Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 45.djvu/410

 cating in his favour (Annales Ricardi, p. 304). Richard constituted him in February 1398 warden of the west marches towards Scotland, and he officiated as constable at the abortive duel between Hereford and Norfolk at Coventry.

It is not impossible that, as he afterwards averred, Albemarle was somewhat alarmed at Richard's arbitrary treatment of Hereford, and Norfolk's prophecy that he would meet with a similar fate, even if it be not true that he and his father indignantly retired to Langley when Hereford was excluded from his inheritance (ib. iii. 382, 449; Traïson et Mort, p. 160 n.) It is not absolutely necessary to suppose, however, that he had already been tampered with by Henry (cf. Archæologia, xx. 24). The acts of treason during Richard's last fatal expedition to Ireland with which he is charged by its French chronicler, Creton, need not bear that construction except in the mind of a writer violently prejudiced by Albemarle's subsequent desertion of Richard's cause. His delay in arriving with the last contingent of the fleet may easily have drawn reproaches from the hot-tempered king, without being due to other than unavoidable causes. Again he was giving the most obvious advice under the circumstances, in persuading Richard not to throw himself with a mere handful of men into North Wales, immediately on hearing of Hereford's landing, but to return to Waterford, where he had left his fleet, and to take over his whole army (ib. xx. 309, 312). Creton is, moreover, inconsistent in admitting that Richard, after landing in South Wales, deserted his army, and in yet blaming Albemarle for subsequently dispersing it. In this version of the story Albemarle makes his way to Henry of Lancaster, through the heart of hostile Wales. But the English version that Richard left his steward, Sir Thomas Percy, to disband his army, and took Albemarle with him to Conway, seems more probable, though it contradicts the statement of an eye-witness (Annales Ricardi, pp. 248, 250).

Almost Henry's first act as king was to deprive Albemarle of the constableship, and the feeling in his first parliament against Albemarle as the supposed murderer of Gloucester was most intense; twenty gages were thrown down to him at once, and he had to thank the king for the mildness of his punishment. He was deprived of the dignity of duke and all the lands bestowed upon him in the last two years of the late reign (Rot. Parl. iii. 452). But in December he was again sitting in the privy council, and on 20 Feb. following Henry actually renewed Richard's grant (1398) of Oakham and the shrievalty of Rutland to him and his heirs male, although the reversal of Gloucester's attainder had revived the rights of his heirs to the reversion (Assoc. Archit. Soc. Reports, xiv. 109). This latter fact in itself throws the gravest doubt on the story of his complicity in the conspiracy of Christmas 1399, at least in the form to which Shakespeare has given such wide currency. The dramatic episode of York's accidental discovery of his son's treason, and the hasty ride to Windsor, by which Albemarle anticipated his father in disclosing the plot to the king, was taken by the Tudor historians from the contemporary but untrustworthy and prejudiced ‘Chronique de la Traïson et Mort du Roy Richart’ (p. 233). There is no mention at all of Albemarle's complicity in any English authority written near the time, and that in some later fifteenth-century chronicles may be derived from the French source (Chronicle, ed. Davies, p. 20;, p. 568; , Collectanea, ii. 484). It is possible that he received the confidence of the conspirators in order to betray them, which seems Creton's view; this and his presiding over the executions at Oxford would explain the bitter animus of the French authorities against him (, i. 21). Richard's brother-in-law, Waleran, comte de St. Pol, had Albemarle's effigy in his coat-armour hung feet uppermost from a gibbet near the gate of Calais (, i. 68, ed. Douet d'Arcq). The strong terms in which the parliament of January 1401, in restoring him to the good name and estate impaired by the judgment of 1399, asserted his loyalty, coupling him with Somerset, in whose case there is no doubt, exclude the hypothesis of a serious complicity in the plot (Rot. Parl. iii. 460). Henry gave him a further proof of his restored confidence by appointing him on 28 Aug. 1401 to the important post of lieutenant of Aquitaine (Ord. Privy Council, i. 187). Some months later he was made governor of North Wales.

He was in Aquitaine when, on his father's death in August 1402, he became Duke of York. He soon returned, and on 29 Nov. 1403 received the onerous position of lieutenant of South Wales for three years (, i. 244, 378). His Welsh command was an ungrateful one. He was kept so ill-provided with funds that he could not pay the garrisons, although he disposed of his plate for the purpose. In order to quiet his mutinous soldiers he was forced to beg a loan from the abbot of Glastonbury, and promised to pledge his Yorkshire estates, while the government still owed him large sums for his services in Aquitaine (ib. i. 456). His discontent proved too strong for his loyalty, for there seems little doubt