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The Century of Discord
The 1300s
July 1307
(The Accession of Edward II)
to
October 1399
(The Elevation of Henry IV)

The Rule of Edward II and the Influence of Piers Gaveston
The Battle of Bannockburn
The Rise and Fall of the Despensers
The Interregnum of Isabella and Mortimer, and the Emergence of Edward III
The Early Years of the Hundred Years’ War and the Battle of Crécy
The Black Death
The Battle of Poitiers
The Second Phase of the Hundred Years’ War and the Dotage of Edward III
The Reign of Richard II and the Peasants’ Revolt
The Long Decline of Richard II
The 1399 Civil War and the Accession of Henry IV

1

The Rule of Edward II and the Influence of Piers Gaveston
The accession and coronation of the 23-year-old Edward II, the old king’s fourth but
eldest surviving son, in the summer of 1307 marked a shift in power from a great
king, or at least one whose reign had been full of great events and endeavour, heroic
or otherwise, to one who presided over his kingdom with all the aplomb and
intensity of a fop
...

The only other remarkable note about the accession of the new king was that he was
the thirteenth child that the old king had produced with his beloved wife, Eleanor of
Castile, but that he was the only male to survive infancy
...
The only great
contribution that Edward II was to make to the life of the nation was his son, the
future Edward III, whose attributes and career clearly showed that he inherited the
family traits of his grandfather and his mother rather than those of his father
...
But early losses quickly dampened
his appetite for war and he soon left the north to a resurgent Robert the Bruce,
retreating instead to his sumptuous and elaborate court where he enjoyed a life of
leisure and play
...
These senior barons believed that a series of constitutional struggles
won against the Angevin-Plantagenet monarchs over the previous hundred years
had earned them the right to a position of influence at court
...
Gaveston had been
banished by Edward I during the latter’s long terminal illness, but had returned
soon after the accession of his friend
...

Their relationship had formed in adolescence in the court of Edward I but it soon
grew to be so open and ignore the norms and social delicacies of the age so clearly
and so utterly that an already unfriendly set of barons quickly became even more
alienated
...

Many of these collected around the person of Thomas, the second Earl of Lancaster,
one of the richest and most influential members of the English aristocracy as well as
being the new king’s cousin and a grandson of Henry III
...

In the decade that followed, Lancaster was to become almost as important in the
country’s destiny as the king himself, and this was especially the case after the
catastrophe of Bannockburn in 1314
...
All this left
England to experience one of the darkest and most dislocated periods in its history
...

She was Isabella, the daughter of Philip IV of France, and the king’s mistake was
compounded when he chose the couch of his friend, over that of his wife, at the
wedding party held on his return to celebrate their marriage
...
This time a position was found for him in Ireland but the following year,
Gaveston once again returned and was accepted back into the king’s court with the
latter’s full blessing
...
Edward II’s terrible mismanagement of the nation’s affairs were felt much more
widely and eventually this led to a crisis that was every bit as significant as the
events surrounding the Provisions of Oxford during his grandfather’s reign
...
This had been agreed to by Edward I early in his reign during his period of
success in Wales, France and Scotland, but had again been challenged by the
increasingly tyrannical old king as he reached the last decade of his life
...
This new body, wholly responsible to parliament, was quick to push
home an advantage over the king that three years of economic, political and military
disaster had brought, and it was able to force through a series of reforms, or
ordinances, that hugely curtailed the authority of the monarch
...

In addition, the king agreed that he would not go to war without the consent of his
barons who were also to be consulted when the king appointed senior officers of
state
...

Gaveston secretly returned to England the following year but, by this time, the
prestige of Edward II had been so badly damaged that even he could not save his
lover, his confidante and his friend
...

However, he was captured during his journey south by the Earl of Warwick, who

4

Gaveston had earlier wronged and who considered himself not privy to any
agreement made at his surrender
...

The king was now left without a constant and obviously important consort who had
been at his side since he was a boy, and matters were made even worse the
following year when Robert the Bruce invaded from Scotland
...

The Battle of Bannockburn
The king responded to this crisis that threatened his kingdom with extraordinary
inertia and, while the country plunged deeper and deeper into crisis, he only
managed to stir himself when riled by his royal cousin and main rival, the Earl of
Lancaster
...
With each baron retaking control of his own lands, thus threatening
Edward’s very crown, he was only belatedly shaken into frantic action, deciding
only late on that a successful military campaign against Robert the Bruce was
needed to restore his authority
...

But his preparations were severely hampered when Lancaster and his followers
refused to send men to fight with him, arguing that the king was acting without the
consent of parliament
...
A victory for Edward II would
restore his regal position and prestige while a loss would virtually make him a
puppet of the absconding barons led by Lancaster
...
This English force had marched from Edinburgh and

5

was heading to relieve the strategically important castle at Stirling, 30 miles away at
the top of the Firth of Forth
...
So the retention of
Stirling was seen as vital to Edward II’s plans for Scotland, but the English force was
never to make it there, instead meeting with the army of Robert the Bruce just to the
south where a trap had been set
...
Hemmed in
on both sides of the glen by terrain unsuitable for cavalry, the English commanders
were unable to deploy their numerical superiority that, it had been assumed, would
win the day
...

Bruce’s tactics led to panic within English ranks, and the king himself only just
evaded capture during an unceremonious retreat south
...

With Scotland now under his control, Robert the Bruce turned his attention once
again to the north of England, which was largely abandoned both by both Edward II,
who had scurried back to London by sea via Dunbar, and by Lancaster, who was
more worried about his own lands and domains in the west
...
With England crumbling under the inaction and vacillation of both men,
Bruce seized his chance to extend his influence and had his brother crowned king of
Ireland
...


6

This period of political atrophy, when both leaders vacillated from the relative
comfort of their respective power bases, coincided with a period of the most extreme
social hardship caused by the Great Famine
...
This was the first of a series of Europe-wide famines that plagued the early
fourteenth century and brought civilised society across the continent to a standstill
...
This period of colder weather across Europe
followed a far warmer period, the Medieval Warm Period, that had begun in about
800
...
These periodic
famines were generally worse through the summer months, with thousands dying
before the new harvests were collected in the autumn
...

This hugely important document in both British and Scottish history, later ratified at
Northampton and Edinburgh in 1328, recognised both the right for Scotland to be
independent and for the right of the Scottish aristocracy to elect its own king
...

The Rise and Fall of the Despensers
The Earl of Lancaster took a leading, if not a positive, role in the paralysis that
followed Bannockburn, but his inability to govern had by 1318 brought many barons
back to the crown
...
Despenser,
however, had worked hard to recover his family’s fortune and had for over two
decades, fighting for both Edward I and Edward II, been loyal to the crown
...

This loyalty continued after 1314 when, during the years of Lancaster’s hegemony,
he seized control of a hapless situation and came to dominate the court of Edward
during the latter’s years of reduction
...
Land was confiscated, dowries were
appropriated and inheritances were cheated
...
But the
younger Despenser, despised by the king’s French wife, Isabella, was also to become
important due to his close personal and romantic relationship with Edward II,
replacing Gaveston in the affections of the king
...

The greed and the violence of the Despensers after 1318 eventually became too much
for many, and another baronial revolt forced the king to send them into exile in the
summer of 1321
...
They
then rounded on Lancaster slowly forcing him off his lands in the Marches, and
pushing him further north during the Despenser War of 1321-22
...
But this did not stop him from making
one final effort to thwart the Despensers and the king when he signed a treaty and
an alliance with Bruce himself
...
In addition to Lancaster, the elder
Despenser also turned on other old enemies with whom he had a score to settle, and
most important amongst these was Roger Mortimer, a fellow baron from the
Marches and a leading opponent of the king
...
Mortimer was captured and sent to the Tower
of London, although the king stubbornly refused to listen to Despenser’s entreaty
that he should be executed
...
This was to
restore the position and prestige of the king and cost Lancaster his life, along with
another 20 or so noble supporters who were called the Contrariants
...

In the years of the Tyranny that followed Boroughbridge, it was the Despensers,
father and son, who soon proved to be the real power behind the throne and, having
denounced the Ordinances that had been passed by Lancaster, they together were to
dominate England for the next four years
...

The hardship and poverty of the Tyranny that the Despensers presided over in the
early years of the 1320s was eventually ended by one of the most bizarre liaisons in
English history
...
However, after 1320 Isabella had increasingly become the focus of an
anti-royal, anti-Despenser faction within elite English society, and so it seems that
the tyrants were to make a crucial mistake when in 1325 they let the queen out of the
country to on a diplomatic visit to her brother in Paris
...
Isabella and Mortimer’s open affair at the court of the king of France
eventually forced the king to ask his sister to leave Paris, and she returned to her
French lands to raise an army
...
In return, the queen offered to marry
her son, who she had kidnapped when he had also come to Paris to pay homage for
his father’s French lands, to the duke’s daughter, Philippa
...

As a result, a mercenary army supporting Mortimer and Isabella landed on the
Suffolk coast at the end of September 1326 with London soon rising up in support
...
As a result, the king and the Despensers fled to the west where their power
and influence soon collapsed
...
A month later in Hereford, the
younger Despenser was also executed
...
The king
himself was also soon captured, in Neath in south Wales, and, having tearfully
handed over the seal of office to his young son who rode with his mother and
Mortimer, he was taken as a prisoner to Kenilworth Castle in Warwickshire
...
Gory tradition grew over the centuries that this was done with the aid of
a red-hot poker that was inserted into the rectum of the king in such a way as to
leave no marks
...

The Interregnum of Isabella and Mortimer, and the Emergence of Edward III
The interregnum of Isabella and Mortimer was to be just as cruel and tyrannical as
the one that it replaced and this meant that it was bound to fail once the barons were
offered the alternative of a return to legitimate rule
...


10

Economic stagnation and political misrule continued at home while a treaty with
France virtually ceded all English claims on the continent to Isabella’s brother
...
In the
meantime, Mortimer forced a depleted and intimidated parliament at Salisbury in
1328 to grant him the inflated title of first Earl of March in an effort to legitimise his
power base in the west
...

However, important members of the nobility were absent from the Salisbury
parliament, and it was these men who were to rally around the young king when he,
spurred on by the execution of his half-brother by Mortimer, audaciously rounded
on his mother and Mortimer as they traveled for a meeting of parliament two years
later at Nottingham Castle in October 1330
...

The coup against Mortimer brought the barons flocking back to the crown, with a
new phase in the topsy-turvy history of early fourteenth century England beginning
after Mortimer’s hanging at Tyburn at the end of November
...
Important among these was Henry, the third earl of Lancaster, whose
brother, Thomas, had been executed in 1322
...
After the execution of his lover, the king’s mother, Isabella, was placed
under comfortable house arrest before being slowly reintroduced to her son’s court
...

Edward III was just shy of his eighteenth birthday when he orchestrated his coup at
Nottingham Castle, and was to go on to rule England for fifty years
...
As a result, his busy reign saw major victories in the
opening salvos of the Hundred Years’ War although, in winning victories as a
continental king, Edward III conversely did more than any other king before him to
create the notion of the English nation
...
This was
most especially the case in the early years of his reign when a series of stunning
victories in France hugely enhanced his reputation
...
The saint, a Greek soldier who had
been beheaded for his faith in Palestine in AD303, had long been associated with
Edward III’s Plantagenet predecessor, the Lionheart, and his evocation was central
to the Order of the Garter that was founded in August 1348
...
The Order of the Garter survived into modern times
as the most important and prestigious of the old chivalric institutions, with the first
women accepted into the order in 1987
...
The chapel, which in time was
to house the final resting places for ten British monarchs, including Edward III
himself, was later rebuilt by Edward IV, and is considered to be one of the finest
examples of English Perpendicular in the country
...
With it plain stonework and its clean
and strong long lines drawing the eye ever upward, the English Perpendicular
offered a clear, new statement of national identity and English nationhood, and
reached its zenith in the 1350s with the construction of the great east window at
Gloucester Cathedral, the resting place of Edward III’s murdered father
...

One of the major grievances that the barons held against Mortimer was his
capitulation to the Scots in the Northampton-Edinburgh agreement, and Edward III
shrewdly used this emotive theme as a rallying cry in the days and months after
Mortimer’s execution
...
The battle was incredibly important
as it marked the beginning of a remarkable military revolution that was soon to be
played out on more important battlefields in France
...
This longbow was about six feet in length and was made from the
wood of the yew, often imported from Italy
...
This
followed the turmoil that had arisen after the death, probably from leprosy, of
Robert the Bruce in June 1329, and the succession of his five-year-old son, David II
...
But
further English progress was hugely hampered by constant French support for the
Bruce counterclaim, and this formed a major reason why Edward III turned this
attention to ancient claims in France
...

The Early Years of the Hundred Years’ War and the Battle of Crécy
Having turned away from a war of conquest in the Highlands, Edward III soon
embarked on a war, one of the longest in history, in France where English claims to
the old Plantagenet-Angevin Empire of Henry II had been all but lost through the
dark days of Edward II, Lancaster, the Despensers and Mortimer and Isabella
...
However, in reality fighting between France and England

13

had begun much earlier and this cross-Channel enmity was to go on long after the
end of the war in 1453
...
Setting out on a much bolder adventure, Edward III instead was to
claim the crown of France itself, a claim that he made through his mother, the
imprisoned Isabella
...
At a similar time, in
March 1337, the French rank of duke was introduced in England for the first time
when his eldest son, the six-year-old Edward of Woodstock, the Black Prince,
became the first Duke of Cornwall
...

Queen Isabella, the king’s imprisoned mother, was the daughter of Philip IV, who
had died in 1314, and the sister of Charles IV, the last Capetian king who she and
Mortimer had affronted in 1326
...

Soon Edward III’s cause, as the closest direct descendent of the Capetian line, was
taken up by many dissident French nobles who favoured a restoration of the Capets,
and this was particularly the case in north-eastern France, on the border with
Flanders, where the Plantagenets had traditionally always been so strong
...

The Hundred Years’ War began in May 1337 and lasted, on and off, for the next 116
years, with Edward III pursuing the dual war aims of restoring English power in

14

Gascony and protecting important English wool trading connections in Flanders
...
This trading bond
had been broken by a French invasion from the north east, although a position of
stalemate was soon reached in the early years of the conflict
...
These had to all intents and purposes bankrupted him by
1339 and, being unable to raise any more money either through English merchants
in London or Italian financiers trading in the Low Countries, he was forced to agree
to a series of far reaching concessions with parliament in order to restore his money
supply
...
All these reforms and changes during Edward III’s reign
returned political debate to the very essence of the Magna Carta, which had stated
that the king must act within the law and that, in time of war, he must expect to
consult his barons
...
This was primarily due to a recognition of the
growing importance that the middle class merchants, bankers and townspeople
were playing in the prosperity and development of the nation
...
These
merchants, members of the gentry and financiers were for centuries to be
represented in the House of Commons
...

But changes in English society during the early years of the Hundred Years’ War,
and ones hugely affected soon after by the Black Death, were cultural as well as

15

political
...

Many within the legal profession opposed this huge cultural change, and it
remained irrelevant in the clerical courts where Latin was still spoken
...
But elsewhere, the
new law was popular, and this hugely aided the development of the notion of the
English nation that, within a generation, inspired Geoffrey Chaucer, who began life
as a page in the court of Richard II, to write The Canterbury Tales in English in 1387
...

One of the reasons why Edward III was in such debt by the late 1330s was because
he had spent so much of his money building a navy to secure the English Channel
and protect the English wool trade in its dealings with the Low Countries
...

However, victory at sea did not bring any great success on land where lack of
finance and stubborn French resistance, especially at the important besieged city of
Tournai, led to an impasse that was to last a number of years
...
Four years away from continental battle had
replenished his war chest, and this was now used to recruit and arm a force of some
12,000
...
This
force, however, was to attack, not in Flanders as in the 1330s, but rather now in
Normandy
...
This, by and
large, was what happened in the campaign that followed Edward’s landing near
Cherbourg in early July, with his army eventually arriving at the town of Poissy,
only a few miles to the north west of Paris, three weeks later
...

As a consequence, he was forced to beat a hasty retreat and headed north eastwards
towards the Low Countries where he remained strong
...

This, which is often seen as the battle that began the end of the chivalric age, began
on the evening of 26 August 1346 on the outskirts of Crécy, a town just to the north
of the River Somme not far from where more young soldiers would again lose their
lives in some of the fiercest battles of World War One 570 years later
...
This at the time was being manufactured in the Tower of
London with the English army in France in the opening years of the war employing
over a hundred cannon
...

King Philip had arrived at Crécy in the late afternoon, and was advised not to fight a
pitched battle so late in the day, with his army tired after days and days of marching
...
Philip, commanding an army of some
30,000 men, began the battle by ordering a barrage from his Genoese archers who
gathered together at the front of his army
...
The 16-year-old Black Prince commanded these men, and their range and
penetration, as well as their rate of fire, was much greater than the French crossbows
they faced
...


17

Edward III’s grandfather, the imposing Edward I, perhaps imagined the importance
that the longbow was likely to play in the ensuing conflict when he had banned all
sports on Sundays except longbow archery practice
...
This military revolution, centred
on the longbow, imagined war prosecuted without recourse to heavily armed
hand-to-hand combat
...
The rout at the Battle of Crécy continued until
the final French attack was turned back at around midnight, and it was completed
the following morning when new French arrivals, unaware of the devastating losses
of the previous day, rode and marched straight into the trap set by Edward III and
his main military commander, the teenage Black Prince
...
Indeed, there were to be no rules followed at Crécy, with the old ideals
of chivalry, so clearly ignored in the battle, dying in the century that followed
...

After the battle, the Black Prince, the eldest son of Edward III and soon after to be
only the second heir to the English throne to assume the title Prince of Wales, was to
take three ostrich feathers from the dead body of the vanquished king of Bohemia
and stick them in his hat
...

The enormous military success at Crécy could not, however, be followed up with
any meaningful territorial gain, and Edward was faced with an army eager to return
to England after a long and arduous campaign, and a parliament reluctant to finance
further war
...
This had been for centuries a home port to
piracy that had been a plague on English ships plying the lucrative Channel trade
routes and this he was determined to stamp out
...
This
forced the townspeople to sue for peace and this gave the town to the English king
...
As a
result, Calais was to remain an English possession for the next 210 years
...
This victory at the Battle of Neville’s Cross near Durham
followed a Scottish invasion of northern England that had assumed incorrectly that
the army needed to protect the North had been withdrawn in order to support
operations on the continent
...
He was to spend the
next 11 years as a prisoner of the English crown, spending much of his time at
Odiham Castle in Hampshire, and he was only finally released after the payment of
a massive ransom
...
This was the second of three great bubonic plague pandemics recorded in
the history of the world since the beginning of urban civilisation with the first, the
Justinian Plague that originated in central Africa, decimating Constantinople and the
Byzantine Empire between AD541-44
...
The third great
bubonic plague pandemic, which broke out in northern China in the 1890s and
spread as far as India, killed some 12 million
...
Spreading quickly along well-established and well-populated
trade routes, it was soon to reach Europe through the Levant and the Italian
commercial cities that a century later were to dominate the Renaissance
...
Within eighteen
months, it had devastated the whole country
...
Fleas that
lived in the fur of brown rats carried this
...

In all likeliness, livestock or fur traders spread the plague from town to town and it
would have passed quickly into the native population
...

A victim of the Black Death, so called since the eighteenth century due to the black
buboes or bruises that would appear in the gland ducts of the neck, armpits and

20

groin, would first suffer coughing and sneezing fits that soon developed into
pneumonia
...
This was followed by the swelling, hardening and
bursting of the buboes, before excruciating pain brought on delirium, madness and
eventually death
...

Although affecting many peasants and those from the lower orders of society, the
disease cut across social barriers and killed many noble born as well, including the
Archbishop of Canterbury and the king’s own daughter, Joan, although no
European monarch was to die from the plague
...
With the Bubonic Plague
returning periodically over the next few decades, and with further severe outbreaks
of plague recorded in 1360-61, which killed two more daughters of the king and,
perhaps, another 20% of the population, 1368-69 and 1375, this figure was decimated
by the Black Death and its aftermath by between a half and two-thirds, with the rolls
of parliament for the 1370s suggesting a reduced population that had been driven
down to about 2
...

The resultant social, political and economic consequences were to be felt for at least
a century
...
This was a workforce that parliament tried to control with the Statute of
Labourers in 1351 that pegged wages at pre-1349 levels
...
This scarcity of agricultural labour in the second half of the fourteenth
century created a radicalisation and politicisation that sometimes led to ad hoc local
arrangements that benefited this peasant class
...
The fuming and insolent resentment that this brought
eventually led to the Peasants’ Revolt some 30 years later
...


21

The Battle of Poitiers
The preoccupation with survival during the Black Death and the subsequent social
and financial dislocation that it brought meant that Edward III was not able to
renew his continental pursuits until 1356
...
This was
to see Gaunt, who received his name as a corruption of Ghent, his birthplace,
attacking southwards through Brittany while his elder brother was to come up from
Gascony
...

However, by the end of the summer campaigning season this had gone disastrously
wrong with the Black Prince left, supported by a force of no more than 7,000 that
included only about 1,000 archers, exposed and pursued by King John II of France
who could count on a force of five times that number
...
But, still smarting from the terrible ignominy of Crécy a
decade before, this was an entreaty that was roundly rejected by a hugely confident
John
...
But again, as with Crécy, the French were eager to press their
numerical superiority, and battle was once again forced on the English
...

As a result, John had built and equipped a large infantry of well-protected pikemen,
and it was these men that he thrust at the front of his force
...
Hiding
most of his longbow men in the hedges that bordered the battlefield, he gave orders

22

for this force to rain down as fierce an onslaught as was possible
...
However, at
the same time, the Black Prince ordered a cavalry attack by his knights on the French
nobility who gathered to the rear
...

Among the dead at Poitiers lay many French nobles who could be added to those
who had lost their lives at Crecy a decade before while the French king himself, after
having retreated from the battlefield with the main body of his knights to the town
of Poitiers itself, was taken prisoner
...
This meant that Edward III now had
captive both the kings of Scotland and France
...
This followed further
English campaigning in 1359 that the Black Prince hoped would result in the
coronation of his father at Rheims
...

The treaty crippled France, ceding huge tracts of western France to the Plantagenets
with Gascony given back to Edward III and many other Aquitaine provinces,
originally held by Henry II, also restored
...
Calais also was accepted as an English possession
...

The release of John the Good was made after the promise of a ransom of a
staggering 3 million crowns, a figure that was to be paid slowly over time and, as a

23

guarantee, Louis, the king’s second son, was sent to England as a hostage in his
place
...
Poitiers was an unmitigated disaster for France and, with the French king
absent, the country, full of marauding mercenaries left behind by the departing
English, descended into anarchy, economic dislocation and baronial lawlessness
...
Edward III presided over,
in terrible juxtaposition to his predecessor and his successor and despite the ravages
of the Black Death, this period of peace and prosperity for England and was seen, as
a result, as the father of the English nation
...
The lion’s share in France was given to the Black Prince who sailed
to set up court in Bordeaux in February 1363, while his second son, John of Gaunt,
had been created the Duke of Lancaster in 1362 before being sent north to control the
crown’s business in the north and in Scotland
...

The Second Phase of the Hundred Years’ War and the Dotage of Edward III
But these halcyon days of Plantagenet rule across vast swathes of Europe were to be
fleeting and, by the late 1360s, the heady days that followed Sluys, Crécy and
Poitiers and the Treaty at Brétigny were long gone
...
The ambitious and capable Charles V,
who had succeeded his father, John II, in 1364, encouraged these
...
The old king’s honour took him there against the advice of many of his
consorts, but he made it clear that he would stay there until his ransom had been
properly paid
...
The Black Prince had long been revered as
England’s most successful martial leader and contemporaries also saw in him the
chivalric virtues of his age
...
But his successes in the 1340s and 1350s
were equally matched by his later losses in the 1360s, and these were exacerbated by
the ravages of a debilitating illness that he caught in Spain in 1366, during the time
of his third great victory at the Battle of Najera, and from which he was never to
recover
...
Soon after, at the beginning of 1371,
illness forced the Black Prince back to England and he was never to return to
Plantagenet lands on the continent again
...
In this quest, Charles V
was also helped by Edward III’s own increasing senility and the death of his
steadfast and dependable wife in 1369
...

After his invasion of Aquitaine, Charles V fought a slow tactical war of attrition
against the Plantagenet forces gathered against him that aimed to wear his
opposition down and in this he was largely successful
...
By 1376, as a result, only a
small enclave in the north east around Calais remained of the huge empire that had
been gained after the Treaty of Brétigny only 15 years before
...
This took place at the so-called
Good Parliament that nominally had been called to raise further taxes for the war
...

One other crucial development that these crises also led to was the election of the
first Speaker in the House of Commons, Peter de la Mare, who was charged with
representing the opinion of the lower house concerning the extra taxation
...
Although many of these
parliamentary changes and precedents were reversed at the next meeting of
parliament a year later, when John of Gaunt was able to reassert royal authority on
behalf of his father in one of the latter’s last acts of government, with, indeed, the
first speaker arrested and, for a while, imprisoned, the Good Parliament can be seen
as one more step on the evolutionary road towards a balanced constitution in which
the House of Commons, as well as the monarch and the Lords, were to hold
legitimate authority
...
He was buried
in Westminster Abbey
...
But in the end, all he had to
show for his campaigning was a few coastal towns on the north French coast with a
resurgent French fleet in the English Channel challenging the English ports there
...
This, however, could not be maintained and, as a result, a
stalemate in the war emerged in the late 1380s that was finally settled with a truce in
1389
...
This was
to last until another English invasion in Normandy, this time led by Henry V, whose
victory at Agincourt was in its way every bit as stunning as those of the Black
Prince’s at Crécy and Poitiers two generations before
...
As a result, a year later in June 1377, the
10-year-old Richard II, the new Prince of Wales, became king and began his reign in
a similar fashion to the grandfather whom he replaced
...

This marital link had made John of Gaunt the richest and one of the most powerful
men in England, although he remained unpopular, particularly in London, due to
his wealth and his ostentation
...
This was to keep him occupied
abroad until military defeat forced him home in 1388
...
Indeed, it would eventually be Bolingbroke
who was to usurp his cousin’s crown, founding a royal line in 1399, the Lancastrian
dynasty, that was to fight for the crown through the War of the Roses
...
Grosmont, a close political and
military supporter of the king and an original member of the Order of the Garter,
had been, 14 years after the first, the Black Prince, only the second ever duke created
in England
...
This came to crisis point in 1381 when a poll tax was brought in to pay off
the huge treasury debt that had grown in the 1370s, and this followed a series of
decrees that pegged wages
...
The poor
had borne the brunt of previous tax levies and it was they who primarily suffered
from the consequences that the downturn in the economy brought
...
The premise upon which this was agreed was that
the monarch was not above the law and that he ruled on behalf of the people
...
As a result, and especially after the Black Death had increased the actual
value of labour from the 1350s, England in the late fourteenth century had
developed a sophisticated and intelligent lower social class, and it was they who in
1381 were no longer willing to lay down for their king without some guarantees and
pledges in return
...
But they also rebelled
because they had developed sufficiently into a political force capable of free thought
...
Riots
soon ensued and revolt spread to Kent where it was to gain much of its vigour
...

By June 1381, this mob had grown to the size of a small army and it was ready,
under Tyler, to move on London
...
Riots, looting and murder ensued in an orgy of violence
that lasted 3 days and that saw the Archbishop of Canterbury lose his head at the
Tower of London
...

Some, though, remained loyal to the young king and these two forces eventually
met at Smithfield, just outside the city walls to the north, near Cripplegate
...
This left the 14-year-old king exposed and threatened by an
increasingly angry mob, although he was to bravely quell the situation by saying
that he would listen favourably to their remonstrations
...
Now starved of Tyler’s dynamic leadership and no doubt in awe of
the king’s presence, they, as a result, dispersed quietly from Smithfield and, in
various states of lawfulness, returned to their home county bases
...
Judges through the rest of
the summer were sent out to punish the revolt’s most prominent leaders, although
the purge that might have been expected never truly materialised and, in the early
months of the following year, a general amnesty was proclaimed
...

The Long Decline of Richard II

29

In many ways, Richard II’s victory at Smithfield was to be the high point of a reign
that was to stretch on for nearly two more decades
...
He was unpopular with the Church that increasingly sided
with Rome against Richard’s encroachment into their affairs
...
In addition, he remained unpopular with the lower classes who saw the
years after 1381 as a betrayal of the agreement made at Smithfield
...
For Richard’s high-handed
approach to government ignored, or at least tried to ignore, parliamentary
developments and privileges that had been granted over the previous 150 years and,
in the end, it was this that was to cost Richard his crown
...
Anne was the daughter of the Holy
Roman Emperor, and their union was seen as a significant move in gaining a
potential ally for the continuing battle to reclaim Plantagenet land in France
...
Both Richard’s England and the emperor supported the pope in Rome,
Urban VI, rather than his rival at Avignon, Clement VII
...

The first years of Richard II’s reign were full of the stresses and strains of a society
emerging from the rigours of the Black Death, and this was to have a profound effect
on the religion of the country
...
This early
form of Protestantism, however, was radically different from the one eventually
instituted by Henry VIII
...
Wycliffe was a priest as well as a
member of Oxford University and he preached that the simple message of
Christianity should be carried by lay preachers and that the Bible, the word of God,
should be freely accessible to the people through English translation
...

However, this support was withdrawn in the early 1380s when Wycliffe radically
rejected the doctrine of transubstantiation that stated that the bread and wine of the
Eucharist represented the actual body and blood of Christ
...
Therefore, it is highly
likely that the radical message of Wycliffe’s preachers may have had some influence
of those peasants who revolted a year later
...
But this was not before his publication of the first English language bible
in 1384
...
Some of
Wycliffe’s words were to be reused to great effect by Abraham Lincoln 479 years
later when he spoke them at Gettysburg in 1863
...
He must also be seen as one of the
founding philosophers of the Reformation that transformed Europe during the next
century, and he was certainly seen as a leading light by Martin Luther himself
...
Bolingbroke was a
royal cousin and the son of John of Gaunt, the uncle who for much of the early 1380s
had reigned as regent on his behalf
...

The king was forced again and again to parliament for money to pay for his court,
and he was soon forced to accept the creation of a committee of barons, the
Councillors of Regency, who were charged with representing the wishes of the
anti-crown party that the king so abhorred
...
The barons, he continued
to maintain, should subsume themselves beneath his authority in an England that
would be, to all intents and purposes, an absolute monarchy
...
But he had left
Bolingbroke behind to stand as custodian for all the considerable lands under the
Lancastrian flag, and it was therefore to him that the barons now turned
...
Matters
eventually reached crisis point for the king in the mid-1380s, and these years of
frenetic Plantagenet power politics started with the loss of Flanders
...
This was a time when the Royal Navy lay in ruin
...
The
campaign was to end almost as soon as it had started, with the Scottish refusing to
commit to battle and taking to the hills
...


32

There is some evidence that de Vere, an acquisitive, arrogant and reproachful man,
had taken a hold over the affections of the teenage king in a similar way that
Gaveston had done with Edward II 80 years before
...
Gloucester was joined immediately by two other eminent
opponents of the king and later by Henry Bolingbroke, who was the Earl of Derby as
well as the son and heir of John of Gaunt
...

The result of the lacklustre campaign in Scotland, which had been devised as a way
of bolstering the king’s lagging authority, was a baronial uprising against the king
led by the Lords Appellant, who directed the work of the Wonderful Parliament of
November 1386
...
But this
attempt to effectively neuter Richard II’s court was bitterly opposed by the king’s
party and, the following year, de Vere raised an army in the north, in Cheshire, in
order to challenge the Lords Appellant on behalf of the king
...
As a result, both de Vere
and de la Pole were driven into exile
...
But the barons could not decide quickly
enough or act with any sort of unity and, as a result, the king was able to retain his
crown
...
This unprecedented demonstration of parliamentary
will, under the control and direction of the Lords Appellant, was a huge humiliation
for the young king with charges of treason being brought against a number of his

33

closest supporters
...

However, Richard II was a petulant and strong willed fighter and, in the fast moving
waters of late fourteenth century English elite society, he was to rise again within a
year
...
This had been continued
after the catastrophe of 1376 and it was a cause that the Lords Appellant were keen
to follow
...
All this left him with a feeling that he was
strong enough once again to attempt the creation of a new and powerful absolute
state
...
Bolingbroke himself went off to the Baltic where he served for a while with
the Teutonic knights with whom he went on pilgrimage to the Holy Land in the
early 1390s
...
However,
her death left him increasingly mentally unbalanced while his extravagance and his
perceived weakness in dealing with Scotland and France, which included a second
marriage to the seven-year-old Isabella of France to cement a truce with France in
1396, only added to his problems
...


34

However, before this downfall at the end of the century, Richard II was responsible
for the rebuilding and refurbishment Westminster Hall, the oldest remaining section
of the Palace of Westminster
...
However, the king conceived the hall, containing specially
commissioned carved stone statues of all of the English kings who had come before
him, as much more than just a meeting place
...

The Civil War of 1399 and the Accession of Henry IV
The road to rebellion against the king began in the summer of 1397 when the
increasingly vengeful and unjust, but still very powerful, king, with John of Gaunt
once again at his side, had the Duke of Gloucester, another royal uncle, and the Earls
of Arundel and Warwick arrested during the Revenge Parliament
...
This revenge on the Lords Appellant, who had
embarrassed him so totally in 1388, led to the execution of Arundel, the exile of
Warwick, as well as the murder of Gloucester while he was captive in Calais
awaiting trial for treason
...

The other two appellants, Bolingbroke and Thomas Mowbray, the Earl of
Nottingham, were rewarded with dukedoms at the same time for their new loyalty,
but both were banished the following year when they each accused the other of
treason
...
Mowbray, who the king banished for life, was to
take the Cross and died of the plague the following year in Venice on his journey to
the Holy Land
...

However, this newly found Ricardian safety and security was shattered within two
years when, in July 1399, the exiled Bolingbroke returned, invading across the North

35

Sea from Germany
...
This had been to confiscate Bolingbroke’s inheritance,
the lands and earnings of the Duchy of Lancaster, after his father, John of Gaunt,
died in February 1399 at his seat in Leicestershire from a deadly strain of venereal
disease
...
In league with Percy, Bolingbroke spent the summer
building up a strong northern power base
...
This marriage legitimised the four
children already born to this union, thus creating the Beaufort line
...

In the opinion of many barons, the vast Lancastrian inheritance of John of Gaunt
should clearly have passed to Bolingbroke, and the king’s unpopular decision came
at the end of a decade of increasing dictatorship and growing absolutist tendencies
that had included other regal and baronial land grabs, particularly during the blood
letting that had followed the Revenge Parliament two years before
...

Originally, Bolingbroke had returned to claim only land that was his due to him
under the flag of Lancaster
...

While Bolingbroke’s power and authority grew with every day’s journey westwards,
the king’s own campaign collapsed, and so the battle that many had expected
between the royal cousins never materialised
...
This presentation was
conducted in the magnificent finery of the newly completed Westminster Hall,
where the hammer-beamed roof had just been emblazoned with white harts, the
royal symbol of Richard II himself
...
The barons hoped that Bolingbroke’s
elevation would guarantee the constitutional rights of their number that had been
reasserted most recently by the Lords Appellant, and that the age of Plantagenet
absolutism had come to an end
...

By the time parliament accepted Henry Bolingbroke as England’s new king in
October 1399, Richard II had been spirited away to Pontefract Castle, and it was
there that he, at the age of 33, was murdered the following year
...
Richard II was not to be
the last English monarch determined to centralise the power of the state in the
person of the king
...
The England of Richard II
was a large, populous and multi-faceted society that necessarily needed to look to
the interests and demands of all sections of society, and these were represented in
the laws, precedents and rituals that were embodied within the institution of
parliament
...


37



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