‘The English kill their kings’, declared a political pamphlet circulating in 15th-century France. It was true. Of the nine kings who reigned between 1307 and 1485, five were deposed and killed because they were unfit to rule. Either they were tyrants, like Richard II and Richard III, or they were useless, like Henry VI, or, like Edward II in his final years, they were both.

France conferred a semi-divine status on its kings. None of the Capetian kings of France was deposed before Louis XVI. The English took a more robust view. Kingship was a demanding job on which the wellbeing of the nation depended. If it was not done properly, the holder of the title must either cede his powers to ministers chosen by others or suffer deposition and death.

The most enigmatic and in some ways the most tragic victim of this process was Richard II. He is the central figure in Helen Castor’s compelling narrative of the long and bloody political crisis that began with the descent of Edward III into senility in the early 1370s and ended