Richard II (1377–1399)
Richard II (or Richard of Bordeaux as he was known, after the town where he was born) was ten years old when, as the eldest son of the Black Prince, he succeeded to the throne. A contemporary painting shows a slender boy-king with pale yellow hair, but these appealing images should not blind us to the fact that once Richard grew up it became clear that he had inherited the violent and imperious nature of his father. Unlike his grandfather Edward III, he had no sense of the importance of carrying the nation with him, of ruling with the help of Parliament. Nevertheless at the first great crisis of his reign, the Peasants’ Revolt, though he was only fourteen years old he showed courage and presence of mind.
Little had changed with the accession of a new king. The country was still ruled, through the council, by Richard’s uncle John of Gaunt, the Duke of Lancaster, and the government remained deeply unpopular. The truce with France came to an end and was not renewed, and English trade, English shipping and English coastal towns began to suffer from French raids. There was even a possibility that the French might invade, though this threat disappeared in 1380 when Charles V was succeeded by another boy-king Charles VI. Then in 1381 a very widespread popular rising broke out as a protest against the new poll tax. This is known as the Peasants’ Revolt. The government had demanded that every male, rich or poor, over the age of fifteen should pay the same tax per head (or per poll). At this grotesquely unfair request the underlying frustrations of small farmers and labourers who still fell within the category of villein came to a head. For forty years the gradual breakdown of respect for authority had spread a sense of the outworn nature of traditional institutions. The socially conservative Church was further undermined by the confusion created by the papal schism of 1378, as there were now two popes in Christendom–one at Rome and one at Avignon.
Furthermore Wyclif had now broken with John of Gaunt. Instead he and his followers the Lollards or ‘babblers’ had turned to taking their message to the people in the countryside, and their russet-coloured robes were becoming a familiar sight in villages all over England. At the same time, one of these Lollards made the first translation of the Bible into English, for Wyclif believed that everyone should be allowed to read the Holy Scriptures and make up their opinion about their meaning.
His philosophic conclusion that ‘dominion’ was to be found in all good people regardless of whether they were priests had revolutionary implications. Although there were few Lollards among the peasants themselves, Wyclif’s emphasis on each man’s worth seeped into the current climate.
In 1381 all these discontents came together in a march on London led by a master craftsman named Wat Tyler (or Wat the roofer). Tyler was at the head of a large number of marchers setting off from Kent, a county which since the Jutes had a reputation for more democratic traditions. Though there was no villeinage in Kent they demanded an end to villeinage for all Englishmen and refused to pay the poll tax. At the same time revolts broke out all over the country. In Essex a travelling priest named John Ball had been preaching on the theme of his well-known rhyme:
When Adam delved, and Eve span
Who was then the gentleman?
In the south the uprisings had a particularly anti-clerical tinge, as most of the participants were serfs from the properties of great abbeys and monasteries. The majority were armed with the agricultural tools they had been using in the fields when word started to spread about the march to London–billhooks for pulling fruit off trees, shears and axes. The uprisings seem to have been quite spontaneous without any political organization behind them. They were nevertheless extremely dangerous. The rebels swarmed across London on either side of the river, setting fire to Southwark and convincing the city guards stationed at the Tower that they were no match for such numbers. They then murdered the Archbishop of Canterbury and the chancellor, and burned John of Gaunt’s Thames-side Savoy Palace to the ground.
In the midst of the mayhem the boy-king Richard was the only member of the government to keep his head. While his ministers dithered, with great courage Richard agreed to meet the rebels and listen to their grievances. At Mile End he promised charters of liberty to abolish serfdom if the crowds would disperse. Then, accompanied by the lord mayor of London William Walworth and only sixty horsemen, he rode out to Smithfield to deal with Wat Tyler and the 2,000 Kentish men he had brought with him. With Richard was his popular mother Joan, the Fair Maid of Kent, whose association with their own county he may have felt would make the rebels readier to listen to him.
After some time talking face to face about the people’s complaints Wat Tyler laid a hand on the king’s bridle. He had a dagger in his other hand, though he seems to have had no intention of using it. But at a time when much of the city was on fire and two members of the government lay dead, Walworth the lord mayor may be forgiven for thinking that Tyler was about to murder the king. At any rate he reacted by plunging his sword into the rebel leader. At this the Kentish folk surged forward and seemed about to seize Richard, while those with bows trained their arrows on him. But Richard’s own courage saved the day. Spurring his horse he galloped up to Tyler’s followers crying ‘Come with me and I will be your captain. Wat Tyler was a traitor.’
Uncertain how to proceed, since Tyler’s oratory had been instrumental in getting them to London, the protesters followed Richard’s slender figure into what were then the fields of Islington. But they were surrounded by a thousand soldiers hurriedly gathered by Walworth, and many sank to their knees to beg the king’s pardon. By nightfall every single one of London’s unwelcome visitors had left the city walls and was heading home convinced by the king’s apparently sympathetic manner that serfdom would be abolished.
Eventually a general pardon would be issued to all those who took part in the Peasants’ Revolt as part of the celebrations to mark Richard II’s marriage in 1382 to the pious Anne of Bohemia, sister of King Wenceslaus. But in the short term the rebels were punished and their wishes ignored. John Ball was executed at St Albans, home of that first British martyr, while the charters abolishing serfdom were never issued because they had been obtained under duress. Although it took another hundred years for villeinage to die out entirely, in practice many lords gave the villeins their freedom and commuted their service to a money payment. The continued shortage of labour meant it was either that or having a very uncooperative workforce.
But Richard II never regained the esteem he won in 1381. John of Gaunt’s absence from the council pursuing the throne of Castile by right of his wife Constance should have meant a fresh start for the country. But Gaunt and his cronies were soon replaced by equally venial men who were Richard’s favourites, the most important being Robert de Vere, Earl of Oxford, whom Richard made Duke of Ireland, and the chancellor Michael de la Pole, a merchant who became Earl of Suffolk.
Richard and the new court party were just as careless of the law and parliament as John of Gaunt had been. Like his father the Black Prince the king had a taste for luxury and a splendid court. To finance it, sudden and illegal taxes were demanded without reference to Parliament. Under Edward III’s youngest son Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester, a parliamentary party began to rally against the court. In 1386 the trouble came to a head when Parliament asked Richard to dismiss Chancellor de la Pole for corruption. The king replied that he would not dismiss the meanest scullion in his kitchen just to please Parliament. In response Parliament impeached the chancellor and appointed eleven lords ordainers to rule the country, as had been done in Edward II’s time.
Richard II was made of sterner stuff than his great-grandfather. Having persuaded the courts to proclaim the Lords Ordainer illegal because they interfered with the royal prerogative, he declared war on the parliamentary party. But in February 1388 at the Battle of Radcot Bridge in Oxfordshire his army was scattered and he himself was forced back to London. At the Parliament known as the Merciless Parliament, five lords including Richard’s uncle the Duke of Gloucester and his first cousin, John of Gaunt’s son Henry of Lancaster, accused the royal favourites of treason. These lords appellant as they were known, because they launched the Appeal of Treason, then executed many of the king’s favourites.
The lords appellant now ruled the country through the council. But the fluidity and the personal nature of relationships at court meant that within the year Richard was asserting himself again, and once he had gained the support of the respectable old clerical party he was ruling on his own. Stability was cemented by the return from Spain of his uncle John of Gaunt, whose influence smoothed the way for less antagonistic politics, and before long two of the five lords appellant–Gaunt’s son Henry of Lancaster and Thomas Mowbray, Earl of Nottingham–came round to the court party. Abroad too there was peace for almost thirty years, after Richard’s marriage in 1396 to the daughter of the French king Charles VI–following the death of his wife Anne of Bohemia–led to a truce between the two countries.
But the king’s sorrow at the death of his wife Anne touched off the most violent and uncontrollable elements in his rather unstable character. He razed to the ground the palace where he had lived with Anne, and when the Earl of Arundel–one of the lords appellant–arrived late for the queen’s funeral, the outraged king publicly struck him in the face.
But Richard II was a subtler character than he appeared. For almost ten years after the Merciless Parliament he bided his time, secretly calculating how to have his revenge on the lords appellant. The year after Anne of Bohemia’s death, he suddenly arrested three of them–his uncle Gloucester, Arundel and the Earl of Warwick. Surrounded by 4,000 soldiers of the king’s personal bodyguard, the Cheshire Archers, Parliament had no choice but to bow to his wishes and condemned the three for treason. In a display of summary justice, Arundel was tried, convicted and beheaded on the same day, while Gloucester was murdered in Calais prison. Warwick escaped death only by the payment of massive fines.
By 1399 the English had had enough of their tyrannical king, and a mass movement to depose him was led by Henry of Lancaster, or Bolingbroke as he is sometimes known. The two cousins met in north Wales at Flint, and when Richard saw that he had no supporters he surrendered. At a meeting of Parliament, Henry of Lancaster stood before an empty throne and claimed the crown. He was careful not to claim it by right of Parliament, because what Parliament gave Parliament might take away. Likewise he did not claim it by right of conquest, for that too might be challenged by another conquest. But his claim was understood to be founded on a mixture of the two. Thus the Lancastrian revolution, which put the descendants of John of Gaunt on the throne, was achieved almost bloodlessly.
The new king, who was crowned Henry IV, had probably not planned to kill his predecessor. But when at Christmas that year a conspiracy to restore Richard to the throne was uncovered, it became clear that there was no room for two kings in one country. Richard, who was being held prisoner in Henry’s Lancastrian stronghold Pontefract Castle, was accordingly murdered, and it was disingenuously announced that he had perished from self-inflicted starvation.