coast, to await there the return of the enemy, and to take revenge on
them for their devastations, his impatience to return to England,
and enjoy his usual pleasures and amusements, outweighed every
consideration; and he led back his army without effecting any thing by
all these mighty preparations. The Scots, soon after, finding the heavy
bodies of French cavalry very useless in that desultory kind of war to
which they confined themselves, treated their allies so ill, that the
French returned home, much disgusted with the country and with the
manners of its inhabitants.[*] And the English, though they regretted
the indolence and levity of their king, saw themselves for the future
secured against any dangerous invasion from that quarter.

{1386.} But it was so material an interest of the French court to wrest
the seaport towns from the hands of their enemy, that they resolved to
attempt it by some other expedient, and found no means so likely as an
invasion of England itself. They collected a great fleet and army
at Sluise; for the Flemings were now in alliance with them: all the
nobility of France were engaged in this enterprise: the English were
kept in alarm: great preparations were made for the reception of the
invaders: and though the dispersion of the French ships by a storm, and
the taking of many of them by the English, before the embarkation of the
troops, freed the kingdom from the present danger, the king and council
were fully sensible that this perilous situation might every moment
return upon them.[**]

There were two circumstances, chiefly, which engaged the French at this
time to think of such attempts. The one was the absence of the duke of
Lancaster, who had carried into Spain the flower of the English military
force, in prosecution of his vain claim to the crown of Castile; an
enterprise in which, after some promising success, he was finally
disappointed: the other was, the violent dissensions and disorders which
had taken place in the English government.

The subjection in which Richard was held by his uncles, particularly by
the duke of Glocester, a prince of ambition and genius, though it
was not unsuitable to his years and slender capacity, was extremely
disagreeable to his violent temper; and he soon attempted to shake off
the yoke imposed upon him. Robert de Vere, earl of Oxford, a young man
of a noble family, of an agreeable figure, but of dissolute manners, had
acquired an entire ascendant