A Distant Mirror_ The Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara W. Tuchman [346]
That was hardly a normal request by one King of another, especially one so lately and still technically his enemy. Richard was only two years away from his grasp at absolute monarchy, the murder of Gloucester, the execution of Arundel, the banishment of Norfolk and Henry of Lancaster, and the series of compulsive provocations which in two more years were to lose him his crown and finally his life. Modern historians have suggested that in his last years he was overtaken by mental disease, but that is only a modern view of the malfunction common to 14th century rulers: inability to inhibit impulse.
Richard was King in a time of increasing tensions, suppressed but not eased since the Peasants’ Revolt. Lawless bands of marauding knights and archers still spread disorder, heavy taxes were a constant complaint, Lollardy, despite the efforts to stamp it out, flickered everywhere. Its social no less than religious threat united crown and Church against it: the days of John of Gaunt’s alliance with Wyclif were gone, although Lollards appeared in high places. During the Parliament of 1394–95 the movement suddenly surfaced with an inflammatory public statement of twelve “conclusions and truths for the reformation of Holy Church in England.”
Supported by several members of the House of Commons, including the ever troublesome Sir Richard Stury and another knight who were both members of the Privy Council, a petition for the twelve reforms, written in English, was presented as a bill to Parliament. Simultaneously it was pinned in public view on the doors of St. Paul’s and Westminster Abbey. The Twelve Conclusions were a mirror of the late medieval Church as seen by the dissatisfied; by those who wanted to believe and have faith but felt blocked by encrusted materialism and idolatry. They were the conclusions Wyclif had reached one by one, beginning with the two most threatening to Church and priesthood: temporal disendowment and denial of the “supposed miracle” of transubstantiation. Other rituals denounced in the list were vows of chastity, which in priests encouraged vice, and in women, who were “by nature frail and imperfect,” led to many horrible sins; consecration or exorcism of physical objects, which was nothing but “jugglery,” akin to necromancy; and pilgrimages to deaf images of wood and stone, which were a form of idolatry. The Tenth Conclusion was new—a virtual denial of the right to kill. It asserted that manslaughter in battle or by court of justice for any temporal cause was expressly contrary to the New Testament.
So alarmed were the bishops by the Twelve Conclusions that they summoned Richard home from Ireland, where he then was, to decree new measures of suppression. The King himself, in fury at the heresy, threatened to kill Sir Richard Stury “by the foulest death that may be” if he ever broke the oath to recant that was forced upon him. The Twelve Conclusions, however, were beyond the sovereign’s power to kill. Lollardy had already found a response in Queen Anne’s Bohemian retinue and through them formed a connection between the ideas of Wyclif and Jan Hus.
Richard’s proposal of marriage, broached before the French Dukes went to Avignon, was not unanimously welcomed. Philippe de Mézières was its ardent advocate in the interests of crusade, as was the Duke of Burgundy in the interests of commerce. But the hostility of half a century was not easily dissipated. Berry and Orléans were both opposed, and when the proposal was debated in the French Council, several members objected on the ground that a marriage without a peace was unnatural. Coucy, if he had not been absent in Italy, might have shared that