February 14th is often given as the date of the death of the deposed King Richard II iin Pontefract Castle in 1400. If that is correct then today is the 625th anniversary of that event. However if his body was publically displayed in St Paul’s in London on February 17th that would surely suggest a slightly earlier date for his death to have occurred to allow for the transportation of his body from Pontefract.
King Richard II
From the Westminster Abbey portrait
Image: Wikipedia
As to what happened in the castle at Pontefract there is little hard evidence.
The somewhat cryptic references in the Privy Council records to the former monarch in the wake of the failure of the Epiphany Plot to restore him to the throne yield little beyond that there was concern for the security of the prisoner at Pontefract and clearly rumours or reports were circulating.
Starvation was alleged at the time as the cause of his death. The new government claimed he fell into depression and refused to eat until it was too late. This is not impossible, and might parallel the later instance of the insanity which seemingly gripped the Empress Charlotte of Mexico when in Rome in 1867.
The opponents of King Henry IV, such as Archbishop Scroogein 1405, charged the King with wilfully starving his predecessor to death.. They may, in addition, have had the allegedly similar fate of the Scottish heir, David Duke of Rothesay, in 1402 in mind.
If faced by an emergency one wonders why his keepers would wait a week to a fortnight, or maybe longer assuming that the patron of The Forme of Cury was well nourished, in an age when everyone carried a dagger and a probably a sword, unless they scrupled to spill the blood royal. Smothering as with the Duke of Gloucester in 1397, and quite possibly or probably the Princes in the Tower in 1483 would be quicker and not leave visible wounds.
The tradition of a violent bloody assault on the prisoner is the tradition of the-contemporary French chroniclers. With his marriage to the child Queen Isabel, daughter of King Charles VI there was interest in his fate and hostility to the new King from leading French figures, such as the Duje of Orleans, as well as the m longstanding view of English as regicicdal now reinforced all the more.
Shakespeare used this tradition in his play and by 1634 visitors to Pontefract were shown cuts on a pillar around which his “barbarous murderes” forced their victim to flee as they struck him down. This is the earliest specific reference to such a feature. It may have been in the Round Tower, the keep, clearly visible on the left in the picture below.
A couple of small rooms, one on the ruined entrance level of the Round Tower and the other the base of the adjacent Gascoigne Tower, being still recognisable as rooms have been pointed out on occasion since the early nineteenth century as ‘King Richard’s Cell’ but only I suspect because they were recognisable as rooms of a cell like nature. It is perhaps more likely he was kept in a larger part of the Round Tower, built as recently as 1374-78, and innermost part of the castle, or in part of the main residential apartments on the north east side of the main enclosure.
In 1530 the newly arrested Cardinal Wolsey asked, upon seeing the castle in the distance if he was being taken there to die “like a beast”, which might also refer to the fates of Rivers, Grey and Vaughn in 1483. Shakespeare gives Rivers lines referring to the castle as the scene of the 1409 regicide. Wolsey need not have worried, being lodged overnight at the neighbouring Cluniac priory.
A further weakness in Shakespeare’s version is the absence from the historical record of Sir
Piers of Exton. The theory to explain him is that he may be a misreading of Sir Peter Bukton, who is recorded.
However the dramatic image of a death dealing blow to the royal skull was disproved when the grave at Westminster was opened in 1871. Although possessed of a thin nature the cranium was undamaged.
At the time the Constable of the castle was Sir Thomas Swynford, the new King’s step-brother, and the Steward of the Honour of Pontefract was Robert Waterton, who had been instrumental in meeting Bolingbroke at Spurn.the previous June. I wrote about him in a post last month at Robert Waterton.
These were two men with everything to win or lose on the detention or final removal of Richard of Bordeaux.
When there were rumours that he had escaped and lived in Scotland as Thomas Ward until he died in 1419 and was buried in the Dominican house in Stirling one is reminded of the Danish False Okuf of 1402, the careers of Lambert Simnel and Perkin Warbeck, of the various false Kings Sebastian in Portugal after 1578, the false Ivan VI in eighteenth century Russia and of Anna Anderson in the twentieth century. When asked about such rumours in 1404 Waterton categorically assured Parliament that Richard was definitely dead - and left it at that. Interestingly he was to include King Richard II his intentions for those to be prayed for at his chantry at Methleyin his will of 1425. He must surely have known more than most ast o what happened on his watch in 1400.
Pontefract Castle in the 1630s
Image: Wakefield City Museum s/ Blogging 4 History
Ii have not yet read Helen Castor’s widely acclaimed joint biography of King Richard and King Henry The Eagle and the Hart. I have seen her give excellent online seminars and interviews about her work on the two monarchs.
Last year I read Marie Louise Bruce’s Usurper King which, despite its slightly sensational title and somewhat uninspired cover, attempts the same type of biography and was, I thought, well worth reading.
Whatever his strengths and failings, his virtues and vices, and he was a complex man in so many ways, gifted yet flawed, one can at least pray for the repose of the soul of King Richard II.
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