The Last Plantagenets (17 page)

One emerges from a study of the part the once Fair Maid played in the history of the period with a feeling that she has been underrated. When she was left a widow by the death of her first husband, she decided that the admiration which the Black Prince had felt for her when she was as pretty and vivacious as a butterfly in the royal court could be fanned into a flame now that he was world famous and had reached his middle years without allowing himself to be married for state reasons. Her campaign was masterly. She had to catch him off
balance (to use a modern phrase) in order to wring a proposal from him. History does not offer a more romantic comedy than the way she led him step by step to a declaration. Once that aloof and self-centered idol of the people had found himself in the bonds of matrimony, she proceeded to make him a good wife. He was kept reasonably contented during his last difficult years.

She has been described as
une dame de gran pris, qe belle fuist, pleasante et sage
. Certainly she was pleasant and wise in the most difficult situation she and her son Richard faced, the relationship with John of Gaunt. She realized from the first that it behooved them to keep the peace with that wealthy and powerful member of the royal family. During a turbulent period immediately before Edward III died, the citizens of London had tried to capture John and he had sought sanctuary in the royal palace of Kennington. The lady Joan concealed him from the angry mobs and sent out three knights to make peace with them, one of them being Sir Simon Burley. After Richard was raised to the throne, she made many trips to Pontefract, John’s great fortress in the north, to patch up family differences. This entailed endless journeying in that lumbering, jolting coach which has already been described. It has been assumed that one of her reasons for doing this was that John of Gaunt was generally believed to be using his immense influence to save John Wycliffe from clerical reprisal. It has never been decided how far the queen mother inclined to agreement with Lollard teachings but there was enough smoke to hint at hidden fire. To hold deep convictions on religious questions was a most unusual thing for a woman of high rank. If it were true that she accepted the views of the man of Lutterworth, it would indeed be proof that she had depths of character seldom suspected.

It may also have been that this constituted an undivulged bond between the two women. Anne’s father had been an enlightened ruler and among the many steps he had taken to raise Prague to a prominent place among European capitals had been the establishment of a university there. This institution had been liberal from the first. When Anne was growing up, she could not have failed to come under the influence of the leaven of religious unrest in Bohemia. It is stated that some of the queen’s entourage carried back with them an acquaintance with Wycliffe’s teachings. Certainly Jan Huss, the great Bohemian leader, acknowledged openly that he had followed the lead of Wycliffe. The young queen never expressed any such leanings, however.

Anne’s compassion had been aroused by the fury with which the peasants were being made to pay for their effort to shake off the bonds of villeinage. It was due to her intercession that an amnesty was granted,
soon after her coronation, to such prisoners as still remained in the toils of the law.

It was because of this that the people began to call her Good Queen Anne.

T
HROUGH the whole course of his reign Richard was fiercely at odds with his uncle Thomas of Woodstock. This youngest son of Edward III was so proud and quarrelsome that he had no enduring affection for any members of the royal family and was particularly antagonistic to John of Gaunt. For Richard he had nothing but contempt, resenting the accident of birth by which this boy had succeeded to the throne in his father’s stead while he, Thomas, had to bow the knee of fealty.

The bad feeling which developed between this outspoken critic and his older brother, John of Gaunt, began before the death of Edward III. John, being the favorite son of the old king, had no difficulty in getting his own very young son Henry (afterward Henry IV) admitted to the Order of the Garter. Thomas, who was twelve years older than the new member, was not chosen. In fact he had to wait until 1380, when he was twenty-five years old, for that honor to be paid him. He never forgave his brother for what he considered a deliberate slight.

A more serious breach came about in 1380 when Thomas commanded an army in northern France. But he could not induce the French army to give battle and so took his forces into Brittany where he laid siege to Nantes. There word reached him that his brother John had agreed to a truce with the new French king. This threw Thomas into a savage mood for he feared the people of England would consider the campaign a failure and lay the blame on his shoulders. He did not return immediately.

It has been pointed out in an earlier volume that there were plenty of heiresses during medieval days, due partly to so many sons of the great families being killed in tournaments and in the incessant wars. There were no richer sisters in England at this time than Eleanor and Mary
de Bohun. Their father had been Humphrey, the tenth Earl of Hereford, who held in addition the earldoms of Essex and Northampton and owned broad acres and many tall castles, including Pleshy in Essex, Monmouth, Leicester, and a great, dark, drafty house called Cole Harbor in the Dowgate ward of London. On his death the division of his properties gave to the elder sister the earldom of Essex, the strong fortress of Pleshy, and a claim to transfer the post of constable of England to her husband. The earldoms of Hereford and Leicester went to the younger, with the castle of Monmouth and the tomblike house in London.

Now the elder sister had married Thomas of Woodstock and they had made up their minds between them that it would be more to their liking if they had the whole inheritance instead of half. They coolly made Cole Harbor their London home. Little Mary, who was very pretty (the elder sister lacked the Bohun beauty) and a grave and gentle child, was taken to live in the castle of Pleshy, in close proximity to a convent of the Poor Clares. It would be a proper arrangement all around, they believed, if Mary would take the vows and devote her life to the church, for, in that event, all the properties would come to them.

The Poor Clares (a popular version of the order founded by St. Clara) were the feminine branch of the Franciscans. They had bravely and sternly persevered in the strict discipline and the vows of poverty laid down for his followers by St. Francis of Assisi. They slept on boards and their lives were a perpetual fast. The members could speak to one another only on permission from the prioress. They dressed in loose-fitting gray gowns with linen cord ropes, tied with four knots to represent their four vows. They worked long hours in taking care of the poor and the sick, a thoroughly fine and self-sacrificing order.

John of Gaunt had been appointed guardian of the attractive, dark-haired Mary and he did not approve of the plan of the elder sister and her husband, unless it came about with the full consent of the younger sister. Nature, as it happened, took the decision in hand. Mary met John’s son Henry, who later became Henry IV, and the young people fell deeply in love. A match was arranged between them, although the elder sister, in the absence of her husband, opposed it bitterly.

Thomas of Woodstock returned from France still filled with umbrage over the truce his brother had negotiated. When he learned that his plans for the younger sister had been upset by her marriage, he became even more enraged, contending that he should have been consulted first. This was a proper enough objection, except that everyone knew his real concern was that Mary’s share of the fat Bohun acres and the well-filled family coffers would not now come into his hands.

The marriage proved to be a most happy one. Although Mary died before her husband became King of England, she had presented him
with seven children, including four sons. She was only twenty-three when she died in childbirth with the last of the children, a girl. The four sons took after her in having the dark eyes and brown hair of the Bohuns, but each of the three girls had the brilliant and handsome fairness of the Plantagenets.

The young mother’s place in history was assured because her oldest son was the great Prince Hal of legend and song, who became Henry V of England and won the fabulous Battle of Agincourt against the French.

Thomas of Woodstock seems to have spent the first years of Richard’s reign in a state of ferment. He was incensed at not being included in the first council to direct the affairs of the kingdom during the boy’s minority, although none of the royal uncles had been selected. As a sop, he was made Earl of Buckingham and constable of England at the coronation. Just when it was that he began to assert himself in state matters cannot be determined, but it happened before he was ensconced in a position of authority by Parliament. He seems to have taken advantage almost from the first of the prerogatives of his birth to dip his fingers into the administrative pie. Certainly he was from the very beginning Richard’s most unsparing critic.

He showed little or no respect for the young ruler, brushing in and out of the royal presence without asking consent. He even addressed the boy as a stern uncle to an adolescent nephew, without waiting for permission. On occasion he would brusquely interrupt Richard’s own remarks and contradict him openly when he disagreed, as he nearly always did. It is even said that he opened the king’s letters and then turned them over, not with suggestions but with instructions as to what should be done about them.

Richard’s chief concern in these early days of his reign was to escape from under the insensitive thumb of the Bully of Woodstock.

Richard, now happily married, should have been in a position to take the reins of government into his own hands. But Parliament was almost unanimous in its opposition. Things were going badly in England. Every naval and military move that was initiated resulted either in disaster or stalemate. The financial position of the country was weak and trade was falling off as a result of the difficulties under which the Flemish cities labored. It was no time for a boy to take control of the nation.

Parliament refused to see that the country was staggering under the
costs of a war which could not be won and which should be terminated. The people, still boasting of the victories won over the French, longed for the days when Edward the warrior king and the Black Prince had led the English armies. No national leader, it seemed, had the courage to come out boldly and propose that a peace be made. Instead they devoted themselves to feeble attempts at financial reform. The only spot on which the parliamentary finger of censure could be laid was the extravagance of the king’s court. Through lack of courage to face the real issue, the House selected two men who were to act jointly as councilors and be in constant attendance on the king. One was Michael de la Pole, who already belonged to the inner circle about the king, and the other was Richard FitzAlan, the Earl of Arundel.

The king went a step further and made Michael de la Pole chancellor. In that capacity Pole appeared before Parliament and stated in unequivocal terms that a final peace must be made with France unless the nation was prepared to exert all its might in pushing the war to a successful conclusion.

The members listened in glum agreement. Someone had dared at last to put into words what they all knew inwardly to be the truth. It developed at once, however, that they were not prepared for the first alternative and only half ready to accept the second course. Richard came to the House and proposed that he lead an army into France at once. He was beginning to fill out and the first downy traces of what would grow into the handsome yellow beard he wore through all of his adult life were showing on his cheeks. But although he was the son of the Black Prince and might possess the same genius for war, he was still a boy and without any military experience. The members, who were controlled by the nobility, could not agree to his proposal.

Finally the House compromised by deciding to grant supplies for a force to be lead by the warlike Bishop of Norwich in a crusade against the supporters of the French anti-Pope. It will be remembered that the bishop had won a quick victory over the clownish peasant leader, Litster, who had called himself “King of the Commons.” But he was soon to discover that facing a large and well-equipped French army was vastly different from scattering a ragtag band without any training and without proper arms. The bishop was so soundly beaten that nothing much was left of the army he had led across the Channel.

The news of this disaster reached Richard at Daventry, which he had reached in the course of a state processional through the Midlands. He was at table and he sprang to his feet, his face livid, crying out that he must return to London at once. The ladies and gentlemen about the board looked at one another with surprise and dismay. What had made
the young king behave in this way? Could it be that the peasants had risen again?

With a few of his closest advisers about him, de Vere, Pole, and Burley, without a doubt, Richard took to horse and galloped the rest of the day and all through the night, stopping frequently for remounts but never for food or rest. A seventy-mile ride in one stage was cause for amazement, particularly in view of the bad roads, but some of the driving force of his father was beginning to come out in Richard. When he arrived in London, dusty and haggard and so bone-weary that he had to be helped from the saddle, he went into conference at once with his uncle of Lancaster who had remained there to nurse his disappointment over Parliament’s refusal to supply him with an army for the invasion of Spain. The boy declared that the bishop must be impeached as soon as he returned to England. John of Gaunt agreed that the too ambitious prelate should be punished. Later they found support for this step in the House, and when my Lord of Norwich returned he was ordered to turn all his temporalities over to the Crown to be applied against a fine, to be levied “at the king’s pleasure.”