The Plantagenets (71 page)

It was 25 June 1376, just over two weeks since the Black Prince’s death. The Good Parliament was still in full session, attempting to purge the king’s household and bring to justice those men they blamed for mismanaging the war. At the heart of the battle was the courageous attempt of Sir Peter de la Mare to take the fight for reform directly to John of Gaunt. With the Black Prince’s death, that battle was being played out against a new and burning question: what was to happen when the old king followed his eldest son into the grave? Who would guarantee the security of the Plantagenet succession?

With Prince Edward dead, Richard of Bordeaux was the next in line to inherit the English Crown. That much was clear. What was not clear was whether he would be allowed to do so in peaceable fashion. The child was nine years old. It was virtually certain, with Edward III reduced to gibbering infirmity, that the new king’s reign would begin with a long minority, of the sort that had only once been seen in
England since the Norman invasion. That minority harked back to Henry III, the architect of the great buildings in which parliament now sat. Every student of Plantagenet family history would recall that Henry III’s minority had been blighted by a French invasion and a long and damaging civil war.

They might also recall that the late King Edward III’s much briefer minority between 1327 and 1330 had been dominated by the grasping regency of Roger Mortimer and Queen Isabella. This, to many, was just as real a danger in the 1370s. It was widely feared, particularly in London, that like Mortimer in the 1320s, John of Gaunt had designs on the throne for himself.

This was unfair. Gaunt, although he was an unsubtle politician and a ruthlessly ambitious magnate, almost certainly had no intention of usurping the young heir to his father’s Crown. He was at his core a loyalist. But this was not the perception among many of those in Westminster in 1376.

As reassurance that Gaunt was not preparing a raid for the throne, the commons had demanded that on 25 June young Richard of Bordeaux be brought before them in order that – as the official records put it – ‘the lords and commons might see and honour Richard as true heir apparent to the realm’. This desperation for an heir of whom they could be certain must have fairly hummed in the London air as Richard appeared before his future subjects.

While he stood before them, Simon of Sudbury, the sixty-year-old archbishop of Canterbury, rose to address the lords and commons together. The king, he told them, had briefed him to speak on his behalf. According to the parliament rolls, he said that ‘although the very noble and powerful prince my lord Edward, recently Prince of Wales, was departed and called to God, nevertheless the prince was as if present and not in any way absent, because he had left behind him such a noble and fine son, who is his exact image or true likeness …’

As Sudbury brought his speech to a close, there was a great clamour from the commons. They asked ‘with one voice that it might please [the king] to grant to Richard the name and honour of Prince of Wales’, just as his father had held it. They were answered that such
was the king’s prerogative alone. But Richard, like the men around him, knew that he would be raised to all the titles and honours that befitted his new station before very much time had elapsed.

Almost a year later to the day, Edward III died: alone but for a priest, stupefied by a series of strokes, barely able to speak. Thomas Walsingham wrote that Alice Perrers took the rings from his fingers before she left him for the last time. One of his last public appearances was before a deputation of Londoners, who came to Sheen and found him trussed up in cloth of gold and physically pinned into his chair in order to hold him upright. The king slipped finally out of consciousness on 21 June 1377, following a reign of just over fifty years. He was sixty-four years old. He had outlived almost all of his companions, and all of his successes.

The old king was laid to rest on Sunday 5 July, in one of the most lavish funerals ever held in England. The procession lasted three days and cost thousands of pounds. Almost the whole of London and Westminster was draped in black cloth and lit by thousands of solemn torchbearers, dressed all in black. Archbishop Sudbury presided as the dead king’s body, draped in red samite emblazoned with a white cross, was placed inside a coffin and interred in Westminster Abbey next to his wife, Queen Philippa. During the interment, a knight entered the abbey church and presented a sword and shield as an offering. At Windsor, another ceremonial sword was placed above the royal stall in St George’s Chapel. Then the fortunes of England and the Plantagenet family were catapulted into the hands of his grandson and a generation of children who had known only the world of the 1370s: a time of devastation, corruption and decay. The whole country looked to Richard.

His coronation took place on Thursday 16 July. The crowds who had come to London for the solemnities of the royal funeral now watched as the city blossomed: a throbbing hub of brightness and hope. As Adam Houghton, bishop of St David’s, said in an address to parliament in 1377: Richard had been sent to England by God, just as Christ had been sent to earth to redeem the people. The streets of the capital were so packed that during the royal procession from the
Tower to Westminster on the evening before the coronation John of Gaunt had to cut his way through the throng with his sword. In Cheapside – the main east–west thoroughfare through the city – a conduit flowed with wine for three days: a dark purple river that led up to a large mock castle at the western end of the street. In the turrets of the castle sat little girls of Richard’s own age, dressed all in white as if to represent the sense of rebirth and repurification that came with the accession of the first new king for half a century.

Richard, at the heart of the procession, soaked up the adulation of the masses. Next to him rode his tutor and father-figure Sir Simon Burley, the loyal soldier and servant to Richard’s father in Aquitaine, who served at Najera and had assisted the Black Prince in the sack of Limoges. He had therefore been around Richard all his life, and had certainly been closely involved in the young king’s upbringing for several years before the coronation. He would have prepared the prince for the expectation and the ceremonial process of his coronation. But he could not have prepared him for the sheer noise and excitement with which the people clamoured in the street.

The ceremony with which Richard was crowned and anointed in the abbey on that busy Thursday afternoon would live with him all his life. At ten years old he stood before all the people of his realm and swore his solemn oath to uphold the laws and customs of his ancestors, protect the Church, do justice to all and uphold the laws that his people had ‘justly and reasonably’ chosen. Then he was presented to the whole abbey for their acclamation. This was a reversal of the usual process, by which the people would cheer in advance of the oath-swearing. It was arranged to make the clear point that this was a king who acceded by the right of his family to rule, and not by the election of the masses.

After the cheers had subsided, Richard was anointed in holy chrism, concealed from the eyes of the congregation by a golden cloth. Oil touched his bare skin at the hands, chest, shoulders and head, sanctifying and separating him from all other men. He was handed the sceptre, sword and ring of kingship before being crowned by Archbishop Sudbury and the earl of March. It was an awe-inspiring experience for
a young boy to go through. And it planted in Richard’s mind the certain knowledge that he was a king by right of God. He was carried out of the abbey raised aloft on Sir Simon Burley’s shoulders. There was such a commotion around him that one of his shoes fell off.

This was characteristic of the experiences of Richard’s early years. On public occasion after public occasion he was cheered and honoured as a Christlike saviour of a troubled people. There were repeated calls from the kingdom’s great men for obedience to the new king: the day after the coronation, Bishop Brinton of Rochester gave a sermon demanding that everyone obey Richard for the safety of the whole kingdom. In his household he was constantly cast in his father’s image – surrounded by his old companions and exhorted to become the king that the Black Prince had never been allowed to be.

And yet there was another side to the politics of kingship. Cheerful as the realm was to have a new king, they also had immediate and desperate requirements of him. England was in acute peril. And the summer that welcomed Richard’s coronation was also plagued by an escalating crisis of security. As the chronicler known as the monk of Evesham wrote:

In this year … there was a complete collapse of peace negotiations [with France]; for the French refused to keep the peace unless an agreement highly favourable to themselves could be reached … During this same period, the Scots burnt the town of Roxburgh … Afterwards, the French landed in the Isle of Wight on 21 August: when they had looted and set fire to several places, they took a thousand marks as ransom for the island. Then they returned to the sea and sailed along the English coastline continuously until Michaelmas. They burnt many places and killed … all the people they could find … It is believed that at this time more evils were perpetrated than had been caused by enemy attacks on England during the previous forty years. [During a battle with French pirates at Lewes] one Frenchman was captured … who, on the point of death … declared, ‘If the English had made the duke of Lancaster their king, they would not now be invaded by Frenchmen as they are.’

What could a boy king do against this?

The answer was very little. England required an arrangement to govern itself while their saviour grew up from a child into a fully-formed king. The natural precedent to follow would have been from the reign of Henry III, when William Marshal had been appointed to a formal regency. But the only candidate for such a post in 1377 was – as the monk of Evesham implied – John of Gaunt. Although he had been reconciled with the commons in parliament after the storms of 1376, there was still a great deal of suspicion of Gaunt’s motives and his abilities. In February 1377 he had intervened at the trial in London of his protégé the radical scholar John Wyclif. Gaunt’s heavy-handed behaviour had prompted riots in the capital. His capacity to vex and frighten made him an unpromising candidate for an official role in the new government.

Instead, England settled on a fudge. From his coronation onwards, Richard was held to be ruling as a king in his own right. A pretence of competence was established. A series of continual councils of twelve great men was appointed to advise him, but writs and charters were given under Richard’s seal. Government was carried out in his name, but power was exercised from his household. The men closest to him were former retainers and servants of the Black Prince, such as Burley, Sir Guichard d’Angle, who had been raised to the earldom of Huntingdon after the coronation, and Aubrey de Vere. It was by no means a perfect arrangement, but necessity dictated. The south coast was in danger, and in France and Aquitaine there were severe threats to the two most important English coastal outposts: Calais and Bordeaux.

To defend the realm, and those dwindling parcels of Plantagenet lands on the Continent, it was imperative that government begin to function fast. One pressing need was to find enough money to fight back against the French in the Channel and on the Continent. Raising taxation from the whole country was vital. Unfortunately, it was also the route to one of the most extraordinary outbursts of violence and popular rage that England would ever experience.

England in Uproar

The Great Revolt – or the Peasants’ Revolt, as it is more commonly called by historians – was England’s first great popular rebellion. It began as a series of village rebellions in Essex and Kent during late May and early June 1381. As royal tax inspectors and judges moved around the counties, inspecting low returns from a poll tax that had been levied in parliament in November 1380 and was collected during the following spring, they were met with coordinated resistance and violence. Royal officials were murdered and the sheriffs of Essex and Kent were snatched in kidnap raids.

As the rebellion built momentum, bands of mounted rebels gathered and began to tour the major towns of Kent, looting and burning official records in Maidstone, Rochester and Canterbury. They were drawn from the ordinary folk of the villages, and led by the ‘better sort’ of yeomen – parish priests, village constables and well-off farmers. They targeted lawyers, royal servants and particularly odious local landowners. But they also acted with restraint and some political sense: an order was issued, according to one chronicler, ‘that no one who dwelt near the sea for the space of 12 leagues should come with them, but keep the coasts of the sea from enemies’.

By mid-June, the Kent rebels had a leader: Wat Tyler. It was rumoured later that he had served in the French wars, but of his biography we know almost nothing. He was aided by John Ball – a renegade Yorkshire priest who had been imprisoned on numerous occasions by Archbishop Sudbury for preaching heretical and seditious sermons outside churches on Sundays. Ball used catchy rhymes
and popular slogans to spread a vision of a classless society in which lordship was abolished and land and goods were held in common. His most famous couplet was ‘When Adam delved and Eve span, who then was the gentleman?’

As the Kent and Essex rebels sacked their counties, they were also in touch with groups of disaffected Londoners. The city of London had been riven by faction and feuds for much of the 1370s. There were multiple hatreds between rival merchant groups and guilds, between native merchants and foreign traders, between supporters and opponents of John Wyclif, and more generally between the apprentice classes and their rich masters. At the invitation of the Londoners, on 11 June the Kent and Essex rebels set out for the capital. The Kent rebels approached via Greenwich and Blackheath; the Essex rebels made their way via Mile End.