Queens Consort (49 page)

Richard’s Scottish expedition had not been a total failure, but the mood in Parliament was hostile. The King had promoted another friend, Michael de la Pole, to the earldom of Suffolk, and Pole and De Vere were given the posts of chancellor and chamberlain. The Scots war had been an attempt on Richard’s part to assert his majority, now that he was eighteen, and it was natural that he should seek to create a circle of loyal magnates from among his peers, but he was criticised for ignoring the advice of the older magnates. The royal finances were overstretched, and the cost of the campaign, as well as the truce with France that had made it possible, was also unpopular. Robert de Vere had caused a scandal by having an affair with one of the Queen’s Bohemian ladies, Agnes Launcecrona, and was trying to repudiate his wife. Richard’s sanctioning of this relationship was perceived as a great insult by his uncles, as De Vere was married to their niece Philippa de Coucy, the daughter of Edward III and Philippa of Hainault’s eldest girl, Isabella. Adultery was one thing, but such an affront to a woman of royal blood was shocking, and it fuelled more general criticisms that Queen Anne’s household had introduced suspicious foreign ‘abuses’. Money, favouritism and the whiff of sex scandals were all creating dissent between the King and his magnates, but Richard refused to accept any correction.

The obduracy of the lords in their demands for financial reform gathered force throughout the following year. When Parliament met in October 1386, the lords demanded that the chancellor, the new Earl of Suffolk, be removed, a motion that was carried despite Richard’s furious objections. Suffolk was impeached and imprisoned at Windsor and Richard, outraged, left London, first for his county of Cheshire and then on a prolonged tour of the provinces. Anne accompanied him, and they were together for the
initiation of Richard Scrope to the see of Lichfield in June. Richard was planning to strike at the lords and in August he summoned his chief justice, Robert Tresilian, to Nottingham, where he inquired into the legal status of Parliament’s actions. In 1352, Edward III’s Treason Act had set out five counts on which treason could be defined, which did not include challenge to the royal prerogative, but Richard was keen that the judicial advice should favour the cause of the crown, and though Tresilian did not claim that the lords’ actions were treasonous, in a neat bit of casuistry, he did assert that Richard had the right to execute as traitors those who had hindered that prerogative.

After Richard had flounced off on progress, a council of fourteen lords had been convened to administer the realm in the King’s name. When Richard returned to London in November 1387 he summoned its leaders, his uncle Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester, Richard FitzAlan, the Earl of Arundel and Thomas Beauchamp, the Earl of Warwick. They attended him at Westminster on 17 November, with a small but threatening company of 300 men-at-arms, and charged De Vere, Suffolk, Tresilian, Archbishop Neville of York and the obliging Nicholas Brembre with treason. Their collective name, the Lords Appellant, derives from their offer to prove their charge by the trial of ‘appeal’, or accusation, in single combat. The situation was already too grave for such chivalrous posturing. Henry of Bolingbroke, the eldest son of John of Gaunt, and Thomas Mowbray, Richard’s former friend, joined the Appellants, and Robert de Vere was raising troops in Oxfordshire. On 20 December, he was defeated by a force captained by Bolingbroke at Radcot Bridge. De Vere escaped by swimming his horse over the river and fled to Louvain, and Richard and Anne were placed under house arrest in the Tower.

For several days, it was claimed later, the Lords Appellant had considered deposing the King, but when Parliament resumed in February, Richard took his place on his throne. However, the ‘Merciless Parliament’ was not inclined to be lenient to those who, the Lords Appellant alleged, had ‘seduced’ the ‘King into bringing the country to the brink of war. Tresilian was dragged out of his hiding place in Westminster Sanctuary and executed, as was Brembre. Queen Anne interceded on her knees for Sir Simon Burley, who had been her husband’s tutor and a close member of her late mother-in-law’s circle, but her pleas succeeded only in sparing Burley the full agony of a traitor’s death. Three other knights of Richard’s chamber did endure being hung, drawn and quartered. Although Richard renewed his coronation oath and received the homage of his magnates, there had been a perceptible shift in the balance of power in England. The Lords
Appellant had made it clear that Parliament, and not the king, was sovereign. Richard never forgave them.

Thomas Mowbray was restored to favour in May, but Richard refused to countenance a reconciliation with Gloucester and Arundel until the return of John of Gaunt in 1389. The Castilian challenge had failed, and though Richard had been pleased to have his uncle out of the way, Gaunt’s presence now bolstered the shaken and divided royal family. In the summer of 1390 Anne and Richard paid a long visit to him at Leicester Castle, and they were all together again at Eltham for Christmas. Richard appeared to have stabilised his government, or at least stage-managed the appearance of stability. On the last day of the 1391 Parliamentary session, the Rolls record that the King was formally petitioned by the commons to be ‘as free in his regality, liberty and royal dignity in his time as his noble progenitors, formerly kings of England, were in their time, notwithstanding any statute or ordinance made before this time to the contrary, and especially in the time of Edward II’. The reference to Edward II makes the petition’s authorship clear.

If all was respectful concord between the magnates, the citizens of London were not quite so particular about the King’s dignity. The year 1391 was a hard one for the city, struck by plague and serious food shortages due to a poor harvest. By November, a curfew had been imposed, and the next month Richard forbade public assemblies as a threat to the peace. London was alive with seditious rumour: that the King was incapable of government, that the King was planning to renege on his promises of reform and recall De Vere. In Fleet Street, a crowd rioted for bread, and the alarmed court heard of armed gangs on the loose. Richard had no reason to favour the Londoners. They had done nothing to help him against the Lords Appellant, and the city had recently refused two royal requests for loans. In May 1392, Richard relocated the court of common pleas to York, and after a ten-day visit there with Anne, went on progress in the Midlands. The mayor, aldermen and sheriffs ofLondon, along with twenty-four citizens, were summoned to appear on pain of death before the King at Nottingham on 25 June. Richard dismissed and imprisoned the mayor and two sheriffs, appointed his own warden and set up a committee to investigate abuses. London’s liberties were revoked and a collective fine of 100,000 pounds imposed. According to Walsingham, Queen Anne had attempted to soften Richard’s heart towards the Londoners, on her knees, at Westminster, Windsor and Nottingham. Practically, such gestures were useless, but Anne took part in the ceremony for the formal submission of London, a hugely elaborate performance in
which the intercession of the Queen featured as the climax.

On 21 August, Richard and Anne crossed London Bridge from Southwark to receive the keys of the city from the mayor, the first time such a ceremony was performed. They processed via St Paul’s to Westminster through streets decorated with gold cloth and crimson banners, pausing at Cheapside to receive two gold crowns and two golden cups from a boy and girl who hovered precariously on pulleys above a castle set in painted clouds. The Londoners presented gifts of horses and holy images of St Anne and the Trinity, and two altarpieces featuring scenes from the crucifixion. When Anne had made her first entry into London before her wedding, she had been given a charter begging her intercession on behalf of the city, just as our other lady Queens who preceded Your most Excellent Highness, may it be pleasing to your most clement and preeminent nobility to mediate with our Lord the King in such wise with gracious words and deeds’. Now, prior to entering Westminster Hall, where the banquet was arranged, Anne proclaimed that she would do her duty for the city. Having changed her dress, she knelt before her enthroned husband and begged him to restore the city’s liberties, emphasising that no king, not even Arthur himself, had been so loved and honoured by his people. Richard then returned the city keys and its ceremonial sword.

If the practical authority of English queens can be said to have declined since the twelfth century, then intercession had undergone a concomitant diminution in status. Where the Anglo-Norman queens had shared and participated in their husbands’ governments, the conciliar role of the consort since then had been reduced to one of supplication. The way intercession had lost its meaning through ritualisation, becoming a staged means of permitting a king to act in a ‘feminised’ manner — to change his mind or show mercy — without compromising his masculinity, has been traced here through Isabella of France’s intercession for the banishment of the Despensers in 1321 and Philippa of Hainault’s pleas for the citizens of Calais in 1347. The failure of Anne’s intercession for Simon Burley shows that as a device it now had no spontaneous power, but merely modified the perception of a decision that had already been taken. Intercession had always been predicated on weakness, the idea of the queen as subversive, in that she was challenging the king’s judgement, contained by the queen as vulnerable petitioner. In London in 1392, her special intercessory status as the intimate of the king’s bed was made erotically explicit. Queens’ sexual relationships with their husbands had frequently been presented as threatening, but the description of the 1392 ceremony in the
Concordia
indicates that Anne’s (presumed) intimacy with Richard was used as an
allegory for the submission of the city itself. The
Concordia
casts Richard as a bridegroom come to take possession of his wife, giving, as one critic has remarked, ‘a whole new meaning to the phrase ‘royal entry’.
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The body of the kneeling queen becomes a conduit for the city’s ‘eroticised abjection’, Richard’s possession of her person a symbol of his possession of his city. The scripted success of Anne’s submission earned her the presumably unironic compliment of
‘virgo mediatrix’
, inviting comparison with the Virgin in her representation as Maria mediatrix.

Anne’s Christmas gift from the grateful Londoners was a pelican, again a symbol of self-sacrificing femininity, as the bird will feed its young with blood from its own breast. Richard got a camel. In spring, Gaunt and Gloucester left to discuss terms for extending the French truce, though the English continued to despise the idea of peace with their old enemy. When the extension was achieved in June, there were outbreaks of violence in Yorkshire and Cheshire, where fighting the French was practically the local industry. That summer, Anne and Richard stayed at Sheen, and the next year made pilgrimage to Canterbury, where they received the news of the death of Anne’s mother, the Empress Elizabeth. A requiem was sung for the Empress at St Paul’s, and in July the King and Queen heard another for Joan of Kent at Corfe. In August Richard staged a joint crown-wearing at Salisbury, then he and Anne set offfor Beaulieu Abbey, followed by Titchfield, where the abbot entertained them to a fine supper featuring twelve dressed pike. They were together at Westminster for the opening of Parliament in 1394, when Richard made his sad grant of arms to Thomas Mowbray.

Anne had spent much of her marriage travelling at her husband’s side. They were rarely separated, and whatever their private relationship may have been, Richard loved her. She died at Sheen on 7 June 1394, aged just twenty-seven, and Richard ordered that the palace to which he had devoted so much attention be ripped down. He vowed that for a year he would enter no building except a church in which he had spent time with the Queen. Anne’s funeral was delayed for two months while Richard prepared in characteristically grand style, ordering a hundred wax torches from Flanders. On 3 August, her body was carried from Sheen to St Paul’s and then to Westminster Abbey. Determined that the ceremony should be fully attended, Richard had summoned the magnates to London for 29 July, but Richard FitzAlan, the Earl of Arundel, still managed to arrive late and the overwrought King hit him so hard that he fell bleeding to the ground.

Anne’s childlessness excluded her from participating in one of the key
dynamics of queenship, but by the end of her life she had attracted affection and respect. Richard’s court was one of the glories of the age, and Anne had an influential role in the continuation of the presentation of English royal magnificence that had begun with the efforts of Edward III. Her epitaph, produced for Henry V’s reburial of King Richard, remembered her as a merciful intercessor whose intervention had resolved disputes. Like Adeliza of Louvain, she had sublimated her lack of children into a maternal concern for the poor, and was celebrated for her charity and her kindness to the sick and the widowed. Most poignantly, Anne of Bohemia’s epitaph particularly recalled her care for pregnant women.

Soon after Anne’s death, Richard departed for a seven-month campaign in Ireland, but the search for a new queen had already begun. As early as August 1394 embassies were sent to the King of Scots, the Duke of Bavaria and the King of Aragon. Keen to prevent a Spanish alliance, and to continue the peace between France and England, Charles VI sent envoys to Ireland to propose his own daughter, six-year-old Isabelle, in May 1395. In an attempt to encourage Richard, Charles commissioned a long treatise from Philippe de Meziéres, a distinguished writer now living in retirement in the Celestine convent in Paris, which discussed the advantages of the match. De Meziéres chose to emphasise the consequences of an earlier royal marriage, that of Isabella of France and Edward II, which had been intended to bring peace between the two nations but had instead resulted in the onset of the Hundred Years War: ‘Call to mind, and sadly, the marriage, then thought a fortunate one, of the mother of the valiant King Edward, your much loved ancestor, from which you are descended, and of the deadly and penetrating thorns resulting from that union, which have been active in such a way that the beautiful lilies from which you spring have been horribly trampled underfoot.’
¹⁴
A marriage to a second Isabelle, De Mezieres asserted, would heal what marriage to the first had wounded. His treatise indulges in some confusingly mystic language — ‘the rich diamond through the holy sacrament of marriage should become son to the shining carbuncle and so shut the mouths of all those who ask for the five-footed sheep’ — but sought to offer some homespun wisdom on the main problem with the match, namely the bride’s age. Richard had no heir, and legally could not hope to consummate his marriage for six years, and it could take still longer for Isabelle to be ready to bear a child. But women, declared De Mezieres, were, like horses, all the better for being broken young, and Richard would have the satisfaction of a wife who had been educated to his tastes.