Richard II of England - Early Life

Early Life

Richard of Bordeaux was the younger son of Edward, the Black Prince, and Joan of Kent ("The Fair Maid of Kent"). Edward, heir to the throne of England, had distinguished himself as a military commander in the early phases of the Hundred Years' War, particularly in the Battle of Poitiers in 1356. After further military adventures, however, he contracted dysentery in Spain in 1370. Never fully recovered, he had to return to England the next year. Joan of Kent had been at the centre of a marriage dispute between Thomas Holland, Earl of Kent, and William Montacute, Earl of Salisbury, from which Holland emerged victorious. Less than a year after Holland's death in 1360, Joan married Prince Edward. Since she was a granddaughter of King Edward I and a first cousin of Edward, the marriage required papal approval.

Richard was born at the Abbey of St. Andrew in Bordeaux, in the English principality of Aquitaine, on 6 January 1367. According to contemporary sources, three kings – "the King of Castille, the King of Navarre and the King of Portugal" – were present at his birth. This anecdote, and the fact that his birth fell on the feast of Epiphany, was later used in the religious imagery of the Wilton Diptych, where Richard is one of three kings paying homage to the Virgin and Child. His elder brother Edward of Angoulême died in 1371, and Richard became his father's heir. The Black Prince finally succumbed to his long illness in 1376. The Commons in parliament genuinely feared that Richard's uncle, John of Gaunt, would usurp the throne. For this reason, the prince was quickly invested with the princedom of Wales and his father's other titles. On 21 June the next year, Richard's grandfather Edward III also died, and at the age of ten Richard was crowned king on 16 July 1377. Again, fears of John of Gaunt's ambitions influenced political decisions, and a regency led by the King's uncles was avoided. Instead the king was nominally to exercise kingship with the help of a series of "continual councils" from which John of Gaunt was excluded. Gaunt, together with his younger brother Thomas of Woodstock, Earl of Buckingham, still held great informal influence over the business of government. However, the king's councillors and friends, particularly Simon de Burley and Aubrey de Vere, 10th Earl of Oxford, increasingly gained control of royal affairs and earned the mistrust of the Commons to the point where the councils were discontinued in 1380. Contributing to discontent was an increasingly heavy burden of taxation levied through three poll taxes between 1377 and 1381 that were spent on unsuccessful military expeditions on the continent. By 1381, there was a deep-felt resentment against the governing classes in the lower levels of English society.