The Accusation of the Five

1388: The Duke of Gloucester and his party became aware that the king was plotting against them and decided to strike first.

They armed themselves and confronted Richard in London. They sent four messengers to the king: the archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Lovel, Lord Cobham, and Lord Devereux. Through these messengers they demanded that the king should deliver up to them "the persons who had seduced him by their pernicious counsel."

A few days later, they accused the following men of being enemies of the state:

1. The archbishop of York
2. The duke of Ireland
3. The earl of Suffolk
4. Sir Robert Tresilian
5. Sir Nicholos Brembre

The duke of Ireland raised forces and tried to oppose the Duke and his party, but was defeated. The duke of Gloucester then appeared with 40,000 men and compelled Richard to summon a parliament. This provided Gloucester and his party with an opportunity, as Hume puts it, "by observing a few legal forms, to take vengeance on all their enemies."

Five men came forward in parliament to bring accusations against the five counsellors:

1. The duke of Gloucester
2. The earl of Derby
3. The earl of Arundel
4. The earl of Warwic
5. The earl of Nottingham.

The proceedings, says Hume, "were well suited to the violence and iniquity of the times." Brembre, the only one of the accused who was in custody, was sentenced to death after only the appearance of a trial in the house of lords (whom, says Hume, were not by law his proper judges).

He was executed along with Tresilian, who had been apprehended in the meantime.

Hume sees these men as being not guilty of any of the accusations against them, but rather as being men who faithfully defended their king first against the unlawful commission established by Gloucester and his party and then against the detention of the king against his will. To Hume, the actions of the accusers and the judges in parliament were "without any regard to reason, justice, or humanity."

(Hume says that "the royal prerogative was invaded by the commission." You can see why Americans didn't especially like Hume's version of the English history, as I think Forrest McDonald points out.)

The Reply of the Judges

1387: "The king...was in reality dethroned," says Hume.

To regain his power, the king first tried to get an election of men who would take his side in the house of commons (seeing that this body "appeared now of weight in the constitution"). This attempt failed, because the sheriffs were mostly appointed by his uncles.

The king then turned to some judges, who turned out to be willing to condemn as unlawful the impeachment of de la Pole and the establishment of the council.

The judges were:

1. Sir Robert Tresilian, chief justice of the King's Bench
2. Sir Robert Belknappe. chief justice of the Common Pleas
3. Sir John Cary, chief baron of the Exchequer
4. Holt
5. Fulthorpe
6. Bourg (three inferior justices)
7. Lockton, serjeant at law

These judges declared (quoting Hume):

1. The late commission was derogatory to the royalty and prerogative of the king
2. Those who procured it, or advised the king to consent to it, were punishable with death
3. Those who necessitated and compelled him were guilty of treason
4. Those were equally criminal who should persevere in maintaining it
5. The king has he right of dissolving parliaments at pleasure
6. The Parliament, while it sits, must first proceed upon the king's business (that is, grant him the money he wants without first getting him to agree to their demands)
7. This assembly cannot without his consent impeach any of his ministers and judges.

Hume comments that except for the last two, all of these determinations appear justifiable. In a note, he says that a Parliament in the time of Edward III got Edward to agree to make his ministers to stand down from office on the third day of every session in order that accusations might be brought against them, which implies that ministers cannot be impeached while in office. Hume also notes that Henry IV insisted that it was an established usage of Parliament "to go first through the king's business in granting supplies"--which was ironic because this was one of the charges that Henry brought against Richard when he deposed him.

"So ill grounded were most of the imputations thrown on the unhappy Richard!"

The Council of 14

By 1386, the barons were fed up with the influence that Robert de Vere had over the king. Prior to de Vere coming along, Richard was under the control of his uncles. According to Hume, Richard's "violent temper" made it impossible for him to stand this control any more, especially that of the Duke of Gloucester.

The barons, listed by Hume as

1. Moubray earl of Nottingham, the mareschal
2. Fitz-Alan earl of Arundel
3. Piercy earl of Northumberland
4. Montacute earl of Salisbury
5. Beauchamp earl of Warwic

are described as being "all connected with each other, and with the princes, by friendship or alliance, and still more by their common antipathy to those who had eclipsed them in the king's favour and confidence."

They decide on two steps. First, the impeach and remove from office Michael de la Pole, the chancellor. (In the course of this, a member of Parliament called for the record of the deposition of Edward II, "a plain intimation of the fate, which Richard, if he continued refractory, had reason to expect from them."

Second, they established a council of 14, to rule for a year, which in effect was a temporary deposition of Richard. It was clear, says Hume, that the barons intended to extend the power of this council indefinitely into the future. All of the members were of the party of the Duke of Gloucester, with the exception of Nevil, Archbishop of York.

Richard's Poor Character

In Hume: the Scottish campaign of 1385 provides an example of Richard's poor character.

While Richard leads an army into Scotland, the Scottish troops invade England and lay waste to Cumberland, Westmoreland, and Lancashire.

Richard's advisers urge him to lead his troops to the west in order to encounter the Scots as they returned to Scotland. But Richard is impatient to return to England, so that he can "enjoy his usual pleasures and amusements." This impatience "outweighed every consideration."

Hume concludes this segment by observing how the English "regretted the indolence and levity of their king."

Why the People Rebelled

A biography of Wat Tyler, described as a hero of the people (from the New York Times, October 28, 1852, with references to Hume and Froissart!)

1381. “The faint dawn of the arts and of good government in that age, had excited the minds of the populace, in different states of Europe, to wish for a better condition, and to murmur against those chains, which the laws, enacted by the haughty nobility and gentry, had so long imposed upon them. The commotions of the people in Flanders, the mutiny of the peasants in France, were the natural effects of this growing spirit of independence; and the report of these events, being brought into England, where personal slavery, as we learn from Froissard, was more general than in any other country in Europe, had prepared the minds of the multitude for an insurrection.” (Hume, History of England, Vol. 2, Ch. 17)

If we put what Froissart and Hume say together, I think we get an idea of why the people rebelled. Froissart speaks of how comfortable the people were becoming. Hume speaks of the "faint dawn of...good government in that age." These two things go hand in hand. When there is good government, that is, a government that protects person and property, then people prosper--even the most humble.

As I understand it, the relationship between lord and serf originally made some sense. The lord was able to protect the serf and the serf was in need of protection. There was originally no effective central government to protect person and property. The king was not yet sufficiently powerful to provide that protection. So the lord protected the serf and in exchange the serf provided certain services--such as planting, harvesting, etc. It was a roughly fair exchange.

But as government became more effective and more able to provide effective justice, the people turned more to the king for the kind of protection they used to get from their lords, the nobility. Once this happens, then the feudal system no longer makes and sense and loses all appearance of fairness. The serfs serve their lord and receive nothing in return. It is a system that the lords naturally want to maintain, but it is clearly unjust. So the peasants have good reason to rise up against it.

They simply want to be paid for their work and to rent their land from their lord--in other words, to participate in a fair exchange for what they give and for what they receive. The article from the NY Times noted above emphasizes the justice of the peasants' cause and regards Wat Tyler as a hero.

(It also looks forward in time--that is, from 1381--to Cade's rebellion, which if I remember correctly is dramatized by Shakespeare in Henry VI.)

Thoughts on the Constitutional Convention

In his speech of June 25 (Madison's Notes), Pinkney describes the inhabitants of the US as a people that lack a noble class and a royal class, so all that remains is the common people. There is in his opinion then no need for a branch of government that corresponds to the nobility and the royalty (that is, a permanent senate and executive).

If this is so, then the dream of the peasants that Froissart describes is fulfilled in the US

Was the Duke of Gloucester There?

Froissart: "All this season the earl of Buckingham [i.e. Thomas of Woodstock] was in Wales, for there he had fair heritages by reason of his wife, who was daughter to the earl of Northumberland and Hereford; but the voice was all through London how he was among these people. And some said certainly how they had seen him there among them; and all was because there was one Thomas in their company, a man of the county of Cambridge, that was very like the earl."

It is worth noting that there was a rumor that the Duke of Gloucester took part in this rebellion. Later on, Gloucester did seek to get the people on his side against the king and perhaps the king believed the rumor of Gloucester's part in the rebellion and later held it against him, among Gloucester's other offenses.

A side note: there is a theory that Chaucer's Nun's Priest's Tale is really about the murder of Gloucester--and that the name of the murderer was Nicholas Colfox. See here for a discussion of this theory.