“I must tell you what had happened before the few last words which are all I’m going to read!” she said. “King Henry the Fourth was setting out on a journey to the Holy Land, and just before he started, he went to pray in the Abbey. But there, before the altar, he was suddenly taken ill, and became unconscious. They carried him into the Abbot’s guest-chamber—the Jerusalem Room which you’ve just seen, but later moved him to another apartment. There when he was dying, remembering the place to which he had first been carried from the Abbey, he said:
‘Doth any name particular belong
Unto the lodging where I first did swoon?’
and Earl Warwick answered:
‘’Tis called Jerusalem, my noble lord.’
“Then the king, remembering a prophecy about the place of his death, replied:
‘Laud be to Heaven!—even there my life must end.
It hath been prophesied to me many years,
I should not die but in Jerusalem;
Which vainly I supposed the Holy Land:—