being the cost of the multitude of bishops, ladies, and their retainers
enjoying the hospitality of the royal household. The Commons had no
business discussing ‘any person of Estate whom he pleased to have in his
company’ and were made to grovel and reveal the source of the com-
plaint: a bill exhibited to them by one Thomas Haxey, not one of their
members but a royal clerk, who was brought before parliament and
condemned by the lords as a traitor. At the plea of the bishops Haxey
was quickly forgiven, but both the substance of the retrospective judg-
ment and the way it was obtained were unprecedented: an individual ‘of
whatever status or condition’ would be punished as a traitor who
inspired the Communes Parliamentito reform anything touching the
king’s person, government, or regality (Regimen, aut Regalitatem).^48
Richard was intent on erasing the humiliations of ten years before. In
June 1397 the earls of Arundel and Warwick were lured into meetings
where they could be arrested, and the king led a force of household
troops by night to apprehend his uncle, the duke of Gloucester, and
promise him the same quantity of mercy as he had shown Simon Burley.
In August, another bill of appeal was presented at a council meeting in
Nottingham castle: before Richard, ‘in his Roial Estat’, with the crown
on his head, the three prisoners were accused of conspiring against his
‘high and royal majesty, crown and estate’, as traitors to king and
realm. In September the process was continued in parliament at West-
minster, where Richard, attended by a force of his Cheshire archers,
presided ‘in greater splendour and solemnity than any king of this realm
before’, in a specially constructed hall ‘from which he could deliver his
judgments’, and the chancellor in his opening sermon founded good
governance on the obedience of subjects to a powerful king and the laws
he made to teach them how to behave towards him and one another. A
general pardon was promised for the high crimes and misdemeanours
the people had committed ‘against their allegiance and the state of our
lord the king and the law of his land’, but certain offences were to be
excepted from it, and fifty individuals whom the king would name.^49
The speaker, Sir John Bussy, denounced Gloucester and Arundel as
traitors for procuring ‘by statute’ the commission of 1386 which gave
them and others ‘the government of the king and realm, both within the
king’s household and beyond’. The commission was read and repealed
The contested state of Richard II 269(^48) W. Mager noted the frequency of references to the ‘regality and state’ of the king of
England in the 1390s: Zur Enstehung des modernen Staatsbegriffe(Wiesbaden, 1968), 66; RP
iii. 279 (15), 286 (13), 338–41, 343 (28), 407–8, 420; in Henry IV’s first parliament, the
Commons were quick to obtain the repudiation of the judgment against Haxey: ibid. 420, 434;
EHDiv. 167–9; T. F. T. Plucknett, ‘Impeachment and Attainder’, TRHS, 5th ser. 3 (1953),
148–9; The History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1386–1421, ed. J. S. Roskell,
Linda Clark, and Carol Rawcliffe, 4 vols. (Stroud, 1992), i. 80–2.
(^49) RPiii. 347, 374; Plucknett, ‘Impeachment and Attainder’, 149 ff.; Chronicles of the
Revolution, 1397–1400, ed. C. Given-Wilson (Manchester, 1993), 54 ff.