The battle was set for Coventry on 16 September 1398. The tournament was to be held at Gosford, and the field survives still as Gosford Green. Bolingbroke commissioned armour from Milan, and Mowbray from Bohemia. The lords of the kingdom were consumed with excitement; this would be the most famous duel of their lifetimes. The days of Arthur and the Round Table might be said to have returned. The two dukes came forward on the appointed day. The archbishop of Canterbury was among the many thousands of spectators. Henry Bolingbroke arrived at nine in the morning, with six mounted retainers. Challenged about his business he proclaimed in a loud voice, ‘I am Henry, duke of Hereford, come to do my duty against the false traitor Thomas, duke of Norfolk’. He crossed himself and rode to his pavilion at one end of the lists. The king entered, surrounded by the Cheshire archers, and proceeded to his chair of state where he might survey the proceedings. Mowbray then appeared and, giving the same challenge as his antagonist, cried out, ‘God save the right!’
The two knights were about to proceed against one other. Bolingbroke spurred his horse forward, while Mowbray remained still. But the king rose and called out, ‘Hold!’ The dukes retired to their respective pavilions, and the king withdrew. Two hours passed, inciting intense speculation among the crowds of spectators. Then the Speaker of the Commons appeared and announced to the multitude the king’s decision. Bolingbroke was to be banished from the realm for ten years, and Mowbray would be exiled for life. The sentence on Bolingbroke provoked loud calls of dismay, but the king’s will was law.
The king really had little choice in the matter. Victory for either man would cause him considerable difficulty. If Mowbray was triumphant, the king’s role in the murder of Gloucester might be subject to scrutiny. If Bolingbroke were the winner, his chance of succeeding or even supplanting the king might be increased. The king had no heir, and he had only recently married a child of seven – Isabella, the daughter of the king of France – from whom no issue could yet be foreseen. It was a most disappointing end to what might have been a great tale of chivalry. But the king prevailed. The two men sailed into exile. Thomas Mowbray died in Venice in the following year, but for Henry Bolingbroke the story was only beginning.
He had sailed to France with a manifest sense of injustice at the hands of the king, and waited there in the hope that favourable events might follow. The king of France, Charles VI, granted him a residence in the centre of Paris. Then, five months after his departure from England, his father died. John of Gaunt, as the first duke of Lancaster, was the progenitor of what became known as the house of Lancaster; he owned vast territories in the north of England, and possessed more than thirty castles throughout the realm. He had been a prominent, but not a notable, commander and administrator. He had in particular earned the hatred of Londoners, and of those who had taken part in the rebellion of 1381, as de facto leader of the realm during the king’s minority. He was a man who combined familial greatness with personal mediocrity.
Henry Bolingbroke might in the normal course of events be expected to inherit his father’s lands and castles. But he was in exile. And the king was greedy. Richard then took a course that alienated much of the support he had acquired over the years of his rule. He extended Bolingbroke’s banishment in perpetuity, and confiscated his father’s estates. Such an interference in the laws of inheritance was immensely shocking to a society that relied deeply upon custom and precedent. No landowner, or landowner’s family, could feel safe under such a king. Any monarch who unlawfully deprived his subjects of their property, in defiance of the injunctions of the Magna Carta, was at once considered to be a tyrant.
At the beginning of May 1399, in a spectacular act of folly, Richard sailed to Ireland with an expeditionary force. It is difficult to understand why he chose to absent himself from his kingdom at such a difficult time; the only explanation must be that he had lulled himself, or been lulled, into a false sense of security. Certainly he believed that he was under divine guidance, and that no earthly enemy could defeat an anointed king. With God as his guard, what did he have to fear?
