Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 1.djvu/530

516 immortality from the pen of Shakespeare. In those narratives of Prince Hal's wild life the dramatic poet, however, appears to have invented little; though, for obvious reasons, he has given other names and characteristics to some of the prince's companions. Even where he is made to assist in a robbery at Gadshill, there appears to have been nothing introduced but what was perfectly historical. Henry IV. was not only so constantly on the stretch for money himself to defray the costs of his civil contentions, but the young Prince of Wales was left so destitute of funds by the rebellion of his Welsh tenants, by the consumption of his English rents to subdue them, and by his father's parsimony, that Stowe in his Annals says:—"The prince used to disguise himself and lie in wait for the receivers of the crown lands, or of his father's patrimony, and, in the disguise of a highwayman, set upon them and rob them. In such encounters he sometimes got soundly beaten; but he always rewarded such of his father's officers who made the stoutest resistance."

He is said to have found all that amusement in the terrors and regrets of the people robbed by him and his companions, which the poet has so livingly described.

Great Seal of Henry V.

It is a curious fact that, in the place of the fictitious Sir John Falstaff, the afterwards celebrated Sir John Oldcastle, Lord Cobham, is said to have been the chief companion of the prince on these occasions; but as Sir John became the leader of the Lollards, and as in Shakespeare's time Protestantism was in the ascendant under Queen Elizabeth, a new character was substituted, and adorned with the name, slightly changed, of Sir John Falstaff, a knight of the same period.

The fears which Prince Henry's wildness had created in the mind of his father, who seemed to anticipate in his son another Richard II., do not appear to have been at all participated in by the people. They saw in the prince too many proofs of a clear, strong, and generous spirit to doubt of his ultimate conduct. The cold and ungenerous nature of his father, his continual demands on their purses, to put down the enemies which his criminal ambition had raised around him; his murder of Richard II., and his many executions of his opponents, members of the noblest families of the realm, had completely weaned their affections from him, and they looked with the most lenient eyes on the jollities and practical jokes of his more warm-hearted son.

The manner in which Henry justified these expectations immediately on the death of his father must have been particularly flattering to the sagacious foresight of the public, and is a circumstance which a poet might conceive as a fine act of an intrinsically great mind temporarily occupied by the levities of youth, rather than one which is of frequent occurrence. On the contrary, it is of a nature as rare as it is beautiful.

We are told that the prince held his merry and even riotous court at Cheylesmore, near Coventry, an estate belonging to his duchy of Cornwall; and thither flocked the young, and, indeed, the more mature nobility, to such a degree, that that of his father was almost wholly deserted; and that Henry IV. regarded this circumstance with peculiar jealousy. Not only had the chief justice Gascoigne, as we have seen, committed the prince to confinement, but John Hornsby, the Mayor of Coventry, had done the same for some violation of the law's decorum while residing at Cheylesmore. But no sooner was his father dead than he withdrew to his closet, and spent the remainder of the day in private devotion, in reviewing his past life, and taking resolves for the future. The consequence was that in the evening he hastened to his confessor, a recluse in the church at Westminster, to whom he confided his views, and who confirmed him joyfully in his noble determination.

The world, therefore, saw him at once break like a sun from obscuring clouds, and. casting off all the habits as well as the costume of wild gaiety, stand before it a grave and wise king, "severe in youthful beauty." He summoned before him the whole troop of his dissolute companions, announced to them that the days of the jovial prince were for ever past, and those of the serious and moral king were come. He bade them take, if they could, the new pattern of his life; but, till that was