as a usurpation of royal power, along with the pardon that Gloucester,
Arundel, and Warwick had prudently obtained for their actions in the
parliament of 1388, so that they could be tried and condemned before
the lords. The Commons also sought the king’s leave to impeach
Thomas Arundel, the earl’s brother, who had been chancellor in 1386
and for most of the years since and was now archbishop of Canterbury,
for his essential part in the drawing-up of a commission which had been
‘expressly against the king, his state, his crown, and his dignity’, a
phrase used repeatedly in the proceedings of the parliament, ‘the peace
of the realm’, ‘royal power’ or ‘liberty of the crown’ sometimes
replacing the king’s ‘state’.^50
Richard was alleged to have told one of his closest servants, probably
in the summer of 1398, that his one ambition was to see the Crown of
England enjoying the prosperity and obedience it had under his prede-
cessors, and to ‘be chronicled perpetually that with wit and wisdom and
manhood he had recovered his dignity, regality, and honourable estate’.
But the truth of his state was that it depended on his ability to exercise
authority over the magnates and use parliament as effectively as it had
been used against him. In an attempt to consolidate his victory in 1397,
the definition of treason was extended by statute from killing the king
to plotting his deposition, and the answers of the judges in 1387 were
reaffirmed by ‘all the estates of parliament’, and the proceedings of
1388 were formally annulled. On the petition of the Commons it was
ordained that anyone seeking the repeal of any judgments or statutes of
the parliament of 1397-8 should be adjudged a traitor, and that the
lords should take individual oaths to observe them. The king was
advised, however, that it would be ‘against the liberty of the crown’ for
him to seek to bind his successors, by oath or any other way, and pro-
posed rather to ask the pope to pronounce sentence of excommunica-
tion on contrariants.^51
The continuing arbitrariness of Richard’s rule did in fact lead to the
immediate repeal of the acts of the parliament of 1397–8 and the
restoration of those of 1388, when Bolingbroke returned from banish-
ment to usurp the throne in 1399. In the first parliament of Henry IV
proctors ‘for all the estates and people’ of England (a bishop and an
abbot for the clergy, an earl and a baron for the nobility, a knight ‘for
all the bachelors and commons of this land by south’ and another for
those ‘by north’, along with the chief justice and another justice of
common pleas) declared that Richard was ‘deposed and deprived’ of
270 Monarchical State of the Later Middle Ages
(^50) RPiii. 348–51, 374–85; EHDiv. 170–2.
(^51) Simon Walker, ‘Richard II’s Views on Kingship’, in Rulers and Ruled in Late Medieval
England: Essays Presented to Gerald Harriss, ed. R. E. Archer and S. Walker (London, 1995),
50; RPiii. 351–9.