Late Middle Ages

Richard II and the fall of chivalric kingship

Richard II of England (1367–1400) has divided historians as sharply as he divided his contemporaries. A child of ten when he acceded in June 1377, he lived long enough to be deposed on 30 September 1399, and was dead in his prison at Pontefract early in the new year. Few late medieval kings have left so rich a documentary trail, and few have been read in such contradictory ways: as a prince of cultivated taste drawn to the forms of sacral monarchy, or as a neurotic despot, an English counterpart to the figures of the early Contarinian theorists of absolute rule. The contested readings matter, because the deposition itself broke the English succession for the first time since 1327 and inaugurated the long dynastic trauma of the fifteenth century. This article treats the politics of Richard’s minority, his personal rule from 1389, the violent turn of 1397–1399, and the deposition and its afterlife, drawing on the chronicles — Walsingham, the Anonimalle Chronicle, Adam of Usk, the Continuatio Eulogii — and on the modern scholarship that has done most to shape our reading of them.

A boy king and the crisis of 1381

Richard’s accession placed an anointed minor on the throne in the middle of a war in France that was going badly and an exchequer that was almost empty. The regency was dominated by his uncles, John of Gaunt duke of Lancaster and Thomas of Woodstock duke of Gloucester, with the young king’s French mother, Joan of Kent, an important figure at court. The first parliament of the reign, in October 1377, broke with established practice by granting the new king a feudal aid for his coronation, and then within weeks had to authorise the first of three poll taxes, the first instance of direct taxation of the peasantry on a national scale. The financial pressure produced the crisis of 1381.

The Peasants’ Revolt, properly the Great Revolt of May–June 1381, has no English parallel. The trigger was the third poll tax, levied at the instigation of the new chancellor, Archbishop Simon Sudbury of Canterbury, and it was John Ball’s letter to the commons of Essex, in the inflammatory jingle of which the phrase “When Adam delved and Eve span” is preserved by the Anonimalle Chronicle, that set out the political programme. Richard met the rebels at Mile End on 14 June and again at Smithfield the next day, where William Walworth, the mayor of London, struck down Wat Tyler in the king’s presence. The mass of concessions granted at Mile End were revoked by the king himself, in a move that, as Chris Given-Wilson has emphasised, was technically permissible since they had not been enrolled in chancery, but that nevertheless left a long residue of mistrust. The revolt was put down with great brutality, and Sudbury and the treasurer Robert Hales were beheaded by the mob on 14 June. Richard’s own role is harder to read; the chronicles of Thomas Walsingham and Henry Knighton preserve a young king who showed extraordinary presence, and the Augustinian continuator of the Eulogium Historiarum has him uttering the celebrated if suspect “villeins ye are, and villeins ye shall remain” at the end of the crisis.

The revolt is important here not so much for what it tells us about peasant ideology — R.B. Dobson’s 1983 reassessment, “The Peasant’s Revolt in Its Context,” remains the indispensable starting point — but for the precedent it set: a king who had personally faced down a mass rising on the streets of his capital, and had been seen to make concessions he later rescinded. The political grammar of grace and revocation would be a feature of Richard’s later rule as well.

The personal rule, 1389–1397

From 1382 Richard’s government was effectively in the hands of a council dominated by Gloucester and, after 1385, by the court party of Robert de Vere, earl of Oxford. Richard assumed the government into his own hands in May 1389, an act recorded by the Eulogium continuator with a sense of portent. The new personal rule cannot be understood without attention to the men Richard gathered around him. The chancellor Michael de la Pole, the chamberlain Robert de Vere, the clerks John Bussy and Roger Walden, and the household officers of the chamber were the heart of a regime that consciously distinguished between the king’s natural household and the great offices of state, and that used the household, the chamber, and the wardrobe as the principal channels of patronage.

Richard’s politics of image is unusually visible. The Wilton Diptych, almost certainly made in the mid-1390s, places the king in the company of the Virgin and the Holy Child, the patron saints of England, and of John the Baptist as patron of the Lancastrian affinity; the visual vocabulary is one of sacral kingship. Richard was the first English king to use the “white hart” as a personal badge, a heraldic device that appears on tombs, buildings, and the jewels worn at the famous Christmas court of 1394–1395 in the form of the giant gold collar and the “hart-crowned”. As Nigel Saul argued in Richard II (1997), this was not a private fantasy but a coherent programme of representation. Anne McGee Morganstern and others have shown how it was matched by the architecture of the palace of Westminster, the great hall rebuilt by Henry Yevele from 1393, and the iconography of the Coronation portrait at Westminster, in which Richard presides over the lords as a quasi-imperial figure.

Beneath this, the politics of the 1390s were fiscal and parliamentary. The king wanted a permanent revenue for the war in France, and a permanent council of prelates, lords, and commons to replace the ad hoc commissions of the past. In 1394 the Commons refused to vote a subsidy, and Richard was forced to accept the unprecedented surrender of the parliamentary record. He returned to the charge in 1397 with a radically different proposal: a committee of lords and councillors that would supervise the great officers of state for life. The committee was essentially a royal initiative dressed up in parliamentary form, and Anthony Tuck in Richard II and the English Royal Tradition (1973) saw it as the occasion on which the parliamentary reaction finally cohered.

The crisis of 1397–1399

In the second half of 1397 Richard struck. On 10 July he produced before the lords in the parliament chamber an appeal accusing Gloucester, Thomas of Woodstock, the earls of Arundel and Warwick, and others of a treasonous agreement in the previous November to break the king’s authority. The procedures were legally dubious, and they set off a long parliamentary vengeance: Gloucester was sent to Calais and there murdered, almost certainly on the king’s instructions; the earl of Arundel was beheaded on the 21st; Warwick was condemned to exile. In the same parliament the royal prerogative was given a long retrospective grant of the customs for life, and a committee of twelve lords and six commoners was appointed to examine and “reform” the entire reign.

The violence of 1397 was matched in the following year. In September 1398, at a confrontation at Coventry, the duke of Hereford (Henry Bolingbroke, son of John of Gaunt) accused the duke of Norfolk, Thomas Mowbray, of treasonous speech. The trial by combat was set aside, and both men were exiled: Hereford for ten years, Mowbray for life. Gaunt died on 3 February 1399; on 18 March Richard, who had sailed to Ireland, declared Hereford’s exile to be perpetual. The seal of his patrimony was lifted in the Exchequer, an act that was technically defensible — a felon’s lands reverted to the crown — but that was understood in the light of what had been done to Gloucester. Hereford landed at Ravenspur on 4 July 1399, and within weeks the regime collapsed.

The most damaging single moment came on 13 July 1399 at Flint, where Richard, returning from Ireland, was captured. The chroniclers’ sense of theatre at Flint — Richard in the dark green coat of his heraldic device, Henry’s halting obeisance before the king he was about to depose — would be retold in Shakespeare’s hands three centuries later. The next six weeks were given over to the formal proceedings that put Henry on the throne. Richard was moved to the Tower; the lords spiritual and temporal and the commons, sitting in the parliament that began on 30 September, accepted that Richard had “freely” resigned the crown and conveyed it to Henry as king. The statute De officio regis, with its long rehearsal of the misdeeds of the reign, was the official manifesto of the revolution.

Deposition, murder, and the politics of memory

Richard died at Pontefract on or about 14 February 1400, almost certainly starved to death on the orders of his successor. Henry IV, never strong in health and always pressed for money, had every motive and few inhibitions. Thomas Walsingham, whose Chronica Maiora is the indispensable English source for these months, is explicit: “I do not dare to write the manner of his death.” The Annales Henrici Quarti, Adam of Usk’s chronicle, and the French Chronique de la Traïson et Mort de Richard II (a translation of which Shakespeare would later use) fill in what Walsingham will not say. The body was brought south and shown at St. Paul’s, and the story that he was still alive, smuggled out, and would return was kept in circulation by a series of impostors — the most famous of them was the Dominican friar Ralph of Cobham — for the next twenty years. The cult of the late king, particularly in the north and in London, was a standing threat to the new regime throughout Henry IV’s reign, and the archbishop of York, Richard le Scrope, was executed in 1405 for a rising that drew on the same language.

Richard’s legacy is harder to read. Tuck, in Richard II and the English Royal Tradition, saw in him the last of the medieval English kings, in conscious continuity with Edward III and the language of the early Black Letter chronicles. More recently, Nigel Saul, Chris Given-Wilson, and Michael Bennett (Richard II and the Revolution of 1399, 1999) have tended to stress the contingent, the contingent failure of a king who had run out of allies by 1399. Whatever the verdict, the deposition marked the end of the chivalric kingship associated with Edward III and the beginning of a different kind of English monarchy, in which the commons were to be a constitutional force and the great families of the kingdom were to be a structural problem. The Wars of the Roses, in this reading, did not come out of nowhere.

Sources and historiography

The principal chronicles are the Chronica Maiora of Thomas Walsingham, the Annales of Henry IV, the Anonimalle Chronicle (for 1381 and 1399), Adam of Usk’s chronicle, the Continuatio Eulogii, and the French Chronique de la Traïson et Mort de Richard II edited by Benjamin Williams. The Rotuli Parliamentorum and the Calendar of Close Rolls provide the documentary record of the depositions. Modern scholarship begins with May McKisack’s The Fourteenth Century (1959) and Anthony Tuck’s Richard II and the English Royal Tradition (1973); the standard short biography is Nigel Saul, Richard II (1997), and the indispensable collection of texts is Chris Given-Wilson, ed., Chronicles of the Revolution, 1397–1400 (1993). Michael Bennett’s Richard II and the Revolution of 1399 (1999) gathers the most influential recent work.

References and further reading

  • Anthony Tuck, Richard II and the English Royal Tradition (Liverpool, 1973).
  • Nigel Saul, Richard II (Yale, 1997).
  • Chris Given-Wilson, ed., Chronicles of the Revolution, 1397–1400 (Manchester, 1993).
  • R. B. Dobson, “The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381,” in The English Rising of 1381, ed. R. H. Hilton and T. H. Aston (Cambridge, 1984).
  • Anthony Goodman, John of Gaunt (Longman, 1992).