https://www.historytoday.com/archive/feature/last-testaments-richard-ii-and-henry-iv Skip to main content Home User menu logged out * Subscribe * Sign in [2026] Subscription Offers Give a Gift Enter your keywords [Search ] [Search] Subscribe Search Toggle navigation Main menu * Home * The Magazine * Subscribe * Buy the Current Issue * Explore the Digital Archive * Institutions * Reviews * Sign in Home Mini header menu * Search * Magazine * Latest * Subscribe [printnew] Subscribe Feature The Last Testaments of Richard II and Henry IV The tyrant and the usurper: the last wills of Richard II and Henry IV give rare insight into the medieval monarchs. Helen Castor | Published in History Today Volume 74 Issue 10 October 2024 Richard II and Thomas Mowbray, from Jean Froissart's Chronicles, 15th century. British Library/Bridgeman Images. On 7 June 1376 the Black Prince, heir to the throne of England, made his will. He had been ill for eight years, but still, on what would prove to be the day before his death, he was as preoccupied as ever with both magnificence and control. He specified the lavish design of the tomb in which he wished to lie in Canterbury Cathedral, and the 14 lines of French verse ('as you are, so I was; as I am, so you will be') to be inscribed upon it. The prince also described the procession that should escort his coffin to the grave, and itemised the gifts - including a suite of black tapestries decorated with his ostrich-feather badge - he intended for favoured religious foundations and members of his family and household. The Black Prince was particularly precise in his instructions, but in outline his bequests followed a familiar pattern. Royal wills in 14th-century England were formal and, for the most part, deeply formulaic documents. The crown itself was not a possession that could be included in testamentary dispositions. Since the violent political dramas of the 12th and early 13th centuries, evolving precedent had established a general principle that the throne should pass by primogeniture from eldest son to eldest son. In late 1376 or early 1377, in the unsettled months after the Black Prince died, his father Edward III did attempt to use a legal entail to prescribe a specific line of royal succession among his own many descendants, but the innovation was quickly abandoned. After all, by what right and through what means could a king hope to dictate what happened to the kingdom after his death? Instead, the wills of members of the royal family - typically written in Latin or French, often using the royal 'we' - tried to influence what might happen to royal souls when they faced the judgement of heaven. They gave instructions about the place and style in which the royal corpse should be buried, and left bequests of personal possessions which - whether by explicit arrangement or implicit assumption - would both prompt and sustain intercessory prayers. Henry IV, from the Great Cowcher Book, c.1402. Henry IV, from the Great Cowcher Book, c.1402. National Archives. This more or less standard process could be implemented with more or less specific detail. Edward, struggling with illness and grief, took a broad-brush approach, handing over private estates, cash, plate and jewels to his executors and trustees so that they could support his religious endowments. But the wills of the next two English kings - Edward's grandsons, the Black Prince's son Richard II, and Richard's cousin Henry IV - do not straightforwardly fit this conventional template. Their texts are atypical, as well as strikingly different from one another, and, in an age where few sources allow direct access behind the closed doors of a public life, they reveal a remarkable amount about the two men's contrasting psychologies. The king's will Richard's relationship with both God and the future was unusual from the start. When his grandfather died in 1377 he became king at the age of just ten. The ritual of his coronation and anointing made an intense impression on a boy aware that, as his father's only surviving legitimate child, he was unique and irreplaceable. Deeply preoccupied with his own sovereign rights, he came to see the role of his greatest lords in government - a government he was too young to lead - as a traitorous usurpation of his God-given authority, rather than a necessary and temporary shouldering of the responsibilities of his crown. By the time he was old enough to rule, this gap between perception and reality yawned so wide that the regime collapsed in 1387-88 into vicious conflict between the young king and five lords - his uncle Thomas of Woodstock, the earls of Arundel and Warwick, Thomas Mowbray, earl of Nottingham, and Richard's equally young cousin Henry of Bolingbroke - over the fundamental relationship between the king, his subjects and the law. The king, it seemed, believed that any challenge to his own royal wishes deserved to be punished as treason, a threat that would deprive his subjects of any possible security under the law - but which also meant that his opponents had to take the dangerous and more obviously treasonable step of raising an army against him to force him back into line. Richard came close to losing his throne, saved only by his unique status and by the impossibility of deciding whether and how any of his uncles or cousins might replace him. Richard II, from The Coronation of Richard II to 1387, by Jean de Wavrin, 15th century. British Library/Bridgeman Images. Richard II, from The Coronation of Richard II to 1387, by Jean de Wavrin, 15th century. British Library/Bridgeman Images. His subjects could only hope that the young king had learned his lesson, but, during the slow rebuilding of his power in the 1390s, there were hints that all was not as well as the restored peace might suggest. The exquisite double tomb Richard commissioned in Westminster Abbey after his young wife Anne of Bohemia died in 1394 - a tomb which there was no suggestion he might occupy in any imminently foreseeable future - offered him the chance not only to approve the design of his own gilded effigy but to write his own epitaph-in-advance: 'he subdued the mighty', it declared, 'and cut down anyone who violated the rights of the crown'. If that sounded ominous about his future intentions, there were also worrying signs about his future capabilities. By the end of 1396 his treasury was full of gold from the dowry he received with his new wife, the six-year-old daughter of the king of France - money he was using, in part, to build up a private military retinue under his personal command. In 1397 he was ready. Woodstock, Arundel and Warwick were charged with treason for their actions a decade before - actions for which they had been expressly pardoned. Warwick was imprisoned for life, Arundel executed and Woodstock murdered before he could face trial. The remaining two rebels of 1387-88, Mowbray and Henry, terrified and uncertain of what might follow, accused each other of treachery. In 1398 Richard declared that the dispute must be tried by combat, only to stop the fight just as it was about to begin in order to proclaim a new arbitrary judgment: both men were banished from England. In early 1399, when Henry's father John of Gaunt died, the king - who had promised that Henry would be allowed to inherit Gaunt's duchy of Lancaster - seized possession of his estates. It seemed that Richard had at last achieved the control of the present that he had always craved. His own will - not the law, nor any reciprocal relationship with his subjects - would dictate what happened in his kingdom. But how could he make sure that the same would always be true in the future? Eternal obedience That was the question to which the king turned in April 1399 when he came to write his will (in the testamentary sense). The document was drafted just before Richard left with an army for Ireland, where he had enjoyed receiving the homage of the Gaelic Irish chiefs during a previous military expedition four years earlier, and where resistance was once again raising its head. It made sense that a king or nobleman who might face death in battle should seek to set his affairs in order beforehand - but Richard had never led his men into military action in person, and he did not intend to start now. Unless the voyage or the campaign went badly wrong, he would find himself in no immediate physical danger. Instead, his central preoccupation was the recent destruction of his enemies. How could he make sure his verdicts against them were never reversed? The king began with the conventional template of a royal will, albeit that he filled out its details with grandiose solipsism. Invoking the saints Richard had adopted as his personal patrons, John the Baptist and 'Edward the most glorious Confessor' - the saint-king of England whose coat of arms he had taken to impaling with his own - the lengthy Latin text began with an elaborate performance of humility, a rhetorical genuflection to mortality: 'Since the sentence of inevitable death defers to no one at all, but rather judges nobility, power, strength, race, age and sex with a balanced scale...' Richard II's will, April 1399. National Archives. Richard II's will, April 1399. National Archives. Inevitability was not proximity; still, Richard would not let slip the opportunity to curate his own spectacular funeral. It was clear that, in the theatre of sovereignty, he intended to play the leading role in death just as much as in life. His golden tomb lay ready for him, but he wished to be dressed for his final journey, he said, in a robe of white velvet or satin, with a crown on his head and a jewelled ring on his finger. His body should be carried to its rest in a blaze of torchlight; the sum of PS4,000 should be spent on the procession and burial, and a gift of a precious golden cup should be sent in his name to every Christian king in Europe. The scene duly set, Richard moved on to the document's central and most arresting section: his plan to control his realm from beyond the grave. With one wife dead and another who had just passed her ninth birthday, he did not yet have a son to succeed him, and had shown no concern to clarify which of his cousins might have the best claim to his throne. Quite the reverse: it appeared that he preferred to be the lone embodiment of any kind of sovereignty, present or future, in his kingdom. But whoever it was - whoever next shouldered what Richard here called 'the burden of the government of the English' - should inherit the contents of his well-stocked treasury, he said, only on condition that every single one of the judgments given in the previous 18 months against Woodstock, Arundel, Warwick, Mowbray and Henry - the five lords who had once dared to resist him - was upheld forever. If, on the other hand, his successor refused to fulfil his wishes - a dreadful thought, 'which we do not believe' - then the gold should pass instead to his four most trusted servants among England's nobles, including John and Thomas Holand, his half-brother and nephew. They, he declared, should use his treasure to defend the judgments 'even to the death, if need be'. It was an extraordinary legacy to his kingdom: the explicit threat of civil war, instigated by the king as a means of enforcing eternal obedience to his wishes - specifically, his destruction of five of his most powerful subjects. It is not clear how many of Richard's people knew the detail of his instructions, but some evidently did; those who saw the document, one chronicler reported, said that it was a 'will exceedingly prejudicial to the realm'. Usurpation The gap between Richard's understanding of the world and its reality was now unbridgeable. He believed that, in depriving his cousin Henry of the lands and revenues of the Lancastrian inheritance, he had destroyed Henry's capacity to resist him. Instead, he had destroyed the foundation of his own relationship with every one of his subjects. If Henry, the greatest nobleman in England, could no longer depend on the protection of the law under the authority of the Crown, then none of England's people were safe. It was clear that the security of Richard's subjects now depended on removing him from the throne. While the king and his forces were away in Ireland, Henry returned from exile to assert his right to his inheritance and the rule of law; within days thousands rallied to his banner. By the time Richard scrambled back to England's shores, he had lost his kingdom without a blow being struck. England's security also depended on installing a replacement king on Richard's throne as smoothly and swiftly as possible, and Henry was in practical political reality the only possible candidate. On 30 September 1399 Richard was formally deposed; two weeks later Henry was crowned in Westminster Abbey as Henry IV. But did the necessity of Richard's removal make it right? Could Richard's tyranny justify Henry's usurpation? The Coronation of Henry IV, Froissart's Chronicles. British Library/ Bridgeman Images. The Coronation of Henry IV, Froissart's Chronicles. British Library/Bridgeman Images. The questionable legitimacy of Henry's claim to rule left his throne vulnerable to challenge. The first revolt came in January 1400, led by a handful of nobles, including John and Thomas Holand, who had been closest to Richard and who now were fearful for their own futures. The conspiracy was betrayed before their trap could be sprung and the rebel lords lynched by angry mobs before Henry could reach them, but the risk of letting Richard live was now clear. Within weeks, an announcement came: the ex-king had died behind the walls of Pontefract Castle. No explanation was offered, but whispers alleged that he had been starved to death. His body was displayed to the people on its journey south, so that all should know he was no longer alive, but he was buried quietly: not in Westminster Abbey as he had planned, but 'in the dead of night' at Langley, 20 miles northwest of the capital. In order to save England from Richard's tyranny, Henry had not only usurped the crown, but killed the man who had worn it before him. Seeking absolution England's new king hoped that he could demonstrate God's blessing on his throne through the justice and effectiveness of his government, but peace and prosperity proved agonisingly hard to secure. In the early years of the new reign, both money and political trust were in desperately short supply, as Henry tried to counter military threats from Scotland and France, while Owain Glyn Dwr raised a rebellion and fought a guerrilla war against English rule in Wales. Meanwhile, anyone dissatisfied with Henry's regime could immediately turn to the question marks over his legitimacy as king - and dissatisfaction, it turned out, could come in many forms. In 1403 Henry faced a revolt led by Harry 'Hotspur' Percy, heir to the earl of Northumberland. Hotspur had been one of Henry's most able and powerful supporters in 1399 and a key lieutenant ever since, but he had grown frustrated and then incensed by what he saw as the inadequacies of Henry's rule and the insufficiency of his own rewards from the new Lancastrian Crown. In July Hotspur was defeated and killed in pitched battle near Shrewsbury - a dramatic victory, but one that left the king shaken, and struggling to replace Hotspur's leadership within his regime. Richard II being taken into the Tower of London as a prisoner, Froissart's Chronicles. British Library/Bridgeman Images. Richard II being taken into the Tower of London as a prisoner, Froissart's Chronicles. British Library/Bridgeman Images. Two years later, when the archbishop of York and Thomas Mowbray's teenage son and heir whipped up armed resistance in Yorkshire, complaining of 'bad governance' and 'unmanageable taxes', Henry's patience snapped. This time there was no battle:on the king's orders, after a summary trial, young Mowbray and the archbishop were sentenced to death and beheaded. And then, in April 1406, 39-year-old Henry's health collapsed. He would never be completely well again. His critics were quick to read the signs: England's king was facing divine punishment for his manifold sins. In January 1409, when Henry made his will during a particularly debilitating bout of illness, its text suggested that the king himself agreed with that spiritual diagnosis. Written in English in the first person - a language and form not used in the will of a king of England in the three centuries since the Conquest - the document in part reflected Henry's admiration for the meditative, ascetic strain that was emerging within contemporary theology. But it was also an anguished plea for forgiveness from a man who, facing the reality of death, could not rest easy in the knowledge that his actions had been righteous: I Henry, sinful wretch, by the grace of God king of England and of France, and lord of Ireland ... bequeath to Almighty God my sinful soul, the which had never been worthy to be man but through His mercy and His grace; which life I have misspent, whereof I put me wholly in His grace and His mercy, with all my heart. Unlike Richard, Henry showed no interest in the pomp that might attend his burial. He left his body and its interment to the direction of his archbishop of Canterbury - a man who had been horrified by Henry's execution of the archbishop of York, but who had come to accept that the king's remorse was genuine and was now becoming his spiritual mentor. Nor did Henry make any attempt to steer the path his kingdom should take when he was gone. He knew all too well how futile such an endeavour would be. Besides, he had confidence in the ferocious abilities of his eldest son, the man who would inherit his crown as Henry V. The prince had been wounded at the Battle of Shrewsbury at the age of 16 by an arrow embedded six inches deep in his face, but God (and the ministrations of an expert surgeon) and the boy's own courage had saved him. Since then, he had demonstrated his formidable intelligence and his implacable discipline in both war and politics. Henry named his son his executor, 'for the great trust that I have in him'. Richard II resigning his crown, Froissart's Chronicles. British Library/Bridgeman Images. Richard II resigning his crown, Froissart's Chronicles. British Library/Bridgeman Images. The king's concern lay instead with those to whom he owed material and personal debts. All testators asked that their debts be paid from the estate they left, but Henry knew how often such instructions were honoured in the breach rather than the observance. Now he asked that all annuities he had granted to men in his service should continue to be paid, 'in especial to all them that have been true servants to me and toward me always', and that rewards should be given to the grooms of his chamber and other attendants, six of whom - William Wardell, John Warren, William Thorpe, Thomas Delacroix, Jacob Raysh and John Halley - he commended by name. The will's short text powerfully reflected the personal preoccupations of a king whose sovereignty had never escaped the troubling questions raised by its own creation. A strange and fickle land Imprisoned in the Tower in the weeks after his fall, Richard had been haunted by his own suffering. 'My God', a visiting cleric heard him say, 'this is a strange and fickle land, which has exiled, slain, destroyed and ruined so many kings, so many rulers and great men.' In the months before his death in 1413, after years of ill health, Henry was haunted by what he himself had done. He still hoped he might sail again to Jerusalem, a place he had visited as a pilgrim during the golden years of his youth; in October 1412 he ordered that 800 oaks should be cut down in his park at Eltham so that three new ships could be built for his royal use. But in March 1413 he collapsed during a visit to Edward the Confessor's shrine in Westminster Abbey, beside the gilded tomb where Richard did not lie. Henry was carried to the abbot's lodging. There, he took his last breath in a room known as the Jerusalem Chamber, beneath a ceiling patterned with Richard's crowned initial R. Most royal wills in 14th- and 15th-century England were formulaic documents. The wills of Richard II and Henry IV are not. Richard's displays his theatricality, his narcissism, his fixation on vengeance and control; Henry's his guilt, his realism and his humanity. The texts give a rare insight into the drama of the deposition of 1399 and the measure of the two men who stood at its heart. Helen Castor is the author of The Eagle and the Hart: The Tragedy of Richard II and Henry IV (Allen Lane, 2024). MedievalEnglandHenry IVRichard IIPolitical Related Articles Angevin family tree showing Henry II and his children. From left: William, Henry, Richard, Matilda, Geoffrey, Eleanor, Joan and John. Niday Picture Library/Alamy Stock Photo. How Henry II Survived the Great Rebellion The Wilton Diptych on display at the National Gallery. Sailko (CC BY 3.0). Richard II: King of the White Hart Popular articles Richard II and Thomas Mowbray, from Jean Froissart's Chronicles, 15th century. British Library/Bridgeman Images. The Last Testaments of Richard II and Henry IV 'Comedy in the Country, Tragedy in London', Thomas Rowlandson, 29 May 1807. Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public Domain. How Can We Write the History of Emotions? Recently published Sicilian Vespers, by Erulo Eroli, 1890-91. A. Dagli Orti/NPL - DeA Picture Library/ Bridgeman Images. The Sicilian Vespers Obsequies for Father Jerzy Popieluszko, Warsaw, 3 November 1984. Arnaud Borrel/Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images. Jerzy Popieluszko's Masses for Poland A bird's eye view of Europe, William Heath, c.1825-30. Rijksmuseum. Public Domain. 'Europe: A New History' by Roderick Beaton review Most read 1. How Can We Write the History of Emotions? 2. Jerzy Popieluszko's Masses for Poland 3. 'Europe: A New History' by Roderick Beaton review 4. The Sicilian Vespers 5. After Hiroshima: The US Occupation of Japan X Get Miscellanies, our free weekly long read, in your inbox every week [ ] [ ] [Sign Up] Footer menu * About * Masthead * Contact * Jobs * Advertising * RSS feeds * Submit an Article * Back Issues * Binders * Cookie policy * Awards * Students * Privacy policy * Terms of Use * X * Instagram * Bluesky * Facebook (c) Copyright 2026 History Today Ltd. Company no. 1556332.