"What right have you to it, my son?" he asked reproachfully.
The Prince made answer: "My lord, as you have held it by the right of your sword, it is my intent to hold and defend the same during my life."
To which replied the king: "I leave all things to God, and pray that He will have mercy upon me."
And thus saying he died.
But the English chroniclers give another picture of the Prince, and describe him sobered and awestruck in the presence of Death, kneeling at his father's side as the priest administered the Holy Sacrament, tenderly recalling his wandering mind and saying—
"My lord, he has just consecrated the Body of the Lord Christ: I entreat you to worship Him, by whom kings reign and princes rule."
Then the king raised himself up to receive the cup, blessed his son, kissed him, and died.
Prince Harry wept distractedly, full of remorse as he thought of all the follies and mistakes of his past life, which had so added to the sorrows of the dead king. But all that was good and great in him came to the front now. Alone, in a little chapel inside the Abbey, he passed the rest of that day, kneeling in utter humility before the King of kings, praying for pardon, for peace, and for strength. "Then, when the shades of night had fallen upon the face of the earth, the tearful Prince in the darkness went to the Anchorite of Westminster (whose stone cell lay on the south side of the infirmary cloister), and unfolding to this perfect man the secrets of his life, being washed in penitence, he received absolution, and putting off the cloak of iniquity, he returned garbed in the mantle of virtue." Nor was this sudden change the impulse of a moment, for "Henry, after he was admitted to the rule of the land, showed himself a new man, and tourned all his wyldness into sobernesse, wyse sadnesse and constant virtue."
The king, at his own wish, was buried at Canterbury by the side of the Black Prince; some chroniclers say, because he trembled at the thought of lying near Richard's tomb in the Confessor's Chapel; and nothing disturbed the peace of the Abbey till the following spring, when on Passion Sunday, "a daye of exceedinge rayne and snow," Henry V. was crowned.
His first act as king was to give King Richard an honourable burial in the tomb he had chosen, to order that tapers should burn around his grave "as long as the world endureth," and that dirges and masses should be said for his soul. Then he concerned himself with the building which had stood still throughout his father's reign, and he made as his chief architect the wealthy and generous Whittington, now Lord Mayor of London—possibly the hero of the old story—with a monk of Westminster named Haweden. To those two was entrusted the work of completing the nave and all the western part of the Abbey.