No adage is more sound than that which affirms a little learning to be a dangerous thing. More than fifty years ago, the Gentleman's Magazine[336] triumphantly maintained, that, at all events, Shakspeare had deviated from history in bringing Henry V. and Gascoyne together after the Prince's accession, because Gascoyne died in the life-time of Henry IV. This view has generally been acquiesced in, and the powerfully delineated scene of our great dramatist has been pronounced altogether the groundless fiction of an event which could not by possibility have transpired. The whole question turns upon the date of Gascoyne's death. He was buried in Harewood Church in Yorkshire; and Fuller gives the following as his monumental inscription: "Gulielmus Gascoyne, Die Dominica, 17o Decris. 1412, 14 H. IV."—"William Gascoyne [died] on Sunday, December 17th, 1412, in the fourteenth year of Henry IV." If this were correct, there would be an end of the question; but the brass was torn from the tomb during the civil wars, and the copy cannot be verified. The inscription, however, as given by Fuller, is at all events self-contradictory. The 17th of December fell on a Saturday, not on a Sunday, in 1412.
The process of the argument, and the accession of new evidence by which we are now at length enabled to set this point at rest, are very curious. The Author, indeed, confesses himself to have been one of those who were induced, by the documents then before them, to believe that Judge Gascoyne died on Sunday, December 17, 1413, somewhat more than half a year after Henry V.'s accession; and although the late discovery of the Judge's last Will proves that the argument was then sound only so far as it established the fact that he died after Henry's accession, and was unsound in fixing the period of his death at so early a period as December 1413; yet the statement of that argument may perhaps not be altogether uninteresting, whilst it may suggest a valuable caution as to the jealous vigilance with which circumstantial evidence should always be sifted before the conclusions built upon it be admitted.
It was then a fact upon record, that Chief Justice Gascoyne was summoned, on the 22nd March 1413, (the very day after Henry's accession,) to attend the parliament in the May following. When the parliament met, Gascoyne's name does not appear among those who were present; whilst Hankford, his successor, is appointed Trier of Petitions in the room of Gascoyne, and, in the case of a writ of error, brings up as Chief Justice the record from the King's Bench. Hankford's appointment as Chief Justice bears date March 29th, 1413; and he is summoned to attend parliament as Chief Justice in the December following.[337] In the Pell Rolls a payment is recorded, July 7, 1413, of his half-year's fee to "William Gascoyne, late Chief Justice of Lord Henry the King's father." The inference from these facts was undoubtedly conclusive: first, that Gascoyne's death was erroneously referred to December 1412; secondly, that he was alive and Chief Justice when Henry V. came to the throne; thirdly, that he ceased to be Chief Justice within eight days of Henry's accession, somewhere between March 22, and March 29, 1413. It was merely matter of conjecture whether he was too ill to discharge the duties of his station, and resigned; or what other probable cause of his removal existed. The conversation, at all events, which Shakspeare records, might possibly have taken place; though it is a fact, scarcely reconcilable with it, that Henry V. never did renew Gascoyne's appointment,—a proceeding almost invariably adopted on the demise of a sovereign by his successor. Henry V. might have offered to commit into his hand "the unstained sword that he was wont to bear:"—within eight days after Henry IV. had ceased to breathe, Gascoyne had no longer in his hand the staff of justice.
The reason which then induced the persons who argued on these facts to suppose that Fuller had by mistake adopted the date of the year 1412 instead of 1413 was this:—It was very improbable that the words "Die Dominica" should have been introduced by the copyist, if they were not really on the tomb. Hence it was inferred that he died on a Sunday. Now December 17th was on a Sunday in the following year, 1413; and, since the date was in Roman letters, it was thought very probable that the last I had been obliterated in MCCCCXIII. The words, indeed, "14th Henry IV," were also quoted by Fuller: but it was unquestionably more credible that those words formed a marginal note in the reporter's manuscript, and were mere surplusages, than that they should have been allowed a place in the brass scroll of a monument.
Such was the state of our knowledge, and such was the course of our reasoning as to the time of Gascoyne's decease, till within a very short period of the publication of this work. A document, however, has been very lately brought to light on this subject, which supersedes that statement altogether; setting the whole argument in a new point of view, and reading a plain lesson on the care and circumspection with which inferences, however plausible, as to dates and facts, should be admitted. In the present instance, indeed, the conclusion to which we had before arrived, on the question of Gascoyne having survived Henry IV, remains unassailable, or rather, is only still further removed from the possibility of historical doubt; and the whole argument on the vast improbability of Prince Henry having ever offered an insult to the Chief Justice, or of his ever having been committed to prison for any offence of the kind, remains at least equally strong as before. Most persons, perhaps, may consider the degree of improbability to have become still greater. Be this as it may, the facts now placed beyond further controversy as to Gascoyne's death are these. In the Registry of the Court of York the last Will and testament of William Gascoyne has been found recorded. It bears date on the Friday after St. Lucy's Day in the year 1419; and it was proved on the 23rd of December following. In the year 1419, St. Lucy's Day, December 13, was on a Wednesday. The Will was consequently made on Friday the 15th of December, and was proved on the morrow week, Saturday, December 23rd. In the Will, the testator declares that he was weak in body; and the strong probability is that he died on the following Sunday, December 17, 1419.[338] This would accord precisely with Fuller's representation of the scroll on the tomb, "on the Lord's Day, December 17." Whilst the facility of mistaking MCCCCXIX for MCCCCXII, (being the obliteration only of one cross stroke in the last letter,) is even more remarkable than that of the error which on the former supposition was thought probable, from the obliteration of the last letter I in MCCCCXIII.
The Author has had recourse to every means within his reach to assure himself of the genuineness of this document, and to ascertain that the testator was the William Gascoyne[339] who was Chief Justice of the King's Bench. The result is, that not a shadow of any of the doubts which he once jealously entertained, remains on the subject; whilst he gratefully remembers the prompt and satisfactory assistance rendered him by the present Registrar of York. The document must be admitted without reserve.
From these now indisputable facts a thought might perhaps not unnaturally suggest itself to the mind of any one taking only a general view of the whole subject, that some countenance is here given to the prevalent notion that Gascoyne had displeased Henry during the years of his princedom; but that, instead of holding the worthy and intrepid Judge in higher honour, (as tradition tells,) and rewarding him for his noble bearing, on the contrary, the King resented the insult shown to his person, and dismissed him (contrary to the usual practice) from his high judicial station. A fact,[340] however, new (it is presumed) to history, enables or rather compels us to dismiss such a conjecture from our minds. Whatever was the definite cause of Gascoyne's withdrawal from the bench as Chief Justice of England; whether his declining health, or an inclination for retirement and repose after so long[341] and wearisome a discharge of his arduous duties, or the competency[342] of his fortune, induced him to draw back at length from the turmoils of public life, and pass his last days among his own friends and relatives in the privacy of a country residence; certainly he carried with him when he left his court, not the resentment and unkindness, but the most friendly feelings and respect of his new sovereign. By warrant, November 28, 1414, (that is, in the very year after his retirement,) the King grants to "our dear and well-beloved William Gascoyne an allowance of four bucks and does out of the forest of Pontefract for the term of his life."
The sum of the whole matter as to the historical representations of Henry's conduct is this:
Before the year 1534, far more than a century after Henry's death, no allusion whatever is made to any occurrence of the kind in any work, printed or manuscript, now extant and known. Sir Thomas Elyot, who mentions it incidentally as an anecdote, combining the merits "of a good Judge, a good Prince, and a good King," gives no reference to any authority whatever. Subsequently it is reported in detail by Hall, but with much exaggeration on Elyot's narrative. It then not only passed current in our histories, but served as a topic of grave import in our Prince of tragedians, and of burlesque in the broad farces of later and perhaps earlier days than his. The biographers of Henry, though they detail in all their minute particulars many circumstances of his youth, far less important either to his character, or as facts of general and national interest, and who lived, some of them, almost a century nearer the date of the supposed transaction than Elyot, are to a man silent on the subject; not one of them betraying the shadow of suspicion that he was even aware of any rumour or vague tradition of the kind. Such facts as the committal to prison of the heir-apparent, especially such an heir-apparent as Henry (it is presumed), must have been notorious through the metropolis and the whole land, and must have excited a great and general sensation; and yet the Chronicles, though they often surprise us by their minute notice of trifling circumstances, do not contain the slightest intimation that any such affair as this had ever come to the knowledge of those who kept them. They are silent, and their silence seems natural.[343]
On the whole, most persons will probably believe that either Gascoyne, or Hankford, or Hody would upon such evidence, we do not say merely charge the jury for an acquittal, but would, on perusing the depositions, have previously recommended the grand inquest to return "Not a true Bill." Still every reader has the evidence fairly before him, and must decide for himself!