Murder, Lies, and Storytelling: The Manipulation of Justice(s) in the Parliaments of 1397 and 1399

Abstract

In the parliament that opened at Westminster on 17 September 1397, King Richard II of England was quite literally at the height of his power. With the parliamentary estates gathered in the yard outside Westminster and surrounded by his own personal retinue of over three hundred archers, Richard gazed down from a specially constructed throne raised above the assembly. From this perch the king presided over the parliament as the chief of a judicial tribunal exacting revenge against the primary movers of the Merciless Parliament of 1388. In this Revenge Parliament of 1397, all of the proceedings of 1388 were voided; the pardons to the Lords Appellant of 1388 were revoked; Richard Fitzalan, the earl of Arundel, was appealed of treason, tried, and summarily beheaded; his brother Thomas, the archbishop of Canterbury, was condemned to perpetual exile; and the king's own uncle, Thomas of Woodstock, the duke of Gloucester, who had been imprisoned across the English Channel in Calais, was accused of treason and, having died in captivity, was posthumously condemned. Shortly thereafter, on 28 September, the third principal appellant of 1388, Thomas Beauchamp, the earl of Warwick, was similarly accused of treason and condemned; but his death sentence was commuted to banishment after he confessed and pleaded for his life before the assembly. Triumphant over his former suppressors, Richard dismissed the parliament after having the judgments declared perpetually irrevocable.' Certainly the ascendant Richard of 1397 would never have predicted that within exactly two years he would be stripped of his power. In an uncanny example of that most medieval of commonplaces, the turn of Fortune's wheel, Richard's own fortunes were completely reversed. Following the Hereford-Norfolk dispute of 1398, the banished and disinherited Henry Bolingbroke, the duke of Hereford, reentered England from the east in early July of 1399 while Richard was on campaign in Ireland. When Hereford finally encountered Richard in north Wales at Conway and at Flint in mid-August, he managed to capture the king without struggle. He took Richard back to London, imprisoned him in the Tower, and