Crown & Country: A History of England Through the Monarchy (38 page)

England was heavily burdened by taxation. The revenue had been lavished on what were now seen as worthless military forays. Taxpayers want at least something to show for their money. Instead the demands got heavier. Three poll taxes were brought in between 1377 and 1381 demanding a shilling of every adult in the land, whether duke, merchant or peasant. The collectors were ruthless in their hunt for cash. Not for the last time, a poll tax triggered a revolt. Riots in Essex and Kent spiralled into widespread rebellion and a march on London.

The rebels’ target was not Richard, but the clique of noble families around him. The rebels even flew the banner of St George, and as they streamed to London they swore loyalty to their young king. It was as if they wanted to rescue their true monarch from the malign clutches of men like John of Gaunt.

As the rebels looted and burned in the City and suburbs, Richard, his mother, Henry Bolingbroke and a handful of councillors took refuge in the Tower. The revolt was of course a terrible threat. But it was also an opportunity for the young king. The lords who had hitherto ruled England in his name were suddenly powerless and directionless in the face of the triumphant mob. John of Gaunt’s sumptuous palace, the Savoy, was burnt to rubble and his rural estates were in turmoil. The duke himself had only just escaped with his life, fleeing to Scotland.

On the other hand that same mob was crying enthusiastically for Richard as their true king. Richard took them at their word. Aged only fourteen and with a courage fully worthy of his father, the Black Prince, he left the protection of the Tower even when the knights supposed to be protecting him refused to venture out. He met the rebels three times with only a tiny entourage. And he faced them down. At the first meeting at Mile End he offered them a charter of liberties. When that did not quell the disturbances he met them again at Smithfield.

There he approached their leader, Wat Tyler. Greeting him as ‘brother’ he asked why the men of Essex and Kent had not gone home. It was a commanding performance. But it was undone when the Lord Mayor of London attacked and murdered Tyler. Quick in response to this nasty turn of events, which threatened to turn the situation into something much worse, Richard rode up to the seething ranks of rebels and shouted: ‘I am your leader: follow me.’

Unbelievably, the mob did as they were commanded and followed their young king out of harm’s way. Leaderless and their grip on the capital broken, they were easily dispersed by the London militia. The rebellion was crushed. And any romantic hope that the boy king was on the side of the common folk was soon smothered as well. Richard rescinded his promises of liberty. Indeed, he went to watch the execution of many of the rebels later in the summer. Any sympathy or fellow-feeling he had shown, or pretended to show, was gone. These men, he now believed, had committed the unforgivable sin of rebellion.

II

Having tasted real power, Richard was reluctant to give it up. He had taken personal steps to crush a serious rebellion. His masterstrokes of political calculation, subterfuge and charisma had succeeded where the nobles and officers of state had failed. He had, he believed, metamorphosed during those tumultuous days in London from an uncertain boy into a man. To signify this transition he found a bride and was married within a year. He was ready to rule in his own name.

The story of the next few years is the descent of Richard from the popularity and power he had gained after the Peasants’ Revolt. He lavished gifts on a handful of favourites, the most prominent being Michael de la Pole and Robert de Vere. The latter had a title created just for him – marquis – which put him above all the nobility apart from the royal dukes. Then he was made duke of Ireland, which made him the equal of the royal family. Under Richard and his friends royal government became a high-tax, high-spend, cliquey affair. And once again taxpayers’ money went nowhere: it was squandered on favourites and failed wars.

Richard had to be reminded to his face of the fate of Edward II. But the warnings did little good. Instead the demands for cash kept coming. Richard’s failures in war meant that the country was facing invasion from France. The ‘Wonderful’ Parliament of 1386 agreed to help Richard, but only if he dismissed his favourites. Richard replied that he would not listen to Parliament even if it asked him to dismiss his kitchen scullion. It was a disastrous game of tit-for-tat. Parliament raised its demands. Richard then said he would invite in the French to help him against Parliament.

This was a shocking, silly thing to say. It was a burst of petulance from the lips of a twenty-year-old who had always had the dice loaded in his favour. And it had a devastating effect. Richard was threatened with deposition. That sobered him up. He surrendered to Parliament, which bound him to ordinances which set up a ruling council as in the days of Henry III and Edward II; impeached de la Pole and instituted an inquiry into royal finances. Richard stomped off in anger. It was called his ‘gyration’ – a tour of the country.

It was no meet-and-greet, however. Richard’s intention was to gather armed support against the nobility and parliamentarians and gain legal judgements to rescue his prerogative. He formed his own private army, who wore his badge of the white hart as a sign of loyalty. Many of the men were drawn from his stronghold in Cheshire, giving him a handy force of archers. Richard was on a mission to assert his vision of monarchy.

An idealized version of this is depicted in the beautiful painting known as the Wilton Diptych. The Diptych is a work of private devotion and it takes us to the heart of Richard’s intense, obsessive, solipsistic view of kingship, which raised him gloriously above his subjects and dangerously cut him off from them.

Richard was born on 6 January – the Feast of the Epiphany – when the three wise men, or kings, knelt in adoration before the Christ child and his Virgin Mother. In the centre of the picture is Richard, repeating that act of homage. January 6th is also the day on which the Church commemorates Christ’s baptism by John the Baptist. He too appears in the Diptych beside the two English royal saints: Edward the Confessor, whose crown and ring had been placed on Richard at his coronation; and, next to him, the Anglo-Saxon martyr-monarch Edmund. Thus aided, Richard is ready to receive the banner of St George from the hands of the Christ child.

Even the angels surrounding the Virgin belong to Richard’s dream world as, like his earthly trusties, the Cheshire archers, they wear his badge of the white hart. With the heavenly host in his pocket, Richard thought, who could stand against him?

The answer, in this new world, was the men who actually held power: the nobility. One of their natural leaders was Henry Bolingbroke, son of John of Gaunt.

Only ten years had passed since Richard and Henry had sworn never to take up arms against each other. But in the ten years the two boys had grown into very different men.

Henry had turned into a man of action, excelling at jousting and blood sports. And he had a soldier’s harsh piety. Richard, on the other hand, had created a glamorous, luxurious court of which he was the glittering centre. ‘He was of common stature,’ wrote a chronicler, ‘his hair yellowish, his face round and feminine, sometimes flushed; abrupt and stammering in his speech, capricious in his manners … He was prodigal in his gifts, extravagantly splendid in his entertainments and dress.’ Style was everything: he commissioned the first royal cookery book and invented the handkerchief.

But this was more than style wars: it was a clash of political values. Richard believed that a king was God on Earth; Henry that he was a first among equals.

The result was real war: Richard and his court favourites against the nobility.

On 19 December 1387 the two sides met at Radcot Bridge just outside Oxford. The royal army was led by Robert de Vere; the nobles by Henry.

Henry won. De Vere fled into exile, leaving Richard without troops and powerless. News of the catastrophe was brought to him at the Tower, where he was spending Christmas. Soon the rebel lords arrived as well and mercilessly browbeat the king, threatening him with force and even with deposition. There was nothing for it but complete and humiliating surrender. The ‘Merciless’ Parliament dismantled the king’s power. Richard’s friends were executed or driven into exile. The kingdom was to be ruled by a committee of the lords and even Richard’s personal affairs were to be put into the hands of a board of guardians, as though he was a child or insane.

Richard was left only with the title of king. But it was enough. Slowly and painstakingly he rebuilt his position and power. The removal of the favourites satisfied many of his critics. After his twenty-first birthday he made a plausible case that he had matured. He reached out to John of Gaunt, who agreed to use his influence to pacify the country. He rebuilt his personal following. And above all he treated his former enemies with mercy.

But he had not forgotten his degradation. Adversity had taught Richard patience and cunning and, gourmet though he was, he had decided that revenge was a dish best eaten cold.

The depth of festering hatred was clearly illustrated when his beloved Robert de Vere died in exile.

In 1395 Richard arranged a funeral for him. All the sometime rebel lords were obliged to attend: the very men who had fought against de Vere at Radcot Bridge. Richard placed a ring on the dead man’s finger and with this quiet gesture he signalled that vengeance would be his.

By 1397 Richard was strong enough to strike. One by one the lords who had rebelled against him were either executed or exiled on trumped-up charges of treason. No one was safe – among the victims was one of his own uncles, the duke of Gloucester. Parliament itself was surrounded by Richard’s Cheshire archers in an unambiguous message that there was one sovereign in England. Richard had regained his prerogative, which had been taken from him over a decade before. And he had meted out the appropriate punishment.

But Richard II saved a special revenge for his cousin Henry. When Henry Bolingbroke was involved in a quarrel with another noble, Thomas Mowbray, Richard ordered that the two men fight to the death in judicial combat. God would be on the just man’s side.

Richard’s behaviour in the affair shows him at his most malign and vain. He deliberately played up the quarrel between Henry and Mowbray and he chose the means of settling it which showed off his own glory to the utmost. In an echo of the pageantry of the Colosseum, Richard would preside like a Roman emperor in the amphitheatre as the defeated man was stripped of his armour, dragged at a horse’s tail from the field and strung up on the gallows that stood ready. But, in the event, Richard behaved more like a royal conjuror than a Roman emperor. For, just as the combatants were ready to charge, Richard, in a dramatic gesture, threw down his staff, stopping the fight and resuming judgement to himself. Henry, the king ruled, would go into exile for ten years and Mowbray for life. Thus King Richard, like a demigod, struck down his remaining foes.

III

In 1399, Henry Bolingbroke was an exile in Paris. Within the year he received a double blow. His father, John of Gaunt, died. And Richard seized all of Henry’s vast Lancastrian inheritance for himself. Henry was left with nothing.

But Richard had overreached himself: all landowners in England now had cause to fear. The king was in his pomp as autocrat. He simply helped himself to other people’s property. Twenty-two years had passed since Henry had been made a knight of the Garter with Richard but now any vestige of cousinly feeling had gone. Henry determined to reclaim what was rightly his by force.

Richard believed he had covered all eventualities. France was now on his side, and he had a private agreement with the duke of Burgundy that close watch should be kept on Henry. Richard even felt secure enough to go to Ireland. But fortune turned against the king. The duke of Burgundy was forced out of Paris by the plague. And Henry was free to do as he wished.

En route on this make-or-break journey back to England, Henry paused at the great royal abbey of St Denis. St Denis was where the kings of France were buried and it was also where they came to receive the sacred banner of the ‘Oriflamme’ (the standard of St Louis) on their way to battle. Henry was on his way to battle and he needed all the help, human and divine, that he could get. But he made sure that God at least was on his side by a single, revealing gesture. Before he left the abbey, he promised the abbot that he would restore to St Denis the revenues of the little priory of Deerhurst in Gloucestershire, given to the abbey long, long ago by Edward the Confessor and purloined, like so much else, by Richard. Already, therefore, before he even left France, Henry saw himself as the true king of England, fully able to redress Richard’s wrongs.

With a fleet of only ten ships Henry sailed around England to the Yorkshire coast.

Yorkshire was the heartland of his stolen estate, and as Henry moved from castle to castle they surrendered easily to their rightful master. Henry marched south, his swollen army reinforced by the great northern earls.

Richard, back home, sought safety in Edward I’s great Welsh castles. But Henry lured him out with the promise that he came only to claim his inheritance and had no intention of threatening the crown itself. It was a lie. But a successful one. As Richard emerged, an ambush of Henry’s men lay in wait. The king of England was Henry Bolingbroke’s prisoner. It was now clear that Henry wanted far more than the duchy of Lancaster: he would settle for nothing less than the crown of England itself.

But how to justify the dethroning of Richard and his replacement with Henry and the Lancastrian dynasty? The neatest solution would be to show that Richard had never been true king by hereditary right anyway. But that Henry was. Conveniently a story to this effect was an article of faith in the House of Lancaster. Henry and Richard were both descended from Henry III – Richard from the eldest son Edward, who had succeeded as King Edward I, and Henry from the second son, Edmund, earl of Lancaster, surnamed Crouchback. According to the story, however, Crouchback was really the eldest son but had been shunted aside in favour of Edward on account of his supposed deformity.