On 21 September 1399, the earl of Warwick’s brother Sir William Beauchamp went to visit King Richard, now a prisoner at the Tower of London. Sir William was accompanied by the writer Adam of Usk, who noted in his chronicle that the visit was also the second anniversary of Arundel’s beheading. Beauchamp and Usk, hearty loyalists to the Bolingbroke cause, came with what the latter called ‘the specific intention of ascertaining [Richard’s] mood and behaviour’.
Richard had been imprisoned in the Tower for nineteen days, having been moved on Duke Henry’s command from Chester castle at the end of August, arriving in the capital on 2 September. His visitors found him in dismal mood: deprived of his regular servants and surrounded by Lancastrian spies, the failed king was finally alone. Even his greyhound was gone, having abandoned him while the king was in south Wales.
Richard was understandably miserable. There could have been no more evocative place than the Tower for the duke to place his cousin. The royal prison was the very fortress in which both had taken refuge during the great rebellion in 1381, and in which Henry had only narrowly escaped capture and death at the hands of Wat Tyler and John Ball’s disciples. Richard must have recalled the childhood memories of looking out over the smouldering city of London from a lonely window at the top of the Tower, and seeing his whole country risen in uproar. Now he was back, and although the realm was no longer in the grip of peasant anarchy, it had once again turned against his rule.
As the company sat down to dinner, Richard ‘began to discourse dolefully’, wrote Usk. ‘My God, this is a strange and fickle land,’ said the king, ‘which has destroyed and ruined so many kings, so many rulers, so many great men and which never ceases to be riven and worn down by dissensions and strife and internecine hatreds.’
Then the historian king started telling his guests sad stories of previous English kings undone by their people. Usk heard him recount ‘the names and histories of those who had suffered such fates, from the time when the realm was first inhabited’. It was a pathetic sight: the Plantagenet king who had such a deep interest in the ancient tales of his regality and his ancestors’ deeds now found history repeating itself, with himself as the victim.
The sight of a king – and a man – brought so low left a deep impression on Usk. ‘Seeing … the troubles of his soul,’ he wrote, ‘and seeing that none of those who had been deputed to wait upon him were in any way bound to him, or used to serving him, but were strangers who had been sent there simply to spy on him, I departed much moved at heart, reflecting to myself on the glories of his former state and on the fickle fortune of the world.’
Usk did not detail which tales of royal misery Richard had recounted. But it is not hard to guess at a few whom he might have mentioned: his hero Edward the Confessor, who had suffered several rebellions, and died in the aftermath of a Northumbrian revolt; King John, the first of the Plantagenets to have his royal prerogative forcibly circumscribed by the will of the barons; Henry III, who was made a prisoner of his own barons; Edward II, Richard’s great-grandfather, whom he had tried to rescue from the ignominy of history by applying to the pope for his canonization in 1395.
Richard recounted the stories in a state of great self-pity. But in his own way, he had been a worse king than all of them combined. Like the Confessor, he had considered his own divinity above the practical necessity of having children to continue his royal line. Like Henry III he had obsessed over holy rituals, while allowing English conquest in France to collapse. Like John, he had tyrannized his people. Like Edward II, he had antagonized the house of Lancaster, stolen land from his nobles, tainted politics with treachery and proven himself incorrigible over the lengthy course of a reign in which he had been offered many chances to reform his ways. More generally, he had listened to the counsel of unworthy advisers and raised low-born men to the ranks of the nobility. He had attacked and plundered his subjects’ property, rather than defending it. He had built himself up as an antagonistic private lord, rather than fulfilling his higher duty to be a source of public lordship. He had believed that kingship was about prestige, instead of leadership. And he had ended up with nothing.
Nine days after Usk dined with the king, on Tuesday 30 September, the lords of England gathered with an assembly of the commons at Westminster Hall. It was a parliament in all but name – although without the king’s authority it could not claim full parliamentary status. An empty throne, draped with gold cloth, stood at one end of the hall. Richard remained in the Tower of London.
Richard Scrope, archbishop of York, stood up and read a statement to the assembly. Richard, he said, had agreed to resign the Crown on the grounds of his own inadequacy. Thomas Arundel, now restored as archbishop of Canterbury, stood and asked if the people would accept this. According to the official record, each lord agreed. Then the commons shouted their assent.
Had Richard really resigned? Certainly it seems that he had no choice. The official record was made to give the impression that he gave up his Crown willingly, saying that he had ‘asserted in his abdication [that] he was worthy to be deposed’. But the Traison et Mort, a loyal source, suggests otherwise. It records a fierce argument between Bolingbroke and Richard, which took place one evening before the ‘parliament’. The latter swore and cursed, and demanded to see his wife, while Bolingbroke refused to release him from the Tower or to do anything else without parliamentary process. According to the Traison et Mort:
The king [was] in great wrath, but he could not help himself, and said to the duke that he did great wrong both to him and to the crown.
The duke replied, ‘We cannot do anything til the parliament meets.’
The king was so enraged by this speech that he could scarcely speak, and paced twenty-three steps down the room without uttering a word; and presently he broke out thus: ‘… you have acknowledged me your king these twenty-two years, how dare you use me so cruelly? I say that you behave to me like false men, and like false traitors to their lord; and this I will prove, and fight four of the best of you, and this is my pledge.’ Saying which, the king threw down his bonnet …
It made no difference. The assembly that met to agree to the king’s deposition moved rapidly through a new and unprecedented legal process. They listened as thirty-three articles of deposition were read out by the bishop of St Asaph. The articles were a litany of Richard’s failings, from the start of his reign to his tyrannical last days. They covered his ‘evil rule’ in the 1380s; his destruction of the Appellants (‘against whom the king was extremely indignant because they wished the king to be under good rule’); his raising of an army against the people under de Vere; his use of the ‘great multitude of malefactors’ from Cheshire against his own subjects; the extortionate selling of pardons; falsification of the parliamentary record; the denial of justice to Bolingbroke; misuse of taxation and loans; a refusal to ‘keep and defend the just laws and customs of the realm’; numerous counts of extortion and deception; removal of the crown jewels to Ireland; breaches of Magna Carta; and a general, withering clause which simply stated that ‘the king was so variable and dissimulating in his words and writings, especially to popes and rulers outside the realm, that no one could trust him’.
After reading the articles, the bishop of St Asaph passed the sentence of deposition. Then Bolingbroke rose from his place in the parliament, crossed himself and claimed the realm as his, saying in English:
‘In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, I, Henry of Lancaster, challenge this realm of England and the crown with all its members and appurtenances, as I am descended by the right line of the blood coming from the good lord King Henry III, and through that right that God of his grace has sent me, with the help of my kindred and my friends to recover it; the which realm was on the point of being undone for default of governance and undoing of good laws.’
He pulled out Richard II’s signet, showed it to the people of his new kingdom, and took Archbishop Arundel’s hand in his own.
The archbishop of Canterbury led Henry Bolingbroke up towards the golden throne at the front of the hall. He knelt and prayed before it. When he opened his eyes, the archbishops of Canterbury and York took an arm each and seated him on the throne. The great hall of Westminster – the heart of Plantagenet kingship – roared with the acclaim and applause of the lords and commons.
The air in the hall vibrated with the cries and noise of the people of England. The noise rounded upwards, towards the hammer-beam ceiling built by Henry Yevele at such lavish royal expense. It swirled around the decorative white harts that skirted the walls, and rebounded off the statues of the thirteen kings who had ruled England between the Confessor and Richard II. And it reverberated in the ears of the first king of a new dynasty: Henry Bolingbroke, who would become the first king of the house of Lancaster.
A new king had been elected. Or, looked at another way, the Crown of England had been abruptly seized. On 1 October 1399, Richard II was formally and ceremonially stripped of his allegiances and his Crown. Within four months he would be dead, having starved in prison at Pontefract castle. Meanwhile, Henry duke of Lancaster was crowned Henry IV of England on 13 October, the feast day of Edward the Confessor. The choice of date was intended to make a point about Henry’s own royal blood. But it could not conceal the bare facts. After eight generations and 245 years of rule, the unbroken succession of the Plantagenets had ended. Great magnates of the blood royal might now wrestle for the Crown between themselves, as the politics of the day demanded. Richard II, by his folly, his greed, and his terrible, destructive misapprehension of virtually every aspect of kingship bar those that met his hunger for obedience, had cast everything he had inherited onto the bonfire of history.
A new age of English kingship had begun.