By C. E. BISHOP.
VIII.—THE LAST GREAT INVADER OF FRANCE.
You remember Franklin’s story of the speckled axe; how he turned the grindstone to polish it up nice, and, tiring of the revolutions, concluded he “liked a speckled axe best.” There was a king of England who had a very speckled character and the people of England (who turned the grindstone for him) long liked their king’s speckled character best of all the kings that they had known.
When Prince of Wales he “cut up” so that he got the name of “Madcap Harry,” some of the most amusing of his pranks being highway robbery and burglary, for all which he was admired in his day and immortalized, along with Jack Falstaff, by Shakspere. One of the light spots on this character is his obedience to the commitment by Chief Justice Gascoigne; and although it belongs to the realm of tradition, it is so pleasant to believe and is so quaintly told by Lord Campbell that we’ll e’en accept it: One of the Prince’s gang of cut purses had been captured and imprisoned by Gascoigne, and the Prince came into court and demanded his release, which was denied. The Prince, says the chronicle, “being set all in a fury, all chafed and in a terrible maner, came up to the place of jugement, men thinking that he would have slain the juge, or have done to him some damage; but the juge sitting still without moving, declaring the majestie of the king’s place of jugement, and with an assured and bolde countenance, had to the Prince these words following: ‘Sir, remember yourself. I kepe here the place of the kinge, your soveraine lorde and father, to whom ye owe double obedience: wherefore eftsoones in his name I charge you desiste of your wilfulness and unlawfull enterprise, and from hensforth give good example to those whiche hereafter shall be your propre subjectes. And nowe, for your contempte and disobedience, go you to the prison of the Kinge’s Benche, whereunto I committe you, and remain ye there prisoner untill the pleasure of the kinge, your father, be further knowen.’”
The prince’s better nature, and a sense of his family’s precarious situation before the law perhaps, induced him to accept the sentence and go to jail. On hearing this the king is recorded as saying: “O merciful God, how much am I bound to your infinite goodness, especially for that you have given me a juge who feareth not to minister justice, and also a sonne, who can suffre semblably and obeye justice.”
In keeping with this wonderful “spasm of good behavior” is the sudden change that came over the Madcap as soon as he became King Henry V. He became as remarkable for his austere piety as he had been for his wickedness. Unfortunately, his piety took the shape of burning Lollards (the shouting Methodists of that day), and he signed the warrant under which the brave and innocent Sir John Oldcastle, his old friend and boon companion, was hung up in chains over a slow fire.
There could be but two outlets in those days for such a degree of piety as Henry had achieved: as whatever he undertook must be bloody and cruel, the choice lay between a crusade or an invasion of France. As the latter promised the most booty and least risk he seemed to have a call in that direction. The attempt seemed about equal to an able bodied man attacking a paralytic patient in bed. The king of France was insane: his heir was worthless and lazy; the queen regent was an unfaithful wife and an unnatural mother, who took sides with the faction that was trying to dethrone the king and destroy his and her son. The kingdom was torn to pieces by civil strife between the Orleanists and the Burgundians, each vying with the other in cruelty, treachery, violence and plundering the government and outraging the people. There was an awful state of affairs—just the chance for a valiant English king.
Henry put up a demand for the French crown, under the pseudo claim of Edward III., whose house his father had deposed. A usurper claiming a neighbor’s crown by virtue of the usurped title of an overturned and disinherited dynasty; as if one stealing a crown got all the reversions of that crown by right. Henry would have made a good claim agent in our day! And the English people, with the remembrance of Cressy and Poictiers, of the Black Prince, and the captive King of France, and all the booty and cheap glory that made England so rich and vain sixty years before, fell in with Henry’s amiable designs on France. It was perfectly clear to the whole nation, from the chief justice down to the clodhopper, that Henry’s claim to the crown of France was a clear and indefeasible one; that the war would be for a high and holy right—and could not fail to pay.
And this was the main object of Henry after all: to divert the kingdom’s attention from his own usurped title by a foreign war; to fortify usurpation at home by attempted usurpation abroad. His father had enjoined upon him this policy, in Shakspere’s words—
“Be it thy course to busy giddy minds