The Plantagenets (77 page)

Thomas Walsingham wrote that the earl of Arundel haunted Richard as a ghost, ‘threaten[ing] him with indescribable terrors’. If so, it did not bend him from his purpose. The following Monday it was Gloucester’s turn. Here was a doleful spectacle indeed, as another English king angled for execution of a duke of the royal blood. Thomas Mowbray, earl of Nottingham, had been sent to Calais to accompany the duke back to parliament. Now he entered a hushed assembly and delivered some astonishing news. The duke was dead.

What Nottingham did not tell parliament was that the duke had been murdered at Calais, on his (and ultimately the king’s) direct orders. He had been taken from his prison cell to a house where he had been suffocated with a feather bed, probably on the night of 8 September, nine days before parliament had opened.

Instead of relaying this information, Nottingham read out a political confession in which Gloucester admitted to numerous crimes relating to the events of 1386, including a dubious admission that the Appellants had agreed for several days to depose the king, before renewing their homage when they could not decide which of them should take Richard’s place. The confession ended with a plea from the duke that the king should ‘accept me unto his mercy and to his grace … though I be unworthy’. Even in death, he was afforded no such mercy. He was posthumously condemned as a traitor.

On Friday 28 September it was Warwick’s turn. He was already a broken man. When he came before parliament he broke down in tears, blaming others for his involvement and howling for the king’s mercy. It was a pathetic sight: a weak old man crying for his life. After pleas from various other lords, Richard condemned him to life imprisonment on the Isle of Man and forfeiture of all his lands and goods. The Appellants of 1386 were finally undone. A new political order was about to begin.

Richard founded it on the redistribution of the numerous lands forfeited by his vanquished enemies, and created a huge new class of high nobility. The two Appellants who had escaped punishment were John of Gaunt’s son Henry of Bolingbroke, earl of Derby, and Thomas Mowbray, earl of Nottingham. They were raised to duke of Hereford and Norfolk respectively, while Mowbray’s grandmother Margaret of Brotherton became duchess of Norfolk in her own right. Edmund duke of York’s son Edward became duke of Albemarle. Richard’s nephew, Thomas Holland, earl of Kent, became duke of Surrey, and the king’s half-brother John Holland, earl of Huntingdon, became duke of Exeter. John Beaufort, earl of Somerset, was raised to marquis of Dorset. And there were four new earls: the king’s friends and courtiers Ralph Neville, Thomas Despenser, Thomas Percy and William
Scrope became the earls of Westmorland, Gloucester, Worcester and Wiltshire. All this represented a massive shift of property, grandeur and wealth. It had been a bewildering fortnight.

On 30 September parliament closed with a ceremony mimicking the end of the Merciless Parliament, as the lords swore before the shrine of the Confessor to uphold everything that had been done. Richard sat enthroned, crowned, magnificent and absolute. The country trembled before him. As John Gower, one of his few literary protégés, wrote in disgust: ‘During the month of September, savagery held sway by the sword.’ It would hold sway for another two years.

Richard Undone

Coventry buzzed with excitement. Since daybreak on Monday 16 September 1398 the tournament green at Gosford, just outside the town, had been filling with knights and nobles, bishops and visiting foreign dignitaries, and ordinary onlookers. Large, intricately decorated tents stood on the grass and were manned by smartly dressed esquires in bright liveries of all colours and cloths, decorated with silver buckles and armour, their weapons gleaming dangerously by their sides. A rare event was due to take place at nine o’clock that morning, one that had caught all England’s attention. Two dukes of the realm were to undergo trial by battle in front of the king. By the end of the day, either Henry Bolingbroke, duke of Hereford or Thomas Mowbray, duke of Norfolk would probably be dead. The victor would be vindicated. And the realm would have witnessed one of the great chivalric occasions of the age.

Bolingbroke and Mowbray had been allies under the Appellant banner in 1386. They had retained favour with the king in the purge of 1397 – not only avoiding the fates of Gloucester, Arundel and Warwick, but profiting handsomely in the distribution of land and titles that followed Richard’s coup. Now, though, they were quite literally mortal enemies. A fierce dispute between them had spilled over into accusations of treason made before the king in parliament, and Richard, in his magnificence, had decided that the only way to settle the quarrel was in armed combat.

The argument was deep-rooted and complex. It centred on an allegation made by Bolingbroke at a Shrewsbury parliament in 1398.
There the duke had told the king and the assembled lords that Mowbray, shaken by the actions of Richard’s revenge parliament, had warned him that the two of them were soon to be ‘undone’ for their deeds in 1387–8. According to Bolingbroke, Mowbray had told him that their pardons were worthless and that plots – stemming from the king himself – existed to kill both Bolingbroke and his father John of Gaunt, reverse the pardons given to Thomas of Lancaster in 1327 and take the entire duchy of Lancaster into royal hands.

These were serious allegations. The implication was that either Mowbray was guilty of blackest treachery by stirring up rebellion against the king, or that he did indeed believe that Richard was planning to wipe out the whole house of Lancaster, removing Gaunt and his son from the Plantagenet succession and thereby seizing another of the greatest inheritances in England for himself.

In fact, the dispute ran deeper. A factional split was emerging at Richard’s court between those nobles affiliated with Gaunt and the house of Lancaster and those who viewed the Lancastrians with suspicion, hostility and jealousy. It seems likely that it was Mowbray, rather than Richard, who had countenanced the deaths of Bolingbroke and Gaunt. After all, he had done away with the duke of Gloucester with little compunction. Richard suspected very strongly that his cousin Bolingbroke was telling the truth, and had imprisoned Mowbray in the royal Wardrobe. But the charges could not be proven. And since Mowbray disowned them in the strongest possible terms, refused to be reconciled with Bolingbroke and demanded that a trial by battle be held, that was the course that Richard had chosen to follow.

Thus, Coventry was alive with nervous tension, feverish spectators and the armed retainers of the kingdom’s greatest lords, all keen to see who would emerge alive from the latest grisly pantomime of Richard II’s despotic reign.

At nine o’clock, Bolingbroke rode out to Gosford mounted on a white courser, the giant horse’s saddle decorated in blue and green velvet, embroidered with gold swans and antelopes. He was accompanied by six liveried attendants, and wore brilliant plate and mail
armour, which he had acquired at great expense from Galeazzo, duke of Milan. He carried a long sword, short sword and dagger, and his silver shield had a bright red cross painted on it: the arms of England and St George. He announced to the constable and marshal of England that he had come to ‘prosecute my appeal in combating Thomas Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk, who is a traitor, false and recreant to God, the King, his realm and me’. He swore his oaths, had his weapons checked and blessed, and was given a small portion of food and wine to sustain him during a battle that might be expected to last until sunset. Then he pulled down the visor on his helmet, signed himself with the cross, took his lance from an attendant and rode forward to his pavilion, decorated all over in red roses, to wait for Mowbray.

Next came the king, amid much fanfare from his heralds. Richard was dressed as magnificently as usual, and accompanied by his large private army of Cheshire archers and men-at-arms. The air bristled with violent intent as Sir John Bushy, Richard’s loyal speaker of the House of Commons, who had condemned Arundel, Gloucester and Warwick, announced to the crowd that no one should so much as touch the wooden lists that surrounded the tournament field, on pain of having his hand chopped off. Then the duke of Norfolk arrived, clad in finery equal to his rival’s: red velvet with silver lions and mulberry trees on his horse. He swore his oaths and entered the lists to go to his own pavilion. As he rode through the barriers, he cried: ‘God speed the right!’

The time had come for battle. The dukes’ lances were measured, and the pavilions rapidly dismantled behind them, to leave the lists open for combat. Each man mounted his horse. The constable and marshal retreated. Justice would now be served. Bolingbroke advanced towards his rival. Mowbray stood stock-still. Everyone waited for the first blow to be struck.

Suddenly, Richard stood up, shouting ‘Ho! Ho!’ Everyone stopped, stunned. There was a great commotion in the crowd, as each duke was sent back to his tent, with his lance confiscated. And there they sat for two hours, as the king retreated into private deliberation. At length Bushy stepped forward once more and announced to the crowd the
king’s verdict. The trial was over. There would be no combat. Indulging his compulsion to acts of high drama and majesty, Richard had decided that both men were to be banished from the realm: Bolingbroke for ten years (later reduced to six), and Mowbray for life.

Here was Richard both at the height of his ominous power and caught in the web of his own paranoid rule. With the aborted trial of Mowbray and Bolingbroke, his theatrical absolutism, which had begun in 1397, reached its peak.

Walsingham called the period between 1397 and 1399 Richard’s tyranny, and he was right to do so. The full force of royal might and prerogative, which was supposed to exist for the protection of the king’s subjects, was turned against them for the enrichment of the king. Plantagenet rule had been founded on the protection of land, property and wealth. Drunk on his own authority, Richard, like Edward II before him, turned kingship on its head.

After the revenge parliament of 1397 had done its draconian work against the three senior appellants, Richard had helped himself liberally to the rewards. The lands confiscated had been redistributed among his friends and the new nobles. Arundel’s lands in north-east Wales had been attached to the earldom of Chester, which was raised to a principality. This now became his power base. Richard spent more and more time in the north-west, in and around his palatinate earldom of Chester, even taking parliament to Shrewsbury in 1398.

Surrounding the king was his Cheshire retinue: knights, squires and archers who wore the livery of the White Hart and took salaries by the day to do what ought to have been their natural duty of guarding over their king. Richard went everywhere with thuggish archers and men-at-arms, who spoke together in their broad northern dialect and addressed the king by the familiar name of ‘Dycun’ – Dickon. Barrel-chested guards waited outside his chamber at night bearing massive battleaxes, saying to him: ‘Dycun, slepe sicurly quile we wake.’ According to Adam of Usk, the Cheshire men committed brutal crimes with impunity: ‘wherever the king went they stood guard over him … committing adulteries, murders and countless other crimes.’
As well as the archers, Richard went everywhere with a big fierce greyhound by his side, which had belonged to the earl of Kent before his death. Constantly on his guard, constantly menacing his people: Richard’s actions were hardly those of a king. He seemed more like an overbearing private magnate, at war with his entire realm.

In the summer of 1397, the king had begun to demand forced loans from his subjects. Letters, stamped with the privy seal, were sent into the shires, demanding specific amounts of money – yet the names of the lenders were left blank. Richard’s officials simply issued these form letters of legalized theft to anyone they identified as rich enough to pay. Furthermore charters were demanded, in which men pledged their lives and property to the king. In the event that they should fall into royal disfavour, these charters could be used to ruin a man in an instant. As the king’s paranoia grew, he even demanded ‘blank charters’: clean sheets of paper on which a subject was forced to affix his seal, which could be used, as Walsingham put it, ‘so that whenever he wished to make attacks on [the sealant] he might have the means to attack them individually’. There could have been no more flagrant way to breach Magna Carta, that hallowed founding document of the English polity, which was renewed customarily at every parliament.

It all smacked of extreme fear and distrust: authority founded on a network of financial liability, rather than a faith in kingship as the source of public authority and the common good. Whole counties and cities had to buy their pardons from the royal wrath for extortionate sums: forced to guarantee their good behaviour at the cost of thousands of pounds. The general pardon issued to the realm in 1397 was made conditional upon Richard receiving customs revenues for life. The dukes of Albemarle and Kent (Richard’s cousin and nephew) were given licence to use the treason laws to hunt out enemies of the king. Yet Richard maintained the outward pretence that his vengeful hand was bringing his realm to peace. In a letter of 1397 to Albert of Bavaria, he wrote that the ‘avenging severity’ which had ‘been meted out to the destruction and ruin’ of his enemies had brought ‘to our subjects a peace which, by the grace of God, may last forever’.

Nothing could have been further from the truth. Rather than pacifying the realm, Richard’s rule of terror, enforced by a swelling private retinue, was forcing it into a state of incipient civil war. As the king built up his retainers, so did his lords. His mass redistribution of lands following the revenge parliament of 1397 caused serious disruption to local power structures. His habit of retaining men-at-arms wherever he went cut into his magnates’ territorial orbits and destabilized shire communities, which were keenly balanced by loyalties to local magnates.

Richard’s behaviour was at times psychopathic, and intimidated even his own courtiers. One vivid report recalled how ‘on solemn occasions when, by custom, he performed kingly rituals, he would order a throne to be prepared for him in his chamber on which he liked to sit ostentatiously from after dinner until vespers, talking to no one but watching everyone; and when his eye fell on anyone regardless of rank, that person had to bend his knee towards the king’.