Page:Craik History of British Commerce Vol 1.djvu/174

172 III. He was esteemed the greatest merchant in England, and must have possessed immense wealth for that age, since on one occasion he lent King Edward no less a sum than 18,500l. Edward made the opulent merchant the chief baron of his Exchequer, and a knight banneret; and in the course of that and the following reign he was often employed in embassies and in other important affairs of state along with the most distinguished men in the kingdom. His political employments and honours, however, do not appear to have withdrawn him from commerce. His son Michael also began life as a merchant. This was he whom Richard II. created Earl of Suffolk, and made his lord chancellor, but who was soon afterwards driven from office, and deprived of property, rank, and everything except his life, which he saved by taking flight to France, in the sweeping reform of the court by the king's uncle, the Duke of Gloucester, and his "wonderful parliament." Michael's son of the same name, however, was recalled, and restored to his father's dignities a year or two before the deposition of Richard: it was his son, also named Michael, whio fell in 1415 at the battle of Azincourt. The uncle, again, and heir of this last, William de la Pole, was the celebrated Earl of Suffolk who commanded at the siege of Orleans in 1429, when that place was relieved by Joan of Arc, and who afterwards becomes more conspicuous in the annals of the disastrous reign of the sixth Henry, as the favourite of the queen, Margaret of Anjou, through whose influence he was first created Marquis and afterwards Duke of Suffolk, and made lord chancellor, lord high admiral, and prime minister, or rather dictator of the kingdom—honours, however, which only conducted him after a few years to a bloody death. But this catastrophe did not put an end to the still buoyant fortunes of the family. Soon after the accession of Edward IV., John de la Pole, the son of the late duke, was restored by the Yorkist king to the same place in the first rank of the peerage to which his father had been raised by the House of Lancaster; and this second Duke of Suffolk eventually married the Princess Elizabeth, the