Unruly, p.27
Unruly, page 27
It’s telling that among the rebels’ first targets were places where government and tax records were kept. They sensed instinctively that, in trying to collect and hold information about ordinary people – what nowadays we’d call their data – someone powerful was depriving them of something. It’s an instinct we do well to listen to when going online. The whole ‘if you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to fear’ approach to private information is predicated on state power being held in honest and ethical hands. That’s not always the case – it certainly wasn’t in 1381 – and, as a general rule, trusting the state doesn’t make it more trustworthy.
After assembling in the home counties, huge numbers of the rebels marched on London where they nearly overthrew the Plantagenet regime. The Tower of London was stormed, John of Gaunt’s Savoy Palace on the Strand was burned down and many important people were lynched, most notably Simon Sudbury, who was both archbishop of Canterbury and chancellor of England, and Robert Hales, the Lord High Treasurer. John of Gaunt himself was out of town, in the north of England, but his teenage son Henry Bolingbroke, of whom we’ll hear much more later, escaped the rebels only by hiding in a cupboard.
It was clear to the boy king that all the grown-ups were losing their heads, either metaphorically or literally. The power and rage of the revolt was something the magnates around him didn’t know what to do about. There weren’t anywhere near enough royal troops in London to deal with the rebels, so the king had to go and meet them and listen to their demands. It was at this point that his weird upbringing and personality came to the fore. Most children would have been frightened under such circumstances, but Richard had been brought up to believe that there was something special about him that no one else in the country possessed.
This belief is probably why, when Richard met the rebels at Smithfield on 15 June, he saved the day. When the royal party arrived, Wat Tyler came over and addressed Richard with scandalous familiarity, calling him ‘brother’. By this point in the crisis, some groups of rebels had dispersed in response to the government’s agreeing to all of their demands, so Richard asked Tyler why he and his followers had not done the same. Tyler replied angrily to this and demanded refreshment, which was duly provided.
Next, an argument broke out between him and some of the royal entourage – the details are lost in the mists of time, obviously – but it culminated in Tyler being stabbed by the Mayor of London. He was mortally wounded, but not actually dead, and seemed very likely to cry treachery and call on his followers to attack the Plantagenet party. This was Richard’s moment: he spurred his horse and rode towards the crowd declaring, ‘I am your captain, follow me!’ They did. And that sorted out the Peasants’ Revolt, basically. He was fourteen years old.
It was extremely brave and well timed and was the most successful moment of Richard’s entire life. Part of the reason it worked was that the rebels were opposed not to kingship but to the class system. They didn’t like the notion of gentlemen, they were suspicious of royal advisers and taxation, but they believed in monarchy. They considered themselves ‘the true commons’ who had been kept away from their noble and rightful king by his dishonest advisers. They bought into the notion of Richard’s righteous leadership as much as the poor addle-headed young king did himself. That was the one aspect of the regime that the peasants didn’t question.
His majesty?
In the end, the magnates did question it, though. Over the next few years, they questioned it like they’d never questioned it before. And, having questioned it, it couldn’t be unquestioned again. The process that England underwent in the last decade and a half of Richard’s reign fundamentally weakened the institution of monarchy.
That sounds like good news, doesn’t it? It’s a bit shit, the institution of monarchy. It’s not fair. Some guy gets to be in charge of everything just because of who his dad was. It’s not a good system. But it is a system of some sort. It’s not anarchy. Richard is in charge and that’s that. One day he’ll die but until then he’s king – we know where we are and we can work on a coping strategy.
Up to this point, it’s all been about the coping strategies. Those august foundation stones of the great British tradition of liberty, Magna Carta and parliament, are methods for dealing with kings who turn out to be arseholes or idiots. And while nobody designed this system, it does make a certain amount of sense: accept who the king is but rein him in so he can’t screw things up too badly.
The long-lasting and widespread literary genre of ‘Mirrors for Princes’ was another approach to this problem. Its most famous example is The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli, written in the early sixteenth century, but it had been going for over a millennium by then and there are dozens of these self-help guides for rulers, obsequious and patronizing in equal measure. The flaw in this approach, obviously, is that the monarchs most in need of instruction are often those least aware of the fact and so least likely to read an instructional manual.
Nevertheless, accepting who the king is and, crucially, who the king is going to be – gripping the notion of primogeniture ever more tightly – is a good way of maximizing stability. It means you don’t really need to have a civil war every time a king dies, on top of all the civil wars you’re having anyway. The idea is: you stop things like the Stephen and Matilda situation with a totally inflexible and preordained line of succession, and you stop things like the King John situation with Magna Carta and parliament. Both kinds of mega-crisis are precluded.
But if you don’t unquestioningly accept who the king is, everything gets a bit wobbly. There’s a frightening new potential coping strategy: change kings. That’s sort of been tried once before when Edward II was made to abdicate, but the next king was his eldest son, so it wasn’t fully stress-tested. The new king’s accession was hastened, no more. The certainty of succession was maintained.
When the magnates got rid of Richard – and, as you are probably inferring, they are going to get rid of him – and he didn’t have a son, and someone else became king … well, suddenly the position of that king, and every other king for ever, is weaker. Kings can be got rid of. But there’s no system in place for how that’s done, or who gets to be the new king. As a result, English history in the fifteenth century is an absolute shitstorm. There’s no way that it wouldn’t have been better all round if they’d stuck with crappy Richard until he died.
They could always have just murdered him. That would probably have gone better, for everyone except Richard – and not significantly worse for him. He ended up getting murdered anyway, just not until after he had been deposed. Yes, he was deposed. The magnates tried to do it by the book. But the book didn’t exist. They were writing the book as they went along. All the previous books said: he’s the king, deal with it.
Unfortunately Richard made it very difficult for the magnates to deal with it. He was awful. Feeble, petulant and narcissistic. Then, in the last few years of his reign, lethally vengeful.
He was intensely status-conscious – he was the first English king to insist on being addressed as ‘your majesty’, in emulation of the more twatty French court. And he was quick to fall into contemptuous rages – another bloody ‘inheritor of the Plantagenet temper’ – once declaring to a parliament that wanted to change his circle of ministers and advisers that he wouldn’t dismiss one scullion from his kitchen at their request (‘scullion’ is an archaic term for a ‘McJob’). Obviously, the commons didn’t give a shit who his scullions were. At that point (1386) they wanted him to sack his chancellor, Michael de la Pole, and dismiss his favourite, Robert de Vere, whom Richard, in an act of magnate-baiting largesse, had just made duke of Ireland.
Duke of Ireland? Seriously?! That’s like earl of Greece or marquess of America. It sounds made up. And of course it is, as are all aristocratic titles. The trouble with this one is that it had only just been made up and it’s pretty clear what the agenda was. Duke was the highest noble title – it had only started being used in England by Edward III, also in emulation of the French, and ranked higher than earl and baron. And Ireland is bigger than the other places people tended to be dukes or earls or somethings of. They’re usually locations on the scale of Warwick or York, maybe Sussex or Cornwall at most. Ireland is an altogether bigger entity. The lack of proportionality in the title inflamed the magnates’ fear that Richard had lost his sense of proportion about the merits of Robert de Vere.
It had unfortunate echoes of when Edward II, just under a century of aristocratic titular inflation earlier, made Piers Gaveston the earl of Cornwall. Richard was fond of the memory of Edward II and tried to get him canonized. The notion that that idiot was in any way saintly is so absurd as to make Edward the Confessor seem momentarily worthy of the status. This enthusiasm of Richard’s was another worrying sign that he didn’t get what it took to be an effective king.
His court was magnificent. He and his queen, Anne of Bohemia, to whom he was devoted, wanted everything to be opulent and intellectual and what today we’d probably call bohemian in a way that has no connection with Anne, who just happened to have been born in what is now the Czech Republic. They invested lavishly in jewellery, fine textiles, metalwork, art and crazy clothes. Westminster Hall was redeveloped with fifteen life-size statues of kings and a hammerbeam roof which remains amazing to behold, and the royal palaces were made sumptuous.
Plus there were emerging writers in the English language at this time – Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower and William Langland are the most prominent. They’re often referred to as the Ricardian poets, in a rare positive note from posterity about this king. It’s ironic because Richard doesn’t seem to have been that into poetry, though Gower’s 33,000-line Confessio Amantis says in its prologue that Richard commissioned it. Doesn’t say he read it, mind you. But I can’t talk. I haven’t read a single syllable of any of those writers’ work and certainly won’t until I’ve watched the box set of The Sopranos that has been gathering dust in my possession for a decade and a half. Still, it’s good to have writers and the fact that their works aren’t exactly easy-reading to the modern eye doesn’t mean they weren’t great, nor that the advance in English vernacular culture wasn’t significant.
So the lovely court, in itself, wasn’t a problem (except that it was expensive and Richard utterly lost his shit when asked to account for his expenditure). A magnificent court can be a good way for a monarch to demonstrate and increase their power. Louis XIV of France created a dazzling court in Versailles which meant that all his major noblemen were right there, under his thumb, not interfering with the actual government of the country. Louis used display and fashion cannily as a way of uniting people behind his rule, and of making foreign regimes fear and respect him as a figure of intimidating grandeur.
Richard had no such political strategy in mind, however, and his expensive court was just prissy and alienating to the powerful men of the realm. A good example of this is the Wilton Diptych, a work of art Richard commissioned towards the end of his reign. It shows how he wanted to project himself to other people and posterity. It’s a picture of three saints – the patron saints of England, St Edward the Confessor (grrr) and St Edmund (as in Bury St Edmunds – the martyred king), plus St John the Baptist – presenting a piously kneeling Richard to Mary and Baby Jesus, who are surrounded by angels all wearing Richard’s badge, which was a white hart with a golden crown round its neck and a golden chain.
It’s very pretty, but it’s not how Edward III or Henry II put themselves across. It fails in two ways: in one sense, it makes Richard look a bit pathetic. For a king with no martial inclination, it serves only to reinforce his critics’ view that he was a soft-skinned weakling. He looks small and slight and childlike – very odd self-presentation for a time when going to war was seen as the monarch’s primary duty.
But, in another sense, he looks like a megalomaniac, with three saints hanging out with him, Jesus and Mary apparently thrilled to meet him and, astonishingly, an angelic host already wearing his branding. If you went into the office of the CEO of, say, Adidas and there was a big picture of him (or her – but it’ll be him) accompanied by some saints, meeting some angels, and they’re all wearing Adidas-branded gear, then you’d make a mental note that the guy was tyrannical and tasteless in equal measure, and expect a scandal about the dysfunctional working environment in the upper echelons of the Adidas corporation to break any day.
Total eclipse of the hart
In Richard’s reign, a scandal like that broke twice – in 1386 and 1399 – and both times it resulted in a small civil war. In between those little wars, there was a period of competent government, which is boring so I won’t dwell on it.
By the end of 1386, Richard’s ineffectual and militarily unaggressive regime was causing consternation. The teenage king hadn’t done anything brave since the Peasants’ Revolt. As noted, Edward III’s dashing reign had put an end to the magnates’ disinclination to fight expensive wars in France. On the contrary, it was now something they felt English kings absolutely ought to do. King Richard disagreed.
In his early reign there’d been an unsuccessful attack on Flanders led, bizarrely, by the Bishop of Norwich, and then a fruitless expedition to Scotland, led by Richard himself, which had resulted in the king falling out with John of Gaunt. Gaunt had then left the country in high dudgeon to go and try to become king of Castile. Meanwhile, the French were threatening to invade. This crisis, coupled with the general dissatisfaction with Richard’s circle of favourites and advisers, led to the emergence of a group known as the Lords Appellant.
There were five of these lords, namely Thomas of Woodstock, who was Duke of Gloucester, a brother of Gaunt, uncle of Richard and son of Edward III, plus the earls of Arundel, Warwick, Nottingham and Derby. This last earl was Henry Bolingbroke, son of John of Gaunt and hide-and-seek champion of the Peasants’ Revolt. The word ‘Appellant’ is Norman French and meant ‘one who is appealing’. Richard, however, found them unappealing because what they were appealing for was the prosecution of his ministers for treason.
The Appellants took control, imposing a commission on the king at the so-called Wonderful Parliament of 1386. Richard found this humiliating and initially refused to attend parliament at all, railing against his disobedient subjects and, according to some reports, threatening to seek help from his cousin the King of France. This was an incredibly dickish thing to say. England had been at war with France for decades and the French seemed about to invade. The King of England turning round and saying that he’d be in favour of that because his French counterpart was a relative, and he’d rather submit to a posh cousin than a bunch of uppity oiks, is a level of faux pas even Donald Trump couldn’t get away with.
In the end Richard came to parliament and submitted to the commission with very bad grace. But he was soon fighting back, touring the country to drum up support, establishing a personal power base in Cheshire and getting some lawyers to say that the Appellants were treasonous. This led to a very short civil war, in December 1387, in which Robert de Vere raised a pro-Richard army in Cheshire and marched it south to be defeated at the Battle of Radcot Bridge by the earls of Nottingham and Derby.
The Appellants were more in charge than ever and, at the Merciless Parliament of 1388, purged the king’s administration, condemning Richard’s most senior ministers to death – this included de Vere and de la Pole, but they had fled to France so escaped execution. This might have been exciting if they hadn’t both died quite soon thanks to medieval Europe’s narratively insensitive mortality rate.
The king was now a puppet of the Appellants. This, he must have thought, is the lowest ebb of my entire reign. It turned out to be the second lowest. The lowest came in the summer of 1399 when Henry Bolingbroke (who by this time was duke of Lancaster as well as earl of Derby because John of Gaunt had just died), landed with a small army on the Humber estuary and took over England pretty much unopposed. This was a sign of how unpopular Richard had made himself.
For much of the previous decade, Richard had seemed like a reformed king. He still wanted peace not war, and fancied himself High Majestic Ruler of the Universe as well as the most holy little slip of a boy in Christendom, but he ran a competent government from when John of Gaunt returned in 1389 until the late 1390s.
However, his confidence was growing, which did him no good. Then, in 1394, his beloved wife died, which also did him no good. He became increasingly obsessed with his power base in Cheshire, which he ran like a private sub-kingdom, and by vengeance against the Appellants.
In September 1397 Richard orchestrated a very dodgy parliament. It was held under the armed guard of Richard’s Cheshire archers, had a cravenly pro-Ricardian speaker, Sir John Bussy, and was seemingly packed with loyalists – or at least those who were put in quite a loyal mood by having a bow and arrow pointed at them. It swiftly accused three of the Appellants of treason: Arundel was executed, Warwick begged not to be executed and was dispossessed of his estates and imprisoned, and Gloucester, the king’s uncle who had been imprisoned in Calais, was murdered before he could even get to parliament. This was by order of the fourth Appellant, Thomas de Mowbray Earl of Nottingham, who had defected to Richard’s side. He was made duke of Norfolk a few days later.
It’s all gone a bit Stalin. There are two of the Appellants left standing – Mowbray, who had murdered Gloucester to show his loyalty, and Bolingbroke, who was John of Gaunt’s son. They didn’t feel safe and, in 1398, this very fact apparently became the subject of a quarrel between them, though we only have Bolingbroke’s subsequent account of what was said.
