The Last Plantagenets (33 page)

It seems clear enough that Richard did remember all five faces in that fateful line and that he hoped never to see any of them again.

The two combatants were stunned. The nobility and the solid citizens in the stands looked from one to another in amazement. The common men, who had tramped over many weary miles to see a fight to the death and now must walk back, were loud and scornful in their comments. As far as could be judged, the sympathy was all on the side of Bolingbroke.

The Duke of Norfolk, in great bitterness of mind and recalcitrance of spirit, went to Germany and later appeared in Venice. Here he died within a few months of the passing of the sentence.

The king had Bolingbroke come to him at Eltham to make his farewells. He tried to convince his cousin that the exile into which he was being sent was intended as a form of honorable absence until the whole truth could be ascertained. The term of exile was reduced from ten to six years, and he was granted the right to remain at Sandgate for six weeks and four weeks in Calais. The streets of London were packed with people to see him depart and to deplore the official action which sent him away.

O
N FEBRUARY 3, 1399, John of Gaunt died at Ely House in Holborn in his fifty-ninth year. He was buried at St. Paul’s beside his first wife, and a magnificent monument was erected over them. Although he had been a failure, his passing nonetheless left a great void in England. Of the sons of Edward III, only one now survived, the innocuous Duke of York. Gaunt’s oldest son was in exile. Richard, now very generally recognized as weak and dangerous, was ensconced on the throne with what seemed to be unusual security. There was peace with France but, if anything happened to disrupt it, what chance was there of a successful prosecution of war?

It has generally been felt that it was regret over the exiling of his son which brought about John of Gaunt’s death, but any close scrutiny of his career must leave doubts on that score. “Great Lancaster,” as he has often been called, was an intensely ambitious and selfish character. Overshadowed by the greatness of his older brother, Edward, he had most deeply desired to achieve glory himself but had been forced to observe the popularity of the Black Prince with the people and to stomach the humiliation of the burning of his palace in London. Several chances had been given him to lead armies in France, but nothing had come of these costly ventures. His scheme to secure the throne of Castile for himself had come to nought. If he resented the sentence passed on his son, he had made no open move to have it set aside. Some men who have failed are not entirely happy when a son accomplishes the desired end. He died, it may be assumed, a sorely disappointed man who, at the end, perhaps, had come to a recognition of his own limitations.

His death gave Richard a chance to make the first of two fatal mistakes. The king granted Henry of Bolingbroke the right to take possession of his vast inheritances by proxy, but soon thereafter changed his mind. On March 18 he revoked the patents by which Henry’s attorneys would have assumed control of the Lancaster holdings and declared everything confiscated to the Crown. The king, in fact, came boldly out into the open for the first time by changing Henry’s banishment to a life term. He even went so far as to bring charges of treason against one Henry Bowet, an attorney who appeared for Bolingbroke.

And so the vengeance of the king fell on the last of the five of the linked arms.

Reference has already been made to the vast extent of the Lancastrian holdings. It may have been that an accounting would have revealed the wealth of John of Gaunt to be greater than that of the king himself. Henry of Bolingbroke was a man of extensive property in his own right and he held also, by reason of his marriage to Mary de Bohun, a full half of the princely Bohun lands. The combined wealth of father and son would have made the ultimate holder, Henry of Bolingbroke, a figure of dangerous power. This, no doubt, was in Richard’s mind but he failed to establish any legal justification for the step he took. To anyone less confident of himself, it would have been clear that an open clash could not now be avoided. Did he consider himself strong enough to stand against the popular and able Bolingbroke? He must have been quite confident that he could keep his cousin on the other side of the Channel.

The disinherited prince was in Paris at the time and in high favor at the French court. He took the news coolly and made no open boasts of reprisal. Nevertheless he lost no time in preparing under cover to fight the confiscatory measures. The first step was to receive Arundel, the ex-Archbishop of Canterbury, who was also in exile and who hurried to Paris to offer his assistance. If any rumor of his cousin’s activities reached Richard’s ears, which seems doubtful, he paid no attention. He believed himself seated most securely in the saddle.

Richard then proceeded to make another grave mistake. He decided to lead an army into Ireland. Conditions in that country were very bad but no worse than they had been for some time, and the reason he gave for his decision, that he sought revenge for the death of his young cousin Roger Mortimer, seemed far from adequate. It may have been that, knowing how deeply the people of England resented his failure to achieve any military victories for them, he thought that in Ireland he might win some easy glory.

The completely adult stage of Richard’s life had now been reached. Gone was the boyish charm, the trace of sweetness, the willingness to listen, never very marked. He had become completely Plantagenet and, unfortunately, it was not the best side of this kingly family which he proceeded to reveal. He was now arrogant, convinced of his own greatness, sure of his unlimited prerogatives, and above all else revengeful. A strain of craftiness had taken the place of reason.

All these traits were displayed in the decision he had made to carry sword and flame into Ireland, and in the events which preceded the invasion. First he felt it necessary to cater to the populace by having a great spectacle. He arranged to hold a tournament at Windsor in which forty knights and forty squires would compete. All were to carry the colors of the queen, green with the device of a falcon in white.

The queen had grown into a quite lovely girl of eleven. She was rather tall but showed no trace of the usual awkwardness of that age. She raced to the highest turret of the King’s House when the news was received that the king approached, so that she would catch the first glimpse of him riding down the road from London Town. At the tournament she distributed the prizes and behaved with such dignity and charm that she won over those who watched.

Richard found, however, that it would be necessary to make a change in the household of the young queen. The lady de Coucy, wife of the Count of St. Pol, had been taking on all the airs of a queen and was indulging in extravagances which caused the king himself, the most lavish of men, to gasp with dismay. She kept “two or three goldsmiths, two or three cutlers, and two or three furriers” continually employed. In addition, it was reported to him, she had eighteen horses always at her command, in addition to the mounted men supplied by her absent husband. Finally, she was embarking on the folly of a new chapel which was going to cost a fabulous amount.

Richard took care of this plunge into fantastic display by commanding the lady to return to France and by putting in her place the widow of his brave cousin, Roger Mortimer, now dead and buried in Ireland.

The king’s final scene with his budding queen was in the chapel at Windsor. Here he heard a Mass and chanted a collect. On leaving he and his bride shared a glass of wine at the church door. He then lifted her in his arms and kissed her many times.

“Adieu, madame!” he said. “Adieu, till we meet again.”

It is not recorded that anyone remonstrated with him on the folly of leaving the kingdom, with all his armed forces, at such a critical juncture. If they did, he brushed their reasoning aside. It was firmly planted in his mind that the time had come to settle the Irish problem. Equally urgent was his desire to avenge his cousin Mortimer, for whom he had entertained a great liking, knowing how honest and loyal that bewildered young man had been. If Queen Anne had been alive, it is possible she might have seen the need to maintain his defences at home and might have convinced him of it. But in the eyes of the girl queen, Richard could do no wrong. Riding away to the Irish wars, he seemed to her the perfect knight and the wisest of kings.

The final measure of his folly was the appointment of his sole surviving uncle, Edmund of York, to act as regent in his absence. Edmund was without political pretensions, but he was indolent and devoid of all qualities of leadership. A poorer watchdog could not have been found.

Richard sailed from Milford Haven late in May 1399, with an army estimated at 4000 knights and squires and 30,000 archers, although this figure undoubtedly was a great exaggeration. On July 4 of the same year Henry of Bolingbroke landed at Ravenspur on the Yorkshire coast.

Nothing was accomplished in Ireland.

Richard had decided to take along as his interpreter an Englishman named Henry Cristall, who had been captured years before by the Irish during a mounted foray. Cristall’s horse had bolted and carried him into the Irish ranks where he was promptly taken prisoner. Making the best of things, he settled down among his captors and married the daughter of one of their leaders, named Bryan, who had been responsible for the mercy shown him. Cristall was released by the Earl of Desmond and returned to Bristol with his wife and one child, a daughter. There had been two daughters, but one was left with Bryan to comfort him in his loneliness.

Cristall was undoubtedly the best of interpreters. Perhaps, however, the king listened to him on military considerations and was persuaded to a prudent rather than a bold course. The French historian Froissart saw Cristall later and received from him a detailed description of the difficulties of campaigning in the green isle. “Ireland,” declared Cristall, “is one of the worst countries to make war in or to conquer, for there are such impenetrable and extensive forest, lakes and bogs, there is no knowing how to pass them and carry on war to advantage—– Whenever
they perceive any parties advancing in hostile array, they fly to such narrow passes, it is impossible to follow them. No men-at-arms, however well mounted, can overtake them, so light are they of foot. They have pointed knives, with broad blades, sharp on both sides like a dart-head, with which they kill their enemies; but they never consider them as dead until they have cut their throats like sheep and taken out their hearts which they carry with them; and some say that they devour them as delicious morsels.”

The kind of information Richard would receive from others of Cristall’s stamp may have coincided with his own ideas. The English king, as his record has demonstrated, was not of warlike spirit. In going to Ireland with such an imposing army, he had expected to frighten the natives into submission. Certainly he had no intention of leading his knights into the impenetrable forests and the impassable bogs which Cristall described.

It was clear that Richard had reservations about the outcome of his Irish campaign. In his will, made before setting out, he left a large sum to his successor, on one condition: that he preserve the conditions established by the last Parliament and if necessary fight to the death for them. In this the son of the Black Prince can be heard, for that great fighting man had placed dynastic considerations and royal prerogatives above everything.

Richard had taken the precaution to have with him young Harry of Monmouth, the eldest son of Bolingbroke, as well as Humphrey of Gloucester, the only son of the deceased Thomas of Woodstock. They were to serve as hostages for the obedience of the father, in the case of young Harry, and for the continued acquiescence of the group that Thomas had led. He sent these two youths straight to Dublin where they were comfortably lodged in the royal palace, and he seems to have been kind and considerate to them. They thus missed the one heavy brush with the Irish when the royal army became hopelessly disorganized in the thickly forested country while on the trail of that inevitable thorn in the side, Art MacMurrough. A French observer has written that “even the knights” had no food of any kind for five days.

As a result of the unsatisfactory outcome of these efforts to bring the elusive Irish to an open test, an envoy was sent to speak with the artful MacMurrough. The Irish leader was very confident and quite adamant on the terms he proposed. Richard became pale with anger when the result of these talks was conveyed to him. “By St. John the Baptist!” he cried. “I shall not leave Ireland until I have him in my power!”

But to accomplish any such result was impossible in a country which
bore out in all details the description given by the prudent Henry Cristall—impossible for one as lacking in military skill as the English king. The royal army was finally extricated from the forest and bogs and marched through the relatively safe passage of the Pale to Dublin. The fighting, declared Richard, would not be resumed until the autumn. A French observer puts in his mouth the words, “When the trees shall be leafless.”

The king was in Dublin, therefore, and living in comfort and luxury, when the news came of Henry of Bolingbroke’s landing at Ravenspur.

The king had become fond of Harry of Monmouth in the meantime and had even knighted him, a sure evidence of preference. The latter received his first intimation of anything amiss when he observed that the king did not look at him and that a total silence fell wherever he moved. His friends in the king’s train held aloof or stood in whispering groups, watching him with anxious eyes. What were they holding back, he wondered, that they had begun suddenly to treat him in this manner? The answer given him was the first intimation he had heard of his father’s disobedience to Richard by returning to England. Young Harry responded with exclamations of joy. His prayers had been answered. His father had returned from exile and he would see him again soon.