7. All this Richard promised to do; but no sooner had the men dispersed and gone back to their homes, than he sent out a military force to seize all who had been concerned in the rebellion; and I grieve to say that, although he had given his word that they should all be pardoned, he ordered the judges to have every one of them executed. 8. After such conduct as this, you will not expect to hear much good of Richard the Second, whose selfish extravagance led him to do all kinds of unjust things, for the purpose of raising money to spend on his own pleasures; so that it might truly be said that he was constantly robbing his subjects; as, for instance, he once wanted to borrow a large sum of the citizens of London, which they would not lend him, because they knew very well he would never return it; so he took away their charter, that is, the grant which gives them the right to elect a lord mayor, and to manage the affairs of the city independently of the king; and they were obliged to give him ten times as much to get it back again, as they had refused to lend. 9. The citizens of London were very rich at this period, many of them being great merchants, and it was in this reign that the famous Whittington was Lord Mayor. 10. He had made a large fortune in the coal trade, which was then a new branch of commerce, for coals were very little used for firing till the time of Edward the Third. 11. King Richard had unjustly banished his cousin Henry, Earl of Hereford, and on the death of Henry’s father, the Duke of Lancaster, had taken possession of his estates. 12. This nobleman was a grandson of Edward the Third, and was much liked by the English, who would rather have had him for their king than the unworthy sovereign they had got, although he would have had no right to the throne, even if Richard had been dead. 13. However, he came back to England, and finding most of the nobles as well as the people willing to make him king, Richard was obliged to resign the crown, and was imprisoned in Pomfret castle, where it is supposed he died by unfair means; but as this is not quite certain, we will hope it was not so. He had reigned twenty-two years, when he was deposed, in 1399. 14. This usurpation of Henry the Fourth was the cause of the long civil wars in England, called the Wars of the Roses, which began in the time of Henry the Sixth, whose right to the throne was disputed, although his father and grandfather had been suffered to reign without opposition. 15. Henry the Fourth was, on the whole, a popular monarch, and under his government things went on pretty well with the generality of the people.