duke of Gloucester, whose father he had lately put to death. Young Henry was brought home from Ireland (after his father had revolutionized England) in a ship fitted out for that purpose by Henry Dryhurst, of West Chester. He met his father at Chester, and in all probability, accompanied him on his triumphant march to London. Creton affirms that Henry IV. made his son prince of Wales at his coronation; "but I think,” adds Richard's sorrowing servant, "he must win it first, for the whole land of Wales is in a state of revolt on account of the wrongs of our dear lord, king Richard.”

There is reason to suppose, that after his sire's coronation prince Henry completed his education at Oxford; for there is an antique chamber of Queen's college pointed out by successive generations as once having been inhabited by Henry. This is a room over the gateway, opposite to St. Edmund'shall. A portrait of Henry was painted in the glass of the window,' and under it, in Latin verse,

TO RECORD THE FACT FOR EVER,

THE EMPEROR OF BRITAIN,

THE TRIUMPHANT LORD OF FRANCE,

THE CONQUEROR OF HIS ENEMIES AND HIMSELF,

HENRY V.

OF THIS LITTLE CHAMBER ONCE THE GREAT INHABITANT.

Fuller, who lived little more than a hundred years after Henry, points out the same college-chamber as the abidingplace of the prince. Henry was placed at Oxford under the tutorship of his half-uncle, Henry Beaufort, a young, handsome, and turbulent ecclesiastic, whose imperious haughtiness did not arise from his ascetic rigidity of manners as a priest. Beaufort had accompanied his charge to Ireland, and returned with him to England. The early appointment of the prince as lieutenant of Wales, March 7th, 1403, limits the probable time of his sojourn at Oxford, as a student, to the period between the commencement of the year 100 and 1402. The

1 Tyler's Henry V. The art of painting on glass had greatly fallen into decay after the accession of Henry VII., who was obliged to import the window of St. Margaret's, Westminster, from Dort. This glass portrait brings the Oxford memorial near Henry's own times.

2 Beaufort's betrayal of a daughter of the illustrious house of Fitzalan is proved by his will.

prince was but sixteen when he fought courageously at that great conflict where his father's crown was contested. At the battle of Shrewsbury, when advancing too rashly on the enemy's forces, he received a wound with an arrow in the face, the scar of which was perceptible all his life. Being advised to retire, that the steel might be drawn out, "To what place?" said he. "Who will remain fighting, if I, the prince and a king's son, retire for fear at the first taste of steel? Let my fellow-soldiers see that I bleed at the first onset; for deeds, not words, are the duties of princes, who should set the example of boldness."

Until after 1407 the prince of Wales was actively employed in the Welsh campaigns. Although Glendower was finally beaten back to his mountain fastnesses, yet the whole of the principality was, during the reign of Henry IV., but a nominal appendage to the English monarchy. Thus deprived of the revenues annexed to his title, the prince of Wales was subjected to the most grinding poverty. His wild dissipation seems to have commenced after his desultory campaigns in Wales concluded, when he returned to court with no little of the licence of the partisan soldier. His extreme poverty, which was shared by his royal sire, made him reckless and desperate, and had the natural consequence of forcing him into company below his rank. Stowe, in his Annals, declares "the prince used to disguise himself and lie in wait for the receivers of the rents of the crown lands, or of his father's patrimony, and in the disguise of a highwayman set upon them and rob them. In such encounters he sometimes got soundly beaten, but he always rewarded such of his father's officers who made the stoutest resistance." But Henry's wildest pranks were per

1 Translated from the Latin of Titus Livius of Friuli, a learned man, patronised by Humphrey duke of Gloucester, and employed by him to write the biography of his brother; which work is (as might be expected) more replete with panegyric than incident.

In this assertion we follow Titus Livius. And we ask the question whether, if Henry's wildness as a youth had not been very notorious, would a contemporary (who is little more than a panegyrist), writing under the direction of the king's brother, have dared to allude to it?

* Speed is enraged at the playermen, who, he says, have verified the imputa tions of Alain Copus, a contemporary of sir John Oldcastle, accusing that noble as a seducer of the prince's youth, a wild profligate, who even robbed occasionally

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formed at a manor of his, close to Coventry, called Cheylesmore, a residence appertaining to his duchy of Cornwall. Here prince Hal and some of his friends were taken into custody by John Hornesby, the mayor of Coventry, for raising a riot. Cheylesmore' was regarded by his care-worn father with painful jealousy; "for thither," says Walsingham, sorted all the young nobility as to a king's court, while that of Henry IV. was deserted." But the prince of Wales did not content himself with astonishing the mayor of Coventry, and his sober citizens by a mad frolic now and then; he saw the inside of a London prison as well as the gaol of Coventry. It does not appear that the prince was personally engaged in the uproars raised by his brothers, prince John and prince Thomas, at Eastcheap, which are noted in the London Chronicle; but in one of these frays the lord mayor captured a favourite servant belonging to the prince of Wales, and carried him before judge Gascoigne. Directly the prince of Wales heard of the detention of his servant, he rushed to the court of justice, where his man stood arraigned at the bar. He endeavoured with his own hands to free him from his fetters, and, on the interference of the judge, bestowed on that functionary a box on the ear; for which outrage Gascoigne dauntlessly reproved the prince, and, at the end of a very suitable lecture, committed him to the prison of the King's-bench. To this Henry, who was struck with remorse at his own mad violation of the laws of his country, submitted with so good a grace, that Henry IV. made the well-known speech,-" He was proud of having a son who would thus submit himself to the laws, and that he had a judge who could so fearlessly enforce them." This exploit is supposed to have been the

on the highway. Shakspeare thus had some grounds for the character of siz John Falstaff, whom, it will be remembered, he calls sir John Oldcastle in his first edition. Titus Livius describes the dismissal of sir John Oldcastle, before the crown was placed on Henry's head, in words which authorize Shakspeare's scene, excepting that the offence imputed to the knight was protestantism, rather than profligacy.

1 Appendix to Fordun, quoted by Carte.

2 Cheylesmore actually descended to George IV., who sold it to the marquess of Hertford.

3 Harrison's Survey of London.

reason that Henry IV. removed his son from his place at the privy council.

The desperate state of the prince's finances, it is possible, might irritate him into these excesses, for all his English revenues were swallowed up in the prosecution of the war to reconquer Wales. Indeed, his chief income was derived from the great estates of his ward, the earl of March. This young prince, who possessed a nearer claim to the throne of England than the line of Lancaster, had been kept a prisoner in Windsor-castle from his infancy. In 1402 Henry IV. gave the person of the minor earl, with the wardship of his revenues, to his eldest son,-thus putting no small temptation in the path of an ambitious young hero. But here the very best traits of prince Henry's mixed character develope themselves: he formed the tenderest friendship for his helpless ward and rival.

From time to time Henry IV. made attempts to obtain a wife for his heir. In the preceding memoir it has been shown that he was, in childhood, contracted to the eldest daughter of Joanna, duchess of Bretagne, afterwards his stepmother. The biography of Isabella of Valois has proved how long and assiduously prince Henry wooed the young widow of the murdered Richard, until all hope ended in her marriage with Orleans. Marie, the second daughter of France, was the next object of his choice; but she, who had been devoted to the cloister even before her birth, on being consulted whether she would prefer an earthly spouse and accept the prince of Wales, indignantly reproved her father's envoys for imagining so profane a thought. A daughter of the duke of Burgundy was demanded for the prince, but the negotiation was unsuccessful. At last, both the son and father seemed to have determined on obtaining the hand of the fair Katherine, the youngest of the princesses of France, and a

He was even forced, at this time, to pawn his personal ornaments, his "petitz jonalx," as he calls them, to pay his garrisons in Wales, for no money could be obtained from the royal revenues.-See sir Harris Nicolas' Acts of the Privy Council, vol. ii. p. 61.

In the Issue rolls are the expenses of Henry IV.'s ambassadors for demanding in marriage, "for the prince of Wales, the second daughter of the adversary.” VOL. II.

I

private mission was confided to Edward duke of York to demand her in marriage for the prince of Wales. York was absent on this errand at the time when Henry IV. was struck with his mortal illness.

Modern research has found reason for the supposition, that prince Henry was intriguing to depose his father just before his last fatal sickness. The angry assertions of Humphrey duke of Gloucester1 accuse Henry Beaufort, bishop of Winchester, of the double treachery of instigating the prince of Wales to seize his father's crown, and at the same time of plotting to assassinate the prince. These are Gloucester's words: "My brother was, when prince of Wales, in great danger once, when he slept in the green chamber at Westminster-palace. There was discovered, by the rouse of a little spaniel belonging to the prince, a man concealed behind the arras near the prince's bed. When he was hauled out by Henry's attendants, a dagger was found on the man's person, and he confessed he was hidden there to kill the prince in the night, instigated by Beaufort; but when the earl of Arundel heard this, he had the assassin's head tied in a sack and flung into the Thames, to stifle his evidence."

Although no chronology is expressly marked for these events, yet internal evidence refers them to the close of Henry IV.'s existence, just before the extreme indisposition of that monarch caused the prince to seek a reconciliation with his father. This he did in a manner usually considered very extraordinary. He came to court on a New-year's day, dressed in a dark blue robe, worked with œillets round the collar, to each of which hung a needle and thread; and this robe, it is asserted, was meant to indicate how much his vilifiers had slandered him to his royal sire. Why needles and threads should point out such an inference, has been an

1 Parliamentary Rolls. Parliamentary History, vol. ii. pp. 293, 294.

2 Many writers have copied this curious passage, and most have quoted the biography of Titus Livius as an authority. It is, however, certain no such incident is contained in its pages. Guthrie throws light on this circumstance in his folio history of England, vol ii., reign Henry IV. He gives the passage at length, quoting it from some tracts appended to Titus Livius, his English translator, who notes, moreover, that he received the particulars from the lips of the earl of Ormond, an eye-witness of the scene.