Henry IV

King of England (1367–1413); reigned from 1399, having deposed his cousin Richard II — the first of the House of Lancaster and the first English king to take the throne by a formal act of deposition. Born Henry Bolingbroke, son of John of Gaunt, he returned from exile in 1399 to seize a crown Richard had left undefended.

The historian Helen Castor stresses that Henry did not simply take power by force. He convened a committee that combed the records to draw up 33 Articles of Deposition documenting Richard’s perjury against his coronation oath, made Richard abdicate as well, and then claimed the throne through a deliberately fudged series of assertions — an act that, because it took, became precedent. That precedent cut both ways: it established that a tyrant could be removed, but also that removing one might require pushing beyond the existing constitution, a tension revived when the Deposition Articles of 1399 came under active discussion by the men standing against Charles I in the 1640s.

Castor draws a sharp character contrast with Richard. Where Richard had visual taste but probably did not read, Henry was a reader and a lover of music, less interested in images; his remarkable first-person English will opens ‘I, Henry, sinful wretch’, and his widow’s alabaster tomb at Canterbury depicts a man of not-quite-46 weighed down by what he had done. Castor also warns against Shakespeare’s grip here: the vivid Falstaff-and-dissolute-Hal material of the Henriad is largely invented, and she acknowledges the pull only by borrowing phrases from the plays as chapter titles before returning to the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century sources.

In the wiki

Helen Castor on Medieval Power and Personalities — Helen Castor on Henry’s deposition of Richard as a foundational and double-edged episode in the unwritten English constitution (‘you try something, and if it takes, it gets built in’), and on the psychological weight the act left on him.

Henry IV

In the wiki

See also