Richard II, Homer and Handbags

A name, a brand, an epitaph...

Richard II’s tomb in Westminster Abbey is a prime piece of spiritual and ritual real estate. Richard picked his spot with care, plumping for the south-west corner of the tiny chapel of St Edward the Confessor behind the high altar. He would lie, he decided, in the colonnaded bay right next to the grave of his grandfather Edward III, just a few feet away from the saint-king’s shrine.

(These days, the fabric of the chapel is too delicate to be included in the tour for the abbey’s million and a half visitors every year, but among the thrills of the Diamond Jubilee Galleries high up in the triforium is the view down to the shrine and the royal tombs. Last time I was there, restorers below were quietly working on the marble chest of Richard’s monument. I could have watched for hours.)

Unlike all the other monuments in the chapel – in fact, unlike any previous tomb of a king of England – Richard’s is a double tomb, designed to house the bodies of Richard himself and his first wife Anne of Bohemia. The twin effigies are damaged now, but once upon a time they held hands (as well as sceptres).

Tomb of Richard II and Anne of Bohemia, engraving from R. de Thoyras, The History of England, vol. I (second edition, 1732)

Anne died in June 1394, and the story usually goes that her twenty-seven-year-old husband was overwhelmed with grief. Perhaps so. Perhaps the double tomb is a manifestation of his anguish; but that’s not how it reads to me. Richard loved nothing more than the glorious image of his own sovereignty, and Anne’s death gave him an opportunity to show it off in the commission for a tomb that would one day be his as well as hers.

The design allowed him not only to display his aesthetic sensibility – gold, gold and more gold – but to oversee the writing of his own epitaph. Richard didn’t like contemplating a future without himself in it, but ventriloquising what the future should think of him was a different and much more appealing prospect.

Anne’s inscription is entirely conventional. The queen, it says in Latin couplets, was beautiful, pious and kind. Richard’s, on the other hand, is odd – and not just because the man it describes was more or less dictating it.

Epitaph of Richard II, detail of engraving from de Thoyras, History of England

It begins:

Prudent and pure, here lies Richard, by right the Second, overcome by fate…

Prudens et Mundus—Ricardus jure Secundus, per fatum victus—jacet hic…

(Overcome by fate: there’s a splendidly non-committal phrase with which to hand-wave the prospect of death…)

He was truthful in speech and full of reason, his body tall, his mind prudent like Homer. A friend of the Church, he subdued the mighty, and cut down anyone who violated the rights of the crown.

Verax sermone—fuit, et plenus ratione: Corpore procerus—animo prudens ut Omerus. Ecclesie favit—elatos suppeditavit, Quemvis prostravit—regalia qui violavit.

In The Eagle and the Hart, I quoted these lines and tried to explain their significance:

Richard was unwilling to wait for the judgement of posterity. He knew how he should be remembered: as faultlessly right, a lone figure of ineffable virtue and wisdom, his weapons trained not on external enemies but on anyone who dared challenge his God-given sovereignty.

But what I didn’t explain – and neither does any other historian I’ve so far read – is why on earth Richard should have chosen to compare himself specifically to Homer. An image of wisdom, yes – but if wisdom were all he had in mind, wouldn’t the royal and biblical figure of Solomon be a more obvious fit for a Christian king?

When I was writing, I didn’t have either a plausible answer or the space to discuss it without derailing the chapter, so I moved on – but the question’s been poking at me ever since. The more I thought about it, the less I knew where the reference might have sprung from. Off the top of my head, I couldn’t think of any other mentions of Homer, or the Iliad and Odyssey, in a medieval English royal context.

That doesn’t mean they’re not there – but I’m confident it means they’re not common. I’m also acutely aware of how much I don’t know about the transmission of classical literature in the medieval world. So I read a brilliant essay by Marilynn Desmond called ‘Homer and the Latin West in the Middle Ages’ – and it turns out the clue’s in her title.

The Trojan Horse, from John Lydgate’s Troy Book, 15th century, BL Royal MS 18 D II, f. 75r

People in the medieval ‘Latin West’ knew the tale of Troy in Latin. They knew Virgil’s Aeneid; they knew other non-Homeric Latin accounts of the Trojan war. As the centuries went by, the legends were told and re-told in Latin and in vernacular languages including French and English. Meanwhile, some scholars were still able to read philosophical and theological texts in Greek. But by the fourteenth century Homer’s form of pre-Christian literary Greek had been ‘an entirely foreign language in Western Europe’ for the best part of a thousand years.

Homer’s name was famous, and several kingdoms, including England and France, claimed – like Rome itself – to have been founded by Trojans fleeing the sack of Troy. But no one in western Europe could read the Iliad and the Odyssey for themselves.

No one, that is, until the middle of the fourteenth century, when Greek manuscripts and scholars began to arrive in northern Italy from Constantinople, capital of the faltering empire of Byzantium. Petrarch acquired a text of the Iliad which he was delighted to own and lamented he couldn’t read. But it was Petrarch’s friend and protégé Boccaccio, in the early 1360s, who worked with a Calabrian-Greek scholar named Leonzio Pilato to produce a word-for-word Latin translation of the Iliad and Odyssey, to be read as a parallel text alongside Homer’s Greek: what Desmond describes as ‘the first Latin rendition of a complete Homeric text since antiquity’.

Homer’s Odyssey (detail), late 15th or early 16th century, BL Harley MS 6325, f. 1r

Homer had always been a big brand. Now, suddenly, he was big and radically new.

It’s not impossible that Chaucer – who travelled to Italy in Richard’s service in the 1370s, read Latin and Italian fluently, and engaged closely with Boccaccio’s work – might have seen this new translation of ‘gret Omer’ before writing his Trojan epic Troilus and Criseyde in the 1380s.

But Richard himself wasn’t any kind of a reader, whether in English, Latin or anything else. His academic biographer describes his interest in literature as ‘largely polite’, which is a polite way of putting it. So what was going on?

Well, he didn’t have to be a reader in order to associate himself with this cutting edge of intellectual fashion. My guess? Putting ‘HOMER’ on his tomb was a 1390s equivalent of ‘VERSACE’ on a handbag. Why be wise as Solomon, like every other king in western Europe, when you could be wise as ultra-chic Homer?

There’s another possible layer to the mystery (a suggestion for which I have to thank Ted Powell, historian of Henry V, a king who was a voracious reader as well as many other things).

The saying ‘even Homer nods’ – meaning ‘even the greatest expert is sometimes fallible’ – is found in English from the late fourteenth century. The spread of the proverb during Richard’s reign seems to confirm Homer’s modishness. It also suggests that Homer had become a watchword in contemporary culture for the greatest and the most expert, the least likely to be distracted or to overlook something significant.

In his epitaph, Richard described his own mind as ‘prudent like Homer’ – ‘prudens’ signifying a practical form of wisdom and foresight – immediately before declaring that he ‘subdued the mighty, and cut down anyone who violated the rights of the crown’. But in 1395, when the tomb was commissioned, he hadn’t yet demonstrably achieved either of those things. If anyone mighty had so far been subdued, it was Richard himself, when the Lords Appellant rose against him in 1387 and condemned his favourites as traitors in the Merciless Parliament of 1388.

Since then, peace had been restored, and Richard had given the rebel lords his royal pardon. But perhaps his epitaph-in-advance contains a more specific warning than I’d previously realised. Before the king reached the end of his life – whenever he might in future be ‘overcome by fate’ – he intended to destroy anyone who had violated the rights of his crown. That would put the former rebels, whatever pardons they had received, specifically in his sights. And because the king was ‘prudent like Homer’, he would be the last man on earth to mistake his target, to forget, or to overlook.

Not many medieval tombs combine the qualities of a Versace handbag and a precisely targeted political threat. But not many medieval kings were like Richard II.