Richard’s despotism and his dethronement
The temptation came to him as a result of the action of Parliament itself. In 1398, following upon its grant the previous year, of a custom on wool for five years and tunnage and poundage for three years, it granted the subsidy on wool, woolfells, and leather to Richard for the space of his life. Beside this unprecedented liberality, it gave him as well a tenth and a half and a fifteenth and a half for the curious term of a year and a half.[253] Nor was this all. It cut off its own head by delegating its authority to a standing committee of Parliament. The opening was barely offered before Richard took advantage of it. With a revenue for life and a Council subservient to his will, scarcely ever was there better chance for despotism; but the acceptance of the opportunity was the close forerunner of disaster.
With the idea in his head that all was safe in England, Richard went off to Ireland. This gave Henry, the heir to the dukedom of Lancaster, a dream of an unguarded throne to which he could climb. Estranged by reason of his disinheritance, he was ready to act as soon as he saw such a vision. He landed in Yorkshire, moved southward, receiving allegiance of the people as he went, and won away from Richard the powerful supporters of the throne. Richard, returning, fought a battle already lost. He resigned his kingship, and the nation as represented in Parliament, accepted his resignation.
The charges against the king, upon which sentence of deposition was pronounced, were summed up in thirty-three articles. Only four of them in any degree concern taxation. These are: (14) he had not repaid loans made in dependence upon his solemn promise; (15) he had alienated the crown estates, and exacted unlawful taxes and purveyances; (19) he had tampered with the elections by nominating the knights whom the sheriffs were to return, in order to ensure to himself a revenue for life; (21) he had extorted money from seventeen whole shires for pretended pardons.[254]
The charges were doubtless colored by enthusiasm for his deposition. The most serious, that of unlawful taxation, seems difficult to substantiate unless it be taken in connection with the article which asserts that the Parliament of 1398 was packed for the very purpose of securing a revenue for life. The complaint against purveyance seems equally ill-founded; during the reign of Edward III it had assumed the proportions of a great abuse of prerogative, but it was not in the time of his grandson an object of great concern to the nation. Thomas of Walsingham, whose tone is somewhat querulous, gives substance to the charges about the nonpayment of loans and the exaction of money for pretended pardons. “Promising in good faith to repay,” he says, “he never after gave the money back to his creditors.” Further, “The clergy and the common people and the temporal lords were constrained to give the king sums of money beyond the strength of man to bear, in order to buy back his good will.”[255] The step was very short to the forced loans of the Tudors.
The trouble with Richard was that he did not go to school to history. Parliament was putting into practice what it could learn from the experience of its predecessors. Richard, swept with a desire, intense and perhaps insane, to wield the sceptre of absolutism, was blinded to what he might have read, and underwent the consequences.
Henry IV, 1399-1413
Henry IV was better advised; at any rate, he was politic enough to live closely by what he had learned. He was suspicious, cautious, slow and faltering in action save in the one supreme instance of seizing the throne; an exceedingly good politician. The power of Parliament and especially of the commons during his reign was more complete than ever before,—fuller, indeed, than it should be again until after the final hand-to-hand struggle with the Stuarts. In the matter of taxation, instances of illegality are rare; Parliament continued to exercise the supreme control in voting taxes; and in the more recently acquired rights of appropriating supplies and examining public accounts, the supremacy of Parliament was established. Not only does this observation hold good during the reign of Henry IV, but it is equally applicable to the two Lancastrians who succeeded him.
In 1400 there appears to have been an exception to this rule. Henry apparently secured an aid not from Parliament but from the Great Council. There was the understanding, however, that the grant was binding not upon the nation at large but upon the members of the Council.
In 1401 the commons attempted to make dependence of supply upon redress of grievances a part of the regular parliamentary procedure. They prayed the king that they know his responses to petitions before setting themselves to the business of granting a supply. Henry met the issue squarely. “On the last day of the Parliament,” say the Rolls, “response was made that this manner of deed had not been seen nor used in the time of any of his ancestors or predecessors, that they should have any response to their petitions or knowledge of the same before they had taken up and completed all the other business of Parliament, be it to make any grant or otherwise. And therefore the king did not wish in any way to change the good customs and usages made and used in former times.”[256] Nevertheless, the commons proceeded to put into practice the substance of their demand by delaying their grants Practice of delaying grants of supply until the last day of the session, when the most important of the petitions would have received answers. Thus the next Parliament, that which met on the 30th September, 1402, withheld its grant until the 24th November; the session closed on the 25th and no business was transacted in the meantime.