My question may seem a bit of a non-starter. For six hundred years, historians have been discussing the weaknesses of King Richard's character: his vanity, his superstitious nature, his capacity for self-delusion, his vindictiveness, his duplicity, his disregard for his subjects, his favouritism, his self-indulgence, his reliance on bad counsel, his lack of manliness, his fickleness, his introspection, his coldness and lack of social skills, his insecurity, his paranoia, his insanity and, of course, his megalomania. The whole thrust of Ricardian historiography has been: ‘What went wrong?’ How did this promising young ruler end up a tyrant, hated and despised by his people?

Recently, however, some scholars have begun questioning the basic premises of this tradition, and – before the momentum of this particular act of iconoclasm becomes unstoppable – I would like to jump on the band-wagon.

It is worth noting that Henry IV avoids the outright accusation of tyranny in the official version of why Richard was deposed. He accuses Richard of ‘evil government’, of greed, of dissimulation, of acting arbitrarily, and (rather oddly) of rebuking certain lords too ‘sharply and violently’ in council, but the ‘Record and Process’ never actually goes so far as to accuse him of being an out and out tyrant.

Richard, for his part, certainly did not see himself as a tyrant. In fact he offered himself up as a champion against tyranny. In the Parliament of January 1397 – the first in which he was free of the baleful effect of his uncles and others who had tried to depose him in 1387/8 – he explained to the Commons why he wanted to support the king of France in his expedition against Gian Galeazzo, the lord of Milan.