This speech was one of those which have a sound of reason to the ear, but will not bear a moment's examination. True, he was descended from Henry III., like Edward III. and Richard, but not in the true line—that being, as we have stated, the line of Lionel, and Henry being now not only the usurper of Richard's throne, but of the Earl of March's reversion.
But the pretence was enough, and more than enough, for all who heard it. They knew it was all empty sound, and the real reasons for assent lay in Lancaster's will, backed by a powerful army and a willing people.
Henry, as proof of Richard's having resigned all his rights into his hands, produced the ring and seal. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Arundel, his late fellow-exile, now took him by the hand and led him to the throne. He knelt for a short time on the steps in prayer, or affected prayer; for Lancaster, amid all his grasping at his neighbour's goods, was especially careful to do outward homage to the great Being who had said, "Thou shalt not covet." On rising, the two archbishops placed him on the throne; and, as soon as the acclamations ceased, the primate made a short sermon, choosing his test, with the finished tact of a priestly courtier, from 1 Samuel ix. 17:—"Behold the man whom I spoke to thee of; this same shall reign over my people;" and the sermon was worthy of the text.
Then the new king, fearful that his bold claims to the right of conquest might alarm some of his hearers, stood up, and said, as reported by old Knyghton:—"Siris, I thank God and zou, spiritual and temporal, and all the astates of the land, and do zow to wyte, it is naght my will that no man thynk that be way of conquest I wold disherit any man of his heritage, franches, or other rights that hym oght to have, no put hym out of that he has, and has had by the gude lawes and custumes of the rewme, except those persons that has been agan the gude purpose and the commune profyt of the rewme."
Thus ended the reign of Richard II.; and, as with it ended also the authority of Parliament and the ministers of the crown, Lancaster immediately summoned the Parliament to meet again in six days, appointed now officers, and, having received their oaths, retired to the royal palace.
The history of the progress of parliamentary power in this reign is most important. We find Parliament at various times assorting its authority, calling on the crown to reform its household, its courts of law, to restrain its expenditure, and dismiss its servants. By its means the Duke of Gloucester obtained his commission to regulate the administration, and to impeach the prime minister, the Earl of Suffolk, De la Pole; and though, during the latter years of his reign, Parliament, as in our time, became corrupt and subservient, yet the people, assuming the exercise of those powers which their delegates had basely surrendered, punished and deposed the monarch whom they could not reform. So self-evident is this fact, that some of our most celebrated legal historians contend that the Duke of Lancaster cannot properly be called a usurper, seeing that he was undoubtedly the elect of the nation.
Richard was dethroned in the twenty-third year of his reign, and the thirty-fourth of his age. His last dark days properly belong to the reign of his rival and destroyer, but will most effectually be finished here. Henry IV. lost no time in submitting to the lords the question what should be done with the late monarch, whose life, he declared, he was at all events resolved to preserve. The lords recommended perpetual confinement in some castle, where none of his former adherents could obtain access to him. This advice was acted upon, as there can be little doubt that it was first suggested by Henry. Richard disappeared, and no one knew anything of his place of detention. The King of France threatened war on behalf of the rights of his daughter, Isabella, and his son-in-law, the deposed king. To avert this storm Henry proposed to make various alliances between the two royal families, including the marriage of the Prince of Wales to a daughter of Charles. But the King of France rejected the proposal, declaring that he knew no King of England but Richard. The French king, however, received intelligence that Richard was dead, and therefore he avowedly ceased to prosecute his claims, but confined himself to those of his daughter, demanding that she should be restored to him, with her jewels and her dowry, according to the marriage settlement. Charles afterwards consented to receive her with her jewels only, counter claims being set up against the dowry.
From the moment, however, that the public statement of Richard's death was made by the King of France, the nation became inquisitive, and it was not long before the dead body of the deposed monarch was brought up from Pontefract Castle, and shown publicly in St. Paul's for two days, where 20,000 people are said to have gone to see it. Only the face was uncovered, and that was wonderfully emaciated. Various were the rumours of the mode of his death on all these occasions, but, as in the case of Richard's victim, the Duke of Gloucester, nothing certain ever transpired. One story was that Sir Piers Exton, with seven other assassins, entered his cell to despatch him, when Richard, aware of their purpose, snatched an axe from one of them, and felled him and several of his fellows to the earth; but that Exton, getting behind him, prostrated him with one blow, and then slew him. Another story was that he was starved to death; and there were not wanting rumours that he had escaped, and lived many years in the guise of an ordinary man. But Henry Bolingbroke may be safely trusted to secure his dangerous captive. The features of Richard were too well known to thousands in London to be mistaken for those of one Maudelain, whose body, it was pretended, had been substituted for Richard's. There can be no doubt but that he died a secret and violent death: the mode of that death must for ever remain a mystery.
CHAPTER LXVIII.
THE PROGRESS OF THE NATION.
FORMATION OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE.
We have already stated our views of the true nature of human history. We do not believe it to consist merely or chiefly in the records of the wars and butcheries which have disgraced the earth. Those may have built up some nations and pulled down others, but, in the aggregate, they have retarded the progress of the race, they have distorted the intellectual vision of mankind, lowered and
