as the
followers of the Pope of Avignon, ended in complete failure, and
Flanders, the great purchaser of English wool, fell under the control
of France. In =1385= Richard, indeed, invaded Scotland, ravaged the
country and burnt Edinburgh, though without producing any permanent
result. In =1386= a French fleet and army was gathered at Sluys, and
an invasion of England was threatened.

2. =Richard's growing Unpopularity. 1385--1386.=--When the king
returned from Scotland in =1385= he made a large creation of peers. He
raised his two younger uncles to the Dukedoms of York and Gloucester;
his Chancellor, Michael de la Pole, to the earldom of Suffolk, and his
favourite, Robert de Vere, Earl of Oxford, to the marquisate of
Dublin, making him not long afterwards Duke of Ireland. Suffolk was an
able and apparently an honest administrator, who upheld the king's
prerogative against the encroachments of Parliament. Oxford was a gay
and heedless companion of Richard's pleasures, who encouraged him in
unnecessary expense, and thereby provoked to resistance those who
might have put up with an extension of the royal authority. That
resistance, however, was to a great extent due to causes not of
Richard's own making. Though the French in =1386= abandoned their
attempt at invasion, the preparations to resist them had been costly,
and Englishmen were in an unreasonable mood. Things, they said, had
not gone so in the days of Edward III. A cry for reform and
retrenchment, for more victories and less expense, was loudly raised.

3. =The Impeachment of Suffolk and the Commission of Regency.
1386.=--The discontented found a leader in Gloucester, the youngest of
the king's uncles. Wealthy, turbulent, and ambitious, he put himself
at the head of all who had a grievance against the king. Lancaster had
just sailed for Spain to prosecute a claim in right of his second wife
to the throne of Castile, and as York was without ambition, Gloucester
had it all his own way. Under his guidance a Parliament demanded the
dismissal of Richard's ministers, and, on his refusal, impeached
Suffolk. Suffolk, though probably innocent of the charges brought
against him, was condemned and driven from power, and Commissioners of
regency were appointed for a year to regulate the realm and the king's
household, as the Lords Ordainers had done in the days of Edward II.
(see p. 226).

4. =The Lords Appellant and the Merciless Parliament. 1387--1388.=--In
one way the