Richard and Northumberland had only travelled a few miles when the king, on ascending a hill, saw the army that his companion had previously concealed. He fell into a panic, and demanded to be taken back to Conway Castle. Once more Northumberland swore, on the precious host, that Henry had no thought of deposing him. If this was a bluff, it was a sacrilegious bluff. So the party travelled onwards to Flint Castle in north-eastern Wales where, alerted by swift messengers, Henry had agreed to meet Richard. It must have occurred to the king that he had now effectively been taken prisoner. He reached the castle before Henry and, on the morning after his arrival, he climbed up to the battlements; from that vantage he saw Henry’s army approaching, and is reported to have said that ‘now I can see the end of my days coming’.
He kept Henry waiting, at the great door, while he ate his last meal of freedom in the keep of the castle. Then at Northumberland’s request he came down to speak with his enemy. In the play Richard II by William Shakespeare, he uttered at this point the words, ‘Down, down, I come like glistering Phaeton’. Henry took off his cap and bowed low to the sovereign. ‘My lord,’ he said, ‘I have come sooner than you sent for me, and I shall tell you why. It is said that you have governed your people too harshly, and they are discontented. If it is pleasing to the Lord, I shall help you to govern them better.’ This report has the ring of truth. Henry would have made sure that his words were exactly recorded. It is significant, too, that he spoke in English rather than in French. Now he represented the nation. ‘If it pleases you, fair cousin,’ Richard replied, ‘then it pleases us well.’
On that same day the two men, and the army, rode on to Chester. The king was consigned to a small room in the castle; he was under the control of the sons of Gloucester and Arundel, two men whom he had put to death. Henry now set his mind to the future. He issued a summons, in the king’s name, for the assembly of a new parliament at Westminster. On 20 August he and his captive rode to London. Henry took up residence in the bishop of London’s palace, while the king was despatched to the Tower.
It may have been only at this point that Henry decided to strike and claim the throne. He had been waiting on events, but now saw his path clear ahead of him. The king was at his mercy, and no body of royal supporters was able to liberate him. There may have been a show of force by the Cheshire archers upon whom the king had relied, but it came to nothing. Henry now decided to consult the histories of the realm for precedents. Two weeks later a committee of dignitaries was established to consider ‘the matter of setting aside King Richard, and of choosing the duke of Lancaster in his stead, and how it should be done’ (Henry had become duke of Lancaster on the death of his father). The committee came to the conclusion that Richard should be deposed ‘by the authority of the clergy and people’.
On 29 September a deputation had gone to the king lodged or imprisoned in the Tower. The official parliamentary report suggests that the members of this deputation ‘reminded’ the king that at Conway he had volunteered to give up his throne; the king, recalling this promise, agreed that he should abdicate. This is most unlikely and, in any case, a contemporary chronicler provides a wholly different picture of the occasion. The author of the Chronique de la Trahison et Mort de Richard II states that the king raged at the nobles who had come to interview him and declared that he would ‘flay some of these men alive’. Another chronicler had visited the king eight days before, and described him as bitterly angry at the country that had betrayed him. It seems fair to say that he did not go quietly into the night.
On 30 September a parliament met at Westminster. There are reports that it was packed with Henry’s supporters, ‘many sorts of folk who were neither noble nor gentle … in such great heaps that the officers could scarcely enter the hall’. The king’s renunciation of the throne was read out to those assembled. Although the official report asserts that he had agreed to its terms, and that he had signed it in the presence of witnesses, there is still a possibility that the document was faked. It was, at the very least, extorted with threats. Richard may have agreed to it as the only way of saving his life.
Yet by acclamation of all those present, it was accepted. They were asked if Henry had the right to be king. ‘Yes!’ they cried out. ‘Yes! Yes!’ Even though parliament had no formal right to deposition, the king was removed in what was essentially a coup d’eétat. Henry then declared that by virtue of ‘the right line of blood coming from the good lord King Henry the Third’ he had come to ‘recover’ a realm on the point of being undone by bad laws. There is no reason to question his sincerity in this. He had a very good claim to the crown. By the complicated processes of genealogy only a boy of eight, Edmund Mortimer, earl of March, had a stronger; but England did not want, or need, another juvenile monarch.
Henry was led towards the throne; he stood for a moment, and then knelt down to pray. Then he rose, made the sign of the cross on the back and the front of the throne, and sat down upon it to general acclamation. He was anointed with the chrism that had come from a miraculous phial given by the Virgin Mary to Thomas Becket; or so it was believed. Richard II had discovered it, two years before, while searching in the Tower for a necklace once worn by King John. It is also reported that, as a result of the anointing, the new king’s hair was soon full of lice.
From his earliest youth Henry had been acquainted with the uses and abuses of power; he was only three months older than Richard, and had carried the sword before him at the coronation in the summer of 1377. Henry had also been with him in the Tower when Richard and his entourage sheltered from the peasants’ rebellion. There had never been peace between the two men, however, and Richard also chose to view Henry as a personal enemy. He gave him none of the great offices of state and had chosen his uncle, Edmund of York, to succeed him in a direct rebuff to Henry. Now the whirligig of the world had turned. Lancaster had triumphed over York, but the forcible removal of the king would bring much mischief and bloodshed to the realm.
On the day after the parliament Richard was informed of his deposition. He replied that he ‘hoped that his cousin would be a good lord to him’. He was soon disabused. The new king asked the lords for their advice on the deposed monarch; he was told that Richard should be placed in a stronghold under the care of trusted gaolers and that no one else be allowed to see him. So Richard was removed, in disguise, to Leeds Castle. From there he was taken, at the beginning of December, to the more heavily fortified castle at Pontefract in Yorkshire.
Some of Richard’s courtiers and supporters rose in rebellion two or three weeks later, but Henry thwarted and defeated them. The rebellion, however, made it clear that the deposed king was still dangerous. At the beginning of February 1400, the king and council met to debate Richard’s future. If he was alive, they concluded, he should be heavily guarded; if he was dead, his body should be shown to the people. Death had entered the room. A week or two later the body of Richard lay in his prison cell. The manner of his going is not known. Some say that he was starved by his gaolers; others believe that, in his grief, he refused all food and so killed himself.
His body was taken south, in procession or in pageant; it was displayed at several convenient sites, so that the people of England could be assured that he was truly dead. An illustration of the scene can be found in an illuminated manual of the period. It shows the king lying in a litter covered in black cloth with a black canopy above him; his head is uncovered, lying on a black cushion. Two black horses, and four knights dressed in mourning, complete the picture. On its arrival in London the bier was taken to St Paul’s Cathedral where a requiem Mass was held. The coffin was then taken to a Dominican monastery at King’s Langley, 21 miles (33.8 kilometres) outside London. A later king, Henry V, ensured that Richard II was reburied in Westminster Abbey; he may have done so in order to expiate the impiety of his father, Henry Bolingbroke, in overthrowing a lawful king.
In the reign of Richard II, a splendid and dangerous sovereign, the handkerchief was introduced to England
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26
Into the woods
Robin Hood is an English native. He and his ‘merry men’ inhabit the forest, where they live by means of various laudable crimes such as robbing the rich and poaching the king’s deer. They always manage to elude the law, generally represented by the sheriff of Nottingham; they dwell in Sherwood Forest, which lies under the sheriff’s jurisdiction.
The story was current in the thirteenth century, and may have been fashioned in its early decades from attested events. In 1216 Robin Hood, a servant of the abbot of Cirencester, was accused of murder; but this may be coincidental. In 1225 the sheriff of Yorkshire seized the goods of Robert Hood or Hod, who had fled from the city of York heavily in debt to the church courts. The same sheriff was asked in that year to pursue a notorious outlaw, known as Robert of Wetherby; the fugitive was eventually hanged in chains. Were Robert of Wetherby and Robin Hood the same person? The names of Robert and Robin were more or less interchangeable. The sheriff of Yorkshire had previously been the sheriff of Nottinghamshire. So facts are conflated and reinterpreted until the point when a legend of outlawry and liberty can appear.
Robin Hood is first mentioned as the generic name for an outlaw in the justice rolls of the late thirteenth century, where he appears as ‘Robehod’ or ‘Robinhood’. He was so well known a hundred years later that the idle priest Sloth, in Piers Plowman, admits that he does not know his ‘pater noster’ but he ‘kan rymes of Robyn Hood’. Among those rhymes was one still being sung at the beginning of the fifteenth century, ‘Robyn hode in scherewode stod’. In this period the outlaw also appears as part of the chronicle of England. One chronicler asserts that he was a follower of Simon de Montfort in his insurrection against the rule of Henry III in 1263; a real outlaw, who supported de Montfort at this time, did indeed live in Sherwood Forest. But his name was Roger Godberd. Nevertheless a monkish hand, in the margins of a copy of Polychronicon, refers in 1460 to ‘a certain outlaw named Robin Hood’ who in Sherwood Forest commits innumerable robberies. Andrew of Wynton, compiling his chronicle a few years earlier, places him in Inglewood near Carlisle and then in Barnsdale.
Soon enough Robin Hood begins to appear everywhere as the epitome of the brave and self-reliant Englishman who rejects oppressive authority; he emerges in songs and ballads, in plays and in mummings. In these works he is eventually joined by the most renowned of his forest companions, Little John and Maid Marian and Friar Tuck, who between them comprise a veritable pageant play. These characters did in fact become an integral part of the May Games of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, prompting speculation that they may be essentially of pagan origin. They are more interesting, however, as representative of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.
The early ballads identify Robin as a sturdy ‘yeoman’, a man somewhere between small farmer and gentleman; his enemies are the sheriffs, the bishops and the archbishops. He does not wish to harm other yeomen, or even knights and squires; he will ‘beat and bind’ only the members of the secular and clerical nobility, who can be classed as rapacious landlords. It is the dream of the oppressed. Certainly Robin was not a member of the aristocracy fallen on hard times, as some of his later and more romantic chroniclers insisted. He was always a representative of the ordinary folk of the land, and in that respect the ballads might have been sung in the local tavern as often as in the knight’s hall. A roughly hewn justice or sense of morality lay behind the fights and the pursuits, the themes of disguise and revenge; the motifs of lawlessness and greenwood liberty were also part of the English dream in a land that was continually and closely administered, in particular by the strictures of royal ‘forest law’.
The woods and forests of England are a token of its ancient life, and as such have been feared and protected in equal measure. The charters of the Anglo-Saxons reveal the presence of woods that still exist. ‘Westgraf ’, mentioned in 703 as part of the topography of Shottery in Warwickshire, is now Westgrove Wood in the parish of Haselor. Wanelund, a word the Vikings used when they came to Norfolk, has become Wayland Wood a little south of Watton. A charter of 682 refers to ‘the famous wood known as Cantocwudu’; it is now known as Quantockwood in Somerset. There are many other examples of an ancient presence.
Sire-wode, later known as Sherwood, stretched from Nottingham to the centre of Yorkshire. The present Birklands contains the last remnant of the medieval oak forest that covered this region; the trees are now gnarled and dry. The other forest connected to Robin, Inglewood, was also of great extent and lay between Penrith and Carlisle. These had become the natural refuge of outlaws from the king’s justice, those who were deemed to wear ‘the wolf’s head’ and could thus be instantly cut down. Yet the English have always made heroes out of robbers and cutpurses; as a result the outlaws of the forest became representative of national freedom and equality. Robin Hood is supposed in legend to have died at Kirklees in Yorkshire. But in truth he did not die. He became part of England’s mythography.
27
The suffering king
Henry Bolingbroke, now distinguished by the title of Henry IV, had obtained the throne by violence and perhaps by fraudulence. The crown on such a head will not sit easily or securely. He himself had proved that kings can be removed at will, and gain legitimacy by popular acclamation. Henry therefore courted the Lords and Commons. He promised that he would not levy taxes, and repealed some of the previous king’s more oppressive legislation. He resumed the mantle of the warrior, pledging to lead armies into Scotland and into France, and thus adopted the style of previous martial kings. He also attempted to bring God on his side, by promising the bishops that he would be the hammer of heretics.
Yet many still believed Henry to be a usurper. From the beginning of the reign rumour spread that Richard II still lived – that he was in Scotland, that he was in Wales, that he was everywhere. Dominican and Franciscan friars preached open sedition in marketplaces and taverns, with the news that the deposed king had survived. One Franciscan friar was brought before the king.
Henry: You have heard that King Richard is alive, and you are glad?
Friar: I am glad as a man is glad of the life of his friend, for I am in his debt, as are all my kin, for he was our patron and promoter.
Henry: You have said openly that he lives, and so you have excited and stirred the people against me.
Friar: No.
Henry: Tell the truth as it is in your heart. If you saw King Richard and me fighting on the battlefield together, with whom would you fight?
Friar: In truth with him. For I am more beholden to him.
Henry: Do you wish that I and all the lords of the realm were dead?
Friar: No.
Henry: What would you do if you had the victory over me?
Friar: I would make you duke of Lancaster.
Henry: Then you are not my friend.
Another interesting exchange took place with a friar.
Henry: Do you say that King Richard is alive?
Friar: I do not say that he is alive, but I say that if he is alive he is the true king of England.
Henry: He resigned.
Friar: He resigned against his will, in prison, which is against the law.
Henry: He was deposed.
Friar: When he was king, he was taken by force and put into prison, and despoiled of his realm, and you have usurped the crown.
At the conclusion of this spirited interview the king lost his temper and cried out, ‘By my head I shall have your head!’ So it proved.
The fact that Henry felt it necessary and expedient to confront these friars in person suggests how seriously he considered any such rumour or rumours to be. He could not be safe – he could not be an anointed king – if Richard were believed to be alive.
In the early months of 1400 some Ricardian loyalists attempted an insurrection by riding on Windsor. They were dispersed and fled westwards, where eventually they were surrounded and despatched by the citizens of Cirencester and Bristol
. The king’s punishment was no more merciful. One of the accused, Sir Thomas Blount, was hanged at Smithfield for a minute or so before being cut down; he was then ordered to sit in front of a great fire while the executioner came to him with a razor in his hand. After begging the prisoner’s pardon he knelt down, opened up his stomach with his razor, and took out the bowels. Blount was asked if he would like a drink. ‘No,’ he replied, ‘for I do not know where I should put it.’ The executioner tied the bowels with a string so that, in the words of a contemporary, ‘the wind of the heart should not escape’; then he threw them into the fire. One of the bystanders shouted out in derision, ‘Go seek a master that can save you’. Blount cried that ‘I shall die in the service of my sovereign lord, the noble king Richard!’ The executioner cut off his head.
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