The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England

by Dan Jones

  The failure of the Epiphany plot prompted Richard’s final demise. According to Thomas Walsingham, when the former king, serving his sentence of life imprisonment at Pontefract, ‘heard of these unhappy events, his mind became disturbed and he killed himself by voluntary fasting, so the rumour went’. The more sympathetic author of the Traison et Mort suggested foul play, claiming that the king was killed by one ‘Sir Piers Exton’, who staved in the king’s head with an axe. It is most likely that the truth lies somewhere between the extremes, and that Richard was deliberately starved on the orders of the new Lancastrian regime, who could no more tolerate his presence in the realm than Roger Mortimer had been able to suffer that of Edward II in 1327. Adam of Usk laid the blame for Richard’s death by starvation on one ‘Sir N. Swynford’ (most likely Sir Thomas Swynford, a knight of Henry’s chamber).

  Certainly, once Richard was dead – probably on St Valentine’s Day 1400 and certainly by 17 February – Henry IV was at pains to show his cousin’s corpse to the country. Richard’s emaciated body was transported from Pontefract to London with the face visible to all. The body lay in St Paul’s Cathedral for two days, before it was transported for burial at King’s Langley in Hertfordshire.

  Richard’s deposition and Henry’s accession was viewed with some bewilderment by contemporaries. The metaphor of the wheel of fortune used by Adam of Usk seemed particularly apt. When the old king had cast Bolingbroke out into the wilderness and enjoyed the heyday of his tyranny, he had seemed to be the mightiest of all his line. Yet within months his entire reign had collapsed and he was dead. God’s providence was indeed a wonderful thing. But Richard’s fall was not entirely a matter of divine caprice. It was widely recognized that he had brought his misfortune upon himself by his atrocious behaviour, his violent misrule and his choice of poor company and counsel. He had neglected his realm in favour of enriching himself, and he had repeatedly treated his coronation oath, Magna Carta and the dignity of parliament with contempt. He had made it easy for Henry, his nearest heir in the male line, to take his Crown from him by appealing to the oldest principle of Plantagenet kingship, the principle that had been at the core of every moment of political and constitutional crisis since 1215: that the king should govern within his own law and with the advice of the worthiest men in his kingdom.

  Despite the best efforts of the new regime to legitimize itself and argue the case for removing the old king, the Crown never fully recovered from the trauma of Richard’s deposition. Unlike Edward II, Richard had not been replaced by his undisputed heir, but by a nobleman who claimed sufficient royal blood to seize the throne, and did so to some degree unilaterally. Henry may have been the closest heir to his cousin by the male line, but Edmund Mortimer, the great-grandson of Lionel of Antwerp via his daughter Philippa, countess of Ulster, had arguably a better claim in blood. Henry IV was not Edward III. A Rubicon had been crossed. The wars that erupted from the middle of the fifteenth century, known now as the Wars of the Roses, began as political wars but – thanks to the unanswered questions raised by Henry IV’s usurpation – they swiftly became wars of Plantagenet succession, which were only settled by the accession of a king, Henry VII, who was barely a Plantagenet at all. (Indeed, after Henry VII had legitimized his usurpation of the throne with a wealth of pageantry attempting to demonstrate his descent from Edward III, he and, later, his son Henry VIII set about murdering and destroying every surviving member of the English aristocracy with a trace of Plantagenet blood.) Richard’s deposition had marked the beginning of this baleful end.

  In some ways, then, Henry IV’s accession threw the England monarchy back to a near-forgotten age. Not since Henry II had displaced Stephen’s son Eustace as heir to the English Crown in the 1150s had the royal succession so obviously combined blood-right with the principles of election and the blunt political reality of a power-grab. No royal dynasty would ever again hand down the Crown with such security and ease for so many generations as the Plantagenets did between 1189 and 1377.

  Of course, Richard’s deposition did not turn the clock back to Norman times. The Plantagenet family’s legacy to England was profound, for by 1400 the realm had changed unrecognizably from the Anglo-Norman realm that had existed during the mid-twelfth century.

  The office of kingship was utterly transformed. By 1400 the king was not just the most powerful man in the land, with the prerogatives of legal judgement, feudal tribute and warfare on behalf of the realm. Now he was an officeholder whose awesome rights were matched by awesome responsibilities in a complex, constitutional, contract with the various estates of the realm. Whereas the Norman kings (and the Saxon kings before them) had occasionally granted their subjects limited and extremely vague charters of liberties, and governed in accordance with custom, the Plantagenet years had seen the growth of a highly refined political philosophy that defined the king’s duties to his realm and the realm’s to the king, and a huge body of common law and statute that governed the land. The king was still the source of universal authority in the realm, but his power underpinned a sophisticated system of justice and lawgiving.

  Under these changed terms of rule, the king’s actions and his personal will still mattered immensely. The personalities of individual kings had profoundly shaped their reigns and their worlds, as had the personalities of their immediate relations – wives, brothers, children and cousins. In that sense, politics remained fundamentally unpredictable and unstable. Yet the Crown was also now distinct from the king, and the machinery and philosophy of royal rule more separate from the person of the king than at any time before. Each successive Plantagenet king had been more tempered by the last by a system of institutions that drew a broad political community into government. Parliaments – including elected representatives of county society, rather than just the great barons and ecclesiastical magnates – reserved the right to grant taxes, and expected that their grievances should be heard and remedied in exchange for the privilege. Government could be scrutinized, inadequate ministers impeached and, ultimately, a king might be removed from office: even the most capable and successful of the later Plantagenet kings, Edward I and Edward III, had experienced uncomfortable moments of crisis in 1297, 1341 and 1376. Parliaments, as well as the battlefield, would become the forums for much of the political upheaval that followed during the fifteenth century.

  Away from parliament, the Plantagenets had given England a complex and deep-seated system of royal government in the localities. Government was no longer the exclusive preserve of churchmen and clerks attendant on the king and the great magnates dominating their own territories. Rather, the business of government was carried out by a combination of trained, bureaucratic professionals at Westminster, and laymen in the shires who were drawn from the community but worked on behalf of the Crown. Judges and lawyers, clerks and accountants, sheriffs, bailiffs, coroners and escheators were drawn from middling ranks of men whose birth might now lead them to expect a professional career as much as a military one. As a result, the political community, which under Norman rule had comprised a handful of the greatest bishops and barons, had expanded so far that even the better class of peasants – men and women such as those who had rebelled in 1381 – felt that they had a stake in royal government and the right to voice their disgruntlement in surprisingly sophisticated terms. The principles of Magna Carta, whose successive reissues had been pinned to virtually every church door in the realm during the thirteenth century, had permeated the consciousness of men of all classes and backgrounds. When Jack Cade’s rebels rose against Henry VI’s administration in 1450, it was evident that the English lower orders had a more keenly developed sense of their place in the English polity than at any time in previous history. Whereas Norman England had been little more than a colonized realm, ruled from above and afar, the England created by the Plantagenets had become one of the most deeply engaged and mature kingdoms in Europe.

  The symbolism of kingship, too, had evolved. The country now had two national saints: S
t Edward the Confessor and St George. Together they exemplified the two faces of Plantagenet kingship: the pious, anointed, sanctified king, and the warrior with God on his side. Earlier English saints, such as St Edward the Martyr, or St Edmund, were now largely forgotten, as St Edward and St George were woven skilfully into the narratives of English history, the fabric of the great buildings, and the iconography of kingship. Both saints would continue to exert a powerful hold on the English imagination – St George, in particular, would become emblematic of English military glory. ‘Cry “God for Harry, England and St George,”’ wrote Shakespeare, looking back on the reign of Henry V and the zenith of English fortune in the Hundred Years War. With those words, the cult that Edward III had encouraged and given form in the Order of the Garter was immortalized in the national imagination.

  The two Plantagenet saints sanctified the two key centres of English kingship. Edward the Confessor had come into his own during the reign of Henry III, and his glorious tomb at the heart of the remodelled abbey was the very hub around which the Plantagenet family mausoleum had been built. Interestingly, access to this mausoleum was not an automatic privilege of royalty. Edward II, despite being named after the Confessor himself, had led too egregious a life to die as a king. As punishment for his shameful reign he had been interred apart from the rest of his family at Gloucester Abbey. Neither, in 1400, was Richard II’s body at rest at Westminster. Rather, the superb double tomb with Purbeck marble base and copper effigies that he had commissioned in 1395 held only the corpse of Anne of Bohemia. Richard, quite literally for his sins, had been buried at King’s Langley – the resting place of that great villain Piers Gaveston. It was not until Henry V’s accession in 1413 that Richard’s body was moved to Westminster, belatedly to lie beside his wife and the Confessor at whose tomb he had prayed for protection before facing Wat Tyler’s rebels at Smithfield in 1381.

  If the royal tombs at Westminster were where St Edward was most venerated, then the Garter Knights Stalls in St George’s Chapel at Windsor were where the more recent national saint received his celebration. (The chapel, rebuilt by Edward IV, later became an alternative burial-place to Westminster for English monarchs.) Edward III’s creation of the Order of the Garter, dedicated to St George and the honourable code of martial chivalry, reinvented the relationship between the soldierly king and his leading noblemen. It provided a spiritual, honorific narrative for the bitter and ravaging wars that Edward and his sons had waged against France. St George had to a degree supplanted even the mythical King Arthur as the hero of English conquest. Undoubtedly, the cult of Arthur – a popular hero effectively stolen from the Welsh under Edward I – had been developed in the Plantagenet years, and Arthuriana had risen from a staple of popular storytelling to a reliable trope of royal pageantry. (Popular stories had developed, for their own part, with the rise of outlaw ballads such as the rhymes of Robin Hood.) But the cult of St George, as it had been developed during Edward III’s reign, was more potent still. While Arthur gave Edward I an imaginative reason for conquering Wales and subjecting Scotland, the banner of St George had served an even more useful end: uniting in common purpose the king with his nobles and the knightly classes, and finally enthusing England with the cause of war across the Channel. This feat had eluded every other Plantagenet king since 1204, when John had lost Normandy and the Anglo-Norman realm had begun its painful, permanent partition.

  St Edward and St George are not the only saints who had risen during the Plantagenet years. Around them were a clutch of other heroes, whose memories were considered blessed, even if they were not all formally canonized. These were the great men who had fallen in opposition to the Plantagenets. At Canterbury, St Thomas Becket’s tomb was the lucrative centre of England’s finest pilgrimage site. The shrine to the cantankerous archbishop murdered by Henry II was steeped in blood and lore, and its holiness rivalled that of many of the continental sites that lay on the pilgrimage roads between the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris and Santiago de Compostela in Galicia. Beginning with Henry II himself, successive Plantagenets came to St Thomas’s shrine alternatively to pray for fortitude and to give thanks for victory, and the site would remain a place of the utmost holiness until 1538, when Henry VIII ordered it destroyed during the dissolution of the monasteries. The shrine was cast down and Becket’s bones were thrown in a creek. Today only a small candle and a plaque mark the holy site, although Becket’s name is still one of the most famous in English history, and his murder remains one of the great events in the English historical canon. He is certainly more famous today than the other great Plantagenet opponents, Simon de Montfort and Thomas earl of Lancaster, although in both cases miracles were associated with their remains and shrines.

  The legacies of each of the Plantagenet kings depended largely on their success in battle, and it was also through their military accomplishments that the dynasty left its stamp on England. Just as English government and political culture had changed during the Plantagenet years, so too had almost every aspect of military strategy and tactics. Henry II, Richard I and John had much in common with their Norman predecessors: the art of war was the art of siegecraft. The great engagements of the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries took place almost exclusively before the walls of castles and fortified towns. Henry II’s largest deployment of the combined troops of his Plantagenet dominions took place – albeit unsuccessfully – before the walls of Toulouse in 1159; Richard I made his name storming Acre and Jaffa, before meeting his death at another siege, in Châlus-Chabrol. John lost Normandy because he failed in his daring attempt to retake Château Gaillard in 1203 from Philip Augustus; his attempt to defeat Philip in a pitched battle, when his allies rode against the king of France at Bouvines in 1214, was the defining disaster of his reign. Three eventful years later, the Plantagenet dynasty was saved from obliteration by Philip’s son Prince Louis at another siege, when William Marshal stormed the town of Lincoln in the name of Henry III and drove the French back towards the Channel.

  From the middle of the thirteenth century, however, pitched battles had begun to replace sieges as the decisive means by which the English made war. Battles were initially the necessary recourse of beleaguered Plantagenet kings whose reigns had dissolved into civil war: Simon de Montfort was hacked brutally to death at the battle of Evesham in 1263, and Thomas of Lancaster beheaded on the battlefield following his defeat by his cousin Edward II in 1322. From the late thirteenth century onwards, English kings began to rely far more frequently on the art of the pitched battle to engage their enemies abroad, too. Edward I’s armies stunned Scotland with victories at Falkirk and Dunbar; Edward II was undone at Bannockburn. Edward III learned much about the art of war from his humiliating defeat at Stanhope Park in the miserable summer of 1327, he was revenged at Halidon Hill in 1333, and thereafter an English array on a battlefield became one of the most terrifying sights imaginable.

  The military innovations that developed in Edward III’s reign – his use of dismounted men-at-arms to fight at close range, and mounted archers to disrupt cavalry charges and rain sharp death on infantry – would earn him some of English history’s most famous battlefield victories. The Hundred Years War gave England a sense of military parity with France that would characterize relations between the realms deep into the Napoleonic era. The names of Crécy and Poitiers still ring through the ages, and the revolution in military tactics would later be crowned by Henry V’s astonishing victory at Agincourt on St Crispin’s day in 1415, where the image of the indomitable English archer was cemented. The importance of these fearsome bowmen in the development of English myth, lore and legend is impossible to overstate. English archers riding into battle beneath the cross of St George and the quartered leopards of England and fleurs-de-lis of France; kings of England fighting hand to hand with the French on enemy soil; the Black Prince earning his spurs at Crécy: these remain iconic images in English history, romanticized by generations.

  The battle of Crécy, which was fought as
the idea of the Order of the Garter was percolating in Edward III’s mind, began the military career of the Black Prince and a brief but brilliant period of English military supremacy that has been admired ever since. So much of England’s royal iconography – particularly that connected with the Order of the Garter – stems from Plantagenet military triumphs in France. We should not forget, either, the potency of the myths and memories connected to Richard I, the Lionheart of the Third Crusade. The term ‘crusade’ still has acute political resonance for Christians and Muslims attempting to live side by side in the twenty-first century – it is unhistorical but extremely tempting for modern rhetoricians to reach back and view our present culture clash as an extension of the wars that were waged between Richard and Saladin more than eight hundred years ago.

  Out of the Plantagenets’ military legacy emerged, too, the foundations of the relationships between England and the rest of the British Isles, which have largely endured ever since. Before the Plantagenets, only the mythical King Arthur had ever been said to hold dominion over Wales, Ireland and Scotland as well as the kingdom of England. Yet this goal of a unified Britain under English mastery was conceived and very nearly realized by Plantagenet kings from Henry II onwards. It was Henry who first made Scotland a kingdom under English control, as revenge for William the Lion’s involvement in the Great War of 1173. Edward I went further, receiving the humiliating homage of a Scottish king, and removing the sacred Scottish coronation stone from Scone Abbey to form a solid base for his coronation chair at Westminster, where it sat for seven centuries until its return in 1996. Yet as Edward and his grandson Edward III discovered, Scots never could be compelled to love English kingship – and indeed, the hostility that was aroused by brutal Plantagenet campaigns north of the border has never truly abated. The cause of Scottish nationalism is rooted in the events of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and if Scots nationalists should this century achieve their aim of cutting their ties with the British union, it will feel for many like the long culmination of a historical process that began in the high Middle Ages.