The political circumstances of the period during which the _Confessio Amantis_ was written and revised are not very easy to disentangle. We may take it as probable that the plan of its composition, under the combined influence of Chaucer’s _Legend of Good Women_[J] and of the royal command, may have been laid about the year 1386. Before this time Richard would scarcely have been regarded by Gower as responsible for the government, and he would naturally look hopefully upon the young sovereign, then just entering upon his duties, as one who with proper admonition and due choice of advisers might turn out to be a good ruler. During the succeeding years the evil counsellors of the king were removed by the action of the lords appellant and the Parliament, and in the year 1389 a moderate and national policy seemed to have been finally adopted by the king, with William of Wykeham as Chancellor and the young earl of Derby, who had been one of the appellants but had quarrelled with his uncle Gloucester, among the king’s trusted advisers. By the light of subsequent events Gower condemned the whole behaviour of the king during this period as malicious and treacherous, but this could hardly have been his judgement of it at the time, for Richard’s dissimulation, if dissimulation it were, was deep enough to deceive all parties. Consequently, up to the year 1390 at least, he may have continued, though with some misgivings, to trust in the king’s good intentions and to regard him as a ruler who might effectually heal the divisions of the land, as he had already taken steps to restore peace to it outwardly. It is quite possible also that something may have come to his knowledge in the course of the year 1390-91 which shook his faith. It was at this time, in July 1390, just at the beginning of the fourteenth year of King Richard, that his hero the earl of Derby left the court and the kingdom to exercise his chivalry in Prussia, and for this there may have been a good reason. We know too little in detail of the events of the year to be able to say exactly what causes of jealousy may have arisen between the king and his cousin, who was nearly exactly of an age with him and seems to have attracted much more attention than Richard himself at the jousts of St. Inglevert in May of this year. Whatever feeling there may have been on the side of the earl of Derby would doubtless reflect itself in the minds of his friends and supporters, and something of this kind may have deepened into certitude the suspicions which Gower no doubt already had in his heart of the ultimate intentions of Richard II. The result was that in some copies at least of the _Confessio Amantis_ the concluding praises of the king as a ruler were removed and lines of a more general character on the state of the kingdom and the duties of a king were substituted, but still there was no mention of the earl of Derby except as before in the final Latin lines. Two years later,