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,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 family-plotting 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 men were easily found about the court in such days.
The people murmured at all this,and were still very sore about the French marriage.The nobles saw how little the King cared for law,and how crafty he was,and began to be somewhat afraid for themselves.The King's life was a life of continued feasting and excess;his retinue,down to the meanest servants,were dressed in the most costly manner,and caroused at his tables,it is related,to the number of ten thousand persons every day.He himself,surrounded by a body of ten thousand archers,and enriched by a duty on wool which the Commons had granted him for life,saw no danger of ever being otherwise than powerful and absolute,and was as fierce and haughty as a King could be.
He had two of his old enemies left,in the persons of the Dukes of Hereford and Norfolk.Sparing these no more than the others,he tampered with the Duke of Hereford until he got him to declare before the Council that the Duke of Norfolk had lately held some treasonable talk with him,as he was riding near Brentford;and that he had told him,among other things,that he could not believe the King's oath-which nobody could,I should think.For this treachery he obtained a pardon,and the Duke of Norfolk was summoned to appear and defend himself.As he denied the charge and said his accuser was a liar and a traitor,both noblemen,according to the manner of those times,were held in custody,and the truth was ordered to be decided by wager of battle at Coventry.This wager of battle meant that whosoever won the combat was to be considered in the right;which nonsense meant in effect,that no strong man could ever be wrong.A great holiday was made;a great crowd assembled,with much parade and show;and the two combatants were about to rush at each other with their lances,when the King,sitting in a pavilion to see fair,threw down the truncheon he carried in his hand,and forbade the battle.The Duke of Hereford was to be banished for ten years,and the Duke of Norfolk was to be banished for life.So said the King.The Duke of Hereford went to France,and went no farther.The Duke of Norfolk made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land,and afterwards died at Venice of a broken heart.