"What! after so many pardons and declarations by the Parliament?" rejoined Bolingbroke. "He will annul all that, and we shall pass through the ordeal like the others; the world in which we live is strangely perfidious." The Duke of Norfolk soon had reason to be convinced of this. Either through thoughtlessness or through treachery, the conversation was reported to the king; he convoked the Parliament, and his first care in the month of January, 1398, was to summon Henry Bolingbroke to render an account of the words of the Duke of Norfolk. The latter was not present, but upon the summons of the Parliament, he came to throw down his glove at the feet of the Duke of Hereford, declaring him a traitor and a perjurer: the combat was authorized between the two noblemen. "I shall then at length have peace," muttered the king, while proceeding to Coventry, on the 16th of September, to be present at the tournament. But having once confronted the two antagonists, he became fearful of a victory for one of them, and, forbidding the ordeal, he submitted the question to a Parliamentary commission chosen by himself. The Duke of Hereford was condemned to an exile of ten years. The Duke of Norfolk was banished forever. He thereupon started for the Holy Land, and died of grief at Venice. But Henry Bolingbroke did not go far away; he remained in France, watching the movements of his cousin Richard, who lavished the riches of England with so thoughtless a hand, that his treasury was constantly empty. His favorites would then help him to replenish it by exactions of every kind. The Duke of Lancaster had died three months after the departure of his son; his immense property was confiscated, notwithstanding the protests of Bolingbroke. A decree outlawed seventeen counties of England, as having been favorable to the enemies of the king; they were compelled to buy back their rights with enormous fines. {354} The disaffection increased, but the king took no heed whatever of it. He embarked towards the end of May, 1390, for Ireland, where his cousin and heir-apparent, the Earl of March, had recently been assassinated. He had just taken the field against the rebels, when Henry Bolingbroke landed, on the 4th of July, at Ravenspur, in Yorkshire, having escaped from France under the pretext of paying a visit to the Duke of Brittany.