In the summer of 1399, King Richard II, second of his name, stood at the apex of his power. Having vanquished his domestic enemies, the Lords Appellant, and asserted a vision of monarchy more absolute and divine than any seen in England before, he embarked for Ireland to pacify his troublesome lordship there. He left behind a kingdom seemingly cowed into submission, its nobility bound by oaths and crippling financial recognisances. Yet, within a mere eight weeks, Richard would return not to a loyal realm but to a kingdom that had deserted him. He would be a prisoner, his crown forfeit, his world shattered. The agent of this astonishing political cataclysm was his exiled cousin, Henry Bolingbroke, the disinherited Duke of Lancaster. The story of Bolingbroke’s return is more than a tale of a bold gamble; it is a profound lesson in the fragility of medieval loyalty and the catastrophic consequences of a king mistaking fear for fidelity. For the county of Lincolnshire, and by extension the manors and people of the Barony of Brattleby, this was not a distant drama but a crisis that struck at the very heart of their world, for the inheritance at the centre of the dispute was the source of their own local power and stability.
The Seeds of Discontent: Richard II's 'Tyranny'
To understand the speed of Richard’s fall, we must first look to the preceding two years. The period from 1397 to 1399 saw Richard II systematically dismantle the political establishment that had constrained him for much of his reign. His principal targets were the Lords Appellant, the powerful magnates who had humiliated him a decade earlier in the Merciless Parliament of 1388. In a swift and terrifying coup, he had his uncle, Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester, arrested and secretly murdered in Calais. The Earl of Arundel was tried and executed with brutal haste, while the Earl of Warwick was condemned and exiled.
This vengeance ushered in a new style of rule. Richard, deeply imbued with a sense of his own anointed majesty, sought to place himself above the law and the traditional counsel of his magnates. He surrounded himself with a cadre of loyalists—men like Sir John Bussy, Sir Henry Green, and Sir William Bagot—many of whom were elevated from the gentry and rewarded lavishly with forfeited lands. Sir John Bussy, as Speaker of the House of Commons, was a particularly prominent figure in Lincolnshire, a knight of the shire whose power derived entirely from royal favour. This "cabinet council" bypassed the great hereditary lords, creating a government that felt narrow, exclusive, and dangerously dependent on the king's personal whim.
Furthermore, Richard developed new and alarming instruments of control. He established a personal army of Cheshire archers, an intimidating foreign presence in the south of England, who acted as his enforcers. More insidiously, he made widespread use of "blank charters" (cartae blankae). Nobles and gentry across the southern and eastern counties were coerced into affixing their seals to blank parchments, giving the king carte blanche to write in any condition or penalty he saw fit at a later date. This was a form of political blackmail on a national scale, holding the propertied classes in a state of perpetual anxiety. It flew in the face of centuries of legal precedent, most notably the principles enshrined in Magna Carta, which guaranteed security of property and judgment by one's peers. For the landowning class, from the greatest duke to the lord of a small manor like Brattleby, the foundation of their status—the secure possession of their inheritance—appeared to be eroding beneath their feet.
The Catalyst: The Disinheritance of a Duke
The final, fatal misstep came in February 1399. On the 3rd of that month, John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster and the king's uncle, died at Leicester Castle. Gaunt, the elder statesman of the realm, had often acted as a moderating influence on his nephew. His son and heir was Henry Bolingbroke, who had been exiled the previous year following a dispute with Thomas de Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk. Before his departure, Bolingbroke had secured letters patent from Richard, a solemn royal promise that, should his father die during his exile, he could claim his vast inheritance by proxy.
This inheritance was no ordinary estate. The Duchy of Lancaster was a palatinate, a private kingdom within the kingdom. Its holdings were immense, stretching across England and Wales, with a particularly dense concentration of castles, manors, and influence in the Midlands and the North. In Lincolnshire alone, the Lancastrian affinity was the dominant power. The great castle at Lincoln, the Honour of Bolingbroke (Henry’s own birthplace), and a vast web of manors tied thousands of tenants, knights, and retainers to the Lancastrian ducal house. For a landowner in Brattleby, held at the time by the kinsmen of the D’Arcy family, their ultimate fealty beyond their immediate lord lay within this Lancastrian sphere of influence. Their economic and social world was underpinned by the stability of the Duchy.
On 18 March 1399, Richard II, with the assent of his council, made a catastrophic decision. He revoked the letters patent granted to Bolingbroke and declared the entire Lancastrian inheritance forfeit to the Crown. He then extended Bolingbroke’s exile from ten years to life. The justification was thin—alleged slanders spoken by Bolingbroke in Paris—but the message was brutally clear. If the greatest inheritance in the realm, belonging to a prince of the blood, could be confiscated on such a flimsy pretext, then no man's property was safe. This act was not merely an injustice against one man; it was an assault on the hereditary principle itself, the bedrock of the entire medieval social and political order. For the nobility, Richard had crossed a line. He had transformed a generalised fear of his tyranny into a specific and universal threat to their own lineage and lands.
The Landing at Ravenspur and the Northern Welcome
While Richard led his army to Ireland in late May, Bolingbroke, now with nothing left to lose, made his move. Encouraged by exiled notables like the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Arundel, he assembled a small force and set sail from Boulogne. Around the end of June 1399, his three ships landed at Ravenspur, a now-vanished port on the Spurn Headland of Yorkshire, the very same place where Edward IV would land in his own successful usurpation seventy-two years later.
Bolingbroke's initial retinue was tiny, perhaps only a few hundred men. His success depended entirely on the reaction of the local nobility. Here, his gamble paid off spectacularly. The two most powerful magnates in the North of England, Henry Percy, 1st Earl of Northumberland, and Ralph Neville, 1st Earl of Westmorland, had been growing increasingly wary of Richard’s rule. Though they had participated in the king’s coup of 1397, they had been inadequately rewarded and viewed Richard’s inner circle of upstart favourites with contempt. They saw in Richard’s confiscation of the Lancastrian estates a mortal threat to their own vast northern patrimonies.
They rode to meet Bolingbroke, who had made his way to Doncaster. It was here, in early July, that the crucial first compact was made. According to chronicles sympathetic to the Lancastrian cause, Bolingbroke swore a solemn oath on the Gospels. He declared that he had returned for one reason only: to claim his rightful inheritance, the Duchy of Lancaster, and to restore his rights as Duke. He had, he insisted, no designs on the throne. This oath was a masterful political stroke. It gave Northumberland, Neville, and the flood of lesser lords and knights who joined them—men like Lord Willoughby de Eresby from Lincolnshire—a veneer of legality. They were not, they could claim, committing treason against their anointed king; they were merely assisting a wronged peer in recovering what was lawfully his. Bolstered by the Percy and Neville affinities, Bolingbroke’s small band swelled into a formidable army as he began his march south. The dam of loyalty to Richard had broken.
The March South: A Kingdom Crumbles
The speed of the collapse was breathtaking. As Bolingbroke marched through the Midlands, his support snowballed. He was greeted not as an invader, but as a liberator. The regent left in charge of the kingdom, Richard’s elderly and ineffectual uncle, Edmund, Duke of York, was paralysed by indecision. He attempted to raise an army at St Albans to oppose the intruder, but he found morale was non-existent. The nobility he summoned either failed to appear or, upon arrival, openly declared their sympathy for Bolingbroke’s cause. They were, after all, simply demanding that a man receive his lawful inheritance—a principle every man in York's army believed in.
York’s council disintegrated. The chief architects of Richard’s tyrannical regime fled for their lives. Three of them—William Scrope, the Earl of Wiltshire (the Lord Treasurer), Sir John Bussy (the Speaker), and Sir Henry Green—took refuge in Bristol Castle. Bolingbroke, his army now a vast host, pursued them west. The Duke of York, seeing the hopelessness of his position, eventually met with his nephew and submitted. The official government of England had ceased to function.
At Bristol, the constable of the castle surrendered without a fight. On 29 July 1399, Scrope, Bussy, and Green were brought before Bolingbroke. Denied a proper trial, they were summarily condemned for treason against the kingdom and beheaded in the city’s marketplace. The execution of Sir John Bussy, Lincolnshire’s most prominent royalist, sent a chilling message back to his home county. This was more than a demand for an inheritance; it was a revolution. Bolingbroke was now dispensing the highest justice in the land, a function reserved for the king alone. By executing Richard’s ministers, he had effectively taken control of the state.
The King's Return and the Confrontation in Wales
News of the unfolding disaster was slow to reach Richard in Ireland. When it finally did, around the middle of July, he was beset by poor advice and bad luck. He sent a small force ahead under the Earl of Salisbury to raise troops in Wales and Cheshire, but delayed his own return. By the time Richard himself landed at Milford Haven near the end of the month, it was too late. The army Salisbury had gathered, hearing rumours that the king was dead, had already disbanded. Richard’s own forces, seeing the hopelessness of their cause, melted away into the Welsh hills. The king, who had left England at the head of a magnificent army, now found himself a fugitive in his own kingdom, accompanied by a handful of loyal followers. He retreated to the safety of Conwy Castle on the North Welsh coast.
What happened next is a matter of some debate among chroniclers, with the Lancastrian version painting a picture of righteous negotiation and pro-Ricardian sources, like the account by Jean Creton, describing outright betrayal. The most likely sequence of events is that Bolingbroke sent the Earl of Northumberland to Conwy as his emissary. Percy offered Richard terms: if the king would agree to restore Bolingbroke’s lands and titles, hand over the men responsible for Gloucester’s murder for trial, and accept a permanent council to govern with him, he could keep his throne. Critically, Percy swore a solemn oath in a chapel that the king would not be harmed.
Desperate and isolated, Richard agreed. He rode out from Conwy to meet Bolingbroke, only to be ambushed by a hidden troop of soldiers under Percy’s command. The promises were a lie. Richard was now a captive. The French chronicler Creton describes the king’s despairing lament: "My God, I have been deceived... These people will put me to death without mercy." He was taken first to Flint Castle, where the famous and poignant meeting between king and usurper took place. Bolingbroke knelt, still feigning deference, but Richard knew the game was up. "Fair cousin," he is said to have remarked, "since it pleases you to take my kingdom, so be it." He was escorted south, a prisoner in all but name, on a humiliating journey to London, where the crowds, long alienated by his policies and taxes, jeered him.
From Duke to King: The Deposition and Usurpation
By the time Bolingbroke entered London in triumph with his royal captive in tow, the original pretext of his return—the restoration of his duchy—was a transparent fiction. The only question was how his seizure of the throne could be legitimised. A crude conquest would lack moral and legal authority, inviting endless challenges. A solution was found that combined legal process, political theatre, and overwhelming force.
Richard was imprisoned in the Tower of London. A parliament was summoned to meet at Westminster on 30 September. A delegation, including Archbishop Arundel and Northumberland, visited Richard in the Tower, where he was allegedly "persuaded" to abdicate. According to the official record, the Record and Process, the king willingly renounced his throne, declaring himself "utterly insufficient and useless" and absolving all his subjects of their allegiance. It is, of course, highly improbable that Richard did so with the cheerful resignation the record suggests.
The following day, Parliament assembled. Richard’s "resignation" was read out and accepted. To bolster the case, a list of thirty-three articles of deposition was read to the assembly, cataloguing Richard’s crimes against the realm. These included the murder of Gloucester, the use of blank charters, his declaration that "the laws were in his own mouth," and, significantly, the illegal disinheritance of Henry Bolingbroke. Having deposed one king, the throne was now technically vacant.
Henry Bolingbroke then rose from his seat and made his formal challenge for the crown. In English, not the customary Law French, he claimed the throne through a deliberately ambiguous mixture of justifications: by right of blood (a tenuous claim through his Lancastrian descent from Henry III), by right of conquest (as he had returned to "recover" the realm), and by the necessity of rescuing the kingdom from Richard’s misrule. The assembly roared its approval. Archbishop Arundel led Henry to the empty throne, and he was proclaimed King Henry IV. On 13 October 1399, the anniversary of the translation of St Edward the Confessor, he was crowned in Westminster Abbey, anointed with a mythical, holy oil said to have been given to St Thomas Becket by the Virgin Mary. The Plantagenet dynasty, which had ruled England for over 250 years, was at an end. The age of Lancaster had begun.
Conclusion: A Fragile Loyalty and a Lincolnshire Legacy
The lightning-fast usurpation of 1399 reveals with stark clarity the conditional nature of medieval kingship. Richard II’s tragic error was to believe that the divine right of his anointing placed him above the reciprocal bonds of duty that tied him to his subjects, especially the great magnates. His rule in the late 1390s had become arbitrary, vindictive, and, most damningly, a threat to the fundamental principle of property and inheritance. He had, in effect, broken the feudal contract.
Loyalty in medieval England was not an abstract absolute; it was a complex web of personal ties, regional affinities, and, above all, self-interest. When Bolingbroke landed, he did not have to persuade the nobility to be disloyal to Richard; he merely had to offer them a vehicle to defend their own interests against a king who had already demonstrated his contempt for them.
For Lincolnshire, the events of 1399 were of profound local significance. The confiscation of the Duchy of Lancaster was the spark that lit the revolutionary fire, an act that threatened the stability of a county dominated by Lancastrian power. The adherence of the northern earls, Percy and Neville, who held significant sway in the region, ensured Bolingbroke’s march south was not checked. The fall of the Lincolnshire knight Sir John Bussy was a powerful local symbol of the old regime’s collapse. In joining Bolingbroke, men like Lord Willoughby de Eresby were not simply choosing a new master; they were acting to restore a political order in which their own inherited rights and lands were secure. The Barony of Brattleby, like countless other manors, was swept up in this tide, its fate decided not by its own lord but by the seismic shift in allegiance to its ultimate overlord, the new Duke of Lancaster and soon-to-be King of England. Bolingbroke’s success was built upon Richard’s failure, a failure to understand that the English crown rested not on divine will alone, but on the fragile, ever-negotiable consent of the governed. This lesson, however, would be a bloody one, for the act of usurpation set a dangerous precedent, sowing the seeds of the dynastic strife that would, decades later, blossom into the Wars of the Roses.
Sources & Further Reading
Primary Sources
The Parliament Rolls of Medieval England, eds. C. Given-Wilson et al. (Leicester, 2005). [The "Record and Process" of Richard's deposition is contained in the roll for the 1399 parliament]. Adam of Usk, Chronicon, ed. and trans. C. Given-Wilson (Oxford, 1997). [An invaluable, though biased, eyewitness account from a lawyer in Bolingbroke’s service]. Chris Given-Wilson, ed. and trans., The Chronicle of Adam of Usk, 1377-1421 (Oxford University Press, 1997). Froissart, Jean, Chronicles, ed. and trans. G. Brereton (Penguin, 1968). [Provides context on the courts of England and France, though less reliable on the specifics of the 1399 campaign]. Jean Creton, "Metrical History of the Deposition of King Richard the Second," in Archaeologia, vol. XX (1824). [A French account, favourable to Richard, by a man who accompanied him to Wales]. Walsingham, Thomas, The St Albans Chronicle: The Chronica Maiora of Thomas Walsingham, Vol II: 1394-1422, ed. and trans. J. Taylor, W. R. Childs, and L.M. Watkiss (Oxford, 2011).
Secondary Sources
Brown, A. L., "The Reign of Henry IV," in Fifteenth-Century England, 1399-1509: Studies in Politics and Society, eds. S. B. Chrimes, C. D. Ross, and R. A. Griffiths (Manchester, 1972). Castor, Helen, The Hollow Crown: The Wars of the Roses and the Rise of the Tudors (Faber & Faber, 2010). [Offers an accessible and dramatic narrative of the period]. Given-Wilson, Chris, The Royal Household and the King's Affinity: Service, Politics and Finance in England, 1360-1413 (Yale University Press, 1986). [A detailed study of the structures of power]. Mortimer, Ian, The Fears of Henry IV: The Life of England's Self-Made King (Jonathan Cape, 2007). [A highly detailed, day-by-day narrative of the usurpation and its aftermath]. Saul, Nigel, Richard II (Yale University Press, 1997). [The definitive modern biography of Richard, offering a balanced view of his reign and downfall]. A History of the County of Lincoln, Volume 2 (Victoria County History), ed. William Page (London, 1906). [Provides background on the religious houses and political structures of medieval Lincolnshire]. Walker, Simon, The Lancastrian Affinity, 1361-1399* (Oxford University Press, 1990). [Essential for understanding the power of John of Gaunt and the Duchy of Lancaster].