a princely dominion over Ireland; which enormous donation was
confirmed by act of parliament to Vere, a favourite of the king.[154] A
petition that the officers of state should annually visit and inquire
into his household was answered that the king would do what he
pleased.[155] Yet this was little in comparison of their former
proceedings.

[Sidenote: Proceedings of parliament in the tenth of Richard.]

There is nothing, however, more deceitful to a monarch, unsupported by
an armed force, and destitute of wary advisers, than this submission of
his people. A single effort was enough to overturn his government.
Parliament met in the tenth year of his reign, steadily determined to
reform the administration, and especially to punish its chief leader,
Michael de la Pole, earl of Suffolk and lord chancellor. According to
the remarkable narration of a contemporary historian,[156] too
circumstantial to be rejected, but rendered somewhat doubtful by the
silence of all other writers and of the parliamentary roll, the king was
loitering at his palace at Eltham when he received a message from the
two houses, requesting the dismissal of Suffolk, since they had matter
to allege against him that they could not move while he kept the office
of chancellor. Richard, with his usual intemperance, answered that he
would not for their request remove the meanest scullion from his
kitchen. They returned a positive refusal to proceed on any public
business until the king should appear personally in parliament and
displace the chancellor. The king required forty knights to be deputed
from the rest to inform him clearly of their wishes. But the commons
declined a proposal in which they feared, or affected to fear, some
treachery. At length the duke of Gloucester and Arundel bishop of Ely
were commissioned to speak the sense of parliament; and they delivered
it, if we may still believe what we read, in very extraordinary
language, asserting that there was an ancient statute, according to
which, if the king absented himself from parliament without just cause
during forty days, which he had now exceeded, every man might return
without permission to his own country; and, moreover, there was another
statute, and (as they might more truly say) a precedent of no remote
date, that if a king, by bad counsel, or his own folly and obstinacy,
alienated himself from his people, and would not govern according to
the laws of the land and the advice of the pe