noble estates of the lords’ bad councillors and justices must be replaced,
and the lords must not use the ‘power they had in their great estates’ to
thwart the remedies provided for the people as a whole. When Richard
appointed his uncle, John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster, and a group of
earls and bishops to examine ‘in privy council... the Estate and
Government’ of the king and his household, the lords in parliament said
bluntly that amendment of government throughout the realm should
‘start with the principal member, which is the king himself, and then
proceed from person to person, including the men of Holy Church, and
from the highest place to the lowest, sparing no person, degree or
place’.^42
The ‘absolutism’ of Richard II may have drawn inspiration from the
De regimine principumof Giles of Rome, a book known to have been
in the library of Simon Burley, the young Richard’s tutor and pre-
sumably a kinsman of Walter Burley, the commentator on Aristotle and
tutor of Richard’s father; particular intransigence against Simon was
shown by Arundel and his allies when they had some of the king’s
closest friends condemned to death or exile at the ‘Merciless Parliament’
of 1388. The influence of Roman law has also been seen in Richard’s
quite sudden insistence in the 1390s on new forms of ceremonial and
royal address emphasizing his ‘majesty’.^43 But a sufficient intellectual
inspiration could have been found in traditional ideas of the hierarchy
of authority and the king’s responsibility for maintaining the peace of
church and realm, such as were expressed in the first years of the reign
by John Wyclif in his tracts De Civili Dominio(‘On civil lordship’) and
De Officio Regis(‘On the office of king’). A ‘civil policy’ consists (stat),
said Wyclif, in a settled order which allots men’s rank (gradus) from
lowest to highest, and the policy which best does this is monarchy. The
king has a threefold existence in his kingdom: in the space he occupies
as an individual, in the space over which his presence is immediately
felt, and in the space (co-extensive with the kingdom) throughout which
his influence makes him virtually or potentially present. Home-grown
themes stand out in a version of the tract on the office of king which
Wyclif soon provided in English so that it should be ‘more knowen’ how
kings ought to rule—not as tyrants, but ‘by reason that falls to their
state’. ‘The king should maintain his lordship by power of his law’, in
accordance with statutes which in England excelled in being few and
266 Monarchical State of the Later Middle Ages
(^42) RPiii. 100–2, 104 (38); Saul, Richard II, 80–1.
(^43) M. V. Clarke, Fourteenth Century Studies, ed. L. S. Sutherland and M. McKisack
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1937), 120; R. H. Jones, The Royal Policy of Richard II:
Absolutism in the Later Middle Ages(Oxford: Blackwell, 1968), 144, 159–63, and ch. 12; the
treatise by Giles of Rome was also translated into English by the Oxford scholar, John Trevisa
(1326–1412); N. Saul, ‘Richard II and the Vocabulary of Kingship’, EHR110 (1995), 861,
868 ff.; id., Richard II, 237, 340–1.