The Plantagenets: History of a Dynasty

by J. S. Hamilton

  Division within the political community in England could further neither of these goals, and in the end Charles sent the count of St Pol personally to request of Richard that he call off the duel. Nevertheless, on Monday 16 September, the duke of Aumale and duke of Surrey, the Constable and Marshal of England, respectively, prepared the lists at Coventry for combat. The Herald of the duke of Brittany, with whom the king had recently entered into a diplomatic understanding that would ultimately lead to a firm alliance, directed the proceedings. Bolingbroke and Mowbray entered the lists, but at this point, at the king’s command, the herald of Brittany suddenly ended the contest before it truly began. Bolingbroke was banished for 10 years and Mowbray for life. The king’s judgment was a legitimate exercise of his authority in the court of chivalry, but it struck contemporaries as unjust, particularly in the case of Bolingbroke. The king himself acknowledged that the judgment against Bolingbroke was not indicative of any offence that his cousin had committed, but necessary nonetheless in order ‘to bring peace and tranquility to the realm’.14 The king further softened the blow somewhat, when he specifically reserved Henry’s right to ‘sue for livery of any inheritances that may descend to him’ – that is to say, the duchy of Lancaster. 15

  Soon after the departure of Mowbray for Bohemia and Bolingbroke for France, the king arrived in Westminster to celebrate the Feast of St Edward the Confessor on 13 October. This was always a special occasion in the royal calendar, but perhaps never more than in 1398. The last of his major opponents had been dispatched into exile. Furthermore, he had the validity of all that had transpired confirmed by a papal legate. Still, the stability of the new dispensation was questionable. Even as the king celebrated his triumph at Westminster, he was confronted by the Countess of Warwick who sought to intercede on her husband’s behalf. Richard, we are told, in an episode reminiscent of his confrontation with the archbishop of Canterbury in 1384, displayed the Plantagenet temper by seizing a sword and swearing that, were she not a woman, he would put her to death instantly. Richard’s apparent supremacy in England may have led him to reconsider his relationships outside the realm. He certainly focused his attention on preparations for the duke of Surrey’s impending expedition to Ireland. He was also much involved with France, but not all of his dealings with the Valois court were as harmonious as in previous years. Not only did he delay until the last moment before confirming the extension of the truce, but he openly expressed his opposition to French intervention in Italy. Both his alliance with the duke of Brittany and his diplomatic contacts with Giangaleazzo Visconti of Milan (albeit the latter had a cordial relationship with Bolingbroke as well) must have appeared threatening to the French. On a more personal level, his decision to take Sir Pierre de Craon into his service (with the grant of an annuity of £500) must have raised eyebrows in Paris. De Craon had attempted to assassinate the Constable of France some years earlier, and his welcome presence in Westminster must have been as unpalatable to Charles VI as Bolingbroke’s reception in Paris was to Richard. Finally, Richard continued to drag his feet with regard to a settlement of the papal schism. France had already unilaterally embarked upon the so-called ‘way of cession’, withdrawing obedience from Pope Benedict XIII of Avignon. Meanwhile, Richard maintained his support of Pope Boniface IX in Rome, perhaps in the hope of obtaining the imperial crown. In any case, in the autumn of 1398, he was rewarded by Boniface with a concordat stating that the pope would confirm episcopal elections in England only after receiving the king’s concurrence.

  Richard held what proved to be his final Christmas court at Lichfield. Attended by the papal legate Peter de Bosc, as well as an ambassador from Constantinople, the emperor’s uncle Hilario Doria, it was a glittering affair. Gifts came from the dukes of Burgundy and Berry, and jousts were held throughout the period that ran from the celebrations of the birth of the Lord to the birth of the king on Epiphany.

  And yet, the New Year began ominously, both literally and figuratively. A comet appeared in the sky, leading the French chronicler known as the Religieux de St Denis to prophesy revolution and the fall of kings. Meanwhile, John of Gaunt lay dying in Leicester. It is not clear whether the king actually visited his uncle on his deathbed. Although his death – or at least his funeral – was announced as early as 8 January, in fact the earl of Lancaster did not pass away until 3 February. In accordance with his will, he was buried at St Paul’s, alongside his first wife, Blanche of Lancaster.

  The death of John of Gaunt presented Richard with a momentous choice. Should he allow his cousin Henry Bolingbroke to return to enter his inheritance?

  He had committed himself to this less than 6 months previously, and nothing resonated more fully with the aristocracy as a whole than the sanctity of landed tenure and rights of inheritance. Nevertheless, faced with the prospect of a popular, and now perhaps implacably hostile, adversary in his cousin Henry, on 18 March 1399 the king revoked his letters confirming Bolingbroke’s right to his inheritance and had his exile extended from a term of 10 years to life. Even so, he acted with some discretion. It is true that he parcelled out the great honours that comprised the heart of the duchy – Leicester, Pontefract and Bolingbroke going to the duke of Aumale; Lancaster itself and Tutbury to the duke of Surrey – as well as lesser lordships, but these grants were all made with the interesting provision that they would stand only until such time as Bolingbroke ‘or his heir, shall have sued the same out of the king’s hands according to the law of the land’. Perhaps Richard envisioned the reestablishment of a less powerful house of Lancaster not under Bolingbroke, but rather his young son, Henry of Monmouth. Although he can hardly have imagined that Bolingbroke would sit idly by and accept his disinheritance, he did believe that his strong relationship with Charles VI and the duke of Burgundy would ensure that Bolingbroke would remain in Paris, a prisoner in a gilded cage.

  So it was that, in the spring of 1399, Richard II felt secure in committing himself to campaign in Ireland in person. The settlement of 1395 was, by this time, at the point of collapse and in need of immediate attention. Richard may also have thought that a military success in Ireland would be instructive for his English subjects. He sought huge sums of money in support of this effort, and he induced his newly created aristocracy to participate fully in this exercise. A dozen magnates and half a dozen bishops accompanied the royal army when it finally departed from Haverford on about 29 May, probably arriving in Waterford a couple of days later on 1 June. Initially, at least, the campaign seemed to show promise. Soon, however, it became clear that the king’s former adversary Art MacMurrough would not submit to him for a second time. The king moved north to Dublin, where the lack of progress in the lordship paled into insignificance against the news freshly received from England. Bolingbroke had escaped from France and landed on the coast of Yorkshire.

  Before we pass to the final challenge to Richard’s throne in 1399, it is necessary to consider an issue that had been of great concern, although in the background, during much of the reign: the succession. Richard had been confronted by questions of succession since before his own accession to the throne. His grandfather, Edward III, had thought it necessary to issue an order of succession, providing for descent of the crown in the male line and thus to Richard in 1376; even so, the king’s legitimacy was, at times, impugned with allusions to the promiscuity of his mother, Joan of Kent. Of greater moment, however, was Richard’s inability to produce an heir of the body. As noted earlier, various explanations have been offered to account for this: that Queen Anne, whom Richard deeply loved, was barren; that Richard was infertile; that Richard and Anne, following current religious fashion, had entered into a chaste marriage. A hint in the direction of voluntary celibacy is provided by Richard’s association with the cult of St Edward the Confessor. The king had campaigned under the saint’s banner in Ireland in 1395, but more significantly, in the autumn of 1395 – probably on 13 October, the feast day of the Confessor – he unveiled a new royal coat of arms in which the
saint’s arms were impaled with his own. This symbol of his heraldic ‘marriage’ to St Edward seems to allude to a spiritual rather than a physical lineage. Richard’s marriage to a 7-year-old French princess in 1396 is far more comprehensible if we assume that Richard had no expectation of producing an heir of the body.

  Regardless, however, whether the source of royal sterility was biological or voluntary, the fact remains that throughout his reign, Richard was able to manipulate the issue of succession for his own political purposes. According to Walsingham, in 1399 Sir William Bagot recalled an earlier conversation in which Richard had indicated that he was considering resigning his crown in favour of his cousin, the duke of Aumale. To this, Mowbray himself had objected that Hereford was more closely related and a more appropriate choice for an heir.

  Certainly, based upon the entail of 1376, Henry Bolingbroke was Richard’s heir in 1399. This made his attempted recovery of the Lancastrian inheritance a matter of urgent importance to both men. Henry Bolingbroke had passed his banishment in Paris, lodging at the Hôtel de Clisson. He was well known to the French royal court, although pressure from England led to a foreclosure of negotiations for a marriage between Henry and a daughter of the duke of Berry. He received sympathy from the French court when news of Gaunt’s death arrived, but this was tempered by the news that his inheritance had been sequestered and his banishment prolonged into a life sentence. It is unlikely that either Charles VI or the duke of Burgundy, effective ruler of France at the time, would favour any dramatic confrontation that might further diminish the hopes for peace with England and an end to the papal schism. Bolingbroke did, however, find support from the duke of Orléans, who entered into a treaty of friendship with the ‘duke of Lancaster’ in June.

  Bolingbroke obviously had widespread support among the Lancastrian affinity, and very likely among the landholding classes more broadly. If Ralph Neville, earl of Westmorland, joined him because the two were brothers-in-law, the commitment of another northern lord, Henry Percy, earl of Northumberland, seems to have been based solely on the justice of Bolingbroke’s cause. The addition of Archbishop Arundel and his nephew, Thomas, putative earl of Arundel, like Bolingbroke in exile on the continent, is not as obvious as it might seem; animosities between the FitzAlans and the house of Lancaster stretched back across several generations. Their support of Henry’s cause thus gave considerable weight to Bolingbroke’s stance.

  The Lancastrian invasion was quickly accomplished. Henry is known to have been in Paris as late as 17 June but, by about 4 July, he landed on the Humber at Ravenspur. Henry moved north into the Lancastrian heartland, securing the surrender first of Pickering and then turning west to Knaresborough. From here, he moved south to Pontefract, at the epicentre of Lancastrian power, and also symbolically important as the cult centre of that earlier opponent of royal tyranny, Thomas of Lancaster. At nearby Doncaster, the northern lords flocked to Bolingbroke’s banner, and he swore an oath that he sought only his rightful inheritance to the duchy of Lancaster. Nonetheless, he also initiated a letter-writing campaign in which he portrayed himself not only as seeking justice for himself, but as the champion of all those who had suffered under Richard’s misrule. If the Kirkstall abbey chronicler exaggerates the size of Henry’s army at 30,000, it was nonetheless a substantial force.

  Edmund of Langley, duke of York and keeper of the realm during Richard’s absence in Ireland, acted with all speed. In late June, he ordered the sheriffs to muster whatever troops they could at Ware, and he initially raised a substantial force. On 4 July, he wrote to his nephew, the king, informing him of Bolingbroke’s landing. Two weeks later, he wrote to the Mayor of London, forbidding the sale of weapons or armour to any but those who were loyal to the king. Richard’s inner circle, including the infamous Sir John Bushy, Sir William Bagot and Sir Henry Green, worried about the potential disruption of their lines of communication with the king, immediately proceeded to Bristol. This city also appears to have been Bolingbroke’s objective. By 20 July, he had moved south from Doncaster to Leicester, moving on to Coventry 3 days later and then to Warwick on 24 July.

  Henry’s army continued to grow, reaching an estimated size of 100,000 men, actually leading him to dismiss some of his would-be followers as he could not provide for such numbers. On 27 July, Henry met his uncle, the duke of York, at Berkeley. Although the exact details of their discussion are unknown, it is clear that York declared his nephew’s cause to be just and threw in his lot with Bolingbroke. Loyalists – such as Bishop Despenser, Sir William Elmham and Sir Walter Burley – were arrested and the combined forces of Lancaster and York marched on Bristol on 28 July. The constable of Bristol Castle, Sir Peter Courtenay, faced with overwhelming numbers, surrendered after a perfunctory show of resistance. Richard’s unpopular councilors, William Scrope, earl of Wiltshire, Bushy and Green, were surrendered as well. Another of Richard’s despised counselors, Bagot, had already sailed from Bristol to join the king in Ireland.

  What Bagot must have found was disheartening. Confronted by a lack of shipping, the king was unable to make a rapid return to England. Richard does not appear to have left Dublin any earlier than 17 July, and probably landed at Milford Haven only on 24 July when Bolingbroke’s army was at Warwick. In the meantime, he had sent the earl of Salisbury ahead with a small force and orders to raise a royal army in north Wales and Cheshire. Once he had landed, Richard probably spent a week in south Wales before recognizing that his only hope was to reach the army being raised by the earl of Salisbury at Chester. They met at Conway by 12 August, but the news was not encouraging. Salisbury reported that he had raised an army of 40,000 men, but had been unable to maintain it. The forces he had left behind in the south under Aumale and Worcester had also evaporated, either by accident or design. Along with the defection of York, and the executions at Bristol, the tide was very clearly turning against the king.

  Henry tarried in Bristol only long enough to see to the executions of Scrope, Bushy and Green, perhaps acting under his authority as steward of England. In any case, by 2 August, he had reached Hereford, and by way of Leominster and Ludlow he reached Shrewsbury on 5 August. On that very day, a delegation led by the sheriff of Chester, Sir Robert Legh, sought out the duke. The supposed heartland of Ricardian loyalty and power had surrendered without offering any resistance, and Henry (for his part) proclaimed that the men of Cheshire should be spared from any looting or pillage by his own forces, although in the event this was not to be the case. On 9 August, Henry advanced to Chester itself, but although he drew up his forces in battle formation, there was no need, as the city surrendered at once. Similarly, Richard’s stronghold at Holt, where he had stored considerable treasure, capitulated without a fight.

  The rapid collapse of all resistance left Richard in a quandary at Conwy. A military option no longer being realistic, he decided to negotiate. He dispatched the duke of Exeter, accompanied by the duke of Surrey, to offer terms under which Bolingbroke might be allowed to enter his inheritance. Having heard what the two emissaries had to say, Henry took them both into custody. Henry’s response to Richard’s embassy, was to dispatch one of his own, headed by the earl of Northumberland who now travelled to Conwy, securing Flint and Rhuddlan along the way. Although he had been accompanied by a large force, he left these troops at some distance and approached Conwy with only a small escort. When they met, Northumberland swore an oath to the king that the duke sought only to recover his Lancastrian inheritance, as was his legal right. Beyond this, according to Jean Creton, the terms offered to Richard were that he be directed by parliament, at which, with Bolingbroke sitting as chief judge (again perhaps in reference to his office as steward of England) Exeter, Surrey and Salisbury, the bishop of Carlisle and Richard Maudeleyn would be tried for treason. These terms, a virtual return to the conditions of the Merciless Parliament, were obviously unacceptable to Richard, but he decided to play for time. Indeed, again according to Creton, he swore that in the fullness of time he would have h
is revenge for this outrage, and that he would flay his enemies alive. For now, however, he agreed to accompany Northumberland – following his swearing of an oath to his good faith in the terms he conveyed – to Chester for a meeting with his cousin of Lancaster.

  Once the king discovered the true size of Northumberland’s retinue, he reportedly requested his return to Conwy, but Northumberland refused to accede to his sovereign’s wishes. Richard discovered en route that Rhuddlan, where they stopped to dine, and Flint were both held by Bolingbroke’s men. He had been hoodwinked, and was now effectively a prisoner. Upon reaching Flint, the king heard mass and then from the ramparts he watched the arrival of the Lancastrian army. He was not only confronted by Archbishop Arundel, who with considerable irony assured him that ‘no harm should happen to his person’, he was also faced with the fact that his erstwhile companions Albemarle and Worcester were in the very midst of his foes. Then Bolingbroke arrived. With courtesy, he waited outside until after the king had dined, and when he entered the courtyard and the king came down to him, Bolingbroke bowed low before him. However, he did not mince words. His first statement to the king said nothing about his Lancastrian inheritance, but addressed the 22 years of misgovernance that England had suffered under Richard, and offered his assistance to the king in correcting this state of affairs. The king, having expressed his satisfaction with this arrangement, Bolingbroke called for horses for the king, and a pair of nags was produced for Richard and Salisbury to ride to Chester.

  Once at Chester, Richard was placed in the highest tower in the castle, to be guarded by the sons of his dead nemeses, the earls of Gloucester and Arundel. That evening at dinner, the earl of Worcester, as Steward of the Household, broke his rod of office, thereby releasing the king’s household from service to him. According to Creton, all of Richard’s companions were separated from him and could not henceforth converse with him. By 19 August, essentially ruling England in Richard’s name, Henry sent out summonses for a parliament to meet at Westminster at the end of September. On 20 August, the king and his captor departed Chester and made for Coventry and from there to Lichfield. There, it would seem, a rescue was attempted by the king’s loyal Cheshiremen, and Richard attempted a dramatic escape, climbing down from his tower at night, only to be spotted and placed under a heavier guard thereafter. Humiliation after humiliation were heaped upon the king. Beyond the pathetic nag that he had been given to ride, throughout their progress from the West Country to London, Richard was allowed no change of clothing. A few miles outside London, a delegation from the city rode out to the royal party. Creton presents Bolingbroke as another Pilate, who in presenting the king to ‘his people’ saw a means to encompass his death without any blame. Entering London, Bolingbroke went directly to St Paul’s and the tomb of his father, where he wept copiously, perhaps as much from joy as from grief.