the French courtiers said (as the
English courtiers had said of Richard), was a marvel of beauty and wit,
and quite a phenomenon--of seven years old. The council were divided
about this marriage, but it took place. It secured peace between England
and France for a quarter of a century; but it was strongly opposed to the
prejudices of the English people. The Duke of Gloucester, who was
anxious to take the occasion of making himself popular, declaimed against
it loudly, and this at length decided the King to execute the vengeance
he had been nursing so long.

He went with a gay company to the Duke of Gloucester's house, Pleshey
Castle, in Essex, where the Duke, suspecting nothing, came out into the
court-yard to receive his royal visitor. While the King conversed in a
friendly manner with the Duchess, the Duke was quietly seized, hurried
away, shipped for Calais, and lodged in the castle there. His friends,
the Earls of Arundel and Warwick, were taken in the same treacherous
manner, and confined to their castles. A few days after, at Nottingham,
they were impeached of high treason. The Earl of Arundel was condemned
and beheaded, and the Earl of Warwick was banished. Then, a writ was
sent by a messenger to the Governor of Calais, requiring him to send the
Duke of Gloucester over to be tried. In three days he returned an answer
that he could not do that, because the Duke of Gloucester had died in
prison. The Duke was declared a traitor, his property was confiscated to
the King, a real or pretended confession he had made in prison to one of
the Justices of the Common Pleas was produced against him, and there was
an end of the matter. How the unfortunate duke died, very few cared to
know. Whether he really died naturally; whether he killed himself;
whether, by the King's order, he was strangled, or smothered between two
beds (as a serving-man of the Governor's named Hall, did afterwards
declare), cannot be discovered. There is not much doubt that he was
killed, somehow or other, by his nephew's orders. Among the most active
nobles in these proceedings were the King's cousin, Henry Bolingbroke,
whom the King had made Duke of Hereford to smooth down the old family
quarrels, and some others: who had in the family-plotting times done just
such acts themselves as they now condemned in the duke. They seem to
have been a corrupt set of men; but such men were easily found about the
court in such days.

The people mur