Rich
EDMUND, an English ecclesiastic; born in Abingdon, England, about 1195. He studied theology at Paris, afterward taught the Aristotelian logic and scholastic philosophy in Oxford, and was prebendary and treasurer of Salisbury Cathedral 1219-1222. He preached the Sixth Crusade in 1227, became Archbishop of Canterbury in 1233, and exhibited great energy as a reformer. His authority was superseded by that of the legate, Cardinal Otho, and being unable to obtain redress at Rome, he retired to France in 1240 and died in 1242. He was canonized in 1249.
RICHARD I. at once picked a quarrel with him, and marched an army into his duchy of Aquitaine. King Henry hastened to the assistance of the young duke, while the other brother, Geoffrey, sided with the prince. But the sudden sickness and death of the ingrate put an end to the quarrel. In the spring of 1189 Richard was in his turn in arms against his father. Philip of France, the pertina, cious foeman of King Henry, mingled in the strife; and eventually Richard joined forces with his father's enemy, did homage to him, and took the field against the old king. A reconciliation was rendered more difficult because of Richard's jealousy of John, his father's favorite.
RICHARD I., King of England, surnamed CŒUR DE LION; third son of King Henry II. and his wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine; born either at Oxford or at Woodstock, Sept. 8, 1157, but was brought up among the knights and troubadours of Poitou, in Aquitaine, with which duchy, his mother's patrimony, he was while Richard became King of England, Duke of Normandy, and Count of Anjou on still a child invested by his father. In England Richard did not spend in all his life a full year; after he became king he spent only 26 weeks in his kingdom.
It may indeed reasonably be doubted whether he could speak English. A favorite of his unprincipled mother, he was induced by her to join his brothers Henry and Geoffrey in their rebellion (1173) against their father (see HENRY II.). Henry II. had his eldest son, Prince Henry, crowned king as his successor during his own lifetime; and in 1183 he ordered that his younger brothers should do homage to him. Richard obeyed with the greatest reluctance; thereupon the ungrateful Prince Henry 080000円 RICHARD I.
July 5, 1189, and was crowned King of England on Sept. 3, following. But he had already taken the vows of the crusader; and besides his coronation, he had another object in coming to England; he wanted to raise funds for his crusade.
He effected this latter purpose in a brief space of time by selling whatever he could get a purchaser for. About midsummer 1190 he met Philip of France at the rendezvous, Vezelai in France; but from Lyons he made his way by a different route from Philip to Messina in Sicily. Both kings spent the winter in that city, and their mutual jealousy came within a hair's-breadth of a rupture. The throne of Sicily had just been seized by the Norman Tancred, an illegitimate son of King Roger, though the lawful heir was Henry of Hohenstaufen, son of Frederick Barbarossa, and afterward the Emperor Henry VI. Moreover, Tancred detained in custody Johanna, widow of the late king (William the Good) and sister of Richard I., together with her very large dowry. But RICHARD I. he made his peace with Richard by giving up to him his sister and her possessions, and by betrothing his little daughter to the boy Arthur (son of Richard's dead brother Geoffrey), whom Richard now declared to be his heir.
On his way to Palestine in the spring of 1191, part of the fleet of the English king was driven on to the island of Cyprus, and the crews were most inhospitably treated by the reigning sovereign, Isaac Comnenus, a nephew of the Emperor of Byzantium, who had revolted from his liege lord. Richard sailed back from Rhodes, routed Isaac in battle, deposed him, and gave his crown to Guy of Lusignan. In Cyprus, too, he married Berengaria of Navarre, whom his mother had brought to him at Messina. At last, on June 8, the English king landed near Acre, and shortly afterward that stronghold surrendered, the siege having lasted two years. Richard took his full share of the jealousies, animosities, and disagreements, though not of the treacheries, that made the Christian crusading host a hotbed of commotion. The glorious exploits of Richard the Lion-hearted -his march to Joppa along the seashore, his approach on Jerusalem at Christmas, his capture of the fortresses in the S. of Palestine, his second advance in the summer of 1192 on Jerusalem (the city he never beheld), and his relief of Joppa -made his name ring throughout the East and excited the wonder and admiration of Christendom, but brought no real advantage to the crusading cause.
Richard, in September, concluded a peace with Saladin for three years, three months, and three days, and in his impulsive, impatient way started off home alone, without waiting for his army and fleet. A storm shipwrecked him near the N. end of the Adriatic. In disguise he began to make his way through the dominions of his bitter enemy, the Archduke of Austria. He was recognized, seized, and handed over to the Emperor Henry VI. (March, 1193). The emperor demanded a heavy ransom for his release, but promised to give him the kingdom of Arles in addition to his liberty. Richard's loyal subjects raised the money; and greatly to the chagrin of Philip of France and Richard's brother John, the captive king returned home (March 13, 1194).
In England in the meantime Longchamp had made himself so unpopular that Richard had been obliged to supersede him, appointing in his place Walter of Coutances, Archbishop of Rouen. It was John, however, who exercised the greatest power in the realm. And though he used his utmost endeavors to prevent Richard's return from his captivity, yet RICHARD II.
Richard generously forgave him. After distributing judicious cious rewards and punishments, raising what money he could , making arrangements for the governance of the kingdom, and being crowned again -the emperor is said to have forced his captive to resign his crown and take it back as a fief of the empire-Richard proceeded to France, and spent the rest of his life there, warring against Philip.
England was governed in his absence by Hubert Walter, Archbishop of Canterbury, who by the measures he took to raise the vast sums demanded by his master trained the English people in habits of self-government. The most important constitutional advances made under Hubert's rule were the formulation of the methods for electing the county grand juries and an arrangement for keeping the pleas of the crown by officers who may be regarded as the forerunners of the modern coroner . ard was shot, on April 7, 1199, by an archer of the Viscount of Limoges, while besieging that nobleman's castle of Chalus-Chabrol, and was buried in the abbey church of Fontevraud.
Rich- Richard cannot be called a good king; his only thought of his subjects was how to get money from them. He was not a faithful husband; he was an undutiful son. Yet, on the other_hand, he treated his perfidious brother John in the most forgiving spirit, and was not incapable of noble and generous acts. His impulsive, hot-headed temperament made him at times cruel, but never vindictive .
He was an adventurer, with a passionate love for contention and strife; he fought for warlike glory, not for victory or real advantage; he had all the personal courage and self-confidence of the born warrior. A fair scholar, he also had the knack of writing verses, and has been called a poet.
RICHARD II., King of England; son of the Black Prince and Joanna of Kent; born in Bordeaux, Jan. 6, 1367; was acknowledged by Parliament heir to the crown on the death of his father in 1376, and succeeded his grandfather , Edward III., on June 21, 1377. The government was entrusted to a council of 12, from which the king's uncles, John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, Edmund, Earl of Cambridg Cambridge , and Thomas, Earl of Buckingham (afterward Duke of Gloucester), were excluded. Nevertheless the central figure during the early years of this reign, as he had been during the last years of the preceding reign, was John of Gaunt, whose overreaching ambition and inability were a fruitful source of disquietude. He was on bad terms with the clergy and with the Londoners, and RICHARD II. was viewed with great suspicion by the king and the commons; yet he was the most powerful man in the kingdom, having at his back the nobles and to some extent the Lollards. War was going on with France, but in a very weak and desultory fashion; the French ravaged the S. coast at the time of Edward III.'s death, and truces were constantly being made for short durations. But this war cost money; so too did the extravagance of the court; and more was absorbed or wasted by the government, for which John of Gaunt was held by the nation at large to be mainly responsible. Consequently taxation was heavy. The imposition of a graduated polltax in 1380 provoked popular risings, directed principally against the gentry and land-holders, in nearly all parts of the kingdom, at Whitsuntide in the following year. The insurgents destroyed the parks, attacked the manor houses, burned the court-rolls, and massacred the lawyers who had charge of them. The men of Essex and Kent, to the number of 100,000, marched on London. The former body, whom the king met at Mile End on June 14, consented to return home when the young monarch assured them he would grant their requests, and take measures to liberate the villeins from bondage and to commute their personal services into fixed money rents. The men of Kent, after destroying the Savoy (the Duke of Lancaster's palace), burning Temple Bar, opening the prisons, and breaking into the Tower and slaying the Archbishop of Canterbury, met the king at Smithfield (15th). During the negotiations, William Walworth, the mayor of London, struck down Wat Tyler, the leader of the insurgents. The king immediately rode among them, exclaiming he would be their leader, and granted them the concessions they asked, and the risings collapsed.
The causes of this wide-spread and simultaneous uprising on the part of the mass of the rural population may be summarized as follows: There had been long continuance of heavy taxation; the villeins resented the re-imposition since the black death of personal services, and were anxious to become tenants of their little farms at a fixed rental; the free tillers of the soil had formed themselves into associations to defeat the Statute of Laborers (1349), which fixed the maximum and minimum of wages; the Lollard or Wyclifite preachers were denouncing the idleness and vices of the regular clergy, and they and others (as John Ball) were promulgating social doctrines calculated to make the common people discontented with their lot and hostile to the landholders. From RICHARD II. the fact that the insurgents directed their enmity against himself and the advisers of the king, John of Gaunt saw that he could never hope to succeed in his ambitious schemes in England; and from this time he kept very much in the background, till, in 1386, he carried himself and his restless plottings to Spain and Gascony. Richard, in 1390, made him Duke of Aquitaine for life. In 1385 Richard invaded Scotland, and took Edinburgh and burned it; but, not encountering the Scotch, returned home. About the same year another coalition of the baronial party, headed by Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester, began to oppose the king and his chosen friends.
They impeached several of them before the Merciless Parliament (1388), and secured convictions and executions. But on May 3, 1389, Richard suddenly declared himself of age, and proceeded_to govern on his own responsibility. For eight years he ruled as a moderate constitutional monarch, and the country enjoyed peace-hostilities with France were not renewed after 1388-and was fairly prosperous. But in 1394 Richard's first wife, Anne of Bohemia, whom he had wedded in 1382, died, and two years later he married Isabella, daughter of Charles VI. of France, a girl of eight.
From that time he seems to have adopted very largely French tastes, manners, and ideas. At all events, in the Parliament of 1397 he began to assert the pretensions of an absolute monarch. On July 8 he had Gloucester, Arundel, and Warwick arrested on the charge of conspiring against the crown. Arundel was beheaded; Gloucester was sent a prisoner to Calais, and died there in prison, probably murdered, a fortnight after his arrest; and Warwick was banished to the Isle of Man. Thomas Arundel, Archbishop of Canterbury, was also banished. In the following year an obsequious Parliament granted to the king the subsidy on wool for life, and delegated all its authority and power to a commission of 18 members, all supporters of the king.
Richard soon aroused the slumbering discontent of his subjects by his unjust methods of raising money, principally by means of forced loans, forced loans, means of forced loans, and by his arbitrary and despotic rule. In the beginning of 1398 the Duke of Norfolk and the Duke of Hereford (Henry, son of John of Gaunt) were accused to the king of having spoken treason against him.
Richard banished them-Norfolk for life and Hereford for 10 years. In January, 1399, John of Gaunt died, and Hereford succeeded him as Duke of Lancaster; but the king refused to give up to the exile the lands of his dead father. Richard in May went over to Ireland, which RICHARD III. he had previously visited at the head of a military expedition in 1394-1395 Henry of Lancaster seized on the opportunity afforded by the king's absence, and landed on July 4 (see HENRY IV.).
Richard at once hurried back, but had neither heart nor power to withstand his cousin. He submitted to Lancaster at Flint, Aug. 19, was carried to London, and placed in the Tower. On Sept. 29 he resigned the crown, and on the following day was likewise deposed by the Parliament, which chose Henry of Lancaster as his successor. A month after his resignation Richard was condemned to perpetual imprisonment by Parliament. His fate is wrapped in obscurity, beyond the almost certain fact that he met a violent death, for which it is not altogether clear that Henry IV. was re responsible. A month after Henry's accession some noblemen of Richard's party formed a conspiracy to restore Richard to the throne, but their purpose was discovered. No doubt this decided the fate of Richard; at all events, authentic history knows nothing more about him from this time.
RICHARD III., King of England; son of Richard, Duke of York, a descendant of Edmund, Duke of York, fifth son of Edward III.; born in Fotheringay Castle, Oct. 2, 1452. After the defeat and death of his father in 1460 he was sent, along with his brother George, to Utrecht for safety, but returned to England after his eldest brother Edward won the crown (1461). Two years later he was created Duke of Gloucester, his brother George being made Duke of Clarence. In the final struggle between the York and Lancaster factions he took an active share; he led the van at the battle of Barnet, rendered valuable aid in winning the fight of Tewkesbury, and is believed, on fairly good evidence, to have had a hand in the murder of Prince Edward, son of Henry VI., who was slain after that battle.
All through the reign of Edward IV. he gave valuable and faithful support to his brother, and was rewarded by him with every confidence, and with numerous high offices. He was believed to have been concerned in the murder of Henry VI. in the Tower on May 21, 1471; but the evidence, though strongly pointing in that direction, is not conclusive.
In the following year he married Anne, the younger daughter of Warwick the Kingmaker, who had been betrothed to the murdered Prince Edward. This alliance was greatly resented by Clarence, who had married the elder sister, and wished to keep all of War- RICHARD III. wick's vast possessions in his own hands.
Clarence quarreled, too, with King Edward, who in 1478 procured his impeachment by Parliament. The refractory duke was put to death privately in the Tower on Feb. 18. Of this judicial murder Gloucester is likewise accused; but the evidence for his complicity is very slight. In 1482 he was put in command of the army that invaded Scotland.
Along with the Duke of Albany he entered Edinburgh; but his one warlike achievement was the capture of Berwick town and castle. In the following year, while still in Yorkshire, he heard of King Edward's death (April 9), and RICHARD III. learned that he himself had been named guardian and protector of his son and heir, Edward V., then aged 13. On his way S. the Protector arrested Earl Rivers and Lord Richard Grey, the uncle and step-brother of the young king, and confined them in his castles. All who were of the old nobility, and resented the rise of the Woodvilles, rallied round Richard. From this time Richard of Gloucester schemed for the crown, and by craft, boldness, and utter unscrupulousness carried his project into execution. The arrest of Rivers and Grey had put the king entirely into his hands, for the queen-mother had hastened to take sanctuary at Westminster. On June 13 Gloucester suddenly accused Lord Hastings, an influential member of the council, of treason, arrested him there and then, and had him instantly beheaded.
The "crime" for which Hastings died was changing sides from Richard to the Woodville party. On June 16 the queendowager was induced to give up, at the RICHARD III. demand of Richard and the council, her other son, the little Duke of York. He was put into the Tower to keep his brother, the king, company. On the Sunday following (22d) a certain Dr.
Shaw preached at St. Paul's cross that the children of Edward IV. were illegitimate, nay, that Edward IV. himself and his brother Clarence were both born out of lawful wedlock. Three days later the Parliament desired Richard to assume the crown; on the next day (June 26, 1483) he declared himself king, and on July 6 was crowned in state by Cardinal Bourchier. Rivers and Grey were executed at Pontefract on June 25. In point of form Richard was a duly elected king, and Edward V. had not yet been crowned; all the same, his accession was de facto a usurpation. Richard's principal supporter all through, from the date of Edward IV.'s death, had been the Duke of Buckingham, a descendant of the Duke of Gloucester, who was privily slain at Calais when Richard II. was king.
Shortly after his coronation Richard set out on a tour through the kingdom, and during the course of it he was surprised by the intelligence that Buckingham was plotting with the friends of Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond (afterward Henry VII.), the chief representative of the House of Lancaster, to effect his overthrow and proclaim Henry king.
But the attempted rising soon collapsed, and Buckingham was taken and (Nov. 2, 1484) executed. It seems to have been shortly before this that Richard contrived the murder of his nephews in the Tower. The deed was done so secretly by Sir James Tyrrell, one of Richard's devoted followers, and a couple of hirelings, that the nation did not know of it till some time after (see EDWARD V.).
During the remainder of his short reign Richard directed all his energies to baffling the plans of Richmond, and to making preparations to meet the invasion which he saw to be imminent. But he was rapidly losing his hold on the nation, alarming and horrifying it by his crimes and tyrannous acts. Henry of Richmond at length landed at Milford Haven on Aug. 7, 1485. Richard met him at Bosworth in Leicestershire on the 22d, and there lost his kingdom and his life, fighting bravely like a king, crown on head, in the midst of his foes (see HENRY VII.). The body of the slain king was subjected to great indignities, carried to Leicester, and there, after being exposed for two days, was buried in the Grey Friars churchyard.
Richard's was a strangely mixed character. Its ruling passion was an inor- Cinate craving for power, to gratify RICHARD OF CORNWALL which he stopped at no crime, however heinous. He possessed many of the typical qualities of the best of the Plantagenets-a skilful soldier, of great ability and energy, brave, bold, reckless of consequences, fond of display, yet not incapable of nobler impulses. He unquestionably had great charm of manner, and knew how to inspire confidence even in those who had the best reasons for distrusting him. He was liberal, too, and, where his own personal ambition was not directly concerned, just and generous. He was also swayed by a lively sense of divine justice, and more than one religious institution owed its foundation to his bitter remorse for the murder of his nephews. In person Richard was short of stature and slight of build, with one shoulder slightly higher than the other; but there is no evidence that he was a hunchback.