King Richard II was frequently accused of ignoring the advice of his older, wiser counsellors, instead surrounding himself with young favourites by whom he was too easily swayed. The chronicler of the Historia Vitae et Regni Ricardi Secundi, in the one full description of Richard's personality which has come down to us, describes the king as "too apt to prefer and to follow the recommendations of the young, to the advice of the elder nobles". Similar accusations are made by the poet of Richard the Redeless:
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Whane ye were sette in youre se / as a sir aughte, Ther carpinge comynliche / of conceill arisith, The cheuyteyns cheef / that yee chesse euere, Weren all to yonge of yeris / to yeme swyche a rewme.... |
When you were set in your seat, as a lord should, There common complaint of counsel arises; The chief counsellors that you always choose Were all to young of years to govern such a realm. |
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John Gower wrote of the political implications of the king's youth in his Tripartite Chronicle: "He took the base, immature counsel of fools to himself, and caused the principles of older men to be rejected". In his Vox Clamantis, he wrote:
The boy is free of blame, but those who have instrumented this boyish reign shall not endure without a fall. So not the king but his council is the cause of our sorrow, for which the land grieves as if with a general murmur. If the king were of mature age, he would set right the scale which now is without justice....But this latter thought pertains to one that maturity demonstrates as able to choose, not to a boy, since his blame is smaller then....To boys, evils are not wrongdoing but joking, not dishonour but glorious sport, and the origin of evil is not there. (Book VI, ll. 555-577)These lines were revised, probably in 1393, to place greater blame on the king:
The king, an undisciplined boy, neglects the moral behaviour by which a man might grow up from a boy. Indeed, youthful company so sways the boy that he has a taste for nothing practical, unless it be his whim....To boys, it is not wrongdoing but joking, no dishonour but glorious sport; but his destiny does arise out of this wrongdoing.It seems that in 1393, when Richard was twenty-six years old, Gower still saw Richard as immature, and perhaps laid even greater stress on the relevance of his immaturity to politics than he had done earlier in the reign when it was more excusable.
This perception was probably encouraged by the fact that Richard seems to have had a youthful appearance and an impetuous, passionate, personality. For instance, the chronicler of the Vita Ricardi Secundi wrote that "his shining hair flowed, his face was white and round and feminine, often flushed with phlegmatic blood; [he was] short of tongue and stammering, unsteady in his ways". More likenesses of Richard II survive than of any other king before Henry VIII, and such portraits provide some evidence to suggest that Richard was thought to be inordinately youthful in appearance and personality.
In addition to accusations such as that of the chronicler of the Vita Ricardi Secundi that Richard was "timid and unsuccessful in foreign war," the extravagant lifestyle the king encouraged at court was the source of many complaints. The atmosphere is summed up in a contemporary account by Thomas Walsingham, who made this memorable assessment of Richard's courtiers:
They were knights of Venus rather than knights of Bellona, more valiant in the bedchamber than on the field, armed with words rather than weapons, prompt in speaking but slow in performing the acts of war. These fellows, who are in close association with the King, care nothing for what a knight ought to know – I am speaking not only about the use of arms but also about those matters with which a noble king should be concerned in times of peace, such as hunting and hawking and the like – activities that serve to enhance the honour of a king. (Walsingham, Historia Anglicana, II, 156)