Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 56.djvu/160

 the Duke of Brittany handing over (April 1378) Brest Castle to the English king for the rest of the war, Buckingham was one of those appointed to take it over (Fœdera, iv. 36). But the duke's position soon began to grow untenable, and Buckingham was sent to his aid in June 1380, as lieutenant of the king, at the head of some five thousand men (Fœdera, iv. 92;, ix. c.). His staff included some of his father's most distinguished warriors—Sir Hugh Calveley [q. v.], Sir Robert Knollys [q. v.], Sir Thomas Percy (afterwards Earl of Worcester) [q. v.] and others. Avoiding the dangers of the Channel, the army landed at Calais (19 July) and plunged into the heart of northern France (ib. ix. 238 sqq.;, i. 434). Penetrating as far south as Troyes (about 24 Aug.), where the Duke of Burgundy had collected an army but did not venture to give battle, Buckingham struck westwards, through Beauce and Maine, for Brittany. The death of Charles V on 16 Sept. weakened the resistance opposed to his progress; the passage of the Sarthe was forced, Brittany entered late in the autumn, and siege laid to Nantes. But the duke soon made his peace with Charles VI, and about the new year Buckingham raised the siege of Nantes and quartered his troops in the southern ports of Brittany, whence they were shipped home in the spring. The chagrin of failure was enhanced by a private mortification which awaited him. His relations with his ambitious elder brother, John of Gaunt, had never been cordial. At the close of the late reign Lancaster had inflicted a marked slight upon him by putting his own son Henry (afterwards Henry IV), a mere boy, into the order of the Garter in preference to his uncle, and Buckingham did not enter the order till April 1380. Since Richard's accession the younger brother had been as popular as the elder was generally hated. During Buckingham's absence in France Lancaster married his son to Mary Bohun, younger sister of Buckingham's wife (Complete Peerage, v. 9). This could not be agreeable to her brother-in-law, who had secured the custody of her estates, and, according to Froissart, hoped to persuade her to become a nun.

In June 1381 Buckingham dispersed the insurgents in Essex, and in the following October held an ‘oyer and terminer’ at Cambridge (, ii. 18;, ii. 19). By 1384 the young king's evident determination to rule through instruments of his own drew together Buckingham and Lancaster. They were associated in the expedition into Scotland early in this year, and in the negotiations with France and Flanders. When Lancaster was accused of treason in the April parliament at Salisbury, Buckingham burst into the king's chamber and swore with great oaths to kill any one, no matter whom, who should bring such charges against his brother (, ii. 114). Richard for a time deferred more to his uncles, and during his Scottish expedition in the following year created Buckingham Duke of Gloucester (6 Aug. 1385), and granted him a thousand pounds a year from the exchequer by letters patent, dated at Hoselowelogh in Teviotdale (Rot. Parl. iii. 206). In the parliament which met in October Richard formally confirmed this elevation, and invested his uncle with the dignity, girding him with a sword and placing a cap with a circlet of gold on his head (ib.;, p. 231). To this parliament, curiously enough, he was summoned as Duke of Albemarle, though neither he nor his children ever again assumed that style, and he did not get possession of Holderness, which usually went with it, until 1388 (, ii. 170). It has been suggested that this may be a case of a foreign title, i.e. a Norman dukedom (Complete Peerage, i. 56). In elevating his two younger uncles, Gloucester and Edmund, duke of York [see ], to the ducal dignity, Richard perhaps hoped to sow fresh dissension between them and John of Gaunt, and to cover his promotion of his humbly born minister, Michael de la Pole, to the earldom of Suffolk. If so, it did not serve its purpose, for Gloucester, on John of Gaunt's departure to Spain, placed himself openly at the head of the opposition to the king, and was one of the judges who condemned Suffolk in 1386, and a member of the commission for the reform of the household and realm. Richard is alleged to have plotted his murder at a dinner. Such charges were made too freely at the time to command implicit credence; but Gloucester, who forced Richard to dismiss Suffolk by threatening him with the fate of Edward II, had certainly given extreme provocation. When the king in August 1387 procured a declaration from the judges that the authors of the commission were guilty of treason and began to raise forces, Gloucester and his friends sought to avert the storm by swearing a solemn oath on the gospels before the bishop of London that they had been actuated by no personal motives, but only by anxiety for Richard's own honour and interests. Gloucester, however, refused to forego his revenge upon De Vere, whom the king had made duke of Ireland. De Vere had repudiated his niece for a Bohemian serving-woman. Failing to get