a violent ground-swell, which, rising at the moment she was about to embark, rent the ship in pieces,-she arrived in safety.

At this period Richard was sixteen; Anne, a year younger. He is described as "the loveliest youth that the eye could behold," singularly fond of splendour and magnificence, generous and munificent; "fair, and of a ruddy complexion, well made, finely shaped, somewhat taller than the middle size, and extremely handsome.” He had a lisp in his speech which would have "become a lady better, and an hastiness of temper, which subjected him to some inconveniences; but he had an infinite deal of good-nature, great politeness, and a candour that could not be enough admired."

But Richard had been brought up by his mother and her sons in the most lavish indulgence, and in the most fatal ideas of his own importance.

As to the person of the young queen, it is more difficult to form a correct notion; she is repeatedly called "the beauteous queen; " but the portraits that exist of her do not give an idea of great loveliness. Her dress seems to have been more remarkable for singularity than for elegance or taste. Stow tells us that the female fashion of the day (which she introduced) was a high head-dress, two feet high and as many wide, built of wire and pasteboard, and with piked horns, and a long training gown; it scems, however, that they occasionally wore hoods instead of these wide-spreading and monstrous coiffures, which must have been equally ridiculous and unbecoming. The Church denounced them as the "moony tire" mentioned by Ezekiel, and very possibly, as they were brought from the East by the Crusaders. Sidesaddles (more resembling pillions than the side-saddles of the present day) were also brought into England by her; and pins, such as are now in use, have been said to have been introduced by her, though pins were certainly common long before.

Nothing could exceed the splendour that attended the royal bride's entrance into London; she was met by the Goldsmiths' Company, splendidly attired. At the Fountain in Cheapside the citizens presented to her and to the king a gold crown, of great value each ; and when the procession had proceeded a little further, a table of gold, with a representation of the Trinity richly embossed or chased upon it —worth about ten thousand pounds of the present money—was offered to Richard, and to the queen a table of equal value, on which was displayed a figure of St. Anne.

The marriage of the royal couple took place at the conclusion of the

Christmas holidays. "Shee was," says Speed, with great pompe and glorie at the same time crowned queene by the hand of William Courtney (a younger sonne of the Earle of Devonshire), Bishop of London, lately promoved from London to the see of Canterbury, at St. Stephen's Chapel, Westminster."

Great were the rejoicings and splendid the festivities which followed these events, and tournaments were held for several successive days. It was at this period that the royal bride obtained the title of "good Queen Anne," for her intercession with Richard that a general pardon should be granted to the people, who since the rebellion of Wat Tyler had been subjected to continual severities and executions.

Shortly after the marriage and coronation of the queen, parliament, "which by this great ladie's arrivall was interrupted and prorogued,” re-assembled, the grant of a subsidy to defray the various expenses demanded, and "many things concerning the excesse of apparell," &c. "were wholesomely enacted," - with what advantage a few extracts will show. Holinshed mentions one coat belonging to the king which was so covered with gold and jewels as to cost the sum of thirty thousand marks; while Sir John Arundel was thought even to surpass the king in magnificence of attire, having no less than fifty-two rich suits of cloth-of-gold tissue. Camden tells us, that the commons "were besotted in excesse of apparell, in white surcoates reaching to their loines; some in a garment reaching to their heeles, close before, and strowting out on their sides, so that on the back they make men seeme women, and this they called, by a ridiculous name, gowne; their hoods are little, tied under the chin, and buttoned like the woman's, but set with gold, silver, and pretious stones; their lirrepippes2 reach to their heeles, all jagged. They have another weede of silke, which they call a paltock;3 their hose are of two colours, or pied, with more; which, with latchets (which they call herlots), they tie to their paltocks, without any breeches. Their girdles are of gold and silver, some worth twenty marks; their shoes and pattens are snouted and piked more than a finger long, crooking upwards, which they call crackowes, resembling the devil's clawes, which were fastened to the knees with chaines of gold and silver."

There is no doubt but that Anne made use of her influence over the king to save the life of Wickliffe under the persecutions with which he was pursued; and that the cause of the reformed religion was favoured * A close jacket.

1 Specd.

2 Tippets hanging down in front.

alike by her and by her mother-in-law Joanna, Princess of Wales, whose power over the yielding though impetuous nature of her son was so well employed in 1386, when civil war threatened to embroil the country, owing to a quarrel between the king and his uncle, the haughty and arrogant John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, who was informed that Richard intended to have him arrested and tried on some capital points before Sir Robert Trevilian, a man entirely in the monarch's interest. That there was some truth in the report is certain; and that those about the king were most anxious to promote the arrest is not less positive. "Neverthelesse, the hopes of wicked men, delighting in their countrie's miseries and civill combustions, were made voide by the great diligence of the king's mother, the Princesse Joan, who spared not her continuall paines and expenses, in travailing betweene the king and the duke (albeit she was exceeding tender of complexion, and scarce able to beare her own bodie's weight through corpulency), till they were fully reconciled." 1

The result of her interference was doubly happy, occurring, as it did, at a moment when England was threatened with invasion by Charles the Sixth of France, who, as Speed quaintly says, was "a yong and foolish prince, who, having in his treasury, left to him by his prudent father, eighteene millions of crownes and being, moreover, set on fire with an inconsiderate love of glory, rather than upon any sound advice (though some impute the counsell to the said admirall, John de Vienne), would needs undertake the conquest of our countrey. These newes stirred all the limbes and humours thereof, though the event (God not favouring the enterprise) was but like that of the mountaine, which, after long travaile, brought forth a ridiculous mouse. Neverthelesse it had beene a most desperate season for a civill warre to have broken forth in England."

An event which occurred during Richard's campaign in Scotland, was destined to end for ever the influence of Joanna. Lord Stafford, son to the Earl of Stafford, being sent by the king with messages to Anne (who had appointed him her knight, and shown him many wellmerited marks of favour), he was met at York by Sir John Holland, the king's half-brother, who having long entertained towards him the most violent jealousy, partly on account of the adoration shown him by the army, and partly from the queen's regard, sought a quarrel with him, the ostensible cause of which was that Lord Stafford's archers had, while protecting a Bohemian knight, an adherent of the queen's, slain

1 Speed.

a squire of Sir John Holland's. Seizing upon this pretext, Sir John attacked Lord Stafford, and, without hesitation or parley, killed him on the spot.

The king, furious at this brutal murder, and still further excited by the passionate appeals of the bereaved father for vengeance on the slayer of his noble son, declared that justice should be done; and, despite the prayers and tears of the unhappy Joanna for her guilty son, vowed, that as soon as his brother should leave the sanctuary of St. John of Beverley, whither he had fled, he should suffer death as the punishment of his crime. Such was the effect of this determination on the princess, that after four days of violent grief she expired at Wallingford, and Richard was so deeply shocked and afflicted at this melancholy event, that he pardoned the offender, who shortly afterwards departed for Syria on a pilgrimage. It had been well for Richard, had he never returned.

It is with regret that we have to record one act of the gentle queen, for the injustice of which there is no defence.

Richard's prime favourite, Robert de Vere, duke of Ireland, having fallen violently in love with an attendant of the queen's, resolved to put away his wife Philippa, grand-daughter to Edward the Third, being the child of his daughter Isabel, by Enguerrand de Coucy, the king's near relative, in order to marry this woman.

Historians differ widely in their statements as to the birth of the lady in question. Speed says she was "a Bohemian of base birth, called in her mother-tongue Lancerone;" and Walsingham calls her "Sellarii filia," a saddler's daughter; while Rymer states that she was landgravine of Luxembourg; and Carte mentions her as "a Bohemian lady of the queen's bedchamber, called the landgrave, a fine woman, very pleasant and agreeable in conversation."

However this may be, Richard, so far from indignantly resenting such injustice and insult to the blood royal, aided the efforts of his favourite to obtain a divorce from his fair and noble kinswoman; and the queen wrote with her own hand to Pope Urban, to entreat him to grant the duke permission to put away his wife and marry the object of his guilty passion. By this unjustifiable act she offended many of the greatest nobles in the land to whom Philippa was related, and this without gaining any advantage for her favourite, as the divorce never was accomplished.

But Anne was severely punished by Providence for this her first and last evil act. A great grief arising from this very act befell the

queen, in the impeachment and execution of Sir Simon Burley, for whom she had ever entertained a warm and constant friendship. The Duke of Gloucester, enraged at the insult offered by the king, queen, and Duke of Ireland to his kinswoman, resolved to be avenged; and after much plotting and underhand dealing on both sides, this powerful and unscrupulous noble, for whom Richard, king though he was called, was no match either in strength of position or authority, accomplished the destruction of several of the king's most attached adherents, who were ignominiously executed at Tyburn by having their throats cut; "Sir Simon Burley onely had the worship to have his head strucken off. Loe the noble respect which the gentle lords had to justice and amendment."

It is difficult to conceive a position more painful and humiliating than the one occupied by Richard at this period. Not only powerless, but possessing not even the shadow of power, he was treated with open disrespect by the insolent nobles, who, headed by Gloucester, had entirely usurped the regal authority, making him a cipher in his own kingdom, and leaving him not so much as the means to keep up the semblance of a court or royal household. He and his queen chiefly at this period resided at Eltham and Shene, so called by Edward the Confessor, from the lonely landscape around it. But even here he could not escape from a sense of his thraldom. The queen had also to suffer from the persecutions which were carried on against her attendants, many of whom were sacrificed without justice or mercy; and that, probably, less on account of their being foreigners, than on account of their Lollardism. Robert de Vere, duke of Ireland, who, judging from the steps taken by Anne with regard to his divorce and second marriage, seems to have been as great a favourite with her as with Richard, had, like several others, fled to the continent, where he died in 1392, at Brabant, having been mortally wounded in a boar-hunt.

Richard had by this time attained his twenty-second year; and weary of the ignoble restraints imposed upon him, he resolved to shake off the fetters that weighed upon him, and declare himself ruler of his own kingdom. He was encouraged in this resolve by the example of Charles the Sixth of France, who, from being kept under the closest tutelage by his uncles, had, by a sudden effort, freed himself from their authority and established his right to govern alone.

Accordingly, on the 3d May, 1389, at an extraordinary council held at the Easter holidays, the king, to the great surprise of the assembled