On the other hand, an examination of the records of the Court of the King’s Bench shows that there is no entry to be found in them of any committal of the Prince. It has been pointed out that the summary committal to prison of an offender, as described by Elyot, was not the course of proceeding at the time. This, however, may be waived. The Prince may have been tried by a jury impanelled on the spot, and sent to prison when found guilty by them; and for this course of proceeding a more dramatically effective committal by the presiding judge may have been substituted. But the incident must, one would think, have been recorded in one way or another, and the absolute silence of the rolls and year-books of the Court affords a strong presumption that nothing of the kind ever occurred.

But on looking back to the records of an earlier time, we find that on one occasion a Prince of Wales had been guilty of contempt of Court and had been punished for it by his father. In the thirty-fourth year of Edward the First, one William de Breora, having had judgment pronounced against him by Roger de Hegham, one of the Barons of the Exchequer, “climbed in contemptuous fashion upon the bar, and with grave and bitter words found fault with the said judgment and also insulted the said Roger as he was leaving the Court.” The Court proceeded to punish him for this offence, and rested its action on what had recently been done in a similar case.

“Such acts,” it says, “namely, contempt and disobedience done to the servants of our Lord King, as to the King himself and his Court, are exceedingly odious. This was lately manifested when the said King removed his eldest and dearly beloved son, Edward, Prince of Wales, from his house for nearly the space of half-a-year, because he had spoken gross and bitter words to a servant of the King; nor would he suffer him to come into his presence till he had satisfied the aforesaid servant of the King in the matter of his offence.”

There can, I think, be little doubt that we have here the germs of the story which Shakespeare afterwards so effectively used. It has been acutely pointed out that several phrases in Elyot’s narrative have the appearance of having been translated from the Latin; and the theory is that some chronicler compounded the various incidents as they had occurred or were supposed to have occurred, and combined them with the story which is told in the Governour, and which has been immortalised by Shakespeare. It should, perhaps, be added that Gascoigne had shown in a very striking way his independence of spirit. After the suppression of the northern insurrection in 1405, the King directed him to pronounce sentence of death on the two leaders, Richard Scrope, Archbishop of York, and Thomas Mowbray, Earl Marshall, who had been captured and probably tried and condemned by some kind of court-martial. Gascoigne, who was Chief Justice (he had been appointed to the office in November 1400), refused to do so. He declared that as to the Archbishop, neither the King nor any of the King’s subjects could lawfully put him to death; as to the Earl Marshall, he had the right to be tried by his peers. Independence in a judge has always been especially dear to Englishmen. To a monkish historian—and almost all the historians of the time were monks—such independence could not show itself in a more praiseworthy fashion than in asserting the exemption of ecclesiastical persons from the jurisdiction of lay courts. Gascoigne, then, would be a genuine hero, and, as with other genuine heroes, a great amount of myth may well have grown up about his true story.

It only remains to examine the conclusion of the legend, as Shakespeare tells it. The young King is there represented as assuring him of his favour, and promising to continue him in office.

We find him acting as a judge in Hilary term 1413 (January and February). Henry the Fourth died on March 20th. His successor summoned a new Parliament by writ bearing date the 23rd day of that month, and among the persons summoned was William Gascoigne. But on March 29th William Hankford, a puisne judge of the Common Pleas, was appointed to Gascoigne’s office. On July 7th of the same year there is recorded a payment made to him, as late Chief Justice, on account of salary and annuity. It is quite possible that he voluntarily resigned his office. We do not exactly know his age, but he must have been advanced in years. He had been practising as an advocate as early as the year 1374, which may well throw back his birth as far as 1340. In this case he would be seventy-three at Henry’s accession, and seventy-three meant much more then than it does now. He died in 1419. It may be mentioned that in 1414 a royal warrant gave him for life four bucks and four does out of the forest of Pontefract. On the whole, the evidence in the matter has an absolutely neutral effect. It disproves, indeed, anything like a display of magnanimity on Henry’s part; but then there does not seem to have been any occasion for such magnanimity. Gascoigne may have been removed from his office, a common enough practice in the days when such offices were held at the royal pleasure, or he may have resigned. That he was continued in his office by the young King is certainly a fiction. There can be little doubt that the same may be said of the whole story.

CHAPTER IV
THE CHARGES AGAINST PRINCE HENRY

The appointment of the Prince in February 1408–9 to the office of Constable of Dover and Keeper of the Cinque Ports has already been mentioned. A little more than a year afterwards—that is, on March 18th, 1409–10—the King, having the “fullest confidence in the circumspection and fidelity of his most dear son, Henry, Prince of Wales,” appointed him for the space of twelve years Captain of the town of Calais. Thenceforward his time was divided between his duties at these places and in London, where he is found in frequent attendance at Councils. In the Acts of the Privy Council and other records there is preserved a continuous history of his public life. The details are of little or no importance; but the impression left by the whole is that the Prince was taking a leading part in the administration of affairs, foreign and domestic. The theory of the Constitution, as it is now understood and carried into practice, excludes the possibility of any such action on the part of the heir-apparent to the throne. The system on which the machine is worked is a government by party, and from party it is held to be necessary that he should stand aloof. The Sovereign, though the powers assigned to him by the Constitution have virtually fallen into abeyance, still has a very considerable share in the management of affairs; but the functions of the Prince of Wales are purely social. Things were very different in the days of personal government. The King’s Ministers were not the representatives of the majority in Parliament, but friends and counsellors of his own choice, often, of course, his own kinsmen. Edward the First had been the support of his feeble father, and the Third Edward had had an able lieutenant in the Black Prince. All that is recorded in authentic documents about Prince Henry tends to make us believe that his behaviour as successor to the crown resembled that of those great predecessors in his place. There is nothing, on the other hand, to suggest a comparison with the dissolute heir of the first Edward, whose frivolous conduct and unseemly intimacies have nevertheless, by some strange caprice of tradition, been transferred to our hero.

It will be sufficient to give a few only of the many occasions on which the Prince’s name is mentioned. It will be seen that they indicate, more or less plainly, the confidence and affection existing between him and his father.