A Distant Mirror_ The Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara W. Tuchman [288]
Oxford’s treatment of his wife was said by Froissart to be “the principal thing that took away his honor.” Even his mother joined in the general condemnation and showed it by taking Philippa to live with her. Probably it was the fact of Philippa’s royal blood and Oxford’s personal unpopularity rather than moral indignation that excited all the disapproval. Although marriage was a sacrament, divorce was frequent and, given the right strings to pull, easily obtained. In Piers Plowman all lawyers are said to “make and unmake matrimony for money,” and preachers complained that a man might get rid of his wife by giving the judge a fur cloak. In theory, divorce did not exist, yet marriage litigation filled the courts of the Middle Ages. Regardless of theory, divorce was a fact of life, a permanent element in the great disharmony between medieval theory and practice.
A formal appeal against Oxford and four other councillors of the King’s party was presented in November 1387 by a group of lords known by virtue of their action as the Lords Appellant. When they appointed a Commission of Government headed by Gloucester with powers as Regent, Richard and Oxford gathered an army to assert the King’s sovereignty by force of arms. The conflict came to a head in the so-called Battle of Radcot Bridge: facing superior forces, Oxford escaped by leaping into the river on horseback, after discarding part of his armor, and galloping away on the far side into the dusk. He took ship for Flanders, where he had taken the precaution to deposit large sums with Lombard bankers at Bruges.
A month later, in February 1388, the lords in a session known as the Merciless Parliament brought charges of treason against Oxford and the Chancellor, Michael de la Pole, Earl of Suffolk, who had also escaped. They were charged with conspiring to control the King, exclude his proper councillors, murder the Duke of Gloucester, impoverish the crown by grants to themselves and their relatives, override Parliament, and return Calais to the French King in exchange for aid against their domestic opponents. The Parliament sentenced Oxford and Suffolk in absentia to be hanged as traitors. Three others who had not escaped—the Chief Justice, the Mayor of London, and Richard’s former tutor, Sir Simon Burley—were executed. Richard remained, humiliated and robbed of the friend he was never to see again. To abase a King and leave him on the throne has its dangers. Richard was to have his revenge.
Against Coucy’s fierce opposition, Oxford was invited to France in 1388 on the grounds that it would be advantageous to obtain information from him about the quarrels in England. It may be, too, that Oxford had indeed made overtures about Calais. Although Coucy “hated him with all his heart,” he was forced to acquiesce. Oxford came, was received at court and well entertained, but Coucy did not rest until, with the support of Clisson, Rivière, and Mercier, he prevailed upon the King to expel the dishonorer of his daughter from France. A residence was found for Oxford in Brabant, where, in 1392, he was killed in a boar hunt at the age of thirty. King Richard had his body brought back for reburial in England, and in an ornate if lonely ceremony, gazed mournfully upon the embalmed face and placed a ring on the dead finger of the great troublemaker. Meanwhile, the divorce having been annulled, Philippa remained the legal Countess