In 1387 the Barons of England deprived King Richard of the reins of government, and impeached his friends, the Archbishop of York, the Duke of Ireland, the Earl of Suffolk, Sir Robert Tresilian, and Sir Nicholas Brember. Brember and Tresilian were publicly executed, the others secured their safety by flight.

Years passed, and Richard recovered his authority, when he punished the lords appellant, sparing only his cousin Hereford and the Duke of Norfolk. Some conversation appears to have passed between these nobles, and Hereford accused Norfolk of having expressed his suspicion that Richard would yet revenge himself upon them for their past offence, and especially for the affair of “Radcot Bridge,” when the Duke of Ireland’s forces were dispersed.

Norfolk denied the charge, and the King permitted the quarrel to be decided by wager of battle. The 29th of April, 1398, was appointed for the trial; the place, Coventry. The noblemen had put spurs to their horses, when Richard, under the advice of his council, stopped the combat, and banished the offenders—as guilty of treason. Norfolk’s sentence was for life; Hereford’s for ten years.

The Londoners were incensed at losing their favourite, Hereford, and when his father, the aged John of Gaunt, died on the Christmas following his son’s banishment, and Richard seized his estates, the general indignation was extreme; for the King had granted legal instruments to both the exiles, securing to them any inheritance which might fall to them.

In face of the gathering storm Richard sailed for Ireland. On the 4th July, 1399, three small ships entered the Humber, and Hereford, attended by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Fitz-Alan, son of the late Earl of Arundel, a few servitors, and fifteen men-at-arms, landed at Ravenser Spurn.

Shut out of Hull, he was met at Doncaster by the Earls of Northumberland and Westmoreland, who espoused his cause, affecting to believe his assertion that he had returned to claim the estates of his father.

King Richard threw himself into Conway Castle, and Northumberland induced him to leave his refuge, to make terms with Hereford. Drawn into an ambush, Richard was delivered into his cousin’s hands. Northumberland had sworn on the sacramental elements to keep faith with the King, and Richard thus reproached him, on the moment of his seizure, “May the God on whom you laid your hand reward you and your accomplices at the last day.”

On the 1st of October, the day following his coronation, Henry IV. signed a licence for Matthew Danthorpe, a hermit, who had welcomed him at Ravenser Spurn, granting him permission to erect a hermitage and chapel on that desolate place.

Richard was imprisoned, and expired in a dungeon of Pontefract Castle, but whether by stroke of Sir Piers Exton’s axe, or broken down by famine, matters not now.

Northumberland was honoured by the dignity of Constable of England, and at the coronation bore a naked sword on the King’s right hand. He was further guerdoned by a grant of the Isle of Man.

On the 7th of May, 1402, the Percies defeated Earl Douglas at the battle of Homildon, inflicting a heavy loss upon the Scots, and capturing Douglas; Murdoch, son of the Duke of Albany, and other captains to the total sum of eighty.

King Henry forbade the ransoming of the prisoners, an interference which aroused the bitter wrath of the Percies. As though in mockery of their pride, he bestowed upon them the Scottish estates of the Douglas, and ordered them to abstain from ransoming Sir Edward Mortimer, Hotspur’s brother-in-law, who had fallen into the hands of Owen Glendower, the Welsh patriot.

These impositions of the royal commands resulted in the revolt of the Percies. The Scotch prisoners were released, and assisted the Percies in the field. The captive Mortimer married Glendower’s daughter, and drew that chieftain into the conspiracy. The lineal heir to the throne was Edmund Mortimer, Earl of March. Him Northumberland proposed to raise to the throne, virtually partitioning the kingdom between the Percies, Mortimers, and Glendower.

The revolt came to the issue of battle at Shrewsbury, on the 21st July, 1403, when Percy and Douglas penetrated the centre of the royal army, and Hotspur, casting up the ventaille of his helmet, was shot in the brain by an arrow, and fell in the press. The victorious advance was turned into a rout. Of Prince Henry, it is written: “The prince that daie holpe his father like a lustie young gentleman.”

Northumberland was marching to join his sons, but retired into Warkworth Castle on receiving the news of their defeat. The King, either from fear or policy, condoned his part in the revolt.

When the Archbishop of York, Richard Scrope, took up arms in 1405, the Earl was implicated in his revolt. Sir John Falconberg had raised the banner of revolt in Cleveland, but Prince John and the Earl of Westmoreland had defeated the rebels. The Archbishop’s army was so strong, for it had been augmented by Lord Bardolph and Thomas, Lord Mowbray, that the royal captains resorted to treaty, and induced the Archbishop to disband his army. No sooner was this done than the leaders of the revolt were arrested.

The Archbishop of York, Lord Mowbray, Sir John Lamplugh, Sir Robert Plumpton, and several other unfortunates, were put upon their trial, and condemned to death. On the 8th June the Archbishop of York was executed at his palace of Bishopthorpe, and his head, with that of Mowbray, was piked and exposed on York walls.

The city of York was heavily fined, and the King proceeded to Durham, where he executed Lords Hastings and Fauconbridge, and Sir John Griffith.

Northumberland, “with three hundred horse, got him to Berwike,” but on the King’s advance passed into Scotland, accompanied by Lord Bardolph.

After brief exile, the end came. “The earle of Northumberland, and the lord Bardolfe, after they had been in Wales, in France, and Flanders to purchase aid against King Henrie, were returned backe into Scotland, and had remained there now for the space of a whole yeare: and as their evill fortune would, while the King held a councill of the nobilitie at London, the saide earle of Northumberland and lord Bardolfe, in a dismall houre, with a great power of Scots returned into England, recovering diverse of the earle’s castels and seigneories, for the people in great numbers resorted unto them. Hereupon encouraged with hope of good successe, they entered into Yorkshire, and there began to distroie the countrie.”

The Sheriff of Yorkshire, Sir Thomas Rokeby, is stated to have lured the old warrior to his doom. Sir Nicholas Tempest reinforced him at Knaresborough, and the little army crossed the Wharfe at Wetherby. They had achieved a succession of trifling successes, but now Sir Thomas Rokeby interposed his forces, cut off their retreat, and compelled them to give battle, on the 28th February, 1408, on Bramham Moor, near Hazlewood.

They were brave men who thus stood opposed. Northumberland’s troops were incited by their dangerous position, by the hope of recovering their lost possessions, and by their hatred of the King. On the other hand, the royalists were anxious to gain the honours and rewards which princes bestow.

The Sheriff was not slack to close, but advanced his standard of St. George, and sounded the charge, as Northumberland bore down upon him with his lances, doing battle once more beneath his banner, that displayed the proud emblazonments of the house of Percy.

The onset was fierce and bloody. Lances shivered to splinters; men went down in their blood, wounded and dying; riderless horses burst from the press, and wildly galloped over the moor. Lances were cast aside, as knights and men-at-arms fell-to with sword, and mace, and axe, testing mail, smashing shield and casque, and finding and bestowing wounds and death despite of guarding weapons and tempered plate-mail.

The archers were fiercely at work, pouring their long shafts upon the rear ranks; the footmen face to face with the wild play of deadly bill and thrust of pike. Morions were cleft, corsets pierced, and men fell thick and fast. The battle was hotly maintained, but for a short time, the insurgents being sorely over-matched. Northumberland fell—never to rise again until rough hands stripped off his mail, and held him for the butcher’s work of headsman’s axe and knife. There ended Lord Bardolph’s many troubles, as he fell, a sorely wounded and dying man, into the Sheriff’s hands.

The leaders fallen, no further object for contention remained to the rebels, and the defeat was complete and irretrievable. The tragedy of the battlefield had to be concluded by the rush of the pursuers, eager to maim and slay; and by the useless rally of defeated men, turning fiercely at bay, to claim blood for blood and life for life; and, alas! by the seizure of flying men, doomed to rope and axe in reguerdon of their last act of vassalage to the devoted house of Northumberland.

The Earl’s head, “full of silver horie hairs, being put upon a stake, was openly carried through London, and set upon the bridge of the same citie: in like manner was the lord Bardolfe’s. The bishop of Bangor was taken and pardoned by the King, for that when he was apprehended, he had no armour on his backe. The King, to purge the North parts of all rebellion, and to take order for the punishment of those that were accused to have succoured and assisted the Earl of Northumberland, went to Yorke, where, when many were condemned, and diverse put to great fines, and the countrie brought to quietnesse, he caused the abbot of Hailes to be hanged, who had been in armour against him with the foresaid earle.”

So, after his treacheries, his aspiring ambitions, the once puissant Earl of Northumberland was brought as low as Richard of Bordeaux when he lay upon his bier at St. Paul’s, his set and rigid face, bared from eyebrows to chin, for the inspection of the Londoners, and, in its surrounding swathing of grave-clothes, in its dreadful emaciation, eloquent of the unrecorded tragedy of secret murder.

A grant of the manor of Spofforth, a former possession of the slain Earl, rewarded the loyalty of Sir Thomas Rokeby.

In the reign of Henry V., an attempt was again made to restore the lineal heir to the throne, an augury of the War of the Roses commenced in his son’s reign. The Earl of Marche, the object of the conspiracy, himself betrayed it to the King. Henry, whose assassination had been planned, took immediate revenge upon the principal offenders, Richard, Earl of Cambridge, Lord Scroop of Masham, and Sir Thomas Grey. They were executed at Southampton, on the 13th of August, 1415, at the moment when the royal fleet was sailing from the harbour to add the terrors of invasion to unhappy France, then suffering from internecine strife.

There is an old tradition that on the day of Agincourt the shrine of St. John of Beverley exuded blood, and when King Henry was in Yorkshire he naturally paid his devotions at the shrine. He was accompanied by his Queen; and it was at this time that he received the sad news of the death of his brother Clarence at BeaujÉ. The Duke was dashing over the narrow bridge when the charging Scots burst upon him; Sir John Carmichael shivered his lance upon the Duke’s corset, Sir John Swinton smote him in the face, and, as he dropped from the saddle, the Earl of Buchan, with one blow of a mace, or “steel hammer,” dashed out his brains.