He kept Henry waiting, at the great door, while he ate his last meal of freedom in the keep of the castle. Then at Northumberland’s request he came down to speak with his enemy. In the play Richard II by William Shakespeare, he uttered at this point the words, ‘Down, down, I come like glistering Phaeton’. Henry took off his cap and bowed low to the sovereign. ‘My lord,’ he said, ‘I have come sooner than you sent for me, and I shall tell you why. It is said that you have governed your people too harshly, and they are discontented. If it is pleasing to the Lord, I shall help you to govern them better.’ This report has the ring of truth. Henry would have made sure that his words were exactly recorded. It is significant, too, that he spoke in English rather than in French. Now he represented the nation. ‘If it pleases you, fair cousin,’ Richard replied, ‘then it pleases us well.’
On that same day the two men, and the army, rode on to Chester. The king was consigned to a small room in the castle; he was under the control of the sons of Gloucester and Arundel, two men whom he had put to death. Henry now set his mind to the future. He issued a summons, in the king’s name, for the assembly of a new parliament at Westminster. On 20 August he and his captive rode to London. Henry took up residence in the bishop of London’s palace, while the king was despatched to the Tower.
It may have been only at this point that Henry decided to strike and claim the throne. He had been waiting on events, but now saw his path clear ahead of him. The king was at his mercy, and no body of royal supporters was able to liberate him. There may have been a show of force by the Cheshire archers upon whom the king had relied, but it came to nothing. Henry now decided to consult the histories of the realm for precedents. Two weeks later a committee of dignitaries was established to consider ‘the matter of setting aside King Richard, and of choosing the duke of Lancaster in his stead, and how it should be done’ (Henry had become duke of Lancaster on the death of his father). The committee came to the conclusion that Richard should be deposed ‘by the authority of the clergy and people’.
On 29 September a deputation had gone to the king lodged or imprisoned in the Tower. The official parliamentary report suggests that the members of this deputation ‘reminded’ the king that at Conway he had volunteered to give up his throne; the king, recalling this promise, agreed that he should abdicate. This is most unlikely and, in any case, a contemporary chronicler provides a wholly different picture of the occasion. The author of the Chronique de la Trahison et Mort de Richard II states that the king raged at the nobles who had come to interview him and declared that he would ‘flay some of these men alive’. Another chronicler had visited the king eight days before, and described him as bitterly angry at the country that had betrayed him. It seems fair to say that he did not go quietly into the night.
On 30 September a parliament met at Westminster. There are reports that it was packed with Henry’s supporters, ‘many sorts of folk who were neither noble nor gentle … in such great heaps that the officers could scarcely enter the hall’. The king’s renunciation of the throne was read out to those assembled. Although the official report asserts that he had agreed to its terms, and that he had signed it in the presence of witnesses, there is still a possibility that the document was faked. It was, at the very least, extorted with threats. Richard may have agreed to it as the only way of saving his life.
Yet by acclamation of all those present, it was accepted. They were asked if Henry had the right to be king. ‘Yes!’ they cried out. ‘Yes! Yes!’ Even though parliament had no formal right to deposition, the king was removed in what was essentially a coup d’état. Henry then declared that by virtue of ‘the right line of blood coming from the good lord King Henry the Third’ he had come to ‘recover’ a realm on the point of being undone by bad laws. There is no reason to question his sincerity in this. He had a very good claim to the crown. By the complicated processes of genealogy only a boy of eight, Edmund Mortimer, earl of March, had a stronger; but England did not want, or need, another juvenile monarch.
Henry was led towards the throne; he stood for a moment, and then knelt down to pray. Then he rose, made the sign of the cross on the back and the front of the throne, and sat down upon it to general acclamation. He was anointed with the chrism that had come from a miraculous phial given by the Virgin Mary to Thomas Becket; or so it was believed. Richard II had discovered it, two years before, while searching in the Tower for a necklace once worn by King John. It is also reported that, as a result of the anointing, the new king’s hair was soon full of lice.
