LEADING DATES
Reign of Richard II., 1377-1399
- The impeachment of Suffolk 1386
- The Merciless Parliament 1388
- Richard begins his constitutional government 1389
- Richard's coup-d'état 1397
- Deposition of Richard 1399
1. Progress of the War with France. 1382—1386.—In 1382 Richard at the early age of fifteen was married to Anne of Bohemia. Though he was a young husband he was at all events old enough to be accused of disasters which he could not avoid. Not only was the war with France not prospering, but English influence was declining in Flanders. In 1382 Philip van Arteveldt, who like his father Jacob (see p. [235]) headed the resistance of Ghent against the Count of Flanders, was defeated and slain at Roosebeke by Charles VI., the young king of France. In 1383 an English expedition led by Henry Spencer, Bishop of Norwich, under the pretext of a crusade against the French as the followers of the Pope of Avignon, ended in complete failure, and Flanders, the great purchaser of English wool, fell under the control of France. In 1385 Richard, indeed, invaded Scotland, ravaged the country and burnt Edinburgh, though without producing any permanent result. In 1386 a French fleet and army was gathered at Sluys, and an invasion of England was threatened.
2. Richard's growing Unpopularity. 1385—1386.—When the king returned from Scotland in 1385 he made a large creation of peers. He raised his two younger uncles to the Dukedoms of York and Gloucester; his Chancellor, Michael de la Pole, to the earldom of Suffolk, and his favourite, Robert de Vere, Earl of Oxford, to the marquisate of Dublin, making him not long afterwards Duke of Ireland. Suffolk was an able and apparently an honest administrator, who upheld the king's prerogative against the encroachments of Parliament. Oxford was a gay and heedless companion of Richard's pleasures, who encouraged him in unnecessary expense, and thereby provoked to resistance those who might have put up with an extension of the royal authority. That resistance, however, was to a great extent due to causes not of Richard's own making. Though the French in 1386 abandoned their attempt at invasion, the preparations to resist them had been costly, and Englishmen were in an unreasonable mood. Things, they said, had not gone so in the days of Edward III. A cry for reform and retrenchment, for more victories and less expense, was loudly raised.
3. The Impeachment of Suffolk and the Commission of Regency. 1386.—The discontented found a leader in Gloucester, the youngest of the king's uncles. Wealthy, turbulent, and ambitious, he put himself at the head of all who had a grievance against the king. Lancaster had just sailed for Spain to prosecute a claim in right of his second wife to the throne of Castile, and as York was without ambition, Gloucester had it all his own way. Under his guidance a Parliament demanded the dismissal of Richard's ministers, and, on his refusal, impeached Suffolk. Suffolk, though probably innocent of the charges brought against him, was condemned and driven from power, and Commissioners of regency were appointed for a year to regulate the realm and the king's household, as the Lords Ordainers had done in the days of Edward II. (see p. [226]).