The Tyranny of Richard II

Glory Eclipsed – An Angevin Empire No More – Watt Tyler & the Peasants’ Revolt – de la Pole & a Restless Parliament – The Battle of Radcot Bridge – The Lords Appellant – An Uneasy Harmony – The Caroline War – Ireland: Pretensions Be Damned – An Age of Tyranny – The Throne Usurped – A Murder at Pontefract Castle

Richard II of England

Edward III had found his niche—and his glory—on the battlefields of France; but with the cessation of hostilities in 1360, Edward was faced with the mundane aspects of kingship: the day-to-day affairs of running the country. His heart lie with the sword rather than the pen, and he gradually turned governmental affairs over to trusted advisors. By 1360 Edward was nearly five decades old, well into his prime by medieval standards, and his closest friends were dying off, including two brothers-in-arms who had been at his side when he overthrew Roger Mortimer at Nottingham Castle thirty years earlier. His staunchest supporters were going the same way, and their heirs were younger and more liberal than Edward liked. These new nobles put the weight of their loyalty behind Edward’s many sons; as various princes gathered supporters, they were spinning the webs that would devastate English nobility in the Wars of the Roses. One of Edward’s sons attempted to pacify the Anglo-Irish lords in Ireland but succeeded only in establishing the much-loathed Statutes of Kilkenny, 1366; the Statutes consisted of thirty-five acts aiming to suppress the Anglo-Irish and enforce English culture and customs on Ireland. The Statutes aimed to “blend” the Anglo and Irish into a common loyal race, but would serve only to deepen the divide. On 8 April 1364 John II of France died in captivity in England; his successor, Charles V (known as “Charles the Wise”), restarted the French war in 1369. Edward, now nearing sixty, entrusted his minor son John of Gaunt (so named because he was born in Ghent) with England’s military operations on the Continent; John failed, and the Treaty of Bruges in 1375 stripped England’s French possessions down to Calais, Bordeaux, and Bayonne. 

John of Gaunt’s disastrous war in France made Edward’s glories a thing of the past. The Angevin Empire, resurrected for a decade and a half, were no more. Popular support of England’s government declined, leading to the so-called “Good Parliament” of 1376. The parliament, originally called to grant taxation, turned into a sounding board for the House of Commons to air their grievances against Edward’s governance. Most of their criticism was aimed at some of Edward’s closest advisors, but John of Gaunt received the most withering condemnations. By this time Gaunt was in virtual control of the government, since both his father and older brother, the Prince of Wales, were gravely ill. Gaunt had no choice but to concede to the demands of parliament, though most of these concessions were stripped in the next parliament in 1377 (nicknamed the “Bad Parliament”). Shortly thereafter, on 21 July 1377, Edward died of a stroke. Because his heir, the Prince of Wales, had died a little more than a year before, the throne passed to Edward III’s grandson Richard, son of the Prince Wales.

Richard was not made of the same mettle as his father and grandfather. Had fortune favored the infamous Black Prince, England’s history may have taken a more glorious path. Edward of Woodstock had lent his military prowess to the Spanish and fought once more against the French in John of Gaunt’s campaign; he had laid siege to Limoges in 1370 but had to abandon it because of harsh criticism regarding his cruelty and a debilitating sickness he suffered himself. John of Gaunt needed the Prince of Wales’ backbone in the war effort, and after that point Charles the Wise had the upper-hand against the English. Edward of Woodstock wouldn’t recover from the sickness he caught outside Limoges, and he died on 8 June 1376—leaving the throne open to his son Richard when his father followed him just a year later. Richard II was the youngest and only surviving son of the Black Prince, and he had four uncles who chomped at the bit from being passed over. These uncles, sons of Edward III, were Lionel, the Duke of Clarence; John of Gaunt; Edmund, the Duke of York; and Thomas, the Duke of Gloucester. The latter uncle didn’t keep his reservations about Richard’s kingship hidden, and he would suffer for it. At the time of his ascension in 1377, Richard was but ten years old, and the country was in the grip of his uncle John of Gaunt. In 1381 Richard chose to marry Anne of Bohemia, the eldest daughter of the Holy Roman Emperor; the two of them wouldn’t have any children, and when she died of plague in 1394, Richard was heartbroken. It was only two years later, on 31 October 1396, that he remarried, but this wasn’t a marriage of love but of politics: he took Isabella of Valois, the nine-year-old daughter of Charles VI of France, as part of a 28-year truce with his rival across the Channel. Isabella would bear him no children, either, by the grace of God; for given the end of his reign, such a child would have faced a grisly end.

the Peasants' Revolt led by Watt Tyler

Richard faced his first crisis not five years into his reign. His grandfather’s wars against the French had bled England dry, and in 1377 the government introduced a new sort of tax in an attempt to restore financial stability. The poll tax forced every male over the age of fifteen to pay fourpence to the government. This caused great consternation, but worse was to come. In autumn 1380 (the same year John Wycliffe began translating the Latin bible into English), parliament granted permission for the tax to be increased to a shilling a head. Fourpence a head was one thing; a shilling a head was quite another. Discontent among the poor peasantry was a time-bomb waiting to blow, and its ignition came when a Kentish peasant named Watt Tyler, in a fit of rage, murdered a tax collector. A number of peasants approved this raw justice, and a following began to grow around him. Tyler announced he would march to London to tell the king of the hardships his people were enduring, and as he made his way to the capital, peasants armed with sticks, scythes, and flails fell behind him. A radical cleric named John Ball joined him, inciting the passions of the mob with fiery sermons. The mob had swelled into the thousands by the time they reached London, and the city’s Lord Mayor and Alderman couldn’t prevent them from entering the city. Londoners barricaded themselves in their homes and closed shop as the peasants marched through the city, and then the protesters lie out on the grass outside the Tower of London and demanded an audience with the king. The next morning the fourteen-year-old Richard came down to his barge on the Thames, but his guardians, fearing that an attempt would be made on the young king’s life, forced him away. The morning after, Richard—despite his guardians’ pleas—rode out on horseback and addressed the crowd. No sooner had he started than a party of more hotheaded rebels stormed the Tower and seized the Archbishop of Canterbury in the White Chapel. Thinking he was one of the king’s bad advisors responsible for promoting the loathed poll tax, they cut off his head. Richard, undeterred, faced the crowd again the next day, this time speaking face-to-face with Tyler. They approached one another on horseback, and as they were talking, Tyler foolishly placed his hand on the king’s horse’s bridle. The Lord Mayor, fearing that this rebel was threatening to take the king hostage, struck Tyler with his crowned staff, sending the man tumbling off his horse. As Tyler lie in the grass, one of the Mayor’s attendants rushed forward and ran him through with his sword. The peasants were shocked and didn’t know what to do. Richard, thinking quickly, rode forward and said, “Good fellows, have you lost your leader? This fellow was but a traitor! I am your king and will be your captain and guide!” He then took Tyler’s place, riding at their head out into the fields where the peasants were able to state their grievances and head home.

Richard addressing the rebel peasants in London

Richard had diffused the situation in London. But the rest of England was a different story. The Peasants’ Revolt had spread east into East Anglia and as far north as York. In East Anglia rebels ransacked the University of Cambridge, killing a number of royal officials. The Bishop of Norwich pacified East Anglia by defeating a group of rebels at the Battle of North Walsham in late June, but the rebellion was still alive and well as far north as York, Beverley, and Scarborough, and it had spread as far west as Somerset. Richard ordered 4000 professional soldiers to restore order throughout England, and the rest of 1381 saw the remaining rebel leaders hunted down and killed. By November 1381 at least 1500 rebels had been executed; the fiery cleric John Ball had been captured in Coventry, tried in St. Albans, and executed on July 15th. Richard’s handling of the revolt—in both his courage and diplomacy before the crowds in London, and his deft execution of those ringleaders who had refused to bend the knee after Richard’s leniency—brought the king a measure of goodwill from the people, especially the aristocracy. But his handling of Watt Tyler’s affair would be the height of his popularity in England; from there it was all a downhill slide until the people of England wished him dead. 

The Battle of Radcot Bridge

His descent into tyranny began just after the Peasants’ Revolt, when he started surrounding himself with questionable favorites who accumulated considerable power in the government. Some of these included his former tutor, Sir Simon Burley; Robert de Vere, the Earl of Oxford; Sir Michael de la Pole, the Duke of Suffolk, who was chancellor from 1383 until his impeachment at the hands of parliament; and Richard had a number of younger favorites, both nobles and knights, who envied the power still wielded by John of Gaunt. These young favorites relentlessly criticized Richard’s uncle and even made an attempt on his life. By 1385 Richard’s favoritism towards these societal misfits, and his devotion to the younger generation of England’s baronial class, strained his relationship with the more mature nobility who dominated parliament. The scene was set for a clash between the crown and parliament, and that clash came in 1386. The Duke of Lancaster headed to Spain in July to pursue his claim to the Castilian crown, and the French used his absence—and the absence of England’s best fleet and professional soldiers—as an opportunity to prepare for an invasion of England. De la Pole, tasked with organizing England’s coastal defenses, went before parliament and requested an outrageous sum of money to get the job done. Parliament already disliked de la Pole, so they used his spectacular request as a pretense to demand his resignation as chancellor. Richard would have none of this, telling parliament that he would not “remove one scullion from his kitchen at their behest.” Parliament, unfazed by this rash and young king, went ahead and impeached the chancellor, and they created a commission—unofficially known as the Lords Appellant—to oversee the crown’s activities for one year. The Lords Appellant would consist of five of England’s most high-ranking nobles: the Duke of Gloucester and the earls of Warwick, Arundel, Nottingham, and Derby. Richard declared these measures to be treasonous and left London to rally royal support in the Midlands. Having garnished a considerable armed force, he put them in the hands of Robert de Vere and sent them south towards London to put the Lords Appellant in their place. As it was, Robert de Vere was the one chastised, as the loyalist forces were defeated in December 1387 at Radcot Bridge. The victorious Appellants occupied London just a few days later, and Richard was forced to return to the capital humiliated.

The Lords Appellant ruling alongside Richard II

A triumphant parliament met in 1388 and made the best of their gains. The so-called “Merciless Parliament” outlawed Richard’s closest allies and ordered two to be executed. Richard had no room to maneuver and was forced to submit to the demands of the Lords Appellant. The Lords Appellant effectively ruled the government until the spring of 1389 when Richard resumed his responsibilities. For all intensive purposes Richard seemed a changed man: he widened his favorites, thus widening his support and preventing a select few from gobbling up too much power, and he published a manifesto promising better government and an ease of taxation. He followed through with these promises, and from 1389 to 1394 taxes fell sharply, especially after he forged a truce with France in 1389. 

Remember that war with France had resumed shortly before the death of Edward III. The so-called “Caroline War”, named after Charles V of France, was the second phase of the Hundred Years War and lasted from 1369 to 1389, a span of twenty years. Charles V, who ascended the throne after the death of his captive father, John II, in 1369 summoned the Prince of Wales, Edward of Woodstock, “The Black Prince,” to come to Paris. The Prince refused, and Charles responded by reopening hostilities. He aimed to reconquer that which had been lost in The Edwardian War. The Caroline War would be marked by a number of French successes, but by the tail-end of it, during the reign of Charles V’s successor, Charles VI, the war would ground to a stalemate and Charles VI would make peace with Richard in 1389. French successes can be attributed to England’s loss of notable commanders: the Black Prince, the Hero of Poitiers, died of sickness; John Chandos was killed in battle on December 31st of 1369, and the captal de Buch was captured by Charles V. The French forces were led by Bertrand du Guesclin, a Breton commander who had offered his services to Charles V. Even before the outbreak of the Caroline War, du Guesclin had tasted defeat in pitched battles against English forces at Auray in 1364 and Najera in 1367. He adopted Fabian-style tactics like those used by Fabius against Hannibal in the days of the ancient Punic Wars; he would raid English territories while shadowing English forces and refuse to give battle. In this way he captured town after town. Poitiers fell in 1372 and Bergerac five years later. The English responded to these successes by launching a series of chevauchees designed to eviscerate the French countryside, weaken French resolve, and make the populace question the rule of the French king. The English hoped de Guesclin would be moved to confront them, but like Fabius he stuck to his guns: as Fabius had watched the Roman fields and villas burn, so du Guesclin did the same with the French possessions. He died in 1380 as one of the most infamous of France’s generals, but by that time England was in no position to turn the tide of war. Not only had she lost her best commanders, not only was she suffering internal turmoil at home, not only had she lost much of the territory gained by Edward III decades earlier, but she had also lost her command of the sea. She had won the Channel at the Battle of Sluys, but England’s defeat at the hands of a Franco-Castile navy in the 1372 Battle of La Rochelle brought an end to that dominance. Now England’s cross-Channel trade was weakened, and her Gascon territories were isolated. By 1380, when du Guesclin died, England’s French possessions had dwindled down to a narrow strip of coastline and the port city of Calais. The next nine years of the war were marked by a back-and-forth struggle of attrition. Both forces wasted enemy-held countryside, burned enemy villages, devastated enemy crops and vineyards, and forced the locals to seek sanctuary elsewhere. Charles VI of France was happy with his gains, Richard II wanted to be remembered as the king who brought peace, and in 1389 they forged a truce. The Caroline War had come to an end, and England would experience just over twenty-five years of peace with France (the Treaty of Bruges would be renewed a number of times until the resumption of hostilities in 1415 by Henry V of England). 

The Battle of La Rochelle

Though Richard believed peace with France was paramount to England’s stability, many of the French nobles preferred war; it was in war, after all, that they could win both glory and wealth. Richard’s uncle Thomas, the Duke of Gloucester, frequently lamented the passing of the old glories at Crecy and Caen and Poitiers; he claimed that while the English had paid taxes to Edward III for glory, they were paying taxes to his grandson so that he could wear fancy robes, adorn himself in expensive jewelry, and host grand feasts. While Edward III had shocked France into submission, Richard preferred a “pretty war” of sham battles: tilting matches where knights in spotless and bejeweled armor rode against one another to win the favor of the king. Richard put up with his uncle’s grumbling, for he knew that his taxes were far less exacting than his predecessors’, and he believed peace was better for England, no matter what his uncle thought. But when his uncle began spreading rumors undercutting Richard’s rule, he’d had enough: he went to visit his uncle at Pleshy Castle and there had him seized and sent off to English-held Calais. The Duke of Gloucester died shortly thereafter, though the circumstances of his death are unknown (for what it’s worth, two of Richard’s surviving uncles didn’t believe the king had a hand in their brother’s death). 

Irish soldiers vs. an English knight

In the 1390s there were hints that Richard’s rule was beginning to slide back into what it had been a decade earlier: he built up a large baronial-style loyalist following wherein honored members wore the king’s badge of the white hat, and he ensured the government’s central officers were staffed by men who pledged him undying loyalty. This could be understandable, since the king didn’t want a repeat of the humiliation he’d experienced at the hands of the Lord Appellant; but he took things even further. He encouraged his subjects to address him as “your highness” or “your majesty” rather than “my lord,” ramped up the ceremony and protocol of his court, and transformed Westminster Hall into a monarchial cult. The groundwork for autocracy and tyranny had been laid, and Richard’s innermost beliefs about his rights as sovereign were made evident in his dealings with the local chieftains (or “High Kings”) of Ireland in his 1394-1395 expedition across the Irish Sea. The chieftains gathered at Dublin to pay homage to their overlord, and there Richard insisted that rebellion and disobedience would be punished, rebel Irish were to enter into “the king’s obedience,” and all Irish, regardless of their status, were to give him their unfettered loyalty. Though by monarchial standards there was nothing original, or even unexpected, in his demands, he would never be so up-front about his self-perception—and his expectations of his subjects—in England. He wouldn’t dare go city to city insisting that every Englishman give him his undying loyalty, for such a move would rouse hostility from parliament. England, though a monarchy, was too democratic for that—but Ireland wasn’t. There Richard “strutted his stuff” and let his pretenses fall by the wayside. The positive reception of the Irish only emboldened his assertions of royal power at home, and they flowed into his dealings with England proper. Just two years after returning to England, his “tyranny” became evident for all to see—and his unraveling began.

In 1397 he aroused suspicion across western Europe by arresting and trying three of the Lord Appellants who had governed England in his stead just shy of a decade earlier. The Earl of Arundel was convicted of treason and executed, the Duke of Gloucester was imprisoned and murdered, and the Earl of Warwick was banished to the remote Isle of Man. He told foreign leaders that his rough and delayed treatment of these Lords Appellant was a direct response to their earlier actions; their disobedience, he said, called for “an avenging punishment” that would “thresh the traitors out even to the husk.” He believed that by destroying their persons and ruining their property he could reunify England under his banner; this was, of course, a reunification under a dictator. He seized the punished nobles’ lands and estates, making them his own, and delegated parliamentary powers to a select committee. In September the next year, the two remaining Appellants—Gaunt’s son (and Richard’s cousin) Henry Bolingbroke and Thomas Mowbray, the Duke of Norfolk—fell into a quarrel. Richard declared that the dispute should be resolved by trial by combat, but on the appointed day Richard decided to use their quarrel as a pretext for ousting them from the kingdom: just after the two men mounted their horses and took up their lances for a mounted duel, Richard interceded and banished them both from England. Mowbray was banished for life and Bolingbroke for a decade. When the exiled Bolingbroke’s father, John of Gaunt, died in February 1399, Richard confiscated his Lancastrian estates (which would have passed to Bolingbroke) and pulled Gaunts’ money into his treasury. This new influx of wealth enabled him to travel back to Ireland to settle an episode of Irish unrest.

With Richard campaigning in Ireland, a restless Henry Bolingbroke threw together a ragtag army and sailed across the Channel, landing in Yorkshire. He met with the Earl of Northumberland, gained his backing, and began marching across central and western England, gathering both noble and popular support. Richard received news of Bolingbroke’s return but wasted time crossing back across the Irish Sea; by the time he reached England in August 1399, his support was dry as the Sahara. He knew didn’t stand a chance against Bolingbroke and surrendered. In September 1399 Richard II officially abdicated his throne, and Bolingbroke ascended to the throne as Henry IV. The ex-king was imprisoned at Pontefract Castle in October to live out the rest of his days, but these days would be short: in January at the turn of the 15th century, a number of his diehard followers staged a coup to return the ex-king to power. Henry IV’s supporters snuffed out the plot, but the new king knew it was too risky keeping Richard alive. Rumor has it that he ordered Richard murdered sometime in February of 1400, but when Richard’s skeleton was exhumed in 1871, there were no marks of violence. He likely died a torturous death via starvation: as Richard had stripped away everything Henry Bolingbroke needed to survive, so Henry IV did the same with the late tyrant king. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.