Henry IV

The usurpation that founded the Lancastrian dynasty was carried out by Henry Bolingbroke, born in 1367 at Bolingbroke Castle in Lincolnshire, the son of John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster and third surviving son of Edward III, and of Blanche of Lancaster, heiress of the duchy. His first marriage, to the co-heiress Mary de Bohun, produced six children, among them the future Henry V; she died in 1394.

As earl of Derby, Henry joined the Lords Appellant who curbed Richard II's government in 1387-88, then made his peace with the king and won renown abroad, campaigning with the Teutonic Knights in Lithuania and travelling on pilgrimage to Jerusalem. In 1398 a quarrel with Thomas Mowbray, duke of Norfolk, gave Richard a pretext to exile him, and when Gaunt died in February 1399 the king seized the Lancastrian inheritance outright. Henry landed at Ravenspur that summer, claiming at first only his duchy; Richard's support collapsed, and on 30 September 1399 Henry took the throne, the deposed king dying in custody soon after.

A crown so acquired was hard to hold. The Epiphany Rising of 1400 sought to restore Richard; from the same year Owain Glyndwr led a sustained Welsh revolt; and the powerful Percy family, early allies of the new king, turned against him. Henry defeated and killed Henry "Hotspur" Percy at Shrewsbury in 1403, and in 1405 executed Archbishop Scrope of York after a northern rising, an act that shocked contemporaries. In 1403 he married Joan of Navarre, daughter of Charles II of Navarre and widow of John IV, duke of Brittany, a match that tied him to two further continental houses, though it brought no children.

From about 1405 the king suffered recurrent and disfiguring illness, and in his last years much of government passed to his eldest son and the council. He died on 20 March 1413 in the Jerusalem Chamber at Westminster Abbey and was buried at Canterbury Cathedral, near the shrine of Thomas Becket. The crown passed without challenge to his son Henry V, the first peaceful Lancastrian succession.