Richard II: A True King's Fall by Warner Kathryn

Author:Warner, Kathryn [Warner, Kathryn]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Amberley Publishing
Published: 2017-10-18T16:00:00+00:00

13

‘To Meet at London London’s King in Woe’: Conflict in London, 1391–1393

On 27 April 1391, Richard had the body of his elder brother Edward of Angoulême transferred to England and buried at Langley Priory in Hertfordshire. Edward’s marble tomb cost 100 marks, or £66 13s 4d, and Richard later also paid over £8 for a missal book and a silver cup for the priory church.1 This burial at a priory founded by his great-grandfather Edward II may have prompted Richard to continue to promote the latter’s canonisation. Richard II always had a strong sense of history, and he was very aware of his great-grandfather’s fate and how much he resembled him in many ways. In July 1391 he gave 40 marks to a Master William Storteford to go to the papal court to plead for Edward II to be canonised, and another 52 marks to ‘certain proctors, notaries, scribes and messengers’ engaged on the same business.2 Rather confusingly, the record speaks of ‘the canonisation of King Edward, great-grandfather of the said now lord the king, whose body was buried at Westminster’. Edward II was buried at St Peter’s Abbey in Gloucester, now Gloucester Cathedral, not at Westminster. His father Edward I, who was both Richard II’s great-great-grandfather on his father’s side and his great-grandfather on his mother’s, was indeed buried at Westminster; yet it seems unlikely that Richard was trying to promote the canonisation of Edward I as well as of Edward II, and this is probably a clerical error.

The king bought himself some new horses – six coursers and eight others – on 9 May 1391, appointing a man named William Gilden to buy them ‘in whosesoever hands found, at prices to be agreed on between him and the owners’.3 A few months later he sent men to Ireland to buy three goshawks and eight tercels for his use.4 In July that year, Richard gave £1 6s 8d to two minstrels sent to him by the king of Aragon, Juan I, eldest son of the late Pedro IV, for their performance.5 And on 23 October 1391, Richard II granted an income of 10 marks each at the exchequer to three minstrels in his household: William Launde, a lute player, Richard Kyrton, who played the guitar, and John Hilton, a harper. He also gave permission to the canon of St Stephen inside his palace of Westminster to take up permanent residence in the ‘place which is called la Salcerie at the right hand within the second gate of the palace, with the chambers built over it’.6

Earlier in the year, a French initiative had seen Sir Thomas Percy and Sir Lewis Clifford invited to Paris in order to negotiate a personal meeting between Richard II and Charles VI at Midsummer 1391, and although this ultimately was not to take place, Percy and Clifford returned to England with their arms full of expensive gifts from Charles.7 Richard and the queen spent Christmas 1391 and New Year 1392 at Langley near St Albans, Hertfordshire, where he had had his brother buried a few months before.

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