Titans of History

RICHARD II

1367–1400

He threw down all who violated the royal prerogative; he destroyed heretics and scattered their friends.

Richard II’s chosen epitaph for his tomb in Westminster Abbey

Richard II’s reign was a personal and political tragedy. As a ruler, he was rigid, inept, inconsistent, paranoid, untrustworthy and vindictive—yet he was also a refined patron of the arts and the boy king who bravely faced the terrifying rebellious mobs of the Peasants’ Revolt. Richard’s tragedy was to succeed to the throne as an unprepared, callow and foolish child in the shadow of his heroic grandfather Edward III and father, the Black Prince.

Born in Bordeaux to Edward, Prince of Wales, and the beautiful Joan the Fair Maiden of Kent, Richard became next in line to the throne after his father following the death of his elder brother in infancy. When his father died in 1376 and then his grandfather shortly afterward, Richard became the new king in 1377, at just ten years old, assisted by his tutor, a loyal family friend, Sir Simon Burley. For the first four years of his reign, power was unofficially devolved to three royal councils but much of the government of the country fell to John of Gaunt, Richard’s uncle, a controversial but capable statesman.

Richard was tall, fair and handsome but regarded as effeminate, more interested in elaborate forms of etiquette—he demanded that spoons were used at court and was said to have invented the handkerchief—than success on the battlefield, a betrayal of the warrior tradition of English kings. In January 1382 the king married the docile and popular Anne of Bohemia and, two years after Anne’s death in 1394, the seven-year-old princess Isabella, daughter of Charles VI of France. But Richard never fathered a legitimate heir and his reign was characterized by his controversial relationship with a series of male favorites—men such as Michael de la Pole and Robert de Vere, with whom Richard was alleged to have had a homosexual affair.

Following a series of costly wars with France, Richard’s advisers raised levels of taxation, leading to the Peasants’ Revolt of June 1381, led by Wat Tyler, in which bands of peasants and artisans from Essex and Kent marched to London, sacking the city and demanding a charter of rights. On June 16, 1381, at just fourteen, Richard negotiated directly with the rebels at Smithfield. When a violent altercation broke out and Wat Tyler was murdered by the king’s men, Richard took control of the crowd, declaring, “You shall have no captain but me.” As hundreds followed him away from the scene, his men rounded up and murdered the remaining rebel leaders. Richard had shown bravery and initiative but he had also participated in what was almost certainly a pre-planned and violent betrayal of his suffering subjects, in which hundreds were executed on the streets and many more were hanged over the following weeks.

Having dealt successfully with the Peasants’ Revolt, Richard faced a more serious problem: opposition from some of the most powerful barons of the realm. In 1386, after Richard had made a botched attempt to invade Scotland, a group of these nobles in Parliament—calling themselves the Lords Appellant, because of their calls for good governance—demanded that Richard remove his unpopular counselors. Led by the king’s uncle, Thomas of Woodstock, duke of Gloucester, the other Lords Appellant were Thomas Beauchamp, earl of Warwick; Richard FitzAlan, earl of Arundel; Thomas Mowbray, earl of Nottingham; and his cousin, Henry Bolingbroke, earl of Derby, son of John of Gaunt and a potential rival for the throne.

When Richard accused them of treason, the Lords Appellant revolted, eventually defeating Richard’s armies at Radcot Bridge, outside Oxford, and briefly imprisoning him in the Tower of London. In February 1388, eight of the king’s counselors were executed by the so-called Merciless Parliament. De la Pole and de Vere fled England as the Lords Appellant took control, arguing that Richard was still too young to govern the country.

The Lords Appellant failed in military campaigns against the Scots and the French—and in 1389, when John of Gaunt returned to England from Spain, Richard rebuilt his authority; Mowbray and Bolingbroke defected back to the king who, now twenty-two, sidelined the Appellants and seized control. Increasingly arrogant and authoritarian, he believed that he had a God-given right to rule. In 1397, Richard invited Warwick to a banquet and arrested him, gave assurances to Arundel that he was not at risk, only to arrest him too, and also had Gloucester arrested in France. Arundel was executed, Warwick exiled and the earl of Gloucester smothered to death in Calais.

Increasingly paranoid, Richard kept an armed guard of Cheshire bowmen. In 1399 he unwisely exiled his cousin, Henry of Bolingbroke, duke of Lancaster, subsequently seizing his lands. When Richard departed for a military campaign in Ireland, the popular Bolingbroke, who claimed that “the realm was on the point of being undone for default of governance and undoing of the good laws,” landed with a small force in Yorkshire, triggering a widespread rebellion. By the time Richard had arrived back on the Welsh coast, most of the influential nobles of the realm had turned against him. Following his capture, Richard was taken to London and paraded through the streets, where large crowds mocked him and pelted him with rotten fruit. Deposed and humiliated, he was starved to death by his captors in Pontefract Castle in February 1400. His nemesis ruled as Henry IV, father of the victor of Agincourt