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Death of a Traveller
Death of a Traveller
A Counter-Investigation

Didier Fassin

Translated by Rachel Gomme

polity
First published in French as Mort d’un voyageur: une contre-enquête
© Seuil 2020

First published in English in 2021 by Polity Press

Copyright © Didier Fassin 2021

The right of Didier Fassin to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in
accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Polity Press
65 Bridge Street
Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press
101 Station Landing
Suite 300
Medford, MA 02155, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism
and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or
transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4740-1
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4741-8 (pb)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Fassin, Didier, author.

Title: Death of a traveller : a counter investigation / Didier Fassin ;
translated by Rachel Gomme.
Other titles: Mort d’un voyageur. English
Description: Medford : Polity Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical
references. | Summary: “A leading anthropologist shows how the police
and the justice system work against marginalized communities”-- Provided
by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020046192 (print) | LCCN 2020046193 (ebook) | ISBN
9781509547401 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509547418 (paperback) | ISBN
9781509547425 (epub) | ISBN 9781509548071 (pdf)
Subjects: LCSH: Discrimination in criminal justice
administration--France--Case studies. | Romanies--Crimes against. |
Homicide--France--Case studies. | Police shootings--France--Case
studies. | Romanies--France--Social conditions. | Minorities--Crimes
against--France | Minorities--Legal status, laws, etc.--France.
Classification: LCC HV9960.F8 F3713 2021 (print) | LCC HV9960.F8 (ebook)
| DDC 364.152092--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020046192
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020046193

Typeset in 11 on 13 pt Sabon by
Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire
Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ Books Limited

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Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the
publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com

 For Angelo’s sister, for his parents,
and for all those who fight for truth and justice
on behalf of the ones injured or killed by the police
The truth was a mirror in the hands of God. It fell, and
broke into pieces. Everybody took a piece of it, and they
looked at it and thought they had the truth.
Djalâl al-Dîn Muhammad Rûmî

The more affects we are able to put into words about a

thing, the more eyes, various eyes we are able to use for
the same thing, the more complete will be our ‘concept’
of the thing, our ‘objectivity’.
Friedrich Nietzsche
 Contents

Acknowledgments ���������������������������������������������������    ix

A Simple Story: Preface to the English Edition �������    xi
Terminological Note ������������������������������������������������      xx
Preamble ����������������������������������������������������������������� xxiii

Prologue���������������������������������������������������������������������� 1
I The Father ������������������������������������������������������ 11
II The First Officer���������������������������������������������� 16
III The Mother������������������������������������������������������ 21
IV The Second Officer ���������������������������������������� 26
V The Doctor������������������������������������������������������ 30
VI The Sister �������������������������������������������������������� 34
VII The Prosecutor������������������������������������������������ 39
VIII The Journalist�������������������������������������������������� 47
IX Dignity������������������������������������������������������������ 51
X Campaign�������������������������������������������������������� 58
XI Mourning�������������������������������������������������������� 65
viii Contents

XII Biography������������������������������������������������������  70
XIII Investigation��������������������������������������������������  77
XIV Dismissal��������������������������������������������������������  82
XV Truth ������������������������������������������������������������  90
XVI Lies����������������������������������������������������������������  96
XVII Reconstruction���������������������������������������������� 104
XVIII That Day�������������������������������������������������������� 116
Epilogue�������������������������������������������������������������������� 125
 Acknowledgments

This project would not have been undertaken without the

collaboration of Angelo’s family. I am profoundly grateful
for the trust they placed in me throughout my work and
for the integrity they showed, in spite of the pain this story
still aroused in them more than two years after the tragedy.
My thanks are also due to the other people involved in
this case, particularly in the Justice and Truth Collective.
I am equally indebted to the lawyers and magistrates who
gave me the benefit of their insight and their skill as well
as their view of the victim, the events that led to his death
and the judicial procedure that followed, and in particular
to the public prosecutor who generously granted me access
to the case file. Having chosen to maintain the anonymity
of the protagonists and not to name the places where they
live and work, I cannot express my gratitude to them by
name.
The research on which this book is based was supported
by funds from the nomis Foundation within the context of
a research program I designed around the theme of crisis.
The warm welcome this unconventional project received
from Séverine Nikel at Le Seuil, before even a single line
had been written, played an important role in my decision
to carry it through, and our subsequent discussions helped
x Acknowledgments

me to clarify my position in this experimental writing. It is

a pleasure for me to have it now published by Polity, and
I am thankful to John Thompson for having fast-tracked
its publication. The translation made by Rachel Gomme is
once more remarkable for its attentiveness to the slightest
semantic inflections in the text. And Munirah Bishop’s
help has been, as always, precious.
Finally, the almost daily conversations I had with Anne-
Claire Defossez throughout the period of writing, and her
comments on the book, helped me to resolve a number of
problems that I faced, to reorient myself when I went off
track, to clear the doubts that obscured the way forward,
and­– ­without reaching them­– ­to test the limits of her
patience.
 A Simple Story
Preface to the English Edition

It is a simple story. Somewhere in France, a man from the

Traveller community is sought after he fails to return from
home leave to the prison where he has been serving time
for a number of robberies that did not involve violence.
As he is visiting with his parents at the family farm, an
elite unit of the gendarmerie, the gign, heavily equipped
and armed, launches a major operation. Hiding in the
dark in a lean-to, he is discovered and killed. The men
who shot him assert that he attacked them with a knife
and they were obliged to fire in legitimate self-defense,
but not before they had announced their presence and
attempted to bring him under control without the use
of weapons. Five members of his family who are pres-
ent outside the lean-to, held handcuffed on the ground at
machinegun point a few yards from the site of the events,
maintain that the shots came only a few seconds after
the gendarmes entered the lumber room, without either
warning or the sounds of a struggle. An inquiry is imme-
diately opened by the national gendarmerie’s investigation
department; its conclusions support the account given by
their colleagues. The public prosecutor makes a statement
that reiterates this version but, because a man has died,
requests a judicial investigation. Taking into consideration
xii A Simple Story

some troubling elements in witness statements and expert

witness reports, the examining magistrate decides to place
the two officers who fired the shots under investigation.
However, eighteen months later, just before giving her
ruling, she is transferred to another jurisdiction. The col-
league who takes over from her is in her first posting as
examining magistrate and has to draw up the final ruling
immediately after her appointment. She follows the public
prosecutor’s analysis and dismisses the case. The family
lodges an appeal. It ends with the same ruling. The two
gign men who fired the fatal shots will therefore never
be brought to trial. Deeply traumatized by her brother’s
death, suspecting from the outset that the gendarmes are
lying, and shocked by the speed with which the public
prosecutor moved to validate their version of the events,
Angelo’s sister commits publicly to ensuring that, as she
puts it, the truth is told and justice done. She takes the
lead in a local campaign that echoes those led by other
young women whose brothers have also died in interac-
tions with law enforcement without the officers involved
in these deaths ever being convicted. When the final appeal
is rejected by the Court of Cassation she submits a petition
to the European Court of Human Rights, in the hope that
it will issue a judgment against the French state both for
the circumstances of her brother’s death and for the way
the justice system proceeded in exonerating the gendarmes
who killed him.
A simple story, then. A minor incident that did not even
merit a mention in the national media. Only the local
newspaper reported it, in brief articles that reiterated the
public prosecutor’s version without any attempt to inquire
into the family’s testimony. Yet what merits attention is
precisely the fact that it is such a routine occurrence. Its
apparent insignificance is what makes it significant. It
combines all the elements present in any number of similar
incidents that take place every day throughout the world:
young men belonging to ethnic minorities who die as a
result of encounters with the police; inquiries conducted by
 A Simple Story xiii

colleagues of the presumed perpetrators who confirm their

account of the events; prosecutors and judges who decide
not to pursue the case and accept their claim of legitimate
self-defense. No homicide, therefore no case to answer.
Lives stolen without justice being done. But, beyond this
common set of circumstances, what makes this incident
exemplary is, on the one hand, the normalization of
deployment of special units and their disproportionate use
of force as standard procedure in poor neighborhoods with
a high ethnic minority population and, on the other, the
increasingly generalized use of incarceration in response
to offenses committed by lower-income sectors of society,
contrasting with the leniency the law and judges exhibit
toward crime and criminality among the privileged classes.
Such tragedies have long remained invisible to the major-
ity of the population. The official versions justified punitive
practices by stigmatizing the victims and exonerating the
police officers responsible in the name of public order. But
in recent years political campaigns have brought them into
the foreground. In the United States, there is the Black
Lives Matter movement, which burgeoned after Michael
Brown was killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri,
in 2014. In France, the Justice and Truth committees have
become vocal, the best known of which concerns Adama
Traoré, who died in the police station at Beaumont-sur-
Oise shortly after his arrest in 2016. Above all, the images
of the dying moments of George Floyd, suffocated by a
police officer in Minneapolis on 25 May 2020, have given
this tragic event a worldwide impact, resonating with the
police violence toward minorities experienced in many
countries. What was until recently a blind spot in the
public space is now common knowledge. What societies
had implicitly tolerated seems to have become intolerable.
Angelo’s death finds its place in this new moral economy,
where what is at issue is not only the extinction of a life
but also the indignity of the circumstances of this death,
particularly the treatment of the deceased’s body, and the
institutional lies that usually allow those responsible to go
xiv A Simple Story

unpunished, further sullying the victim’s memory. Like a

modern Antigone, the sister fights to restore respectability
to her dead brother and, through him, to the Travellers,
who are continually stigmatized and discriminated against,
and she thus stands against all the Creons who lay claim to
public authority.
But how can an account of this tragedy be rendered
without eliding the issues involved? Is there a way to
escape having to choose between outraged condemnation
of an injustice and a bare description of the facts? This is a
classic dilemma for social scientists, who often profess the
value neutrality advocated by Max Weber, yet are aware
that they are bound up in what Norbert Elias described as
an involved epistemology. Over recent decades the answer
has continually oscillated: in the French context, the ten-
sion is between the critical sociology of Pierre Bourdieu,
declared to expose hidden power relations, and the prag-
matic sociology of Luc Boltanski, supposed to establish
a pure grammar of action and justifications for it, which
dominated their field alternately in the late twentieth cen-
tury. Rather than asserting that a solution to this dilemma
has been found, it can be fruitful to take the view that this
is an aporia which needs to be treated as such.
On this basis, I therefore proposed to approach Angelo’s
death from two distinct directions. In the first stage, I
strove to reproduce each of the testimonies gathered by the
investigators and by myself, not only from those present
at the scene but also from people who became involved
later, so as to give an account from each individual’s point
of view, whether that of the sister, the medical doctor,
the public prosecutor, the local journalist or the examin-
ing magistrates. In the second stage, I attempted to carry
out anew the investigation, drawing on all the available
material, from records of depositions to expert witness
reports, so as to produce a reconstruction of the events
that, being based purely on empirical data, is as free as
possible of bias and pressure. The writing strategy I have
devised is therefore experimental. It seeks first to avoid
 A Simple Story xv

the false objectivity of any unequivocal statement of the

facts, as I give space to discordant voices and incompat­
ible versions. It then makes it possible to do away with a
comfortable relativism that would be limited to parsing
each individual’s argument, since at the end of my analysis
I propose an account of the events as they might plausibly
have unfolded. My aim therefore is to open up the black
box of the functioning of the state, more specifically its
law-enforcement mechanisms, the police and the justice
system, rather than adopting the position habitually taken
by the social sciences on the outside. To put it another
way, my aim is to investigate the investigation, and to do
so by revealing what the judges caused to disappear. This
is a delicate process and a risky endeavor, though. The
judicial investigation is indeed legally protected by judicial
confidentiality that may be lifted only by the public prose-
cutor. By dismissing the case, and consequently preventing
a trial from being held, the examining magistrate removed
the case from public view. By reopening the file, I make the
various elements in it accessible to readers.
The field of research in which I present my proposition
thus sits on the boundary between history and literature,
between law and journalism. It is not a new one, but
it is one that I invite readers to explore afresh. Michel
Foucault recounts how, when he discovered the story of
an early nineteenth-century parricide whose astonishing
memoir describes how he committed a triple murder in
his own family, he and the students in his seminar fell
under the spell of both the case and the text. The story
immediately aroused his interest, but it also moved him.
It enthralled him, in the strong sense of the word, on
both these levels. It was only later that he decided, with
his young colleagues, to publish I, Pierre Rivière, Having
Slaughtered My Mother, My Sister and My Brother . . .,
gathering together the extant documents, including the
famous memoir, and adding a series of notes that effec-
tively represent the reflections of the researchers in this
little group. The aim, one of them later noted, was to make
xvi A Simple Story

all the material in the case file available to the public. I

think I can say that my relationship to Angelo’s story
followed the same course. The circumstances of his death
attracted my attention, while the courage and determi-
nation demonstrated by his sister aroused my sympathy.
The idea of making it the subject of research and of a
book came to me only a year later, here too in order to
enable a broad audience to form their own view of what
really happened in the lean-to that day, and what could
possibly explain the great disproportionality between the
crimes with which the young man was reproached and
his eventual fate. Unlike the collective of authors at the
Collège de France, I have not published the documents
themselves, which would have been against the law, but I
have integrated them into the accounts I have put together
and the counter-investigation I have conducted.
The published archive therefore comprises not raw
material but, rather, narratives and analyses drawn from
it. As far as the narratives are concerned, the reconstitu-
tion of the various versions is akin to the literary form of
the non-fiction novel, and the reference that immediately
comes to mind is In Cold Blood, in which Truman Capote
recounts a quadruple murder that took place in a small
town in Kansas. Asserting that everything contained in
this account derives from his own observations, his inter-
views and official records, he usually adopts the position
of omniscient narrator, producing a third-person account
that alternates the points of view of the murderers, the
victims, the police and others related to the crime and
criminals. Since the crime has been solved, the perpetra-
tors having confessed, he is able to construct a coherent
narrative. For my own part, while I draw on similar kinds
of empirical material and alternate the viewpoints of eight
individuals more or less directly involved in the events,
I do not pass over the inconsistencies in these versions,
which, at least as far as Angelo’s death is concerned,
are irreconcilable. Since the circumstances in which the
gendarmes were led to open fire were never fully eluci-
 A Simple Story xvii

dated, I give readers the opportunity to follow the trail

and grasp the experience of each of the protagonists as
they describe it, without prejudging the veracity of their
account. What I am writing is not a novel but an investi-
gation. As far as the analysis is concerned, the exploration
of the various modalities of truth, the deconstruction of
the rationales for lying among the police, the flaws in
the investigation and the justifications for the dismissal
of the case resemble the means in a work of detection,
similar to the method by which Carlo Ginzburg proceeds
in The Judge and the Historian. His book was written in
defense of his friend Adriano Sofri, who was accused of
having organized, sixteen years earlier, the execution of
a police chief himself suspected of being responsible for
the death of an anarchist. To this end, Ginzburg points
out the implausibilities and contradictions in the suspect
avowals of the informer who accused three of his former
Lotta Continua comrades in exchange for a suspension
of sentence for his own involvement, and he discusses the
question of evidence and proofs, which are necessarily
treated in different ways depending on whether one is
conducting a trial or undertaking research, as the title of
the book suggests. Although the event under consideration
and the judicial process are very different in my case, I
proceed similarly to a counter-investigation. However, I
do so not having decided in advance that the gendarmes
did not fire in legitimate self-defense but by systematically
taking up each piece of evidence the judges drew on or,
conversely, ignored in their process of establishing what
they call judicial truth. It is what ultimately leads me to
propose another interpretation of the facts, one that pays
more attention to the improbabilities and contradictions
in the official version and that aligns better with the exist-
ing evidence and proofs.
What fascinated Foucault and his fellow researchers in
the story of Pierre Rivière was the process of veridiction at
work, among the doctors, judges and the murderer him-
self, in a case that combined crime and madness, criminal
xviii A Simple Story

responsibility and mental health. What drove Capote’s

investigation and Ginzburg’s counter-investigation was the
possibility of drawing out a truth, in the first case through
literature, in the second in the name of justice. These,
then, are two distinct projects with regard to the question
of truth-telling: for Foucault and his colleagues it is the
interplay of utterances of truth that interests them; for
Capote and Ginzburg it is the truth itself that is at stake.
The present book moves progressively from the former to
the latter, from the operation of veridiction toward the
search for truth. This truth, which I have called ethno-
graphic truth, is independent of the relations of power and
knowledge underlying the production of judicial truth. It
has no argument to make apart from the fact that it arises
out of the twofold decision to give all accounts the same
credit and to rely solely on assessment of the evidence.
Deliberately limited in its ambition, this version, unlike
the judicial truth, has no bearing on recognition of the
guilt or innocence of those accused. But it has weight for
those to whom truth is habitually denied, for it restores
some part of their dignity and even offers them a glimpse
of the hope of justice. While it has no impact in the courts,
it partakes of an ethical concern.
This concern is a live one. It articulates a matter of
urgency. While the death of men in interactions with the
police is a frequent occurrence generally fostered by the
exoneration of the alleged perpetrators, it is rare to have
access to all the evidence in one of these cases, and even
exceptional when the case has been dismissed because it
is then subject to judicial confidentiality, breach of which
is punishable in France by one year’s imprisonment and
a fine of €15,000. Having been granted authorization to
consult the documents in the case concerning Angelo’s
death, I have therefore felt an obligation to put this privi-
lege to good use by seeing this work through. Apart from
the singularity of the case, starting with the fact that it
concerns a Traveller, with all the marginality, suspicion
and ostracism implied by that identity, it seemed to me
 A Simple Story xix

that, both in the method of intervention chosen to effect

the young man’s arrest and in the logic of the judicial
process that culminated in the absolution of the two men
who fired the fatal shots, there were a number of features
that could be identified or inferred in many other cases
throughout the world. The details of these cases may vary,
but they are tragically alike in their dénouement: the loss
of a life and the impunity of those responsible. In this
respect the simple story of the death of Angelo, extended
through his sister’s fight for justice and truth, acquires if
not a universal then at least an exemplary significance.

D.F., August 2020

 Terminological Note

The organization of law enforcement and the operation

of the judicial system is specific to each country, and even
sometimes to each jurisdiction within a given country, as
in the United States. Some explanations are therefore in
order so as to make the account that follows clear for
readers unfamiliar with the French systems.
In France there are two main law-enforcement institu-
tions, which have roughly equivalent authority but distinct
legal status and territories of operation. The national
police is a civilian force that operates within cities and
on their outskirts. The national gendarmerie is a military
force operating in rural areas and small towns. There are
also municipal police forces under the authority of local
mayors, whose role is more limited, complementing the
two other forces. In this text the generic term “police” is
used to refer to law-enforcement bodies. Angelo’s family,
who live on a farm, have only ever had dealings with
the gendarmerie, and the two who killed the young man
were adjudants (non-commissioned officers), the first rank
above beat officer. For the purposes of clarity, the trans-
lation uses the term officers for these two in order to
distinguish them from the other gendarmes involved in the
operation. All belong to an elite unit, the gign, or Groupe
 Terminological Note xxi

d’intervention de la gendarmerie nationale (National

Gendarmerie Intervention Group), which was created to
intervene in terrorist attacks, hostage situations and the
fight against organized crime­– ­in other words, circum-
stances very different from a simple arrest.
The judicial system in France, as in the majority of coun-
tries in continental Europe and their former colonies, is
based on civil law, derived from Roman law, and thus quite
different from the common law that operates in the United
States, the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth.
One notable feature is the stage of judicial investigation,
prior to the trial at criminal court, that is instigated by
the procureur de la République (public prosecutor), or
requested by the victim(s), and is conducted by a juge
d’instruction (examining magistrate). The latter’s role is to
establish whether a breach of the law has been committed
and whether there is evidence to support charging the
perpetrator(s). At the end of her or his investigation, after
having received a statement (réquisition) from the public
prosecutor and the responses (observations) from the
counsels, the magistrate draws up a ruling (ordonnance),
which may be either a dismissal (non-lieu), in which case
there is no trial, or a referral to the criminal court (renvoi)
where the accused will be tried. A decision to dismiss may
be appealed in the same way as a court decision. If the
decision or verdict is upheld on appeal, there remains the
possibility of a petition to the Court of Cassation, but this
court rules only on points of procedure, not on matters of
substance; if procedural problems are confirmed, this leads
to a new trial. One final stage, when all internal means of
recourse are exhausted, is to appeal to the European Court
of Human Rights, if the appellant considers that her or his
rights have been violated. If the European Court rules in
favor of the plaintiff, it may issue a decision against the
state in question, accompanied by a requirement to pay
the appellant a sum corresponding to the legal costs and
to the material and moral harm suffered. However, such a
decision does not mean that the case has to be retried and
xxii Terminological Note

therefore does not expose the individuals charged to any

form of judgment or sanction.
The victims in the present case belong to the social group
known as gens du voyage (travelling people). Determining
the right way to name them is always a sensitive matter,
for there are several words whose definitions and implica-
tions vary depending on context and speaker. The choice
has been made here to respect the way the protagonists
identify themselves. As far as Angelo and his family are
concerned, most of them think of themselves simply as
voyageurs (Travellers). The term may seem paradoxical
given that they are settled, but it is noteworthy that, at
the family property, a former farm, all prefer to sleep in
caravans rather than in the buildings, testimony to a sort
of nostalgia for a traveling way of life despite the fact
that some of them have never known it. They sometimes
use the term manouche when speaking about themselves,
but never rom (Roma) or gitan (gypsy), since the former
relates in their eyes to a specific community and the latter
has pejorative connotations. While the translation of the
book uses US English, the British English writing of the
term “Traveller” has been preferred to differentiate it
from the word “traveler,” which refers to a person who is
traveling. The double “l” signifies the identity of a group.
 Preamble

This is a book of a singular kind. It is not the result

of a traditional sociological investigation. It is a counter-­
investigation. I explain how it arose in the prologue. It
seeks to shed light on the death of a man through the
accounts of those who killed him and those who were more
or less immediate witnesses to the scene. It also attempts to
analyze the judicial handling of the case up until it was dis-
missed, those who fired the fatal shots being exculpated on
grounds of legitimate self-defense. Inset between these two
elements is a description of the reactions of the deceased
man’s family and a reconstruction of the victim’s life story.
I present the accounts of the protagonists as faithfully as
possible through the use of a subjective, third-person nar-
rative. By contrast, I examine the judicial process through a
critical lens, in order to show how choices were made early
on between irreconcilable versions of the story, resulting in
problematic decisions. On the basis of a re-examination
of the individual accounts and the case file, I then propose
a different version of the facts that makes it possible to
integrate the contradictions, divergences and discrepancies
that remain in the judges’ interpretation. The aim is thus
to create, around this tragic case, an experimental form
of writing that honors the diverse viewpoints, as evoked
xxiv Preamble

in the epigraph from Rumi, while at the same time ulti-

mately acknowledging my own perspective, at the end of
an inquiry inspired by the quotation from Nietzsche. The
unusual approach I have adopted raises two questions.
First, can I be said to take sides? This is a charge read-
ily leveled against sociologists and anthropologists, who
are often suspected of taking the part of the dominated.
The observation is not entirely without foundation, and
there is, moreover, no such thing as total impartiality.
But here the opposite argument is called for. Once the
magistrates have fully accepted one version of the events
and rejected the other, the simple fact of giving equal
weight to each, as I do here, and thus presenting them
as both equally credible, tends to be seen as a failure of
impartiality, whereas in fact it testifies to an effort to
restore it. In this respect I show, in the sections focusing
on the conditions of production of truth and lies in legal
cases, that this case is far from an anomaly. It is not the
exception, but the rule. It reveals not a dysfunctional
justice system but its normal functioning, which needs
to be analyzed as such if we are to understand the logics
that prevail in the handling of such cases.
Second, is this work still one of social science?
Admittedly, it does not follow the traditional forms of
the discipline. Subjective recounting of the facts belongs
to literature, the conduct of the inquiry is reminiscent of
a particular kind of journalism, and the reconstruction of
the investigation without doubt echoes the form of the
criminal investigation process. These comparisons are
reasonable, in my view, and in no way discreditable. But
I contend that I maintain certain fundamental principles
of the social sciences: empirical research based on a field
study supplemented by examination of documents; equal
attention accorded to the words of all those involved; a
commitment to subject all available evidence to critical
examination; the desire to go beyond the individual case
and reveal the generality of social processes; and, indeed,
the acknowledgment of the presence of the researcher,
 Preamble xxv

whom I have chosen to present from the outset as one

protagonist among others.
Although the criminal investigation is long since over,
the dismissal of the case was confirmed on appeal, and
the petition to the Court of Cassation was judged inad-
missible, it is probable that the case will be referred to the
European Court of Human Rights. The way I have written
it, presenting an honest reconstruction of the points of
view of the main protagonists and a rigorous analysis of
all the evidence in the investigation case file, and eventu-
ally putting forward an account of the events that differs
from that of the justice system, takes this possibility into
account.
 Prologue

It appeared to me that the examining magistrate had

not deciphered the problem at the root of this case, and
I thought it might be of interest if I contributed here the
information resulting from my own deciphering of it.
Fernando Pessoa, Il Caso Vargas

One morning, the sociologist receives an email from a

collective that has come together to seek justice following
the death of a Traveller. He has never heard of the case.
He does not know the three persons who sign the email,
all women. They give a succinct account of the tragic
death of a thirty-seven-year-old man, the brother of one
of them. He was killed by officers from the gign, Groupe
­d’intervention de la gendarmerie nationale, a special unit
of the gendarmerie dedicated to terrorist attacks and hos-
tage situations, who had come to arrest him as he was
deemed to have absconded because he had not returned
to prison following home leave. The three women tell the
sociologist that they have read some of his books, and
they would like to invite him to participate in a panel
discussion focused on ending state violence, as their press
release puts it. Moved by the man’s story, sympathetic to
the collective’s campaign, and baffled by the implausibility
2 Prologue

of the official version of the events­– ­all factors that echo

other cases in which he has taken an interest­– t­he sociol-
ogist nevertheless replies that, unfortunately, as he is not
in France, he must decline their invitation. A few moments
later, however, he follows up with a postscript proposing
to write a short text that they could read at the event if they
wish. They accept with enthusiasm. He therefore sends
them a few pages in which he reflects on the machinery of
law enforcement, penal structures and the prison system
in France, where recent developments have led to tragedies
such as the one in which this man died. Indeed, this tragic
event sits at the intersection of ethnographic research he
has been conducting for some fifteen years on the police,
courts and prisons. The deceased man’s sister writes a
brief message to say that she was touched when she read
the text, as since her brother’s death she has been feel-
ing a powerful need to articulate these things but knows
that, when spoken by Travellers, they go unheard. She
adds that she shared the text with her father, who himself
experienced prison from the age of thirteen: after listening
attentively he told her that he approved of what it said.
The short address is therefore included in the program for
the event. A slightly amended version is published a few
weeks later on the first anniversary of the tragedy, as an
opinion column in a national daily newspaper.
Over the following months, the sociologist continues
to receive the collective’s regular press releases. He is
thus kept informed about the judicial process, the hopes
raised when those who fired the shots are placed under
investigation and then dashed when the case is dismissed.
He learns also of the marches in memory of the victim
and in support of his family, held in the nearby admin-
istrative town where the case is to be decided as well as
in other places where similar tragedies have taken place.
After several email exchanges, he eventually goes to meet
with the Traveller’s sister and other members of his family,
including his parents, in their village. Spending the day
with them, he takes note of the wound that remains open,
 Prologue 3

the anger at a justice system that did not listen to them,

the grieving that cannot begin until their words have been
heard. Thus is germinated the idea for a book that would
respect their version of the tragedy they have lived, and are
still living through. The proposal is still unformed, and the
support not guaranteed, as he explains to them. But they
accept the idea without hesitation. He tells them too that
he cannot simply reproduce their view, that he will have to
include accounts from other perspectives. And he speaks
to them of his scruples about questioning them on such
painful events, causing them to relive this traumatic recent
past. It hurts to talk about it, they say, but it does us good
all the same. In any case, we talk about it with each other
every day. Every day we talk about it. A few weeks later,
the sociologist writes to the family to tell them that his
publisher is willing to publish the book. It is such a poign-
ant day for us to receive that news, replies the Traveller’s
sister. Today would have been his fortieth birthday.
Thus begins an investigation, or rather a counter-­
investigation, that leads the sociologist to interrupt all his
other projects for several months. The man’s death and
the ensuing criminal inquiry take a forceful hold on him­
– a­ sort of ethical urgency that cannot be put off. For,
ultimately, this story is a tragic illustration of what has
formed the substance of his two most recent books: the
will to punish and the inequality of lives. He must once
again return to examine the circumstances of this tragic
event and the legal proceedings in order to understand
what has played out here at both the specific and the
generic level. He therefore conducts twelve interviews with
the protagonists in the case, explaining his project clearly
to each person so as to avoid any misunderstanding. The
deceased’s relatives and those involved either closely or
more distantly in the events and its aftermath agree read-
ily, as do the judges and lawyers, save one. Conversely,
repeated approaches to the gendarmes, both individually
and via their institution, both locally and at the national
level, yield no result. Likewise multiple requests to some
4 Prologue

of the indirect witnesses, such as the emergency doctor,

and to others having taken part in the story, such as the
journalist. Thanks in particular to the diligence of the
family and of the public prosecutor’s office, documents are
assembled: the five handwritten accounts by the parents,
uncle, brother and sister-in-law, made just after the trag-
edy; the twenty-seven statements of witness depositions;
the autopsy and ballistics reports, that of weapon exam-
ination, the toxicology and forensic analyses; the record
of the reconstruction of the events and of the visit to the
scene; the public prosecution’s charges and the defense
lawyers’ responses; the ruling that dismissed the case and
its upholding on appeal; the fourteen press releases from
the support committee and the twenty-eight articles in the
regional press. The pieces of the jigsaw gradually come
together. Yet gaps remain, owing to questions that were
not asked by the investigators, contradictions that were
not brought up during the criminal investigation, points of
vagueness and approximations in the various versions of
the facts, silences and refusals to be interviewed. Thus, a
rich but incomplete fabric is woven, in which the record
of a deposition can partially fill in for the missing inter-
view with the witnesses concerned.
But the point of this project is not to substitute the
authority of the words written by the sociologist for the
authority of the words spoken by the judge. The aim is
first to do justice to all the versions of the events and
then, on the basis of evidence collected, to formulate a
plausible interpretation unfettered by the judicial decision.
The relationships between the work of judge and that of
historian have long been scrutinized, with the aim either
of demonstrating the similarities between them or, on
the contrary, to warn against a historiography that sets
itself up as public prosecutor or defender of characters
or events. Some historians have even gone so far as to
re-examine court decisions in cases from their own times.
In the present instance, there is something of a poten-
tial dialogue between the judge and the ethnographer, in
 Prologue 5

which the ethnographer takes the liberty of investigating

the judge’s interpretation. A new form therefore needs
to be essayed in order to produce accounts that keep as
closely as possible to the facts as they emerge over the
course of interviews, depositions, field observations and
the assembly of other documentary traces, all the while
embedding them in descriptions and narratives through
a process of re-creation. Composing the text becomes an
operation akin to jointing a brickwork of empirical data,
using the cement of reasoning and imagination, so as to
generate a novel structure of what might be termed an aug-
mented reality. This augmented reality first places readers
as close as possible to the experience of the protagonists
and then draws them into the counter-investigative work
of the sociologist.
But, in order to craft this masonry, the facts need to be
tracked down to the smallest detail. Creative freedom is to
some extent restricted by the commitment to truth-telling.
Thus, when the text says that the officer thinks you never
know with Travellers, and that he believes that his was the
fatal shot, it is because during his deposition he states that
Travellers represent a difficult community for them and,
later, that he was probably the one who killed the man.
When the text notes that the father thinks the evacuation
of the officer was staged to make it look as if he was
injured, and imagines that the shots could have led his
oxygen bottles to explode and thus transformed his son
into a terrorist, these are points made in one of the inter-
views. Many more examples could be cited, almost line by
line. Similarly, the terms employed in the text reproduce
as far as possible the words used by the speakers. The
gendarmes call their victim the target (la cible), the objec-
tive (l’objectif), the individual or the man; they say that
they want to neutralize (neutraliser) him, which means
to kill him, and euphemistically talk of handling (prendre
en compte) his father and his brother when they pin them
down and handcuff them. The family uses expressions
typically belonging to the language of the Roma to speak
6 Prologue

of the gendarmes (schmitts, clistés, cagoulés), translated

here as cops, whose semi-automatic weapons are Tommy
guns (mitraillettes); the lean-to of the house is named a
shed (cabouin) or a barn (grange). When referring to the
Travellers, the public prosecutor alternates the slightly
pejorative noun gypsy (manouche) and the common
phrase travelling people (gens du voyage). However, the
point is not to incorporate verbal tics, syntax errors or
clumsy expressions that would undermine the credibility
of the speakers and distract readers. Hence the refusal to
use the realist effects of quotation marks and dialogues.
Furthermore, it is important to remember that, while inter-
views do allow access to the words of the speaker, records
of depositions are not word-for-word transcriptions but
summaries of what the court clerk heard. They thus do not
constitute a complete reproduction.
No proper name of any person or, indeed, of any place
appears, nor any date. This choice of anonymization arises
not only out of ethical concerns to protect the individuals
involved or legal considerations to protect the author; both
these protections are illusory given that modern search
engines make it a simple matter to identify all the details of
such an event. Anonymization is used above all as a way to
draw out the broader meaning of this death, the conditions
of its possibility, the actions of the gendarmes, the practice
of judges, the campaign led by the family. Specific though
this story is, it nevertheless reveals fundamental features of
the state’s law-enforcement institutions and of the punitive
treatment of Travellers: it is not merely a regrettable inci-
dent. One exception is made to this rule of anonymization:
the forename of the Traveller. Refusing to consign him
to anonymity is a way of respecting the memory of the
person who is, ultimately, the only victim of the events
that occurred one day in early spring at his parents’ farm.
The fragile trace of a life cut short. An intimate connection
through which, for his family, he lives on.
But the plan to render an account of the case in all
its complexity soon came up against a major dilemma
 Prologue 7

with regard to the different versions. The problem is the

difficulty of recounting the events in an even-handed way.
The separate accounts, each one written from a subjective
point of view, seek to reconstruct how each person expe-
rienced the scene, the events that preceded it and those
that followed. This approach inevitably results in the pres-
entation of some experiences that were actually lived and
others that were falsified. For whatever one decides about
who is telling the truth, the two versions presented, that
of the relatives and that of the gendarmes, are irreconcil-
able. One of them at least is mistaken, and possibly even
deliberately false. In order to get as close as possible to
subjectivities, experiences should therefore be recounted
as they were supposed to have really been lived, including
the awareness of deceit, even if this version is radically
different from what the individuals concerned said in
interviews or depositions. Which effectively would come
down to no longer respecting the accounts of the protag-
onists, introducing from the outset the perspective of an
external observer assumed to know what did happen. This
is not strictly speaking a moral dilemma, in the sense of
choosing the side one thinks speaks the truth (assuming
that there is one side that holds this truth). It is simply the
logical conundrum of having to reconstruct a scene as if
the protagonists had indeed experienced it in the way they
tell it, even when they are deliberately misleading their
interlocutors. And this has to be done without being able,
and without wishing, to decide in advance which of them
are telling the truth.
The way out of this dilemma adopted by the sociolo-
gist was as follows. In the first stage, he worked on the
assumption that all the protagonists were telling the truth,
and therefore he adopted their point of view on the basis
of the versions they gave. The parallel accounts of the first
officer and the father, the second officer and the mother,
as reconstructed, are based strictly on the information
each of these individuals presented as the truth. This obvi-
ously results in entirely incompatible stories. The judicial
8 Prologue

system chose between them. The public prosecutor in

his early statement, and the examining magistrate in her
decision, came down in favor of the officers and against
the family. The investigation might end there, and this is
indeed what almost always happens. But we can also take
into consideration the fact that, in the judiciary, not all
individuals are treated equally, and not all words are given
equal weight, particularly when law-enforcement officers
are accused, and also when either the plaintiffs or the
accused are Travellers. In the second stage, the sociologist
therefore attempted to re-examine the different versions,
this time in order to decide whether there were reasons to
think that some of them were more consistent than others.
He first presented a general discussion of the principles
underlying the search for truth and the detection of lies.
He then analyzed the different versions, both by drawing
out any internal contradictions and improbabilities and
by comparing them with the set of external evidence from
other testimonies, expert opinions and technical reports.
This process resulted in another possible reading of the
facts of the case.
In short, the initial intention to give even-handed
treatment to the versions of the officers and the family,
respecting both equally, did not prevent the subsequent
rigorous dissection of the legal arguments and verdict and
the presentation of a version based on rational grounds of
probability. To venture a parallel from cinema, we might
say that the book begins in the manner of Rashōmon and
ends in the spirit of Twelve Angry Men. And this two-
stage process is in fact not unlike the construction of the
object of study itself, a criminal case. Indeed, the judicial
procedure first produces depositions, which are more or
less divergent versions of the facts, then an investigation,
which examines all the evidence gathered, and finally con-
clusions. The method followed by the sociologist, right
through to the writing-up of his work, ultimately follows
a similar pattern. Hence some repetitions, mirroring the
process of the counter-investigation. This process might
 Prologue 9

be called a sociological investigation, in reference to but

in contrast with the criminal investigation, because it is
not limited to the individuals questioned but expands its
interrogation to the social conditions of possibility of the
events concerned.
As many studies, in France and elsewhere, have estab-
lished, decisions taken by the courts reflect the balance of
power and relations of inequality within a society, which
come into play not only in the way certain people are
convicted and others acquitted but also in the way social
worlds are represented­– i­n this case, those of the gen-
darmes and of the Travellers. In other words, they involve
the production both of justice and of truth. When the soci-
ologist embarked on this project, he knew that he would
obviously have no impact on the former, but he thought
he might be able to unravel its connection with the latter
while the justice system represents the truth of the courts
as the sole legitimate one. His counter-investigation could
indeed reveal a different reading of the facts. The point
was not to take the side of the vanquished against the
victors, as historians sometimes put it­– ­in other words
to deem the family’s version more truthful than that of
the officers­– ­but to produce an account independent of
all institutional links, of all professional affinities and, as
far as possible, of any prejudice. The account must derive
purely from the application of a dual principle: all voices
deserve the same degree of attention, and the conclusions
must proceed purely from the correlation of the available
evidence interpreted in context.
It was this dual principle that, in the family’s view, the
judges had not respected. For the aim of their campaign
was not so much to see the officers who fired the fatal shots
convicted, though they believed they should be punished in
line with what they saw as their level of culpability, as to at
last get what they felt was a true account of the conditions
in which their son and brother died. An account which,
as they put it, would make it possible to raise questions
about the police’s methods of intervention, the functioning
10 Prologue

of the penal system, the political context of law and order,

and the social representations of Travellers that, taken
together, had made his tragic death seemingly ineluctable.
But, for the sociologist, the reason it made sense to
engage in this work went beyond the mere critique of
punitive practices to which he had devoted his previous
books. By focusing on the events that led to the death of
the young man, by granting the accounts of his family
equal value with those of the gendarmes, by formulating
a version independent of that of the courts, by offering a
glimpse of what his life had been like, troubled to be sure,
but so different from the defamatory portraits painted
by the criminal investigation file and the media recon-
structions, by pulling him out of oblivion and freeing him
from stereotypes, the sociologist thought that it might
be poss­ible to return to him, whatever his criminal past,
something of what society refuses Travellers, and that the
family, through their campaign for justice and truth, had
never stopped demanding: respectability.
He started writing.
 I
The Father

He is on the doorstep when he sees the gate open and gen-

darmes, dressed in dark uniforms, balaclavas and helmets,
and armed to the teeth, storm into the courtyard. He just
has time to say to his son, who is sitting in the little lounge:
Go hide, go hide, pointing to the shed. This space, a lean-to
around twenty square yards attached to the house, is used
as a lumber room. It is where he stores the objects he
collects to sell in second-hand markets. Books of cartoons,
old furniture, bicycles, strollers. There is also an air con-
ditioner and a generator. Angelo slips behind him, enters
the dark room and shuts the door. The father sees him
disappear, in his sweatpants and colored tee-shirt.
The gign men swarm into the courtyard. A lot of them.
Fifteen or so, maybe more. They yell orders. The father sees
one of them rush towards him, shouting at him to kneel
down with his hands above his head. He refuses to comply.
He has never been willing to bow down to the police. The
officer pushes him to the ground and makes him lie face
down. He handcuffs him behind his back. He trains his
Tommy gun on his head. Don’t move or we’ll shoot. With
his tube in his nose, the father says he can’t breathe. He is
sick, he needs his oxygen. The gendarme will have none of
it. Shut up. Struggling to breathe, the old man nevertheless
12 The Father

continues to demand, to protest, to curse. There are three

disabled people here, he says angrily. His words evidently
leave the gendarmes unmoved. A short distance away his
wife, who is sick, is kneeling on the ground in front of the
caravan, next to their daughter-in-law whom a gign man
has just brought in, pulling her by the arm. At the side of
the house, near the smoking barbecue, his younger son and
his brother-in-law are, like him, lying flat on the asphalt
with a boot planted in their backs. Standing beside them,
gendarmes point the barrel of their weapons at them.
The others have entered the two buildings on the farm
where the family live. If they find a door closed they kick it
open. They can be heard overturning furniture, throwing
objects across the rooms. When they have finished with
the houses, the caravans are searched in the same way.
After several minutes of this crashing about, the gendarmes
come back out to them, clearly annoyed. They have not
found the one they are looking for. Where is he? Where
is the fugitive? they roar. The parents reply that they have
no idea. What do they imagine? That they will give him
up to them? All at once, however, the father realizes that
it would have been better to answer, to tell them he had
gone off into the woods. They might have followed this
false trail. He is sorry that he did not think of this in the
moment. But it is too late to go back on his words. In any
case, the gign men have now gathered in the middle of
the courtyard. They are talking among themselves in low
voices. They seem to be preparing to leave. If only.
A noise in the shed. Angelo must have knocked some-
thing down. He must have thought they had all left and
wanted to move. A dull thud. But the gendarmes have
heard it. Two of them advance with caution, followed by
three others. They hold their Tommy guns in their hands.
The father tenses on the hard surface of the terrace. He
would like to shout to his boy: Give yourself up! But he
thinks that is what he will do. He won’t play the hero. It’s
not his style. The gign men shove the door open with a
crash. They go in. Almost immediately, a burst of gunfire.
Other documents randomly have
different content
English merchants had aboord with them to buy wares with, in place
whither they were bound to go. ¶ In the same yeare, William
Courtneie archbishop of Canturburie, hauing more regard to his
owne priuat commoditie, than to the discommoditie of others,
purchased a bull of the pope, whereby he was authorised to leauie
through his whole prouince foure pence of the pound of ec­cles­ia ­ st­i­‐
call promotions, as well in places exempt, as not exempt, no true
nor lawfull cause being shewed or pretended, why he ought so to
doo; and to see the execution of this bull put in practise, the
archbishop of Yorke, and the bishop of London, were named and
appointed.
Manie that feared the censures of such high
Waltham bishop
executions, chose rather to paie the monie foorthwith, of Salisburie
than to go to the law, and be compelled happilie, buried at
Westminster
mauger their good willes. Some there were that amongst the
appealed to the sée of Rome, meaning to defend their kings.
cause and to procure that so vnlawfull an exaction
might be reuoked. Speciallie, the prebendaries of An. Reg. 19.
Lincolne stood most stiffelie against those bishops,
The duke of
but the death of the archbishop that chanced shortlie Irelāds corps
after, made an end of those so passing great troubles. conueied from
This yeare, Iohn Waltham bishop of Salisburie, and Louaine into
England, and
lord treasuror of England departed this life, and by there roiallie
king Richard his appointment had the honor to haue interred.
his bodie interred at Westminster amongst the kings.
After this decease, Roger Walden that before was secretarie to the
king, and treasuror of Calis, was now made lord treasuror. Yée haue
heard, that in the yeare 1392, Robert Véer duke of Ireland departed
this life in Louaine in Brabant. King Richard therefore this yeare in
Nouember, caused his corps being imbalmed, to be conueied into
England, and so to the priorie of Colnie in Essex, appointing him to
be laid in a coffine of cypresse, and to be adorned with princelie
garments, hauing a chaine of gold about his necke, and rich rings on
his fingers. And to shew what loue and affection he bare vnto him in
his life time, the king caused the coffine to be opened, that he might
behold his face bared, and touch him with his hands: he honored his
funerall exequies with his presence, accompanied with the countesse
of Oxenford, mother to the said duke, the archbishop of Canturburie,
and manie other bishops, abbats, and priors: but of noble men there
were verie few, for they had not yet digested the enuie and hatred
which they had conceiued against him.
In this meane while, the duke of Lancaster was in Froissard.
Gascoigne, treating with the lords of the countrie, and
The Gascoignes
the inhabitants of the good townes, which vtterlie send vnto K. Rich.
refused to receiue him otherwise than as a lieutenant signifieng vnto
or substitute to the king of England, and in the end him, that they
ought not to be
addressed messengers into England, to signifie to the diuided from the
king, that they had beene accustomed to be gouerned crowne.
by kings, and meant not now to become subiects to anie other,
contrarie to all reason, sith the king could not (sauing his oth) alien
them from the crowne. The duke of Lancaster vsed all waies he
might deuise, how to win their good wils, and had sent also certeine
of his trustie councellors, ouer hither into England, as sir William
Perreer, sir Peter Clifton, and two clearkes learned in the lawe, the
one called maister Iohn Huech, and the other maister Iohn Richards
a canon of Leicester, to plead and sollicit his cause.
But to be breefe, such reasons were shewed, and The grant of the
such matter vnfolded by the Gascoignes, whie they duchie of
ought not be separated from the crowne of England, Aquitaine to the
duke of Lancaster
that finallie |831| (not­with­stand­ing the duke of reuoked.
Glocester, and certeine other were against them) it
was decréed, that the countrie and duchie of Aquitaine should
remaine still in demesne of the crowne of England, least that by this
transporting thereof, it might fortune in time, that the heritage
thereof should fall into the hands of some stranger, and enimie to
the English nation, so that then the homage and souereigntie might
perhaps be lost for euer. Indeed, the duke of Glocester, being a
prince of an high mind, & loth to haue the duke of Lancaster at
home, being so highlie in the kings fauor, could haue béene well
pleased, that he should haue enioied his gift, for that he thought
thereby to haue borne all the rule about the king, for the duke of
Yorke was a man rather coueting to liue in pleasure, than to deale
with much businesse, and the weightie affaires of the realme.
About the same time, or somewhat before, the king Ambassadors sent
sent an ambassage to the French king, the archbishop into France to
of Dublin, the earle of Rutland, the earle Marshall, the treat a marriage
betwéene king
lord Beaumont, the lord Spenser, the lord Clifford Richard & the
named Lewes, and twentie knights with fortie French K.
esquiers. The cause of their going ouer, was to intreat daughter.
of a marriage to be had betwixt him, and the ladie Isabell, daughter
to the French king, she being as then not past eight yeares of age,
which before had beene promised vnto the duke of Britaines sonne:
but in con­si­der­a­tion of the great benefit that was likelie to insue by
this com­mun­ic­ a­tion and aliance with England, there was a meane
found to vndoo that knot, though not presentlie. These English lords,
at their comming to Paris, were ioifullie receiued, and so courteouslie
interteined, banketted, feasted, and cherished, and that in most
honorable sort, as nothing could be more: all their charges and
expenses were borne by the French king, and when they should
depart, they receiued for answer of their message, verie comfortable
words, and so with hope to haue their matter sped, they returned.
But now when the duke of Lancaster had, by laieng Thom. Wals.
foorth an inestimable masse of treasure purchased in
1396.
a manner the good wils of them of Aquitaine, and
The duke of
compassed his whole desire, he was suddenlie Lancaster marieth
countermanded home by the king, and so to satisfie a ladie of a
the kings pleasure, he returned into England, and meane estate,
whome he had
comming to the king at Langleie, where he held his kept as his
Christmasse, was receiued with more honor than concubine.
loue, as was thought; wherevpon he rode in all hast
that might be to Lincolne, where Katharine Swinford as then laie,
whom shortlie after the Epiphanie, he tooke to wife. This woman
was borne in Heinault, daughter to a knight of that countrie, called
sir Paou de Ruet: she was brought vp in hir youth, in the duke of
Lancasters house, and attended on his first wife the duchesse Blanch
of Lancaster, and in the daies of his second wife the duchesse
Constance, he kept the foresaid Katharine as his concubine, who
afterwards was married to a knight of England, named Swinford,
that was now deceassed. Before she was married, the duke had by
hir three children, two sonnes and a daughter; one of the sons was
named Thomas de Beaufort, & the other Henrie, who was brought
vp at Aken in Almaine, prooued a good lawyer, and was after bishop
of Winchester.
For the loue that the duke had to these his children, Wickleuists
he married their mother the said Katharine Swinford, increase.
being now a widow, whereof men maruelled much,
considering hir meane estate was farre vnmeet to match with his
highnesse, and nothing comparable in honor to his other two former
wiues. And indeed, the great ladies of England, as the duches of
Glocester, the countesses of Derbie, Arundell and others, descended
of the blood roiall, greatlie disdeined, that she should be matched
with the duke of Lancaster, and by that means be accompted second
person in the realme, and preferred in roome before them, and
therefore they said, that they would not come in anie place where
she should be present, for it should be a shame to them that a
woman of so base birth, and concubine to the duke in his other
wiues daies, should go and haue place before them. The duke of
Glocester also, being a man of an high mind and stout stomach,
misliked his brothers matching so meanlie, but the duke of Yorke
bare it well inough, and verelie, the ladie hir selfe was a woman of
such bringing vp, and honorable demeanor, that enuie could not in
the end but giue place to well deseruing. About this season, the
doctrine of |832| Iohn Wickliffe still mightilie spred abroad héere in
England. ¶ The schisme also still continued in the church, betwixt
the two factions of cardinals French and Romane; for one of their
popes could no sooner be dead, but that they ordeined an other in
his place.
In this eighteenth yeare also was a woonderfull The earle
tempest of wind in the months of Iulie and August, marshall affieth ye
and also more speciallie in September, by violence French kings
e
whereof, in sundrie places of this realme, great and daughter, in y
name of king
woonderfull hurt was doone, both in churches and Richard.
houses. ¶ The ambassadors that had béene latelie in
France, about the treatie of the marriage (as before An. Reg. 20.
yée haue heard) went thither againe, and so after
that the two kings by sending to and fro were growne A truce for 30
yeares betwéene
to certaine points and couenants of agreement, the England and
earle marshall, by letters of procuration, married the France. Tho.
ladie Isabell, in name of king Richard, so that from Walsin.
thencefoorth she was called quéene of England. Amongst other
couenants and articles of this marriage, there was a truce accorded,
to indure betwixt the two realms of England and France, for tearme
of thirtie yeares. The pope wrote to king Richard, beseeching him to
assist the prelats against the Lollards (as they tearmed them) whom
he pronounced to be traitors, both to the church and kingdome, and
therefore he besought him to take order for the punishment of
them, whom the prelats should denounce to be heretikes.
At the same time, he sent a bull reuocatorie
The popes letters
concerning religious men, that had either at his hands to K. Rich. against
or at the hands of his legats or nuncios purchased to ye Wickleuists.
be his chapleins, and accompting themselues thereby K. Richard goeth
exempt from their order; so that now they were by ouer to Calis.
this reuocatorie bull, appointed to returne to their order, and to
obserue all rules thereto belonging. This liked the friers well, namelie
the minors, that sought by all means they might deuise, how to
bring their brethren home againe, which by such exemptions in
being the popes chapleins, were segregated and diuided from the
residue of their fraternitie or brotherhood. The king in this twentith
yeare of his reigne, went ouer to Calis with his vncles the dukes of
Yorke and Glocester, and a great manie of other lords and ladies of
honour, and thither came to him the duke of Burgognie, and so they
communed of the peace. There was no enimie to the conclusion
thereof but the duke of Glocester, who shewed well by his words
that he wished rather war than peace, in somuch as the king stood
in doubt of him, least he would procure some rebellion against him
by his subiects, whome he knew not to fauour greatlie this new
aliance with France.
The king after the duke of Burgognie had talked The maner of the
with him throughlie of all things, and was departed interview
from him, returned into England (leauing the ladies betwéene king
Richard and the
still at Calis) to open the couenants of the marriage French king.
and peace vnto his subiects, and after he had finished Fabian.
with that businesse, and vnderstood their minds, he
went againe to Calis, and with him his two vncles, of Lancaster and
Glocester, and diuerse prelats and lords of the realme; and shortlie
after came the French king to the bastide of Arde, accompanied with
the dukes of Burgognie, Berrie, Britaine and Burbon. There was set
vp for the king of England a right faire and rich pauilion a little
beyond Guisnes within the English pale; and another the like pauilion
was pight vp also for the French king on this side Arde, within the
French dominion; so that betwéene the said pauilions was the
distance of thréescore & ten pases, and in the midwaie betwixt them
both, was ordeined the third pauilion, at the which both kings
comming from either of their tents sundrie times should méet and
haue com­mun­ic­ a­tion togither.
The distance betwixt the two tents was beset on Froissard.
either side in time of the interview with knights armed
Fabian.
with their swords in their hands; that is to say, on the
The oth of the
one side stood foure hundred French knights in armor two kings.
with swords in their hands, and on the other side
foure hundred English knights armed with swords in their hands,
making as it were a lane betwixt them through the which the two
kings came and met, with such noble men as were appointed to
attend them. And a certeine distance from the two first pauilions,
were appointed to stand such companies of men as either of them
by appointment had |833| couenanted to bring with them. The two
kings before their méeting, receiued a solemne oth for assurance of
their faithfull and true meaning, to obserue the sacred lawes of
amitie one toward an other, in that their interview, so as no damage,
violence, molestation, arrest, disturbance, or other inconuenience
should be practised by them, or their friends and subiects: and that
if anie disorder rose through anie mishappe, arrogancie, or strife
mooued by anie person, the same should be reformed, promising in
the words of princes to assist one an other in suppressing, the
malice of such as should presume to doo or attempt anie thing that
might sound to the breach of friendlie amitie, during the time of that
assemblie eight daies before, and seuen daies after.
On the six and twentith of October, the king of The chapell of our
England remooued from Calis toward the castell of ladie of peace.
Guisnes, and with him the duke of Berrie, who was
sent to take his oth. The morow after, being the euen of Simon and
Iude, the kings met, and the lords of France, to wit, the duke of
Berrie, Burgogne, Orleans, and Burbon, the earle of Sauoie, the
vicount of Meaux, and others conueied the king of England; and
from him were sent to conduct the French king diuerse of the
English lords, as the two dukes of Lancaster and Glocester, foure
earles; to wit, of Derbie, Rutland, Notingham, and North­um­ber­land.
After the two kings were come togither into the tent for that purpose
prepared, it was first accorded betwixt them, that in the same place
where they thus met, should be builded of both their costs a chapell
for a perpetuall memorie, which should be called The chapell of our
ladie of peace. On saturdaie being the feast daie of the apostles
Simon and Iude, the kings talked togither of certeine articles
touching the treatie of peace, and hauing concluded vpon the same,
they receiued either of them an oth vpon the holie Euangelists, to
obserue and kéepe all the couenants accorded vpon.
 On the mondaie the French king came to the king The French K.
of England his pauillion, and the same time was giueth his
brought thither the yoong queene Isabell daughter to daughter to king
Richard in
the French king, who there deliuered hir vnto king marriage.
Richard, who taking hir by the hand kissed hir, & gaue The order of the
to hir father great thanks for that so honorable and French kings
gratious a gift, openlie protesting, that vpon the seruice at table.
conditions concluded betwixt them, he did receiue hir, that by such
affinitie both the realmes might continue in quietnesse, and come to
a good end and perfect conclusion of a perpetuall peace. The
quéene was committed to the duchesses of Lancaster & Glocester, to
the countesses of Huntington and Stafford, to the marchionesse of
Dublin daughter to the lord Coucie, to the ladies of Namure,
Poinings, and others: which with a noble traine of men and horsses,
conueied hir to Calis: for there were twelue charrets full of ladies &
gentlewomen. This doone, the kings came togither into the king of
Englands pauillion to dinner. The French king sate on the right side
of the hall, and was roiallie serued after the maner of his countrie,
that is to saie, of all maner of meats appointed to be serued at the
first course in one mightie large dish or platter, and likewise after the
same sort at the second course. But the king of England was serued
after the English manner. When the tables were taken vp, and that
they had made an end of dinner, the kings kissed ech other, and
tooke their horsses. The K. of England brought the French king on
his waie, and at length they tooke leaue either of other, in shaking
hands and imbracing on horssebacke. The French king rode to Arde,
and the king of England returned to Calis.
¶ We haue omitted (as things superfluous to speake The expenses of
of) all the honorable demenor and courteous king Richard at
interteinement vsed and shewed betwixt these this interview.
princes and noble men on both parts, their sundrie The mariage
solemnized at
feastings and banketings, what rich apparell, plate Calis.
and other furniture of cupboords and tables, the
princelie gifts and rich iewels which were presented from one to an
other, striuing (as it might séeme) who should shew himselfe most
bounteous and liberall: beside the gifts which the king of England
gaue vnto the French king, and to the nobles of his realme (which
amounted aboue the summe of ten thousand marks) the K. of
England spending at this time (as the fame went) aboue thrée
hundred thousand marks. After the kings returne to Calis on
wednesdaie next insuing, being All |834| hallowes daie, in solemne
wise he married the said ladie Isabell in the church of saint Nicholas,
the archbishop of Canturburie dooing the office of the minister.
The thursdaie after, the dukes of Orleance and The maior of
Burbon, came to Calis to sée the king & the quéene: London and the
and on the fridaie they tooke their leaue and citizens meete the
K. & the quéene
departed, and rode to saint Omers to the French king. on Blackeheath.
On the same daie in the morning the king and the
queene tooke their ship, and had faire passage: for within thrée
houres they arriued at Douer, from whence they sped them towards
London, whereof the citizens being warned, made out certeine
horssemen, well appointed in one liuerie of colour, with a deuise
imbrodered on their sléeues, that euerie companie might be knowne
from other, the which with the maior and his brethren, clothed in
skarlet, met the king and quéene on Blackeheath, and there dooing
their duties with humble reuerence attended vpon their maiesties till
they came to Newington: where the king comanded the maior with
his companie to returne, for that he was appointed to lodge that
night at Kennington.
Shortlie after, to wit, the thirteenth of Nouember, the yoong
quéene was conueied from thence with great pompe vnto the Tower,
at which time there was such prease on London bridge, that by
reason thereof, certeine persons were thrust to death: among the
which the prior of Tiptrie, a place in Essex was one, and a
worshipfull matrone in Cornehill an other. The morrow after she was
conueied to Westminster with all the honor that might be deuised,
and finallie there crowned queene vpon sundaie being then the
seauenth of Ianuarie. On the two and twentith of Ianuarie was a
parlement begun at Westminster, in which the duke of Certaine thrust to
Lancaster caused to be legitimated the issue which he death in the
had begot of Katharine Swinfort, before she was his prease on London
bridge. Iohn
wife. ¶ At the same time Thomas Beaufort sonne to Stow.
the said duke, by the said Katharine, was created The quéens
earle of Summerset. ¶ There was an ordinance made coronation.
in the same parlement, that iustices should not haue 1397.
anie to sit with them as assistants. ¶ Moreouer there The duke of
was a tenth granted by the clergie to be paied to the Lancaster his
kings vse at two seuerall termes in that present yeare. bastards made
legitimate by
In this yeare the king contrarie to his oth reuoked the parlement.
iustices foorth of Ireland, whom by constraint (as The iustices
before ye haue heard) he was inforced to banish, reuoked out of
exile.
thereby to satisfie the noble men that would haue it
so.
In this twentith yeare of his reigne king Richard Brest yéelded vp
receiuing the summes of monie (for the which the to the duke of
strong towne of Brest was ingaged to him) by euill Britaine.
counsell (as manie thought) deliuered it vnto the duke Priuie grudge
of Britaine, by reason whereof no small sparke of betwixt the king
and the duke of
displeasure arose betwixt the king and the duke of Glocester.
Glocester, which kindled vp such a flame (as it was The talke betwixt
easie to doo) finding matter inough to féed vpon in the king and the
duke of Glocester.
both their brests, that finallie it could no longer be
Out of a French
kept downe, nor by any meanes quenched. In the pamphlet.
moneth of Februarie, the king holding a sumptuous
feast at Westminster, many of the soldiors that were newlie come
from Brest preased into the hall, and kept a roome togither. Whom
as the duke of Glocester beheld, and vnderstood what they were, to
remember how that towne was giuen vp contrarie to his mind and
pleasure, it grieued him not a little: and therefore as the king was
entred into his chamber, and few about him, he could not forbeare,
but brake foorth, and said to the king: “Sir, saw ye not those felowes
that sate in such number this daie in the hall, at such a table?” The
king answered that “he saw them,” and asked the duke what they
were? To whom the duke made this answer: “Sir, these be the
soldiors that came from Brest, and haue nothing now to take to, nor
yet know how to shift for their liuings, and the worse, for that (as I
am informed) they haue béene euill paied.” Then said the king;
“That is against my will, for I would that they should haue their due
wages; and if anie haue cause to complaine, let them shew the
matter to the treasuror, and they shall be reasonablie answered:”
and herewith he commanded that they should be appointed to foure
certeine villages about London, there to remaine, and to haue
meate, drinke, and lodging vpon his charges till they were paied.
Thus as they fell into reasoning of this matter, the duke said to the
king: “Sir, your |835| grace ought to put your bodie in paine to win a
strong hold or towne by feats of war, yer you take vpon you to sell
or deliuer anie towne or strong hold gotten with great aduenture by
the manhood and policie of your noble progenitours.” To this the
king with changed countenance answered and said: “Vncle, how say
you that?” And the duke boldlie without feare recited the same
againe, not changing one word in anie better sort. Wherevpon the
king being more chafed, replied; “Sir, thinke you that I am a
merchant, or a verie foole, to sell my land? By saint Iohn Baptist no:
but truth it is, that our coosine the duke of Britaine hath satisfied vs
in all such summes of monie as our progenitors lent vnto him, and to
his ancestors, vpon gage of the said towne of Brest, for the which
reason and conscience will no lesse but that the towne should
therevpon be to him restored.” Vpon this multiplieng of woords in
such presumptuous maner by the duke against the king, there
kindeled such displeasure betwixt them, that it neuer ceassed to
increase into flames, till the duke was brought to his end.
The earle of saint Paule at his last comming into The earle of saint
England to receiue king Richards oth for obseruing Paule his counsell
the truce, had conference with the king of diuerse to K. Richard.
matters. The king by waie of complaint, shewed vnto Polydor.
him how stiffe the duke of Glocester was in hindering
all such matters as he would haue go forward, not onlie séeking to
haue the peace broken betwixt the realmes of England & France, but
also procuring trouble at home, by stirring the people to rebellion.
The earle of saint Paule hearing of this stout demeanor of the duke,
told the king that it should be best to prouide in time against such
mischéefs as might insue thereof, and that it was not to be suffered,
that a subiect should behaue himselfe in such sort toward his prince.
The king marking his woords, thought that he gaue him good and
faithfull counsell, and therevpon determined to suppresse both the
duke and other of his complices, and tooke more diligent regard to
the saiengs & dooings of the duke than before he had doone. And as
it commeth to passe that those which suspect anie euill, doo euer
déeme the woorst; so he tooke euerie thing in euill part, insomuch
that he complained of the duke vnto his brethren the dukes of
Lancaster and Yorke, in that he should stand against him in all things
and seeke his destruction, the death of his counsellors, and
ouerthrow of his realme.
The two dukes of Lancaster and Yorke to deliuer
The dukes of
the kings mind of suspicion, made answer, that they Lancaster & Yorke
were not ignorant, how their brother of Glocester, as a excuse the duke
of Glocester to
man sometime rash in woords, would speake the king.
oftentimes more than he could or would bring to
effect, and the same proceeded of a faithfull hart, which he bare
towards the king, for that it grieued him to vnderstand, that the
confines of the English dominions should in anie wise be diminished:
therefore his grace ought not to regard his woords, sith he should
take no hurt thereby. These persuasions quieted the king for a time,
till he was informed of the practise which the duke of Glocester had
contriued (as the fame went amongst diuerse persons) to imprison
the king. For then the duke of Lancaster and Yorke, first reprouing
the duke of Glocester for his too liberall talking, vttering vnaduisedlie
woords that became not his person, and which to haue concealed
had tended more to the opinion of vertue, than to lash out
whatsoeuer his vnstaied mind affoorded, which is a great fault (as in
effect the poet noteth:
Eximia est virtus præstare silentia rebus,
At contra grauis est culpa tacenda loqui)
and perceuing that he set nothing by their woords, were in doubt
least if they should remaine in the court still, he would vpon a
presumptuous mind, in trust to be borne out by them, attempt some
outragious enterprise. Wherefore they thought best to depart for a
time into their countries, that by their absence he might the sooner
learne to staie himselfe for doubt of further displeasure. But it came
to passe, that their departing from the court was the casting awaie
of the duke of Glocester. For after that they were gone, there
ceassed not such as bare him euill will, to procure the K. to dispatch
him out of the way. |836|
The duke in déed sore stomached the matter, that A conspiracie
his counsell might not be followed in all things, and betwéene the
speciallie for that he saw (as he tooke it) that the king duke of Glocester,
and the abbat of
was misled by some persons that were about him, saint Albons.
otherwise than stood with his honor: for reformation Out of an old
whereof, he conferred with the abbat of saint Albons, French pamphlet
and the prior of Westminster. The abbat was both his belonging to Iohn
Stow .
coosine and godfather: and hauing on a daie both the
duke and the prior at his house in saint Albons, after dinner he fell in
talke with the duke and prior, and amongst other com­mun­ic­ a­tion
required of the prior to tell truth, whether he had anie vision the
night before or not. The prior séemed loth to make a direct answer;
but at length being earnestlie requested as well by the abbat as the
duke, he declared that he had a vision in déed, which was “that the
realme of England should be destroied through the misgouernement
of king Richard.” “By the virgine Marie,” said the abbat, “I had the
verie same vision.” The duke herevpon disclosed vnto them all the
secrets of his mind, and by their deuises presentlie contriued an
assemblie of diuerse great lords of the realme at Arundell castell that
daie fortnight, at what time he himselfe appointed to be there, with
the earles of Derbie, Arundell, Marshall, and Warwike: also the
archbishop of Canturburie, the abbat of saint Albons, the prior of
Westminster, with diuerse others.
These estates being come to Arundell castell at the
daie appointed, about the verie beginning of the one An. Reg. 21.
and twentith yeare of king Richards reigne, they
sware ech to other to be assistant in all such matters The purpose of
as they should determine, and therewith receiued the the conspirators.
sacrament at the hands of the archbishop of The earle
marshall
Canturburie, who celebrated masse before them the discloseth the
morow after. Which doone, they withdrew into a conspiracie.
chamber, and fell in counsell togither, where in the end they light
vpon this point; to take king Richard, the dukes of Lancaster &
Yorke, and commit them to prison, and all the other lords of the
kings counsell they determined shuld be drawne and hanged. Such
was their purpose which they ment to haue accomplished in August
following. But the earle marshall that was lord deputie of Calis, and
had married the earle of Arundels daughter, discouered all their
counsell to the king, and the verie daie in which they should begin
their enterprise. The king bad the earle marshall take héed what he
had said, for if it prooued not true, he should repent it: but the earle
constantlie herevnto answered, that if the matter might be prooued
otherwise, he was contented to be drawne and quartered.
The king herevpon went to London, where he dined The earle of
at the house of his brother the earle of Huntington in Rutland saith R.
the stréet behind All hallowes church vpon the banke Grafton.
of the riuer of Thames, which was a right faire and
statelie house. After dinner, he gaue his councell to vnderstand all
the matter; by whose aduise it was agreed, that the king should
assemble foorthwith what power he might conuenientlie make of
men of armes & archers, and streightwaies take horsse,
accompanied with his brother the earle of Huntington, & the earle
marshall. Herevpon at six of the clocke in the afternoone, the iust
houre when they vsed to go to supper, the king mounted on
horssebacke, and rode his waie; whereof the Londoners had great
maruell. After that the king began to approch the dukes house at
Plashie in Essex, where he then laie, he commanded his brother the
earle of Huntington to ride afore, to know if the duke were at home,
and if he were, then to tell him that the king was comming at hand
to speake with him.
The earle with ten persons in his companie The duke of
amending his pase (for the king had made no great Glocester
hast all the night before, as should appeare by his arrested.
iournie) came to the house, and entering into the
court, asked if the duke were at home, and vnderstanding by a
gentlewoman that made him answer, that both the duke and
duchesse were yet in bed, he besought hir to go to the duke, and to
shew him that the king was comming at hand to speake with him,
and foorthwith came the king with a competent number of men of
armes, and a great companie of archers, riding into the base court,
his trumpets sounding before him. The duke herewith came downe
into the base court, where the king was, hauing none other apparell
vpon him, but his shirt, and a cloke or a mantell cast about |837| his
shoulders, and with humble reuerence said that his grace was
welcome, asking of the lords how it chanced they came so earlie,
and sent him no word of their comming? The king herewith
courteouslie requested him to go and make him readie, and appoint
his horsse to be sadled, for that he must needs ride with him a little
waie, and conferre with him of businesse. The duke went vp againe
into his chamber to put vpon him his clothes, and the king alighting
from his horsse, fell in talke with the duchesse and hir ladies. The
earle of Huntington and diuerse other followed the duke into the
hall, and there staied for him, till he had put on his raiment. And
within a while they came foorth againe all togither into the base
court, where the king was deliting with the duchesse in pleasant
talke, whom he willed now to returne to hir lodging againe, for he
might staie no longer, and so tooke his horsse againe, and the duke
likewise. But shortlie after that the king and all his companie were
gone foorth of the gate of the base court, he commanded the earle
marshall to apprehend the duke, which in­con­ti­nent­lie was doone
according to the kings appointment.
¶ Here we find some variance in writers. For as by
Out of an old
an old French pamphlet (which I haue séene) it French pamphlet.
should appeare, the king commanded first, that this
duke should be conueied vnto the tower, where he ment to commen
with him, & not in any other place: but neuerthelesse, the king
shortlie after appointed, that he should be sent to Calis, as in the
same pamphlet is also conteined. Other write, that immediatlie vpon
his apprehension, the earle marshall conueied him vnto the Thames,
and there being set aboord in a ship prepared of purpose, he was
brought to Calis, where he was at length dispatched out of life,
either strangled or smoothered with pillowes (as some doo write.)
For the king thinking it not good, that the duke of Glocester should
stand to his answer openlie, because the people bare him so much
good will, sent one of his iustices called William Kikill, an Irishman
borne, ouer vnto Calis, there to inquire of the duke of Glocester,
whether he had committed any such treasons as were alledged
against him, and the earles of Arundell and Warwike, as after shall
be specified. Iustice Kikill hearing what he confessed vpon his
examination, wrote the same as he was commanded to doo, and
therewith spéedilie returned to the king, and as it hath beene
reported, he informed the king (whether trulie or not, I haue not to
say) that the duke franklie confessed euerie thing, wherewith he was
charged. Wherevpon the king sent vnto Thomas Mowbraie earle
marshall and of Notingham, to make the duke secretlie awaie.
The earle prolonged time for the executing of the † For he was son
kings commandement, though the king would haue to a king, and
had it doone with all expedition, wherby the king vncle to a king.
conceiued no small displeasure, and sware that it
should cost the earle his life if he quickly obeied not his
commandement. The earle thus as it séemed in maner inforced,
called out the duke at midnight, as if he should haue taken ship to
passe ouer into England, and there in the lodging called the princes
In, he caused his seruants to cast featherbeds vpon him, and so
smoother him to death, or otherwise to strangle him with towels (as
some write.) This was the end of that † nobleman, fierce of nature,
hastie, wilfull, and giuen more to war than to peace: and in this
greatlie to be discommended, that he was euer repining against the
king in all things, whatsoeuer he wished to haue forward. He was
thus made awaie not so soone as the brute ran of his death. But (as
it should appeare by some authors) he remained aliue till the
parlement that next insued, and then about the same time that the
earle of Arundell suffered, he was dispatched (as before ye haue
heard.) His bodie was afterwards with all funerall pompe conueied
into England, and buried at his owne manor of Plashie within the
church there, in a sepulchre which he in his life time had caused to
be made, and there erected.
The same euening that the king departed from The earle of
London towards Plashie, to apprehend the duke of Arundell
Glocester, the earle of Rutland and the earle of Kent apprehended.
were sent with a great number of men of armes and
archers to arrest the erle of Arundell; which was doone easilie
inough, by reason that the said earle was trained with faire words at
the kings |838| hands, till he was within his danger: where otherwise
he might haue béene able to haue saued himselfe, and deliuered his
fréends. The earle of Warwike was taken, and committed to the
tower the same day that the king had willed him to dinner, and
shewed him verie good countenance. There were also apprehended
and committed to the tower the same time, the lord Iohn Cobham,
and sir Iohn Cheinie knights. The earle of Arundell was sent to the
Ile of Wight, there to remaine as prisoner, till the next parlement, in
the which he determined so to prouide, that they should be all
condemned, and put to death. And for doubt of some commotion
that might arise amongst the commons, he caused it by open
proclamation to be signified, that these noblemen were not
apprehended for any offense committed long agone, but for new
trespasses against the king, as in the next parlement should be
manifestlie declared and prooued.
Shortlie after, he procured them to be indicted at The names of the
Notingham, suborning such as should appeale them in appellants.
parlement, to wit, Edward earle of Rutland, Thomas A gard of
Mowbraie earle marshall, Thomas Holland earle of Cheshire men
Kent, Iohn Holland earle of Huntington, Thomas about the king.
Beaufort erle of Summerset, Iohn Montacute earle of Salisburie,
Thomas lord Spenser, and the lord William Scroope lord
chamberleine. In the meane time, the king fearing what might be
attempted against him by those that fauoured these noblemen that
were in durance, sent for a power of Cheshire men, that might day
and night keepe watch and ward about his person. They were about
two thousand archers, paid wéekelie, as by the annales of Britaine it
appeareth. The king had little trust in any of the nobilitie, except in
his brother the earle of Huntington, and the earle of Rutland sonne
to the duke of Yorke, and in the earle of Salisburie: in these onelie
he reposed a confidence, and not in any other, except in certeine
knights and gentlemen of his priuie chamber.
In the meane time, whiles things were thus in The lords
broile, before the beginning of the parlement, diuers appointed to
other, beside them of whom we haue spoken, were come in warlike
manner to the
apprehended and put in sundrie prisons. The parlemēt.
parlement was summoned to begin at Westminster Polydor.
the 17 of September, and writs therevpon directed to The dukes of
euerie of the lords to appeare, and to bring with them Lancaster & Yorke
a sufficient number of armed men and archers in their assemble their
powers to resist
best arraie: for it was not knowen how the dukes of the kings
Lancaster and Yorke would take the death of their dealings.
brother, nor how other péeres of the realme would
take the apprehension and imprisonment of their kinsemen, the
earls of Arundell and Warwike, and of the other prisoners. Suerlie
the two dukes when they heard that their brother was so suddenlie
made awaie, they wist not what to saie to the matter, and began
both to be sorowfull for his death, and doubtfull of their owne
states: for sith they saw how the king (abused by the counsell of
euill men) abstained not from such an heinous act, they thought he
would afterwards attempt greater misorders from time to time.
Therefore they assembled in all hast, great numbers of their
seruants, fréends, and tenants, and comming to London, were
receiued into the citie. For the Londoners were right sorie for the
death of the duke of Glocester, who had euer sought their fauour, in
somuch that now they would haue béene contented to haue ioined
with the dukes in seeking reuenge of so noble a mans death,
procured and brought to passe without law or reason, as the
common brute then walked; although peraduenture he was not as
yet made awaie.
Here the dukes and other fell in counsell, and
Caxton. Fabian.
manie things were proponed. Some would that they Polydor.
shuld by force reuenge the duke of Glocesters death,
other thought it méet that the earles Marshall and Huntington, and
certeine others, as chéefe authours of all the mischeefe should be
pursued and punished for their demerites, hauing trained vp the king
in vice and euill customes, euen from his youth. But the dukes (after
their displeasure was somewhat asswaged) determined to couer the
stings of their griefes for a time, and if the king would amend his
maners, to forget also the iniuries past. In the meane time the king
laie at Eltham, and had got about him a great power (namelie of
those archers, which he had sent for out of Cheshire, in whome he
put a singular trust more than in any other.) |839|
There went messengers betwixt him and the dukes, The king and the
which being men of honour did their indeuour to dukes reconciled.
appease both parties. The king discharged himselfe of
blame for the duke of Glocesters death, considering that he had
gone about to breake the truce, which he had taken with France,
and also stirred the people of the realme to rebellion, and further
had sought the destruction and losse of his life, that was his
souereigne lord and lawfull king. Contrarilie, the dukes affirmed, that
their brother was wrongfullie put to death, hauing doone nothing
worthie of death. At length, by the intercession and meanes of those
noble men that went to and fro betwixt them, they were accorded, &
the king promised from thencefoorth to doo nothing but by the
assent of the dukes: but he kept small promise in this behalfe, as
after well appeared.
When the time came, that the parlement should be Caxton.
holden at Westminster, according to the tenour of the
The great
summons, the lords repaired thither, furnished with parlement.
great retinues both of armed men and archers, as the
earle of Derbie, the earle Marshall, the earle of Rutland, the lord
Spenser, the earle of North­um­ber­land, with his sonne the lord Henrie
Persie, and the lord Thomas Persie the said earles brother, also the
lord Scroope treasuror of England, & diuerse other. All the which
earles and lords brought with them a great & strong power, euerie of
them in their best araie, as it were to strengthen the king against his
enimies. The dukes of Lancaster and Yorke were likewise there,
giuing their attendance on the king with like furniture of men of
armes & archers. There was not halfe lodging sufficient within the
citie & suburbes of London for such cōpanies of men as the lords
brought with them to this parlement, called the great parlement: in
somuch that they were constreined to lie in villages abroad ten or
twelue miles on ech side the citie.
In the beginning of this parlement, the king greatlie complained of
the misdemeanour of the péeres and lords of his realme, as well for
the things doone against his will and pleasure, whiles he was yoong,
as for the streit dealing, which they had shewed towards the
quéene, who was thrée houres at one time on hir knees before the
earle of Arundell, for one of hir esquiers, named Iohn Caluerlie, who
neuerthelesse had his head smit frō his shoulders, & all the answer
that she could get, was this: “Madame, praie for yourselfe, and your
husband, for that is best, and let this sute alone.” Those that set
foorth the kings greeuances, as prolocutors in this parlement were
these: Iohn Bushie, William Bagot and Thomas Gréene. The king
had caused a large house of timber to be made within The kings
the palace at Westminster, which he was called an gréeuances
hall, couered aboue head with tiles, and was open at opened in this
parlement.
the ends, that all men might see through it. This
house was of so great a compasse, that scarse it Tho. Walsing.
Iohn Bushie,
might stand within the roome of the palace. In this William Bagot,
house was made an high throne for the king, and a Thomas Gréene.
large place for all estates besides to sit in. There were A new house
made within the
places also made for the appellants to stand on the palace of
one side, and the defendants on the other, and a like Westminster for
roome was made behind for the knights and the areignment of
the lords indicted.
burgesses of the parlement. There was a place Additions to
deuised for the speaker, named sir Iohn Bushie, a Polychron.
knight of Lincolnshire, accompted to be an exceeding Sir Iohn Bushie
speaker.
cruell man, ambitious, and couetous beyond measure.
Immediatlie after, ech man being placed in his The archbishop of
roome, the cause of assembling that parlement was Canturburie
shewed, as that the king had called it for reformation sitting in
parlement is
of diuerse transgressions and oppressions committed accused of
against the peace of his land by the duke of Glocester, treason by the
the earles of Arundell, Warwike, and others. Then sir speaker.
Iohn Bushie stept foorth, and made request on the behalfe of the
communaltie, that it might please the kings highnesse for their
heinous acts attempted against his lawes and roiall maiestie, to
appoint them punishment according to their deseruings, and
speciallie to the archbishop of Canturburie (who then sat next the
king) whome he accused of high treason, for that he had euill
counselled his maiestie, inducing him to grant his letters of pardon
to his brother the earle of Arundell, being a ranke traitor.
When the archbishop began to answer in his owne Impudent
defense, the king willed him to sit |840| downe againe flatterie.
and to hold his peace, for all should be well. Herewith
sir Iohn Bushie besought the king, that the archbishop should not be
admitted to make his answer, which if he did, by reason of his great
wit and good vtterance, he feared least he should lead men awaie to
beléeue him: so the archbishop might be heard no further. Sir Iohn
Bushie in all his talke, when he proponed any matter vnto the king,
did not attribute to him titles of honour, due and accustomed, but
inuented vnused termes and such strange names, as were rather
agreeable to the diuine maiestie of God, than to any earthlie
potentate. The prince being desirous inough of all honour, and more
ambitious than was requisite, seemed to like well of his speech, and
gaue good eare to his talke.
Thus when the archbishop was constreined to Tho. Walsi.
keepe silence, sir Iohn Bushie procéeded in his
purpose, requiring on the behalfe of the commons, that the charters
of pardons granted vnto the traitors, to wit, the duke of Glocester,
and the earles of Arundell and Warwike, should be reuoked by
consent of all the estates now in parlement assembled. The king
also for his part protested, that those pardons were not voluntarilie
granted by him, but rather extorted by compulsion, and therefore he
besought them that euerie man would shew foorth their opinions
what they thought thereof. There were two other persons of great
credit with the king, besides sir Iohn Bushie, that were, as before
yee haue heard, verie earnest to haue those charters of pardon
reuoked and made void, to wit, sir William Bagot, and sir Thomas
Gréene.
But bicause this matter séemed to require good deliberation, it
was first put to the bishops, who with small adoo gaue sentence,
that the said charters were reuocable, and might well inough be
called in: yet the archbishop of Canturburie in his answer herevnto
said, that the king from whome those pardons came, was so high an
estate, that he durst not saie, that anie such charters by him
granted, might be reuoked: not­with­stand­ing, his brethren the
bishops thought otherwise: not considering (saith Thomas
Walsingham) that such reuoking of the kings charters of pardon
should sound highlie to the kings dishonor: forsomuch as mercie and
pardoning transgressions is accompted to be the confirmation and
establishing of the kings seat and roiall estate.
The temporall lords perceiuing what the bishops The charters of
had doone, did likewise giue their consents, to reuoke pardō granted to
the same pardons: but the iudges with those that ye lords made
were toward the law, were not of this opinion, but void by
parlement.
finallie the bishops pretending a scrupulositie, as if
they might not with safe consciences be present where iudgement of
bloud should passe, they appointed a laie man to be their prolocutor
to serue that turne. To conclude, at length all maner of charters of
pardon were made void, for that the same séemed to impeach the
suertie of the kings person. When sir Iohn Bushie and his associats
had obteined that reuocation, it was further by them declared, that
the earle of Arundell had yet an other speciall charter of pardon for
his owne person, which he had obteined after the first. And
therefore sir Iohn Bushie earnestlie requested in name of the
communaltie that the same might likewise be reuoked.
The question then was asked of the bishops, who Thom. Wals.
declared themselues to be of the like opinion,
The archb. of
touching that charter, as they were of the other. At Canturburie
that selfe time the archbishop of Canturburie condemned to
absented himselfe from the parlement, in hope that perpetuall
banishment.
the king would be his fréend, and stand his verie Six daies saith
good lord, for that he had promised nothing should be Grafton .
doone against him in the parlement whilest he was
absent. But neuerthelesse, at the importunate sute of the said sir
Iohn Bushie and others, the archbishop was condemned vnto
perpetuall exile, and appointed to auoid the realme within six
wéekes. And therewith the king sent secretlie to the pope for order
that the archbishop might be remooued from his sée to some other,
which sute was obteined, and Roger Walden lord treasuror was
ordeined archbishop in his place, as after shall appeare.
On the feast daie of saint Matthew, Richard fitz Aleine, earle of
Arundell, was brought foorth to sweare before the king and whole
parlement to such articles as he was to be charged
The earle of
with. And as he stood at the bar, the lord Neuill was Arundell areigned.
commanded by the |841| duke of Lancaster, which sat The duke of
that daie as high steward of England, to take the Lācaster high
hood from his necke, and the girdle from his waste. Steward of
England at this
Then the duke of Lancaster declared vnto him, that areignement.
for his manifold rebellions and treasons against the
kings maiestie he had béene arrested, and hitherto kept in ward,
and now at the petition of the lords and commons, he was called to
answer such crimes as were there to be obiected against him, and
so to purge himselfe, or else to suffer for his offenses, such
punishment as law appointed.
First, he charged him, for that he had traitorouslie The earle of
rid in armour against the king in companie of the Arundell his
duke of Glocester, and of the earle of Warwike, to the answers to the
points of his
breach of peace and disquieting of the realme. His indictmēt.
answer herevnto was, that he did not this vpon anie
euill meaning towards the kings person, but rather for the benefit of
the king and relme, if it were interpreted aright, and taken as it
ought to be. It was further demanded of him, whie he procured
letters of pardon from the K. if he knew himselfe giltlesse? He
answered, that he did not purchase them for anie feare he had of
faults committed by him, but to staie the malicious speach of them
that neither loued the king nor him. He was againe asked, whether
he would denie that he had made anie such rode with the persons
before named, and that in companie of them he entred not armed
vnto the kings presence against the kings will and pleasure? To this
he answered, that he could not denie it, but that he so did.
Then the speaker sir Iohn Bushie, with open mouth, The earle of
besought that iudgement might be had against such a Arundell
traitour: “and your faithfull commons (said he to the condemned.
king) aske and require that so it may be doone.” The
earle turning his head aside, quietlie said to him; “Not the kings
faithfull cōmons require this, but thou, and what thou art I know.”
Then the eight appellants standing on the other side, cast their
gloues to him, and in prosecuting their appeale (which alreadie had
béene read) offered to fight with him man to man to iustifie the
same. Then said the earle, “If I were at libertie, and that it might so
stand with the pleasure of my souereigne, I would not refuse to
prooue you all liers in this behalfe.” Then spake the duke of
Lancaster, saieng to him; “What haue you further to saie to the
points before laid against you?” He answered, “that of the kings
grace he had his letters of generall pardon, which he required to
haue allowed.” Then the duke told him, “that the pardon was
reuoked by the prelates and noble men in the parlement, and
therefore willed him to make some other answer.” The earle told him
againe “that he had an other pardon vnder the kings great seale,
granted him long after of the kings owne motion, which also he
required to haue allowed.” The duke told him, “that the same was
likewise reuoked.” After this, when the earle had nothing more to
saie for himselfe, the duke pronounced iudgement against him, as in
cases of treason is vsed.
But after he had made an end, and paused a little, he said: “The
king our souereigne lord of his mercie and grace, bicause thou art of
his bloud, and one of the peeres of the realme, hath remitted all the
other paines, sauing the last, that is to saie, the beheading, and so
thou shalt onelie lose thy head;” and forthwith he was had awaie, &
led through London vnto the Tower hill. There went with him to sée
the execution doone six great lords, of whome there were thrée
earles, Notingham (that had married his daughter) Kent (that was
his daughters son) and Huntington, being mounted on great
horsses, with a great companie of armed men, and the fierce bands
of the Cheshire-men, furnished with axes, swords, bowes and
arrowes, marching before and behind him, who onelie in this
parlement had licence to beare weapon, as some haue written.
When he should depart the palace, he desired that his hands might
be losed to dispose such monie as he had in his pursse, betwixt that
place and Charingcrosse. This was permitted, and so he gaue such
monie as he had in almes with his owne hands, but his armes were
still bound behind him.
When he came to the Tower hill, the noble men The executiō of
that were about him, mooued him right earnestlie to the earle of
acknowledge his treason against the king. But he in Arundell.
no wise would |842| so doo, but mainteined that he
was neuer traitour in word or deed: and herewith perceiuing the
earles of Notingham and Kent, that stood by with other noble men
busie to further the execution (being as yée haue heard) of kin and
alied to him, he spake to them, and said: “Trulie it would haue
beséemed you rather to haue béene absent than here at this
businesse. But the time will come yer it be long, when as manie shall
meruell at your misfortune as doo now at mine.” After this, forgiuing
the executioner, he besought him not to torment him long, but to
strike off his head at one blowe, and féeling the edge of the sword,
whether it was sharpe inough or not, he said; “It is verie well, doo
that thou hast to doo quicklie,” and so knéeling downe, the
executioner with one stroke, strake off his head: his bodie was
buried togither with his head in the church of the Augustine friers in
Breadstréet within the citie of London.
The death of this earle was much lamented among Ouid.
the people, considering his sudden fall and miserable
end, where as not long before among all the noblemen of this land
(within the which was such a number, as no countrie in the world
had greater store at that present) there was none more esteemed:
so noble and valiant he was, that all men spake honour of him. After
his death, as the fame went, the king was sore vexed in his sléepe
with horrible dreames, imagining that he saw this earle appeare vnto
him threatning him, & putting him in horrible feare, as if he had said
with the poet to king Richard;
Nunc quóq; factorum venio memor vmbra tuorum,
Insequor & vultus ossea forma tuos.
With which visions being sore troubled in sleepe, he curssed the
daie that euer he knew the earle. And he was the more vnquiet,
bicause he heard it reported, that the common people tooke the erle
for a martyr, insomuch that some came to visit the place of his
sepulture, for the opinion they had conceiued of his holinesse. And
where it was bruted abroad as for a miracle, that his head should be
growne to his bodie againe, the tenth daie after his buriall, the king
sent about ten of the clocke in the night, certeine of the nobilitie to
sée his bodie taken vp, that he might be certified of the truth. Which
doone, and perceiuing it was a fable, he commanded the friers to
take downe his armes that were set vp about the place of his buriall,
and to couer the graue, so as it should not be perceiued where he
was buried.
But now to returne to the parlement. After the The earle of
death of this earle, the lord Thomas Beauchampe Warwike
earle of Warwike was brought forth to abide his triall arreigned of
treason.
by parlement, and when his accusers charged him in
like points of treason, such as before were imposed to the earle of
Arundell; he answered that he neuer meant euill to the kings person,
nor thought that those rodes and assemblies that were made in
companie of the duke of Glocester, the earle of Arundell, and others,
might not be accompted treason. But when the iudges had shewed
him, that they could not be otherwise taken than for treason, he
humbly besought the king of mercy and grace. The king then asked
of him whether he had rid with the duke of Glocester, and the earle
of Arundell, as had beene alledged? He answered that he could not
denie it, and wished that he had neuer seene them. Then said the
king, Doo yee not know that you are guiltie of treason? He answered
againe, I acknowledge it; and with sobbing teares besought all them
that were present, to make intercession to the kings maiestie for
him.
Then the king and the duke of Lancaster communed, and after the
king had a while with silence considered of the matter, he said to the
earle; By saint Iohn Baptist, Thomas of Warwike, this confession that
thou hast made, is vnto me more auailable than all the duke of
Glocesters and the earle of Warwikes lands. Herewith the earle
making still intercession for pardon, the lords humblie besought the
king to grant it. Finallie the king pardoned him of life, but banished
him into the Ile of Man, which then was the lord Scroopes, promising
that both he, and his wife, and children, should haue good
enterteinment. Which promise not­with­stand­ing was but slenderlie
kept, for both the earle and the countesse liued in great penurie (as
some write) and yet the lord Scroope, that was lord chamberleine,
had allowed for the earles diet foure thousand nobles yéerelie paid
out of the kings coffers. |843|
On the mondaie next after the arreignement of the The parlemēt
earle of Warwike, to wit, the foure and twentie of adiourned to
September, was the lord Iohn Cobham, and sir Iohn Shrewsburie.
Cheinie arreigned, and found guiltie of like treasons
for which the other had beene condemned before: but at the
earnest instance and sute of the nobles, they were pardoned of life,
and banished, or (as Fabian saith) condemned to perpetuall prison.
¶ The king desirous to see the force of the Londoners, caused them
(during the time of this parlement) to muster before him on Blacke
heath, where a man might haue seene a great number of able
personages. And now after that the parlement had continued almost
till Christmasse, it was adiourned vntill the quinden of S. Hilarie,
then to begin againe at Shrewesburie.
The king then came downe to Lichfield, and there The king keepeth
held a roiall Christmasse, which being ended, he his Christmasse at
tooke his iournie towards Shrewesburie, where the Lichfield.
parlement was appointed to begin in the quinden of 1398.
saint Hilarie, as before yée haue heard. In which Cheshire made a
parlement there holden vpon prorogation, for the loue principalitie.
that the king bare to the gentlemen commons of the K. Richard prince
of Chester.
shire of Chester, he caused it to be ordeined that from
Creation of dukes
thencefoorth it should be called and knowne by the and earles.
name of the principalitie of Chester: and herewith he
intituled himselfe prince of Chester. He held also a roiall feast,
kéeping open houshold for all honest commers, during the which
feast, he created fiue dukes and a duchesse, a marquesse, and foure
earles. The earle of Derbie was created duke of Hereford, the earle
of Notingham that was also earle marshall duke of Norfolke, the
earle of Rutland duke of Aubemarle, the earle of Kent duke of Surrie,
and the earle of Huntington duke of Excester; the ladie Margaret
marshall countesse of Norfolke, was created duchesse of Norfolke;
the earle of Summerset marques Dorset, the lord Spenser earle of
Glocester, the lord Neuill surnamed Daurabie earle of Westmerland,
the lord William Scroope lord chamberleine earle of Wiltshire, and
the lord Thomas Persie lord steward of the kings house earle of
Worcester.
And for the better maintenance of the estate of K. Richard
these noble men, whome he had thus aduanced to beareth saint
higher degrees of honour, he gaue vnto them a great Edward his armes.
part of those lands that belonged to the duke of
Glocester, the earles of Warwike, and Arundell. And now he was in
good hope, that he had rooted vp all plants of treason, and
therefore cared lesse who might be his freend or his fo, than before
he had doone, estéeming himselfe higher in degrée than anie prince
liuing, and so presumed further than euer his grandfather did, and
tooke vpon him to beare the armes of saint Edward, ioining them
vnto his owne armes. To conclude, whatsoeuer he then did, none
durst speake a word contrarie therevnto. And yet such as were
cheefe of his councell, were estéemed of the commons to be the
woorst creatures that might be, as the dukes of Aumarle, Norfolke
and Excester, the earle of Wiltshire, sir Iohn Bushie, sir William
Bagot, and sir Thomas Gréene: which thrée last remembred were
knights of the Bath, against whom the commons vndoubtedlie bare
great and priuie hatred.
But now to proceed. In this parlement holden at Shrewsburie, the
lord Reginald Cobham, being a verie aged man, simple and vpright
in all his dealings, was condemned for none other cause, but for that
in the eleuenth yéere of the kings reigne he was appointed with
other to be attendant about the king as one of his gouernours. The
acts and ordinances also deuised and established in The L. Reginald
the parlement holden in the eleuenth yeare were Cobham
likewise repealed. Moreouer, in this parlement at condemned.
Shrewesburie, it was decréed, that the lord Iohn The authoritie of
Cobham should be sent into the Ile of Gernesie, there both houses in
parlement
to remains in exile, hauing a small portion assigned granted to
him to liue vpon. The king so wrought & brought certaine persons.
things about, that he obteined the whole power of Thom. Wals.
both houses to be granted to certeine persons, as to Iohn duke of
Lancaster, Edmund duke of Yorke, Edmund duke of Aumarle,
Thomas duke of Surrie, Iohn duke of Excester, Iohn marquesse
Dorset, Roger earle of March, Iohn earle of Salisburie, and Henrie
earle of North­um­ber­land, Thomas earle of Glocester, and William
earle of Wiltshire, Iohn Hussie, Henrie Cheimeswike, Robert Teie,
and Iohn Goulofer knights, or to seauen or eight of them. These
were appointed to heare and determine certeine petitions and
matters yet depending and not ended: but |844| by vertue of this
grant, they procéeded to conclude vpon other things, which
generallie touched the knowledge of the whole parlement, in
derogation of the states therof, to the disaduantage of the king, and
perillous example in time to come.
When the king had spent much monie in time of The K. procureth
this parlement, he demanded a disme and a halfe of the popes buls
the cleargie, and a fiftéenth of the temporaltie. against the
breakers of his
Finallie, a generall pardon was granted for all offenses statute.
to all the kings subiects (fiftie onelie excepted) whose
names he would not by anie meanes expresse, but reserued them to
his owne knowledge, that when anie of the nobilitie offended him,
he might at his plesure name him to be one of the number
excepted, and so kéepe them still within his danger. To the end that
the ordinances, iudgements, and acts made, pronounced and
established in this parlement, might be and abide in perpetuall
strength and force, the king purchased the popes buls, in which
were conteined greeuous censures and cursses, pronounced against
all such as did by anie means go about to breake and violate the
statutes in the same parlement ordeined. These buls were openlie
published & read at Paules crosse in London, and in other the most
publike places of the realme.
Manie other things were doone in this parlement, to Rightfull heires
the displeasure of no small number of people; disherited.
namelie, for that diuerse rightfull heires were Polydor.
disherited of their lands and liuings, by authoritie of K. Richard his euill
the same parlement: with which wrongfull dooings gouernment.
the people were much offended, so that the king and
those that were about him, and chéefe in councell, came into great
infamie and slander. In déed the king after he had dispatched the
duke of Glocester, and the other noblemen, was not a little glad, for
that he knew them still readie to disappoint him in all his purposes;
and therefore being now as it were carelesse, did not behaue
himselfe (as some haue written) in such discréet order, as manie
wished: but rather (as in time of prosperitie it often happeneth) he
forgot himselfe, and began to rule by will more than by reason,
threatning death to each one that obeied not his inordinate desires.
By means whereof, the lords of the realme began to feare their
owne estates, being in danger of his furious outrage, whome they
tooke for a man destitute of sobrietie and wisedome, and therefore
could not like of him, that so abused his authoritie.
Herevpon there were sundrie of the nobles, that
The duke of
lamented these mischéefes, and speciallie shewed Hereford
their greefes vnto such, by whose naughtie counsell appealeth the
duke of Norfolk of
they vnderstood the king to be misled; and this they treson. Thom.
did, to the end that they being about him, might Wals.
either turne their copies, and giue him better
counsell; or else he hauing knowledge what euill report went of him,
might mend his maners misliked of his nobles. But all was in vaine,
for so it fell out, that in this parlement holden at Shrewsburie, Henrie
duke of Hereford accused Thomas Mowbraie duke of Norfolke, of
certeine words which he should vtter in talke had betwixt them, as
they rode togither latelie before betwixt London and Brainford,
sounding highlie to the kings dishonor. And for further proofe
thereof, he presented a supplication to the king, wherein he
appealed the duke of Norfolke in field of battell, for a traitor, false
and disloiall to the king, and enimie vnto the realme. This
supplication was red before both the dukes, in presence of the king:
which doone, the duke of Norfolke tooke vpon him to answer it,
declaring that whatsoeuer the duke of Hereford had said against him
other than well, he lied falselie like an vntrue knight as he was. And
when the king asked of the duke of Hereford what he said to it: he
taking his hood off his head, said; “My souereigne lord, euen as the
supplication which I tooke you importeth, right so I saie for truth,
that Thomas Mowbraie duke of Norfolke is a traitour, false and
disloiall to your roiall maiestie, your crowne, and to all the states of
your realme.”
Then the duke of Norfolke being asked what he The duke of
said to this, he answered: “Right déere lord, with your Surrie marshall
fauour that I make answer vnto your coosine here, I and the duke of
Aumarle constable
saie (your reuerence saued) that Henrie of Lancaster of England.
duke of Hereford, like a false and disloiall traitor as he
is, dooth lie, in that he hath or shall say of me otherwise than well.”
No |845| more said the king, we haue heard inough: and herewith
commanded the duke of Surrie for that turne marshall of England, to
arrest in his name the two dukes: the duke of Lancaster father to
the duke of Hereford, the duke of Yorke the duke of Aumarle
constable of England: and the duke of Surrie marshall of the realme
vndertooke as pledges bodie for bodie for the duke of Hereford: but
the duke of Northfolke was not suffered to put in pledges, and so
vnder arrest was led vnto Windsor castell, and there garded with
kéepers that were appointed to sée him safelie kept.
Now after the dissoluing of the parlement at The order of the
Shrewsburie, there was a daie appointed about six procéeding in this
wéeks after, for the king to come vnto Windsor, to appeale.
heare and to take some order betwixt the two dukes,