The funeral of Richard II at the Dominican friary of King’s Langley in Hertfordshire in March 1400 marked not only the end of the king’s life but also the symbolic end of the international court culture he embodied. Richard’s own clearly stated desire to be buried at Westminster abbey next to his first consort, Anne of Bohemia, was ignored in favor of a more obscure location. His burial in the highly visible royal mausoleum at Westminster would have represented too great a threat to the new Lancastrian regime. Instead, a memorial service, attended by the new King Henry IV, was held at St Paul’s cathedral with Richard’s body clearly on display. The objective of this compromise arrangement was to kill two birds with one stone – to fulfil the pragmatic need to display the former king’s corpse so that rumors of his survival could be eliminated (as far as possible), while denying Richard’s own desire to be reunited with his deceased wife (the double tomb commissioned by him was already in place and other aspects of the king’s regality, such as his full-length portrait, were already on display). Although it was possible to remove his portrait from the abbey it would have been difficult – if not impossible – to move the double tomb, which had been completed by this time. The result, as Joel Burden, states was a “classic fudged affair.”

The desire to suppress the memory of Richard’s rule implied by such a fudge was particular not only to the dead king’s obsequies but also to the international court culture over which he had presided. Sundering Richard’s earthly remains from those of his wife was perhaps the most symbolically effective way of suppressing the memory of the international court culture they represented. As this book has argued, it was Richard’s marriage to Anne of Bohemia that allowed the international court culture to flourish in England. But there was always internal resistance to that culture, principally from the pro-war party and the Appellants. As we saw in chapter 1, attempts to dismantle the international culture had begun as early as 1386–88 when the Lords Appellant (of whom Henry Bolingbroke, later Henry IV, was a junior member) purged the Ricardian court, executed some of the king’s adherents (including his former tutor, Simon Burley), and exiled others such as his favorite Robert de Vere, earl of Oxford.