On July 24, 1399, King Richard II landed on the Welsh coast, having hastily abandoned his expedition to Ireland. He was returning to England to confront the threat posed by his cousin Henry Bolingbroke. Richard had sentenced Bolingbroke to a five-year exile, but, following the death of his uncle John of Gaunt and the confiscation of his vast Lancastrian estates, the sentence was extended to banishment for life. The duke had returned to England to claim his rightful inheritance, but few people doubted that he now had designs on the crown itself. Richard’s immediate departure for Ireland so soon after disinheriting Bolingbroke severely undermined his ability to defend his kingdom against a rebellion that signaled a broad rejection of his rule.

Richard’s regime began to crumble almost as soon as he arrived in Wales, while Bolingbroke, now controlling a vast army in Bristol, was gaining ever greater support from the disgruntled nobles of the realm. Meanwhile Richard’s regent in England (his uncle Edmund, duke of York) was unable to prevent Bolingbroke’s advance and joined forces with the insurgents. Faced with the collapse of his support, Richard now abandoned his troops and made a mad dash across Wales to link up with his only remaining ally, the earl of Salisbury, in the north. He fled in the middle of the night, attended by only fifteen companions and dressed as a poor friar. As a result, the army that had accompanied the king from Ireland rapidly began to dissolve. Richard found himself trapped in Conway castle in North Wales; and his attempts at negotiation with Bolingbroke led to his humiliating surrender (fig. 1). Conveyed to London as Boling-broke’s prisoner, Richard was confined to the Tower of London, where he resigned the crown in favor of Bolingbroke, who succeeded him as Henry IV. Richard was sent to one of the new king’s northern holdings, Ponte-fract castle, where he was subsequently murdered.

The collapse of Richard’s rule in 1399 is well known today, thanks largely to William Shakespeare’s dramatic account of these events in his history play Richard II (1595).