The Plantagenets: History of a Dynasty

by J. S. Hamilton

  The culmination of Richard’s peace policy came in the meetings at Ardres with Charles VI. On Friday, 27 October 1396, Richard was resplendent in a robe of red velvet and a gold collar that had previously been given to him by the king of France. Interestingly, his companions wore the livery of Queen Anne. A second, formal, meeting was held on the following day, and treated not only Anglo–French relations, but also the Great Schism, which Charles VI was anxious to heal. On Monday, 30 October, Isabella was formally presented to the English king by her father, and on the following Saturday the royal couple were wed in the church of St Nicholas, Calais. Three days later, Richard II and Queen Isabella sailed from Calais for England, enjoying a smooth crossing of just 3 hours. On 23 November, the queen made a ceremonial entry into London. She was crowned on 5 January by Thomas Arundel, now archbishop-elect of Canterbury. The coronation, and the king’s birthday on the next day, were celebrated by a fortnight of tournaments and other entertainments.

  As 1396 drew to a close, Richard seemed to stand at the head of a united Christian Europe. Armed with a 28-year truce with France, a sizable dowry in his royal coffers, and at least the appearance of restored relations with his magnates, he was in a position to pursue his dreams. Unfortunately, that they were just dreams soon became apparent. To realize the vision of a triumphant crusade of the Christian powers was one of Richard’s central ambitions. In anticipation of peace with France and an end to the Schism, a multi-national expedition led by Sigismund of Hungary had already been dispatched in 1396 to begin the rollback of the Turks. Many of the crusaders were Burgundian, but the army included such prominent French knights as Marshal Boucicaut, Jean de Vienne and Enguerrand de Coucy, as well as an English contingent under the king’s cousin, Sir John Beaufort, eldest son of John of Gaunt by his mistress (and later third wife), Kathryn Swynford. By Christmas, or New Year’s at the latest, however, word had reached Paris and London of the massive defeat of the Crusaders by the Turks at Nicopolis on 25 September 1396. The death or capture of so much of the flower of European chivalry spelled the end of the crusading movement as heretofore envisioned.

  As an expression of the new Anglo–French friendship, Richard had agreed to support the planned French expedition against Milan, and for this he needed money. The January parliament of 1397 at Westminster started well enough, with Bishop Stafford of Exeter extolling the present well-being of both church and state. The commons, however, were less pleased with the proposal to fund a French expedition into Italy; had the matter not collapsed under its own weight when the French called off the expedition, it might well have led to a showdown. Richard had gone before the commons in person to make the case for the campaign, but all the commons would concede was that this was a private undertaking of the king and so not a matter for their consideration or funding.

  Tensions were raised further on 1 February when the commons sent forward a set of grievances. These included complaints about the qualifications of sheriffs and escheators, the state of the defence of the Scottish Marches, the continuing abuse of badges of livery and finally the excessive cost of maintaining the royal household. The king responded to the first three grievances in a conciliatory fashion, but vehemently refused to consider the fourth, which impinged upon his prerogative. He demanded to know the author of this attack on his regality, and the unfortunate clerk, Thomas Haxey, was brought before him and sentenced as a traitor, although later pardoned. The king made very clear that he would not countenance a repeat of the assaults made on his prerogative during the ascendancy of the Appellants.

  In the spring of 1397, another of Richard’s grand schemes seemed to be coming to fruition. In pursuing a Plantagenet dream that stretched back to the reign of Henry III, Richard II seems to have had a very genuine desire to obtain the imperial crown. In the spring of 1397, the Archdeacon of Cologne visited England, and an English delegation was sent to Cologne in July bearing costly gifts not only for the archbishops of Cologne and Trier, but also for the dukes of Bavaria and Saxony, all imperial electors. Richard’s agents had received the homage of Rupert of Bavaria, Count Palatine of the Rhine in May, and in return for an annual pension of £1,000 the archbishop of Cologne likewise performed homage to Richard on 7 July. Meanwhile, on 10 July, payment was made to another imperial elector, the count of Guelders. Perhaps it was this seeming international diplomatic success that emboldened Richard to strike at his enemies with sudden force.

  On the very same day that payment was made to the count of Guelders, 10 July 1397, the earl of Warwick was arrested after dining with the king and taken to the Tower. At the same time, Archbishop Arundel, given considerable assurances for his brother’s safety, was convinced to persuade the earl to surrender himself. He too was quickly dispatched; not to London, however, but to the Isle of Wight.

  In the meantime, the king himself rode through the night to Pleshy to beard his uncle Gloucester in person. Gloucester was sent on to Calais, whence he would never return alive. Richard sent letters to the sheriffs announcing the arrests, made on the advice of the earls of Rutland, Kent, Huntingdon, Somerset and Salisbury, along with Lord Despenser and Sir William Scrope. The king sent out supplementary letters, stating that the arrests had nothing to do with the events of 1387, but rather were for other offences against the king’s majesty. It is, in fact, possible, if not likely, that this was true. At least some of the contemporary chronicles, particularly those written in France, allege that there was a conspiracy against Richard in 1397. The English chroniclers, and most subsequent historians, have seen the coup as an act of revenge, 10 years in the making. Walsingham, however, provides an intriguing explanation, which might not be so far-fetched as it initially sounds. In his account, Walsingham states that, in July 1397, Richard was informed by an embassy from Cologne that he had secured a majority of the votes to be elected emperor, but that some electors would not ratify the decision because of his seeming inability to rule the lords of his own kingdom. This was the provocation that led to a drastic demonstration of his control over his lords.

  The conspirators were to be tried in parliament. Meanwhile, Richard set about strengthening his position. He already had retainers spread throughout the counties, and now he acted to place trusted men in charge of strategic castles. The Sheriff of Cheshire, for instance, was ordered to raise some 2,000 archers. The king also sought to raise cash through loans from throughout the kingdom. At Nottingham on 5 August, a formal appeal of treason was made against Gloucester, Arundel and Warwick. The New Appellants, as they are sometimes called, were the same individuals that Richard had named in his letters of 13 July (the earls of Rutland, Kent, Huntingdon and Salisbury, Thomas, Lord Despenser and Sir William Scrope), with one significant addition – that of Thomas Mowbray, earl of Nottingham.

  When parliament opened on 21 September, the assembly was overawed by the deployment of some 200 Cheshire archers, whose presence foreshadowed the eventual outcome of the proceedings. After an opening speech by the chancellor, Bishop Stafford, stressing the intrinsic and indivisible nature of royal power, a familiar group of courtiers, the earls of Rutland, Huntingdon, Kent, Nottingham, Somerset and Salisbury, along with Lord Despenser and Sir William Scrope, presented their appeal of treason against the duke of Gloucester, the earls of Arundel and Warwick, and Sir Thomas Mortimer, for their actions in 1387–1388. John of Gaunt, firmly in Richard’s corner, presided over the trial as steward of England, a trial that included several bitter exchanges. In one of these, the king reminded the earl of Arundel, the first to be tried, of his refusal to grant mercy to Simon Burley a decade earlier. Arundel, despite protests that the king had previously pardoned him for his actions in 1387–1388, was quickly convicted and sentenced to a traitor’s death. Like Burley, however, he was spared drawing, hanging and quartering, condemned only to beheading. On Monday 24 September, it was the duke of Gloucester’s turn. Thomas Mowbray, as Captain of Calais, now announced that the duke was, in fact, already dead and unable to stand trial. Nonetheless, his confe
ssion, extracted during his imprisonment in Calais, was copied into the parliamentary record.

  On the same day, Archbishop Arundel was also found guilty of treason, stripped of his temporalities and banished from the realm for life. Finally, on Friday 28 September, the earl of Warwick was tried. He admitted his guilt and begged for mercy. The earl of Salisbury pleaded on Warwick’s behalf and the king relented and spared the earl’s life, stripping him of his lands and sentencing him to exile in the Isle of Man, where he remained for the rest of the reign. In the aftermath of the Revenge Parliament, the king took steps to prevent any sort of political cult arising around his vanquished foes. The earl of Arundel was reburied in a plain, unmarked grave. Gloucester’s corpse was returned to England, but he was given burial not in Westminster as had been originally planned and which fitted his royal blood, but rather in Bermondsey Priory. Only Archbishop Arundel survived to trouble the king. The archbishop had been given 6 weeks to leave the realm and made the most of that time. Significantly, and perhaps with a sense of irony, he seems to have left London on 13 October, the feast day of St Edward the Confessor that was so important to the king himself and the Plantagenet dynasty. Yet even after he finally departed the realm, he proved troublesome to Richard. Although the king wrote in thanks to the men of Ghent for receiving the archbishop, in fact Arundel made his way to Rome to lay his case before Pope Boniface IX and await his chance to return.

  The king’s enemies having been punished, it was time to reward his followers and recast the nobility of England. Henry Bolingbroke, earl of Derby, now became duke of Hereford; Edward, earl of Rutland, duke of Aumale; Thomas Holand, earl of Kent, duke of Surrey; John Holand, earl of Huntingdon, duke of Exeter; and Thomas Mowbray, earl of Nottingham, duke of Norfolk. John Beaufort, who had survived the disaster at Nicopolis was elevated from earl of Somerset to Marquis of Dorset. With the elevation of all these new ‘duketti’, as the chroniclers derisively termed them, there was also room for the creation of new earls. Ralph Neville became earl of Westmorland; Thomas Despenser was granted the earldom of Gloucester that his great-grandfather had so desired; Thomas Percy became earl of Worcester; and William Scrope became earl of Wiltshire. As parliament moved toward adjournment, the question was raised of the status of the other two Appellants of 1387, Bolingbroke and Mowbray. They were members of the newly elevated ‘duketti’, it is true, but Richard sought to allay any lingering fears of further reprisals by stating publicly that he considered both to be his ‘loyal liegemen’.

  By the end of September 1397, Richard stood triumphant. His greatest enemies had been destroyed and his most trusted friends rewarded. Not only had he elevated his inner circle to the highest levels of the aristocracy, he had further rewarded them in a striking way, both visually and symbolically, by allowing them to quarter their arms – as he had done himself – with those of St Edward the Confessor. At the same time, Richard had increased the size and strength of his bodyguard of Cheshire archers, and a great many Cheshire knights and squires were awarded the livery of the White Hart and attached to the king’s affinity.

  This retinue was to become greatly feared and loathed throughout the realm, and yet they developed a remarkable familiarity with the king. A famous quotation attributed to these Cheshire archers enjoins the king: ‘Dycun sleep quietly while we guard you.’13 It has been suggested that Richard’s most prominent and influential character trait was not some complex psychosis, or even the narcissism that he surely possessed in some degree, but rather a simple sense of inferiority, or perhaps more accurately, insecurity. Throughout the reign, there had been good reason for Richard to be insecure. But, in 1397, his position was virtually unassailable. His continuing sense of insecurity, manifested in the Cheshire affinity and the relentless grinding down of his beaten enemies, became self-fulfilling.

  At the same time, Richard appears to have taken an interest in arranging the appointment of members of his household as sheriffs, rather than using local gentry, perhaps again pointing to his continuing insecurity.

  Sometime in December 1397, on the road between Windsor and London, Thomas Mowbray, duke of Norfolk, joined the travelling party of Henry Bolingbroke, duke of Hereford. The exact details of their conversation will never be known, as each subsequently presented a version more favourable to himself, but the consequences of their exchange were to prove momentous for themselves, the king and the realm. Essentially, Mowbray warned Bolingbroke that both were in extreme danger for the part that they had played at Radcot Bridge and the subsequent events of 1387–1388. When Bolingbroke dismissed such alarming rumours by noting that both men had been repeatedly pardoned by the king, Mowbray questioned the value of the king’s word. After all, Arundel had argued at his recent trial that he too had been pardoned for his actions as an Appellant.

  More than that, however, Mowbray alluded to conspiracies against John of Gaunt and his sons, and he apparently struck a nerve when he informed Bolingbroke of a plot at court to destroy the very foundation upon which the house of Lancaster rested by restoring the 1322 verdict of treason and disinheritance against Thomas of Lancaster. Long doubted by historians, this latter part of Mowbray’s allegations has recently been taken more seriously. If the plot to destroy the house of Lancaster has never been proven, its plausibility has nonetheless been enhanced by the fact that, at the ensuing Shrewsbury parliament, the new earl of Gloucester, Thomas Despenser, achieved the annulment of the verdict of treason against his own grandfather and great-grandfather, the elder and younger Hugh Despensers.

  Whether Bolingbroke himself believed Mowbray, or perhaps suspected a plot designed to entrap him, after consultation with his father Gaunt, he chose to bring this dangerous conversation to the attention of the king.

  The royal court spent the Christmas season in 1397 at Coventry. The king was at nearby Great Haywood in Staffordshire on 20 January when he summoned Bolingbroke to rehearse his conversation with Mowbray. He then commanded his cousin to repeat the story yet again before the impending session of parliament.

  Parliament opened in Shrewsbury on 28 January 1398. At first sight, this would seem a curious location for a parliament, particularly in winter, but certainly it sent an interesting signal. Aside from the matter of geographic isolation, Shrewsbury lay close to the king’s stronghold in the principality of Chester. It was too small easily to accommodate and feed the various contingents who would attend, perhaps magnifying the splendour of the court. It was also in Shrewsbury that, 10 years earlier, Richard had posed his notorious questions to the judges.

  The Shrewsbury parliament formally annulled all of the acts of the Merciless Parliament of 1388, although the duke of Norfolk, ominously perhaps, did not subscribe his name to this measure. The parliament also arraigned several of the king’s remaining adversaries, including Sir Thomas Mortimer, who had been responsible for the death of Thomas Molineux at Radcot Bridge. At the same time, it ratified a new definition of treason that was consistent with Richard’s own sense of his regality. Finally, the king’s finances were given a substantial boost as he was granted the customs duties on both wool and leather for life.

  The only failure of the session, from the king’s point of view, was the inability to settle the dispute between Mowbray and Bolingbroke, which was delegated to a parliamentary committee for reference back to the king.

  Despite the annulment of the verdict against the Despensers, on 20 February Richard issued a statement reaffirming the rights to all the lands of Thomas of Lancaster to John of Gaunt and Henry Bolingbroke, ‘that might fall to the crown by reason of Lancaster’s treason against Edward II’. Three days later, Bolingbroke and Mowbray made their appearance before the king and the parliamentary committee at Oswestry. The case was adjourned to be heard at Windsor in April, with Mowbray in the meantime to be held in custody. A further meeting of the parliamentary committee at Bristol on 19 March tentatively agreed that the dispute between the dukes of Norfolk and Hereford should be settled by combat unless proof of guilt or
innocence in the case should be found. The two opponents appeared before the king again on 28 April at Windsor, where no settlement was reached. Indeed, matters were further complicated when the duke of Hereford added new accusations to the charges against Norfolk, including the murder of the duke of Gloucester. Bolingbroke threw down his gage, which Mowbray picked up. The king, who may have genuinely sought reconciliation between the two dukes, now commanded that the dispute be settled by combat at Coventry in August, the date subsequently being moved to 16 September.

  The duel between Bolingbroke and Mowbray was an international sensation. The duke of Milan, Giangaleazzo Visconti, sent Bolingbroke a fine suit of armour, while Mowbray received similar gifts from various German supporters. There were interested observers from Portugal, the Low Countries and, most of all, France. Charles VI sent a series of representatives to Richard urging him to extend the truce with France and to work with his father-in-law to end the papal schism.