The New Murrey and Blue blog

I am heartily sick of certain historians – or ‘historians’ in some cases – who use the ‘tyrant’ word as a badge to stick on the rulers they dislike as a sort of badge of disgrace. These people invariably gloss over the similar – no, let’s be plain, worse, far worse! – deeds of the blood-stained murderers they adore. Because the root of this attitude is certainly an obstinate desire to make tin gods of certain ‘chosen’ monarchs, who are held up as patterns for us to admire.

Indeed, virtually the entire Tudor dynasty is held up in this way – though they tend to tread lightly over Edward VI and Mary I, and maybe admit them as inconvenient interruptions in the path between the wonderful Henry VIII and the glorious Elizabeth I.

Let us first consider poor Richard II, who is almost universally condemned as a tyrant. He executed two nobles in his 22 years of reign. That scarcely puts him up there with Stalin, does it? When the Appellants seized power in 1387, they were far more tyrannical, executing numerous knights and other persons to whom they objected, and banishing others, including a duke, an earl and an archbishop. But that was fine, apparently. Not tyrannical at all. No doubt it was the ‘will of the people’.

These wretched tyrants and murderers (who included in their ranks the future tyrant, murderer and regicide Henry Bolingbroke) claimed that Richard was extravagant. In fact, at this point, he was spending less on his household than the sainted Edward III, his grandfather, had done. So if Richard was extravagant, what was Edward III?

The Appellants then ruled so ineptly that in quite a short time Richard was able to regain power in a bloodless coup. Note, bloodless. No one was executed and even Gloucester and Arundel, the most obnoxious of his oppressors, were restored to the Council after a short ‘holiday’.

As Harold F. Hutchinson wrote in The Hollow Crown ‘The English chroniclers, writing or revising when a touchy usurping Lancastrian was only too ready to take offence, magnified any incident which could add to the discredit of the deposed, and were unable to appreciate that the years 1389-1396 were in some ways the most brilliant years of medieval England;’ (1)

In other words, following his deposition, Richard II was defamed and his name quite consciously blackened, to make his deposition seem justified. Does that by any chance sound familiar?

Among Richard II’s many achievements was his ending of the long, costly, unjustified and – most important – losing war against France. This alone made his name anathema to certain factions within his England and to certain modern historians who – even in the 21st Century! – still hanker after the glories of imperialism and blood-letting. One of Richard’s greatest ‘crimes’ was that he did not kill enough foreigners. Instead, he focused on the British Isles and sought to establish order.

Eventually, in 1397, Richard chose to take out Gloucester, Arundel and Warwick, the senior appellants. The first two were still opposing his policies and had a long track record of loud-mouthed objection and trouble-making. Arundel was executed; Warwick was sentenced to life imprisonment. Gloucester died in prison in Calais, and it is usually assumed he was murdered. Yet Parliament convicted him of treason. I am not sure why so many assume that had he been brought back to Westminster he would have been let off with Community Service. (It is even conceivable that he died of natural causes, like another Duke of Gloucester in the time of Henry VI.)

Even at its blackest, this is no more than the Appellants did 10 years earlier – and yet they are never accused of tyranny! Richard consciously and deliberately mirrored the procedures they had used, so if he was a tyrant on this measure so were they!

The Appellants had crushed and humiliated Richard in 1387-88, and executed or banished many of his friends and most loyal supporters. They even banished a couple of elderly widows from the court because, presumably, these courageous knights feared the dangerous influence of two old women.

Medieval concepts of honour required that a man – let alone a king! – should avenge slights and offences to his honour. Yet the very people who so often accuse Richard of being ‘unmanly’ – whatever that means – are shocked and horrified when he behaves in the way expected of medieval men and avenges his wrongs. What’s more, they never commend him for his restraint. Because, compared to the Appellants, he was very restrained indeed. There were no mass purges of lesser men, and Bolingbroke and Mowbray – Appellants both – emerged not only with renewed pardons but with higher titles.

That Bolingbroke and Mowbray later decided to fall out is scarcely Richard’s fault. As there were no witnesses to speak for either’s version of events, there was no choice but to order the matter to be settled by combat. Richard gets blamed even for this, though he spent months trying to resolve the quarrel by other means. What more was he supposed to do? Wave a magic wand? Tell them to kiss and make up?

In the end, he stopped the combat and banished both. Again, he is criticised for this choice, but does it not occur to anyone that by doing this he saved at least one life? It would have been no great loss to him if one had been hacked to bits by the other.

Banishment was not penniless banishment. Both were amply provided with funds.

And here we come to the nub of it. When his father, Gaunt died, Richard seized poor Harry Bolingbroke’s lands. He disinherited him. Crime of the century! Oh, the tears historians have shed over poor, penniless Henry, begging his bread in exile.

Except, it was not like that. Richard continued to keep both men in funds. Indeed a huge payment was sent to Bolingbroke by the Duke of York‘s regency government just as Henry was proceeding to invade. What’s more, although Bolingbroke’s lands had been taken into Richard’s custody, the King’s grants to others included a crucial saving clause ‘Until, Henry, Duke of Lancaster, shall sue for the same.’

In other words:

Richard recognised that Bolingbroke was Duke of Lancaster. Henry had not been attainted.

It was envisaged that, at some point, Henry would return and be allowed to sue for his lands. He had not been disinherited, and in the interim, he was getting huge amounts of cash from Richard. He was not, like the dukes of Somerset and Exeter in the 1460s, a homeless, penniless beggar.

In short, his invasion, and still more his subsequent usurpation, was not justified. He had been treated quite fairly, certainly by the rough standards of medieval justice.

(1) The Hollow Crown, Harold F. Hutchinson, p129.