He was violent in his temper, profuse in his expenses, fond of idle show and magnificence, devoted to favorites, and addicted to pleasure; passions, all of them the most inconsistent with a prudent economy, and consequently dangerous in a limited and mixed government.
Had he possessed the talents of gaining, and still more those of overawing, his great barons, he might have escaped all the misfortunes of his reign, and been allowed to carry much further his oppressions over the people, if he really was guilty of any, without their daring to rebel, or even to murmur against him.

But when the grandees were tempted, by his want of prudence and of vigor, to resist his authority, and execute the most violent enterprises upon him, he was naturally led to seek an opportunity of retaliation: justice was neglected; the lives of the chief nobility were sacrificed; and all these enormities seem to have proceeded less from a settled design of establishing arbitrary power, than from the insolence of victory, and the necessities of the king's situation.

The manners indeed of the age were the chief source of such violence: laws, which were feebly executed in peaceable times, lost all their authority during public convulsions: both parties were alike guilty: or, if any difference may be remarked between them, we shall find, that the authority of the crown, being more legal, was commonly carried, when it prevailed, to less desperate extremities, than was that of the aristocracy.
On comparing the conduct and events of this reign with those of the preceding, we shall find equal reason to admire Edward and to blame Richard; but the circumstance of opposition, surely, will not lie in the strict regard paid by the former to national privileges, and the neglect of them by the latter.

On the contrary, the prince of small abilities, as he felt his want of power, seems to have been more moderate in this respect than the other.

Every parliament assembled during the reign of Edward, remonstrates against the exertion of some arbitrary prerogative or other: we hear not any complaints of that kind during the reign of Richard, till the assembling of his last parliament, which was summoned by his inveterate enemies, which dethroned him, which framed their complaints during the time of the most furious convultions, and whose testimony must therefore have, on that account, much less authority with every equitable judge.[*] Both these princes experienced the encroachments of the great upon their authority.