Within the Hollow Crown

Copyright © 1948, 1958, 2010 by Margaret Campbell Barnes
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Originally published in 1948 by Macdonald and Jane's Publishers Limited.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Barnes, Margaret Campbell.

Within the hollow crown : a reluctant king, a desperate nation, and the most misunderstood reign in history / Margaret Campbell Barnes. p. cm.

1. Richard II, King of England, 1367-1400—Fiction. 2. Great Britain—
History—Richard III, 1483-1485—Fiction. I. Title.
PR6003.A72W58 2010
823'.912—dc22

2009046226

"…Within the hollow crown

That rounds the mortal temples of a king
Keeps Death his court, and there the antick sits,
Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp,
Allowing him a breath, a little scene,
To monarchize, be fear'd, and kill with looks,
Infusing him with self and vain conceit
As if the flesh which walls about our life
Were brass impregnable; and humoured thus
Comes at the last, and with a little pin
Bores through his castle wall, and farewell king!"

I
n attempting to write a novel concerning a character so hedged about with controversy it has been necessary to read and weigh up a voluminous amount of contradictory testimony. Nothing was too bad to say about the second Richard after Henry Bolingbroke had usurped his throne, and the whole tone of contemporary chroniclers changes abruptly; yet to unintimidated French historians he remained the highly civilized person who was kind to Isabel of Valois and strove consistently for peace. And the comparatively recent discovery of a manuscript written by a Cistercian monk of Dieulacres Abbey shows the capable young king in a far kinder light than is allowed by any Lancastrian historian.

   In the case of the King's younger uncles and one or two other characters whose rank and titles changed during the reign, only one title has been used in order to avoid confusion.

   My thanks are due to the Librarian and staff of the Epsom and Ewell Public Libraries, and to the authors of works which I have consulted:
Richard the Second
, Anthony Steel;
Richard II
, H. A. Wallon, Paris;
The Deposition of Richard II, M. V. Clarke
, M.A., and Professor V. H. Galbraith, M.A.;
King Richard II
, Shakespeare;
Richard of Bordeaux
, Gordon Daviot;
Chronique
de la Traison et Mort
, English Historical Society;
Extracts from
the Bulletin of the John Rylands Library
, Manchester;
Froissart's
Chronicles
, Translated by Lord Berners; Froissart, Chronicler an
d
Poet
, F. S. Shears;
Chaucer's Poems; Chaucer and his England, Dr
. G. G. Coulton;
Chaucer
, George H. Cowling; Lives of the Queen
s
of England
, Agnes Strickland;
England in the Age of Wycliffe
, Professor G. M. Trevelyan;
The Black Prince,
John Cammidge;
Lord Mayors of London
, W. and R. Woodcock; Men and Women o
f
Plantagenet England
, D. M. Stuart;
Two Thousand Years of London
, C. Whitaker-Wilson;
History of East London, Hubert
Llewellyn Smith;
Our Cockney Ancestors
, K. Hare;
Love, Marriage and
Romance in Old London
, C. T. S. Thompson;
Old London Illustrated
, H. W. Brewer and Herbert A. Cox;
The Tower of London, Cano
n Benham, D.D., F.S.A.;
Everyday Things in England, C. H. B. an
d M. Quennell;
History of Pontefract Castle, Richard H. H. Holmes
;
History of Bodiam Castle
.

Young Richard Plantagenet knelt by a richly blazoned tomb in Canterbury Cathedral while priests and monks chanted prayers for the repose of his father's soul. Every now and then he made a valiant effort to recall his wandering thoughts and leash them to the solemn meaning of the Latin words; but it was difficult not to drowse in an atmosphere so heavy with incense and packed humanity. He was only fifteen and this was the fifth anniversary of the Black Prince's death, and even when he had been alive Richard hadn't cared for him with all that passion of loyalty of which he was capable.

   Not that he would have dreamed of telling anyone so, of course—unless perhaps it were his closest friend, Robert de Vere.

   Such an unnatural confession would hurt his mother and shock his uncles, besides seeming to admit some rather shameful lack of appreciation in himself. For hadn't all these people crowded into the Cathedral year after year on the Black Prince's birthday to pay homage to a national hero? And wasn't all England still mourning for the martial, grown-up king they might have had instead of a useless minor like himself? But unfortunately his illustrious father had always been too busy fighting to play with him when he was small and Richard remembered him mostly as an irritable invalid, blighted in his prime by some unpleasant disease picked up in the Spanish campaign.

   Actually, he had preferred his old war-horse of a grandfather, Edward the Third, who had lived a year longer and anxiously bequeathed him the crown.

   At last the long Requiem chants died away in a series of lovely, diminishing echoes that pursued each other upwards from choir to clerestory and out through the open arches, one hoped, to the feet of God. Richard eased his knees from a faldstool and seated himself beside his mother to listen to the usual eulogy of their dead. Sudbury, the Archbishop, spoke proudly of how the late Prince of Wales had carried the renown of English arms like a flaunting banner across the Continent—of his courage at Crécy and his generalship at Poitiers. His effective voice was like a clarion call to the new, untried generation, and Richard, in common with other youngsters of his age, gazed with apologetic awe at the recumbent effigy of the proven warrior, flanked by a hardy company of living comrades-in-arms bearing the famous black armour and the captured ostrich feathers of Bohemia. He had been brought up on the names of Crécy and Poitiers. The overworked words had been dinned into him until something inside him sickened secretly at the sound of them. He felt that people used them unfairly, like pikes to prod him with, so that in self-defence he tried to avoid the warlike things they stood for. Unconsciously, against such high-sounding standards, he was always striving to keep inviolate that precious indescribable thing which was
himself
—the spiritual quality which so many well-meaning people tried to encroach upon. And being both imaginative and intelligent, he could usually find plenty of alleys of mental escape when he didn't want to listen to them. Even now, while formally trying to fill a chair of state which was considerably too big for him, he was able to give the primate's eloquence the slip and enter into the intimate, satisfying world of his own conceits.

   He couldn't be bored for long in so exquisite and interesting a place. If his father's war cult left him cold, the boy had imbibed his mother's cult of beauty. He loved the rich colours of vestments and stained glass, the cool mysterious perspective of dim aisles and the grandeur of tall arches soaring into the vaulting of the roof. By sliding forward a little in his chair he could catch a glimpse of the worn steps leading to Becket's golden shrine and relive the well-known tragedy of a previous Plantagenet's anger and remorse. What must it feel like, he wondered, to be murdered. How must poor Saint Thomas have reacted when he saw the King's knights invading his sanctuary? Had he suffered much? Richard shivered involuntarily, miserably uncertain whether he himself could ever face the violence of four assassins with the bravery of Becket. "Priest or no priest, he set about some of them first!" he recalled, reconstructing the thrilling scene which he and Robert de Vere had pestered their tutor to recount so often. From the time when he had first come from Bordeaux it had formed a favourite theme for their "play-acting"; and what with his own vivid imagination and Robert's dramatic skill, they had managed to scare themselves deliciously. And as soon as they were a bit older they had ghoulishly searched the Cathedral floor for bloodstains.