ct of bitter reproach against him, and he seems to have believed
that Gloucester was plotting to bring him back into the servitude to
which he had been subjected by the Commissioners of regency.

11. =The Parliament of Shrewsbury. 1398.=--Whether Richard was mad or
not, he at all events acted like a madman. In =1398= he summoned a
packed Parliament to Shrewsbury, which declared all the acts of the
Merciless Parliament to be null and void, and announced that no
restraint could legally be put on the king. It then delegated all
parliamentary power to a committee of twelve lords and six commoners
chosen from the king's friends. Richard was thus made an absolute
ruler unbound by the necessity of gathering a Parliament again. He had
freed himself not merely from turbulent lords but also from all
constitutional restraints.

12. =The Banishment of Hereford and Norfolk. 1398.=--Richard had shown
favour to the two lords appellant who had taken his side. Derby became
Duke of Hereford, and Nottingham Duke of Norfolk. Before long Hereford
came to the king with a strange tale. Norfolk, he said, had complained
to him that the king still distrusted them, and had suggested that
they should guard themselves against him. Norfolk denied the truth of
the story, and Richard ordered the two to prove their truthfulness by
a single combat at Coventry. When the pair met in the lists in full
armour Richard stopped the fight, and to preserve peace, as he said,
banished Norfolk for life and Hereford for ten years, a term which was
soon reduced to six. There was something of the unwise cunning of a
madman in the proceeding.

13. =Richard's Despotism. 1398--1399.=--Richard, freed from all
control, was now, in every sense of the word, despotic. He extorted
money without a semblance of right, and even compelled men to put
their seals to blank promises to pay, which he could fill up with any
sum he pleased. He too, like the lords, gathered round him a vast
horde of retainers, who wore his badge and ill-treated his subjects
at their pleasure. He threatened the Percies, the Earl of
Northumberland and his son, Harry Hotspur, with exile, and sent them
off discontented to their vast possessions in the North. Early in
=1399= the Duke of Lancaster died. His son, the banished Hereford, was
now Duke of Lancaster. Richard, however, seized the lands which ought
to have descended to him from his father. Every man who had property
to lose felt that Lancaster's ca