Queens Consort (51 page)

On 10 July, Richard invited Warwick, Gloucester and Arundel to dinner. Only Warwick accepted, and after they had dined together with apparent cordiality, Richard had him arrested and sent to the Tower. Men were then sent to detain Arundel while Richard himself rode to Pleshy for his uncle Gloucester. On 13 July the King sent out proclamations
announcing the arrests and forbidding any assembly as treasonous. He was careful to stress that the three men had been detained not for past offences but on the evidence of a new plot dating back to the previous summer. Parliament was summoned to judge the Appellants in September, and Walsingham describes how Richard spent the summer gathering supporters as though for a war. On 17 September the King opened Parliament surrounded by 1,000 Cheshire archers and 500 men-at-arms. By that time, Gloucester had been murdered on his orders in prison in Calais. A confession was read out in which he admitted his guilt in the events of 1386—7, though inconveniently it contained no new evidence and the date had to be left off as Gloucester had apparently written it after his death in August. Arundel was tried and beheaded as a traitor on 21 September, defiant to the last, while Warwick made such a convincing show of contrition that his life was spared and he was condemned only to imprisonment and the forfeit of his goods.

Having dealt with his enemies, Richard now cemented his control with vast land grants of their properties to those who had supported him and promoted five new dukedoms, including his cousin Henry Bolingbroke to Hereford. On the second day of the Parliament, it had been ‘ordained that anyone who should in future be convicted of violating, usurping or undermining the King’s regality should be adjudged a false traitor and should be sentenced to suffer appropriate penalty for treason’.
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Atter high Mass on 30 September, Richard sat enthroned in his crown as the lay lords swore to observe the rulings of the Parliament and to adhere to them in perpetuity, condemning any who sought to repeal or annul them as traitors. It is not certain that little Queen Isabelle attended the banquet and ball that followed at Westminster Palace. The prize for best dancer and singer was won by the new Duchess of Exeter.

Isabelle and her husband were, however, together for Christmas at Lichfield. On 24 January they moved to the abbey of Lilleshall, where they received the Chamberlain of France, Viscount Perellos, who had visited the Queen two months earlier at Woodstock. Isabelle may have enjoyed Perellos’s adventurous tales of his Irish Christmas at the court of the ‘wild’ King O’Neill. They then moved on to Shrewsbury for the opening of Parliament on 29 January. The next day Richard chose to examine a curious piece of business: the accusations of his cousin Henry Bolingbroke against his friend Thomas Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk. In his early thirties in 1398, Bolingbroke was the fourth child and only living son of John of Gaunt by his first wife Blanche of Lancaster. He had been admitted to the order of the Garter by Edward III alongside his cousin
Richard in 1377 and their relationship had always been an odd mixture of loyalty and mistrust. Henry had been pardoned for his membership of the Appellants in 1387, but he had tactfully elected to spend the period between 1388 and 1391 on an extended martial grand tour, which included fighting with the Teutonic knights (a sort of early Foreign Legion) in Lithuania, tournaments in France, a pilgrimage to Jerusalem and visits to Prague, Vienna, Venice, Milan and Savoy His return to London with a leopard, a gift from his distant Lusignan cousin the King of Cyprus, had caused a great stir.

As Gaunt’s heir, Henry was one of the most significant magnates in the land, a position that had been augmented by his marriage in 1381 to Eleanor de Bohun’s sister Mary, co-heiress to the wealth of the Earl of Hereford. Mary had given him seven children, of whom four sons and two daughters were living, before her death in 1394. Henry had acted as his father’s deputy in the Duchy of Lancaster while Gaunt was in Aquitaine in 1394, and his political rehabilitation after Radcot Bridge was signalled by his place on Richard’s regency council during the King’s first Irish expedition after the loss of Anne of Bohemia. It was as a loyal subject, then, that Henry approached Richard at the house of the bishop of Lichfield on 22 January 1398 to report a conversation between himself and Norfolk, in which the latter claimed that Richard intended them to suffer the same fate as Gloucester, Warwick and Arundel, the other Lords Appellant. Henry observed that they had been pardoned, but Norfolk claimed there was a plot against the house of Lancaster and that he did not trust the King’s word. Bolingbroke claimed that Norfolk had been trying to trick him into sedition and into joining a counter-plot against Richard.

At Shrewsbury, Henry’s accusation was formalised. Mowbray was removed from his office as the marshal of England and the case was eventually heard at Windsor on 28 April. In the intervening months, Richard’s increasingly tyrannical behaviour was making itself felt throughout the country. A priest was arrested for preaching against him at Shrewsbury and there were armed uprisings in Oxfordshire and Berkshire. Despite his proud assertion to the envoys of the Byzantine Emperor in April that ‘when we could no longer endure their rebellion and wantonness, we collected the might of our prowess and stretched forth our arm against them our enemies and at length, by the aid of God’s grace, we have trodden on the necks of the proud and the haughty’,
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Rlchard was growing increasingly paranoid. He sent out proclamations demanding that traitors be rounded up, he pursued the unfortunate retainers of the Lords Appellant, he forbade the sending of letters abroad and demanded that
incoming foreign mail to magnates be intercepted. His main fear was the resentment provoked by his financial policies. In contravention of Magna Carta, Richard had introduced a fine known as ‘la pleasaunce’ through which the King’s goodwill, or ‘pleasure’, could be purchased. Supporters of the Appellants had to buy their safety. By Easter 1398 over 20,000 pounds had been raised through la pleasaunce, through forced ‘loans’, across seventeen counties. As his subjects suffered, Richard’s court grew ever more deliriously magnificent: ‘Though he abounded in riches beyond all his predecessors [he] nonetheless continued to busy himself amassing money, caring not at all by what title he could acquire it from the hands of his subjects.’
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In the quarrel between Norfolk and Bolingbroke, Richard saw the opportunity to help himself to even more wealth. At Windsor, it was decided that the dispute should be settled in the old-fashioned way by single combat. On 16 September, at Coventry, Henry appeared in green velvet decorated with gold antelopes and swans on a white charger. His opponent faced him in crimson with silver lions. With characteristic dramatic timing, Richard waited until the men had actually started riding towards one another before calling a halt to the duel and, after two hours’ deliberation, sentenced both men to exile. Rather than having one Appellant left standing, he had decided to get rid of them both and appropriate their lands for his own use After John of Gaunt died in February 1399, Richard also took possession of his estates in council at Westminster, and parcelled up the Mowbray inheritance on the death of Edward I’s granddaughter Margaret, Duchess of Norfolk.

Isabelle, of course, had no part to play in any of this. The majority of her time was spent at Eltham, where she continued her education with her governess, Lady de Courcy. In the spring of 1399, Richard visited her at Windsor before his departure for his second Irish campaign. The mood of the country could be gauged by the sparsity of the crowds that turned out for the splendid tournament he had arranged to celebrate St George’s Day Richard had made his will, though without nominating a successor. He played with Isabelle in the gardens at Windsor, holding her hand and picking her up to kiss her. He promised that she should join him soon in Ireland. What Isabelle did not know was that her husband had already planned for Lady de Courcy, whose extravagance was unpopular, to be commanded to pay her debts and leave for France. For all his petting, Richard did not give a thought to his nine-year-old wife’s loneliness and isolation. He did not keep his promise to send for her from Ireland. In fact, she never saw the King again.

Richard set sail for Ireland at the end of May. By July, Henry Bolingbroke, now Duke of Lancaster, was back in England. During his French exile Henry had acquired the clandestine backing of Charles VI’s brother the Duke of Orléans (which the Duke later vehemently denied), and had been sounding out the disaffected English magnates. In the north, the men of his Lancastrian affinities began to mobilise. On 4 July, Henry landed with no more than a hundred men at Ravenspur on the Humber estuary. Five days later he was at Knaresborough, moving on to Pontefract for a muster of Lancastrian troops. At Doncaster he wasjoined by Henry Percy, heir to the Earl of Northumberland, the ‘Harry Hotspur’ of Shakespearean fame, with 30,000 men. By the time Henry reached Warwick on 24 July, his supporters were so numerous that he was obliged to send some of them home. Adam of Usk estimated that 100,000 had turned out for Lancaster. Richard’s uncle, Edmund, Duke of York, was Keeper of the Realm during the King’s absence in Ireland. He chose swiftly between his nephews. On 27 July York and Lancaster met with a certain dramatic irony at Berkeley, where the Duke assured Henry that he had no wish to fight against him.

The King had managed to reach the coast at Milford Haven on 24 July. With a small company, he rode for Chester, where the Earl of Salisbury was waiting with an army, but by the time he arrived at Conway, his men were already deserting, helping themselves to the royal baggage as they left. Disgruntlement was so widespread that, according to one story, even the King’s greyhound defected and joined Henry at Shrewsbury. On 9 August, Henry was at Chester, his troops having laid waste to Richard’s most loyal county. The Earl of Northumberland was sent to bring Richard in. The King decided on a mad plan to meet Henry, escape and raise an army in Wales, but Northumberland took him to Flint Castle, strongly garrisoned with Lancastrian soldiers. Mindful of Richard’s passion for elegant dining, Henry courteously allowed him to finish his supper before entering the castle to arrest him, though his understanding of his cousin’s character was also evident in the refined little cruelty of not permitting Richard to change his clothes on the journey south.

As a precedent for the second deposition of an English king in a century, Henry had only the innovations of Isabella of France to look to. In a propaganda campaign of’bogus genealogy, false prophecy, anti-Ricardian fabrication and novel ceremonial’,
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the Process by which Llenrt Bo1ingbroke turned himself into Henry IV shared its latter two characteristics with Isabella’s routing of Edward II. Using Isabella’s strategy of serving writs in the King’s name, he summoned the estates of the realm on 19
August 1399. After convening a meeting of ecclesiastics to debate the succession, he announced his claim on 30 September. Officially, Richard, like Edward, abdicated willingly, though
The Hardyng Chronicle
reports that, according to the Earl of Northumberland, ‘Henry made King Richard under duress of prison in the Tower of London in fear of his life to make a resignation of his right to him.’ After hearing thirty-three ‘Articles of Deposition’, Parliament declared that there was ‘abundant reason for proceeding to deposition for the greater security and tranquillity of the realm and the good of the kingdom’. ‘Richard of Bordeaux’, as he was henceforth known, was sentenced to imprisonment.

On 13 October, Henry [V was crowned at Westminster. He was anointed with the sacred chrism, believed to have been given to St Thomas à Becket when the Virgin appeared to him, and which had been used for the coronation of Edward II. Richard had been relieved of the oil, which he had removed in its golden eagle vessel from the Tower prior to his departure for Ireland, perhaps planning a recrowning on his return. All his life, Richard had consciously identified himself with Edward II. It was therefore appropriate that after Henry had him murdered at Pontefract Castle, probably in February 1400, he was laid to rest not with his beloved Anne, as he had requested, but in the chapel at King’s Langley built by Edward for his favourite, Piers Gaveston.

Queen Isabelle had been waiting at Sonning in Berkshire for news of her husband, whom she was not permitted to see. During the rebellion, the house had been stormed and her attendants’ badges ripped off. In December, she received a visit from the earls of Kent and Salisbury, who reassured her that Richard was free and the imposter hiding in the Tower. Their conspiracy failed. Even as they proclaimed to the men of the west that Richard was in the field, he may already have been dead. Richard had been sent to Pontefract at the end of October, and in early February he was officially still alive, though by this time Henry’s council were discussing what to do with his body if the ‘rumours’ of his death proved to be true. Isabelle’s fear, confusion and sense of isolation can only be imagined. Henry attended Richard’s requiem at St Paul’s, but it is not certain that Isabelle was allowed to see the body.

The Queen was now a diplomatic problem. According to the original agreement, the French argued, her dowry, the last instalment of which had been paid in 1399, ought to be returned, as she was not technically a queen dowager and had not in any case reached the age of canonical consent. Stalling, Henry sent to Paris to open discussions for a new marriage with his eldest son, now Prince of Wales, who was eventually to
marry Isabelle’s younger sister Catherine. The English simply had no money to repay the dowry but they could not risk their already delicate position in France. In a treaty signed at Leulinghem in May 1401, Henry agreed that Isabelle would be repatriated with her jewels and property, though in fact he never did give back the dowry. In 1406, Isabelle was married to her first cousin Charles, Count of Angoulême, who became Duke of Orléans when his father was murdered by the Duke of Burgundy in 1407. Shortly afterwards she died giving birth to her daughter, Jeanne. Perhaps the most that can be said of Isabelle is that, like so many of Richard’s grandiose gestures, her symbolic value was huge. But as a means of retaining and governing a kingdom, she had been virtually pointless.