Great Tales from English History, Book 2 Read online

  Also by Robert Lacey

  ROBERT, EARL OF ESSEX

  THE LIFE AND TIMES OF HENRY VIII

  THE QUEENS OF THE NORTH ATLANTIC

  SIR WALTER RALEGH

  MAJESTY: ELIZABETH II AND THE HOUSE OF WINDSOR

  THE KINGDOM

  PRINCESS

  ARISTOCRATS

  FORD: THE MEN AND THE MACHINE

  GOD BLESS HER!

  LITTLE MAN

  GRACE

  SOTHEBY’S: BIDDING FOR CLASS

  THE YEAR 1000

  THE QUEEN MOTHER’S CENTURY

  ROYAL:HER MAJESTY QUEEN ELIZABETH II

  GREAT TALES FROM ENGLISH HISTORY:

  THE TRUTH ABOUT KING ARTHUR, LADY GODIVA,

  RICHARD THE LIONHEART, AND MORE

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2004 by Robert Lacey

  Illustrations and maps © 2004 by Fred van Deelen

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

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  Hachette Book Group

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  Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com

  First published in Great Britain by Little, Brown and Company, 2004 First United States edition, June 2005

  First eBook Edition: November 2009

  ISBN: 978-0-316-09039-1

  FOR SCARLETT

  Contents

  Also by Robert Lacey

  Copyright

  Map of England 1387-1688

  The Houses of York, Lancaster and Tudor

  The Houses of Tudor and Stuart

  Map of England and North-west Europe 1387-1688

  Introduction: History in Our Heads

  1387: Geoffrey Chaucer and the Mother Tongue

  1599: The Deposing of King Richard II

  1399: ‘Turn Again, Dick Whittington!’

  1399: Henry IV and His Extra-Virgin Oil

  1415: We Happy Few - the Battle of Azincourt

  1429: Joan of Arc, the Maid of Orleans

  1440: A‘Prompter for Little Ones’

  1422-61, 1470-1: House of Lancaster: the Two Reigns of Henry VI

  1432-85: The House of Theodore

  1461-70, 1471-83: House of York: Edward IV, Merchant King

  1474: William Caxton

  1483: Whodunit? The Princes in the Tower

  1484: The Cat and the Rat

  1485: The Battle of Bosworth Field

  1486-99: Double Trouble

  1497: Fish N’ Ships

  1500: Fork In, Fork Out

  1509-33: King Henry VIII’s Great Matter’

  1525: Let There be Light’ William Tyndale and the English Bible

  1535: Thomas More and His Wonderful‘No-Place’

  1533-7: Divorced, Beheaded, Died…

  1536: The Pilgrimage of Grace

  1539-47:… Divorced, Beheaded, Survived

  1547-53: Boy King - Edward VI, The Godly Imp’

  1553: Lady Jane Grey -The Nine-Day Queen

  1553-S: Bloody Mary and the Fires of Smithfield

  1557: Robert Recorde and His Intelligence Sharpener

  1559: Elizabeth - Queen of Hearts

  1571: That’s Entertainment

  1585: Sir Walter Ralegh and the Lost Colony

  1560-87: Mary Queen of Scots

  1588: Sir Francis Drake and the Spanish Armada

  1592: Sir Johns Jakes

  1603: By Time Surprised

  1605: 5/11: England’s First Terrorist

  1611: King James’s‘Authentical’ Bible

  1616: ’Spoilt Child’ and the Pilgrim Fathers

  1622: The Ark of the John Tradescants

  1629: God’s Lieutenant in Earth

  1642: ’All My Birds Have Flown’

  1642-8: Roundheads V. Cavaliers

  1649: Behold the Head of a Traitor!

  1653: ’Take Away This Bauble!’

  1655: Rabbi Manasseh and the Return of the Jews

  1660: Charles II and the Royal Oak

  1665: The Village that Chose to Die

  1666: London Burning

  1678/9: Titus Oates and the Popish Plot

  1685: Monmouth’s Rebellion and the Bloody Assizes

  1688-9: The Glorious Invasion

  1687: Isaac Newton and the Principles of the Universe

  Bibliography and Source Notes

  Acknowledgements

  Acclaim for Volume 1 of Robert Layer’s GREAT TALES FROM ENGLISH HISTORY

  Map of England 1387-1688

  (see map on page xii for battles)

  Simplified family tree, showing the Houses of York, Lancaster and Tudor

  Simplified family tree of England’s Tudor and Stuart monarchs

  Map of England and North-west Europe 1387-1688

  HISTORY IN OUR HEADS

  FOR MOST OF US, THE HISTORY IN OUR HEADS is a colourful and chaotic kaleidoscope of images — Sir Walter Ralegh laying down his cloak in the puddle, Isaac Newton watching the apple fall, Geoffrey Chaucer setting off for Canterbury with his fellow pilgrims in the dappled medieval sunshine. We are not always sure if the stories embodied by these images are entirely true — or if, in some cases, they are true at all. But they contain a truth, and their narrative power is the secret of their survival over the centuries. You will find these images in the pages that follow — just as colourful as you remember, I hope, but also closer to the available facts, with the connections between them just a little less chaotic.

  Our very first historians were storytellers — our best historians still are — and in many languages‘story’ and‘history’ remain the same word. Our brains are wired to make sense of the world through narrative — what came first and what came next — and once we know the sequence, we can start to work out the how and why. We peer down the kaleidoscope in order to enjoy the sparkling fragments, but as we turn it we also look for the reassuring discipline of pattern. We seek to make sense of the scanty remnants of the lives that preceded ours on the planet.

  The lessons we derive from history inevitably resonate with our own code of values. When we go back to the past in search of heroes and heroines, we are looking for personalities to inspire and comfort us, to confirm our view of how things should be. That is why every generation needs to rewrite its history, and if you are a cynic you may conclude that a nation’s history is simply its own deluded and self-serving view of its past.

  Great Tales from English History is not cynical: it is written by an eternal optimist — albeit one who views the evidence with a sceptical eye. In these books I have endeavoured to do more than just retell the old stories; I have tried to test the accuracy of each tale against the latest research and historical thinking, and to set them in a sequence from which meaning can emerge.

  The first volume of Great Tales from English History showed how the beginnings of English history were shaped and reshaped by invasion — Roman, Anglo-Saxon, Danish, Norman. And that was just the armies. The Venerable Bede, our first English historian, described the invasion of the new religion, which, in AD 597, so scared King Ethelbert of Kent that he insisted on meeting the Christian missionaries out of doors, lest he be trapped by their alien magic. We met Richard the Lionheart, England’s French-speaking hero-king, who spent only six months living in England and adopted our Turkish-born patron saint, St George, while he was fighting the Crusades. Then, as now, we discovered, some of the things that most define England have come from abroad. Ma
gna Carta was written in Latin, and Parliament, our national‘talking-place’, derives its name from the French.

  This volume opens in the aftermath of another invasion — by a black rat with an infected flea upon its back. In 1348 and in a succession of subsequent outbreaks, the Black Death wiped out nearly half of England’s five million people. Could a society undergo a more ghastly trauma? Yet there were dividends from that disaster: a smaller workforce meant higher wages; fewer purchasers per acre brought property prices down. In 1381 the leaders of the so-called’Peasants’ Revolt’ with which we concluded the earlier volume were men of a certain substance. They were taxpayers, the solid, middling folk who have been the backbone of all the profound revolutions of history. Later in this volume we will see their descendants enlisting in an army that would behead a king.

  Changing economic circumstances have a way of shaping beliefs, and so it was in the fourteenth century. John Wycliffe told the survivors of plague-stricken England that they should seek a more direct relationship with their God, read His word in their own language, and not rely upon the priest. Wycliffe’s persecuted followers, the Lollards, or‘mumblers’, as they were called by their detractors, in derision of their privately mouthed prayers, would provide a persistent underground presence in the century and a half that followed. If invasion was the theme of the previous volume, dissent — spiritual, personal and, in due course, political — will take centre stage in the pages that follow.

  Sir Walter Ralegh, one of the heroes of this volume — and one of mine — is said to have given up writing his History of the World when he looked out of his cell in the Tower of London one day and saw two men arguing in the courtyard. Try as he might, he could not work out what they were quarrelling about: he could not hear them; could only see their angry gestures. So there and then he abandoned his ambitious historical enterprise, concluding that you can never establish the full truth about anything.

  In this sobering realisation, Sir Walter was displaying unusual humility — both in himself and as a member of the historical fraternity: the things we do not know about history far outnumber those that we do. But the fragments that survive are precious and bright. They offer us glimpses of drama, humour, frustration, humanity, the banal and the extraordinary — the stuff of life. There are still a good few tales to tell…

  GEOFFREY CHAUCER AND THE MOTHER TONGUE

  1387

  Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote

  The droghte of March hath perced to the roote…

  GEOFFREY CHAUCER’S CANTERBURY TALES opens on a green spring morning beside the River Thames, towards the end of the fourteenth century. Birds are singing, the sap is rising, and a group of travellers gathers in the Tabard Inn — one of the rambling wooden hostelries with stables and dormitory-like bedrooms round a courtyard, that clustered around the southern end of London Bridge. At first hearing, Chaucer’s‘English’ sounds foreign, but in its phrasing we can detect the rhythms and wording of our own speech, especially if we read it aloud, as people usually did six hundred years ago:‘Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages…’

  The pilgrimage was the package holiday of the Middle Ages, and Chaucer imagines a group of holidaymakers in search of country air, leisurely exercise and spiritual refreshment at England’s premier tourist attraction, the tomb of St Thomas Becket at Canterbury: a brawny miller tootling on his bagpipes; a grey-eyed prioress daintily feeding titbits to her lapdogs; a poor knight whose chain mail has left smudgings of rust on his tunic. To read Geoffrey Chaucer is to be transported back in time, to feel the skin and clothes — and sometimes, even, to smell the leek- or onion-laden breath — of people as they went about their daily business in what we call the Middle Ages. For them, of course, it was‘now’, one of the oldest words in the English language.

  The host of the Tabard, the innkeeper Harry Bailey, suggests a story-telling competition to enliven the journey — free supper to the winner — and so we meet the poor knight, the dainty prioress and the miller, along with a merchant, a sea captain, a cook, and twenty other deeply believable characters plucked from the three or four million or so inhabitants of King Richard II’s England. Chaucer includes himself as one of the pilgrims, offering to entertain the company with a rhyming tale of his own. But scarcely has he started when he is cut short by Harry the host:

  ’By God! quod he, for pleynly, at a word,

  Thy drasty ryming is nat worth a toord!’

  It is lines like these that have won Chaucer his fondly rude niche in the English folk memory. People’s eyes light up at the mention of The Canterbury Tales, as they recall embarrassed schoolteachers struggling to explain words like‘turd’ and to bypass tales of backsides being stuck out of windows.‘Please, sir, what is this “something” that is “rough and hairy”?’

  In one passage Chaucer describes a friar (or religious brother, from the French word frère) who, while visiting hell in the course of a dream, is pleased to detect no trace of other friars, and complacently concludes that all friars must go to heaven.

  ’Oh no, we’ve got millions of them here!’ an angel corrects him, pointing to the Devil’s massively broad tail:

  ’Hold up thy tayl, thou Satanas!’ quod he,

  ’Shewe forth thyn ers, and lat the frere se…’

  Whereupon twenty thousand friars swarm out of the Devil’s ers and fly around hell like angry bees, before creeping back inside their warm and cosy home for eternity.

  In gathering for a pilgrimage, Chaucer’s travellers were taking part in a Church-inspired ritual. But the poet’s message was that the Church — the massive nationalised industry that ran the schools and hospitals of medieval England as well as its worship — was in serious trouble. While his imaginary company of pilgrims included a pious Oxford cleric and a parish priest who was a genuinely good shepherd to his flock, it also included men who were only too happy to make a corrupt living out of God’s service on earth: a worldly monk who liked to feast on roast swan; a pimpled‘Summoner’ who took bribes from sinners not to summon them to the church courts; and a‘Pardoner’ who sold bogus relics like the veil of the Virgin Mary (actually an old pillowcase) and a rubble of pig’s bones that he labelled as belonging to various saints. Buy one of these, was the message of this medieval insurance salesman, and you would go straight to heaven.

  Chaucer humorously but unsparingly describes a country where almost everything is for sale. Four decades earlier England’s population had been halved by the onslaught of the‘Black Death’ — the bubonic plague that would return several more times before the end of the century — and the consequence of this appalling tragedy had been a sharp-elbowed economic scramble among the survivors. Wages had risen, plague-cleared land was going cheap. For a dozen years before he wrote The Canterbury Tales Chaucer had lived over the Aldgate, or‘Old Gate’, the most easterly of the six gates in London’s fortified wall, and from his windows in the arch he had been able to look down on the changing scene. In 1381 the angry men of Essex had come and gone through the Aldgate, waving their billhooks — the‘mad multitude’ known to history as the ill-fated Peasants’ Revolt. During the plague years the city’s iron-wheeled refuse carts had rumbled beneath the poet’s floorboards with their bouncing heaps of corpses, heading for the limepits.

  Chaucer paints the keen detail of this reviving community in a newly revived language — the spoken English that the Norman Conquest had threatened to suppress. Written between 1387 and 1400, the year of Chaucer’s death, The Canterbury Tales is one of the earliest pieces of English that is intelligible to a modern ear. For three hundred years English had endured among the ordinary people, and particularly among the gentry. Even in French-speaking noble households Anglo-Saxon wives and local nursemaids had chattered to children in the native language. English had survived because it was literally the mother tongue, and it was in these post-plague years that it reasserted itself. In 1356 the Mayor of London decreed that English should be the language of council meetings
, and in 1363 the Lord Chancellor made a point of opening Parliament in English — not, as had previously been the case, in the language of the enemy across the Channel.

  Geoffrey Chaucer’s cheery and companionable writing sets out the ideas that are the themes of this volume. In the pages that follow we shall trace the unstoppable spread of the English language — carried from England in the course of the next few centuries to the far side of the world. We shall see men and women reject the commerce of the old religion, while making fortunes from the new. And as they change their views about God, they will also change their views profoundly about the authority of kings and earthly power. They will sharpen their words and start freeing their minds — and in embarking upon that, they will also begin the uncertain process of freeing themselves.

  THE DEPOSING OF KING RICHARD II

  1599

  THE LAST TIME WE MET RICHARD II HE WAS a boy of fourteen, facing down Wat Tyler and his rebels at the climax of the Peasants’ Revolt.‘Sirs, will you shoot your king? I will be your captain!’ the young man had cried in June 1381 as the‘mad multitude’ massed angrily on the grass at Smithfield outside the city walls. His domineering uncle John of Gaunt was away from London, negotiating a truce in Scotland, and Richard’s advisers had shown themselves wavering. But the boy king had said his prayers and ridden out to face the brandished billhooks.

  An uncomplicated faith brought Richard II a brave and famous triumph, and it was small wonder that he should grow up with an exalted idea of himself and his powers. While waiting for vespers, the evening prayer, the young man who had been treated as a king from the age of ten liked to sit enthroned for hours, doing nothing much more than wearing his crown and‘speaking to no man’. People who entered his presence were expected to bow the knee and lower the eyes. While previous English kings had been content to be addressed as‘My Lord’, now the titles of‘Highness’ and‘Majesty’ were demanded.