lenges passed to and fro, bitter denunciations and insults were repeated day after day; and had it not been for the moderation and wise temper of the King, personal violence would have ensued. So complicated and changeable had been the politics of the different lords, that it only needed an occasion to revive old insults and long cherished enmities. The issue was, that the mildest punishment which royal generosity could exercise, was visited upon the arraigned nobles. They were merely deprived of the higher titles with which they had been adorned by Richard.

Soon after, the Earl of Northumberland came to the House of Peers with a message from the King, which, he said, must be considered in the most secret manner. The King sought the advice of his lords as to what disposition should be made of the abdicated King Richard, who was then confined in the Tower. At the same time Henry expressed his solicitude to protect his cousin from personal harm, which was probably sincere, as it was in harmony with his humane and cautious character. After a debate in secret conclave, the peers united in the opinion that the ex-King should be conveyed privately and quietly to some retired castle, and separated from all who had shown themselves to be attached to him. The King then came down to the House and declared Richard a state-prisoner for life, in open session. The ex-King was removed first to Leeds Castle, and finally to Pontefract Castle, where in the sequel he de parted this life.

Although the power of the usurping monarch seemed to be now completely established; although the evidence of his popularity was overwhelming;

although he had an obsequious Parliament, a devoted court, a settled domain, peace among his counsellors; his own example of insubordination was too recent and too successful, not to stimulate the ambition of powerful lords, and to stir up dissension in his kingdom. There were two sources whence he had reason to fear an attempt against his power: one from powerful enemies, and one from powerful friends. It was nothing more than one who had usurped regal authority had to expect, that he should be forced to encounter constant rebellion and resistance. It was the fruit which he had sown, and which he must reap.

The six lords whom we have mentioned as having received so light a punishment for their more than doubtful complicity in the death of the royal Duke of Gloucester, were jealous and turbulent men, whose restless natures could not flourish under a quiet reign. They had been the guilty tools of Richard in his least pardonable crimes. They were not grateful to Henry because he refrained from taking their heads, when they thoroughly deserved it. Their only hope of regaining their former importance in the councils of the realm was to overturn Henry, and to restore Richard. Soon after the close of the Parliamentary session, they met secretly at Westminster, and formed a plot of assassination. Arrangements were made for assembling a force of their retainers sufficient for the purpose; the details were agreed upon; a certain part in the bloody drama was assigned to and assumed by each. It was determined that the King should be enticed out of the metropolis, on an occasion when he could be surrounded by the agents of the assassins, and despatched without ceremony. The King, with the Prince of Wales, was invited to preside over a tour

ney at Oxford, which, he was assured, would be unusually brilliant. The insidious tongue of the Earl of Huntingdon, Henry's own brother-in-law, conveyed the treacherous request. Henry, suspecting nothing villanous from such a source, promised to attend the pageant. A band of ruffians was selected to rush upon the royal pavilion, and strike down both the person of majesty and the heir to the throne. Then one of the conspirators was to proclaim the restoration of Richard.

When the day arrived that had been selected on which to commit the regicide, the plans of the conspirators were complete. No obstacle seemed to intervene, or to promise prevention of the villanous design. King Henry had retired from London to his favorite castle of Windsor, and was to proceed thence to Oxford on the morning of the tournament. But the near approach of the catastrophe startled one of the confederates, whose principle of honor (or of fear) was not wholly dead within him. He determined to discover the whole scheme to the King. The Earl of Rutland, son of the Duke of York, and cousin to the King, was a young man of craven disposition, of had heart, easily led by others, and by no means a model conspirator. He inherited from his father a dislike to turmoil, while yet his facility of temper and malignity made him the ready dupe of those who were about him. When the conspiracy was just ripe, this prince hastened to Henry at Windsor, made known to him his danger, and urged him to retire at once to London. Meanwhile the day of the tournament wore wearily away to the confederates at Oxford, in momentary expectation of their royal victim, yet ever mistrustful that some treason to their purpose had prevented his

arrival. The approach of evening made it no longer pos sible for them to contain their impatience. They were not men to shrink, now that danger was fully upon them. Gathering together a force of five hundred fol lowers, they hurried with all speed to Windsor. They hoped to find Henry there and but feebly defended, and to assassinate him with little difficulty. But on their arrival they discovered, to their utter discomfiture, that the royal bird had flown on the evening previous.

Nothing was left to them but to make best their escape, the possibility of which had now become doubtful. The next day Henry was close upon their heels with a powerful army. The conspirators, still clinging to the ghost of a hope, resolved to attempt to rouse the country, and separated, each toward his own section, to summon their retainers; Huntingdon to Essex, Kent and Salisbury to Cirencester, Despencer and Lumley to Bristol. But Henry's loyal subjects not only refused to come beneath the insurgent standard, but took revenge out of the hand of the law, and themselves punished the traitors. Huntingdon, albeit the brother-in-law of the King, was dragged by the populace from the marshes where he had tried to conceal himself, and was tortured and put to death by the rude yeomanry before the castle of Pleshy. The mayor and corporation of Cirencester, at the head of the citizens, environed Kent and Salis bury, and having taken them, ordered the penalty of instant death. The citizens of Bristol treated in like manner the two lords who had sought refuge there. The same summary justice was visited upon other conspirators in different parts of the kingdom; till the lawlessness of loyalty became so prevalent, that Henry, always moderate in retaliation, and never bit

ter in his enmities, was constrained to command his people to desist the carnage, on pain of death.

Henry was now convinced that there would be no long-continued peace to his crown while Richard lived. This conspiracy, so formidable, and planned with so much ingenuity, was indeed defeated; but it was a warning. Its greatest strength had been, that the traitors could use as their rallying cry the name of a living and legitimate monarch. There would obvi ously be no possibility of quenching discontent; the only remedy was to make discontent powerless, by depriving it of its most dangerous weapon. It was plain that Richard must disappear. Here occurs the great stain which sullied more than any other the name of Henry of Bolingbroke. A few weeks passed, and it was announced that Richard was dead. The court said that he died by self-inflicted starvation. More lately, the writers inimical to the House of Lancaster have declared that the friendless monarch was starved by order of the King. Narratives more reasonably verified, and on which Shakespeare at least relied, relate that he was assassinated by Sir Robert Exton, in his cell at Pontefract Castle. Richard's death occurred on the 13th of February, 1400, at the early age of thirty-four. His corpse was brought in state to London, and his face exposed to the gaze of the populace in St. Paul's, for the space of three days. Thus Henry sought to persuade his subjects that the fealty due to Richard had ceased, since he was dead. This event seems to have elicited but little comment. Richard had become so thoroughly contemptible, that none regretted his death, excepting those who lost the excuse which his name gave for insurrection.

Henry was forced to turn at once to his foreign