Richard II

Richard II is remembered, when he's remembered at all, as the weak king Shakespeare made him — a man of beautiful speeches and catastrophic decisions, deposed by his cousin and neatly replaced. That reading is not exactly wrong. It's just that it skips the genuinely strange interior life of a man who was, in measurable ways, centuries ahead of his court and catastrophically out of step with it at the same time.

He was ten years old when his father died, fourteen when he inherited a kingdom mid-rebellion, and fifteen when he rode out alone at Smithfield in June 1381 to face Wat Tyler's rebel army after Tyler had just been killed in front of the crowd. The promises he made that day — freedom for every serf in England — he revoked within weeks. But the ride itself was not nothing. No one else in that field was willing to do it. That particular species of courage, the theatrical, absolute, almost delusional kind, defined him his entire life.

What rarely gets discussed is the court he built. Richard's household in the 1390s was the most culturally sophisticated in England's history to that point. He was the patron of Geoffrey Chaucer and John Gower. He commissioned the Wilton Diptych, a small portable altarpiece so exquisite that art historians still argue about its precise meaning. He is the first English monarch documented to have used a handkerchief — recorded in his household accounts, no less. The first English cookbook, *The Forme of Cury*, was compiled by his master cooks around 1390. His court consumed saffron, ginger, and exotic spices in quantities that read less like medieval England and more like somewhere else entirely.

The tragedy — and it is a genuine one — is that Richard confused aesthetic refinement with divine authority. By the late 1390s he had developed a theory of kingship so absolute it left no room for the nobility who surrounded him. He forced loans, revoked pardons, and had his own uncle, the Duke of Gloucester, smothered at Calais in 1397. When Henry Bolingbroke landed in 1399, the barons simply didn't stop him. Richard surrendered, abdicated, and was dead at Pontefract Castle by February 1400 — most likely starved, possibly self-starved. He was thirty-three.