friends and partisans, who believed that he was murdered, and they trembled for their own security. To pacify the public mind, Richard issued a proclamation, stating that these arrests had been made with the full assent of the Dukes of Lancaster and York, and of their sons and all the leading members of the council; that they were made, not on account of the transactions of the tenth and eleventh years of his reign, for which bills of indemnity had been given, but for recent offences; and that no one need be alarmed on account of participation in those past proceeding's.
This was to lull into security fresh victims, and to obtain that sanction from Lancaster, York, and their sons, which Richard pretended to have had, and which was not true. These princes were at Nottingham, and Richard determined to retort upon them their conduct towards his favourites. He therefore hastened down thither, and as these noblemen were at dinner he suddenly summoned them to the gate, and compelled them to set their seals to a form of arrest which had been prepared for the purpose. They were made to say, "We appeal Thomas Duke of Gloucester, Richard Earl of Arundel, and Thomas Earl of Warwick, as traitors to your majesty and realm," and to call for trial upon them.
On returning to the hall, they found the king seated on the throne, wearing his crown, who granted the request they had been induced to make, and appointed a parliament to hear the cause on the 17th of the following month, September, 1397.
About three weeks later Sir William Rickhill, one of the justices, was suddenly roused from his bed at midnight at Essingham, in Kent, and ordered to hasten to Dover and follow the Earl of Nottingham, the earl marshal, to Calais. On his arrival there the earl put into his hand a commission to examine the Duke of Gloucester, whom he had imagined for some weeks was dead. Sir William refused to perform this office unless accompanied by two witnesses; and, on being admitted, advised Gloucester to return his answer in writing and to keep a copy. This caution afterwards saved the life of the prudent judge, who knew the danger of being the sole repository of a king's secrets. As soon as he had received Gloucester's statement, he was refused further admittance to him.
To secure his measures Richard employed every means to impress the Parliament and public with awe. Great preparations were made for the assembling of a Parliament which was to decide the fate of a prince of the blood, and one so powerful and popular, as well as of some of the chief nobles of the realm. It is said that the sheriffs had been tampered with—a most base and unconstitutional act, and which, resorted to in the assembling of this famous Parliament, opened the way for much subsequent corruption of the kind. A wooden shed of great extent was erected near Westminster Hall, for the reception of so numerous an assembly as was summoned to give the greater sanction to its decrees, and the lords came with such prodigious retinues, no doubt for their own safety, that they not only filled all the lodgings of London, but all the towns and villages for ten miles round.
The king came to Westminster attended by 600 men-at-arms, wearing the royal livery of the hart, and 200 archers, raised in Cheshire. On the second day of the session Sir John Bussy, the speaker, and a thorough creature of the king, petitioned that the clergy might appoint proxies, the canons forbidding their presence at any trials of blood, and Lord Thomas Percy was appointed their procurator. The Parliament passed whatever Richard was pleased to dictate to it. It annulled, the commission of regency and the statute confirming it, passed in the tenth year of his reign. It abrogated all the acts which attainted the king's ministers—though the Parliament which passed them and the people had sworn to maintain them for ever—and declared that they had been extorted by force. It revoked all pardons granted heretofore to Gloucester, Arundel, and Warwick.
This facile assembly first impeached Thomas Arundel, Archbishop of Canterbury, as the aider and abettor of the accused noblemen, for having moved and advised the arrest and execution of Sir Simon Burley and Sir James Berners, contrary to the wishes of the king, and that while chancellor, and bound to support the rights of the crown. The archbishop rose to defend himself; but Richard, fearful of the effect of his eloquence, desired him to waive awhile his observations, on pretence of requiring more time to consider the matter; but the next day he was declared to be guilty, and banished for life.
The following day, September 21st, the charges were read to the lords against the three nobles. They were that Gloucester and Arundel had compelled the king, under menace of his life, to sign the commission of regency; that at Hornsey Park they had drawn to their party the Earl of Warwick and Sir Thomas Mortimer, and by force had compelled the king to do their will. The Earls of Rutland, Kent, Huntingdon, Somerset, Salisbury, and Nottingham, and the Lords Spenser and Scrope, were accused of the same crime; that at Huntingdon they had conspired to depose the king, and shown him the statute of the deposition of Edward II., and had also insisted on the death of Sir Simon Burley, in opposition to the king's will.
Arundel pleaded not guilty and former pardons; but he was condemned and executed. Warwick was convicted of high treason; but, on account of his submissive behaviour, his life was spared, and he was banished to the Isle of Man.
On the 24th a mandate was issued by the king and his council in Parliament to the earl marshal to bring his prisoner, the Duke of Gloucester, from Calais to the bar of the house. Three days after this an answer was returned by the earl marshal that "he could not produce the said duke before the king and his council in that Parliament, for that, being in his custody in the king's prison at Calais, he there died."
The simple unexplanatory abruptness of this announcement is particularly startling. It immediately impresses the mind with the conviction of foul play; that the king, not daring to bring to further trial a prince so nearly related to the crown, and so highly esteemed by the people, and yet resolved not to let him escape, had procured his assassination. Apoplexy and other things were talked of, but there could be but one opinion of his end—murder. How this was effected has never been discovered. When Henry Bolingbroke had usurped Richard's throne, and it was his particular interest to prove Richard a murderer of their common uncle, one John Hall, a servant of the Earl of Nottingham, was brought forward,
