Page 90 of 163
* Froissard, liv. ii. chap. 77. Walsing. p. 252. Knyghton,
p. 2637.
** Walsing. p. 267.
*** 5 Rich. II. cap. ult., as quoted in the Observations on
Ancient Statutes, p. 262.
**** Walsing. p. 265.
A youth of sixteen, (which was at this time the king’s age) who had discovered so much courage, presence of mind, and address, and had so dexterously eluded the violence of this tumult, raised great expectations in the nation; and it was natural to hope that he would, in the course of his life, equal the glories which had so uniformly attended his father and his grandfather in all their undertakings. {1385.
But in proportion as Richard advanced in years, these hopes vanished; and his want of capacity, at least of solid judgment, appeared in every enterprise which he attempted. The Scots, sensible of their own deficiency in cavalry, had applied to the regency of Charles VI.; and John de Vienne, admiral of France, had been sent over with a body of one thousand five hundred men at arms, to support them in their incursions against the English. The danger was now deemed by the king’s uncles somewhat serious; and a numerous army of sixty thousand men was levied, and they marched into Scotland with Richard himself at their head. The Scots did not pretend to make resistance against so great a force: they abandoned without scruple their country to be pillaged and destroyed by the enemy: and when De Vienne expressed his surprise at this plan of operations, they told him, that all their cattle was driven into the forests and fastnesses; that their houses and other goods were of small value; and that they well knew how to compensate any losses which they might sustain in that respect, by making an incursion into England. Accordingly, when Richard entered Scotland by Berwick and the east coast, the Scots, to the number of thirty thousand men, attended by the French, entered the borders of England by the west, and carrying their ravages through Cumberland, Westmoreland, and Lancashire, collected a rich booty, and then returned in tranquillity to their own country. Richard, meanwhile, advanced towards Edinburgh, and destroyed in his way all the towns and villages on each side of him: he reduced that city to ashes: he treated in the same manner Perth, Dundee, and other places in the low countries; but when he was advised to march towards the west coast, to await there the return of the enemy, and to take revenge on them for their devastations, his impatience to return to England, and enjoy his usual pleasures and amusements, outweighed every consideration; and he led back his army without effecting any thing by all these mighty preparations. The Scots, soon after, finding the heavy bodies of French cavalry very useless in that desultory kind of war to which they confined themselves, treated their allies so ill, that the French returned home, much disgusted with the country and with the manners of its inhabitants.[*] And the English, though they regretted the indolence and levity of their king, saw themselves for the future secured against any dangerous invasion from that quarter.
1386.
But it was so material an interest of the French court to wrest the seaport towns from the hands of their enemy, that they resolved to attempt it by some other expedient, and found no means so likely as an invasion of England itself. They collected a great fleet and army at Sluise; for the Flemings were now in alliance with them: all the nobility of France were engaged in this enterprise: the English were kept in alarm: great preparations were made for the reception of the invaders: and though the dispersion of the French ships by a storm, and the taking of many of them by the English, before the embarkation of the troops, freed the kingdom from the present danger, the king and council were fully sensible that this perilous situation might every moment return upon them.[**]
There were two circumstances, chiefly, which engaged the French at this time to think of such attempts. The one was the absence of the duke of Lancaster, who had carried into Spain the flower of the English military force, in prosecution of his vain claim to the crown of Castile; an enterprise in which, after some promising success, he was finally disappointed: the other was, the violent dissensions and disorders which had taken place in the English government.
The subjection in which Richard was held by his uncles, particularly by the duke of Glocester, a prince of ambition and genius, though it was not unsuitable to his years and slender capacity, was extremely disagreeable to his violent temper; and he soon attempted to shake off the yoke imposed upon him. Robert de Vere, earl of Oxford, a young man of a noble family, of an agreeable figure, but of dissolute manners, had acquired an entire ascendant over him, and governed him with an absolute authority. The king set so little bounds to his affection, that he first created his favorite marquis of Dublin, a title before unknown in England, then duke of Ireland; and transferred to him by patent, which was confirmed in parliament, the entire sovereignty for life of that island.[***]
* Froissard, liv. ii. chap. 149, 150, etc., liv. iii. chap.
52. Walsing p. 316, 317.
** Froissard, liv. iii. chap. 41, 53. Walsing. p. 322,
323.
*** Cotton, p. 310, 311. Cox, Hist. of Ireland, p. 129.
Walsing, p. 324.
He gave him in marriage his cousin-german, the daughter of Ingelram de Couci, earl of Bedford; but soon after he permitted him to repudiate that lady, though of an unexceptionable character, and to marry a foreigner, a Bohemian, with whom he had become enamored.[*] These public declarations of attachment turned the attention of the whole court towards the minion: all favors passed through his hands: access to the king could only be obtained by his mediation: and Richard seemed to take no pleasure in royal authority, but so far as it enabled him to load with favors, and titles, and dignities, this object of his affections.
* Walsing. p. 228.
The jealousy of power immediately produced an animosity Between the minion and his creatures on the one hand, and the princes of the blood and chief nobility on the other; and the usual complaints against the insolence of favorites were loudly echoed, and greedily received, in every part of the kingdom. Moubray, earl of Nottingham, the mareschal, Fitz-Alan, earl of Arundel, Piercy, earl of Northumberland, Montacute, earl of Salisbury, Beauchamp, earl of Warwick, were all connected with each other, and with the princes, by friendship or alliance, and still more by their common antipathy to those who had eclipsed them in the king’s favor and confidence. No longer kept in awe by the personal character of the prince, they scorned to submit to his ministers; and the method which they took to redress the grievance complained of well suited the violence of the age, and proves the desperate extremities to which every opposition was sure to be instantly carried.
