Difficulties abound in the path of usurpers. King Richard had not protested, he had asked for nothing, but he still lived in the Tower. Before dissolving the Parliament, King Henry IV. despatched the Earl of Northumberland to the House of Lords. The latter asked that the message with which he was entrusted should be kept secret; he then consulted the House upon the manner in which the dispossessed king was to be treated; "for my master Henry," he added, "has resolved, at any cost, to preserve the life of Richard." The Lords all replied that King Richard should be secretly led away to some castle, and placed in the hands of faithful custodians, who should prevent all communication with his friends. This was the sanction which Henry IV. wished for; the dispossessed monarch was conducted to Leeds Castle, in Kent, and then transferred by night from castle to castle, as had been his great-grandfather, Edward II. In the month of January, Richard had arrived in Pontefract Castle, in Yorkshire.
The removal of the dethroned king could not suffice to strengthen the power; conspiracies were already beginning. The lords appellant had scarcely been punished, but their fears as well as their resentment urged them to revenge. They had formed the project of assassinating Henry and of replacing Richard upon the throne. A tournament was announced at Oxford for the 3rd of January, and the Earl of Huntingdon, the brother-in-law of the king, invited the latter to be present thereat. The invitation was accepted. The murder was to be accomplished during the jousts; the king and his son were to succumb beneath numbers. The day came; the king had not arrived, and the Earl of Rutland was absent from the place of meeting. The conspirators saw themselves betrayed; but a bold stroke might yet save them; they galloped to Windsor, and took possession of the castle. The king was no longer there: warned in time, he had taken refuge in London. The arrest warrants were already issued against the traitors, and, on the morrow, Henry marched against them, at the head of a considerable force. They did not await him, and fled to arm their vassals. Civil war appeared imminent; but public opinion was with King Henry: it administered justice to the conspirators, without the king being obliged to interfere. The citizens of the Cirencester seized the Earls of Kent and Salisbury, and struck off their heads; Lord Le Despencer was beheaded by the citizens of Bristol; the Earl of Huntingdon was dismembered at Pleshy by the servants of the late Duke of Gloucester. The King had only to cause the trial of a few accomplices of low degree, but the attempt of the lords appellant probably cost the life of King Richard; it was learnt, towards the end of January, that he had died at Pontefract. It was related that he had refused to take any food since the death of his brothers, the Earls of Kent and Huntingdon; distrustful people asserted that he had been starved to death. Others maintained that he had been attacked in his prison by some assassins, and that, after having valiantly defended himself, he had been killed by a blow behind the head. When the body of the unhappy monarch was brought to London, before being interred at Langley, a portion only of the face was uncovered. The details of his death were forever unknown, and many people were resolute in denying it.
The little Queen Isabel had remained in England during the lifetime of her husband, notwithstanding her father's wish to see her return to his side. The death of his son-in-law caused one of the dreaded attacks of insanity to poor King Charles VI.; but his uncles were anxious to profit by the indignation which was manifested at Bordeaux, the birthplace of the deposed monarch; the Dukes of Burgundy and Bourbon advanced towards Guienne, and the first movement of the population was favorable to their wish. "Richard was the best man in his kingdom," it was said at Bordeaux, "and the people of London have treacherously abandoned him." But as the French army advanced, the ardor of the Gascons abated. The French were poor, and annoyed by subsidies and taxes, which were sometimes reproduced upon two or three occasions during the year. "We are not accustomed to be treated thus," said the English subjects, "and it would be too hard upon us. We have still a king, and he will send his ministers to us to explain himself. Meanwhile, we have a large commerce with England, in wine, in wool, and in cloth." The uncles of the king were compelled to retire without having accomplished anything. Henry IV. was in no hurry to renew the war with France; he caused a proposal to be made to marry the little Queen to the Prince of Wales; but the father and the daughter rejected this alliance. Charles VI. claimed with Isabel his jewels and the two hundred thousand livres in gold which King Richard had received upon her dowry. Henry was poor and the sum considerable; when the young Queen was at length consigned to her family, in the month of August, 1401, the ambassadors of England replied to the claims of the French by a demand for a hundred and fifty thousand crowns of gold which remained due upon the ransom of King John the Good. The question of the dowry of Isabel was no longer mooted, and peace subsisted between the two countries during the greater part of the reign of Henry IV., notwithstanding the challenges of the Duke of Orleans and Wallerand of Luxemboug, Count of Ligny and St. Pol, which gave rise to slight hostilities upon the coasts. Good warrior as he was, the King of England had too much to do at home, and too much trouble to consolidate his throne to seek afar for hazardous adventures.
At the very outset of his reign, however, and on the morrow of the conspiracy of the lords appellant, Henry had attempted an expedition into Scotland. Not daring to ask subsidies of the Parliament, the king had had recourse to the military service of the feudal system, and, convoking under his banners all holders of fiefs, and furnished with the tithe voted by the clergy, he had advanced as far as Edinburgh, to summon King Robert, the Duke of Rothsay, his son, and all the great Scottish noblemen to come and render homage to him. Robert III. was aged, feeble, and infirm; he had abandoned the power to his brother, the Duke of Albany, constantly at contention with the heir to the throne, the Duke of Rothsay, sanguine, thoughtless, and venturesome. The young duke hastened to Edinburgh, to defend it. Henry was repulsed; his provisions failed him: he was compelled to withdraw from Scotland, having reaped no other glory in this campaign than the humanity towards the peasants, of which he had given proofs, and the discipline which he had been enabled to maintain in his army.
While the King of England was fighting and suffering failure in Scotland, an unexpected insurrection broke out in Wales. A lawyer, who had afterwards served as esquire in the house of the Earl of Arundel, a Welshman,—descending, it was said, from Llewellyn, the last Welsh prince,—Owen Glendower or Glendwyr, had seen his little estate encroached upon through the avidity of a powerful neighbor, Lord Grey de Ruthyn. Owen had appealed to the Parliament; his complaint had been rejected. The Welshman resolved to avenge himself by force of arms, and drove from his lands the servants of Lord Grey. He was thereupon outlawed. His pretensions grew with his anger; it was no longer a question of a little field or of a cluster of trees; Owen Glendwyr publicly proclaimed his illustrious origin, laying claim to the independent sovereignty of Wales. Fire smouldered under the ashes among these people, subjected for so many years; the love of national liberty was not extinguished. From all parts the Welsh hastened round Owen; students quitted their universities, laborers their ploughshares, at the call of independence. At the beginning of the year 1401, King Henry IV. found himself compelled to proceed to Wales with an army. But Owen was too shrewd to hazard a pitched battle; he left to the climate and to famine the task of fighting for him. From the mountains in which he had taken refuge, he soon saw King Henry compelled to retire. A second campaign, attempted in 1402, was not more fortunate: the rain fell in torrents; the rivers became swollen at the approach of the English soldiers, who left Wales convinced that Glendwyr was a sorcerer in league with the elements.
The rumor that King Richard was still living had come once more to be circulated in Scotland and in the North of England, restoring a certain amount of courage to the malcontents. In vain had King Henry severely punished the fomenters of this news; Richard was expected with the Scottish army, when it entered into England in the spring of 1402. At the head of the English opposition was a Scotchman, George, Earl of March. The Duke of Rothsay was to have married his daughter, but he had rejected her, to unite himself with the family of the Earl of Douglas, the hereditary enemy of the Earls of March. The Earl of March had thereupon renounced his allegiance to the King of Scotland, and had allied himself with the Percies, all powerful in the county of Northumberland. It was with his assistance that the Scots were defeated and repulsed at Nesbit Moor, in June, 1402. Internal rancors soon brought forward a second army; the Earl of Douglas, furious at the success of his rival, solicited the assistance of the Duke of Albany, and, at the head of a considerable force, he soon overran the two banks of Tyne. Having advanced as far as Newcastle, he was falling back, loaded with booty, when the Earls of Northumberland and March cut off his road on the 14th of September. The Scots covered Homildon Hill, and the English were stationed opposite upon another elevation. Hotspur Percy had already commanded the charge of his men-at-arms, when the Earl of March restrained him by the arm. "Let your archers commence," he said; "the turn of your horsemen will soon come." Arrows rained down upon the Scots deployed upon the flank of the hill: Douglas did not stir; his men were falling in their ranks, when a Scottish baron, Fordun Swinton, at length cried, "Ah! my brave comrades, who restrains you to-day, that you should remain there, like deer or stags, to allow yourselves to be killed, instead of displaying your former valor by fighting man to man! Let us descend from here in the name of God!" And the Scottish men-at-arms, thereupon moving, caused the English archers to fall back. The latter, however, continued to shoot, and Douglas received five wounds; he fell from his horse, and was made a prisoner. Disorder set in in the Scottish ranks; the flower of their chivalry had been decimated by the arrows or had surrendered without striking a blow.
The son of the Duke of Albany, Murdoch Stewart, was among the number of the prisoners. The English knights had not raised their lances or drawn their swords; the battle had been won by the archers of old England. The Earl of Northumberland arrived on the 20th of October at the Parliament convoked at Westminister, gloriously accompanied by all his prisoners.