In the first days of his reign, the new sovereign was enabled to believe that public opinion fully confirmed his usurpation. All the great noblemen were eager to fulfil at his coronation their hereditary offices; the Earl of Northumberland alone, who had rendered eminent services to him, marched beside him in the procession, holding aloft in sight of all the sword worn by Bolingbroke on landing at Ravenspur. The House of Commons responded to the slightest wishes of the king, and the greater number of the unpopular measures of the last reign were withdrawn by common consent. {360} A great uproar arose in the House of Lords: the peers who had appealed against the Duke of Gloucester were summoned to exculpate themselves; all took their stand upon the wish of King Richard, upon the fear which he inspired, and upon the unanimous vote of the House. Recriminations poured down in every part; forty gauntlets were thrown upon the ground as challenges to combat. A weak and timid monarch would have taken alarm in the midst of this violent confusion: Henry IV. was enabled to calm the agitation. He divested the "lords appellant," as they were styled, of the titles which Richard had given to them as rewards; the Dukes of Albemarle, Surrey and Exeter, the Marquis of Dorset and the Earl of Gloucester, became once more the Earls of Rutland, Kent, Huntingdon, and Somerset, and Lord Le Despencer; but the new king wreaked no other vengeance upon them. The high treason law was restored to more limited and less vague formulae; appeals to the Houses in cases of treason were abolished, and the Parliament was forbidden to delegate its authority to a commission. The eldest son of the king was declared Prince of Wales, Duke of Guienne, Lancaster, and Cornwall, as well as heir presumptive to the throne. Henry was too prudent to again raise the question of the law of succession which he had so boldly disregarded: he did not wish his hereditary right to the throne to be discussed; he well knew that the little Earl of March, so carefully installed in Windsor Castle, was the real heir to the throne, as great-grand-son of Lionel, Duke of Clarence, the elder brother of John of Gaunt. The child was not nine years of age; the king caused him to be well brought up, as well as his brother, and neither was destined to recover his liberty during his lifetime; but their sister, soon afterwards married to the Earl of Cambridge, had transmitted to the House of York those rights or those pretensions which condemned England to half a century of civil war. {361}