View of the State of Europe during the Middle Ages, Vol. 3

by Henry Hallam

Character of Richard.

The character of Richard II. was now developing itself, and the hopes excited by his remarkable presence of mind in confronting the rioters on Blackheath were rapidly destroyed. Not that he was wanting in capacity, as has been sometimes imagined. For if we measure intellectual power by the greatest exertion it ever displays, rather than by its average results, Richard II. was a man of considerable talents. He possessed, along with much dissimulation, a decisive promptitude in seizing the critical moment for action. Of this quality, besides his celebrated behaviour towards the insurgents, he gave striking evidence in several circumstances which we shall have shortly to notice. But his ordinary conduct belied the abilities which on these rare occasions shone forth, and rendered them ineffectual for his security. Extreme pride and violence, with an inordinate partiality for the most worthless favourites, were his predominant characteristics. In the latter quality, and in the events of his reign, he forms a pretty exact parallel to Edward II. Scrope, lord chancellor, who had been appointed in parliament, and was understood to be irremovable without its concurrence, lost the great seal for refusing to set it to some prodigal grants. Upon a slight quarrel with archbishop Courtney the king ordered his temporalities to be seized, the execution of which, Michael de la Pole, his new chancellor, and a favourite of his own, could hardly prevent. This was accompanied with indecent and outrageous expressions of anger, unworthy of his station and of those whom he insulted.[]

He acquires more power on his majority.

Though no king could be less respectable than Richard, yet the constitution invested a sovereign with such ample prerogative, that it was far less easy to resist his personal exercise of power than the unsettled councils of a minority. In the parliament 6 R. II., sess. 2, the commons pray certain lords, whom they name, to be assigned as their advisers. This had been permitted in the two last sessions without exception.[x] But the king, in granting their request, reserved his right of naming any others.[y] Though the commons did not relax in their importunities for the redress of general grievances, they did not venture to intermeddle as before with the conduct of administration. They did not even object to the grant of the marquisate of Dublin, with almost a princely dominion over Ireland; which enormous donation was confirmed by act of parliament to Vere, a favourite of the king.[z] A petition that the officers of state should annually visit and inquire into his household was answered that the king would do what he pleased.[a] Yet this was little in comparison of their former proceedings.

Proceedings of parliament in the tenth of Richard.

There is nothing, however, more deceitful to a monarch, unsupported by an armed force, and destitute of wary advisers, than this submission of his people. A single effort was enough to overturn his government. Parliament met in the tenth year of his reign, steadily determined to reform the administration, and especially to punish its chief leader, Michael de la Pole, earl of Suffolk and lord chancellor. According to the remarkable narration of a contemporary historian,[] too circumstantial to be rejected, but rendered somewhat doubtful by the silence of all other writers and of the parliamentary roll, the king was loitering at his palace at Eltham when he received a message from the two houses, requesting the dismissal of Suffolk, since they had matter to allege against him that they could not move while he kept the office of chancellor. Richard, with his usual intemperance, answered that he would not for their request remove the meanest scullion from his kitchen. They returned a positive refusal to proceed on any public business until the king should appear personally in parliament and displace the chancellor. The king required forty knights to be deputed from the rest to inform him clearly of their wishes. But the commons declined a proposal in which they feared, or affected to fear, some treachery. At length the duke of Gloucester and Arundel bishop of Ely were commissioned to speak the sense of parliament; and they delivered it, if we may still believe what we read, in very extraordinary language, asserting that there was an ancient statute, according to which, if the king absented himself from parliament without just cause during forty days, which he had now exceeded, every man might return without permission to his own country; and, moreover, there was another statute, and (as they might more truly say) a precedent of no remote date, that if a king, by bad counsel, or his own folly and obstinacy, alienated himself from his people, and would not govern according to the laws of the land and the advice of the peers, but madly and wantonly followed his own single will, it should be lawful for them, with the common assent of the people, to expel him from his throne, and elevate to it some near kinsman of the royal blood. By this discourse the king was induced to meet his parliament, where Suffolk was removed from his office, and the impeachment against him commenced.[c]

Impeachment of Suffolk.

The charges against this minister, without being wholly frivolous, were not so weighty as the clamour of the commons might have led us to expect. Besides forfeiting all his grants from the crown, he was committed to prison, there to remain till he should have paid such fine as the king might impose; a sentence that would have been outrageously severe in many cases, though little more than nugatory in the present.[d]

Commission of reform.

This was the second precedent of that grand constitutional resource, parliamentary impeachment: and more remarkable from the eminence of the person attacked than that of lord Latimer in the fiftieth year of Edward III.[e] The commons were content to waive the prosecution of any other ministers; but they rather chose a scheme of reforming the administration, which should avert both the necessity of punishment and the malversations that provoked it. They petitioned the king to ordain in parliament certain chief officers of his household and other lords of his council, with power to reform those abuses, by which his crown was so much blemished that the laws were not kept and his revenues were dilapidated, confirming by a statute a commission for a year, and forbidding, under heavy penalties, any one from opposing, in private or openly, what they should advise.[f] With this the king complied, and a commission founded upon the prayer of parliament was established by statute. It comprehended fourteen persons of the highest eminence for rank and general estimation; princes of the blood and ancient servants of the crown, by whom its prerogatives were not likely to be unnecessarily impaired. In fact the principle of this commission, without looking back at the precedents in the reign of John, Henry III., and Edward II., which yet were not without their weight as constitutional analogies, was merely that which the commons had repeatedly maintained during the minority of the present king, and which had produced the former commissions of reform in the third and fifth years of his reign. These were upon the whole nearly the same in their operation. It must be owned there was a more extensive sway virtually given to the lords now appointed, by the penalties imposed on any who should endeavour to obstruct what they might advise; the design as well as tendency of which was no doubt to throw the whole administration into their hands during the period of this commission.