at its head.  Leave had been given to Henry of Lancaster to receive his father’s inheritance on the death of John of Gaunt, in February 1399.  But an ordinance of the Continual Committee annulled this permission and Richard seized the Lancastrian estates.  Archbishop Arundel at once saw the chance of dealing blow for blow.  He hastened to Paris and pressed the Duke to return to England, telling him how all men there looked for it, “especially the Londoners, who loved him a hundred times more than they did the king.”  For a while Henry remained buried in thought, “leaning on a window overlooking a garden”; but Arundel’s pressure at last prevailed, he made his way secretly to Britanny, and with fifteen knights set sail from Vannes.

[Sidenote:  Ireland and the Pale]

What had really decided him was the opportunity offered by Richard’s absence from the realm.  From the opening of his reign the king’s attention had been constantly drawn to his dependent lordship of Ireland.  More than two hundred years had passed away since the troubles which followed the murder of Archbishop Thomas forced Henry the Second to leave his work of conquest unfinished, and the opportunity for a complete reduction of the island which had been lost then had never returned.  When Henry quitted Ireland indeed Leinster was wholly in English hands, Connaught bowed to a nominal acknowledgement of the English overlordship, and for a while the work of conquest seemed to go steadily on.  John de Courcy penetrated into Ulster and established himself at Downpatrick; and Henry planned the establishment of his youngest son, John, as Lord of Ireland.  But the levity of the young prince, who mocked the rude dresses of the native chieftains and plucked them in insult by the beard, soon forced his father to recall him; and in the continental struggle which soon opened on the Angevin kings, as in the constitutional struggle within England itself which followed it, all serious purpose of completing the conquest of Ireland was forgotten.  Nothing indeed but the feuds and weakness of the Irish tribes enabled the adventurers to hold the districts of Drogheda, Dublin, Wexford, Waterford, and Cork, which formed what was thenceforth known as “the English Pale.”  In all the history of Ireland no event has proved more disastrous than this half-finished conquest.  Had the Irish driven their invaders into the sea, or the English succeeded in the complete reduction of the island, the misery of its after ages might have been avoided.  A struggle such as that in which Scotland drove out its conquerors might have produced a spirit of patriotism and national union which would have formed a people out of the mass of warring clans.  A conquest such as that in which the Normans made England their own would have spread at any rate the law, the order, the civilization of the conquering country over the length and breadth of the conquered.  Unhappily Ireland, while powerless to effect its entire deliverance,