John of Gaunt III's rule was becoming unpopular due to high taxation and his affair with Alice Perrers, political opinion closely associated the Duke of Lancaster with the failing government of the 1370s. Furthermore, while King Edward and the Prince of Wales were popular heroes due to their successes on the battlefield, John of Gaunt had not won equivalent military renown that could have bolstered his reputation. Although he fought in the Battle of Nájera (1367), for example, his later military projects proved unsuccessful. When Edward III died in 1377 and John's ten-year-old nephew succeeded as Richard II of England, John's influence strengthened.
Alice FitzAlan, Countess of Kent in history as "Warwick the Kingmaker"; Cecily Bonville; Isabel Ingoldisthorpe, wife of John Neville, 1st Marquess of Montagu; John Tiptoft, 1st Earl of Worcester, and Anne Bourchier, 7th Baroness Bourchier. Living descendants of Alice Fitzalan include the current British Royal Family. Alice FitzAlan, Countess of Kent Alice Holland, Countess of Kent (c. 1350 – 17 March 1416), LG, formerly Lady Alice Fitzalan, was an English noblewoman, a daughter of the 10th Earl of Arundel, and the wife of the 2nd Earl of Kent, the half-brother of King Richard II. As the maternal grandmother of Anne Mortimer, she was an ancestor