In the late summer of 1399, an anointed king, a man who believed himself chosen by God and accountable to Him alone, was brought as a captive to the Tower of London. He was not a foreign enemy but the legitimate, crowned monarch of England, Richard II. Within weeks, his throne would stand empty in Westminster Hall before the assembled lords and commons, his titles stripped away by a meticulously crafted legal process. In his place stood his cousin, Henry Bolingbroke, Duke of Lancaster, who claimed the crown not merely by a whisper of hereditary right, but by conquest, acclamation, and an exhaustive list of Richard’s failings. The events of 1399 were more than a palace coup; they constituted a constitutional earthquake. For the first time since the deposition of Edward II seventy-two years earlier, the sacred bond between king and kingdom was violently renegotiated. The crown, once seen as a divine inheritance, was now revealed to be a conditional prize, one that could be lost through perceived tyranny and won by political force. This was the moment the English monarchy became negotiable, setting a perilous precedent that would echo through the bloody dynastic struggles of the next century.
I. An Unforgiving Inheritance: Precedent and Personality
To understand the revolution of 1399, one must first grasp the conflicted nature of English kingship. In theory, the monarch was God’s viceroy on Earth, consecrated with holy oil at his coronation, a ceremony that elevated him above ordinary mortals. His authority was indivisible and his person sacrosanct. Yet this exalted theory had long been challenged by a stubborn English tradition of consultation and law. The ghost of Magna Carta, sealed at Runnymede in 1215 and forcefully re-established after the royalist defeat at the Battle of Lincoln in 1217, haunted the Plantagenet dynasty. This charter, and the parliamentary bodies it empowered, asserted that even a king was subject to the law of the land and the counsel of his great men.
The most dangerous precedent, however, was the deposition of Richard II’s own great-grandfather, Edward II, in 1327. Edward’s perceived misrule, his reliance on unpopular favourites, and his military failures led to his forced abdication and subsequent murder. Parliament had sanctioned the removal of an anointed king. Though the act was driven by the ambition of his wife Isabella and her lover Roger Mortimer, it created an indelible stain on the fabric of monarchical legitimacy. The unthinkable had been done once; it could, therefore, be done again.
Richard II, who ascended the throne as a ten-year-old boy in 1377, seemed acutely aware of this precarious inheritance. His personality was a volatile mixture of artistic sensitivity, deep piety, and an unshakeable belief in his own royal majesty. He saw the constraints imposed by his nobility and Parliament not as traditional checks on power, but as insolent affronts to his divine authority. Where his grandfather, the warrior-king Edward III, had commanded loyalty through military glory and a partnership with his aristocracy, Richard demanded it as his absolute due. He cultivated an elaborate, formal court, introducing new modes of address like "Your Highness" and surrounding himself with a clique of loyalists who were rewarded lavishly, often at the expense of the established magnates.
This clash between Richard’s absolutist vision and the nobility’s contractual expectations festered throughout his reign. An early crisis came in 1386-88 with the rise of the Lords Appellant, a powerful group of magnates who effectively seized control of government, executing or exiling several of Richard's closest friends. Richard was forced to submit, but he never forgave the humiliation. For the next decade, he bided his time, ruling with apparent moderation while nursing a deep-seated desire for vengeance.
II. The Tyranny of a King: Revenge and Dispossession, 1397-1399
The fragile peace shattered in 1397. Now thirty years old, Richard felt secure enough to strike back against the men who had humbled him a decade earlier. In what became known as his "tyranny," he enacted a ruthless and systematic purge. The Duke of Gloucester, his own uncle and a leading Appellant, was arrested and secretly murdered in Calais. The Earl of Arundel was tried and executed in a spectacle of royal vengeance. The Earl of Warwick was exiled. Parliament, intimidated by the king’s armed Cheshire retainers, was coerced into annulling the acts of the 1388 "Merciless Parliament" and declaring the Appellants traitors. Richard had broken the power of his opponents and seemed, at last, to be the absolute master of his kingdom.
Among the remaining Appellants were two powerful figures: Thomas de Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk, and the king’s cousin, Henry Bolingbroke, Duke of Hereford, son of the immensely wealthy and respected John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster. In an atmosphere thick with paranoia, Mowbray allegedly warned Bolingbroke that the king would never forgive them for their past allegiances. Bolingbroke, perhaps seeing an opportunity or fearing entrapment, reported this conversation to the king. Richard, seizing the chance to rid himself of two more over-mighty subjects, ordered the dispute to be settled by a trial by combat.
Yet, on the day of the duel at Coventry in September 1398, just as the two armoured dukes were about to charge, Richard dramatically halted the proceedings. Citing the need to prevent civil strife, he banished both men from the realm: Mowbray for life, and Bolingbroke for ten years (later reduced to six). Crucially, he gave Bolingbroke letters patent guaranteeing that, should his father John of Gaunt die during his exile, he could lawfully take possession of his vast inheritance by proxy.
This promise proved worthless. John of Gaunt died on 3 February 1399. Within weeks, on 18 March, Richard II made the single most disastrous decision of his reign. Flouting his own sworn letters, he declared Bolingbroke a traitor and cancelled the legal instruments that allowed him to claim his inheritance. The entire Duchy of Lancaster—a colossal portfolio of castles, manors, and revenues spanning the length of England—was seized by the Crown. For the landed classes of England, from the greatest duke to the smallest knight holding a local manor like the one at Brattleby, this was an act of terrifying significance. It was a direct assault on the principle of hereditary property right, the very foundation of the medieval social and political order. If the king could disinherit the Duke of Lancaster with the stroke of a pen, no man’s property was safe. Richard had not merely antagonised a rival; he had alienated the entire political nation.
III. The Eagle's Return: An Inheritance Reclaimed
Compounding his error, Richard then departed for a military campaign in Ireland in May 1399, leaving the kingdom in the care of his ineffectual uncle, Edmund, Duke of York. He had created a power vacuum and a kingdom seething with resentment, and then he had sailed away.
It was the opportunity Henry Bolingbroke had been waiting for. On or around 4 July 1399, he landed with a small band of followers at Ravenspur, on the Yorkshire coast. His declared objective was shrewdly understated. He did not come as a would-be king but as an aggrieved subject, seeking only the restoration of his rightful inheritance, the Duchy of Lancaster, and his place as Steward of England. This was a cause every landholder could support. From a Lincolnshire perspective, his arrival was momentous. The Duchy of Lancaster was the dominant power in the county, with its administrative heart at Bolingbroke Castle and vast estates influencing the lives of thousands. For lords of manors either holding from the Duchy or living in its shadow, the king’s seizure of its assets represented profound instability. Bolingbroke’s return promised a restoration of the natural order.
Support for the returned exile was immediate and overwhelming. The two most powerful northern magnates, Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, and his son Harry "Hotspur," joined him at once. As Bolingbroke marched south, his army swelled. The kingdom’s defences, under the dithering Duke of York, simply melted away. York himself, after a futile attempt to muster resistance, eventually submitted to his nephew’s cause. Within a month, Bolingbroke was the de facto master of England.
Richard, receiving delayed news of the invasion, finally returned from Ireland in late July, landing in Wales. But it was too late. His army, sensing the shift in political winds, deserted him. He found himself isolated, moving between the great Welsh castles of the Crown, a king with no kingdom to command. He was eventually cornered at Conwy Castle, where he was met by the Earl of Northumberland. The earl, allegedly swearing a sacred oath on the Host that Richard would not be harmed and would retain his crown if he agreed to a trial concerning his governance, persuaded the king to leave the safety of the castle walls. It was a trap. On the road to Flint, Richard was ambushed by a detachment of Bolingbroke’s soldiers and taken into custody. The anointed king was now a prisoner. The chronicler Adam of Usk captured the pathos of Richard’s submission at Flint Castle, where he reportedly lamented, "My God, a wonderful land is this, and a fickle; which hath exiled, slain, destroyed, or ruined so many kings, rulers, and great men."
IV. The Invention of a Narrative: Abdication and Deposition
Bringing a captured and humiliated king to London presented Bolingbroke with a profound legal and ideological problem. Simply killing Richard was unthinkable; it would make him a regicide and a tyrant. Allowing him to live, even as a prisoner, risked royalist uprisings. Bolingbroke needed to remove Richard from the throne with a veneer of legality and consent that would secure his own dynasty. What followed was a masterclass in political stage-management.
The solution came in three parts. First, Richard must be seen to give up the throne voluntarily. On 29 September, a delegation visited the king in the Tower of London. According to the official parliamentary account, the Record and Process of the Renunciation and Deposition of King Richard II, the king cheerfully agreed to abdicate, reading a formal statement of resignation in which he absolved all his subjects of their oaths of fealty. He was said to have declared that "if it were in his power, he would have Henry of Lancaster succeed him on the throne," even placing his own signet ring on Bolingbroke’s finger. The reality of this scene is highly dubious; it was a performance extracted under duress, designed to create the illusion of consent.
Second, voluntary abdication was not enough. To justify such a momentous act and prevent Richard from ever reclaiming his throne, he had to be proven unworthy to rule. Lancastrian propagandists drew up a list of thirty-three articles of accusation against him. These ranged from specific legal and financial transgressions (like tampering with parliamentary records and imposing illegal taxes) to broader charges of tyranny. He was accused of ruling by his own arbitrary will, of declaring that the laws of England were "in his own breast," of threatening his subjects, and of breaking his sacred coronation oath to uphold justice and the laws of the realm.
The final act of the drama took place on 30 September 1399, in Westminster Hall. Parliament was assembled, but with a symbolic difference: the royal throne was empty. The Speaker read out Richard's supposed instrument of abdication. Then, to erase any doubt, the articles of accusation were read aloud, and the assembly formally voted to depose the king. With Richard II now legally nullified, Henry Bolingbroke rose from his seat. In a clear, deliberate voice, he made his formal challenge for the crown, a carefully worded claim based on a mixture of dubious hereditary right (through a fabricated story of descent from a senior line), the right of conquest, and, most importantly, the need to rescue the realm from Richard’s misgovernment. The Archbishop of Canterbury took him by the hand and led him to the empty throne. The usurpation was complete. Henry IV was king.
V. A Conditional Crown: The Lancastrian Legacy
Henry IV’s reign was plagued by the consequences of his actions. His seizure of the throne, for all its legalistic window-dressing, was an act of force that shattered the mystique of divine right. Having taken the crown by deposing a king for tyranny, he had created a standard against which he and his successors would be judged. His reign was beset by rebellions—from Owain Glyndŵr in Wales, to the very Percy family who had helped him to the throne, and from plotters who claimed Richard was still alive. He lived and ruled under constant threat, a king who knew his crown was not entirely secure. Richard II died shortly after his deposition, almost certainly starved to death at Pontefract Castle, a grim necessity to extinguish any hope of his restoration.
The precedent of 1399 cast a long and bloody shadow-sm over the fifteenth century. It fundamentally altered the English political landscape. The crown was no longer an unassailable gift from God but an office held on the implied condition of good governance, as defined by the most powerful magnates of the realm. When the Lancastrian dynasty itself faltered under the troubled reign of the pious but ineffectual Henry VI, the memory of 1399 provided the perfect template for a rival claimant. In 1461, Richard, Duke of York’s son, Edward, would use arguments of Lancastrian usurpation and governmental collapse to seize the throne, plunging England into the Wars of the Roses. The logic was inescapable: if Bolingbroke could depose his cousin for being a bad king, why could a Yorkist not depose a Lancastrian for being a weak one?
From the perspective of a local landholder in Lincolnshire, such as the lord of the Barony of Brattleby, the events of 1399 would have been viewed with a mixture of apprehension and pragmatism. Their primary loyalty was to the regional power, the Duchy of Lancaster. Bolingbroke’s victory secured their immediate interests and restored a familiar-and-local lord to a position of ultimate authority. Yet the spectacle of a crowned and anointed king being so publicly unmade, his authority dismantled by a committee of his subjects, must have been profoundly unsettling. It demonstrated that the entire social hierarchy, which depended on the inviolability of oaths and inheritances, could be upended at the highest level. The negotiable monarchy, born in the autumn of 1399, had introduced a fatal element of instability into the English body politic, one that would take nearly a century of civil war to resolve. In deposing Richard II, Henry Bolingbroke secured a kingdom, but he also bequeathed to his heirs a contested and conditional crown.
Sources & Further Reading
Primary Sources:
The Parliament Rolls of Medieval England (PROME). The Record and Process of the Renunciation and Deposition of King Richard II (1399) is the official Lancastrian account of the usurpation and is a foundational document. Adam of Usk, The Chronicle of Adam of Usk, 1377-1421. Edited and translated by C. Given-Wilson (Oxford, 1997). Adam was an eyewitness to many of the events and provides a vivid, though biased, narrative. Walsingham, Thomas, The St Albans Chronicle: The Chronica Maiora of Thomas Walsingham, Vol. II, 1394-1422. Edited and translated by J. Taylor, W. R. Childs, and L. M. Watkiss (Oxford, 2011). A key monastic chronicle offering a contemporary perspective on Richard’s reign and deposition. Chronicles of the Revolution, 1397-1400: The Reign of Richard II. Translated and annotated by C. Given-Wilson (Manchester, 1993). An excellent collection of primary source extracts from various chronicles (Dieulacres, Kirkstall, etc.).
Secondary Sources:
Saul, Nigel. Richard II. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997). The definitive modern biography of Richard II, offering a balanced and deeply researched account of his life and reign. Mortimer, Ian. The Fears of Henry IV: The Life of England's Self-Made King. (London: Jonathan Cape, 2007). A compelling narrative focusing on the insecure foundations of Henry IV’s rule following the usurpation. Given-Wilson, Chris. Henry IV. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016). A recent and authoritative scholarly biography of the first Lancastrian king. Bennett, Michael J. Richard II and the Revolution of 1399. (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 1999). A focused study on the causes and events of the deposition itself. Stenton, Doris Mary. 'Lincolnshire'. In The Victoria History of the Counties of England*. (London, 1906). Provides context on the manorial holdings and political influence of major families and institutions like the Duchy of Lancaster within the county during this period.