LORDS OF THE FIELD (1387–1389)
Although the addition of Henry and Mowbray broadened the opposition to the king, it also made it more brittle, for this was a coalition shot through with personal and political differences. Henry and Gloucester had still not resolved the division of the Bohun inheritance; Mowbray and Warwick entertained rival claims to the lordship of Gower (Glamorgan); Mowbray had plotted against Gaunt's life in 1385.1 However, the real fault-line was how far each was prepared to go to purge the court and reform the royal administration. Gloucester and Arundel pressed throughout the crisis for radical solutions, while Henry and Mowbray – usually portrayed as speaking with one voice, a point difficult to verify – advocated clemency and moderation.2 Unlike Gloucester and Arundel, Warwick had no history of personal antagonism towards the king, but inclined to stronger measures than did Henry and Mowbray. For the moment, though, once the decision had been taken not to depose the king, the Appellants were united in their aim, which was to neutralize de Vere. The forces they assembled at Huntingdon consisted largely of their private retinues.3 Although the size of their army is not known, it certainly numbered thousands rather than hundreds, and the largest retinues were probably those brought by Henry and Arundel, the wealthy Appellants.4 Henry's recruiting agent in December 1387 was Sir William Bagot, a Warwickshire knight retained by Gaunt who also had ties to Henry as well as to Mowbray and Warwick.5 With many of the Lancastrian retainers abroad with Gaunt, Henry must have relied largely on his own followers, but he had been able to raise 250 men-at-arms and 300 archers at short notice a year earlier, and can hardly have come to Huntingdon with fewer.
The brief military campaign which led to the skirmish at Radcot Bridge, fifteen miles west of Oxford, began with the Appellant forces marching west through Northampton, Daventry and Banbury into north Oxfordshire. Meanwhile de Vere continued southwards from Cheshire through Evesham until he reached Chipping Campden, where he spent the night of 19 December. The Appellants now divided their forces. Gloucester, Warwick and Mowbray took up a position close to Moreton-in-Marsh; Arundel occupied Burford, to prevent de Vere's army crossing the Windrush should he slip past the first Appellant line, while Henry moved south to block the crossing of the Thames at Radcot Bridge.6 As a result it was Henry who received much of the credit for the rout of the royalist forces, especially, though not exclusively, in the account of the Lancastrian chronicler Henry Knighton. Before de Vere's army even encountered the first Appellant line, his men began deserting, and in a brief engagement with Arundel's men at Burford Thomas Molyneux was killed by Sir Thomas Mortimer. With a second force blocking his retreat, de Vere now pressed on, but when he arrived at Radcot Bridge, eight miles south of Burford, he found some of Henry's forces barring his way, having broken the bridge in three places so that only a single horseman could cross at one time, and the remainder, including Henry himself, fast approaching. Meanwhile Gloucester was coming up from behind. With ‘wonderful daring’, therefore, he threw off his sword and gauntlets and plunged his horse into the Thames, his only remaining avenue of escape.7 Remarkably, he got clean away. That it was a foggy afternoon doubtless helped; when his discarded armour was found the next day, it was initially thought that he must have drowned. In fact, he disguised himself as a groom and managed to reach London for a final meeting with Richard II before crossing to the continent, never to set foot in England again.8
Knighton's account is too favourable to Henry. A less partisan reading of the events of 19–20 December might be that, as the least militarily experienced of the Appellants, he had been posted as long stop in the unlikely event that de Vere managed to get as far as the Thames, and that even then he allowed the real prize to slip through his grasp. On the other hand, the Appellants themselves believed that the decisive action of the day had taken place at Radcot,9 and in fact each of them had played his part in achieving their principal objective, the rout of de Vere's forces.10 On the following day, 21 December, the victorious ‘lords of the field’ marched to Oxford, where on Christmas Day they held a masked ball to celebrate their victory.11 Two days later they reached London and drew up their forces in view of the city walls, while the mayor, Nicholas Exton, handed over the keys of the city to them and distributed ale, wine, bread and cheese to their retainers to discourage them from plundering the city.12
Richard meanwhile had taken refuge in the Tower of London, but he soon abandoned hope of holding it against the Appellants and agreed to parley. At a meeting in his chamber on 28 December, he asked them to drop their Appeal; their response was to threaten him with deposition. Next he tried to persuade Henry and Mowbray to break ranks with their senior colleagues, taking Henry up on to the walls of the Tower for a private discussion and inviting him and Mowbray to remain behind when the others left.13 But Richard's position was too weak for negotiation, and he and his opponents knew it. To break his resolve, the Appellants (or at least Gloucester, Arundel and Warwick) deposed him for three days, from 29 to 31 December, but according to one account Gloucester and Henry both claimed the right to become king in Richard's stead, so they decided at a council meeting on 1 January 1388 to reinstate him.14 The idea that Henry would have claimed the throne for himself while his father was still alive is fanciful. If he did favour deposition, he would surely have argued that Gaunt should become king, but the real point at issue between him and Gloucester was probably not who should replace Richard but whether he should be deposed at all.
Now began the cleansing of Richard's court. De Vere, de la Pole and Neville may have fled, and Tresilian was nowhere to be found, but Brembre was quickly seized and on 1 January 1388 orders were issued for the arrest of a further twelve persons, mostly knights of the king's chamber and clerks of his chapel, the inner sanctums of the royal household.15 The next week also saw the expulsion from court of some fifteen bishops, lords and ladies regarded as undesirable influences and the replacement of various royal officers with the Appellants' nominees.16 The process of gathering evidence was also set in motion. On 18 January, the earl of Arundel's brother Thomas, bishop of Ely, encouraged an assembly of Londoners at the Guildhall to come forward with any grievances they had against the accused, and on 1 February six of the king's justices were imprisoned in the Tower and replaced by the Appellants' nominees.17 Two days later the Merciless Parliament opened with the five Appellants, dressed in identical gold robes and walking arm in arm, entering the White Chamber of Westminster palace and genuflecting in unison before the king.18 It was important to project an image of unity: it was also with arms linked that they had confronted Richard in the Tower on 28 December, and whenever charges were read out during the parliament the five Appellants stood together in a line facing the king.19 They also advertised their solidarity by interchanging liveries, symbolic of political confederacy.20 Equally important, however, was to emphasize their underlying loyalty to the crown;21 thus the first thing that they did after genuflecting was to declare that they had never countenanced the king's death either secretly or openly, following which Gloucester made a personal statement that, contrary to rumour, he had never intended to depose Richard or make himself king.22 Richard had little option other than to excuse his uncle, but whatever the truth of the matter the threat of deposition was not so much lifted as suspended, and it continued to hang over him throughout the session in order to ensure his compliance.
The Merciless Parliament was the longest yet held in England, sitting for four months (3 February–4 June 1388), with a break for Easter from 20 March to 13 April.23 Its purpose was to try those whom the Appellants accused of treason. Since four of the five Appellees had fled, their cases could be disposed of fairly rapidly, although this did involve some unwelcome (to the Appellants) debate as to the legality of the process of Appeal, which they deflected by declaring that such great matters must be judged not according to legal precedent but by ‘the procedure of parliament’ – in effect, an assertion of the judicial supremacy of parliament irrespective of legal niceties.24 Despite this, by 13 February de Vere, de la Pole, Tresilian and Neville had been convicted of treason in absentia, with the first three sentenced to death, Archbishop Neville to exile, and all four to forfeiture of their lands and goods. The one Appellee unfortunate enough not to have escaped was Nicholas Brembre, whose trial began on Monday 17 February. It soon ran into difficulties.25 He began by asking to be allowed legal counsel, which was refused; he then asked to see a copy of the charges against him, which was also refused; when he attempted to respond to the charges, he was told that he must simply reply ‘Guilty’ or ‘Not guilty’; when he offered to defend himself by battle, this too was refused. Thus passed the first day of his trial. On the following morning, when he was brought in again, the king tried to speak up for him, but in reply several of the lords (not just the Appellants) flung down their gauntlets in affirmation of his guilt. Eventually his case was referred to a committee of twelve lords headed by the king's uncle, the duke of York, who declared that they found no reason to impose the death penalty. This infuriated the Appellants, but at this point, on the morning of Wednesday 19 February, a diversion occurred: Robert Tresilian was found hiding in sanctuary within the Westminster precinct. Led by Gloucester, the five Appellants strode over from the palace, dragged him from the abbey and, with cries of ‘We havet hym! We havet hym!’, hustled him into parliament to face his accusers. Having already been convicted, no defence was allowed him, and within a few hours Tresilian had been bound hand and foot, dragged on a hurdle to Tyburn, and there hanged naked before having his throat cut.26
As far as Brembre was concerned, however, it was not easy to see how the Appellants would proceed. In the event, they interrogated two representatives from each of the London guilds about their former mayor's guilt, but their answers were inconclusive and they were sent home again. Finally they called in the mayor, recorder and some of the city's aldermen, who stated that they ‘supposed’ Brembre had been aware of the treachery imputed to him – whereupon, on the afternoon of 20 February, he was taken to the Tower and drawn on a hurdle to Tyburn, his contrition in extremis evoking much sympathy from the onlookers. He too was hanged and had his throat cut.27 In the end, then, the Appellants got their way, but already their disregard for legal process was causing unease among the lords and justices – and these, it should be remembered, were the new royal justices, appointed just a few weeks earlier on the Appellants' nomination. The commons, on the other hand, were firm in their support. As the trials unfolded, this division between the lords and the commons would become more marked, one result of which was that for the remainder of the parliament appeal was replaced by impeachment, with the commons as a body acting as prosecutors and the lords as judges. This was how the next two defendants, the lawyer John Blake and the royal sergeant-at-arms Thomas Usk, were dealt with, the former for drafting the Questions to the Judges, the latter for trying to raise the Londoners against the Appellants in the autumn of 1387. Both were executed with the customary embellishments on Wednesday 4 March, ‘drenching the streets with their flesh, in the accustomed manner for traitors’.28
If there was little opposition to the convictions of Blake and Usk, what followed was more controversial. On trial were four knights of the king's chamber arrested at the beginning of January: Simon Burley, the under-chamberlain; John Beauchamp, steward of the royal household; James Berners; and John Salisbury. It was Simon Burley's trial which revealed the depth of the fracture within the Appellant coalition, indeed it came to be remembered as the cause célèbre of the parliament. Burley was in his fifties, a Knight of the Garter, a former confidant of the Black Prince, and Richard's tutor. His intimacy with Richard was widely attested, as was his habit of making enemies: in 1385 Richard had hoped to elevate him to an earldom, but had had to abandon the idea in the face of opposition.29 Three years on, Gloucester, Arundel and Warwick were determined to send him to the scaffold, but their hopes of despatching him speedily were disappointed. Two preliminary hearings on 12 and 17 March proved inconclusive, and the four knights were sent back to the Tower while the parliament adjourned for Easter. When the trials were resumed, the duke of York proved especially resistant, making an impassioned speech on 27 April in defence of Burley's long record of loyalty to the crown and offering to serve personally as his champion; when Gloucester took up the challenge, York ‘turned white with anger and told his brother to his face that he was a liar’, at which the two royal dukes almost came to blows.30 Henry too did all he could to save Burley, resulting in a dispute with Gloucester; the king, the queen, Mowbray and many other lords also pleaded for Burley's life, but Gloucester, Arundel and Warwick, supported by the commons, insisted that he must die. The deciding factor was apparently news of a popular rising in Kent in late April in favour of Burley's execution.31 Yet if Richard had, by now, come to realize that he could not save his friend, it was a humiliation that he never forgot, and the fact that Henry and Mowbray opposed his execution was a critical factor in saving them from the same fate as the three senior Appellants nine years later.32 The king could at least spare Burley the agony of a traitor's death: citing his membership of the Order of the Garter, he pardoned him the drawing and hanging to which he had been sentenced, so that when he went to his death on Tower Hill on 5 May, he was simply beheaded. A week later, the other three chamber knights followed him, although only Sir John Salisbury suffered the full penalties of treason.
With the execution of Beauchamp, Berners and Salisbury, the bloodletting finally ceased. Eight men had died, five of them suffering the very public torments of a traitor's death. Others, such as the six justices who had answered Richard's Questions and the deeply unpopular royal confessor, Thomas Rushook, had been convicted of treason but were ultimately exiled to Ireland rather than executed, with even Gloucester and Arundel willing to respect Rushook's clerical status and to accept the justices' plea that they had been coerced. Many other matters had also occupied parliament's time – especially foreign policy and crown finance – but it was the life and death drama of appeal and impeachment, the scales of retribution and grace, which enthralled and shocked contemporaries: the brutal public executions, the revival of treason as a weapon of political faction, and the open talk of deposition all stirred uncomfortable memories of the dark days of the 1320s. At one level, the Merciless Parliament was a clash of noble, even royal, factions, but it was also a very public and – in the strict sense of the word – popular event, played out in the streets of London and Westminster village as well as in the White Chamber of the palace, and the support of the parliamentary commons, who never wavered in their support for even the most draconian measures,33 and of the citizens of London, was crucial in allowing the Appellants to get their way, both in December 1387 when they declined to help Richard and again during the parliament itself.34 One reason for this was because the Appellants had courted public opinion through the circulation of letters and proclamations, but it is also indicative of the profound unpopularity by 1387 of the regime presided over by Richard and his advisers.35 The Appellants' victims were also well chosen as a focus of popular hatred: Tresilian was not just disliked personally (which he was), he also personified the harshness and venality of the judicial system;36 Brembre, although not the petty tyrant sometimes portrayed, had plenty of enemies in the city, especially among the non-victualling guilds;37 while Burley, despite his support from the peers, was popularly regarded as unworthy to wield such influence in government.
Popular enthusiasm for the destruction of the king's party may even have broadened the horizon of the Appellants' ambitions: would Gloucester seriously have considered a tilt at the throne if the communibus (however defined) had not been behind him? It also showed that they had learned the lessons of the last dozen years or so. As government had grown and politics expanded during the fourteenth century, a larger percentage of the population was affected by what happened at Westminster, and more people took an interest in what was done there.38 Recent events in England had demonstrated this, notably the Good Parliament of 1376, which had revealed for the first time how effective a force the commons could be, and the Peasants' Revolt of 1381, the first popular uprising in England to be directed principally against royal ministers and the judicial system. The idea that they were in any sense the heirs to Wat Tyler and John Ball would have appalled the Appellants, but the Kentish uprising of April 1388 which sealed Burley's fate was a reminder that public support at any level was worth cultivating. The problem was to ensure that the momentum generated by events did not carry them out of control. Although Henry and Mowbray supported the original Appeal of Treason, as events gathered pace and the net widened, they found themselves being pulled in directions they did not want to go. Henry learned much from his involvement in the political crisis of 1387–8, but most importantly, perhaps, he learned how powerful an agency popular sentiment could be, and how difficult it was, once harnessed, to keep it under control.
While parliament remained in session, the Appellants more or less carried all before them, and before it ended they sought guarantees against future attempts by Richard to exact revenge. Comprehensive pardons were granted to them, to the lords and commons, and to the Londoners; oaths to uphold the acts of the parliament were circulated to the sheriffs of each county; and on 3 June, at high mass in Westminster abbey, the king renewed his coronation oath, the lords renewed their oaths of homage and fealty to him, and William Courtenay, archbishop of Canterbury, pronounced sentence of excommunication on any person who incited the king to reverse the acts of the parliament.39 Few believed that he would not try, however, and Gloucester, Arundel and Warwick were sufficiently apprehensive to agree that in future they would never come into the king's presence simultaneously.40
Despite his role in the Appeal, Henry had managed to maintain cordial relations with at least some of those whom the Appellants had dismissed from the royal household,41 and for the first time since 1382 he now began attending court with some regularity and making his voice heard on political matters.42 Unusually, he spent much of the summer in London. At some point in the year, probably during the summer, he suffered from a bout of the pox and, whether because of this or not, he did not take part in either of the English military ventures of the summer, which was perhaps fortunate since neither was a success.43 The earl of Arundel's expedition to Brittany in June 1388 consumed most of the supply voted by the commons but achieved little, while an attempt to drive off a Scottish raiding party ended in English defeat at Otterburn (‘Chevy Chase’) on 5 August. A week after this, when the king issued a summons for a punitive expedition to Scotland, Henry transported harness and other equipment from London to Leicester in preparation for the campaign, but in the event it was cancelled, it being considered too late in the year to mount an effective response.44 All this was disappointing, and by the time that another parliament met at Cambridge on 9 September – barely three months from the dissolution of the Merciless Parliament – public support for the Appellant regime was ebbing; in fact this assembly was to mark the start of the process whereby Richard recovered his authority.
The main concern of the commons at Cambridge was law and order, an issue upon which they and the lords did not see eye to eye. Richard exploited their disagreements, thereby winning back some of that gentry support which he had so conspicuously lacked during the previous year.45 Yet the real reason for the upturn in the king's fortunes was simply that the death or exile of several of his closest friends had removed the chief reason why the Appellant coalition had come together in the first place. Its fragility now manifested itself. Henry and Mowbray were reconciled to the court during the winter of 1388–9; Gloucester, Arundel and Warwick, however, were not. Mowbray in particular was once again, by the spring of 1389, basking in the royal sunshine that he had enjoyed in the early to mid-1380s.46 Henry never enjoyed – and never sought – that level of intimacy with Richard. He received one or two relatively minor gifts from the king,47 but with the resources of the Lancastrian inheritance behind him he felt no need to compete for favours, preferring to cultivate a discreet, though not aloof, distance from the court. He did, however, attend the king's council intermittently, and occasionally witnessed royal charters, which he had never done before February 1388.48 He was certainly in the council chamber at Westminster on 3 May 1389 when Richard sprang a surprise by announcing that, since he had now reached the age of twenty-two, he proposed to take personal charge of government. Thomas Arundel was dismissed from the chancellorship, Gloucester and Warwick from the council, and the earl of Arundel from the office of admiral; the two chief justices whom the Appellants had appointed were also removed, as were many of those who had been brought into the royal household and administration over the past eighteen months. The council, said Knighton, made no attempt to oppose the king's will, ‘but all praised God that He had provided them with so wise a king to watch over them in future’.49
The royalist revanche of May 1389 was intended to draw a line under the crisis which had engulfed English politics since October 1386. The Appellant coalition had fractured long before this, in fact it barely outlasted the Appeal of Treason; even by the time the second session of the Merciless Parliament began in April 1388, Henry and Mowbray had probably decided, in common with many of their fellow peers, that they wanted no further part in the increasingly grisly spectacle which was unfolding, and eighteen months later the breach was complete. At a council meeting at Clarendon on 13 September 1389, it was reported that Gloucester, Arundel and Warwick (none of whom was present) were anxious to re-establish friendship and concord with the king and council and to abolish the suspicion and mistrust existing between them.50 Henry was by now a member of that council, as was Mowbray, and both were present at the meeting – a telling indication of the distance that now yawned between them and their former colleagues-in-arms. Two months later Henry was still with the king at Westminster,51 but by now he knew that his days in the political spotlight were coming to an end: on 19 November 1389, after three years and four months abroad, John of Gaunt landed at Plymouth, declaring his intention to restore peace and harmony between the king and the nobles.52 Henry was free to step back into his father's shadow – or to embark on new ventures.
1 Above, p. 38.
2 John Gower, in his Chronica Tripertita, ascribed the entire 1387–8 crisis solely to the three senior Appellants, barely mentioning Henry and Mowbray: The Major Latin Works of John Gower, ed. and trans. E. W. Stockton (Seattle, 1962), 290–8.
3 Cf. Knighton, 420: they ‘sent to every part of the realm to assemble their people’; also Historia Mirabilis Parliamenti, 8: ‘they raised up the people, each one from his own region’.
4 When the Appellants divided their forces before Radcot Bridge, the retinues of Arundel and Henry were deployed separately, while those of Gloucester, Warwick and Nottingham combined to form a third ‘division’.
5 Bagot collected £200 on behalf of Henry at Kenilworth castle on 10 December 1387; at Daventry on 15–16 December, cloth was bought to make signa (badges) for Henry's retainers to wear: DL 28/1/2, fos. 1r, 4v, 13v, 14v, 16r–v, 17v. For Bagot, see L. Clark, ‘Sir William Bagot’, ODNB, 3.242–4, who suggests Bagot may have persuaded Henry and Mowbray to join the older appellants. For Bagot's close involvement with Henry and Gloucester over the division of the Bohun inheritance in early 1388, see DL 41/248, and the petition from Sir John Lestrange preserved as BL Add. Charter 14713. Lestrange and Lord Lovell both claimed the goods and chattels of Sir Nicholas Willy, forfeited for felony, worth about £240. Lestrange claimed to have petitioned Gaunt before his departure for Spain, but ‘now in his absence’ Lovell had seized them by fraud and with violence. He handed one copy of his bill to Gaunt's council and a second to Bagot for him to give to Henry – an interesting sidelight on Henry's involvement in Duchy affairs during his father's absence. Henry's wife, Mary, was evidently friendly with Bagot's wife, Margaret, to whom she gave a brocade, and in September 1388 one of Bagot's sergeants, John, brought Mary news of the Cambridge parliament. Bagot himself received a gown and a silver livery collar ad modum de suagg (a swage) from Henry in 1387 (DL 28/1/2, fos. 21r, 29v).
6 For these events see J. Myres, ‘The Campaign of Radcot Bridge in December 1387’, EHR, 42 (1927), 20–33; R. Davies, ‘Some Notes from the Register of Henry de Wakefield, Bishop of Worcester, on the Political Crisis of 1386–88’, EHR 86 (1971), 547–58; Morgan, War and Society, 188–90.
7 Knighton, 420–3. He probably forded the Thames at Bablock Hythe rather than Radcot itself.
8 He died at Louvain in Brabant five years later.
9 Westminster Chronicle, 268.
10 According to Knighton, 422–5, about 800 of them drowned in the boggy meadows around the Thames, but few others were killed; those who had not already fled were stripped of their arms and sent back to their homes.
11 For Domini de Campo see De Illustribus Henricis, 98. Adam Usk, a student at the time, witnessed their entry to Oxford: Warwick and Derby led the vanguard of the army, Gloucester the centre, and Arundel and Nottingham the rearguard (Usk, 12–13). Henry bought eighteen masks (visers) and gowns ‘for the disguising (degysing) on the feast of the Lord's birth’: DL 28/1/2, fo. 14r. The Appellant army probably spent the night of the 22nd or 23rd at Notley Abbey, between Oxford and St Albans. Henry's wife, Mary, kept in close touch with him during the campaign, sending her messenger Richard Willey from Kenilworth to Notley, Northampton, Daventry, and Chipping Norton for news (ibid., fo. 26r).
12 SAC I, 844.
13 Knighton, 426; SAC I, 846, says that Richard kept Henry behind ‘as a token of love’ (in pignus amoris). The chroniclers give different dates for this meeting. Saul, Richard II, 189, dates it to 30 December.
14 Clarke and Galbraith, ‘The Deposition of Richard II’, 157. The chronicler of Whalley abbey (Lancashire) said that Richard was discoronatus for three days by Gloucester, Arundel and Warwick (he does not mention Henry and Mowbray) and that the people (communibus) wanted Gloucester to become king, but Henry said that since he came from the senior line (elder brother) he should be king. The evidence for Richard's deposition is supported by Gloucester's confession in 1397, and the fact that no royal writs were sealed from 29 to 31 December (ibid., 159–60; CR, 81).
15 Westminster Chronicle, 230–1; SAC I, 850; Knighton, 426–8. Their lists do not tally exactly, but it is reasonably clear that the knights arrested were Thomas Trivet, Simon Burley, John Beauchamp of Holt, James Berners, John Salisbury, Nicholas Dagworth and William Elmham, and the clerks were Nicholas Slake, Richard Medford, Richard Clifford and John Lincoln; John Blake was also arrested.
16 The lower levels of the king's household had already been purged on 31 December: Westminster Chronicle, 228–33.
17 Historia Mirabilis Parliamenti, 14; Westminster Chronicle, 232–4.
18 Historia Mirabilis Parliamenti, 14; for the ‘parliamentum sine misericordia’, see Knighton, 414.
19 Knighton, 426; Westminster Chronicle, 310.
20 Each of the other four lords gave Henry a gold and henna brocade and a long gilded gown of his livery, and Henry reciprocated by giving a blue and gold brocade of his own livery to each of them ‘for the parliament’: DL 28/1/2, fos. 5r, 11v, 12r. Gloucester also gave Henry two brocades of his livery for the Radcot Bridge campaign. Some of the heraldic images in a richly illuminated psalter and book of hours, BL Egerton MS 3277, may have been commissioned in part ‘as a moral justification for the Appellants' cause’: L. Dennison, ‘British Library, Egerton MS 3277: a Fourteenth-Century Psalter-Hours and the Question of Bohun Family Ownership’, in Family and Dynasty in Late Medieval England: Harlaxton Medieval Studies IX (Donnington, 2003), 122–55, at p. 149.
21 For example, when they came into the king's presence on both 17 November and 28 December, they prostrated themselves three times before being bidden by Richard to rise: Westminster Chronicle, 212, 226.
22 Westminster Chronicle, 234; PROME, vii.64; Historia Mirabilis Parliamenti, 14–15.
23 It is also very well documented. For the chronology, sources and text of the roll, see PROME, vii.55–120. Cf. also Saul, Richard II, 191–6; Tuck, Richard II and the English Nobility, 121–7; Goodman, Loyal Conspiracy, 41–8.
24 The Questions to the Judges had stated that it was against the king's regality to use impeachment in parliament without the king's consent, to which the use of the process of Appeal was a riposte.
25 The best accounts of Brembre's trial are in Westminster Chronicle, 280–3, 308–13.
26 Historia Mirabilis Parliamenti, 17–18.
27 Westminster Chronicle, 310–17; Historia Mirabilis Parliamenti, 18. As the noose was placed around his neck, the son of Brembre's arch-rival John of Northampton stepped forward to ask him whether he believed he had treated his father fairly. Some claimed that he admitted his vindictiveness towards Northampton, others that he refused to confess to any wrongdoing. Gloucester had clashed with Brembre before, at the parliament of 1378, while Gaunt's support for Northampton in the politics of the city may well have inclined Henry against him as well: P. Nightingale, A Medieval Mercantile Community: The Grocers' Company and the Politics and Trade of London 1000–1485 (New Haven and London, 1995), 257; CPR 1385–9, 158–9.
28 The Westminster Chronicle, 314, says that it took thirty strokes of the sword (mucronis) to sever Usk's head; he is better known as the author of the Testament of Love.
29 At Richard's coronation, Burley carried the young king on his shoulders; for the next decade he served as Richard's under-chamberlain and was well rewarded. He was deeply unpopular in Kent, where he held extensive lands (illegally, some thought) and was accused of abusing his position as Constable of Dover castle and Warden of the Cinque Ports. One of the charges against him in 1388 was that he had tried to raise 1,000 men from the Cinque Ports with whom to challenge the Appellants in November 1387: C. Given-Wilson, ‘Richard II and the Higher Nobility’, in Richard II: The Art of Kingship, ed. A. Goodman and J. Gillespie (Oxford, 1999), 107–28, at pp. 117–18.
30 Westminster Chronicle, 328–9.
31 SAC I, 852–3; Historia Mirabilis Parliamenti, 21; Westminster Chronicle, 330–1. The queen went down on her knees to Gloucester and Arundel to beg for Burley's life, but to no avail; he had brought her over from Bohemia at the time of her marriage.
32 See below, p. 105. In 1392, John of Gaunt contributed £10 to the cost of Burley's tomb (DL 28/3/2, fo. 18v).
33 According to the Westminster Chronicle, 283, no less than 305 gauntlets were flung down as wagers of Brembre's guilt at one point during his trial. Knighton, 443–51, preserves a petition from the commons sometimes seen as directed against the Appellants rather than the royal favourites (J. Palmer, England, France and Christendom 1377–1399 (London, 1972), 136–7, 237–8), but this is difficult to accept: even if it was submitted during the second session and showed some impatience at the length of the parliament, Knighton states clearly that it was directed at the king's advisers, and it raised issues which had been of concern for several years before 1388. HOC, i.185–91, analyses the political connections of the knights and burgesses and their ‘compliant endorsement’ of the attack on the court party.
34 See, for example, Knighton, 407, 427; CE, 364–5; Westminster Chronicle, 217, 307 (the pardon sought by the Londoners at the end of the parliament); SAC I, 844–5, says that while the ‘poor’ of London supported the Appellants, the wealthier citizens were more fearful; they were certainly divided over Brembre's fate. See also C. Oliver, ‘A Political Pamphleteer in Late Medieval England: Thomas Fovent, Geoffrey Chaucer, Thomas Usk, and the Merciless Parliament of 1388’, New Medieval Literatures VI, ed. D. Lawton, R.Copeland and W. Scase (Oxford, 2003), 167–98; and M. Giancarlo, Parliament and Literature in Late Medieval England (Cambridge, 2007), especially 164–9.
35 For letters and proclamations, see Knighton, 411; Goodman, Loyal Conspiracy, 41; SAC I, 842–3, talks of the ‘great delight among the common people’ at Radcot Bridge; Westminster Chronicle, 211, and Knighton, 421, note the numbers of gentry and lesser men who supported the Appellants.
36 J. Maddicott, ‘Law and Lordship: Royal Justices as Retainers in Thirteenth and Fourteenth Century England’, Past and Present Supplement 4 (Oxford, 1978), 59–68.
37 For Brembre, see Nightingale, A Medieval Mercantile Community, 228–317.
38 See J. Watts, ‘The Pressure of the Public on Later Medieval Politics’, in The Fifteenth Century IV: Political Culture in Late Medieval Britain, ed. L. Clark and C. Carpenter (Woodbridge, 2004), 159–80; and Watts, The Making of Polities.
39 PROME, vii.72–8, 81–2. The commons also granted the Appellants £20,000 for ‘saving the king and kingdom’ – that is, to pay their retainers for the Radcot Bridge campaign: PROME, vii.67; CPR 1385–9, 456. For the schedule of the oath sent to the sheriff of Sussex, dated 4 June 1388, see C 49/96; 170 Sussex men (thirty-five clerics, ninety-five gentry and forty burgesses) swore it. On 31 May, Richard invited the lords and commons to his manor of Kennington for a banquet to celebrate the dissolution of parliament.
40 CE, 367.
41 Sir Thomas Trivet, who was suspected of having advised the king to lay an ambush for the three senior Appellants in mid-November, received a cloth of velvet as a gift from Henry, and Sir Richard Abberbury entertained Henry at his house and was given a livery gown by him (DL 28/1/2, fos. 5v, 11v, 16v, 5r, 17r).
42 For example, he began regularly to secure pardons or grants from the king on behalf of other men: CFR 1383–91, 237; CPR 1385–9, 368, 406, 409, 439, 452, 461, 510, 531; CPR 1388–92, 7, 29, 41, 100, 128, 150, 177, 449, 463; CPR 1391–6, 189, 332, 372. He may also have used his influence to secure approval for his father's plans to make peace with Juan of Castile, although it has been argued that this was a betrayal of English interests in the Iberian peninsula: for different views of this see P. Russell, The English Intervention in Spain and Portugal in the Time of Edward III and Richard II (Oxford, 1955), 504–14; Goodman, John of Gaunt, 129–30; Westminster Chronicle, 371. Gaunt sent Sir Thomas Percy to England in the spring of 1388 to ask for approval for the settlement, and Henry certainly communicated with Percy (DL 28/1/2, fo. 5r). Gaunt was given permission by the king to finalize the settlement on 1 June 1388 (Foedera, vii.587–8), but even after this Gaunt may have broken the agreement.
43 In London, he stayed partly at St David's Inn in Fleet Street. For medicines, smocks and breeches, and a gilded spike or needle pro pokkes domini aperiendo (‘for lancing the lord's pustules’), see DL 28/1/2, fos 15r–v.
44 Ibid.; Westminster Chronicle, 350–1; Goodman, Loyal Conspiracy, 50; CPR 1385–9, 606, 610.
45 PROME, vii.121–6; Tuck, Richard II and the English Nobility, 134–7; Saul, Richard II, 199–201.
46 C. Given-Wilson, ‘Thomas Mowbray, First Duke of Norfolk’, ODNB, 39.590–5.
47 In February 1389, for example, a breastplate forfeited by John Beauchamp of Holt, one of the knights executed in the Merciless Parliament (CCR 1385–9, 571).
48 Henry witnessed charters in February, June, October and November 1388: C 53/162; when not at court or in London in 1388–9, he often stayed at Kenilworth (CPR 1396–9, 122, 518, 548, confirmations of grants dated 17 and 18 Oct. 1388, 12 June and 1 July 1389).
49 Westminster Chronicle, 391–3, 401: a further wave of dismissals of those associated with the Appellants followed in July; Knighton, 528–31; SAC I, 866–7, suggests an angrier king than other chroniclers imply. The official proclamation, dated 8 May, is in CCR 1385–9, 671, 676. Richard's inspiration was surely the identical action taken by his near-contemporary Charles VI in November 1388 (Saint-Denys, 555ff.).
50 POPC, i.12. The last instalment of the £20,000 granted to the Appellants in the Merciless Parliament was paid a month later, on 20 October: Issues of the Exchequer Henry III to Henry VI, ed. F. Devon (London, 1837), 239; CCR 1389–92, 27, 128.
51 He witnessed two charters dated 14 November 1389 (C 53/162).
52 Westminster Chronicle, 407–9; SAC I, 891–5.