men whose White Hart liveries identified them as his faithful retainers. They were on a singular, very important mission: to take the king’s uncle, the duke of Gloucester, into custody.

  Behind them in London they left the earl of Warwick imprisoned in the Tower. He had been Richard’s dinner guest, and at the end of a convivial feast, the king had risen, ordered the earl arrested and had him thrown into prison. Now it was the duke’s turn.

  By daybreak they had arrived before the high stone walls of the fortress. They were prepared for a confrontation, but it quickly emerged that the duke had only a skeleton staff with him. The king’s men far outnumbered Gloucester’s, and it was therefore with ease that they marched into the fortress. Richard greeted Gloucester as ‘fair uncle’. Then he had him arrested and taken away under armed guard to a ship that would transport him to a prison in Calais.

  This was the culmination of a coup carried out with all the speed and efficiency of Edward III’s arrest of Roger Mortimer in 1330. Within the space of twenty-four hours – and with no prior warning – Richard arrested all three of the senior Appellants of 1386. Gloucester and Warwick were taken by the king in person. Arundel was persuaded by his brother, the archbishop of Canterbury, to turn himself in, and Richard had him sent to the Isle of Wight. Thunderbolts had struck. The Appellants had been abruptly and bewilderingly punished. And the kingdom was, in the words of Thomas Walsingham, ‘suddenly and unexpectedly thrown into confusion’. For the next two years, England trembled under the tyranny of Richard II.

  Richard’s sudden revenge on the Appellants – which marked the beginning of his tyranny – was a matter of great confusion. In the aftermath of the coup, a series of royal proclamations explained that the three lords had been arrested for ‘offences against the king’s majesty’, but denied that these were offences relating to 1386. Few believed that this was true.

  Naturally, all manner of theories abounded. The chroniclers of the time recorded their own suspicions. The French author of Chronicque de la Traison et Mort de Richart Deux roy Dengleterre heard that there had been an Appellant conspiracy against Richard, John of Gaunt and the duke of York. Thomas Walsingham heard that Richard believed he was about to be elected as Holy Roman Emperor, but that the electors wished to be convinced he could discipline his own subjects before granting him dominion over hundreds of thousands more. Others like the chronicler Adam of Usk simply disbelieved the king’s proclamations and wrote that Richard harboured a long-held grudge against his former enemies, and had merely been biding his time for the previous decade until he was politically ready to revenge himself.

  Whatever his motivations, it was remarkable how quickly Richard simply brushed his enemies aside. After their arrests on 10 July 1397, it took just three months for the king to rid himself entirely of his old foes. By the end of the September 1397 parliament, Warwick, Gloucester and Arundel had simply vanished.

  When parliament opened on 17 September 1397 it was both packed with Ricardian loyalists and held under military guard. As Westminster Hall was being refurbished, the meeting was held in a large, open-sided wooden structure. The commons and lords filed in under the glare of 300 of Richard’s Cheshire archers. Inside, they found the king sitting high upon a throne, from which, according to the monk of Evesham, he could ‘deliver his judgements’ and preside with ‘greater solemnity than any king of the realm ever had before’.

  When the chancellor, Bishop Stafford of Exeter, stood up to give the opening sermon, he told the assembly of the new doctrine of royal government. He took as his theme Ezekiel 37:22: ‘There shall be one king over them all.’ It was an ominous beginning. As he warmed to his subject, Bishop Stafford announced to the assembly that ‘if the king were to be powerful enough to govern, he must be in full possession of his regalities, prerogatives and rights’. Then a general pardon was issued, from which it was announced that fifty people were excluded, ‘whom it would please the king to name’. But Richard did not name them. Instead, he invited anyone who felt they had anything to apologize for to seek the royal pardon in person. In the year that followed, 500 individuals would apply for and receive the royal pardon. Richard was forcing his enemies to step forward and name themselves. Those who were pardoned had to pay heavily for it.

  Next, and despite his previous denials that Gloucester, Arundel and Warwick had been arrested for decade-old offences, Richard turned his mind to 1386. A month before parliament opened, he had mirrored the events of that year by approving a new appeal of treason against his three enemies lodged by seven noblemen (Richard’s Holland nephew and half-brother, the earls Kent and Huntingdon, and the earls of Somerset, Nottingham, Salisbury, along with Thomas, Lord Despenser, and Sir William Scrope). Most of these men later claimed to have acted under duress. But their appeal was used to full effect. Led by a hand-picked speaker, Sir John Bushy, whom Walsingham described as supplicating to Richard ‘as if praying to him’, the packed, intimidated parliament repealed the act establishing the council, and also the pardons extended to Gloucester, Arundel and Warwick in the aftermath of the Merciless Parliament. Several days later, Archbishop Arundel of Canterbury (the earl’s brother) was removed from his post and sentenced to exile.

  During all of this, John of Gaunt presided over parliament as lord high steward. It was a cruel role for the ageing duke to play, but he had Lancastrian interests to think of. He was in poor health and since an absence in his duchy of Aquitaine between 1394 and 1396 he had been sidelined in politics. Now he relied on Richard’s favour to protect his eldest son, the former Appellant Henry Bolingbroke, as well as to legitimize the bastard children he had fathered by his longstanding mistress and eventual third wife, Katherine Swynford. Gaunt did his duty. On Friday 21 September he stood by the king as the earl of Arundel was brought before parliament for trial, wearing a robe with a scarlet hood. He was formally accused of treason for his actions in 1386, while the new appellants danced around and shouted abuse at him. ‘Your pardon is revoked, traitor,’ Gaunt told his old enemy the earl, before pronouncing him guilty of treason and sentencing him to death. ‘Where are the faithful commons?’ demanded Arundel, looking bitterly around him. Then he told Speaker Bushy: ‘I know all about you and your crew, and how you got here.’ It did him no good. He was led out of parliament and beheaded with a sword on Tower Hill. His head came off with one stroke of the sword, and the torso stood on its own for as long as it took to recite the Lord’s prayer.

  Thomas Walsingham wrote that the earl of Arundel haunted Richard as a ghost, ‘threaten[ing] him with indescribable terrors’. If so, it did not bend him from his purpose.
The following Monday it was Gloucester’s turn. Here was a doleful spectacle indeed, as another English king angled for execution of a duke of the royal blood. Thomas Mowbray, earl of Nottingham, had been sent to Calais to accompany the duke back to parliament. Now he entered a hushed assembly and delivered some astonishing news. The duke was dead.

  What Nottingham did not tell parliament was that the duke had been murdered at Calais, on his (and ultimately the king’s) direct orders. He had been taken from his prison cell to a house where he had been suffocated with a feather bed, probably on the night of 8 September, nine days before parliament had opened.

  Instead of relaying this information, Nottingham read out a political confession in which Gloucester admitted to numerous crimes relating to the events of 1386, including a dubious admission that the Appellants had agreed for several days to depose the king, before renewing their homage when they could not decide which of them should take Richard’s place. The confession ended with a plea from the duke that the king should ‘accept me unto his mercy and to his grace … though I be unworthy’. Even in death, he was afforded no such mercy. He was posthumously condemned as a traitor.

  On Friday 28 September it was Warwick’s turn. He was already a broken man. When he came before parliament he broke down in tears, blaming others for his involvement and howling for the king’s mercy. It was a pathetic sight: a weak old man crying for his life. After pleas from various other lords, Richard condemned him to life imprisonment on the Isle of Man and forfeiture of all his lands and goods. The Appellants of 1386 were finally undone. A new political order was about to begin.

  Richard founded it on the redistribution of the numerous lands forfeited by his vanquished enemies, and created a huge new class of high nobility. The two Appellants who had escaped punishment were John of Gaunt’s son Henry of Bolingbroke, earl of Derby, and Thomas Mowbray, earl of Nottingham. They were raised to duke of Hereford and Norfolk respectively, while Mowbray’s grandmother Margaret of Brotherton became duchess of Norfolk in her own right. Edmund duke of York’s son Edward became duke of Albemarle. Richard’s nephew, Thomas Holland, earl of Kent, became duke of Surrey, and the king’s half-brother John Holland, earl of Huntingdon, became duke of Exeter. John Beaufort, earl of Somerset, was raised to marquis of Dorset. And there were four new earls: the king’s friends and courtiers Ralph Neville, Thomas Despenser, Thomas Percy and William Scrope became the earls of Westmorland, Gloucester, Worcester and Wiltshire. All this represented a massive shift of property, grandeur and wealth. It had been a bewildering fortnight.

  On 30 September parliament closed with a ceremony mimicking the end of the Merciless Parliament, as the lords swore before the shrine of the Confessor to uphold everything that had been done. Richard sat enthroned, crowned, magnificent and absolute. The country trembled before him. As John Gower, one of his few literary protégés, wrote in disgust: ‘During the month of September, savagery held sway by the sword.’ It would hold sway for another two years.

  Richard Undone

  Coventry buzzed with excitement. Since daybreak on Monday 16 September 1398 the tournament green at Gosford, just outside the town, had been filling with knights and nobles, bishops and visiting foreign dignitaries, and ordinary onlookers. Large, intricately decorated tents stood on the grass and were manned by smartly dressed esquires in bright liveries of all colours and cloths, decorated with silver buckles and armour, their weapons gleaming dangerously by their sides. A rare event was due to take place at nine o’clock that morning, one that had caught all England’s attention. Two dukes of the realm were to undergo trial by battle in front of the king. By the end of the day, either Henry Bolingbroke, duke of Hereford or Thomas Mowbray, duke of Norfolk would probably be dead. The victor would be vindicated. And the realm would have witnessed one of the great chivalric occasions of the age.

  Bolingbroke and Mowbray had been allies under the Appellant banner in 1386. They had retained favour with the king in the purge of 1397 – not only avoiding the fates of Gloucester, Arundel and Warwick, but profiting handsomely in the distribution of land and titles that followed Richard’s coup. Now, though, they were quite literally mortal enemies. A fierce dispute between them had spilled over into accusations of treason made before the king in parliament, and Richard, in his magnificence, had decided that the only way to settle the quarrel was in armed combat.

  The argument was deep-rooted and complex. It centred on an allegation made by Bolingbroke at a Shrewsbury parliament in 1398. There the duke had told the king and the assembled lords that Mowbray, shaken by the actions of Richard’s revenge parliament, had warned him that the two of them were soon to be ‘undone’ for their deeds in 1387–8. According to Bolingbroke, Mowbray had told him that their pardons were worthless and that plots – stemming from the king himself – existed to kill both Bolingbroke and his father John of Gaunt, reverse the pardons given to Thomas of Lancaster in 1327 and take the entire duchy of Lancaster into royal hands.

  These were serious allegations. The implication was that either Mowbray was guilty of blackest treachery by stirring up rebellion against the king, or that he did indeed believe that Richard was planning to wipe out the whole house of Lancaster, removing Gaunt and his son from the Plantagenet succession and thereby seizing another of the greatest inheritances in England for himself.

  In fact, the dispute ran deeper. A factional split was emerging at Richard’s court between those nobles affiliated with Gaunt and the house of Lancaster and those who viewed the Lancastrians with suspicion, hostility and jealousy. It seems likely that it was Mowbray, rather than Richard, who had countenanced the deaths of Bolingbroke and Gaunt. After all, he had done away with the duke of Gloucester with little compunction. Richard suspected very strongly that his cousin Bolingbroke was telling the truth, and had imprisoned Mowbray in the royal Wardrobe. But the charges could not be proven. And since Mowbray disowned them in the strongest possible terms, refused to be reconciled with Bolingbroke and demanded that a trial by battle be held, that was the course that Richard had chosen to follow.

  Thus, Coventry was alive with nervous tension, feverish spectators and the armed retainers of the kingdom’s greatest lords, all keen to see who would emerge alive from the latest grisly pantomime of Richard II’s despotic reign.

  At nine o’clock, Bolingbroke rode out to Gosford mounted on a white courser, the giant horse’s saddle decorated in blue and green velvet, embroidered with gold swans and antelopes. He was accompanied by six liveried attendants, and wore brilliant plate and mail armour, which he had acquired at great expense from Galeazzo, duke of Milan. He carried a long sword, short sword and dagger, and his silver shield had a bright red cross painted on it: the arms of England and St George. He announced to the constable and marshal of England that he had come to ‘prosecute my appeal in combating Thomas Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk, who is a traitor, false and recreant to God, the King, his realm and me’. He swore his oaths, had his weapons checked and blessed, and was given a small portion of food and wine to sustain him during a battle that might be expected to last until sunset. Then he pulled down the visor on his helmet, signed himself with the cross, took his lance from an attendant and rode forward to his pavilion, decorated all over in red roses, to wait for Mowbray.

  Next came the king, amid much fanfare from his heralds. Richard was dressed as magnificently as usual, and accompanied by his large private army of Cheshire archers and men-at-arms. The air bristled with violent intent as Sir John Bushy, Richard’s loyal speaker of the House of Commons, who had condemned Arundel, Gloucester and Warwick, announced to the crowd that no one should so much as touch the wooden lists that surrounded the tournament field, on pain of having his hand chopped off. Then the duke of Norfolk arrived, clad in finery equal to his rival’s: red velvet with silver lions and mulberry trees on his horse. He swore his oaths and entered the lists to go to his own pavilion. As he rode through the barriers, he cried: ‘God speed the right!’

  The time had c
ome for battle. The dukes’ lances were measured, and the pavilions rapidly dismantled behind them, to leave the lists open for combat. Each man mounted his horse. The constable and marshal retreated. Justice would now be served. Bolingbroke advanced towards his rival. Mowbray stood stock-still. Everyone waited for the first blow to be struck.

  Suddenly, Richard stood up, shouting ‘Ho! Ho!’ Everyone stopped, stunned. There was a great commotion in the crowd, as each duke was sent back to his tent, with his lance confiscated. And there they sat for two hours, as the king retreated into private deliberation. At length Bushy stepped forward once more and announced to the crowd the king’s verdict. The trial was over. There would be no combat. Indulging his compulsion to acts of high drama and majesty, Richard had decided that both men were to be banished from the realm: Bolingbroke for ten years (later reduced to six), and Mowbray for life.

  Here was Richard both at the height of his ominous power and caught in the web of his own paranoid rule. With the aborted trial of Mowbray and Bolingbroke, his theatrical absolutism, which had begun in 1397, reached its peak.

  Walsingham called the period between 1397 and 1399 Richard’s tyranny, and he was right to do so. The full force of royal might and prerogative, which was supposed to exist for the protection of the king’s subjects, was turned against them for the enrichment of the king. Plantagenet rule had been founded on the protection of land, property and wealth. Drunk on his own authority, Richard, like Edward II before him, turned kingship on its head.