CHAP. VI - INVASION OF RICHMOND:—DEFEAT AND DEATH OF RICHARD

Summary

Richard's return to London

Richard remained at Nottingham during the whole autumn, and only returned to London on the 9th of November. He was met, on his approach to the capital, by the mayor and aldermen in scarlet, and upwards of 400 citizens in violet, a little beyond Kennington on the Surrey side of the Thames, and conducted through the city, in procession, to the mansion called the Wardrobe, at Blackfriars, where he took up his abode for a time. Perhaps he had to some extent recovered the goodwill of the people, who now began to regard him as secure upon the throne, and, leaving the judgment of his acts to God, remembered only that they were his subjects, and that he had shown himself an able ruler., At least such may have been the view of mayors and aldermen, to whom it was a matter of some consequence to live on terms of friendship with the court. But it very soon appeared that even now such sentiments were by no means universal. On the 6th of December he wrote to the Mayor of Windsor, stating that a number of false reports, invented by ‘our ancient enemies of France,’ were circulated by seditious persons, to provoke discord and division between the king and his lords. To check this, the mayor was commanded, if any such reports or writings got abroad, to examine as to ‘the first showers and utterers thereof,’ whom, when found, he was to commit to prison and sharply to punish, as an example to others.