The new lay ministers lent themselves to gigantic frauds.

The chamberlain, Lord Latimer, bought up the royal debts and embezzled the public revenue.

With Richard Lyons, a merchant through whom the king negotiated with the gild of the Staple, he reaped enormous profits by raising the price of imports and by lending to the Crown at usurious rates of interest.

When the empty treasury forced them to call a Parliament the ministers tampered with the elections through the sheriffs.
[Sidenote: The Good Parliament] But the temper of the Parliament which met in 1376, and which gained from after times the name of the Good Parliament, shows that these precautions had utterly failed.

Even their promise to pillage the Church had failed to win for the Duke and his party the good will of the lesser gentry or the wealthier burgesses who together formed the Commons.