Chapter 3 - The Lancastrian Succession and the Masculine Body Politic

Summary

By September 1399, when Henry returned from exile with an army to claim his Lancastrian inheritance – and ultimately the English throne – Richard had alienated himself from most of the people who had any stake in England's political fortunes. In the face of Richard's worsening reputation, Henry could credibly explain his actions as those of a wronged man defending his noble honour and birthright against an untrustworthy lord. By October, public sentiment and the political winds had shifted to the point where Henry and his supporters could argue that Richard's removal was a noble act in defence of the honour and common profit of the realm. Henry's chivalric reputation and his status as ‘a man, not a boy’ became a key theme in the discourses justifying Richard's deposition; compared to Richard, Henry emerged as an ideal king who embodied masculine virtues of prudence, honour, courage and moral self-governance. Gendered norms of true and false manhood conditioned political perceptions, as was made abundantly clear in the canon lawyer Adam Usk's eyewitness account of events. Usk was on the committee of experts assembled to debate ‘the question of deposing King Richard [II] and replacing him as king with Henry duke of Lancaster, and of how and for what reasons this might lawfully be done’. Amongst the reasons seized upon were Richard's ‘sodomitical acts’; this was not intended to describe the king's personal sexual behaviour but was instead shorthand for his unnatural inversion of the political and social order.

The Record and Process that set out the official terms of Richard's removal painted a vivid picture in negative of what the English political community expected of their kings. Deposition articles excoriated Richard as a devious and wilful ruler who had corrupted justice and flagrantly defied expectations of manly honour in order to enrich himself and his friends and destroy his enemies. Richard's intemperance featured prominently in charges that he had fraudulently manipulated treason law in order to wreak his vengeance on Gloucester, Arundel and Warwick in the 1397 parliament, while other articles accused him of more general violations of the laws and customs of England.