LIKE ANY PROMINENT billionaire and property owner today, Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, was involved in two kinds of politics, local and national. The local politics consisted of Gaunt’s relationship with the landowners, from the highest ranks of the gentry down to the yeomen, the free and wealthier peasants. They resided in the counties, mainly in the north of the country, where the Duke held vast estates and where his influence in local government and law was strong.
Some of the wealthier families among the gentry were bound to the Duke of Lancaster by contractual arrangements that had originated decades earlier. But these old feudal contracts in the form of elaborate, ornate documents called charters had to be periodically reviewed and sometimes rewritten to mutual advantage. Arrangements with some of the upper gentry, the lower gentry, towns, and the top stratum of the yeomen were of recent and such ever-changing character that, judging from the thousands of documents issued in Gaunt’s name, whether from the Savoy Palace in London or a castle in the north, this business was the constant activity of the clerks in the Duke’s chancery, or writing office.
Copies of these documents were retained in the Duke’s chancery and from time to time were pasted end to end in fat rolls, called registers.
The documents are mostly written in French because they were addressed to lords, gentry, and merchants whose Latin was weak or nonexistent; some, addressed to churchmen, are in Latin. More than half the items included are the short documents called indentures. These are contractual agreements drawn up by the Duke’s administration acting on his behalf and sealed with his personal seal. The documents are written with a pen or stylus on parchment. Messengers were busy on the roads, carrying the indentures and letters to their addressees and the responses back to the Duke.
In an indenture, the Duke promises to do something to help the other (socially inferior) party to the agreement—give that party’s family more land, allow hunting on the Duke’s estate, reduce rent, bestow a pension, provide a local government office, or support him in an important lawsuit. The indenture also specifies the obligations of the nonducal recipient: to pay rent, provide service of one kind or another, give the Duke wood or meat or produce once or twice a year, or attend to administrative matters on or near the Duke’s estate.
When armies were raised to fight in France or Spain, the flow of indentures from the Duke’s document office increased at a feverish pace, because this was how armies were organized and paid. The Duke would pay a stipend, or a pension for so many years of military service, and would compensate the other party to the indenture, a captain, for raising a defined number of equipped and armed soldiers. The soldiers were to congregate at a certain place on a given day, usually one of the southern ports—Portsmouth was a favorite—in four to eight weeks.
In return, the Duke’s administrators were supposed to recover the costs outlined in the military indenture from the royal treasury, with the funds coming ultimately from a tax approved by Parliament. All the people accompanying the Duke abroad were thus mercenaries, except very rarely for a handful of aristocrats and wealthy gentry who served out of loyalty to and intimacy with the Duke.
The royal government was always in arrears, sometimes for several years, in compensating Gaunt for his outlay to his captains and ordinary mercenaries. He had to pay at least half the cost of his Spanish expedition out of his own pocket. At his death, after a long career as a general, Gaunt was probably still in the red with regard to military expenses.
Gaunt, with his administrators, had to keep the indentured soldiers contented because, when they were not at war, they were many of the same people he had to deal with in matters of lands, rents, local administrative services, peace-keeping in the countryside, and the functioning of the law courts in the counties he dominated. He was not always able to keep them happy, since the royal government so often fell behind in reimbursing him.
In the early stages of the Hundred Years’ War, even common mercenaries could pick up cash on the side from looting French estates, towns, and farms, or holding for ransom French knights they captured on the battlefield. When a truce was declared, the mercenaries went home with their loot or ransom money, bought land, and started or upgraded gentry or yeoman families. But after about 1370, as the war wound down, the chances for this rapacious behavior diminished.
The problem of local politics for Gaunt was therefore this: The thousands of indentured captains and soldiers he needed for regiments were also the people he had to deal with in the functioning of local economy and law. They were his constituents, and like all politicians, he had to keep his supporters happy. Sometimes it was too expensive to do this, and discontent in the countryside led to difficulty in collecting rents and taxes and keeping the peace.
The discontent could even mean that demobilized and angry mercenaries would form rural criminal gangs, loot peaceful farms, or audaciously invade the Duke’s own estates and hunting grounds.
These gangs also provided for “maintenance” of their members in the county law courts through bribing and pressuring royal judges and suborning juries. Only one in seven of malefactors indicted by grand juries was ever convicted at trial, about the same proportion as in New York City today. The rest plea-bargained, were pardoned, or simply absconded into the forests like Robin Hood. Local politics, therefore, offered the Duke persistent problems and small agonies.
That some of the indentures, letters, and other documents in the Duke’s Register deal with the same matters over and over again may indicate that Gaunt had taken a personal interest in the matters they dealt with. In spite of his high profile on the national and European scene, local politics and the contentedness of his constituents had to be important to him.
But that many of the petty issues mentioned in the Register—four volumes in small print, covering about 60 percent of the years of Gaunt’s maturity, the registers for the other years having been lost—do not appear to have achieved resolution indicates that the Duke had only so much time and energy personally to devote to these local matters.
In the majority of instances he left it to his hardworking and sorely pressed officials and secretaries to face up to the local problems as best they could. After all, what Gaunt was most interested in with respect to the countryside and the streets was his income. If there were social tensions aplenty, and functioning of the law at the local level was falling prey to gangsterism, he could not deal obsessively with many such details.
Gaunt’s involvement in national politics involved his relations with Parliament and his connection to his nephew King Richard II. As a grand magnate and prominent member of the royal family, he had to get personally involved in these issues of national politics. They were not matters his clerks could handle by issuing documents.
The English Parliament was, in its beginning in the reign of Edward I in the late thirteenth century, an instrument of the king. Parliament was a special meeting of the king’s Great Council of magnates, a group of lords and ecclesiastics ever ready to be summoned to Westminster and give the king advice. He often asked the magnates to approve going to war and the levying of special taxes to fight the war.
When, in addition to the summoned magnates, representatives of the larger towns (“the burgesses”) and the gentry of the shire (“the knights”) were summoned, the meeting was called a Parliament. By the mid-fourteenth century such a Parliament was summoned once or twice a year and was in session for about three weeks. In the early years of Parliament, representatives of the lower clergy (priests, friars, and professors) were also summoned, but this practice was suspended around 1330 because the voices of the lower clergy turned out to be sometimes dangerously radical, as was the case with some Franciscan friars.
The bishops and a very small group of abbots of large and old monasteries continued to be summoned to Parliament. The bishops and abbots also met with the lower clergy in their own assembly, called a convocation; such a body still meets.
Around 1340 the magnates (lords and ecclesiastics) and the representatives of the counties and towns (knights and burgesses) split apart into distinct corporate “houses,” called the House of Lords and the House of Commons. The Lords met in the royal palace at Westminster. The Commons met in the chapter house (monks’ meeting room) of Westminster Abbey.
The Lords were (and still are) summoned by the monarch by “private,” or individual, writs of summons. That made someone officially a great lord. The Commons were summoned by common or collective writs: the king instructed the sheriff of the county to see to it that representatives of the gentry were elected and the mayors and aldermen were to choose urban representatives.
In Gaunt’s lifetime the Commons were compensated for their expenses. By the sixteenth century this practice had ceased, and it was not resumed until 1911. The Lords paid their own way and would have been insulted if the king had offered to cover their expenses.
The burgesses representing the towns were chosen by the oligarchic town councils, the mayors and aldermen. In practice this meant that wealthy merchants represented the towns. The members of Parliament for the counties were nominally elected by the gentry who attended monthly meetings of the county court. In practice there could be open elections and the two MPs chosen were usually but not always from rich gentry families. The sheriff might choose, however, not to hold an actual election but simply consult with the leading gentry families as to who should be chosen.
Parliament in the time of Gaunt had three sorts of functions. In ascending order of importance these were propaganda, legal and judicial functions, and taxation. Propaganda meant that the king sat on his throne surrounded by his magnates and the Commons stood humbly in front of him. The king, or his chancellor on his behalf, made important announcements and invariably ended by asking for money and giving reasons why this taxation was urgent.
There were three aspects to the legal functions of Parliament. First, Lords could be tried for serious crimes, including treason. The House of Lords retained this function until 1925. Nominally it still does, and it is the highest court in England, but the actual presiding over trials is done by twenty-five professional lawyers. Second, MPs could petition the king for such things as pardons for well-connected criminals or repair of roads and bridges in specific localities.
By the 1350s a third legal function had been accorded Parliament: the passing of new laws, called statutes. But changes in the law came much more often from decisions in the royal courts than from parliamentary legislation.
Before the 1340s Parliament could and occasionally did meet without a grant of extraordinary taxation being requested. But from the mid-fourteenth century until the end of the great war with France in 1453, requests for money invariably were made. The Parliament gave the king a customs tax over exports (wool) and imports (wine). He needed approval of Parliament if he wanted to increase the customs rate—or at least so the MPs claimed.
The big infusion of money into the royal treasury, which made the intermittent war with France possible, was the grant of the “tenth and fifteenth” tax on the value of movable property (not land) and income. The knights and burgesses paid the tenth; the lords the lesser amount, the fifteenth. This inequity separated commoners from the more privileged aristocracy.
The king, the royal family, and the courtiers and members of the royal household looked upon Parliament and especially the Commons as mostly a necessary evil that could not be cast aside, because of the need for subsidies, as the parliamentary taxes came to be called. But until 1376 the royal government pretty well got what it wanted out of Parliament.
In that year, Parliament showed a surprising degree of independence; there occurred something that sounds like real political debate in Commons, and the procedures of Parliament were changed in two respects. The Commons now had a Speaker to preside over their sessions and represent them to the king, his councillors, and the Lords.
Commons was morphing under Gaunt’s eyes from a special tax-approving council of the upper middle class into a deliberating legislative body. Instead of rubber-stamping new taxes on income and movable property, it wanted an accounting of how previously voted taxes had been spent. It had become a national legislature that debated the king’s business.
Gaunt must have sensed that his great-grandfather Edward I had made a mistake in creating the national assembly of Parliament. French kings made no such error before 1789. They obtained approval of new taxes from isolated provincial assemblies, not a national legislature that a handful of outspoken gentry could mobilize against the royal government.
A judicial procedure was introduced, called impeachment, by which the Commons could indict the king’s ministers for high crimes and misdemeanors. The Lords acted as a jury. If the indictments were sustained, removal from office, heavy fines, and imprisonment could be imposed on the alleged ministerial malefactors or in some instances bankers or merchants who trafficked in royal finances. (In 1787 an impeachment procedure was included in the newly formed Constitution of the United States.)
Because of these changes and the general politicization of Commons and its striving for a high degree of autonomy, the Parliament of 1376 came to be called the Good Parliament. The ultimate enemy that the Good Parliament aimed at was John of Gaunt. The royal officials and merchants who were impeached were members of his entourage. All this occurred while Edward III was slowly dying. Edward the Black Prince was already dead. The Black Prince’s son, Richard II, who would come to the throne in 1377, was not yet ten at the time. This left Gaunt to be the front man for the royal government and the object of parliamentary hostility. He stood out in front and referred to the Commons as “plebs,” the lower class in Roman society, as he asked for a subsidy for the war.
Led by their Speaker, Sir Peter de la Mare, the Commons refused to proceed to vote a subsidy. Instead they impeached several government officials who were accused of corruption and mismanaging the war in France; a couple of merchants who were accused of making excess profits through fiscal relations with the Crown; and Alice Perrers, Edward III’s mistress, on grounds of corruption In general, the Commons, through their Speaker, complained that the King “has with him certain councillors and servants who were not loyal or profitable to him or the kingdom and they have made gains by subtlely, thus deceiving our lord the king.” (Translated by G. Holmes.) The culprits were deemed to be Richard Lyons, a merchant, and William Latimer, a bureaucrat. Alice Perrers was accused of costing the king two thousand to three thousand pounds a year, an enormous sum.
Gaunt was at too high a level to be attacked directly by the Commons. A dozen people impeached by the Commons, however, were convicted by the Lords. There was nothing that Gaunt, for the moment, could do to outflank the Commons to save them.
The Good Parliament looks like the beginning of liberal democracy in England—the Commons versus the Crown. But actually it represented more the beginning of a split in the royal family that was to lead, in the mid-fifteenth century, to the Wars of the Roses, the civil war over the throne between two factions of the Plantagenet dynasty.
Sir Peter de la Mare, Speaker of the House of Commons, was the steward or chief estate manager of the Earl of March, who was married to a granddaughter of Edward III. The royal princes and great nobles who hated and feared Gaunt, and Gaunt’s Lancastrian faction, congregated around the Earl of March, his royal wife, and their descendants. From this group was to emerge in the fifteenth century the Yorkists, the countervailing royal faction to the Lancastrians.
Gaunt showed by his retreat in the face of the Earl of March and the anti-Lancastrians in 1376 what a good politician he was. He could not withstand the oppositional Commons led by Sir Peter de la Mare; he could not save the impeached courtiers, bureaucrats, and merchant bankers, at least for the moment. Instead, Gaunt directed his attention to the next meeting of Parliament, in 1377. Because of pressure on the sheriffs, many of the oppositional MPs were not reelected. The newly elected Commons were easily manipulated by Gaunt and the Lancastrian party. Now it was Gaunt’s steward who was chosen Speaker.
Nearly all the people impeached and convicted in the Good Parliament were let off by what came to be known as the Merciless Parliament (mercilessly pro-Gaunt, that is) of 1377. Alice Perrers retired quietly to the estate given her by Edward III. There was still much hostility to Gaunt, especially in the streets of London. He was suspected by courtiers and London street people alike of wanting to supplant his young nephew and make himself king.
Gaunt was an innovator in organizing elections to Commons. He saw that if Commons was no longer a passive tax-voting council, that if it had become a political chamber with a royalist group supporting Lancaster and the royal government, and an opposition group—“the country party,” as they came to be called in the sixteenth century—then attention must be paid to how the MPs were chosen.
In the counties it was the sheriff who ran the election of MPs at a meeting of the county court and made “return of writs,” that is, certified to the royal government the names of the two MPs who were chosen. At least two-thirds of the time there was no actual election process. The sheriff consulted with the leading gentry families and decided who should be selected as MPs. This gave the sheriffs, who were royal officials, a wide latitude in specifying who the MPs from the counties would be. If an election had to be held because there was vocal conflict among the gentry families, it was the sheriff who counted the votes. He would go to a barn in the county seat accompanied by thirty to seventy electors. He would line up the supporters of two candidates along one wall and the supporters of two other candidates along the facing wall. (There was no secret ballot until the nineteenth century.) In a close vote the sheriff decided the election, since he did the counting. A brazen sheriff getting his marching orders from London would count only the side he favored.
The election of MPs from the towns was in the hands of each town’s mayor and aldermen. They were easily persuaded or suborned by the royal government. A favorite threat was to rumble about cancellation of the royal charter by which the town exercised its internal autonomy and self-government.
It was Gaunt who started this system and put it into practice. It was still nakedly in operation in 1600. The amazing thing—and it tells us something about the gentry’s independent temperament—is that some opposition candidates were nevertheless chosen.
There is no evidence that Gaunt made any effort to replace Richard II. A few months after Gaunt’s death, in 1399, the throne was taken from Richard by Gaunt’s son Henry Bolingbroke, who became Henry IV. But this was something Gaunt had not foreseen or planned. He had done everything possible to prop up his erratic nephew.
Richard was ten years old when his grandfather Edward III died in 1377. Richard had been brought up in a negligent manner in the royal court. His mother, Joan of Kent, Princess of Wales, was absent most of the time, pursuing private and courtly matters. Richard was indulged by the courtiers. With the presence of Alice Perrers, the court was an oversexed, corrupt place and not suitable for raising a child. Nevertheless Richard II was relatively well educated. He was highly literate and was a musician. He was also undisciplined, selfish, overindulgent, and lazy.
As a young king Richard gathered around him a group of wild young men from the nobility much like himself. He formed a homosexual attachment to Robert de Vere, Earl of Oxford, upon whom he lavished gifts and much attention. Thereby Richard aroused the hostility of some of the leading magnates, including his uncle the Duke of Gloucester. These formed the Lords Appellant of 1386-1387, who removed the king’s household officials and exiled de Vere.
Richard bided his time and with the help of John of Gaunt stabilized his government in the 1390s. He was probably the richest king in Europe. With Gaunt’s acquiescence, he turned against the Lords Appellant, led by the Duke of Gloucester, in 1398 and had them murdered, sometimes with legal cover, sometimes by assassination.
Richard’s paranoid seeking for revenge because of his lost lover and what he thought of as his mistreatment by the Lords Appellant frightened two members of the great nobility, Henry Bolingbroke and Thomas Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk. The two ended up accusing each other of treason to the king. Richard exiled them both and then, when Gaunt died in 1399, refused Bolingbroke, who was in France, entry into the Lancastrian estates. Bolingbroke was exiled for life.
While Richard was pursuing a difficult campaign in Ireland in 1399, Bolingbroke landed in eastern England from France with a hundred soldiers and marched westward toward Wales, intending to interrupt Richard’s return to his stronghold in Chester. The lords and their retainers joined Bolingbroke in vast numbers. With very little fighting he put together a huge army as he moved across the country from east to west.
The magnates had come to think of Richard as not suitable to be king. His arbitrary attack on members of the higher nobility frightened them. He continued to surround himself with younger nobles who did not marry, or if they did, had, like Richard and his queen, Anne of Bohemia, no issue.
There appears to have been a homosexual coterie at the royal court. Richard seems to have had no interest in heterosexual behavior. After Anne died, he married a five-year-old daughter of the King of France partly for diplomatic reasons, but partly to avoid the marriage bed for many years.
By the time Richard had got his ships together and left Ireland with some of his army, his cause was lost, and he surrendered to Henry. A special parliament was called, headed by the magnates and London citizens. First they deposed Richard for unconstitutional acts (his claiming that the law was in his breast, illegal taxation, arbitrary judgment against Boling-broke, and others). Then they acceded to Bolingbroke’s claim to the throne (as one of the two closest claimants by blood, and the closest in the male line). Richard was taken to the Tower of London and later was done away with at Pontefract Castle.
Richard II abdicated, but to make sure of his abjuration of the throne, the magnates saw to it that he was also deposed. The charges against Richard, which consisted of twenty-nine articles, do mention his sodomite behavior—to please the churchmen and perhaps further inflame the London populace against the King. Gaunt had seen disaster lurking, and he protected Richard even against his own son, Bolingbroke. After Gaunt came the deluge.
Gaunt believed in the sacred nature of anointment to the kingship. He believed in primogeniture, under which in 1377 Richard, the then ten-year-old son of Gaunt’s elder brother Edward, had inherited the throne.
Undoubtedly Gaunt would have loved to wear the crown. But that was outside the realm of possibility. Above all, Gaunt was a Plantagenet who wanted to maintain the dignity of the bloodlines of his family.
What Gaunt would have thought if he had lived another eighteen months and witnessed his son Henry Bolingbroke usurp the throne with approval of Parliament is hard to say. Gaunt would certainly have had mixed feelings, and if Bolingbroke in exile in France had consulted his father on his plan to invade England and push his cousin off the throne, it is probable that Gaunt would have discouraged him.
Henry IV was a typical magnate, devoted to the hunt, politics, and the pursuit of women. He had gained fame, probably undeserved, participating in a crusade against heathen Slavs on the eastern border of Germany. Bolingbroke already had a son in 1399; that son, in 1413, would become Henry V. The Lancastrians ruled until 1471, to be replaced by the Yorkists.
Because of Bolingbroke’s usurpation of the throne in 1399 with the approval of Parliament, Henry IV and his Lancastrian successors were always gentle in their treatment of Parliament, including the House of Commons.
The gentry and burgesses in Commons by 1450 were asserting the “liberties of the House of Commons”: freedom of speech in Parliament, freedom from arrest while Parliament was in session, and freedom to decide on disputed elections to the House of Commons. The Lancastrian monarchy ignored these radical demands. They were not realized until the seventeenth century.
In the third volume of his three-volume Constitutional History of England, William Stubbs, Victorian Britain’s greatest medieval historian, postulated the existence of something he called “the Lancastrian Constitution.” From the accession of Henry IV in 1399 until the replacement of the Lancastrian dynasty by Edward IV of York in 1471, Stubbs saw operating in England a constitutional system and principle in which the king ruled in cooperation with Parliament, a foreshadowing of Britain’s modern constitution.
Twentieth- and twenty-first-century historians have rejected Stubbs’s protomodern Lancastrian Constitution. It is true that Henry IV, his son, and his grandson were sensitive to parliamentary power, but this is seen as a pragmatic development, not a course of action based on a constitutional principle.
Whether the Lancastrian Constitution was a pragmatic thing or was founded on enunciation of a protomodern principle, it predated 1399 and can be seen in John of Gaunt’s careful and manipulative but nonauthoritarian dealings with Parliament, and especially the House of Commons. Gaunt played politics and sought to control elections and massaged the MPs. He avoided conflict with them as far as he could.
This fits in with our general picture of Gaunt as at bottom a moderate person who accepted the world he had been born into, sought to affect it at the margins, but never used his wealth and image to confront and change his world. He was open to new ideas but made his own liminal judgment as to how far he could go with these novelties. He loomed large on the public stage, but essentially he was a private person committed to his family. He was willing to acknowledge defeat and to compromise with reality. He was an enlightened and energetic aristocrat who lived at the dividing line between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.
Gaunt knew that he was the beneficiary of good fortune and the blessings of history. But he also was aware of the social, political, and cultural contexts that limited what he could do with inherited wealth, status, and power. He was the model for successful elites in all times and places—courageous, literate, conscientious, but forever conscious of the limits to what great wealth and high station could achieve.
Politics is the distribution of power and of the benefits of power. Who gets what, where, when? Politics involves “the political nation,” that is, the people who really count at a given time and who derive the benefits from the distribution of power. The political nation comprises opinion makers. They are the people whose cooperation and advice are needed by even the most authoritarian governments.
In Gaunt’s time the political nation consisted of about 5 percent of the free male population. They were the lay and ecclesiastical lords and the Commons, members of Parliament who represented the upper stratum of the gentry, selected by the shire courts and by the merchant classes in the towns. Even as late as 1832, the date of the first Parliamentary Reform Act, the political nation was still circumscribed at 5 percent of the male population.
In 1376 England had sufficient bureaucrats that the government could have been administrated centrally from London in an authoritarian manner. The slowness of communication presented a problem, but not an insuperable one. Yet Gaunt chose to deal with the obstreperous Commons in a mild way. He simply manipulated the electoral system to get MPs who would do his bidding in 1378.
In 1376 he could have dismissed Parliament angrily and hunted down and harassed the MPs. He chose not to pursue this draconian method partly because his temperament was one of caution and accommodation. But that was not the only reason for his moderate behavior.
The key here was the framework of the common law. By this time there was well entrenched in England a system of circuit judges, grand juries, “petty” juries in criminal cases, and juries in civil (property) actions as well as in the fast-developing areas of “torts” or liability.
The political system of Parliamentary government was connected to this judicial system. Gaunt could not dismiss the Commons and hunt them down and punish them without raising misgivings in society about the stability of the common law. The shire court was the key institution that embraced both politics and law. It was the court of first jurisdiction for civil and criminal actions, and also the place where MPs were elected. In both law and politics there was a significant level of autonomy and corporate self-government. Whatever his personal feelings may have been, Gaunt could not challenge this interconnected system.