Richard II: A King Undone by His Own Court
Raphael Holinshed described Richard II as handsome and well-formed and said that, if the wicked conduct and disobedience of those around him had not changed him, he would have had a pure and good nature. He was also extravagant, ambitious, and strongly attached to bodily pleasures. He loved books and helped both Chaucer and Froissart. During the Great Revolt he showed courage, presence of mind, and good sense. But after the revolt, when weakness had crept into everything, he gave himself to pleasure and ruinous luxury and left the affairs of the kingdom in the hands of a group of wasteful and destructive ministers.
The Opposition and the Merciless Parliament
A strong opposition formed against these men. It was led by Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester, by Richard, Earl of Arundel, and by Henry of Bolingbroke, a grandson of Edward III. This party controlled the Merciless Parliament of 1388. It brought ten of Richard's friends to trial and, once the charges were proved, had them all hanged.
In 1390 the king, still a young man of twenty-three, took heart and for seven years ruled in keeping with the constitution, that is, in full harmony with the laws, traditions, and elected representatives of the nation.
The Turn Toward Tyranny
The death of Queen Anne of Bohemia deprived Richard of her moderate and useful influence. In 1396, hoping to strengthen the peace between France and England, he married Isabella, the daughter of Charles VI. Because Isabella was only seven years old, he spent his energy on male and female attendants and favorites. The new queen brought a number of French attendants to London, and they introduced French manners and perhaps the French theory of absolute monarchy to the English court.
In 1397 Parliament sent Richard a petition of complaint against the excessive extravagance of the court. He replied haughtily that these matters were outside the competence of Parliament and asked the name of the member who had proposed the petition. Out of fear, Parliament condemned the objecting member to death, and Richard pardoned him.
Murders and Confiscation
Not long after this, Gloucester and Arundel suddenly left London. The king, suspecting a plot against himself, ordered their arrest. Arundel was beheaded and Gloucester was strangled in 1397. In 1399 John of Gaunt died and left rich estates. Richard needed money for an expedition to Ireland, and amid the fear and terror of the nobility, he seized the duke's property.
Bolingbroke's Landing and the End of the Plantagenets
Henry of Bolingbroke, the exiled son of John of Gaunt, was deprived of his father's inheritance. While the king was busy restoring peace and order in Ireland, Henry landed at York with a small army that rapidly grew, and the powerful nobles joined him. When Richard returned to England, he found the enemy army far larger than his own and found his friends scattered by an imaginary fear. He surrendered himself and his crown to Bolingbroke, who became king as Henry IV in 1399.
In this way the Plantagenet dynasty, which had begun with Henry II in 1154, came to an end, and the house of Lancaster began, which ended with the reign of Henry VI in 1461. Richard II died at the age of thirty-three in Pontefract prison in 1400, perhaps from the severe cold of his cell, or, as Holinshed and Shakespeare believed, was murdered by the agents of the new king.
France Around 1300
The France of 1300 was by no means the great country that now stretches from the English Channel to the Mediterranean and from the Vosges and the Alps to the Atlantic. On the east it reached only as far as the Rhône. A large part of the southwest, Guienne and Gascony, had been joined to the English empire by the marriage of Henry II to Eleanor of Aquitaine in 1152. In the north, England had taken the provinces of Ponthieu and Abbeville. English kings held these provinces as fiefs of the French kings, but in every real sense they ruled them as sovereigns.
A Patchwork of Territories
- Provence, Dauphiné, and Franche-Comté, the Free County, belonged to the Holy Roman Empire, whose rulers were mostly German.
- The French kings ruled the principalities of Valois, Anjou, Bourbon, and Angoulême indirectly, through close relatives.
- They ruled Normandy, Picardy, Champagne, Poitou, Auvergne, most of Languedoc, and the Île-de-France, the north-central province that included the neighborhood of Paris, directly as kings.
- Artois, Blois, Nevers, Limoges, Armagnac, and Valentinois were held by feudal princes who were sometimes nominal subjects and servants of the French kings and at other times rose against them in war.
- Brittany, Burgundy, and Flanders were fiefs of France, but, as Shakespeare says, they counted as almost royal duchies and in practice acted like independent states.
France was not yet France.
Flanders: Wealth, Industry, and Class War
The most vital and, at the same time, the most elusive fief of France at the start of the fourteenth century was Flanders. In all of northern Europe, north of the Alps, only Flanders could match Italy in economic development. Its borders were very changeable in time and place. Let us regard it as the region that includes Bruges, Ghent, Ypres, and Courtrai.
The Surrounding Territories
East of the Scheldt lay the duchy of Brabant, which at that time included Antwerp, Mechelen, Brussels, Tournai, and Louvain. South of Flanders lay the independent bishoprics of Liège and Cambrai and the county of Hainaut around Valenciennes. Loosely, "Flanders" usually included Brabant, Liège, Cambrai, and Hainaut. To the north were seven small principalities that made up roughly the Holland of today. These regions did not reach their full fertility and prosperity until the seventeenth century, when their empire stretched from Rembrandt to Batavia. But in 1300 industry, trade, and class war were shaking Flanders and Brabant.
The Trade of Bruges
A canal nineteen kilometers long joined Bruges to the North Sea. Every day a hundred merchant ships passed through its waters, bringing the goods of three continents from hundreds of ports to Flanders. Aeneas Sylvius counted Bruges as one of the three most beautiful cities in the world. The goldsmiths of Bruges made up a large part of the city's military force, and the weavers of Ghent formed twenty-seven regiments of its armed force, which came to 189,000 men.
From Guilds to Capitalism
The medieval guild organization, which had given the craftsman the dignity of freedom and the pride of mastery, now gave way, in the face of the metal and weaving industries of Flanders and Brabant, to a capitalist system. The employer supplied capital, raw materials, and machinery to the workshop workers and paid them, no longer protected by guilds, by the piece or by contract. It became hard to enter a trade guild. Thousands of workers became day laborers and wanderers, going from city to city and workshop to workshop. They found temporary work whose small pay forced them to live in filthy quarters and left them nothing but the clothes on their backs. Communist ideas appeared among the proletarians and peasants.
The poor asked why they should be hungry while the storehouses of barons and bishops overflowed. All who did not eat by the strength of their own arms were regarded as parasites on society. The employers, for their part, complained of the risks that threatened their investments. They cited the unreliability of raw materials, the spoilage of goods aboard ships, shifting markets, the tricks and cheating of rivals, and repeated strikes that raised wages and prices, changed the value of money, and cut some profits to the point where they could not pay their debts.
The Flemish Revolt and Its Crushing
Louis of Nevers, Count of Flanders, favored the employers too much. The people of Bruges and Ypres, supported by the neighboring peasants, raised the banner of revolt, deposed Louis, plundered monasteries, and killed several millionaires. The Church ordered priests to refuse to perform religious duties in the revolutionary areas. Even so, the rebels forced the priests to do their duty, and one rebel leader swore that he would not rest until all priests were hanged.
Louis appealed to his lord, the king of France. Philip VI came to his aid, defeated the rebel forces at Cassel in 1328, hanged the mayor of Bruges, restored the count, and made Flanders subject to France.
The French Economy and the Shepherds' Revolt
On the whole France was less industrialized than Flanders. Industry often stayed at the handicraft stage, but Lille, Douai, Cambrai, and Amiens reflected the bustle of the neighboring Flemish textile towns. Bad roads and the road-tolls and exactions of the feudal lords made internal trade difficult, yet canals and rivers formed a network of natural highways across France that were useful to commerce.
The rising merchant class, through its alliance and intermarriage with kings, had around 1300 reached such a level of rank and wealth that it frightened the aristocracy, which was rich in land and poor in money. The government of the towns was in the hands of influential merchants, who supervised the guilds and held production and trade in a strict monopoly. Here too, as in Flanders, a revolutionary working class was seething.
The March of the Poor
In the revolt known as the Shepherds' Revolt, the destitute peasants rose, as they had done in 1251. The wave of rebels poured into the towns and stirred the angry and embittered proletarians to follow them. Under the leadership of a revolutionary monk, barefoot and unarmed, they marched south and announced Jerusalem as their destination. Being hungry, they plundered shops and fields, and when people resisted them they looked for weapons and in this way became an armed army.
In Paris they opened the prisons and broke up the royal troops. The king hid in the Louvre, the nobles and gentlemen took refuge in their castles, and the merchants hid in their houses in fear. The revolutionary army, swollen by the poor of the capital, passed through the city. It now numbered forty thousand men and women, unbelievers and believers. At Verdun, Auch, and Toulouse they killed all the Jews they could find.
The End at Aigues-Mortes
When they gathered at Aigues-Mortes on the Mediterranean coast, the forces of the government's plenipotentiary at Carcassonne besieged them and cut off their food supply. He waited until all the rebels had died of hunger or cholera, and the few who remained alive he hanged himself.
The French State and Court
What kind of government had left France in the grip of greedy wealth and lawless, rebellious poverty? In many respects the French government was the strongest in Europe. The powerful kings of the thirteenth century had subdued the feudal lords to the state and, with a skilled civil service, had built a national judicial and administrative power. At times they also called together the Estates-General for consultation.
The Estates-General originally meant a general assembly of landowners and was later applied to an advisory body made up of representatives of the nobles, the clergy, and the townspeople or middle class.
Paris in the Eyes of Visitors
The French court was admired by all Europe. There dukes, counts, and powerful knights mixed with silk-clad ladies at splendid feasts, and stately dances and the clash of lances in show tournaments preserved the pomp of the age of chivalry. John, king of Bohemia, called Paris the most important seat of chivalry in the world and swore he could not live a moment outside it.
Petrarch, who saw Paris in 1331, described it with less enthusiasm. In substance he wrote that Paris is not what it is said to be, and that the fame comes from the lies and exaggerations of its inhabitants, but that it is certainly a great city. He had seen no dirtier city except Avignon. At the same time the most learned men live there, and it is like a basket in which the world's rarest fruits are gathered. There was a time when the French were considered barbarians for their savage and awkward manners, but things have now been completely changed. Good company, love of society, easygoing manners, wit, and a gift for joking are their moral traits. They use every chance to show off and fight sorrow with jokes, laughter, singing, eating, and drinking.
The Succession Crisis
Philip IV, although he had forcibly seized the property of the Templars and the Jews, left his son an almost empty treasury in 1314. Louis X died after a short reign in 1316 and left no heir except a pregnant wife. After a period without a king, his brother Philip V was crowned. A group of opponents wanted the throne for Joan, Louis's four-year-old daughter. But an assembly of nobles and clergy approved the famous decree of 1316, stating that the laws and customs in use among the Franks, without any discussion, exclude daughters from the throne.
When Philip V himself died without a male child in 1322, this decree also barred his daughter from the throne, and his brother Charles IV was declared king. The purpose of these laws was probably to exclude Isabella of France, the daughter of Philip IV, who had married Edward II of England and in 1312 had borne Edward III. The French were determined not to let any English king rule France.
Edward III's Claim
When Charles IV died without a male child, the Capetian dynasty came to an end. Edward III, who had become king of England a year before, claimed the throne of France as the grandson of Philip IV and the most direct living heir of Hugh Capet, and he presented his claim to the assembly of French nobles. The assembly rejected it on the ground that Edward's mother, who herself had no right to the throne under the laws of 1316 and 1322, could not transmit the throne to him. The barons preferred to choose one of Philip IV's nephews, the Count of Valois. He became king as Philip VI and began the Valois dynasty, which ruled France until Henry IV and the start of the Bourbon house in 1589.
The Road to War
Edward first protested, but in 1329 he gave in and paid full homage to Philip VI as feudal lord of Gascony, Guienne, and Ponthieu. As Edward grew up and his cunning grew with him, he refused obedience, and again the dream of sitting on the thrones of two countries disturbed his imagination.
The royal advisers assured him that Philip was a weak-spirited king who, on one crusade to the Holy Land, had left the battlefield at once in fear. The time seemed right to begin the Hundred Years' War.