Richard II

I'm reading Terry Jones' highly entertaining new book on Chaucer, and am finding myself very interested in his unorthodoxly sympathetic interpretation of Richard II--the king who inherited his throne at age ten, famously told his serfs after the Peasant's Revolt, "Villeins you are, and villeins you shall remain," and who was so thoroughly disliked by his own nobles that they ousted and probably murdered him in 1399. Historians--perhaps with the exception of Shakespeare, who also maintained a certain sympathy even while acknowledging Richard's mistakes--tend to portray Richard as pompous, distant and removed from his own people, and bent on enacting his own notions of divine kingship. Jones, on the other hand, sees Richard as maintaining two distinct personas: one following the continental predisposition for ceremony, the other comfortable with people who represented "gentilesse" through deeds, not bloodlines.

It's an interesting theory. Certainly I call to mind the old adage, "To the victor remain the spoils": that is, the survivor is always the one who gets to tell the pleasing circumstances of his own rise to power. The guy who gets slaughtered very possibly gets, in addition to a dead body, a tarnished reputation to go with it.