The Lead-Up to Shakespeare’s Richard II

Richard II begins as Richard’s cousin, Henry Bolingbroke, charges Thomas Mowbray with serious crimes, including the murder of the Duke of Glouchester. Bolingbroke’s father, John of Gaunt, privately blames the king for Gloucester’s death. At Richard’s command, Bolingbroke and Mowbray prepare for a trial by combat at Coventry.

But what was happening in the weeks leading up to this defining moment? How would Richard’s actions contribute to his downfall at the hands of Henry later? Did Henry have any idea what destiny had in store for him or that it would set off a decades-long struggle for the crown?

In the excerpt below, from Chapter 12 “1397–1398: To Stand Upon My Kingdom” of The Eagle and the Hart: The Tragedy of Richard II and Henry IV, historian Helen Castor takes readers back in time to the weeks before Shakespeare’s play begins. The Spectator wrote: “It is the measure of her genius for narrative and character that the tale she tells does not remotely suffer from comparison with Shakespeare.”

Henry’s life was running off the road. Since Mary’s death four years earlier, he had been in unhappy stasis: his father’s deputy and a loving father to his own children, but shut out of office and influence by Richard, and refused permission to adventure abroad by Gaunt. In recent weeks, there had been small signs of hope that new avenues might be opening to him. The evaporation of Richard’s plans for English troops to fight alongside the French in Italy meant the way had become clear for Henry to explore the possibility of a marriage to Lucia Visconti, cousin of his friend Gian Galeazzo, duke of Milan, a young woman he had met on his journey back from the Holy Land in 1393 and whom the duke now offered as a bride. But everything depended on his fight with Mowbray. Even if he won, Richard’s dangerous volatility made it difficult to see what lay ahead. Without victory, there was no future at all.

He had five long months to wait, months that seemed at times like torture. He moved restlessly around the Lancastrian estates, from the north to the south and then back to the midlands, sometimes in the company of his father and always with loyal friends who had served him for years: Thomas Rempston, who had been retrieved by Lancastrian diplomacy from his Lithuanian captivity after the reyse of 1391; Thomas Erpingham, the senior Lancastrian knight who had been at Henry’s side ever since that campaign; Hugh Waterton, in whose home Henry’s little daughters were being raised; Waterton’s cousin Robert, who would be his squire and second when the duel took place. As he traveled through the duchy’s lands, he sought new recruits for his retinue, granting annuities and distributing livery collars of forget-me-nots. He was also equipping himself for the combat to come. At Henry’s request, Gian Galeazzo Visconti sent him a suit of the finest Milanese armor, along with four expert Lombard armorers to ensure that the engraved and burnished steel fitted him exactly, to tiny fractions of an inch.

Richard too was corresponding with allies on the Continent. His attention was no longer principally focused on Paris. Ever since the triumph of his marriage and the subsequent collapse of the proposed Italian campaign, he had lost interest in other practical manifestations of his treaty with France. Instead, he remained fixed on the glorious vision of himself as Holy Roman Emperor. The English king had “set his hopes on the Empire,” the pope in Rome told the Milanese ambassador, “although truly it is impossible for him to win it.” Not that Richard showed any sign of recognizing that obvious geopolitical conclusion. In the autumn of 1397 he had distributed pensions to a handful of German knights, and in the spring of 1398 he confirmed the £1,000 annuity to be paid from the English exchequer to the new Count Palatine after the recent death of his father. In May, Richard arranged for the archdeacon of Cologne to visit Rome in pursuit of his claims to the imperial title. There the archdeacon would join the bishop of Lichfield, William Scrope’s cousin Richard, who had been at the papal curia for months already to lobby for Edward II’s still-elusive sainthood. The king also responded to the Byzantine emperor Manuel II Palaeologus, with whose court at Constantinople embassies had been exchanged during the previous year, and who had now requested military assistance against the Turks. He could not yet send troops or money, Richard told the emperor, because his treasury had been drained by the need to deal with the malevolence of some of his magnates; but “at length, by the aid of God’s grace, we have by our own valor trodden on the necks of the proud and haughty, and with a strong hand have ground them down, not to the bark only, but even to the root.” As a result, he declared, “we have restored to our subjects peace … which by God’s blessing shall endure for ever.”

A glance around his kingdom, however, was enough to suggest that with each passing day Richard’s grandiloquent claims bore less and less resemblance to reality. A stream of knights and esquires presented themselves to apply for pardons before the council committee, and others were individually summoned to account to the king for their past service to Woodstock, Arundel, or Warwick. Yet Richard did not seem reassured that treachery had been expunged from his realm. From March 1398, letters carried in and out of England’s ports were routinely intercepted and read by the king’s agents, while Rutland and Thomas Holand, the new dukes of Aumale and Surrey, were commissioned to hunt for traitors, wherever in the kingdom they might be, and to punish them as they deserved. Paranoia, the ongoing search for enemies within, was becoming the standard operational mode of Richard’s state.

And paranoia fed hungrily on its own effects, since the king’s assault on those he perceived as his enemies was beginning to precipitate new forms of resistance. On March 31, Palm Sunday, several hundred men rose in revolt in Oxfordshire, near the site of the Appellants’ victory over de Vere’s Cheshire- men at Radcot Bridge a decade before. One of the rebel leaders in the village of Witney, where the earl of Arundel had taken up position before the battle, called himself by the name of Arundel’s young son and heir. Another, a man named Henry Roper from Bampton, a village just three miles from the bridge itself, rallied his followers with his axe in his hand. “Arise all men and go with us,” he cried, “or else truly and by God you shall be dead!” It was part intimidation, part warning. The king, who had once promised that no harm would come to those involved in the events of 1387–88, was now forcing his subjects to pay for pardons that were not worth the parchment on which they were written. The people of Oxfordshire had noticed the threat. The revolt was put down and Roper found guilty of treason; he was hanged, drawn and quartered, and sections of his dismembered body dispatched to cities in the south, east, and midlands for display as a grisly deterrent. But rumblings of unrest continued, and as spring turned to summer the council kept a wary eye on potential troublemakers in the shires.

The king’s response was only to double down. At Nottingham in June, he added another four months to the deadline by which those who had served Woodstock, Arundel, or Warwick were required to compound with the council for pardon. At the same time, he distributed financial rewards to the Cheshiremen who had fought at Radcot Bridge, all the while recruiting more retainers to wear his badge of the white hart. Together with the blank charters extracted over the summer from London and the sixteen counties of the southeast—a part of his kingdom in which he was spending less and less time—it seemed clear that Richard now divided his subjects into two categories: his favored servants on whom he lavished boundless rewards; and the rest, whose suspect loyalty he intended to compel with endless punishments.

Still, much depended—for everyone attempting to gauge the king’s intentions as well as for the combatants themselves—on the outcome of the trial to be held at Coventry. Spectators were arriving from across Europe. The duke of Brittany was already in the country, visiting Richard’s court to negotiate a formal alliance; it was agreed that his herald should act as an honorable and neutral umpire for the duel. The count of St. Pol came from Paris. The dukes of Burgundy, Orléans, and Guelders sent their heralds, as did Henry’s brother-in-law the king of Portugal. Knights and squires traveled from Scotland, France, and Germany. By Sunday, September 15, great crowds had gathered at Coventry, where part of the butchered remains of the Oxfordshire rebel Henry Roper could still be seen above the city gate. The king had taken up residence two and a half miles away at Baginton Castle, the home of William Bagot. Henry had been staying at his father’s nearby castle of Kenilworth but now moved into the city itself, as did his opponent, Mowbray. The challenge was set for the next morning at nine.

In the early autumn light, the protagonists assembled in the splendidly decorated lists. In the royal stand, Richard sat surrounded by his bishops and lords under the vigilant gaze of his Cheshire archers, Gaunt grim and drawn beside him. This, for Richard, was kingship: a moment when he sat center stage, the source of all authority and arbiter of all action. The masters of ceremonies were Rutland and Thomas Holand as constable and marshal of England, offices that had formerly belonged by hereditary right to Woodstock and Mowbray but had now, like so much else, been abruptly reassigned. Both men were dressed in liveries of red silk embroidered with silver garters, the emblem of England’s chivalry. From his elegant pavilion sewn with red flowers, Henry, the challenger, stepped forward in his Milanese armor, a silver shield on his arm bearing the red cross of Saint George, to declare his opponent “a false and disloyal traitor to God, the king, his kingdom, and myself.” Mowbray, in German armor, swore to prove before God that he lied. Their sharpened lances were measured to check they were of equal length for a fair fight; their tents were cleared away, and both men mounted their horses. At a word from the Breton herald, Henry spurred his charger forward to take his place for battle. Richard had first sat in judgment at a trial by combat when he was thirteen years old, the same age at which Henry had first jousted before the court. But not like this. Silence fell.

Then Richard rose to his feet and told them to stop.

About the author

Helen Castor is an acclaimed medieval and Tudor historian. Her first book, Blood and Roses: The Paston Family in the Wars of the Roses, was longlisted for what is now known as the Baillie Gifford Prize for Nonfiction and won the English Association’s Beatrice White Prize. Her next two books, She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth and Joan of Arc: A History were both on numerous Best Books of the Year lists and made into documentaries for BBC television, and Joan of Arc was longlisted for the PEN America/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography. She has one son and lives in London.