The Last Plantagenets (3 page)

The pilgrims, needless to state, were deeply offended. A soldier in the party, one Thomas of Andover, stepped out of the line and shook his fist at the blunt prelate.

“Why, Lord Bishop,” he demanded to know, “do you dare speak thus against St. Thomas? At peril of my life, I declare thou shalt end thy days in violence and ignominy!”

Thomas of Andover might claim on the strength of this the right to be considered a prophet, for Simon of Sudbury was destined to die at the hands of common men who remembered all the reasons they had for disliking him, not excluding this instance of his unorthodox thinking.

At no stage in his career did Edward the Black Prince show to such advantage as in the few years allowed him to live after his return to England. He had won such popularity by leading English armies in the French wars that nothing he did, not even his brutal disregard for the lives of common people, was allowed to detract from the love his countrymen had for him. As administrator of the Aquitanian possessions he had been indifferent and slipshod and always wildly extravagant; but all this was easily forgiven him and soon forgotten. But it was a different man who came back to an England in the slough of defeat and want, to find his once great father verging on senility and the supporters of his brother Lancaster controlling Parliament and the administrative offices.

His decisions from that moment to the day of his death were unerringly right. He strove from his sickbed to direct affairs into the right channels. His judgment of men was as sound as his insight into issues. The Black Prince in eclipse was greater than the victorious leader charging down the vine-clad slopes at Poictiers.

The physicians could not put a name to the disease which had gripped him. From the length of time it took him to die (he lived six years after his return) and the violence of the pains from which he suffered, it seems practically certain that it was cancer. Medical practitioners had little knowledge of that disease, calling it
canker
, and were quite helpless in fighting it. The prince, subjected to all manner of absurd dosages and the undignified methods which ignorance conceived, grew slowly but steadily worse. Through it all his spirit remained high, and his intelligence was sharpened, perhaps, by withdrawal from too close contact with the course of events to a point where he saw all things
in the clear white light of understanding. He appreciated to the full the possibility that a boy of Richard’s tender years might be shoved aside in the matter of the succession.

On the day before his death he took the only step remaining to him. He asked his father and his brother Lancaster to come to him at Kennington. They arrived together and he had Richard and the princess Joan summoned to the room.

“I recommend to you my wife and son,” he said. “I love them greatly. Give them your aid.”

When a Bible was produced, the doddering king and the ambitious Lancaster swore upon it to maintain the rights of the boy.

After Edward III had bade his son a final farewell and had left the room, certain members of the nobility were admitted. They all swore to support Richard in his rights. At the finish, the dying man indulged in what perhaps was his last smile. He looked about him and said to the assembled barons, “I give you a hundred thanks.”

The people of England have always taken the liveliest interest in the House of Commons, which is natural enough because they were largely responsible for this form of government. The name seems to be of Italian origin and is found in English records in 1246 for the first time, although it had been in usage long before. No phase of English history is more interesting than the parliamentary records, particularly about the men who were summoned to attend or who came in by the elective method; the great men and the villains, the courageous leaders and the toadies, the farsighted and the backward-lookers, the liberals and the conservatives. A national habit of finding names for certain Parliaments began in the earliest days and has provided a method of appraisal. Generally, of course, the labels applied have had a decidedly partisan bias.

There was, for instance, the Mad Parliament in 1258, so called because of the historic quarrel between Henry III and Simon de Montfort. The Weathercock King called his brother-in-law, Montfort, a traitor and the latter retaliated by declaring that, if Henry were not a king, he would make him eat his words: a warm passage certainly between a ruler and a subject.

Then there was the Unlearned in 1404, which gained its name because there was not a single lawyer among the members. The lawyers of the day were responsible, needless to state, for the label.

Among others were the Parliament of Bats, the Merciless, the Diabolical,
the Meddlesome, the Addled (which met in 1614 and was dismissed without having passed any kind of measure at all), the Rump, the Barebones (named after a Puritan member, Praise-God Barebones), and the Drunken. The last named was held in Scotland, the first to be summoned after the Stuart Restoration. There had been much drinking of toasts the evening before and the claret bottles had been passed around and around. When the House opened, the Speaker was incapable of remaining seated in his chair and an adjournment was necessary.

It happened that before the Black Prince died the fiftieth Parliament was summoned. The name Good has been applied to it, and with the best of reasons. It convened in 1376 and found itself saddled with the task of cleaning up the administrative mess which the old king had allowed to develop at Westminster and, fully as important, the settlement of the succession. The members selected Peter de la Mare as Speaker, the first time a commoner had acted in that capacity. He was a man of great courage and ability and he made such a vigorous attack on the group about the king that he was asked to lead the discussion when the two branches of Parliament met together. The result was that two members of the nobility were dismissed from office and sent to prison. They cleaned out as well the rascals of lower degree, mostly London merchants who had been active members of the clique. Then an unprecedented step was taken. The old king’s mistress, Alice Perrers, was sent packing and informed that if she showed her handsome nose in court again she would be stripped of all her property. The king, who had been in some respects the most haughty of the Plantagenets, accepted this rebuff without a word of protest.

The sentiment of the Good Parliament was strongly anti-Lancaster. Duke John sensed that, for the time at least, he must bend to the wind. He even visited the House and agreed that the Augean stables at Westminster needed cleaning out.

Parliament took a decided stand in the matter of the succession, declaring that Richard should be considered the rightful heir and requesting that the boy appear before them. Lancaster moved unobtrusively about the fringes of the House and spoke cautiously to this member and that, but made no move to block the will of the majority. He strove, nonetheless, to have a measure passed similar to the French Salic Law which excluded women from ruling. His purpose was to bar the possibility of the crown passing to the daughter of his deceased brother Lionel who had come into the world ahead of him. The daughter, who had been named for her grandmother Philippa, and was married to the Earl of March, was next in line of succession after Richard. The members listened, but gave him no measure of support. Let the French have their
Salic Law; the people of England preferred their own way of doing things.

If Duke John had had his way, the history of the country would have been vastly different.

It was on January 25 that Richard made his appearance before the House. Few of the members had ever seen him and there was a stir in the vaulted chamber and a turning of heads when the ten-year-old youth arrived. His mother had been sensible enough to see that he was attired as plainly as the men he would face. His slender limbs were in hose of one color and his shoes lacked the high curl of the French fashion. He was, without a doubt, the handsomest boy they had ever seen and the gift he had for rising to an occasion, which was to be demonstrated at several crucial moments in his life, stood him in good stead. Seating himself in the elaborate chair which had been placed for his use, he faced the members with complete self-possession. When he spoke, his words were well chosen and his voice clear and steady. Here, said the members one to another, was a real king in the making.

The result of the visit was to clear away any possible doubts. He was called “the very heir-apparent” and, after the death of his father, they petitioned that he be created Prince of Wales, Duke of Cornwall, and Earl of Chester, the titles the Black Prince had held. This was done on November 20.

The succession was now a matter of legal record. But the old king was still alive and in his befuddled mind there seemed to be a certain reservation, based on his liking for the most congenial of his sons, the plausible Duke John. Given sufficient time, Lancaster might be able to fan this small spark of uncertainty into a blaze of action. It might even be possible to win from the doddering occupant of the throne the pronouncement of a wish for his oldest surviving son to succeed him.

One question must arise in every mind in considering the state of things in England at this point: if Duke John had so many enemies, why did he possess such great power? Could not those who feared and hated him, which included most of the nobility, many of the bishops, and the citizens of London to a man, combine to thwart him in his ambitious schemes? The answer to these questions consisted largely of one word—Wealth. In addition to the possessions which came to him in his own right as a son of the king, he had at the age of nineteen married his cousin Blanche, the second daughter and co-heiress (there being no sons
in the family) of Henry, Earl of Lancaster. The Lancastrian holdings of land were almost beyond computation, as the result of royal grants and a genius for acquisitive marriages. His immediate descendants had continued to gather in castles and estates and had become inevitably the richest family in the kingdom. In March 1361, two years after the marriage of John and the multiple-dowered Blanche, his father-in-law died and he became Earl of Lancaster in his wife’s right. The next year the elder daughter, Maud, also died. She had married the Duke of Bavaria and had been left a widow with no children. So all her estates came into the hands of the princely mogul, together with the earldoms of Derby, Lincoln, and Leicester, the older daughter’s share. One year later Edward III created his favored son the first Duke of Lancaster.

Blanche died of the plague while John was campaigning in Castile and soon thereafter he married Constance, an illegitimate daughter of Pedro the Cruel. This matrimonial alliance would later involve him in abortive efforts to seize the Spanish throne and, in the fullness of time, to a divorce.

At the time of the death of the Black Prince, Duke John was easily the richest man in England. He owned Kenilworth, the most famous of English castles, and had gone to great effort and expense to turn it into a home of beauty as well as an almost impregnable fortress. To this end, he had erected a new suite of buildings, including a banqueting hall of rare architectural merit. What he accomplished at Kenilworth was a proof of something often overlooked, that he was a man of sophisticated taste and discernment. In the north he owned the almost equally famous castle of Pontefract. He had scores of other possessions, largely in the northern counties, and owned the castles of Leicester, Lancaster, Pevensey, and Monmouth, to name only the better known.

On the bank of the Thames, west of the city, was the palace called the Savoy, which the Lancastrian duke used as his London home. It was packed with the beautiful things the discerning eye of its owner had acquired on the continent. As far as the arts were concerned, John was the best-versed man in England. He could drop into a conversation such names as Niccola Pisano and Guido Cavalcanti. If the Londoners had found nothing in him to dislike or criticize, they would have hated him for the Savoy alone. The richness and wonder of the place was so great a contrast to the poverty and suffering in the city; and John did not hesitate to display his learning and his sense of superiority.

To name the titles he held was like calling a muster roll with the blowing of trumpets and the rat-tat of kettledrums: John, Duke of Lancaster, Earl of Derby, Lincoln and Leicester, Lord of Beaufort and of Bergerac, Roche-sur-Yon, Noyen; seneschal of England, constable of Chester, and, sometimes, King of Castile. And always there were the
names that people had coined for him, Great Lancaster and Lord of the North.

The possession of large estates always carried with it overlordships and many retainers. It was in Duke John’s power to summon to his banner at any moment thousands of men from all corners of the kingdom, wearing the silver and azure bands on their sleeves or fluttering from their lances. There were other members of the baronage who had wide possessions, such as Edmund Mortimer, Earl of March, but even the greatest of them were of small account when compared with the colossus of the north.

And so, with the victor of Poictiers dead and laid away in his magnificent tomb in Canterbury Cathedral, Lancaster lost no time in asserting his power. The Good Parliament was dismissed and everything it had done proclaimed illegal. Peter de la Mare was placed under arrest and brought before the King’s Court. He was declared guilty on several counts short of treason and sentenced to imprisonment.

He was still in confinement when a new Parliament, which should be called the Bad, assembled at Westminster. It had been most carefully hand-picked under the sharp scrutiny of Duke John. One Sir Thomas Hungerford, a Lancastrian adherent, was elected Speaker, which was to be a regular parliamentary post from that time on. Although most of the members were strongly Lancastrian in sentiment, a stout minority fought for the release of Peter de la Mare. They failed in this purpose. De la Mare, who deserves a place in the list of courageous parliamentary leaders over the centuries to follow—Peter Wentworth, Sir Edward Coke, Sir John Eliot, John Pym, and John Hampden—was kept in confinement in Nottingham Castle. Alice Perrers, who was swishing her velvet skirts about the court again and holding the king’s favor in her plump hands, had acquired a bitter hatred for de la Mare and vehemently demanded his execution for treason. Being sensible of the enormity of any such action, the duke had to use all his influence over his father to prevent it from being done.