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 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.

The King died on March 20th. Parliament had 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 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.