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Despite the frightening events at the Tower and the abandonment of Henry by Richard, the real estrangement between the cousins didn’t occur until 1382. Up until then, Henry was a loyal member of Richard’s court and a highly visible presence at all the royal celebrations, including festivities and jousts. His father, John of Gaunt, continued to be a trusted member of Richard’s court and was heavily involved in governmental matters. Both Henry and John looked the other way when Richard granted away lands to his favourites who in many cases were men of lower birth. There was a growing contingent of noblemen who were growing resentful of Richard’s new up-and-comers. Henry and John tried their best to keep the peace, but the situation soon became untenable.
In 1382, there was a dispute between landowners in Buckinghamshire where Henry of Bolingbroke held land. The dispute was so great that King Richard was brought into the matter. Instead of ruling in Henry’s favour, King Richard ruled in favour of the Despensers, old allies of King Edward III. As a result, Henry was completely ostracised from court.1
Gaunt too was having major issues with Richard. At a February 1385 council meeting there was a heated debate about what to do next in France. John of Gaunt recommended another French invasion and wanted King Richard himself to lead the army. But Richard had none of it and angrily rebuked John, blaming him for all of their military failures in France. Gaunt stormed out of parliament as did Richard’s two other royal uncles, Gloucester and York. Next, quite shockingly, King Richard put out a hit on Gaunt.2 He didn’t order his arrest or trial, he ordered his outright assassination. Gaunt was tipped off which allowed him to escape before the deed had been done. Months later, at the encouragement of Richard’s mother, the two men were formally reconciled, but they would never again trust each other.
It wasn’t just Henry and John who had trouble with the king. The nobles too were suffering from rough royal treatment. As Richard reached adulthood, he became more tyrannical and violent. He continued to award great offices of power to his favourites while snubbing those noblemen who were traditionally placed in those roles. In July 1383 he raised his lowly friend Michael de la Pole, son of a wool merchant, to be the chancellor of England, the highest office in the kingdom. In another example of Richard’s bad behaviour, he had a disagreement with the archbishop of Canterbury. Rather than working it out diplomatically, Richard immediately drew his sword and had to be stopped from murdering the churchman.3 Less than one year later, Richard argued with the earl of Arundel and punched him in the face hard enough to knock him down.4 The nobles were terribly unhappy with Richard’s brutal style of kingship, lack of military experience, misguided attempts to negotiate with France, reckless financial spending, attempts to degrade the power of parliament, and general misrule resulting from his circle of favourites. They had finally had enough.
In what became known as the ‘Good Parliament’ of October 1386, Richard’s tyranny was held in check. The king’s chancellor, de la Pole, announced that the government would need £150,000 immediately for the defence of the realm against France. The nobles and commons strongly protested and instead suggested that the expenses of the royal household should be examined. The nobles were well aware that Richard spent money on himself indiscriminately, all the while extorting huge sums of money from his citizens to pay for the war against France which had proven so far to be a huge failure. When members of parliament pushed back on his newly proposed poll tax to fund next year’s efforts in France, Richard angrily stormed out of Westminster Abbey, abruptly ending the entire parliamentary session.
The nobles then put up a united front against the king, threatening to depose him if we would not cooperate, just as his great-grandfather Edward II had had done to him.5 Deposition would be a complete disaster for Richard on many levels, especially since at this point he was married but childless. If he were to be deposed, his untrustworthy uncle Gaunt would become the next king of England, followed by his hated cousin Henry. With little other choice, Richard returned to parliament. He himself escaped deposition, however, his chancellor did not. Additionally, a council of fourteen lords were appointed to rule England and reform government for the term of one year.6 This group became known as the lords Appellant and they would be a thorn in Richard’s side for much longer than their initial one-year appointment.
To say King Richard was humiliated would be a massive understatement. Given Richard’s vengeful nature, the lords Appellant knew Richard would find a way obstruct their reforms. Indeed, he spent much of 1387 travelling the kingdom so he could avoid them. Although the lords had control of his entire administration, Richard found one thing legally he still had the power to do: appoint an heir. Richard declared that he as king, not the lords Appellant, had the right to choose his own heir and that he would not follow the line of succession put forth by Edward III. He threw out his grandfather’s Act of Entail and instead declared that his heir would be 12-year-old Earl of March, Roger Mortimer, great-grandson of King Edward III.
Roger Mortimer was the son of Phillipa, the daughter and only child of King Edward’s second-born son Lionel of Antwerp. Even though Lionel was deceased, Richard used the right of substitution in selecting Roger, just as Edward III had done in selecting Richard as the Black Prince’s substitute. However, it was highly unusual to name an heir through a female line, especially when there were other capable male heirs closer in line to the throne. Richard selected the Mortimers so that John of Gaunt, Henry of Bolingbroke, and the entire Lancastrian line would be excluded from the succession. Richard’s declaration was met with great resistance from the lords of his realm who were already disgruntled from enduring years of his tyrannical treatment.
Finally, November 1387 rolled around and another parliament was summoned which was a relief to Richard because he thought he had outlasted his enemies and the lords Appellant would be disbanded. Quite the opposite happened though. Instead, the lords Appellant put forth charges of treason against five of the king’s closest councillors including Robert de Vere, Michael de la Pole, and the archbishop of York.7 Richard agreed to hold the five men in his custody until the charges could be heard by parliament in early 1388. He did nothing of the sort. Instead, he tipped the men off, allowing most to flee the kingdom for their own safety. Only de Vere decided to stay in England to stand his ground against the charges.
When they learned Richard had allowed the accused to escape, the lords Appellant held a special meeting on 12 December 1387 at Huntingdon to decide how to deal with the king. It is at this time that Henry first joined the lords Appellant.8 Up until that point, he had refrained from joining the dissident group and their activities. Henry knew of Richard’s vengeful tendencies and that he would probably be destroyed if he openly allied with the Lords against their king. However, it was nearly impossible not to invoke Richard’s wrath, whether it was deserved or not, so against his father’s advice, Henry threw in his lot with the reforming lords.
The Lords Appellant now had two options before them. They had already mustered a large army numbering in the thousands and were debating whether to march to London to confront the king militarily, or march west to intercept de Vere’s army which was on the way to London to reinforce the royal army. The Lords settled on going after de Vere first. The five lords split up their forces so they could encircle de Vere and cut off his line of retreat. When de Vere discovered the trap, he attempted to make his way into London but was blocked by Henry’s forces at Radcot Bridge on the Thames. After a brief skirmish, de Vere’s army was quickly overwhelmed and fled the field. Seeing his last hope of victory dissolve before his eyes, King Richard left Windsor and placed himself in a more secure location, the Tower of London, to await his fate.
Emboldened by the victory of de Vere at Radcot Bridge, the victorious rebel Lords marched into London with their armies, ready to make a more forceful rejection of Richard’s rule. On 27 December 1387, they met with Richard at the Tower of London and laid down their demands. They would give him one more chance to avoid impeachment if he agreed to have his favourites arrested and tried. They also made him agree to honour Edward III’s Act of Entail which placed John of Gaunt back in line to the throne after Richard. To all of this Richard agreed because he had no other choice.
In the spring of 1388 what was to become known as the ‘Merciless Parliament’ convened, named so due to the ruthless way in which the victims were treated. The session lasted several months as all of the king’s favourites were rounded up and put on trial. All in all, eight men were executed, including de la Pole and de Vere. Seven other men had their titles and lands revoked, plus they were exiled from England.9 It seemed as if the lords finally had the upper hand over Richard, but the king was not content to let others supplant his royal authority.
For the next several years, Richard tried to retaliate against the lords Appellant. He continually threatened the lords and nobles with arrest, confiscation of lands, titles, goods, and even exile if they didn’t bend to his every whim. The situation had become so untenable Henry decided to leave England. From 1388 to 1393, he set off on several overseas trips where he showed off his knightly skills and built long-lasting relationships with foreign leaders. His demeanor and his gallantry at the jousts earned him great respect and a reputation as one of the best knights in Europe. He eagerly accepted an invitation from renowned French knight Boucicaut, Sir Jean le Maingre, to compete in the famous St Inglevert jousts in March 1389.10 It was a great honour to be invited to the jousts and Henry’s father, John of Gaunt, announced the news all around England, which must have irked Richard and inflamed his jealousy. Boucicaut was so impressed with Henry that he invited him to join him on crusade in Tunisia but Richard refused to grant Henry permission to take the trip.
Undeterred, Henry set about a plan to fight a holy war in Lithuania. He left England in August 1390 with a huge entourage and joined up with a contingent of German knights. Together, they found initial success by sacking the town of Vilnius; however, the castle at Vilnius held out for weeks. Henry’s food supplies and gunpowder ran out and a great number of men in his army died from the cold, inhospitable conditions. Henry retreated with his army and waited out the cold winter at Königsberg before travelling back to England in May 1391 where he received a glorious welcome back reception.11
By the spring of 1392, Henry’s mind had returned to his foreign glories and he began planning another trip to Lithuania. He set sail in July but was disappointed to learn upon landing that the two sides had made peace and there was nothing for him to do there. He certainly couldn’t return to England without achieving something to show for his expensive trip so he came up with an ingenious idea: a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Very few Englishmen had ever been to Jerusalem. To have done so would have immediately made you sort of famous. The one-way trip from England (and from Lithuania) was well over 4,000 kilometres and to get there one had to make their way through warring nations and extremely dangerous travelling conditions. Even with Henry’s considerable resources, the trip took him nearly a year to complete.12
Upon his return to London in June 1393, he probably expected a huge welcome but instead he was greeted with serious unrest within his cousin Richard’s court. The root of the current discontent stemmed from the peace treaty which had just been made between England and France, which was negotiated by John of Gaunt and John’s brother Thomas, Duke of Gloucester. In order to secure the peace, they agreed to give away Richard’s claim as the real sovereign of France, which obviously proved to be highly unpopular back in England. Henry was linked to the disastrous treaty just by family association. Richard was likely behind the treaty since he was an advocate of peace over war, but he was content to let Gaunt and the Lancastrians take the fall for it.
Although John of Gaunt and Henry Bolingbroke stayed loyal to their kinsman Richard over many tumultuous years, the king did not return the same respect or appreciation. In 1394, Richard again changed the order of succession to suppress the power of his uncle and cousin. As soon as John of Gaunt set sail on an expedition to France in September 1394, Richard changed the line of succession.13 John of Gaunt and Henry posed too much of a threat to his throne, plus he could never forgive Henry for his part in the lords Appellant. For those reasons, Richard decided that the person who would be the least threatening to his reign would be Edward III’s fourth son, Edmund of Langley, Duke of York, who was an arthritic invalid. From this point forward, Richard’s demeanor towards his Lancastrian relatives was very chilly. No more warm familial welcomes, no new titles or awards; he virtually ignored them.