RICHARD II. 



RICHARD II. 



the king's three uncles John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster ; Edmund 

 of Langley, then earl of Cambridge, afterwards duke of York ; and 

 Thomas of Woodstock, then earl of Buckingham, afterwards duke of 

 Gloucester were all excluded ; but this arrangement appears to have 

 been collusive, aud intended merely to lull the popular dislike and 

 suspicion of Lancaster, in whose interest most of the counsellors are 

 said to have been ; and who, although he at first retired to his castle 

 of Keuilworth, was the next yrar appointed to the command of a 

 fleet fitted out to act. against France. In the course of that year, 

 1378, great honour was obtained by John Philpot, a citizen of London, 

 who, having equipped a small naval armament at his own expense, set 

 sail with it against the Scottish privateer Mercer, who had recently 

 carried off all the ships in the port of Scarborough, and succeeded in 

 capturing him with all his prizes. During the next three years the 

 war with France was prosecuted in Brittany under the conduct of the 

 Earl of Buckingham ; but the death of Charles V., in September 1380, 

 having been speedily followed by a peace between the Duke of Brittany 

 and the new French regency, Buckingham, now finding an enemy in 

 his former ally, was glad to return home with his army in April 

 1381. 



Meanwhile in England the heavy pecuniary exactions called for by 

 the war were hastening on a crisis which other causes had been long 

 contributing to bring about. Three contending forces may be dis- 

 tinctly perceived at work in the ferment which now broke forth. 

 First, there was the crown, or rather its natural ally the ancient aris- 

 tocracy, in whose hands the young king on the present occasion was, 

 and of which he may be considered as the mere representative or 

 instrument, striving to protect from encroachment the almost exclu- 

 sive control of the national affairs which it had possessed at least from 

 the era of the Conquest. Secondly, there was the recently-established 

 House of Commons, the representative of the minor gentry and the 

 middle classes, pressing forward to secure a share in the government, 

 and, with the instinct of a growing power, eagerly seizing hold of 

 every opportunity of forwarding its object, its chief means being the 

 right of taxation, of which it was already in the undisputed enjoy- 

 ment, and which it had learned to apply with considerable skill as a 

 screw for compressing .the crown, and extorting from it new conces- 

 sions and privileges. It may be remarked that the present state of 

 affairs, .with the king a boy and a cipher, and the government in the 

 hands of a regency, was peculiarly favourable for such attempts on the 

 part of the House of Commons. Lastly, there was the great body of 

 the population, forming the labouring class, of which by far the larger 

 portion was yet engaged in agriculture, and in a state of villeinage or 

 servitude, bound to the soil, and so confounded in some sort with 

 the cattle and chattels of the landlord, counted, or at least treated, as 

 things, not as persons, at any rate in so far as all rights of a political 

 cl'aracter were concerned. But the example of what had recently 

 taken place in other countries, in France and in Flanders, and the pro- 

 gress that the development of society had made among ourselves, had 

 inspired even this, the lowest class, with a general desire of acquiring 

 anew position in the commonwealth of being raised from bondage 

 to freedom and citizenship. Of course, both on the part of the House 

 of Commons (or middle classes), and still more on that of the villeins, 

 what was reasonable and right in this ambition may have been mixed 

 with much that was ill-considered, extravagant, and impracticable; 

 their efforts may have been in some respects ill-directed, both in regard 

 to ends and means ; but in the main, what took place must have hap- 

 pened if society was to advance at all, or even if it was to retain any 

 principle of life. The explosion of these various elements was pro- 

 voked by the state of pecuniary necessity to which the crown was 

 reduced in the years 1379 and 13SO. First, to induce the Commons 

 to grant the money that was wanted, it was found necessary, after a 

 short struggle, to submit to their demands, of not only being allowed 

 to inspect the accounts of the royal treasury, but even of appointing 

 the king's ministers. Then, in December 1380, the famous Capitation 

 Tax was imposed, which gave rise to the rebellion of Wat Tyler in 

 the summer of the year following. This formidable movement began 

 at Fobbings, near Brentwood in Essex, on the 30th of May 1381, when 

 the people rose against Thomas de Bainpton, one of the commissioners 

 who had been appointed to superintend the collection and enforce the 

 payment of the tax. It thence spread over Essex, Kent, Suffolk, 

 Norfolk, and other counties along the eastern and southern coasts ; 

 the most noted among the popular leaders being two priests called 

 Jack Straw and John Ball. Watt, the Tyler (or tiler), of Dartford, 

 who killed the royal tax-collector, in consequence of an outrage com- 

 mitted on Tyler's daughter, and then placed himself at the head of 

 the Kent men, seems however to have been by far the most deter- 

 mined and ferocious of the rebel captains. Two other persons of the 

 names of Lister and Westbroom, were called Kings of the Com- 

 mons in Norfolk and Suffolk. In the earlier part of the month of 

 June, Tyler and his followers, having marched upon London, perpe- 

 trated a series of frightful devastations : they sacked the archbishop's 

 palace at Lambeth, demolished the Marshalsea and King's Bench 

 prison?, and the Duke of Lancaster's palace of the Savoy, set loose 

 the prisoners in Newgate and the Fleet, and dtstroyed the former 

 building ; eet fire to the Temple, and to the Priory of the Knights 

 Hospitallers at Clerkenwell; and massacred great numbers of the 

 wealthier classes, among others the two first officers of the kingdom 



the Archbishop of Canterbury, who was chancellor, and Sir Robert 

 Hales, the treasurer. At last, on the 15th, the career of the dema- 

 gogue was suddenly terminated by the bold hand of Sir William 

 Walworth, the lord mayor, who, when Tyler, coming forth from his 

 men, rode up to the king stationed in front of the abbey of St. Bar- 

 tholomew in West Smithfield, plunged a dagger into his throat, on 

 which he was speedily despatched by one or two other persons in the 

 royal suite. Richard himself on this occasion, young as he was, 

 showed both firmness and presence of mind. The insurgents, deprived 

 of their leader, were easily induced to lay down their arms; and in a 

 few weeks the rising of the commons was completely suppressed in all 

 parts of the kingdom. The victory obtained by the king and the 

 government was followed by the shedding of torrents of blood on the 

 scaffold : it is said that the persons executed amounted in all to about 

 1500; Straw, Ball, and the other leaders being among the number. 

 All the promises also that had been made to the congregated multi- 

 tudes while they had still arms in their hands were broken. The 

 Essex men had only asked for the abolition, of bondage, the fixing of 

 a maximum for the rent of land, the universal liberty of buying and 

 selling in fairs and markets, and a general pardon ; and before they 

 broke up and retired to their homes they had actually received a 

 written grant of these demands under the king's hand. Even Wat 

 Tyler and the men of Kent, when they came to specify their terms, 

 had insisted upon nothing more extravagant than that the forest law 

 should be repealed, and all \\arrens, waters, parks, and woods thrown 

 open, go that the killing of fish, fowl, and game of all kinds should be 

 everywhere free to every man. 



On the 14th of January 1382, Richard was married to Anne of 

 Bohemia, daughter of Charles IV., the late emperor of Germany. The 

 next two years were filled up with a war against the French in Flan- 

 ders, conducted by Henry Spenser, the young and fighting bishop of 

 Norwich, who in the late commotions had distinguished himself by 

 his decisive style of dealing with the rebels ; first, as Froissart tells 

 us, meeting' them in the field, and then, when he had routed them, 

 exchanging his sword and armour for a crucifix and sacerdotal robes, 

 and thus arrayed, confessing and absolving his prisoners as he hurried 

 them to the gibbet, and who now went over to the Continent to assist 

 the burghers of Ghent in their contest with the Count of Flanders 

 and the French king, and in support of the cause of Urban VI., in 

 the general European war excited by the struggle between that pope 

 and his rival Clement VII. r fhe bishop in his first campaign defeated 

 the Count of Flanders, and took the town of Gravelines ; but in the 

 spring of 1384 he was obliged to make his way back with much pre- 

 cipitancy to England, where he was arraigned by the parliament for 

 the failure of the expedition, and his temporalities were confiscated 

 till the king should be repaid the money it had cost. In 1385 the war 

 with France was transferred to Scotland ; and in the summer of that 

 year Richard, for the first time, appeared at the head of his army, 

 which penetrated as far as Aberdeen, having on its way reduced Edin- 

 burgh, Dunfermline, Perth, and Dundee to ashes, without having 

 however during its whole progress seen the face of the enemy. An 

 expedition of John of Gaunt to Spain, to assert his claims to the 

 throne of Castile and Leon, grounded on his marriage with Constance, 

 the eldest daughter of the late king Peter the Cruel, after occupying 

 him for about three years, terminated, in 1388, in the marriage of the 

 duke's daughter Catharine to Henry, prince of Asturias, the heir of 

 the reigning Castilian king, John I., an alliance which seated the 

 descendants of the English duke for many generations upon the 

 throne to which he aspired. 



Meanwhile, during the absence of the duke, the ascendancy at home 

 had been assumed by his younger brother Thomas, now duke of 

 Gloucester ; and in the latter part of the year 1387, an ill-conceived 

 and worse-directed attempt of Richard to take the management of 

 affairs into his own hands had resulted in the complete defeat of that 

 design by Gloucester, the execution of Richard's two principal coun- 

 sellors, the Chief-Justice Tresiliau and Sir Nicholas Brember the 

 lord mayor of London, and the expulsion of the Archbishop of York, 

 and of the royal minions De Vere, duke of Ireland, and De la Pole, 

 earl of Suffolk, from the kingdom. The " wonderful parliament," as 

 it was called, which met on the 3rd of February 1388, after ratifying 

 the proceedings of the victorious party, also sent Sir Simon Burley 

 and three other knights to the scaffold, banished four more of the 

 judges to Ireland, and in short completely put down the king's faction. 

 On the 15th of August this year was fought the famous battle of 

 Otterbourne, or Chevy Chase, in which the Scots lost their commander, 

 Earl Douglas, but the English were finally driven from the field, after 

 both their leader Lord Harry Percy (popularly designated Hotspur) 

 and his brother Lord Ralph had fallen into the hands of the enemy. 



Richard remained in the state of subjection to which he had been 

 reduced by the "wonderful parliament" for more than a year. At 

 last, at a great council held in May 1389, he unexpectedly intimated 

 that, being now in his twenty-second year, he intended to take the 

 management of affairs into his own hands ; and the suddenness of the 

 movement secured its success for the moment. Gloucester found it 

 necessary to retire into the country. But, in fact, although no 

 further attempt was made for the present formally to set Richard aside, 

 his own indolence and indisposition to business very soon threw the 

 government into the hands of his uncle Edmund, duke of York, and 



