The Story of Britain: From the Romans to the Present (28 page)

Edward III finally expired on Midsummer’s Day 1377. For a long time his own glorious summer had been a fading memory. As he was breathing his last, ungrateful courtiers ran from the palace to attend to the new powerbrokers in the land. Even Alice Perrers, who had been such a feature of the great Edwardian tournaments where she had appeared as the Lady of the Sun, deserted him–though not neglecting to pull the rings off his fingers first. The man who had been the greatest prince of the Europe of his day and England’s most popular king for two centuries would have died alone had not a priest happened to be passing. He gave the old king the last rites before his soul departed.

Richard II (or Richard of Bordeaux as he was known, after the town where he was born) was ten years old when, as the eldest son of the Black Prince, he succeeded to the throne. A contemporary painting shows a slender boy-king with pale yellow hair, but these appealing images should not blind us to the fact that once Richard grew up it became clear that he had inherited the violent and imperious nature of his father. Unlike his grandfather Edward III, he had no sense of the importance of carrying the nation with him, of ruling with the help of Parliament. Nevertheless at the first great crisis of his reign, the Peasants’ Revolt, though he was only fourteen years old he showed courage and presence of mind.

Little had changed with the accession of a new king. The country was still ruled, through the council, by Richard’s uncle John of Gaunt, the Duke of Lancaster, and the government remained deeply unpopular. The truce with France came to an end and was not renewed, and English trade, English shipping and English coastal towns began to suffer from French raids. There was even a possibility that the French might invade, though this threat disappeared in 1380 when Charles V was succeeded by another boy-king Charles VI. Then in 1381 a very widespread popular rising broke out as a protest against the new poll tax. This is known as the Peasants’ Revolt. The government had demanded that every male, rich or poor, over the age of fifteen should pay the same tax per head (or per poll). At this grotesquely unfair request the underlying frustrations of small farmers and labourers who still fell within the category of villein came to a head. For forty years the gradual breakdown of respect for authority had spread a sense of the outworn nature of traditional institutions. The socially conservative Church was further undermined by the confusion created by the papal schism of 1378, as there were now two popes in Christendom–one at Rome and one at Avignon.

Furthermore Wyclif had now broken with John of Gaunt. Instead he and his followers the Lollards or ‘babblers’ had turned to taking their message to the people in the countryside, and their russet-coloured robes were becoming a familiar sight in villages all over England. At the same time, one of these Lollards made the first translation of the Bible into English, for Wyclif believed that everyone should be allowed to read the Holy Scriptures and make up their opinion about their meaning.

His philosophic conclusion that ‘dominion’ was to be found in all good people regardless of whether they were priests had revolutionary implications. Although there were few Lollards among the peasants themselves, Wyclif’s emphasis on each man’s worth seeped into the current climate.

In 1381 all these discontents came together in a march on London led by a master craftsman named Wat Tyler (or Wat the roofer). Tyler was at the head of a large number of marchers setting off from Kent, a county which since the Jutes had a reputation for more democratic traditions. Though there was no villeinage in Kent they demanded an end to villeinage for all Englishmen and refused to pay the poll tax. At the same time revolts broke out all over the country. In Essex a travelling priest named John Ball had been preaching on the theme of his well-known rhyme:

When Adam delved, and Eve span

Who was then the gentleman?

In the south the uprisings had a particularly anti-clerical tinge, as most of the participants were serfs from the properties of great abbeys and monasteries. The majority were armed with the agricultural tools they had been using in the fields when word started to spread about the march to London–billhooks for pulling fruit off trees, shears and axes. The uprisings seem to have been quite spontaneous without any political organization behind them. They were nevertheless extremely dangerous. The rebels swarmed across London on either side of the river, setting fire to Southwark and convincing the city guards stationed at the Tower that they were no match for such numbers. They then murdered the Archbishop of Canterbury and the chancellor, and burned John of Gaunt’s Thames-side Savoy Palace to the ground.

In the midst of the mayhem the boy-king Richard was the only member of the government to keep his head. While his ministers dithered, with great courage Richard agreed to meet the rebels and listen to their grievances. At Mile End he promised charters of liberty to abolish serfdom if the crowds would disperse. Then, accompanied by the lord mayor of London William Walworth and only sixty horsemen, he rode out to Smithfield to deal with Wat Tyler and the 2,000 Kentish men he had brought with him. With Richard was his popular mother Joan, the Fair Maid of Kent, whose association with their own county he may have felt would make the rebels readier to listen to him.

After some time talking face to face about the people’s complaints Wat Tyler laid a hand on the king’s bridle. He had a dagger in his other hand, though he seems to have had no intention of using it. But at a time when much of the city was on fire and two members of the government lay dead, Walworth the lord mayor may be forgiven for thinking that Tyler was about to murder the king. At any rate he reacted by plunging his sword into the rebel leader. At this the Kentish folk surged forward and seemed about to seize Richard, while those with bows trained their arrows on him. But Richard’s own courage saved the day. Spurring his horse he galloped up to Tyler’s followers crying ‘Come with me and I will be your captain. Wat Tyler was a traitor.’

Uncertain how to proceed, since Tyler’s oratory had been instrumental in getting them to London, the protesters followed Richard’s slender figure into what were then the fields of Islington. But they were surrounded by a thousand soldiers hurriedly gathered by Walworth, and many sank to their knees to beg the king’s pardon. By nightfall every single one of London’s unwelcome visitors had left the city walls and was heading home convinced by the king’s apparently sympathetic manner that serfdom would be abolished.

Eventually a general pardon would be issued to all those who took part in the Peasants’ Revolt as part of the celebrations to mark Richard II’s marriage in 1382 to the pious Anne of Bohemia, sister of King Wenceslaus. But in the short term the rebels were punished and their wishes ignored. John Ball was executed at St Albans, home of that first British martyr, while the charters abolishing serfdom were never issued because they had been obtained under duress. Although it took another hundred years for villeinage to die out entirely, in practice many lords gave the villeins their freedom and commuted their service to a money payment. The continued shortage of labour meant it was either that or having a very uncooperative workforce.

But Richard II never regained the esteem he won in 1381. John of Gaunt’s absence from the council pursuing the throne of Castile by right of his wife Constance should have meant a fresh start for the country. But Gaunt and his cronies were soon replaced by equally venial men who were Richard’s favourites, the most important being Robert de Vere, Earl of Oxford, whom Richard made Duke of Ireland, and the chancellor Michael de la Pole, a merchant who became Earl of Suffolk.

Richard and the new court party were just as careless of the law and parliament as John of Gaunt had been. Like his father the Black Prince the king had a taste for luxury and a splendid court. To finance it, sudden and illegal taxes were demanded without reference to Parliament. Under Edward III’s youngest son Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester, a parliamentary party began to rally against the court. In 1386 the trouble came to a head when Parliament asked Richard to dismiss Chancellor de la Pole for corruption. The king replied that he would not dismiss the meanest scullion in his kitchen just to please Parliament. In response Parliament impeached the chancellor and appointed eleven lords ordainers to rule the country, as had been done in Edward II’s time.

Richard II was made of sterner stuff than his great-grandfather. Having persuaded the courts to proclaim the Lords Ordainer illegal because they interfered with the royal prerogative, he declared war on the parliamentary party. But in February 1388 at the Battle of Radcot Bridge in Oxfordshire his army was scattered and he himself was forced back to London. At the Parliament known as the Merciless Parliament, five lords including Richard’s uncle the Duke of Gloucester and his first cousin, John of Gaunt’s son Henry of Lancaster, accused the royal favourites of treason. These lords appellant as they were known, because they launched the Appeal of Treason, then executed many of the king’s favourites.

The lords appellant now ruled the country through the council. But the fluidity and the personal nature of relationships at court meant that within the year Richard was asserting himself again, and once he had gained the support of the respectable old clerical party he was ruling on his own. Stability was cemented by the return from Spain of his uncle John of Gaunt, whose influence smoothed the way for less antagonistic politics, and before long two of the five lords appellant–Gaunt’s son Henry of Lancaster and Thomas Mowbray, Earl of Nottingham–came round to the court party. Abroad too there was peace for almost thirty years, after Richard’s marriage in 1396 to the daughter of the French king Charles VI–following the death of his wife Anne of Bohemia–led to a truce between the two countries.

But the king’s sorrow at the death of his wife Anne touched off the most violent and uncontrollable elements in his rather unstable character. He razed to the ground the palace where he had lived with Anne, and when the Earl of Arundel–one of the lords appellant–arrived late for the queen’s funeral, the outraged king publicly struck him in the face.

But Richard II was a subtler character than he appeared. For almost ten years after the Merciless Parliament he bided his time, secretly calculating how to have his revenge on the lords appellant. The year after Anne of Bohemia’s death, he suddenly arrested three of them–his uncle Gloucester, Arundel and the Earl of Warwick. Surrounded by 4,000 soldiers of the king’s personal bodyguard, the Cheshire Archers, Parliament had no choice but to bow to his wishes and condemned the three for treason. In a display of summary justice, Arundel was tried, convicted and beheaded on the same day, while Gloucester was murdered in Calais prison. Warwick escaped death only by the payment of massive fines.

By 1399 the English had had enough of their tyrannical king, and a mass movement to depose him was led by Henry of Lancaster, or Bolingbroke as he is sometimes known. The two cousins met in north Wales at Flint, and when Richard saw that he had no supporters he surrendered. At a meeting of Parliament, Henry of Lancaster stood before an empty throne and claimed the crown. He was careful not to claim it by right of Parliament, because what Parliament gave Parliament might take away. Likewise he did not claim it by right of conquest, for that too might be challenged by another conquest. But his claim was understood to be founded on a mixture of the two. Thus the Lancastrian revolution, which put the descendants of John of Gaunt on the throne, was achieved almost bloodlessly.

The new king, who was crowned Henry IV, had probably not planned to kill his predecessor. But when at Christmas that year a conspiracy to restore Richard to the throne was uncovered, it became clear that there was no room for two kings in one country. Richard, who was being held prisoner in Henry’s Lancastrian stronghold Pontefract Castle, was accordingly murdered, and it was disingenuously announced that he had perished from self-inflicted starvation.

Despite the profound instability the Lancastrian revolution caused, in the first twenty years of the new dynasty Parliament reached a peak of influence to which it would not return for another 200 years. The rightful heir was the Earl of March, grandson of the childless Richard II’s senior uncle Lionel of Clarence, who was Edward III’s third son. The usurper Henry IV therefore had particular need of the Lords’ and Commons’ support–so the meeting of Parliament became an annual event. Ever since Magna Carta the tradition had grown up that the power of the king was limited by the need to confer with the King’s Council. Now consultation became more important than ever.

A key part of that Parliament was the House of Commons. For more than 150 years lawyers, well-to-do townsmen, merchants and small landowners had been responsible through the Commons for raising the king’s taxes in the shires. Although the aristocracy with their vast estates and private armies continued to be the crown’s advisers, the Commons’ control of taxation left the kings of England no option but to listen to the middle classes’ petitions. Uniquely in Europe, by the early fifteenth century it was firmly established that the Commons as well as the nobility or the king were the initiators of new laws. By the beginning of Henry V’s reign in 1413 it had become the accepted custom that when the House of Commons sent a bill for the royal signature the king might throw it out but he could not change its form to suit himself. English freedoms versus continental royal absolutism became a matter of pride for educated Englishmen.

Since the Commons consisted of both the country gentry and the commercial classes, there was never in England the sense of separate castes that prevailed abroad. Instead common interests bound together the small landowner or country gentry and the merchant. The English class system always surprised foreign observers by its flexibility, with people moving swiftly up and down the scale through marriage and successful careers. In particular, the merchant’s daughter had become an instrument for increasing the family fortune, as the merchant class benefited from expanding trade, improved education and better health and as the population and the economy at last recovered from the effects of the Black Death. The men who ran the wool trade took over the building of richly decorated parish churches from the lords of the manor–these may be seen in the ‘wool churches’ of East Anglia, of which the finest examples are at Long Melford, Sudbury and Lavenham.

The wealthier merchants were also putting up large townhouses, often of brick–a material not used since the Romans. The architecture became domestic rather than defensive–the castle was dying out as a rich man’s home. The broad windows in such castles as were built in this period, for example at Herstmonceux in Sussex, indicate that the crenellations above them were added purely for decoration.

As these fortunes were being made from England’s growing share of international trade, which was increasingly regulated by treaty, towns and cities became much more sophisticated and complex organisms. Incorporated by royal consent or charter into legal entities, they had their own governments, with powers to make their own laws and hold their own elections, which the king had to respect. Wealth created a more defined class system in towns, which became more oligarchical–controlled exclusively by well-to-do tradesmen, especially clothiers, who elected one another. Trade became standardized too. The craft organizations–the guilds–had powers to perform spot checks on merchants’ and craftsmen’s premises to make sure that standards were being complied with.

But the guilds’ powers were not just regulatory. Along with the town corporations, they were patrons of a new standard of English urban civilization. They provided charitable functions for the poor, and city grammar schools for their own children. They arranged the processions and music which were so constant an accompaniment to fifteenth-century life. Everybody, whatever their circumstances, knew the Bible stories thanks to the celebrated guild plays, of which the best known are those at York, performed on large wagons moving around the city. In the City of London the immense wealth of the Fishmongers’, the Goldsmiths’ and above all the Mercers’ or clothiers’ guilds were made dramatically visible in the magnificent halls that still stand today; the guilds continue to manage fortunes in real estate accrued over the centuries, enabling them to carry out generous charitable work. Like their magnate equivalents, the heads of guilds were allowed to wear their own uniforms or livery. No less than the individual merchants, the guilds were responsible for a further transformation in church architecture in the erection of chantry chapels, tacked on to the main body of churches to house the many guild altars. This led to an increase in the numbers of church personnel, as altar priests were specially engaged just to chant masses all day long to ease the afterlife of the souls of departed members.

As more and more sons of clothiers, merchants and shopkeepers such as butchers and bakers benefited from education, scriveners or copiers were kept busy writing out books for their burgeoning audience–until close English trade links with the Burgundian Netherlands brought a printer named William Caxton to England with a printing press with movable type. When he imported one of the presses in 1474, invented by the German Johan Gutenberg, middle-class literacy took off as never before, and the homes of small tradesmen soon contained as many books as those of the upper classes.

Despite all these progressive tendencies, another strong current in fifteenth-century England was the return of feudalism, or the rule of barons, thanks to the weakness of the crown. The Lancastrian kings’ reliance on Parliament increased the powers of the Lords, bringing bloody inter-generational factionalism and the sort of anarchy not seen since Stephen. Traditionally the two places where feudalism remained almost unadulterated were the border lands guarding England from Wales and Scotland, where independent armies and a palatinate system had prevailed since the early Norman kings. It was from the border lords that the first challenge to the new regime came.

As the name suggests the power base of the Lancastrian dynasty was in the north-west, where Henry IV owned huge swathes of Lancashire and Yorkshire. Indeed Henry of Lancaster had secured the throne with the aid of his fellow northern magnates, above all the soldiers of the Percys of Northumberland. It was the Percys’ loyalty during the uneasy early days of the new regime that had kept the Scots out of England–but Henry IV had not rewarded them as they considered their due. Full of pride in their family–as the old saying went there was only one king in Northumberland and that was not the king of England–they were soon nursing a grievance. In particular, they had not become the key advisers in the King’s Council they had been led to believe they would. Thus, when a Welsh rebellion broke out within a year of Henry’s accession, a desire for revenge and kinship links persuaded the Percys to join it.

In 1400 a new Welsh war for independence was touched off by a quarrel over land resolved in the English law courts in favour of the English marcher baron Lord Grey of Ruthin and against the Welsh landowner Owen Glendower. Glendower’s calibre as a general and the disaffection the Welsh felt for their overlords were a potent combination, and Glendower became so confident that he summoned a Welsh Parliament, acknowledged the French pope at Avignon instead of Rome and made a legal treaty allying himself as Prince of Wales to the French king Charles VI, father-in law of the deposed Richard II. When a French troopship arrived at Carmarthen Bay and the Earl of Northumberland’s son Harry Percy, who had been sent to Wales to put down the rebellion, started intriguing with the conspirators the Welsh revolt became an attempt to overthrow the new dynasty. By 1403 its leaders were aiming not only for an independent Wales but to reinstate the rightful heir to the throne of England, the Earl of March. Chief among the disaffected nobles was the marcher lord Sir Edmund Mortimer. Himself descended from Edward III through his grandfather Lionel of Clarence, he linked the Percys and Glendower to the Earl of March: he was respectively Harry Percy’s brother-in-law, Owen Glendower’s son-in-law, and uncle to the Earl of March.

In July 1403 at the Battle of Shrewsbury on the Welsh borders Henry IV intercepted the Percy armies led by Hotspur (as the Scots had admiringly named Harry Percy) on their way to join up with the Welsh under Glendower. Hotspur was killed by his former pupil, Henry IV’s son Henry of Monmouth, the future Henry V. The immediate threat of a general rising was temporarily beaten off, though Glendower escaped. But in 1405 a new rebellion broke out, this time led by Hotspur’s father the Earl of Northumberland. Since the Archbishop of York, Richard Scrope, the second most important churchman in England after the Archbishop of Canterbury, was one of the northern leaders it had to be crushed with the utmost severity. To considerable disquiet Scrope was executed, even though as a churchman he was not subject to secular law.

By the deaths of Richard II and Archbishop Scrope, Henry IV had shown he was quite capable of ruthless acts to safeguard his dynasty, but it was at great mental cost. Henry of Lancaster was not the natural material of which usurpers are made, being of a melancholy and religious disposition, and he never attempted to root out the Clarence Plantagenet line by killing March. He was said to have been struck with leprosy in 1407 at the moment that Archbishop Scrope was executed. By all accounts the rapid decline which ended with his death at the age of forty-six began with a nervous breakdown that year.

As the king became steadily more incoherent and unaware of his surroundings, power devolved to his close family circle. His son, the future Henry V, with the help of his half-uncles, the ambitious Beaufort sons of John of Gaunt, began to take control of the King’s Council, undermining the influence of Henry IV’s chief adviser, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Arundel. In 1413 the king’s health finally gave out and he died in the Jerusalem Chamber of the Palace of Westminster–thus fulfilling an old prophecy that he would die in the Holy Land.