To the surprise of the nation Richard took his humiliation quietly. But he was merely biding his time; he had sworn revenge in his heart, but he was ready to wait long for it. For the next nine years he appeared an unexceptionable Richard rules constitutionally. sovereign, anxious only to conciliate the nation and parliament. He got rid of the ministers imposed upon him by the lords appellant, but replaced them by Bishop Wykeham and other old statesmen against whom no objection could be raised. He disarmed Gloucester by making a close alliance with his elder uncle John of Gaunt, who had been absent in Spain during the troubles of 1387-1388, and was displeased at the violent doings of his brother. His rule was mild and moderate, and he succeeded at last in freeing Peace with France. himself from the incubus of the French war—the source of most of the evils of the time, for it was the heavy taxation required to feed this struggle which embittered all the domestic politics of the realm. After two long truces, which filled the years 1390-1395, a definitive peace was at last concluded, by which the English king kept Calais and the coast-strip of Guienne, from Bordeaux to Bayonne, which had never been lost to the enemy. To confirm the peace, he married Isabella, the young daughter of Charles VI. (Nov. 1396); he had lost his first wife, the excellent Anne of Bohemia, two years before.
The king seemed firmly seated on his throne—so much so that in 1395 he had found leisure for a long expedition to Ireland, which none of his ancestors had visited since King Richard reduces Ireland to obedience. John. He compelled all the native princes to do him homage, and exercised the royal authority in such a firm manner as had never before been known in the island. But those who looked forward to quiet and prosperous times both for Ireland and for England were destined to be undeceived. In 1397 Richard carried out an extraordinary and unexpected coup d’état, which he had evidently premeditated for many years. Having lived down his unpopularity, and made himself many powerful friends, he resolved to take his long-deferred revenge on Gloucester and the other lords appellant. His revenge on Gloucester and the lords appellant. He trumped up a vain story that his uncle was once more conspiring against him, arrested him, and sent him over to Calais, where he was secretly murdered in prison. At the same time Gloucester’s two chief confederates of 1387, the earls of Arundel and Warwick, were tried and sentenced to death: the former was actually executed, the latter imprisoned for life. The other two lords appellant, Mowbray, duke of Norfolk,[2] and Henry of Bolingbroke, the son of John of Gaunt, were dealt with a year later. Richard pretended to hold them among his Banishment of Bolingbroke and Norfolk. best friends, but in 1398 induced Bolingbroke to accuse Norfolk of treasonable language. Mowbray denied it, and challenged his accuser to a judicial duel. When they were actually facing each other in the lists at Coventry, the king forbade them to fight, and announced that he banished them both—Henry for six years, Norfolk for life.
Having thus completed his vengeance on those who had slain his friends ten years before—their respective punishments were judiciously adapted to their several responsibilities in that matter—Richard began to behave in an arbitrary Arbitrary rule of Richard. and unconstitutional fashion. He evidently thought that no one would dare to lift a hand against him after the examples that he had just made. This might have been so, if he had continued to rule as cautiously as during the time when he was nursing his scheme of revenge. But now his brain seemed to be turned by success—indeed his wild language at times seemed to argue that he was not wholly sane. He declared that all pardons issued since 1387 were invalid, and imposed heavy fines on persons, and even on whole shires, that had given the lords appellant aid. He made huge forced loans, and employed recklessly the abuse of purveyance. He browbeat the judges on the bench, and kept many persons under arrest for indefinite periods without a trial. But the act which provoked the nation most was that he terrified the parliament which met at Shrewsbury in 1398 into voting away its powers to a small committee of ten persons, all creatures of his own. This body he used as his instrument of government, treating its assent as equivalent to that of a whole parliament in session. There seemed to be an end to the constitutional liberties of England.
Such violence, however, speedily brought its own punishment. In 1399 Richard sailed over to Ireland to put down a revolt of the native princes, who had defeated and slain the earl of March, his cousin and their lord-lieutenant. Second expedition to Ireland. While he was absent Henry of Bolingbroke landed at Ravenspur with a small body of exiles and mercenaries. He pretended that he had merely come to claim the estates and title of his father John of Gaunt, who had died a few months before. The adventurer was at once joined by the earl of Northumberland and all the lords of the north; the army Henry of Bolingbroke lands in England. which was called out against him refused to fight, and joined his banner, and in a few days he was master of all England (July 1399). King Richard, hurrying back from Ireland, landed at Milford Haven just in time to learn that the levies raised in his name had dispersed or joined the enemy. He still had with him a considerable force, and might have tried the fortune of war with some prospect of success. But his conduct seemed dictated by absolute infatuation; he might have fought, or he might have fled to his father-in-law in France, if he judged his troops Flight of Richard. untrustworthy. Instead of taking either course, he deserted his army by night, and fled into the Welsh mountains, apparently with the intention of collecting fresh adherents from North Wales and Cheshire, the only regions where he was popular. But Bolingbroke had already seized Chester, and was marching against him at the head of such a large army that the countryside refused to stir. After skulking for three weeks in the hills, Richard surrendered to his cousin at Flint, on the 19th of August 1399, having previously stipulated that if he consented to abdicate his life should be spared, Surrender and abdication of Richard. his adherents pardoned, and an honourable livelihood assured to him. This surrender put the crown to his career of folly. He should have known that Henry would never feel safe while he survived, and that no oaths could be trusted in such circumstances. At all costs he should have endeavoured to escape abroad, a course that was still in his power.
Richard carried out his part of the bargain; he executed a deed of abdication in which he owned himself “insufficient and useless.” It was read to a parliament summoned in his name on the 30th of September, and the throne was Accession of Henry IV. declared vacant. There was small doubt as to the personality of his successor; possession is nine points of the law, and Henry of Bolingbroke for the moment had the whole nation at his back. His hereditary title indeed was imperfect; though he was the eldest descendant of Edward III. in the male line after Richard, yet there was a whole family which stood between him and the crown. From Lionel of Clarence, the second son of Edward III. (John of Gaunt was only the third) descended the house of March, and the late king had proclaimed that Edmund of March would be his heir if he should die childless. Fortunately for Bolingbroke the young earl was only six years of age; not a voice was raised in his favour in parliament. When Henry stood forward and claimed the vacant throne by right of conquest and also by right of descent, no one gainsaid him. Lords and commons voted that they would have him for their king, and he was duly crowned on the 13th of October 1399. No faith was kept with the unhappy Richard; he was placed in close and secret confinement, and denied the ordinary comforts of life. Moreover the adherents for whose safety he had stipulated were at once impeached of treason.
Henry of Lancaster came to the throne, for all intents and purposes as an elective king; he had to depend for the future on his ability to conciliate and satisfy the baronage and the commons by his governance. For by his Position of the new king. usurpation he had sanctioned the theory that kings can be deposed for incapacity and maladministration. If he himself should become unpopular, all the arguments that he had employed against Richard might be turned against himself. The prospect was not reassuring; his revenue was small, and parliament would certainly murmur if he tried to increase it. The late king was not without partisans and admirers. There was a considerable chance that the French king might declare war—nominally to avenge his son-in-law, really to win Calais and Bordeaux. Of the partisans who had placed Henry on the throne many were greedy, and some were wholly unreasonable. But he trusted to his tact and his energy, and cheerfully undertook the task of ruling as a constitutional king—the friend of the parliament that had placed him on the throne.
The problem proved more weary and exhausting than he had suspected. From the very first his reign was a time of war, foreign and domestic, of murmuring, and of humiliating shifts and devices. Henry commenced his career by Rebellion of the earls. granting the adherents of Richard II. their lives, after they had been first declared guilty of treason and had been deprived of the titles, lands and endowments given them by the late king. Their reply to this very modified show of mercy was to engage in a desperate conspiracy against him. If they had waited till his popularity had waned, they might have had some chance of success, but in anger and resentment they struck too soon. The earls of Kent and Huntingdon, close kinsmen of Richard on his mother’s side, the earl of Salisbury—a noted Lollard—and the lords Despenser and Lumley took arms at midwinter (Jan. 4, 1400) and attempted to seize the king at Windsor. They captured the castle, but Henry escaped, raised the levies of London against them, and beat them into the west. Kent and Salisbury were slain at Cirencester, the others captured and executed with many of their followers. Their rebellion sealed the fate of the master in whose cause they had risen. Henry and his counsellors were determined that there should Murder of Richard. be no further use made of the name of the “lawful king,” and Richard was deliberately murdered by privation—insufficient clothing, food and warmth—in his dungeon at Pontefract Castle (Feb. 17, 1400). It is impossible not to pity his fate. He had been wayward, unwise and occasionally revengeful; but his provocation had been great, and if few tyrants have used more violent and offensive language, few have committed such a small list of actual crimes. It was a curious commentary on Henry’s policy, that Richard, even when dead, did not cease to give him trouble. Rumour got abroad, owing to the secrecy of his end, that he was not really dead, and an impostor long lived at the Scottish court who claimed to be the missing king, and was recognized as Richard by many malcontents who wished to be deceived.
The rising of the earls was only the first and the least dangerous of the trials of Henry IV. Only a few months after their death a rebellion of a far more formidable sort broke out in Wales—where Richard II. had been popular, Welsh rising under Owen Glendower. and the house of March, his natural heirs, held large estates. The leader was a gentleman named Owen Glendower, who had the blood of the ancient kings of Gwynedd in his veins. Originally he had taken to the hills as a mere outlaw, in consequence of a quarrel with one of the marcher barons; but after many small successes he began to be recognized as a national leader by his countrymen, and proclaimed himself prince of Wales. The king marched against him in person in 1400 and 1401, but Glendower showed himself a master of guerrilla warfare; he refused battle, and defied pursuit in his mountains, till the stores of the English army were exhausted and Henry was forced to retire. His prestige as a general was shaken, and his treasury exhausted by these fruitless irregular campaigns.
Meanwhile worse troubles were to come. The commons were beginning to murmur at the king’s administration; they had obtained neither the peace nor the diminished taxation Discontent of the commons. which they had been promised. Moreover, among some classes at least, he had won desperate hatred by his policy in matters of religion. One of his chief supporters in 1399 had been Archbishop Arundel, an old enemy of Richard II. and brother to the earl who had been beheaded in 1397. Arundel was determined to extirpate the Lollards, and used his influence on the king to induce him to frame and Statute De heretico comburendo. pass through parliament the detestable statute De heretico comburendo, which recognized death by burning at the stake as the penalty of heresy, and bound the civil authorities to arrest, hand over to the church courts, and receive back for execution, all contumacious Lollards. Henry himself does not seem to have been particularly enthusiastic for persecution, but in order to keep the church party on his side he was forced to sanction it. The burnings began with that of William Sawtré, a London vicar, on the 2nd of March 1401; they continued intermittently throughout the reign. The victims were nearly all clergy or citizens; the king shrank from touching the Lollards of higher rank, and even employed in his service some who were notoriously tainted with heresy.
External troubles continued to multiply during Henry’s earlier years. The Scots had declared war, and there was every sign that the French would soon follow suit, for the War with Scotland. king’s failure to crush Glendower had destroyed his reputation for capacity. The rebel achieved his greatest success in June 1402, when he surprised and routed the whole levy of the marcher lords at Bryn G’las, between Pilleth and Knighton, capturing (among many other prisoners) Sir Edmund Mortimer, the uncle and guardian of the young earl of March, whom all malcontents regarded as the rightful monarch of England. A few months after the king’s fortune seemed to take a turn for the better, when the Scots were defeated at Battle of Homildon Hill. Homildon Hill by the earl of Northumberland and his son Henry Percy, the celebrated “Hotspur.” But this victory was to be the prelude to new dangers: half the nobility of Scotland had been captured in the battle, and Northumberland intended to fill his coffers with their ransoms; but the king looked upon them as state prisoners and announced his intention of taking them out of the earl’s hands. Northumberland was a greedy and unscrupulous Border chief, who regarded himself as entitled to exact whatever he chose from his master, because he had been the first to join him at his landing in 1399, and had lent him a consistent support ever since. He had been amply rewarded by grants of land and money, but was not yet satisfied. In indignation at the first refusal that he had met, the earl conspired with Glendower to Conspiracy of Northumberland with Glendower. raise rebellion in the name of the rightful heirs of King Richard, the house of March. The third party in the plot was Sir Edmund Mortimer, Glendower’s captive, who was easily persuaded to join a movement for the aggrandizement of his own family. He married Owen’s daughter, and became his trusted lieutenant. Northumberland also enlisted the services of his chief Scottish prisoner, the earl of Douglas, who promised him aid from beyond Tweed.