Reckless Effrontery

What makes​ a ruler a tyrant? Is it justifiable to depose or even kill one? Medieval political theorists devoted anguished thought to these questions. In the 12th century, John of Salisbury urged tyrannicide as a political duty. ‘Whoever does not prosecute’ a tyrant, he wrote in his Policraticus, ‘transgresses against himself and against the whole body’ of the republic. In 1407 his theory was put to the test when John the Fearless, duke of Burgundy, ordered the assassination of his rival Louis of Orléans. He justified the murder as lawful tyrannicide and found a sympathetic theologian, Jean Petit, to support his position. But Petit’s defence infuriated Jean Gerson, chancellor of the University of Paris, who had his book condemned and publicly burned.

Only eight years earlier, Henry IV had deposed his cousin Richard II, who died in custody soon afterwards. Richard’s rule was so loathed that the army Henry amassed didn’t have to fight a single battle. Nevertheless, the shadow of usurpation and regicide haunted his short reign, and he spent most of his fourteen years in power putting down one conspiracy after another. A prophet had predicted that Henry would die in Jerusalem, where he hoped to go on pilgrimage to expiate his sins. Instead, he died in the Jerusalem Chamber of Westminster Abbey in 1413, aged 45. He had written a will beseeching God’s mercy on his ‘sinful soul, the which had never been worthy to be man’. Richard’s will, in contrast, centred on the pomp of his funeral, down to the robe and jewels in which he wished to be buried.

Helen Castor begins The Eagle and the Hart, a double biography of Henry IV and Richard II, with her own definition of tyranny. The tragedy of the two kings is ‘chillingly resonant’, she writes, because it shows ‘what happens when a ruler demands loyalty to himself as an individual, rather than duty to the established constitution. When he seeks to create his own reality rather than concede the force of verifiable truths. When he demands that his own will should trump the rule of law.’ Richard, in her telling, was an incorrigible narcissist who, after inheriting the throne at the age of ten, never attained the maturity that his peers and the Commons longed to see, but revelled in the pageantry of his court while showering his favourites with wealth and titles. Henry, on the other hand, had all the qualities of leadership that his cousin lacked – except the vital qualification of birthright. But as Richard had no child or surviving brother, no one in the male line stood closer to his throne.

Unlike most monarchs, Richard seems to have been unconcerned about his lack of heirs. While he was devoted to his first wife, Anne of Bohemia, he may not have desired her sexually. His favourite and probable lover, Robert de Vere, also stayed childless through two marriages. Richard may have taken perverse comfort in his failure to beget a successor because it made him seem indispensable. Two hundred years later, another childless monarch, Elizabeth I, had John Hayward imprisoned in the Tower for dedicating a book on the events of 1399 to her rebellious former favourite, the Earl of Essex. The queen found it seditious even to broach the topic of a past tyrannicide; Essex’s supporters planned to use a performance of Shakespeare’s Richard II as a signal for his uprising to begin. After having Essex beheaded, Elizabeth told a confidant: ‘I am Richard II, know you not that?’

Castor has written an epic history, almost novelistic in its attention to the characters of her protagonists and their thoughts and feelings, though she never puts words in their mouths. To assist the reader she includes maps, three genealogical tables and a directory of major players in the French and English noble families. I found myself turning repeatedly to the family trees, since everyone was related to everyone else in the complicated mesh of siblings, uncles and cousins that made up the ruling class, and titles were constantly changing due to inheritance, marriage and royal grants. Noblemen had children by multiple wives, not to mention mistresses, because death in childbirth was common. Richard’s second wife, Isabella of France, died at nineteen; Henry’s first wife, Mary de Bohun, died at 24 after giving birth to her sixth child. The men lived longer, though not by much; plagues, battles and executions took a toll. Castor’s history turns on the acts of men in their twenties, thirties and forties. John of Gaunt, the richest and ablest of Richard’s many uncles, lived to be 58 and was considered an elder statesman long before he died. The brevity and contingency of life meant not only early death, but early marriage and early accomplishment. An ambitious knight of the blood could become a chivalric hero at sixteen and command an army at eighteen.

Historians of this turbulent age are well supplied with sources. In addition to official documents, chroniclers such as Henry Knighton, Adam Usk, Thomas Walsingham and Jean Froissart wrote detailed narratives, partisan but not of one mind. For obvious reasons, their histories focus on the nobility. Although England was a precociously centralised realm with a sophisticated bureaucracy, it had neither a standing army nor a permanent system of taxation to support one. Every time the king wanted to mount a military expedition, which was often, he had to persuade a resistant parliament to levy a new tax. Meanwhile, tremendous power was vested in the landed aristocracy. In a strange anomaly, the realm included three palatinates, territories to which the king’s writ did not run. Instead, Castor explains, the lord of such a region ‘had the right to exercise judicial authority within its borders in the king’s name and on his behalf’. Richard was earl of Chester, and when he was at odds with Parliament he could more easily recruit men and resources from the palatinate of Cheshire than he could as king. Gaunt derived his wealth and power from the vast county palatinate of Lancashire, raising his son Henry to succeed him as duke of Lancaster. Henry was willing to endure a long series of undeserved slights and punishments, even exile, from the king without complaint, but when Richard tried to disinherit him after Gaunt’s death, depriving him of his title and patrimony, he returned and mounted his rebellion. When he acceded to the throne, his dukedom was united to the Crown, but even today the Lancastrian estates are separately administered for the monarch as duke of Lancaster.

Richard came to the throne in unpropitious times. His great-grandfather Edward II had been deposed for incompetence, as he himself would be. But his grandfather Edward III was already a legend. During his fifty-year reign he won notable victories in Scotland and France, especially at Crécy in 1346 and Poitiers in 1356. He outlived his popular, capable son, Edward the Black Prince, so it was as the prince’s heir that Richard became king. Given his youth, normal procedure would have been to establish a regency. But the obvious candidate, Gaunt, was too unpopular with the Commons to be named regent; many feared that he had designs on the throne. So the fiction of the king’s personal rule was maintained while his uncles and other interested parties manoeuvred behind the scenes. This left Richard in an embarrassing situation. Since his minority had never been official, neither could its end be, and he remained under the control of his advisers. As he grew older, he sought new opportunities to assert himself. One way would have been on the battlefield, or at least on the tournament field, like his cousin and childhood friend Henry. But in contrast to his warlike father and grandfather, Richard disliked fighting and was determined not to endanger his person if he could help it.

His chance to shine came at a moment of crisis: the rising of 1381. An unwieldy coalition of peasants and urban artisans from Kent and Essex had grown sick of serfdom, oppressive taxes, the lavish lifestyles of the rich and a string of military defeats. Led by Wat Tyler, they torched Gaunt’s London palace, burned documents, tore down prisons, murdered Flemish textile workers, assassinated the archbishop of Canterbury and the royal treasurer, and even seized the Tower of London, where Richard’s counsellors had sequestered him. But the rebels’ hope lay in the 14-year-old king himself, still too young to be blamed for the misrule and corruption that surrounded him. Richard met with Tyler and his supporters at Smithfield and conceded to all their demands, following a risky plan hatched by his defenders. His ‘fair words’ counted for nothing: the establishment quickly regained control and pursued the traitors without mercy. But from that point on, no one could deny that Richard held the reins.

Like those of his predecessors and successors, Richard’s reign was defined in large part by the war with France. Castor avoids the misleading term ‘Hundred Years’ War’, since the conflict actually lasted from 1337 to 1453, interrupted by periods of peace secured through negotiated truce or sheer exhaustion. The war had begun when Edward III claimed the French throne as nephew to Charles IV of France, who had died without a male heir. Edward’s claim came via his mother, Charles’s sister Isabella. Not wanting to be ruled by an Englishman, the French rejected his claim by invoking the ancient Salic Law against female inheritance. England did allow women to inherit or at least transmit the crown. If that principle had been applied in 1399, Richard II would have had a closer heir, via the female line, than Henry IV – yet Henry had no intention of relinquishing either the English crown or his French claim. This is one of many contradictions in an impossibly tangled dynastic web.

It is unnerving to reflect on how often the conflict would have led to a French conquest or a united throne, had fate not taken a hand. In 1386 the French planned a major invasion by sea, assembling a fleet in the Flemish harbour of Sluys to carry up to ten thousand mounted knights and a hundred thousand archers and infantry, with vast quantities of provisions. The English panicked and the coastal militia mutinied, leaving the shores undefended. But the provisioning took so long that, by the time the French were ready to sail in November, the wind had turned and bad weather made a Channel crossing impossible.

Peace was restored again in 1396, when Richard was in need of a second wife. His negotiators secured the hand of Isabella, the six-year-old daughter of Charles VI of France, with a huge dowry. (Royal marriages were often part of peace negotiations.) This was a diplomatic coup and the bride, her dolls packed with her trousseau, entered London in triumph to be crowned in Westminster Abbey. Had Richard managed to hold onto his throne until Isabella reached the canonical age of twelve, the two might have produced a son to inherit both realms and unite the French and English crowns. But it was not to be. Richard was deposed, and Charles VI’s periodic bouts of madness lapsed into permanent psychosis, leaving his realm in chaos and provoking the brutal civil war between the Armagnacs and Burgundians that began with the murder of Louis of Orléans in 1407. With France mired in anarchy, the English pressed their advantage under both Henry IV and his even more militant son Henry V, who married the French princess Catherine of Valois. Their son, Henry VI, was the only English monarch to be crowned king of France – in 1431, not long after the capture and execution of Joan of Arc had devastated the French yet again. But whether or not women could transmit the crown, they could and did transmit genetic flaws. Through his mother, Henry VI inherited his grandfather Charles’s tendency to mental illness. His disabling breakdowns began in 1453, the year the Anglo-French war finally ended and left the two realms distinct.

Although fortune had favoured Richard against the French armada, no amount of good luck or good counsel could shield him from the consequences of his own judgment. He was incompetent both at home and abroad. The fisc was empty, yet he refused to curtail the opulence of his court or his generous grants to his friends. His arbitrary treatment of the peers was based on personal loyalty, not proven service to the realm. He was rumoured to have sought an alliance with France against his own people, and his beloved de Vere had plotted to assassinate Gaunt. Richard’s comeuppance came at the so-called Merciless Parliament of 1388, which Castor describes as a ‘bout of judicial bloodletting’. A necessary fiction maintained that the king could do no wrong, because any direct accusation would count as treason. So the Lords Appellant – the five peers determined to call his misrule to account – could only accuse Richard’s friends of taking advantage of his ‘tender age … and the innocence of his royal person’. These men, they argued, had usurped the royal authority and feathered their nests at his expense. In short, they were traitors who must be punished as such.

Among the Lords Appellant were Thomas of Woodstock, the earls of Arundel and Warwick, and two younger men, Thomas Mowbray and Henry (then earl of Derby). Their chief targets were Nicholas Brembre, the volatile mayor of London, who had lent money to the king; Robert Tresilian, a biddable judge who had bent the law on Richard’s orders; Alexander Neville, the archbishop of York; Michael de la Pole, the chancellor; and de Vere, whom Richard had recently named marquess of Dublin and duke of Ireland. All five, along with a widening circle of associates, were convicted of treason by Parliament. Brembre, the only one who dared to appear in court and defend himself, was hanged. Tresilian, captured in hiding, suffered the same fate. Neville lost his see but not his life because he was a priest, while de la Pole and de Vere escaped into exile – de Vere after a furtive late-night parting from the king.

Beyond these convictions and executions, the Merciless Parliament required the king to grant all his subjects a general pardon ‘for every kind of treason, insurrection, felony, trespass, conspiracy [and] confederacy’ they had ever committed. Richard complied, with no intention of keeping his word. The Lords and Commons had done everything possible to render their acts irrevocable, while making it clear that they didn’t intend to set a precedent. In the short term, reform had been achieved. But Richard was aggrieved and biding his time. His vengeance came in 1397, when he arranged to have Warwick, Arundel and Woodstock arrested. In his carefully stage-managed Parliament, it was their turn to be convicted as traitors, though without specific charges. Mowbray had by now changed sides, while Henry remained as neutral as he could. Thousands of men-at-arms and archers were recruited for security, or rather intimidation. Arundel was beheaded, Warwick banished to the Isle of Man after a pitiful plea for his life, and Woodstock murdered in prison by Mowbray. The estates of all three were forfeit. The jubilant Richard, who was angling to become Holy Roman Emperor, wrote to the duke of Bavaria in triumph: ‘Future generations … must learn what it is to offend the royal majesty. For he is a child of death, who offends the king.’

Many more​ intrigues run through this sombre narrative. One is Gaunt’s persistent quest for a Spanish crown, which he claimed through his second wife, Constanza, heiress of Castile. He devoted many years and campaigns to this objective, hoping to secure his paper throne through an alliance with Portugal. Though the idea seems preposterous in retrospect, it made sense at the time. A large Castilian fleet, allied with France, posed a threat to England which could have been neutralised if Gaunt, as king of Castile, had reversed the alliance. Richard, meanwhile, was only too glad of his uncle’s absence. In the end, all Gaunt accomplished was to marry his daughter Catalina to the future Castilian king Enrique III, extending the reach of the Lancastrian dynasty.

While Henry was fighting the long Anglo-French war, the union of England and Wales came close to rupturing. A Welsh rebellion led by the hero Owain Glyn Dŵr (Shakespeare’s ‘Glendower’) kept his troops occupied for years. Glyn Dŵr, a brilliant guerrilla fighter, would strike with force then disappear into the hills (Fidel Castro and Che Guevara are said to have learned from his tactics). He was the last Welshman to claim the title prince of Wales, and if his struggle for independence had succeeded, he planned to establish an independent Welsh church, found two universities and revive the ancient laws of Hywel Dda. Although his revolt was eventually suppressed, Glyn Dŵr himself was never captured or betrayed, despite the large bounty on his head. His burial place remains unknown, and in Welsh folk memory he enjoys a reputation comparable to King Arthur.

Meanwhile the English Prince of Wales (soon to be Henry V, victor of Agincourt) displayed his own heroism in a fight with the rebel Harry Percy, better known as Hotspur. In a pitched battle in 1403, the 16-year-old prince led his father’s rearguard. He was hit by an arrow in the face; the shaft lodged under his eye, six inches deep. ‘But adrenaline and the brute force of his will kept the boy on his feet,’ Castor writes. ‘He snapped off the shaft and refused to leave his father or his men.’ Henry’s forces won the day; Hotspur was slain and the other rebel leaders taken prisoner. Remarkably, the prince survived: if medieval physicians excelled at anything, it was healing battle wounds. The royal surgeon, John Bradmore, devised a unique surgical instrument and an ingenious technique to remove the arrowhead, then tended the lesion as it healed for three weeks, using antiseptic pads soaked in wine, rose honey and turpentine oil. Anaesthesia did not exist, but the prince is said to have borne the agonising pain with courage.

The real Henry V had next to nothing in common with Shakespeare’s Prince Hal and he certainly did not spend his youth carousing with lowlifes in taverns. In contrast, Richard II, which deals only with the final year of his reign, is as accurate as it can be given the requisite foreshortening of the action. Castor’s take on Richard is not unlike Shakespeare’s, though she is, if anything, less sympathetic. Gaunt, who has been variously judged by contemporaries and historians, emerges as a man of integrity, devoted to the good of the realm despite his obvious ambitions. The book not only has a Shakespearean subtitle – The Tragedy of Richard II and Henry IV – but each chapter title derives from a phrase in one of the history plays, so that we are invited to measure Castor’s perceptions against what Shakespeare did with the same cast of characters.

Literary scholars remember Richard’s reign as a great age of English poetry, though he deserves little credit. In 1390, John Gower had introduced his Confessio Amantis (‘A Lover’s Confession’) as ‘a book for King Richard’s sake,/To whom belongeth my allegiance/With all my heart’s obedience’. But in 1393 he changed the prologue, recasting the Confessio as ‘a book for England’s sake’ dedicated ‘unto my own lord,/Which of Lancaster is Henry named’. Luckily for Gower, Richard had other things on his mind and took no notice. In any case, the Confessio does not criticise the regime. But ‘William Langland’, author of the satirical and apocalyptic masterpiece Piers Plowman, had to write it under a pseudonym. If his true identity had been known, he might easily have ended up in the Tower. The author of Richard the Redeless (‘Richard the Ill-Advised’), another satire, has never been discovered. The highest placed of the Ricardian poets, Chaucer, relied on court patronage and had to maintain a careful distance from politics. But his wife, Philippa, was the sister of Katherine Swynford, Gaunt’s third wife, and their son Thomas Chaucer was repeatedly elected speaker of the Commons under Henry IV.

Richard was no lover of verse, but he did commission lavish works of visual art. Perhaps the most famous is the Wilton Diptych, now in the National Gallery, painted around 1396 to celebrate his marriage to Isabella of France. The left panel shows Richard, crowned and apparelled in cloth of gold, kneeling as his three patron saints present him to the Virgin and Child. They are St John the Baptist and two kings, Edward the Confessor and Edmund the Martyr, whose jewelled golden crowns are similar to his own. On the right panel, Mary is flanked by refined feminine angels in sapphire blue, each crowned with a floral garland and bearing the king’s own insignia, the badge of the white hart. Such personal livery badges were controversial. Parliament had repeatedly tried to curb their use, and in 1388 attempted to ban them outright, because the men who wore them, flaunting the authority of their lords, ‘do not shrink from practising with reckless effrontery … extortion in the surrounding countryside’. Richard’s Cheshire archers, all ‘men of the white hart’, were notorious for such abuses. But angels in the royal livery? They are at once very beautiful and – like the speeches Shakespeare composed for his tragic king – remarkable monuments to his self-regard.