Richard II Starves: End of a Controversial Reign

Richard II died in Pontefract Castle in February 1400, almost certainly starved to death on the orders of Henry Bolingbroke, who had deposed him the previous September. Richard had been king since the age of ten, surviving the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 by facing down the rebels personally at fourteen, then spending the next two decades attempting to consolidate royal authority against a powerful baronial class that viewed the monarchy as first among equals rather than absolute. His conflict with the Lords Appellant in the late 1380s, when a group of nobles effectively took control of the government, left him determined to rule without constraint. When he regained power, he exiled Henry Bolingbroke, Duke of Lancaster, and then seized the Lancastrian estates after John of Gaunt's death, an act that threatened the property rights of every nobleman in England. Bolingbroke returned from exile in 1399 with a small army that grew as disaffected nobles joined him. Richard was captured, forced to abdicate, and imprisoned in Pontefract Castle. The killing of an anointed king was an act that haunted the Lancastrian dynasty's legitimacy for generations. Henry could not execute Richard publicly without exposing the weakness of his own claim to the throne. The alternative was quiet elimination. Richard's body was displayed publicly to prove he was dead, but the circumstances fed rumors that he had escaped or been smuggled abroad, rumors that Henry IV had to suppress for years. The dynastic instability that Richard's deposition created eventually erupted into the Wars of the Roses, a fifty-year civil conflict between the houses of Lancaster and York that tore England apart and ended only when Henry Tudor seized the throne in 1485.