Chapter 7

THE TWO DUCHIES AND THE CROWN (1394–1396)

In English domestic politics, the early 1390s were characterized by the steady reassertion of Richard II's personal control of government. With the war in abeyance, the crown's financial situation eased, and following his return from Spain, Gaunt's relations with the king improved markedly, at any rate on the surface. In the January 1390 parliament, Richard bestowed two striking favours on his uncle: he converted his life tenure of palatinate powers in the duchy of Lancaster into a hereditary grant, and he endowed him with the duchy of Guyenne for life. Yet Gaunt was not satisfied with this.1 Despite relinquishing his claim to the Castilian crown in 1387, he still clung to his dream of a great continental apanage, not just for the term of his life but one which he could pass on to his heir. In order to realize it, however, he knew he must also win the support of the French, for only if Guyenne were held as a fief of the French crown might such an arrangement be incorporated into a durable peace treaty, and it was this that became his main aim during the series of Anglo-French peace conferences which punctuated the early 1390s, at which he acted as principal English negotiator. Richard, who was eager for peace, initially supported the proposal, even though it meant that the direct link between Guyenne and the English crown which had endured for nearly 250 years would be broken. So, naturally, did Henry, for it meant that after Gaunt's death he would become duke of Guyenne as well as of Lancaster, holding them from the kings of France and England, respectively.

The French were not averse to Gaunt's proposal, reckoning that with time the new duke of Guyenne would become absorbed into the French polity and the troublesome Anglo-Gascon link thus be severed; even Gloucester, normally so resistant to concessions to the French, was prepared to go along with it, albeit reluctantly.² To many, however, it was anathema. The Gascon lords and townsmen, who treasured their freedom from the direct rule of a resident duke and saw their link to the English crown as the best defence against the encroachment of the French monarchy, sent delegations to protest to the king and only agreed to admit Gaunt's deputies to Bordeaux if they came ‘not as the deputy of the duke of Lancaster, but as the deputy of the king of England’.3 Gaunt was a persistent man, however, and in June 1393 he negotiated a draft Anglo-French treaty which included the grant of Guyenne to himself, to be held of the French crown, as a condition of lasting peace. To what extent Richard supported this is not clear; there was by now growing tension between the king and his uncle over the peace talks, with suspicion on Richard's part that Gaunt was negotiating more for his own benefit than for that of England.⁴ Opposition to the draft treaty also surfaced in Cheshire and Lancashire, led by professional soldiers such as Sir Thomas Talbot and Sir Nicholas Clifton who accused Gaunt, Gloucester and Henry of scheming to deprive the king of his lordship in France and threatened to kill them if they set foot in the north-west.⁵ Cheshire contributed a disproportionately high number of men to English armies during the fourteenth century, and the ringleaders of the revolt were men who feared that peace would deprive them of their livelihoods. Gaunt and Henry accordingly went north in the summer of 1393 and managed to pacify the rebels with a mixture of firmness (though very little violence) and promises of future military employment.⁶

Yet this was not the end of the matter: in the parliament which met at Westminster in January 1394, the earl of Arundel launched a scathing personal attack on Gaunt and the king, accusing them of over-familiarity (because Richard wore his uncle's livery collar), of stifling debate in the royal council, and of disregarding the rights of the crown by granting Guyenne to his uncle.7 On the latter point the commons agreed with him, describing it as ‘ludicrous’ for the king of England to do homage and fealty to the French king for Guyenne, whereby the English would ‘pass under the heel of the French king and be kept for the future under the yoke of slavery’. The upshot was that both lords and commons rejected the treaty, a decision applauded by the Westminster chronicler, who declared that if anyone less exalted had proposed such terms, he would have been branded a traitor, ‘but the duke of Lancaster does as he likes, and nobody brands him’ – indeed he had even duped or bribed his brother Gloucester into supporting the plan. The draft treaty, at any rate, was now a dead letter, and by the time Gaunt and Gloucester returned to Leulinghem in late March 1394 to confer once more with the dukes of Berry and Burgundy, hope of a definitive peace treaty had evaporated; instead, the two sides settled on a four-year truce.⁸ Henry, meanwhile, toured the north-western shires to suppress the continuing disturbances there, and by mid-July the unrest had subsided.⁹

Yet Guyenne was an itch that Gaunt needed to scratch, and when a revolt broke out in the duchy at the prospect of him holding it even for life, he left England in October 1394 to spend over a year there trying to establish his rule.¹⁰ For much of this time Richard was also out of the country: the truce allowed him to turn his attention to Ireland, whither he departed in September 1394 with an army numbering about 7,500 men, including the duke of Gloucester and four earls.¹¹ Henry did not accompany the king to Ireland; with Gaunt away, he remained in England to watch over the interests of the Lancastrian inheritance.¹² In fact, with both the king and his uncle out of the country, the winter and spring of 1394–5 proved to be a fallow interlude in English politics, but shortly after Richard's return, at a great council held at Eltham (Kent) in late July 1395, the legality of the grant of the duchy to Gaunt was once more brought into question when a delegation from the city of Bordeaux asked the king that it be rescinded, citing letters of Edward III promising that the city would be perpetually annexed to the English crown and never alienated to anyone except the heir to the throne. Two Lancastrian knights who were present responded by justifying the grant (on what grounds is not stated), but five doctors of law declared that the king had no option but to revoke the grant, and the lords of the council agreed with them. This left only the duke of Gloucester and Henry to disagree. Gloucester said that it depended on whether the charter to Bordeaux could be found in the royal archives, but that it would in any case be dishonourable for the king to go back on his grant, but few apart from Henry supported him.13 Eventually, angry that people were muttering against them, Gloucester and Henry walked out of the chamber and sat down to a meal in the hall, where they were joined by the duke of York (although whether he agreed with them is not clear). Soon after this Gloucester returned to London,¹⁴ but fortunately enough had been done to forestall any decision to revoke the grant, and Richard managed to assuage the fears of the Gascons without depriving Gaunt. However, it had been a close-run thing.¹⁵

Gaunt, meanwhile, having restored order in Guyenne with promises to respect the Gascons' privileges, was preparing to return to England. In early October he was expected imminently, but instead tarried a while in Brittany before crossing to Dover shortly after Christmas. Henry hurried down from Hertford to meet him, and father and son were reunited at Canterbury on 1 January 1396. However, when Gaunt stopped off at King's Langley (Hertfordshire) a few days later to pay his respects to Richard, the king greeted him coolly, ‘with due respect, as was proper, but, as some assert, not with affection’.¹⁶ It was a sign of things to come. Gaunt was now in his mid-fifties, and the restless ambition and sense of duty that had defined his political career were dwindling. Yet his pre-eminent position in the councils of the king had not been relinquished so much as usurped. The earls of Rutland and Nottingham and the chamberlain of the royal household, William Le Scrope, were now the guiding hands behind English foreign policy. While in Brittany in November, Gaunt had negotiated a marriage between his nine-year-old grandson (the future Henry V) and Marie, the daughter of the duke of Brittany, and drawn up a bilateral treaty of alliance with the duke; Richard, when he heard of it, was furious with his uncle, and nothing came of it.17 Chastened, Gaunt retired from court and a few weeks later married his mistress of twenty-five years, Katherine Swynford, at Lincoln, before embarking with Henry on a tour of their northern estates.¹⁸ The match was greeted with astonishment, the great ladies of the court mortified at the idea of having to cede precedence to a woman of such low birth.¹⁹ It was another step in the descent of Gaunt's political influence.

By early 1396, the House of Lancaster was becoming dangerously isolated from the levers of power. During Gaunt's fifteen-month absence, Henry had mostly divided his time between the great Lancastrian strongholds of Tutbury, Pontefract and Leicester and, when he attended parliament or the royal council, London and Hertford,²⁰ but although he did what was required of him to fulfil his public duties, he had not moved any closer to either winning or seeking to win the king's confidence. It is worth remembering that not once during Richard's reign did Henry hold any military command in the royal service, any office in the king's household or administration, or any ambassadorial powers on the king's behalf.²¹ The patronage he received from the king in terms of lands or wardships was negligible. The contrast in this respect between him and his cousin (also Richard's cousin) Edward earl of Rutland, the son of the duke of York, is telling. Some seven years younger than Henry, Rutland during the 1390s acted as constable of England, admiral of England, constable of the Tower of London, constable of Dover castle and warden of the Cinque Ports, and keeper of the king's forests south of the Trent. By way of reward, he was granted the castle and lordship of Oakham (Rutland), the lordship of the Isle of Wight along with Carisbrooke castle, and a clutch of lucrative wardships.22 Henry's brother-in-law (and Richard's half-brother) John Holand, earl of Huntingdon, was similarly lavishly rewarded with offices, lands and other favours in the 1390s, during which he was chamberlain of England. The chamberlain of the household from 1393–9, William Le Scrope, and Henry's former co-Appellant Thomas Mowbray, captain of the town and castle of Calais, also received much from the king during these years.²³

Henry's measured degree of distance from the royal court might be explicable in personal terms, by Richard's mistrust of his cousin, Henry's reluctance to involve himself too deeply in politics while his father was still alive, or Gaunt's desire to protect his heir from the potential consequences of his opposition to the king in 1387–8. Yet the problem went deeper than this, for by now an element of open rivalry between the crown and the house of Lancaster had begun to manifest itself, a rivalry all too reminiscent of the decade-long struggle between Edward II and Earl Thomas which had so nearly led to the extinction of the Lancastrian inheritance seventy years earlier, and which in certain respects had its roots in that earlier conflict. At the local level, Richard still nurtured a desire to clip his uncle's wings in the north-west, a region with which, as earl of Chester, he tried to develop a special relationship.²⁴ De Vere's attempt to boost royal support there in 1387 may have backfired, but during the 1390s Richard made a more determined effort to assert his authority, as a result of which both king and duke expanded their affinities in Cheshire and Lancashire significantly, apparently, though not overtly, in competition with each other.²⁵ The visible manifestation of this arms race was the livery badge. In the winter of 1389–90, to please his uncle, Richard had sported a Lancastrian collar, but within a few months he began distributing his own badge of the white hart, not just as a way of augmenting his following among the gentry in the aftermath of the crisis of 1386–9, but also to try to counter the appeal of the SS collars distributed by Gaunt and his son, which had acquired something of the cachet of a chivalric order. Both sides were criticized for the gang culture which livery badges induced: to the commons they were a source of sufficient unease to require legislation,26 while chroniclers and poets anthropomorphized them as the medieval antecedents of animated cartoon warriors battling it out for control of the kingdom. Richard's white hart badges, wrote one poet, ‘swarmed so thick throughout the length and breadth of his land’ that he came to believe in the infallibility of his power, and if ‘the good greyhound’ had stood idly by there would have been no stopping him. The greyhound was Henry, ‘because of his livery of linked collars of greyhounds’, according to Usk; the Dieulacres chronicler's image of a pack of hounds driving ‘that hated beast the white hart’ from the land appealed to a society addicted to the chase.²⁷

Livery badges might only be symbols, but their connotations reverberated. So too did the implications of Richard's attempts to secure the canonization of Edward II. He had been pressing for this since the early 1380s, and in 1395 a book of Edward's miracles, compiled at Richard's request, was despatched to Rome to speed up the process. Even his bid to make a saint of his great-grandfather had something of the character of a duel with the House of Lancaster, since for much of the fourteenth century it was not Edward II but Thomas of Lancaster who had seemed more likely to be canonized, and ‘Saint’ Thomas's cult had a good deal more popular support than ‘Saint’ Edward's. Indeed it was probably Richard's enthusiasm for Edward's cult which sparked the late fourteenth-century revival of Thomas's cult, with Walsingham declaring that in 1390 ‘Saint Thomas of Lancaster was canonized’. In fact, Thomas never was canonized, although he continued to be popularly venerated into the early sixteenth century, while the cult of Edward II barely outlived Richard's deposition.28 In the 1390s, however, there was a real danger that this competition for divine favour might escalate, for Richard regarded his great-grandfather's deposition as the great stain on the history of the English crown and was determined to rehabilitate Edward's reputation. The idea that Earl Thomas, a rank traitor in his eyes, should remain forever vindicated, let alone canonized, while Edward and his loyal supporters remained eternally damned, was anathema to Richard, and if Edward were to be canonized it would not be inconceivable, indeed it might well be seen as logical, for Richard to declare the acts accompanying his deposition, including the judgments of 1327, to be annulled.

These rival cults thus had the potential to dig deep into the bedrock of noble power, which was always land; and if it came to a trial of strength between the crown and the house of Lancaster, it was always likely to be land that lay at the heart of the matter. Disputes over land might fall into abeyance for generations or even centuries in the Middle Ages, but rarely were they forgotten entirely, with each turn of fortune's wheel liable to bring renewed claims from those whose ancestors had lost out, and renewed insecurity for those who had benefited from their misfortune. It must have been with trepidation, therefore, that Gaunt and Henry viewed the rise to royal favour in the mid-1390s of a number of young men whose forefathers had once held estates now possessed by the house of Lancaster – men such as Thomas Despenser, the great-great-grandson of the infamous Hugh Despenser the Younger who had profited so hugely, if briefly, from the forfeiture of Earl Thomas, or John de Montague, the nephew and heir of that William earl of Salisbury who, in the 1360s, had been pressurized into acknowledging Gaunt's claim to a number of properties in Wiltshire.²⁹ The greatest danger, however, came from the crown itself, for it was Edward II who had been the principal beneficiary of Earl Thomas's forfeiture until its restoration to his brother in 1327.³⁰ That the reversal of the 1327 judgment, leading in all probability to the reclamation by Richard of the Lancastrian estates, would require a political upheaval of seismic proportions was self-evident, and Richard would have to believe himself to be strong enough to contain the resulting fall-out. The problem was that his grip on power was tightening almost by the month. This is what made the accelerating rivalry between crown and duchy and the decline of Lancastrian influence so dangerous.

In addition to this there was the matter of the succession to the throne, a question made doubly urgent by the death of Richard's queen, Anne of Bohemia, on 7 June 1394. Twelve years of childless marriage meant that the succession had been working its way up the political agenda for some time now. Some believed that should the king fail to have issue, the throne would devolve by hereditary right to Roger Mortimer (b.1374) or, in the event of his death, upon his younger brother Edmund (b.1376).31 The Mortimer brothers were the sons of Edmund, earl of March (d.1381), who had married Philippa, the daughter of Lionel, duke of Clarence. They were thus descended from the second son of Edward III, albeit through a female line, whereas Gaunt was the third son of Edward III. It was even asserted later that Richard had declared in the parliament of 1386 that Roger was his heir, although there is no mention of this in the official records.³² In January 1394, however, Gaunt is alleged to have petitioned that Henry be acknowledged as Richard's heir, at which Roger Mortimer protested, claiming seniority. Gaunt's response was to cite the so-called Crouchback Legend, which had it that Edmund, first earl of Lancaster, rather than Edward I, had in reality been the elder son of Henry III, but that he had been passed over for the crown on account of his crooked back, although its reversion had been vested in his heirs (the house of Lancaster). Roger replied, quite correctly, that this was simply false, and the king ordered them to drop the matter.³³ That Gaunt used the Crouchback Legend to assert the Lancastrian claim – as Henry would later do – is beyond doubt, and he was even said to have forged a chronicle to try to prove his point, although it needs to be remembered that all these accounts were written after 1399 and thus influenced by Henry's usurpation.34 They are, however, independent of each other, and the likelihood is that a discussion of the succession did take place at the time of the 1394 parliament, probably in the context of the Anglo-French negotiations. After all, the fundamental objection of the Gascons to Gaunt's appointment as duke of Guyenne was that they did not want to accept anyone as their duke ‘unless he be the king or the king's heir’. One obvious solution to this problem was that either Gaunt or his son be recognized as Richard's heir – which, given Edward III's entail of 1376, they may well have regarded themselves as entitled to in any case in the event of Richard dying childless.³⁵ Yet if this self-evidently appealed to Gaunt, it was hardly likely to have been Richard's way of solving the Gascons' problem. In fact, the king had no wish to air the question of the succession, and he would not have thanked Gaunt for raising it, although he must have known perfectly well that others were discussing the possibility of the crown passing to the house of Lancaster. After all, unless Richard had a child, Gaunt and then Henry were his next heirs in the direct male line, and this was a kingdom in which the majority of great estates had been entailed upon male heirs during the course of the fourteenth century, as indeed the crown had been in 1376.³⁶ Yet Richard did not want Henry to succeed him, as he made clear a few years later.³⁷ Here, then, was another issue threatening to open a fissure, not just between the crown and the house of Lancaster but also between the house of Lancaster and other members of the royal family.

This was still a fissure, however, not a rupture. If Richard were to produce an heir, much of the tension would be taken out of English politics, and it was partly to this end that the king's foreign policy was directed in 1395–6. Gaunt and Henry played virtually no part in this, indeed Henry, still dreaming of foreign fields, was sorely tempted by an offer from William, count of Ostrevant, to join him on a campaign in Friesland (or Frisia), the rebellious and inaccessible northernmost region of his father the count of Holland's domains, but both Gaunt and the king advised him not to go.38 Gaunt may have thought it irresponsible of Henry to wish to be off seeking fame abroad when his own powers were on the wane, and although it had no discernible effect on their relationship, this is the first and only hint of a disagreement between father and son. They spent the spring of 1396 in Yorkshire together, doubtless attending to Duchy business.³⁹

By this time, the king's foreign policy had borne fruit. On 3 March 1396, a twenty-eight-year truce with France was concluded, including an agreement that the English king would marry Charles VI's daughter, Isabella, at a grand ceremony to be held in the autumn.⁴⁰ In August, Gaunt and the king crossed to Calais for a meeting with Duke Philip of Burgundy to finalize the arrangements.⁴¹ Henry did not accompany them, but he and his eldest son, now ten, both attended the summit between Richard II and Charles VI at Ardres, eight miles south of Calais, in late October,⁴² a courtly extravaganza comparable to the Field of the Cloth of Gold of June 1520, not simply because of its extraordinary cost but also because it was held on the same site. Four days of talks between the two monarchs culminated in the little Isabella, now almost seven years old, being handed over to her twenty-nine-year-old husband on 30 October, and five days later they were married at the church of St Nicholas at Calais. This union apart, the diplomatic achievements of the summit were not impressive: an agreement to try to bring an end to the Papal Schism and some vague promises to try to resolve Anglo-French disputes without resort to arms and to continue the search for a final peace between the two kingdoms. Richard also promised to aid his new father-in-law against all men in future – an undertaking which Charles may have interpreted more literally than the English king intended. Equally important for Richard was the opportunity the summit afforded him to project an image of kingship in keeping with his conception of his office. The gifts which he and Charles exchanged, the banquets they hosted for each other, their gorgeous apparel and enormous, richly caparisoned retinues excited the amazement of contemporaries and must have set the English exchequer back by a minimum of £10,000 and quite possibly a lot more.43 Gaunt and Henry played a full part in the proceedings: together with the duke of Gloucester and the earls of Rutland, Nottingham and Northumberland, they escorted the French king to Richard's pavilion on the opening day of the summit, all six of them decked out in full-length suits of red velvet with a white heraldic bend of the livery of the former Queen Anne.⁴⁴ By 15 November, however, Henry was back at Dover, and on 22 November he reached London. He and Gaunt spent Christmas at Hertford and paid a brief visit to Tutbury early in 1397 before returning to Westminster for the opening of the parliament, the first for two years, which had been summoned for 22 January.⁴⁵

¹ The two simultaneous grants suggest some give and take between Gaunt and Richard: PROME, vii.143–5; CChR 1341–1417, 318.

² Saul, Richard II, 213–14.

³ SAC I, 940–3; Goodman, John of Gaunt, 195–7. Many Englishmen were equally critical: a council held at Stamford in May 1392 denounced as ‘absurd’ the idea that Guyenne be lost to the crown ‘for the benefit of a single person [Gaunt]’: Westminster Chronicle, 490–1.

⁴ As some had accused him of doing in Iberia. The importance of the draft treaty of 1393 was emphasized by Palmer, England, France and Christendom, chapters 2, 8 and 9, but others have questioned its status as a draft treaty, suggesting that it was simply a set of over-ambitious proposals which had little chance of being ratified: see Saul, Richard II, 213–24, and C. Phillpotts, ‘John of Gaunt and English Policy towards France’, Journal of Medieval History xvi (1990), 363–86.

⁵ SAC I, 944–5. There were also local grievances: J. Bellamy, ‘The Northern Rebellions in the Later Years of Richard II’, BJRL 47 (1964–5), 254–74; Morgan, War and Society, 193–7, notes the gradual build-up of discontent in Cheshire since 1389–90, centring on the collection of a £2,000 subsidy as well as the threat to the livelihoods of the county's military community.

⁶ Some of the rebels were also opponents of Lancastrian dominance in the north: Walker, Lancastrian Affinity, 171–4. Henry was at Pontefract on 26 August 1393: DL 28/3/4, fo. 20v.

⁷ Gaunt was reputedly angry with Arundel for standing idly by in his castle of Holt (Clwyd) during the summer instead of helping to suppress the rising in the north-west: SAC I, 956. There were also suspicions that the king made little effort to arrest the ringleaders: PROME, vii.258–9, 264–6.

⁸ Westminster Chronicle, 518–19.

⁹ Thomas Talbot gave himself up in May, confessed in Henry's presence to ‘manifest high treason’, and was committed to the Tower of London. Gaunt was deeply displeased by Richard's later decision to pardon him (he had been retained for life by the king in 1392): CCR 1392–6, 294; CPR 1391–6, 433; Bellamy, ‘The Northern Rebellions’, 260, 268.

¹⁰ Palmer, England, France and Christendom, 152–65.

¹¹ Saul, Richard II, 277–84.

¹² He accompanied his father to Plymouth in mid-October to bid him farewell, and took the opportunity to visit the putative tomb of King Arthur and Guinevere in Glastonbury abbey. He was back in London by 6 November at the latest: DL 28/3/4, fos. 32v–34r; CPR 1396–9, 542.

¹³ For Froissart's account of the meeting, see Oeuvres de Froissart, xv.147–82; for the minutes, see J. Baldwin, The King's Council in England during the Middle Ages (Oxford, 1913), 135–7, 504–5.

¹⁴ On 23 July. The council continued until 26 July, when both Henry and the king returned to London (Saul, Richard II, 473; DL 28/1/5, fo. 28r; C 53/165).

¹⁵ Palmer, England, France and Christendom, 162–3.

¹⁶ SAC II, 38–9.

¹⁷ M. Jones, Ducal Brittany 1364–1399 (Oxford, 1970), 132–6, and Recueil des Actes de Jean IV, Duc de Bretagne, ed. M. Jones (2 vols, Paris, 1983), ii, nos. 1033–6. The treaty was dated 25 November 1395, and three days later a separate letter of obligation was drawn up whereby Henry of Bolingbroke was to receive 30,000 francs in return for the hand of his son. In fact, Marie married Jean, count of Perche, in July 1396, by which time Richard II had already written to Charles VI suggesting that the young Henry might be betrothed instead to the French king's youngest daughter, Michelle, but this never happened either (Diplomatic Correspondence, ed. Perroy, no. 229A and p. 253).

¹⁸ Goodman, John of Gaunt, 156.

¹⁹ Annales, 188; Oeuvres de Froissart, xv.238–9.

²⁰ The charters Henry witnessed in 1395 were dated 26 July at Eltham, 11 and 26 Sept. at Westminster and 22 Sept. at Windsor; he occasionally sought a royal pardon for a follower, as on 12 June (CPR 1391–6, 577). He attended parliament in Jan.–Feb. 1395 and was at Tutbury for several weeks in the spring and again in August before journeying on to Pontefract; he visited Leicester for the anniversary of Mary de Bohun's death in late June and was at Hertford or in London from October to December: PROME, vii.287, 304; DL 28/3/4, fos. 32v–34r. Details of his movements in 1395 are taken from his great wardrobe account, DL 28/1/5 and charter witness lists (C 53/165).

²¹ Except in 1383, when he was sixteen and simply accompanying his father: see above, p. 40.

²² Jean Creton said that ‘the king put more trust in him [Rutland] than any of his friends’: CR, 138; RHKA, 166–7; R. Horrox, ‘Edward of Langley, Second Duke of York’, ODNB, 17.801–3.

²³ Saul, Richard II, 226–7.

²⁴ Cf. T. Thornton, ‘Cheshire: The Inner Citadel of Richard II's Kingdom?’, in The Reign of Richard II, ed. G. Dodd (Stroud, 2000), 85–96.

²⁵ See Walker, Lancastrian Affinity, 174–81, for Richard's ‘assault upon his uncle's lordship’ in the north-west at this time, rejecting the idea of cohabitation between the two affinities in the 1390s.

²⁶ Walker, Lancastrian Affinity, 94–6; RHKA, 238–43; Saul, Richard II, 200–1, 263–4, 440; D. Fletcher, ‘The Lancastrian Collar of Esses. Its Origins and Transformations down the Centuries’, in The Age of Richard II, ed. J. Gillespie (Stroud, 1997), 191–204.

²⁷ ‘Then were those royal badges both of the hart and of the crown hidden away, so that some said that the esquires of the duke of Lancaster, wearing their collars, had been preordained by a prophecy to subdue like greyhounds in this year the pride of that hated beast the white hart’: The Deposition of Richard II, ed. T. Wright (Camden Society, Old Series, 1838), 8–12; Usk, 52; CR, 155; and see P. Strohm, ‘The Literature of Livery’, in P. Strohm, Hochon's Arrow: The Social Imagination of Fourteenth-Century Texts (Princeton, 1992), 179–83. Henry's gift to Queen Isabella on her arrival in England in 1396 was a necklace with a golden greyhound set with a ruby and a pearl (Traïson et Mort, 110).

²⁸ SAC I, 896; for these competing cults see C. Given-Wilson, ‘Richard II, Edward II, and the Lancastrian Inheritance’, EHR 109 (1994), 553–71; the two cults sprang up in the 1320s (to some extent as rivals from the start) but had waned since the mid-century. The immediate cause of Walsingham's remark was the death in 1389 of the young earl of Pembroke, whose ancestor Aymer de Valence had sat in judgment on Thomas of Lancaster in 1322.

²⁹ Somerville, Duchy of Lancaster, i.35–6.

³⁰ Given-Wilson, ‘Richard II, Edward II, and the Lancastrian Inheritance’, passim.

³¹ Westminster Chronicle, 194.

³² So said the authors of the Brut (ii.341) and the CE (iii.361). One of them clearly copied from the other, or else they used a common source; the latter is perhaps most likely. The Brut says that Richard made Roger his heir apparent (heyre parant), but this cannot be correct, for this would have implied that he would take precedence, even if Richard and Anne produced a son. For the re-dating of this episode to the parliament of 1386 rather than 1385, and the argument that it was linked to talk of Richard's deposition and that Richard was reminding parliament that if he were dethroned they would get a twelve-year-old in his place, see I. Mortimer, ‘Richard II and the Succession to the Crown’, History (2007), 320–36.

³³ CE, iii.369–70. The nineteen-year-old Roger succeeded to his earldom of March and was granted livery of his lands during the January 1394 parliament (on 25 February), which might have occasioned a debate about the succession: CP, viii.448–9. He had not been formally summoned to this parliament, but he witnessed his first charter on 13 March, a week after it ended (C 53/164).

³⁴ Hardyng and Usk both corroborate the use of the Crouchback Legend, the first by Gaunt ‘in order to supply his son Henry with a title to the crown’, the second by Henry: CR, 195–7; Usk, 64–7.

³⁵ SAC I, 962–3; Palmer, England, France and Christendom, 152–9; Bennett, ‘Edward III's Entail’. In CE (369–70), the chronicler's account of Gaunt's claim in the January 1394 parliament comes between a discussion of Gaunt's thwarted ambitions in France and his appointment as duke of Aquitaine; although the chronology of this chronicle is often confused, the context is suggestive.

³⁶ Bennett, ‘Edward III's Entail; C. Given-Wilson, ‘Legitimation, Designation and Succession to the Throne in Fourteenth-Century England’, in Building Legitimacy. Political Discourses and Forms of Legitimacy in Medieval Societies, ed. I. Alfonso, H. Kennedy and J. Escalona (Leiden, 2004), 89–105.

³⁷ CR, 202.

³⁸ The invitation is further evidence of Henry's reputation abroad: ‘If you can persuade your cousin the earl of Derby to join your company’, Count William was told, ‘your expedition will be more worthy and your enterprise more renowned.’ According to Froissart, ‘everyone knew that [Henry] would willingly have gone, if the king had not prevented him at the request of the duke of Lancaster’ (Oeuvres de Froissart, xv.228–9, 269–71). For this episode see also Tuck, ‘Henry IV and Chivalry’, 67.

³⁹ They witnessed royal charters when the king visited York in late March: C 53/165 (29 March and 1 April); Saul, Richard II, 473.

⁴⁰ The earls of Rutland and Nottingham served as proxies to plight Richard's troth in Paris, the latter placing the ring on Isabella's finger and occupying the seat normally reserved for the groom (Saint-Denys, ii.363–5, 413–15).

⁴¹ Henry witnessed a charter at Westminster in late July (C 53/165), but apart from this not much is known about his movements during the summer of 1396.

⁴² For the young Henry's presence at Ardres, see DL 28/3/5, fo. 14r.

⁴³ Saul, Richard II, 229–34; Palmer, England, France and Christendom, 176–7; Saint-Denys, ii.451–67; J. Stratford, Richard II and the English Royal Treasure (Woodbridge, 2012), 57–64.

⁴⁴ SAC II, 38–51. Despite Froissart's assertion to the contrary, Henry's kitchen journal (DL 28/1/9) makes it clear that he went to Calais; the duke of York remained in England as keeper of the realm (Oeuvres de Froissart, xv.298; Foedera, vii.841). Henry's household was based at Guines, just west of Ardres, for his two weeks in France. Gaunt paid £200 for accommodation at Calais on 16 October, but probably moved closer to Ardres once the summit began (DL 28/1/9, fo. 4v; DL 28/3/5, fo. 12r).

⁴⁵ CCR 1396–9, 73; DL 28/1/9, fos. 2v, 5r, 6v, 7r–v.