A Farewell to Kings
The Book of Holy Kings (XVIII)
For God’s sake let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of Kings.
Shakespeare, Richard II
The hapless Edward II was deposed and imprisoned by his own Queen, Isabella, and her new favourite, Sir Roger Mortimer, in 1327. Unsurprisingly, he was murdered in captivity shortly afterwards. Three years later, the young Prince of Wales, also called Edward, dispensed of both the Queen, his mother, and her lover, and took control as Edward III.
The new monarch was tall, strong, and handsome, taking more after his grand-father, Edward I – conqueror of Wales and ‘Hammer of the Scots’ – than his unlamented father. Yet Edward III lacked the generous civilisational vision that Edward I, for all the distress he caused the Welsh and Scots, possessed. He was only interested in a strong, unified Britain to the extent that it served his lust for personal glory and renown.
Edward embarked on a series of wars in France and scored some notable triumphs, most memorably at Crècy in 1346. But the Black Death came the next year and some forty percent of English men, women and children died. It cast a shadow over the remainder of Edward’s reign, but the entirety of Europe had been badly affected and the English were still able to make good progress on the battlefields of France.
The King’s son – another Edward, known as the Black Prince – won a stunning victory at Poitiers in 1356, but this was the high-water mark of English military achievement in France, for the fourteenth-century at least. The new French king, Charles V, changed his army’s tactics, avoiding pitched battles and using mobile units to chip away at English-held territories, sapping the occupiers’ morale and draining their resources.
The Black Prince died prematurely in 1376 of an illness contracted while on campaign. Edward by this time had grown old and mentally enfeebled. He followed his son into the grave one year later, leaving behind a viper’s nest of squabbling nobles and a kingdom undermined by political and religious dissent.
Into the maelstrom stepped Richard II, the Black Prince’s eleven-year-old son. He grew into an elegant, sophisticated sovereign, with an appreciation of European art and culture which his predecessors had generally lacked. Richard’s wife, Anne of Bohemia, was the daughter of the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles IV, and this gave the English royal family a link with the deeper history and identity of Europe which had also been previously absent.
Anne died of plague in 1394 and Richard commissioned the small (53 x 37 cm) gem-like work known as the Wilton Diptych partly in her memory. The King is depicted kneeling before Our Lady and the Infant Jesus with John the Baptist, Edward the Confessor and Edmund the Martyr standing behind him in support. Angels wearing Richard’s personal emblem – the White Hart – surround the Virgin and Child, and flowers bloom beneath the Madonna’s feet.
The reverse side shows the White Hart and the royal coat of arms.
The Wilton Diptych, painted by the anonymous ‘Wilton Master’, has a luminosity and tenderness – a noble yearning for Divine and human love – that betrays the hand and mind of a genuine master. It reveals the sense of the sacred that shaped and informed the High Middle Ages. A collective aspiration towards the heights, allied to faith in Man as God’s agent on Earth, created a climate where, despite the depredations of war and plague and the vicissitudes of kings and barons, transcendent beauty could flourish and flame out into the fabric of workaday life.
The Wilton Diptych is Richard II at his absolute best. Yet he had a challenging shadow side. The King could be peevish and spiteful, bearing pointless grudges and projecting his own insecurity onto others. After Anne’s death he married Isabella of France and having signed a peace treaty with the French his head appeared to be turned by the splendour of their court. He turned on those nobles who he believed had previously wronged him, exiling his cousin, Henry Bolingbroke in 1399, and confiscating the estates of Bolingbroke’s late father, John of Gaunt.
Richard then set off for Ireland, and in his absence Bolingbroke landed in Yorkshire, stating that he had no ambition other than reclaiming his father’s lands. But the nobility, along with the clergy, merchants, and landowners – all of whom felt threatened by Richard’s behaviour – decided en masse that Richard should be deposed and Bolingbroke made king instead.
And so it transpired. When Richard returned from Ireland, his troops deserted him and he fled to Wales where he was still popular. But he was arrested, taken to London, then moved to Pontefract Castle, where he was subsequently starved to death.
Straightaway, the new king, Henry IV, was faced with a potentially fatal threat to his authority. Owain Glyndŵr, a cultivated, charismatic, and inspirational leader of men, launched a national Welsh revolt that left Henry floundering. Whatever forces he sent into Wales were battered every time by foul weather as Glyndŵr’s men evaporated into the landscape, as elusive as shadows. Henry started to feel that the ancient British gods, together with the unquiet ghost of Richard, were acting in concert against him.
Glyndŵr began writing to the kings of France and Scotland as an equal and drew up plans for a Welsh university and parliament. But the King’s son, Prince Hal, kept a cool, strategic head. At the Battle of Shrewsbury in 1403, he defeated Glyndŵr’s ally, the Earl of Northumberland and his son, Harry Hotspur, and from then on the tide began to turn. Prince Hal was patient and canny. Year after year he ground Glyndŵr down until the formidable King-in-all-but-name was reduced to the level of a minor outlaw or brigand.
So he faded into history and the last great revolt was over. The Welsh were subdued, and King Richard remained dead and unavenged. The gritty usurper, Henry IV, was too busy fending off rivals to carve out a national mission and goal. So where now might glory be found? Where now the grace, finesse, vision, and faith the Wilton Master gave us in his jewel of a painting?
