Henry IV (13 page)

The Merciless Parliament was the longest yet held in England, sitting for four months (3 February–4 June 1388), with a break for Easter from 20 March to 13 April.
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Its purpose was to try those whom the Appellants accused of treason. Since four of the five Appellees had fled, their cases could be disposed of fairly rapidly, although this did involve some unwelcome (to the Appellants) debate as to the legality of the process of Appeal, which they deflected by declaring that such great matters must be judged not according to legal precedent but by ‘the procedure of parliament’ – in effect, an assertion of the judicial supremacy of parliament irrespective
of legal niceties.
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Despite this, by 13 February de Vere, de la Pole, Tresilian and Neville had been convicted of treason
in absentia
, with the first three sentenced to death, Archbishop Neville to exile, and all four to forfeiture of their lands and goods. The one Appellee unfortunate enough not to have escaped was Nicholas Brembre, whose trial began on Monday 17 February. It soon ran into difficulties.
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He began by asking to be allowed legal counsel, which was refused; he then asked to see a copy of the charges against him, which was also refused; when he attempted to respond to the charges, he was told that he must simply reply ‘Guilty’ or ‘Not guilty’; when he offered to defend himself by battle, this too was refused. Thus passed the first day of his trial. On the following morning, when he was brought in again, the king tried to speak up for him, but in reply several of the lords (not just the Appellants) flung down their gauntlets in affirmation of his guilt. Eventually his case was referred to a committee of twelve lords headed by the king's uncle, the duke of York, who declared that they found no reason to impose the death penalty. This infuriated the Appellants, but at this point, on the morning of Wednesday 19 February, a diversion occurred: Robert Tresilian was found hiding in sanctuary within the Westminster precinct. Led by Gloucester, the five Appellants strode over from the palace, dragged him from the abbey and, with cries of ‘We havet hym! We havet hym!’, hustled him into parliament to face his accusers. Having already been convicted, no defence was allowed him, and within a few hours Tresilian had been bound hand and foot, dragged on a hurdle to Tyburn, and there hanged naked before having his throat cut.
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As far as Brembre was concerned, however, it was not easy to see how the Appellants would proceed. In the event, they interrogated two representatives from each of the London guilds about their former mayor's guilt, but their answers were inconclusive and they were sent home again. Finally they called in the mayor, recorder and some of the city's aldermen, who stated that they ‘supposed’ Brembre had been aware of the treachery imputed to him – whereupon, on the afternoon of 20 February, he was taken to the Tower and drawn on a hurdle to Tyburn, his contrition
in extremis
evoking much sympathy from the onlookers. He too was hanged
and had his throat cut.
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In the end, then, the Appellants got their way, but already their disregard for legal process was causing unease among the lords and justices – and these, it should be remembered, were the new royal justices, appointed just a few weeks earlier on the Appellants' nomination. The commons, on the other hand, were firm in their support. As the trials unfolded, this division between the lords and the commons would become more marked, one result of which was that for the remainder of the parliament appeal was replaced by impeachment, with the commons as a body acting as prosecutors and the lords as judges. This was how the next two defendants, the lawyer John Blake and the royal sergeant-at-arms Thomas Usk, were dealt with, the former for drafting the Questions to the Judges, the latter for trying to raise the Londoners against the Appellants in the autumn of 1387. Both were executed with the customary embellishments on Wednesday 4 March, ‘drenching the streets with their flesh, in the accustomed manner for traitors’.
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If there was little opposition to the convictions of Blake and Usk, what followed was more controversial. On trial were four knights of the king's chamber arrested at the beginning of January: Simon Burley, the under-chamberlain; John Beauchamp, steward of the royal household; James Berners; and John Salisbury. It was Simon Burley's trial which revealed the depth of the fracture within the Appellant coalition, indeed it came to be remembered as the cause célèbre of the parliament. Burley was in his fifties, a Knight of the Garter, a former confidant of the Black Prince, and Richard's tutor. His intimacy with Richard was widely attested, as was his habit of making enemies: in 1385 Richard had hoped to elevate him to an earldom, but had had to abandon the idea in the face of opposition.
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Three years on, Gloucester, Arundel and Warwick were determined to send him to the scaffold, but their hopes of despatching him speedily were disappointed. Two preliminary hearings on 12 and 17 March proved inconclusive, and the four knights were sent back to the Tower while the parliament adjourned for Easter. When the trials were resumed, the duke of York proved especially resistant, making an impassioned speech on 27 April in defence of Burley's long record of loyalty to the crown and offering to serve personally as his champion; when Gloucester took up the challenge, York ‘turned white with anger and told his brother to his face that he was a liar’, at which the two royal dukes almost came to blows.
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Henry too did all he could to save Burley, resulting in a dispute with Gloucester; the king, the queen, Mowbray and many other lords also pleaded for Burley's life, but Gloucester, Arundel and Warwick, supported by the commons, insisted that he must die. The deciding factor was apparently news of a popular rising in Kent in late April in favour of Burley's execution.
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Yet if Richard had, by now, come to realize that he could not save his friend, it was a humiliation that he never forgot, and the fact that Henry and Mowbray opposed his execution was a critical factor in saving them from the same fate as the three senior Appellants nine years later.
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The king could at least spare Burley the agony of a traitor's death: citing his membership of the Order of the Garter, he pardoned him the drawing and hanging to which he had been sentenced, so that when he went to his death on Tower Hill on 5 May, he was simply beheaded. A week later, the other three chamber knights followed him, although only Sir John Salisbury suffered the full penalties of treason.

With the execution of Beauchamp, Berners and Salisbury, the bloodletting finally ceased. Eight men had died, five of them suffering the very public torments of a traitor's death. Others, such as the six justices who had answered Richard's Questions and the deeply unpopular royal confessor, Thomas Rushook, had been convicted of treason but were ultimately exiled to Ireland rather than executed, with even Gloucester and Arundel willing to respect Rushook's clerical status and to accept the justices' plea that they had been coerced. Many other matters had also occupied parliament's time – especially foreign policy and crown finance –
but it was the life and death drama of appeal and impeachment, the scales of retribution and grace, which enthralled and shocked contemporaries: the brutal public executions, the revival of treason as a weapon of political faction, and the open talk of deposition all stirred uncomfortable memories of the dark days of the 1320s. At one level, the Merciless Parliament was a clash of noble, even royal, factions, but it was also a very public and – in the strict sense of the word – popular event, played out in the streets of London and Westminster village as well as in the White Chamber of the palace, and the support of the parliamentary commons, who never wavered in their support for even the most draconian measures,
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and of the citizens of London, was crucial in allowing the Appellants to get their way, both in December 1387 when they declined to help Richard and again during the parliament itself.
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One reason for this was because the Appellants had courted public opinion through the circulation of letters and proclamations, but it is also indicative of the profound unpopularity by 1387 of the regime presided over by Richard and his advisers.
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The Appellants' victims were also well chosen as a focus of popular hatred: Tresilian was not just disliked personally (which he was), he also personified the harshness and venality of the judicial system;
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Brembre, although not the petty tyrant sometimes portrayed, had plenty of enemies in the city, especially among the non-victualling guilds;
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while Burley, despite his
support from the peers, was popularly regarded as unworthy to wield such influence in government.

Popular enthusiasm for the destruction of the king's party may even have broadened the horizon of the Appellants' ambitions: would Gloucester seriously have considered a tilt at the throne if the
communibus
(however defined) had not been behind him? It also showed that they had learned the lessons of the last dozen years or so. As government had grown and politics expanded during the fourteenth century, a larger percentage of the population was affected by what happened at Westminster, and more people took an interest in what was done there.
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Recent events in England had demonstrated this, notably the Good Parliament of 1376, which had revealed for the first time how effective a force the commons could be, and the Peasants' Revolt of 1381, the first popular uprising in England to be directed principally against royal ministers and the judicial system. The idea that they were in any sense the heirs to Wat Tyler and John Ball would have appalled the Appellants, but the Kentish uprising of April 1388 which sealed Burley's fate was a reminder that public support at any level was worth cultivating. The problem was to ensure that the momentum generated by events did not carry them out of control. Although Henry and Mowbray supported the original Appeal of Treason, as events gathered pace and the net widened, they found themselves being pulled in directions they did not want to go. Henry learned much from his involvement in the political crisis of 1387–8, but most importantly, perhaps, he learned how powerful an agency popular sentiment could be, and how difficult it was, once harnessed, to keep it under control.

While parliament remained in session, the Appellants more or less carried all before them, and before it ended they sought guarantees against future attempts by Richard to exact revenge. Comprehensive pardons were granted to them, to the lords and commons, and to the Londoners; oaths to uphold the acts of the parliament were circulated to the sheriffs of each county; and on 3 June, at high mass in Westminster abbey, the king renewed his coronation oath, the lords renewed their oaths of homage and fealty to him, and William Courtenay, archbishop of Canterbury, pronounced sentence of excommunication on any person who incited the king to reverse the acts of the parliament.
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Few believed that he would not try,
however, and Gloucester, Arundel and Warwick were sufficiently apprehensive to agree that in future they would never come into the king's presence simultaneously.
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Despite his role in the Appeal, Henry had managed to maintain cordial relations with at least some of those whom the Appellants had dismissed from the royal household,
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and for the first time since 1382 he now began attending court with some regularity and making his voice heard on political matters.
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Unusually, he spent much of the summer in London. At some point in the year, probably during the summer, he suffered from a bout of the pox and, whether because of this or not, he did not take part in either of the English military ventures of the summer, which was perhaps fortunate since neither was a success.
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The earl of Arundel's expedition to Brittany in June 1388 consumed most of the supply voted by the commons but achieved little, while an attempt to drive off a Scottish raiding party ended in English defeat at Otterburn (‘Chevy Chase’) on 5 August. A week after this, when the king issued a summons for a punitive expedition to Scotland, Henry transported harness and other equipment from London to Leicester in preparation for the campaign, but in the event it was cancelled, it being considered too late in the year to mount an effective response.
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All this was disappointing, and by the time that another parliament met at Cambridge on 9 September – barely three months from
the dissolution of the Merciless Parliament – public support for the Appellant regime was ebbing; in fact this assembly was to mark the start of the process whereby Richard recovered his authority.

The main concern of the commons at Cambridge was law and order, an issue upon which they and the lords did not see eye to eye. Richard exploited their disagreements, thereby winning back some of that gentry support which he had so conspicuously lacked during the previous year.
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Yet the real reason for the upturn in the king's fortunes was simply that the death or exile of several of his closest friends had removed the chief reason why the Appellant coalition had come together in the first place. Its fragility now manifested itself. Henry and Mowbray were reconciled to the court during the winter of 1388–9; Gloucester, Arundel and Warwick, however, were not. Mowbray in particular was once again, by the spring of 1389, basking in the royal sunshine that he had enjoyed in the early to mid-1380s.
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Henry never enjoyed – and never sought – that level of intimacy with Richard. He received one or two relatively minor gifts from the king,
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but with the resources of the Lancastrian inheritance behind him he felt no need to compete for favours, preferring to cultivate a discreet, though not aloof, distance from the court. He did, however, attend the king's council intermittently, and occasionally witnessed royal charters, which he had never done before February 1388.
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He was certainly in the council chamber at Westminster on 3 May 1389 when Richard sprang a surprise by announcing that, since he had now reached the age of twenty-two, he proposed to take personal charge of government. Thomas Arundel was dismissed from the chancellorship, Gloucester and Warwick from the council, and the earl of Arundel from the office of admiral; the two chief justices whom the Appellants had appointed were also removed, as were many of those who had been brought into the royal household and administration over the past eighteen months. The council, said Knighton, made no attempt to oppose the king's will, ‘but all praised God that He had provided them with so wise a king to watch over them in future’.
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