Henry IV (31 page)

For the moment though, as July turned to August, as the royalist armies evaporated, and especially once the king had been captured, the need to
restore a sense of normality became increasingly urgent, for the country was in turmoil. Law courts had ceased to function, government was paralyzed, robbers and highwaymen went about their business unchecked, and rumour spiralled out of control.
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On 11 August, a report that Richard had returned from Ireland brought a crowd of Londoners to Westminster abbey to search for him, and although they failed to find him they did arrest a number of his supporters whom they imprisoned in Ludgate.
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The overthrow of the king was in danger of escalating into a popular uprising, and the sacking of Cheshire was not something which Henry could afford to see repeated elsewhere; it was just such popular fervour which, at the time of the Merciless Parliament, had hijacked the relatively limited political programme to which he had subscribed. A series of measures during the week following Richard's capture thus attempted to reassert control. Parliament was summoned to meet at Westminster on 30 September, justices and keepers of the peace were told to resume their sessions, and the sheriffs were ordered to proclaim the restoration of law and order; the current lawlessness, they were told, was contrary to both Henry's and Richard's wishes.
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To avoid plundering on the way to London, Henry dismissed most of his supporters at Chester, retaining only a select band of knights, esquires and valets who would remain with him for the duration of the upcoming parliament.
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Before leaving Chester, he also despatched Henry Dryhurst to Dublin to bring his eldest son back to England.
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The journey to London took twelve days, with Henry and Richard reaching Westminster on Monday 1 September. At Lichfield, on either 23 or 24 August, the king tried to escape by lowering a rope from his window, but the attempt was foiled and henceforward he was guarded more closely; Walsingham reported that at St Albans about a thousand men were set to watch over him each night.
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Yet Henry continued to act with deference towards the king, always standing behind him, ‘resplendent in his armour’, waiting until proper respect had been shown him and refusing to allow any undue ceremonies to be performed in his own honour. Written instruments continued to be issued in Richard's name up until the moment when he was deposed.
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From mid-July until mid-August, Henry had shown less regard for legal niceties, as witness the executions of Le Scrope, Bussy and Green at Bristol, or Perkyn Leigh at Chester, but once he had the king in his grasp he demonstrated a judicious awareness of the need to act in accordance with the law – not because the throne might slip from his grasp, which was unlikely, but with an eye to what might later be said about how he had acquired it. That Richard would be deposed was by now widely accepted. While Henry was still in Cheshire, a deputation of Londoners had offered the city's submission to him, and Salisbury, Norwich and King's Lynn soon followed suit.
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On his arrival at the capital, he was greeted as a conquering hero. The first thing he did was to make his way to St Paul's to pray at his father's tomb, a grateful son to the last.
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Richard, after being allowed to hear mass at Westminster on the morning of 2 September, was despatched to the Tower, where he would spend the next two months. Henry tactfully eschewed Westminster palace or any of the other royal residences in the vicinity of London, instead taking up his lodgings first at the bishop of London's palace by St Paul's and then at the Hospitaller priory at Clerkenwell.
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It took a month to devise and implement a formula for replacing the king. The committee charged with drafting it consisted of lawyers, prelates and
nobles, and included Adam Usk as one of its doctors of laws; monks were ordered to bring all their chronicles to Westminster to be scrutinized for precedents, and a range of evidence was assembled.
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The obvious precedent was the deposition of Edward II in 1327, but the bull of 1245 by which Pope Innocent IV had deposed Emperor Frederick II was also consulted, and Usk's assertion that the ‘perjuries, sacrileges, sodomitical acts, dispossession of his subjects, reduction of his people to servitude, lack of reason and incapacity to rule’ cited by Innocent were taken as sufficient to justify deposition is up to a point borne out by the thirty-three charges against Richard set out in the Record and Process, the official account of the proceedings.
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The accusation of perjury was repeated ten times in the Record and Process, while the formal sentence of deposition recalled the king's ‘many perjuries, his cruelty, and his numerous other crimes’. As this indicates, the central thrust of the charges was a sustained denunciation of Richard's character: evil, wicked, deceitful, faithless, crafty, overbearing, vainglorious, foolish, unbridled and cruel are just a selection of the adjectives used to blacken his name. He bore hatred in his heart, employed fear and threats to bend others to his arbitrary will, and acted as though ‘the laws were in his mouth, or in his breast’. A more specific list of crimes welded this character assassination to constitutional issues: Richard had violated his coronation oath, imposed extortionate and unwarranted financial burdens upon his subjects, and undermined the liberties of the Church, the realm and parliament. Such claims were validated by reference to his harsh and unjust treatment of his opponents (especially Henry himself, Archbishop Arundel and the duke of Gloucester), to his unruly Cheshiremen, and to the blank charters and novel oaths he forced upon his subjects and ministers.

The Record and Process thus set out both a moral and a legal case for Richard's deposition. Distorted and exaggerated as they were, the charges against him contained recognizable elements of truth, and they chimed well with contemporary belief in the correlation between a ruler's ability to govern himself and his ability to govern his kingdom.
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To focus on the
process by which Richard was deposed is, however, to miss the main point of the Record and Process, the full title of which was ‘The Record and Process of the Renunciation of King Richard the Second since the Conquest and of the acceptance of the same renunciation, together with the deposition of the same King Richard’. As this makes clear, the crucial stage in the procedure by which Richard ceased to reign was his renunciation of the crown. The Record and Process is in fact a carefully structured and worded document. Beginning with Richard's ‘voluntary’ resignation of his crowns to Northumberland and Archbishop Arundel at Conway; progressing via his ‘cheerful’ and ‘willing’ confirmation of this resignation, symbolized by his ‘public’ removal of the royal signet ring from his finger, in the Tower of London on 29 September; continuing thence to the public reading of his renunciation in both Latin and English before the ‘estates and people’ of the realm in Westminster Great Hall, and their unanimous acceptance of this, ‘without dissent’, on 30 September; it makes it clear that the process of unkinging Richard was in effect complete before a single charge had been publicly read against him. Only after the acceptance of his resignation did the assembly agree, ‘in order to remove any scruple or malevolent suspicion’, to read out the many ‘wrongs and shortcomings [which] rendered him worthy of deposition’. As Usk stated, the additional sanction of deposition was simply ‘a further precaution’ (
pro maiori securitate
); even the formal sentence of deposition questioned its own necessity, stating that it was ‘beyond what was strictly required’ since it was unclear as to whether, following his resignation, Richard had ‘any royal dignity or honour left in him’.
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This point was of central importance. It was not simply that there was widespread unease about the legality of deposing an anointed king, although that was certainly the case. Equally germane was that, as king-in-waiting, Henry had no wish to concede at the outset that it was lawful for the estates of the realm (let alone parliament) to depose a king contrary to his wishes; hence the insistence on the voluntary nature of Richard's resignation, although, as is made clear by an independent eyewitness account of the meetings in the Tower and at Westminster on 28–29 September, this was a fiction. According to this source, ‘The Manner of King Richard's Renunciation’, when asked if he was willing to abdicate, the king became ‘greatly incensed’ and refused utterly to do so, declaring that ‘he would like to have it explained to him how it was that he could resign the crown, and
to whom’.
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Later, confronted by Henry in person, Richard agreed to resign on certain conditions; only when told that this was impossible, and that ‘he must do it simply, without any conditions’, did he read out the act of renunciation prepared for him. On the following day, when this was read to the estates and they were asked whether they accepted Richard's resignation, they cried out, ‘Yes, yes, yes’; the notary John Ferriby then proceeded to a reading of the articles of deposition, which was followed by another cry of ‘Yes, yes, yes’ to the king's deposition. The first and fundamental stage in the process was thus securing the king's resignation; as Usk put it, the king ‘self-evidently deposed himself’.
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‘The Manner’ amply exposes the lies which underpinned the Record and Process, as well as explaining why it was the latter which was circulated to monasteries and other interested parties, although even before this was done the text was further sanitized, with some of the charges being amplified and one or two inconvenient truths excised.
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Walsingham, for example, stated that after the decision of the estates had been conveyed to Richard in the Tower on 1 October and proctors had renounced their homage and fealty to him, the king replied that ‘he did not wish to renounce those special dignities of a spiritual nature which had been bestowed upon him, nor indeed his anointment; he was in fact unable to renounce them, nor could he cease to retain them’.
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Nor was it true that he had admitted in his act of renunciation to being unworthy or unable to govern, ‘it was simply that his government had not been acceptable to the people’. When Chief Justice Thirning, principal proctor for the estates, refuted this, ‘the king simply smiled and asked to be treated accordingly, and not to be deprived of the means with which to sustain himself honourably’.
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Thus only once it was clear that further negotiation was futile did Richard bow to the inevitable, but even then he refused to hand his symbols of office to Henry, instead ‘simply placing his crown upon the ground, he resigned his
rights to God’. Usk confirmed this, pointing out that his signet ring was not handed over willingly (as per the Record and Process), but removed and given to Henry later.
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By this time Henry had been chosen as king. The fourth stage of the procedure described in the Record and Process – following Richard's resignation, its acceptance by the estates, and his deposition – was Henry's ‘challenge’ to the throne and his acclamation as king. This was presented in strikingly different style and language from the rest of the document. The language of Richard's renunciation and deposition was punctiliously formal, inflated and legalistic. The use of Latin rather than the customary Anglo-Norman of the parliament rolls was a statement of gravity, the prose verbose and repetitive, frequently using several words where one would have sufficed.
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Those present in the Tower and their representative capacities were carefully enumerated, as in a charter witness list. The intention, clearly, was to elevate it to a precision of meaning that could not fail to be understood.
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Henry's challenge, by contrast, was brief and imprecise, and it was delivered and recorded in the vernacular, the first such formal declaration by a king in the English tongue.
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It being apparent, as the Record and Process put it, that ‘the realm of England with its appurtenances was vacant’, Henry rose from his seat, made the sign of the cross, commended himself to God, and read from a script as follows:

‘In the name of fadir, son, and holy gost, I, Henry of Lancastre, chalenge this rewme of Yngland, and the corone with all the members and the appurtenances, als I that am disendit be right lyne of the blode coming fro the gude lorde kynge Henry therde, and thorgh that right that god of his grace hath sent me, with helpe of my kyn and of my frendes, to recover it; the whiche rewme was in point to be undone for defaut of governance and undoing of the gode lawes.’

Usk said that Henry read this from the throne, but he is surely wrong; both the Record and Process and ‘The Manner’ were at pains to emphasize that right up until the moment of his acclamation as king, he remained seated
in ‘his proper and accustomed place’, the seat formerly occupied by his father. Details which might have implied presumption on Henry's part were omitted from the official version.
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The blunt, unvarnished English of Henry's claim was a statement in itself, an implicit rejection of the language of majesty and distance which Richard had cultivated during the later years of his reign and a signal that Henry intended to practise an accessible style of kingship.
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It was nevertheless a carefully worded statement and behind it lay a good deal of discussion. Henry's initial instinct had been to claim the kingdom by conquest, but Chief Justice Thirning advised him that this might imply that he could disinherit landholders at will.
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Vestiges of a claim by conquest were nevertheless retained in Henry's challenge, dangling unobtrusively from the idea that God had seen fit to favour his cause and, along with ‘my kin and my friends’, to help him ‘recover’ the kingdom. ‘Default of governance’ and ‘undoing of the good laws’ provided a second line of justification, but the crux of Henry's claim was, as it had to be, blood-descent. This was not justified by the Crouchback Legend, which had been rejected at a meeting of the committee held on 21 September following a search of the chronicles assembled at Westminster,
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but a more generalized manifesto probably intended to incorporate both the idea that Henry had royal blood on both sides of his pedigree and that he was, after Richard, the heir to the throne in the uninterrupted male line. Indeed, ‘The Manner’ stated that he claimed the kingdom as the ‘nearest male heir’ to Henry III, and this may well be correct, with the words attributed to him in the Record and Process being inserted later as a suitably ambiguous compromise.
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