Before Henry had been two months on the throne, civil war had broken out. The insurgents were Richard's kinsmen and favourites. The two Hollands--Earls of Kent and Huntingdon, who were Richard's half-brothers--conspired with Montacute, Earl of Salisbury, and Lord Despenser, who had been his trusted friends. They plotted to seize King Henry, as he lay at Windsor keeping the festivities of Christmas, to slay or imprison him, and to release their old master from Pontefract Castle. Unfortunately for themselves, they took into their counsels Edward Earl of Rutland, the son of the old Duke of York. The cowardly prince, finding that he was suspected, informed the king of the plot before the conspirators were ready. Henry escaped from Windsor, and called his friends together at London. The rebel earls set out in various directions to endeavour to raise their retainers, but they were all overtaken. Kent and Salisbury fell into their enemies' hands at Cirencester, Huntingdon was caught in Essex, Despenser at Bristol. All were beheaded without any delay or form of trial. Henry's grim reply to this insurrection was the production of the dead body of King Richard, which was brought from Pontefract to London, and publicly displayed to prove his death. Nevertheless, many men refused to credit his decease, and for years after there were some who maintained that the body exposed in St. Paul's was not that of the late king, but that of his chaplain, who bore an extraordinary personal resemblance to him. They believed, or tried to believe, that Richard had escaped and was alive in Scotland. Trading on this notion, an impostor presented himself at the Scotch court, and was long entertained there as the true King of England by the simple Robert III. [Sidenote: =Rebellion in Wales.--Owen Glendower.=] Hardly was the rebellion of the Hollands put down before a second civil war arose. The Welsh had always been devoted to King Richard, and had taken his deposition very ill. In 1400, a gentleman named Owen-ap-Griffith, of Glendower, who had been one of Richard's squires, put himself at the head of a rising in North Wales. Owen was of the old princely blood of the house of Llewellyn, and proclaimed himself Prince of North Wales under the suzerainty of his master Richard, whom he declared to be still alive in Scotland. He was a guerilla captain of marked ability, and completely baffled the efforts that King Henry made to put him down. He swept all over North Wales, captured many of its castles, and extended his sway over the whole countryside. To the day of his death Owen maintained himself in independence, ravaging the English border when he was left alone, and retiring into the recesses of Snowdon when a great force took the field against him. His incursions penetrated as far as Worcester and Shrewsbury, and no man west of the Severn was safe from his plundering bands. [Sidenote: =England harassed by Scotland and France.=]