Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 48.djvu/161

 road had reduced his own small following to six (Traïson, pp. 282, 293). The unhappy king, tearfully bewailing his hard fortune, if we may believe Creton, wandered restlessly from castle to castle, Beaumaris, Carnarvon, and Rhuddlan, and back to Conway. At last Henry sent Northumberland and (in the English accounts) Archbishop Arundel to Conway, where they are said to have received his offer to resign the crown. He was taken to Flint, where Henry met him on 19 Aug. Henry treated his captive with outward respect, save that he mounted him for the journey to Chester on a sorry hack ‘not worth a couple of pounds.’

The journey to London commenced on the 21st, and at Lichfield, a favourite spot with Richard in happier days, he escaped through a window by night, but was retaken (, p. 376). Between Lichfield and Coventry the army was attacked by bands of Welshmen. On 1 Sept. they reached London, where the mayor and citizens came out to congratulate Henry. Richard was taken to Westminster, and next day to the Tower. Pending the meeting of parliament summoned in his name for 30 Sept., a committee learned in the law reported that there were sufficient grounds for his deposition, but recommended that before he was deposed the resignation he was understood to be willing to make should be accepted. Adam of Usk (a member of the committee) being admitted to see him on 21 Sept., the second anniversary of Arundel's execution, heard him rail upon the fickleness of his country (, p. 29). On Monday, 29 Sept., a committee of lords and others visited him to receive his resignation, and, according to the official account, he insisted on reading himself, and with a ‘cheerful mien,’ his renunciation of the crown, for which he declared himself wholly unworthy. He expressed a wish that his successor should be Lancaster, on whose finger he placed his royal signet ring. The lords of parliament assembled next day round a vacant throne in Westminster Hall, accepted his resignation, and decided that the thirty-three counts of accusation drawn up by the committee formed sufficient grounds for his deposition. Henry then seated himself in the vacant throne.

On the morrow Richard was informed of what had been done, and that ‘none of all these states or people from this time forward either bear you faith or do you obeisance as to their king.’ To which he answered that ‘he looked not thereafter, but hoped his cousin would be good lord to him.’ No voice had been raised for Richard; the famous speech of the faithful bishop of Carlisle, which Shakespeare has made so familiar, rests entirely on the suspicious authority of the ‘Chronique de la Traïson’ (p. 70), and the probabilities are all against its genuineness [see ]. The peers who were consulted as to what means short of death must be taken to render Richard powerless for harm, advised strict confinement in some sure and secret place. He was first taken, disguised as a forester, it is said, to Archbishop Arundel's castle of Leeds in Kent, but soon conveyed to Yorkshire, and confined successively at Henry's castles of Pickering, Knaresborough, and Pontefract. Sir Robert Waterton and Sir Thomas Swynford, Henry's stepbrother, had charge of him at Pontefract. Richard's friends conspired to murder Henry on the day of the Epiphany, 1400, Richard's birthday, and the conspirators gave out that Richard had escaped from Pontefract to Radcotbridge. Creton (p. 405) asserts that they caused him to be personated by Richard Maudelyn, one of his favourite chaplains, described as in almost every respect the double of his master. The rising collapsed on 8 Jan.; by the end of the month Richard's death was reported in France, and admitted by Charles VI. But among the memoranda for the consideration of the great council which met on 9 Feb. is a recommendation that ‘if Richard, late king, be still living, as it is supposed he is, order be taken that he be surely guarded’ (Ord. P. C. i. 107). The council advised that, if still alive, he should be ‘mys en seuretee aggreable à les seigneurs du roiaume,’ but that if he were dead he should be shown openly to the people, that they might know of it. The terms of this minute and the extreme care with which it was drawn up seem significant (, p. 159 n.). The view that the minute was a ‘murderous suggestion’ fits in only too well with the virtual consensus of the English chroniclers that Richard died on 14 Feb., and with the entry on the ‘Issue Rolls’ (p. 275) under 17 Feb. of payment for the carriage of his body to London. The ‘Rolls’ also contain evidence of hasty and secret communications between London and Pontefract. The official version seems to have been that, on hearing of the death of his supporters, Richard declined food and drink, and gradually pined away ‘for-hungered’ (cf. Annales, p. 331). Others asserted that the unhappy king was starved to death. If he was murdered, this was much more likely to have been the method adopted than the more violent one at the hands of an unknown Sir Piers of Exton, for which the ‘Chronique de la Traïson’ is the sole authority. The latter story was un-