A tiny scrap of humanity.1
The summer of 1394 was to claim the life of a third royal woman, that of Richard II’s queen, Anne of Bohemia. Aged 28, she passed away, probably from the plague, at Sheen Palace, on the site of the later Tudor palace of Richmond. Having been at her side until the end, Richard was so grief-stricken that he ordered Sheen be torn down, for he never wanted to return to it. As the king’s wife and a foreigner, Anne’s life followed a different path from that of her cousin by marriage, Mary de Bohun, although they shared a love of literature and courtly entertainment. Elegant and cultured, she helped Richard establish a court where art and protocol were placed above war, and her story sheds a different light on the despotic figure with whom Henry and Gaunt came into conflict.
Anne of Bohemia was born in May 1366 in Prague, a city of 35,000 people. She was the eldest of six children from the fourth marriage of Charles IV, King of Bohemia and Holy Roman Emperor, whose reign was considered a golden age in the history of Prague in political, legal and cultural terms. He encouraged the first Humanist thinkers, corresponded with Petrarch and founded universities, acted as patron to manuscript painters and consolidated the imperial states. His previous wives had come from France, Bavaria and Poland, and he was 47 when he married the 16-year-old Elizabeth of Pomerania in 1363, who brought him a dowry of 100,000 gold florins. By this time, he had already spent years working to achieve his ambition: to make Prague the most beautiful city in the world, rebuilding the castle, the St Vitus Cathedral, municipal buildings and bridges in a high Gothic style known as the Bohemian School. It was a city influenced by the artistic traditions of Northern Italy and France, creating a culturally sophisticated court that led one historian to describe Anne as a member of a ‘late-fourteenth-century international jet set’.2
Anne was raised in the Hradschin Palace, largely under the care of her elder half-brother Wenceslaus, especially after he became king following the death of their father in November 1378. The match had already been suggested by Charles the previous year, along with a host of other offers that Richard received on becoming king. Initially it was rejected as his mother, Joan of Kent, was keen on securing him a wealthy Milanese wife. By April 1379, three English envoys were negotiating with the Duke of Visconti, who had produced eleven daughters among seventeen legitimate children. There were already connections with the English royal family, Richard’s uncle Lionel of Antwerp having been briefly married to Violante Visconti, who remarried after his death to the duke’s son Ludovico. His younger sister Lucia was suggested as a candidate for the hand of Henry, Earl of Derby, following the death of Mary de Bohun, but she would later wed Mary’s cousin, Edmund Holland. Possible brides for Richard included Caterina, Agnese and Antonina, who were of an age, and were all wed in 1380. Their five younger sisters meant there was no shortage of available Visconti girls but the English were encouraged to look elsewhere by Pope Urban VI, under whose influence negotiators were sent to Bohemia. In response, Anne’s mother Elizabeth sent Duke Primislaus of Saxony, Anne’s uncle, to investigate England and determine whether it was suitable for ‘that excellent virgin, the damsel Anne’, who herself wrote to the English Council, saying she would become Richard’s wife ‘with full and free will’.3
For all Prague’s cultural status and enthusiastic building programme, there was little money left to furnish its daughters with dowries. Although a dowry was initially discussed, it was actually Richard who ended up paying Wenceslaus, in the form of a loan of £15,000, to wed Anne. Adam of Usk wrote respectfully of her, whilst stating that she had been ‘bought for a great price’.4 Richard must have been keen for the match to go ahead, as the loan made the marriage unpopular at his court and those councillors who had anticipated the arrival of a wealthy foreign queen. The English negotiators Simon Burley and Michael de la Pole had even been captured and ransomed, which set back talks until the summer of 1380. The following May, Gaunt received the Bohemian delegation at the Savoy: one of that palace’s last official functions before its destruction at the hands of the rebels in mid-June. The Patent Rolls for May 1381 record payments made to the visitors: 250 marks to ‘Peter de Wartemberg, knight, master of the chamber of the king’s brother, the king of the romans and Bohemia’; and the same amount to Conrad Crayer, ‘knight, master of the same king’s household’, and 50 marks to Crayer’s son Leopold.5 The marriage was to take place at once. Anne was 15, Richard 14.
Anne set out from Prague in September. She spent a month in Brussels as the guest of her paternal uncle Wenceslaus, before proceeding to Gravelines, accompanied by the Duke of Brabant and his duchess, Anne’s aunt. They handed Anne over to the earls of Devon and Salisbury at Calais, who conducted her across the Channel to Dover on 18 December. Richard and Thomas, later Duke of Gloucester, were awaiting her at Dover in the formidable castle perched on the white cliffs overlooking the Channel. Anne would have met a tall, handsome, fair-haired young man, ‘his face fair and rosy, rather round than long and sometimes flushed’, according to the Monk of Evesham. She would have rested and been refreshed after her journey in the three-storied Great Tower, which had been rebuilt by Henry II, safe from the storm brewing outside, which dashed her ships to pieces in the harbour below. From Dover, the couple rode the 25 miles north and west, through Canterbury to the village of Ospringe outside Faversham, where they stayed at the royal lodge, allowing the young pair a chance to get to know each other away from the eyes of the court. Their next stop was Leeds Castle, the fairy-tale Norman stronghold set in the middle of a lake which had been bought by Richard’s great-great-grandmother, Eleanor of Castile. Traditionally a location for royal honeymoons, it had been passed down through a string of English queens and Richard continued this line, granting it to Anne as a gift while they spent the Christmas season there.
Great celebrations and pageantry had been prepared to welcome Anne into London. The city dignitaries came out to meet her at Blackheath, where Richard had met Wat Tyler and the rebels the previous summer. At Cheapside, the Goldsmith’s company had built a castle, a ‘somercastell’6 suspended on cords, from which three virgins scattered leaves painted in a ‘diaper’ or lozenge pattern over the royal procession.7 The Goldsmiths wore red and black particoloured clothes, decorated with silver bars and trefoils, gold and silk knots, and red powdered hats.8 The total cost to the company was just over £35, an amount which would have bought seven horses for a knight in 1374 or been sufficient to feed his household for a year. No doubt the Londoners enjoyed the spectacle of foreign royalty: Anne and her entourage were to establish new fashions in horned headdresses, long-toed ‘cracow’ shoes and riding side-saddle: two centuries later, John Stow wrote that by Anne’s ‘example the English people had used piked shoes, tied to their knees with silken laces, or chains of silver or gilt’. Although she had not brought a dowry, Anne’s trousseau was not entirely worthless; it included the silver gilt basins and plates bearing her father’s arms which were listed in the treasure roll after her death.
In spite of the preparations, the atmosphere was uneasy; the people of London were aware that the Violante marriage would have brought greater wealth into the country and barely six months had passed since the rebels had gone on their killing spree through the streets, attacking the houses of wealthy immigrants. While the royal pair had been feasting at Leeds Castle, the city had been raising the funds required for Anne’s reception and coronation, with all the commensurate expenses for robes, decoration and display. At Blackheath, part of the decorations featuring Anne’s arms had been ripped off a fountain and destroyed by the people9 and there was resentment about the rewards for her large entourage. Although there would be periods of peace and court culture would flourish, the tensions at the heart of her husband’s reign would never dispel.
Anne and Richard were married in Westminster’s St Stephen’s Chapel on either 14 or 20 January 1382 and she was crowned shortly after, in the cathedral by Archbishop Courtenay on 22 January. She had at least two crowns, a gem-encrusted one which was made in Paris and required repairs in 1402 for the wedding of Henry’s and Mary de Bohun’s daughter Blanche, and a second, which had been held in security by the city of London, whose return Richard demanded on 1 January 1382.10 After a week of celebrations, the court moved to Windsor; a month later, they were at the Black Prince’s palace of Kennington; and later that year, Richard took Anne on progress to Bristol. The pair would have had plenty in common, with a shared appreciation of culture and court ritual, as well as devotion to their favourite saints. Richard had long been devoted to the cult of Edward the Confessor and in 1382 Anne appealed to the pope for permission to solemnly celebrate the feast day of her patron saint, St Anne, on 26 July.
Richard and Anne regularly went on pilgrimage, to give thanks and offer prayers. They began their marriage with a tour of East Anglia, visiting important shrines such as Ely, Bury St Edmunds and Walsingham, at the heart of the Marian cult, and ended their travels in spring 1394 with a visit to the shrine of St Thomas at Canterbury. They were patrons of religious and secular literature, and translations of the Gospels into English were made for Anne, a fact John Wycliffe would exploit when urging the widespread use of the Bible in the vernacular, although there is no evidence of Anne ever supporting him. This fact has also led to her being claimed rather anachronistically as one of the female founders of the Protestant Reformation. Chaucer dedicated his Legend of Good Women to Anne, as did the author of a treatise on heraldry in the 1390s, while Richard commissioned Confessio Amantis from John Gower after meeting him on the Thames around 1385 and inviting him on to the royal barge. Anne’s emblem of the ostrich, bound and chained, began to appear in the margin of English manuscripts decorated in the Bohemian style and the style of divine art was imported into depictions of royalty, culminating in the Westminster Coronation portrait and the Wilton Diptych.
An illustrated initial in a royal charter to the city of Shrewsbury depicts Anne kneeling before Richard, wearing a cloak with ermine collar, a large crown that matches his, long hair streaming down her back and stylised features. She is presented as much smaller than her husband physically and, although the perspective and relative sizes and ages of illustrated figures was not consistent in such images, this is borne out by the comments of the Monk of Evesham who described her as a little ‘scrap of humanity’. Anne is also depicted in fairly generic royal style in an altar piece in the English College of Rome, although her voluminous robes make her appear large and solid. Although it is possible that the artist never saw Anne in the flesh, the corresponding image of Richard gives the king the beard and moustache familiar from his portraits. John of Gaunt’s confessor, Richard Maidstone, who saw Anne on at least one prolonged occasion, in 1392, described her as:
A maiden too, her face enclosed by yellow hair
Her tresses neatly set beneath a garland’s gleam
Her red dress shines in colour, brightened by the gold,
Concealing underneath her very pretty limbs …
Her name is Anne; I pray she might be Anne in deed.
She’s beautiful, with other beauties all around;
Led by such Amazon, New Troy is unsurpassed.
Her dress is strewn and overspread with gleaming gems!
Carbuncle, adamant and beryl, all are there
Her head is overspread with every precious stone.11
The best visual image of Anne might be found in the Liber Regalis, which appears to have been complied, or at least updated, with details of her coronation, in 1382. Sitting on a throne facing her husband, she wears flowing blue and white robes to match his, her long golden hair loose beneath her crown, and even the cast of her features echoing his. A contemporary manuscript illustration12 of her funeral shows the effigy placed on top of her coffin, dressed in pink and white, with her arms folded, but the hair showing under her gold coronet is of a light brown. This would have been a wig placed on the wooden sculpture that now survives in Westminster Abbey, but was chosen to create the closest possible likeness to her during life. Likewise, the features of the effigy would have been modelled on those of the real Anne, perhaps shortly after death. Her tomb was inscribed with the legend ‘beauteous in body and her face was gentle and pretty’, and there is some correlation between the oval face, high eyebrows and long nose of the effigy and the face of Anne on her gilt bronze tomb, cast in 1396–99 by London coppersmiths Nicholas Broker and Godfrey Prest, to top a design by Yevele.13
One of the most interesting books to be commissioned during Anne’s queenship was The Forme of Cury, ‘cury’ being cooking, allowing a glimpse into the diet and cuisine of the royal pair. It was created by Richard’s chef on the ‘advice of masters of physic and philosophy for the health of the household’. The recipes contain typical English ingredients; vegetables such as beans, spinach, peas, onions, marrow, cabbage, mushrooms and leeks; fruits such as apples, pears and figs, along with the herbs garlic, mint, rosemary, parsley, sage and marjoram. Other, luxury, items were imported for the royal table, including whole or ground rice, sugar, saffron, cinnamon, mace, galingal, cloves, pepper, ginger, nutmeg, cardamom, caraway, raisins and dates, which would have been brought by Italian and Turkish merchants trading with Egypt and the Middle East. A few recipes indicate further foreign influence, such as Sawse Sarzyne (Saracen Sauce), which combined hops, fried almonds, red wine, sugar, rice flour, pomegranate and ‘pouder douce’ (sweet powder), Lumbard Mustard (from Lombardy in Italy) which mixed mustard seeds with honey, wine and vinegar, and Vyande Cypre of Samoun (Salmon meat of Cyprus), containing salmon, almonds, rice flour, sugar, salt and spices. The most popular flavours were sweet and strong, as testified by the frequent use of ‘pouder douce’ and ‘pouder fort’. Many of the dishes were dyed, using saffron for yellow, sandalwood for red and alkalet root for purple; some were adorned with gilded or silvered tree leaves. The royal pair also requested the translation of a treatise on urine, the examination of which was then the most common diagnostic method used by doctors, into ‘the mother tongue for the comprehension of laymen and for their governance’.14
Richard was keen to show off his bride, keeping her close to him at all times. Following the pilgrimage to East Anglia in 1383, they travelled to the south coast, through the New Forest, to Arundel, Beaulieu and Corfe. In fact, they were rarely apart.15 The marriage appears to have been genuinely close, right from the start, and Chaucer used Anne as his model for Alceste, Queen of the God of Love, although the question of their sexual relations has long since puzzled historians, largely because of their childlessness. Infertility can affect couples in numerous ways, with either partner experiencing symptomless reproductive impediments: low fertility, such as poor sperm motility, could never have been suspected during the fourteenth century, let alone treated. The inability to produce an heir could have devastating effects on families of all ranks: for a king, it could be a matter of life or death. Richard’s situation in 1399 may have been markedly different had he had a legitimate teenaged son waiting in the wings. Chronicler Walsingham’s speculations about the king’s sexuality, his choice of second wife and the chronicler’s later propaganda emulating Edward the Confessor have led many historians to conclude that Richard’s childlessness was elective, that he actually lived chastely with Anne, that they did not consummate their marriage at all, or else refrained from sex early on.
Yet Anne appears not to have given up hope of bearing a child. Apothecary bills dating from the end of her life include ingredients traditionally used to aid conception,16 and conception could not have occurred unless the couple were sharing a bed. Given his awareness of the importance of an heir and the press of rival claims at his court, it would seem remarkable for Richard to deliberately choose a chaste union. It has been suggested that religious motives dictated such a move, a conscious elevation to the condition of purity, an aspiration to deity, but Richard had outlets enough for his faith and his position would have been strengthened, not weakened, by the appearance of an heir. It was what his contemporaries expected. Richard may have been ahead of them in many ways, seeking a form of absolute kingship and ceremony that many failed to appreciate, but ultimately he wished to preserve his position. The marriage to Anne was unpopular from the start: it brought little status and no wealth. The bride and groom had not met, so there was no prior attachment, while there had been financial advantages to the proposed alliance with Milan. The question arises as to why Richard married at all, had his intentions been to live a chaste life. Even if it was for the sake of appearances, to satisfy the council, there was still a danger that the marriage might be considered invalid. Richard would have been a remarkably unusual medieval king if he had taken steps to avoid sleeping with his wife and producing a son. Conclusive proof of a pregnancy emerges from a letter written by Anne to her brother Wenceslaus, now housed in the British Library, in which the queen shares her sadness over a miscarriage she had recently suffered.17
One of the few occasions when Anne and Richard were separated was in the summer of 1385. The queen remained in London while Richard headed a force into Scotland. The campaign was less memorable than an incident that occurred in the English camp when the short temper of the king’s half-brother led to murder. According to Froissart, a quarrel had broken out between an archer in the service of Sir Ralph Stafford, who was protecting a Bohemian knight, and the squire of John Holland, son of Joan of Kent. When the archer killed the squire, Stafford approached Holland to apologise, but Holland barely gave him a chance to speak, killing him at once. On hearing the news, Richard was furious. He confiscated Holland’s lands and threatened him with death. Torn between her sons, their mother Joan pleaded on her knees for forgiveness. This was finally granted the following spring, on the promise that Holland would undertake a pilgrimage and found three chantries for Stafford, although it came too late for Joan of Kent. She died just days after the incident, at the age of 56, reputedly of a broken heart.
Queen Anne also attempted to plead for the life of those dear to her family. In 1388, she intervened directly in the events arising from the challenge mounted by the Lords Appellant. When the life of Richard’s old tutor and friend Simon Burley was threatened, she spent three hours on her knees, asking for him to be spared. The rebels’ refusal to respect her request enraged Richard and added to the festering discontent between him, Arundel, Gloucester, Henry of Derby and others. Burley had been appointed an executor of Joan of Kent’s will but neither this nor Anne’s words could save him. He was executed as a traitor by the Lords Appellant during the Merciless Parliament that year.
Anne also had to confront a family scandal that had arisen in her own household. It concerned a lady of the bedchamber who had accompanied her to England from Prague, an Agnes de Launcekrona. Richard’s cousin Robert de Vere had been married for a decade to Philippa, daughter of Gaunt’s sister Isabella, when he embarked on an affair with Agnes, scandalising the court and clashing with Anne and Richard’s formal ideals of chivalry and propriety which set the standard for the queen’s household. It has also been suggested that Agnes did not give her consent to de Vere; that she was raped or deceived, ‘copulated in nefarious marriage’, as two of de Vere’s followers appear to have abducted her for the purpose. This was not uncommon; double standards were an inherent part of the sexual lives of aristocratic men. Chronicler Walsingham described Agnes as ‘ignoble’ and ‘disgusting’, using the Latin term foeda, which implies a dirtiness associated with a lower-class woman: according to him, she was a ‘cellarer’, making her unable to refuse the advances of a man of higher social rank. It is only necessary to give the depositions in the Assize court records a cursory reading to understand just how frequently this power dynamic was exploited by men in a position of power, particularly in the context of master and servant. However, the fact that Agnes was a lady of the bedchamber means her birth cannot have been that lowly and suggests that she was a victim of Walsingham’s habitual exaggeration. That it came to the question of divorce signals de Vere’s more serious intent. Perhaps Agnes had fallen pregnant, although no child appears to have survived. Perhaps de Vere was genuinely in love.
Despite the inglorious circumstances, Anne was loyal to her fellow countrywoman. In 1387, de Vere successfully petitioned the pope for divorce and took Agnes as his second wife. Victorian biographer Agnes Strickland suggests that Anne even wrote to the pope personally to ask for his support,18 but whatever her level of involvement, the remarriage proved a deeply unpopular move, alienating the king’s mother and uncles. To set aside a woman of royal blood, a granddaughter of Edward III no less, was scandalous, a perceived fouling of the social boundaries by which an unsuitable woman was elevated. It found echoes with the examples of Alice Perrers and Katherine Swynford and challenged concepts of female worth. De Vere’s new marriage would not last though, nor would his second wife enjoy the titles that Philippa continued to use. Two years later, a new pope would overturn this match and declare the 1387 divorce to be invalid. But by that time, de Vere was in exile. What happened to Agnes after that is unknown. She may have accompanied her husband to Brabant or returned to her homeland of Bavaria.
In March 1390, Anne played more than a ceremonial role at the jousts Richard organised at Smithfield to honour Gaunt’s formal investiture as Duke of Aquitaine. According to Froissart, the occasion lasted two days and was proclaimed across Europe. In line with royal protocol, Anne was responsible for awarding the prizes, arriving with sixty of her ladies riding on palfreys, each leading a knight on a silver chain to the arena through the streets from Westminster to the sound of trumpets. She was also responsible for placing a coronet on the head of Constance, Duchess of Lancaster in recognition of her status in Aquitaine, and hosted a dinner and dancing in the Bishop’s Palace at St Paul’s.
Anne played a role of even greater significance in 1392 when she pleaded with Richard to have mercy on the people of London after he had fallen out with the bankers and a mob had attacked the Bishop of Salisbury’s residence. Richard devolved the administrative courts to York and Nottingham, imposed crippling fines, imprisoned the mayor and his officials, and appointed replacements. London’s dignitaries were forced to defer and a reconciliation took place. Richard and Anne made a triumphal return to the city in August (recorded in ‘Concordia’, a contemporary poem by Richard Maidstone, Gaunt’s Carmelite confessor), when the streets were adorned with pageants of towers, descending angels, God and a wilderness of beasts. The celebrations began at Wandsworth with aldermen on their knees, then moved into Bridgegate, where Richard was given gifts of horses and Anne received a palfrey covered in cloth of gold and red and white particoloured cloth, topped by a gold saddle. The queen’s devotions were well known: at Ludgate she was presented with a gilt-engraved tablet depicting St Anne and at a Westminster feast the next day, she was given a gold ewer in a case of beryl. The city also contributed towards the royal Christmas celebrations at Eltham that year, paying costs and sending gifts. The following summer, Richard commissioned the warden of London Bridge to pay for statues of himself and Anne to be carved into the stone gate on the bridge.19 Maidstone depicts Anne’s mercy:
They come up to the queen with humble countenance
Beseeching her, and she prays good for them in turn.
Her heart loves them, but grieves that such a famous town
Had earned the royal wrath; but ‘hope remains’ she said …
The queen is able to deflect the King’s firm rule
So he will show a gentle face to his own folk.
A woman soothes a man by love: God gave him her.
O gentle Anne, let your sweet love be aimed at this!20
If Anne’s marriage had not been welcomed by Londoners in 1381–82, she certainly gained their appreciation over the next ten years. According to Maidstone, her ‘pleasing face’ was the ‘city’s friend’, promising that ‘whatever’s in my power … it will be done’. The ‘Concordia’ allots her a long, persuasive speech, after which Richard grants her request to look favourably upon the city and Anne’s historical reputation as ‘the good’, was secured. The Westminster Chronicler records that at Epiphany 1393, the grateful city presented its queen with a jewel. Anne was also listed as a recipient in the will made by Isabella of Castile, sister of Constance and wife of Edmund of Langley, Duke of York. On 6 December 1392, Isabella left Richard a jewelled version of his personal symbol, a hart with pearls, while Anne received a gold belt with ivy leaves.21
An inventory of Anne’s jewels made in 1399 gives some idea of the splendour and symbolism with which she was adorned on ceremonial occasions. The treasury contained five gold collars bearing Anne’s badges of ostriches and ferns, set with diamonds, rubies and pearls; five gold and jewelled chaplets and a dozen gold belts, one of which was mounted with a crowned letter A. The most valuable of the chaplets, worth over £500, was set with seventy-two rubies, 150 diamonds and twelve dozen pearls. Three silver gilt basins bore the combined crowns of Richard and the Holy Roman Emperor, a tribute to his union with Anne; on another pair of basins, this same motif was surrounded by the Lancastrian ‘SS’ collar, suggesting that it was a gift at some point from Gaunt or Henry. There was also a double ostrich egg which opened to reveal Anne’s arms, which also appeared on a gold chalice and pax, for the celebration of the Mass.22 Among their possessions were listed a standing mirror supported on a base fashioned like a tree, which was set with pearls, enamelled with roses and depicted a queen on the reverse. There were fabric belts of different colours, decorated with leaves, jewels and flowers and hung with bells, a fork for green ginger and a pomander.
In the summer of 1394, the plague broke out again across Europe. Richard and Anne were at Sheen when she was suddenly taken ill. Along with Eltham, it was one of her favourite palaces. She had her own apartments and gardens there and, according to Stowe, could seat thousands of people to dine. As Froissart records: ‘the Lady Anne, Queen of England, fell ill, to the infinite distress of King Richard and all her household. Her disorder increased so rapidly that she departed this life at the feast of Whitsuntide’, which fell on 7 June that year. ‘King Richard was inconsolable for her loss,’ added Froissart, ‘as they mutually loved each other, having been married young.’ Richard swore that for a whole year he would never enter any building he had been in with Anne, except for churches, and ordered the royal apartments at Sheen to be torn down.
Three days later, from Westminster, he issued instructions to the magnates to be ready to accompany the body of his ‘beloved companion’ on its final journey from Sheen. Additional wax candles were ordered from Flanders in time for the procession on 29 July and burial on 3 August. When Joan de Bohun’s brother, Richard FitzAlan, the eleventh Earl of Arundel arrived late to the ceremony and asked whether he might leave early, Richard flew into a rage and attacked him with a steward’s wand, drawing blood. His brother Thomas Arundel, the Archbishop of Canterbury and an enemy of Wycliffe’s Lollards, praised Anne for reading the Bible in English during his eulogy. Soon after the ceremony, Richard departed for Ireland and embassies were dispatched to Scotland, Aragon and Bavaria to begin the search for a new queen of England.
Cultured and courtly, it was typical of Richard that he allowed himself to be wooed by a poem. By May 1395, when he approached the English king seeking an alliance, Charles VI of France already had three daughters – Isabelle, Marie and Michelle. In fact, after only ten years of marriage, his wife Isabeau of Bavaria had given birth to seven children and would go on to deliver five more; their fruitfulness offered quite a contrast with Richard and Anne’s empty cradle. Yet the daughters of France were scarcely out of their infancy: the oldest, Isabelle, was only 5, Marie was not yet 2 and Michelle only 4 months old. An elder sister, Anne, had died in infancy. Richard was then 28. Even if he took the eldest daughter for a wife, he would not be able to consummate the marriage and produce an heir for at least another decade. So Charles turned to poetry.
Once a soldier, Philip de Mezières was living in the Parisian convent of the Celestines when Charles commissioned him to write an epistle to the King of England. Illuminated and stretching to eighty-two folios, it laid out the reasons why the ‘very excellent and very benevolent prince and worthy king’ should consider taking Isabelle of Valois as his next bride. Charles hoped the long history of war between England and France would be concluded and urged Richard to join him on a crusade against the Turks; there was also a symmetry in the match, Mezières wrote, in righting the wrongs that had been committed by a previous French bride and the princess’ namesake, Isabella of France, who had conspired against her husband Edward II. The French argued that it would be advantageous for Richard to bring up his future wife at his own court, in order to educate her according to his tastes and mould her to his will. The opinions of the 5-year-old girl concerned, so soon to leave her home, siblings and family, were not considered important beside the benefit to France and her future husband’s wishes. There was also the question of 800,000 gold francs, 3,000 advanced immediately into English coffers. Richard was convinced.
It was in June 1395 that Froissart visited England and found his stay coinciding with Richard’s return from Ireland. He visited the shrine of Thomas Becket and the tomb of the Black Prince in Canterbury Cathedral and awaited the king, who arrived the following day with a ‘large retinue of lords and ladies’. Having been presented to the king, Froissart was privy to some of the discussions about the French match, learning that ‘if the Duke of Burgundy of the Count of Hainault had had daughters … King Richard would have willingly chosen one of them’. Initially, feeling was against the marriage, it being a ‘matter of astonishment in England that the king should be so eager to marry the daughter of his chief enemy’, and it did not ‘add to his popularity’. Richard, though, remained ‘indifferent’ to wider opinion and replied to concerns about her age that he was still ‘young enough to be able to wait’.
Richard’s choice has been interpreted by historians in a number of ways, most interestingly in terms of his sexuality. With Isabelle not quite 7 at the time of the marriage, there was no question of consummation for a number of years. Richard may have been willing to wait to father an heir, or it may have been a deliberate policy to preserve his own chastity. The chronicler Walsingham noted contemporary rumours that suggested Richard’s homosexuality and Adam of Usk relates how, in 1399, the charges of ‘sodomitical acts’ were levelled at Richard by his ‘doctors’ and bishops, though this is not specifically stated as homosexuality and could refer to sexual acts committed with a woman. It was an emotive term, as sexual irregularity in a monarch could be one too many of a swathe of complaints; it may also have been used to draw a direct parallel between Richard and his deposed and probably murdered great-grand-father Edward II. Yet Anne of Bohemia’s letter mentioning her miscarriage implies an active sexual relationship with Richard, so the king was clearly not exclusively homosexual, if he was at all. Richard could have married a woman of reproductive years; as Usk relates, in 1395 he was negotiating with King John I of Aragon for the hand of his daughter Yolande, a woman ‘very fair and of marriageable years’, but chose Isabelle. Usk calls this ‘a matter for wonder’ and explains it by arguing that Richard wanted French support to ‘pour forth his pent-up venom’ and destroy his enemies. It seems more likely that Richard was seeking the most advantageous match, swayed more by immediate questions of political survival and expediency than by any sense of urgency to father an heir. Only hindsight informs us of the untimely end of his reign: as far as he was concerned, he had decades left in which to create a family with Isabelle.
England’s new queen had been born in the Louvre on 9 November 1389. It was then a twelfth-century fortress on the western side of Paris with a huge courtyard and a turret at each corner, all surrounded by a moat. Earth ramparts had been built around it during France’s conflict with Edward III, but in the 1360s the architect Raymond du Temple had converted the interior into a royal palace, with a central spiral staircase, large windows and extensive decoration, and pleasure gardens laid out to the north. By the time the English delegates arrived in Paris in 1395, led by the Archbishop of Dublin and the Earl of Rutland, Isabelle was living with her mother in the Hôtel Saint-Pol on the Seine, leaving the increasingly mad Charles in the Louvre. Saint-Pol was considered a healthier residence, far from the fumes and pestilence of Paris, and also contained the royal library. It was considered safer for the children to be apart from Charles, whose mental health had begun to deteriorate in 1392, leading to outbreaks of violence and delusion.
On 9 March a truce was signed in Paris, to establish peace for twenty-eight years between England and France. The marriage of Richard and Isabelle was given the blessing of the French Council two days later, followed immediately by a proxy betrothal in the Sainte-Chapelle, where the Earl of Nottingham repeated the vows on Richard’s behalf. From England, the king sent his betrothed two rings, one with a diamond and one with a sapphire and a ruby,23 along with gifts of a jewel, garter robes, a bracelet and devotional tablets. Yet Richard had another aim in mind with this match. One of the clauses agreed early in negotiations was a pledge of French military support in the event of Richard’s own subjects rising against him. He had not forgotten the revolt of the Lords Appellant and was anticipating future trouble, although he could not have imagined exactly what lay ahead. Adam of Usk went so far as to suggest that the deciding factor in Richard’s marital choice was the support France could offer against the Lords Appellant, and Froissart related a conversation between Richard and the Count of Saint-Pol regarding his fears that Gloucester would rebel again. Unhappily for Richard, this clause was later dropped.
Perhaps it was in response to this clause, or at least a realistic understanding of his relationship with Richard, that led Henry, Earl of Derby, to conclude his own pact of friendship with the French. Signed in Paris on 19 June, it came between Richard’s betrothal and Isabelle’s departure for England. Henry’s ally, though, was not Charles, but his younger brother Louis, Duke of Orléans, who acted as regent during the king’s periods of incapacity and was rumoured to be having an affair with the queen. Their agreement excluded the rest of the royal family, including the king’s children, but Louis vowed that the ‘Duke of Lancaster and myself will always be united in the strictest ties of love and affection, as loyal and true friends should be’. They were to be friends to each other’s friends and enemies of their enemies, ‘aid and assist’ the other in the defence of their person in words and deeds and defend each other in war.24 This gesture of friendship would last longer than the one forged between Charles and Richard, and was terminated by Louis in 1402 only after Henry had deposed his cousin and taken his throne.
In October, Isabelle left Paris with her father and travelled to Ardres, where the English party was waiting. Richard was lodged at Guisnes (now Guines) Castle, strategically located 6 miles south of Calais and which had been besieged by the English in 1352. The kings met on the morning of 26 October, when the English dukes were presented with gifts of gold collars made by Parisian goldsmith Jean Compère, one of which was seized from Gloucester the following year, according to the treasury accounts for 1399. The young bride was formally handed over four days later, and Richard took his betrothed to Calais in a golden litter, where they were married in the church of St Nicholas on 1 November. The king’s gift to his bride was a gold chaplet set with rubies, sapphires and pearls; Gloucester and Gaunt presented her with brooches of white eagles, Gaunt’s gift laid out for her to find on a plate of spices and candied fruit after they had dined together. Henry of Derby gave her a golden greyhound.25 Isabelle had two crowns in her trousseau, both with eight fleurons, four large and four small, decorated with gems and pearls, one featuring the heraldic devices of pimpernel and Plantagenet broom.26 It was at Calais that the care of the young girl was handed over to the duchesses of Gloucester and Lancaster, Eleanor de Bohun and Katherine Swynford, whom Gaunt had married that January. Two days later the party sailed for Dover and progressed from there through Canterbury, Faversham, Sittingbourne, Rochester and Eltham and on to the Tower. The crowds who gathered on London Bridge to catch a glimpse of her were so large that several people were crushed to death. Isabelle was able to do something for the city in June: the former rights, liberties and privileges of London’s officials were restored to them ‘at the supplication of [the] queen’.27
On 4 December, instructions were issued to the sheriffs of London to attend Isabelle’s coronation ‘on the Sunday that was the morrow of the epiphany’, so 6 January. At New Year, Richard made his wife a gift of a chaplet set with diamonds, rubies and pearls and the city of London presented her with a gold chaplet worth 12,000 francs. She dined with Gaunt and Katherine Swynford at Ely Place, where they presented her with gifts of gold cups and a basin.28 Reminders of her youth come in the appointment of a French governess, Margaret de Courcy, who received an annual income of £100 from New Year’s day 1397,29 and the details of her trousseau, which included dolls with silver gilt furniture. The treasury accounts for 1399 likewise list a young girl’s trinkets. Alongside the silk chaplets – one of white and gold, colours often associated with Isabelle, decorated with a rabbit, one of red and white, and a third with rubies, sapphires and pearls and decorative ‘tissues’ or ribbon – were mirrors, rings, a rosary with large green enamelled beads, a silk missal, a casket with a gold key sent by her mother and a purse embroidered with pearls. Touchingly, her jewellery was set with clasps to allow adjustment as she grew.30 She was adorned with many of these items when she rode in procession with her ladies from the Tower along Cheapside to Westminster on 4 January. It is likely that she was crowned in the abbey the following day, the proposed date of 6 January, or on 8 January as one London chronicle mentions, although there is little surviving evidence for the occasion. One historian has even questioned whether the coronation took place at all.31
Details of Isabelle’s new household survive in the Patent Rolls for 1397. Her chancellor was Thomas Peverell, Bishop of Llandaff, and Master Richard Courcy, Margaret’s son, was her secretary, paid 40s a year. The Keeper of Robes was John Elys, John de Merville was master embroiderer, Richard Bluell was master cordwainer and her goldsmiths were Richard Bussh and Christopher Tildeslegh. Her chief tailor was John Waryng, who received 12d a day; Nicolas van Spyre, her yeoman tailor, and a yeoman of the cellar named William Leycestre were paid an annual salary of £10. The silkwoman who was appointed to serve Isabelle, Joan Denardeston, was a well-known and trusted royal employee who ‘for seven years past [had] faithfully served the king with silk and … the king’s brodery and all other necessaries within his household’, and was to ‘continue to serve in those respects both the king and Queen Isabel [sic] receiving therefore as shall be agreed upon between the officers of the king and queen and herself’.32
Another key early influence on Isabelle was Katherine Swynford, who was referred to by Froissart as the ‘little queen’s companion’ and was the second lady in the land after Isabelle herself. The queen attended the confirmation of the dukedom of Aquitaine on Gaunt on 6 July but, after that, relations between uncle and nephew soured. Froissart relates how Richard was convinced, by gossip relayed to him by Thomas Mowbray, that a plan was afoot to depose him, ‘to separate my queen from me and shut her up in some place of confinement’. Protesting their loyalty, Edmund of York, Gaunt and his duchess stayed away from court and in their absence the king seized the opportunity to take aim at his enemies.
That summer, Richard felt confident enough to strike back against the Lords Appellant for their attacks on his favourites a decade before. In July, he ordered the arrests of Gloucester, Richard Arundel and Warwick, riding in person to collect his uncle from Pleshey Castle. Gloucester, his wife Eleanor and their household turned out in surprise to welcome the king, unaware of his intentions. Eleanor would never see her husband again. When the ‘Revenge Parliament’ sat that September, charges of treason were passed: Warwick was exiled for life to the Isle of Man, Arundel was executed for treason and his brother Thomas, Archbishop of Canterbury fled into exile. An announcement was made that Gloucester had been exiled to Calais, where he had died, although the duke would not actually die, probably on Richard’s orders, for another few weeks. An illustration in Froissart’s chronicles depicts him being strangled, his hands clasped together in prayer, although other accounts describe him being smothered between two feather beds.
The anonymous author of the poem ‘A Political Retrospect’ of 1462 described the impact of the event:
The good duc of gloucestre in the season
Of the parlement at Bury being
Was put to deth; and ay sith gret mourning
Hath ben in England, with many a sharp shower
Falsehood, mischief, secret sin upholding
Which hath caused in England endless languor.
An earlier poem of 1450, ‘The Death of the Duke of Suffolk’, even names his reputed murderers as ‘Pulford and Hanley that drownyd ye Duke of Glocestar’, and the poem ‘On Bishop Booth’ also mentions drowning as the method of execution.
Gloucester’s supposed ‘confession’, admitting his treasonous intent, was read aloud in Parliament. His jewels and possessions were seized, including a signet ring with the Lancastrian swan symbol and a white enamelled swan with a chain about the neck, as well as headdresses, sleeves, garters, belts, rings, rosaries, brooches and forks for green ginger.
The impact on Eleanor was devastating, stretching far beyond her personal loss. Only two weeks before, she and Gloucester had celebrated the marriage of their daughter Anne to Edmund Stafford, a younger brother of the Ralph who had killed John Holland, to whom the earldom had passed in 1395. Now legally the widow of a convicted traitor, Eleanor fled to Barking Abbey, where her daughter Isabel was a nun, and paid to recover certain items from Pleshey which were in the hands of the receivers. In February, ‘at the king’s gift’, she had returned to her two carriages containing her ‘body garments’ and other small items worth around £19 which had been confiscated by the Mayor of London.33 By 1 March 1398, she had parted with £104 for silver gilt vessels, £160 for two groups of silver, and £440 for the recovery of other items from the castle and London. Gaunt and Edmund, Duke of York reacted with fury and horror to the murder of their brother. However, the treacherous pair Pulford and Hanley named in ‘The Death of the Duke of Suffolk’ as responsible for Gloucester’s death were never brought to justice. Instead, two other reputed murderers, Hall and Serle, formerly in the employ of Thomas Mowbray, Captain of Calais, would be tried and executed for the crime during the reign of Henry IV, Gloucester’s nephew and brother-in-law.
Eleanor did not long outlive her husband. Her son Humphrey died on 2 September at the age of 18, which may have hastened her own death on 3 October 1399. Her will was made before Humphrey’s demise, as she bequeathed to him a psalter ‘well and richly illumined with gold enamelled clasps, with white swans and the arms of my lord and father enamelled on the clasps, and with gold mullets on the binding; this psalter was left to me with remainder to my heirs, and was to pass from heir to heir’. She also left ‘a coat of mail with a latten cross on the spot over the heart which belonged to my lord his father’ and ‘a gold cross hanging by a chain with an image of the crucifix and four pearls round it, with my blessing, as the possession of mine which I loved most’.34 She was buried in Westminster Abbey, in the chapel of St Edmund, with the de Bohun swan emblem above her head.
But just as Richard struck at his enemies, the wheel of fortune was to turn against him and his young bride Isabelle would not have seen it coming. She was enjoying the position and benefits of queen, though she was too young to exercise real power: her main residences were Eltham and Windsor and, by June 1398, she was also recorded as having a court at Isleworth, on the Thames 8 miles from central London. It was a royal manor house, part of the Duchy of Cornwall, surrounded by extensive grounds that are now part of Twickenham Park, where Henry IV would later found Sion Abbey. The first moated house on the site, with inner courtyard, two bedchambers, tiled roof, outer courtyard and mill, had been burned down in 1264 and may have been rebuilt along similar lines. It was a traditional property of English queens, having been granted to Isabella of France in 1327, Philippa of Hainault in 1330 and held for life by Anne of Bohemia. Much of Isabelle’s time was devoted to her education, and she was tutored and prepared for her role by Margaret de Courcy. When the heir to the throne, Roger Mortimer, died at the age of 24 in July, Isabelle was the recipient of all his estates, rents and properties until the majority of his heir, who was then only 7 years old.
Isabelle’s reign and marriage had barely begun before it all unravelled. In November 1398, a comet ‘burning with extraordinary intensity’ was seen in the sky for eight successive nights. It was interpreted by the chronicler of Saint-Denys to herald revolution or the death of a king. Although Richard had taken steps in 1397–98 to remove his rivals and enemies, his position was not secure. Isabelle had only been England’s queen for three years when, at the age of 9, her crown was removed.
1 Hector.
2 Thomas.
3 Costain.
4 Thompson.
5 Parliament Rolls, Richard II, May 1381.
6 Jefferson.
7 Lancashire.
8 Cherry.
9 Hilton.
10 Stratford.
11 Maidstone.
12 Froissart.
13 See Westminster Abbey’s webpage.
14 Bennett.
15 Gillespie.
16 Geaman.
17 Ibid.
18 Strickland.
19 Carlson.
20 Maidstone.
21 Stratford.
22 Ibid.
23 Ibid.
24 Monstrelet.
25 Stratford.
26 Ibid.
27 Calendar of Patent Rolls (CPR), Richard II, December 1396.
28 Weir.
29 Hilton.
30 Stratford.
31 Weir.
32 CPR, Richard II, October 1398.
33 CRP, Richard II, February 1398.
34 Ward.