This is not to deny that the long fifteenth century was different from the centuries that had gone before, and, indeed, those that followed, in its sheer number of depositions, and it was this, of course, which gave the traditional, negative, view its credibility. Four kings were removed from the throne by force. Another, Edward IV, was also temporarily deposed and his predecessor reinstated, giving six violent changes of ruler in all between 1399 and 1485. This clearly destabilized ‘high’ politics. But what modern readings of the period seek to do is to present that destabilization as strengthening rather than subverting the power of the crown. The importance attached to the king within the body politic made his removal profoundly unsettling. The extent to which subjects could challenge, let alone depose, the anointed king was ideologically extremely problematic and this was normally a source of great strength to the king. In the fifteenth century deposition ceased to be unthinkable but, it is now argued, this was not the consequence of an erosion of the power and importance of the crown. What had transformed the situation was that, for the first time since the twelfth century, opposition to the reigning king could be legitimated by the existence of rival claimants to the throne.
The removal of Richard II from the throne in 1399 was not the first deposition of a post-Conquest king, but it was the first to interrupt the undisputed line of descent. In 1327 Edward II had simply been replaced by his eldest son. In 1399 Richard II had no children. If it was accepted that the crown should descend in the male line, as we now know that Edward III believed,2 then Henry IV’s accession was that of the rightful heir. But if descent through the female was allowed, and there was a twelfth-century precedent in the transmission of the crown from Henry I to Henry II via Matilda, then Richard’s heir in 1399 was his young cousin Edmund Mortimer, earl of March. Edmund was the great-grandson of Edward III’s second son, Lionel, duke of Clarence, whereas Henry IV was the son of Edward’s third son, John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster. But Edmund’s descent was through Lionel’s daughter Philippa. The issue was not prominent in 1399, mainly because Edmund was a child and could be easily passed over, but the Mortimer claim did not go away and it introduced a new element into politics.
Given the ideological difficulty of opposing the king, the need to find some way of legitimating dissent was crucial. Earlier in the middle ages, and still in the fifteenth century, this was usually done by claiming that the critics of the crown had the king’s
Best interests at heart and that their opposition was directed not at him but at the ‘evil counsellors’ who were leading him astray. This convenient fiction only worked, however, if the king went along with it and repudiated his advisers, or at least the policies associated with them. If he refused, then ultimately the only alternative was deposition. Trying to make the king behave better by placing him under some sort of restraint, which might seem the obvious solution, was not in fact an option, other than as a way of jolting the king into mending his ways voluntarily. In a very real sense a controlled king was not a king at all. The king’s role required him to have the last word. Put simply, his job was to make decisions which no one else had the authority to make - and that authority could not be wielded by committee, or even by another dominant individual, without coming to seem at best negotiable and at worst partisan.
Horrifying as the thought of deposition undoubtedly was, the practical inalienability of royal authority meant that the possibility of deposition as a solution never quite went away. Hence the importance of some way of squaring the ideological circle, and validating that possibility. The existence of an accepted rival claimant made deposition thinkable (although still very far from easy) by allowing the disaffected to claim the moral high ground by presenting themselves as upholders of the rightful king. This is most obvious in the immediate aftermath of a deposition, when the displaced ruler was still alive and could act as a powerful focus for opposition to his supplanter. The revolt of Richard Il’s aristocratic allies in the Epiphany rising of 1400 or the plans to reinstate Edward V in the summer of 1483 are examples. But once the deposed ruler was dead, and such risings generally triggered his murder, this validation was lost unless there remained a successor to his title.
This was the role of the Mortimer claim under both Henry IV and Henry V, although it was deployed without encouragement from Edmund Mortimer himself. In 1460 it was his inheritance of the Mortimer claim through his mother Anne, Edmund’s sister, that allowed Richard, duke of York, to challenge Henry VI’s right to be king, after his attempts to lay claim to a greater share of political authority by other means had been construed as treason by the circle around the king. When York’s son, Edward, became king in 1461, the act of parliament setting out his title included, as one would expect, a laborious assertion of the supremacy of the Mortimer claim over that of Lancaster. It also, revealingly, took the trouble to dismantle a claim which Henry IV himself had only hinted at in 1399 - that he was not just Richard’s heir but that his title was actually superior to Richard’s. The story was that Henry’s great-great-grandfather (in the maternal line), Edmund of Lancaster, had been the eldest (not the second) son of Henry III, passed over in the succession because of a physical deformity.
Dynasticism clearly mattered. Bolingbroke’s rewriting of history, or Richard III’s claim in 1483 that the children of Edward IV were illegitimate because their parents’ marriage had been bigamous, confirms as much. So does the way in which some usurpers found themselves contending with ‘ghosts’.3 Henry IV was confronted by a pseudo-Richard II, and Henry VII famously faced a whole series of pretenders. Indeed, in a sense Henry VII (whose own title to the throne was negligible) was himself a ‘ghost’, standing in for the dead sons of Edward IV by his marriage to their sister Elizabeth of York. Henry’s ‘Yorkist’ credentials clearly carried considerable weight with contemporaries, but it was not something Henry himself wished to stress, and he underlined his own status as rightful king by dating his reign from the day before Richard III’s death at Bosworth. In practice, however, Henry could not void Richard’s reign. It had to be recognized that Richard had been king indeed, or, as the standard formulation had it, ‘king late in deed but not in right’.
The public emphasis on rightful title explains why Shakespeare’s plays can present the political conflicts of the period as being only about who should be king. But, except in the immediate aftermath of a deposition, dynastic concerns always signalled the existence of other tensions. No king in this period was deposed only on the basis that he should not have been king in the first place, but was always presented as having ruled unacceptably. This was even the case with Edward V, who as an uncrowned twelve-year-old had no record of government to criticize. His accession, it is true, was blocked on the grounds that he was illegitimate. But it is clear that his removal was also being justified on the grounds that, as a child dominated by his mother’s family, he would rule badly.
World History
