INTRODUCTORY. 7 



was renewing, under more favourable circumstances, the effort 

 which his father made to disable under Parliamentary sanction 

 the issue of females from inheriting the crown in England ; 

 while the revolution of 1688 charged James with the fraud of 

 having, in the interests of his Church, palmed a supposititious 

 child on the English succession. As, again, the parliament 

 which deposed Richard was renewed by Henry, through the 

 device which made the writs returnable at too short a period 

 for a fresh election ; so, in the face of another legal difficulty, 

 the Convention Parliament was made to bridge over the 

 abdication or flight of James and the accession of William. 



The reaction too is very similar. The favourites of Richard 

 and the favourites of James were swept away. Bushey and 

 Green and Bagot are the first victims, Scrope and Despenser 

 the next, the one for old, the others for new offences. But 

 Northumberland was politically the Marlborough of 1399, as 

 greedy, as false, as hypocritical, as confident in his power of 

 deception. He is the most hateful person at the beginning of 

 the fifteenth century, as the great tactician of scientific warfare 

 is at the beginning of the eighteenth. But Northumberland 

 was more unlucky, for he raised a civil war in England, while 

 Marlborough was prevented, by the consummate tact of William, 

 from raising the same issue with any practical chance of success. 



Henry again had another enemy in the more zealous Church- 

 men. His father had notoriously favoured the Lollards in their 

 attacks on the temporalities of the Church, and could not dis- 

 engage himself from the reputation of having fostered their 

 doctrines. Richard had assured the Church that he would 

 protect its property, but he had persecuted, in his wild raid on 

 the reforming nobles at the conclusion of his reign, some of the 

 political prelates, and apparently the clergy had, almost to 

 a man, sided with Henry in the revolution of 1399. But just 

 as after the deposition of James, there arose a clerical party 

 which doubted of the lawfulness of the act by which Richard 

 had been deposed, and found a representative in Scrope, Arch- 

 bishop of York, the brother of the attainted Earl of Wiltshire. 



