Richard II of England
Richard II, also known as Richard of Bordeaux, was King of England from 1377 until he was deposed in 1399. He was the son of Edward the Black Prince, and Joan of Kent. The Black Prince died in 1376, leaving Richard as heir apparent to his grandfather, King Edward III. Upon the King's death, the 10-year-old Richard succeeded to the throne.
During Richard's first years as king, government was in the hands of a series of regency councils, influenced by Richard's uncles John of Gaunt and Thomas of Woodstock. England faced various problems, most notably the Hundred Years' War. A major challenge of the reign was the Peasants' Revolt in 1381, and the young king played a central part in the brutal suppression of this crisis. Less warlike than either his father or grandfather, he sought to bring an end to the Hundred Years' War. A firm believer in the royal prerogative, Richard restrained the power of the aristocracy and relied on a private retinue for military protection instead. In contrast to his grandfather, Richard cultivated a refined atmosphere centred on art and culture at court, in which the king was an elevated figure.
His dependence on a small number of courtiers caused discontent among the nobility, and in 1387 control of government was taken over by a group of aristocrats known as the Lords Appellant. By 1389 Richard had regained control, and for the next eight years governed in relative harmony with his former opponents. In 1397, he took his revenge on the Appellants, many of whom were executed or exiled. The next two years have been described by historians as Richard's "tyranny". In 1399, after John of Gaunt died, the King disinherited Gaunt's son Henry Bolingbroke, who had previously been exiled. Henry invaded England in June 1399 with a small force that quickly grew in numbers. Meeting little resistance, he deposed Richard and had himself crowned king. Richard is thought to have been starved to death in captivity, although questions remain regarding his final fate.
Richard's posthumous reputation has been shaped to a large extent by William Shakespeare, whose play Richard II portrayed Richard's misrule and his deposition as responsible for the 15th-century Wars of the Roses. Modern historians do not accept this interpretation, while not exonerating Richard from responsibility for his own deposition. Although probably not insane, as many historians of the 19th and 20th centuries believed him to be, he may have had a personality disorder, particularly manifesting itself towards the end of his reign. Most authorities agree that his policies were not unrealistic or even entirely unprecedented, but that the way in which he carried them out was unacceptable to the political establishment, leading to his downfall.
Early life
Richard of Bordeaux was the younger son of Edward, Prince of Wales, and Joan, Countess of Kent. Edward, eldest son of Edward III and heir apparent to the throne of England, had distinguished himself as a military commander in the early phases of the Hundred Years' War, particularly in the Battle of Poitiers in 1356. After further military adventures, however, he contracted dysentery in Spain in 1370. He never fully recovered and had to return to England the next year.Richard was born at the Archbishop's Palace of Bordeaux, in the English principality of Aquitaine, on 6 January 1367, reportedly prematurely due to Joan's stress caused by the Black Prince's departure on Spanish campaign. According to contemporary sources, three kings, "the King of Castile, the King of Navarre and the King of Portugal", were present at his birth. This anecdote, and the fact that his birth fell on the feast of Epiphany, was later used in the religious imagery of the Wilton Diptych, where Richard is one of three kings paying homage to the Virgin and Child.
Richard's elder brother, Edward of Angoulême, died near his sixth birthday in 1370.
During the Good Parliament of 1376 the Black Prince was dying. Having taken a house in London, he summoned both Edward III and John of Gaunt and made them swear to recognise his son, the future Richard II, as successor to Edward. Both John and the King swore to recognise Richard.
The Prince of Wales finally succumbed to his long illness in June 1376. The Commons in the Good Parliament genuinely feared that Richard's uncle, John of Gaunt, would usurp the throne. For this reason, Richard was quickly invested with the princedom of Wales and his father's other titles and publicly recognised him as heir.
File:Coronation Richard2 England 01.jpg|thumb|left|Coronation of Richard II aged ten in 1377, from the Recueil des croniques of Jean de Wavrin. British Library, London.
On 21 June 1377, King Edward III, who was for some years frail and decrepit, died after a 50-year reign. This resulted in the 10-year-old Richard succeeding to the throne. He was crowned on 16 July at Westminster Abbey. Again, fears of John of Gaunt's ambitions influenced political decisions, and a regency led by the King's uncles was avoided. Instead, the King was nominally to exercise kingship with the help of a series of "continual councils", from which Gaunt was excluded.
Gaunt, together with his younger brother Thomas of Woodstock, Earl of Buckingham, still held great informal influence over the business of government, but the King's councillors and friends, particularly Sir Simon de Burley and Robert de Vere, 9th Earl of Oxford, increasingly gained control of royal affairs.
In a matter of three years, these councillors earned the mistrust of the Commons to the point that the councils were discontinued in 1380. Contributing to discontent was an increasingly heavy burden of taxation levied through three poll taxes between 1377 and 1381 that were spent on unsuccessful military expeditions on the continent. By 1381, there was a deep-felt resentment against the governing classes in the lower levels of English society.
Early reign
Peasants' Revolt
Whereas the poll tax of 1381 was the spark of the Peasants' Revolt, the root of the conflict lay in tensions between peasants and landowners precipitated by the economic and demographic consequences of the Black Death and subsequent outbreaks of the plague. The rebellion started in Kent and Essex in late May, and on 12 June, bands of peasants gathered at Blackheath near London under the leaders Wat Tyler, John Ball, and Jack Straw. John of Gaunt's Savoy Palace was burnt down. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Simon Sudbury, who was also Lord Chancellor, and Lord High Treasurer Robert Hales were both killed by the rebels, who were demanding the complete abolition of serfdom. The King, sheltered within the Tower of London with his councillors, agreed that the Crown did not have the forces to disperse the rebels and that the only feasible option was to negotiate.It is unclear how much Richard, who was still only fourteen years old, was involved in these deliberations, although historians have suggested that he was among the proponents of negotiations. The King set out by the River Thames on 13 June, but the large number of people thronging the banks at Greenwich made it impossible for him to land, forcing him to return to the Tower. The next day, Friday, 14 June, he set out by horse and met the rebels at Mile End. He agreed to the rebels' demands, but this move only emboldened them; they continued their looting and killings. Richard met Wat Tyler again the next day at Smithfield and reiterated that the demands would be met, but the rebel leader was not convinced of the King's sincerity. The King's men grew restive, an altercation broke out, and William Walworth, the Lord Mayor of London, pulled Tyler down from his horse and killed him. The situation became tense once the rebels realised what had happened, but the King acted with calm resolve and, saying "I am your captain, follow me!", he led the mob away from the scene. Walworth meanwhile gathered a force to surround the peasant army, but the King granted clemency and allowed the rebels to disperse and return to their homes.
The King soon revoked the charters of freedom and pardon that he had granted, and as disturbances continued in other parts of the country, he personally went into Essex to suppress the rebellion. On 28 June at Billericay, he defeated the last rebels in a small skirmish and effectively ended the Peasants' Revolt. In the following days rebel leaders, such as John Ball, were hunted down and executed. Despite his young age, Richard had shown great courage and determination in his handling of the rebellion. It is likely, though, that the events impressed upon him the dangers of disobedience and threats to royal authority, and helped shape the absolutist attitudes to kingship that would later prove fatal to his reign.
Coming of age
It is only with the Peasants' Revolt that Richard starts to emerge clearly in the annals. One of his first significant acts after the rebellion was to marry Anne of Bohemia, daughter of Charles IV, Holy Roman Emperor, on 20 January 1382. It had diplomatic significance; in the division of Europe caused by the Western Schism, Bohemia and the Holy Roman Empire were seen as potential allies against France in the ongoing Hundred Years' War. Nonetheless, the marriage was not popular in England. Despite great sums of money awarded to the Empire, the political alliance never resulted in any military victories. Furthermore, the marriage was childless. Anne died from the plague in 1394, greatly mourned by her husband.Michael de la Pole had been instrumental in the marriage negotiations; he had the King's confidence and gradually became more involved at court and in government as Richard came of age. De la Pole came from an upstart merchant family. When Richard made him chancellor in 1383, and created him Earl of Suffolk two years later, this antagonised the more established nobility. Another member of the close circle around the King was Robert de Vere, Earl of Oxford, who in this period emerged as the King's favourite. Richard's close friendship to de Vere was also disagreeable to the political establishment. This displeasure was exacerbated by the earl's elevation to the new title of Duke of Ireland in 1386. The chronicler Thomas Walsingham suggested the relationship between the King and de Vere was of a homosexual nature, due to a resentment Walsingham had toward the King.
Tensions came to a head over the approach to the war in France. While the court party preferred negotiations, Gaunt and Buckingham urged a large-scale campaign to protect English possessions. Instead, a so-called crusade led by Henry le Despenser, Bishop of Norwich, was dispatched, which failed miserably. Faced with this setback on the continent, Richard turned his attention instead towards France's ally, the Kingdom of Scotland. In 1385, the King himself led a punitive expedition to the north, but the effort came to nothing, and the army had to return without ever engaging the Scots in battle. Meanwhile, only an uprising in Ghent prevented a French invasion of southern England. The relationship between Richard and his uncle Gaunt deteriorated further with military failure, and Gaunt left England to pursue his claim to the throne of Castile in 1386 amid rumours of a plot against his person. With Gaunt gone, the unofficial leadership of the growing dissent against the King and his courtiers passed to Buckinghamwho had by now been created Duke of Gloucesterand Richard Fitzalan, 4th Earl of Arundel.