rid himself of two peers whom he feared and hated at a blow. But it is
difficult to understand by what means he drew the crafty Bolingbroke
into his snare.[176] However this might have been, he now threw away all
appearance of moderate government. The indignities he had suffered in
the eleventh year of his reign were still at his heart, a desire to
revenge which seems to have been the mainspring of his conduct. Though a
general pardon of those proceedings had been granted, not only at the
time, but in his own last parliament, he made use of them as a pretence
to extort money from seventeen counties, to whom he imputed a share in
the rebellion. He compelled men to confess under their seals that they
had been guilty of treason, and to give blank obligations, which his
officers filled up with large sums.[177] Upon the death of the duke of
Lancaster, who had passively complied throughout all these transactions,
Richard refused livery of his inheritance to Hereford, whose exile
implied no crime, and who had letters patent enabling him to make his
attorney for that purpose during its continuance. In short, his
government for nearly two years was altogether tyrannical; and, upon the
same principles that cost James II. his throne, it was unquestionably
far more necessary, unless our fathers would have abandoned all thought
of liberty, to expel Richard II. Far be it from us to extenuate the
treachery of the Percies towards this unhappy prince, or the cruel
circumstances of his death, or in any way to extol either his successor
or the chief men of that time, most of whom were ambitious and
faithless; but after such long experience of the king's arbitrary,
dissembling, and revengeful temper, I see no other safe course, in the
actual state of the constitution, than what the nation concurred in
pursuing.

The reign of Richard II. is, in a constitutional light, the most
interesting part of our earlier history; and it has been the most
imperfectly written. Some have misrepresented the truth through
prejudice, and others through carelessness. It is only to be understood,
and, indeed, there are great difficulties in the way of understanding it
at all, by a perusal of the rolls of parliament, with some assistance
from the contemporary historians, Walsingham, Knyghton, the anonymous
biographer published by Hearne, and Froissart. These, I must remark,
except occasionally the last, are extremely hostile to Richard; and
although we are far f