THROUGH the whole course of his reign Richard was fiercely at odds with his uncle Thomas of Woodstock. This youngest son of Edward III was so proud and quarrelsome that he had no enduring affection for any members of the royal family and was particularly antagonistic to John of Gaunt. For Richard he had nothing but contempt, resenting the accident of birth by which this boy had succeeded to the throne in his father’s stead while he, Thomas, had to bow the knee of fealty.
The bad feeling which developed between this outspoken critic and his older brother, John of Gaunt, began before the death of Edward III. John, being the favorite son of the old king, had no difficulty in getting his own very young son Henry (afterward Henry IV) admitted to the Order of the Garter. Thomas, who was twelve years older than the new member, was not chosen. In fact he had to wait until 1380, when he was twenty-five years old, for that honor to be paid him. He never forgave his brother for what he considered a deliberate slight.
A more serious breach came about in 1380 when Thomas commanded an army in northern France. But he could not induce the French army to give battle and so took his forces into Brittany where he laid siege to Nantes. There word reached him that his brother John had agreed to a truce with the new French king. This threw Thomas into a savage mood for he feared the people of England would consider the campaign a failure and lay the blame on his shoulders. He did not return immediately.
It has been pointed out in an earlier volume that there were plenty of heiresses during medieval days, due partly to so many sons of the great families being killed in tournaments and in the incessant wars. There were no richer sisters in England at this time than Eleanor and Mary de Bohun. Their father had been Humphrey, the tenth Earl of Hereford, who held in addition the earldoms of Essex and Northampton and owned broad acres and many tall castles, including Pleshy in Essex, Monmouth, Leicester, and a great, dark, drafty house called Cole Harbor in the Dowgate ward of London. On his death the division of his properties gave to the elder sister the earldom of Essex, the strong fortress of Pleshy, and a claim to transfer the post of constable of England to her husband. The earldoms of Hereford and Leicester went to the younger, with the castle of Monmouth and the tomblike house in London.
Now the elder sister had married Thomas of Woodstock and they had made up their minds between them that it would be more to their liking if they had the whole inheritance instead of half. They coolly made Cole Harbor their London home. Little Mary, who was very pretty (the elder sister lacked the Bohun beauty) and a grave and gentle child, was taken to live in the castle of Pleshy, in close proximity to a convent of the Poor Clares. It would be a proper arrangement all around, they believed, if Mary would take the vows and devote her life to the church, for, in that event, all the properties would come to them.
The Poor Clares (a popular version of the order founded by St. Clara) were the feminine branch of the Franciscans. They had bravely and sternly persevered in the strict discipline and the vows of poverty laid down for his followers by St. Francis of Assisi. They slept on boards and their lives were a perpetual fast. The members could speak to one another only on permission from the prioress. They dressed in loose-fitting gray gowns with linen cord ropes, tied with four knots to represent their four vows. They worked long hours in taking care of the poor and the sick, a thoroughly fine and self-sacrificing order.
John of Gaunt had been appointed guardian of the attractive, dark-haired Mary and he did not approve of the plan of the elder sister and her husband, unless it came about with the full consent of the younger sister. Nature, as it happened, took the decision in hand. Mary met John’s son Henry, who later became Henry IV, and the young people fell deeply in love. A match was arranged between them, although the elder sister, in the absence of her husband, opposed it bitterly.
Thomas of Woodstock returned from France still filled with umbrage over the truce his brother had negotiated. When he learned that his plans for the younger sister had been upset by her marriage, he became even more enraged, contending that he should have been consulted first. This was a proper enough objection, except that everyone knew his real concern was that Mary’s share of the fat Bohun acres and the well-filled family coffers would not now come into his hands.
The marriage proved to be a most happy one. Although Mary died before her husband became King of England, she had presented him with seven children, including four sons. She was only twenty-three when she died in childbirth with the last of the children, a girl. The four sons took after her in having the dark eyes and brown hair of the Bohuns, but each of the three girls had the brilliant and handsome fairness of the Plantagenets.
The young mother’s place in history was assured because her oldest son was the great Prince Hal of legend and song, who became Henry V of England and won the fabulous Battle of Agincourt against the French.
Thomas of Woodstock seems to have spent the first years of Richard’s reign in a state of ferment. He was incensed at not being included in the first council to direct the affairs of the kingdom during the boy’s minority, although none of the royal uncles had been selected. As a sop, he was made Earl of Buckingham and constable of England at the coronation. Just when it was that he began to assert himself in state matters cannot be determined, but it happened before he was ensconced in a position of authority by Parliament. He seems to have taken advantage almost from the first of the prerogatives of his birth to dip his fingers into the administrative pie. Certainly he was from the very beginning Richard’s most unsparing critic.
He showed little or no respect for the young ruler, brushing in and out of the royal presence without asking consent. He even addressed the boy as a stern uncle to an adolescent nephew, without waiting for permission. On occasion he would brusquely interrupt Richard’s own remarks and contradict him openly when he disagreed, as he nearly always did. It is even said that he opened the king’s letters and then turned them over, not with suggestions but with instructions as to what should be done about them.
Richard’s chief concern in these early days of his reign was to escape from under the insensitive thumb of the Bully of Woodstock.
Richard, now happily married, should have been in a position to take the reins of government into his own hands. But Parliament was almost unanimous in its opposition. Things were going badly in England. Every naval and military move that was initiated resulted either in disaster or stalemate. The financial position of the country was weak and trade was falling off as a result of the difficulties under which the Flemish cities labored. It was no time for a boy to take control of the nation.
Parliament refused to see that the country was staggering under the costs of a war which could not be won and which should be terminated. The people, still boasting of the victories won over the French, longed for the days when Edward the warrior king and the Black Prince had led the English armies. No national leader, it seemed, had the courage to come out boldly and propose that a peace be made. Instead they devoted themselves to feeble attempts at financial reform. The only spot on which the parliamentary finger of censure could be laid was the extravagance of the king’s court. Through lack of courage to face the real issue, the House selected two men who were to act jointly as councilors and be in constant attendance on the king. One was Michael de la Pole, who already belonged to the inner circle about the king, and the other was Richard FitzAlan, the Earl of Arundel.
The king went a step further and made Michael de la Pole chancellor. In that capacity Pole appeared before Parliament and stated in unequivocal terms that a final peace must be made with France unless the nation was prepared to exert all its might in pushing the war to a successful conclusion.
The members listened in glum agreement. Someone had dared at last to put into words what they all knew inwardly to be the truth. It developed at once, however, that they were not prepared for the first alternative and only half ready to accept the second course. Richard came to the House and proposed that he lead an army into France at once. He was beginning to fill out and the first downy traces of what would grow into the handsome yellow beard he wore through all of his adult life were showing on his cheeks. But although he was the son of the Black Prince and might possess the same genius for war, he was still a boy and without any military experience. The members, who were controlled by the nobility, could not agree to his proposal.
Finally the House compromised by deciding to grant supplies for a force to be lead by the warlike Bishop of Norwich in a crusade against the supporters of the French anti-Pope. It will be remembered that the bishop had won a quick victory over the clownish peasant leader, Litster, who had called himself “King of the Commons.” But he was soon to discover that facing a large and well-equipped French army was vastly different from scattering a ragtag band without any training and without proper arms. The bishop was so soundly beaten that nothing much was left of the army he had led across the Channel.
The news of this disaster reached Richard at Daventry, which he had reached in the course of a state processional through the Midlands. He was at table and he sprang to his feet, his face livid, crying out that he must return to London at once. The ladies and gentlemen about the board looked at one another with surprise and dismay. What had made the young king behave in this way? Could it be that the peasants had risen again?
With a few of his closest advisers about him, de Vere, Pole, and Burley, without a doubt, Richard took to horse and galloped the rest of the day and all through the night, stopping frequently for remounts but never for food or rest. A seventy-mile ride in one stage was cause for amazement, particularly in view of the bad roads, but some of the driving force of his father was beginning to come out in Richard. When he arrived in London, dusty and haggard and so bone-weary that he had to be helped from the saddle, he went into conference at once with his uncle of Lancaster who had remained there to nurse his disappointment over Parliament’s refusal to supply him with an army for the invasion of Spain. The boy declared that the bishop must be impeached as soon as he returned to England. John of Gaunt agreed that the too ambitious prelate should be punished. Later they found support for this step in the House, and when my Lord of Norwich returned he was ordered to turn all his temporalities over to the Crown to be applied against a fine, to be levied “at the king’s pleasure.”
Richard had been badly shaken by this further evidence of English inability to wage successful war on the continent. He retired within himself and began to make plans for a new kind of warfare by which the balance might be righted. An effort was made to keep this secret, but rumors nevertheless began to circulate. It was whispered that he was concerned with “urgent and secret affairs.” Warlike machines of fearful and wonderful design were being constructed in the Tower to equip a new royal army which Richard himself would lead; no more royal uncles, no more headstrong bishops; the son of the Black Prince would no longer consent to such makeshift leadership. The word “gunpowder” was bandied about and there was also talk of “crakys,” a term which had been applied to some form of gun or cannon to discharge the destructive force which Roger Bacon had discovered more than a century before. It was announced that one Thomas Norbury had received orders to buy up all available supplies of sulphur and saltpeter. Clearly the secret weapon the young king hoped to use in reviving the war efforts of the nation had to do with gunnery. It was, of course, the kind of thing a boy of his years would turn to and it hardly needs stating that nothing came of it. The mechanical and military genius needed to change the face of warfare was lacking.
Parliament was now desirous of peace but still would not assume any responsibility for dropping the Plantagenet claim to the throne of France. The French would not consider any terms of permanent peace which did not begin with that relinquishment. This stalemate was due to the lack of leadership from which England was suffering. With the possible exception of Michael de la Pole, who was shrewd and able, none of the men about the king or in Parliament, including the great nobles and the upper hierarchy of the church, had the courage and the wisdom to lead the nation out of this dilemma.
In earlier days it had been the custom to have Parliament meet at any place which suited the king. Edward I, the originator of so many common-sense regulations, decided this was wrong and that Westminster should be made the permanent parliamentary home. There were the best of reasons for this. A great nobleman never traveled without a long train of knights, men-at-arms, and servants, sometimes running into the hundreds. This was equally true of bishops, who felt the need of advisers, deans, almoners, and clerks of all degree; so many, in fact, that an ecclesiastical party would sometimes be a half mile long, some riding in litters, some on donkeys, some plodding along painfully on foot. Everyone shared the discomfort of a parliamentary meeting in the provinces, particularly the landholders of the neighborhood, who were expected to entertain distinguished visitors. Even the townspeople suffered, for the great lords would billet their retainers with them and then neglect to pay the bills.
It is not on record that the bishops and barons received any payment as members of the House, but the compensation set for mere knights was four shillings a day and for plain citizens two shillings. This was not enough to pay the expenses incurred. Through five successive reigns the sheriffs of Lancashire petitioned to be exempt from sending members because there were no cities or boroughs which could afford the cost. One Sir John Strange, who sat for Dunwich, asked that he be given a cade and a half barrel of herrings instead of money, figuring he would be ahead on that basis.
This being the situation, it is hard to find a reason for calling a meeting of Parliament in Salisbury in April 1384. Salisbury was an established town of consequence, with its own beautiful cathedral and the right to be represented by two members, but it was sheer pandemonium when my lords the bishops and my lords the barons and all their horses and all their men descended upon it.
It was in this bedlam that a dramatic episode occurred. A Carthusian friar, unknown to anyone although it was reported that he came from Ireland, publicly charged the Duke of Lancaster with plotting the deposition and death of the king. Just when or where he made this statement, or the details of the conspiracy, history does not say. It was not made before the House, for certainly he would not have been allowed to enter there. Probably the mad friar (for he must have known that a painful death would be his sole reward) managed to worm his way into the headquarters of the king to divulge his information. The story came to Richard’s ears, but his uncle had no difficulty in convincing him that the charge was baseless.
The solid market town of Salisbury, which had been converted into a veritable madhouse by this time, became the scene of noisy demonstrations. The popular dislike of the great Duke of Lancaster had been subsiding, but even the accusation of an unidentified friar was enough to set everyone against him again.
The friar was not sent to prison. Perhaps the gaols had been thrown open to accommodate visitors, for every building in town which boasted a roof was crowded from cellar to garret. Instead he was put into the charge of Sir John Holland, the king’s half brother, who would later be made the Duke of Exeter. It was said that this was done on John of Gaunt’s suggestion. A worse choice could not have been made, for this son of the queen mother by her first marriage was proud, cruel, and treacherous. The upshot was that on the night before the date fixed for the enquiry Holland coolly reported that the accuser had been killed. It developed that the order for the murder had come from Holland himself.
The crowded streets of the old town seethed with excitement and conjecture. Had the Duke of Lancaster connived with Holland to get rid of the witness against him? Or had the king and his party arranged the killing so that the duke would have no chance to refute the charge and thus be left under a cloud?
Thomas of Woodstock, as might have been expected, took the latter view. Although he and his brother John had continued on bad terms, he came storming into the king’s chamber and declared that the whole thing was a conspiracy. The king, he cried, had abetted it.
“I will kill anyone,” he declaimed with many oaths, his face black with rage, “who brings such charges against my brother. I will kill anyone. No matter whom!”
This could only be construed as a direct threat to the king, and as such was treason. But Richard, whose temper was sharp in most circumstances, and who was surrounded by advisers who confirmed him in an unshakable belief in kingly infallibility, had not yet been able to outgrow a fear of this browbeating uncle. The threat of violence to the royal person went unpunished.
John of Gaunt had, in the meantime, departed for his stronghold in Yorkshire, the castle of Pontefract. In some chronicles his exit is laid to a fear that his nephew would charge him with conspiracy but more likely he had sensed the rebirth of popular hatred and thought it wise to allow time for the storm to blow over. It is hard to believe him guilty. The only hint of complicity on his part is found in his preference for friars as his spiritual advisers. But that some at least of these wandering adherents to the faiths of St. Francis remained true to the strictest Franciscan rules was a proper reason for the duke’s leaning to them. In any event could he be weak enough to conceive of a treasonable design which an obscure friar would be in a position to reveal?
The situation remained tense, for Thomas of Woodstock continued to voice threats against the king and those about him. The Commons, after a month of deliberation at Salisbury, made grants which were inadequate for the waging of determined war, contending that no more was needed in view of the truce with France which had still a year to run. The policy of the members could be perfectly defined by a phrase which would come into popular use nearly seven centuries later—too little and too late.
The ailing queen mother, who had reached the stage where she wanted nothing so much as the chance to coddle her aching bones in the comfort of her regal apartments, decided she must do something to aid her son in his difficulties. The first move, clearly, was to cure the differences, if any existed, between the young king and his uncle of Lancaster. Scarcely capable of placing a foot to the ground, she set out for Pontefract, using in all probability the cumbersome and jolting vehicle in which she had encountered those rough fellows, the men of Wat the Tyler. The mighty and forbidding castle (pronounced Pumfret), which covered eight acres of ground and had the same number of tall towers, lay roughly 180 miles north of London. It would take probably three weeks for the invalid to cover that much ground in her lumbering wagon but she accepted the ordeal cheerfully and willingly. In due course she arrived and proceeded to use her best endeavors to divine what was in John of Gaunt’s mind and to bring him to a mood of complete reconciliation. In this she succeeded. The proud duke, who all his life had felt a consuming desire to sit on a throne and wear a crown of gold but had lacked the grim will to bring it about, was now accepting the inevitable. Even if the youthful king were removed, the choice would not fall on him. The English people would be willing to fight for the legal succession of the heirs of Lionel, the amiable and handsome six-foot-seven second son of Edward III or, failing that, they would prefer the belligerent Thomas to the suspect John. The only chance left was his nebulous claim to the throne of Castile. Constance, his Spanish second wife, who was living in a degree of confinement which suggested some impairment of her reason, was his sole excuse for this design. She had only one more year to live and nothing would come of his Castilian pretensions, but Richard’s mother encouraged him, no doubt, by promises of support.
From that time on, although there were continuous whispers of plotting, the great duke seems to have stood on Richard’s side, appreciating the difficulties under which that proud, not too gifted, and somewhat neurotic young ruler labored. But the same was not true of the younger uncle. This blustering member of the family, to whom the appellation of the Bully of Woodstock may fairly be ascribed, grew more and more antagonistic to Richard and even more willing to put difficulties in his path and to voice loud and sweeping criticism of everything he did.
This seems a good point to pause and propound questions with reference to the once great Plantagenets. Why did they all seem so impotent at this crisis in national affairs? Why was there so much opposition to Richard, who was still a boy and hardly likely to possess yet the force and character to be a strong king?
Perhaps the second proposition should be considered first. The fault with Richard, the chief fault as his kinsmen saw him, was his love of peace. He never acknowledged it openly but there is no mistaking the fact that he shrank from the whole issue of conflict. Possessing the pride, the passion, the revengeful traits of his forebears, he was still at this time a rather gentle and indolent boy who preferred to listen to his minstrels and to dip into those suspect instruments of weakness called books than to fight in tournaments and lead armies against the French. To one of his uncles, at least, he was a highly undesirable graft on the once vigorous and brilliantly leafed family tree. How could the war prosper and men be in a position to enjoy their real purpose in life, which was to leap into a saddle and exchange blows with everyone in sight, while the control of the nation lay in such slight and ineffective hands? Thomas of Woodstock, for one, saw only one solution to this problem. Get rid of him!
And now for the first query. It must seem to observers of the scene that the brilliant family had for the space of one generation, at least, fallen into a decline. The men were still tall and handsome and the women were winsome and lovable in the fair-haired Plantagenet way, but where was the spark, the will to accomplish, the gift of success? No longer was there a real trace of the conquering, firm governing instinct of Henry II. The desire to lead armies to war and to fight furiously with sword and mace on foreign strands and on burning deserts, which animated Richard of the Lion Heart: what had happened to that inheritance, questionable though it seems? Where was the splendid spirit of another warrior king, Edward I, who saw the need to establish decent order in law and procedure in the semi-feudal country he was called upon to rule? Where was the lavish and tinsel greatness of the successful Edward III?
The deterioration (which had broken out with several previous members of the family: the cruel John, the weak gadfly Henry III, and the sad oaf Edward II) had set in with the numerous brood that Queen Philippa brought into the world. Edward the Black Prince was the only one to measure up to the highest Plantagenet standards and yet there was as much to deplore as to admire in that hero of fixed ideas, who vitiated English strength in France to fight for a cruel, degenerate king of Castile in defense of the most rigid conception of monarchial rule, but who, because of the magnificent courage of his death, has remained a shining figure in English history. He lacked, certainly, the wisdom to make a strong and admirable king of England. Then there was John of Gaunt, suave, handsome, cultured, with great ambition, but lacking in the resolution that was the first of the great Plantagenet traits and thus is condemned to a rather shabby role in history. Two of the other sons, the amiable giant Lionel, who died early, and the mediocre Edmund of Langley, had little share of the family fineness. Finally, there was the insensitive, overbearing Thomas of Woodstock, who always appears on the pages of history in moments of black rage, in loud declamation, in selfish maneuvers.
In none of them is it possible to detect the kingly qualities of the family. Not a single spark of genius for government or war could have been struck from the Plantagenets of this generation.
Richard, who would have been happy in warm Bordeaux where he was born, was sadly miscast as King of England. His role, unfortunately for him, was to be that of target for this mediocre group who stormed and conspired around him and were as incapable as he of preserving the imperial heritage which had come down to them.
The Plantagenets would have a resurgence of greatness later—in Henry V, in that handsome and capable soldier Edward IV (until he became fat and unkempt and more interested in his amours than in the toil of kingship), and finally in the traces of grandeur which can be found in the much maligned Richard III.