Hello. This week we're continuing our series on undeserved royal reputations
and you may have seen our previous episode on Richard the Lionheart and today, I'm going
to examine Richard II. Megalomaniacal. Tyrannical. Vain, and an all-round bad King. Well he might have
been all those things, but I'm not convinced, and like Richard the Lionheart before him,
and Richard III after him, this King Richard has a lot more to the story than meets the eye. In
many ways he's quite an interesting monarch. Now the first thing to understand about Richard II
is that he wasn't supposed to be King. The trouble was his father, Edward the Black Prince,
was supposed to be King, and he was everything that a country currently in the middle of the Hundred Years
War needed. But he died in 1376 and Richard's brother Edward of Angouleme, who was supposed to be
heir had died in 1370. Which left Richard as the heir to Edward III's throne and because he wasn't the
first born as well he was a spare that had become an heir, and we have a chequered past with those.
Then, to make matters worse, Edward III died in 1377 and left Richard in charge
of the country at 10 years old, and this was a country in a war that would last another 50 years.
Now because 10 year olds just aren't allowed to run countries he was
supported by a council of regents and this had effectively replaced one person who wasn't
supposed to be king for a few years, with a group of twelve nobles who were not supposed to be king
at all. Throw in one powerful uncle in the form of John of Gaunt, and things are not going to go well.
If there's one thing Plantagenets cannot make a success of, it's a powerful uncle.
Now for my money I'm just not convinced that Richard was as tyrannical as history portrays
him. I just don't think he was that good at the job. I mean he does have his moments but
in the grand scheme of things, the grand game of thrones he plays and he loses, and that's when
harsh things happen. We think of the Tudor court as the ultimate historical dangerous viper pit
but to be honest the Plantagenet court is equally as brutal. In the Plantagenet court losing Kings
get killed whereas in the Tudor court, the court kills everyone else but the King. But the danger
is pretty much the same. But I digress. So getting back to the early reign of Richard
II, the government is being done by a series of continual councils which feature pretty much all
the factional in-fighting and family enrichment that goes along with this oh so Norman type of government.
In terms of actually improving England it wasn't really going anywhere. The Hundred Years War
was not going well at all, and far from the grand sweeping lands of France that both Edward's father,
grandfather and further ancestors could boast, all England had at this time was Calais and
part of the Gascony coastline stretching from Bordeaux to Bayonne. So whatever these 12 nobles
are doing so far it isn't working. Now Richard's principal tutor was a man named Sir Simon Burley who
was a close friend of the family, and he encouraged Richard to restore the glory of the English throne
through assertion of his personal authority and royal prerogative, and we see a great example of
this in his approach to the Peasant's Revolt. Now for a quick guide to the Peasants Revolt,
and i do mean a quick guide, with the Black Death having wiped out one third of medieval
Europe, good labourers are in short supply and that meant they could demand higher pay, higher wages,
or go looking elsewhere for work. Unfortunately the system of serfdom prevents this. That ties
people to the manor, to the land, in a kind of indentured service. It's almost like paid slavery.
So, although these workers were paid, they weren't free, and they couldn't go and look for
higher wages. They had basically to put up with whatever they were given. This, combined with an
ever increasing burden of taxation culminating in the third poll tax in 1381, sparked a riot in Kent
closely followed by an armed insurrection that swept through the south of England.
Now, Richard met these rebels at Smithfield, an altercation broke out with the revolt leader,
Wat Tyler being killed by the mayor of London, because mayor of London really knew how to kick
ass in them days, Richard then advanced into the armed crowd and calmed the situation down, leading the
remaining rebels out of the area. Now when Richard faced down these rebels he was 14 years old,
and it was less of a confrontation than we think. I mean Richard had already agreed to the demands
of the rebels, particularly in line with the abolition of serfdom, and we may consider that
he was lying. It's a possibility. But you'd have to have a pretty impressive poker face
to pull off that lie in front of an armed and angry crowd that just had to death the Archbishop
of Canterbury. It's more likely that he agreed with the demands but once the rebellion had petered out
that government dragged its heels. Now the pardons that he offered to the revolters were
revoked two weeks later. It's unclear at this stage whether this was the plan from the start or not.
However either way this isn't the behaviour of a tyrant, and this is the point. Tyrants work
on the principle of they are right and everyone else can go hang. So the tyrant Richard would
likely have just kept killing rebels until they surrendered. He would be doing hangings, he would
be doing executions, he would be making an absolute example of these people whether that turned out to
be a good idea or not. Compliance with the rebels, even faked compliance, is just not the tyrant way.
There are other elements of Richard's reign that are often pointed to when considering him to be a
tyrant and that is his rewarding of his favourites at court, in particular in this case Robert de
Vere the ninth Earl of Oxford whom Richard made the justice of Chester and the Duke of Ireland.
Quite powerful roles. Also Michael De La Pole who had been made Earl of Suffolk and Chancellor. And
of course this gets right up the noses of other nobles like the Earl of Warwick, the
Earl of Nottingham. John of Gaunt's own son the Earl of Derby, Henry Bolingbroke.
Well, the thing is, call me cynical, but this is just what monarchs and politicians do. Henry the
Eighth did it, Elizabeth the First did it, William the Conqueror did it. It's just a monarch thing and
it still goes on today. They promote people that they like and they keep out people that they don't,
even if the people they're keeping out might actually be good at the job.
That's just not the way these things ever run. This isn't tyranny. This is just normal politics.
Now in response, these overlooked nobles banded together to form a faction known as the Lords
Appellant and they confronted the King. They forced the removal of De La Pole as
Chancellor. Forced de Vere to flee the country, and had others loyal to the king executed. Now
this does look tyrannical to me but in fact it's the Lords Appellant that are the tyrants here.
Richard just appears to be rubbish at politics. Which is a hallmark of those
who come to the throne at an early age without actually growing up within that environment.
Now he would go further in annoying the rest of his nobility by coming to peace terms with
the French. This went down very well with the commons and the people, you know the ones that
do the actual fighting and dying, but of course it meant that those fighting nobles like Gaunt
and so forth no longer had a "darn good war" to make themselves richer and more powerful.
So up to now Richard has agreed to the demands of rebels, excluded people he
didn't like, cave to another group of rebels and made peace to end a long and unnecessary war.
I'm not seeing tyranny all over the place here are you? But if you do want to see tyranny, the
closest we can get to it then is we are looking at the last two years of Richard's reign. This is
the time most historians refer to as "the tyranny of Richard". Richard has the Duke of Gloucester and
the Earls of Arundel and Warwick, the main Lords Appellant arrested. We're not entirely sure why but
given that they've been part of pretty much every plot and hassle against richard for the entirety
of his reign, it's probably not without cause. But the thing is, if he's that tyrannical then why wait
10 years to take revenge on them? Again it just sounds less despotic when you think that.
Arundel was executed, Gloucester died before reaching trial, Warwick was to be imprisoned for
the remainder of his life, Bolingbroke was exiled to France for life. Finally the problem is solved.
But in 1399, when John of Gaunt died, Henry Bolingbroke, his son, returned to claim the lands that were
is by inheritance. But given that these lands had been seized by the crown if he wanted them
back you're going to have to do it by force, and that's what he did. Bolingrboke invaded,
Richard was caught off guard, ill-prepared and without an army. Meeting little resistance Bolingbroke
accepted the surrender of Richard and agreed to spare his life if he abdicated the throne.
Henry Bolingbroke was crowned Henry IV on the 13th of October 1399. Now deposing a king is a big deal.
Especially when you're basically doing it to get your estate back. So henry needed a better reason
than his vast tracts of land, and what better reason than doing his sacred duties to the realm
by removing a tyrannical despot? In short Henry needed Richard to be the tyrant that history has
since painted him. Remember history is written by the winners, and then Shakespeare would go on to
make it somewhat worse. Possibly because he needed to create a bigger tyrant than Elizabeth the First
who knows? Richard is said to have been starved to death in the oubliette of Pontefract
Castle, from the French word 'oublier', to forget. The metal door you can see here
covers the entrance to that dungeon today. Richard was in many ways a bad King. He was probably vain,
he was possibly mentally ill, he was almost certainly useless in terms of political nous,
but was he really a cruel vindictive and irresponsible tyrant? I'm not convinced. If
you compare him to William the Conqueror, or Henry VIII or any one of the Tudor monarchs,
and he's a pussycat by comparison. So let's slate him for the things he actually was which was
possibly the worst Plantagenet. That, in itself, is an achievement. Thanks for watching. Goodbye