Richard was under great pressure in the last years of his reign. Henry Bolingbroke was exiled in 1397 but returned to effect Richard’s deposition and became Henry IV in 1399. At the same time that Richard’s followers were displaying his white-hart emblem in the late nineties, some of his opponents were using the same image to undermine his rule. Hassig remarks on the classical notion of the stag’s timidity, ignored by the bestiary writers in their emphasis upon its positive scriptural associations. Bartholomew does reveal, however, that the hart or stag, cervus, could still be understood as a creature with two sides to its character.^[44] We know that the contrary idea of the tainting timidity of the stag was accessible in ‘Properties’ in the chapter on the fox, and those in possession of this knowledge only had to present the hart in a different light to present the king and his liveried followers as timid and impotent. The author of the alliterative poem Mum and the Sothsegger, thought to date from the last years of the reign, uses the negative properties of the stag to attack and mock the king. In Passus II, the writer begins by marvelling at the number of livery badges Richard has granted. He tells Richard that although he has given out so many badges, the harts fail to stand by him because they are afraid of the eagle (an emblem of Bolingbroke). Also, they are dismayed that moulting-time is coming, and so the whole herd runs away to the forest and is scattered. The writer goes on to list the wrongs performed by the harts. They had cumbered the country, stripped the poor, let the king down and spoilt the broth (lines 28–52). For every hart on a badge, Richard lost 10 score of hearts (lines 42–3). In Passus III, the writer makes fun of the stags in old age, hobbling and feeble, searching among the bushes for adders and feeding on venom in an effort to rejuvenate themselves.^[45] Whereas De Bado Aureo, writing for Richard’s queen, made the stag’s property of moulting a token in heraldry of discretion and increasing wisdom, here it is represented as an embarrassment and disgrace.