ordered him immediately to prison; the
Prince of Wales is said to have submitted
with a good grace; and the King is said to
have exclaimed, "Happy is the monarch who
has so just a judge, and a son so willing to
obey the laws." This is all very doubtful, and
so is another story (of which Shakespeare has
made beautiful use), that the Prince once
took the crown out of his father's chamber
as he was sleeping, and tried it on his own
head.

The King's health sank more and more, he
became subject to violent eruptions on the face
and to bad epileptic fits, and his spirits sank
every day. At last, as he was praying before
the shrine of St. Edward at Westminster
Abbey, he was seized with a terrible fit, and
was carried into the Abbot's chamber, where
he presently died. This was on the twentieth
of March, 1413, in the forty-seventh year of his
age, and the fourteenth of his reign. He was
buried in Canterbury Cathedral. He had
been twice married, and had, by his first wife,
a family of four sons and two daughters.
Considering his duplicity before he came to
the throne, his unjust seizure of it, and, above
all, his making that monstrous law for the
burning of what the priests called heretics,
he was a reasonably good King, as kings went.

CHAPTER XIX.

THE Prince of Wales began his reign like a
generous and honest man. He set the young
Earl of March, free; he restored their estates
and their honours to the Percy family, who
had lost them by their rebellion against his
father; he ordered the imbecile and
unfortunate Richard to be honourably buried
among the Kings of England; and he dismissed
all his wild companions, with assurances
that they should not want, if they would
resolve to be steady, faithful, and true.

It is much easier to burn men than to burn
their opinions; and those of the Lollards were
spreading every day. The Lollards were
represented by the priests—probably falsely for
the most part—to entertain treasonable
designs against the new King; and Henry,
suffering himself to be worked upon by these
representations, sacrificed his friend Sir John
Oldcastle, the Lord Cobham to them, after
trying in vain to convert him by arguments.
He was declared guilty, as the head of the
sect, and sentenced to the flames; but, he
escaped from the Tower before the day of
execution (postponed for fifty days by the
King himself), and summoned the Lollards
to meet him near London on a certain day.
So the priests told the King, at least. I
doubt whether there was any conspiracy
beyond such as was got up by their agents.
On the day appointed, instead of five-and-twenty
thousand men, under the command
of Sir John Oldcastle, in the meadows of
St. Giles, the King found only eighty men,
and no Sir John at all. There was, in another
place, an addle-headed brewer, who had gold
trappings to his horses, and a pair of gilt
spurs in his breast—expecting to be made a
knight next day by Sir John, and so to gain
the right to wear them—but there was no Sir
John, nor did anybody give any information
respecting him, though the King offered great
rewards for such intelligence. Thirty of these
unfortunate Lollards were hanged and drawn
immediately, and were then burnt, gallows
and all; and the various prisons in and
around London were crammed full of others.
Some of these unfortunate men made various
confessions of treasonable designs; but, such
confessions were easily got, under torture and
the fear of fire, and are very little to be
trusted. To finish the sad story of Sir John
Oldcastle at once, I may mention that he
escaped into Wales, and remained there,
safely, for four years. When discovered by
Lord Powis, it is very doubtful if he would
have been taken alive—so great was the old
soldier's bravery—if a miserable old woman
had not come behind him and broken his
legs with a stool. He was carried to London
in a horse litter, was fastened by an iron
chain to a gibbet, and so roasted to death.

To make the state of France as plain as I
can in a few words, I should tell you that the
Duke of Orleans, and the Duke of Burgundy,
commonly called "John without fear," had
had a grand reconciliation of their quarrel in
the last reign, and had appeared to be in
quite a heavenly state of mind. Immediately
after which, on a Sunday, in the public streets
of Paris, the Duke of Orleans was murdered
by a party of twenty men, set on by the Duke
of Burgundy—according to his own deliberate
confession. The widow of King Richard had
been married in France to the eldest son of
the Duke of Orleans. The poor mad King
was quite powerless to help his daughter, and
the Duke of Burgundy became the real
master of France. Isabella dying, her husband
(Duke of Orleans since the death of his
father) married the daughter of the Count of
Armagnac, who, being a much abler man than
his young son-in-law, headed his party: thence
called after him Armagnacs. Thus, France was
now in this terrible condition, that it had in
it the party of the King's son, the Dauphin
Louis; the party of the Duke of Burgundy,
who was the father of the Dauphin's ill-used
wife; and the party of the Armagnacs; all
hating each other; all fighting together; all
composed of the most depraved nobles that
the earth has ever known; and all tearing
unhappy France to pieces.

The late King had watched these dissensions
from England, sensible (like the
French people) that no enemy of France
could injure her more than her own nobility.
The present King now advanced a claim to
the French throne. His demand being, of
course, refused, he reduced his proposal to a
certain large amount of French territory, and
to demanding the French princess, Catherine,
in marriage with a fortune of two millions of