rioters; the other, Sir Simon Burley, an honourable knight, who had
been the dear friend of the Black Prince, and the governor and
guardian of the King. For this gentleman’s life the good Queen
even begged of Gloucester on her knees; but Gloucester (with or
without reason) feared and hated him, and replied, that if she
valued her husband’s crown, she had better beg no more. All this
was done under what was called by some the wonderful – and by
others, with better reason, the merciless – Parliament.
But Gloucester’s power was not to last for ever. He held it for
only a year longer; in which year the famous battle of Otterbourne,
sung in the old ballad of Chevy Chase, was fought. When the year
was out, the King, turning suddenly to Gloucester, in the midst of
a great council said, ‘Uncle, how old am I?’ ‘Your highness,’
returned the Duke, ‘is in your twenty-second year.’ ‘Am I so
much?’ said the King; ‘then I will manage my own affairs! I am
much obliged to you, my good lords, for your past services, but I
need them no more.’ He followed this up, by appointing a new
Chancellor and a new Treasurer, and announced to the people that he
had resumed the Government. He held it for eight years without
opposition. Through all that time, he kept his determination to
revenge himself some day upon his uncle Gloucester, in his own
breast.
At last the good Queen died, and then the King, desiring to take a
second wife, proposed to his council that he should marry Isabella,
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of France, the daughter of Charles the Sixth: who, the French
courtiers said (as the English courtiers had said of Richard), was
a marvel of beauty and wit, and quite a phenomenon – of seven years
old. The council were divided about this marriage, but it took
place. It secured peace between England and France for a quarter
of a century; but it was strongly opposed to the prejudices of the
English people. The Duke of Gloucester, who was anxious to take
the occasion of making himself popular, declaimed against it
loudly, and this at length decided the King to execute the
vengeance he had been nursing so long.
He went with a gay company to the Duke of Gloucester’s house,
Pleshey Castle, in Essex, where the Duke, suspecting nothing, came
out into the court-yard to receive his royal visitor. While the
King conversed in a friendly manner with the Duchess, the Duke was
quietly seized, hurried away, shipped for Calais, and lodged in the
castle there. His friends, the Earls of Arundel and Warwick, were
taken in the same treacherous manner, and confined to their
castles. A few days after, at Nottingham, they were impeached of
high treason. The Earl of Arundel was condemned and beheaded, and
the Earl of Warwick was banished. Then, a writ was sent by a
messenger to the Governor of Calais, requiring him to send the Duke
of Gloucester over to be tried. In three days he returned an
answer that he could not do that, because the Duke of Gloucester
had died in prison. The Duke was declared a traitor, his property
was confiscated to the King, a real or pretended confession he had
made in prison to one of the Justices of the Common Pleas was
produced against him, and there was an end of the matter. How the
unfortunate duke died, very few cared to know. Whether he really
died naturally; whether he killed himself; whether, by the King’s
order, he was strangled, or smothered between two beds (as a
serving-man of the Governor’s named Hall, did afterwards declare),
cannot be discovered. There is not much doubt that he was killed,
somehow or other, by his nephew’s orders. Among the most active
nobles in these proceedings were the King’s cousin, Henry
Bolingbroke, whom the King had made Duke of Hereford to smooth down
the old family quarrels, and some others: who had in the familyplotting
times done just such acts themselves as they now condemned
in the duke. They seem to have been a corrupt set of men; but such