Middle English Literature

Usurpation
For a year, beginning in November 1386, twelve lords of a “great and
continual council” ruled England instead of King Richard II. Appointed
by parliament and replacing the ineffectual chancellor Michael de la Pole,
earl of Suffolk, the council’s principal task was to reform the expenses and
revenues of the king’s household. The king attempted a recovery of his
power in August 1387, which culminated in a ruling by King’s Bench that
the council members had been “derogatory to the regality and prerogative
of the lord king” and that those who had limited his ability to appoint the
ministers and to summon and dismiss parliament as he wished were traitors
(see the image “Court of King’s Bench,” p. 145). However, Richard’s
friends and supporters subsequently failed in their attempt fully to regain
control by force. In the Merciless Parliament of February to June, 1388,
five Lords Appellant presented charges of treason against these members of
the king’s court, who were then exiled, hanged, or beheaded.
Richard was unable fully to revenge these humiliations until 1397, when
he had regained sufficient power to recall the King’s Bench’s ruling. Of the
five appellants, Thomas of Woodstock, duke of Gloucester, was murdered;
Richard Fitzalan, earl of Arundel and Surrey, was tried and executed; and
Thomas Beauchamp, earl of Warwick, was banished. A little later, in Sep-
tember 1398, Thomas Mowbray, earl of Nottingham and duke of Norfolk,
and Henry Bolingbroke, earl of Derby, were also exiled.
With the death of John of Gaunt in February 1399, Richard moved to
deny Henry his inheritance. Henry responded in July by returning from
France while Richard was in Ireland, and Henry quickly gained control of
central and eastern England. After some delay, the king landed in south
Wales and eventually met with Henry’s representatives at Conway around
August 15 after the royal forces had all but dispersed. After agreeing to
surrender his person and to summon a parliament to settle matters, Richard
met with Henry at Flint and was taken into custody in the city of Chester
before being transferred to the Tower of London at the beginning of
Usurpation
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70
Force and Order
September. Henry either had been planning all along to claim the throne or
at some moment in the August–September period he decided on the more
ambitious goal, and he appointed a commission to marshal arguments and
evidence as to how this could be done, setting September 30 as the date
for parliament’s session. Several meetings between Richard and Henry’s
delegates, and then Henry himself, on September 28 and 29 secured Richard’s
agreement to a list of articles against him. These charges were read out in
parliament on September 30 to cries of approval, Henry securing at the
same time confirmation that the lords assented to his new kingship. The king
was crowned two weeks later, and in mid-February the 33-year-old former
king, now Richard of Bordeaux, died in captivity in the Lancastrian stronghold
of Pontrefact.
The records of the negotiations between Richard and Henry, from the con-
ferences at Conway to the meetings in the Tower, disagree on several points,
depending on the authors’ allegiances and the reasons why the documents
were written. The version of the “Record and Process” in the parliamentary
rolls is the official Lancastrian account and a deft piece of propaganda writ-
ten some time after September 30. The Lancastrians were eager to promulgate
the “Record and Process,” not only by having a redaction entered in the rolls,
but also by circulating it among select abbeys so that the narrative and
charges would be entered in chronicles.
“La Manere de la Renonciacione” differs from the “Record and Process”
in that it includes descriptions of what happened on September 28, whereas
the “Record and Process” begins its narrative on the 29th. Several points
in “La Manere” suggest a less clearly propagandist intent, and it may have
been written by someone who was merely a witness to the events of the
28–30 September. It survives in one manuscript, possibly written at an East
Kentish religious house, perhaps Canterbury, but quickly came into the
hands of at least one other chronicler.
Adam of Usk (ca. 1352–1430) studied and taught law at Oxford before
entering into service for Thomas Arundel, archbishop of Canterbury (1396–
7, 1399–1414). He accompanied Arundel and Bolingbroke to Chester in
1399 and, upon returning to London with them and Richard, became part
of the committee concerned with finding the evidence and arguments to
provide a rationale for deposing and replacing the king. Nevertheless, his
eyewitness account of the days leading up to the usurpation are written in
a characteristically personal style with a relatively ambiguous tone. Usk’s
account is contained in his continuation of Ranulf Higden’s Polychronicon
(see “The English and England,” p. 50), which he began to write in 1401
and which chronicles the years 1377–1421.

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Thomas Walsingham (d. ca. 1422), monk of St. Albans abbey in Hert-
fordshire, was most likely also responsible for a continuation of Higden’s
diverse history, and he chronicled the intervening years from Higden’s
endpoint in 1340 to 1377. However, his most important work was his con-
tinuation of Matthew Paris’s Chronica Majora, which he began about 1380.
Walsingham compiled his own Chronica Majora from a number of dif-
ferent authors to cover the years 1308–92, then continued his theocentric
history to 1420 while cloistered from 1396 until his death by using official
documents, letters, and oral accounts (see also the image “Royal Benefactors,”
p. 154). Often critical of Richard II and John of Gaunt, his account of the
usurpation relies on the “Record and Process” but provides slightly differ-
ent information.