Twelve

Time Honour’d Lancaster

‘My body to be buried in the Cathedral Church of St. Paul, of London, near the principal altar, beside my most dear late wife Blanch, who is there interred’.

The Last Will and Testament of John of Gaunt, 1340–99

On 24 April 1385, two Florentine merchants named Peter Mark and James Monald, ‘of the Society of Albertini’, received their expenses for a long trip from London to Florence on behalf of the King of England.¹ The six pounds that they received in recompense for their journey covered the cost of their passage, their stay at inns and guesthouses for pilgrims and travellers, and the inevitable cost of feeding and shoeing their horses. The King had charged the two men with a personal errand: to carry a gift to Pope Urban, of a ‘gold cup and a gold ring set with a ruby’, and also a ‘Book of Miracles of Edward late King of England, whose body was buried at the town of Gloucester’.² As Edward III and Edward I were buried in Westminster Abbey, there can be no doubt who Richard was referring to: his great-grandfather, Edward II, who was deposed by Isabella and Mortimer in the political coup of 1327. The decorous gift that Peter Mark and James Monald were charged with carrying was Richard’s second attempt to have his ancestor canonised, thanks to his firm belief that Edward II was a martyr. In the latter part of his reign, Richard was known to have visited his great-grandfather’s tomb at Gloucester. Richard’s interest in Edward II meant he was familiar with the historic feud between the late King and his cousin Thomas of Lancaster; the feud that ended in revenge and bloodshed. Thomas of Lancaster’s rebellion may have stewed in Richard’s mind in the late 1390s, as tension between the Crown and the House of Lancaster bubbled to the surface. Richard’s resentment of the power and potential of John of Gaunt and Henry Bolingbroke became increasingly clear as he began to alienate them from his inner circle of advisors and courtiers. Richard’s pursuit of sainthood for his great-grandfather was likely an identification of his own fears: usurpation and murder at the hands of those closest to him.

By the end of the 1390s, John of Gaunt became concerned over the future of his family and his estate and began put his affairs in order, writing his will in 1398. Around this time – after his marriage to Katherine – Gaunt’s grip on domestic politics began to slacken as Richard leant on other members of the nobility, particularly his cousin Henry Rutland, son of Edmund, Duke of York. During the 1390s, Richard promoted Rutland to Constable of England, Constable of the Tower and Dover Castle, Admiral of England and Warden of the Cinque Ports – coastal towns in Kent, Essex and Sussex – and bestowed on him the Lordship of the Isle of Wight. Richard also promoted his half-brother John Holland, who became Chamberlain of England. A former Lord Appellant, Thomas Mowbray, captained Calais. John of Gaunt and Henry Bolingbroke were notably absent from Richard’s inner circle.

Henry Bolingbroke deliberately avoided court and politics and, in 1396, stated his intention to leave England to chase adventure in Friesland, to aid the Counts of Hainault and Ostrevant in crushing a rebellion that had spiralled out of control in the region. Bolingbroke was invited by ‘his cousins of Hainault and Ostrevant’ who sent an emissary to England to recruit men and archers for their war. On a diplomatic trip to England, the Duke of Guelders advised Gaunt against his son’s trip, suggesting ‘the expedition would be attended with much danger’. Henry Bolingbroke was eager to leave, whereas after Guelders’ intervention, Gaunt was firmly against the journey. The dispute caused a rift between father and son, yet the journey to Friesland was no more perilous than Bolingbroke’s years fighting alongside the Teutonic Knights. It is more likely that John of Gaunt wished to keep his son close, due to Richard’s volatility. With the House of Lancaster already treading water with the Crown, Gaunt could not risk losing his heir.

Despite Richard’s melancholy, hope emerged after the death of Anne of Bohemia, for a truce with France was finally decided. It was agreed that England and France would be at peace for twenty-eight years, and Richard was betrothed to the daughter of Charles VI, Isabella – she was only seven years old. The settlement of the King’s new marriage suggests that, by this time, John of Gaunt had been elbowed out of Anglo-French politics as, surprisingly, he was not involved in the negotiations; instead, they were managed by Thomas Mowbray and the Earl of Rutland. However, it is possible that it was ill-health that prevented Gaunt from travelling to France. In a letter to the King, he referred to an illness that often left him incapacitated.³ Nonetheless, the Duke of Lancaster oversaw the finalisation of the marriage agreement with the Duke of Burgundy and was part of a grand spectacle at Ardres. The town was a short distance from Calais – the same site of the Field of Cloth of Gold, held 120 years later. In early October, at Ardres, surrounded by sumptuous courtly splendour, the monarchs of England and France attended four days of talks, before the marriage between Richard and Isabella was settled to take place at the Church of St Nicholas in Calais five days later. John of Gaunt loyally – and possibly in pain from whatever malady afflicted him – attended the second wedding of his nephew to his child bride, having sworn to oversee the safe return of the French Princess to Paris should Richard die. The marriage – despite the large age gap – promised a new beginning for England and France. However, with a secure truce, Richard turned his attentions inward and began to pick away at the underlying resentment that he had harboured against his critics for a decade.

Around the time of Richard’s marriage to Isabella, he began to heavily invest in his self-image. One of the most striking examples of this is the Wilton Diptych, a dual-panelled altarpiece commissioned by Richard around 1396 that is steeped in symbolism. On the left panel, Richard kneels, his hands clasped together in prayer. Although Richard was an adult by the time the Diptych was painted, he is pictured here as a boy – around the same age as his great triumph against the rebels at Smithfield. Behind him stands Saint Edmund, Edward the Confessor and John the Baptist and facing him, gazing down at his youthful face, is the Virgin Mary and Christ Child. Richard is innocent, saintly, blessed by the Holy family, yet elsewhere in the painting lies a symbol of personal power and vanity. Behind the Virgin and Child are a line of Angels, all wearing Richard’s personal emblem, his badge of authority – the white hart. A seated white stag with a golden collar around its neck was a symbol used by Richard continuously in the latter years of his reign. As Richard developed Westminster Hall, his domain, he was sure to include the emblem of the white hart along the stringcourse, the horizontal band on the exterior wall. The emblem was not only used in art and architecture, but as a military insignia. The army that fought for Richard, from Cheshire, wore the white hart to demonstrate that they were in the King’s service. Richard’s emblem littered Westminster, but the most powerful representation of his kingship is in the beyond life-sized Westminster Portrait painted in the 1390s. Unlike the Wilton Diptych, Richard is shown as an adult, bearded, crowned and enthroned and stares directly at the viewer with a penetrating, almost chilling gaze. Although portraits of monarchs and nobility became fashionable from the fifteenth century, such a picture was uncommon and no parallel to the Westminster Portrait survives. By investing in the projection of his image and his emblem, Richard was trying to forge his identity as a King, an icon, whose authority was supreme.

 

Lords and Commons congregated at Westminster Abbey clothed in furs and wool capes for protection against the bitter cold, prepared to endure a long winter Parliament. In November, shortly after the royal wedding at Calais, the King dispatched summons to Parliament which would be held in the refectory of Westminster Abbey, as Westminster Hall was undergoing renovation. The King’s most pressing issue was an ambitious promise he had made to the King of France during the negotiations at Ardres. In pursuit of an end to the Papal Schism, Richard had promised to assist Charles VI in a joint expedition against the Duke of Milan. All of this was an attempt to earn the respect of the French King. However, the Commons were visibly against the proposal and flatly rejected the request for a subsidy. Smelling a rat, they suggested that if Richard wanted to play into the hands of the French King, he would have to pay for the cost of the expedition himself. Eventually, the Milanese proposal was abandoned, for Charles VI suffered another period of psychosis – having most famously believed he was made of glass – and was unfit to campaign, but the Commons’ response to the request lingered with Richard, eating away at his self-importance.

After the King had eaten on a cold February day, he summoned the lords into his presence. The nervous audience of clergymen and the nobility shuffled into the King’s chamber and waited to hear what he had to say. Richard complained that the Commons had acted contrary to his regality, nodding to a statement that he had received, noting that the expenditure of the King’s household was excessive. Richard’s response was theatrical, taking ‘great grief and offence’ at the accusation. Spitting with rage, he ordered John of Gaunt to command the Speaker of the House, a knight from Lincolnshire named John Bussey, to find out who had included the criticism of his expenses on the bill.⁴ Eventually, a name was delivered to the King; a clerk called Thomas Haxey had produced the offending bill. A terrified Haxey was arrested and gave a grovelling, tearful apology, and it seemed – for a short while – that the matter was laid to rest. Five days later the clerk was summoned to the White Chamber at Westminster where he was questioned by John of Gaunt and subsequently condemned to death as a traitor. This act of injustice suggests that Gaunt was eager to remain in the King’s favour, even at the cost of the life of a clerk.

The day before John of Gaunt questioned the clerk for treason, Richard had granted his wish to have his Beaufort children legitimised. As the ‘undoubted emperor in our realm of England’, Richard declared all four of Gaunt’s children, ‘by the plenitude of our royal power, and with the assent of Parliament’, to be fully legitimate and able to inherit ‘whatsoever honours, dignities, pre-eminencies, status, ranks and offices, public and private, perpetual and temporal, feudal and noble there may be . . . as fully, freely and lawfully as if you had been born in lawful wedlock’.⁵ For Gaunt, this was a crucial part of securing his dynastic future. It was also through this declaration that the course of English history was altered, with the Beaufort’s Tudor descendants usurping the Plantagenets a century later. Although John of Gaunt had previously contended the Commons’ reproach on royal lifestyle choices, it is unlikely that he considered Thomas Haxey to be a traitor to the Crown. His uncharacteristic support of Richard’s drastic treatment of the clerk was surely to avoid antagonising the King after one of his greatest requests had been so recently granted.

Prior to Haxey’s sentence being carried out, the condemned man was under the supervision of Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Arundel – the brother of Richard Arundel, a Lord Appellant. The Archbishop approached Richard asking him to pardon Haxey, rather than deliver such a cruel fate. Remarkably, the King agreed. These whiplash actions were an unsettling demonstration of power and manipulation that would become Richard’s hallmark in the final years of his reign. Shortly after the January Parliament and the Haxey affair, Richard was invigorated with power, knowing that he made men fear him. Before long, he made his first move against the enemies he had quietly observed over the previous decade.

 

On 10 July 1397 the Earl of Warwick climbed on board a barge destined for Coldharbour House, situated on the northern banks of the River Thames within the heart of the City. He had been invited to a banquet in the King’s honour at the mansion home of John Holland, the Earl of Huntingdon. The King had also invited the Duke of Gloucester and the Earl of Arundel, who had rejected the invitation and cautiously remained at his castle in Surrey. Unfortunately for Richard – who was eager for dramatic vengeance – the Duke of Gloucester was also unable to attend, for he was bedridden with sickness at his home in Pleshey, Essex. Only the Earl of Warwick came that night to dine with the King, where he ate well and was lavishly entertained.

At the end of the banquet, the unassuming Earl was arrested and immediately imprisoned at the Tower of London. As Warwick was bustled out of Coldharbour House, an army was already on its way, marching through the night towards Gloucester’s residence. As the army stamped across the countryside, Thomas Arundel, the Archbishop of Canterbury, rode hard to his brother’s home in Reigate where he arrived by nightfall, breathless from his journey. Thomas Arundel beseeched his brother, the Earl, to give himself up. Arundel had the option to run and hide, or give himself up as an innocent and hope for a fair trial. He was soon arrested and dispatched to Carisbrooke Castle, whose Lord was Richard’s cousin, the Earl of Rutland.

With a deep, personal interest in vengeance against his uncle, Richard accompanied the force that rode through the darkness to arrest him. Judging by the events ten years earlier, he assumed that Gloucester would already have assembled an army. When the horses clattered closer to the Duke’s home, the household was woken and a disorientated Gloucester stumbled from his bed, accompanied by his scared and tearful wife. In an eagerly anticipated moment, Richard personally arrested the stunned Duke of Gloucester, and swore to his uncle that he would receive the same treatment as Simon Burley.

The Duke of Gloucester was already a contentious political figure and showed himself to be consistently hostile to peace negotiations with France; it is unlikely his arrest came out of the blue. Froissart’s account of the situation is probably exaggerated, but he does accuse Gloucester of plotting against the King, providing ample opportunity for Richard to legitimately enact his revenge. Allegedly, Gloucester had been attempting to rally the Londoners into rebellion and, with the Earl of Arundel, ‘plotted to seize his person [the King] and that of the Queen and carry them to a strong castle where they should be confined under proper guards’, and then ‘four regents should be appointed over the Kingdom of whom the Dukes of Lancaster and York were to be the chief, and have under them the government of all the northern parts . . . the Duke of Gloucester was to have for his government, London and Essex and that part of the country to the mouth of the Humber . . . the Earl of Arundel was to have Sussex, Kent, Surrey, Berkshire and all the country from the Thames to Bristol.’⁶

Gaunt and his brother, the Duke of York, had wanted nothing to do with Gloucester’s alleged coup and, according to Froissart, they absented themselves from the tumultuous situation to go north on a hunting trip. Less than a week later, Gaunt was nonetheless expected to publicly announce that he had given his assent to the arrests. Katherine Swynford went with Gaunt – possibly at his request, for her safety – despite her active role caring for and educating the young French Queen. With Katherine’s background as a governess for Gaunt’s two daughters, it is likely that her affections as well as her duties were engaged with the child bride. The Lancastrian party went north and Gaunt left the King to handle the situation, an action that Froissart supposed he came to regret, for he lost the opportunity to mitigate Richard’s drastic revenge.

Despite Gaunt’s absence, the Lancastrian force was fully behind the King, committed to guarding his person. Henry Bolingbroke loyally commanded a force of men at arms and archers to protect the King whilst he stayed at Nottingham. Richard worked tirelessly to uncover proof of Gloucester’s plot against him before holding a council to decide the fate of his prisoners. Without Gaunt present to reason with the King, the outcome was inevitable and Richard was as heavy-handed as he wished. Warwick and Arundel were to be tried for treason, but the fate of the Duke of Gloucester was more complicated. If Gloucester were put on trial, John of Gaunt would naturally preside, as Lord High Steward of England. It was rightly assumed that Gaunt would not send his brother to the executioner, so a covert operation was necessary for Richard to be rid of his meddling uncle. After his arrest at Pleshey, the Duke of Gloucester had been spirited away to the garrison at Calais. With the Channel between the prisoner and his followers, an angry uprising from his supporters was less of a threat.

Thomas Mowbray was the Captain of Calais where the Duke of Gloucester was held prisoner. At the end of August 1397, Mowbray was given his second command to murder the Duke – having initially not been able to carry out the deed. Under pain of torture – and likely the promise of mercy – Gloucester admitted that he had acted treasonously and ‘wickedly’ against the King and his ‘regality’.⁷ He admitted to plots against Richard and to threatening to depose him, and begged for the King’s mercy. All of this was recorded in a document by Sir William Rickhill, a judge on the Common Bench. After his confession and Rickhill’s departure from Calais, the Duke of Gloucester was taken from the castle dungeon to an inn in the town. He was smuggled into a back room where a priest was waiting to hear his last confession. The Duke was then pinned to the ground and smothered to death with a feather mattress.

 

Members of Parliament were quiet as the breeze whipped through the open-sided tent and strained to hear the new Chancellor, Bishop Stafford of Exeter, open proceedings. He took Ezekiel 37:22 as his theme: ‘There shall be one King over them all . . . for the realm to be well governed, three things were needed: first the King should be powerful enough to govern; secondly, his laws should be properly executed; and thirdly, his subjects should be duly obedient’. The Chancellor went on to add that the King – in order to govern sufficiently – must be permitted ‘his regalities, prerogatives and other rights’. Amongst the lords present at the outdoor Parliament, watching the Chancellor make his address, were John of Gaunt and his son Henry Bolingbroke. They had both been permitted by the King to bring armed retinues to Westminster and both were anxiously prepared to play their part in keeping the peace. It is certain that by this stage both Gaunt and Bolingbroke were aware of the death of Gloucester, for the King had ordered a proclamation to be released at the end of August announcing it – from natural causes.

Richard had largely remained at Westminster prior to the trial of the Earls of Warwick and Arundel. He was protected by a private army, mostly made up of Cheshire archers, who were an unwelcome bullish presence in London. Parliament met on the feast of St Lambert, 17 September, in a large tent in Palace Yard as renovations to Westminster Hall were still underway, providing a hammering din throughout the proceedings. The tent was surrounded by soldiers, adding to an already tense atmosphere. According to Thomas Walsingham, the nobles of the kingdom attended nervously, ‘by their fear of the King’, and were allowed to bring their retinues only if they held a licence. The Commons was made up of a very different crowd to the previous Parliament and was wholly compliant; almost half the Members had never previously stood in the Commons, and the Speaker, Sir John Bushy, was one of Richard’s most trusted men. It appeared as though the King had heavily rigged proceedings in his favour.

The main cause of the Parliamentary summons was the trial of Warwick and Arundel, who had been charged with an ‘Appeal of Treason’, echoing the same appeal presented to the King in 1387. On the feast of St Matthew, four days after the opening of Parliament, the King’s cousin the Duke of Rutland, along with Thomas Holland and the Earls of Nottingham, Somerset and Salisbury, Lord Despenser and William Scrope, walked into Parliament all dressed in red silk robes, banded with white silk and powdered with letters of gold. They then ceremoniously handed the King the appeal against the traitors, which they had prepared at Nottingham. They accused Thomas, Duke of Gloucester; Richard, Earl of Arundel; Thomas, Earl of Warwick; and Thomas de Mortimer of ‘having traitorously risen in armed insurrection against the King at Harringay Park’.⁸ This accusation was in reference to the original uprising against Richard in 1387.

After the court was seated, the first of the accused – the Earl of Arundel – was brought forward wearing a scarlet hood and was ushered before John of Gaunt, who as Steward of England was expected to conduct the trial. Gaunt gestured to the prisoner and asked him to ‘remove your belt and his hood’ before loudly reading the charges against the Earl who adamantly denied his guilt.⁹ Arundel stuck fast by the pardon he received from the King after the 1387 uprising, which had later been revoked, and continued to deny his treachery. The court quietly watched as John of Gaunt sharply rejected the accused Earl’s bold defence. Despite his best attempts at redemption, Arundel had been cornered, for it is likely that he had suggested forcible removal of the King. As the Earl insisted his innocence, Henry Bolingbroke angrily rose to his feet and reminded Arundel of his former intention to ‘seize the King’. With this, Richard ordered his uncle to speak the inevitable sentence: ‘I, John, steward of England, adjudge you a traitor, and sentence you to be drawn, hanged, beheaded and quartered, and the lands descending from your person, both entailed and unentailed, to be forfeited forever by you and your heirs’. The condemned Earl was then manhandled through Cheapside to Tower Hill, followed by ‘a great crowd of citizens’ who were eager to witness the bloody dispatch of a noble. In a final act of mercy, or honour for Arundel as a nobleman, Richard spared him the agony of being hung and drawn. Instead, he was forced to his knees and his head was severed from his body. According to Thomas Walsingham, ‘the colour in his face remained the same the whole time’. The Earl, who bravely stood up to a tyrannical King, never paled at the imminence of his death.

Three days after Arundel’s execution, his brother Thomas was removed from his position as archbishop and banished. Warwick was brought to trial, ‘sobbing and whining’ as he desperately begged for mercy. After initially receiving the same sentence as Arundel, he was granted some clemency and was banished to the Isle of Man. Thomas Mortimer was also banished, and the Duke of Gloucester was posthumously tried and declared a traitor.

It is highly unlikely that John of Gaunt condoned the sentence, or truly believed that the Duke of Gloucester was a traitor. Gaunt vigorously upheld royal authority, yet he was also unbendingly loyal to his immediate family above all. The only reason that Gaunt could possibly have to remain silent whilst Gloucester met a sorry end was to protect his heir, who stood perilously close to the block himself: it smacks of the probability that Gaunt chose to save his son, rather than his brother. As Gloucester was condemned as a traitor against the Crown, a devastated John of Gaunt quietly wept.

It was pitch black in the graveyard of Austin Friars on the night of 1 October. The silence was pierced by a handful of men who clumsily carried torches to aid the Duke’s path towards the fresh grave of the Earl of Arundel. After Parliament was adjourned until the New Year, Richard quietly ordered Gaunt to conduct a covert and macabre mission.

Damp soil, glazed with dew, was piled to the side of the grave as men dug deep into the earth. A heavy corpse was exhumed, which Gaunt identified as the stinking body of the Earl of Arundel. The Earl’s lifeless form was carefully raised from its resting place and placed on a cart, which was duly wheeled off into the night.

The body of the Earl – who had fought his hardest against condemnation in Parliament – had attracted interest as a political martyr. London had historically been loyal to Gloucester and, without his body to mourn, the mob’s attention was turned to the other executed Lord Appellant. With no respect for the dead, Richard demanded Arundel’s body be moved to another location before any cult around him could gain momentum. In compensation for overseeing the morbid deed, Richard granted John of Gaunt a portion of Arundel’s land in Norfolk.

 

At the end of a politically turbulent year, Henry Bolingbroke rode towards London from Woodstock, where he had just spent two nights with the King. For Henry – although cautious – all appeared well. He had recently received the Dukedom of Hereford and was, seemingly, in the King’s favour with little cause for concern. As he rode through Brentford, he crossed paths with the former Appellant and Captain of Calais, Thomas Mowbray, who had also been elevated in status, to the position of Duke of Norfolk. On seeing Bolingbroke, Mowbray veered his horse over to the newly appointed Duke and began to offer him secret information. According to Henry, Thomas Mowbray anxiously revealed his suspicions, stating ‘the King has ordered you and me to be killed, because we rode with the Duke of Gloucester’. Henry did not believe Mowbray’s assertion, and argued that the King had already pardoned both of them. However, Mowbray was adamant that the King planned to undo his pardon, and ‘annul that record’, revealing a plot that never gained ground: to kill Bolingbroke and Gaunt earlier in October. Mowbray accused Richard’s loyal supporters of hatching the plot: the Earls of Surrey and Wiltshire, Thomas Holland, Lord Scrope, Lord Despenser – now the Earl of Gloucester – and John Montagu, Earl of Salisbury. He believed that the men intended to murder him and six others, including Gaunt’s son by Katherine Swynford, Thomas Beaufort.¹⁰ Crucially, Thomas Mowbray also accused the lords of plotting ‘to reverse the judgment of Earl Thomas of Lancaster, and that would be to our disinheritance, and of many others’.¹¹ Mowbray had identified a conspiracy that would destroy the House of Lancaster. With little choice, Henry Bolingbroke went straight to his father.

The possibility of war between the nobility and the Crown had presented itself, and John of Gaunt was desperate to maintain peace and familial harmony. He advised that the best option, on the back of Mowbray’s rumour, was to go to Richard and tell him the truth. In January 1398, Henry Bolingbroke duly recounted to the King what was said in his meeting with Thomas Mowbray on the road at Brentford. Bolingbroke was evidently terrified, for shortly before he came to Richard in Shrewsbury, he visited the shrine of John Bridlington, where he prayed for safety, and as he faced the King, he may have been wearing a necklace he had recently commissioned, containing a medicinal stone, known for protection against poison.¹²

Richard carefully listened to Henry Bolingbroke’s account of his meeting with Mowbray and asked him to write it down, before issuing an order for Mowbray’s arrest. Henry met with the King at his lodgings in Great Haywood in Staffordshire, whilst John of Gaunt prepared to ride west to meet his son and attend the resumption of Parliament, which was to be held at Shrewsbury. By this point, Thomas Mowbray had been made aware of Henry’s report to the King. It is possible that he had attempted to manipulate both Gaunt and Bolingbroke into a conspiracy against Richard, but was thwarted by Gaunt’s loyalty – a crucial misjudgement on Mowbray’s part, but one that emphasises the continuing tension between Richard and his uncle. Furious that he had backed the wrong horse, Mowbray allegedly planned the assassination of Gaunt as he made his way to Shrewsbury. It has never been definitely decided whether Mowbray did indeed orchestrate such a plan, but in any case Gaunt survived. The Duke was warned of the threat and travelled to Shrewsbury via an alternative route.

Thomas Mowbray eventually gave himself up and was imprisoned in the Tower. He was stripped of office and title and was forced to await his fate in a cold, dark cell. Henry Bolingbroke cut a humble figure, apologising profusely to Richard for his role with the original Lords Appellant and begging further pardon. After a brief and agonisingly anxious period in the Tower, he was granted his freedom. Under the strain of the outcome of the Shrewsbury Parliament and his honourable advice to his son to be honest with the King, John of Gaunt fell ill. Struck with a fever, he was forced to spend his recovery at Lilleshall Abbey in Shropshire, where his worried wife Katherine stayed by his side until he recovered. The pressure of Richard’s unpredictable behaviour and concern for the safety of his son had an inevitable impact on the ageing Duke’s health.

On 31 January a commission gathered at Bristol, having received an order to handle the Mowbray conspiracy. It was led by John of Gaunt and was peppered with enemies of Thomas Mowbray; Henry Bolingbroke immediately had the upper hand. Both Mowbray and Bolingbroke were permitted to speak as John of Gaunt presided, and before the entire committee, Henry Bolingbroke revealed his anger with Thomas Mowbray, accusing him of neglecting his office as Captain of Calais, stealing Crown funds and even murdering the Duke of Gloucester. Mowbray denied all charges laid before him and it was ordered that, if the matter could not be resolved, it would have to be decided ‘by the laws of chivalry’. During a following meeting at Windsor, Mowbray admitted plotting to kill John of Gaunt, and the King offered both men the chance to reconcile their differences.¹³ Furious that his honesty had put him on the back foot, Henry Bolingbroke refused to make amends with Thomas Mowbray, and Mowbray likewise. Both men had played into Richard’s hands, and it was decided that the two great Lords of England would fight it out in a duel.

It is surprising that John of Gaunt was willing to accept this outcome to the dispute and it is highly unlikely that it was his decision. Having previously rejected Bolingbroke’s wish to fight in Friesland for fear that it would be too dangerous, Gaunt would hardly be willing to risk the life of his firstborn son and heir in a duel – even in adherence to the code of chivalry. It seems that the decision was Richard’s, in the guise of a diplomatic solution. Whatever the outcome of the duel, it would suit the King. If Mowbray were defeated, he was rid of a probable traitor and the dutiful killer of Gloucester. If Bolingbroke were defeated, he was rid of a threat, for upon the death of Gaunt – as Richard was well aware – Bolingbroke was set to inherit unfathomable wealth and power. And so the most famous duel in history – later dramatised by Shakespeare – was set to take place at Coventry on 16 September – almost exactly one year after the Parliament that rid the King of Arundel, Warwick and Gloucester. With the two remaining Lords Appellant about to fight one another, Richard had seemingly managed to play an impeccable political game.

In the five months between the announcement of the duel and it taking place, Henry Bolingbroke anxiously moved around the Lancastrian lands. John of Gaunt accompanied his son to Yorkshire where they probably hunted together and discussed the impending event. Bolingbroke was known for his skill in the lists. He was a trained knight, excellent jouster and seasoned warrior, which may have eased Gaunt’s concern for his wellbeing. However, as a nobleman, Thomas Mowbray had also received such training. News of the duel spread throughout the country, for it was going to be the spectacle of the year. Rumours even travelled overseas, as members of the French nobility wrote to Bolingbroke during the summer hiatus and Gian Galeazzo Visconti, the Duke of Milan, sent him a brand-new suit of armour, with four Milanese armourers to enable him to correctly assemble it.¹⁴

After a final, dutiful attempt to reconcile Henry Bolingbroke and Thomas Mowbray, Richard dispatched invitations to the duel. Bolingbroke’s immediate family were evidently concerned for his wellbeing. In the weeks leading up to the duel, Henry was at Kenilworth Castle – Gaunt’s favourite home – and his half-brother, Henry Beaufort, who was now the Bishop of Lincoln, ensured that the diocese prayed for his cause.¹⁵

Early on the morning of 16 September, eager spectators began to arrive at Coventry, grappling for a good view of the lists. Representatives from Scotland, France and Germany attended; the French were led by the Count of Saint Pol, who had been present at the Smithfield joust. John of Gaunt was also present, but according to Froissart, ‘seldom saw his son’ and also ‘never went near the King’. Shortly before nine o’clock, Henry Bolingbroke emerged, wearing the Milanese armour he had been gifted, with seven magnificent horses that were suitably adorned. Bolingbroke addressed the crowd – an audience of hundreds – who had come to witness a theatre of chivalry and politics: ‘I am Henry of Lancaster, Duke of Hereford . . . and I have come here to do my duty in combat with Thomas Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk, a false and disloyal traitor to God, the King, his Kingdom and myself’. He then raised his silver shield which bore the arms of Saint George – a red cross – and made his way to his decorated pavilion.

As part of a fashionable display of authority at such a tense event, the King was the next to arrive and, as he made himself comfortable, Thomas Mowbray was permitted to enter – dressed in German armour – and rode towards his pavilion. Following strict sporting rules, both men had their lances measured before the pavilions were removed from the arena and the horses were unrestrained. At the highest moment of tension, just as Henry Bolingbroke made ready for the advance, the King abruptly stood and loudly ordered the duel to stop. Bolingbroke and Mowbray backed down, shocked. The crowd – who had been denied a show – whispered and grumbled as Richard left the stand and waltzed away into a two-hour discussion over the next course of action.

His loyal man – Speaker of the Commons, John Bushy – finally returned to deliver the King’s verdict. He announced that both Bolingbroke and Mowbray were to be exiled; Henry Bolingbroke for ten years and Thomas Mowbray, eternally. John of Gaunt had been anxiously watching events unfurl. It is unknown whether he was with Richard as he came to his decision, but Gaunt quickly pleaded with the King to reduce the years of his son’s exile. Richard hesitantly ordered Bolingbroke’s sentence to be reduced, but by only four years. It is uncertain why Richard chose exile as the course of action, but it reeks of indecision. It is likely that he had been looking for an opportunity to remove Henry Bolingbroke as a political threat. Exile was a better option for the King than allowing Bolingbroke to triumph – as he probably would have – in an exhibition of knightly prowess.

John of Gaunt and Henry Bolingbroke had a month to say their goodbyes and, for Gaunt, it was a time to give welcome advice to his hot-headed son. In the immediate aftermath of the duel that never was, Bolingbroke stayed with Gaunt at Leicester and made arrangements for the welfare of his children, who were in the care of Sir Hugh Waterton at Eaton and their tutor, Thomas Rothwell. Bolingbroke suggested he might go to the Count of Ostrevant in Hainault, as he had previously hoped, but John of Gaunt instead advised that he go straight to the Valois princes in Paris to seek their support. John of Gaunt was popular in Paris, respected by the royal circle and throughout his life had conducted himself well in their presence. His suggestion for Bolingbroke to seek their help was shrewd. Richard had previously sought to impress the French King and was dependent on their truce, making it plausible that, with French intervention, he might reduce or even relinquish Bolingbroke’s sentence. Financially and logistically prepared for his exile, Henry Bolingbroke left Dover for Calais on 13 October 1398. He most likely said his final farewell to his father at Eltham Palace in Kent, where he also took leave of the King. Considering John of Gaunt’s decision to write his will the previous year, the recurring illness that had prevented him travelling and a fever that left him at the mercy of the monks in Shropshire, it is likely that he felt the gravity of his son’s possibly final goodbye deeply.

Around Christmas, two months after Bolingbroke’s departure, John of Gaunt’s health began to deteriorate and he wrote to Henry, urging him to visit his sisters, Philippa in Portugal and Catherine in Castile. It was also around this time that – according to Froissart – Henry Bolingbroke received news from Gaunt’s physicians that his father ‘laboured under so dangerous a disease, it must soon cause his death’.

From January 1399 Gaunt remained exclusively at Leicester Castle and, it appears, anticipated his approaching death, for he made amendments to his will. According to a chronicle written around twenty years later, his languor was ‘suddane’, which would account for Gaunt’s inability to attend a diplomatic conference in Scotland that year; with his Scots experience, his presence would have certainly been expected. The chronicle also reveals that Richard visited Gaunt on his deathbed, offering him words of comfort. However, such words were unlikely to allay Gaunt’s fears for the inheritance of his family, soon to be at the whim of a volatile and ruthless King. Shortly after Richard’s visit, John of Gaunt died in his bed at Leicester Castle on 3 February 1399, with his beloved Duchess Katherine at his side. He died anxious and distressed over the future of his son, Henry, and the Lancastrian dynasty he had fought tirelessly to strengthen and develop.

The chroniclers at the time paid little attention to the death of the King’s uncle, despite his influential role in European and domestic politics over the previous half-century. This means the exact cause of Gaunt’s death remains a mystery. Thomas Gascoigne, a fifteenth-century chronicler, blamed the Duke’s vigorous sex life for his demise. He claimed that when Gaunt was visited by Richard, he exposed himself to the King, to show him how his genitals had become rancid, rotting from venereal disease.¹⁶ This is unlikely, playing on earlier outraged morality over his extramarital relationship with Katherine Swynford.

John of Gaunt’s will makes no clear reference to the cause of his death, but demonstrates the great concern he had for his loved ones and the preservation of his estate. In a final act of loyalty and duty to Richard, Gaunt bequeathed him his favourite gold cup, which had been a gift from Katherine, and a gold salt cellar with a garter motif and a jewel. To Katherine he gave his most precious personal jewels, all kept together in a ‘little box of cypress wood, to which, I carry the key myself’. He carefully allocated his remaining possessions and ensured the obits that he had secured in his lifetime for the souls of his former Duchesses would continue. As Gaunt died in Leicester, a large cortège was necessary to accompany his body south. It travelled through St Albans, the home of Thomas Walsingham, who had been scornful of Gaunt in his lifetime, but may also have been one of the monks who humbly prayed over his corpse as it was laid out in the abbey for one night. As his will requested, Gaunt’s body was then transported to the Carmelite church in Fleet Street, in recognition of his lifelong commitment to the Carmelite Order.

The strangest stipulation in his will was that his body be laid out for ‘forty days’ – ten times the usual period – and that there may be ‘no cering or embalming’, before finally being buried. The longevity of the allocated period may suggest Gaunt’s repentance, humility and piety. He acknowledged his negligence of the commandments and requested three candles be burned in reference to the Holy Trinity, ‘to whom I submit for all the evils I have done’. So in a wash of candlelight, John of Gaunt posthumously hoped to be absolved of the many offences he believed he had caused God.

Nonetheless, his funeral was a magnificent affair and was attended, dutifully, by Richard, who – according to Froissart – was darkly pleased over the death of his uncle, writing to the King of France with the news ‘with a sort of joy’ but neglecting to tell Henry Bolingbroke.¹⁷ Devastated, Bolingbroke clothed himself as a mourner and held a requiem mass for his father. The King of France and the Dukes of Orleans, Berry and Burgundy attended, as they had all greatly respected the Duke of Lancaster.

Finally, as he wished, John of Gaunt was interred in ‘the Cathedral Church of St Paul, of London, near the principal altar, beside my most dear late wife Blanch, who is there interred’, around the Passion (16 March). Choosing to be buried next to his first wife, the mother of his heir, was John of Gaunt’s final honourable act. His third wife, however, loyally and mournfully followed his body on its journey from Leicester to London.

What should have been a smooth transition of status, wealth and land from father to son, became an irresistible opportunity for the King. Before Gaunt was even buried, Richard ordered Henry Bolingbroke’s exile to be extended for life. He stripped Henry of his lands and took possession of the Duchy of Lancaster himself.

As Henry waited in Paris, mourning his father, a messenger arrived with news from William Bagot, a knight who was present for Richard’s decision. Bagot took it upon himself to write to the exiled Duke, urging him to ‘help himself with manhood’.¹⁸ Henry Bolingbroke was faced with a crucial, life-changing decision: to fight an anointed King, his own cousin, for the dynastic rights and responsibilities his father had carefully accumulated and protected, or surrender all to the will of a tyrant, thus adhering to the code of chivalry, law and familial loyalty his father had sworn to protect.

 

A century after Gaunt’s death, Niccolò Machiavelli wrote: ‘[a] new ruler must determine all the injuries that he will need to inflict. He must inflict them once and for all’.

Around 4 July 1399, a small vessel bobbed about off the Yorkshire coast, finally landing at Ravenspur.¹⁹ Henry, Duke of Lancaster, leapt from the boat accompanied by around sixty men. In the North of England, he was warmly welcomed and soon began reclaiming the castles that had belonged to his father: the rebellion had begun. As Henry arrived at Pontefract Castle – his father’s favourite northern residence – ‘crowds of gentlemen, knights and esquires from Yorkshire and Lancashire flocked to join him’ and by the time he had reached Doncaster, he had 30,000 men under his command, fighting for the House of Lancaster.

The King was in Ireland at the time of Bolingbroke’s invasion and promptly returned with a force that dwindled under the realisation that Richard could not defeat his cousin. The King fled into hiding disguised as a ‘poor priest’, but eventually Henry captured him at Flint Castle and transported him to the Tower of London under ‘close guard’.²⁰ As Richard was imprisoned, Henry processed through the streets of London, lauded as a hero. His first action was to visit the tomb of his father, where he knelt by candlelight and wept. His tears were likely for his father, but also, possibly, for what Henry was about to do. At the feast of Michaelmas, an incensed Richard resigned his kingship to his cousin; in one last display of petulance he refused to hand over his crown to Henry, and instead laid it on the ground at his cousin’s feet.

‘The Lord Richard, late King, after his deposition, was carried away on the Thames in the silence of dark midnight, weeping and loudly lamenting he had ever been born’. According to the Welsh chronicler, Adam Usk, who served the Archbishop of Canterbury at the start of the fifteenth century, Richard was transported to Pontefract Castle, where he lay in chains, cold and damp and slowly starving to death.²¹ Henry IV had won his crown, but the Lancastrian royal dynasty, that Gaunt wished to be defined by honour, began in blood.