A Murdered Peace

The history of Henry IV’s reign did not captivate me until I read Terry Jones’s Who Murdered Chaucer? His depiction of the deep paranoia of Henry’s court intrigued me. “The opening months of Henry IV’s reign – the last of Chaucer’s life – were not placid times. They were chaotic and dangerous. Those who had been fearful of what the future might hold were right to be fearful.” Shakespeare put the words in Henry’s mouth: “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.” (Henry IV part 2, III, 1, 31) The line has become a cliché much misquoted, but he was spot on.

Shortly after Henry ascended the throne a plot was hatched by Richard’s supporters. This plot, known as the Epiphany Rising, provides the background for A Murdered Peace. Jones writes, “A plot to assassinate Henry shortly after Christmas was apparently hatched around the dinner table of the Abbot of Westminster…. By a remarkable stroke of good fortune for the usurper, the non-clerical ringleaders were lynched by furious mobs in various cities, leaving Henry able to carry on with the appearance of clemency.

“Whether the convenient dispatch of his enemies was orchestrated by Henry’s agents, we’ll never know, but certainly Archbishop Arundel seems to have been uncharacteristically supportive of this particular instance of mob rule. In a letter he sent back to the convent in Canterbury he turns lynch mob into ‘the virtuous common people’.”

Clemency. Yes, well, as for that … The uprising, failed or no, sealed the fate of the former king; as long as Richard lived, Henry and all his family were in danger.

As I have noted in other Author’s Notes, historians are not always agreed on the fine points of history; the Epiphany Rising is no exception. I’ve used Michael Bennett’s brief account as my outline (Richard II and the Revolution of 1399, Sutton 1999). I preferred it to other accounts because of a longstanding conflict between the citizens of Cirencester and the abbey regarding the claim that the citizens were tenants of the abbot.

In Bennett’s version, when the townsfolk surrounded the rebel nobles and their men at an inn, the Earl of Kent’s chaplain started a fire to distract those standing guard and enable the rebels to escape. But the townsfolk set up a hue and cry that the rebels were endangering the town, dragged the nobles and their men out into the square, and killed them (Bennett 189–91). The alternate story is that the townsfolk entrusted the rebels to the abbot of St. Mary’s Abbey, Cirencester, and only when the captives started a fire in the abbey to make their escape did the townsfolk round them up and execute them. Why would the citizens of Cirencester give up an opportunity to gain favor with the king by disposing of those who had dared to threaten his life and the lives of his sons? And, especially, why would they hand this honor to the abbot?

“In 1385 some of the townsfolk attacked the abbey. Richard II issued a commission to the keepers of the peace in Gloucestershire upon information that divers of the king’s lieges of Cirencester had assembled and gone to the abbey and done unheard-of things to the abbot and convent and threatened to do all the damage they could. The townsfolk were kept in check for a few years, but in 1400, when they rendered Henry IV a signal service by crushing the rebellion of the earls of Salisbury and Kent, whom they beheaded in the market-place, they seized the opportunity to put forward their complaints against the abbot and his predecessors. At the king’s command an inquisition was held by the sheriff. Five juries from the town and the neighbourhood testified against the abbot, and it was claimed that the town of Cirencester had not been parcel of the manor until 1208, when the abbot compelled the townsmen to perform villein service. The king’s decision was postponed, and there is no record of it.” (A History of the County of Gloucester, fn. 51–54).

Oh, the ambiguity!