The charges were doubtless colored by enthusiasm for his deposition. The most serious, that of unlawful taxation, seems difficult to substantiate unless it be taken in connection with the article which asserts that the Parliament of 1398 was packed for the very purpose of securing a revenue for life. The complaint against purveyance seems equally ill-founded; during the reign of Edward III it had assumed the proportions of a great abuse of prerogative, but it was not in the time of his grandson an object of great concern to the nation. Thomas of Walsingham, whose tone is somewhat querulous, gives substance to the charges about the nonpayment of loans and the exaction of money for pretended pardons. “Promising in good faith to repay,” he says, “he never after gave the money back to his creditors.” Further, “The clergy and the common people and the temporal lords were constrained to give the king sums of money beyond the strength of man to bear, in order to buy back his good will.”[255] The step was very short to the forced loans of the Tudors. The trouble with Richard was that he did not go to school to history. Parliament was putting into practice what it could learn from the experience of its predecessors. Richard, swept with a desire, intense and perhaps insane, to wield the sceptre of absolutism, was blinded to what he might have read, and underwent the consequences. [Henry IV, 1399-1413] Henry IV was better advised; at any rate, he was politic enough to live closely by what he had learned. He was suspicious, cautious, slow and faltering in action save in the one supreme instance of seizing the throne; an exceedingly good politician. The power of Parliament and especially of the commons during his reign was more complete than ever before,--fuller, indeed, than it should be again until after the final hand-to-hand struggle with the Stuarts. In the matter of taxation, instances of illegality are rare; Parliament continued to exercise the supreme control in voting taxes; and in the more recently acquired rights of appropriating supplies and examining public accounts, the supremacy of Parliament was established. Not only does this observation hold good during the reign of Henry IV, but it is equally applicable to the two Lancastrians who succeeded him. In 1400 there appears to have been an exception to this rule. Henry apparently secured an aid not from Parliament but from the Great Council. There was the understanding, however, that the grant was binding not upon the nation at large but upon the members of the Council. [Practice of delaying grants]