France in December 1410. No sooner was it proclaimed than in the following March he began to negotiate with the Duke of Burgundy, and concluded a truce with him in May. In the following year an alliance, offensive and defensive, was made with the French Princes who were acting on behalf of the then disabled King; and again, a month after this, another treaty was concluded with the Duke of Burgundy. The affairs of the Prince himself were one of the subjects dealt with in these negotiations. Henry the Fourth was eager in the extreme to strengthen his position by a matrimonial alliance with a royal family of undoubted title. It was now a daughter of the French King, and now a daughter of the Duke of Burgundy, who seemed to him a desirable bride for the heir to his crown; and it is just possible that the young man, who was quite capable of being resolute in such matters, did not wholly approve of the diplomacy by which his father sought to dispose of him in marriage.

It is possible that a curious story, previously referred to as bearing on the question of Henry's possible residence at Oxford, may belong to this time of estrangement. It was on a New Year's Day-the New Year's Day of 1411-12, if this conjecture be correct-that the Prince, finding that his enemies had slandered him to his father, came to Westminster Hall. Dressed, according to one version, in his old student's gown, with the needle and thread, still yearly presented to the members of Eglesfield's foundation, stuck in its collar, he advanced, leaving his attendants clustered round the coal fire in the middle of the hall, to the upper end where the King sat with his immediate attendants. Saluting his father

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ALLEGED ROBBERY OF RECEIVERS

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he begged for a private audience, and the King, who was unable to walk, was carried into another room. Then the Prince fell on his knees, and drawing his dagger from its sheath presented it to his father, and begged him to plunge it into his heart if he thought that there could be found there any feelings but those of affection and loyalty. The chronicler Otterbourne tells a somewhat similar story, but refers it to the June of this same year.

Another charge that has been brought against Henry may be traced in the first place to John Stow, whose Summary of the Chronicles of England was published in 1570, and through him to Robert Fabyan, whose Chronicle was probably written early in the sixteenth century. Stow writes :

"He (the Prince) lived somewhat insolently, insomuch that while his father lived, being accompanied with some of his young lords and gentlemen, he would wait in disguised array for his own receivers and distress them of their money, and sometimes at such enterprises both he and his companions were sorely beaten; and when his receivers made to him their complaints how they were robbed in their coming to him, he would give them their discharge of so much money as they had lost, and besides that they should not depart from him without great rewards for their trouble and vexation, especially they should be rewarded that best had resisted him and his company, and of whom he had received the greatest and most strokes."

Of Fabyan it is only necessary to say that he does not give any such details, but says generally that the "King, before the death of his father, applied himself unto all vice and insolency, and drew unto him violent and wildly - disposed persons."

Stow, therefore, it will be seen, improved upon Fabyan. Recent writers have improved upon Stow by finding a cause for these lawless proceedings in Henry's grinding poverty. Poverty was doubtless the prevailing condition of both father and son; but the King was as liberal to his heir as his means permitted. The Prince had often, it is clear, money enough to advance his soldiers' pay, for we hear of sums repaid him on this account. The story may be dismissed as a fable, or, if it has any foundation at all, as the exaggerated report of a youthful freak.

A still more baseless invention is that the Prince and his wild companions indulged in various extravagant doings at his manor of Cheylesmore, near Coventry, and that on one occasion he and they were taken into custody by the Mayor of Coventry. The legend cannot, it seems, be traced beyond the latter part of the seventeenth century.

The other charges against Henry's character may be more conveniently considered in the next chapter.

CHAPTER V

ACCESSION TO THE THRONE

IN December 1413 the King, whose health had been failing for some years, was dangerously ill. He was then at his palace at Eltham, and for a while, says Walsingham, he seemed to be dead. But he recovered, and kept Christmas with such festivity as he might. In the following March he was again attacked as he was praying in the Confessor's Chapel at Westminster Abbey. His attendants carried him into the Abbot's house, where he shortly afterwards expired. One of his biographers tells us that the dying man called his successor to his side and advised him to fear God, to choose an honest confessor, to be diligent in his duty as a king, and to pay his (the speaker's) debts. The speech has the appearance of the appropriate orations which historians were accustomed to put into the mouth of their characters. If, as seems likely, the cause of death was apoplexy, it is probable that he never recovered consciousness.

Parliament had

The King died on March 20th. been prorogued to the 24th of the month. It was ipso facto dissolved by the demise of the Crown; but the prelates, peers, and representatives of the Commons

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who had been summoned to it assembled in an informal manner, and for the first time in English history, without waiting for the solemnities of coronation, spontaneously offered homage to their new Sovereign, though at the same time taking care to prevent their action from being afterwards made into a precedent.

The young Henry's accession to the throne is said to have been the occasion of a sudden change which converted a reckless and profligate youth into a sober God-fearing man. The contemporary evidence for this assertion comes from two sources-Thomas Walsingham, one of the long line of writers who formed the historical school of St. Alban's, and Thomas Elmham, who was then a monk of Canterbury and afterwards became one of Henry's chaplains. Elmham writes:

"He was in the days of his youth a diligent follower of idle practices, much given to instruments of music, and one who, loosing the reins of modesty, though zealously serving Mars, yet fired with the torches of Venus herself, and, in the intervals of his brave deeds as a soldier, wont to occupy himself with the other extravagances that attend the days of undisciplined youth."

And after treating of the death of the King he goes on to put a confession of sin into the mouth of the Prince. Strong as are the expressions, they are nothing more than what are uttered day after day by worshippers whom neither the world nor their own conscience accuses of any heinous crime. Further on we read :

"After he had spent the day in wailing and groaning, so soon as the shades of night covered the earth, the weeping Prince, taking advantage of the darkness, secretly visited a certain recluse of holy life at Westminster; and laying bare