above all that parliament had presumed to turn into a statute the grant
like that made by Edward II in 1310 of a commission with ‘full power
to order the state of our household and our realm’ (plein poair de
ordener l’estat de nostre hostel & de nostre roiaume). The judges were
arraigned, and the chief justice, Robert Tresilian, was the most notable
of those executed at ‘the Merciless Parliament’ of 1388, in which the
king’s uncle, Thomas duke of Gloucester, his cousin, Henry Boling-
broke, earl of Derby (the future Henry IV), and the earls of Arundel,
Nottingham, and Warwick turned the accusation back at the king’s
ministers and friends and charged them of ‘accroaching to themselves
royal power, disfranchising our said lord the king of sovereignty, and
stealing and diminishing the royal prerogative and regality’. To avoid
the objection to impeachment without the king’s consent the five lords
adapted the common law process of ‘appeal of felony’ to bring their
victims before parliament, and when this procedure also was adjudged
unknown to English Law or Civil Law, declared that the realm of
England never was ruled by Civil Law, and it was the intention of the
king and the lords of parliament that it never should be; moreover,
English courts were ‘only executors of ancient laws and customs of
the realm and ordinances and establishments of parliament’, and it
was the lords’ intention that such a high crime as this, ‘which touched
the person of the king... and the state of all his realm, and was
perpetrated by... peers of the realm’, should be tried ‘by law and
course of parliament’ the lords acting as the judges.^46
It is significant of the concern for government according to the law
that Richard was presented with a collection of the statutes in 1389, the
year in which he was at last able to say: ‘I am of full age to govern my
house and household and also my kingdom. It seems to me unjust that
my state should be worse than that of the least person in the kingdom.’^47
In 1391 the Commons prayed that the king should ‘be free in his
regality, liberty and royal dignity’ as any of his progenitors had been,
notwithstanding any statute or ordinance previously made, particularly
‘in the time of King Edward the Second, who lies at Gloucester’.
Richard thanked them for their tenderness to his ‘honour and his state’,
and delayed his revenge for the the humiliations of 1386–8 until 1397.
At the beginning of that year he put on a show of anger when he learnt
from the chancellor and the lords that the Commons had raised with
them concerns which ‘seemed to him against his regality and state [sa
Regalie & Estat], and his royal liberty’, the most offensive complaint
268 Monarchical State of the Later Middle Ages
(^46) RPiii. 221–4, 229–45; SRii. 44–6; EHDiv. 154–63; Knighton’s Chronicle, 368–89,
392–9, 453–505; S. B. Chrimes, ‘Richard II’s questions to the judges’, Law Quarterly Review,
72 (1956), 365–90; D. Clementi, ‘Richard II’s ninth question to the judges’, EHR86 (1971),
96–113.
(^47) Saul, Richard II, 237; EHDiv. 164–5.