‘Weep thou for me in France’: French Views of the Deposition of Richard II

Summary

On 30 September 1399 Richard II was deposed by his cousin Henry Bolingbroke. Within five months, Richard was dead, almost certainly murdered after the Earls’ Revolt had demonstrated how much of a risk he still posed to the new regime. These events had a strong impact on the other side of the English Channel, where the Valois court enjoyed particularly close ties with Richard II and his government. Decades of close diplomatic negotiations, involving princes of the blood on both sides, had culminated in 1396 in a marriage between the English king and Isabelle, daughter of the French king, Charles VI. These political links between the courts were reinforced by the cultural links fostered by individuals such as Geoffrey Chaucer, Oton de Grandson, Eustache Deschamps and Philippe de Mézières. Indeed, four Frenchmen attended the court of Richard II in the 1390s and wrote accounts of the events leading up to the deposition. The most famous of these was the Hainaulter, Jean Froissart, who discussed the deposition of Richard II in Book IV of the Chroniques; he had travelled to England in 1395 to present the king with a book on ‘matters of love’, no doubt recognising the value of such a theme in the context of the marriage negotiations. Less well known to English scholars is the French royal notary and secretary, Pierre Salmon, who accompanied Isabelle of France to Calais for the marriage to Richard II in 1396 and then travelled on to England. In his Dialogues, written in 1409 and revised between 1412 and 1415, Salmon offered an account of his hectic diplomatic missions, travelling backwards and forwards between Paris, London and other European cities during the last years of Richard II’s reign. Jean Creton, valet de chambre of the king of France and the duke of Burgundy, was almost certainly the author of the French metrical history of the deposition of King Richard the Second, a verse chronicle written during the winter of 1401–2; the writer had been in England from the spring of 1399, and enjoyed a remarkable eyewitness perspective on most of the key events culminating in the deposition of Richard II.