The tyrant and the usurper: Richard II v Henry IV

It wasn’t supposed to turn out like this. Twenty-two years earlier, when Richard had become king at the age of 10, Henry – just three months younger – stood beside his chair at the coronation feast, holding the ceremonial sword of justice. The symbolism here was clear: as the boys grew up, Henry would succeed his father, John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, as the greatest nobleman in England and the chief supporter of Richard’s crown.

Back then, it was impossible to imagine how disastrously the cousins’ relationship would break down, to the point where Henry would depose Richard to take the throne for himself. What had brought England to such crisis – and why had two boys so closely related by birth and upbringing become such different men?

In 1377, England had been united in grief at the death of the boys’ grandfather, Edward III, one of the greatest kings the country had ever known. Edward’s eldest son, Edward the Black Prince – the hero of England’s ongoing war with France – had died a year earlier after a long illness. England’s people transferred their loyalty without question to the Black Prince’s son, Richard, as “the true heir apparent of the realm”.

A spoilt child

The difficulty was working out how the realm should be governed until Richard was old enough to rule for himself. In theory, the obvious answer was that John of Gaunt, the king’s oldest surviving uncle and the kingdom’s most powerful magnate, should serve as regent. In practice, though, Gaunt was too unpopular – unfairly suspected of wanting to make himself king in his nephew’s place – and, at the same time, too powerful for anyone else to do the job.

The only workable solution was to fudge the issue. Officially, there would be no minority; the 10-year-old king would rule. Unofficially, decisions taken in the king’s name would be made by his nobles.

A young man growing to maturity who understood the duties as well as the powers of his crown might have come to understand why such misrepresentation of political reality was necessary, and what he was required to do to take command when the time came. However, Richard was not that man.

For as long as he could remember, Richard had been told that he was special. As his father’s only surviving legitimate child, he was unique and irreplaceable. His mother, Joan of Kent, had been married before. As a result, he was also the cosseted baby of a family in which he – unlike his four older half-siblings – stood alone in the line of royal succession.

But Richard had never seen kingship in action. For as long as he could remember, his father and grandfather had been too ill to lead England’s government. Now, Gaunt and the other lords trying to keep the war effort going faced growing complaints about military failures and high taxes. In their attempts to unite the country, they presented Richard to parliament as a boy sent by his grandfather “in the same manner as the scripture says: ‘Here is my beloved Son, here is He who is wished for by all men’”.

Seasoned politicians might recognise overblown rhetoric, but Richard heard the message that he was England’s messiah. And four years later, amid the chaos and violence of the Peasants’ Revolt, the teenage king found that Wat Tyler’s rebels were looking to him alone for leadership. They stood, they said, “with King Richard and the true commons” against what they saw as a corrupt and failing government.

Richard agreed – but his conclusion was not that he must learn to rule his people well. He had no interest in fighting to defend his kingdom, in the hard work of negotiating peace, or in the importance of law and justice. Instead, what had gone wrong in England, he believed, was that his nobles had usurped his own God-given royal authority.

Richard’s understanding of power was focused entirely on his own will rather than the needs of his people

To Richard, the decades-long conflict with France – now going so badly that the treasury was empty, England’s territories on the continent under assault and the south coast repeatedly damaged by French raids – was a tedious irrelevance. In 1384–85, while Gaunt tried to defend the north against the Scots and find terms for peace with the French, Richard and his favourites were plotting (unsuccessfully) to murder him. In 1386 – with Gaunt by now fighting abroad – a parliament led by Richard’s youngest uncle, Thomas of Woodstock, tried to force the 19-year-old king to focus on the imminent and terrifying threat of invasion by a French armada. Richard’s furious response was that he would ask for help against parliament’s insolence from his “cousin”, the French king, “and rather submit ourselves to him than succumb to our own subjects”. It was a shocking demonstration that Richard had grown into a thin-skinned narcissist whose understanding of power was focused entirely on his own will rather than the needs of his people.

Prepared for power

Richard’s English cousin saw matters entirely differently. Like Richard, Henry was his father’s only legitimate son but, unlike Richard, he had not grown up in royal isolation from his family of strong-willed siblings. Henry had two older sisters, a half-sister from his father’s second marriage, and four half-siblings – three boys and a
girl – born to Gaunt’s mistress, Katherine Swynford, a warm and intelligent woman who, after the early death of Henry’s mother, Blanche of Lancaster, took charge of the bustling Lancastrian nursery.

Where Richard’s education was a protective cocoon in which he was exposed to neither physical danger nor intellectual challenge, Henry’s was designed to be a demanding preparation for the responsibilities he would inherit as Duke of Lancaster. His military training began when he was young. He learned to joust and, at his father’s side, to lead men in peace and in war. He loved books and music, and won admiration wherever he went: he was “gracious, good-natured, courteous” and “loved by all”, a chronicler in France later noted.

He also understood the dangers that loomed when government was not functioning well. During the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, while Richard was discovering the unique powers of his crown, Henry was almost
killed when the rebels overran the Tower. He was saved from death by the kindness of a smallholder from Kent, whom Henry remembered for the rest of his life. He saw at first hand the relentless efforts his father made to defend England’s interests through diplomacy and war, and how bitterly Gaunt was rewarded with plots to destroy him.

Then, in 1386, 19-year-old Henry was entrusted with the safeguarding of Lancastrian interests while Gaunt was abroad. Sitting in parliament, he supported the idea of a council, led by Thomas of Woodstock, Edward III’s youngest son, taking over the leadership of the government in order to resist the French invasion Richard was ignoring. To English relief, the weather thwarted the invasion, but – given the extremity of Richard’s threats against those who had tried to make him recognise reality – the council’s work continued. Henry watched as Richard responded by removing himself from Westminster, and by declaring that all those who had supported the council’s appointment should be punished as traitors.

Prelude to crisis

When Richard returned to London in November 1387, his threats prompted Thomas of Woodstock and the earls of Arundel and Warwick to arm themselves against him. They were trying, they said, to remove the favourites around the king who were the real traitors to the realm. This deflection of blame from Richard himself was a desperate attempt to protect the three lords from charges of treason. It also reflected the fact that Richard had no obvious heir – no son or brother – who could replace him on the throne without risking England descending into anarchy.

No deflection could avert the confrontation that was coming, though – and when it became clear that negotiations could not work because Richard’s word could not be trusted, two younger lords joined Woodstock, Arundel and Warwick in rebellion: Thomas Mowbray, Earl of Nottingham, and Richard’s cousin Henry.

This was the fork in the road: the moment that would determine the path of Richard and Henry’s relationship, and with it the shape of England’s future. Henry led the forces that defeated Richard’s favourite, Robert de Vere, at the battle of Radcot Bridge and drove de Vere into exile. In 1388, at what became known as the ‘Merciless Parliament’, Henry and his allies charged Richard’s closest advisers with treason and presided over a spate of executions.

They were playing a profoundly dangerous game in the hope the king might learn a necessary lesson. Richard had no choice but to comply – until, in 1389, he reclaimed his place at the head of ‘normal’ royal government, helped by the newly returned and always dutiful Gaunt. An uneasy peace was restored, during which Henry took the opportunity to seek adventure – and put some distance between himself and his cousin – by fighting on campaign in Lithuania with the crusading order of Teutonic Knights, and travelling as a glamorous pilgrim through the courts of Europe to Jerusalem.

Richard, meanwhile, sought to free himself from the financial and political constraints that had forced him to submit to his subjects’ control. A permanent peace with France could not be found, but a 28-year truce, sealed in 1396 by Richard’s glittering wedding to the six-year-old daughter of the French king, Isabella of Valois, called a halt to the war. And all the while he was building up a military retinue, a private army of knights and archers who wore his badge of the white hart and answered only to his personal authority.

The lesson he had learned, it turned out, was not the one his subjects had hoped. In 1397, the king made his move, grasping for the power he had always believed should be his. Woodstock, Arundel and Warwick were arrested and charged with treason for their actions 10 years earlier – actions for which the pardons they had received were not, in Richard’s brave new world, worth the parchment on which they were written. Warwick was sentenced to life imprisonment, Arundel executed, and Woodstock murdered behind the walls of his Calais prison.

Betrayal and banishment

Although untouched so far, those rebel lords’ junior partners of 1387–88, Henry and Mowbray, were terrified of what might follow. While Richard tightened his grip on the kingdom through military force and judicial insecurity, fear drove Henry and Mowbray to accuse one another of treachery. Richard decreed that the truth should be tried by combat – but when the two men came face to face in the lists at Coventry in 1398, the king stopped the duel and banished them both from England.

It seemed that no royal judgment and no royal promise could ever be trusted. Richard declared that the exiles would be allowed to take possession of any lands they might inherit, but once again he lied. When Gaunt died, heartbroken, in February 1399, the king took Henry’s duchy of Lancaster into his own hands. Believing he had destroyed the power of the cousin he hated, Richard sailed with his army for Ireland, where he had previously enjoyed watching the Irish chiefs kneel in homage before him.

But Richard did not realise that, in disinheriting Henry, he had destroyed his own power. If even the greatest nobleman in England could not rely on the protection of the law against the king’s will, then no one could. England looked for rescue to Henry – the ‘eagle duke’ as he was called by contemporaries, after one of his badges. When Henry landed at Ravenspurn in Yorkshire with a small band of loyal followers, England’s people rallied to his banner. By the time Richard returned from Ireland, his kingdom was already lost.

Richard still had no son to succeed him. The ‘eagle duke’ – his first cousin, a fine soldier, an able leader – was the only possible candidate to rule in his place. On 13 October 1399, the crown was placed on Henry’s head in Westminster Abbey. But the one attribute of sovereignty Henry lacked was the one Richard still had: birthright. A king who had become a tyrant was replaced by a king who was a usurper – and that meant Henry’s throne would always be vulnerable.

Just how vulnerable became obvious less than three months later, when the handful of nobles who had been closest to Richard rose in revolt. The rebellion was put down, but the danger of a living former king was clear. Within weeks it was announced that Richard had died in his prison – starved to death, rumour said. In order to save England from Richard’s tyranny, Henry had not only done what his cousin had always feared – usurped his power – but committed the sin of regicide.

A man who believed in justice and in the sacred authority of kingship had been forced to violate both in his attempt to preserve the kingdom. The rest of Henry’s life would be spent trying to escape Richard’s shadow, in the hope that good government, and God’s blessing, might one day justify his claim to England’s crown.

Helen Castor is a historian, broadcaster and author. Her new book, The Eagle and the Hart: The Tragedy of Richard II and Henry IV, is published by Allen Lane on 3 October