from Haverfordwest at the end of September, and landed in Ireland on 2 Oct. He left the Duke of York as regent in England, Lancaster having gone to take possession of the duchy of Guienne, granted to him in 1390. Gloucester accompanied the king. There was little if any fighting. The presence of the English king for the first time since Henry II's day, and his imposing force, overawed the refractory chieftains, and after Christmas the four ‘kings’ of Meath, Thomond, Leinster, and Connaught were persuaded to come to Dublin and recognise Richard's sovereignty. They were instructed in the usages of civilised society by an Irish-speaking knight, who afterwards gave Froissart an amusing account of his experience, and on 25 March Richard knighted them in St. Patrick's Cathedral, and granted them pensions. The expenditure of the crown for the half-year ending at Easter 1395 reached the enormous total of 121,000l. (Issues, p. 258).
Richard's return was hastened by the arrival of Archbishop Arundel with news of a great lollard attack upon the church, encouraged by Sir Richard Story and other knights of his court. Swearing that he would hang them all unless they recanted, Richard hastened back in May, and frightened them into silence. The university of Oxford, the centre of the movement, was ordered to expel adherents of the lollards. Richard by no means shared the lollard views of some of his trusted counsellors. In 1385 he had met a proposal for the spoliation of the church with a declaration that he would leave it in a position as good as, or better than, he found it. He was a patron of the Benedictines and Franciscans, and his orthodoxy is attested by such a strong opponent of the lollards as Richard Maidstone. Nor is there any evidence for the supposed lollard views of his first queen. Froissart, on revisiting England in July 1395, after twenty-eight years' absence, found the king busy with still more thorny questions—the refusal of the people of Guienne to receive John of Gaunt as their duke, and his own proposal to marry an infant daughter of the French king. The chronicler was informed by members of the royal council that Gloucester was urging the king to coerce the Aquitanians into receiving his elder brother, to leave the field clear for himself at home. But Lancaster was recalled early in 1396. Richard became less careful to avoid reviving the memory of old enmities. In the autumn of 1395 he had the embalmed body of De Vere brought over from Louvain, where he had died three years before, and solemnly laid it to rest in the chapel of the family foundation at Earls Colne in Essex; the coffin was opened that he might look upon the face and press the hand of his old friend. Moreover, Richard had again been urging the pope to canonise Edward II, supporting the request by a book of Edward's miracles (Issues, p. 259).
Richard's marriage to Isabella, daughter of Charles VI of France, increased the tension. The marriage treaty arranged by Rutland (eldest son of the Duke of York), Nottingham, and the chamberlain, William le Scrope, on 9 March 1396, was accompanied by the extension of the truce (which would lapse in 1398) for twenty-eight years. Richard went over to Calais on 27 Sept., taking with him Lancaster and Gloucester, with a crowd of other nobles, and met Charles a month later between Guisnes and Ardres, near the site of the Field of the Cloth of Gold. The four days' interview must have almost rivalled the later meeting in splendid extravagance if Richard, besides distributing nearly 7,000l. in presents, really spent 200,000l. He is said to have changed his dress every day, while his father-in-law wore the same throughout. But the French historian credits him with discouraging excessive splendour in dress (St. Denys, ii. 458). The marriage took place at Calais on 4 Nov., and three hundred thousand francs, or nearly half the dowry, were paid over.
Richard secured substantial advantages by the match, without surrendering any claims; but no treaty which did not restore lost territory could be popular in England. This indeed had the appearance of ceding territory, for Brest, which was to be held ‘until the end of the war,’ was restored to the Duke of Brittany, and it was whispered that Richard intended to cede Calais too. He was criticised for preferring a child of seven to the marriageable daughter of the king of Arragon, and his support of Charles VI's plan for ending the schism by the renunciation of both popes ran counter to the wishes of his subjects, who preferred the decision of a council (Usk, p. 9; St. Denys, ii. 448). Whether or not they suspected Richard of clearing the ground for an attack upon them, Gloucester and Arundel seem to have fanned this discontent. Rutland and Nottingham almost monopolised the king's confidence. Archbishop Arundel's translation to Canterbury in September may have relieved for a moment the growing strain of the situation, but it also enabled Richard to transfer the chancellorship to Edmund Stafford [q. v.], bishop of Exeter. The clouds gathered thickly in the January parliament of 1397. Richard's legitimation of the Beauforts, the natural children of Lancaster, in which he claimed to have acted as ‘entier emperour de son
