thus able to suppress the
rebellion. Some of the noblemen who were caught by the excited
defenders of the throne were butchered without mercy and without law.

[Illustration: Henry IV. and his queen, Joan of Navarre: from their
tomb in Canterbury Cathedral.]

2. =Death of Richard II. 1400.=--A few weeks after the suppression of
this conspiracy it was rumoured that Richard had died in prison at
Pontefract. According to Henry's account of the matter he had
voluntarily starved himself to death. Few, however, doubted that he
had been put to death by Henry's orders. To prove the untruth of this
story, Henry had the body brought to St. Paul's, where he showed to
the people only the face of the corpse, as if this could be any
evidence whatever. After Richard's death, if hereditary succession had
been regarded, the person having a claim to the crown in preference to
Henry was the young Edmund Mortimer, Earl of March, the descendant of
Lionel, Duke of Clarence (see p. 287). Henry therefore took care to
keep the boy under custody during the whole of his reign.

[Illustration: Royal arms as borne by Henry IV. after about 1408, and
by successive sovereigns down to 1603.]

3. =Henry IV. and the Church.=--Besides seeking the support of the
commonalty, Henry sought the support of the Church. Since the rise of
the friars at the beginning of the thirteenth century (see p. 191) the
Church had produced no new orders of monks or friars. In the
thirteenth and fourteenth she produced the schoolmen, a succession of
great thinkers who systematised her moral and religious teaching.
Imagining that she had no more to learn, she now attempted to
strengthen herself by persecuting those who disbelieved her teaching,
and after the suppression of the revolt of the peasants, made common
cause with the landlords, who feared pecuniary loss from the
emancipation of the villeins. This conservative alliance against
social and religious change was the more easily made because many of
the bishops were now members of noble families, instead of springing,
as had usually been the case in the better days of the mediaeval
Church, from poor or middle-class parentage. In the reign of Richard
II. a Courtenay, a kinsman of the Earl of Devonshire, had become first
Bishop of London (see p. 263), and then Archbishop of Canterbury. He
was succeeded in his archbishopric by an Arundel, brother of the Earl
of Arundel who had been executed by Richard, and Archbishop Arund