The Voice of a Tyrant

Richard II's Tomb, Part Two

It’s five weeks exactly since I wrote my first post about Richard II’s tomb, Homer, and handbags – and, as a direct result of writing it, I have new thoughts to share.

Which means, before getting down to historical business, I need to say thank you for the ongoing conversations here, from which I’ve learned and thought and learned some more.

I’ve learned (thanks to Shane) that there are ‘virtually no game animals left [in Cyprus] larger than rabbits’. Could that have anything to do with the couple of hundred years of hunting with cheetahs that took place on the island? I’ve thought (thanks to Olivia) about how intensively trained the horses that carried hunting cheetahs must have been, as well as the cheetahs themselves. I’ve learned (thanks to Britta) that pretzels (Brezel) were and are particularly popular in Bavaria – a place that’ll crop up again later in this post, in an entirely un-pretzel-related context. And I was reminded by a conversation with a friend that, among all my talk of Succession’s sophisticated layering of Shakespeare and classical myth, I hadn’t pointed out that it’s also, brilliantly, a mash-up of Dallas and The Office.

But the person I have to thank for this week’s post is Nick, who raised the question of when exactly the tomb Richard II commissioned for himself and his first wife Anne of Bohemia in Westminster Abbey was finished.

In my original post, I set out to answer the question of why Richard might have compared himself, in the epitaph-in-advance he inscribed around the tomb, to Homer. My main conclusion – by which I stand – is intellectual fashion: the medieval equivalent of VERSACE on a handbag.

versace

A post shared by @versace

I also suggested that Richard might be reminding the lords who had opposed him in the conflicts of the late 1380s that – in emulation of Homer’s prodigious memory – he would never forget what they had done. The epitaph declared that Richard ‘subdued the mighty, and cut down anyone who violated the rights of his crown’. But when he commissioned the tomb in 1395, I pointed out, he hadn’t yet demonstrably achieved either of those things. Perhaps, therefore, the epitaph was a warning, and a targeted political threat.

But Nick’s comment on the post made a different point. Commissioning the tomb was one thing; finishing it, another. As so often – as always – chronology matters.

I went back to the surviving documents to see what more detail I could find.

In April 1395 royal contracts were sealed with four London craftsmen – two masons, Henry Yeveley and Stephen Lote, and two coppersmiths, Nicholas Broker and Godfrey Prest – for the construction of an ornate marble tomb topped with gilded metal effigies of Richard and Anne. The total cost, to be paid in instalments, was £650 – a huge sum, the equivalent of a year’s income for a minor earl – of which £400 went to the coppersmiths and £250 to the masons, who were also promised a bonus of £20 on the successful completion of their work.

The specifications for this spectacular monument were detailed and precise. Richard, with his usual sharp aesthetic sense of his own majesty, knew exactly what he wanted. That included an epitaph – but its wording, in the spring of 1395, had not yet been decided. There would, the contract said, be ‘writings to be engraved around the said tomb, such as will reasonably be delivered to the said Nicholas and Godfrey for this tomb’ (‘Et auxi escriptures d’estre gravez entour la dite Toumbe come as ditz Nicholas & Godfrey serront delivres resonablement pur ycel Toumbe’). And it was agreed that the complex job should be finished in a little more than two years, by Michaelmas – 29 September – 1397.

Then, as now, building contracts were prone to overrun. But it turns out that we do have an end date by which the tomb was complete and Anne’s body interred inside.

In April 1399, when thirty-two-year-old Richard made his will before leaving for his second military campaign in Ireland, he gave detailed instructions for what he intended to be his own splendid but far-off funeral:

In whatever place it should happen that we depart from this light, we have chosen a royal burial in the church of St Peter at Westminster among our ancestors of illustrious memory, the kings of England; and we wish our body to be buried in the monument which we have caused to be erected as a memorial for ourself and for Anne of renowned remembrance, once queen of England, our consort.

Illustration of Richard and Anne’s tomb by J.P. Neale, from The History and Antiquities of the Abbey Church of St Peter, Westminster, volume II (London, 1823)

So: the contracted delivery date for the tomb was 29 September 1397, and – whether the coppersmiths made their deadline, or whether they overran by a few weeks or months – the work does seem to have been finished by the spring of 1399. And it’s plausible to suppose that the inscription around the edge of the metal table on which the gilded effigies lay was one of the last elements to be installed.

Now the timeline for the summer and autumn of 1397 looks like this.

• July 1397: Richard orders the arrest of his most hated noble opponents, his uncle Thomas of Woodstock, duke of Gloucester, and the earls of Arundel and Warwick

• August 1397: the three noblemen are formally accused of treason

• 17 September 1397: parliament meets in a temporary marquee outside Westminster Hall (because Richard’s builders, led by Henry Yeveley, are hard at work there too)

• 21 September 1397: Arundel is found guilty of treason and beheaded

• 24 September 1397: it’s announced in parliament that Woodstock has – somehow, conveniently – died in prison; he too is declared to be a traitor

• 28 September 1397: Warwick begs for his life, weeping in terror, and is sentenced to life imprisonment

• 29 September 1397: the contract for the tomb comes to an end, and the work is either complete, or soon will be.

In other words, the epitaph Richard added to the tomb was not a threat or a warning for the future.

It was a first draft of history.

By 29 September 1397 – at exactly the time the tomb was being finished – Richard had, to his own intense satisfaction, ‘subdued the mighty, and cut down anyone who violated the rights of his crown’.

And once I’d pieced all that together, I realised both the content and the tone – the voice – of the epitaph was beginning to sound familiar.

The Latin texts survive of two diplomatic letters Richard sent abroad in the immediate aftermath of his destruction of Woodstock, Arundel and Warwick.

Richard had always enjoyed the idea of communing with his fellow rulers, as a special audience of kings and princes who would understand him in a way his subjects never could.

But these two letters are particularly extraordinary.

One, sent in the spring of 1398 to the Byzantine Emperor Manuel Palaeologus, was prompted by the emperor’s request for money to help defend Constantinople against the Turks. Richard was ostentatiously sympathetic but regretful; he was unable to send either cash or men, he explained, because of the drama that had unfolded at home.

… As for sending money, you know what I believe is notorious throughout all parts of the world: how some of our subject magnates and nobles, while we were of tender years and afterwards, have made many attempts on the prerogative and royal right of our regal state, and have wickedly directed their malevolence even against our person. Wherefore when we could no longer endure their rebellion and insolence, we gathered the might of our power and stretched forth our arm against these our enemies, and at length, by the aid of God’s grace, we have by our own valour trodden on the necks of the proud and haughty, and with a strong hand have ground them down, not to the bark only, but even to the root; and have restored to our subjects peace, which they had troubled, and which by God’s blessing shall endure for ever. Since then, for the purpose of bringing this to a happy conclusion, we have gone to vast expense, which has exhausted our exchequer, and very little time has since elapsed …

It was clear that Richard enjoyed explaining his own glorious achievements. But the other letter, addressed to Albert, duke of Bavaria, was all explanation, with no pretext whatsoever; simply Richard seizing his chance to broadcast his triumph to the world.

It’s so remarkable that I think it’s worth quoting in full.

Richard by the grace of God king of England and France and lord of Ireland to the high and mighty Albert, duke of Bavaria, count of Holland and Zeeland, our very dear friend, greeting and continued success in his undertakings.

We render humble and devout thanks to the highest observer of human minds, in whose hand are not only the hearts but the bodies of kings and princes, who has until now protected – beneath favouring auspices, by his powerful right hand – our royal throne and person since the very cradle from the hands of all enemies, and especially from those within our household and close counsels, whose plotting is notoriously more destructive than any plague.

For noblemen and leaders of our household, whom we have honoured, whom we have brought to the highest peak of honour, to whom we have opened a generous hand and whom we have treated with sincere affection, have for a long time, since we were of tender years, traitorously conspired to disinherit our crown and usurp our royal power, raising themselves with many abettors of their iniquity to rebel against our royal will, publicly condemning our faithful servants to death and doing whatever they pleased at their own will. Thus have they striven damnably to spend their malice even upon our person, having wrongfully usurped the royal power by going about among our privy affairs, so that they left us hardly anything beyond the royal name.

And though our royal clemency indulged these traitors with time enough to change their hearts and show the fruits of repentance, so deeply rooted in evil seemed their obstinacy that by the just judgement of God our avenging severity has been meted out to the destruction and ruin of their persons.

Thus, through the accompanying providence of God, we have brought together the right hands of our power, bruising these confessed and convicted traitors and, threshing them out even to the husks, we have adjudged them to natural or civil death, so bringing to our subjects a peace which, by the grace of God, may last for ever.

But since the heinousness of their crimes demanded a heavier penalty than could be exacted upon their persons, we have accordingly, for a perpetual reproach to them, caused their punishment to be perpetuated upon their heirs, who must not climb to the pride of honours but be for ever shut off from reaching the height of any dignity or privilege, that posterity may learn what it is to offend the royal majesty, established at howsoever tender years; for he is a child of death, who offends the king.

Wherefore, dear friend, we have so seriously unravelled this case, setting forth so much that your highness may take warning from the perils of another and provision for the future, and that the faces of those who contrive wickedness against Christ, our lord and king, may be hammered back into confusion and prevented from doing the like by the enormity of the punishment.

Also that the quantity of our good fortune, which our present relation the more fully makes known to you, may provide you with matter of consolation and joy, and we desire that our Almighty God may long keep your person unharmed in prosperity.

And with that, Richard dispatched the letter. Duke Albert’s response, if there was one, is not recorded.

Suddenly, ‘he subdued the mighty, and cut down anyone who violated the rights of his crown’ sounds positively restrained by comparison – but it does also neatly fit the tenor of Richard’s jubilant rhetoric once he had destroyed his enemies. The epitaph must – surely – have been composed around this time.

Section of the text inscribed around Richard and Anne’s tomb

If the inscription was installed on the tomb by 29 September 1397, the date turned out to be one that gave Richard no further cause for jubilation.

Two years later, on 29 September 1399, he found himself a prisoner in the Tower, unwillingly reading a statement of his own abdication. Six months after that, death came for Richard; but it would be another thirteen years before he was finally laid to rest in the golden tomb on which he had proclaimed his own victory.

It’s hard not to be reminded of another monument to another king, described in Shelley’s poem by a traveller from an antique land:

...
And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay 
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.