Richard II of England

• 1. Three Kings at Bordeaux

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  Richard II of England was born in the Archbishop's Palace of Bordeaux on the 6th of January 1367. Contemporary sources claimed that three kings were present at the birth: "the King of Castile, the King of Navarre and the King of Portugal". The baby arrived reportedly early, brought on by the stress his mother Joan suffered when her husband, the Black Prince, left on a Spanish campaign. Whatever the truth of that royal audience, the tale suits a life lived on a stage. Richard would rule England from 1377 until 1399, and historians still argue over how he ruled. How does a child inherit a kingdom while his uncles circle him? Why did a king who craved peace, ceremony and obedience end up removed by his own cousin? And why do so many people picture him through a play rather than through the record?

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• 2. A Boy Among Uncles

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  In 1376, during the Good Parliament, the Black Prince lay dying in a house he had taken in London. He summoned his father, Edward III, and his brother John of Gaunt, and made both swear to recognise his son Richard as the next king. They swore. The Prince died in June 1376. The Commons genuinely feared that Gaunt would grab the crown, so Richard was swiftly invested with the princedom of Wales and his father's other titles.

  Edward III, frail for some years, died on the 21st of June 1377 after reigning for 50 years. His grandson was ten. Richard was crowned at Westminster Abbey on the 16th of July. Fear of Gaunt again shaped the arrangements, and a regency led by the king's uncles was ruled out. In its place came a series of "continual councils" from which Gaunt was shut out.

  Gaunt and his younger brother Thomas of Woodstock, Earl of Buckingham, kept great informal influence over government. Even so, the king's own councillors and friends gradually took charge of royal business. Chief among them were Sir Simon de Burley and Robert de Vere, 9th Earl of Oxford. Within three years the Commons trusted these men so little that the councils were abandoned in 1380.

  Money made the mood worse. Three poll taxes between 1377 and 1381 paid for military expeditions on the continent, and those expeditions failed. By 1381 ordinary English people felt a deep resentment toward the governing classes, and it was about to boil over.

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• 3. Mile End and Smithfield

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  On the 12th of June, bands of peasants gathered at Blackheath, near London, under the leaders Wat Tyler, John Ball and Jack Straw. The rebellion had begun in Kent and Essex in late May. Its roots lay deeper than the latest poll tax. The Black Death and later outbreaks of plague had upset the economy and the population, and landowners and peasants had been at odds ever since. The rebels burned John of Gaunt's Savoy Palace. They killed Simon Sudbury, the Archbishop of Canterbury and Lord Chancellor, and Robert Hales, the Lord High Treasurer. Their demand was the complete abolition of serfdom.

  The king sheltered in the Tower of London with his councillors. They concluded that the Crown lacked the forces to scatter the rebels and that negotiation was the only choice. How far the fourteen-year-old Richard shaped that decision is unclear, though historians have suggested he favoured talks. On the 13th of June he set out along the River Thames, but crowds thronging the banks at Greenwich made landing impossible, and he turned back to the Tower.

  On Friday the 14th of June he rode out and met the rebels at Mile End. He accepted their demands. This only emboldened them, and the looting and killings went on. The next day he met Wat Tyler at Smithfield and repeated his promises, but Tyler was not convinced. The king's men grew restless and a scuffle broke out. William Walworth, the Lord Mayor of London, dragged Tyler from his horse and killed him.

  The rebels realised what had happened, and the moment turned tense. Richard called out, "I am your captain, follow me!", and led the crowd away. Walworth meanwhile gathered a force to ring the peasant army. Richard granted clemency, and the rebels went home.

  The pardon did not last. The king soon revoked the charters of freedom and pardon he had granted. As trouble continued elsewhere, he went into Essex himself and defeated the last rebels in a small skirmish at Billericay on the 28th of June. Hunters then tracked down leaders such as John Ball, who were executed. Richard had shown real courage for his age. Yet the lesson he likely took, that disobedience endangers royal authority, fed the absolutist outlook that would later prove fatal to him.

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• 4. Favourites and Appellants

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  On the 20th of January 1382, Richard married Anne of Bohemia, daughter of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV. The match had diplomatic purpose. With Europe divided by the Western Schism, Bohemia and the Empire looked like possible allies against France in the Hundred Years' War. The Silesian Duke and Bohemian Viceroy Přemysl I Piast negotiated it from his castle at Fryštát, in the present-day Czech town of Karviná. England did not like the marriage. Large sums went to the Empire, no military victory followed, and the couple had no children. Anne died of the plague in 1394, and her husband mourned her deeply.

  Michael de la Pole had been central to the marriage talks and won the king's confidence. He came from an upstart merchant family. When Richard made him chancellor in 1383 and Earl of Suffolk two years later, the older nobility took offence. So did they at Robert de Vere, the king's favourite, who was raised to the new title of Duke of Ireland in 1386. The chronicler Thomas Walsingham hinted that the king and de Vere were lovers, but he bore the king a grudge.

  The war with France split the court. The king's party wanted negotiation, while Gaunt and Buckingham urged a large campaign to protect English possessions. A so-called crusade under Henry le Despenser, Bishop of Norwich, failed miserably. Richard then led a punitive expedition against Scotland, France's ally, in 1385, but his army returned without ever meeting the Scots in battle. Only an uprising in Ghent stopped a French invasion of southern England. Gaunt left in 1386 to press his claim to the throne of Castile, amid rumours of a plot against him. Leadership of the opposition passed to Buckingham, now Duke of Gloucester, and to Richard Fitzalan, 4th Earl of Arundel.

  At the parliament of October 1386, Michael de la Pole asked for taxation at an unprecedented level to defend the realm. Parliament refused to consider any request until he was removed. Richard famously replied that he would not dismiss even a scullion from his kitchen at parliament's request. Only the threat of deposition made him give way. A commission was set up to review and control royal finances for a year. That assembly became known as the Wonderful Parliament.

  Richard was deeply offended. From February to November 1387 he toured the country on what he called a "gyration", rallying support. He made de Vere Justice of Chester, which began a loyal military base in Cheshire. Chief Justice Robert Tresilian also gave him a ruling that parliament's conduct had been unlawful and treasonable.

  Back in London, Richard faced Gloucester, Arundel and Thomas de Beauchamp, 12th Earl of Warwick. They brought an appeal of treason against de la Pole, de Vere, Tresilian, Nicholas Brembre, the mayor of London, and Alexander Neville, the Archbishop of York. The king stalled while he waited for de Vere to bring troops from Cheshire. The three peers were joined by Gaunt's son Henry Bolingbroke, Earl of Derby, and Thomas de Mowbray, Earl of Nottingham. History knows the five as the Lords Appellant. On the 20th of December 1387 they caught de Vere at Radcot Bridge, routed his forces and drove him abroad.

  Richard had to obey. Brembre and Tresilian were condemned and executed. De Vere and de la Pole, who had also fled, were sentenced to death in their absence at the Merciless Parliament in February 1388. The king's circle of favourites lay in ruins.

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• 5. Peace and Revenge

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  On the 3rd of May 1389, Richard took full control of government and blamed the recent troubles entirely on bad councillors. He was over twenty-one. The Lords Appellant had failed to assemble a broad anti-French coalition, and the north of England had suffered a Scottish raid. Richard promised peace with France and a major cut in taxation. John of Gaunt came home in 1389 and settled his quarrel with the king, then calmed English politics as an elder statesman. For eight years the king governed in relative harmony with his old opponents. He had not forgotten the insults, however, and the execution of his former teacher Sir Simon de Burley stung most of all.

  A proposal in 1393 would have greatly enlarged the English Crown's lands in Aquitaine. It collapsed because the English king would have had to pay homage to the King of France, which the English public refused to accept. In 1396 a truce was agreed instead, set to last 28 years. As part of it Richard promised to marry Isabella of Valois, daughter of Charles VI. She was six years old, so some people doubted the plan, since she could not give England an heir for many years.

  Ireland drew a different response. English lordships there faced the danger of being overrun by Gaelic Irish kingdoms. Richard crossed in the autumn of 1394 and stayed until May 1395 with more than 8,000 men, the largest force brought to the island in the late Middle Ages. Several Irish chieftains submitted to English overlordship. It was among the finest achievements of his reign and lifted his standing at home, though the gains did not last.

  In July 1397 the king had Gloucester, Arundel and Warwick arrested. Why he did it is not wholly clear. One chronicle spoke of a plot against him, but there is no evidence for one. More likely he felt strong enough at last to punish the three for the events of 1386-1388. Arundel went on trial at the parliament of September 1397 and, after a bitter quarrel with the king, was condemned and executed. Gloucester was being held at Calais by the Earl of Nottingham. Just before his trial, Nottingham reported him dead. The king probably ordered the killing to avoid the shame of executing a prince of the blood.

  Warwick was also sentenced to death, but his penalty was reduced to life imprisonment. Arundel's brother Thomas, the Archbishop of Canterbury, was exiled for life. Richard carried the persecution into the counties, prosecuting local men who had backed the appellants. Their fines brought the Crown great revenues, though chroniclers questioned the legality of the cases. Gaunt's collusion made much of this possible, and a wide group of magnates supported it. Many received grand new titles and were mocked as Richard's "duketti". Bolingbroke became Duke of Hereford, and Mowbray became Duke of Norfolk.

  The House of Lancaster still posed a threat. It was richer than any other family in England and of royal descent, which made it a likely heir to the childless king. In December 1397 Bolingbroke and Mowbray fell into a quarrel. Bolingbroke said Mowbray had told him that, as former appellants, they were next in line for royal revenge. Mowbray denied it fiercely, since such a remark amounted to treason. A parliamentary committee ordered a duel, but at the last moment Richard exiled both men, Mowbray for life and Bolingbroke for ten years.

  In 1398 came the Parliament of Shrewsbury, often called the Revenge Parliament. It declared the acts of the Merciless Parliament null and void and announced that no restraint could lawfully be placed on the king. It handed parliamentary power to a committee of twelve lords and six commoners chosen from his friends. Richard now ruled without needing to summon parliament again. Then Gaunt died on the 3rd of February 1399. Richard made Bolingbroke's exile permanent and seized his estates. Bolingbroke was living in Paris, where France had little interest in challenging the peace policy, and Richard felt safe enough to sail for Ireland again in May.

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• 6. Court of Majesty

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  At solemn festivals, it was said, Richard sat on his throne in the royal hall for hours without speaking, and anyone his gaze fell upon had to bend the knee. In the years after he crushed the appellants in 1397, he held a near monopoly on power, which was rare in medieval England. A new court culture grew in that climate. Where kings had once been addressed simply as "highness", people now used "royal majesty" or "high majesty". The model was continental, taken from the French and Bohemian courts, which had been the homes of his two wives, and from the court his father kept in Aquitaine.

  The design served a belief in royal prerogative that had roots in his youth, when the Peasants' Revolt and then the Lords Appellant challenged him. His grandfather Edward III had run a martial court in which the king and his noblemen depended on each other as military captains. Richard saw that arrangement as handing the baronage too much power. So he sought peace with France and built a private retinue larger than any English king's before him, whose members wore badges showing his White Hart. Freed from needing the nobility to raise armies, he could make himself a distant, venerated figure, with art and culture at the centre of court life.

  Richard had himself painted in panel portraits of elevated majesty, which no English king had done before. Two survive. One is an over life-size portrait in Westminster Abbey from around 1390. The other is the Wilton Diptych, made between 1394 and 1399 and probably meant to travel with him on his Irish campaign. It shows him as one of three kings paying homage to the Virgin and Child, an image tied to his birth on the feast of Epiphany. It is also one of the few English survivors of the courtly International Gothic style, which developed in Prague and Paris. The painter made Richard look much younger than he was, and he likely wore a beard by then.

  Richard spent far more on jewellery, rich textiles and metalwork than on paintings, yet little survives. A crown, called "one of the finest achievements of the Gothic goldsmith", probably belonged to Anne.

  His grandest building project was Westminster Hall, extensively rebuilt in his reign. Henry III had begun the work in 1245, and it had sat idle for over a century. Perhaps the completion of John of Gaunt's magnificent hall at Kenilworth Castle in 1391 spurred Richard on. Fifteen life-size statues of kings were set in niches on the walls. The royal carpenter Hugh Herland designed the hammer-beam roof, called "the greatest creation of medieval timber architecture". It swept away the three Romanesque aisles and left one vast open space, with a dais where Richard could sit alone.

  This was also the period when English took shape as a literary language. Little evidence links Richard personally to the patronage of poetry, yet the culture flourished in his orbit. Geoffrey Chaucer served him as a diplomat, a customs official and a clerk of The King's Works while writing some of his best-known work. Chaucer also served Gaunt and wrote The Book of the Duchess as a eulogy for Gaunt's wife Blanche. His friend John Gower wrote the Confessio Amantis on a direct commission from Richard, though Gower later turned against the king. Richard also took an interest in the occult, especially geomancy, which he treated as a grand discipline including philosophy, science and alchemy.

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• 7. Deposition and Death

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  In June 1399, Louis I, Duke of Orléans, took control of the court of the insane Charles VI of France. His ambitions clashed with the policy of friendship toward England, so he let Bolingbroke go. Bolingbroke landed at Ravenspurn in Yorkshire near the end of June with a small band of followers. He insisted he only wanted his inheritance back, and both great northern magnates, Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, and Ralph Neville, Earl of Westmorland, backed him. Richard had taken most of his household knights and loyal nobles to Ireland, so resistance was slight. Edmund, Duke of York, the Keeper of the Realm, had no real choice but to join Bolingbroke.

  Richard was delayed returning and landed in Wales on the 24th of July. He reached Conwy and met Northumberland for talks on the 12th of August. On the 19th, at Flint Castle, he surrendered to Bolingbroke and promised to abdicate if his life were spared. He was held in the crypt of the Agricola Tower at Chester Castle. On the road to London the furious king was made to ride behind Bolingbroke. He was imprisoned in the Tower of London on the 1st of September.

  The argument now was that tyranny and misgovernment had made Richard unfit to be king. Normal primogeniture would have made Edmund Mortimer, Earl of March, the heir. He descended from Lionel, Duke of Clarence, Edward III's second son to reach adulthood, through Lionel's daughter Philippa. But in 1376 Edward III had entailed the succession on male heirs, which passed over Philippa's line in favour of John of Gaunt and then Henry Bolingbroke. Richard's own view is uncertain. In 1397 he gave Bolingbroke the highest place in the order of precedence, which suggests he accepted him as heir presumptive.

  The official record was read on Tuesday the 30th of September by the Archbishop of Canterbury before lords and commons in Westminster Hall. It says Richard gave up his crown willingly and confirmed his deposition, citing his own unworthiness. The Traison et Mort Chronicle tells another tale. It describes a meeting between Richard and Henry the day before. In blind rage the king ordered his own release from the Tower, called his cousin a traitor, demanded to see his wife, swore revenge and flung down his bonnet. Henry would do nothing without parliament's approval. John Trevor, Bishop of St Asaph, read thirty-three articles of deposition, which lords and commons accepted unanimously. Richard was formally deposed on the 1st of October 1399. Henry was crowned on the 13th of October, the feast day of Edward the Confessor.

  Henry had agreed to let Richard live. That changed when the earls of Huntingdon, Kent and Salisbury, and Lord Despenser, and possibly the Earl of Rutland, were revealed to be plotting to kill the new king and restore Richard. The Epiphany Rising was averted, but it showed the danger of keeping Richard alive. He is thought to have starved to death in Pontefract Castle on or around the 14th of February 1400, though the date and manner remain in some doubt. His body was displayed in St Paul's Cathedral on the 17th of February. It was buried at King's Langley Priory on the 6th of March.

  Rumours that he lived never gained much credence in England. In Scotland, a man identified as Richard came into the hands of Regent Albany and was lodged at Stirling Castle. He served as the nominal, perhaps reluctant, figurehead for anti-Lancastrian and Lollard intrigues. Henry IV's government dismissed him as an impostor. Sources on both sides of the border suggest he was mentally ill, and one calls him a beggar by his death in 1419. He was still buried as a king in Blackfriars, Stirling.

  Meanwhile Henry V sought to atone for his father's crime and to silence the rumours. On the 4th of December 1413 he had the body from King's Langley reburied in Westminster Abbey, in the tomb Richard had prepared himself. The remains of Richard's wife Anne already lay there.

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• 8. Shakespeare's Shadow

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  When Richard's tomb was opened in 1871, the remains showed that he had stood six feet tall, about 1.82 metres. Contemporary writers, even unfriendly ones, called him a "most beautiful king", though one described his "face which was white, rounded and feminine." He was athletic, intelligent and well read, and he tended to stammer when agitated. His faith was orthodox, and late in his reign he turned against the Lollard heresy. He revered Edward the Confessor so much that around 1395 he combined his own coat of arms with the saint's mythical arms. Despite not being a warrior king, he enjoyed tournaments and hunting.

  Most people meet Richard through William Shakespeare's play Richard II. The play shows a cruel, vindictive, irresponsible king who reaches a semblance of greatness only after his fall. Shakespeare took many liberties and left much out. He drew on writers such as Edward Hall and Samuel Daniel, who relied in turn on chroniclers such as Thomas Walsingham. These Tudor historians were unsympathetic to Richard, yet considered his deposition a wrong that brought divine punishment. In that view, civil discord began with Richard's misrule and lasted until Henry VII took the throne in 1485. The belief that he caused the Wars of the Roses was still common in the 19th century, and it was challenged in the 20th. Some recent historians study those wars on their own, apart from Richard's reign.

  His state of mind has been debated since the first academic historians took up the subject in the 19th century. Bishop Stubbs argued that late in the reign Richard's mind "was losing its balance altogether." In 1941 Anthony Steel wrote a full biography and concluded, from a psychiatric standpoint, that the king had schizophrenia. V. H. Galbraith answered that no historical basis existed for such a diagnosis, and later historians such as Anthony Goodman and Anthony Tuck agreed. Nigel Saul, author of a 1997 academic biography, found no basis for assuming mental illness but saw clear signs of a narcissistic personality. He wrote that toward the end "Richard's grasp on reality was becoming weaker."

  The larger puzzle is why his political agenda failed. Older views saw in his kingship the early modern absolute monarchy of the Tudors. More recent scholars see it as closer to what his predecessors had practised, and say that staying within traditional monarchy let him achieve what he did. His actions, though, were too extreme and too abrupt. Peace was meant to ease taxation and win over the Commons. The promise went unmet, because the royal retinue, the opulent court and generous gifts to favourites cost as much as war and brought less in return. Simon Walker writes: "What he sought was, in contemporary terms, neither unjustified nor unattainable; it was the manner of his seeking that betrayed him." Relying only on Cheshire for his retinue also cost him support in the rest of the country. His policy of keeping armed retainers was later copied by Edward IV and Henry VII.

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