Crown & Country: A History of England Through the Monarchy

by Starkey, David

  There he approached their leader, Wat Tyler. Greeting him as ‘brother’ he asked why the men of Essex and Kent had not gone home. It was a commanding performance. But it was undone when the Lord Mayor of London attacked and murdered Tyler. Quick in response to this nasty turn of events, which threatened to turn the situation into something much worse, Richard rode up to the seething ranks of rebels and shouted: ‘I am your leader: follow me.’

  Unbelievably, the mob did as they were commanded and followed their young king out of harm’s way. Leaderless and their grip on the capital broken, they were easily dispersed by the London militia. The rebellion was crushed. And any romantic hope that the boy king was on the side of the common folk was soon smothered as well. Richard rescinded his promises of liberty. Indeed, he went to watch the execution of many of the rebels later in the summer. Any sympathy or fellow-feeling he had shown, or pretended to show, was gone. These men, he now believed, had committed the unforgivable sin of rebellion.

  II

  Having tasted real power, Richard was reluctant to give it up. He had taken personal steps to crush a serious rebellion. His masterstrokes of political calculation, subterfuge and charisma had succeeded where the nobles and officers of state had failed. He had, he believed, metamorphosed during those tumultuous days in London from an uncertain boy into a man. To signify this transition he found a bride and was married within a year. He was ready to rule in his own name.

  The story of the next few years is the descent of Richard from the popularity and power he had gained after the Peasants’ Revolt. He lavished gifts on a handful of favourites, the most prominent being Michael de la Pole and Robert de Vere. The latter had a title created just for him – marquis – which put him above all the nobility apart from the royal dukes. Then he was made duke of Ireland, which made him the equal of the royal family. Under Richard and his friends royal government became a high-tax, high-spend, cliquey affair. And once again taxpayers’ money went nowhere: it was squandered on favourites and failed wars.

  Richard had to be reminded to his face of the fate of Edward II. But the warnings did little good. Instead the demands for cash kept coming. Richard’s failures in war meant that the country was facing invasion from France. The ‘Wonderful’ Parliament of 1386 agreed to help Richard, but only if he dismissed his favourites. Richard replied that he would not listen to Parliament even if it asked him to dismiss his kitchen scullion. It was a disastrous game of tit-for-tat. Parliament raised its demands. Richard then said he would invite in the French to help him against Parliament.

  This was a shocking, silly thing to say. It was a burst of petulance from the lips of a twenty-year-old who had always had the dice loaded in his favour. And it had a devastating effect. Richard was threatened with deposition. That sobered him up. He surrendered to Parliament, which bound him to ordinances which set up a ruling council as in the days of Henry III and Edward II; impeached de la Pole and instituted an inquiry into royal finances. Richard stomped off in anger. It was called his ‘gyration’ – a tour of the country.

  It was no meet-and-greet, however. Richard’s intention was to gather armed support against the nobility and parliamentarians and gain legal judgements to rescue his prerogative. He formed his own private army, who wore his badge of the white hart as a sign of loyalty. Many of the men were drawn from his stronghold in Cheshire, giving him a handy force of archers. Richard was on a mission to assert his vision of monarchy.

  An idealized version of this is depicted in the beautiful painting known as the Wilton Diptych. The Diptych is a work of private devotion and it takes us to the heart of Richard’s intense, obsessive, solipsistic view of kingship, which raised him gloriously above his subjects and dangerously cut him off from them.

  Richard was born on 6 January – the Feast of the Epiphany – when the three wise men, or kings, knelt in adoration before the Christ child and his Virgin Mother. In the centre of the picture is Richard, repeating that act of homage. January 6th is also the day on which the Church commemorates Christ’s baptism by John the Baptist. He too appears in the Diptych beside the two English royal saints: Edward the Confessor, whose crown and ring had been placed on Richard at his coronation; and, next to him, the Anglo-Saxon martyr-monarch Edmund. Thus aided, Richard is ready to receive the banner of St George from the hands of the Christ child.

  Even the angels surrounding the Virgin belong to Richard’s dream world as, like his earthly trusties, the Cheshire archers, they wear his badge of the white hart. With the heavenly host in his pocket, Richard thought, who could stand against him?

  The answer, in this new world, was the men who actually held power: the nobility. One of their natural leaders was Henry Bolingbroke, son of John of Gaunt.

  Only ten years had passed since Richard and Henry had sworn never to take up arms against each other. But in the ten years the two boys had grown into very different men.

  Henry had turned into a man of action, excelling at jousting and blood sports. And he had a soldier’s harsh piety. Richard, on the other hand, had created a glamorous, luxurious court of which he was the glittering centre. ‘He was of common stature,’ wrote a chronicler, ‘his hair yellowish, his face round and feminine, sometimes flushed; abrupt and stammering in his speech, capricious in his manners … He was prodigal in his gifts, extravagantly splendid in his entertainments and dress.’ Style was everything: he commissioned the first royal cookery book and invented the handkerchief.

  But this was more than style wars: it was a clash of political values. Richard believed that a king was God on Earth; Henry that he was a first among equals.

  The result was real war: Richard and his court favourites against the nobility.

  On 19 December 1387 the two sides met at Radcot Bridge just outside Oxford. The royal army was led by Robert de Vere; the nobles by Henry.

  Henry won. De Vere fled into exile, leaving Richard without troops and powerless. News of the catastrophe was brought to him at the Tower, where he was spending Christmas. Soon the rebel lords arrived as well and mercilessly browbeat the king, threatening him with force and even with deposition. There was nothing for it but complete and humiliating surrender. The ‘Merciless’ Parliament dismantled the king’s power. Richard’s friends were executed or driven into exile. The kingdom was to be ruled by a committee of the lords and even Richard’s personal affairs were to be put into the hands of a board of guardians, as though he was a child or insane.

  Richard was left only with the title of king. But it was enough. Slowly and painstakingly he rebuilt his position and power. The removal of the favourites satisfied many of his critics. After his twenty-first birthday he made a plausible case that he had matured. He reached out to John of Gaunt, who agreed to use his influence to pacify the country. He rebuilt his personal following. And above all he treated his former enemies with mercy.

  But he had not forgotten his degradation. Adversity had taught Richard patience and cunning and, gourmet though he was, he had decided that revenge was a dish best eaten cold.

  The depth of festering hatred was clearly illustrated when his beloved Robert de Vere died in exile.

  In 1395 Richard arranged a funeral for him. All the sometime rebel lords were obliged to attend: the very men who had fought against de Vere at Radcot Bridge. Richard placed a ring on the dead man’s finger and with this quiet gesture he signalled that vengeance would be his.

  By 1397 Richard was strong enough to strike. One by one the lords who had rebelled against him were either executed or exiled on trumped-up charges of treason. No one was safe – among the victims was one of his own uncles, the duke of Gloucester. Parliament itself was surrounded by Richard’s Cheshire archers in an unambiguous message that there was one sovereign in England. Richard had regained his prerogative, which had been taken from him over a decade before. And he had meted out the appropriate punishment.

  But Richard II saved a special revenge for his cousin Henry. When Henry Bolingbroke was involved in a qu
arrel with another noble, Thomas Mowbray, Richard ordered that the two men fight to the death in judicial combat. God would be on the just man’s side.

  Richard’s behaviour in the affair shows him at his most malign and vain. He deliberately played up the quarrel between Henry and Mowbray and he chose the means of settling it which showed off his own glory to the utmost. In an echo of the pageantry of the Colosseum, Richard would preside like a Roman emperor in the amphitheatre as the defeated man was stripped of his armour, dragged at a horse’s tail from the field and strung up on the gallows that stood ready. But, in the event, Richard behaved more like a royal conjuror than a Roman emperor. For, just as the combatants were ready to charge, Richard, in a dramatic gesture, threw down his staff, stopping the fight and resuming judgement to himself. Henry, the king ruled, would go into exile for ten years and Mowbray for life. Thus King Richard, like a demigod, struck down his remaining foes.

  III

  In 1399, Henry Bolingbroke was an exile in Paris. Within the year he received a double blow. His father, John of Gaunt, died. And Richard seized all of Henry’s vast Lancastrian inheritance for himself. Henry was left with nothing.

  But Richard had overreached himself: all landowners in England now had cause to fear. The king was in his pomp as autocrat. He simply helped himself to other people’s property. Twenty-two years had passed since Henry had been made a knight of the Garter with Richard but now any vestige of cousinly feeling had gone. Henry determined to reclaim what was rightly his by force.

  Richard believed he had covered all eventualities. France was now on his side, and he had a private agreement with the duke of Burgundy that close watch should be kept on Henry. Richard even felt secure enough to go to Ireland. But fortune turned against the king. The duke of Burgundy was forced out of Paris by the plague. And Henry was free to do as he wished.

  En route on this make-or-break journey back to England, Henry paused at the great royal abbey of St Denis. St Denis was where the kings of France were buried and it was also where they came to receive the sacred banner of the ‘Oriflamme’ (the standard of St Louis) on their way to battle. Henry was on his way to battle and he needed all the help, human and divine, that he could get. But he made sure that God at least was on his side by a single, revealing gesture. Before he left the abbey, he promised the abbot that he would restore to St Denis the revenues of the little priory of Deerhurst in Gloucestershire, given to the abbey long, long ago by Edward the Confessor and purloined, like so much else, by Richard. Already, therefore, before he even left France, Henry saw himself as the true king of England, fully able to redress Richard’s wrongs.

  With a fleet of only ten ships Henry sailed around England to the Yorkshire coast.

  Yorkshire was the heartland of his stolen estate, and as Henry moved from castle to castle they surrendered easily to their rightful master. Henry marched south, his swollen army reinforced by the great northern earls.

  Richard, back home, sought safety in Edward I’s great Welsh castles. But Henry lured him out with the promise that he came only to claim his inheritance and had no intention of threatening the crown itself. It was a lie. But a successful one. As Richard emerged, an ambush of Henry’s men lay in wait. The king of England was Henry Bolingbroke’s prisoner. It was now clear that Henry wanted far more than the duchy of Lancaster: he would settle for nothing less than the crown of England itself.

  But how to justify the dethroning of Richard and his replacement with Henry and the Lancastrian dynasty? The neatest solution would be to show that Richard had never been true king by hereditary right anyway. But that Henry was. Conveniently a story to this effect was an article of faith in the House of Lancaster. Henry and Richard were both descended from Henry III – Richard from the eldest son Edward, who had succeeded as King Edward I, and Henry from the second son, Edmund, earl of Lancaster, surnamed Crouchback. According to the story, however, Crouchback was really the eldest son but had been shunted aside in favour of Edward on account of his supposed deformity.

  If this story were true, it was the perfect solution for Henry. So Henry referred the story to a specially convened panel of historians and constitutional experts. The panel was supposed to meet in secret. But then as now constitutional experts are a garrulous lot and one of the panel, Adam of Usk, recorded their deliberations in his Chronicle. Like all good historians, the panel went back to the sources, as Adam reports. Unfortunately for Henry these unanimously confirmed that Edward was indeed the eldest son: Edwardus primogenitus regis Henrici. The Crouchback story was indeed too good to be true. Henry would have to think again.

  Richard, for his part, put up a brief struggle. But, faced with the threat of force, he abdicated his throne – to God.

  For the first time since the Conquest the continuity of the succession had to be deliberately broken. Only one body could do that: Parliament.

  Henry moved quickly and a parliament was summoned to meet at Westminster Hall. The hall had been splendidly rebuilt by Richard as a monument to his own glory. But now it was to witness his final humiliation. First, the terms of the king’s abdication were read out. Then followed a long list of the charges against him. Finally, he was declared dethroned and deposed and his subjects absolved of their allegiance. All this had taken place in Richard’s absence, and the royal throne under its great canopy of cloth of gold had remained empty.

  But now Henry, in a theatrical gesture worthy of Richard himself, stepped forward to claim the vacant throne. He spoke simply and forcibly and in English. He descended, he said, of the true royal blood of the good King Henry III. Thanks to the help of God and his friends he had been able to reclaim that right and, in so doing, he had saved the realm from ruin by the bad government of his predecessor, Richard.

  Put like that, Henry’s claim sounds logical and convincing. But in fact it was a mere ragbag. For in reality he had only had a single compelling claim – he was the man of the hour.

  In twelve weeks Henry Bolingbroke had transformed himself from landless exile into Henry IV, king of England. But to prove that he was more than a usurper, he needed God’s blessing as well as Parliament’s.

  This was arranged, too. And at his coronation Henry was anointed with an opportunely discovered vial of oil reputedly given to Thomas Becket by the Virgin Mary. Divine oil would surely wash away the sins of the past. But Henry IV was about to commit the greatest sin of all.

  Richard II may have been deposed by law before Parliament but he was still an anointed monarch. And so long as Richard lived Henry would have no security. So Henry decided to kill the former king – but secretly and without leaving marks on the body – by leaving Richard to starve slowly to death in Pontefract Castle.

  Edward II, of course, had been murdered even more nastily. But none of the blame attached to his successor Edward III. In 1399, however, a king had indeed murdered a king. The taboo was broken. What was to stop others doing the same to Henry or his descendants? In 1400, only a year after his coronation, the Welsh rose up against English rule.

  But the greatest threat to the Lancastrians came from within England and from the family who had been Henry’s strongest supporters. The Percys, whose head was the earl of Northumberland, were the most powerful family in the north of England, with vast estates, strong castles and a multitude of armed followers. They had been the first to back Henry when he invaded England in 1399. And it was their support that had carried him to victory. But having made Henry king, why should the Percys stop there? Especially as Henry refused to behave as an obedient puppet. Perhaps they could do even better by backing another claimant? Perhaps a Percy could become king himself ?

  Henry recognized the threat and did his best to conciliate them. But in 1403 he learned that Hotspur – the son and heir to the earl of Northumberland – had joined the Welsh rebels and was invading England.

  Hotspur rode south to join up with the Welsh. On 21 July 1403 the joint army arrived just outside Shrewsbury. From here Hotspur sent a defiant mess
age to Henry challenging his right to the throne. Henry too was eager for a fight to the finish. The sides were evenly matched and the battle raged from midday to nightfall. The hardest fighting was around the king and Hotspur. In the end it was a personal battle between the two men.

  Henry was victorious. About sixteen thousand men were killed in the battle; Hotspur’s body was taken to Shrewsbury, where, as the corpse of a traitor, it was quartered. But the low-ranking slain on both sides were buried on the spot in a mass grave. In commemoration the site was renamed ‘Battlefield’ and a church, complete with an armed statue of Henry IV, was built as a monument to his victory. But this victory brought Henry no security. For no sooner had he cut down one enemy than another arose. Moreover, the king himself, doggedly though he fought, harboured private doubts. And if Henry doubted, why should anyone else believe in the Lancastrian title?

  Henry IV’s last years were a sad contrast to the promise of 1399. Gone was the vigorous youth who had won a country to his cause. Instead, he aged rapidly and developed a disfiguring skin disease: perhaps leprosy, perhaps a psychosomatic acute dermatitis. Whatever the diagnosis, to many contemporaries the disease seemed proof of God’s displeasure with the usurper king.

  In March 1413, Henry came to Westminster with the hand of death already on him. On the 20th, while praying at the Confessor’s tomb, he had a seizure and was brought to the Jerusalem Chamber in the abbot’s lodgings. The crown was placed beside his pillow; he seemed to cease breathing and his face was covered. Thinking like everybody else that his father was already dead, his son and heir, Prince Henry, took the crown. Suddenly the old king roused himself and demanded of Henry by what right he took the crown since he himself had none to it. Coolly Henry replied: ‘As you have kept it by the sword, so I will keep it whilst I have life.’ It is a good story and, as an insight into the prince’s character, it is shrewd. For whatever doubts Henry IV may have harboured about his right to the throne, Henry V had none at all.