ds a
year upon the crown, and had engaged the king to admit that bad debt;
and that, when created earl of Suffolk, he had obtained a grant of five
hundred pounds a year to support the dignity of that title.[***]

* See note L, at the end of the volume.

** Cotton, p. 315. Knyghton, p. 2683.

*** It is probable that the earl of Suffolk was not rich, nor
able to support the dignity without the bounty of the crown;
for his father, Michael de la Pole, though a great merchant,
had been ruined by lending money to the late king. See
Cotton, p. 194.

We may even the proof of these articles, frivolous as they are, was
found very deficient upon the trial: it appeared that Suffolk had made
no purchase from the crown while he was chancellor, and that all
his bargains of that kind were made before he was advanced to that
dignity.[*] It is almost needless to add, that he was condemned,
notwithstanding his defence; and that he was deprived of his office.

Glocester and his associates observed their stipulation with the king,
and attacked no more of his ministers: but they immediately attacked
himself and his royal dignity, and framed a commission after the model
of those which had been attempted almost in every reign since that
of Richard I., and which had always been attended with extreme
confusion.[**] By this commission, which was ratified by parliament, a
council of fourteen persons was appointed, all of Glocester's faction,
except Nevil, archbishop of York: the sovereign power was transferred
to these men for a twelvemonth: the king, who had now reached the
twenty-first year of his age, was in reality dethroned: the aristocracy
was rendered supreme: and though the term of the commission was limited,
it was easy to foresee that the intentions of the party were to render
it perpetual, and that power would with great difficulty be wrested from
those grasping hands to which it was once committed. Richard, however,
was obliged to submit: he signed the commission which violence had
extorted from him; he took an oath never to infringe it; and though
at the end of the session he publicly entered a protest, that the
prerogatives of the crown, notwithstanding his late concession, should
still be deemed entire and unimpaired,[***] the new commissioners,
without regarding this declaration, proceeded to the exercise of their
authority.

* Rymer, vol. vii. p. 481. Cotton, p. 31.

** Cotton,