The Wars of the Roses (adaptation) IV", Hall wrote, "underlying these plays is the curse on the House of Lancaster. Bolingbroke deposed Richard II to become Henry IV. Richard II was a weak and sometimes a bad king, ungoverned, unbalanced; he could not order the body politic. Yet for Shakespeare, his deposition is a wound on the body politic, which festers through reign after reign, a sin which can only be expiated by blood-letting. The bloody totalitarianism of "Richard III" is the expiation of England." John Jowett argues the production very much reinforced the teleological assumptions upon which the Tudor myth is based; "it generated an
History of reform of the House of Lords This was a revival of a royal power unused (for male recipients) since the reign of King Richard II of England. In the Wensleydale Peerage Case (see Peerage law) the House of Lords decided that peers created for life were not entitled to a seat in the House. Though the religion of a minority of Irish people at the time, the Church of Ireland remained the official, established religion of Ireland, until its disestablishment by the Irish Church Act 1869 came into effect in 1871. The representation of the Church in the House of Lords also ceased. Eminent lawyers were