Richard II of England

Richard of Bordeaux became King of England at ten in 1377 after his father the Black Prince died young, leaving the boy to inherit his grandfather Edward III's war-stretched realm. He helped crush the Peasants' Revolt in 1381 with unusual brutality for his age, then spent years trying to end the Hundred Years' War while building a courtly world of art and elevated ceremony - less interested in battle than his warrior forebears. His belief in royal prerogative and reliance on a narrow circle of favorites provoked the nobility: in 1387 the Lords Appellant seized control, and though Richard clawed power back by 1389, he waited eight years before taking revenge in 1397, executing or exiling his enemies in what historians call his "tyranny". When he disinherited the exiled Henry Bolingbroke in 1399 after John of Gaunt's death, Henry returned with a small force that swelled fast, met almost no resistance, and took the crown. Richard is believed to have been starved to death in captivity shortly after, his final fate still uncertain.