Alice Perrers
The authority for Edward’s final years is the last great Benedictine chronicler, Thomas Walsingham (c.1340–1422), a Norfolk man at St Albans who continued the tradition of Matthew Paris. Aided by fellow monks, well informed by distinguished visitors, his books provide the fullest account of the reigns during which he lived. Fond of scandal, he was to be the source of much of Shakespeare’s history through the medium of Holinshed.
The king had been deteriorating since Philippa’s death in 1369, his progresses restricted to the home counties. After the abortive campaign of 1372, he went to pieces, drinking heavily and falling further under the spell of a greedy mistress, once a lady-in-waiting to the queen. This was Alice Perrers, thirty years younger than him, the daughter of a Berkshire thatcher and widow – previously maidservant – of a London merchant, from whom she had acquired a highly professional interest in real estate.
‘A shameless, impudent harlot’ is how Walsingham describes Alice. ‘She was not attractive or beautiful, but compensated for these defects by her seductive voice.’13 He tells us she hired a Dominican friar, supposedly a physician but in fact a warlock, to make wax images of herself and Edward joined together, enhancing the spell with incantations and magic herbs. After giving the king a bastard son when only fifteen (before Philippa died), followed by two daughters, Alice fastened her hold. Besides extracting cash, jewels and estates that included fifty manors,14 she developed into a ruthless businesswoman.
With a City office in Thames Street, Alice was a curiously modern figure, as much entrepreneur as courtesan. She had close links with the chamberlain, Lord Latimer, and his disreputable financial agent, the London vintner and alderman Sir Richard Lyons, whom she joined in advancing war loans to the Crown at astronomical interest. Together, they bought up at a knock-down price royal debts that were then redeemed by the Exchequer at face value, often making her 100 per cent profit. She also dealt in pearls, amassing 200,000.
Always ready to use her influence at court for cash, brazenly flaunting her position, by Edward’s command Alice attended a tournament in the City in 1375 as ‘The Lady of the Sun’, dressed in a golden gown. She was clearly the model for the horrible Lady Meed in Langland’s Piers Plowman (if not for Chaucer’s Wife of Bath). Everybody other than the king and John of Gaunt loathed her, attributing her domination to sorcery and love-philtres – the heresiarch John Wycliffe called her ‘the Devil’s Tool’.
Senility and death
Looking like an Old Testament prophet, with long white beard and hair, Edward ended as a drink-sodden dotard. His third son, John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, ruled in his name, hated for his arrogance and his friendship with Alice Perrers, that ‘evil enchantress’.15 Dissatisfaction at reverses in France and an end to the loot was fuelled by a scorching summer in 1375, during which everybody dreaded a further outbreak of plague. When the Black Prince died the following spring, the English were in despair. While he was alive they had felt safe from enemy invasion as he was a fine soldier – unlike Gaunt.
At the parliament of spring 1376, the Speaker of the Commons, Sir Peter de la Mare, complained that Edward’s chamberlain Lord Latimer (a veteran of Crécy rumoured to be a multiple murderer) and his agent, the shady Richard Lyons, had profiteered from trafficking in royal debts and moving the staple – the monopoly on wool for export – from Calais. Sir Peter also accused Alice of annually stealing thousands of pounds in bullion from the king. Before granting taxes, the Commons insisted that Latimer be dismissed, Lyons imprisoned and the lady banished from court.
Gaunt, who angrily referred to the Commons as ‘these ignorant knights of the hedgerow’,16 took revenge in the next parliament. Packed with his supporters and having his steward as speaker, it declared the ‘Good Parliament’ to have been no parliament, reinstated Latimer and Alice Perrers at court, and released Lyons from a luxurious imprisonment. Sir Peter de la Mare spent several months in a dungeon at Nottingham Castle.
Walsingham says that by early 1377 Edward sat like a statue, unable to speak or move.17 He died at Sheen on 21 June, after a final stroke. The tale of Alice stripping the rings from his fingers before fleeing from the palace, leaving him attended by only a single priest, may be untrue but shows how much she was hated. (Most of Alice’s wealth was confiscated by parliament, and she spent the next quarter of a century engaged in litigation to recover it, dying relatively poor in 1404.) In reality, Edward’s three surviving sons were at his deathbed.
He was given a funeral Froissart considered to be of a sort unseen since King Arthur’s time. When his hearse, escorted by 400 torch bearers, was carried through the streets to Westminster Abbey by twenty-four knights in black, his sons walking behind, the crowd wept and sobbed. According to his instructions, he was buried by the side of the grandfather whom he had venerated. The effigy on his tomb in the abbey has a face (derived from a death mask) that, although distorted by a stroke, inspires awe.
Retrospect
Edward III’s conquests did not last, despite his having spent so much blood and treasure, while he became pitiful when an old man. Yet, as Froissart says, during his prime he had been a marvellous king, and not only because of his victories; he had given his subjects peace and prosperity. Throughout his long reign there had never been the slightest hint of rebellion or civil war or rebellion, and in years to come England would remember him with nostalgia.18 Like his grandfather, he had shown himself to be a daemon rather than a demon.
9
The Absolutist – Richard II
Richard II, there can be little doubt, not only determined to act as though he were an absolute monarch, but had a theory of absolute monarchy
F. W. Maitland1
Reburying a friend
Walsingham describes how in November 1395 Richard II went to Colne Priory in Essex for the reburial of Robert de Vere, killed in exile three years before – by a wild boar when hunting. The king had the coffin opened, to look at his friend’s face for a last time, holding bony hands whose fingers gleamed with costly rings.
The story recalls Edward II and Gaveston and, although a very different personality from his great-grandfather, Richard was fascinated by Edward, making a pilgrimage to gaze on his effigy at Gloucester. Hoping to have him canonized, he ordered lists to be compiled of the miracles performed at his tomb.
In the national myth, Richard is the king of the Peasants’ Revolt, the boy ruler who made them lay down their arms. (A recent exam question is said to have been ‘empathize with the agony of a fourteenth century peasant’, indicating modern obsession with the Revolt.) No less tragic in real life than in Shakespeare’s play, he lost his kingdom through trying to possess it more completely.
Born at Bordeaux in 1367, the Black Prince’s son, Richard was crowned at Westminster a month after his grandfather’s death. ‘The City had been decorated with so many golden, silver and silk banners, and other toys to dazzle spectators that you would have thought you were watching a Roman Emperor’s Triumph’, comments Walsingham.2 His uncle John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, was in the forefront, carrying the sword Curtana. During the ceremony the ten-year-old boy made a touching attempt to look dignified.
Richard’s early reign was dominated by his uncle Gaunt, who had been England’s real ruler for some time. Born at Ghent (Gaunt) in 1340, he married his cousin Blanche of Lancaster, the greatest heiress in the land, but after her death acquired a second wife who was the daughter of Pedro the Cruel, so that he hoped to become King of Castile. The only person of sufficient weight to challenge him in England was the Earl of March, who had married the only child and heiress of Gaunt’s elder brother Lionel, Duke of Clarence. However, March was too busy trying to manage his wife’s enormous Irish estates. The duke hated and feared him (his son was the young king’s heir), but he died campaigning in Ireland in 1381.
Lancaster was notoriously unpopular in London, where his Palace of the Savoy, in the Strand between the City and Westminster, magnificently rebuilt
and hung with wonderful tapestries, was thronged by a huge staff. He was blamed not only for the defeats in France, but for failing to stop the French from sacking seaports and the Scots from raiding the North. Londoners saw the Savoy’s opulence as the fruit of corruption, chasing men in Lancaster’s livery through the streets. There was a general lack of trust in the man who ran the government.
The Peasants’ Revolt
First levied in 1377 at a groat (4d) per head, the poll tax was raised to 3 groats in 1381, a heavy burden on the mass of the population, who toiled in the fields, earning no more than a shilling a week. Brutally collected, it caused fury. Hedge priests fanned the flames, such as mad John Ball from Kent with his rhyme:
When Adam delved and Eve span,
Who was then a gentleman?
In May 1381 thousands of home counties men marched on London under the banner of St George, bringing their bows and led by Wat Tyler (who took his name from his job). Lancaster was away in the North, while the authorities were taken by surprise. En route, the ‘true commons’ murdered tax collectors and sacked manor houses and abbeys. When they arrived they broke into wine cellars, becoming not so much drunk as demented. One casualty was the unsavoury financier Sir Richard Lyons, who had his head sawn off in Cheapside. Having burned the Savoy to the ground, they stormed the Tower, where they beheaded the Archbishop of Canterbury and the treasurer.
Similar revolts broke out elsewhere, Froissart commenting that ‘England was on the point of being lost beyond recovery’.3 Then the fifteen-year-old Richard summoned the rebels to meet him at Smithfield and discuss their demands. Swollen headed, declaring that all laws would soon come from his own mouth, Wat Tyler demanded an end to villeinage, equality of all men, abolition of every bishopric save one and division of Church lands among layfolk. When Richard and his escort arrived at Smithfield, a knight told Wat to repeat his demands. The rebel leader pulled a dagger, threatening to stab the knight for not being sufficiently obsequious, whereupon the mayor, William Walworth, knocked Wat off his horse, someone killing him as he lay on the ground.
Wat’s men drew their bows, but Richard spurred his horse towards them, crying, ‘I will be your king, I will be your captain and your leader – follow me and you can have everything you want.’4 Bewildered, they followed him into the fields outside the City, then threw down their arms and begged for pardon. Wisely, he forbade his troops to attack, allowing them to disperse, aware the Essex men had not arrived and Kent was still out of control. Within a short time, the revolt collapsed, but it was weeks before the disturbances ended. There were surprisingly few executions, although the men who had been most responsible were hanged, drawn and quartered, including John Ball.
Before his execution, one of the leaders, Jack Straw, confessed that they had planned to kill all landlords, including monks and rectors and, finally, the king. They meant to keep the friars who were their friends, however, to say Mass and christen, marry and bury them. There would have been new laws for a society without rich or learned men.
The south-east and east had seen ‘a kind of tribalism almost reminiscent of the age of Bede’5 – Straw said that Tyler would have become King of Kent. But the underlying reason for the Revolt had been the peasants’ wish to exploit the labour shortage caused by the Black Death and the landlords’ determination to thwart them. They were also unsettled by French raids and the threat of invasion – in Kent no men who lived within 12 miles of the sea were recruited by the rebels because it was their job to guard the shore.
The man
Richard II is the hardest Plantagenet to fathom. One historian suggests that despite a weak physique he hoped to be a great king, and that the effort unbalanced him.6 Identifying narcissistic tendencies, another argues more plausibly that Richard was a man of only average intelligence, whose wish for absolute power doomed him. ‘It was not wisdom and prudence that were the characteristics of his rule; it was chastisement and tyranny.’7
He has had few admirers. An exception was the architectural historian John Harvey who considered him the greatest Plantagenet because of his belief in ‘Divine Kingship’, ‘a highly intelligent and supremely cultured man, fully abreast of the intellectual attainments of his age’.8 In reality, the king’s reading was limited to chivalric romances such as Le Roman de la Rose and some hagiography, the English verse of John Gower and possibly Chaucer, with a few pages from law books. The only ‘science’ in which he showed any interest was astrology. What impressed Harvey was Richard’s building – the new Westminster Hall, with a new nave for Westminster Abbey and another for Canterbury Cathedral, but these had more to do with his grandiose concept of kingship than aesthetic sensibility. Westminster Hall was rebuilt to outdo John of Gaunt’s hall at Kenilworth, while the abbey was the dynasty’s mausoleum and the cathedral the Black Prince’s burial place.
His pleasures were hunting, hawking and horse-breeding, and often he drank far into the night. (He never jousted, presumably because of poor health.) He owned an even more expensive wardrobe than his grandfather and loved good food, ordering his master cook to produce a book of receipts, The Forme of Cury. Unusually clean, he frequently visited bath-houses and had new ones built at Sheen and Eltham, besides introducing handkerchiefs.
In religion Richard was ultra-orthodox, founding a charterhouse at Coventry. (The Carthusians were admired because unlike other monks they had not relaxed their way of life.) When the Church reacted to Wycliffe’s heresies, he encouraged its persecution of ‘Lollards’. He also adopted his ancestors’ cult of the royal saints of Anglo-Saxon England – the Wilton Diptych shows him kneeling at the feet of Edward the Confessor and Edmund of East Anglia.
From Richard’s skeleton, we know he was nearly 6 ft tall, big for his time. We know, too, that he had curly fair hair. Otherwise, his appearance is elusive. Painted long afterwards, the portrait at Westminster Abbey shows him at his coronation, as a boy. The Monk of Evesham says he was pale complexioned, with a round, feminine countenance. He looks handsome in the Wilton Diptych from the last years of the reign, in which he appears in profile, clean-shaven and with delicate features including a sharp, retroussé nose. In contrast, the effigy he commissioned for his tomb in the abbey gives him a full face with an incipient double chin and small eyes, its strangeness accentuated by a tiny forked beard.
Nobody could have resembled Edward III less. Arrogant, aloof, abrupt, Richard stammered when he lost his temper with servants or courtiers, which happened all too often. A highly strung, sexless, self-obsessed exquisite with a very lofty idea of his dignity, he was not exactly gifted with charm.
He got on well with his mother – he was distraught when she died in 1387 – and liked women, but did not take mistresses. In January 1382 he married Anne of Bohemia, daughter of the Emperor Charles IV, King of Bohemia – son of the blind king killed at Crécy. The court at Prague where she grew up was French and German speaking with Slavonic undertones, and her mother was Polish. The couple became devoted to each other, but there were no children – perhaps she was barren. (The crown Richard commissioned for her is among the most superb pieces of medieval goldsmiths’ art to survive.) From the start, she had a good influence. ‘The land was reeking with the blood of the unhappy peasantry, when the humane intercession of the gentle Anne of Bohemia put a stop to the executions.’9 ‘Beauteous her form, her face surpassing fair’ is how Richard describes Anne in her epitaph.10 Highly intelligent, not only did she read German, Czech, Latin and French, but she even owned an English Bible. Richard always took her with him on progress, and when the couple were apart they wrote to each other regularly.
They presided over a magnificent court. Looking back, Walsingham grumbled that Richard behaved as if his resources were inexhaustible, employing 300 men in his kitchen alone. Among the courtiers was Chaucer, who in 1389 became Clerk of the King’s Works. While English was Richard’s first language (although Froissart comments on his good French), there is no proof that he ever read Chaucer’s verse, but
it is likely since he commissioned Chaucer’s friend, John Gower to write a long English poem, Confessio Amantis.
Richard rules for himself
Surprisingly, Richard’s minority lasted until he was twenty-one, under the tutelage of Gaunt and the council. When he asserted himself, sacking the chancellor, Lord Scrope, whom he replaced by the biddable Michael de la Pole – created Earl of Suffolk in 1385 – there was strong opposition. In the parliament of 1384, Richard Fitzalan, Earl of Arundel denounced the king’s extravagant court and ineffective government. Richard responded by shouting at the earl, a fire-eating veteran of the French campaigns who had been his governor, that he was a liar and could go to the devil.
During the same year a Carmelite friar informed the king that Gaunt was planning to kill him. Richard ordered the duke’s immediate execution, but changed his mind when courtiers protested that the friar must be a liar. In 1385 he decided to arrest Gaunt, changing his mind again when confronted by him at Sheen. The duke rebuked his nephew for listening to evil counsellors and contemplating the murder of a loyal subject. He received an apology, which was followed by a formal reconciliation.
In autumn 1385, provoked by a French expedition that encouraged the Scots to attack across the border, Richard invaded Scotland, burning Edinburgh and some villages, together with the abbeys of Melrose and Newbattle – and falling out with Gaunt over tactics. The campaign did nothing to stop Franco-Scottish cooperation. Brief as it was, Richard took the opportunity to create his uncle Edmund of Langley Duke of York and his uncle Thomas of Woodstock Duke of Gloucester.
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