The Last Plantagenets (15 page)

The citizens of lusty London and the haughty landed gentry were not pleased to know about the bathing habits of the young king. Must he (good St. Francis forfend!) wash himself every day? The ritual followed caused much grumbling among men who believed in a piece of soap in a firm hand. First the king would be stripped to his fair white skin and seated on sponges in front of a fire. Then he would be enclosed in a narrow space about which clean sheets had been draped and hot water would be poured over him which had been boiled first in all manner of herbs. At the finish the young king would be sprinkled with rose water and popped into his bed by two squires of the bedchamber.

These were French ways. And had not the English beaten the French in every battle they had fought?

The men and women that a king gathers about him (and most often it is the women rather than the men) do much to create the opinions that his subjects form of him. Richard had not been fortunate in this respect. Parliament had appointed a council to govern the realm while the king remained a minor, but certain changes had come about rather quickly. The queen mother had been a predominant influence and the boy had early proven himself the possessor of a will of his own. Some changes in the personnel of the council had resulted and a small inner circle had become the advisers on whom the adolescent ruler relied.

First there was Sir Simon Burley, for whom Richard had conceived a strong affection from the very first. Burley had proven himself stout of heart in the French wars and had been a special favorite of the Black Prince. He was a gentle knight and a man of some culture, but willing, and even eager, to improve his social and financial position. A younger son in a Herefordshire family, he had no estates and the slimmest of prospects generally. In fact, when he was first introduced at court by an uncle, his income was said to have been no more than twenty marks a year! When Richard became king he moved quickly to save his genial and sympathetic tutor from such penury. Burley was appointed governor of Windsor Castle and master of the king’s falcons, as well as constable of Guildford and Wigmore. The duties which thus devolved on Burley kept him continuously in and out of court. He saw more of the king certainly than any of the council, even the chancellor and the archbishop. Richard gave him generous grants of land and a house in London on Thames Street, which was close to the royal residence of Baynard’s Castle. As a result, from a meager inheritance his income grew to one of 30,000 marks.

He does not seem to have injected himself into the problems of the chancellery, but anything having to do with the royal falcons would always engage the royal attention in preference to problems of state. The king seems to have listened to Burley on points of foreign policy, as witness the fact that the personal side of the negotiations for the king’s marriage had been entrusted to him. They had been so well handled that Burley remained a member of the closest triumvirate at court, made up of the king, the queen, and himself.

There must have been a haughtiness about his manner which those less close to the king resented. An open feud developed between him and the Earl of Arundel. The latter was admiral of the fleet in the west and he had, in the years between 1377 and 1386, achieved nothing but
defeat and loss. The year 1378 had been a particularly bad one for the proud Arundel. First he attacked the French port of Harfleur and was driven off. In joint command with the Earl of Salisbury he was beaten in a naval battle with the Spanish. Arundel became the target of popular abuse and Burley seems to have been particularly outspoken in his criticism of the sluggish handling of the naval operations. The proud and overbearing Arundel was to become one of the leading figures in the tragic circumstances of Richard’s reign, and so will be dealt with at considerable length later. It is not necessary at this point to say more than one thing further about him. He never forgave Burley.

The difficulties which Richard encountered early were largely due to his friendship for a young member of the upper baronage. Robert de Vere, Earl of Oxford, was hereditary great chamberlain of England. The Veres, or Veers as it was sometimes spelled, traced their history back to the Conquest and to Aubrey de Vere, who had been given all the estates of a great Saxon thane named Wulfwine. Coming down in such steady succession, the de Veres had added to their holdings by strategic marriages, notably the union of the third earl with the heiress of the Bolebec family, which brought into their hands huge stretches of land in Buckinghamshire. Accordingly young Robert, ninth in a line which ultimately extended itself to twenty (no wonder the term Vere de Vere was coined to signify the very ultimate in blue-bloodedness), was not only born with a gold spoon in his mouth but, figuratively speaking, a heap of honors and titles piled up around his pillow.

Richard, eight years his junior, seems to have conceived a close liking for him from the beginning. Efforts to prove a relationship between them on the order of Edward II’s infatuation for Piers Gaveston progressed no further than an unsupported rumor, and it may surely be dismissed on the strength of Richard’s subsequent conduct. It was more likely the affection that a boy can have for one a few years his senior, although it is hard to understand why he decided to make the young Earl of Oxford his friend and model. Robert de Vere was not handsome, talented, or brave. Later he was to prove himself of weak and unreliable character. Nevertheless, Richard liked him enough to heap honors on him. It may have been that at this early age, de Vere had an open eye for the main chance. He had been married when sixteen years old to Philippa, daughter of Princess Isabella and Enguerrand de Coucy and was therefore a cousin-in-law of the king. He proceeded to ingratiate himself with Sir Simon Burley, realizing in all probability that Burley held the largest share of Richard’s affection. He conveyed one of his manors in Herefordshire to the still impecunious knight. Much of the enmity that Burley
drew down on himself was due to a general belief that he was pulling strings behind the scenes in favor of de Vere.

This may have been true, but the facts seem to indicate that de Vere had no need of his help. Richard had doubled the yearly allowance paid from the estates to the young earl (who was a ward of the Crown) as soon as he became king. He then proceeded to shower honors on him. The custody of the town and castle of Colchester was handed to him, the castle and lordship of Queenborough, and the warships of several rich estates. A ward acting as a guardian must have been something new in the annals of favoritism. Quite as unusual, and even more aggravating to the older barons, was the selection of this brash and grasping youth as a member of the privy council and of the Order of the Garter.

De Vere was with Richard in the Tower when the peasants took possession of London, but he does not seem to have distinguished himself in any way, except that he did not run away as the half brothers of the king had done.

It is hard to understand why a third member of the king’s immediate entourage, Michael de la Pole, was also selected for popular disfavor. Pole was the son of Sir William de la Pole, the shrewd wool merchant of Hull who became the first great English merchant prince. The father had been so rich, in fact, that at various times he made loans amounting in all to a total of £76,180 to that most unsatisfactory of debtors, Edward III. The victorious Edward had dined once in the Great Hall of Pole’s house on the High Street of Hull and had listened with absorbed interest to the talk of that able man of business. In the end, of course, Pole had been sent to prison for no legally tenable offense, but he had left a sufficient estate to start his son William off on a firm financial footing.

The first years of Pole’s official career were spent with the armies abroad. He fought under the Black Prince at Limoges and was afterwards with John of Gaunt on several expeditions. That he had acquitted himself well was evidenced in his selection as captain of Calais, the spearhead of English operations in France, and later as admiral of the fleet north of the Thames.

Pole was a logical choice for a place among the king’s councilors. He had practical commercial experience, which all of the others lacked. It had not taken him long to justify the wisdom of his selection and he had been made governor of the king’s person as well as one of the two councilors in constant attendance on the king.

Pole had always been an adherent of John of Gaunt and he now began to show himself as a born king’s man. At any rate he was quickly drafted into the inner circle of court intimacy and, in spite of the sound
common sense he displayed in his official transactions, the ever watchful and belligerent barons began to regard him with suspicion.

There were others who were counted as members of the king’s coterie: Alexander Neville, the Archbishop of York, Sir Robert Tresilian, whose hands were still red with the blood of common men but who was holding the post of chief justice, and Sir Nicholas Brembre, a grocer of London and a “worthie and puissant man.” Only two of these men of proven capacity deserved the storm of criticism which would descend on all of them—de Vere and Tresilian.

T
HROUGH Bohemia passed much of the trade from the East. Here also the shock of the Mongolian invasion had been shared with Poland and Hungary more than a century before. The English understood the importance of this country, so beautiful and fertile that it was sometimes called the Golden Road. But the Bohemians had no real knowledge of England. An island, small and fogbound, was their impression of the country where the conquering Plantagenets had reigned so long, but from which, strangely enough, there had emerged at intervals small armies capable of cutting the French forces to pieces, largely because of a death-dealing weapon known as the longbow. A king of Bohemia named John, who was blind, had been with the French at Crécy and had ridden into battle with his horse chained to the steeds of knights on each side. The bodies of all six, the three men and the three horses, had been found on the field later by the victorious English. A son of John’s named Wenceslaus (but not the Good King Wenceslaus of the Christmas carol) had succeeded. Changing his name to Charles, he became the Holy Roman Emperor and remained a firm friend of France. He was a shrewd and cautious man, preferring to gain his ends by conspiratorial methods; in appearance sallow, black-a-vised, and huddled of shoulder. He had been married four times and by the last of his wives had a daughter named Anne.

The little princess, who was only twelve when he died, does not seem to have taken after her Machiavellian father. She was fair of complexion and in figure rather tall, straight, and trim. She had a gift for winning affection.

Charles of Bohemia died in 1378 and his successor, much to his
mortification, found it impossible to maintain the alliance with the French. The Christian world had been broken into two camps by the schism over the papacy. France, Spain and Scotland stood with Clement VII, who was called the anti-Pope, while England, Flanders, most of Italy, and all of Germany were ranged behind Urban VI. Even when Charles of France asked for Anne as a wife for his son, it had been necessary for Bohemia to refuse.

Early in 1379, before it was known that the French match had been broken off, the English council began to look over the field. Sir Simon Burley was in Milan to negotiate a marriage between Richard and Catherine, daughter of Bernabò Visconti. This move was not successful. Bernabò and other members of his family were at odds, with the result that his nephew Gian Galeazzo succeeded in poisoning him. Burley had warned Westminster that the proposed alliance would be a mistake and he is next reported at Prague where his mission was to foster a match between King Richard and the princess Anne.

He found the princess Anne gentle, bright, even intelligently educated. If not beautiful, she was clearly of “goodly person” and pleasing address. It seems certain that even at this initial stage the little princess and the courtly Englishman found themselves on good terms. He must have painted for her an enticing picture of the handsome boy king, for on his return to London he brought assurances of her personal willingness.

The next step seems to have been the arrival in England of Duke Primislaus of Saxony, an uncle of the princess. He had been sent by Anne’s mother, who still held the title of empress, to spy out the land, so to speak, and in particular to see if favorable financial terms could be arranged. Apparently the duke was well impressed, for he produced a letter from the empress which read in part: “I, Elizabeth, Roman empress, always Augusta, likewise queen of Bohemia, empower Duke Primislaus to treat with Richard king of England concerning the wedlock of that excellent virgin, the damsel Anne, born of us; and in our name to order and dispose and, as if our own soul were pledged, to swear to the fulfillment of every engagement.”

Things were now reaching solid ground. An English party, headed by the Earl of Kent and including “two others,” later identified as Michael de la Pole and Sir Simon Burley, set out for Bohemia. It did not require any further efforts on the part of Burley or his fellow ambassadors to obtain the consent of the daughter of the Caesars. Anne, in fact, wrote a letter to the council of England, saying she would become the wife of their king “with full and free will.”

The shrewd Bohemians, however, succeeded in driving a stiff bargain with the Englishmen, one which later created much dissatisfaction at
home. There was to be no dowry and it was further stipulated that England should pay to Anne’s brother Wenceslaus, the new emperor, the sum of 10,000 marks. All expenses of her journey were to be borne by the country of the prospective bridegroom. It must have been that Richard’s advisers saw great advantages in an alliance which would help to cement relations with the great cities of Flanders and prevent the French king from driving a wedge between England and her profitable markets on the continent. Otherwise they would not have agreed to such conditions.