inaugurated the fatal quarrel.  The King was obliged to return immediately, and committed the government of the country to his cousin, Roger de Mortimer, who was next in succession to the English crown, in right of his mother, Philippa, the only child of the Duke of Clarence, third son of Edward III.  The death of this nobleman opened the way for the intrusion of the Lancastrians, the Duke of Lancaster having obtained the crown during the lifetime of Richard, to the exclusion of the rightful heir-apparent, Edmund, Earl of March, son to the late Viceroy.

The feuds of the Earl of Ormonde and the Talbots in Ireland, proved nearly as great a calamity to that nation as the disputes about the English succession.  A Parliament was held in Dublin in 1441, in which Richard Talbot, the English Archbishop of Dublin. proceeded to lay various requests before the King, the great object of which was the overthrow of the Earl, who, by the intermarrying of his kinsmen with the Irish, possessed great influence among the native septs contiguous to his own territory.  The petitioners pray that the government may be committed to some “mighty English lord,” and they moderately request that the said “mighty lord” may be permitted to create temporal peers.  They hint at the Earl’s age as an objection to his administration of justice, and assert that “the Lieutenant should be a mighty, courageous, and laborious man, to keep the field and make resistance against the enemy.”  But the great crime alleged against him, is that “he hath ordained and made Irishmen, and grooms and pages of his household, knights of the shire.”  These representations, however, had but little weight in the quarter to which they were addressed, for Ormonde was a stout Lancastrian; and if he had sinned more than his predecessors, his guilt was covered by the ample cloak of royal partiality.  However, some appearance of justice was observed.  Sir Giles Thornton was sent over to Ireland to make a report, which was so very general that it charged no one in particular, but simply intimated that there was no justice to be had for any party, and that discord and division prevailed amongst all the King’s officers.  The system of appointing deputies for different offices was very properly condemned; and the rather startling announcement made, that the annual expenses of the Viceroy and his officers exceeded all the revenues of Ireland for that year by L4,456.  In fact, it could not be otherwise; for every official, lay and ecclesiastical, English and Anglo-Irish, appear to have combined in one vast system of peculation, and, when it was possible, of wholesale robbery.  Even the loyal burghers of Limerick, Cork, and Galway had refused to pay their debts to the crown, and the representatives of royalty were not in a position to enforce payment.  The Talbot party seems to have shared the blame quite equally with the Ormondes, and the churchmen in power were just as rapacious as the seculars.  After having ruined the “mere Irish,” the plunderers themselves were on the verge of ruin; and the Privy Council declared that unless an immediate remedy was applied, the law courts should be closed, and the royal castles abandoned.  Further complaints were made in 1444; and Robert Maxwell, a groom of the royal chamber, was despatched to Ireland with a summons to Ormonde, commanding him to appear before the King and Council.