A year later, Richard, who had dissembled his feelings and submitted, asked Gloucester in full Council how old he was. When the Duke replied that he was twenty-three he said that he was old enough to manage his own affairs and requested the resignation of the Chancellor and the Treasurer, the chief officers of state. When six months later, John of Gaunt came back to England, his ambitions satisfied, Richard proceeded to make him his firm friend. Just as the Appellants had been forced to carry on Richard’s peace policy, so now Richard carried on their policy, making unexceptionable appointments to the Chancellorship and Treasurership in the persons of Wykeham and Brantingham, and in general showing perfect tact and good judgment. He ruled, however, according to his own ideas, made a definitive peace with France in 1394, and was the first English king since Henry II to attempt the conciliation of Ireland. His worst misfortune during the period 1389-1397 was the death of the Queen, who had been his good angel and for whom he passionately mourned. She died in 1394 and in 1396 he married the seven-year-old daughter of the King of France: the marriage sealed the peace treaty, but his subjects suspected him of desiring to enlist the aid of Charles VI against their turbulence if his dreams of absolute power should provoke another Merciless Parliament. By 1397, however, he felt strong enough to take vengeance for 1388 on Gloucester, Arundel, and Warwick. Richard’s friends “appealed” them in their turn; Arundel was executed, Gloucester arrested and murdered, Warwick imprisoned for life. A year later the remaining two Appellants Mowbray and Henry of Derby (now Dukes of Norfolk and Hereford respectively) accused each other of treason; they agreed to decide their quarrel in the lists at Coventry and Richard stopped the fight and exiled Mowbray for life and Henry for six years. Shakespeare begins his play at this point. Richard was now supreme and an obedient Parliament resigned into his hands all its privileges: he flaunted his authority by making all who approached him kneel; he frightened every land-holder by seizing the estates of Gloucester and the exiled Mowbray; he became, in truth, the “Richard the Redeless”, that is, “Richard the ill-advised” that one of his contemporaries called him. When in 1399 John of Gaunt died, he seized his lands to pay the expense of an Irish expedition. Henry broke his exile to claim his rightful inheritance, all men deserted Richard, even the colourless Duke of York, and he was forced to abdicate, sent to Pontefract and murdered there.

THE CHRONOLOGY OF THE PLAY

The story, thus baldly set down, has ‘well-defined moments of crisis, suggesting the grinding of the mills of God; the murder of Richard’s friends with its legacy of hatred and revenge; Richard’s dramatic coup of 1389; the death of Anne with its concomitants, the loss of her wise counsel and the ruin of Richard’s own happiness; his triumph over the Council; the death of John of Gaunt, Richard’s folly and his final disaster. Gordon Daviot has combined together in the same scene events that differ in point of time. In Act I, Scene IV, dated “Autumn 1386,” she has introduced the appointment of the Commission in November 1386 and the attack on Richard’s friends in November 1387: quite correctly Radcot Bridge, which was fought in December 1387 follows in Scene V a month later. In Act II, Scene I, we have Richard’s question about his age, asked in May 1389, Lancaster’s return in the following November, and Anne’s illness and death in 1394; the result is admirable. “Are you happy, Richard?” asks the Queen. “I begin to know the taste of it again,” he replies, “but there is a feast of it coming. We shall be throwing happiness to the dogs presently.” Half an hour later Richard’s happiness is gone for ever. Here is Nemesis with a vengeance, whereas if the half-hour had been, as it actually was, five years, the dramatic effect of this stroke of Fate would have been lost. Scene II suggests that the Irish expedition took place two years after Anne’s death; in fact Richard set out for Ireland in September 1394, three months after. In the same scene the accusation of Arundel is planned; Arundel’s condemnation took place in September 1397, nine and not “five” years after the Merciless Parliament had condemned Burley and Tressillian. Mowbray and Henry were banished in September 1398 and Richard executed his deed of abdication in September 1399, and in fact the Irish killed Roger Mortimer in the summer of 1398 before Henry’s exile began so that he should have known of it. John of Gaunt died in March 1399 so that the three years mentioned in the rubric to Scene V is too long. Once you begin to play tricks with the chronology of an historical play you must get into difficulties and, after all, a play is not a history. The chronology does not matter much except to a purist; it is more important that events should move rapidly to their consummation. If in Richard of Bordeaux one is conscious of an irresistible onward sweep of events, it is ample justification for inaccurate chronology.

THE MINOR CHARACTERS

When Anne calls herself “Richard’s little barbarian wife” she is hardly fair to her own parentage, for she came of the family of Luxembourg, the most famous line in the Europe of her day; she was the daughter of one, and the sister of another Emperor and her father, Charles of Bohemia, was the founder of the University of Prague and a great lover of the arts. The family was German, not Czech. She introduced into England continental fashions—pointed shoes, and the high crescent-shaped headgear one may see in representations of the costumes of the age; she was a lover of poetry and a patron of Chaucer, who wrote at her bidding the Legend of Good Women.