The Last Plantagenets (37 page)

Even a former king is prevented from indulging in the niceties of toilet when political disaster has robbed him of his freedom. Richard’s thick yellow hair lost its lustrous curl, his double-pointed beard became shaggy and unkempt, his cheeks showed some of the lankness of care.
He was like one of the captive lions that the kings of England had always kept in cages in the Tower of London. He had no way of filling in the dismal hours save to pace about his cell and bewail the mistakes which had brought him to this pass. Why had he been so demanding of his full prerogatives? Why had he given his thrice-damned cousin an excuse to break his exile by seizing all the Lancastrian estates? Why had he been so foolhardy as to take his army to Ireland at such a juncture?

The reason for all these errors lay in his pride. He had been determined to prove that he was not the brainless boy his heavy-fisted uncles had tried to make out. He had desired so deeply to show he had inherited the greatness of his father and grandfather, if not as a warrior, then as a man of intelligence, of superior culture, of the will power to reign strongly and well.

But all things had gone awry. He had not known how to use and display the gifts with which he had been born. It must have been that such qualities as he possessed were not suited to kingship.

On the night of February 14 the wind increased in volume and howled about the eaves of the houses and whistled through bell towers and about the stone buttresses below. If any of the townspeople, after damping out the fires, had gone to stare out through the ill-fitting shutters, they would have caught their breaths in dread. The solitary light no longer shone from that window high up in its tower.

The next morning the whispered word was carried down to the town that Richard Plantagenet had died the day before.

For some time thereafter there was a continual stir about the castle. Messengers arrived on smoking steeds, clearly after riding great distances. Mounted men pounded out over the drawbridge, to set off for the south with equal dispatch. Then came men whose apparel and appearance fitted such a crisis—priests, lawyers belike, surgeons, also the most dreaded of men with faces the color of the cerements they made.

On the third day a carriage with creaking wheels emerged from the castle, surrounded by a heavy guard of mounted men. No one could catch a glimpse of the interior of this vehicle as it progressed through the town, but the people knew what it contained. All that was left of a once gaudy king was being taken away for burial, almost certainly to
London where he had been received so enthusiastically as a boy king but had been so violently disliked at the finish.

The news that seeped down to the town was that Richard had died of starvation. The story was repeated many times and had something about it of a lesson carefully rehearsed. When the deposed king had learned of the bungling adventure of his foolish friends, he had declined to partake of food and drink. “He was for-hungered,” said the servants from the castle. The townspeople were ready to accept this explanation, as were most of the people of England. But a more careful consideration of the circumstances would have led to doubts. In the first place there was the strong probability that the news of the rebellion had been kept from the prisoner. Still harder to explain was the time element. The Holland fiasco came to an end during the night of January 9. It would have taken some time for word of it to reach Richard, many days certainly, assuming that the story was allowed to reach him at all. Starvation is a slow process. When a victim refuses food and is so confined that his physical strength is not drawn upon, he almost certainly will live for weeks.

Further, there is no mistaking the physical emaciation and the wasted face of the victim of starvation. Was the body which was shown later in London a proof that he had died from such cause?

Another explanation is that the knight Sir Piers Exton, who as already explained had heard Henry’s plea in London, came to Pontefract with eight others. A compact had been made between them to remove Richard from the new king’s path. They came upon him as he sat at his dinner, all with drawn swords. They stood for a moment in a silent line, staring at him.

It was at once apparent to Richard that his time had come. He rose silently, shoving the table back to allow room to defend himself. Then he sprang at one of the intruders, wrenching his weapon from him, and began to attack them with great courage and energy. The story, as told in some detail in one of the chronicles of the day, was that Exton sprang up on the chair that Richard had vacated and struck him on the head with a poleax. This brought the uneven struggle to a rapid conclusion.

This is the explanation that defenders of Richard prefer to accept because it presents him as dying bravely, a true Plantagenet at the finish of his far from happy life. But it must be said that it seems the kind of story so often concocted when the central figure in a tragedy of history comes to a sudden death. It seems, however, more easy to believe that he died by violence than by starvation.

When word reached London that Richard was dead, a deep silence seemed to settle over the city. His removal from the high office of king had been almost universally desired and it must have been recognized that his death was an inevitable sequel to deposition. But it was still with a sense of shock that the news of his end was received. Perhaps they gave some thought to the intrepid boy king who had ridden out to face the rioting peasants at Smithfield. Perhaps also they considered the record of those years, after the uncles ceased troubling, when so much constructive legislation was put through Parliament. They might even have been inclined to think him the victim, in some degree at least, of adverse circumstances.

When it became known that the cortege was approaching the city, the apprentices put up the shutters and bolted them, the stocks were covered in the shops, the pens laid down in the countinghouses and the tools in the workrooms, and all of them—men, women, and children—dressed in their best, poured out into the streets.

The body of Richard had been placed on a litter covered with black cloth under a canopy also of black. The four horses were sable and the four knights pacing beside the bier were in black armor. Froissart reports that the cortege could proceed only at a snail’s pace, so great were the crowds on the streets. When they reached the Chepe, the litter was set down and the coffin opened so the people could see the body of the deposed king. For two hours the viewers passed in silence before the bier. It was estimated that at last 20,000 people took advantage of this opportunity to look on the face of the dead king.

What they saw must have surprised and mystified them. Richard’s head, sunk down on a black cushion, was uncovered. The body had been embalmed but it was soldered down in lead so that the face only was in view!

It had been the will of Parliament that the body be shown to the people, and it seems logical that, if Richard had died of starvation, that fact would have been made manifest, to prevent any belief in the possibility of violence. His wasted body would have been openly on display. It was not, therefore, to hide the ravages of want that the frame had been so completely concealed. Could it have been to hide other evidence from the eyes of the beholders, the wounds inflicted by the weapons of assassins?

The face of Richard was said to have been calm and beautiful in death.

There were rumors later that it was not the corpse of the deposed king which had been brought to London and which was buried first in the church at King’s Langley. It was whispered about that Maudelyn, who had been executed at Cirencester, had not been buried with the other conspirators. Had his body been kept for this purpose, to convince the people that Richard was dead? Richard, so the story ran, had escaped to Scotland and was awaiting the opportunity to reclaim his crown.

It was established later that the Scottish rulers gave a small allowance to a man who claimed to be Richard of England and who did not die until 1419. The English government scoffed at the story, claiming the man was an impostor and that he was a certain Thomas Warde of Trumpington. There does not seem to be any good reason not to believe that the “poor, foolish king” came to some violent end at Pontefract and that it was his body which was shown to the people.

The king who had lost a shoe at his coronation seems to have been fated to suffer one deprivation after another. He lost all his friends, some of them unworthy, at the hands of the Merciless Parliament, he lost his wife, he lost the esteem and confidence of the people by his proud ways, he lost his throne, and, then, finally, his life.

H
ISTORY arbitrarily counts the reign of Richard II as the last in the glittering dynasty of the Plantagenets, or, as it is sometimes called, the Angevins. The reason is sound enough. Edward III left so many children that it was hard to keep the lines of descent clear and, when the two main branches became embroiled in the long continued Wars of the Roses, the need for distinctive labels became imperative. And so we have, following the unfortunate Richard II, the Lancastrian kings and the Yorkists. The blood in the veins of Henry IV, who succeeded Richard II, was pure Plantagenet, and the same can be said of Henry V and Henry VI, who continued the Lancastrian line, and of Edward IV and Richard III, who are listed as Yorkist kings. It is only when Henry VII, that highly intelligent and efficient but sly and shabby king, seized the throne that the Plantagenet line came to a definite end. The seventh Henry was the grandson of Owen Tudor, a Welsh knight with whom the French widow of Henry V fell in love after the death of her royal spouse. There is much doubt as to whether the union of the enamored pair was ever sanctified by marriage. As Henry’s mother, moreover, was Margaret Beaufort, a descendant of John of Gaunt and Katharine Swynford (whose children were all born out of wedlock and were made legitimate later), the bend sinister stood out prominently on his genealogical tree and the Plantagenet tincture in his blood was small.

Richard III, who has been indelibly fixed in the memories of men by the genius of Shakespeare as the hunchback who murdered the princes in the Tower (but whose back was straight and who did
not
murder the two princes), was the last king who was completely Plantagenet.

The years from 1400 to 1485, which intervened between the deaths of Richard II and Richard III, were filled with the color and the
cruelties of civil war, with stories of deep villainy and vile conspiracy and with some slight imprints of the genius of an emerging civilization. It is a period, however, which is illuminated only in small degree by authentic chronicles and so remains dark with doubts and question marks for historical controversy. There is, in consequence, a fascination about these cloudy years. Certainly no record of the virile dynasty which began with Henry II can be complete without some recounting of the savageries and mysteries of the fifteenth century. In the chapters which follow, an effort will be made to set down the sequence of events in brief form and to place on the canvas in greater length some of the more spectacular episodes and the colorful human figures of the period.

Although Henry IV was responsible for making the lovely
Myosotis arvensis
the symbol of loyalty to the absent under its popular name of Forget-me-not (during his years of exile he wore it in his collar with the words
souveigne-vous de moy
), it is true that to many readers of history his short reign is one of the least likely to intrigue the memory. This may be due to the ill health which settled upon him when he assumed the gold circlet and the ermine robe, but perhaps it can be traced more certainly to the fact that in many respects his few years of power seem like a continuation of the days of Richard. There was the same futility of military effort to enforce peace along the Scottish border and in Wales and a continuous planning to restore the once extensive English holdings in France without any real hope of success. Parliament continued to insist on the right to appoint the members of the royal council, and there was much criticism of extravagance in the royal household. Henry strove to repeat Richard’s unconstitutional scheme to secure himself a revenue for life, which indicates that he was in desperate need of funds. He had a sharp temper and no doubt he was irked that the restrictions set up to restrict Richard’s actions were being applied to him also. But having seen what his predecessor’s obstinacy led to, he forced himself to give in with reasonably good grace. Parliament’s negation of his gesture in the direction of a lifetime subsidy was so sharp and final that he never renewed the attempt.

In his youth Henry had been courageous and the possessor of qualities which won him popularity with the people. He had taken the risk of allying himself with the dissenters in 1388 when he believed it necessary to set new curbs on his cousin Richard, but in 1397 he stood beside
the king in dealing with Thomas of Woodstock and the Earl of Arundel in the belief that the harsh opposition of these two malcontents had carried them into treasonable excesses. As a king he was quite a different man, beginning to realize perhaps that it is easier to criticize authority than to exercise it. He became cold-blooded, jealous, suspicious (even of his son and heir), and sometimes lacking in decision. These qualities may be charged to his ill health but they do not serve to win him any lasting degree of praise on the pages of history.