Henry IV also used the Castle as a prison, first for the infant Earl of March and his brother, who were descended from an elder brother of Henry's father, John of Gaunt. Lady Despenser, who had the care of them, got them out of the Castle and on the way to Wales, but the alarm was given, and the maker of the keys lost his hands and then his head. In 1406 Prince James of Scotland, then eleven years old and on his way to school in France, was caught by a privateer and imprisoned in the Octagonal Tower at the top of Castle Hill, in the south-west corner of the upper ward—a tower once called the Maiden's but now the Devil's. Under Henry IV and Henry V the prince's imprisonment lasted seventeen years, during some of which he was King of Scotland by name. In 1413 he had Griffin ap Owen Glendower as a fellow prisoner, and in 1415 the poet Charles of Orleans, taken at Agincourt. The treaty of release in 1423 provided for the payment of 60,000 marks and his marriage with some English lady of noble birth. He chose his bride without difficulty—Jane Beaufort, a young daughter of the Earl of Somerset—married her at St. Mary Overy in Southwark, and at once set out for Scotland. He was a short stout man, but vigorous and agile, broad in the shoulders, narrow in the waist, and his hair auburn; he had a good singing voice, played on musical instruments, and excelled in games. He was murdered, and his Queen Jane wounded, by conspirators, thirteen years later. He loved his wife to the end, and was one of the few kings who had no mistress and no bastards. Before he left England he had written the poem, The Kingis Quhair, which records his captivity and courtship at Windsor. It was spring, but he was sad—
The bird, the beste, the fisch eke in the see,
They lyve in fredome everich in his kynd;
And I a man, and lakkith libertee—
yet not wholly sad, because he rose early and went to look out of the window at the world and at the people passing by, and though he was steeled against mirth, to look did him good. Outside his window, at the foot of the tower, was a fair garden, so fenced with hawthorns and so set with dense foliaged trees that a man walking in it could not be seen by the passer-by. There the nightingale sang on the small green branches. There he saw the maiden, Jane Beaufort. It is difficult and perhaps unnecessary to consider the poem apart from the known personality and acts of the king who wrote it, though nobody need trouble to say that he wrote like a king, for he did not; he wrote like a poet—much like Chaucer, in fact—and like a man. But allow what we know of him, his captivity, his hard life, and tragic death, to suffuse the images created by the poem, and The Kingis Quhair is one of the loveliest ceremonious poems of love.
Under Henry V, in the year of Agincourt, the Emperor Sigismund came to the feast of St. George. He brought with him the heart of St. George as an offering to the chapel.
ANNE BOLEYN'S WINDOW, DEAN'S CLOISTERS
Henry VI, the founder of Eton College in 1440, was born at Windsor, and buried in the south aisle of St George's Chapel, but not until some years after his death.
Edward IV rebuilt St. George's Chapel, or began the building which was completed under Henry VIII and Edward VI. On the north side of the Chapel he built the Dean's and Canons' houses, and those of the petty Canons. Edward and his queen were buried near the altar under a tomb of such splendour that it was plundered in 1642.
Henry VIII began the royal tomb-house at the east end of St. George's as a sepulchral chapel for himself. Later he granted it to Wolsey, who caused a black marble sarcophagus to be made, bordered and canopied with costly bronze work. The Cardinal never lay under it. It was stripped, and the ornaments sold, by Parliament soldiers a century later. The sarcophagus itself was afterwards used to cover the body of Nelson at St. Paul's. In the choir of the Chapel of St. George lie Jane Seymour and Henry VIII, who built the gateway bearing his name, under which the public enter the lower ward.
When Henry VIII's queen, Anne Boleyn, was crowned in June, 1533, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, and then about sixteen years old, carried the fourth sword. This young man, who was to be atrociously executed at the age of thirty by the same Henry, lived at Windsor for some time as the companion of the king's bastard son, the Duke of Richmond, and while confined there some years later he wrote a poem which gives perhaps the most beautiful picture connected with Windsor. I will belittle the rest of this little book by here quoting the poem in full: "Prisoned in Windsor he recounteth his pleasure there passed":