Richard II of England — a king’s vengeance bred the usurper who unmade him

Richard II, the last Plantagenet king of the senior line, was deposed in London on 30 September 1399 and replaced by his cousin Henry of Bolingbroke, who took the throne as Henry IV. Within five months Richard was dead at Pontefract Castle in Yorkshire — most likely starved to death on the new king’s quiet instruction — at the age of 33. He had reigned for twenty-two years, and he lost his crown in a single summer, undone less by foreign enemies than by his own treatment of the great nobles of his realm.

Richard had come to the throne in 1377 as a boy of ten, the grandson of Edward III, and his minority and early reign were shadowed by powerful magnates who curbed and humiliated him. In 1387–88 a group of senior lords, the Lords Appellant, used a hostile “Merciless Parliament” to destroy the king’s favorites and reduce him to a figurehead. Richard never forgot it. After years of careful, even successful, government in the 1390s, he turned in 1397 to a calculated revenge: he had the leading Appellants killed, imprisoned, or exiled, packed Parliament, extracted forced loans, and ruled as something close to an absolute monarch, claiming the laws were in his own breast.

The single act that destroyed him followed the death in February 1399 of his uncle, John of Gaunt, the richest man in England. Richard confiscated the vast Lancastrian inheritance and converted the existing exile of Gaunt’s son, Henry Bolingbroke, into banishment for life. The rule of inheritance was the foundation of the whole noble order; by seizing one duke’s lawful estate, Richard taught every magnate in England that nothing they owned was safe. When the king then sailed to Ireland with much of his strength, Bolingbroke landed in Yorkshire to reclaim his birthright, and the nobility flocked to him.

Richard returned to find his support evaporated. He surrendered at Flint Castle in August 1399, was carried to the Tower, and on 30 September was made to renounce the crown; Parliament confirmed his deposition and a long bill of charges. Henry IV was crowned on 13 October. A failed plot to restore Richard early in 1400 made the deposed king too dangerous to keep alive, and he died at Pontefract around 14 February 1400. The usurpation he provoked left the Lancastrian title clouded by the manner of its taking — a flaw that, three generations later, would help open the dynastic bloodletting of the Wars of the Roses.