Hello and welcome back to Epox, where if you remember last time I left the narrative with the death of Edward III, who was an old king.

He reigned for quite a long time.

He wasn't that old in our terms. He was in his 60s.

But his first son, the Prince of Wales, the Black Prince, had himself died in his fulties of some disease.

We're not entirely sure. Probably dysentery finally carried him off, but he'd been ill for a long time with something.

And so the crown passes down to his son, a Richard, known to history as Richard II, but he was a small child.

He was about nine, ten, ten years old. And so he ruled in his minority, so they say. And so that's always worrisome in the

pre-modern period when you've got a child monarch, because what it really means is there's going to be

a power struggle over who controls him. If it's not entirely clear, who will control him, then there'll be

some sort of power struggle. And even if there isn't a power struggle, if the regent or the person or persons that control him aren't good,

then it's just the same as having a bad king.

So where we went from a very strong monarch in Edward I,

to a terrible monarch in Edward II,

back to a good one in Edward the third.

Now we're back to a bad one with Richard

the second. So it's a reign of instability and failures as far as the English crown is concerned.

So I'll pick up the story again with Professor Sir Charles Oman and maybe quote a bit from

Churchill as well in his history of the English-speaking peoples.

So I'll let Oman continue.

He says this, quote,

The Little King Richard II was a boy 10 years old,

born in the year when his father went on his ill-fated expedition to Spain to help Don Pedro.

...