Foundation (History of England Vol 1) (47 page)

Yet triumphalism can turn into tyranny. In the summer of 1397 Richard invited the earl of Warwick to dinner and then, when the meal was over, ordered his arrest. On hearing the news of this, the earl of Arundel was persuaded to surrender himself. The king then rode out to Pleshey Castle in Essex, the home of Thomas of Woodstock, duke of Gloucester, with a party of armed retainers. Woodstock was roused from sleep, and was then personally arrested by his nephew. Richard ordered the immediate arrest of these three great lords on the grounds that they were conspiring against him. He may also have been brooding on old offences, since these were the three men who had led the rebellion against him and had briefly deposed him in the Tower. He now believed himself strong enough to destroy them. He was asserting his manhood by avenging past affronts.

The chronicler, Thomas Walsingham, wrote that the kingdom was ‘suddenly and unexpectedly thrown into confusion’. Richard then called a parliament that, in the general atmosphere of suspicion and terror, was notably submissive. It had every reason to be cooperative. Westminster itself was filled with troops, and the king was protected by a bodyguard of 300 archers from his favourite county of Cheshire. The building in which the parliament assembled was surrounded by archers. Richard was relying upon force, and the threat of force, to make his way.

At the beginning of the session he declared, through the mouth of his chancellor, that the king demanded the full plenitude of his power. He had been aware of many illegalities committed in previous years but now, out of his affection for his people, he extended a general pardon – except to fifty individuals, whom he would not explicitly name. This was of course a policy to keep everyone in subjection. He might include anyone he pleased within the category of the unknown fifty. The king was also gracious enough to accept, at the urging of the Commons, the duties levied on leather and wool in perpetuity.

Thomas of Woodstock, after his arrest, was despatched to the English bastion at Calais where on the king’s direct orders he was quietly killed. Reports suggest that he was either strangled with a towel or suffocated beneath a featherbed. The result was in any case the same.

Arundel was subjected to what would now be called a show trial, of which a partial transcript survives. John of Gaunt, the duke of Lancaster, presided.

It was indeed worthless. On the same day Arundel was led to Tower Hill where he was beheaded. The earl of Warwick suffered a more lenient fate. He was banished for life to the Isle of Man. The extensive lands of the three lords were confiscated, and given to the king’s friends and supporters. His enemies appeared to have been scattered.

Yet Richard was despondent. His wife, Anne of Bohemia, had died in 1394 from an outbreak of the plague; they had been married for twelve years, but had produced no children. That was another mark against him. He was, after all, already twenty-seven years old and should have sired a family. In his extravagant grief he ordered that the palace of Sheen should be razed to the ground; this is the place where he and Anne had once been happy. It seems likely that his health was also deteriorating, since the royal accounts show very large sums of money being paid to his physicians. He may have been becoming dangerous.

Many of the lords testified later that they had in fact become frightened of the king. With the invisible list of fifty traitors he could confiscate lands and property as he wished. He could consign anyone to prison. According to a later deposition the king had declared that the law of England resided in his own breast, and that he could make or break laws at his discretion. He levied large fines on the towns and shires that had sided with the rebel lords. He demanded loans from the richer abbeys and monasteries. He was, like most kings, avaricious and acquisitive; but his greed was compounded by violence and disregard of law. ‘He is a child of death,’ he wrote to the count of Holland, ‘who offends the king.’ Yet like all tyrants he was fearful. He was defended at all times by the 300 Cheshire archers. ‘Sleep securely while we wake, Dick,’ the captain of his guard was heard to say to him, ‘and dread naught while we live.’

Richard’s pre-eminent will became manifest in a quarrel between two lords at the end of 1397. Thomas Mowbray, the duke of Norfolk, and the king’s cousin, Henry Bolingbroke, the duke of Hereford, had only recently been ennobled to the highest rank of the peerage. They were rewarded for their support of the king.
Mowbray, for example, had been captain of Calais when the unfortunate Thomas of Woodstock was despatched to that garrison town; there is no doubt that he played some role in his suffocation. In the climate of fear and suspicion in which they now lived, however, even the king’s friends began to fear for their lives.

They had a conversation. ‘We are on the point of being undone,’ Mowbray told Bolingbroke. ‘That cannot be,’ Bolingbroke replied. ‘The king has granted us pardon and has declared in parliament that we behaved as good and loyal servants’. Mowbray went on to remark that ‘it is a marvellous and false world that we live in’, suggesting that Bolingbroke and his father, John of Gaunt, narrowly escaped being murdered by the king’s men; he also suggested that Richard, with the connivance of other lords, was planning to disinherit both of them and give their lands to others. ‘God forbid’, Bolingbroke exclaimed. ‘It will be a wonder if the king assents to such designs. He appears to make me good cheer, and has promised to be my good lord. Indeed he has sworn by St Edward [the Confessor] to be a good lord to me and others.’ Mowbray was dismissive. ‘So has he often sworn to me by God’s body; but I do not trust him the more for that.’ In a world of whispers and of clandestine plotting, of lies and of secrecy, this was equivalent to treason.

Rumours spread. Bolingbroke informed his father, John of Gaunt, of the conversation. Word got back to the king. It seems likely that he confronted Bolingbroke, and demanded a full account of what had been said. Having heard his report the king demanded that he repeat it to the parliament. Mowbray then gave himself up into the king’s custody, and denied everything that Bolingbroke had revealed. The two dukes were told to appear before a parliamentary committee set up to resolve the dispute. Still the controversy could not be concluded and, in the old judicial fashion, it was decreed that Thomas Mowbray and Henry Bolingbroke should fight a duel in which God would confer victory upon the true man. Yet who was the true man? It is possible that their roles should be reversed, and that Bolingbroke had been the one who had first expressed misgivings about the king; when they failed to work upon Mowbray, he decided to accuse him of treason to cover up his own guilt. That is one possibility. It is also possible that
Mowbray had whispered treason as a plot to snare Bolingbroke; Bolingbroke, suspecting this, decided to end the conspiracy by denouncing him. The truth cannot now be recovered.

The battle was set for Coventry on 16 September 1398. The tournament was to be held at Gosford, and the field survives still as Gosford Green. Bolingbroke commissioned armour from Milan, and Mowbray from Bohemia. The lords of the kingdom were consumed with excitement; this would be the most famous duel of their lifetimes. The days of Arthur and the Round Table might be said to have returned. The two dukes came forward on the appointed day. The archbishop of Canterbury was among the many thousands of spectators. Henry Bolingbroke arrived at nine in the morning, with six mounted retainers. Challenged about his business he proclaimed in a loud voice, ‘I am Henry, duke of Hereford, come to do my duty against the false traitor Thomas, duke of Norfolk’. He crossed himself and rode to his pavilion at one end of the lists. The king entered, surrounded by the Cheshire archers, and proceeded to his chair of state where he might survey the proceedings. Mowbray then appeared and, giving the same challenge as his antagonist, cried out, ‘God save the right!’

The two knights were about to proceed against one other. Bolingbroke spurred his horse forward, while Mowbray remained still. But the king rose and called out, ‘Hold!’ The dukes retired to their respective pavilions, and the king withdrew. Two hours passed, inciting intense speculation among the crowds of spectators. Then the Speaker of the Commons appeared and announced to the multitude the king’s decision. Bolingbroke was to be banished from the realm for ten years, and Mowbray would be exiled for life. The sentence on Bolingbroke provoked loud calls of dismay, but the king’s will was law.

The king really had little choice in the matter. Victory for either man would cause him considerable difficulty. If Mowbray was triumphant, the king’s role in the murder of Gloucester might be subject to scrutiny. If Bolingbroke were the winner, his chance of succeeding or even supplanting the king might be increased. The king had no heir, and he had only recently married a child of seven – Isabella, the daughter of the king of France – from whom no issue could yet be foreseen. It was a most disappointing end
to what might have been a great tale of chivalry. But the king prevailed. The two men sailed into exile. Thomas Mowbray died in Venice in the following year, but for Henry Bolingbroke the story was only beginning.

He had sailed to France with a manifest sense of injustice at the hands of the king, and waited there in the hope that favourable events might follow. The king of France, Charles VI, granted him a residence in the centre of Paris. Then, five months after his departure from England, his father died. John of Gaunt, as the first duke of Lancaster, was the progenitor of what became known as the house of Lancaster; he owned vast territories in the north of England, and possessed more than thirty castles throughout the realm. He had been a prominent, but not a notable, commander and administrator. He had in particular earned the hatred of Londoners, and of those who had taken part in the rebellion of 1381, as de facto leader of the realm during the king’s minority. He was a man who combined familial greatness with personal mediocrity.

Henry Bolingbroke might in the normal course of events be expected to inherit his father’s lands and castles. But he was in exile. And the king was greedy. Richard then took a course that alienated much of the support he had acquired over the years of his rule. He extended Bolingbroke’s banishment in perpetuity, and confiscated his father’s estates. Such an interference in the laws of inheritance was immensely shocking to a society that relied deeply upon custom and precedent. No landowner, or landowner’s family, could feel safe under such a king. Any monarch who unlawfully deprived his subjects of their property, in defiance of the injunctions of the Magna Carta, was at once considered to be a tyrant.

At the beginning of May 1399, in a spectacular act of folly, Richard sailed to Ireland with an expeditionary force. It is difficult to understand why he chose to absent himself from his kingdom at such a difficult time; the only explanation must be that he had lulled himself, or been lulled, into a false sense of security. Certainly he believed that he was under divine guidance, and that no earthly enemy could defeat an anointed king. With God as his guard, what did he have to fear?

Henry took advantage of the king’s absence and, in the early
summer, sailed from Boulogne; on 4 July he landed at Ravenspur in Yorkshire with no more than 300 soldiers. His courage, and earnestness, cannot be in doubt. From his own old territories in the north, he began his campaign to destroy the tyrant of England. Richard had left the kingdom to the guidance of Edmund, duke of York, his uncle and Henry’s. York was neither principled nor courageous. He had no intelligence of Henry’s movements, and at first marched west rather than north-east. In the confusion Henry strengthened the castles on his lands, and in the process several thousand men flocked to his service. At Doncaster he met the senior family of the north, the Percys; Henry Percy, earl of Northumberland, was accompanied by his son known as Hotspur.

In their presence Henry swore an oath that he had returned to England only to claim his lands; he had no designs upon the king himself. He may have been lying, but it is more likely that he was not yet sure of his ultimate goal. He would proceed with caution, taking advantage of events as they unfolded. The combined army of the rebel lords and retainers then began the march south, taking control of central and eastern England with only pockets of resistance. It may now have occurred to Henry that the king was too unpopular to be saved.

Richard himself was still in Ireland. He received news of the invasion by 10 July, but did not set sail for England for another two weeks. He could not muster enough ships. In that period his cause was lost. When the Welsh gentry were summoned to support him, they replied that they believed Richard to be already dead. Henry had decided to move west in order to confront the king, if and when he should return, and at a parish church in Gloucester the duke of York surrendered to the invader. York realized that Richard’s hopes of retaining the crown were diminishing day by day. He joined Henry’s army and went on to Bristol, where three of the king’s most prominent officials were executed. It had become a triumphal progress.