King Richard II

1367 – 1400 · Generation XVIII · King of England (r. 1377–1399) · House of Plantagenet

Richard II was King of England from 1377 until he was deposed in 1399. He was born at Bordeaux on 6 January 1367, the younger son of Edward the Black Prince and Joan of Kent, and was known in youth as Richard of Bordeaux. The death of his elder brother Edward made him his father’s heir, and when the Black Prince died in June 1376 the boy became heir to his grandfather, Edward III. The old king died on 21 June 1377. Richard, aged ten, was crowned in Westminster Abbey on 16 July. Because many feared the ambitions of his uncle John of Gaunt, no formal regency was set up. A series of “continual councils” governed in the king’s name, though Gaunt and his brother Thomas of Woodstock kept a strong informal hold on affairs.

Heavy poll taxes to pay for failing campaigns in France helped bring about the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. Rebels from Kent and Essex marched on London, burned Gaunt’s Savoy Palace and killed the Archbishop of Canterbury, Simon Sudbury, and the treasurer, Robert Hales. Richard, fourteen years old, rode out to meet them at Mile End on 14 June and at Smithfield the next day. There the Lord Mayor, William Walworth, struck down the rebel leader Wat Tyler, and the king calmed the crowd and led it away. The charters of freedom he had granted were soon revoked and leaders such as John Ball were hunted down and executed. Historians have suggested that the crisis left him with a lasting fear of disobedience and a lofty idea of royal power.

In January 1382 he married Anne of Bohemia, daughter of the Emperor Charles IV, in Westminster Abbey. The marriage was childless but close, and when Anne died of plague at Sheen in 1394 Richard was so stricken that he had the palace pulled down. His reliance on a small circle of favourites, above all Michael de la Pole, whom he made chancellor and Earl of Suffolk, and Robert de Vere, raised to Duke of Ireland in 1386, alienated the great nobles. In 1387 the Lords Appellant, led by Gloucester, Arundel and Warwick and joined by Henry Bolingbroke and Thomas Mowbray, routed de Vere’s army at Radcot Bridge. The Merciless Parliament of 1388 then condemned the favourites, and several were executed, among them Richard’s old tutor Sir Simon Burley.

Richard took back the government on 3 May 1389, blaming the troubles on bad advisers, and ruled for eight years in apparent harmony with his former opponents. Unlike his father and grandfather he preferred peace to war with France. In 1396 he agreed a 28-year truce and married Isabella of Valois, the six-year-old daughter of Charles VI, at Calais. In Ireland he acted with force. His expedition of 1394–1395 brought many Irish chiefs to submit. His court was built around art and ceremony rather than warfare. He came to be addressed as “majesty”, gave his White Hart badge to a large personal retinue drawn heavily from Cheshire, and had himself painted in a way no English king had been before. The panel portrait now in Westminster Abbey, from the 1390s, is the earliest known painted portrait of an English monarch, and the Wilton Diptych shows him kneeling before the Virgin and Child. He had Westminster Hall rebuilt under Hugh Herland’s great hammer-beam roof. Geoffrey Chaucer held office under him, and John Gower wrote the Confessio Amantis at his request.

In July 1397 he struck back at the Appellants. Arundel was tried and executed, Gloucester died in custody at Calais, very likely on the king’s orders, and Warwick was imprisoned for life. Historians call the two years that followed Richard’s tyranny. When Bolingbroke and Mowbray quarrelled he exiled them both, and after Gaunt died on 3 February 1399 he made Bolingbroke’s exile permanent and seized the Lancastrian inheritance. While Richard was campaigning in Ireland, Bolingbroke landed at Ravenspurn at the end of June, gathered support as he went and met little resistance. Richard surrendered at Flint Castle on 19 August, was held in the Tower, and on 30 September an assembly at Westminster accepted his deposition. Bolingbroke was crowned Henry IV on 13 October.

A plot by Richard’s former supporters to restore him, the Epiphany Rising, sealed his fate. He died at Pontefract Castle on or about 14 February 1400, most probably of starvation, although whether he was murdered or starved himself is unknown. He was buried at King’s Langley, and in 1413 Henry V moved the body to Westminster Abbey, to lie beside Anne in the tomb Richard had prepared. Shakespeare’s Richard II fixed the image of a king whose misrule and fall set off the Wars of the Roses. Modern historians reject that last link while still holding him largely responsible for his own downfall.

Place in the family

King Richard II was a first cousin 4 times removed of King Henry VIII.

Images

The Wilton Diptych, about 1395–1399: Richard kneels with his patron saints before the Virgin and Child (National Gallery, London) (Anonymous painter, public domain)
The boy king with his court after his coronation, from Jean de Wavrin’s chronicle, about 1479–1480 (British Library) (Illuminator of Jean de Wavrin’s Chroniques d’Angleterre, public domain)
The death of Wat Tyler at Smithfield in 1381, with Richard addressing the rebels, from a manuscript of Froissart’s Chronicles made about 1475 (Unknown illuminator, public domain)
Richard meets Henry Bolingbroke at Flint Castle in 1399, from an early 15th-century manuscript of Jean Creton’s account of his fall (British Library) (Jean Creton and unknown illuminators, public domain)

One of 26 people of House of Plantagenet (1126–1485) in this archive. The longest-reigning English house, counting its Angevin beginning and the rival Lancaster and York branches that fought the Wars of the Roses.

Line of descent: King William I The Conqueror → King Henry I → Matilda the Empress → King Henry II → King John → King Henry III → King Edward I Longshanks → King Edward II → King Edward III → Edward the Black Prince → King Richard II.

Parents

Edward the Black Prince (1330 – 1376)
Joan of Kent (1328 – 1385)

Life

1367 — Born
1377 — Ten year old Richard II succeeds his grandfather, Edward III; the kingdom is ruled at first by the King’s uncles, John of Gaunt and Thomas of Gloucester.
1382 — Richard promises that the taxes will be repealed, but as the rebels return they are hunted and executed.
1389 — Richard takes control of the government; William of Wykeham is Lord Chancellor
1394 — Richard leads English army to reconquer west of Ireland.
1396 — Richard marries Isabella daughter of the King of France and signs a 28 year truce with France.
1397 — Richard takes revenge against Lords Appellant and exiles Henry Bolingbroke
1398 — Richard (Dick) Whittington becomes Lord Mayor of London
1399 — Bolingbroke becomes Duke of Lancaster on the death of John of Gaunt, but Richard seizes his possessions. Bolingbroke returns from exile to claim his inheritance and seizes the throne.
1399 — Richard, who is away fighting at Leinster in Ireland, returns, but is deposed and imprisoned in Pontefract Castle, where he dies in 1400
1400 — Died

Sources

Richard II of England · Wikipedia
Richard II (r. 1377–1399) · The Royal Family (royal.uk)
Richard II and Anne of Bohemia · Westminster Abbey