An odd bit of historical trivia that I came across: the Duke of Ireland was killed by a wild boar in the woods near our house, on 22 November 1392.

I was not aware that there had ever been a Duke of Ireland. It was a title given in 1386, for his lifetime only, to Robert de Vere, the ninth Earl of Oxford, by King Richard II. Richard II was the only king of England to visit Ireland between 1215 and 1690. One of the ways he demonstrated his regard for Ireland was to give titles to his very good friend the Earl of Oxford. In 1385, Richard made de Vere Marquess of Dublin, the very first title of Marquess granted in England, and in 1386, Duke of Ireland, the first duke in England who was not closely related to the royal family.

There was speculation then and now about exactly how close the relationship between King and Duke was. In 1385, when the unprecedented title of Marquess was granted, Richard II was 18 and Robert de Vere 24. Both married twice; neither is known to have had children. It should be added that de Vere married his second wife, one of the ladies of the household of Richard II’s first queen, Anne of Bohemia, after a very public love affair. This of course does not exclude anything.

It all ended horribly. Richard II was not a consensus-minded guy and tried to rule England and Ireland with the assistance and advice of a very few chosen friends. The regional magnates, banding together as the Lords Appellant, rebelled against him, and defeated the pro-Richard forces, led by de Vere, at the Battle of Radcot Bridge in 1387. De Vere was forced into exile; this medieval illustration shows him after his defeat, sadly crossing the Thames on his way to exile in Flanders.

The “Merciless Parliament” of 1388 consolidated control of England by the Lords Appellant, and condemned de Vere to death in absentia. It lasted less than a year; the Lords Appellant proved even worse at government than Richard II had, and his uncle John of Gaunt returned and brokered a restoration of power to Richard in 1389. One of the Lords Appellant who Richard persuaded to change sides was John of Gaunt’s son Henry Bolingbroke, Earl of Derby. Henry and Richard were the same age and had been childhood playmates.

Richard elevated Henry to the title of Duke of Hereford (incidentally, Richard II created nine dukedoms, a record not broken until Charles II three hundred years later). But ten years later, they quarrelled, Henry was sent into exile, and so the plot of Shakespeare’s Richard II begins. I must admit that until I came across the trivial point of the identity of the Duke of Ireland, I was not aware of the whole 1380’s crisis and knmew nothing about Richard’s reign between the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381 and the exile of Bolingbroke in 1397, leading inexorably to Richard’s overthrow and death two years later.

Although Richard regained power from 1388, he made no attempt to recall de Vere from his exile in Leuven. As I said up top, de Vere was killed in a hunting accident in the woods close to our house in 1392, aged 30. The titles of Duke of Ireland and Marquess of Dublin died with him, and his uncle inherited the title of Earl of Oxford. Three years later his body was brought back to England and reburied. It is reported (in the St Albans Chronicle) that the king had the coffin opened to kiss his lost friend’s hand and to gaze on his face one last time. Ironically, the emblem of the de Vere family was a boar, the same animal that killed the Duke of Ireland.