Richard II of England

Richard was born on January 6, 1367, in Bordeaux, the seat of English government in Aquitaine, where his father held court as Prince of Aquitaine ^[1]. That father was Edward of Woodstock, remembered as the Black Prince, the celebrated soldier son of King Edward III. Richard's mother was Joan of Kent, a granddaughter of Edward I whose beauty and complicated marital history made her one of the most talked about women of her generation ^[2].

Richard was a second son, and for his first few years nobody expected him to wear a crown. His elder brother Edward of Angouleme died in early childhood, and the Black Prince himself, worn down by a long wasting illness contracted on campaign in Spain, died in June 1376 ^[1]. Within a year the old king was gone too. When Edward III died on June 21, 1377, the crown passed over his surviving adult sons and settled on his ten year old grandson, in keeping with the principle of direct hereditary descent ^[2].

The boy was crowned at Westminster Abbey on July 16, 1377, in a ceremony of unusual splendour. Because he was a child, no formal regent was appointed. Instead England was governed through a series of councils, while Richard's uncle John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, remained the most powerful magnate in the realm without ever holding the government outright ^[3]. Anyone asking who was Richard II of England in those first years would have found a figurehead king surrounded by ambitious adults, a situation that shaped his lifelong suspicion of overmighty subjects.

The defining moment of Richard's youth arrived in June 1381. Repeated poll taxes, levied to fund the failing war with France, ignited a mass rising across Essex and Kent. Tens of thousands of rebels led by Wat Tyler marched on London, opened the prisons, burned John of Gaunt's Savoy Palace, and dragged Archbishop Simon Sudbury and Treasurer Robert Hales from the Tower of London to be beheaded ^[4].

Richard, then fourteen, met the rebels twice in person. At Mile End on June 14 he granted charters of freedom and pardon that persuaded many to disperse. The following day at Smithfield, during a tense parley, London's mayor William Walworth struck Tyler down. With the crowd on the edge of violence, Richard rode forward alone and called on the rebels to follow him, declaring that he would be their leader. The gamble worked, the crowd melted away, and the rising collapsed ^[4].

The concessions were revoked once order returned, and the government pursued the ringleaders through the courts. Yet the episode left a lasting imprint on the young king. Chroniclers close to events credited his personal courage, and modern historians have argued that the experience fed his conviction that royal authority, exercised directly and personally, could master any crisis ^[1]. It is among the best documented Richard II of England facts, and it remains the most dramatic royal intervention in any medieval English popular revolt.

As Richard grew into adult rule during the 1380s, friction with the political establishment sharpened. He promoted a circle of favourites, above all Robert de Vere, Earl of Oxford, whom he raised to the unprecedented title of Duke of Ireland, and the chancellor Michael de la Pole, a merchant's son elevated to the earldom of Suffolk ^[3]. The older nobility resented the wealth and influence flowing to these men, and Parliament grew hostile to the crown's requests for money while the French war went badly.

Matters broke in 1386, when the so called Wonderful Parliament impeached de la Pole and forced a commission of government on the king. Richard toured the country seeking support and obtained judicial opinions declaring the commission unlawful, a move his opponents read as a threat to their lives. Five great lords, the Lords Appellant, took up arms: the king's uncle Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester, alongside the earls of Arundel, Warwick, Derby, and Nottingham ^[5]. In December 1387 they routed de Vere's army at Radcot Bridge in Oxfordshire.

The Merciless Parliament of 1388 completed the humiliation. The Appellants convicted the king's closest associates of treason, executing several, including his former tutor Sir Simon Burley, while de Vere and de la Pole fled abroad and died in exile ^[5]. Richard, just twenty one, kept his crown but lost his government. In May 1389 he formally declared himself of age and resumed personal rule, and for the next eight years he governed with apparent moderation, working alongside John of Gaunt after the duke's return from Spain ^[1].

The 1390s revealed Richard's genuine achievements as a ruler in peacetime. He pursued a settlement with France, and in 1396 he sealed a twenty eight year truce, the longest pause in the Hundred Years' War to that point, cemented by his marriage to the six year old French princess Isabella of Valois ^[2]. He also led an army to Ireland in 1394 and 1395, the first English king to campaign there since John, and secured the submission of most of the major Gaelic chiefs ^[1].

Any fair account of Richard II of England achievements must dwell on his patronage. He rebuilt Westminster Hall with the vast hammerbeam roof designed by the carpenter Hugh Herland, a structure that still stands and still hosts great occasions of state ^[6]. The Wilton Diptych, a portable altarpiece now in the National Gallery in London, shows Richard kneeling before the Virgin and Child, presented by his patron saints; it is one of the finest surviving English paintings of the Middle Ages and a window into his intensely personal religious kingship ^[7]. His court fostered a remarkable literary moment: Geoffrey Chaucer held royal appointments through the reign, and John Gower dedicated the first version of his Confessio Amantis to the king ^[1].

Richard also cultivated a new language of majesty. He commissioned a large seated portrait of himself for Westminster Abbey, insisted on elaborate ceremony, and encouraged forms of address such as majesty and highness that had rarely been applied to English kings before ^[3]. Historians have long debated whether this reflected a considered theory of sovereignty or a fragile personality demanding reassurance, and the sources permit both readings.

In January 1382 Richard married Anne of Bohemia, daughter of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV. The match brought little money and was mocked by some chroniclers at the time, but it grew into a marriage of real affection ^[2]. Anne became a moderating presence at court, interceding publicly for the citizens of London and for condemned men. When she died of plague at the palace of Sheen in June 1394, Richard was devastated; according to contemporary accounts he ordered the palace where she died to be pulled down ^[1].

The marriage produced no children, and the succession question shadowed the rest of the reign. Richard's second marriage, to the child princess Isabella in 1396, served diplomacy and guaranteed that no heir would arrive for many years, leaving his uncles' descendants, above all the house of Lancaster, watching the throne closely ^[2].

Richard's tastes marked him out among medieval kings. He was tall, fair haired, and, unusually for a Plantagenet, no enthusiast for war or tournament glory. He spent heavily on jewels, fine textiles, and cookery; a compilation of recipes from his kitchens, The Forme of Cury, survives as one of the earliest English cookbooks ^[1]. He planned a double tomb in Westminster Abbey so that he and Anne could lie together, hands joined in gilt bronze effigy ^[6].

In July 1397 the settled surface of the reign broke apart. Richard suddenly arrested the three senior Lords Appellant of 1388. Arundel was tried and beheaded, Warwick was exiled to the Isle of Man, and Gloucester, the king's own uncle, died in custody at Calais, almost certainly murdered on royal orders ^[5]. Parliament, packed and intimidated, reversed the acts of 1388, and Richard extracted forced loans and blank charters from his subjects. Chroniclers and later historians labelled the final two years of the reign a tyranny ^[3].

The two junior Appellants, Henry Bolingbroke of Derby and Thomas Mowbray of Nottingham, were dealt with in 1398. After each accused the other of treason, Richard first ordered a trial by combat at Coventry, then dramatically halted it and banished both men, Mowbray for life and Bolingbroke for ten years ^[5]. When John of Gaunt died in February 1399, Richard converted his cousin's sentence into perpetual exile and seized the vast Lancastrian inheritance. The confiscation told every landowner in England that no property was safe from the king's will ^[1].

That summer Richard sailed to Ireland on a second expedition. Bolingbroke landed at Ravenspur on the Yorkshire coast around the end of June 1399, claiming at first only his duchy. Support for the king evaporated. Richard returned to Wales, found himself isolated, and surrendered at Flint Castle in August. On September 29, 1399, in the Tower of London, he resigned the crown, and the next day Parliament accepted the deposition and recognised Bolingbroke as King Henry IV ^[8]. Richard was moved north to Pontefract Castle in Yorkshire. After a rising by his supporters in January 1400 failed, his survival became intolerable to the new regime, and he died at Pontefract on or about February 14, 1400, most likely starved, though the exact circumstances were never established ^[8].

Henry IV buried Richard quietly at Kings Langley, but rumours that the deposed king lived circulated for years, especially in Scotland. In 1413 Henry V, seeking reconciliation, had the body moved to the tomb Richard had prepared beside Anne of Bohemia in Westminster Abbey, where the couple still lie ^[6].

The deposition of 1399 carried consequences far beyond one man's fall. By setting aside the direct line of succession, it opened the dynastic dispute between Lancaster and York that erupted two generations later in the Wars of the Roses, and fifteenth century writers repeatedly traced that catastrophe back to Richard's removal ^[8]. Shakespeare's Richard II, written in the 1590s, fixed the king in the popular imagination as an eloquent, self dramatising ruler undone by his own misjudgements; the play was politically sensitive enough that supporters of the Earl of Essex commissioned a performance on the eve of their rising in 1601 ^[2].

Modern scholarship, led by Nigel Saul's full biography, presents a more layered figure: a genuine patron of art and letters, a peacemaker in a war weary age, and an intelligent theorist of monarchy whose refusal to accept limits on his prerogative destroyed him ^[1]. For readers of any Richard II of England biography, the reign offers a study in how medieval kingship worked, and how completely it could fail when a king lost the trust of the men whose cooperation the whole system required.