The Plantagenets: History of a Dynasty

by J. S. Hamilton

  One key player was missing from the Merciless Parliament – John of Gaunt, who was still abroad pursuing his claims in Castile. Nevertheless, his views on the events of the winter were probably communicated by his son-in-law, Sir John Holand, who returned from Spain in April. It may well be that Holand helped to moderate the actions of the parliament. Although he had begun to make a career as a soldier and supporter of the crown, Holand had fallen out of favour with his half-brother, the king (Holand was the second son of Joan of Kent by her marriage to Thomas Holland) for the killing of Richard’s boyhood friend, Ralph Stafford, during the Scottish campaign of 1385. Now, however, as Gaunt’s agent, he seems to have been reconciled with the king; in June 1388, he was elevated to the peerage as earl of Huntingdon, and would later be made Chamberlain of England, as well as duke of Exeter. He remained one of Richard’s most steadfast supporters from this time forward.

  Following the Merciless Parliament, Richard seems to have retreated into such traditional royal pastimes as the hunt, leaving the management of affairs to a continual council appointed by parliament. Although we do not know the exact membership of this council, it seems likely that the earls of Arundel and Gloucester dominated its activities. Their primary objective – aside from destroying the king’s inner circle – appears to have been a renewal of the war with France, and they embarked upon a diplomatic campaign that was aimed at constructing a grand military coalition involving Brittany, the Low Countries and Aquitaine.

  In the end, only the duke of Brittany agreed to participate, but even he ultimately withdrew and made his peace with Charles VI after learning that Gaunt, now in Aquitaine, would not join this proposed expedition. Undaunted, the earl of Arundel led a naval expedition to the area of La Rochelle, but lacking allies, achieved little. Meanwhile, the truce with Scotland had expired and the Scots launched a major invasion into the north of England. One of the two Scottish forces in the field, commanded by the earl of Douglas, delivered a humiliating defeat to an English army under Henry (Hotspur) Percy at Otterburn on 5 August 1388. Although attacks on Carlisle and Berwick were repulsed, these deep penetrations into English territory and the concomitant looting and destruction, coupled with a costly expedition to France, did little to raise the stature of the Appellants in the eyes of the public. Moreover, although the Appellants had thought that they could carry out their military plans with ordinary royal revenues – especially the profits from the forfeited estates of their victims, such as de Vere and de la Pole – such was not the case and, by September 1388, at Cambridge, they were forced to ask a reluctant parliament to make a grant of the traditional tenth and fifteenth. The commons were much more concerned with domestic questions of law and order, specifically the issue of livery and maintenance, through which retainers of the great men of the realm appeared to flaunt the law at will. When the Appellants balked at the proposal that all badges of livery be abolished, Richard himself stepped into the breach offering to take the lead by putting aside his own badges of livery. His statesmanlike willingness to negotiate a compromise (finalized in the parliament of January 1390) indicates a remarkable new maturity, and began a surprisingly quick recovery of royal authority.

  On 3 May 1389, Richard II declared himself of age before his council in the Marcolf chamber at Westminster. On the following day, he replaced Bishop Arundel as chancellor, appointing William Wykeham, the aged bishop of Winchester and longtime servant of Edward III. He also replaced the treasurer and dismissed the earls of Arundel and Gloucester from the council. Later in the month, he appears to have performed a crown-wearing, a powerful symbolic gesture. Perhaps he even considered a second coronation to mark the beginning of his personal rule. He certainly had a new pair of slippers made to replace a part of the regalia lost in 1377. Interestingly, he also presented a set of vestments to Westminster Abbey, which included a chasuble that was adorned with the coats of arms of the king and queen, but perhaps more significantly, also depicting figures of the Virgin, St Edward the Confessor, St Edmund King and Martyr and John the Baptist, the same quartet that was so powerfully presented on the Wilton Diptych a few years later. Another interesting insight into the mindset of the king in 1389 is the production for him of a volume of English statutes. Although the compilation contains the Magna Carta and the Articuli super Cartas, there is certainly a concentration on the reign of Edward II, with which Richard seems more and more to have associated himself. Richard was profoundly interested in the history of English kingship, and would remain so until his final days.

  Soon after Richard’s reassertion of power, a new truce was agreed between England and France in May 1389. The absence of war allowed Richard to forego the second instalment of the subsidy that was promised at the Cambridge parliament. Stability was further enhanced by the king’s apparent reconciliation with the Appellants. No attempt was made to recall de Vere or others from exile, and no acts of retaliation were aimed at the Appellants or their supporters. Even more importantly, in the autumn of 1389, John of Gaunt returned from Spain. Richard rode out to meet his uncle before Reading, where he was holding a council, and the two exchanged a kiss of peace. It was Gaunt who, in December 1389, formally reconciled the king with the five Lords Appellant.

  During the early 1390s, Richard attempted to expand the base on which his restored power rested. In part, he did this by retaining knights and squires from throughout the kingdom, building links with the leaders of the county communities, which had been lacking before. In another way, he expanded his base by elevating the sense of regality. It was during the early 1390s that terms such as ‘royal majesty’ and ‘highness’ came to replace the more mundane ‘my lord’ in royal address. Richard also extended his patronage during these years. The royal court continued to be a centre of literary culture, and it has been convincingly argued that the virtual explosion of vernacular literature during his reign must, in part, reflect Richard’s patronage. Although there is no evidence that the king ever patronized or rewarded the royal clerk, Geoffrey Chaucer qua poet, Chaucer clearly wrote Troilus and Criseyde with the court in mind. Another writer with court connections, Thomas Usk, produced his Testament of Love in the 1380s. Two of Richard’s chamber knights, Sir John Clanvow and Sir John Montagu, were well-regarded writers. Clanvow, although best known today for his Lollard sympathies, wrote The Boke of Cupid, whereas Montagu’s works have not survived, but were commented upon favorably by Christine de Pisan. The best known case of Richard’s literary patronage is his commission of John Gower to write a poem about love. Gower had offered advice to the young king in his earlier Vox clamantis, and Gower famously dedicated the Confessio amantis to Richard II – even if he later followed the shifting political winds and rededicated it to England and added praise for Bolingbroke. He had been commissioned by the king himself after meeting the royal barge while rowing on the Thames. Finally, the great chivalric chronicler Froissart visited the court in 1395 and presented the king with a book of his poems.

  Work was also undertaken to convey majesty visually. This is best exemplified in the Coronation Portrait and the Wilton Diptych, both of which embody Richard’s image of kingship. The Coronation Portrait, which was probably painted in about 1395, shows the youthful king enthroned, facing forward wearing his crown. In his right hand, he bears an orb, in his left the royal sceptre.

  Enveloped in an ermine trimmed red robe, he wears a blue tunic decorated with the crowned initial ‘R’. The pose is suggestive not only of the king as dispenser of justice, as found on royal seals, but also of the divine judge, as frequently depicted similarly in sculpture. The Wilton Diptych, probably dating to around 1397, is an even more complex statement of royal majesty. As a portable altarpiece, the Diptych was highly personal, more for Richard’s self-absorption than for any public audience. On the left-hand panel of the Diptych, Richard kneels, wearing a crown, his hands extended upward as if to receive some gift. He is flanked by the royal saints, Edmund and Edward the Confessor, along with John the Baptist.

&nb
sp; Opposite the king and saints, on the right-hand panel, are the Virgin and Child surrounded by 11 angels. Mary appears to present the infant Christ to Richard, and Christ in turn appears both to reach forward toward Richard and to bless the king. It has been argued that the Diptych embodies Richard’s commitment to the crusading movement and thus the banner he receives from the Christ child stands for his patrimony, the Holy Land. Even more suggestive, however, is the argument that the painting represents the king surrendering and receiving back England (or, indeed, all of Britain) from the Virgin as her dowry. A detailed miniature painting of an island was discovered on the upper orb of Christ’s banner during cleaning in the 1990s and this supports this new interpretation. The iconography is entirely consistent with Richard’s vision of his kingship in the 1390s.

  Architecture was also used to convey Richard’s vision. Westminster, both the abbey and the palace, had always held a special place in Richard’s conception of kingship, and this became increasingly clear in the 1390s. Although he had initiated funding for the rebuilding of the abbey with an annual grant of £100 in 1386, in the aftermath of Radcot Bridge and the Appellant crisis it is unlikely that this money ever reached the abbey. Nevertheless, in 1390–1391, he arranged for the abbey to draw £120 from the revenues of alien priories, and he supplemented this with occasional cash gifts, such as one for £106 13 s 4 d immediately after Queen Anne’s death, and with licenses to facilitate the acquisition of sufficient labour both to quarry the Purbeck marble in Dorset required for the columns in the nave, and for general construction.

  Even before this decade of increasing royal power began, indeed at the very depth of his kingship, Richard signalled his commitment to Westminster as a royal centre. Following the hanging of the chamber knights, Sir John Salisbury and Sir James Berners by the Merciless Parliament, he had them both interred in the chapel of St John the Baptist in Westminster Abbey. In this, he may have been following the French lead as, in 1380, Charles V had honoured his great marshal, Bertrand du Guesclin, with burial in the Capetian royal mausoleum at St Denis. Whatever his inspiration, this was a pattern that the English king would develop further throughout the 1390s. In 1395, Richard ordered the burial of John Waltham, bishop of Salisbury, who had specified his final resting place as his own cathedral, not just in Westminster, but in the very heart of the abbey in the Confessor’s chapel. The bishop, said Richard, was ‘deserving of burial among kings’. Later in the year, Sir Bernard Brocas, the queen’s chamberlain, was buried in St Edmund’s chapel, to be followed by another chamber knight, Sir John Golafre, in 1396, and by Archbishop Robert Waldeby of York in 1398.

  The royal mausoleum of Henry III’s imagination was being transformed into the resting place not only for the royal family, but for the broader familia, which was comprised of those who served the king with steadfast devotion.

  In the same years, Richard’s personal predisposition toward peace with France and the concomitant possibility of renewing the crusading movement became increasingly clear. Although such a policy was unpopular with many of the magnates, particularly Gloucester and Arundel, and may have been at the heart of popular disturbances in Cheshire in 1393, as the local economy depended heavily on the provision of archers for military service, by 1392 Richard was in communication with the French court regarding the prospects of peace, initially in the broadest sense. He had received letters carried to him by a Norman knight named Robert le Mennot who, following a conversion experience in the Holy Land, had become a vocal exponent of peace, earning the nickname ‘the Hermit’.

  Le Mennot was associated with Philippe de Mézières, the best-known exponent of Christian cooperation. As early as 1385, Richard may have been moved by conversations with the exiled King Leo of Armenia, who made repeated attempts at Anglo–French mediation. The peace process was brought to a sudden and unanticipated halt, however, in August 1392, when Charles VI was stricken with the first of the seizures that would leave him increasingly incompetent to rule over the remaining 30 years of his reign. Nevertheless, in May and June 1393, Richard was in Canterbury, anticipating a crossing to Calais in order to seal the peace with France. The draft treaty, however, included a provision by which Richard would perform liege homage for Aquitaine, recognizing the overlordship of the king of France. This proved unacceptable to public opinion both in England and in Gascony, as vocally attested in the parliament of January 1394, and the treaty had to be shelved. Be that as it may, neither the French nor the English were anxious to resume hostilities and negotiations continued.

  The summer of 1394 was defined by the death of Queen Anne, an event that deeply moved the king. The extravagance of Richard’s mourning is best – if not most accurately – remembered in his decision to have destroyed the site of her death, Anne’s favourite manor of Sheen: this was not, in fact, ordered until the following year, when Richard wished to use the building stone elsewhere.

  Nonetheless, he did spend massive sums on funeral arrangements, not least on the magnificent double tomb that was designed to hold his own remains, as well as Anne’s. The emotional outpouring and physical legacy of Richard’s grief can only be compared to the memorial crosses that Edward I left behind to mark the final passage of his own beloved Queen Eleanor a century earlier. Although he has often been criticized for his outburst of violence against the earl of Arundel at Westminster at the actual funeral service on 3 August – spilling blood and causing a delay to the service while the abbey was cleansed of this pollution – the earl’s late arrival and early departure from the obsequies was contemptible in every way, and in Richard’s mind must have been unforgivable. It is worth noting that, while he was in Ireland on campaign in 1394, Richard had a certain small chest moved to Westminster Abbey for safekeeping. The chest contained various papal bulls and other papers relating to the marriage of his parents (and his own legitimacy), but perhaps more interestingly, it also contained an obligation from the earl of Arundel, presumably the debt of £40,000 that the king had imposed upon him in return for his release from the Tower following the fracas at the funeral. This would not be lightly dismissed. Soon after the queen’s death, Richard resolved to go in person to Ireland.

  No English king had crossed the Irish Sea since John, and the English grip on lordship there had grown tenuous since the invasion of Edward Bruce in 1315. That Ireland had been on the king’s mind for some time is clear from his appointment of his favourite Robert de Vere first as Marquess of Dublin in 1385 and then as duke of Ireland a year later. In the aftermath of the Merciless Parliament and Richard’s recovery of power, the earl of Gloucester was appointed king’s lieutenant in Ireland in October 1391, but the commission was subsequently cancelled. Instead, the young earl of March, Roger Mortimer, was appointed.

  The appointment was complicated, however, by the fact that, at 19 years of age, he was still a minor: and it would be 2 years before he would actually cross to Ireland, and by then it would be in company with the king. Richard assembled a sizable force of no fewer than 7,000 men for this first Irish expedition. He landed at Waterford on 1 October. He quickly achieved his initial goal of subduing the Irish chieftain Art MacMurrough who called himself king of Leinster. MacMurrough, following a 3-month campaign of harassment came into the king’s peace on 7 January. Soon thereafter, the head of the O‘Neill clan performed homage and fealty to Richard in person at Drogheda, and other chieftains followed suit. By early spring 1395, Richard had seemingly restored English lordship throughout all the areas to which it had ever extended. Returning to England in May, Richard had enhanced his military reputation and provided, in the language of his settlements with the Irish chieftains, another glimpse into his vision of kingship. Unfortunately, the Irish settlement would not prove lasting and would draw Richard back to the island, with fateful consequences in 1399.

  On his return from Ireland, the king once again turned to the subject of peace with France. But his expedition to Ireland may also have inspired him to search for a broader peace, extending bey
ond the realm of international relations and warfare. It was particularly after his return from Ireland, where a number of Irish kings had performed oaths of obedience to him, that the language of kingship associated with Richard II began to exhibit a marked difference. No longer addressed merely in terms of lordship, both letters addressed to the king and letters sent out in the king’s name increasingly made use of the language of majesty, which hitherto had been largely unknown, or at least unused, in England. Perhaps this is another instance of Richard adopting some of the cultural elements of French kingship, and it may also reflect his increasing interest in the imperial crown. In the end, however, it seems to have had as much to do with domestic politics and Richard’s own essential vision of kingship as with anything else.

  Scholars have pointed to Richard’s correspondence with other European rulers, such as the count of Holland, to whom, in 1398, Richard described how the Appellants ‘had rebelled against the royal will...leaving to him little but the royal name’. The king’s response had been to adjudge them ‘to a natural or civil death, bringing to the lives of his subjects a peace that would last forever’. This vision of royal peace may well be the key to unlock the ‘tyranny’ of Richard II. Instead of a peace, a lengthy truce of 28 years was agreed to in 1396, to be accompanied by a diplomatic wedding between Richard II and the 7-year-old daughter of Charles VI, Isabella, the first Anglo–French royal marriage in nearly a century.

  The truce allowed both England and France to maintain honour, and realize practical benefits, while sacrificing next to nothing. It was confirmed during a series of personal meetings between Richard II and Charles VI in October 1396 at Ardres, near Calais. The truce itself spoke of the possibility of healing the papal schism and of renewing crusading activity against the Turks, both of which may have been dearer to the king’s heart than war with France. There is much contemporary evidence, albeit indirect, to support such a view. Richard’s chamber knight, Sir John Clanvow, wrote pointedly of the difference between the justice of crusading warfare and the evil of internecine fighting between Christian kings. Similarly, Philippe de Mézières, who served as go-between in the negotiations between Richard II and Charles VI, in his Letter to King Richard II, urged an Anglo–French crusade. As well as Richard himself, many leading members of the court embraced de Mézières’ crusading vision. Richard, along with Charles VI, sponsored the little-known crusading Order of the Passion, and a presentation copy of de Mézierès’ De la Chevallerie de la Passion de Jhesu Crist made for Richard is the only known extant text. The king’s uncles, John of Gaunt and Edmund of York, as well as his cousin the earl of Rutland and his half-brother the earl of Huntingdon, were all members of the order.