The meeting of the kings of England and France, preceding the wedding, was one of the spectacles of the age, foreshadowing the later Field of the Cloth of Gold.2 Both kings brought enormous retinues. Huge quantities of food and drink were sailed by barge to Calais for the occasion. New clothes were made for all, and gifts liberally dispensed by the monarchs on both sides. Even though the French king had begun to be afflicted by the madness which would characterise his reign – Charles VI suffered intermittently from the delusion that he was made of glass and about to shatter into pieces – it was very important for his people that he was seen to be as magnificent as the king of England. Charles sent the count of St Pol to Calais to greet Richard. When the count returned to Saint-Omer, he was accompanied by most of the English royal family, including Henry, John and Katherine.3 At Saint-Omer they were joined by the duke of Brittany and his duchess, Joan (Henry’s future wife). A magnificent banquet was held by the duchess of Burgundy at which every effort was made to delight the English lords, through wine, food and flattery. The English then escorted the dukes of Berry, Bourbon and Burgundy to a similar reception near Calais.
On 26 October, the two kings and their thousands of companions and retainers assembled in a huge encampment at Ardres. The whole plain was covered with brightly coloured tents and pavilions. Next day the kings met, surrounded by their dukes, knights and guards, and talked while they ate sweetmeats. Richard agreed to support the king of France in his quarrel with the duke of Milan, and to pursue a common policy towards the Church, which was then split between two popes. The following day they met again, and the princess was handed over to the English. Henry attended the royal wedding at Calais on 4 November and a few days later took ship back to Dover.4 Then the various parties split up, Richard going via Rochester to Kennington, Henry travelling via Dartford to London.5
Henry left London on 23 December and spent Christmas at Hertford.6 He was back in London by 6 January 1397. He departed again on the 13th to take part in a joust, probably at Hertford, following which his horses needed medical treatment. He was back in London on 19 January, at ‘the time of the parliament’, as the treasurer of his household noted.7 After his father’s constant efforts to talk up Henry’s usefulness to the king, Henry was once more appointed a receiver of petitions. So he was present at parliament from its opening, on 22 January. But trouble was brewing. Several other lords stayed away.
Henry would have had a lot of sympathy with those who absented themselves. Their reasons concerned Henry’s friend Gian Galeazzo Visconti, the duke of Milan. When Richard had agreed at Ardres to support the king of France in a war against Gian Galeazzo, he had not properly thought through the implications. Now, in parliament, those implications became clear. Richard proposed to demand a full measure of war taxation to pay for an expedition which could do the English no good at all. On 23 January, members of the commons elected Sir John Bussy as their Speaker and he immediately asked for clarification of certain points mentioned in the chancellor’s address. Bussy also asked that those lords who had stayed away from this parliament should now appear. The next day, the king’s officers openly explained that taxation was necessary to finance a war against Milan. The commons were not happy about this, and refused. The next day an irate Richard demanded they reassure him they would not try to resist his war plans.
Henry was deeply concerned. He had kept in touch with Gian Galeazzo by letters and gifts since he had met him in 1393, affectionately addressing him as ‘the count of Virtue’.8 He still had not forgotten Lucia Visconti, and would in due course discuss marrying her.9 To him, Richard’s plan to raise an army to fight Gian Galeazzo was absurd. It was unwarranted, a sign of Richard’s weakness for all things French. After all, the reasons for the hatred between Milan and France were hardly any more reasonable than the French king himself when in one of his fits. Gian Galeazzo’s daughter, Valentina, was married to Louis, duke of Orléans, brother of King Charles. One day in 1395, while she was looking after the three-year-old dauphin and her own four-year-old son, a poisoned apple had been slipped through the open window of the chamber, in the hope that the dauphin would eat it. Instead, her own son saw it, ran to it and bit it; he died shortly afterwards. The story sounds like a vicious slander, but the idea that she herself had tried to give the apple to the dauphin in the hope that her own son would succeed, and that he had died out of divine punishment for such an evil act, caught the public mood in France. Despite Valentina’s extreme distress – this boy was her fourth child to die in infancy – she was castigated as a traitor and an enemy of France. So terrible was her treatment that Gian Galeazzo had to demand action to restore her status and honour. He was ignored. This made Gian Galeazzo even angrier, and to spite France he supposedly informed the sultan Bayezid that the Nicopolis Crusade was on its way, giving warning of the French army’s strength and movements. When this became known, the French felt Gian Galeazzo had betrayed them spiritually as well as politically, and there was bitter enmity between Milan and Paris.
Even though there was probably more to the dispute than this account reveals, Froissart’s story shows that it was widely circulated.10 Hence, for the English to set out to fight for the king of France against the duke of Milan was a ridiculous waste of taxpayers’ money. Henry knew it, so did the commons. But Richard would not be argued with. He had given his word to the French king that he would help him. He had also promised some of his magnates that he would pay for their expenses in going to fight Milan.11 His third reason for insisting on attacking Milan was that Gian Galeazzo was a tyrant, and an unjust ruler (having usurped his uncle’s throne), and an enemy of Christian people everywhere, and it behoved the English to eradicate such an upstart. His fourth reason was that he wished to be ‘at liberty to command his people, to send them to aid his friends, and to dispose of his own goods at his will, where and whensoever he chose’.12
Henry seems to have suffered this outburst in silence. His father had requested that Thomas Talbot be brought to justice and that his Beaufort children be recognised as legitimate by the king. These things had yet to happen. So, although Richard had just outlined the basis for his absolutism, Henry said nothing. But he must have thought hard. He would have thought even harder a few days later, when Richard seized upon a petition presented by one Thomas Haxey. This had been passed by the receivers of petitions in this parliament, including Henry, but the king was infuriated by one clause, which stated that the expenses of his household should be reduced. He demanded that the author of the petition be brought before parliament. On 7 February Haxey was taken before the king and condemned to death as a traitor. Alarmed, the archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Arundel, immediately stepped forward to plead mercy for Haxey. He also asked that, as a cleric, Haxey be handed over to the archbishop for custody. Richard assented. But the message was clear: to deny the king his unfettered right to rule was punishable by death.
*
Historians have argued for many years over whether Richard went mad in 1397. In the mid-twentieth century it was thought that he had indeed lost his mind, and the death of Queen Anne was identified as one of the catalysts. But really this is a modern myth: there is no evidence of madness in the king, just an ever-increasing tendency to rule his subjects through the medium of terror. In explaining their actions in 1397–8, the lords who were later arraigned for treason all pleaded that they had been frightened of the king. It was a genuine excuse; anyone in their position would have been scared. Even those intimate and trusted friends of the king, who were given high titles and extensive lands, were only favoured so long as they followed the king’s orders. Modern scholars now see Richard as essentially narcissistic, convinced of his own perfection, and yet deeply insecure. We might elaborate on this slightly and say that he was exceptionally self-conscious: so much so that his own identity, royal personage, ideas, rivalries and feelings formed not only the core but the limit of his entire world. As a result, with no real balance or objective view of himself and his kingdom
, he suffered from a chronic lack of self-confidence, which made him by turns unreasonably angry and vengeful, as well as unreasonably generous, unjustifiably kind and increasingly paranoid. Moreover, these characteristics were noticeable from an early age: in his sacking of the chancellor for disagreeing with him, for example. When he rode out in front of the crowd during the Peasants’ Revolt, aged fourteen, he may have been very brave in the eyes of the expectant public, but he was driven by his own narcissistic obsession with himself and his powers as a monarch. Now, sixteen years later, he was wiser and more artful, but no one now believed he was a great leader. He was a thirty-year-old who still had something about him of the boy who pulls the legs off spiders – not because he is interested in insects or likes causing pain but because he has an unending fascination with the contrast between his inner fear and his apparent power.13
While we may have some sympathy for Richard, his psychological problems had a disastrous effect on the political situation in England. Haxey’s plight was just the tip of a very big iceberg. The Nicopolis Crusade (in which Bayezid defeated and massacred a Franco-Hungarian army) had plunged all France into grief, so they cancelled the intended expedition against Milan. Richard’s response was to follow their lead and reverse his declaration of war. Even though he had justified his bellicosity towards Milan in terms of his moral responsibility to remove Gian Galeazzo from power, he now justified his change of mind by saying he had always sought peace. Such a mercurial ruler could hardly be an inspiration to his people. Wise men do not follow leaders whom they suspect might later reproach them for their loyalty.
Following the parliament, Richard summoned a meeting of the royal council. He had decided to change his mind on another issue: the pursuit of a single policy towards the Church of Rome. Richard had recently decided his priority was to be elected Holy Roman Emperor, and this required some diplomatic shifting.14 Both the duke of Gloucester and the earl of Arundel refused to attend the council meeting, both claiming they were ill.15 Richard was furious, and sought a means whereby he could stop his regal authority being treated with such disdain. He fixed on the fact that his uncle and the earl of Arundel had been Appellants. Richard now sought to be revenged on the Lords Appellant, to make them an example to anyone who would question his authority, as he had done with Haxey.
Henry, as a former Appellant, had every reason to be afraid. Even though he had been pardoned for any action against the king in 1388, he knew that it would not take much for Richard to reverse all the pardons he had granted and to sentence all five Lords Appellant to death. Besides, his alienation from Richard was growing more serious. In February 1397 Richard adopted his cousin, Edward, earl of Rutland, as his ‘brother’.16 This was perhaps in emulation of Edward II’s adoption of Piers Gaveston as his brother.17 The implications of Richard actually having a brother would have been enormous – a real brother would automatically have become heir to the throne – and it is surprising that historians have tended to overlook this formal adoption.18 With Richard making Rutland’s father keeper of the realm in 1394 and 1396, the adoption was the clearest indicator yet that Richard wanted the succession to the throne to pass to the house of York, not the Lancastrians or the Mortimers.
Wisely, Henry disappeared off to the Lancastrian estates in the Midlands after the council meeting. He went to Leicester in March, then moved to Tutbury at the end of the month, and returned to Leicester at the beginning of May.19 These cannot have been happy days. Indeed, one of the reasons why he did not marry at this time may have been his preoccupation with his own fate. Even though Edward ‘the king’s brother’ was commissioned to negotiate a marriage between Henry and the daughter of the king of Navarre, and there were rumours of his marrying Lucia Visconti (which Henry himself may have started), he stayed single.20 No doubt at Leicester he reflected sadly on the tomb of his dead wife. In June he returned south to Hertford, to discuss the looming crisis with his father.21 Within two weeks they were both summoned to Westminster. Richard wanted to know exactly where their loyalties lay. In this dispute between the king and the leaders of magnate opposition, would John and Henry defend the duke of Gloucester? Or would they remain dutifully quiet?
For John there was no question. He was loyal through and through, in both policy and instinct. He had not joined the Appellants in 1387, having been out of the country, and even though he had protested his loyalty on every occasion it had been called into doubt. Moreover, he hated the earl of Arundel. His only predicament concerned his son, Henry. If Richard revoked the pardons granted to the senior Appellants, then what was to stop him revoking the one granted to Henry too? What was there to stop Richard from accusing Henry of treason at a later date? If Henry did anything to incur Richard’s wrath, then he too would find himself on the wrong end of the executioner’s axe.22
Henry had even less choice. When Richard outlined his plans to him in the summer of 1397, he made it quite clear that he could either support the impeachment or be impeached along with the others. Eight lords would appeal the three senior Lords Appellant of treason. Henry did not join these Counter-Appellants, but was with the king at Westminster on 5 July and stayed for the next month in his household.23 Thus we may be sure that he had prior knowledge of the king’s actions on 10 July. That night Richard and a contingent of men-at-arms left Westminster and went to Pleshey Castle in Essex, where his uncle Duke Thomas was staying, and dragged him out of bed. Those at Pleshey, seeing the king there in the middle of the night, immediately knew that this was no ordinary arrest. The duchess, Lady Eleanor, wept copiously, and pleaded with the king to be merciful. Richard declared – whether to her or not is unclear – that he would show him as much mercy as the duke had shown Simon Burley nine years earlier.24 He took him to Tillingbourne, and handed him over the next day to Thomas Mowbray, constable of Calais, with orders to take the duke across the Channel.
It seemed that Richard had successfully carried out a coup against the Appellants. Henry was utterly disempowered. When announcing to the Londoners that he had arrested the duke of Gloucester, and the earls of Arundel and Warwick, Richard could say that not only had he the approval of the eight Counter-Appellants but also John, Henry and the duke of York (even though these three did not join the appeal).25 Henry’s acquiescence to the arrests, and his subsequent elevation to a dukedom, have led a number of historians to think that in 1397 Henry was again in favour with the king. However, there was still no amicable grounding to their relationship. Henry’s loyalty to Richard at this time was simply life-preserving, not approving, as can be seen by his refusal to join the Counter-Appellants. Richard’s lack of action against him was, rather, a matter of expediency. Had Richard threatened Henry and Mowbray as well as the leading Appellants in July 1397, he would have forced John also into revolt, and with him the entire Lancastrian confederacy. As it was, Richard broke the opposition by dividing Thomas and Henry from the other Appellants.
Everyone was nervous. No one knew what was going to happen. Even with their accord with the king worked out, Henry and his father were in danger. With the duke of York, they raised a large body of men which they brought to Dale Abbey for five days while the king was at Nottingham.26 That this was with the king’s approval is shown by various payments in Henry’s accounts and by the king’s later explicit instructions.27 However, the raising of a Lancastrian army was a sure sign of uncertain times. On 28 August, Richard issued a letter patent specifically ordering John and Henry to bring an army to the next parliament ‘for the king’s protection’.28 John was to raise three hundred men-at-arms and six hundred archers; the duke of York one hundred men-at-arms and two hundred archers; and Henry was to assemble two hundred men-at-arms and four hundred archers. These forces, plus another two thousand of the king’s Cheshire archers, effectively destroyed any chance of men rallying to defend the accused lords.29
Then came the shocking news. The duke of Gloucester was dead. He had died, it was said, of natural causes in Calais.30 That sounded suspicious, com
ing so soon after his arrest. What were John and Henry to think? If Thomas was really dead, there was nothing they could do now to save him. If he was being kept alive – as, in fact, he was – the best they could do was to persuade Richard of his loyalty.31
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On St Lambert’s Day, 17 September 1397, parliament assembled in a great marquee which had been set up in the yard of Westminster Palace. The old hall was being refashioned and rebuilt, so it was not possible to gather in the usual place. Outside there were many ranks of armed men. The two thousand Cheshire archers held their bows ready, arrows notched.
With the empty throne towering above them at one end, the members stood and waited. Then the king entered. The chancellor began to explain why parliament had been summoned. It was, he said, ‘to the honour and reverence of God and the salvation and correction of the realm’. If anyone there thought that it sounded like a crusade, they were not far wrong. ‘One king shall be king to them all’, declared the chancellor, ‘and they shall be no more two nations, neither shall they be divided into two kingdoms any more.’32
The atmosphere was tense. There were many new faces, many men appointed by Richard. The rumours went around among the older hands that the king had arranged the return of as many pro-royalist members as possible.33 Rumours of the duke of Gloucester’s survival circulated too, as did speculation as to the earl of Arundel’s fate. More certain was the tension throughout the city. Thousands of archers and men-at-arms created an atmosphere of nervous hostility. The inns in the city had been overrun, with many of the Cheshire archers getting drunk and violent, and taking advantage of their favoured position as the king’s men.
The Fears of Henry IV: The Life of England's Self-Made King Page 20