therefore easy to understand, and using secular lords and the knightly
class to enforce them. The point of Wyclif’s argument is that the clergy
should not have temporal power or great possessions, since ‘the worship
of priests’ was ‘grounded in virtues’, only ‘the worship of lords...
grounded in states’. The king fulfilled his office when he kept lords,
commons, and labourers in harmony in their proper ‘states’, and ‘then
were Christ’s realm well set in its state’.^44
The more Richard was led to exalt ‘the state of the king’ the more he
was personally humiliated. In 1386 he saw Michael de la Pole, by then
his chancellor and earl of Suffolk, impeached and imprisoned, when he
came to ‘the wonderful parliament’ asking for an aid to save the realm
from the enemy. Pole was accused among other things of failing, as
one who represented l’estat du roi, to act on the advice of the lords
appointed to recommend how ‘the state of the king and the realm’ could
be put ‘in better governance and disposition’—advice which seems to
have been that the size of the king’s household should be reduced
and ‘his state concerning (touchant) the revenues and charges of his
exchequer’ be audited. The chronicler Henry Knighton writes that the
king’s resistence to his chancellor’s impeachment was overcome by a
reminder of the fate of Edward II, which was said to have been in accor-
dance with an ‘ancient law’ giving the people (not specifically parlia-
ment) power to depose a king who would not be ‘governed and guided
by the laws of the land and its enactments and laudable ordinances’ and
by ‘the wholesome counsel of the lords and nobles of the kingdom’.^45
A further act of this parliament appears to have fuelled the king’s
resentment for the rest of his reign, as an affront to his ‘prerogative or
the liberties of his crown’: the forcing of his assent to a Commons
petition that fourteen bishops and nobles should be appointed, if
only for a year, to have (as he afterwards complained) ‘government
[gubernaclum] of the whole kingdom’. Within the year Richard put ten
questions to his judges at a meeting of his council at Shrewsbury (and
repeated the operation at Nottingham) to elicit the judgments that those
who had procured the appointment of the commission had indeed
attacked the king’s regality and prerogative and should be executed as
traitors, and that parliament could not impeach the king’s ministers
without his will. The ninth question showed that Richard resented
The contested state of Richard II 267(^44) John Wyclif, Tractatus de Civili Dominio Liber Primus, ed. R. L. Poole (London: Wyclif
Society, 1885), 185–98; Tractatus de Officio Regis, ed. A. W. Pollard and C. Sayle (London:
Wyclif Society, 1887), 49–59, 65–7, 70–1, 92–3, 79; Four English Political Tracts of the Later
Middle Ages, ed. Genet, 5, 8, 9, 13, 14, 19; Anne Hudson, Lollards and their Books(London,
1985), 10, 141, 144.
(^45) RPiii. 215–18, 221–4; EHDiv. 150–2; Select Documents, ed. S. B. Chrimes and A. L.
Brown (London, 1961), 160–2; Knighton’s Chronicle, 1337–1396, ed. and tr. G. H. Martin
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 352 ff., 360–1; Clarke, Fourteenth Century Studies, 48–52.