"Richard II. was a far superior man to many of the weaker kings of England; but being self-willed and unwarlike, he was unfitted for the work which the times required. Yet, on a closer inspection than the traditional view of the reign has generally encouraged, we cannot but observe that the finer qualities which came out in certain crises of his reign appear to have frequently influenced his conduct: we know that he was not an immoral man, that he was an excellent husband to an excellent wife, and that he had devoted friends, willing to lay down their lives for him when there was nothing whatever left for them to gain. ... Richard, who had been brought up in the purple quite as much as Edward II., was kept under restraint by his uncles, and not being judiciously guided in the arts of government, fell, like his prototype, into the hands of favourites. His brilliant behaviour in the insurrection of 1381 indicated much more than mere possession of the Plantagenet courage and presence of mind. He showed a real sympathy with the villeins who had undeniable grievances. ... His instincts were undoubtedly for freedom and forgiveness, and there is no proof, nor even probability, that he intended to use the villeins against his enemies. His early and happy marriage with Anne of Bohemia ought, one might think, to have saved him from the vice of favouritism; but he was at least more fortunate than Edward II. in not being cast under the spell of a Gaveston. When we consider the effect of such a galling government as that of his uncle Gloucester, and his cousin Derby, afterwards Henry IV., who seems to have been pushing Gloucester on from the first, we can hardly be surprised that he should require some friend to lean upon. The reign is, in short, from one, and perhaps the truest, point of view, a long duel between the son of the Black Prince and the son of John of Gaunt. One or other of them must inevitably perish. A handsome and cultivated youth, who showed himself at fifteen every inch a king, who was married at sixteen, and led his own army to Scotland at eighteen, required a different treatment from that which he received. He was a man, and should have been dealt with as such. His lavish and reprehensible grants to his favourites were made the excuse for Gloucester's violent interference in 1386, but there is good ground for believing that the movement was encouraged by the anti-Wicliffite party, which had taken alarm at the sympathy with the Reformers shown at this time by Richard and Anne." _M. Burrows, Commentaries on the History of England, book 2, chapter 5._ ALSO IN: _J. R. Green, History of the English People, book 4, chapter 4 (volume 1)._ _C. H. Pearson, English History in the 14th Century, chapter 10-12._ ENGLAND: A. D. 1381. Wat Tyler's Rebellion.