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He seemed too melancholy for one

Whose heart was hard as steel.

Coucy, though clearly associated with the ousting of the Dukes, nevertheless entertained Philip the Bold and his son the Count of Nevers immediately afterward. The Duke’s accounts show that he and his son dined and slept at the castle on December 8 “at the expense of Monseigneur de Coucy,” and that during the visit he presented a diamond ring to the Dame de Coucy and a brooch of sapphires and pearls to her baby daughter. Coucy was always worth cultivating.

The reorganized Council made a serious effort to end the Dukes’ personal autocracy and restore the administrative system of Charles V. The Marmosets—Rivière, Mercier, and others—regained authority, bureaucracy was purged of the uncles’ men, five commissioners of reform were appointed to seek out the worst abuses, remove corrupt officials, and replace them by “good men.” As a step toward reconciliation with the bourgeois of Paris, the office of Provost of Paris and some, though not all, former municipal offices and privileges were restored. Measures were taken, or at least formulated, to improve sewage collection and restrict professional beggars, whose crutches and eye-patches and gruesome sores and stumps were stripped off each night in the district known by virtue of the transformations that took place there, as the Cour des Miracles.

The central problem of financing government was recognized in a series of ordinances dealing with financial and judicial reforms. Cancellation of the University’s tax-exemption was one measure attempted by Rivière and Mercier with no good result, for it earned them the powerful enmity of the University to add to that of the Dukes.

At the same time in England, a more lethal drama of King against uncles and other opponents was taking place. The central figure was Philippa de Coucy’s husband, Robert de Vere, ninth Earl of Oxford, King Richard’s closest adviser and friend. Brought to court as a boy by virtue of his marriage to Philippa, Oxford gained a dominant influence over Richard, who was five years his junior and fatherless. He “managed the King as he pleased,” and “if he had said black was white, Richard would not have contradicted him.… By him everything was done and without him nothing done.”

The King at 21, slender, yellow-haired, pale-faced, with a skin that flushed easily, was “abrupt and stammering in his speech,” over-splendid in dress, averse to war, ill-tempered with his domestics, arrogant and capricious. His Plantagenet pride, combined with Oxford’s influence, shaped an erratic and willful sovereign who levied extortionate taxes to pay for his luxuries. Before his downfall, which finished off the Plantagenets, he invented the handkerchief, recorded in his household rolls as “little pieces [of cloth] made for giving to the lord King for carrying in his hand to wipe and clean his nose.”

Government by favorite leans toward the arbitrary exercise of power, which in any case was Richard’s natural tendency. He had made Oxford a Knight of the Garter and, at 21, a member of the Privy Council, and showered on him a stream of endowments—lands, castles, wardships, lordships, revenues—and a hereditary sheriffdom belonging to Buckingham’s wife’s family. This was unwise, but if autocrats always acted wisely they would not furnish history with moral lessons. The ruthless Buckingham, now Duke of Gloucester, did not need extra provocation to hate his nephew, whom he despised for his reluctance to pursue the war. Attracting the enemies of Oxford, Gloucester became the focus of the oppositionist party bent on curbing the power of the King’s favorite.

The struggle reached a peak when Richard, on the occasion of a rebellion in Ireland, created for Oxford the unprecedented title of Marquis of Dublin and subsequently Duke of Ireland with precedence over all the earls. He was given regal powers to crush the rebellion, but instead of going to Ireland, which would at least have given the nobles the satisfaction of removing him from