Authors: Lisa Hilton
This ‘little scrap of humanity’, as the Westminster chronicler described her, had spent much of her childhood at the Hradschin Palace in the flourishing city of Prague, which under her father’s rule had been transformed with the building of new districts, the awe-inspiring cathedral of St Vitus and a university. Charles IV, who aspired to emulate Charlemagne and St Louis, was a pious, exceptionally learned man, a traveller and collector of Carolingian art. He was a patron of Petrarch, while his grandfather had promoted the work of Dante. Influenced by the new Italian philosophy of humanism, Charles inaugurated a ‘“new age” in all the domains of social, artistic and literary advance’
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and he was also innovative in his attitude to sovereignty. Anne would have witnessed, and perhaps participated in, a court ceremonial that elevated even acts of everyday business to an almost holy status, ‘sanctifying’ the embodiments of state power through a cultivated association with religious imagery. Anne lived mainly at the court of her elder brother Wenzel while their father toured his scattered empire, and after Charles’s death in 1379, it was Wenzel with whom the English dealt. In terms of her breeding and extensive cosmopolitan connections, Anne was an ideal bride. Her elder sister Margareta was Queen of Hungary and Poland, her aunt Bona had been Queen of France and her father’s first wife had been a Valois princess. Richard himselfwas to try to emulate the stately ceremonial and sophisticated atmosphere his bride had known at the imperial courts. But she was embarrassingly poor.
Initially, discussion of Anne’s dowry had been diplomatically postponed, but it was soon obvious that Wenzel simply could not afford one. Nevertheless, the marriage was considered sufficiently important for Richard to effectively buy Anne from her brother for ‘loans’ totalling 15,000 pounds. Acquiring Anne was less a matter of healing the rift in Christendom than of detaching the imperial powers from their links with the French, and Richard was prepared to pay dearly for it, yet Anne’s impecuniousness immediately aroused dissent.
She set out from Germany with her retinue in September 1381, chaperoned by her aunt the Duchess of Brabant. They travelled from Ghent to Bruges, where they were greeted by the Count of Flanders, then on to meet the earls of Devon and Salisbury at Gravelines, protected by an impressive company of 500 men-at-arms. Anne’s escort now left her, and she continued on to Calais with the English party, crossing to Dover on 18 December. Her arrival was inauspicious — a storm raised huge waves
in the harbour, smashing the ships against one another and destroying the vessel in which the new queen had sailed — but she reached Canterbury safely three days later, accompanied by John of Gaunt, and then moved on to spend Christmas at Leeds Castle before leaving for London in mid-January Already people were complaining that the King would have been better advised to marry the rich Visconti princess. Anne had been obliged to linger at Leeds while money was raised for her ceremonial entry into the capital through loans from the abbot of Westminster, the bishop of Worcester and a grocer turned mayor of London named Nicholas Brembre. After a pageant at Blackheath, Anne and Richard progressed through the city, but the people made their feelings apparent by ripping down the royal arms crossed with the imperial ones that had been hung on a fountain to welcome her.
Anne’s foreign entourage also provoked antagonism. Richard was keen to display his magnanimity, and gave an annuity of 500 pounds to the Duke of Teschen, while two other envoys were granted 250 pounds apiece and numerous other gifts of between five and 200 florins were distributed. To make matters worse, the primates of London and Canterbury argued about which of them should be given precedence at her wedding and coronation, a quarrel resolved by sharing the honours. The bishop of London conducted the wedding on 20 January and the archbishop the coronation two days later. It is testament to Anne’s judgement and a certain sweetness of character that she was eventually able to make herself beloved of the Londoners, but the awkward circumstances of her marriage highlighted an uneasy relationship between the King and his people which would eventually result in desperate conflict.
The previous year, Richard had confronted a rebellion. Conflict between a king and his magnates was nothing new, but the 1381 revolt was revolutionary in that it was orchestrated by the peasants. In the years after the Black Death, agricultural labourers had seen the potential for an improved standard of living, as the scarcity of men made their work more valuable. Their hopes were dashed by a combination of taxation and legislation to return wages to pre-plague levels and resentment soon turned to violence, culminating in a union of peasants from Kent and Essex marching on London. The image of Richard the blond boy-king riding bravely out to calm his rioting subjects is familiar from school textbooks, but his involvement in the Peasants’ Revolt was a source of contemporary disagreement which sheds light on his complex and contradictory character. In the pro-Richard version of events, the King retreated from the Tower, where the rebels were planning to ‘slay all the lords and ladies of
great renown’, diverted their attention by agreeing to meet them at Mile End, where he granted freedom from villein status (essentially a prevailing form of slavery whereby men were bound to the land they worked and to those who owned it), confronted the peasant leader, Wat Tyler, at Smith-field and, when a scuffle broke out resulting in Tyler’s death, personally led the peasants away from the danger posed by his bodyguard. The other version has Richard opening the doors to the Tower, making craven concessions at Mile End and behaving with unpleasant duplicity at Smith-field. The granting of manumission and the guiding to safety of the rebels at Smithfield are the points on which the chronicles concur, but was Richard ‘marvellously impelled by cleverness beyond his years and excited bv boldness’
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or a snea king coward who permitted the protestors to take liberties with his mother at the Tower and shrilly declared he wished the villeins would be ‘incomparably more debased’?
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Inevitably, hindsight invites comparisons between Richard II and his great-grandfather Edward but, as in Edward’s case, it is imperative to attempt to disentangle the perceptions of his contemporaries from those of a broader history. The variance of chronicle accounts of the Peasants’ Revolt is just one instance of how Richard’s mercurial tendencies were interpreted in different ways from different standpoints. He had his ‘Gaveston’ in Robert de Vere, Earl of Oxford, with whom he was accused of enjoying perverse intimacies and, like Edward II, he was fond oflatenight drinking parties. He also had an exaggerated, doomed sense of his own prerogative and a persistent belief in his right ‘arbitrarily in his own mad counsels to exercise his own personal will obstinately’.
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Following the accusation that he was timid in war, Richard has been presented as an arty rather than a hearty king, his reign a ‘watershed in English art’,
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Christine de Pisan described him as ‘a true Lancelot’, while his personal contribution to the flowering of late fourteenth-century court culture has been questioned. The King was a dedicated setter of fashion, something of a gourmand, even a voluptuary, but he was also profoundly pious and engaged with the pageantry, if not the activity, of chivalry. John Gower saw the Peasants’ Revolt as the germ of Richard’s tyranny and ultimate deposition, a warning from God which he ignored, but it was, and is still, a matter of debate whether he did so through arrogance or weakness, or whether he was simply a martyr to the dishonourable ambition of the coming age.
The man Anne of Bohemia married in 1382 was fair-haired and self-consciously youthful, keeping his face clean-shaven when it was conventional for grown men to wear a beard. He was ‘abrupt and somewhat
stammering in his speech, capricious in his manners … prodigal in his gifts, extravagantly splendid in his entertainments and dress … haughty and too much devoted to voluptuousness’.
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If his ideal was what he saw as the re-establishment of the royal prerogative, his daily preoccupation was the manifestation of the royal dignity. Perhaps more than any other northern European king until Louis XIV of France in the seventeenth century, he strove to make a pageant of every moment of his existence. He developed elaborations on court protocol, insisting on more complex ceremonial and new forms of address such as ‘Your Highness’ and ‘Your Majesty’ which had never before been used in England. The peerage was expanded with new ranks in its hierarchy: the title of marquess was introduced in 1385, baronies by patent formalised in 1387 and all of the King’s relations, the royal earls, were elevated to the rank of duke in 1397. Forever in the shadow of his father’s legend, Richard was obsessed with chivalry and an expert manipulator of the propaganda generated by great tournaments, though he did not joust himself but watched from his throne. It was noted that at formal crown-wearings he would remain seated in silent splendour all day long, and those to whom he inclined his royal gaze were expected to fall to their knees. With hindsight, Richard’s emphasis on his own regality seems rather pathetic, pompously empty, but his own age regarded him differently. He certainly provoked criticism, but the size and splendour of his court also inspired awe.
The Smithfield tournament of 1390 is typical of the kind of chivalric display in which Richard revelled. Attended by his brother-in-law Waleran of Luxembourg, the Count of St Pol and William of Bavaria, it featured the King himself taking out the honours in a new badge, his emblem of the white hart. After the jousts, the company moved to Westminster, where they heard service and midnight Mass and then processed to high Mass with the King and Queen in their crowns. The celebrations continued at Kennington, where Richard presided — crowned — over a banquet, and after that at Windsor, with another feast. At every stage of the festivities, rich colours andjewels, music and rare delicacies combined in a concetto of regality. ‘The sensory overload engendered by the overlapping layers of exquisite creations was part of the magic that distinguished the realm of the great from the drudgery of the rest,’ writes Marina Belozerskaya. ‘Great princely celebrations were also international events, epicentres whence ideas and tastes radiated across Europe.’
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On the surface, at least, then, Anne’s new life was one of elegance and luxury. Londoners may have grumbled at her lack of a dowry, but she was greeted in the capital with novel displays of magnificence, including a
pageant featuring a gilded castle made by the city goldsmiths. Chaucer remarked on the new glass windows installed in royal residences, and though many of Richard’s building projects, such as the reconstruction of the Great Hall at Westminster or the thirteen statues of English kings commemorating their descent from Edward the Confessor (an inheritance on which William the Conqueror had insisted all along), were emphatically grandiose, they also had a private character, motivated by increasingly sophisticated notions of comfort and privacy At Eltham, Richard installed a bath house, a painted chamber, a ballroom and a garden for the Queen. Another was made for her at King’s Langley, while at Sheen he chose the island of La Neyt in the Thames for the royal lodging, which featured a bathroom with 2,000 coloured tiles and private lavatories. Chaucer’s directions in the prologue to ‘The Legend of Good Women’ suggest that Eltham and Sheen were Anne’s preferred residences, and she perhaps linked these smaller palaces with the meditative seclusion he glorifies in his poem.
At Eltham, Richard constructed a spicery and two sauceries to serve another of his enthusiasms, eating. In this as everything else, Richard was determined to appear a perfect king, and the prologue to
The Forme of Cury
, his recipe book, describes him as ‘the royallest viander’ in Christendom. The book contains 196 recipes, divided into first courses, main courses and puddings, and shows that court food was heavily spiced with ginger, cloves and cardamom, and similar in flavour to modern Arabic food, with meats cooked in sugar, spices and fruits. Richard, who is credited with inventing the handkerchief for his personal use, did not go in for coarse great lumps of meat. Spoons were used, and there are recipes for pates, galantines and stews, hare with almonds, oysters with rice and ginger and fruits baked with honey and wine. Spices were a tremendous luxury, and their prodigal use may have had as much to do with status as with preservation or flavour.
Richard was passionate, too, about fine clothes, and set the fashion for all the men at court. Clothes were more than a form of indulgence, they were an essential part of the image of royal power: A kins who was poorly attired or accoutred would sooner or later forfeit the allegiance of his subjects, as Henry VI was to find in the next century.’
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Courtiers were obliged to emulate the King if they wished to get ahead, a challenge encountered in the poem ‘Richard the Redeless’, which describes a man who wears the whole of his wealth on his back. New trends included the codpiece, worn over tight hose, embroidered doublets with padded shoulders and the ‘houpelande’, a long, coloured robe with a high neck,
often set with jewels, which replaced the more functional cloak. Such fashions were designed to display the male physique to perfection, emphasising long legs, a slim waist and powerful shoulders; others were more frivolous, including the ‘shoon in long pikes’ that Anne’s Bohemian entourage was credited with introducing: shoes so long and pointed they had to be supported with chained garters wrapped round the knee and attached to the toes. Women wore fitted gowns that flowed at the hem, with beautiful collars sewn into the neck of their houpelandes. Anne owned at least two such collars bearing her emblems, an ostrich feather and a branch of rosemary, and ornamented with pearls.
Anne’s jewellery is also of interest in that it in all likelihood connects her with Chaucer, the most celebrated poet of the age. The ‘F’ version to the prologue of ‘The Legend of Good Women’ begins with the poet asleep in a garden, dreaming of the God of Love and a queen, Alcestis, who reproaches the poet with his previous work, ‘Troilus and Criseyde’. Alcestis claims that ‘Troilus’ is unjust to women and to love, since its subject is inconstancy, and commands him to write a history of faithful women which shall be delivered to the (real) Queen at Eltham or Sheen: