 Have a Hart: A Slightly Boarish Rendition of Ricardian Retaining James L. Gillespie Are there not little chapters in
everybody's life, that seem William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair, Chap. VI.
Richard II's ambivalent attitude toward private retinues is revealed in his support of the Commons' efforts to limit the distribution of liveries through legislation. This was first proposed at the Cambridge parliament of 1388, but the interests of the Lords Appellant were hardly compatible with such a legislative agenda. The Commons had begun their petition with the request that "all liveries called badges, whether given by the king or the lords, of which use has begun since the first year of King Edward III, and all other lesser liveries, such as hoods shall henceforth not be given or worn but shall be abolished upon the pain specified in this parliament." The intransigence of the Appellants, the governing power in the realm, gave Richard the opportunity to redeem himself before his faithful Commons by donning the mantle of the lion of justice. Declaring his desire to ensure the peace of his realm, the king volunteered to abandon his own distribution of badges as an example to his subjects. Richard demonstrated the talents of a modern peace negotiator in Ireland or the Middle East; he proposed to lay the contentious issue of legislation aside for a more propitious occasion! The Commons agreed, and an ordinance was drafted for the consideration of the next parliament. This ordinance stated that "no man of whatever condition could wear a lord's livery badge unless retained for life by indenture, and no person of lesser estate than esquire could wear a lord's badge unless he was a household servant of that lord." [3] When the next parliament met in January 1390, Richard was well on the way to recovering the political initiative from the discredited Appellants. The king was now less eager for reform. The Commons, however, kept the issue on the agenda; they again requested the king's help. Richard prevaricated and referred the question to the judgement of his council. The council dealt with the matter in April, and in May, they issued what has come to be known as the Ordinance of Livery and Maintenance. This ordinance stated that "no duke, earl baron or banneret shall give livery of company unless he [the retainer] is retained with him for the term of his life in peace and war by indenture, or unless he was a servant in the lord's household." The ordinance failed to make any mention either of the king or of badges, the root of the original Common's complaint and a practice adopted by Richard in the run-up to his quarrel with the Appellants. [4] Although he was not bound by the ordinance, Chris Given-Wilson has demonstrated that Richard tried to adhere to its provisions prior to 1397 in the recruitment of his household and his affinity.[5] Nonetheless, Richard was determined to have his own great retinue. The existence of royal retainers is as old as kingship itself. (Having spent some time on the fringes of the Royal Hashemite court of Jordan, I can attest that royal retinues still flourish.) The practice of retaining knights and archers attached to the royal household can be traced back at least to the politically troubled reign of Henry III. Michael Prestwich demonstrated the military value of such retainers during the reign of Edward I.[6] Richard II was, therefore, operating within an already hoary tradition, yet he was the first ruler, later to be followed by Margaret of Anjou and Richard III, to be accused of using his retinue to establish a military despotism.[7] []There was nothing exceptional in the young king's retaining policies prior to the Scottish expedition of 1385. Richard had retained approximately 250 of the followers of his recently deceased father and grandfather in the first two years of his reign, but the boy king recruited very few new men to his service. Perhaps the Scottish expedition opened his eyes to the potential dangers as well as the prospects of private retinues. His uncle John of Gaunt's retainers constituted 1,000 of the 4,500 men-at-arms and 3,000 of the 9,144 archers that composed the royal host.[8] The recruitment of the Ricardian retinue of mounted archers illustrates the watershed marked by the Scottish campaign. Upon Richard II's accession, four of Edward III's grants of 6d. per diem to king's archers were renewed, but there was no attempt to recruit or maintain a force of royal archers in these early years. The baronial councils of the king's youth had no interest in strengthening the influence of the Crown, and so no new archers were retained. Not even the events of 1381 seem to have awakened any desire to build a retinue for the king. The only royal archers noted during these years were Ralph Grendor who did receive a new patent in 1381 that added an appointment as rider in the forest of Dean to a previous grant of 6d. per diem authorized by Edward III and Richard Pupplington, described as "one of the senior archers of the Crown," who was once again to receive 6d. a day, "as he had in the late reign, in consideration of his service of more than forty years to the king and the late king." Richard II enjoyed the services of "the late king's archers" who continued to draw their allowances. It is, however, doubtful how useful a forty-year veteran such as Pupplington was. Yet, not all of Edward III's archers were ready to follow their master to his new kingdom. One of Edward's archers was still drawing his wages in 1397 when an exchequer warrant referred to him as "unus sagittariorum nostrorum.[9] There was a foundation upon which Richard might construct his own force. The first indications of the king's own activity on this front occurred in the latter part of 1385. By this time, Richard had begun to assert himself and to create a coterie of personal supporters. The aftermath of the Scottish campaign, during which the king had been provided with a bodyguard of two hundred mounted archers, provided an excellent opportunity for the distribution of rewards to the king's followers. On 20 August 1385, twenty-five men were retained as archers of the Crown, and they were granted 6d. per diem from the issues of various bailiwicks throughout the realm; another five archers received patents on 25 August, eight more on 10 October, and a single rear-marker on 6 November. The assignment of wages to local sources throughout the kingdom may indicate that these archers were to serve as a reserve force and to be a source of support for the Crown in the countryside. Nevertheless, members of the royal household figured prominently in this distribution of bounty. Seven of the 20 August appointees and one of those appointed on 25 August released wages of 3d. a day due to them for their stay in the king's household. Those recruited on 10 October were men who had long served Richard and/or his grandfather as archers of the Crown but had never received a patent for their wages. Richard authorized these patents with the signet, the most personal of the royal seals. This perhaps was an example of the king's use of this prerogative instrument for his personal interests, a source of complaint to his increasingly active opponents.[10] It was not until he was faced with a direct challenge to his regality that Richard II recruited a truly substantial private retinue. The monk of Westminster reported on the king's efforts to recruit adherents in Cheshire and North Wales to counter the strength of his aristocratic foes. As Richard moved through the area in an effort to evade the parliamentary commission imposed upon him by the Wonderful Parliament, he "continually took into his personal service the men of the country through which he travelled." The king's stalwart Robert de Vere, appointed justice of Richard's palatinate earldom of Chester, seconded the king's efforts. Meanwhile, Richard sent a sergeant-at-arms to recruit retainers in Essex, Cambridge, and East Anglia, areas where his rivals enjoyed great support. The king's agent emphasized the regalian nature of the royal retinue through the distribution of badges of silver and gilt crowns to the "more substantial and influential inhabitants of those counties." These men were to swear that they would hold with Richard to the exclusion of all other lords whatsoever and that, armed and ready, they should join the king whenever they were called upon.[11] Regalian badges, however, were no match for baronial power! Richard's sergeant was arrested near Cambridge and imprisoned. Vere led the Cheshire retinue to a disastrous encounter with the private forces of the Appellants at Radcot Bridge. The death of Sir Thomas Molineux, the local organizer of this Cheshire retinue, in the affray put an effective end to Richard II's first attempt to assert his regality through the power of a private army.[12] Richard began to rebuild his retinue in the 1390s. He courted the support of a younger generation of the nobility, especially those with ancestral grievances against the houses of his foes.[13] The results of this 'courtship' were seen in 1397 when the earls of Nottingham, Rutland, Kent, Huntingdon, Somerset and Salisbury joined with William lord Scrope and Sir Thomas Despencer in a symbolic reenactment of the process initiated by the Lords Appellant against Richard's courtiers of the previous decade. Now the appeal was lodged against the leading Appellant lords, the duke of Gloucester and the earls of Arundel and Warwick in a parliament ringed with Richard's Cheshire retainers. The king very much enjoyed this symbolic juxtaposition. He rewarded new Appellants with promotion. The earls of Nottingham, Rutland, Kent and Huntingdon, joined by Gaunt's son, the former Lord Appellant, the earl of Derby, were created dukes (or, as Richard's critics mocked, duketti) of Norfolk, Albemarle, Surrey, Exeter and Hereford. Lord Scope and Sir Thomas Despencer, joined by Sir Thomas Percy, steward of the royal household, became the earls of Gloucester, Wiltshire and Worcester. The earl of Somerset was elevated to the Marquisatte of Dorset.[14] Only Salisbury who had just received his earldom in June was not advanced. Although these mass elevations scandalized the king's critics, Richard viewed them as a means of enhancing his retinue and the royal court in the eyes of France and the Holy Roman Empire whose rulers could assemble retinues replete with dukes. The appeal of 1397 and the royalist coup that it symbolized also relied on the support of less exalted retainers. He had begun to assemble a retinue of supporters who could back him in the shires and provide him with credible military security. This process had begun as soon as he had freed himself from Appellant control through his declaration of his coming of age in 1390. In compliance with the terms of the ordinance of that year, he began to retain for life. Prior to that year, the king had only retained seven knights for life. Thirty-six knights were so retained in an initial burst of activity between 1391 and 1393, and an additional twenty-five knights were added to the royal retinue during the showdown of 1397 98. Richard also retained 175 esquires during the final decade of his reign, 125 of these for life. It was for this new personal retinue that Richard II devised his livery of the white hart that he introduced in 1390 at the Smithfield tournament, the greatest chivalric event of his reign.[15] The white hart never displaced the crown as the royal badge; it was rather a badge for Richard's personal followers. The white hart did make its way into the lower ranks of society as well by the end of the reign as the king expanded his quest for support. A privy seal writ dated 21 November 1398 to John de Macclesfield, keeper of the Great Wardrobe, ordered Macclesfield to deliver cloth for the robes of six men described as "noz vadlets pur le cerf" and for an additional four "Garciones puer le cerf." The robes for the yeomen were to be made with fur trim; those for the grooms were to be made without fur.[16] If the yeomen of the stag received such apparel, how much more sumptuous must have been the display of the white hart by the gentry. The stag overleapt the bounds of the kingdom as a sign of support for Richard II. A privy seal writ dated 2 July but without a regnal year noted that Richard had granted twelve Spanish ladies, twelve Spanish knights and ten Spanish esquires license to "wear and use our livery of the stag, each according to her/his estate, in the manner and style as it is used within our realm of England." The king also ordered harts made of gold. One of these was sent to the archbishop of Cologne in 1398; a second was sent to the Byzantine emperor in the following year. Even the angelic host of the Wilton Diptych was arrayed in the white hart.[17] It appears that the retainers within the royal household continued to wear the badge of the crown. It is even possible that the king's bodyguard of Cheshire archers, so closely identified with the white hart, actually wore the crown albeit their commanders would have sported the stag. After he had described Richard's capture by Bolingbroke in 1399, the Dieulacres chronicler remarked: "Then indeed were the royal insignia both of the stag and of the crown placed under wraps."[18] If the Cheshire bodyguard did, in fact, wear the crown, their obedience to captains donning the white hart served as a symbolic reminder of the king's identification of his personal security with the authority of the Crown. As the final crisis of the reign approached, Richard II intensified his efforts to recruit his own private force. The new recruits were less socially prominent; their function was more clearly martial. Previously, Richard had limited his recruitment of archers of the Crown to the maintenance of a force of twenty-four archers "ordained in the late [1390] Parliament ."[19] Richard II began to add to the force in the wake of the first Irish expedition, and he also increased the ranks of the yeomen of the livery of the Crown. Such recruitment was only natural in the aftermath of a military campaign, and its scale hardly justified T. F. Tout's fears of a military despotism. The showdown of 1397, however, did generate a real increase in numbers as sixty men were recruited into the ranks of the archers and the yeomen of the Crown. By 1398, there were about seventy-five archers of the Crown who traveled with the royal household to enhance the king's security.[20] It was this same quest for security that led Richard to recruit that famous -- or infamous -- Cheshire retinue from his palatinate earldom, elevated to the status of a principality in 1397. Three days after the arrests of Gloucester, Arundel and Warwick, the king ordered the sheriff of Cheshire to raise two thousand archers and to muster them at Kingston-on Thames on 15 September. This was the force used to insure that parliament would endorse the appeal against the usurpers of the Ricardian prerogative. Richard's project to embellish Westminster Hall meant that parliament was assembled in an open hall ringed by archers. It was these archers who escorted Richard's most implacable foe, the earl of Arundel, to his execution.[21] A Cheshire retinue had proven its worth; Richard hoped to capitalize further on the strength such a force seemed to offer him. The king, therefore, recruited a more permanent force from the principality. The payroll for this more permanent Cheshire retinue for Michaelmas 1398 survives. The retinue included ten knights, eighty-five esquires, and 101 archers retained for life. An additional force of 197 archers retained during pleasure and an another fifty-five men whose status is not clear augmented this force.[22] The recruitment of retainers "during pleasure" was a violation of the spirit of the 1390 ordinance with which Richard had heretofore voluntarily complied. This reserve force secured, and was itself supported by, the resources of Holt Castle in Clwyd. Holt had been forfeited by the earl of Arundel, and it became a secure base for Richard. The king sent a private hoard of nearly £44,000, as well as jewels and arms from the privy wardrobe to Holt.[23] Richard II was creating a private network to support his prerogative. The most visible, and therefore, most controversial, component of the Cheshire retinue was a group of 311 archers divided into seven watches each under the command of a Cheshire esquire whose duty it was to stand guard over the king day and night. With one watch standing guard each night, Richard's personal security was assured: "Dycum, slep sicury quile we wake, and dreed nouzt quile we lyve ."[24] These archers do not appear, as was alleged at the king's deposition, to have been drawn from the criminal elements who found the palatinate a convenient refuge from royal justice.[25] They were, however, drawn from classes below the respectable levels of gentry retaining albeit a few were drawn from the junior branches of such families.[26] In any event, they were not a very refined lot. Richard and Thomas Willaboy, two members of the bodyguard did kidnap and ransom a man in 1399. Adam of Usk, who helped engineer Henry IV's accession, complained about Richard's retinue "whom the king favoured to such an extent that he would not deign to hear anyone who had a complaint against them, rather he scorned them as being all the more hateful. That was the greatest cause of his own ruin." The distinction between a common soldier and a criminal has not always been easy to make even in more modern times.[27] The cost of this retinue was also a source of comment. In 1398, Richard ran a deficit of over £11,000. He was at this stage paying retaining fees to over eighty knights and 210 esquires. The great wardrobe, which provided livery for the retinue, doubled its expenditures from £8,000 in period from November 1390 to September 1392 to £16,000 for the last available account ending in 1394. Further increases inevitably followed in the last years of the reign. Household expenses rose from £19,000 in 1394 to nearly £38,000 in 1396. The wages and annuities paid for the 1398 Michaelmas term to the Cheshire retainers totaled £2,511 4s. 10Όd. The Cheshire costs were largely "off the books" since, as a palatinate, the principality's finances were separate from those of the kingdom.[28] The gravamen concerning the Cheshire retinue presented at Richard's deposition concluded:
This gravamen hints at Richard II's basic problem, a problem that would haunt his namesake a century later. He did not have either the material or the intellectual resources to create a late medieval absolutist state. Both Richards had very real enemies within their kingdoms. Richard II established an unsuccessful approach to this problem grasped at by both Margaret of Anjou and Richard III. Richard II opted to tarnish the moral prestige of his rôle as the lion of justice in an effort to beat his baronial rivals at the retaining game. He hoped to dominate the field of factional politics and subsume the factions by means of a retinue largely drawn from his own principality. This retinue would itself add to the royal pageant as they paraded in the king's livery, a tableau vivant every bit as impressive as the Wilton Diptych graced by an host of angelic retainers wearing the white hart.[29] If Richard could not eliminate retaining as the Commons had hoped or indeed, given the aristocratic mentality of his age see the need to do so, he could, at least, be his own most over-mighty subject! When the final test came for Richard II, as it did for Richard III, the king discovered that he had overestimated the strength of his retinue. This power was more symbolic than real. Richard II and Richard III were betrayed by important magnates whom they had counted among their followers, and their retinues proved an inadequate defense against the scions of the line of John of Gaunt. Richard II's gilded white hart and Richard III's white boar had tarnished their kingship. The prestige of the Crown was diminished by these forays into a factional defense of the royal prerogative. Kingship and the men who wore the crown paid a terrible price for failure. A royal retinue was not made of 'wood.' It was flesh and blood as was its master, and its purposes varied. Chris Given-Wilson has perhaps given the best summary of Richard II's intentions.
Richard II was impressed, as he expected others to be impressed, by the pageant of royal power manifested through his retinue. He never perceived the cost to the perception of his regality, nor did he distinguish between pageantry and true military security. Richard II's failures had led to the ultimate degradation of monarchical authority when Henry VI found himself personally under attack by the private retinues of his subjects at the first battle of St. Albans. Having grown up in this milieu, Richard III was more of a realist, but the white boar was, nonetheless, of the same genus as the white hart.
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Whether bastardized or legitimized, the practical context in which the ideals of
chivalry and brother-hood-in-arms found expression in the fourteenth century had
shifted from fief to indenture. The retinue and household were the centers of
chivalric and martial activity for the magnates of the day much as the
comitatus had been for the Germanic chiefs of the previous millennium.
Richard II did nothing particularly innovative or absolutist when he embraced this
tradition of lordship in an attempt to defend and enhance his kingship. In the
process of extending his special lordship, nonetheless, Richard II, much like his
later namesake, Richard III, tarnished his image as the font of justice for all his
subjects. The second Richard was certainly aware of the paradox. He placed great
value on his rôle as the lion of justice; his efforts to pacify his Irish
lordship in the aftermath of his first Irish expedition were, in fact predicated
on this image of kingship. 