Richard II

Grandson of Edward III and only surviving son of Edward the Black Prince and Joan of Kent, Richard II was born at Bordeaux in 1367, while his father governed Aquitaine. The Black Prince's death in 1376 made the boy heir to the throne, and he succeeded his grandfather in June 1377 at the age of ten. The early reign was managed by councils dominated by his uncles, above all John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster.

Richard's most celebrated act came at fourteen, during the Peasants' Revolt of 1381, when he rode out to meet the rebels at Mile End and Smithfield and defused the rising after the killing of their leader Wat Tyler. As he grew, conflict developed over his choice of councillors. In 1387-88 a group of magnates known as the Lords Appellant defeated the royal favourites in arms and purged the court through the Merciless Parliament, executing or exiling several of the king's closest associates.

His marriages reached across Europe. In 1382 he wed Anne of Bohemia, daughter of the Emperor Charles IV of the house of Luxembourg; the union was childless, and her death in 1394 affected him deeply. In 1396 he married the six-year-old Isabella of Valois, daughter of Charles VI of France, sealing a twenty-eight-year truce in the long Anglo-French war. Richard's court cultivated an elevated conception of majesty, reflected in the Wilton Diptych and the rebuilt Westminster Hall, and his reign coincided with the literary flowering associated with Chaucer.

From 1397 Richard took revenge on the former Appellants, executing or exiling his old enemies and ruling with little restraint. In 1398 he banished his cousin Henry Bolingbroke, Gaunt's heir, and on Gaunt's death the following year confiscated the vast Lancastrian inheritance. While the king campaigned in Ireland, Bolingbroke landed in Yorkshire, ostensibly to recover his estates; support for Richard evaporated. Captured and brought to London, he was deposed in September 1399 and imprisoned at Pontefract Castle, where he died in February 1400, probably by starvation. Bolingbroke reigned in his place as Henry IV.