One sorrowful day in August, 1399, King Richard stood on the ramparts of Flint Castle, in its lonely position on the Dee estuary in Northeast Wales, watching the soldiers of Henry, Duke of Lancaster, advance from the direction of Chester. Flint townspeople still relate that the king's ever-present companion, his greyhound Math, betrayed his master that day by running to greet the triumphant Henry. Richard had already been betrayed by the Earls of Northumberland and Arundel who had persuaded him to leave the safety of Conwy Castle to journey to Flint. Math's ghost is now said to howl nightly in the ruins of the ancient castle.

Poor Richard! He certainly had delusions of grandeur, but many of his attempts to establish a realm of royal absolutism were to come to fruition only in the reign of his successor. His own reign saw the unleashing of forces completely beyond his control. Great economic and political developments were changing the face of Europe forever. The king's own lack of judgement only precipitated his eventual abdication, enforced after a rule of 22 years of great social unrest and baronial discontent. His reign also coincided with the period of the French Wars, that ate away at his treasury and caused constitutional crises at home.

Richard had become king at the age of ten. England, still held shackled by great war debts, was governed by a powerful council of nobles, supervised by the Richard's uncle, John of Gaunt Duke of Lancaster by virtue of his first marriage, to Blanche of Lancaster. The Duke's second marriage was to Constanza of Castile, a union that forced a great deal of his attention to acquiring the throne of that Spanish kingdom.

Four years after Richard acceded to the throne, he was faced with the mass popular uprising known as the Peasants' Revolt. To raise funds for the French war, a poll tax was adopted by the government the unfair distribution of which caused massive resistance. An outbreak of rioting followed attempts to collect the tax from the poorer classes.

The rebels marched on and occupied London. Richard and his advisors hastily promised charters of emancipation and redress of grievances to the rebel leaders, promises, it turned out, that they had no intention of keeping. The young king pacified the angry mob when their leader Wat Tylor was killed; he then showed he meant business by having their leaders executed. Perhaps scared for the safety of his Crown, he then squandered the support of his lords in Parliament by going too far. His despotic measures, in an attempt to reassert royal prerogative, alienated the barons, who sided with Duke Henry of Lancaster.

Richard's major problem was that he had high ideas of his own dignity and of the power of the divine right of kings. This not only brought him into conflict with his barons, leading to his ultimate deposition, but also with the powerful English Church, whose leaders could always appeal to Rome against any royal encroachment on their privileges. Richard devoted all his energies to the establishing of a despotism that was out of place in the England of his time. Neither the time nor the place was right for the establishment of an absolute monarchy.

The nobles had grown too powerful and Richard's insistence that he was the sole source of English law, not bound by custom, did not sit too highly with those who thought otherwise. The kings' tampering with the will of Parliament, nullifying measures passed by both Lords and Commons, coupled with his attempts to create a written constitution that would serve the rights of the crown for ever, and his assertion that it was high treason to try to repeal his statutes, his appeals to the Pope to obtain confirmation of his measures all combined to force the barons to acquiesce in his deposition. The last straw was Richard's attempt to make Parliament the instrument of destruction of its own liberties (a political move carried out with much greater success by Henry Viii many generations later).

It did not help Richard, who introduced the handkerchief to England, that his nobles had regarded with loathing his patronage of the arts, his extravagant tastes, his choice of favorites and his effeminate ways. In 1386, the king had given the title of Marquis of Dublin to Robert de Vere, a greedy, arrogant man. A group of nobles known as the Lords Appellant, including the Dukes of Lancaster and Norfolk demanded trial for Richard's friends, including de Vere. When de Vere raised an army, he was defeated, and the "Merciless Parliament of 1388 tried an executed many of Richard's followers. Richard was outraged, but in 1389, coming of age, began his majority by dispensing with a council altogether.

Richard regarded his coronation as giving him the right to keep royalty from being dishonored by any concessions to anyone, from the Pope himself, through the leading barons, down to the poorest of is subjects. His will directed that he be given a royal funeral. It seems that his ideas, originally formed into a system of defence against the papacy (growing increasingly powerful in the affairs of Europe) were formulated into a doctrine of absolute monarchy. He was repudiated by his nation.

When he found a pretence to banish both Bolingbroke and Mowbray (Dukes of Lancaster and Norfolk), Richard believed he had a free hand to begin his aim of ruling by absolute fiat. He raised a private army, imposed additional taxes, lavished gifts upon his favorites and spent huge sums of money on extravagant court feasts. He also incurred the enmity of the citizens of London, without whose support no king of England could now successfully govern.

The great revolution of 1399 was an assertion of the rights of Englishmen to constitutional government, thus it bears an uncanny resemblance to the great revolt of the American Colonies some centuries later. The principal grievances were the same. The articles of deposition setting forth the charges against the king were just as uncompromising as his own absolute doctrine. Richard had greatly overreached his powers by appropriating the lands of the Duchy of Lancaster after the death of John of Gaunt in 1399. This was the ultimate blunder that led directly to its downfall. If the great house of Lancaster could lose its property to the king, then no man's land was safe in England. The future Henry lV was thus acting as the champion of property rights when he met Richard at Flint Castle.

By elevating Bolingbroke, Duke of Lancaster, son of John of Gaunt and grandson of Edward lll to the throne, the nobles passed over Richard's nearest heir. They thus asserted the right of Parliament to elect the fittest person from within the royal family, for a short time at least, constitutionalism triumphed in England. Unfortunately for the future of the kingdom, the passing over of the elder branch of the royal house in favor of the House of Lancaster meant the eventual reasserting of the claims of the House of York and the consequent Wars of the Roses with their attendant anarchy.

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