page_title: Wonderful Parliament
section_title: Attack on Michael de la Pole
hierarchical_section_title: Wonderful Parliament / Attack on the Royal prerogative / Attack on Michael de la Pole
caption_attribution_description: English: Eltham Palace, LondonThis is a photo of listed building number 1079041.
context_page_description: The Wonderful Parliament was an English parliamentary session held in October to November 1386 which pressed for reforms of King Richard II's administration. The King had become increasingly unpopular in the preceding years due in the main to perceived extravagance to his favourites and the unsuccessful prosecution of the ongoing war in France. Further, there was a well-grounded fear that the King of France was poised to invade England, as he had been gathering a fleet in Flanders for much of the year. Discontent with Richard II climaxed when the King requested a then-unprecedented sum with which to invade France himself. Instead of granting the King's request as he must have expected, the two Houses of the Lords and Commons effectively united against him and his unpopular Chancellor, Michael de la Pole, 1st Earl of Suffolk. They saw de la Pole as both a favourite who had benefited—unfairly—from the King's unwarranted largesse, and the minister responsible for the King's failures. They demanded the Earl's impeachment.
  The King at first refused to attend the parliament; he in fact attempted to dissolve the sitting, to no avail.
context_section_description: It is possible that the original plan was to Impeach de Vere, who was felt to have at least as much influence with the King as Suffolk, if not more. However, the fact that the attack was eventually launched on the Chancellor is probably down to the simple fact that he was more parvenu and thus, of the two, the easier target. Whatever the original tactics, the plan that was finally acted upon was to impeach de la Pole, and thus to attack the King indirectly; but the articles of impeachment had been sloppily prepared (in fact, it was only the second time in its history that parliament had attempted to impeach anyone). This is not to say that the articles were "frivolous, trivial or paltry." But even so, as a result, the most general charges were unprovable. Others (for example, the conduct of the war with France) were shown to be the joint responsibility of the royal council, and so not solely Suffolk's fault. A recent verdict upon the claims against Suffolk suggests that they were "trivial or unfounded... merely pretexts for dismissing the chief minister of an unpopular King." Even so, the parliament itself became increasingly focused on personally attacking the Earl and the perceived abuse of the authority of the chancellorship, even down to the supposed theft of a charter from Dover Castle. The affair ended up "dragg[ing] on for at least a month [and] degenerated into three badly sustained and trivial charges, behind each of which motives of malice or private interest may be suspected," one commentator has written. De la Pole's main defence was two-pronged: on the one hand, he accused his accusers of expecting a higher morality from him than from the King's other advisers, and on the other hand, that he could not be held solely responsible for what were collective decisions. 
  King Richard had not attended the parliament in person, having retired—possibly in anger—to the royal palace at Eltham, and he refused to obey its demands for impeachment. According to one contemporary chronicler, he declared he would not get rid of a kitchen scullion on the grounds that parliament asked him to. According to the author of another chronicle, the Eulogium Historiarum, he even tried to dissolve parliament at this point, but the Commons refused to leave.
caption: Part of Eltham Palace in Kent, where Richard sat out most of the parliament
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