Richard II: A Brittle Glory

Richard II (1377-99) came to the throne as a child, following the long, domineering reign of his grandfather Edward III. He suffered from the disastrous combination of an exalted sense of his own power and an inability to impress that power on others. Neither trusted nor feared, Richard battled with failures and emergencies before succumbing to a coup, imprisonment, and murder. Laura Ashe's account of his reign emphasizes the strange gap between Richard's personal incapacity and the amazing cultural legacy of his reign—from the Wilton Diptych to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and The Canterbury Tales.