The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England

by Dan Jones

  After the revenge parliament of 1397 had done its draconian work against the three senior appellants, Richard had helped himself liberally to the rewards. The lands confiscated had been redistributed among his friends and the new nobles. Arundel’s lands in north-east Wales had been attached to the earldom of Chester, which was raised to a principality. This now became his power base. Richard spent more and more time in the north-west, in and around his palatinate earldom of Chester, even taking parliament to Shrewsbury in 1398.

  Surrounding the king was his Cheshire retinue: knights, squires and archers who wore the livery of the White Hart and took salaries by the day to do what ought to have been their natural duty of guarding over their king. Richard went everywhere with thuggish archers and men-at-arms, who spoke together in their broad northern dialect and addressed the king by the familiar name of ‘Dycun’ – Dickon. Barrel-chested guards waited outside his chamber at night bearing massive battleaxes, saying to him: ‘Dycun, slepe sicurly quile we wake.’ According to Adam of Usk, the Cheshire men committed brutal crimes with impunity: ‘wherever the king went they stood guard over him … committing adulteries, murders and countless other crimes.’ As well as the archers, Richard went everywhere with a big fierce greyhound by his side, which had belonged to the earl of Kent before his death. Constantly on his guard, constantly menacing his people: Richard’s actions were hardly those of a king. He seemed more like an overbearing private magnate, at war with his entire realm.

  In the summer of 1397, the king had begun to demand forced loans from his subjects. Letters, stamped with the privy seal, were sent into the shires, demanding specific amounts of money – yet the names of the lenders were left blank. Richard’s officials simply issued these form letters of legalized theft to anyone they identified as rich enough to pay. Furthermore charters were demanded, in which men pledged their lives and property to the king. In the event that they should fall into royal disfavour, these charters could be used to ruin a man in an instant. As the king’s paranoia grew, he even demanded ‘blank charters’: clean sheets of paper on which a subject was forced to affix his seal, which could be used, as Walsingham put it, ‘so that whenever he wished to make attacks on [the sealant] he might have the means to attack them individually’. There could have been no more flagrant way to breach Magna Carta, that hallowed founding document of the English polity, which was renewed customarily at every parliament.

  It all smacked of extreme fear and distrust: authority founded on a network of financial liability, rather than a faith in kingship as the source of public authority and the common good. Whole counties and cities had to buy their pardons from the royal wrath for extortionate sums: forced to guarantee their good behaviour at the cost of thousands of pounds. The general pardon issued to the realm in 1397 was made conditional upon Richard receiving customs revenues for life. The dukes of Albemarle and Kent (Richard’s cousin and nephew) were given licence to use the treason laws to hunt out enemies of the king. Yet Richard maintained the outward pretence that his vengeful hand was bringing his realm to peace. In a letter of 1397 to Albert of Bavaria, he wrote that the ‘avenging severity’ which had ‘been meted out to the destruction and ruin’ of his enemies had brought ‘to our subjects a peace which, by the grace of God, may last forever’.

  Nothing could have been further from the truth. Rather than pacifying the realm, Richard’s rule of terror, enforced by a swelling private retinue, was forcing it into a state of incipient civil war. As the king built up his retainers, so did his lords. His mass redistribution of lands following the revenge parliament of 1397 caused serious disruption to local power structures. His habit of retaining men-at-arms wherever he went cut into his magnates’ territorial orbits and destabilized shire communities, which were keenly balanced by loyalties to local magnates.

  Richard’s behaviour was at times psychopathic, and intimidated even his own courtiers. One vivid report recalled how ‘on solemn occasions when, by custom, he performed kingly rituals, he would order a throne to be prepared for him in his chamber on which he liked to sit ostentatiously from after dinner until vespers, talking to no one but watching everyone; and when his eye fell on anyone regardless of rank, that person had to bend his knee towards the king’.

  The whole atmosphere of terror that Richard created shook his people into a restless state. It was not just the aristocracy that was discomfited: there were outbursts of popular rebellion and dissent, too. A rising of Oxfordshire yeomen in March 1398 threatened to kill the king and nobles; a simultaneous outbreak in Berkshire sought to ambush the king as he passed through the county. And while most of the new nobility – who owed their whole position to Richard and stood to lose it all in the withering heat of his glare – professed their loyalty to him, that loyalty was paper-thin.

  It was in this environment that quarrels, feuds and plots between Richard’s nobles had been allowed to flourish. And so it was that the Bolingbroke–Mowbray dispute, which brought out so many aspects of Richard’s tyranny, had become a moment of national drama, the high point of which was the king’s restatement of his own absolute power of judgement over life, death and high politics.

  When Bolingbroke left London to begin his six-year term of banishment in October 1398, the streets were lined with sorrowful citizens, declaring (according to Froissart) that ‘this country will never be happy until you return.’

  None of them could realize just how soon the king’s cousin would be back.

  On 3 February 1399, John of Gaunt died at Leicester castle. He was fifty-eight, and was buried with what Adam of Usk called ‘great pomp’ at St Paul’s Cathedral in London, after a slow procession through the English countryside, his cortege surrounded by black-clad mourners. The king visited his uncle on his deathbed, and a later story was put about that before he died Gaunt showed Richard the ulcers around his genitals as a somewhat superfluous warning against lechery.

  Gaunt had not been universally popular during his long life and career, but he had led a life of adventure and loyal service to the Plantagenet family during some very trying circumstances. He had headed great armies and splendid embassies. He had fought long and hard to have himself crowned a king in Spain – an effort that yielded him no crown, but raised two of his daughters to become queens consort of Portugal and Castile. At home, he had fought equally obdurately to protect the rights of the Plantagenet Crown during the last years of Edward III, and of the duchy of Lancaster during Richard II’s reign. He had been an early sponsor of the radical theologian John Wyclif, and a key figure in London’s fractious politics. Most important, he had built up an unparalleled landed inheritance, worth well over £12,000 a year. Whoever inherited the duchy of Lancaster would also inherit Gaunt’s position: by some distance the richest and most powerful magnate in England, below the king.

  It was Henry Bolingbroke, Gaunt’s eldest son, to whom his death meant most. For Bolingbroke was heir to the whole duchy of Lancaster, and that made him, by 1399, a terrifying spectre to his cousin Richard II.

  After the aborted duel at Coventry, Bolingbroke and Mowbray had both left England. Mowbray, who was stripped of his duchy, had decided to go on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem and had died of the plague in Venice. But Bolingbroke, whose exile was generally held to be unfair, had gone to the court of Charles VI in Paris, where he was made welcome and could monitor the situation in England from close at hand.

  What he saw was a king striving to conquer his own country. One by one, the great and ancient English lordships were falling into the hands of Richard and his cronies. Lands and castles that once belonged to Warwick, Gloucester, Arundel and Norfolk had all reverted to the king. In 1398 Roger Mortimer, 4th earl of March and Richard’s possible heir through the female succession of Lionel of Antwerp, had been killed in Ireland. His son Edmund was a young boy, and thus the March lands too had reverted to the king in wardship.

  It was inevitable, as Richard built up this vast landed power bloc, that he should have come into conflict
with the duchy of Lancaster. And indeed, great expanses of the Midlands were riven with conflict as the king and John of Gaunt’s spheres of private influence overlapped, and competition grew for retainers.

  After Gaunt’s funeral, Richard went to King’s Langley – the favourite residence of Edward II, the place where Piers Gaveston’s body had been laid to rest and where that king had brooded on revenge over his own Lancastrian nemesis. By the time he reached King’s Langley, Richard had made his decision. According to his loyal servant Sir William Bagot, Richard declared that he would sooner restore the heirs of Gloucester, Warwick and Arundel than allow Bolingbroke back into England. Bagot sent a message to Bolingbroke, advising him that he was now the king’s ‘full enemy’. Richard, meanwhile, convened a council in Westminster on 18 March, in which he formally annulled Bolingbroke’s right to inherit the duchy of Lancaster and sentenced him to perpetual banishment.

  The ultimate land-grab was complete. Everything that Gaunt had feared in his final years had come to pass. In spring 1399 great swathes of the confiscated Lancastrian inheritance were doled out to key Ricardian supporters: Lancaster, Tutbury and Kenilworth went to the duke of Surrey; the Welsh lands to the duke of Exeter; Leicester, Pontefract and Bolingbroke itself were granted to the duke of Albemarle. Most of the rest remained in royal hands, its vast revenues now pouring straight into the treasuries Richard was building up in royal castles. To everyone in England it was now clear, as Walsingham put it, that Richard had banished his cousin not for the quarrel with Mowbray, but ‘because it was a good opportunity of seizing the duke’s property’. Richard was no king: he was a wanton thief of his subjects’ lands and an enemy of the common good. He had sealed his own fate.

  When news of his disinheritance reached Bolingbroke in Paris, it could hardly have come as a surprise. He had known Richard all his life, and had been at close quarters during every crisis of the realm, from being hidden in a cupboard in the Tower of London during the Great Revolt of 1381, to standing on either side of Richard’s long-running war with the Appellants. He knew that Richard was not a man to be trusted.

  But he would also have been astonished at the other news that reached Paris. Richard – as if oblivious of the danger that his attack on the Lancastrian inheritance would cause him – was preparing to lead a second invasion of Ireland. He would be taking his supporters and much of his private retinue across the Irish Sea, leaving England unguarded for months.

  It was too good an opportunity to miss. Richard had enemies both in England and France, and Henry made contact with all of them. His first ally was Thomas Fitzalan, the former archbishop of Canterbury whom Richard had stripped of his office and exiled at the same time as Fitzalan’s brother, the earl of Arundel, was executed. The Arundels and Lancastrians might not always have seen eye to eye, but they were united in their hatred of the king. In England they made contact with the disaffected Henry Percy, earl of Northumberland, and Ralph Neville, earl of Westmorland. Henry was convinced by voices in England that an invasion in pursuit of his inheritance would find favour among enough other lords to make it feasible.

  Richard left for Ireland at the end of May, and landed on 1 June. He must have known that an invasion was possible, or even likely, since he took with him the crowns and regalia of England – the essential tokens of Plantagenet kingship – as well as Henry of Monmouth, Bolingbroke’s son. He also took most of his loyal nobles and large numbers of men-at-arms and archers, and with them, set about bringing various Irish chieftains to heel.

  Henry left France at the end of June, unimpeded by a French government disabled by the recurring insanity of Charles VI. On 4 July 1399 he landed near Ravenspur, at the mouth of the Humber. He disembarked with a tiny contingent of no more than 100 men – hardly a fearsome invasion. But the moment he landed, wrote the Kirkstall chronicler, ‘a great multitude of knights and squires came to him’. They included a broad coalition of northern earls and knights, including Harry ‘Hotspur’ – Northumberland’s son, who was reputed to be the finest knight in England.

  Now Richard’s kingdom, so long bullied and blackmailed, simply melted into Bolingbroke’s arms. The author of Traison et Mort wrote that ‘there was no good mother’s son who did not go to the duke and offer him both his services and his goods’. All England rang with news of Bolingbroke’s arrival. The government left behind by Richard was headed by Edmund Langley, duke of York – uncle to both Bolingbroke and the king – and served by royal favourites including Sir John Bushy and Sir Richard Scrope. They attempted to muster a loyal army at Oxford in mid-July, but as the Midlands surged to Bolingbroke’s side, they were forced to pull back, ever further west. Adam of Usk estimated that Bolingbroke raised 100,000 men. For once, a chronicler may not have exaggerated.

  Richard came back to England at the end of July, and attempted to raise an army in south Wales. But Bolingbroke was already at Bristol, and word was flooding across the border from England that virtually the whole country was abandoning the king. Disguising himself as a Franciscan friar, the king and a few colleagues left the men they had mustered in the south, and instead rode north across Wales to Conwy, where the earl of Salisbury was raising a loyalist army. But when Richard arrived in the north, there was further disappointment. The earl’s 40,000-strong army was deserting in droves, and carrying off the king’s belongings – gold and silver, jewels, good horses and fine robes.

  By the beginning of August, Bolingbroke was almost the undisputed master of England. As Richard sat helpless in Conwy castle, praying to God and the Virgin Mary for intervention, and telling his friends that he hoped the king of France would come to his aid, the kingdom demonstrated just how little loyalty it owed him. On 5 August the principality of Chester – the very heart of Ricardian power – sued for peace. On 9 August Chester castle surrendered to Henry’s army with not even a show of resistance. Although the duke commanded that there should be no massacre of the Cheshiremen, there was still sufficient looting and devastation for Adam of Usk to find Coddington church – where he attempted to celebrate mass – emptied of everything but the doors and broken chests.

  Richard, who had tried to extort, rather than earn, the loyalty of his land, was undone. His allies the duke of Albemarle and the earl of Worcester rallied to Bolingbroke’s side. The dukes of Exeter and Surrey were taken prisoner. Bolingbroke, citing his authority as the steward of England, sent the earl of Northumberland to Conwy castle to bring Richard in. The terms were abhorrent to a king still possessed by dreams of his own regality. He was summoned to appear of his own free will at a parliament in which Henry would sit as ‘chief judge’ of England, and at which five of his allies would be tried for treason: the dukes of Exeter and Surrey, the earl of Salisbury and the bishop of Carlisle, and Richard Maudelyn. The king flew into his customary rage, ranting that he would have his opponents put to death: ‘There are some of them,’ he said, ‘whom I will flay alive.’ But he had no choice. He had to accompany Northumberland.

  Richard and Henry met face to face at Flint. Although the king was now clearly the duke’s prisoner, they went through a charade of noble courtesy. Bolingbroke bowed low to the king; Richard addressed him as ‘fair cousin of Lancaster’.

  According to the author of the Traison et Mort, who was an eyewitness, Bolingbroke then told Richard that he had returned to England ‘before you sent for me’ because ‘you have not ruled well these twenty-two years … and therefore with the consent of the commons, I will help you to govern it’.

  ‘Fair cousin, since it pleases you, it pleases us well,’ said Richard. Then he formally surrendered himself to his cousin. He and Salisbury were given two very poor horses to ride, and they set out with Bolingbroke, under armed guard, for Chester. It was no longer the military sanctum of a paranoid king, but his prison, where all his magnificence and splendour was finally and utterly subdued.

  Richard Alone

  On 21 September 1399, the earl of Warwick’s brother Sir William Beauchamp went to visit King Rich
ard, now a prisoner at the Tower of London. Sir William was accompanied by the writer Adam of Usk, who noted in his chronicle that the visit was also the second anniversary of Arundel’s beheading. Beauchamp and Usk, hearty loyalists to the Bolingbroke cause, came with what the latter called ‘the specific intention of ascertaining [Richard’s] mood and behaviour’.

  Richard had been imprisoned in the Tower for nineteen days, having been moved on Duke Henry’s command from Chester castle at the end of August, arriving in the capital on 2 September. His visitors found him in dismal mood: deprived of his regular servants and surrounded by Lancastrian spies, the failed king was finally alone. Even his greyhound was gone, having abandoned him while the king was in south Wales.

  Richard was understandably miserable. There could have been no more evocative place than the Tower for the duke to place his cousin. The royal prison was the very fortress in which both had taken refuge during the great rebellion in 1381, and in which Henry had only narrowly escaped capture and death at the hands of Wat Tyler and John Ball’s disciples. Richard must have recalled the childhood memories of looking out over the smouldering city of London from a lonely window at the top of the Tower, and seeing his whole country risen in uproar. Now he was back, and although the realm was no longer in the grip of peasant anarchy, it had once again turned against his rule.

  As the company sat down to dinner, Richard ‘began to discourse dolefully’, wrote Usk. ‘My God, this is a strange and fickle land,’ said the king, ‘which has destroyed and ruined so many kings, so many rulers, so many great men and which never ceases to be riven and worn down by dissensions and strife and internecine hatreds.’

  Then the historian king started telling his guests sad stories of previous English kings undone by their people. Usk heard him recount ‘the names and histories of those who had suffered such fates, from the time when the realm was first inhabited’. It was a pathetic sight: the Plantagenet king who had such a deep interest in the ancient tales of his regality and his ancestors’ deeds now found history repeating itself, with himself as the victim.